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In this episode, our guest, Dr. Jana Lee, shares her expertise on measuring coaching effectiveness and creating inclusive classrooms through skill-based instruction. Formerly a special education teacher and now a K-12 education consultant, Dr. Lee brings insights from both years of hands-on experience and researched best practices.
Throughout the conversation, she emphasizes the importance of shifting from level-based grouping to flexible, skill-based grouping and the need for systematic data collection. Dr. Lee underscores the power of cross-curricular consistency where students practice the same skills across all subject areas to create a cohesive learning environment. The Big Dream Dr. Lee's big dream for education is that all students—of all learning capabilities—leave their K-12 experience feeling more confident for their post-secondary lives. This means addressing not just academic capabilities, but rebuilding students socially, emotionally, and mentally so they're prepared to pursue what best fits their wants, needs, and interests. Dr. Lee believes this is achieved by approaching education through as inclusive a lens as possible. Mindset Shifts Required To create an inclusive learning environment for all students, teachers can embrace the mindset shift that moves away from making instructional decisions based on preconceived beliefs about what students can do (including assumptions based on IEPs, benchmark results, or perceived gaps). Instead, educators can make flexible decisions based on what students demonstrate in the moment. This requires shifting from level-based grouping to skill-based grouping, where students aren't stigmatized by being in the "struggling" group but are instead grouped dynamically based on specific skills they're working on. Action Steps Effectively supporting diverse student needs requires moving away from preconceived ideas or level-based grouping and embracing students’ independent capabilities. Dr. Lee suggests the following action steps to help make the necessary mindset shift today: Step 1: In your day-to-day teaching, identify 60-90 seconds in your lesson where students will work completely independently on a skill-based task. During this time, resist the urge to intervene—even if students ask to use the bathroom, weren't present yesterday, or are off-task. This independent work reveals who truly needs support and what specific help they need. Step 2: Collect student artifacts that show thought processes (e.g., written work in secondary classes, and oral language or behavioral observations in elementary). Analyze these artifacts not just for right or wrong answers, but to identify where the error in thinking occurred, which informs how you'll remediate differently rather than simply repeating the same instruction. Step 3: Co-create clear "look fors" or success criteria with leadership that align directly to building or district goals. Ensure these criteria focus on specific instructional moves and pedagogy, then use them consistently in professional learning communities to analyze patterns, celebrate gains, and identify areas for targeted support. Challenges? The biggest challenge teachers face is allowing students to struggle independently for a short time without jumping in to help. Teachers naturally want to support students immediately, but this prevents them from collecting the crucial data needed to understand who needs what type of support. Without seeing what students can do completely on their own, teachers can't accurately identify where errors in thinking occur or create targeted interventions that address the root cause rather than just repeating previous instruction. One Step to Get Started Mark a specific point in your next lesson where you'll give students 60-90 seconds to work completely independently on a skill-based task. Let them struggle, let them sit, let them make mistakes—anyone who doesn't produce something tells you they need to be in your small group for targeted support. This single practice will transform your ability to collect meaningful data and make responsive instructional decisions. Stay Connected You can find this week’s guest on her website, Jana Lee Consulting, or on Instagram. www.janaleeconsulting.com or Instagram @jana.c.lee. To help you implement today’s takeaways, our guest is sharing her Data Insight Survey with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 244 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:
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TRANSCRIPT
Lindsay Lyons: [00:00:00] Dr. Generally, welcome to the time for teachership podcast. Dr. Jana Lee: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here and be able to chat with you. Lindsay Lyons: I am so excited to, and so I've been starting episodes recently with like what's on our mind as we jump into the conversation, so I'll share that on my mind. Are two things. So one, you had an amazing episode on Chrissy Beltran's, uh, podcast, which I loved about how to measure coaching effectiveness. And then I also have been thinking myself about outcomes-based, uh, contracting, which for schools and districts listening or engaging with episode, it's like paying coaching, uh, coaches, contractors for like, how the actual impacts on student learning, um, as part of the, the deal with the contract. That lends itself to a lot of measurement questions, like how do we actually measure student learning effectively? And so I'm really excited to dig into this concept of measuring today. Dr. Jana Lee: What on your mind? Absolutely. And, and what's on my mind? The [00:01:00] excitement and being able to share how we can actually collect some concrete data that speaks to the. Impact that our work is having, not just on teachers, but also on on students, just like you shared. I think that it's a very nuanced concept, um, but one that is really important to dig further into because it just showcases the, the work that we are doing and its effectiveness. Lindsay Lyons: Thank you for that. I, I, one of the things I wanna like just ask big picture before we get into like the specifics is I love Dr. Patina love's, uh, quote about freedom dreaming. And so she says, there are dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. And so with that in mind, like what is that big dream that you hold for education? Dr. Jana Lee: Wow. What a, what a very big question. I think my, my big dream is that. Teachers, 'cause I'm always thinking about what's happening.[00:02:00] Boots on the ground alongside students and teachers are the ones that are the most, you know, just have the most interaction naturally being that they're in the classroom, but that all students of all learning capabilities leave their K to 12 experience feeling more confident. And ready for their post-secondary lives. Uh, and that that can look a number of different ways, uh, and that it's not just a student's academic, um, capabilities that we're looking at, but also how we're rebuilding them socially and emotionally and mentally, where they're leaving, being ready to do what's next. For them that best fits, you know, their, their wants, their needs, their interests, and I think that that is something that can be achieved when we approach education [00:03:00] through as inclusive a lens as possible. And we make decisions on a regular daily basis that are inclusive for all students. Lindsay Lyons: Great. I, I think as we think about that, one of the things that. May come up for people as they're thinking about, for example, um, pedagogies, but also the measurement aspect of like, how do I know I'm doing well? How do I assess students, right? Like from all the lenses I think about maybe how we learn things in teacher school versus what is. Real and good and equitable and inclusive for students. And so are there any mindset shifts that you've noticed you've had to coach on or, uh, have seen kind of the aha moment come to a teacher or even yourself as you're kind of switching to like, this is, this is actually different from what I thought I would be doing or should be doing, but this is the way. Dr. Jana Lee: Sure. I mean, a lot of my work recently and my, my background is in special education. I was a, [00:04:00] uh, worked as a special education teacher in the South Bronx of New York for, um, almost 10 years. And so I had students of all, you know, shapes and sizes and, and all, um, sort of different circumstances and home backgrounds and, you know, I had to learn how to put my own beliefs of what I thought they were capable of. Uh, you know, including students with IEPs, students who had, you know, challenges in their behavior or just, you know, had great foundational gaps. I had to put that to the side to a degree and move more toward groupings and, and, um, shifts in my instruction that were reflective of what they were doing in the moment and, and learning how to collect that information to make. Flexible decisions and not allowing my preconceived beliefs about them drive the decisions that I was making. And so a lot of my work today, [00:05:00] and this might be, you know, a bit controversial, um, and I'm not saying that we should get rid of leveled groupings of any sort, but I am saying that a lot of my work recently. Has been around, how do we shift from, from grouping students and providing them with, um, scaffolds or instruction based on their levels or what, you know, grade level we think they're at functionally speaking and more so make decisions in the moment and use data in the moment that allows us to make grouping decisions. And I think, you know, a lot of the pushback at times that I get from that is. Well, I would have the same students in the group anyways. You know, that's not always, that's not necessarily true. Uh, I think when we build a culture of, I'm not. When we build a culture that moves away from, well, you typically struggle, so let me work with you and move more toward, I'm gonna look for X, Y, and Z, and then work for [00:06:00] you if that. If you're producing something that doesn't align with that, then we build a culture of safety and risk taking where students are actually destigmatized because it's not based on whether they have an IEP or whether you know their benchmark results. You know? Shows a certain, uh, certain gaps. Um, and I'm not saying that we don't use those benchmark results, but I'm, I am saying that oftentimes the, I find that decisions are made, you know, school-wide and in the classroom more so based on the overarching benchmark results as opposed to what we see students are really creating and doing, um, in the classroom. And so. You know, that's been a really big shift in thought, uh, because traditionally speaking, when we're working with students, um, I think we, we work with them based on, and this might be difficult to admit, but based [00:07:00] on what we believe and, and think that they are able to do. Um, and so that's, that comes to teachers and leaders being, uh, very, very explicitly thinking about. You know, how do I move away from that and move more toward a, a skill-based grouping, flexible approach. Lindsay Lyons: I love so much of what you're saying. I'm just, I'm taking notes here on like, the levels idea, right? The skill levels versus, and even within that I've been playing with. Um, so I've worked with a, I coach with a lot of teachers and have taught, um. A lot of multilingual learners. And so sometimes we'll say like, oh, these are level ones, or these are level twos specifically speaking about a test that actually assesses a variety of things linguistically. And so it's like, this might be like, instead, can we move to more language? Like this is a student who excels with verbal explanation and their verbal expression's actually better in a small group versus a large group or like, like how nuanced can we be? I think there's like one piece, [00:08:00] right? Yeah. And then there's also this idea of like. In the moment, that's really hard for a teacher. So there's a lot of practice that's required, I think, and, and maybe some modeling of like, how do you do that kind of responsiveness that you're talking about, right? Like, I noticed these things. So first I have to know what I need to notice, and then I need to notice it, and then I need to actually be able to kind of move all the pieces and do all the groups and and respond. Um, which is so cool. And I'm sure involves a lot of work, right? Dr. Jana Lee: It does. And you know, to go back to. To, to swing it back to what you mentioned earlier about looking at how our outcomes are impacting student achievement, we need a very systematic way of collecting that quantitative evidence, that evidence that speaks to numbers. And so if you as a teacher are on the ground looking at that. You know, as I call it, the check for understanding and using that as the moment to measure independent proficiency of a skill [00:09:00] that's a lot easier for you to collect, um, and track than perhaps, you know, constantly grouping students based on those levels where, you know, there's a range of things that you need to address in the level grouping. And it's quite difficult for teachers to know where do I begin? Right? Um, and I think. Along with that, you then, when you combine that benchmark work with, what am I seeing students are struggling or proficient in with skills in the classroom, those two pieces of, of, of data, those data points should speak to each other. So ideally we should know where our benchmarks are going to land. Prior to the benchmark, even existing because teachers are engaging with that information on a regular basis. And you know, I I, I think another big component of that is how are we layering in the work that teachers are or the, the, those data points that teachers are collecting in the [00:10:00] classroom, how are we layering that into what they're doing in. The other pieces of the school community, how are, you know, leadership providing feedback as it relates to, uh, teachers making those flexible decisions? How are we, how are teachers engaging with student work in their, you know, professional learning communities or grade team meetings? So it really. It, it, it's, it moves beyond. Ideally, it moves beyond just, uh, teachers making those decisions in the classroom and leadership being very strategic and allowing teachers to then engage with that. Information outside of the classroom and with each other to create streamlined instructional decisions. You know, before I forget, I think a really big component of this is that we see the greatest change when students are receiving consistency across classrooms. Uh, which is why the shift from, you know, why, why part of my work. And my belief is that we have to teach [00:11:00] skills and, and, you know, use content to drive the teaching of those skills and then use instructional activities to create engaging interaction with the content. And so when students are receiving skill-based instruction across the BO board. We're far more likely to see increase in student achievement because it's not just happening in isolation. It's not just content driven. It's not like, oh, I'm gonna go to social studies and learn just about social studies. And then when I go to math, I only, you know, I'm just learning math. It's about what does justify look like in social studies and what does it mean to justify in math? And so when we can allow teachers to on the ground, collect information on students as it relates to those skills, and then bring that information to their meetings, they can create. Consistent instructional, you know, strategies and they can collaborate around what's working and not working for specific students, um, that allows students just greater opportunity throughout their day to practice these skills and [00:12:00] continue to thrive. And that's really, you know, goes back to the idea of, uh, creating inclusive culture and allowing us to have greater opportunity to measure the impact that we're having on, on student, on student achievement. Lindsay Lyons: Whoa, there's so much. I wanna just like a stamp and ask more about, so Dr. Jana Lee: listen, I can go on and on. So at some point you can just say, Jonna, we've had enough. Like, can you mo moving on? Lindsay Lyons: I, I love this. So the idea of like. That it's actually easier to teach to skill-based groups because you're actually teaching less as opposed to more because it's such a big umbrella is I just wanna like stamp that for people who did, who missed that the first time. That's brilliant. And what a good mindset shift. Also, I'm thinking about kind of both the structures and then the data specifically to gather when we're thinking about instructional leaders. So instructional coaches or maybe, you know, in a small school setting, it might be like a building leader, like an assistant principal or someone. Dr. Jana Lee: Yeah. Lindsay Lyons: Um, so [00:13:00] like you were talking about professional learning communities, I imagine there's probably instructional coaching cycles that could happen. There's like all of these, Dr. Jana Lee: all of it Lindsay Lyons: places. And so are there like either structures that you recommend or like moves leaders can make to. Enhance or set up these structures as well as what data would you actually encourage folks to gather or even gather yourself as an instructional leader to then like look at, analyze, respond to in that professional learning space? Dr. Jana Lee: Yeah, so it all starts with your goals. Whether they're district goals, building goals, uh, whatever the goals are, everybody needs to know about them. And everybody needs to know what is my role in bringing this goal to life? And I would make the assumption that. Somewhere in those goals include, you know, how collectively, uh, we are increasing student achievement, right? Um, and so. From a leadership coaching perspective, it is really important that your role as a coach is [00:14:00] defined in terms of when I am supporting teachers or when I am looking at the building of these meetings that I might have, or my faculty meetings, or the way in which I'm communicating weekly to my staff. How am I bringing in? Uh, these goals, number one. And then number two, how am I making it clear about, as a leader, my role in supporting boots on the ground for teachers? So teachers, there's no secrets here. There's a lot of transparency, right? So there, that's the first thing. There's gotta be real clarity around, as a coach, what am I doing to support these goals? Right. And then how does that come to life instructionally so that I can support teachers very clearly. So what goes along with that in terms of a system, I'm a huge fan of taking the guesswork out of support, create, co-create a list of look fors or success criteria that speaks to. [00:15:00] The pedagogy that you are looking for in the classroom. So often support comes through, you know, oh, let me give you, just for a lack of a better word, like rose or a thorn or a grower, you know, grow or glow. That feedback is, is kind of, can go all over the place. Um, whereas we see the greatest gains when the feedback is very centered on an instructional move or, or something specific. As it relates to the look fors that you've created, and those look fors should align directly to the goals of the district. That or the school community. That is a very, um, that's a structural component that will make. That will take a lot of the guesswork also out of, are we meeting our goals? Because everybody has a role to play. And a lot of times if I were to ask a teacher, what are your building goals or what are your district goals to, you know, know no fault of their own, lot of them [00:16:00] struggle and being able to communicate that. Um, and so everybody needs to be working toward. Toward what the, you know, overarching student achievement goals are for the community and everybody has a role to play. And then as teachers, it's important that teachers are very clear on, you know, what are the moves that they need to be making in order to bring those goals to life. And in order to fulfill the look fors and the success criteria that they have co-develop. As it relates to, you know, the, the bigger picture. Um, and teachers are then very clear on what they are working toward, and they know that the support that comes from leadership or coaching is going to align directly toward that. So, you know, you, you start small. And, uh, in your PLCs or in your leadership meetings, you're looking at the, the data that you are collecting with those look fors and success criteria to say one of two things. Yeah. We're moving in the right direction in terms of where we wanna go with achievement. [00:17:00] Right. Uh, or to say, Hey, we're really moving, we're really growing in these areas. But it looks like when it comes to, you know. Student engagement in these in small groups. I'm just, you know, or, um, the, uh, number of minutes that teachers are, are en engaged in direct instruction. These are little pockets that we really wanna hone in on. So it allows you to see themes and patterns to modify the support and to leverage and highlight the great gains that you are seeing. Um, and you know, it also allows. It takes the guesswork out. It kind of, well, two things, takes the guesswork for leadership. Out of what support am I providing? The language is there, there's consistency in messaging. Everybody knows what they're doing and what they're working toward. And for teachers, it kind of allows them to lessen their, um, their bring their walls down a little bit because it's less of a guessing game. Like, oh, what are they in here to see? Like, am I doing the right thing? Right? Am I doing what they [00:18:00] want? Uh, there are also teachers are clear on, on the moves that they should be making, and all of it collectively allows us to collect information that is number driven. Um, it allows for, uh, teachers to feel like their voices are being heard in terms of. You know what they want this to look like when look, fors and success criteria are co-created, and it allows support to be very driven and focused. And then your student achievement should back that great workup. So you're not just relying on student achievement numbers to tell you the success of, you know, the, the, the, the pedagogy. You're allowing, you know, both of those pieces of information to speak to the impact that you're having. Holistically. Lindsay Lyons: Yeah, that ma, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm thinking about the, uh, student achievement specifically that student achievement data. So you, you could go in right, as a, a le instructional leader, even as a teacher [00:19:00] who's kind of observing different pieces and observe certain things. Um, and then there's also, like, I know I've heard you talk about the student artifacts themselves, right? Being really powerful. So beyond. A lot of times traditionally we think a lot of times of like a test or something, but like, you know, how did that student do on that exit ticket? Right? Or like, what was the quote shared in the, the verbal discussion and we're assessing discourse. Are there particular, um, either like lesser collected types of data or like data that actually is really illuminating that one might not initially think, uh, to collect that you would highlight? Dr. Jana Lee: Absolutely. You know, I think in secondary, um. Anything that I, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to secondary first, and then I'm gonna go to elementary because I think elementary can be a little bit more difficult, particularly when it comes to reading and writing. I'll talk about that in a moment. In secondary, anything that shows a student's thought process in written form is going to allow teachers to. Assess, not whether they got it right or [00:20:00] wrong, but where the error in thought process occurred. Right. That then I'm having a lot of conversations. My team and I are having a lot of conversations with teachers around. When you're then remediating or targeting, or intervening, it's not just about repeating what the student already heard in the previous lesson. You have to change the approach and identify where the gap was. So that you better understand what that remediation needs to look like. We actually have, um, a small, uh, a small group playbook that maybe I can, I can send to you the link, Lindsay, and, and you can throw it up somewhere or you know, people can access it. Um, but that, that small group playbook allowing teachers to say, this is where I saw the error, and then this is how I would respond. So you might have students that didn't get it correct. 'cause they just didn't follow the directions. Right. That's gonna look how you, how [00:21:00] you target your feedback for that student is gonna look a little different than the student who, you know, made a gap or, or, um, has processing challenges and got it wrong because the way in which they're, they're sequencing, their thoughts are, are just mi mixed up, right? So we've gotta be able to hone in on that a little bit. Uh, with more certainty. And so looking at actual artifacts, anything that shows that thought process is going to allow us to, to do that. Now, I moved to elementary, which is more difficult because, you know, you're getting into the nuances of students who are learning how to read or reading how, you know, reading to learn. You get into students who might not have that, um, that writing maturation quite, quite yet, especially in your. I would even say pre-K, kindergarten, first grade, where students are just learning how to craft or draw or label, right? This is where, um, teachers have to be able to collect [00:22:00] something that's, that is, um, either behavioral, right? Um, something that is oral, uh, that oral language, something that. Uh, demonstrates production, but it might not necessarily be in written form. So they might be bringing anecdotes that speak to what it is that they saw from students or heard, whether it's, you know, something tactile or, um, you know, so students are engaging in a turn and talk. Right? So that information might be more anecdotal, but it should still be thick enough, I guess I would say, heavy enough where. Teachers can dig in to see where did the thought process or where is the, the, where are we not, uh, hitting the mark? Why is the student not me meeting that skill? Especially in reading, you know, with, with phonics and whatnot being something that obviously a lot of, you know, school communities are moving [00:23:00] more toward how are we, you know, digging or annotating our curriculum to also show where students are maybe going left or not, you know, not. Not where they're missing the mark. So you might see more of the annotation of curriculum or anecdotes be brought to the table, but nonetheless, the same rules apply in terms of being able to, to speak to student thought and, and where the, you know, where the, the error occurred Lindsay Lyons: so much there. One of the things I'm thinking about is like the. When we have to do responsive coaching or remediation, right? We have to have that diagnosis of where the error occurs. I think sometimes we just jump right over that we don't think about, like we just need to know that there's not an understanding and then, but then how do you possibly correct the understanding, right, if we're not sure where the error occurs. So I just love that you illuminated that for us, like. We need to just understand students' thinking. And again, that to your point, it could look very different how we assess [00:24:00] that. I even had, yesterday I was in a discourse session at Boston Public Schools and the instructional coach there, um, or program lead there for social studies was like, oh, what I used to do in my fourth grade class. And it was like mind blowing. She's like, we use these little manipulatives. And like every time they spoke, it would be like you build on the same tower if you build on each other's ideas, you make a separate tower if you're new ideas. And like each person has a different color, so you can see where the pattern of conversation goes. I'm like. I never would've thought of that. Elementary teachers are brilliant, but like, yeah, think about the creative ways that we can do that, that might not be in writing, but is still highly valuable. Like, that's such a good idea. Dr. Jana Lee: And that's where the collaboration of like bringing that work to a, a professional learning community or meeting is so important because it allows. For teachers to engage in those conversations and learn from one another and see what's working versus not with particular students or even just with instruction in general. Um, and so if you know that you have students that are constantly, you know, making a, a, a mistake when it [00:25:00] requires thinking that's more than like one or two minutes long, um, that's something that teachers can say we're gonna focus on. How to support the student or the group of these, group of students with that in our classes, right? In our, along our lessons, and this is the strategy that we're gonna use. That's why I'm such a. I, I, I, I will scream this from the rooftops. We have to be able to provide teachers with strategies that are program content and grade agnostic and let the content drive the rigor. So whether I'm in a math class, or social studies, or reading or writing, we want these strategies to be able to be something that can be seen across the board. And so that's the consistency that is so important for students to receive. Throughout their day as opposed to just in isolation, as I mentioned earlier, um, in isolation with, you know, one or two teachers. Lindsay Lyons: Such a powerful point. Such a powerful point. I, [00:26:00] I am recognizing that we are close to the end of our time together. I'd love to ask just a few more questions. Maybe we can, of course, some lightning round of some sort. Dr. Jana Lee: Yes. I gotcha. Lindsay Lyons: Okay. So biggest challenge that teachers face in like the either looking at data or like measuring data or like any of the things we've talked about, is there something that comes up as like, this is a huge challenge and here's how you. Could go about it. Dr. Jana Lee: Letting students, giving students 60 to 90 seconds to do something completely independent without their support is really difficult for teachers to do. The number one thing that I would say to, to. To support that with teachers. Um, mark, somewhere in your lesson, the 60 to 90 seconds that you're just gonna let students go. And for the student that asks to go to the bathroom, let them, for the student that wasn't here yesterday and doesn't know what to do, let them sit there for the student that's bugging their neighbor. Let [00:27:00] them, anybody who doesn't produce. Lets you know that they're a group of, they're the group that you need to pull at some point to address whatever it is that they didn't get right or that they didn't do. Um, that's the most difficult letting students sit there and work on their own for 60 to 90 seconds, even if they're struggling. Lindsay Lyons: I'm gonna use that as a parent, just like shoes on. Okay. We're taking five minutes. Got it. Like, I'm gonna at least let you struggle for 90 seconds. Yes. Dr. Jana Lee: Yes. Yes. We have to see, we have to see what they can do on their own before we start to dig in and, and, and support because it's the only way that we can collect who needs what. Lindsay Lyons: Love it. Okay. Biggest thing you would encourage listeners to do when they end the episode? Something that's like easily start able or implementable right away. Yeah. Dr. Jana Lee: Um, where in your lesson are you gonna give them 60, 90 to seconds, 60 to 90 seconds to work on their own as it relates to the skill that you are teaching. Lindsay Lyons: Great. This is for fun. So it could be related to work [00:28:00] or not at all. Okay. What is something that you have been learning about lately? Dr. Jana Lee: Um, so bringing. So my dissertation was on, um, uh, adolescent reading comprehension. So we have students who are in secondary schools that are, or secondary grade levels that do not know how to read. And so a lot of what I've been thinking about has been how do I translate my findings with that and share with as many secondary teachers as possible strategies that they can use in their classrooms to support those learners who might be reading at a, you know. Elementary or, or, you know, uh, reading grade levels behind Lindsay Lyons: that resonates deeply as a high school special education teacher who had students reading at the first grade level. So thank you for doing that important work. Um, and then people who want to like myself now follow all of that work that you're doing. Where can folks connect with you In the online space? Or, or, Dr. Jana Lee: [00:29:00] yes. So you can find me at jonna dot c Lee on Instagram. Uh, you can head to my website, www.jonnaleeconsulting.com. Uh, I've got resources there that'll lead you to all of my other platforms. Um, yeah, we've got some really exciting things that are, uh, I'm excited to be able to share that with the world, and that's where you can find me. Absolutely. I'm so excited to have, uh, been able to be here with you today and engage in this really important and fun conversation, so thank you.
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In this episode, we chat with Chrissy Beltran, a coach for coaches who is committed to exploring the evolving role. In her work, Chrissy emphasizes the importance of having a clear vision for instructional coaching and strives to offer practical, actionable strategies.
In our conversation, she highlights the need for differentiated approaches that meet teachers where they are and underscores the value of building strong relationships. Chrissy’s approach centers on supporting teachers so they can better support students, always keeping the broader goal of student development in mind. The Big Dream Chrissy’s ultimate vision for education is a system where schools empower students to discover their passions and develop the skills they need to build fulfilling lives. It’s all about helping them grow into the adults they are meant to be and build the life they want to build. She dreams of an environment where every child has the opportunity to explore, learn, and grow into the person they aspire to be, with equity and individual choice at the heart of the educational experience. Mindset Shifts Required Both new coaches and those in the role for some time can benefit by embracing a key mindset: we’re there to support teachers so they can support students—the purpose is to help grow these kids into adulthood. Coaches can shift from focusing only on classroom routines to embracing a broader purpose: supporting teachers as partners in student growth. Coaches must move beyond critiquing what’s “wrong,” but maintain a strong sense of purpose to look for ways to leverage every interaction as an opportunity for positive change. Action Steps For coaches looking to define their role or just get started, Chrissy recommends the following action steps: Step 1: Reflect on and define your personal vision for coaching. What do you want your role to look like? How do you want to spend your time? One helpful exercise is to draw out a pie chart and visually define the time you want to spend in classrooms, facilitating teams, or in meetings. Step 2: Once you are clear on your coaching vision, communicate it clearly with school leadership to ensure alignment and support before you dive in and communicate with teachers. Step 3: Introduce yourself to teachers with clarity about your role, emphasizing partnership and growth rather than quick fixes or top-down mandates. It’s important for teachers to understand what a coach is and isn’t, managing expectations around instant-change or quick fixes. Instead, coaching is an ongoing process, a partnership. Step 4: Build your coaching strategy toolbox, differentiating them as low, medium, and high-impact strategies. This helps you stay responsive to teachers and what they need, what their capacity is, and what’s most likely to move the needle for positive change. Meet teachers where they are, choosing the strategy that is most effective in working toward shared goals. Challenges? One of the biggest challenges coaches face is resistance from teachers. Whether it’s because of negative past experiences or uncertainty about the coaching role, some teachers simply don’t want to work with a coach. Building trust takes time and persistence, but it’s important to approach each relationship with respect, empathy, and a willingness to adapt strategies to individual needs. Coaches need to keep investing in the relationship, even when there’s resistance. One Step to Get Started To begin making an impact, coaches should assess their current practices and add one new strategy to their toolkit. This small step can help them better differentiate their support and more effectively meet the diverse needs of the teachers they work with. Stay Connected You can connect with Chrissy and find out more about her work on her website, Buzzing With Ms. B, Instagram, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Facebook group, and Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast To help you implement today’s takeaways, Chrissy is sharing her Book Pass PD Strategy with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 243 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:
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TRANSCRIPT
Chrissy Beltran, welcome to the time for teachership podcast. Thank you so much for having me today. I loved having you as a guest on my podcast, and I'm so excited to be a guest on yours. Oh my gosh. I am so excited too. And I have to say, anyone listening, instructional coaches like. Chrissy, your, uh, your podcast is like the one, anytime I need instructional coaching inspiration, I'm like, I'm just gonna binge listen to this for the next three hours. Oh, that's so sweet. Thank you. For sure. I highly encourage people to go to your podcast and check it out, and we'll of course link to it as well in the, in the blog post and show notes. Awesome. Thanks. Um, but I'm, I'm so curious, be beyond the podcast or maybe inclusive of the podcast, like what do you want people to know about you or just keep in mind for our conversation today as we get into it. Um, I guess that's a big question. I guess in general, just that, um, I mean, you know, I support instructional coaches and I, I am trying to help coaches make sense out of this role that is. Evolving and is very nebulous and often not defined at a school level. And, um, administrators don't often know what it is. Teachers don't often know what it is, so it's kinda like, what are we doing? We're just building these planes and flying them and crashing and building and flying and crashing. And so, so I just, you know, I tried to provide practical, actionable coaching two coaches, because they're often missing that. We, we get into the school and it's kinda like when you're a new teacher and they stuff you in a classroom and shut the door and say, you know, see you in May. You know, and you're like, oh my gosh, how am I allowed to be responsible for this much, you know, important stuff. And coaching is similar, similar, it's you're the first day of school, you go into your room and you're like. I guess this is my job now. I don't have students here. What is happening? And so that's really where I try to come in and provide the support because I know how isolating and, um, unsettling that feeling is of not knowing what your job is. Oh my gosh, that resonates deeply. That is probably one of the most common things that I hear from people who have just started a coaching role. What am, what am I doing? Yes. What is my job? I remember in my interview asking, what will my job look like? And my principal was like, well, whatever you think best. And that wasn't completely true, but it was mostly true and it was shocking. I mean, that makes me think about this next question that usually, you know, um. Ask people. I feel like as a coach and as a teacher as well, and a leader, you need to have kind of your, your north star, your big vision, right? Mm-hmm. And so I think that kind of anchors and can help construct what your role might be. Um, and so, so I'll ask it now. So in line with the idea of freedom dreaming, which Dr. Patina love describes as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. What is that big dream that you personally hold for either education broadly for instructional coaching, however you wanna interpret this? Okay, sure. So when I think about. About school in general and education in general. I feel like we're very far from what I would like to see. Um, but really I feel like everything we do is supposed to help little people, young people, grow into the adults that they're going to be, who have to build a life in, in whatever place they live and. We all get to choose what our lives are to a degree, right? We make choices, we have decisions, we have opportunities. We decide yes or no, and sometimes we don't know how those choices we make are going to impact our future lives. And you know, there are different, we some have more choices or more options or more possibilities than others. And so I would love school to be the place where. Kids can explore and find out what they love and get good at some, some things that they're gonna need to build the life that they want to build. So like, that would, like, that's, that addresses all the issues of equity. Like if we can do this, if we can really, truly help kids become the person that they wanna be so that they have the life that they want to live. I mean, I have friends, I just had a conversation with a friend of mine, brilliant person, struggles to live his life, you know, he just is still not sure. At our ripe old age of 44, what exactly he wants his life to look like. And I feel like we miss such an opportunity. And there are lots of factors there of course, but we miss such an opportunity in school to help kids figure out what they want before they leave. And I think so much of that is 'cause we focus on these really discreet skills because that is what is like, they have to master these skills. They have to master these skills. And obviously skills matter, right? You cannot build a life you want without some skills, but. It is hard to see kids leaving our schools who still don't really know what they wanna do with themselves. And 18 is very young, but we can give them more of a direction for sure, if they can only like try different things and find out what they're good at and what they enjoy. And I feel like coaching, it's difficult because. You are in, you're at the mercy, right? You're in, you're in between. You're the middle management kind of, except you don't have any power of a manager. And so you are like, you're hearing the words come down from on high, and then you see the classrooms and you see the kids, and you see the teachers and you see the challenges every day. And so you're always trying to balance out, oh my gosh, we have this curriculum and we have this, um. We have this test coming up, the big capital T test, and this is what kids are gonna be held accountable for. So we really do need to prepare them for that 'cause it's not fair to them to be held, you know, accountable for something we haven't prepared them for. But is that really the whole reason we're here? No, it's not the whole reason we're here. So you're having this constant little battle in your brain. And so I feel like as coaches, the reality of that is we have to always have that idea embedded in everything that we do. Because we can't, you can't, we are not responsible for the system. We can't fix the system tomorrow. We don't get to make those choices, unfortunately, at the level that we are. Um, but if that's always in your brain, then you can make changes towards that direction. I love that. And you know, I've been, um, steeped in like little, little kids culture lately. Yeah. Active parenting. And whereas I was a high school teacher and it's so interesting to see that little kids actually do know a lot more about what they want. Sometimes it's really expansive. Like, oh, today I wanna be a firefighter and tomorrow I wanna be a doctor and then I wanna be a veterinarian. The next like, sure. But it is like I am clear on what I want in this moment and I see less and less of that as they get older. And so I love your vision of like. The, it's in there somewhere. Let's just like help them explore and get, like, stay connected to that. Mm-hmm. And I, it just brings me so much joy to hear that, oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I know what you mean. And I, I see that in my children, they're four and seven and I think about, like, I, I want them to. To have found the thing that they love, you know, and mul or multiple things, you know, and so like whenever I put them in an an activity, it's not so they can like be amazing at it. It's so they can try it and see and learn something and have a cool experience and, and put that in their pocket, you know, as something that they know about now, you know, it's like exposure and then they can choose something over time that they love. It's my goal. I love that. And you know, I actually think that that is a lot about like instructional coaching and teachers kind of as well is like, let's test this thing out. Yes. Let's see if this like works with kids. Let's like get creative. And um, I had a colleague recently we were co-presenting and she's like, let's just play with inquiry. Like let's just play with it. And I'm like, oh, I love this idea of like. Your job can be playful. Mm-hmm. And it can be like fun and joyful and you can explore. Yes. So I think there's so, so much power in instructional coaching to help teachers find and reconnect with like their love of teaching in addition, of course to like helping, helping students. Right. The ultimate goal. But I, I am curious, I think a lot of times. You know, we go from maybe teachers to instructional coach and it can kind of, as you mentioned, like be a very big shift where you're like, there are no kids in this room. What am I doing now? You know, like what are those kind of mindset shifts or, uh, maybe a key mindset to keep in mind as a coach is kind of entering that role or even. A seasoned coach who's like, okay, I really wanna do things a little bit different this year. What would you tell them? Sure. I think that, um, but you know, in terms of the work that we do, we are there to support teachers because they support kids. Supporting teachers is not the end of, of our sentence. It's not the end of what we're doing. Um, the purpose is to help grow these kids right into adults that have to make their lives, you know, with all the choices that they have. And so. You know, whenever we're working with teachers, it can be like at first you, whenever you first get started, you're kind of, it's kind of jarring 'cause you're like. This doesn't look like my classroom. I'm visiting these rooms. It's so different and weird. Why are they doing it like that? And it's, it's hard not to have that. But you're a normal human being, right? We, we normally do this. We connect what we know and we are like comparing, you know? And like, this is different. This is weird. And so, you know, at first we start out. Looking at what seems like not right? Right? What seems off. Um, and then over time we can actually take a step back and be like, okay, well what is the purpose here? What am I doing here? We're not, I'm not here to be like, well, this seems weird and that seems wrong, and that's wrong and this is wrong. Instead, we have to like, think beyond what we did in the classroom and think about a bigger purpose for our work, right? So if our bigger purpose is about. It's about supporting kids and growing them. Into kids who have opportunities, right into kids who have choices because they can do all the basic things and also they know some stuff about lots of different things. Then we can kind of have that constantly running in the background of the work that we do with teachers and the work that we do with kids. And so instead of like focusing on what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong, we can be like, okay, how can I take this? Interaction, any coaching interaction, because we have millions of them and we don't even always consider them coaching, but any interaction you have with a teacher is an opportunity to like leverage that right into something bigger. And so you can say, okay, I'm having a conversation passing in the hallway, right. I'm not gonna change teaching, I'm not gonna change it today. I'm not gonna, you know, completely reboot the system today, but I can do something that will help me move this conversation forward so that I can help the teacher grow in that direction and make the changes. And if we're always having our purpose in the back of your mind, and yours might be a little different than mine, right? Everybody has a different vision of what they, what they would love to see school look like. But if you can. Have that purpose in the back of your mind, then you can kind of always find the kind of like the motivation and the energy to like move that conversation forward into something bigger and say, okay, I know that we're having a small conversation now, but I can leverage this by saying, why don't I come by and see that in your classroom tomorrow? Or would you like to come by today and take a look at this resource or, you know, we can, we, we can continue to develop the small CS that teachers give us. So if we can focus on like, okay, let's take, we're having a, a team meeting here and we're talking about planning and we're using a curriculum, right? And that's, that feels kind of, you know, restrictive or it feels kind of dry and pointless sometimes you're like, Ugh, this lesson is like so corny or useless. What can we do to like move that into a bigger, teachable moment, not just for kids, but for teachers? How can we have a conversation and say, you know what? What are some opportunities we have to connect this to reality, to connect this to current events, to connect this to the world that kids live in, so that they kind of have an idea of what they believe about themselves, about the world, about what they like and what they don't like, what they think is good and what they don't think is good. How can we like take this moment and make it bigger? And so if we can just kind of always have that mindset running. But we can take moments, leverage them into bigger stuff than, I think that as a coach, we avoid some of like the, like if somebody passes in the hallway and they're like, Ugh, parent night. I just, ugh, talking with parents just stresses me out instead of saying, I know, right. Ugh. Parents. Which is maybe what our instinct is to do sometimes. Uh, 'cause we feel like, well, we're commiserating, which is okay to commiserate, but then we wanna say, what can we do to help you feel prepared for that? We wanna take everything and turn it into something bigger, and we have these opportunities. We just have to keep that in the forefront that we can do this, we can make these things into bigger moments. I love that. That's such a really great concrete example too, because I imagine that is, that is a common thing people have encountered is like, yes, do I commiserate as like a fellow teacher, which I might used to have been last year, right? Or do I coach forward? Right. Yeah, and you can do both. You demonstrate a little empathy by being like, I know it can be really stressful. What can we do is whenever you move it forward, right? Yeah. Absolutely. I, so I wanna get into differentiating coaching for sure. I want, maybe let's take one more step, just as like a, um, if I'm just getting into coaching or I'm kind of like redefining my relationship with my teachers, is there any kind of tip or action step that you would recommend for coaches who are just trying to define that role, get started, um, kind of address some of the challenges of that that we talked about? Yeah, definitely. I think that some of it is that we have to have a clear vision for what coaching is, and if you have not been coached or if you had been coached by somebody who maybe was not the vision of coaching that you would like or had a role that wasn't. Maybe gonna look like yours or wasn't ideal, which happens all the time that we get an ideal role. Um, if you have had that experience, then I think it's really important to like really pause and paint a picture and envision what do I want my coaching work to look like? What do I want my day to be like? Where do I wanna spend my time? Um, Angela, uh, Harkness and, and, um, Lindsay Deacon, the Educ Coach Survival Guide. I just saw them this summer in, um. In Round Rock outside of Austin at the Region 13 Coaching Conference, and they did a really neat little activity where you draw like a circle. You could do paper plate. You kind of wanna divide it up in terms of time and how much time you wanna spend on certain things. You know, like a little pie, pie chart. And so I think that that can be helpful just in thinking about, okay, well how much, how much time do I wanna spend in classrooms? How much time do I wanna s. Bend. You know, like I know that personally, whenever I first started coaching, I was responsible for facilitating PLC teams. And that was like an every Tuesday, you know, once you hit the door, until you leave the the school thing, you know, it wasn't like something I could choose or not choose. And that required preparation as well. So that was like Tuesday shot, right? Tuesday was gone. Part of Monday was also gone to prepare for Tuesday. Monday was also leadership after school. Wednesday was this, you know, after school learning. Thursday I had to prepare for an hour of pd. Those things are just already like off your calendar, so then you really have. To think about with that white space that you have, what kind of coach do I wanna be and what is my coaching work gonna look like? And the beauty of differentiating coaching is that I think it actually, you have to define your coaching role in order to be able to do this. And you have to have an idea of how you wanna differentiate in order to find your coaching role because you're a picking strategies that you are, you think will be most helpful to teachers to kind of focus on. And that's going to be the main crux of your folks, your of your coaching work. But then you're also saying, okay, in this moment, how am I going to be responsive to teachers? And that's where we differentiate, that's where we create the personalized experience. So in terms of like defining your role, you wanna have big picture ideas and you wanna have like, you know, like a, like a goal and a vision of what you want your coaching to be. And you wanna be able to clearly communicate that with administration and clarify all of that first before you even bother talking to a teacher. Because that's, if not, you're gonna be sadly disappointed. And it's gonna be very confusing for teachers as well. So make sure you're on the same page there. And then make sure you can communicate it clearly with teachers and when you go to introduce yourself, that you are clear on what a coach is and what a coach isn't. That it is a partner. It is somebody to help support teachers to grow, to find opportunities for learning, and to do that together. Um, and it's not that you're gonna be able to fix anybody. You're not gonna fix anything and walk into a classroom and just change everything overnight. It's not gonna happen. Um, and, and I think that sometimes that's a position that administrators put us in. You know, so be aware of like the realities of the role. Define it clearly with what strategies you're gonna focus on. So then you have flexibility within that to meet teachers' needs because you already know the big picture, if that makes sense. That makes total sense. And I, I am so curious as you like kind of preview differentiated coaching strategies and stuff, I'm like, ooh, I wanna know more. So can you take us through, I mean, I know your, like your book is on undifferentiated coaching and I'm, I'm so curious to know. Um. Yeah, just like what, what, what's included in that? What does that mean? What does that look like? Sure. Um, so yes, I am writing a book. Uh, it should be coming out in May or June with a SCD, so I'm super excited about that. And it's about a coaching strategy toolbox. So the idea is that each of us has this little toolbox and it's full of different strategy. Some of them you don't even realize are gonna contribute to your coaching. Right? And so in terms of. The value of each strategy, I have them sorted into low impact, medium impact, and high impact. 'cause some strategies are more impactful in making classroom change and some are less so. But that doesn't mean we never use them. It doesn't mean they aren't valuable for a purpose. So you kind of have to consider in the moment, okay, what is my purpose? What is my intent? How much time does the teacher have? Like how responsive are they to the work that we are trying to do here? Do they like working with me? Do they not want to work with me? It's just the reality, right? And so you have to think about what your purpose is in order to select some possible strategies that could move your interactions forward. And so, kind of like I mentioned before, really responding to teacher needs. Being attuned to like what is the actual issue that they're having so that we can address that instead of just having like a trite response or well, have you tried the curriculum and you know, kind of directing people back to stuff they already know. We want to think about what is it that they're telling me? Really listen so that we can uncover the root of the issues that they're having, and then choose a strategy from your toolbox that you could use to move this forward into to further coaching work. And so whether that is moving very slowly along with a teacher who is not. Super besties with you, um, and runs the other way whenever they see you. But you wanna make a real point of relationship building, right? You wanna demonstrate empathy, you wanna build credibility, and that's low level and less invasive. You can choose one of those strategies. You can try recommending a resource just to show that you know, resources, right? You're demonstrating your credibility, you're showing that you are listening to a need that they have. You can try serving as a sounding board just listening to the issues that they have and giving, you know, certain. What you're really doing when you're being a sounding board is you are listening to what issues that they have, kind of sorting out those issues with them through questioning, and then say, well then what can we do? How can we do something about this? We don't wanna vent for all eternity. We wanna do something to make your lives better as a teacher and your kids' lives better as students. So what can we do? These so are, they're like very low impact things that you can do if that's what the moment calls for and you want, instead of saying, well, let's go jump right into a coaching cycle. They're not gonna respond to that. And so, so many times we try to get everybody, and I've seen this at schools where people try to get everybody into the same. Like a routine, like a, um, like a system where they have people go through a coaching cycle every two weeks and then they move on to the next person or something. They kind of systematize it because coaching is so, like I said, nebulous, but that doesn't meet the needs of the teachers where they are, which is what differentiation is all about. We wanna meet the needs of where they are and move them forward a little bit. That's what we do with kids. It's, we wanna do the same thing with teachers. So you wanna think about what impact can I choose right now? What is my purpose and how can I move this forward? So there are low, uh, medium and high impact strategies. High impact strategies tend to be the ones that you see in coaching cycles. So looking at, um, model lessons, co-taught lessons in the moment, coaching, video coaching, and then medium impact strategies are more about alignment and knowledge building things that you would tend to do in teams, but you can do one-on-one as well. Wow. That's incredible. And thank you for giving those specific examples because you are right that not everyone wants coaching and there are people who literally run. Yes. So that's so helpful to think about. Okay, like what do I do here? And then what do I do with perhaps the new teacher who's like. I wanna try all the things. Let's go coaching. Yay. Right? Yeah, exactly. 'cause you wanna respond to the person in front of you. You want to teach like, and coach the actual teacher, not like the model cookie cutter of a teacher. Right. Um, and so we have to support the person that we're actually working with by responding to the needs that they have and to their interest level and to their skill level. And um, and sometimes the best thing we can do is just. Continue to move the relationship forward because if we dump in a really high impact strategy right at the beginning, that can be a real turnoff. Like if you're working with a veteran teacher and you offered to model a lesson, they're probably not gonna be super excited if they were not already excited about you. Yeah, exactly. Um, I am curious, I'm sure you've encountered, I mean, I'm sure just like personally you've encountered, but also like coaching coaches, you've encountered challenges that people have faced in coaching. I mean, that I, that's probably the number one that comes to mind is like resistance to the idea of coaching. And now you're paired with them. Sure. Yeah. But I mean, so we could go with that one, or we could go with another one you're thinking of. I'm curious. Uh, of, of a challenge that you've experienced or, or had others experience and like, how do they work through it or what's kind of the, the way forward when they encounter that challenge? Sure. I can give a couple of examples. Um, I mean, this is one that I have myself seen. You know, personally, I mean, we've all experienced resistance. Nobody walks into a school and has everybody go, I'm so glad you're here. Like, it's just not gonna happen. So, so one, one person that I, that I did work with, one teacher, um, there was definitely resistance, I think had nothing to do with me at the time. I think it was. Simply the coaching role. You know, it was, um, who are you coming in here to tell me literally anything And, uh, you don't even have a classroom of your own. I did two months ago before the summer ended, but you're right, I currently do not. So that was a big, um, a really hard, stressful time for me. Person was kind of imposing, um, and, uh, was used to being left alone because they were, um, borderline aggressive. You know, so like, kind of, you know, even physically would use, you know, like I since was a tall person. I'm not a very tall person. Um, but I've been around tall people my whole life, so it, it didn't stress me out, but I think it stressed out a lot of people. And so, you know. Having to find a way. I, I really thought back at the time to my own students who sometimes came in in that same manner and they had generally come in in that manner. 'cause they had had experiences in the past. Who that that had actually shaped them into thinking that, you know, teachers were there to get 'em in trouble or something along those lines, and that they kind of couldn't be trusted. And I figured that that was probably, in many cases, a situation that teachers had seen as well, whenever they were acting in that way. I'm gonna guess that regardless of the quality of their instruction, that they had had those experiences. And maybe that was kind of the root of the problem, you know? And so I definitely. There were things that had to be done. We did a lot of team things. There was a lot of alignment conversation. There were a lot of planning supports and, you know, she wasn't really excited about any of that. But, um, I, I think that keeping a constant demeanor of respect and sort of a persistent. Positivity. Not like an annoying, like, everything's great, la la, la. Not that, but, you know, kind of a, I, you know, I know this is hard, but I believe we can do it. You know, and then showing up and actually following through. So I think eventually I, I wore her down to where she would at least, you know, have engage in conversations with me that we're not, you know, snippy and rude. Right. So then over time. It took, I mean, this really, this was like a two to three year process, um, because we were doing lots of team things, but actually, and I would visit the classroom, but there was, there were always stories about, well, oh, we're not doing that because this, or we're not doing that because that, or I choose to do this instead. And so it was a lot and, and my job was not like police officer or anything, but it certainly was to say, okay, well we plan to do this, and you, there's no evidence that you ever have done any of that. So like, is there an issue with it? Or like, why are we planning things that don't happen? What's the point? You know? So we had small conversations over time and I just kept investing in the relationship and investing in the relationship over time. And then the strategy that I picked once, I felt like she was ready to kind of move into a higher impact. Coaching strategy because it had taken a long time to get there. I chose to work with her on visiting other colleagues because I feel like that is a great gateway drug into coaching. Okay. It's high impact. It's incredibly high impact, but it's not you. And so they are more likely to be receptive, and so you could just say, who do you wanna see? And you can start with it wide open. If you really are having a hard, if it's a really hard nut to crack, start with the door wide open. What do you wanna see? And they can choose what they'd like to see. And then from there you can narrow it down and say, okay, so we've been talking about this specific area. Tell me a little bit about this. You know what? I know somebody who's really great in that area. Maybe we can go visit them. And then you can start moving them through that process till eventually you are. You've established a pretty good coaching relationship and you can get in that classroom as well and do more coaching work with them. Um, so that, that is one strategy that if it's not in your toolbox visiting a colleague or a peer observation, it can also be called, um, learning walks. Some people call 'em that, but I prefer, like, we're not just focused on this one classroom experience, right? Because sometimes learning walks are like visiting a whole grade level or something. This is. You're taking a teacher to see another teacher, the other teacher knows they're coming and has prepared for that moment and has a conversation with the guest teacher when it's over, and then you can also have a conversation with them. So that is one that if you are dealing with a teacher, trying to work with a teacher who has demonstrated resistance over time to any kind of change in their classroom, visiting a colleague can be life changing. Oh my gosh, that's so good. The moment you said it, I was like, that's it, that's the end. Because it totally takes you as the coach out of the equation and, and the fact that they were like, oh, you don't have a classroom any, like anymore or at this moment. Exactly. Like, it's like, oh, here's someone who does and they're doing this thing that you want or want to try. Right. Let's just, I'm just, I'm just here in the background. I'm just the facilitator. The connector will debrief after, like I love that. Yes. Brilliant. One of the challenges that I faced when I started coaching is I came from a school that was not affluent in any way, but was like solid middle class for the most part. You know, there were, I mean, you know, on average it was, it was middle class, lower middle class. And then I moved to a school who had, that had, um, many students in poverty and so. The teachers would say things like, well, that won't work here, because they knew where I came from. And I mean, it was like seven miles away, right? But it was on the other side of the freeway, and it was right by the border. I live in El Paso, it was right by the, the, um, the, the Mexican border. So it was, you know, a lot of kids who. Did not have a lot of resources at home, and so the teachers tended to say, well, that won't work here. They would even tell me things like, well, our classrooms are too small for that, even though the school. The architect was the same architect, so it was the exact same building as the school that I came from. But the things that we get stuck, right, the limitations that we put on ourselves, it never occurred to me to say my classroom was too small for that in my school. And then I came to the exact same building and they were like, no, it's too small. It was so weird, right? And so seeing such a different way of looking at teaching was really eye-opening and having a teacher visit their colleague down the hall and say, because they would say those that won't work with these kids. These are the same kids, okay? Next door. They are random sampling for the most part of the same kids. So if you walk seven feet, you can see that this can happen, this can be done, right? And I think that the other beauty of visiting a colleague, which is one of my favorite strategies, obviously. First of all, I don't have to do a lot. I get to go watch a cool lesson, and that's like the best. But on top of that, they get to see a real thing in action with real kids. And you get to have this conversation that highlights the strengths of another teacher in your school. You get to like help lift up that teacher into leadership and you get to build these relationships across your school where one teacher can go seek out another teacher instead of, you know, sometimes they come, they come to their teachers. This is not the case of this example, but there are those teachers that come to you for everything, right? They will knock on your door before they knock on anybody else's, and you want them to have another friend that they can trust, that they know is a great teacher, that they can go knock on their door too, because they're gonna get such a different perspective from that teacher, and they are going to build the cross grade level, you know, cross vertical alignment teams that really makes schools grow. If everybody looks to you all the time. They, you, you can't grow a school. There's one of you. It's not possible. You've gotta help build those relationships across your school, where even second grade can go to fifth grade because they know that fifth grade teacher is so good at teaching writing, and they wanna see what they do. Brilliant. Oh my gosh. Also, one of my favorite strategies. This is, I'm so glad you highlighted all of those pieces. Brilliant. Um, okay. As we wrap up the episode, a little bit of a lightning round here for the last few questions. Okay. So what is one thing you would encourage audience members to do once they end the episode? Something they could implement right away. I think, um, um, a really tangible thing because it's a lightning round, right? So a really tangible thing. You can tell I'm not good at lightning round. Uh, uh, something that it's easy to do is, is really take a look at what does your coaching look like right now? What strategies are you comfortable using? And then add one so that you can differentiate further and meet teachers' needs in a different way. Brilliant. Okay. Next one. This is for fun. It could relate to what we're talking about or not, but what is something you personally have been learning about lately? So I, um, you know, I mean we, I, I love to learn through reading historical fiction, and I know it's not like I, I need the story first and then I can dig into the history. So that's what helped it stick in my brain. Um, without a story, it doesn't stick. So I have been, I read this book about ancient Vietnam and these two si, it was based on a true story of these two sisters, and they had been trained their whole lives to be like warriors. And then their father would, because it was, this was whenever the Han was like, um. Was had like overtaken the country and so the father, and they had completely undone their ways. I did not know that Vietnam prior to that had been like a matriarchal structure. I had no idea. So whenever the Hanh came, they were like, no, you're gonna like get married. You're gonna have, you know, these households, you're gonna raise your children in this way. All this stuff is really interesting. And so these two sisters. Became warriors. And then whenever their father was executed, they raised this army to fight against the Han and it was a woman like an all women army. And I had never heard that story before and I did not know that's what the book was about when I started reading it. But it was fascinating and it was based on a true story. Oh my gosh. Okay, now that needs to go on my tv. Yeah, it's, it's called Bronze Drum is the name of the book. Bronze Drum. Okay. Thank you for that. Yeah, it was really good. Sure. And then finally, where can folks learn more about with you, connect with you? Maybe share the name of your podcast? Sure. Uh, podcast is instructional coaching with Miss B. You can listen anywhere you listen to podcast. And then you could also listen on the website at buzzing with miss b.com. And so I try to get the episodes on there as well, um, every week. But you know, there's like over 250 episodes so you know, there's bound to be a topic you're interested in. Amazing. Thank you so much. And we, um, when that book comes out, we can always like link, even if, oh, thanks, this episode airs before it, we can go back and link it so that just people can find the book and we will keep you all posted on that. Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you, Christy. This was absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for sharing your brilliance. Thank you. I'm so glad that I got to talk with you today. 
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In this episode, we sit down to talk with Mary Kelly, CEO of StrataTech Education Group, which provides adult education programs for trades like refrigeration or welding.
Mary shares the impact of her own high school teacher, who changed her life trajectory and ignited her passion for education. Together, we discuss the transformative power of education—including for adults—the systemic issues perpetuating inequality, and the potential of skilled trades to level the playing field. The Big Dream Mary’s dream is for education to be available to everybody, no matter where they’re from. She recognizes that many people were born into negative and challenging circumstances, but education is the way out—it’s the way for upward mobility. But the access to education has to be there. Mindset Shifts Required “Fixing the education system” or providing access to education is overwhelming—no one person can change it. But educators and leaders can consider what’s in their sphere of influence and where they can influence positive change. Another mindset shift Mary advocates for is around the trades. Those taking trades are not just the “dumb kids,” because many of them are making millions as plumbers or in other roles. There needs to be a shift in different paths and not putting students or people into only one category. Equity in Education: Exploring the Trades Mary discusses her experience managing trade schools and how they’re a space of equitable education for anyone interested in learning. Open enrollment means students don’t need to test to qualify for the classes; they just need to be willing to do the work. The student self-identifies their ability and interest in the program and then pursues it; this is a revolutionary approach to education, where we often rely on testing and putting students in a box rather than relying on their individual agency. Education in the trades is all related to the job—everything they learn applies to what they want to do. This can be a motivating environment because the students are learning an application rather than being “talked at” in some more traditional school settings. Mary also discusses the benefits of the for-profit model. Because students are paying, they’re committed. Further, they’re the customer, so the school works to support them in any way they can, creating a positive place for students to reach their goals. One Step to Get Started For educators striving to show up for their students better, Mary recommends starting with this question: Look at what you’re offering and see if you’re meeting every individual’s needs, or is it just based on the group. It’s important to work with each student individually and meet their unique needs. To connect with Mary, you can visit the corporate website, StrataTech Education Group, or email her at [email protected]. If you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 242 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:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Mary, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 00:03 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Thank you. 00:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I'm excited to be here, lindsay. Listeners will have just heard the formal bio at the start of the show, but I wanted to invite you to share anything else. That is something people should keep in mind as they're engaging with the episode and as we kind of jump into our conversation today. It can be personal, professional, what's on your mind today, anything you think, oh my God, a lot's on my mind today. 00:26 - Mary Kelly (Guest) There's a lot of craziness going on. We don't have time for all that. So I guess probably the one question I get a lot look, I'm a CEO of a very large organization in a predominantly male space, so I do get a lot of questions like how did that happen? And I have to tell you, lindsay, it's totally by accident. So I did not wake up one day and say, guess what? I want to be CEO. 00:54 I came from a very large family and there were problems in my family. My dad was an alcoholic and I kept getting these high IQ scores but I wasn't doing well in school and all they kept doing was testing me but nobody really kind of asked the question that needed to be asked, right? So I get into high school and I had an English teacher in high school who actually asked me the question. She said you're so smart, why is there something going on? Specifically said, is there something going on at home? And I cried and I tried. I never had had that conversation and you know what, for the first time in my life I felt like I was seen at school and it it changed the trajectory of my life. It really did, and at that point, subconsciously, I said to myself this is what I want to do. I want to help kids like me and I want to go into teaching. And so I went into teaching thinking I was going to be a teacher. Right, that's another story. 01:53 I did teach for a little while. I hated, to be honest with you. I hated the public system. I love my kids, but there was a lot of politics. I'm just not. What you see is what you get from me. I'm a New Yorker and I just couldn't do the politics and I spoke out too much and, uh, long story short, I was pretty miserable. 02:11 A friend of mine was working in adult ed and said have you ever thought of working with adults? And I'm like I don't know. I want to make a difference. They're already. They're already adults. I can't make a difference there. And I went to work for Bryan and Stratton, which is a business college in New York fantastic school and my very first job with adults was teaching English and math fundamentals. And, lindsay, I fell in love. These were my people. These were people that had been dismissed as troublemakers. You'll never be anything, but they were so smart. No one had ever given them a chance and no one had seen them. And so that was my foray into adult education. 02:50 Years later I ended up kind of a you heard my bio, I you know for a little. I was in there for a while. Then I thought I was working for a nonprofit, for a for-profit school. I said, oh, for-profit's bad. And I went to work for a nonprofit school Guess what they're the same. It's about getting people enrolled right. And I worked for a great. I worked for New School University in New York, which was great, but it was all the same. And I found that the for-profits, the good ones and there's a lot of good ones you never hear about A lot of people doing really good work. They're out there and they're responding to a need that nobody else is serving, and up until recently they were the only ones servicing a particular group. So, but long story short, I left there and I went into the nonprofit world. I said these people are crazy. I ran back to education. So you know what? And I you know I've been in it ever since and I found my. 03:44 I was working at Lincoln education. They had 38 schools up and down the East coast. Um, I, I became a campus president, a group vice president kept moving up, um, but I was in medical and allied health and I really wanted to get into the skilled trades. Uh, but I was really good at what I did and I just couldn't do it at Lincoln and the old CEO of Lincoln started. This company had been coming after me for a while and I said, yep, I get to go do the skill trades, let me do it. And you know, I had been teaching, I'd been in education for a long time at that point and I didn't think there was more to show me. But, man, I fell in love again. I fell in love again and I've been here for 15 years and it's been a blast and I work with amazing people here. So so kind of a long story, but that's, that's the story. And here I am. 04:29 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love it. Oh, I love that backstory and I love that it's grounded in kind of just a simple question. That was transformative for you right, thinking about the power that educators hold to influence students' sense of belonging and their life trajectories. I mean, it's a beautiful story that illustrates that potential and that positive opportunity that we all have in education space. So thank you for that. I think you know this is probably connected to what you were just sharing, but I'm curious to know. I often ask the question at the start of these shows. You know, dr Bettina Love describes the idea of freedom dreaming as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, and so I'm always curious what that big dream is that guests hold for the education space. So do you mind telling us about what that big dream might be? 05:16 - Mary Kelly (Guest) for you Right. I want education to be available to everybody, no matter where you're from, and to be the difference maker. For you Right? And I think there's a lot of people that have pointed that out. I think you know there's a lot of people that are born on the wrong side of the tracks. They didn't do anything wrong, they just were born in a certain area and they have access to the worst of everything. Right, but education can be that one thing that lifts them out of that. How many stories have we heard about people that come from there through an education? 05:52 That is the way for upward mobility, and I want that for everybody in this country, and unfortunately, right now, there's a lot of people that don't have that and aren't having access to it and don't know how to get it, and so my dream is that someday it'll be very easy for everyone to be able to access that and we can go back to being. Look, america is not an ideal. We were the American dream, right, it was come here and you can be anything you want if you work hard enough. It's not true anymore. You could work your butt off and you still may not be able to get where you need to get and that's not correct, like we need to look at that as a society and say where do we go off the rails here? And part of it is the education system. 06:34 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh my gosh, yeah, absolutely. There are so many pieces of the education system that are just not. Oh my God. 06:39 - Mary Kelly (Guest) I know, I just want you to look. I'm a huge fan of public education. I do believe that everybody should have access. So you know, I just want to throw that out. I do think that looking at the economy and having a free market helps make things better, having that competition I think all those pieces are important, right. When you base education funding on tax dollars, you're in trouble. There's always going to be inequality, like it's just an unequal system that was built from the start. So get rid of the system and figure out a better way. And it's not the lottery either. 07:17 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Great point. So, yeah, I'm curious to know, I guess in the rest of the time that we have together, like, how do we accomplish that, or how have you kind of accomplished that right? I mean, I think there's probably several things that go into it. I often ask about you know, mindset shifts for educators and ways that we kind of move away from that traditional mindset that like, oh okay, you're, you know, born with wealth, so you're going to have all of these AP opportunities or you know whatever it is, and there's also kind of like concrete actions that education systems and educators in classrooms can take. I'm curious, like, feel free to go either direction, both directions, like mindsets or actions. What have you seen be successful? 08:01 - Mary Kelly (Guest) I love how you're thinking and they're great questions. I think. I think that's a loaded, a loaded question in many ways Right, and so a lot of times, like you know, I will say this I'm going to go off track for a minute, but you know I have a lot of friends, we've been around for a while, you know, and we talk about stuff and and, and some of my friends are getting a little disenfranchised and like, oh my God, all these bad things are happening. My belief is that most people are good, most people are good and you see that, like when nine 11 happened, when there's a crisis that happens when the Houston floods came, I mean people all jump in. It doesn't matter if you're an immigrant or a non-immigrant. Like everybody was in Texas when they had the Houston floods, you had people that were jumping in boats and saving people, right, like everybody was in it together and for that moment we were together, right, and I think generally that's where people are, but they get so overwhelmed by how much there is to do. So your question is a little overwhelming Like, how do you fix, like, this whole broken system? And you asked me how I do it. 09:10 Like, for me, I obviously haven't, I haven't fixed it. But I come from a place of what can I do in my sphere of influence? Right, like I told you my story, if someone made a difference to me, how can I make a difference in the people that I'm around and that I'm exposed to and that I can affect? Right, the skill trades is, as part of that, has really spoken to me. Um, because you're getting a group of people quite honestly like, if you look at our country, like who took shot, people took shop classes. They said, oh, only the dumb kids take shop classes. You have millionaire plumbers. These people aren't dumb, they were actually smart, they were smarter than most of us. You know, I got out with an English degree. I wasn't making anywhere near what my friends who started their own business and were in the skill trades were doing, right, so I think that's part of it. Like in the edge, in the part of the, the story that we sold, we're seeing that it's wrong. You see Gen Z today and they're saying what am I going to spend for college and why am I going to spend it? Is it worth it? What am I going to get out of it? Right, and that's a legitimate question. And in the skill trades. You have a way of equalizing what education made unequal. Right Kids were put in track. I actually don't believe in track systems. I don't believe in that at all. I think you probably know this right. Research has totally shown that when you mainstream people, they do better. 10:40 My older brother is, I think, joe's 60. Well, maybe he's just 69. He's going to be 70. Joe's awesome. He was borderline when he was born, so they used forceps. He was in a military hospital. My father was military for a while and so at that time, I mean, he was borderline. If he had put in a mainstream classroom his life would have been very different, but he wasn't. He was put in special classes and so you know the Pygmalion effect right, he rose to what level they were expecting and his life turned out very different. I mean, he's great, he's married and all that. But what could it have been if we had just mainstreamed them, right? So I got totally off track and forgot where I was going. 11:27 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Great point. You're free to redirect me, yeah, so I mean I think the track system I'd love to jump on there. You're absolutely right. The research shows that there is only disastrous effects of that. It doesn't serve anyone. And so I think about that in terms of how you know, both like thinking about how people choose to enroll in the skills trades and in a school such as that or such as that. But I also think about you know how the school itself is operating right in the skills trades, like how, how you kind of do away with that. So can you take us kind of behind the scenes of like what is the structure of your system and kind of how do you kind of push back against that? 12:10 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Sure, well, listen, everyone's equal. Like, we have an open enrollment. So if you want to learn how to do welding and you've never done it before, come on down and we have. You know we put out over 5000 graduates a year, right, I have five schools soon to be another school, very large schools, so, like the Houston school is about 1,300. They all range about a thousand, but it's open enrollment. I mean, you're paying for the to go to school. So who am I to say you can't, right? I literally, to be honest with you, I have had in welding. We actually had two. Well, we've had three students. 12:45 I know just at my Jacksonville campus, um, that uh were physically handicapped and I was like, hey, are we doing the wrong thing by letting them in? And my people were like, they say they can do it. We got to give them a chance. Two of them were deaf. They're out working in the welding world, right, they knew what they could do. 13:06 So so there isn't, from the very get-go, there's not an inequality. Like you don't get tested and then put in a track, everybody's in the same track together and you're really just learning a skill. So part of it, too, is they're not spending a lot of time on academic subjects, right. I will say, though, like when you're in HVvac and electrical, there's a lot of theory there. I mean, you have to learn ohm's law, you have to learn quite a bit. So, and and students will decide where they want to go, like. If it's you know they, if it's someone who really doesn't want to, like, get into the books, they may go into welding, and so what's really cool for our guys is, if you're going to have to take some stuff, right, but if you're going go into welding, you're only going to spend. Out of five days, only one day is going to be classroom, right. 13:48 It's going to be online, which we pivoted during COVID for that, and our students don't want to have to spend gas money and go to school every day, right. So we try to create a robust online experience only for the didactic, because the skills you have to do inside, what are you going to learn on that didactic? You're not going to learn English composition you don't need to know that as a welder but you are going to learn about gases and how you use gases, right. You're going to learn to read blueprints, because you can't be a welder without reading blueprints. So what you're learning is completely relevant to what you're doing, and I think that's partly what we've missed, like I know, way back when I was in school and trying to look at it in an education classroom, they were talking about, you know, trying to integrate the curriculum. 14:33 I don't think we've done that at all. I mean, we've actually moved away from that and we've gotten told to teach it to the test. And so when you integrate the curriculum and something that's relevant for the student, they're going to be more interested. Right, the students aren't't good. Students don't want to sit there and have someone be Charlie Brown and wonk wonk wonk at them. Right, they want to know. How does this make sense to me? How can I apply this right? And that's our job as teachers to give them that Absolutely. 15:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I mean, I think so much about the ratio of being talked at and, like you know, learning new content versus application. Or just let me do the thing in traditional schools right, it's probably backwards, right, it's probably four times is the talking and then one day maybe is an application versus that one to four that you have, which is just so awesome. And I also am hearing, like you know, whatever someone's physical capacities or whatever someone's kind of limiting beliefs that you know adults or educators may have of of students, it's like, no, the student knows, like you said, like the student knows what they're capable of, what they're interested in. Let them do the thing. 15:40 I mean that is that is revolutionary in education, because that's not what we do, right? We, like you said, we do tracking or we test kids and then we put them in boxes and we, how cool would it be if everyone did that when it was like, oh, you want to take that course, great, go for it, we've got you Right, like I. Just that's not the way that it usually is. And think of how agentic students I mean I imagine you know or like how agentic students feel when it's like, oh, I get to decide. That's so cool, absolutely. 16:11 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Absolutely, I think. I think the good news is, I think we're trying to, we're starting to move forward as people are questioning there's more questioning of the traditional system than ever, right? I mean there's questions like why, why, first off, does a kid have to go to college right, and why, first off, does a kid have to go to college right and they may not even have to go to trade school? I mean there's places where in high school, you know they're creating employer high school relationships where the student can go right to work. I'm all for that right. 16:37 The apprenticeship model I mean that's used very well in other countries. We've not done well with that. All of those things are really important. I do think kids know and I think as parents I'm a parent I thought I knew better and you know, I'll tell you our youngest she just got her should be, but she knew, she knew where she ended, where she was supposed to be, she met her guy there, that's. You know she's been with a lot like. She just knew how to follow our path and I think we forget that our kids know right, that is so beautiful. 17:22 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I think my the start of my kind of professional journey really is rooted in student voice and, like the student voice, research field and all of that, and so that absolutely speaks, speaks to me, and I think about the capacity students have to, you know, pursue whatever educational course they want, but also to to do things that are meaningful in their communities. 17:44 So civic action or civic engagement. I think about, like you know, the welder who, or the plumber who is like an integral member of the community, cause what would the community do without access to that skill? Right, I mean thinking about that. Community connectedness and the agency students have, not in their own lives but in the lives of those around them, is so cool, and I think you've illuminated for me just different ways that your organization does things compared to traditional schooling. Is there anything else that we should know? You know, for those of us who haven't actually, like been in a school like those that you have, what else is different, you know, for the better, from traditional ways we might school kids? That is, you know, more equitable or more student oriented. 18:26 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Yeah. So I would say, well, look first off, we're for profit, right, and one of the beautiful things of the for profits that people never talk about is, if a student is paying their money, they're making a choice. So what that group of schools have done really, really well, and some of them there were bad actors there, just like there are bad actors elsewhere. Right, it's mostly at the degree level, it's not, you know, at the lower level, but what they've done well is being able to figure out how to keep there's a lot of student services. So you see, a lot of public education. Now higher education is all moving to student retention and bringing in student retention teams. We've been doing that for years. Right, like all this. If you look at like Southern New Hampshire, right, like big, big school, paul LeBlanc, who did a fantastic job taking that to where it was and becoming a big player, will tell you that he based his model off of University of Phoenix, right, and University of Phoenix out there now is getting a bad rap and people are saying, oh, they just took their money and da da da, university of Phoenix, and that's what it started at. It started as a way to help adult people be able to go to school and meet their schedule. The student's a customer. Everyone that works for me. We have over 500 and I think 540 employees at this point. Right, we've grown a lot. It's because they know the student is the customer, right, and I'm really lucky because I have a ton of people that work for me that are here for the mission and I'm really lucky because I have a ton of people that work for me that are here for the mission. They all understand that these students are coming to us somewhere. If they're right out of high school, they're doing it because you know they got to do something right or they've always wanted to do this. 20:06 If we've had people that are 60 years old, we get people that are you know, further on in adulthood, that are working in dead end jobs and they can't support their family and they're like I got to do something and somebody told them hey, the skilled trades is probably a good place. They come and talk to us and we're able to kind of direct them where they need to go, Right, like that's who's coming to us. My people all understand what a difference it makes. They're all here short term, they're about seven months in and they can work while they're here, because it's part-time right, because most of my people need to work. 20:36 I don't have really wealthy people going to school, right. I have a lot of pell grant students that are coming here and they can get out in seven months and they can completely change the trajectory for them, and not only them, but for generations to come. They don't have to make 15 an hour wherever. That is right. Like you've I'm sure you've seen the money that skilled trade people make. I mean, if you're willing to work, I mean if you're a welder and you're willing to travel, you can make six figures easily. So I mean that's the benefit of it. And so, and my people, a lot of them, have been here a long time and they've seen those stories where you know a kid was homeless and came to school and they were homeless, they were living in a tent, but they finish and then they come back a year later and they get I guess they call them these big dually trucks Like that's a big thing, a dually truck. It's like I don't know, it's like a big truck, it's all souped up. 21:47 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) It's all souped up, it's all got all kinds of stuff, but they'll come driving up in there and they'll, you know, or they'll, public school space. I imagine that if we were to think like that as educators in all of the education spaces right, like in a sense, like I'm getting paid as a teacher because I have a student in my classroom who needs my help, right, I mean you could do a little workaround, logically, but that I love that, right, we are here to make that kid's dreams come true. We're here to have that student be successful, be on the trajectory for life that they want to be a community member, to figure out, like, exactly what they want to do. I just love the idea that that we are here for them and I, I think the the you know like socialist in me or whatever it's like oh, it's so sad that it's like takes capitalism to like, you know, make us think that way, but it totally does, because we live in in a capitalist system, right, that it is. It is like this is where my money or my paycheck is coming from. Is these students like? 22:46 Of course, I want to support them as best we can and I hope that educators in public spaces can also take that nugget and and live that out, because that is uh so inspiring to, to be able to say, like you know I'm here for you guys. Like what, what do you need? Um, and and I think there's, there's probably a lot of um you know ways that you can build systems and and larger systems, like around some of the things you're talking about, and having students have agency and direction in all of their educational kind of journeys. I'm curious to know what's like one thing that you would recommend an audience member who's engaging with this episode to like do once they're done with the episode, that might be able to give them just a little bit, you know, more student agency or kind of the some of the things that we've kind of talked about in the episode today, like what's, what's one action they could take to kind of get them started on that path of like the larger transformation that we've we've talked about. 23:45 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Sure, and I would think, like your listeners are mostly teachers, right? 23:48 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, I would say teachers and leaders of schools. 23:53 - Mary Kelly (Guest) I would immediately look at what you're offering and saying. Is this meeting every individual's needs or is this just based on a group? Right, and so that's like that's another piece of what we do. They're in the lab a lot. We work with them. So, like say, you're learning TIG welding, right, and, by the way, I'm a horrible welder. I've gone out because I think it's important for people to see me do it and we all laugh about it, and everyone laughed at me because that's why I'm an administration, because I can't weld. But it was a great one and it's a lot harder than it looks. I will tell you that. So, but let's just say you know you're doing a phase on TIG welding. You've got 20 kids. We do 20 to one, no more than that on the lab floor, because that's the right amount for an instructor. And the instructor goes from booth to each kid has his own booth and they're working at their own pace and the instructor is dropping in and helping the student at their own pace, right? 24:46 The outcome is they have to be able to do it, but 20 kids on the floor doing it all in very different ways. The instructor will show them the demo. They all get together. It says, hey, here's how you do it, then go do it. But then each kid's going to do it and have challenges with doing it, and that's where the instructor's working one-on-one with them. Right, and every kid's going to have a different way that the instructor's going to have to talk to them. 25:08 I mean, we've got fantastic instructors because they understand that, right, like, not every kid's going to learn the same. Some it's a visual thing, Some it's, you know, showing them again something you may have to show them five times, whatever it happens to be. You may have to stand there right up with them as they're doing whatever that happens to be right. So, but if you're trying to learn TIG welding, the outcome at the end you have to be able to do it. Like you're going to be measured. 25:33 The assessment is you have to do it, and then in welding, it's basically like you look at the weld and you mark the errors, the imperfections, so, which is kind of cool, right, right, so all the kids have to have, like they have to graduate with a big. But the point is, is that everyone's going to be at a different level and sometimes we get super advanced students that come in there and they knock it out right away. They've been, you know, they've been working on their farm equipment or whatever it happens to be. We take those kids and we pair them up with the other kids that aren't doing well and say well, you know you've got to be here. So, like, why don't you get some leadership while you're here? So I think that's a good example of how putting something into practice. 26:12 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I think about the pedagogy of kind of coach, coaching almost right when it's like here's the model we all have to get to the same outcome. You're all going to tackle different ways and then I am responsive to you in the room like who needs what. I think that's like ultimately great pedagogy. I wish it was more classroom spaces were like that. That's incredible and that they get to apply it right away, right like I'm going to watch the model and now I'm going to do the thing. 26:37 - Mary Kelly (Guest) And in all honesty, to be fair, I mean skilled trades. The physicality of it requires that. 26:42 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Just to kind of wrap us up. I like to ask this question just for fun. It could be related to our conversation and kind of professional space, or it could just be personal, something unrelated to what we've talked about. What is something that you have been learning about lately? Ai? 26:57 - Mary Kelly (Guest) I am fascinated by AI. I haven't learned enough. Right, ai is not going to replace skill trades, but it's going to replace a lot of things. Right, but I think it's going to make us better. But I think all of us have a responsibility. You know, I wish I had seen I'm 62, so I've been around for a while. I wish I had seen how big the internet was going to be, back when it was starting. I would have done a lot more investigating, right, I understand where AI is going. I literally Lindsay in my LinkedIn box. You know we can save articles. I have 30 articles saved so that I can read them whenever I have time. I just find AI fascinating and I think, you know, it's kind of like a Charles Dickens thing. Right, it's the best of times. It was the worst of times because it could be not good, but I think what it could do that's good really excites me. 27:50 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) That's interesting. Yeah, I need to learn more as well. That is, that is definitely going to be something that, like you said, the internet. We look back on and be like, oh wow, that's where it went, right. 27:59 - Mary Kelly (Guest) I totally missed it. I was like, oh, that's no big deal. 28:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I think you're not alone. And then, finally, where can listeners learn more about you, learn more about your organization, connect with you online? What are those spaces? 28:17 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Sure, sure. So our our corporate website. So we are Stratitech Education Group. Our brands are Tulsa Welding School and the Refrigeration School. So if you wanted to go to a brand site and learn about Tulsa Welding School, it's twsedu, I believe, and just look up Tulsa Welding School and rsiedu for the refrigeration school. Stratatech is Stratatech, s-t-r-a-t-a-t-e-c-h, stratatechcom. That's our website. So and I'm available, I'd love to talk to people. Mary Kelly, k-e-l-l-y no E, please. That was a big thing in Ireland. They will fight over that. So, mary, please. That was a big thing in Ireland. That that that they will fight over that. 28:59 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) So, mary, Kelly dot at stratatechcom. So awesome, Mary. Thank you so much for this conversation. Oh, I had a ball, lindsay. 29:05 - Mary Kelly (Guest) It was a lot of fun and thank you for doing what you're doing. You're having very important conversations and I'm just going to say one last thing. Thank you to all your listeners, because teaching is a noble profession. You don't make enough money. That needs to change. There's so many unfair things about it. But if you heard my story, you can make the difference in a life. Don't forget that on a bad day, remember you're making a difference and God bless you for doing what you're doing. Thank you for that. That was a wonderful way to end. 
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In this episode, we’re continuing to look at leading change in turnaround and low-performing schools by diving into a transformative book: “Pedagogies of Student Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency" by Shane Safir, Sawson Jaber, Crystal Watson, and Marlo Bagsik.
Lindsay talks about her key takeaways from the book, such as how to co-create educational environments where students transition from participants to partners. We look at themes of centering marginalized voices and leveraging meaningful street data, exploring how to elevate schools from “good” to “great” in the context of school redesign. Why? From the Research The book is anchored in a liberatory purpose of education, one where education is co-created with students. The authors’ research shows that by integrating pedagogies of voice and agency, we can enhance educational practices and address equity transformation. This is done by centering those who have been at the margins—collecting “street data”—and by embracing qualitative outcomes that are harder to measure but hold significant value. What? Action Steps for Educators To start working toward the vision of student-centered education spaces, educators can incorporate the following steps: Step 1: Understand and collect street data. You can read the book and listen to the podcast for more information, but educators can begin by collecting street data that goes deeper into the students’ experience. This could be looking at quotes and non-verbal cues that come up from student discussions. The goal is to get data from students, typically on the margins, that informs your decision-making and action steps. Step 2: Use good inquiry questions in your data. The characteristics of these include:
As an instructional leadership team or school redesign team, start by co-creating a question that is at the heart of your intended change. Step 3: Rid yourself of the “10 toxins.” The authors talk about “toxins” like the idea that “the teacher is the expert” or “containment” (i.e., no moving around the classroom). that educators need to know and remove from their mindset. Step 4: Instead, embrace the 10 ways of positively showing up. Some of these include deep listening, learning inter-generationally, and interacting with the whole person. Step 5: Integrate pedagogies of voice. The authors outline eight different areas to focus on, organized into the four agency domains:
Final Tip: Always anchor your educational approach in the core purpose of witnessing and affirming one another's humanity, ensuring that every practice reflects this liberatory vision. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Post-Unit Perception Survey with you for free. Also, pick up your copy of “Pedagogies of Student Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency,” or the first book by the authors, “Street Data.” And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 241 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:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:03 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 241, and so you can get the show notes and all of the info at the blog post, lindsaybethlyonscom, slash 241. Today we're talking all things pedagogies of voice. This is a beautiful, beautiful book. I loved Street Data. As you probably know if you listen regularly to this podcast, I am constantly citing Street Data because it's excellent and this is kind of the second version. That really not second version. What is it called? Sequel? There we go, that kind of follows up and says how do we situate this idea of Street Data in instructional realities, like within the classroom? What does this look like? 00:45 So this book Patagogies of Student Voice, Street Data and the Path to Student Agency was written by four awesome humans Shane Sapir, Saswan Jaber, Crystal Watson and Marlo Bugsyk. I'm really hoping I'm pronouncing everyone's names correctly. They are incredible and I would love to have them on the podcast, so stay tuned, Perhaps we will get them. I think they're very busy. They've been making the rounds of all the places, but this episode is really just going to keep in mind this idea of school transformation and school redesign, elevating schools from good to great. And how do we take some of the brilliant ideas in this book and apply them to perhaps a strategic plan, a kind of new approach or mental model to how we're going to move forth in partnership with students and not just as a team of adults. So here we go. 01:44 One of the things that I love is that they really anchor in a liberatory purpose of education. They have this beautiful, beautiful art throughout the book, um and and framework um, grounded in the olive tree, um, which is important to Palestine, and rooted as a symbol of justice, which I really appreciate. And this idea of this liberatory purpose of education being one that is co-created with students. Right, An educational experience where students are true partners and co-creators, where students can ask questions of society they live in, they develop critical literacy and numeracy, they shape the conditions of their lives, they develop their own moral compasses. Right, what do they think is right from wrong? What is truth from fact? And perhaps my favorite one although I do love all of them is to witness and affirm one another's humanity. Like, how cool would that be if all of our schools centered the witnessing and affirmations of one another's humanity? I think often we talk about student-led discussions and discussions of high emotion topics on this podcast and I think often we avoid or feel uncomfortable with topics of discussion that bring up high emotions because we are fearful that someone's humanity will not be affirmed, will not be witnessed, will not be like we will just not uphold someone else's humanity or dignity right or that someone in the class will not. But if that is a core tenet of who we are as a school community, then we are going to make sure that we approach all of the things, including the class discussion, but all of the things, all of the policies and instructional practices and ways of being with each other in that school community, with that mind. I would just love if that was, you know, stated and also like lived by right as a way of being, which they're going to talk about. 03:48 They talk about in the book and we'll talk about shortly here. Throughout there's, of course, tons of ideas of street data to gather everything from having student voice and report cards to noting nonverbal engagement in a classroom visit, tracking feedback that is both affirming and corrective, and I think there's so, so much that we often collect as data. And, of course, if you haven't read the book Street Data, please go back and read that because it's excellent If you are a podcast listener, listen to Street Data, um, which is with shane zephyr and alcee mumby as co-hosts, and they get into a lot of the concepts of the book in audio format with amazing guests. So that's great. But we often focus on this idea of you know satellite or map data, which is just a bit more removed from the day-to-day student experience of being in school, and so we want to make sure that we are as close as possible to kind of that street level view of what students are experiencing. I also just love that at some point they talked about how you know. Quotes and transcripts and also non-verbals from discussions, from discourse in the classroom are artifacts of street data, Like they are about the student experience. You can notice what the students are kind of all grappling with right and how learning is happening, which is just such a cool idea is like student-led discussion or discourse transcripts as street data just oh, it just made my heart sing, okay, so, uh, as we are thinking, you know, through this school transformation, school redesign lens, a couple things that I wanted to share. 05:32 Um, one they share four criteria of good inquiry questions, which does stem from the street data book with jimmy ledugan and, uh, shane zafira as co-authors. So one is that it needs to name the specific group of students or adults it could be like, I think, families or someone at the margins. So we have to, like, center the margins right. That's a key component of kind of their equity transformation cycle Should name an uncomfortable truth that doesn't blame learners and is in our locus of control. I do love this because I'm always looking for good language around this Adaptive leadership scholars I'm always citing Heifetz, Graschau and Linsky on this saying, you know, there's the kind of this underlying belief, habit or loyalty which is a thing that lies at the heart of adaptive challenges, and we have to get to that. 06:19 And so I'm always advocating for a root cause analysis that gets to that, and I just love the phrasing of uncomfortable truth. So good, Um, our good inquiry questions should allow for inquiry and probing, Love that, and it can be used to gather street data to reimagine our pedagogies. I love all of this. So thinking about as a leadership team, an instructional leadership team, a school redesign team, whatever your team is one I would and I said this in the previous episode a few episodes ago, but just you know, I always say there should be students and folks at the margins at the table on the team, but that also that we are first co-creating an inquiry, question right, and doing these things, naming the group we're looking at and seeking data from street data, from naming an uncomfortable truth and being able to ask additional questions and probe to learn more. So I think that is something that is often missing from school transformation efforts or kind of redesign efforts. They talk about the 10 toxins which also were in street data. 07:26 I won't give the whole book away. You need to get the book. There's so many things in here, but I'll just say some highlights that I think are things we talk about a lot and just want to emphasize. One teacher is expert right. Two, rugged individualism. This idea of sorting kids, ranking kids doing independent projects, when really in you know, in life we often learn and thrive with each other right as what we do together. I often feel like this as an instructional coach and PD provider what I do with colleagues is always better. It is always better than what I could do by myself. Could I do it faster by myself? Better than what I could do by myself? Could I do it faster by myself? Yes, it's better, no. So rugged individualism is a toxin Containment containing, whether it's students to desks in seated positions. 08:14 Don't walk around my classroom right. 08:15 Don't go out of the halls. 08:16 Containing within the school right, no field trips. That kind of thing we can't learn within the larger community. Schooling has to happen in, but in seat right. And this idea of scarcity mindset, which is common when we talk about pacing guides, or I don't have time to do circles and center belonging, I don't have time to do revision and resubmission on a project after I give feedback. I have to just give them feedback, give them the grade and then we don't do anything with it, right, Because of time constraints, time being the biggest scarcity mindset that I notice, but I think there's so many that come up in education. So just be wary of those toxins and, of course, get the book for all 10. They say kind of this complimentary or not complimentary, kind of like the flip side of this right 10 ways of being. Include 10 points. 09:09 I want to highlight five here. One is deep listening. This has been truly on my heart for a while now. But deep listening to one another, particularly at the margins. Intergenerational learning I recently listened to a MindShift podcast episode about a preschool that was co-located with an elderly community. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful and joyous and it just warmed my heart but also just activated my imagination to think about the possibilities here and to know that many homes and families are inclusive of like three generations and we often see that as a deficit. We don't often talk about the assets, the opportunities that provides for intergenerational learning, and how do we design classrooms and school communities with that in mind? How do we partner better with families and community members of multiple generations and truly have a partnership where we're learning in community with one another? That could be central to school transformation efforts. 10:16 Additionally, wholism like treating the whole person, schools as sites of healing and relationality as a core way of being right. We are in relationship with one another. We are not here to just, you know, put information in your brain and send you on your way. We are in true relationship. We are going to remember each other for years and decades to come. We mean something to one another, we are curious about one another's personhood and we are committed to healing harm, particularly harm that has been done by school systems to the kids that are in front of us, perhaps by previous schools. Perhaps the school we're in, perhaps the previous generations of schools excuse me of families, Like families, are going to have a hard time coming to institutions of schooling that were harmful to them. Right, there's so many opportunities and reasons for schools as sites of healing. 11:18 Now, the core piece of this book is pedagogies of voice. So they have eight kind of pedagogies they focus on, and I love their metaphor of like a seed store where you can find these different practices. They have so many links and QR codes to really specific practical resources that, again, are just amazing, as well as like videos of students being reflective, and it's so good, the book is so good, but they support four agency domains, these pedagogies of voice, so identity, belonging, inquiry and efficacy, and so I'll just name some of the pedagogies of voice and you can kind of think about, as you order the book and wait for it to be coming to you, ways that you might be able to do this, to make this happen, to make it core to your practice amongst adults as well as your practice instructionally with students. So this idea of story-entation, which is a word from Shane Safir coins for one of her earlier books, this orientation towards stories, I just I love it as being central to supportive of identity as well as other things of course. I think these are all kind of intersectional agency domains. 12:28 Micro-affirmations, right. Where can we just constantly be affirming of kids' strengths, right, and have an asset mindset? I love the idea of micro-affirmations and I've talked before about having values language present in the space in the classroom so that students, when given the opportunity, can share a value or an appreciation for another person in their class, Like this. Just this affirms that idea. So I love it. Belonging, radical inclusion and circle up I talked about circles a lot. I love them. I think it definitely amplifies a sense of belonging. 13:06 Inquiry I think this is the biggest place that I think for instructional kind of I wouldn't say it's like hardest, but I think there is such tension between how we've historically done things in this agency domain and where we could go with it that it feels sometimes like the biggest lift. So I just want to name here those two things are questions over answers, so having a curiosity stance, having inquiry stance to posing great questions and creating great questions. We talk about this when we're designing student-led discussions and discourse opportunities. We want to create a really thoughtful prompt so that students are interested and have opportunities to connect. They actually have a great list of what makes a good compelling question or discussion question, and I think that's worth taking a look at. And I think that that's worth taking a look at, but this idea of question over answers and centering student led discussion in trying to grapple with those questions and answers is is key and a huge shift away from and I mean they cite Joe Feldman. 14:22 We've also talked about Asao Inouye on this podcast and his work. I think there's so, so much here. We've done a whole series about go back and listen to those episodes, but being able to value the feedback, which is about, you know, growth and learning and the joy of learning and building on our skills and being in community and in relationship with one another over grades, which prioritizes, like these structures of traditional schooling and these principles, like rugged individualism where we rank each other. I mean that just right. It's a huge shift, though, because we are often operating in these really seemingly confining situations, but again, I'm thoughtful about the scarcity mindset and the toxins that we shared earlier. And then, finally, efficacy as an agency domain making learning public. 15:23 I love this idea, both like from the standpoint of when I was working in New York Performance Standards Consortium School in New York City, we would have portfolios that students would use at the end of the year to kind of that was about their graduation or moving on to the next grade and ultimately their graduation from high school was based on in lieu of regents exams in many cases, but even when it wasn't, we would still do them because they're so valuable to have a community of people giving you feedback and just having an authentic audience. But also this idea of kind of like place-based learning and being rooted in a place and being in community with people outside of your school system. I've been heartened to think deeply about be in spaces around civic showcases in Massachusetts and New York and this idea of being in community with young people who are striving to make change and that that partnership youth-adult partnership is critical for that and that's a way to make learning public and as well as this idea of reflection and revision is so critical and reminds me of Zaretta Hammond's work around kind of that reflection and I think about metacognition and metastrategic thinking and that coaching that happens student to teacher and teacher to student. So I think that's also really on my heart. I will finally share. 16:46 There's a last section in this book that I love. That is a nod to leaders and, as I am talking as part of this leadership series here and addressing school transformation and redesign, thinking about how we, yes, collect the data, yes, develop the inquiry question. But once you have that data, in response to that inquiry question that you have co-created, ideally with students and multiple stakeholders, like what do you do there? And so the authors share a really great 60-minute sample agenda and I'll just talk you through kind of the components of it and you can get the book to dig in a little deeper. But one there's like this very human check-in, to start right, Because we're whole humans. 17:29 Then when we observe the data, we have this opportunity to reflect as a group, but we stay low inference, we don't interpret at this point, we're just kind of noticing. And then when we interpret, we're naming patterns or themes on post-its I think they recommended like three words or less Like what are those high-level themes? And then think to yourself like what's most important and why? Like what do you think is the most important thing that is coming up in this street data that we're looking at? I love that there's a feeling section. So just having a few minutes to say what are the emotions that came up for you as you were engaging in this, and then you were, as you were engaging in this, and then you know, having a whole group discussion of, like, what matters, what's our greatest opportunity here, what's the entry point for shifting our pedagogy, so that equity transformation cycle is, is really important. So we're, we're doing the deep listening, we're uncovering, like, what is the data actually telling us? You know we're thinking about having how we're going to to move forward. I think this is something that could be truly transformational. It's just doing this 60-minute activity with your leadership team. 18:28 Once you have gathered some street data and learned about the experiences of folks you have identified as being on the margins in relationship to you know what do they have to say about their experiences related to your inquiry question? So all sorts of stuff to get from this book Pedagogies of Voice. But again, thinking about that orientation towards witnessing and affirming one another's humanity as part of a liberatory education is really something that I have been thoughtful about. So, yes, there's all of these ways of doing it and I think the book will be your guide here for this. But just to know what your kind of core purpose is. To have a great inquiry question, guided by identifying who's at the margins and being wary of those various toxins. Right Teacher, as expert, rugged, individualism, containment, scarcity mindset and instead doing some deep listening, intergenerational learning, healing and being in relationship with one another. 19:37 A final note I will share is that there was it's actually in a footnote in this book I was recently writing. I had to write a proposal for doing some work with a state and they said use an active verb. And I had written experience as the verb. And then I doubted myself and I was like, oh, they're not going to think this is an active verb. In this footnote, they say they're not going to think this is an active verb. In this footnote they say here's a note on experience as a verb. 20:06 Quote makes room for qualitative outcomes that are harder to measure but equally valuable. They go on to say the signals and orientation to identity development and belonging as core dimensions of learning. So, absolutely, experience is a verb. That is an important one and, in alignment with the street data principle that what matters isn't always what's easy to measure, I really think this is a valuable takeaway. So good luck with your transformation. Let us know how it's going. Let us know which of these pieces you gravitate towards and what you'd like to learn about next and what you're going to grapple with next as we go on and make our schools amazing places to be humans. 1/12/2026 240. Leading Change in Turnaround/Low-Performing Schools: My Takeaways from RSLP (Hammond)Read Now
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In this episode, Lindsay is continuing the series on school transformation, school redesign, school leadership, and leading change. This episode focuses on the key takeaways from a recently published book by Zaretta Hammond: "Rebuilding Students' Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice."
The book is grounded by three pillars of liberatory education: personhood, information processing power, and agency, which together form the foundation for revolutionizing education. This discussion focuses on the key takeaways from Hammond’s book, with some simple action steps educators can apply to their context today. Why? From the Research Hammond’s work is essential in today’s educational landscape because we’ve had, as she describes, a “pedagogy of compliance” for too long. This model relies on orderliness, low tolerance for mistakes, and minimizing opportunities for kids to talk. This approach limits possibilities in building classrooms full of engaged, thriving students. Instead, Hammond imagines the “pedagogy of possibility”—where we can go when we center student voices in education. Hammond focuses on the instructional core and how we are engaging students in learning through curriculum and classroom discussion. Amplifying student voice is not just about having feedback on cafeteria lunch, but is much deeper, sitting at the heart of our instructional practices. What? Action Steps for Educators To begin working in the pedagogy of possibility instead of a pedagogy of compliance, educators can draw from Hammond’s insights, including: Step 1: Embrace the pillars of liberatory education by focusing on personhood, information processing power, and agency. This shift allows for a more humanized learning environment where students are empowered to advocate for themselves. Step 2: Prioritize the instructional core—what and how you are teaching and engaging students in the classroom. Part of this is teaching learn-to-learn skills and encouraging “personal cognitive algorithms,” or how a student uniquely learns and engages with learning. Learn-to-learn skills Hammond discusses include:
Step 3: Embrace one-on-one conferences with students as must-dos, not something you do if there’s time. This allows educators to coach students independently and give them opportunities to develop meta-strategic thinking (i.e., how they think about their learning). Step 4: Avoid over-scaffolding by providing just-in-time supports instead of just-in-case measures. Empower students to recognize and utilize learning tools independently, enhancing their cognitive abilities for effective school transformation. Final Tip: There’s so much more to share! Grab the book for lots of practical hands-on ideas and protocols to implement in your classroom. One example is the implementation of talk and wordplay—we learn through talking, through dialogue. So circles, socratic seminars, small group discussions all help expand our thinking. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Leader Bundle with you for free. Also make sure to grab your copy of "Rebuilding Students' Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice” by Zaretta Hammond. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 240 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:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:03 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Welcome to episode 240 of the Time for Teachership podcast. Continuing the series of kind of school transformation, school redesign, school leadership and leading change. I want to talk to you about such an exciting book I mean a truly transformative book that was just released a few months ago and, as of the time of this recording was released like a month ago or less Rebuilding Students' Learning Power, teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice, by Zaretta Hammond. My goodness, this is incredible. So we're going to talk about kind of the key ideas from this book. I'm hoping to have Zaretta Hammond on the podcast. That would be so incredibly exciting and as we work out scheduling, you know, stay tuned for that. But here are kind of the big things that I got from the book and takeaways that I want you to have in preparation for listening and diving deeper with Zaretta Hammond herself. Here we go. So I really love that. 00:59 She grounds the work and the book itself in three pillars of liberatory education right from the get-go. One is personhood, which includes like humanized learning environments, like the whole self. Right, we're full people. Two and this is the kind of crux of the book information processing power. So this includes these learn-to-learn skills that she dives into in the book Just to get to, like you know, deeper learning, critical literacy, creative thinking like the foundation of all of that stuff are those learn to learn skills and being able to process information and finally, of course, agency. So connected, of course, to the student voice. We're always talking about self-directed learning and being able to advocate for meaningful experiences for themselves. So I think this idea of personhood, information processing power and agency as this three pillar stool that we're excited about and getting into is just a wonderful, I think, orientation to the work. 01:52 Now she talks also in the introduction of this idea of we've had a pedagogy of compliance for far too long. This is very common and it's a pervasive mental model that a lot of us have. So a couple of those hallmarks include favors, orderliness over productive struggle, low tolerance for mistakes and minimizing opportunities for kids to talk. I mean we constantly as teachers. I mean I myself have a podcast, I talk a lot, we are constantly trying to share information, teach by talking, and we've talked about a lot on the podcast and even pulled goal percentages from street data the book Street Data for how often kids should actually be talking. So I love that kind of student led discussion can actually be a disruptor of this pedagogy of compliance, in this or en route to this pedagogy of possibility that she calls it, or en route to this pedagogy of possibility that she calls it. And so, in order to get to this pedagogy of possibility she talks about a lot of different things and we'll dive into a few here, but I do just love that she focuses on the instructional core. 02:54 Like, we have to focus on the instructional core. We can't just have, you know, kids talking about, like, what they liked, about the cafeteria lunch, right? We can't just, you know, do all of these things that might satisfy a desire for belonging in the external school space but don't actually change anything about how we teach kids how to learn right. And so, in service of that, she talks about teaching students learn to learn skills and critically encourages teachers to reduce the excessive scaffolding. I'm going to say more on that in a moment, because I think this is really important and really make sure that there are many opportunities that we are actually coaching kids how to think, like we're giving them opportunities to develop their metastrategic thinking and metacognition and we're actually having one-on-one instructional conversations, which she says are required. Like these one-on-one conferences, they're not like a nice to have, they're a need to have. And we're coaching students. 03:50 I love that she calls it like kind of a personal cognitive algorithm. We're helping kids learn to figure out how they're learning and what cognitive tools they have that align with you, know what works for them, what's available to them, and get to learn on their own so that it's not just our class they're benefiting in right, it's all classes, it's all both in and outside of school learning experiences. And, of course, to do this well, we have to have the structural support from policy and administrators and be able to make sure we're all on the same page in terms of what the goals are regarding instructional coaching and instructional leadership. Ideally, what we have when we create this space for leaders is we have, excuse me, for students and learners is that we have independent learners, not dependent learners. And she talks about how really you want those independent learners to be able to perform their own kind of gap analysis where they're saying you know, like, how do I get from where I am to where I want to be right, what needs to change so that I can, you know, improve my skill, improve my conceptual understanding? I do love that she talks about conceptual understanding a lot. 04:57 Having just read James Nottingham and the importance of conceptual understandings and grasping a concept, this was really, really powerful for me and if you haven't listened to the James Donningham episode, please go back and listen. That was a few months ago. Really phenomenal conversation about his recent book, teach Brilliantly. The third question she says, you know, is like how well am I grasping this concept? So again, conceptual knowledge. And then where are my leverage points for adjusting my learning tactics? So again that metastrategic thinking what tools do I have that will support me? And I don't want to give the whole book away. I mean this is kind of like her introduction introductory chapters, but I just love this orientation. 05:38 As we think from a school transformation lens and a school design lens, are we focused on the instructional core? Are we thinking about cognitively coaching kids and making sure that they have a sense of how they process information and what cognitive tools they have to be able to get better at it? Are we taking time and making sure that, amidst all of the typical school redesign? Or maybe we're not, if we're lucky doing all the typical school redesign things, or maybe we're not, if we're lucky doing all the typical school redesign. Things like grabbing a high quality instructional curriculum, handing over a pacing guide and saying follow this to a T right. I love that Zora Haman gets into hazing guides and it says you know like we need to not just follow them rigidly right when we are actually responsive. Putting the responsive and culturally responsive teaching right when we are actually responsive. Putting the responsive and culturally responsive teaching right, which we often forget or sidestep or choose not to do because of these external pressures like pacing guides. We don't enable kids to figure it out at you know all at different paces, in different ways, because they have different personal algorithms. So we maintain the high expectations, but we take the time to responsibly coach students and have one-on-one conversations, even if they're just three minutes long. So I really love this idea. 06:56 I think the big thing I'm latching onto is this idea of cognitive coaching or this cognitive apprenticeship. She calls it, you know teachers as what she calls cognitive mediators and supporting students metastrategic thinking so that they can be better information processors. Like I love this thesis. This is what we are here for. This is what real school transformation is about and, as we are trying to grow structures and processes for great schools, I think this should be at the core. So ideally you are able to work with Zaretta Hammond for multiple years and in an ongoing way, because that's what this truly requires. If you are not, please buy her book and dig deep into this. But I think there are so many spaces for us to think about as individual educators, as instructional coaches and leaders, as teams, like departments, or in our team meetings and our PLCs. How do we center this work? And I've talked a lot about PLCs in the past year and had some great experts on and folks who have published wonderful books with concrete strategies around looking at student work and aligning expectations and standards. 08:03 I also highly encourage people to utilize the time, as Zaretta Hammond suggests, to practice that one-on-one coaching with students, because it is so unfamiliar. This is something that we have not experienced in our teacher prep programs most likely, and is going to require a big mental shift, a huge, you know, increase of skills in terms of being responsive and thinking about all of this, maybe new information that's new to us as well as students around information processing and how cognitively our brains work to, you know, take in new information and connect it to what we already know and make it stick right. So we'll just share a couple things from her book and I'll do a quick version because I think I want to give you a taste and I want you to actually dig into the whole book because it is. It was one of those books where I was folding down every other page and underlining like every other line. It was just like I've realized, like I've read it basically twice now, because you need to kind of go back in and use it as a living text and you learn something new each time. It's just that dense and it all the pieces are really necessary to go together to be able to actually move forward. 09:19 And she talks about that right For true change. You don't want to just like run right in with this stuff. You want to think about your approach. You want to reflect deeply yourself before you're implementing anything. So here we go. Here are some learn to learn skills that she talks about. And she prefaces this with like kind of what is information processing? I just want to dig into these learn to learn skills. 09:40 So she's like right, the first thing we do is we size it up and break it down. So does this seem hard? How do I need to organize myself In investigating history we talk about as part of the investigating sources routine. That first kind of step is like what kind of source is this right? What am I attuning to? Is there an author, right? What's the bias? So that kind of thing right. How do I organize myself, get ready, are there strategies that I'm already thinking I can use? Then we scan the hard drive. Have I seen something similar to this before? Have I seen this thing before? What's the opposite of the thing I'm looking at? So we're trying to access that prior knowledge. 10:21 If you will, my favorite part of this and I think the places where she offers the most support and I think could be the most transformative we could really lean into here, particularly based on some of the feedback we've gotten around investigating history is chew and remix. So this is the third step. So questions a learner might ask themselves here how is this connected to what I already know? Is anything confusing? How could I make sense of it? Which of the four cognitive routines can I use? She elaborates on this. But basically it's, like you know, distinguishing, like how are different things similar or different systems right? Whole to part, part to whole? What are the kind of interrelationships of this concept Relationships, action, reaction and perspectives right, these are kind of therelationships of this concept relationships, action, reaction and perspectives right, these are kind of the four cognitive routines distinctions, systems, relationships, perspectives. 11:15 But what I really want to lean into here is that one of the biggest pieces of feedback we've gotten from the grade three and four pilot in the state of Massachusetts for our investigating history curriculum that was just piloted in the school year 24-25 is our kids don't have enough background knowledge about this content to be able to engage the way they need to. And I think an expansive view and you've heard me say this a lot, so sorry, but an expansive view of background knowledge in the sense of, like, what experiences have we had? What metaphors and I love that she uses this as a tool what metaphors can we link to? How is this similar to something I have literally experienced in my life, or something that maybe is not a scholarly source quote unquote but is something that I am aware of? I know about this concept in this other space. 12:04 Like, how can I link to that so that I can engage in this step three of chew and remix? Like I am thinking about this thing, I'm connecting it, I'm remixing it in my brain, I'm making it my own. And then I can go on to step four and five, which are skillful practice, where I'm kind of like you know, practicing, applying. I'm kind of like you know, practicing applying, I'm making some small changes and stretching myself, monitoring my progress, you know that stuff. And then five, making it sticky. Making it sticky, so I am using the skill, I'm teaching someone else or telling someone else about it, maybe engaging in some retrieval practice. But that chew and remix, like how do I link it from, like the new thing coming in to what I already know? 12:41 I think is gold and such an opportunity, given all of the kind of frustration or kind of not knowing what to do with the fact that teachers are reporting that their students don't have quote the background knowledge for some of this historical content. So I mean, one of the things that I want to kind of name is that she talks about collectivist cultures and these five principles she lays out of collectivist cultures and then she links what she calls cultural learning tools or these cognitive tools in these four different categories to support kids in their information processing or in those kind of learn-to-learn skills. And so the four kind of categories of tools are around memory, so kind of building schema and connecting to those existing funds of knowledge that we just talked about Making a metaphor is an example that she shares. I love that, as well as talk and wordplay. I love the idea that she is connecting to collectivist cultures like gravitation, to oral histories and dialogue and connects to sociocultural learning theory. Like we talk and think as we talk. I am a verbal processor. I'm learning this more and more as I grow up, but I think a lot of kids I've seen it in circles, socratic seminars, small group discussions in my own classroom there is something that happens when we talk to one another we expand our thinking. 14:06 And talking to James Nottingham in that that earlier interview I referenced on the podcast, he kind of expanded my ideas of you know what is the purpose of a discussion? The goal should always be that we're expanding our one another's thinking right. So when we engage in a discussion we don't want to come out as being right. We want to come out as having kind of our minds blown right, like our, our an expanded sense or more nuanced sense of a concept than when we went in with our own original ideas. Right Patterns and puzzles is another kind of of thing. So this could be like an open source I've always loved open source or like drawing a concept map. So thinking about how different pieces are connected within a concept, as well as perspective taking, which we do all of the time in history. But something like a protocol, like World Cafe or, I've heard, like talking heads or something like this right is like ways that we could kind of bring perspective taking to the forefront. I also think about leading change for adults as well as students. 15:06 Thinking about facilitating and helping people come to the realization of a disorienting dilemma by just sharing a little bit of information that causes people to say, whoa, this isn't what I thought it was right. I am having a little bit of disorientation here because I thought things were this way and this new information is just kind of blowing my mind and making me think I need to rethink this. And research has shown that doing that in groups, having that disorienting dilemma and being able to verbally process it in a group setting, is actually most beneficial. Because you can quote try on other ways of thinking, which I absolutely love. Because you can quote try on other ways of thinking, which I absolutely love. 15:46 So thinking about, like how we coach students using some of Zaretta Hammond's ideas around learn to learn skills. Actually, I mean, she says you know, we literally teach this to kids. We teach them how the information processing kind of arc works and we teach them learn to learn skills and we help them become aware of this and we help them recognize and literally hand over to them Don't like control it as the teacher. We're all going to do this thing now, right, we're going to use this tool, but to say to students hey, these are some tools, recognize what works for you, recognize when you might use it and be able to use it on your own. And what I love is that she encourages people to just play. Just play with the tools, like low stakes. Just play with them at first right, figure them out. Don't try to control it as the teacher, but do prompt the reflection of the students. And I just think this whole thing is just so, so cool and so meaningful. 16:46 So I think the large piece here this is a little bit of a different episode because I'm kind of like just spewing ideas that I'm hearing, but I think the one big piece in terms of mindset is around cognitive coaching is key to school transformation, like doing this well as a teacher, as a team of teachers, as a school, is super important. And how do you do that? Well, one, you yourselves as educators, and we ourselves as educators, as coaches right, we need to know this information. We need to know how kids learn. We need to know the five learn to learn skills ourselves. We need to be aware of some cultural learning tools that students can use when they're thinking strategically and meta-strategically. We also have to be aware of the key concepts we want kids to grapple with, as James Donaghan says. 17:37 Zaretta Hammond also says this concept being able to conceptually grasp things is super important and she shares a conceptual grasp scale in the book that goes all the way from like a zero out of zero. It's a zero to six scale. So the zero is like I don't even know what I don't know, basically all the way to six, where it's called a symphonic grasp, which I love, which is like now I can use this concept in new ways. I can see the less obvious relationships. I can critique other concepts and ideas because I'm all the way here, right, and of course there's like different pieces along the way, but to just know one what concepts are important that I need my students to know, like what's most essential? Two like how do I know that they actually know? Like where are they in that zero to six scale and how do I know that? Right, and and then, when we are thinking about how they are learning and grasping those concepts, we are thinking about those learn to learn skills and those cultural learning tools we're exposing kids to and we're thinking about those one-on-one cognitive conversations that we have structurally made time for in the actual instructional, either period or school day for younger kids in elementary settings. And finally, I think again. I said I would return to this later, but this idea of over-scaffolding is something that every passing week, month, year, I am just more and more aware of. 19:07 And I love Zoraida Hammond's language around responsive right, we talk about culturally responsive teaching. We need to lean into the responsive part. What she says is we have too many just-in-case supports, right. So like sentence frames that don't ask kids to actually like make sense of these multiple, complex ideas, pre-written sentence sums that they're they might not even need overuse of note taker worksheets, excessive anchor charts. Like we have all of these things that we're like well, we'll give this and we'll give kid does need and turn over, ideally, the tools to a kid themselves to figure out oh, I need this, right, I need something, and this tool is available. This will work for me because I know how I learn Right. And so we want the just in time supports versus the all of the just in case supports. 20:01 So she has a ton of really helpful kind of quote, unquote look fors for over scaffolding. That's like, oh, are you doing this? You might be over scaffolding, right, and it's a beautifully laid out table with lots of details. So I highly again encourage you to get the book and check all of that out. Okay, this was basically a love letter to. This is a red I haven't in her book, but I hope that you got some concrete ideas out of it and, if nothing else, that you are thoughtful about how we center students cognitive processing power and rebuilding that up in your school transformation efforts. 
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In this episode, we dive into different adaptive leadership strategies to drive change in a school redesign context. Though geared toward educators in “low-performing” or “turnaround” schools, this episode has practical insights for anyone who wants to make school a place where every student can thrive.
Drawing from the research, host Lindsay walks us through the intricacies of school redesign and change initiatives. She talks about how to incorporate youth and multi-stakeholder voices, capacity building, and community engagement. Mindset Shifts Required There are two common missteps when it comes to leading a change initiative at turnaround schools:
These can be addressed by mindset shifts and understanding what the research says about adaptive leadership and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Why? From the Research Drawing on the work of Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky (2009), adaptive challenges are defined as those “typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs, and loyalties rather than technical complexity, and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis.” Understanding that these challenges bring up emotions and deeply-rooted value systems, it makes sense that we need to take a totally different approach than a technical implementation of a new curriculum or program. Lindsay also draws on Zaretta Hammond's insights into student learning power and cognitive justice, underscoring the importance of focusing on students' cognitive development and equitable learning experiences. By centering marginalized voices and employing strategies like capacity building and strategic planning, schools can effectively address adaptive challenges and foster educational equity. What? Action Steps for Change After recognizing first that most challenges are adaptive and, therefore, need a multi-faceted approach, here are some steps leaders can take to implement change initiatives: Step 1: Identify the adaptive challenge. Be open to what the problem really is, digging deeper than looking only at technical issues. This leads to a “disorienting dilemma,” as Mezirow puts it, which is the starting point for real change. Step 2: Have a group dialogue. This disorienting dilemma is uncomfortable—so uncomfortable it moves us to action. Having a mutli-stakeholder group dialogue about the adaptive challenge lets each person be open to new ideas and perspectives to solve it. Step 3: Develop cycles of feedback and co-creation with stakeholder groups so everyone—families, students, educators, administrators, community members—have meaningful say in the change plan. Step 4: Empower stakeholders by fostering ongoing professional development, centering marginalized voices, and building authentic student leadership and family partnerships. Step 5: Enhance school capacity through coaching, providing instructional leaders and coaches with their own coaches. Professional learning and coaching can help everyone develop the knowledge, skills, and mindset to foster connections with stakeholders and collaborate effectively. This is not done in one-off workshops, but ongoing learning. Step 6: Build stronger partnerships with families by authentically engaging them. Ari Gersen-Kessler talks about how this is the difference between “good” and “great” schools. His book, On the Same Team, dives deeper into how and why to partner with families. Step 7: Center the stories of families and students who have been marginalized by traditional schooling, ensuring their voices are at the table and their data sets are what we’re looking at. Step 8: Focus on student learning and learning power by putting instruction and curriculum at the heart of what we do. Learning is the core of education, not the co-curriculars and “extras,” so the focus needs to be there. This includes high-quality instruction materials and the flexibility to develop personalized approaches for each student. Final Tip: Embrace a human-first approach that values the stories and emotions of students and families, moving beyond off-the-shelf solutions to craft responsive initiatives. The resources mentioned in this episode include the following books:
And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 239 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:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Linday Lyons (Host) Hello and welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. We are jump-starting episode 239 and this one is going to be about kind of quote-unquote school redesign. So if you are in a situation where your school has been designated as quote low performing or in turnaround status, which is what we call it in Massachusetts, this episode is for you. However, if you are not in one of those situations and just are aiming to make your school kind of a place for every single student to thrive and you just want to level up what's going on there, this is also for you. So here we go. When we are thinking about a school redesign approach, my vote is always for one that is grounded in adaptive leadership, in youth and multi-stakeholder voice and a capacity building approach. I will always vote for those three kind of organizing principles. Now, when we are thinking about what this actually looks like, this means being in multi-stakeholder community as a leadership team, having a representative kind of like leadership governance structure with feedback loops to different stakeholder groups, collaboratively making decisions, being just in a mode of co-creation and constant inquiry. That is what is going to lead to the real transformation. So it's going to take time. It is not an overnight. Here we go, but investing in the actual structures themselves and the process of doing things, which is likely going to be very different than you've done before. That's what's going to make the real difference and that's what's going to make actually any change that you would like to make work smoother, better, faster in the future. 01:59 So let's start with maybe some common missteps. So in my work in the past with turnaround schools and with schools who are just leading change initiatives in general, there are two common missteps that I have noticed and I just want to point them out, because you may be in the midst of leading a change initiative or a strategic planning team, an instructional leadership team at your school or district, like whatever the thing is, and you may be noticing yourself doing these things. One is that when we're identifying a challenge that is a major challenge, a longstanding challenge, we are, you know, disservicing many kids and we're trying to figure out how do we, you know, have educational equity, that kind of thing? Trying to figure out how do we have educational equity, that kind of thing. We are identifying too often challenges as technical and not adaptive. That's number one. The challenges we identify are not adaptive. We're saying that they are technical, so we are misdiagnosing them. The second misstep is that leadership structures are not shared across multiple stakeholder groups. They are held on to, maybe in what research often calls distributed leadership models, where we have admin and educators, but we don't have parents, we don't have students, we don't have, you know, broader kind of community members, families it's just people who are employed by the DOE. Okay, so as we get into these a little bit deeper, I'll reference a little bit of research and a little bit more detail and then we'll move on. 03:35 But just want to say Heifetz, graschau and Linsky they wrote a 2009 book on adaptive leadership that I cite all the time. One of the most common quotes that I use here is that they talk about adaptive challenges in this way. They say they are quote typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs and loyalties rather than technical complexity, and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis. End quote you can imagine having a conversation changing things where we have intense emotions coming up right. That's probably very common in change leadership. You've probably experienced this many times and you can also imagine that when we get really deep down in our root cause analysis, for example, and we touch on someone's values, and that there's a value tension between what we're actually doing and what we purport to value, or we have a loyalty to a particular thing that is inequitable that's what the data tells us, right, or that's what the reality is, that's what the kids are telling us, the families are telling us. Or we get into a belief that needs to be unearthed, examined and reconceived because it is inequitable. Big emotions, big time emotions, and that is going to take a very different approach than than oh, we're going to adopt this new high quality curriculum. 04:46 Here we go, step by step, pd, we're all set now, beautiful school, right, that they're just, they're very different technical and adaptive challenges and almost always a long-standing problem is an adaptive challenge, or there's an adaptive component to it and we ignore that and therefore do not get results. Right, we do not enact transformation because we're ignoring this component. So when we are naming an adaptive challenge, we enable us to have what Mesereau calls a disorienting dilemma. Right, we can facilitate this as leaders, but basically that's a disorienting dilemma is when we have kind of this paradigm shift, or enables, I should say, a paradigm shift for transformative learning, where we have kind of this realization that disorients us, that kind of shakes up our way of thinking and we say, oh wait, a minute. 05:43 I was under the impression that we were doing this or that this was the experience of students in our school. I am now realizing from student stories that they are sharing with us, for example, this is not at all the case. Right Now I need to critically examine all the assumptions that I have, and I am so uncomfortable that I am willing to do that. Right, I am so uncomfortable with this disorientation. I am realizing the way I've been thinking about this isn't working anymore, and the best way to kind of try on other ways of thinking, according to change scholars, is that you actually can have a group dialogue, ideally multi-stakeholder, so you have multiple perspectives brought in already just from the stakeholder group and you can experience and witness other people's ways of thinking and enable yourself to try on something different. Right, I will link to a blog post where I talk more about this, but I just love this idea of we get to the adaptive challenge by having a disorienting dilemma and then we try on other ways of thinking because we're in a group, right, or we pull in, even if they're not live in the room, the experiences and stories of folks who have been, you know, proximate to the problem or the challenge. 06:53 The second step I just want to touch on is that only teachers and administrators are on the committee for school change. When you are absent from the conversation about creating change in your community, you then need to go down the path of quote-unquote buy-in, and we always talk about buy-in. Buy-in is not necessary when you are part of the creation, when you have an authentic, meaningful, active role in the co-creation right, then I don't need to buy into anything. It's my plan, right? I'm part of the construction and of course, we can't have, you know, 2,000 individuals in a room together writing the words of the plan specifically. But we can create a representative stakeholder structure that has multiple stakeholder groups represented in the leadership team and we build capacity, for which I'll get into momentarily feedback loops from those stakeholder groups, so everyone does feel like they have a role in co-creating. Where we're going and providing feedback on drafts of that plan. Then you eliminate the need for buy-in because you're not forcing a plan on anyone. You're saying we're in this together, we are here for all of you, we want feedback from all of you, we want input from all of you, we want to co-create and be in partnership with all of you. We're not doing this to you, we're doing this with you, right, and so I think that's the big kind of mental shift and the with, not for or to and how to do it. The structure is to create the multi-stakeholder group, to create the structure and support and professional learning for all of those stakeholders to be true representatives and be able to stay connected to their stakeholder groups that they represent and gather feedback regularly. So, knowing that these are the two missteps that challenges identified are not adaptive, they actually are and leadership structure is not shared across multiple stakeholder groups it should be what it could look like. I want to talk about that next, what it could be. There we go. 09:04 Capacity building is. I think, first and foremost, our approach to professional learning has to be one of capacity building. Even as a person who you know, my whole job is coming in and getting paid by school districts to support, I want school districts to work me out of a job. I don't. I would love to stay with people forever and and just go deeper and deeper and deeper. And, yes, that is possible to a degree. I love multi-year partnerships. I think we can go really deep there. But I don't want to be employed by a school or district for 20 years Like that is just not helpful to them and it is not the way that your school is going to thrive when you are constantly reliant on external people to say what's going on. 09:47 I think maybe being in an advisor capacity or a hey, let me run this by you capacity, after two or three years that makes more sense to me. But to constantly rely on we need all of the instructional strategies from you, we need the direction from you, we need the like. That doesn't. That doesn't seem ethical and it doesn't seem helpful to me. So here's what I mean we can support all stakeholders, but educators included, because we often talk about PL or professional learning. Through an education educator lens, we can help everyone develop the knowledge and skills to foster and I would also add mindset, to foster stronger connections with other stakeholders in the school community and collaborate effectively. If they can collaborate with one another, they have everything they need, as long as professional learning continues to build those skills and, of course, provide evidence-based information and research. But to be able to be in community with one another and be present for each other's experiences and to like, quote, listen deeply and to be responsive, like that is what's awesome, and Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues work that 2017 research that came out on effective professional learning Like. 10:55 One of those hallmarks is that it should be ongoing. It cannot be a one-off workshop, right. It has to be that the way we do things of professional learning and otherwise is ongoing. We are in it for the long haul, right. We're not going to stop this initiative after our strategic plan is up. This commitment to shared leadership and to unearthing and addressing effectively adaptive challenges that are holding our school back from success are holding our students back from success. Like we're not going to stop after three years, four years, five years, like that's our core. And so I think another note on this is particularly for overworked teachers. Teachers are totally overworked. 11:34 I find it most compelling to actually embed professional learning in the contracted school day and not require teachers to work outside of it, though you need to, for sure, find money to pay them. I also think you know another just nod to the brilliance of educators is identifying those positive deviants the classrooms or places or individuals where students are thriving in these spaces or in connection with these educators and investigating it as a team right and expanding what works. I think that's a beautiful model that honors the wisdom already present in the schools. So, after we have this kind of capacity building approach, we have this mindset going into professional learning and we have it threaded throughout the year and multiple years. I also think the structures of both student leadership and family partnership should really be in place. 12:21 So Ari Gersen-Kessler taught me that research has actually shown stronger partnerships with families is actually one of the five keys to moving from a good to great school or district, and authentic family engagement is one of those keys for system-wide change, and so I would argue that you should go get his book. He has made basically a how-to guide to making this happen in book form. Go get his book. He has made basically a how-to guide to making this happen in book form, and it's called the Stronger Together, I believe, is the name of the book, and it's about his fat teams, families and educators together, and so we can link to that in the blog post. It is excellent. 12:56 But again, structurally we need to know how do we collect information and gather experiential data from families, figure out what's going on in families' brains, what are their wants, desires, needs and work in partnership to get that accomplished. Similarly, student leadership structures should go beyond and I've talked about this ad nauseum. On this I guess I'll make this brief, but they should go beyond the typical student council that plans prom or field trips or whatever the thing is right. It should be connected to the instructional core, connected to school policy, like let's actually co-create and be in partnership around real, meaningful policy and instructional change. Third, and I mentioned this already, lean on experiential, or what Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan call street data. We draw on scholarship that really pulls extensively from street data and also Safiya and colleagues newest book, pedagogies of Voice. I constantly am talking about this, the people I partner with are constantly talking about this. 14:02 But to learn about the experience of students and I would also add, families who have been marginalized by traditional schooling and the designs and policies of traditional systems, like we need to make sure that those stories of people who have not been successful are the ones that we center, are the ones at the table, are part of the kind of data set that we are reading through sorting, through analyzing in making these decisions. That can't just be like an add-on. I think it needs to be central too Because, again, adaptive challenges let's unearth as we explore those stories and experiences, the beliefs, habits and loyalties that we might hold as educators, right, or even as adults that students are kind of unearthing for us, create our disorienting dilemmas through the words and experiences of students right. Fourth, I would say, focus on student learning and quote learning power which comes from Zaretta Hammond and her new book Rebuilding Students' Learning Power, which just came out in 2025. Incredible book Pedagogies of Student Voice actually also emphasizes both of these books I've just been reading, kind of in concert with one another and they both emphasize the importance of focusing our work on the instructional core. 15:18 We cannot do equity if we leave out instruction, if it is not intimately tied to instruction and learning about students' experiences with instruction, not just how they feel at school, although that is incredibly important, but learning about instructional related or curricular related things from and with students and then co-creating with students better instruction, like being in partnership around the instruction. That, to me, is at the heart of what we need to do. Often we bring in students for extracurricular conversations or again like the student council, like what's the fun thing we're planning, but it is separate often from the core of why we're there, which is learning. So Renna Hammond's book has really emphasized and changed my brain around thinking about cognitive justice and making sure that students are kind of getting this coaching one-on-one from their teachers to make sure that students have their own cognitive tools and know their own personal algorithm. I love all the words she uses to help them be better independent learners and information processors. That's real equity. Right. That someone knows their brain and their learning process well enough that they do well, not just in my classroom but next year and the next year and out in the world forever. Right. That they can constantly take in information wherever they are, whether they're reading the New York Times physical paper right or they are seeing a new data set presented in a documentary or whatever it is. That is cognitive justice, and strategic plans should include these goals and measure progress toward them and invest resources in building educators' capacity to do these things well. Measure progress toward them and invest resources in building educators' capacity to do these things well and also not to disserate a Hammond. 16:59 She talks about, you know, letting go of the rigidity of the kind of high-quality instructional materials pacing guide that you might have. While it's important to have high-quality instruction materials right. The rigidity of the pacing guide is something I have always rallied against and that teachers find the most confining in some pretty awesome curriculum that I've seen out there in the world. Like the pacing guide often inhibits its success and when I have helped to kind of coach districts on implementation, I have often coached a prioritization approach where it's like, okay, what is the most important pieces of this, what do my personal students need? So, again, a personalization approach, prioritization, personalization. We have to do this. Well, because we need I often say like one day a week, but we need certainly an amount of time to meet one-on-one with students, to give them individual feedback, to coach them cognitively, to support their information processing, to have a responsive workshop model, for example, in terms of what the individual students need based on their formative assessment earlier this week. Right, we cannot just do things that are laid out by curriculum designers that have no personal connection to the kids in your classroom. They have no student data to base the next decision point on. I have yet to see a curriculum, although I will say that some get close. El education has like a skills block, all block, kind of responsiveness to analyzing the data and then kind of making choices around grouping and instruction based on the data. But, like holistically, there are things that we need to do, to make space for and build into our instructional plans and time and pacing guides to say we need time to just respond to the kids and to give them feedback and to have conversations. 18:52 Now, possible strategic plan components. This is not like a grab and go strategic plan, but just some things to think about as you're building your strategic plan, keeping in mind all the things we just talked about. One we want to build shared leadership structures. So again, this means creating a multi-stakeholder leadership team and also figure out some equitable kind of processes or agendas for meetings that focus on the things that matter. Starting off, you might want to collectively dream the possible. I love the idea of kind of freedom, dreaming as a group. 19:21 I would use a protocol for perhaps like the ones in the book Practicing Futures I think the subtitle is a civic imagination action handbook. So land on clear vision together, connect with stakeholders' hearts and make it easy to remember, and that is going to have that quote-unquote buy-in right. Research has shown that we're going to have people be more committed, have more pride in and clarity around that goal and the vision and what we need to do to make it happen. Next, I would design and facilitate capacity-building workshops for student leaders, families and educators. So build capacity for street data collection and feedback loops so stakeholders can truly act as connected representatives of those groups. Action research for learning what's right and wrong and like what people's experiences are and making changes as a result. So the process of the structure is stable, but the actions that we're taking should not be set in stone. 20:24 This also might include like helping people design multiple formats for stakeholders to engage and give feedback. So it might be that some people can meet and prefer to be in person. Others need something digital or like on Zoom. Other people might need something asynchronous right Zoom. Other people might need something asynchronous right. There might need to be different access points for people. 20:41 And also build facilitator or administrator capacity whoever's actually doing the facilitating of these groups to identify narratives that are popping up in these conversations that are highlighting adaptive challenges. I think, similarly, if you're doing a root cause analysis, clarify the parameters of what truly is a root cause. I would argue in an adaptive challenge it's something that identifies a deeply held belief or loyalty that's inhibiting transformation and also that's in your locus of control. No blaming of other groups or structures, right, like what's in our locus of control. And what is that deeply held belief that is inhibiting our progress? Let's name it and then let's tackle that held belief that is inhibiting our progress. Let's name it and then let's tackle that. 21:22 Okay, the second big kind of overall piece I would have is to build internal capacity for instructional coaching. Give instructional coaches and leaders their own coach. Even if you, as the principal, are the coach, you don't have a separate instructional coach, or maybe it is a department lead. Those folks should have their own coach. Right, coaching is amazing at all levels. And also conduct learning walks with students and ideally, families, if you can like multi-stakeholder learning walks where we're co-developing and using an observational criteria tool that centers on student learning what are the students doing? And saying, not, what is the teacher doing. Then identify trends from there and develop a professional action plan to support the needs of teachers. Right, so we're building capacity. All the time we are learning what's going right in instruction, finding the positive deviance uh, you know, investigating how that was created and expanding that, noting what needs to be supported, supporting it, but constantly collecting data and getting coaching and building our instructional coaching capacity. 22:18 Number three launch and maintain a practice of reviewing student work and cognitive apprenticeship practice PLCs or department meetings or team meetings, whatever you call them. Teacher teams should look at student work. For sure, I adapted DESE Massachusetts DOE looking at student work tool and I like to use that. But whatever the clean, simple process is, use a simple tool that you can reuse again and again to align on standards-based kind of grade level expectations plan for instructional adjustments based on that student data. You know, co-draft, a definition of instructional success, observable criteria, list all the things and, of course, get feedback from multiple stakeholders on this draft as well. And what I love about Zaretta Hammond's book is she talks about how PLCs are a great place to simulate and practice the one-on-one kind of coaching conversations or cognitive coaching conversations with students. So practice the language of information processing, practice being responsive in the moment to students. That takes practice and this is such a beautiful place to practice. So I would use PLCs for those two pieces. And then, of course, to offer instructional and pedagogical support workshops as needed, to those teams as they are defining what the instructional next steps for them are, based on that student data. 23:36 I would also make sure it is so hard right, I think about the adaptive leadership idea of resistance. Is loss right? Resistance to change is actually a loss of potentially like an identity, for example. I would frame a lot of these discussions with appreciative inquiry. So, for example, I think there's a SWOT analysis that people usually do for strategic planning or other business things. I prefer SOAR. So, instead of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, it's strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results. So it's all kind of in the positive. We don't need to just say here all the things are terrible, but here are the things, where do we want to be? And let's focus on that and let's get there right. And also, you know, determining processes for highlighting and studying examples of positive deviance, as we mentioned. 24:24 Okay, the fourth and final piece of this list, I would say both capacity to collect student experience data. So, again, identify students at the margins, generate key questions to ask, design and facilitate data collection workshops for all those stakeholder groups, so everyone has the capacity to collect data. And also noting that everyone should have their own coach. Give family and student leaders their own coach too. The fact that we think, you know, we know, I think we know in education that every teacher is better with a coach, every instructional coach is better with a coach, every admin is better with a coach. Like, how would we put family and student leaders in these roles and not coach them right? I think we also wanna give coaching to them and ideally, as much as possible, use our professional learning budgets to be expansive. In our thinking about who gets professional learning, it should include families and students. Okay, this has been a long episode so I'll just leave you with some final tips. 25:18 Community created should be a hallmark of this right. These strategic plans should be community created. And, again, co-creation decreases the need for quote buy-in. It should be human first, connect with educators, family members, leaders, students, hearts and invite stories. Members, leaders, students, hearts and invite stories. 25:41 Often change initiatives fail because we don't connect to emotion and be responsive. Yes, evidence-based is important, but off the shelf and straight into implementation mode just doesn't work. There are too many considerations that we often ignore that end up making the initiative fail, whether it's a curriculum or otherwise. So, yes, evidence-based and then personalize it. Be responsive to the needs of your community and truly, deeply like be present for it. 26:09 I want to say listen, but I'm trying not to use ableist language Like take in the stories and the experiences of students and families, particularly ones that we have underserved in the past, and be responsive to those. If you are currently in a state of turnaround or redesigning a school, I would love to know what is working for you, what challenges are coming up. This is an area of deep passion. I've kind of got away from it for a while, but, noting that my scholarship initially started in leadership and changed leadership, really want to go back there. So please let me know, reach out and let me know what else you would want to learn about on a future podcast episode related to this topic. 
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this solo episode, we’re talking about unlearning Thanksgiving at home. Regular listeners of the podcast will likely know that the story of Thanksgiving taught to young kids in the US is often inaccurate, and yet, many of us struggle with how to talk about it — we’re either uncomfortable with the topic itself or don’t have the knowledge to really engage in it.
Here, we want to equip you to have conversations with your family and children, offering strategies to discuss politicized historical truths with family during Thanksgiving gatherings. The episode introduces resources you can use to guide conversation, aiming for a more inclusive and accurate representation of history. Why? This is an important topic to discuss simply because many of us don’t actually feel comfortable doing so! In a 2024 poll by CBS News, about 71% of Americans said they would try to avoid discussing politics on Thanksgiving, reflecting the discomfort many feel around these topics. However, the truth of history is often politicized, and it's crucial to seek the truth. We want to center Indigenous voices in our country's history, challenging myths or falsehoods taught to us as children. What? There are many ways and access points to begin having conversations about Thanksgiving — the truth of Thanksgiving — with your family. Here are some simple steps you can take to get started: Step 1: Visit native-land.ca with your child to see what land you’re living on and which Indigenous Nation it belongs to. You can engage them in a simple notice-and-wonder activity to explore Indigenous land history. Step 2: After acknowledging the land you’re living on, you can correct the Thanksgiving record. Pulling from the state of Massachusetts’ Investigating History Curriculum, you can use a tool like the Abbey Museum’s myths and truths cards to challenge ideas around Thanksgiving. For example, one card says:
Step 3: Going a bit deeper, start incorporating books by Indigenous authors into family discussions. Some great options for young children include:
For older children, some recommendations include:
Step 4: In addition to stories and books, you can engage in the following resources during Thanksgiving:
Step 5: As you read and engage in these books, you can draw on tips from episode 236 to engage your children in challenging conversations. You can also utilize our family coaching opportunities through EduBoost for support in handling these challenging conversations with your children. Final Tip: As you approach these sometimes-challenging conversations, model humility and a commitment to lifelong learning by admitting when you don't have all the answers and engaging in learning alongside your children. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my IH Curriculum Link with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 238 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:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 238, unlearning Thanksgiving at Home. We know that regular listeners and readers of Time for Teachership likely know the story of Thanksgiving taught to young kids in the US is likely inaccurate and we may not know how to talk about it with our kids or our families more broadly, or we may know the factual information but may be uncomfortable broaching the subject and want a little bit of support in doing so. That's what this episode is for. So here we go. In a 2024 poll by CBS News, about 71% of Americans said they're going to try to avoid discussing politics on Thanksgiving. That was reported in the Hill and we can link to that in the blog post. But that's like three out of four people just about that's a lot of people who don't want to discuss politics, and we know that the truth of history is often politicized, whether it should be or not, and so our goal in this episode is really to seek truth and center Indigenous voices in Indigenous history and in our country's history and unlearn kind of the myths or falsehoods that we have likely learned as young children living in the United States. If that resonates with you, if that was your experience. So here are some suggestions and again, speaking as a non-Indigenous person, I just I want to name that up front. And again speaking as a non-Indigenous person, I just I want to name that up front. We want to go find the resources written by, authored by, you know, advised by, created by Indigenous folks. And so first I'm going to direct us to native-landca, which is a website you can visit with your child and invite them to share just a simple notice and wonder what do you notice about this map of the land that we're occupying, that we're living on? Whose? Is it? Click into the Indigenous Nation when it names? What's really cool about the website is it names the Indigenous Nations that you're living on, many sometimes. There are many, right, it's not just one and you can click into them. They're usually live links to like the nation's page, like webpage, and so you can see like modern day tribal council and what initiatives are they into and what are some pictures of people living today. Just a whole load of resources to explore, to connect past and present. And if you feel like you need a little bit of support with how to get that conversation started, or you dive into the conversation and then you're like okay, I don't know how to bring this further A few episodes back, episode 236 of the podcast. We talked about some ideas for conversation starters or some prompts for question generation, so check that out if that feels like something you would like. Once you acknowledge the land that you're living on, correct the Thanksgiving record, I have a lot of resources in my brain from the Investigating History Curriculum which is the state's in Massachusetts, the state's Department of Education curriculum that they've co-created with EduCurious and Primary Source at different grade levels. 03:05 This one particularly is a unit from the third grade curriculum which was piloted this past school year, as we record this. So school year 24-25 is a pilot. It should be out for release soon but you can't access the pilot materials. You just have to complete a form and it's free to access. So I'm going to link that later in the blog post at the very end you can grab that. 03:26 But I want to first talk about an activity from the Abbey Museum. That are myths and truths cards. So again, this is located in Unit 2 of the IH curriculum, but it centers prominent myths or truth and your role is to guess whether it's true or false. So you could do this with children. You might do it with slightly older children. You might not do it with a preschool child. Also, just a content warning here. I'm going to read just three of them and in one in particular there is a lot of violence. So just a heads up if you want to kind of skim through the next two to three minutes of the podcast, if that is triggering for you, but also just want to name there. This is part of the third grade curriculum. So this is something that students should know happened and, depending on your background and your lived experiences and knowledge of history, this may be familiar and it may not. So if it's not, I want you to make sure you know that it has happened. Here we go. 04:26 The pilgrims invited the Indians to celebrate the first Thanksgiving. That's what's written on the first card, true or false? The answer card says false. The Wampanoag tribe, upon hearing gunshots from the Plymouth settlement, gathered approximately 90 men in fear that a battle was about to begin. Upon arriving at Plymouth and seeing the quote festivities, they then went out and brought back five deer and several turkeys. Again, native and Europeans alike were very familiar with harvest feasts long before 1621. So that's the card and I'm reading word for word what is on the card. So this might not be the same language that I would use, but it's part of the Abbey Museum's language. I'm just's also part of it, right? It's kind of this, oh right, like we need to be aware of even the language in the initial card or statement that we may hear in popular culture being something we need to actually rethink. 05:37 Okay, second card, and again the content warning for this one, if you want to skim through for a minute. The pilgrims and Indians became great friends. True or false? False Answer false. About a century later, theft of Indian lands by European settlers forced the Wampanoag to go to war to keep their homes. In 1637, english soldiers massacred some 700 Pequot men, women and children at Mystic Fort, burning many alive and shooting. Those that fled the colony of Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay Colony observed a day of Thanksgiving commemorating the massacre. A day of Thanksgiving commemorating the massacre, heavy stuff. And so you know, take care of yourself as you listen, take care of yourself as you introduce these ideas to children and again, consider the age of the children. This is from a third grade curriculum. Third one I'll read Thanksgiving has been celebrated every year since the first Thanksgiving in 1621. True or false? This is false. 06:32 Our modern celebrations of the Thanksgiving quote holiday date back only to 1863. President Lincoln named a national holiday during the Civil War in an attempt to promote solidarity and unity between the warring states. So just sit with that a minute. There are layers upon layers to unpack here. So again, especially with older students, students who have learned about the Civil War and enslavement in their curricula, in their social studies classrooms, that is a lot of layers to unpack there, right? So we're not only talking about the traumatic history of how white settlers are treating and massacring right Indigenous people, but we are also unpacking the fact that in a debate about the right to enslave people, we are seeking to lie about a nation's past and have this holiday that celebrates all of that violence, when we're talking about perpetuating violence in, you know, hundreds of years later. Layers upon layers. So of course there's a lot to unpack and that may feel very daunting, particularly if you yourself, as an adult, are just learning some of this history. There is certainly a lot. So, again, I highly recommend a couple things. 08:01 One, to go back to episode 236 for some just general conversation starters and how do you kind of approach conversations like this. I'll also link in that episode, excuse me, is also linked a resource about how to stay and give difficult conversations with children. So there's kind of a one pager that Kara Pranikov and I created actually for preschoolers and, you know, the adults and parents and educators of preschoolers, but can be used at any level. And the big kind of thing just want to name is that sometimes you don't know how to respond in the moment and if that is the case, that's okay. You can pause, say, hey, that's a really interesting question. I don't know the answer, I'm going to look it up and we'll come back to it. Or hey, I actually want to sit with us for a little bit. That's a really interesting point you're making. I want to sit with us. Let's return to this conversation later. 08:46 That is totally okay for your kids to know that you don't have all the answers, but you're honestly and authentically engaging with them and that maybe you're going to find the answers together. I think that's such a big piece to this right. If we're not willing to learn, if we're not willing to admit that we don't know the answer or we made a mistake or we used to say this term and now we've realized that was terrible and hurt someone's feelings. And you know, like all the things we do as parents and you know, like all the things we do as parents, as family members, as adults around young people, we want to model the humility, the desire to grow, to learn and be community members that seek justice and truth and, you know, perpetuate a sense of belonging in folks in our community. So the other piece of that and I'll talk about this at the end as well, but the other piece of that is that we are now offering family coaching. So live support, like fairly live as live as we can get asynchronously, but ask us a question and within 24 hours we'll get back to you with a possible response. So if you are in that moment, you could say we're going to pause the conversation and within 24 hours I will get back to you. Kiddo, I'm going to consult somebody to think about. You know my game plan here for the next few minutes. Okay, let's continue with our resources Now. 09:57 The rest of the episode is very resource heavy, so I highly recommend opening up the blog post or committing the blog post named memory. So, as always, it's lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog. Slash the episode number. So in this case it is 238, lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog slash 238. And then you can go ahead and access all of these great links. 10:18 So the Investigating History Grade 3 Resource List for the unit Unit 2, that we've been talking about, has a list of books by Indigenous authors that are excellent. I'm just selecting my favorites from that list right now, so I wanted to just name those. For kiddos, these are predominantly picture books. Berry song by Michaela Goad keep on them up. We actually won thanksgiving story, which is our family's favorite, by Daniel Greendeer, anthony Perry and Alexis Bunton, if you live during the plummet. Thanksgiving by Chris Newell excellent, excellent in terms of content, learning, less pictures. Pictures there's like a higher text to picture ratio than these other books in the list here. 10:55 But particularly for older kiddos or for your own learning, I mean, it's a quickly digestible. I think I read it in like an hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours, but it's like a. It's like 100 pages of, not a ton of text per page. There are some visuals. So you know you're thinking about again that like third grade, fourth grade, that's going to a good one to read together. Remember by Joy Harjo and we Are Water Protectors by Carol Lindstrom. These are all excellent for kiddos and, again, centering Indigenous stories, indigenous authors. 11:24 For older kids I would say middle high school as well as adults, I always like the young people versions of a people's history because I can read them and then hand over the same text to a young person like a teenager. For example, when I taught high school, this was always a really good thing. As a, it's like faster for me to read than the adult version, but it's also something I could say hey, look on this exact page, see my annotations, or let's have a conversation around the same exact text that is accessible to a younger person. So for that reason, I highly recommend An Indigenous People's History of the United States for Young People by originally by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who wrote the adult version, I think, and then it was adapted for young people by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese. Debbie Reese is phenomenal. She's an author and scholar viewer of children's books and she has an amazing website where she has just an unreal amount of commentary and just extensive reviews and it's called American Indians and Children's Literature. So we will link to that webpage as well in this blog post. 12:33 Okay, in addition to all of those stories and resources. We're just going to link a couple more things. There is a page on the National Museum of the American Indian website that are suggested activities for Thanksgiving or discussing Thanksgiving, and so I think the most compelling one to me because this excerpt was actually part of the grade three curriculum for investigating history that I got to see and experience this year and just was so thought-provoking personally is to read and discuss the Haudenosaunee's Thanksgiving Address. So you actually read through it. It's about two pages and it's about giving thanks right, like it's the actual giving of thanks to you know, nature and everything. I really think that that is worth your time to check that one out. But of course there's a lot more activities in there. Feel free to go through all of them. 13:28 And then I also want to share one that's actually on an educator webpage. It's an article that was shared by NEA so National Educators Association from Dr Star Yellowfish, and she has ideas for how to stop harmful kind of quote unquote traditional Thanksgiving activities. So if you are a family member who's like, yeah, I want to do this in my family, I want to talk about the real truth, I want to make sure we're not doing harmful activities, but actually, I also want to bring this to my kiddos school community, so that no kid has to learn like the fake history, the insulting quote, unquote history that is taught historically, taught in elementary schools, for example. You might have some language and even some activities and just even a landing page to go back to and share the link itself with school administration or teachers who you know are just maybe unfamiliar or just don't know exactly what to do, how to switch activities, like do we still talk about Thanksgiving? In what way do we Like all of that? She gives a lot of specific language scenarios and links to activities. For example, she talks about how making a feather headdress is actually offensive and feathers are sacred to indigenous communities. You do not want to do that. However, she gives a substitute activity for making something and kind of links to directions and like how to do that and what materials you would need to do that, and so she's like this is actually a way that is much more culturally accurate and also inoffensive, and so you know, do this instead. So she offers some nice replacement things if you're like oh, we set aside time to do this activity. Okay, well, here, check this out right. So I think that is another great resource. Again, that's ideas from Dr Star Yellowfish posted on the NEA website. 15:13 As a final resource, I've been talking about it a lot. I've been talking about it a lot over the last year, but the Investigating History curriculum has been really good at, I think, teaching a lot of people in Massachusetts, including myself, a lot about Indigenous communities, particularly in the grade three and four communities. Excuse me curricula, and while they're still in pilot mode, you can, as I said earlier in the episode, access them for free. You just have to complete a quick registration page earlier in the episode. Access them for free. You just have to complete a quick registration page. 15:44 And so just to note that today's resources that we named that were links within the IH curriculum, came from the grade three, unit two, cluster two set of lessons, and so we will link to that in a blog post as well. So today's blog post, one more time, can be accessed at lindsaybethlionscom slash blog, slash 238. And I do want to remind you one more time we are opening EduBoost up to families, so please feel free to check out that page for more information on the website as well, that's lindsaybethlionscom slash families, for more on family coaching and how we can help you with any conversation that you are encountering with your kiddo and wanting more support with. Make sure you reach out, ask us a question, share what's going on. We've got you. 
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In this episode, we talk with Dr. Eric Soto-Shed and Kara Pranikoff, who have both been guests on the podcast before (see episodes 138, 175, and 216 to hear more from them). Together, we discuss the art of engaging families in meaningful discussions that foster education and growth.
The episode highlights the role of families as co-creators in education, integrating structured home conversations to enrich children's learning with diverse perspectives. As educators, researchers, and parents themselves, Dr. Soto-Shed and Kara also share practical insights for families to establish rituals and routines that boost communication, empathy, and understanding. Sparking Family Conversations It is so important to engage with children and teenagers around high-emotion issues, but many parents don’t know where to start. Leading with curiosity and vulnerability is a great way to open those conversations. Adults can ask: “I’m curious, what do you think about this? How are you feeling about it?” This opens the conversation with curiosity—there’s no right or wrong answer. Parents and caregivers can lead a conversation by sharing their thoughts and emotions. For example, “I was reading this article today and I’m feeling this way—here’s how I’m wrestling with it. I’m curious where you are, too.” As you begin The goal is to transform challenging conversations into opportunities for growth and to create a safe space for dialogue. Mindset Shifts Required To spark and embrace meaningful conversations, families must view themselves as integral partners in education, not just passive observers. This means embracing the role of co-creators in the learning process—parents and caregivers actively participate in discussions, model open communication, and foster curiosity. Further, educators and parents or caregivers need to communicate openly about what is happening in the classroom. This means educators can share openly about curricular areas and what conversations are coming up, and parents/caregivers take an active interest in that, responding with strategies at home that continue the conversation. Action Steps Meaningful conversations don’t usually just happen out of nowhere—they’re intentionally created. Parents and caregivers can create safe spaces for open conversations, playing the role of co-creators, supporters, encouragers, and others as outlined by Dr. Soto-Shed in this episode. Here are some action steps to get started with: Step 1: Begin by incorporating curiosity-driven conversations at home. Encourage your child to take the lead on discussions about high-emotion topics, such as politics or current events, while remaining open about your own emotions and thoughts. Step 2: Name the value of this work. It’s important for parents and caregivers to recognize and communicate the value of having these conversations, both for how they support their child’s education and their development as an individual. Step 3: Establish family rituals and routines that promote communication and reflection. A simple method like "onions and orchids" has everyone, adults and children, discuss daily highs and lows. This helps incorporate feedback and gratitude into your conversations. Another approach is to talk about articles or news stories from around the world. It brings up current events and allows natural conversation points to arise. Step 4: Actively engage as educational partners with your child's school. Know what they are learning in school and, instead of generic questions like “how was your day,” ask tailored, specific questions about what they are learning: “tell me more about XYZ. I know you’re reading a book about ABC—what is it like?” Stay Connected You can stay connected with our guests online. Find Eric on his Harvard faculty page or by email at [email protected], and contact Kara by email, [email protected], or on her website karapranikoff.com. To help you implement today’s takeaways, our guests are sharing Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships and Staying Engaged in Difficult Conversations handout with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 237 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:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) erica, welcome to the time for teachership podcast. 00:05 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) I'm so excited, you guys are here. 00:08 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) So first let's just talk about. I mean, we're all educators, we've I think common listeners have heard your voices or read about your ideas on on the podcast before. But what should people know about you beyond kind of the professional educator bio? What are you bringing into the space today that you want people to know? 00:28 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) So, first of all, I'm so happy to be here and be in conversation with you, Lindsay, and you, eric, so thanks for opening up this conversation. I think that it would help listeners to know that I have two college age kiddos One is 23, one is 20. And so I have lived through lots of really difficult conversations and I would say that I continually learn how to be in conversation around the topics that are happening in our world with my kids, even at age 23 and 20. So I just want to name it's a long life journey, eric. What about you? 01:16 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) I would say that I've been in education and teaching and teacher education for 25 years and I've been a parent for two. So I come to this with a great degree of humility and respect for parents. We have one child, that is, I think about a second child. I just have an awe of what parents do and so recognize, I mean, the true wonder of it, love it, but also the true challenge and just what kind of every stage, the wonders and challenges that it brings, and so that's just been really on my mind a lot, and so that's one thing. And then the other thing is that you know, I've been at universities and working in academia for the past 15 to 20 years. I think there's a lot of wisdom in the world, a lot of wisdom and experience, a lot of wisdom in the ground and a lot of wisdom in our day-to-day interactions, and so I hope to both learn from that and draw on that as well as sort of the traditional academic frameworks as well. 02:13 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Super appreciate broadening that horizon beyond, like the White Towers, like academia and all of that stuff. 02:19 That feels very untouchable sometimes for, like, what do I do now as I'm in the car, going to get my kid, and talking about this thing. So yeah, I really appreciate both of your perspectives and I think this is going to be a really cool conversation. So I think the first question I kind of have is like what are the possibilities for opening up conversation with your kids around? I mean, anything could be politics, current events, could be an interpersonal conflict that kid is having in their life, could be around kind of a quote unquote, controversial issue, or I like to call them like high emotion issues, as like a broad umbrella, but what's kind of possible? And or, if you want to take it from the perspective of like, not necessarily fear, but like a wondering of like, oh, if I'm in this moment or maybe I've had this moment with my kid where I'm like, oh, I don't know what to do here Like what comes to mind as you think about parenting and caretaking children at any age and having these tough conversations that bring up high emotions? 03:22 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) So, first of all, I love that language, high emotion issues and I love that it kind of encapsulates the emotions that we bring to things that are happening in our community, but also that interpersonal space, or even, I think, kids as they grow up, kind of figuring out their own identity. There's a lot of high emotion around there. So I think, first and foremost, I think it's really important to get curious right, To really ask your kid you know, I'm thinking about this thing. Or you brought up this thing yesterday. I want to go back to it and I'm just I'm kind of curious what are you thinking about that issue? How are you feeling about that issue? 04:03 I think it's important to let them have the space to lead the conversation where they want to take it. And then I would also say the corollary is to be honest about your own emotions. So I also think it's okay to say I read this article this morning and I'm feeling this way and here's why. And I'm trying to figure out how to wrestle with that. I'm wondering if you are too. So I think both things is where I might start. 04:32 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) And one thing you said there, cara, that I thought was really interesting and I just want to kind of amplify it is also maybe leading with what you're thinking about, right. 04:41 So when you invite curiosity, you kind of say like this is what I'm thinking, so it's not just sort of like me probing you for what's on your mind, but really a conversation and sort of starting with the sharing I think can be a really way to invite kids into the conversation. So I think that was just a really like subtle but important point. And then it also relates to sort of a broader way I was thinking about it, where I was thinking about just listen, the importance of listening, and so I think curiosity is a really active way to listen and I really appreciate that. And other times your kids might be talking, your kids might be writing, your kids might be communicating in ways where you can become aware of. Okay, let me get a sense of what's on their radar and then use that as a springboard into the conversation. So I just think it's really kind of listening, either with some active curiosity or just some attuneness to what students or kids are sharing I think is really important and useful. 05:35 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) And I love the way you just named all the different ways that kids might share right. It's not just verbal, so that's a really good thing to keep in mind also. 05:43 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I was really thinking the same thing that attunement is. So it like sometimes I just notice in my parenting world, like that my kid will get very quiet. Like just there's just like. This quiet stillness is like a like unsettled look, and it's like normally really talkative not talkative right now, like ooh, something's, something's there. So like that, and can we I think hard to your point like, can we also like, maybe we let it linger, maybe there's nothing to be said today, but I'm gonna ask the question anyways, I'm gonna let you think on it, and then I can return tomorrow and I can check in tomorrow, or that kid's gonna bring it back up on their own in the interim, which is so common, right, and and that there's space for that, and there there's not necessarily like, oh, I'm going to ask this question and then there's going to be this wonderful conversation Like that's not always how it goes. 06:29 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Does it ever go that way? I mean, I just would like to say that. 06:34 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) Yeah, and you know what that makes me think of too is this other point around this. You know, when you begin that conversation, just be ready for a range of responses. If we're talking about emotions, a range of emotions if we're talking about an engagement, a range of engagement, right, and part of that, you know, lindsay, again I think was kind of you stated I want to amplify is around. Let's revisit this right and see if what I heard yesterday would seem to be disengagement or brush me off was just an initial sort of reaction and there's more there. Maybe there's just not much of a response there. Right, that is possible. 07:07 There's so many issues in the world I think of myself, right where sometimes something just hits me unbelievably hard and I'm shocked by that, and there's sometimes there's really intense stuff happening in the world where I'm like, wow, I'm not really having a response to that and that kind of shocks me too. And so I think that as humans, we just have different responses and so, like, let's not just pretend that we're going to say, hey, what's going on, and there's going to be this unbelievable flood of things, we can be prepared for the rains, but like, what are the different ways? We can kind of continue to follow through, ask about different issues or follow up with the same issue and, just you know, expect a wide variety of possibilities. 07:44 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) You know, also thinking about we're all like former social studies teachers in the social studies realm things that come up curricularly, that I mean we all were in that third and fourth grade space last year in the Massachusetts pilot for investigating history and thinking about. You know things that might even be things that you can plan to almost talk about, right. So current events are one thing, or interpersonal relationship issues with your kid. It's like, oh, that pops up Now. I got to respond immediately in the moment and that can be a challenge. 08:14 But then there's also these like units that teachers are teaching and prepping for and can notify you in advance. Or you know, you see, like this is going to come next week in our class, like this is a text we're going to read. I mean, ideally there's that kind of communication between school and home. But if you see that you know, like what are, what are kind of those actions that you can think about, either from the teacher lens of what would have been helpful for families or what has been helpful for families to engage with you and support, kind of from the home perspective, to support the work in the classroom, or from the family perspective, like how might you support or have you supported any work that's going on in the classroom or in the school more largely? More broadly, um does that question make sense? 09:00 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Yeah, we're thinking from both hats, right? Yeah, so I'm going to take the teacher hat and then I'm going to do the parent hat, is that okay? So I think, from the teacher perspective, I think, especially right now, teachers can be very afraid of communicating with their families, and I actually think that what we want more than anything is communication and is awareness, and so I would always encourage a teacher to write about something that's coming up in a unit, or even share. Here's a little bit of a transcript from this conversation that happened in the classroom. Here's what it sounds like when third and fourth graders are talking about this current event or this historical injustice that we're learning about. 09:46 I think if you give families a sense of what's actually happening in the classroom, it's helpful. They can't imagine it. How could they? Right? They're not in that space. And then, from the family point of view, if you do get information about a unit or about a conversation that's happened in the classroom, I think it's important A to kind of study your own self before you have a conversation with kids, right? So if we're talking about some historical injustice or you're not sure about how to talk about race with your child, I think you want to kind of study your own self and do kind of some of your own work before you enter into the conversation, and then again I think you can lead with. I heard this is happening in your classroom. Tell me about it, right, like what's going on? How's that feeling for you? Like what are you talking about? I'm curious. So I think those are my two spaces that I went. 10:46 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) Eric. What about you? You know I really appreciate that response, cara, and I'm going to do something I rarely do, which I'm going to cite some scholarships. So really I think it's practitioner-facing scholarship that I really like, and this is Karen Mapp's dual capacity framework for parent and community engagement, and really what it talks about is both teachers and educators building up their capacity to build and partner with parents, and also us thinking about parents and their capacity and what they can do. 11:15 And in the revised framework, map lays out these sort of six roles that we can think about families as schools are engaging them, and I think they provide some really nice buckets for us to think about all sorts of possibilities, and so I'll just name those six roles. The first would be think about parents as co-creators, next, as supporters, third, as encouragers, fourth, as monitors, fifth, as advocates and sixth, as models. And I think, when you think about those potential roles that families can play, caregivers can play, I think there's a lot we can do, and so I'm thinking specifically around some work that the three of us did when we were working with some elementary curriculum that had some pretty charged topics. One of the things we were saying is not only sort of send that letter home. This is what we're doing, but like checking on your students right, checking on your children right, like monitor, see what's going on with them, how are they responding, ask them what happened today in school, with a real specific lens of, like whoa we were dealing with some pretty hard history in a particular lesson, and so I think those various roles can be helpful. 12:30 So the monitor piece, but then I also get really excited about the co-creator, like what is the um, the wisdom that families have around engaging young people that we can bring into school, given the stuff that we're talking about, um, what are, what are, what does that look like? Right? Or what's the experience at home that we can kind of build off of and share? And so that idea of co-creator, I think is really exciting for some possibilities, and so know that both schools and parents need to be thinking about, or schools and families need to be thinking about these multiple roles that families can play. 12:53 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh my gosh, I love all of your ideas, love the research. Thank you for citing that, and I actually was just thinking like very initial idea of BrainsRound. But how could it be if there was actually a circle where we are sharing the conversations that we maybe had at home about said topic, like the homework is literally just go home and have a conversation? Now I also want to like ask this, because I know a lot of my high schoolers like maybe don't have family, like they are the only ones at home at a particular given time and it's hard to like time-wise communicate. 13:23 But if you gave them enough lead time, like in the next week, have this conversation, right, and then you can either audio record, bring a transcript, just like give a summary, and then we get to just like dive into and kind of analyze and unpack, like I mean, there's so many things you could do there, right, but like unpack and talk through, like here are all these varied perspectives and where might they come from and what's the most generous interpretation of each and what are the values that underlie this. Like there's so much richness that could happen. And in a sense, that's like a little bit different from maybe co-creating curriculum, but it is co-creating the experience of like talking about a thing that could be so cool and as a family member, I would be really excited to I don't know have our family's voice, like somewhere in an educational space as well. I don't know, this is just like an idea, but other ideas, thoughts. 14:12 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) I love that idea If I could just build. I just have two like maybe sort of additions to that I want to kind of build off of. It's really exciting. The first is one just to name the value of it, because by far the most valuable experience I did in my education was like the immigration history of my family, right, and my father told me all this stuff which was so cool. My mother had passed, I was able to learn about you know her story as well and it's just been profound. It sticks with me. 14:34 Talk about a valuable um project that I called it, I think, from Lithuania, from Lithuania to Louisiana, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot something, the story and I got all this like cool little background. And so what you're doing here, lindsay, is you're saying there's other possibilities around current events, other issues. So it's not the sort of big sort of research like what's your thought on X, what's your thought on Y, whether it's an issue, a values question, and so I love just having sort of these smaller, sort of focused conversations around timely issues or underlying things such as values. So that's really exciting. Then the second thing, just in terms of you mentioned some of the challenges in terms of how to do that right. I think we can think about discussions also being, like you know, text messages or notes. 15:18 I know that much of my youth was mediated by, like me leaving something on the counter for my dad and him getting home at 11 and filling out the form, and me waking up in the morning and the form filled out, and so you know what could that look like. So I think there's, you know, with technology or the old school note, there's many ways you can have this sort of exchange of ideas between you know, families, caregivers, parents and children, and then bring those into schools in very intentional ways. So I think that's just a really exciting thing. I'm proud not to hear your thoughts too. 15:49 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) No, I mean, I love everything that you named and I also really love the capacity for kind of role modeling, what a kind of intergenerational conversation could look like. I think there are so many of us who would benefit. I mean, actually all of us would benefit from intergenerational conversation, and I think folks sometimes don't know where to look or what that could look like. And so I also think like the capacity for learning from each other, be it from a note or an actual space or from a transcript. I think the recognition of the importance of that and here's how to do it would make people hungry for more and also would help people see what that's like, feel what that's like, and the capacity for learning from each other across generations. 16:40 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) As I've been thinking about the Massachusetts civ civics showcases too, I've also been thinking about this idea of like civics it both in school and at home, and thinking about, like how do we as families, like either in conjunction with the school or separate from the school, like feel agentic enough or like informed enough to to know, like what does civic action look like and how can that look in different communities, at the family level or like the city or town level? 17:10 And also thinking about the Mindset what is it Mindshift podcast, which I just like was sharing, I think, with maybe both of you listen to it. 17:19 It was just so powerful to hear, like the co-located preschool and like elderly community living like in the same space and sharing space together and having like four-year-olds reading with people in an elderly community, like that's so beautiful and just makes me think of what is possible and also what is happening in many homes, like many multi-generational homes. What is possible and also what is happening in many homes, like many multi-generational homes. And to really leverage that and to say like hey, this is an actual act of civic action and engagement to like go, like, hear stories and like bear witness to the testimonies of older folks and for older folks to do that with younger folks and just be like let's be in community with one another, but like a beautiful space both for like current events and controversial issues, but also just the power of story. I think there's so much there that can be learned and applied to novel situations, including just ways of interacting and ways of thinking. 18:17 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) I mean, I think that idea about narrative is really possible, right? So, eric, you mentioned from Lithuania to Louisiana and that narrative and how powerful it was for you, but also I think about how powerful it would be for other classmates right To hear that story, right, and then get curious about the stories that are in their families. We know the power of personal narrative for just kind of understanding each other and drawing connections, and so I think you're right. Anytime we're in space and able to hear about experiences that are similar and, more importantly, different from each other, I think we just build our capacity for understanding and just like appreciation for the way people move in the world and just like appreciation for the way people move in the world, All right, any final thoughts before we go to our last little bit of like lightning round questions. 19:19 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) I do have. It's a half a thought and then it's half a question. Some are geared to you, cara, but, lindsay, you could also weigh in with the infinite wisdom and that's around like rituals and routines for engaging kids at home. And so I'm thinking about this in two ways. One is I have an amazing teacher educator friend, katie Reiser, who runs the teacher education at Brown. We used to work together and she's just an amazing parent and would have these rituals and daily routines with her son where she would ask him questions about things that they did. But it was like very specific and you know she was a former ELA teacher and I was like wow, this is. And her kid was super engaged and I was like this is super dope, it's like really intentional and it's awesome. 20:10 So I'm wondering about like, any like, if there's any thoughts around rituals. You know I'm just trying to figure out the ritual of changing a diaper right now. And then the other aspirational thing I have is last week I was listening to a great podcast interview with the historian David Blight talking about history and the current sort of challenges we have around history. But he was talking about the declaration of independence and really what a beautiful document, as fraught as it might be in some respects, what a beautiful document is and how that he has, on every 4th of July, he will listen to it, a reading of it, and it brings tears to his eyes and it's, like you know, I'm all about the barbecues, I'm all about the chills. I don't want to get like super duper, like you know, but I'm wondering about like kind of ritualizing, like some sort of family ritual where we do something together, not daily, but, you know, sometime on a special holiday. So, carmen, I'm just wondering, like, as a veteran parent, what are your thoughts around like rituals and routines? 21:15 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) So, first of all, I do love thinking about rituals and I think it we don't often share them right outside. 21:23 So so I can think of a few that that we did. So the first was just the understanding that when we sat down at the dinner table together we would do onions and orchids so what's something that was good in your day and what was something that was not good in your day. And having that ritual every day A you got some information. B we all shared, so adults shared also, and you could model how, you know, it might be a big thing, it might be a little thing, right. So both positive and negative, right? You know, my orchid could be a really good cup of coffee or it could be something really big, right? So I think there's that. And then the other ritual that I can think of two more. The other one that we did was we would often talk about happy and thankfuls, so like what are you happy or thankful for? And I think that that kind of cultivated again, like just an awareness of the world. 22:22 And I would say the third thing that we did always as a family was we talked about articles and the news and the things that were around, right. So the newspaper we had hard copy, it was on the table. We would share things that we read in magazines. Hey, I just read about this. What do you think? Um, and so from a young age, I think just talking about world events was, um, was typical in the house, and I, my kids still talk to me about world events. So, um, I think that was just I don't know, there's three different things that we did that helpful, so helpful. That is amazing, totally thank, eric, brilliant question oh, my goodness. 23:05 And now you two need to come up with your rituals and tell me what to be doing now, because whatever age will work. 23:11 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I have been thinking about this question and I never thought to just ask anyone. So this is so good, eric, that you actually asked the question and Cara, you're brilliant, so that's awesome. I have been thinking a lot about like feedback, like the, the act of like learning through feedback, and like learning from mistakes, and like not seeking perfection, and so I was. I we have not instituted this. 23:32 This is not a ritual I do, but it's an one I aspire to is like what's one thing you learned today, like what, what is one thing you like made a mistake around and can learn from, kind of thing. I don't know how I'll phrase that for a three-year-old, but you know something like that. And then also I think like this might not be a ritual for the dinner table, although dinner table I just want to share. I was recently with my dad and he was like you know what the best moments of my life were like sitting around the dinner table when you guys were all in high school and able to like share stories of your day, and I was like that is beautiful. 24:03 And I'm sure there are many like more positive things to come, but like I just was like that's great, and also I just want to like go back in time and be like what did we share? And like how did you start that conversation? Because as a parent, I'm like, hmm, like that seems like a really cool environment you cultivated, like how did that happen so awesome? Um, dinner table conversations. But I also think about these moments of frustration, or like, um, like I think about driving the most. 24:29 Like someone cuts you off in traffic, right, and you're, you're in the moment, you're frustrated and we have tried to ritualize, um, my kid and I, like you know what in the moment can we do to empathize with that person, as opposed to to being like they are terrible human being. 24:43 They have like wronged us and now we will rage, like I'll just be like okay, that person must have like uh, maybe they have a person who's like giving birth right now in the back and they really needed to get to the hospital, right, or like that person was just like thinking about something that like maybe they just got fired from their job and their mind is somewhere else, so they just missed that red light and they just went right through it, like and it's really cool to see that at three years old, my kid is starting to actually be like well, maybe they have that, and I mean right now it's just repeating things that I've said in the past, but it's really cool that the response is like huh, that person did something to me, but maybe it's because of this other reason, so that's's a cool ritual. 25:23 So thank you again for asking the question. Thank you, guys, for your brilliance. I realize we're almost at end of time, lightning round. What is one thing you would encourage someone engaging with this episode to do, like today or tomorrow, like a very small start. I know we talked about a lot of things, so like what's like one easy thing they could do to get started here? 25:47 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) Can I jump in? Cause I got a thought, cause I'm about to do this. In two hours and 10 minutes, when I go pick up my child, my two-year-old, I'm gonna ask his teachers at daycare, like what did y'all learn today? Like what did y'all do today? And then, instead of asking my son, like how was today? Like tell me a little bit more about groceries, or tell me a little bit more about dinosaurs or whatever it is. And so it's this idea of going back to like getting a sense of like what's going on in the school setting, so you can kind of at home, talk about it more specifically. That's one thing that I'm going to do as a parent, I think as an educator, I would also then think about how can I share what we're doing with parents a bit more? 26:27 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Okay. So, eric, I'm going to piggyback on that. When I was in the elementary school classroom and wrote a note home to families every week, at the bottom I would give three things Ask your kid about da-da-da-da-da-da, ask your child to know exactly that. Like, I fed some information, so educators can do that really easily and I think from my parent hat, the thing that I would do is pick up my kid and share something that I had read or heard or was on my mind or heart, and just open a conversation and see how it feels to share that. 27:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Love it. Amazing answers. One thing you're learning about lately. It could be parenting related or it could be just totally for fun. 27:14 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Oh my gosh, there are so many things. What am I learning about lately? Um yeah, parenting related. Lately, Parenting related, I am thinking a lot about how to support my kids in executive function and what does it look like to try and set them up for independence and give them a sense of moving forward and being able to thrive executive functionally on their own. That's what I'm learning about. 27:51 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) I am learning a lot about the value of turmeric extract for joint health and that is because I am a father of a two-year-old that I'm picking up and tossing around in pools and oceans and my shoulders are not liking life a lot recently and I tried this extract from Whole Foods three days ago. I've had it for the past three days and it's been really impressive and I did know a little bit about the science and the anti-inflammatory backed by science effects of turmeric, but I've experienced it for the past few days and so it's been really cool. 28:18 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Love that. Yeah, that's awesome. 28:20 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) And finally, where can people connect with you or learn more about you? 28:26 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) So you can connect with me through my website, karapranikoffcom. My email is there. I would love to like talk shop with any teacher or parent, basically any time in the day Love to talk shop. 28:44 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) Yeah, in my day job I am on the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. So if you just look out for Eric Soto-Shed, harvard Graduate School of Education, hgse for shorter, you can get all my contact information, a little bit more about my work and also really open to engage folks. 29:03 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Thank you guys so much. This is absolutely wonderful. I appreciate you both. 29:06 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) Thank you. 29:07 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Thanks for having us Lindsay Love talking with both of you. 
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In this solo episode, Lindsay talks about how to approach current event conversations with your children at home. We delve into the importance of guiding your children through these conversations instead of letting them go to other, potentially unsafe, spaces to talk about things.
Using research-backed strategies and tools, we talk about creating an environment where kids can express their emotions and align their understanding with family values. Listeners will discover how to inspire active family engagement in social issues and nurture curiosity through creative outlets like sci-fi and fantasy. The goal is to equip families to enrich their dialogues and support their children's development in our complex world. Why? Kids need us—both parents and educators—to talk to them. If we don’t, they will find other places to go, including online spaces that are unsafe and might radicalize them. By fostering home environments where children feel a sense of belonging and emotional safety, children can have authentic, real, and honest conversations. This preserves humanity and prevents potential harm from predatory online communities. What? Lindsay promotes the head, hand, heart model when approaching conversations with children about current events. This refers to the idea that a child is a whole person, a whole human, and their mind, emotions, and actions are all engaged with these big topics. Keeping that framework in mind, here are some ways to begin conversations with your children: Step 1: Begin conversations by naming feelings. Ask children how they feel about a topic and where in their bodies they experience these emotions, especially if it’s hard to put language to their emotions. This helps create a safe space for dialogue. Step 2: Discuss values. Encourage children to identify how a topic aligns or conflicts with their values. Ask: Why is this important? How does it support or go against your values? You can also remind them of things they value and bring relevant connection points (e.g., “I know you think it’s important when your friends and family are honest with you. How does this relate to honesty?”). Step 3: Encourage questions. Ask children what questions they have about a topic. By encouraging them to ask questions, you are opening up a space for them to process and dig a little deeper into a topic. This promotes critical thinking, even as they grow older. Similarly, parents can ask open-ended questions back to their child to keep the conversation going. Step 4: Take action. Explore ways to engage in community initiatives or brainstorm creative solutions, especially those you can do together as a family. Encourage reading; sci-fi and fantasy are great ways to open up conversations about new ideas and possibilities, because they break free of the realistic constraints of our current society. You can dream with your children about what things could look like in your own context. Step 5: Use the color question brainstorming strategy, developed by Dr. Laura Lipton (listen to her interview on episode 220). If you’re in a conversation with several people, brainstorm your questions based on three colors. Green is for imagination and possibility (e.g., “What might happen if this policy is pushed through”), red for facts and data (e.g., “How many people have benefited from this initiative?”), and blue for opinions and values (e.g., “What’s the best way to address this issue?”). This can help spark vibrant family discussions. Final Tip: If you get stuck during a conversation, it's okay to be transparent and take time to reflect or research before continuing the dialogue. Be truthful and honest about where you are—it’s always okay to come back to the conversation again. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Staying Engaged in Difficult Conversations handout with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 236 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:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 236. And today we're talking about approaching current event conversations with your kid at home as part of a month-long family series to support families, and thinking about how to support kids in all sorts of things Current events, topics, how to discuss politics or quote unquote controversial issues, social studies, content they may be learning about in school, ela, book themes that are emerging from books they're reading in school, interpersonal conflict, conflict with friends, conflict with family members, conflict at school or with the institution of schooling or with a specific teacher, other life things like what's going on with their bodies as they go through out of lessons, like whatever the thing is that you want to talk about with your kiddos. We want to support you in talking about that thing with your kiddos, and so let's dive into today's episode and keep in mind again, it's going to be a month-long series and I think you know we'll see how everyone feels. But I would like to bring it back as a recurring series as well, because we want to support holistically everyone in a child's life, not just educators, but families as well, so that we can truly partner as a family school partnership. So let's dive in. Kids need us to talk to them, otherwise they're going to find other places to go. Basically, I'm talking about online spaces that are unsafe, that might radicalize children, and there is going to be a link in the blog post version of this podcast episode to some research. It's summarized nicely in an NEA Today article, so I'll link that one. 01:33 But the person being interviewed here in this, amara Stapik-Araez, says when educators fail to engage students on issues that matter to them, students will look elsewhere, and I say this a lot in terms of education and teachers, but I also want to say it to family members. Right, I think, wherever we can have conversations in spaces that we perceive as relatively safe, in spaces where we have a sense of belonging or we are connected emotionally, relationally, to others, that's the space that the kids are going to have the most ability to be honest, to be curious, to really investigate what they're feeling or thinking, think about what others in the conversation might be feeling or thinking, and have like authentic, real, honest conversations that get at truth and preserve humanity. Online spaces do not always do that and in fact, many are predatory. Many communities or communities are used as kind of hubs, like YouTube or TikTok are used as hubs to radicalize particularly young boys. I think there's a lot of research on that, but I would imagine everyone who does not feel a sense of belonging and an opportunity for conversation in spaces in their daily lives, their families or their school systems, and so they turn somewhere for those conversations and ultimately are harmed right, or are harming others, or both right. So, keeping all of that research in mind and knowing that we want to create spaces for real conversation where students can explore and children can explore what they're thinking and feeling, let's talk about some practical entry points. So I've been thinking a lot about kind of like a head, heart, hands model that has been present in education and people have talked about this with teachers a lot. We talk about the whole child and the head, heart, hands, elements of just, you know, being a human. I mean let's kind of use that framework to approach the conversation. 03:33 I think often not always, I will caveat this not always, but often it may be easier to start with, just like name the feeling. So how are you feeling about? This is a question that you could ask a child. Right, they bring up a topic, or even you bring up a topic. There's like hey, I noticed this was happening or I saw this in the news, like how are you feeling about this? And obviously all of these questions are dependent on the age of the child, but I will say that they're generally applicable, with some modification. Or you know, selecting particular questions from this list, that we'll go through all ages. You know, like preschool to college, and so I think about you know I want you to think about you know, whatever kid of your age currently is as you're listening to this or engaging with this blog post, you know what would work best for your kid and then go from there. But generally, name the feelings. How are you feeling If you can name the feeling and if you can't, or even if you can, it's also an interesting companion question, I think, to think about. 04:31 Where in your body do you physically feel it? So sometimes I can't name the emotion but I can say, oh, I feel that in my stomach, like I feel that in my gut. My gut is like churning. My stomach feels like it's on a roller coaster. It's flipped upside down right or wow, my head hurts. Even trying to think about that intellectually is like what, like I'm so confused or kind of in a disorienting dilemma. As the change researchers say, you know, my head hurts or I'm feeling, like I may be, my fingers are tingling, like I'm really energized to like do something physically, like I want to make change happen or whatever the thing is Right. So you might be able to anchor in where in your body you're feeling it and then a kid might be able to identify how they're feeling, like name a motion, but I think, name the feelings first. 05:17 You could ask students and children about their values. I say students because I'm always talking to educators, even when I'm talking to families. Children, students, identify your values. So, for example, okay, the topic has been broached, why is this important to you? So, if a child brought it up to you, why is this important? Or how might it go against or support a value of yours? So I know you value, you know your kids, or you can invite them to name what they value but I know you value honesty. You really think it's important that me and your friends and your family are honest with you. So how does this, you know, relate to honesty, right? Or how does it violate honesty? Oh, someone lied to you. Oh, I know honesty has a core value of yours. Gosh, that's really frustrating. I could see why this is important to you, right? So, again, as much as they can lead the conversation, great. And then at times you may want to jump in and kind of, in that example that I just went through, kind of help them along or model for the first kind of time you're thinking through this and you'll all find your way. Right, we're learning this, as they're learning, and we're all learning how to engage together. So those are some heart questions, right, name the feelings, identify your core values. 06:25 We'd also get into some head questions. So, literally, ask the question what questions do you have? So, oh, yeah, I saw that on the news. What questions do you have about that? Or I heard that, yeah, you and your two friends got into an argument at lunch today, like what questions do you have about that? Or the school made this new policy. Oh, I bet there's a lot of questions that are coming up for you, like do you want to share some of them? You also can engage the head by thinking critically. 06:51 So what might be the underlying need? So maybe you're talking about a quote-unquote controversial issue where there's kind of a polarization of two sides or two political parties, maybe in the news, around a legal issue or some sort of policy initiative. So you might invite them to think critically and again, think about what age they are. But what might be the underlying need? What does that person maybe need, that person who's pushing that policy, or that person who demanded that thing or took that action? Like, what did they need? Like what do you think that they were missing? Or feeling like they didn't have? What were they trying to get through? That action, right? So again, scaling for language based on how old your kid is or how ready they are to engage with this. You could also do this with an ELA text, right? Oh, you're reading a story in your class. Yeah, that character took that action. That's interesting, you know. You might be reading the book along with them, so you may have a little bit more insight into all of these pieces. But what might be a reason why that person did that right? What might they need? What might that person value, right? 07:46 So, kind of at a higher level high school level I always talk about like safety versus freedom is a very big uh kind of like. Both needs are necessary or both values are necessary for society. We want to have safety. We want to have freedom. So in a conversation about gun control, right, like, okay, so this person seems to be valuing safety. Well, safety is really important. This person seems to be valuing freedom. Freedom is really important. Like where? And then that's an entry point, right to the conversation where can we find an optimal balance, what's a good balance between those two things? What does that look like for you? Right, Okay, we also can engage the hands in the conversation. And again I say, the heart isn't easiest and I go heart to head to hands, like just how I work. But other kids might want to start with hands and then kind of bounce around, like to head to heart and, you know, enter wherever your kiddos are. 08:34 So hands, you know, maybe think about what can we do as a family to take action about this? So this is really upsetting you. Is there anything I can do or we can do together? Is there anything you can do in your local community that you can think of? How could we address this problem? Right, if it's a social issue, for example, often I find that it's helpful to support a local community initiative versus to kind of start your own. There's usually something in your local area that is already in existence that you can contribute to or volunteer at or contribute money to or raise awareness of through whatever relational or social media platforms you have. 09:10 You could rate an op-ed so you can kind of process your feelings with your kiddo, and then you know, particularly if they're younger you could be the person writing it, or the kiddo could be the person writing it if they're older, then publish that or send that to a local outlet. You can also just explore or brainstorm creative solutions. If you're not quite ready to take that step to action, or you're just not even sure, maybe, what that action looks like, or all of the action plans that seem in front of you just feel like they don't quite meet the mark and you're like I think there's something different we should do, to actually do something that hasn't been done before, or creatively think about an approach to this problem, then you could just simply, you know, hang out in the explore or brainstorm creative solutions phase first. So that might mean reading together. 09:53 I often like sci-fi and fantasy novels as a way to open up conversation about what is possible, because often they break free of the realistic constraints of our everyday society and they come up with some amazing ideas, right, and then we just have to think about how do we bring those to real life, how can we take elements of that? What do we like about that? We could also just dream, right, just like dream up what that could look like and create our own, you know, short stories or novels. If you're very ambitious and kind of like creatively dream up what is possible without the confines of reality, because art is also really important, and that's another way you can do it. Right, it doesn't always have to be writing. It can be drawing, painting, some sort of art and creative art project where we're envisioning the possible together through art. 10:43 Now I had an awesome conversation with Dr Laura Lipton, who was the co-author of Groups at Work, a book that we featured on this podcast earlier, and we talked particularly to teacher leaders in school systems. But I want to bring a strategy that they recommended in their book to this conversation, because I think one of the hardest things, right we said this at the top of the episode. I said this invite students to think about the questions that they have. So if you ask your child, what questions do you have about this? That, in my experience, particularly with the investigating history curriculum implementation in Massachusetts this past year in school year 24, 25,. That was one of the hardest things that the researchers at Tufts University, part of the Circle Project, found in their research of this curriculum implementation around grades three and four specifically, but also grades five through seven. Search of this curriculum implementation around grades three and four specifically, but also grades five through seven, generating questions for kiddos was one of the hardest inquiry-based routines to do out of all of them. So looking at hard sources like yeah, that was hard but actually not as hard as creating questions, synthesizing and putting it together, making a claim, that was hard but not as hard as generating questions. And I think about you know all the research for you know three-year-olds, for example, ask however many it is now I can't even remember 300 questions a day or something like that and after a lot of schooling and society and let's be honest, I will raise my hands here to say that as parents we can't always answer all of the questions so through all of that lived experience, students and children kind once they get older, and so knowing that, you may want to think about an approach to inviting questions or modeling questions for your kiddos so that they are more able to do something like that. 12:29 So here is a strategy that Dr Laura Lipton suggested, so it's called color question brainstorming, and I can envision this at, you know, like a dinner table or something with a family where you have like two or three people or more, kind of taking turns and rounds here. So, brainstorming, they suggest a group of four. So if you can, great group of four. If you can't, you know whoever you have and you're going to list, kind of all of your questions based on these three color categories and then you're going to highlight the most relevant questions. So there's a little bit of critical thinking as kind of a part two, but the first part is to write questions on these three categories. 13:08 Green, green questions are about imagination and possibility. So a nice sentence starter for a question that's green might be what might happen if, right. What might happen if this policy gets pushed through, right. What might happen if we, you know, contribute to this local community initiative, right? Next color is red. Red questions are facts, figures or data. So question sentence starters here might be how many or how much, right. How many people have been affected by this social issue? How much money will this cost our city or town to invest in this cool project that I dreamed up. 13:54 Blue questions are opinions, values or needs. So why is this? What's the best way to Our question? Sentence starters here so why is this? What's the best way to Our question? Sentence starters here so why is this important to me? Why is this important to that person? Right? What's the best way to address this issue? What's the best way to hear from and gather input from many community members to make an action plan to move forward, right? 14:17 So again, this is color question brainstorming from Dr Laura Lipman and Bruce Wellman, and the categories are green for imagination and possibility, red for facts, figures and data, and blue for opinions, values and needs. And this is awesome because they're all different types of thinking. Your brain is activated in different ways. I can even actually see them now, literally as I'm recording this. I did not think about this prior to talking through this in this moment, but it actually, I think, mirrors some of the head, heart, hands as well, like what kind of things are you talking about? Are you in your head like the red facts, figures, data? Are you in your heart where you're thinking about the blue kind of opinions, values, needs the blue kind of opinions, values, needs. Are you in the green of like taking action with your hands, like what's the imagination or possibility? Oh, that's so funny, okay, well, there we go. It all comes back together. 15:12 So, as you have these conversations, if you get stuck, I just want to say, as a kind of final piece here it is okay if you get stuck, if you don't know what to say, if you just want to take a minute and say, hey, I'd love to talk more about this with you. I'm not sure what to say here. Just be truly transparent and honest. I need to do a little research or I need to think on that. That's a great question. Come back to it. You can always do that. 15:30 In fact, I will link a free resource that we developed for a nursery school, actually for preschool, preschool and for the family members there. It's called Staying Engaged in Difficult Conversations. It's a quick handout, so feel free to reference any of the tips on that sheet. You'll find that at today's blog post, lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 236. They also want to say we are opening EduBoost, our Slack-based coaching community for educators up to families, and we're super excited about it. So me and my colleague, cara Pranikoff, are here for you If you have any questions and you get stuck. You want to return to the conversation. You want to even take a brief five-minute pause from the conversation and Slack us and see if we're on in that moment. We'll get back to you in 24 hours with a response or relevant resources for your questions. So, families, we are here for you. Let's keep supporting one another. I'm so excited to learn more about how these conversations are going at home with you and your kiddo, and stay tuned for the remainder of this month's series on families. 
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In this episode, we talk with returning guest Ari Gerzon-Kessler (check out our other discussion on episode 155). Ari has been an educator since 2000 and is currently an educational consultant working with schools and districts committed to forging stronger school-family partnerships. Ari is the author of On The Same Team: Bringing Educators and Underrepresented Families Together.
We frame this conversation about relational family engagement in light of the current political and educational climate we’re in. Drawing on personal experiences, research, and professional perspectives, Ari showcases how small, intentional efforts can profoundly impact school communities. Building a Foundation of Trust Ari opens our conversation by telling an anecdote about his daughter’s first day of school. After dropping her off when she was teary and worried, Ari, naturally, wondered how she’d settle in. Then, just a short while after, he received a text message from the teacher saying she was having a good morning and was able to pivot and settle into the class. That moment of intentional communication fostered a sense of trust, connection, and gratitude—creating a strong foundation for the parent-teacher relationship. This is a simple story to illustrate how important relational family engagement is in creating better education environments. Shifting Our Understanding of Family Engagement Ari wants to see a conscious shift from seeing family engagement as an outcome to a strategy—something we intentionally do. There is a lot of scholarship on what types of outreach, such as relationship-centered home visits, achieve positive outcomes like lower absenteeism. Beyond the mindset shift to family engagement as a strategy, it’s important to engage with the question, What is the purpose of family engagement? Many still see it as events, and whether or not the families attended. But this can be expanded to include day-to-day communication, relationship-building, and trust. These are the things that have more impact on children’s educational outcomes. It’s a shift to human-to-human connection rather than traditional event-based family engagement. Action Steps To build positive family-educator relationships, Ari draws on his scholarship and experience to offer a few action steps educators can take: Step 1: Break barriers and build trust by using team-building or ice-breaker activities at the start of any gathering instead of “talking at” parents. This is a great way to get people talking and laughing together. In a parent gathering, share names and something about their lives to connect on a personal level and build psychological safety. Step 2: Keep communication simple. A short text or photo to a parent can mean the world of difference and build a relationship of trust. Step 3: Implement relationship-centered practices, such as home visits or virtual meetings, to build meaningful connections with families. These interactions should prioritize listening and understanding family perspectives instead of the educator talking the whole time. Step 4: Follow through by creating a sense of continuity and being concrete with what you are changing as a result of gathering and hearing from parents. Without the follow-through on ideas and changes, you won’t build long-term trust. Step 5: Set aside time for positive outreach. Educators and administration can set aside time each month to send calls or text updates to families with children who are struggling to establish that open line of communication. Challenges? One of the main challenges is overcoming time constraints and existing structures that prioritize traditional engagement methods. Educators may also feel overwhelmed by additional responsibilities. However, by integrating relational practices into existing workflows and emphasizing the long-term benefits of trust and collaboration, schools can gradually shift towards more inclusive and supportive environments. One Step to Get Started To begin cultivating stronger educator-parent relationships, start with a simple step and ask families how they would like to communicate. This simple step demonstrates respect and consideration for family preferences, while also setting the stage for more personalized and effective interactions. Stay Connected You can learn more about Ari and his work on his website, Same Team Consulting, or connect with him on LinkedIn or by email at [email protected]. You can also grab a copy of his book, On The Same Team: Bringing Educators and Underrepresented Families Together, to get more practical resources and strategies for strong relational family engagement. To help you implement today’s takeaways, our guest is sharing 6 Practical Ways to Develop Authentic Family Partnerships Playbook with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 235 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:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) We're not on video at all, right. 00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Sorry, hold on, ari. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast, or I should say, welcome back to the Time for Teachership podcast. It's good to have you. 00:12 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) It's great to be here. Thanks, lindsay, I always enjoy our conversations. 00:16 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Absolutely. I am really excited for kind of the frame for today. We won't ask the same questions as before, so people should go back and listen to the other episode, but you know, so much has been happening in the world with us individually, and so I kind of want to frame the context for us today. What do you think is important for folks to know in the audience, both in terms of, like, the hats we're speaking to today, but also kind of this idea of where we are as a nation and kind of as an educational kind of society or sphere of life here at this moment of recording in August 2025. 00:52 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, yeah, well, and I think most folks who've been following the news and feeling the impact of the shifting climate since just the last six months since inauguration, we know that attacks on education funding massive threats to kind of the safety and well, each month a lot of families are afraid and educators don't know how to support them. And you know, the heart of my work are these teams that bring immigrant families and educators together and there's this sense of, oh well, we, we can't deepen relationships, they're afraid to just come to school. And it's been fascinating to see that actually, as we've built initial rapport over the last year or two, that we're often getting more families that are afraid to come to school actually coming out, and I think that's in most communities. Speaking to the need, of course, the attack on DEI and the sense that, regardless of people's political beliefs around DEI, I think we all are on the same page of wanting to build cohesive school communities where everyone feels a sense of belonging, and that's really the heart of the work that I care about. 02:22 So that piece I hope is common ground, that all best practices that foster better relationships and trust are beneficial across the board, regardless of anyone's political affiliation. So, yeah, so those are some just quick reflections on the national landscape and how it's impacting, I think, our day-to-day work. And then I know you and I have talked over the years about the intersection of like being closely in connection daily with educators and then being parents working with the educators in our kids' schools, and I've had some a couple of just really meaningful, powerful experiences. Now wearing that parent hat, that's giving me insight on how to actually help other educators better support our families. 03:11 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, you had mentioned kind of the day one experience that you had with your child's school. Do you mind sharing that story? Yeah, no absolutely yeah. 03:20 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) So something that I often one of my top practices, I support schools with is increasing two-way communication and this piece that families are feeling flooded with too much communication and or they're feeling like the communication is not through the right channels. And I'm working on a piece for Agitopia right now on those two themes to themes. And so what I got to experience powerfully as a parent was day one, april 10th, my daughter's two and a half birthday. She was allowed to start school and she was nervous, pretty introverted at the time. I brought her to her first day of school and she was in tears not uncommon and I walked away feeling, of course, sad and anxious, really curious, like how her first day was going to go, and I jumped in my car, was driving to a meeting with all of our family, community liaisons, and as I arrived at that meeting I get a text from her teacher saying hey, selah is having, you know, like a wonderful morning. Now she was able to kind of pivot after a few minutes. I'll loop back with you again later in the day with an update. 04:37 So to get this text on day one built this sense of trust, connection, deep gratitude, that, like the teacher, in the middle of that morning was so thoughtful and aware that she reached out with a text instead of sending me an email five days later or whatever. And I shared that with the liaisons moments later at the meeting and said, hey, we've been working for a couple of years on trying liaisons at moments later at the meeting and said, hey, we've been working for a couple of years on trying to increase texting and reduce emails, because that's what our parents have been telling us again and again. Here is kind of proof in the pudding of what it feels like as a parent, and I now trust my daughter's school, you know, probably for years to come simply from that really positive start. So I just think that speaks volumes to intentionality and being proactive and why things practices like in the summer, calling all new families to welcome them for 30 seconds makes such a huge difference. 05:39 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh my gosh, thank you for telling that story and, in the spirit of Shane's Affair, called it story and teaching. I'll share kind of a similar my kids first school. When he was three months, he brought into kind of like the you know infant center or whatever and didn't ask like my name, his name, it was just kind of a drop off and it felt horrifying like he was fine, it was a great school, all the things, but like just that lack of communication. That lack of that contrasted with just around the same time, april of this past year, he switches to a new school, has the tears that drop off, is really nervous and they it was an email but I actually preferred email, so it was, it was perfect. And they sent me just like a picture of him playing with a toy and it was like he's fine, like you know. 06:23 You know it was a phrase, it was short, sweet, but it was like five minutes after drop off or something and it was like thank you, because now I don't have to worry all day long. And it's just the power of like where my mind went. It's funny, your mind went to like you were just going to something around family engagement. I was sitting there thinking, as an educator in a classroom, how great would it have been had I had the thought to be able to share directly with parents and family members to just say, hey, I know your kid came in having a tough day and like here's the great thing that they did today. Like even as a high school child right to be able to share that. I'm sure parents and family members would have totally appreciated that. 07:04 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, yeah, well, and you're sparking just two quick connections. One is positive outreach, which is the other in my top three practices. Positive outreach at any level. And I remember in the pandemic we established, you know, like here are the 150 high school students at this particular school, we want to re-engage and we did, you know, 20, 30 minutes a week of positive calls and that is so incredibly impactful. Yeah, and then, just you know, to your story of like the initial outreach, just that proactive piece can make such an initial difference. 07:42 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Absolutely. And I think this kind of spins into our next thing about kind of the why. Why is it so important that family engagement is a priority amidst budget cuts, amidst all of the competing priorities that school districts have? And I know you know a lot of the research on this. Do you mind speaking to kind of the benefits of doing stuff like this? 08:00 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Sure, yeah, yeah, I think, lindsay, it's a conscious shift from seeing family engagement as an outcome and something we can kind of check boxes around to. You know, dr Karen Mapp and many others in our field have said it needs to be a strategy, not an outcome, and it's a strategy that drives all the outcomes we care about out. The third practice of my three actually comes up naturally now. You know, relationship centered home visits. That's not only the research has proven, it's great for academic learning and obviously for relationship building and trust. But when a few districts in California a year ago embraced that as one of their practices to reduce chronic absenteeism, it was remarkable. I mean, I read about this in New York Times last year they knocked their chronic absenteeism rates from 30 percent of their students down to 14 or 15 percent. So that's hundreds of students and families where those home visits made a pivotal difference. 09:07 Hands out to me is our paradigm around. What family engagement is that? I think to this day in most schools we still see it about events and did they attend. And the reality is, as you were just speaking to, like the day-to-day communication, the relationship building, trust is much more impactful, as well as things like the research shows that if we get parents talking about education with their kid at home and the value of learning, that does more than anything else to predict academic success, more than socioeconomic status, parents' education level host of things. So that's one piece. 09:42 And yeah, and I was sharing this with colleagues this week that you know, I worked with some teachers and principals in Boston last summer and we brainstormed what does family engagement look like at your school? 09:54 And when I was on my flight home to Colorado I looked at the list and it didn't surprise me but it really was stark. More than 90 percent of what they put on their list of what is family engagement were events. Of what they put on their list of what is family engagement were events. So it's really seeing the value of how do we shift towards more relational communication practices, which I know we'll dive a little deeper in. And I would say, on the event front, many of us can go to school events and not forge a stronger connection with the staff or with other families. So a lot of our family and educator together teams at 31 schools now in Colorado are looking at how do we reinvent events like back to school night, parent teacher conferences, to make them much more relationship building oriented and mutual and human to human, versus the traditional approach that's just not working for families and is usually unsatisfying for educators when we create spaces to hear their experiences of these events. 10:58 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh, wow, that is. My mind is exploding right now with all sorts of ideas, but that that is so profound because I think about, you know, again, as a parent, showing up to preschool activities. Like there are some activities that I don't integrate, interact or engage with like another parent, a teacher or another child that my child is friends with, and it's like what, what was that versus? You know, having like a text thread or like a Slack coaching space or something, or, you know, whatever it is, some other means that's asynchronous. It might not be live, but it is. 11:27 You know, I often think about, like you know, I want to be seen as a person, as a family member as well, like I kind of want my child teacher to be, like hey, what do you do? Or like what's important to you, or you know these kinds of relational things because I feel like, without knowing them, you know, how do you, how do you best like have a values alignment when you're teaching my child? Right, how do you know that? Actually, I kind of reject the gender binary and I don't want to raise my child in a way that's very gendered, and like I have to actively write that in the forms when there's not a space for them, because that's not a question that someone asks, right, or there's no opening to have those kind of conversations, and so that relational versus like attendance at an event. I mean, we know with students at school you can attend school and not get very much out of it, right? Like where's the relationship, where's the engagement? That's deep and thoughtful. I love that shift. That's brilliant. 12:20 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Well, and I appreciate you sharing about wanting to be known and seen, because my older brother visited last week. I hadn't seen him in three years and he was in Canada the last seven years and we briefly talked about family engagement and what he said, you know, affirms what you were sharing and was really helpful for me because I'm always learning in this field. He said to me yeah, I went to an event at my kid's school and I wanted to get to know other families. I wanted them to ask about my hobbies, my strengths. I wanted to be able to share. I coach tennis. 12:58 I'd love to help the school, but instead the educators really, just as is commonplace at so many schools, followed the traditional mode of we're going to show we're experts and share a ton of information with you and not create the space. Um, and when I, you know, when I commented on that, he said I don't even think it was in their mindset that that they could create a more collaborative, humanistic space for sharing. And I also get as a former principal, there is this element of ooh, I'm going to have to release some control and that's tricky. Yet I also know that if we're intentional in creating nice structured spaces to hear more voices, that can also be fruitful and not, you know. Get off the rails. 13:49 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, that's a perfect segue. I would love to know from all the work you've done, like what are those ways that we do create those structured spaces for more relational dynamics and engagement with families and educators? What action steps do you have for us? 14:14 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, yeah. Well, in terms of the in-person gatherings, I mean, I think, one huge learning. What action steps do you have for us? The essence of these family and educator together teams that you know, I wrote about in depth in my book on the same team and they have really illuminated over hundreds of gatherings, what makes a difference for families. So instead of them coming into the meeting and listening to someone talk to them or at them, you know, for 10, 20 minutes this is so commonplace we start with a quick team building activity that you know some might call an icebreaker but gets everyone laughing often is a paired activity that goes across language, cultural, other boundaries and barriers. 14:57 And then we've learned again over the years to apply SEL best practices to parent gatherings, where we do an introduction circle where everyone shares their name, their child's name and something about their life and that builds the sense of okay, we're all humans here and have both rich differences and similarities, and it also creates much more psychological safety when everyone's brought their voice in. Briefly. When we're then inviting families in to share their input, they feel much more comfortable and since most of the families I work with have been marginalized in our school communities, it's just so important for us to be very thoughtful in the initial, say 20, 30 minutes of gatherings. And the last thing I would say that's really the essence of doing connection better is privileging relationship building, not going to content right away in initial meetings and then making sure that families' voices comprise as much or more of these gatherings than educators' voices, which really flips the traditional paradigm. So, yeah, I would say those have been some of the core pieces. 16:07 And a final one is you know, parents will lose trust in us if we don't show follow through. So, like creating some sense of continuity and getting concrete around, what are we changing as a result of what we learned from hearing everyone's perspective tonight? Because one of my failures as a leader of this work in the early, I'd say, three years was that we built great relationships and trust and that was a win in itself. But if we walked down the hallway to a random teacher's classroom and said, hey, it's April now, how are you doing family engagement different If they had not been a part of those gatherings? There weren't systemic changes. So I'm really keenly aware of like what can we easily and efficiently change at any given school that will have multiple benefits for ideally all members of the community. 17:01 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love that. 17:01 I think that is something I'm trying to work on as well as like how can we, both as a reflective opportunity but also as a measurement opportunity, just like reflect on and kind of codify like this is the change, and like report that right Of the family members and the educators? 17:29 Is there anything that you have found to be particularly successful in terms of like engaging family members who might have, like you talk a lot and write a lot about linguistic, like linguistically affirmative spaces and affirming spaces and having like translation and things like that. I'm wondering also about like time constraints and people who you know are like oh, I don't know if I have the time to like come in and be part of that. I know you've talked about like a childcare as like actually part of the whole setup and kind of infrastructure. I'm just thinking about some of the other constraints that educators might have in their minds or families might have in their minds. It's like, oh, I'd love to be part of this and I'm thinking about this challenge and wanting to know how do I overcome it or if there's like an alternative means of relationship building that might not be synchronous. I don't know. I'm thinking about a lot of questions at once. 18:19 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, no, absolutely I mean. Yeah, I mean one thought is that we're shifting our perspective as educators to appreciate more, you know, the linguistic capital and other capital that we often, you know, we often assume like, oh, that family speaks Spanish or Hmong, they're going to have a hard time connecting with us. Instead shifting to, like they have a bilingual, multilingual child, how can we connect with them and build a bridge to them, which means concrete things like that. They get a positive call too, because I, as an educator, tap the translation line to make sure that we're building that relationship. In terms of time constraints, I'm glad you brought that up, because if we're moving away from an event focus, um, and the reality is I'm busy in in my, my two jobs as an educator right now I can't go to, you know, this saturday's event at my daughter's school, which is like the welcome back community service thing, because I'm happening to take her to like an art class, which is not I'm not normally that kind of like ambitious parent on the weekends. It's usually about rest and hang out at home. But that transparency aside, my point is the small back and forth texts, powerful one line of like, like you were saying. 19:41 You also mentioned earlier the photograph. When I was with moms at one FET team gathering a couple of years ago and we said what would be most helpful, three out of three moms in that group shared stories of yeah, when the teacher just sent me a photo with a couple words, that meant the world. And I don't need all these long emails necessarily about curriculum. So that's one example. And and then I'm also thinking about other relationship building strategies that, again, referencing my recent experience as a parent, my child's teacher emailed me for the first time, you know, since last school year ended, and just asked two questions like what are you most excited about for this coming school year and what are you curious or concerned about this coming school year? And what are you curious or concerned about? 20:29 And I sat out, you know, at night for 20 minutes after my daughter was asleep, and it sparked deep, deep reflection I was able to share with her. You know, hey, I'm an educator too. You might be interested in connecting and and. So that was great that she didn't just inform me, she posed questions and and so, and between that, home visits, which again also can be virtual. I mean, they're not the same, but I've seen the power of identifying five families in your class that didn't come to back to school night and laying out, you know, a schedule of OK over the next two weeks. Here's some blocks where I'm going to try to connect for 15 to 20 minutes to do a virtual visit with families. I think those are some of the ways to ensure we're building trust with all of our families. 21:19 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love that. I think one of my takeaways from this conversation already that's such a simple shift is like, instead of talk, just invite a question. Like ask a question and invite a response. Like what a small shift, but what a powerful one. This seems like a good starter. I was going to ask you that's my one thing, what is your one thing? That like, if someone is like this feels really big, this feels like you know it's a big thing. 21:42 It's a long process to build like relational trust and all of the pieces. But you can start the momentum right. You can start with something. What would be that one thing for you that you would recommend to someone to just kind of start tomorrow? 21:55 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, no, I love that question and the timing is perfect because you know we're talking in mid-August, as school year kicks off in many states. I always say in August, the easiest and best thing you can do is just ask families how would you like me to communicate with you? And I've seen teachers leverage that information to realize okay, half of the parents want this info in an email, the other half want it in a text. It also just starts sharing power with the family where they can say you know like I'd love to be able to connect with you for five minutes once a month after school when you're saying goodbye to your students or shortly after. So I think that would be the one easy, easy question to ask families and, ideally, doing an inventory. 22:47 I talk about this when I do trainings on parent-teacher conferences. The word that comes to me is like and I did it myself the arrogance of us as educators to five, six weeks into school year to even say phrases like well, let me tell you about your child's strengths, and it's like OK, I've had my daughter or son at home for nine years and you're telling me about their strengths. So you know those inventories that make them easy on. You know families maybe ask five questions Like what are you most proud of your child about? What are your greatest hopes for their school year? Tell me a little about what they enjoy doing outside of school. Those can open up doors to just be a better teacher and support to that child and so that I guess that would be a parallel. What's one easy thing you can do. 23:41 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love those. I love that they're specific as well. Right here, if you're really like I've never asked families questions before like there you go, there's a bunch, you can just ask those now. I love that and I also am thinking that those are kind of some quick things that you can do for some longer things. I know you do coaching, you support school districts, you do kind of one-on-one stuff. What are some of the kind of range of things as an educator is listening or a family member who wants to advocate on behalf of, maybe, their child's school or school district, like, what are some of the ways that you or folks like you are kind of like supporting schools to do stuff like this? What are the options available for them? 24:19 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, yeah, and that's a great question. I mean, I would say we've touched on a number of these great practices right that can be woven in a principal can give teachers and teachers can advocate for this, or parents can 15 minutes once a month. The staff makes positive calls or they send text updates to kids who are struggling academically in a class, and I've seen it. Some of our middle schools, you know, that's a couple hundred families that get a call that afternoon. So there's all these practices that I, you know, coach and embed into trainings around. I know we're overwhelmed as a profession. How can we work smarter, not harder, and weave them in so it's not add-ons for educators to do, you know, in the evening and after school. 25:01 The other major piece that you know, I truly think is the game changer, is starting teams and creating these somewhat unique spaces. 25:11 Because what I found, lindsay, is that schools that do family engagement kind of a la carte or don't have a built-in space to discuss family engagement and to listen to families, just stay stuck in a traditional family involvement approach. 25:30 And these teams just literally creating 90 minutes once a month to come together, break bread, have dinner together, ask great questions, listen, you know, engage in team building activities is utterly transformative and I see these schools make five years worth of progress in six months compared to neighboring schools that don't have teams and don't create these spaces. So a lot of my coaching work is how do you launch a team? And you know my book is a step-by-step guide because after five, six years at 15 schools, I was like, wow, we have kind of a special sauce here. This is really needed in pretty much every school community to have this space. So I think that would be the heart of what I would encourage schools to really think deeply about and, if they have some sort of existing team, getting more clear on its purpose. And I'm doing some work this fall with some schools where they have a family engagement team, but they're doing so much around theories and frameworks and data and not doing the story-centered approach you were talking about at the beginning of our conversation. 26:42 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh, that's a really good thing to highlight just that difference, right and like oh, we're just looking at data, we're just looking at right Versus. We're listening to stories, we're inviting conversation. It is very stark that you put it that way and that, I think, is going to resonate with a lot of people. So thank you for that frame. I think, too, this is a fun question that I asked you last time. I'm curious now also, like what is something that you have been learning about lately? Either, uh, something related to our conversation or something completely not related to our conversation. Take it wherever you want. 27:15 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, um, no, that's great. 27:17 Um, I'm reading a book that my Zen teacher and one of our you know, my peers um just published and just read last night about the shadow and how much we can learn, you know, and and this new concept of like the golden shadow, which I didn't know about, which is like when you look at other people and deeply admire something about them and then you don't necessarily see that capacity and that gift in yourself enough. 27:48 Um, and so both there's the projection side of like oh, that person seems really like overly ambitious, and then turning towards like well, where do I actually have that ambitious part in myself as I judge them for their overly ambitious approach or style? So, yeah, I would say, you know, that is resonating from last night's reading. And then I continue to learn from other walks of life about family engagement, and so that's been really fascinating the last year or two to really take this lens of wherever I travel, wherever I go, can I look for examples of big systems creating more of this authentic care approach versus the more transactional, institutional way of doing things? 28:40 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) That's such a good lens for just everyone, whatever your thing is, whatever. Yeah, oh, that's really good. Okay, thank you, I'm glad I asked that question again. Where can listeners learn more about you? Connect with you? I know you have a new website, which we will, of course, link to, and we'll, of course, link to the book as well in the show notes and blog posts for this episode, any other place that you would recommend people reaching out, or anything else you want to comment on before the close of the episode. 29:06 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, in terms of reaching out, yeah, I spent much of this summer creating a website that just was released last week sameteamconsultingorg. I'm really excited about that. Easy to find on LinkedIn. People can email me directly at ariagurzon at gmailcom, and I'd say those are the easiest pathways. And then, you know, my book on the same team is right now it's 47% off on Amazon, so it's a steal. Right now it can be found at the publisher Solution Tree site as well. 29:39 Yeah, and I think I would just close, lindsay, I was mentioning to you like there's been some powerful experiences lately. I'll just share briefly a story I had. That was one of those. Oh, we could bring this back into schools and make it an easy thing we do in terms of how we approach interactions with more intentionality. 29:58 I got on a flight a few months ago to Sacramento and usually we don't see the pilot, right, they don't come out. And pilot came out and said hi, welcome, I want to thank you for putting food on my family's table. For 27 years I was in the Air Force. I've now been a pilot for 27 years. I have 10 kids. I think they're all mine. So bringing humor, right, humor and connection. And then he took it further and he said here's my team and we count on each other. You all are part of our team as well and we count on each other. You all are part of our team as well. And then, you know, I just was moved and I thought about wow, imagine if the front office person at a school, the principal and they're welcome, the teacher and they're welcome made that sort of relational we're all one community took them all three minutes to do intentionality and purpose. 30:56 And the final part of the story, you know, is 10 minutes later we had some insane turbulence out of Denver and I have had a couple rough flights over the years and I started to get anxious and then I just paused and I was like, wait, 27 years plus the Air Force, he's got this. And that totally settled my nervous system and I had high trust and I think we can think of all the families in our nation schools that don't come in with trust or have had that trust broken and what those kinds of couple minutes can really do to shift the level of trust. So yeah, I think that's the one story I felt moved to share with you today. Oh, my gosh, that's that's the one story I felt moved to share with you today. 31:37 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh my gosh, Thank you. That's a beautiful story and I am just reminded there's been like a thread of airplane related stories that I've heard lately. I'm just reminded how, like airplane stories if you have them there are many parallels to education and life. 31:51 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Absolutely. 31:52 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Ari, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for coming back on. 31:55 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) A delight, Lindsay. Thanks so much for. |
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AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
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