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In this episode, authors Beth Pandolpho and Katie Cubano chat with me about the transformative potential of education through emotional intelligence and civil conversations. They share their vision for an equitable education system where every student can thrive and every educator enjoys intellectual freedom and resources that equip them as professionals.
Beth Pandolpho is an educator, instructional coach, writer, and consultant with over 20 years of experience. Beth is passionate about engaging in work that promotes equity and access for both teachers and students. Katie Cubano is an educator and instructional coach with over 15 years of experience. Katie’s focuses on supporting teachers and schools as they design and implement curriculum and instruction that effectively and equitably meet students’ needs. Katie and Beth co-authored Choose Your Own Master Class: Urgent Ideas to Invigorate Your Professional Learning, which we discuss more in this episode. The Big Dream Beth and Katie's big dream for education is twofold. First, for students to have full access to education—their right as citizens—that enables them to grow into who and what they want to be, while also becoming the engine of social mobility. Then, the dream is for educators to work under conditions that enable them with intellectual freedom, material resources, and professional learning opportunities that help them do the job they love to the benefit of all their students. Mindset Shifts Required To achieve equitable outcomes for teachers and students, you need to focus on the teachers and offer best practices. Beth and Katie explain how the whole book is a mindset shift because it offers research-backed information for any teacher to apply. Some of the biggest mindset shifts required revolve around the structure and delivery of professional development. Teachers deserve the same responsive, choice-based learning experiences they provide their students. Additionally, educators can embrace that being wrong is the way we learn, and mutual understanding should be a high priority in the classroom. Action Steps Step 1: Listen to and serve the students who have been most underrepresented and marginalized. It’s not about trying to give them a voice—they have one already. We need to listen and implement what they need. Step 2: Embrace being wrong and know it’s a path to learning and growth as an educator, and offer opportunities for mutual understanding in the classroom. Step 3: Access and utilize resources that help teachers explore urgent educational issues and respond to their students' needs in both curriculum and classroom culture. Challenges? One of the biggest challenges Beth and Katie foresee is overcoming set mindsets many educators have about what’s right and wrong, or what’s good for themselves and students. This makes it harder to partner with people you disagree with, a challenge to achieving equitable outcomes. One Step to Get Started Beth and Katie suggest that listeners start by making one small change, such as rethinking a debate or choosing one chapter or issue to focus on. This small change can have a big impact on your students. Stay Connected Connect with Beth by email at [email protected], and with Katie by email at [email protected] or on X at @katiecubano. To help you implement the lessons from today, Beth and Katie are sharing their Reproducible Chart with you for free. You can also purchase a copy of their book, Choose Your Own Master Class: Urgent Ideas to Invigorate Your Professional Learning to learn more about this important work for educators. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 177 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Beth and Katie. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 0:00:07 - Katie Cubano Thanks for having us. 0:00:08 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you. I'm so excited to have you. I mean, I have told you this before we hit record, but I absolutely love this book. Every teacher and leader in school needs it. I'm thrilled to be having a conversation with you about it. I am curious to know. There are so many things in the world that we all like encompass. There are so many things that we can talk about in this book. What is important for listeners to know? Either about you or just that you want them to have in mind as we jump into our conversation today? 0:00:38 - Katie Cubano Okay. So, um hi, I'm Katie Cubano and I've been in education for over 15 years now. Um, I taught English in the secondary grades for over a decade before becoming an instructional coach, Worked on the same team as Beth until last June when I resigned to be home with my one-year-old so my now one-year-old. So I'm working in the paid workforce right now in a part-time role. So I'm doing student teacher supervision for the College of New Jersey and taking care of my little one and Beth, and I also published Choose your Own Masterclass in 2023. 0:01:16 - Beth Pandolpho Hi, I'm Beth Pandolfo and I've taught English for over 20 years at the high school and college level. I'm presently an instructional coach for grades six through 12. And I think one thing at this point in my career that's important to me is just working toward equity and access for teachers and students. 0:01:37 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. I think that is a shared belief and goal for all of us and I think that's actually a really good segue into the big first question that I usually ask people. So this idea of freedom dreaming comes up on every episode of this podcast, and Dr Bettina Love describes it as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. Considering that, what is the big dream that you hold for education? 0:02:01 - Katie Cubano So I think that we'd love to talk about this in two parts, the first part being our dream for students and then the other piece being our dream for teachers. So I think you'd love to talk about this in two parts, the first part being our dream for students and then the other piece being our dream for teachers. So I think you know our dream for students is to make sure that every student has full access to their right, to their civil right, to an education which enables them to not only succeed academically and follow their passions, but also to grow into citizens who are able to create a more just and humane world, to sort of and this is my frere Ruth speaking to humanize and be humanized in turn by their relationship to learning and to community. 0:02:35 - Beth Pandolpho And just to continue that I think a lot about students having the ability to become who and what they want to be, and education as the engine of social mobility. And then our dream for teachers. Katie, do you want to start on our dream for teachers? 0:02:55 - Katie Cubano Sure. So we feel so passionate about the work we do, about the students we love and about the colleagues who we love and we work alongside. And we want to make sure that teachers work under conditions which enable them with the intellectual freedom, material resources and professional learning opportunities that help them to do the job that they love and benefit, to the benefit of all of our students. 0:03:20 - Beth Pandolpho And I think part of you know why we wrote the book is that we feel really strongly about teachers being treated like the educated and creative professionals that they are. 0:03:32 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love both of these streams. Excellent, thank you. That was really also very succinct. I'm very impressed by you all. So, as you think about kind of the path to the dream, I'm curious to know being instructional coaches, being in that space, thinking about you know, working together on the book. I'm just envisioning this, this path. What feels like? You know, the blocks along the path, where, where along the path, do you see yourself having accomplished great things? And then kind of like what snacks? I usually think about some buckets. Like you know, there's a lot of mindset work. There's a lot of like you guys call them, I think, like introspective reflection sections of your book, right, there's the pedagogy pieces and instructional pieces, like what does this look like with students? There's like the assessment, the content, right, there's all sorts of different things that I think good quality teaching and the structures that enable these teachers to thrive in the ways you described. There's just so much. So where do you see kind of yourselves along this path? 0:04:37 - Beth Pandolpho Yeah, and I think for Katie and I, we both were thinking about students and teachers, because a lot of times we work toward equity for students and then we're seeing things happen systemically that feel really not fair. So, in terms of students, I feel like right now in my career, my focus is listening to and working to serve our most underrepresented and vulnerable student populations and creating opportunities where there weren't any before. And then, in terms of my work with teachers, I'm very interested in how we can provide scaffolds and supports in the classroom, because often what works for our most vulnerable students works for everyone. 0:05:17 - Katie Cubano Yeah, I love that, beth, that's so true and I shockingly, I agree with you completely. I think that when I think about the path to the dream for me and sort of where I've been and where I'm going next, a lot's really been rooted in my approach to the teaching of ELA, both in pedagogy and thinking about content, working with a lot of students whose needs have not been fully met by both education and society at large and, as a result, they're working to improve their skills and I'm sure that you have plenty of other guests and plenty of other listeners who have talked about the problem with thinking just about remediation as our lens, right. So really I've focused my energies both as an educator and an instructional coach and I think also in the way that Beth and I think about and talk about teaching and learning and students and teachers in the book, really focusing on providing students with engaging and relevant curriculum and instruction that meets them where they are and helps them be lifelong readers and writers, not just people who are assigned reading and writing. I think so often in the ELA classroom we're like teaching as though this is like a college English course and our students have chosen to major in, you know English literature or something, when what we really need to be doing is focusing on what they need to grow into people who have reading and writing at the core of their identity as they move forward, or at least as like a part of their identity that they can appreciate and see as something that matters to them in real ways. So for me, this has always included like a very robust, independent reading program, with all the attendant efforts that go into making that happen. And so as an educator in my own classroom, as an instructional coach, supporting my colleagues to do that kind of work and advocating for the funding necessary to get the texts they need, to help them find great texts, to listen to what texts they want, and try and get other people to pay for that. Beth and I did a lot of work like that with our other teammate as well. And then in the book, beth and I also talk about the importance of an independent, robust and independent reading program. We think about our values for our students. We have a chapter on um lining up. It's on a decreasing um um decision fatigue, and we talk about lining up our values with our practices and how so often they can get trampled when we're not very intentional. Um, those values we can just get swept up. So robust independent reading, strong writing workshop approach, that really honors the fact that even our high school learners need writing instruction, maybe even more so than our younger learners, or at least as much as our younger learners do. And then I think the other piece, both as an educator and an instructional coach, really thinking about comprehensive article and vocabulary study, which maybe seems small and unimportant but was really important in my classroom and foundational to helping students build background knowledge about how systems and levers of power work and helping them become sort of aware and justice-minded citizens who can use that knowledge to advocate for change. A lot of times that knowledge is withheld, intentionally or unintentionally. We can get into a whole discussion about that, but they've missed it and they need it. So a lot of that work too. So that's sort of the content and pedagogy piece. And then in terms of dreaming, our dreaming for teachers both of us, we're interested in really supporting them to explore the issues we talk about in the book, which, you know, urgent is in the subtitle. It's a nice long subtitle which I'm very happy about. So it's choose your own masterclass urgent ideas to invigorate your professional learning, and we want to support teachers to explore these issues so that they can draw inspiration directly from the thought leaders that we've, um, we've we've explored, who are all from outside of the field of education, and use those insights to reflect on ways that they can immediately and creatively respond to their needs, the the needs of their students, in both curriculum and instruction, also in climate and culture in their classrooms and schools. Because we feel really strongly that teachers really deserve a responsive and choice-based professional development, professional learning experiences. That's what they give their students Beth is always saying so beautifully and that's what we want in our work and throughout, you know, through the book, to give back to them. 0:10:06 - Beth Pandolpho Yeah, I just want to add onto that, Katie. That is something that I say a lot. Like why don't we give teachers what they give their students? Like, why are we not giving teachers what they give their students? And there's a Starbucks quote and it's like the one who sweeps the floor should choose the broom. And I mean, you know not that teachers want to be, you know, analogous to like. You know not that teachers want to be, you know, analogous to like. You know that teaching is like using a broom. But also, why are they being told what to do exactly what to do? Why are they not just being given the stimulus of what to think about and then figure it out in response to their students? So I feel like those are mantras that Katie and I are always thinking about. And so for us, like writing this book was really an act of love for our colleagues and our teachers, Like we wanted this to be like a gift. If we could do anything to make professional development better, we felt like this was what we'd want our colleagues to have. And for the administrators, when we got the peek behind the curtain, we thought, wow, these people need some support. So it was with both of those things in mind. 0:11:14 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing, and I'm sure in some of these questions we will talk about the format of the book itself and kind of that idea. I feel like that for me, was a huge mindset shift that I have seen in leaders as they are thinking about designing PD for teachers and what that could possibly look like. I think your book is a beautiful answer to that. I'm curious to know if that's a mindset shift that you want to unpack here or if you have other mindset shifts that you were thoughtful about in terms of like, what is it that teachers leaders like? What mindset journeys do they really need to go on, or how should they shift to be able to get to that place where we can achieve the dream that you described? 0:11:56 - Beth Pandolpho Yeah, I do think we wanted to talk about it in terms of the book. When we were thinking about our mind shift, I said you know, katie, what's our mind shift? And she's like, our mind shift is the book, that's our book. So I said you're right, because we think in order to achieve more equitable outcomes for teachers you know and outcomes for teachers you know and students, you have to also focus on the teachers. So for teachers, this is a way. It's a book of six chapters. They're standalone, they're like long research articles. So you can begin with chapter four and if you only read chapter four, you have a full experience. If your colleague reads chapter two, there are jigsaw questions to have cross-curricular conversations. All of the thought leaders are from outside of education because, you know, we've decided that social and emotional learning is really important, but also, like psychology knew this was important for decades to say teachers are really busy. Here's some urgent ideas from outside the field of education. You don't need to wait 20 years to find them out. Like, here they are, and then it's not what Beth and Katie think about them. Like, what do you think about them? These are people that are doing the work you know in other fields. So the way we identified the topics for the chapters is we made a gigantic chart, but then we also just took people from our school and said like okay, here's our PE teacher, here's our very resistant, whatever teacher. And we were like we need to if we want to make equitable professional development. We need to think about all of these people. And so there were things. It could have looked very different if it was the Beth and Katie book, because we would have just done what we liked. But we did it what? Which would have been fun. 0:13:37 - Katie Cubano That would have been a lot of fun, no, but only we would have only our family. 0:13:40 - Beth Pandolpho It would be for us. Yeah, it would be for us, so yeah, so we had to challenge ourselves because there were times like there were teachers that would not want to read the Beth and Katie book. So the things that we decided were urgent in education. The first one is emotional intelligence, and people talk a lot about you know that's not what we're here to do in school. And oh, kids are so much more sensitive, you know, than they were previously. So like we don't want to feed into that. But really emotional intelligence and academics, like they're intertwined, you can't do one without the other. So one chapter is on chapter one is on emotional intelligence. 0:14:17 - Katie Cubano Katie, and I just want to add to that One of the things Mark Brackett talks about, who we bring into that first chapter he talks about. Sure, kids today are more sensitive, and that's great. Sensitivity is a superpower that can be harnessed, you know, to make everything in a person's life better, to help them become so much more self-aware, to help them understand their reactions to you know conversations both with in the home, out, you know, in in school as educators, right Too, or so we're talking about both student self-awareness and teacher self-awareness in that piece. But we love what Mark Brackett, how he frames that like, yes, they are more sensitive and that is okay and that is something that we can use to help them move forward, not something that holds them back. 0:15:02 - Beth Pandolpho And you can't separate your emotions from academics, like if you come in and you had something happened at home or something with a friend that is going to impact you. We can't separate it. If you feel nervous or unsafe and there's an exam you're not going to do as well, I mean, these are not things we could just say, this does not belong in school, like we bring our whole humanity to every space. So, katie, do you want to talk about chapter two and balancing technology? 0:15:29 - Katie Cubano Oh, you know I do so major mind shift here. This chapter is called balancing technology use in the classroom, and you know we were seeing a lot, and we still are seeing a lot. We're very happy to see this conversation about the importance of schools helping students not be so attached to their phones, right? So what can schools do? Some schools are banning them entirely. They're putting them in lockers. I actually advocate for that approach, but there's lots of approaches, you know, all along the continuum, and what we weren't seeing, though, was a reckoning with the degree to which we're tethering students to their devices in the classroom and when they go home for the day, and we felt like there needs to be a major mind shift here, because you know it is our responsibility to give, to help students receive an education which respects, you know, their need for healthy lives and health, healthy balance, including time away from their screens, and not only in the classroom, again, but at home, time for play in nature, time for family and time for community, and we are not striking this balance right now with the degree to which we ask students to access their education on the computer, and, you know, when we think about the original goal of that we talked about of students having a full access to their to their civil right to an education. You know we got these one to one devices with so much enthusiasm and now we need to pause and say is the current state of affairs providing students with a full access to their civil rights to an education? And we would argue that it's tipping into such an unhealthy territory with the amount that we're having them on the screens. The great news is we're very well positioned to help stem this tide of tech overuse and help our students understand the problems with surveillance, capitalism, big tech's role in both their education and their lives outside of school. And we have some really practical strategies and exercises that educators can use to start to think about how they, if their pattern tipped into sort of digitizing as the default, which many of us went that way, especially with the pandemic that's totally understandable how we can start to walk that back. So just one quick example and all of these are free, free printable reproducibles if people want to check them out and adapt them in ways that work for them. But on our website for the book. But one quick example would be just simply auditing your tech tool usage. So thinking about. You know how many are you using and what is the defense for the use of each, and is there any duplication happening? You know, are you using? I'm not gonna be able to think of the name of it now. I know Pear Deck, but what's the other one that my friend wanted, the one that's just like Pear Deck? Anybody, anybody, pear Deck. But what's the other one that my friend wanted, the one that's just like Pear Deck, anybody, anybody has such a silly name too. 0:18:18 - Beth Pandolpho I'm not going to be able to oh, I know I know which one you mean, but yeah, but so I mean where Katie's going with this is. People say, like I heard about this tool and it's like right, it's exactly Pear Deck and we have a premium subscription to Pear Deck. So let's like so I mean also in there with the best intentions teachers want to do, like the newest, the best, the most engaging, interesting, and it's just like right, it's Pear Deck, it just it's the same exact thing. So, save your energy and your goodwill, and so you know, we're really just to be like link it to your instructional outcome, and if you're already have something that that fits that bill, then then that's sufficient and maybe what you have that fits that bill is not using the screen, Maybe it's doing it in paper and that was working great. 0:19:06 - Katie Cubano You know, Beth shared this really great example the other day. She was saying like she was saying, like you know, great example, digitized for the pandemic. I'm going to let students choose from these four articles, and I always do this. I have these four articles curated. I love them. Oh, I found a new one in the Times this week and I'm going to add that. So now I've got five beautiful articles, I'm going to put them all up on Google Classroom. Right, the students even to get to that post, sometimes the exercise in willpower and attention resources just to get to that post on Google Classroom. 0:19:42 - Beth Pandolpho And then five to choose from five, and then some open them all up. So now they have six tabs open in addition to whatever else they had open. And how do you pick these articles that? Your teacher, you know, was just waxing poetic about all of them. So I said to Katie I mean, at some point you want to just say here's a pink article and it's about this, and here's the yellow article, which is about this. The pink one's longer, you'll find the yellow one a little bit shorter and a little more user-friendly. What are you feeling today? 0:20:13 - Katie Cubano I mean, for me it's going to be three. Let's be honest, it's going to be at least three in my classroom. But yes, point being, print out the articles, put them on the desk and bring it back to your desk. 0:20:23 - Beth Pandolpho And now you can attend. And again, we're not talking about wasting paper. Save them. I mean, I started saving things from year to year, but they don't. If they're not writing on them, like, I'll have those back, or if you want to annotate them, I don't need them back, but we're doing something wrong. And now we've spent all this time and we're only on to our second chapter, but we just feel, we feel so strongly that we've gone too far in one direction in a way that's detrimental to kids. 0:20:52 - Katie Cubano Yeah, and I think that and this is the last thing I'll say about it it's so much more than just curriculum and instruction too. So in the chapter we highlight three thinkers there Jenny O'Dell, who wrote how to do nothing, resisting the attention economy. Cal Newport, who wrote digital minimalism excuse me. And Johan Hari, who wrote stolen focus, why you can't pay attention, and how to Think Deeply Again. And I just really I really encourage folks to look at the resources, because the free resources, because we dive into so much more than what I just mentioned about auditing, auditing the tech tools you're using we dive into deeper concerns about, again, surveillance, capitalism, the attention economy, helping students come to understand those things, and thinking really intentionally about ways that you can opt to do something different, to operate in a third space Jenny O'Dell would call it while still serving your students and being a part of the community of teachers where you work, yeah, and so we don't have to continue answering this question. 0:21:53 - Beth Pandolpho if you want to move on, or we can, you know, kind of just like highlight some of the other few chapters. 0:22:00 - Katie Cubano We were going to talk about civil conversations next. 0:22:04 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, let's maybe just like a quick view of the rest of the chapters, just kind of topical level, and then maybe for the next question we can focus on the civil conversations, because I'd love to talk about that. 0:22:16 - Beth Pandolpho Okay, so the chapter three is on fostering civil classrooms for a more civil society. Chapter four is supporting student growth and mastery through teacher leadership teachers in the classroom as leaders. And the next chapter is really an introspective chapter for teachers, reducing decision fatigue, because teachers are tasked with so many micro decisions in a day, and we called it reducing decision fatigue to increase equity, because we think it increases equity for teachers if they can manage the amount of decisions, and also for students, so we're not giving students different answers because we've managed these decisions. And then the last chapter is called telling stories that lead to liberation, which is really about the way we think about and talk about students, that we have a more positive framing because it actually matters, because when we put negative labels on people, we actually put an artificial ceiling on what they can achieve. 0:23:14 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh. Yeah, I wish we had like four hours for this conversation, cause I'd love to get into all of these. They're so good. But I'm I'm wondering about you know like maybe we take the chapter three, for example, or we can take like the broader idea of personalized PD and kind of like what your book gives leaders. But however, whichever direction you want to go, but I'm thinking about like the action step, so like if you're talking to leaders about you know what, what will make this possible in their spaces? What are the actions that this looks like to implement or for teachers, what are the actions that this looks like? I know you have so many tangible things at the end of each chapter. I'd love to, I'd love to get into those a little bit. There's there's so many follow-up questions I'll probably insert here, but I'd love for you to just give me your initial thoughts and then we can take it from there. 0:23:59 - Beth Pandolpho Katie, can I just I'm gonna start on this one because I feel like I can anchor it to a chapter, because I hadn't thought about it in this way, but this is something that I'm doing at work that I feel like answers. What are the brave actions we need to take? And that made me think. If I said Katie, if I said that our mindset is represented in this book, this really is about telling stories that lead to liberation. And one thing that we're doing at our school is we took all of the student affinity groups, like the Black Student Union and we have a Muslim Student Association, and I'm not going to list them all, but we actually just decided we need an affinity group like these groups. They don't have paid advisors and we've actually just we sat with every single group. The assistant principal did and I did, and we just said what are your goals and objectives? How can we support you? And now they're presenting at a faculty meeting. They're going to have. They have. If you had the question is, if you had eight to 10 minutes with teachers, what do you want them to know and how can they support you in the classroom and beyond? The Muslim Student Association went to one of our elementary schools and did a lesson about their culture and how students, and they came with all the students' first names in the class written in Arabic and they helped the kids write their names and they visited, I'm going to say, 20 classes, pairs of students. The Hindu Culture Club is doing a Bollywood movie night. These are things that they can't accomplish without adults in the building and you know the assistant principal can't be their advisor and I'm not in a position there's no advisory position but what we can do is listen to them and get it on the school calendar and make sure they have chaperones. So I feel like what's the path to the dream? It's listening to students who have been historically, you know, marginalized, underrepresented and not heard, and you know we don't have to give them a voice. They actually have a voice. We just have to create the opportunity and the space for them. And right now and my job is very busy and multifaceted, that is the most joyful part of my job sitting around a conference table with students and they are so grateful and when I want to say, all I'm doing is just saying, yeah, you could do that. Sure, I know who to email, you can email me, and they're so. They feel so liberated, and now we're working to connect them with the middle school because also their club enrollment drops off when they graduate, and so now we're working to connect them with the middle school because also their club enrollment drops off when they graduate, and so now we're working to recruit the eighth graders. So that's something that I can do and our DEI coordinator can do. We partner with the middle school. How can we now get them to interface with the eighth grade? So that's, I feel like that's my path, and it doesn't I mean, I know it says brave action, it actually doesn't feel very brave. It feels. It feels just like what we should be doing. 0:26:38 - Katie Cubano Beth talked about her immediate context, so I guess I'll do the same. I'm not working in a K-12 building right now, which is so weird. Worked in a K-12 building not only for the over 15 years of my 16th year this year, but then throughout my college preparatory program, so it's just so weird to not be in the rhythms of the building. But because I'm not, it feels kind of futile for me to list things I did when I was those feel like past actions. 0:27:09 - Beth Pandolpho Oh, I'm sorry. I was just going to say one thing that I think sort of encompasses. You know and again, it would never be a waste of time to listen to all of the things that Katie did, because it's kind of amazing but I also think that one of the challenges that we all go through is that we need to. We have a broken system and we need to fix it while it's still operating, and so it's this moving target. So, but sorry, katie, I didn't mean to. 0:27:32 - Katie Cubano No, that's okay. No, so like the piece of the of the puzzle I'm working with now is in my student teaching supervision role, um, and what I'm finding is that's a little shift for me is that I'm learning to serve students and work alongside students who may already have privilege and power in ways that maybe the communities, um, that I worked alongside before did not, and that is its own challenge worked alongside before, did not, and that is its own challenge. So I've been reading and rereading this Carla Shalaby essay. You must accept them and you must accept them with love. You must accept them and accept them with love, which is a James Baldwin quote, and she talks exactly about this specific thing and it's it's been such, it's been very supportive to me in thinking about how do I help pre-service teachers enter the profession ready to cultivate excellence in their work, provide culturally and developmentally responsive and equitable classrooms for their students, do so in a way which honors, like, what they desire for themselves and the vision that they have for themselves, not just the vision I have for them, right, so it's a lot. It's sort of supporting them in their pre-service work to anticipate where do they need more support, what resources do they need. How can I model teaching that's sort of rooted in a love of all students and again, while helping them be the teacher they want to be and not the teacher I want them to be? Because now, like we're back in a in a power relationship, I don't want if that's what I'm doing is trying to get them to become me. Essentially and Beth and I have talked about this a lot with you know, in our experiences in general in education, to be a leader is not to. You can't be a leader by just wanting people to follow the same path that you took and wanting them to do it the same way you did it. That's not leading, that's not responsive at all. So this is a new challenge for me and the brave action is sort of I'm not sure what part of it it feels admitting that it's hard for me to work in a situation where I'm serving students who have privilege and power and to do that in a way that's rooted in love and not sort of get resentful or get annoyed at things that they may privileges they may have, that even as myself, as a pre-service teacher and as a young teacher I didn't have and just to serve them genuinely. 0:30:00 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. I also wanted to share, if it's okay with you, all things that I was reflecting on from what you shared that just were the brave actions that I think would be super cool or like action steps perhaps you could say to consider. So things that I talk about but were just novel to me in the thought process. So these are kind of my ahas for the book, particularly around that chapter on civil discussion. So one I love that you distinguish between norms and baseline assumptions Mind blowing. I was just like this is incredible and I'll mute myself actually after that one, just because I want to know do you guys want to just kind of explain that a little bit? 0:30:37 - Katie Cubano Sure. So I want to shout out my friend and Beth's friend and both of our colleagues One of my best friends, justin Dolce-Moscolo Garrett, and we's friend and both of our colleagues one of my best friends, justin Dolce-Moscolo-Garrett and we worked together to sort of develop this concept of baseline assumptions. We didn't develop it in a vacuum and we have lots of resources in the book for folks to look at to start to understand that. But it came from I guess what it came from was this realization that lots of people were norming with their classes but there was still something missing. Like the norms were dictating what was happening in the class. Like we're trying to dictate the actions in the classroom, but there was never like a baseline discussion of. Here are the things, here are the assumptions that are going to guide the discussions. Here's how we'll have the conversation is great, but there needs to be some guardrails around what we're talking about and whether what we're agreeing to are the conditions of our understanding of society before we can actually get into the how we're going to have the conversation and respecting other people. Through the way I show up in my conversation, you know and I'm careful of my conversational quirks and things like that and we really did feel like that piece was missing. And I think that a lot of times folks are worried and scared to say to their students you know, in this classroom we are going to operate on the assumption that, but it's our belief that we have the intellectual freedom to do so. So, you know, for me, one of the ways this manifested as a teacher of English is, I would say to my students in this, in this classroom, we're not going to debate whether people who are gay should be able to get married. They should and and and. You don't have to agree with that personally, but in this classroom you have to respect that view personally. But in this classroom you have to respect that view and you know that's teaching is not apolitical, we know this. So it is. I'm glad that you brought it up as a brave action, because it is. You know, does it mean that some people might disagree with you? Sure, but it, and that doesn't mean that every baseline assumption has to be what I just said. They're both things that you as the, as the teacher, bring to the conversation and they're called professional learning with teachers because they did like lunch and learns. 0:33:08 - Beth Pandolpho These baseline assumptions are really important because they did devolve into things that were not really up for debate and they could click back a few slides and say like, oh, you know, that's not part of the conversation, because we sort of established that everyone can have clean water and that's brave to do with colleagues. But I feel like it gave them the language because they thought about it before. So I'm going to say that's a brave action to do it with your colleagues. So it's sort of then it's neutral, it's not judgmental, it's not like you said something wrong, it's like ooh, right. Also, remember, that's not. We're not debating that or discussing that. 0:33:50 - Katie Cubano And what it kind of does is. It gives people an opportunity, and I think that people initially meet this with fear. For many reasons backlash, but another reason is they don't wanna tell a student what to think about something. One of the things we talk about in the civil conversations chapter is sometimes what you're actually doing with. A baseline assumption is giving a child an opportunity to try on an identity that they're not going to get to try on anywhere else in their life, and that can be really. You can say to them you don't have to think this in your own life. You have to respect it in here, though, that this is a guardrail in our conversation in here, and it really does. It gives them the opportunity to see what that would feel like, and then they can let it go as soon as they leave if they want, if that's what their families want, if that's how things go for them, but at least in that moment it gives them that chance which they might not otherwise have, but at least in that moment it gives them that chance which they might not otherwise have. 0:34:44 - Beth Pandolpho Another thing that Katie says about civil conversations that I also really like is that in school, you know it's like let's have a debate. You're going to have, you know, one class period to research this issue and then your job is to just debate the other side. And you know the more we've been thinking and we have enough of that going on in society, so we're just like we need more conversation. So Katie and I have been using the terms like inquiry and conversation. We're going to look at both these issues and we we cite work from Francis Kissling in the chapter like what is good in the position of the other. You know, and I and you know Katie used the example of, you know, gay marriage. Know, katie used the example of you know gay marriage, like I used the example of, like you know, everyone should be able to buy a cake from a bakery for their wedding, like you know. And let's talk. We're not going to debate, you know we're not going to debate it whether you think they should or they shouldn't. And also, like, where are the people coming from who didn't want to sell the gay couple the cake? And we talked about religion and what could you admire about them as being religious and trying to adhere to their faith. So just looking at it as a complex issue instead of like I think they shouldn't get the cake. Well, I think they should get a cake and I think that we have enough polarity that we don't need to nurture that in our classroom at all and that it's okay, yes, oh, oh my gosh. 0:36:05 - Lindsay Lyons There's so many things that I want to jump in on. You guys are brilliant. So one thing I wanted to say is that, yes, the around that, like the Adrienne Marie Brown quote that you used about being wrong oh my gosh, so good, right, and just the idea of being wrong, right, like that, we learn a lot and grow a lot from being wrong. Like the, the goal that you shared about mutual understanding. I was imagining, like if, instead of the rhetoric outcome right, or the make a claim, defend it outcome that we typically I mean I use that as a teacher, I encourage, I literally was coaching people this month to use that as a teacher and now I'm like, huh, what if it was instead mutual understanding? That was the outcome, like, literally as a priority standard on a rubric. How cool would that be right? And you guys have a ton of like. Um, page 96, page 107, I mean there's a bunch of prompts that you guys share about, like here are the question prompts that you could hand to a student when they see an argument or an opinion about something and you could unpack it right. And you could unpack it right and you could to your point, beth, like what is valuable about this argument? Right? Like what is the underlying value? I think there's so much in that we talk about or I talk about using like the positive psychology's values and actions and I think you guys actually cited them as well as kind of a culture builder, but how cool would it be if we actually integrated it into academic conversations as well. Right, where are the values in this? I also loved the, I think, related to what you were just talking about, this idea of asking students to just think about what they think about, as opposed to what's your opinion on this go, and that just made me think about you know what? How do we create? You also write about flow states, but I love Chiksmahai's work and, like thinking about, you know, carving out time free from distractions. That's what enables us to be creative. That's what enables us to like have the time to consider what we think and how. You know all the different things. I think they merge together around. This question for me is like, what does the class look like, or what could it look like when it enables us? I know that's a big question. I just want to know if you have thoughts on that Did you say class, yes, yeah. 0:38:11 - Katie Cubano So I think one very concrete thing is you know, when we think about planning for rhetoric, when we think about planning for you know, thinking through persuasive, being persuasive in our writing. So often those units rush to picking a position to defend and I think that, excuse me, an essential piece that often our units are missing is like a whole lot of time for students to just learn about the issue. Just, they have knee-jerk positions, sure, I mean for many things, not for everything, but for many things. But before even asking them what their position is, what is a topic you're interested in? I don't even want to know what you think about it yet, because I don't even think you fully know what you think about it yet, and that's not your fault, you haven't had the time to figure that out. So, like, let's spend some time just building our knowledge around this issue before you decide what your position's going to be on that, to the degree that that's possible. I know that. You know there would some there. You know there's some argument that our positions are sort of going to create our arguments, that our positions are already set. It's not going, we're not necessarily going to be swayed by information, but I do think that maybe, while that may be true of adults, we have an opportunity with students to take some time to build background knowledge before having them jump into defending you know one position or another and using rhetoric toward that end. 0:39:46 - Beth Pandolpho Yeah, and I just want to add one thing that I'm thinking years ago, before I had the language for it, I did a four corners activity and I had told every student, like go to the corner that you believe in, and if you end up in the corner by yourself, I will come and stand with you. And one student I don't want to say what it was, but he went to a very unpopular corner, something that I could not, you did not agree with, and I went and I stood next to him and I just said tell me why you think that like share with everyone. But just it gave him a chance to like interrogate that knee jerk decision without I didn't criticize him, I stood next to him and I think there's something that now, when I have language for it, I would think it's that cancel culture, but instead I was like calling him in. You know, like here are some reasons. I think it's problematic. Where were you coming from when you stood here? But I mean it changed the whole feeling of the class that I went and stood next to him. And again, when you talk about brave action, it, but it felt pretty brave to go stand there with that opinion that he decided he strongly agreed with. 0:40:55 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you both for those concrete examples. I think I'm looking at the time. I totally lost track of time because I've been so engaged in this conversation. Maybe we could do a lightning round for the next couple of questions. One I'm wondering what the biggest challenge that you faced or that you anticipate facing as you continue this work is, and feel free to both answer. 0:41:15 - Beth Pandolpho I mean, I think the biggest challenge would be that people have really set mindsets about what's right and wrong and what's good for themselves and what's good for themselves and what's good for children. So I think I think that is a big challenge, and how do you partner with people that you don't necessarily agree with? 0:41:34 - Lindsay Lyons Agree, yeah, so good, and everyone should get the book to read more about how to, how to partner with people to do that Um one thing that you would encourage listeners to do when they end the episode. What's kind of that? First, next step. 0:41:50 - Beth Pandolpho I think that everything feels so big. And but if you could do one thing, one small change, if you decide you're going to rethink your debate, right, rethink your debate, you know, just like it's choose one chapter, choose one issue, choose one thing, because small changes have a big impact. 0:42:11 - Lindsay Lyons Something you're learning about lately. This does not have to relate to your profession or this conversation. It can be literally anything. 0:42:18 - Beth Pandolpho Well, I'm going to I like I'm going to say something first, and I feel like Katie's going to have some kind of beautiful wrap up. I think what I'm continuing to learn is that we can't change everything we want to, but what we can always do is we can show up for people, we can show up for what we feel is right, and maybe not always, but sometimes that's enough. 0:42:38 - Katie Cubano I just finished Ta-Nehisi Coates' the Water Dancer, which was published a long time ago now, but I don't always get to books the year that they're published and it was, without a doubt, the best book I've read this year and I'm going to be honest with you guys, besides short form pieces, I'm only reading fiction right now in my life. My brain, with a one-year-old, cannot handle weighty nonfiction. So I'm reading the Water Dancer, or I was reading it. I just finished it and there's this beautiful passage in there about abolitionist. Corinne Quinn is the name of the character. The narrator says about her that she loved the idea of abolition, she loved the idea of of. She loved than them, but she did not love enslaved people. And I just ever since I had I read that it was just so beautifully put I did it. Zero justice, everything. Tanahasi codes touches turns to gold and I hope he writes more fiction soon. But it's really had me reflecting on like what are the times in my life when I was solely operating or not solely, because I don't think I was ever solely, but I was at least in part operating out of ego when I was advocating for, against injustices, and then like, what are the times in my life when it has been only pure and genuine love for students? And then how can I reflect on those times and what I was doing and how I was feeling, to make sure that it only ever falls on the side of doing it, because I love students and I want them to have full access to their civil rights education all the time and never fall on the side of. I'm doing this because it makes me feel better than other people or it makes me feel like a purpose for my life, because it's not about me, it's not about us, it's about the work of of, it's about the, the freedom, dreaming right, that's what it's about. So I love that he's had me, he's had my head there. In this kind of time when I'm um in education, but not sort of in the school building right now, it just feels like the right time. There's no wrong time to be reflecting on that, but this feels like a particularly right time. 0:45:10 - Lindsay Lyons That was so beautiful. Thank you, thank you, guys. So the last question I'm going to ask is just where do people learn more about you, connect with you, get your book, all the things? 0:45:21 - Beth Pandolpho Well, I have a website and it's bethpandolfocom and that's just kind of like a landing page for all of my things, um, and my email is on there and it's connect at bethpandolfocom, and I'm more active on linkedin than I am on what is now x katie yeah, so folks can just reach me via email at. 0:45:43 - Katie Cubano It's just Kate Cubano at gmailcom, kate, and then Cuban with an O at gmailcom, and I'm not super active on X and I don't have a LinkedIn. I just I'm just not doing it right now with our book is on Amazon and on Barnes and Noble. Also, though, I would love to share, we to share. We would love to share with you, lindsay, the link to the book website on Solution Tree, so that folks can access those materials that we mentioned. 0:46:14 - Lindsay Lyons Brilliant. We'll put it in the blog post for this episode in the show notes Awesome. Thank you guys. So much, Katie and Beth. It was an absolute pleasure. Thanks for joining. 0:46:22 - Katie Cubano Thank you.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
August 2024
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