184. Season 5 Updates (a little late)

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We’re already over a month into this school year and season of the podcast—half a decade of episodes, here we come!—and want to share some of the updates for this season. Better late than never!   

Mid-way through last season, I started experimenting with monthly mini series related to key topics I coach on and honestly just love learning about. I’ve tried to align the publication of these episodes with the time frame educators have typically expressed interest in discussing these areas. I’d also love feedback if you have topics for mini series I should add or suggestions for shifting when topics appear on the pod. 

With that, let’s explore the lineup for this season!   

Updated Topical “Mini Series” 

1. Systems Transformation: In this series, we’ll learn about developing professional learning structures, developing equitable systems of competency-based assessment, and advancing racial justice with an intersectional lens. 

 

1. Curriculum Design: In this series, we’ll learn about situating curricular thinking and planning within justice-based frameworks, how to co-create units using a step-by-step process, and exploring curriculum design possibilities from educator-created units to leaders’ stories of facilitating teacher-(co-)developed curricula. 

 

1. Leadership: In this series, we’ll learn about shared leadership and adaptive leadership, and how we can apply these approaches to leading justice-oriented change in our educational communities. 

 

1. Culture of Discussion:  In this series, we’ll learn about creating a positive and appropriately challenging class culture, laying the foundation for generative discussions of politics, current events, and “how we live together,” all while navigating high emotions.   

 

1. Investigating History (Social Studies Curriculum):  In this series, we’ll learn about a Massachusetts-created open source Social Studies curriculum that currently spans grades 5-7 and is being piloted in grades 3-4. We’ll explore the inquiry routines and key instructional principles that form the foundation of the curriculum and hopefully talk to some key players in the design and implementation! 

For a personalized professional learning experience on one of the topics discussed in this episode, I’m sharing 4 playlists with you for free: 

• Systems Transformation Playlist
• Curriculum Playlist
• Leadership Playlist
• Culture of Challenge and Discussion Playlist

And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 184 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.

​TRANSCRIPT
​0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons
Welcome to season five. A little late we actually started a month ago but welcome to season five of Time for Teachership. I am so excited for episode 184. And although we're a bit late on the season premiere episode, as we've already premiered, we're back to school. We're in already a month, at least in the Northeast, but more in different parts of the country, least in the Northeast, but more in different parts of the country, and I just really want to name in this fifth season of the podcast half a decade of episodes. Here we go. I'm so excited I want to share some of the updates for this particular season. Better late than never. 

So midway through last season I started experimenting with monthly mini series. I started experimenting with monthly mini series and each mini series is related to key topic areas that I coach on and, honestly, I just personally love learning about and have lots of thoughts that I want to share and lots of things that I want to learn from guests on the show. So you might have noticed that that's been going on. I've tried to align the publication of these episodes with the time frame. Educators have typically expressed interest in discussing these areas. So, of course, at different time points throughout the year you're thinking about different things and different topics feel salient in different parts of the year more so than others. Now, I know that's not a perfect science and different folks are in different parts of their school year and different topics resonate with different people kind of across the board. So I'd actually love some feedback if you have topics for miniseries that I should add or suggestions for shifting when those topics appear on the podcast. With that, let's explore the lineup and the hopes and dreams for this particular season or the remainder of this particular season. 

Here we go. Updated topical miniseries will include one on systems transformation. Now in this series we'll learn about developing professional learning structures, developing equitable systems of competency-based assessment as one potential structure to build out, and advancing racial justice with an intersectional lens. So thinking about all three of these these are kind of all niche topics that kind of intersect around, as always, equity, and thinking about the system-wide transformation of maybe an entire school or an entire district, an overhaul of and co-creation of, an entire policy in a particular area, right. So there's a lot going on here, including a lot of adaptive leadership around justice, around change and leading change. Right, there's a lot of moving pieces in this part and so really excited to kind of keep bringing in specific topics within the umbrella of how to lead change and transform systems. In the last month you heard our mini series on systems transformation or you read the blog post on systems transformation. So you've gotten some insight too into kind of how broad and almost cerebral and like theoretical and also kind of the intimate like ways of being with one another, being in one another's community and how to engage with folks. So it's kind of big and it's kind of narrow and it's kind of atopical and it could be topical. So there's a wide range here that I'm really excited to explore with folks. 

The second mini series topic is curriculum design, and so we've had this one from the get-go. In this series we'll really learn about situating curricular thinking and planning within justice-based frameworks. So there is some theory. But it's also like how do we do this thing right? How do we make it really hyper-practical, how do we co-create units using a step-by-step process, for example, and thinking about how we explore those curriculum design possibilities. I'd love to, as educators are willing to share, share kind of success stories of what folks have created in terms of units that they have implemented in their class and want to share with others and or thinking about like a development on the show, as we've done before in our unit, dreaming series of ideas that we kind of co-construct and we can witness the process in the podcast episode of that creation. Also in this section, really excited about kind of leaders stories of facilitating teacher co-developed curricula. So if you are a school or district leader or a department chair thinking about how do we approach fueling, fostering, dreaming up this beautiful curriculum when you're leading a team or when you're leading folks who may create the same curriculum that you end up with and everyone ends up teaching the same thing, or you're leading a staff or a team that is going to actually develop a bunch of different curricula and what are kind of the key components or process steps of developing that so excited to hear both from educators and leaders in this space. 

Miniseries topic number three leadership. There are so many theories of leadership and so many aspects of leadership that I think honestly all of these pieces tie to leadership. But this mini-series specifically is thinking about shared leadership approaches. So in school sometimes we call this distributive leadership. I think shared is nice because it typically encompasses students and communities more than our distributive, which is typically teachers. So all of the things, all of the stakeholders involved in shared leadership and that kind of co-creation of change as opposed to top-down change that we ask everyone to quote, buy into and so kind of mindset shifts around this practical pieces, around this theory, around this, as well as adaptive leadership. And again, these pieces really touch all of the other topics. But adaptive leadership, really thinking about how we apply that theory of adaptive leadership and leading change and leading longstanding change where there's no clear solution and we actually need shared leadership approaches to co-develop the solution. So these really go hand in hand, which is why they're categorized together in this mini episode. 

So, when we're leading justice-oriented change in our educational communities, how do we kind of take the theory into practice in the effort of leading change in any aspect? Right, we talked about leading change in the systems, transformation, which is really transforming maybe one particular area, and leadership. It's kind of like how do I build these skills globally, build these structures globally in my educational community? So I'm ready for anything. So I've kind of built the system so that it is nimble and agile and whatever. The word adaptive, I suppose right, and we are ready for anything that comes our way because the system is already in place. I see that kind of as like a preemptive we don't know exactly what we're focused on yet. We're focused on building the structure, so we're ready, All right. 

Number four this mini series, is a culture of discussion, and I think about this one as really the foundational layer of a lot of things that you would do either in your class or your staff community. So in this series we're learning about creating a positive and not toxic positivity, positive but truly positive, values driven and appropriately challenging culture. This could again relate to class culture, which is typically how I conceive of it from my teacher brain first, but also, of course, relevant to that staff level culture or even again, if you're a department lead or chair your team level culture. So, creating that values aligned, appropriately challenging, right, Everyone's kind of in their zone of proximal development environments, where tasks are building my skills, Right, really feeling like I'm in that flow from chicks in the highs theory. I'm in that flow state. We've talked on the podcast before with Angela Watson about this idea of flow state. That was a great episode, Check it out. We want everyone to be there, staff and students alike. So that requires that positive foundation of values, alignment, and that all the tasks are appropriately challenging, not too much, but also not overly scaffolded, because then they're going to be easy and boring and we're just going to tune out right. So what this does ultimately is, when we lay this foundation of belonging and values and appropriate challenge, we are laying the foundation for things like generative discussions, which could include discussions of hard things that are often kind of high emotion topics. 

I've been calling them Things like political conversations, particularly in the midst of an election year excuse me, presidential election year which only happens every four years, right? So this is big, this is in the news, this is kind of in everyone's conversation. Kids are going to pick up on this. Staff are certainly going to be aware of this, so we want to be able to invite conversation. One of the things that I was recently talking to a social studies group about is you know, I've heard folks talk before about the distinction between politics or political classrooms and partisan classrooms. So someone shared that you know we shouldn't be talking politics in class and I said well, actually, especially in social studies, we should be. We can be a political classroom. 

Part of our standards are to talk about politics and political structure and have political discourse and be civically engaged, Like this is part of our standards, particularly in Massachusetts, very embedded in those standards now, and that's certainly one of the things in the framework Partisan, I believe, is what this teacher was talking about. Where it's. We're not telling students what to think, we're not saying you need to vote for this candidate because da, da, da, da, da right. And so I think we often avoid right thinking about adaptive and justice-based things. Right, we often avoid conversations that may bring up high emotions or we're not so sure or we're uncomfortable. 

What we really want to do is create foundations for generative discussions where our hearts and our heads are kind of full right, Our minds are, like, appropriately challenged, we're using evidence-based conversation, we are fueling change, opening up possibilities for justice, and we're not kind of entrenched in our positions, we are open to understanding and seeking to understand one another. Right, and we are creating and deepening those relations in our community, whether it's staff to staff, staff to student or student to student. So, again, this culture of discussion miniseries is all about laying that foundation that's going to enable us to get to those generative discussions of things like politics, current events, figuring out how we live together with one another in this shared community, all while navigating things that come up like high emotions, like that kind of fear of saying the wrong thing, like the fear of being harmed, like the navigating high emotions. All the pieces right. So we want to make sure that foundation is in place before we go there, and we do want to be able to go there. So this mini series is really taking you on the journey. Sometimes we'll start with the foundation pieces belonging, values driven stuff and then sometimes we'll talk about appropriate challenge and appropriate scaffolds and not hyper scaffolding, and sometimes we'll get to that kind of top tier, where we ultimately want to go, which is like what are those discussions looking like? What are the protocols for them? How do we literally engage and how do we support that engagement? How do we structure it so that it is something that we value and deepens our community and our capacity and not restrict it or harm it? Okay, and now our fifth one. This is a new one this year. This is our fifth mini series. 

Topic I love social studies curriculum. I'm always talking about social studies curriculum, but I also always want to speak expansively or share expansively about various topics, kind of the how to create curriculum, regardless of the grade or subject you teach, and I also really love social studies. So we have in Massachusetts the Department of Education, called DESE, here has partnered with organizations to create a Massachusetts aligned curriculum for social studies in elementary and middle school and that continues to be built out and I am very grateful to be part of the coaching work to prepare teachers to implement this and work with teachers to figure out like what this looks like and feels like and is implemented like with the students in the classroom. So really grateful to all the brilliant folks I get to work with on this project. And this curriculum is called Investigating History, so let's talk about what this might look like. 

In this series we'll dig into the Massachusetts created open source so anyone can access it social studies curriculum. It currently spans grades five through seven for the public. It is being piloted in grades three through four and we'll explore things that are relevant beyond folks in Massachusetts and beyond folks who are using this specific curriculum, because, again, I want it to be relevant for anyone who is listening and so, even if you don't teach social studies, I do feel like, again, the pedagogy behind it is really important. So I'm hoping in this series to partner up and have guests on the show who have implemented the curriculum with students. So these would be the teachers who are piloting and, for grade three and four, piloting and teaching the full curriculum for grades five through seven, maybe some students. If we're excited to get those students on and talk about what it's like to experience this curriculum. We could talk with folks from the state, from Massachusetts, from DUSY, and think about what they are thinking and observing. We could bring on folks from Tufts that they have a really cool research project over there around democracy in classrooms and they're doing a huge research study on this curriculum and its impact on students. I think that would be so fun to explore. We could also bring on curriculum writers. I mean, my hopes are high, so very excited. But again, I think relevant for social studies and wherever you teach, with whatever curriculum you teach. And again, just back to the pedagogy roots, what I'm really excited to do, because this is an inquiry-based curriculum, we can explore the inquiry routines, of which there are three, and core principles, or what they call key instructional principles, of which there are four that really form the foundation of the curriculum and are good for any curriculum and I hope to talk to all those folks and we'll keep you posted on that. We'll look for that in probably the spring. So that is the preview for season five for the remainder of the year. 

Get excited, I'm going to link in terms of freebies for this episode. I'm gonna link all the things that might be relevant to you related to each of particularly the first four miniseries I discussed. So in the blog post for this episode, which you can get at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 184, I'm going to give you a personalized professional learning experience based on whichever topic you are most interested in learning about. So I'll be sharing four playlists with you for free on that blog post. Those include my systems transformation playlist, curriculum playlist, leadership playlist and culture of challenge and discussion playlist. So again, grab those at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 184. And I'm looking forward to connecting with you in the next episode. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page
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