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In this episode, we speak with Biz Thompson to apply a step-by-step unit planning protocol to dream up a new book-based unit that will cultivate deep thinking.
Biz currently works as a middle school librarian in Framingham, Massachusetts. Previously a high school English teacher for eight years, Biz brings a teacher-oriented approach to her work and curriculum development. Unit Planning Step 1: Context/Spark In Biz’s experience, book-based curriculum design is best when it’s centered around identity. Both middle schoolers and high schoolers are finding out who they are and identity is where we inevitably end up, no matter what types of texts are chosen. So, selecting books that resonate with students’ identities and backgrounds is an important starting point. Unit Planning Step 2: Pursuits (from Dr. Muhammad’s HILL Model) Identity: The goal is to help students explore and understand their own identities and those of others. Middle and high school students are in a stage of discovering who they are, which makes it crucial to select texts that reflect diverse experiences and perspectives. For example, there are many students from South America where Biz works in Framingham. Though challenging, it’s important to find books that represent their experience but don’t pigeon-hole students or rely on harmful stereotypes. Criticality: Engaging students in discussions about power, equity, and the disruption of oppression involves choosing texts that challenge and expand their understanding of these concepts. Students can also give input on what texts are studied and how they should be studied. For example, Biz recounts a conversation in the classroom over the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. While there are some problematic themes of white saviorism and harmful language, students still wanted to study the book—just using a critical lens to analyze it and draw important insights. Joy: Biz reflects on how it can be difficult to find joyful texts that are seen as carrying literary weight, as many are full of serious and heavy topics. Still, it’s important to integrate joyful elements into the curriculum by balancing identity and critical themes while also providing moments of joy or hope. Unit Planning Step 3: Project Question A central question for framing units is, "How can students' personal identities and background knowledge be integrated into their understanding of complex themes like justice and systemic issues?" Another framing question can be how can we as a school community and class heal together? The goal is not to sit in the oppression, but move through it and repair it with the students’ voices and perspectives leading the way. Unit Planning Step 4: Summative Project (Publishing Opportunity and Possible Formats) Book-based units are most effective when students are empowered and equipped as leaders, participating actively in their communities. Culminating projects and activities can be designed with this in mind, offering opportunities for civic action and community involvement. Biz reflects on the eighth grade curriculum that requires a civics project in Social Studies, so ELA (English Language Arts) teachers can collaborate to align the curricula. Their civics projects can apply what they are learning to a real-life context and integrate literary studies with practical civic action. Unit Planning Step 5: Unit Arc While studying challenging topics such as the Holocaust or the justice system, educators need to be aware of how these difficult themes and ideas impact the students in their class. Before diving into them directly, there needs to be a sense of safety and community to learn, grow, and dive into challenging discussions together. Take time at the start of the unit to do this! Thinking of a unit arc that centers the question of “how do we heal together?” means providing various entry points for students coming from different backgrounds. Language differences, expression, linguistic ability, and personal experiences means students come to the unit from all different ways of approaching a text. So, educators can offer multiple access points to understand and learn what the book is talking about, such as sharing by writing, verbally, or doing a gallery walk. Another perspective in considering your unit arc is to consider how to bring the text to life. One option is to integrate literature with community-based projects, such as inviting guest speakers or organizing discussions with local officials, which really enhances students' engagement and understanding of the text they’re engaging with. Stay Connected You can connect with Biz on the Cameron Library page of the Framingham website. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Biz is sharing the link to Facing History & Ourselves which uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 186 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons biz. Welcome to the time for teachership podcast. Thank you, I am so excited to have you here. I am curious to know if there is um anything like right when we're jumping into the conversation, that you want to share with folks who might be listening or reading the blog post version of this conversation. That's like maybe the either impetus for our conversation or context for maybe some of the ideas you'll share books you'll share about today. Sure. 0:00:32 - Biz Thomspon So I'm a school librarian in Framingham, massachusetts. I was a high school English teacher for eight years before I transitioned into my role as a middle school librarian transitioned into my role as a middle school librarian. So I come from like maybe more of the teacher lens than other librarians do and I learned about you from our fabulous Framingham team librarian, john Garrigan Amazing. 0:00:58 - Lindsay Lyons I'm so excited as a fellow like high school literacy and social studies teacher, I'm very excited. 0:01:02 - Biz Thomspon Yes. 0:01:05 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, so cool. Okay, so if we are going to take the approach of kind of brainstorming a unit or like something that maybe a high school or middle school or whoever ELA teacher might be able to actually do in their class, I would love to start with, maybe, what you would like in this, what you envision students to be like learning or pursuing through reading, through texts, through books and I often ground us in things like the three parts of Goldie Muhammad's framework. So she talks about, like identity how will my instruction help students learn something about themselves or others? She talks about criticality, so disrupting power and oppression, and like kind of navigating conversations with that. And or joy, just like how do we find joy in right? Like those are three very different things, so we can focus on anywhere. 0:01:56 - Biz Thomspon your brain takes you Sure yeah, I feel like it's really hard to find joy in the texts that we choose for middle schoolers and high schoolers. There's not a lot of joy out there. Is there In things that are considered to have literary merit. There isn't. It's usually dark themes. It's actually kind of hard to find texts that are truly joyful. Kind of hard to find texts that are truly joyful. What's been interesting in my time in Framingham is so I was working at the high school it was basically like we had a book room and there were books and then you would build the unit around the book, and so much of that is shifting and in the last curriculum redesign we did, our focus was on building background knowledge and not necessarily in the literacy or in the you know all those things that you just mentioned. But I find that I look to identity a lot when I'm thinking about books, because for middle schoolers and high schoolers they're finding out who they are and that's where we always inevitably end up, no matter what types of texts we're choosing, and so that kind of becomes hard in a place like Framingham where a lot of the students at my school not necessarily in every school are from South America. They're from Brazil and there really aren't a lot of texts that center around even South American children, families, so it's really hard to match identity perfectly with that. And I think we've also talked a lot about in our learning spaces that some of the even if we're looking at them like a Latin American text, if we can't get to South America that we're looking for texts that don't pigeonhole or focus on harmful stereotypes, which can be difficult to do. So there are some instructors who will look at a book about, you know, students crossing the border and say this is relevant and it is. But we're at a point where we also have students who just like go to school and have families and do the regular things that teenagers do without all of that too, and there's not as much representation in that space. I think. Um, I've also worked sometimes with my avid 10 year old who's in fifth grade and she goes to a Montessori school, and we'll run ideas back and forth too, so like they've been working on topics of like, inclusion and thinking about cognitive differences, physical differences and how to learn and create empathy there, and so we'll bounce titles back, which is kind of fun, but then it's always like the teachers in our area are like reading all the books and I think there also has to be good writing right. We can have joyful books, we can have, you know, we can have books that sort of capture identity, but if they're not well-written they're not coming from a soulful place. The kids know that and they don't. They don't care for it very much. 0:05:13 - Lindsay Lyons I love that idea of becoming from a soulful place, being like the thing that's yeah accurate, like yes, amazing yes, we learned about holding Caulfields. 0:05:21 - Biz Thomspon We know who the ponies are, so that's so good, oh my gosh. 0:05:27 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, and I also just love who. So I also live in Framingham and just like the very like high Brazilian population, like wanting to name, but like you want to be able to like see yourself where and put yourself in that position of like I can identify with those main characters. And then, if you don't have texts that are translated to English, that are either written by Brazilian authors or, you know, centered in Brazil, or like having a Brazilian American identity, like it's like okay, right, how do we find something that's general, not oppressive and so connected, right? 0:06:01 - Biz Thomspon This is like such a multifaceted kind of thinking about identity that's so important, so I just appreciate you naming it, yeah, yeah and it's, and I think like, um, in some ways, publishing is so far ahead of where it was when I was a student, when so many of my colleagues were students, but sometimes, um, like educators will presume that there's something there that isn't there yet, right, even in non-fiction, like we need non-fiction books that don't have a lexile of, like high school for middle schoolers. Um, we need to look beyond. Well, I love, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there are other people that they're important, um to us, right, uh, that we need to be writing about, and I feel like publishers look to the same people and they just publish like book after book about those people or those experiences, and we're not like branching out so much. 0:07:00 - Lindsay Lyons So true, so true. I'm curious to know is there a particular like question that you find interesting for students to grapple with around either identity or just like reading books in general, or like to your point about building background knowledge? Is there kind of a framing question that comes to mind? If we were to like brainstorm this out, yeah, I think like oh, there's a student. 0:07:25 - Biz Thomspon I think usually when we're designing units in particular, we do have sort of a central question. So I keep thinking of when we were redesigning the eighth grade curriculum so our eighth graders read the Memoir Night by. Elie Wiesel and they had also traditionally read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and we revisit To Kill a Mockingbird frequently because it's, you know, we have the white savior story there and there's some, you know, harmful language that sometimes students of color have not been so comfortable with and I think our teachers do a great job of acknowledging that and sort of working through it and talking about that. And it was interesting. We were thinking of pulling it one year and I teach like a flexible class and the students in there. I asked them like should we keep this book? Should we not? Like this is what the conversations are and most of them actually said it's great, we should read adults um version, uh, to sort of tell lots of sides of that story of like justice, right, um, and all of that's very heavy and um. So we were looking for a book to start the year that um captured identity and we landed on Don't Ask Me when I'm From by Jen DeLeon and she's from Framingham and when I read her book it really resonated as like honest to me, right, this was an amalgamation of her experiences as a Guatemalan American growing up in Framingham, of her experiences teaching students in Boston, and the book deals with, you know, metco and what that looks like and microaggressions and things like that, and so I think when the teachers are working through that unit they're looking for students to make those personal connections and build their background knowledge and learn a little bit about Netco. You know they talk about sort of like microaggression, about code switching, things like that, and it also, I think, maybe gives vocabulary that they might not have for those experiences that they're probably having all the time in the world and I think it's a way for the kids to get to know each other and to understand what their spaces are. And there are some activities that students do. So in the book, the characters there's sort of like a mean girls moment where they have this like full school like assembly to deal with some of the racial incidents that have been happening. And there's been all this documentation about, like, building the wall on the border right, so the students decide to subvert it by creating a wall, but then everyone puts sort of like their own kind of experience in school what they want people to know. And some of our teachers have started doing that sometimes when they read the book and it's really eyeopening to see that, like it tends to be the moment when students say the quiet part out loud, they share the thing that like people might presume about them but isn't true. It's a sort of defy those stereotypes and I think there's a lot of power in that. And then, and when we first decided, kids were like oh, this is great. And now, because it's in school, they're kind of like oh, this is like, just okay, I'm like it's not, like I don't know. This is as close to you as we're getting. I forget what your original question was, but but that's sort of mind when we're thinking about how do we frame units and how do we add, weave identity, and then all that good stuff. 0:11:31 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love all of the pieces of that, all of the books that cover different aspects of identity and like to embed that kind of like disruption and building the background knowledge, like you're kind of like taking us through all the nuances of all the pieces which I love, yeah, the initial question was just kind of like is there a question that frames all of it like an essential question? 0:11:48 - Biz Thomspon yeah, I think from the educator standpoint, not necessarily from the student standpoint. The question we were asking ourselves is we are, when we are going into material like the holocaust, like the justice system, and students are also learning civics now at the same time so they're learning about the legal system, about how our government works how can we get them there from a place that is closer to where they are right? Because I think teachers were finding that when they just had to jump into the holoca, reading like Telltale Heart or whatever there wasn still feel very strongly about the content of the book and it's awful Like it's really hard to read and you need to have a community in place and you need to have some safety with each other in order to do that. In order to do that, and so I think we were trying to center it in their own identity and, kind of like, build towards. Okay, then we're going to move on to these really tough, hard topics together. 0:13:06 - Lindsay Lyons Two things I want to lift up from that. One is kind of right, there's kind of this base building of the foundational trust and community that has to happen as part of the unit or prior to the unit, because otherwise you're not going to get what you need out of it, right, students will have a harmful experience or something right. And then the other one I'm thinking I know you shared the teacher lens, right as like get them together as close as they are as possible. I was thinking the student lens of that or like the essential question of that that student facing might be. Like how do we like heal together? Because, oh yeah, right, it's almost like you're showing, I'm just thinking like right, like with the Holocaust, with like there's harm in there, just mercy, it's all about like the harm of the structures and the systems, the school assembly, or like the wall piece that you were saying from don't ask me where I'm from Like there's, there's all these confrontations of harm. And then it's like, how do these communities we're learning about? But also, how do we as a school community, as a class, like heal together? Because ultimately we don't want to sit in the oppression, we want to like move through it and repair, yeah, with our voice, with our own voices, not somebody else's. 0:14:09 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, yes. 0:14:10 - Lindsay Lyons I love the element of student leadership and youth leadership in that, so I love that. I'm almost wondering is there something that either you did when you did the curriculum revamp or that you're thinking now as we're talking through? That would be like a kind of culminating project or activity, that students are kind of putting all these pieces together into some sort of like civic action or like community piece. 0:14:34 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, well there is something kind of naturally embedded, not in their English language arts class but in their social studies class. So every eighth grader is tasked with completing a civics project. I think what would be great actually was if there was space for the ELA teachers and the social studies teachers to align and kind of look at what they've studied so far in ELA to try and focus there. And I think the civics project was rolled out in the 2020 school year, so they're still figuring out how to do it. So I don't want to fall. I had to teach civics then too, so I get it. But I think if, like down the the road, if there were collaboration time, that would be a great way to um, put those two things together. There have been been in what I've taught in eighth grade enrichment class, so students who are sort of like above grade level, where we've worked on some community advocacy, like I've asked them, like, when you look around, what do you think needs to be better? And then we try to find the points of contact or find and students have had like meetings with the superintendent and things like that, and it's not always related to like exactly what they're reading, but it is related to building that voice and, and it's funny like, sometimes they'll be like well, we need to change the time of school and then we'll go down and they're like, actually that's kind of impossible, but that's learning Right, you know, like, and it's in their hands. It's probably hard for me, but sometimes I try to take a step back. It's very hard for me to. Sometimes I try to take a step back and I haven't had a chance to do that in a while, but I look forward to doing it again. 0:16:19 - Lindsay Lyons I love all the whole process of that right Like so to be able to identify the issues and draw those parallels to what they might be reading. I love the interdisciplinary nature of social studies. The piece being like that project is such a nice organic way of like you're already doing this. What can you learn from? Or, yeah, um, the texts. And then, yeah, I, I love the goal of building voice that you named, and also just that that it is hard, that it's not easy, and that to really develop youth leadership, we have to just confront those challenges and and get familiar with them, and we also have to have it sounds like you do at Framingham have the audience that's authentic from the adult perspective, like we're willing to meet with you. Share the restrictions, talk through and kind of problem solve together. So I do think that's like I'm just thinking of foundational. If you're teaching something like this, right, these are that kind of foundational community wide things to just make sure, because you don't want the students to go into the superintendent and the superintendent's like I don't have time for this or anything yeah, and I think too. 0:17:16 - Biz Thomspon I think, as you know, when I have the occasion to sit in with teachers and they're developing assessments and things, I tried to and as a high school teacher I wasn't very good at doing this but just I find when students are each other's audiences, the quality of the work is better than when they think they're just submitting something to a teacher. If it's public, if it's an audience of your peers, I think that automatically sort of brings a level of persistence that might not be there. If you're like, oh, the same adult is going to read this again and I'll just admit it and they'll tell me how I did, and that's the end yeah, the authentic audience and project so incredible. 0:18:03 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, like to have um an assignment, feel like there's some real weight behind it and, yeah, yeah, change can happen. 0:18:11 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, that's really good so you remember to like put a period at the end of your sentence or whatever. 0:18:16 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, yes, oh my gosh, I, I like, I'm loving all of these pieces. I'm curious to know if there's any like ELA teacher activities that you particularly enjoy to have students almost like on a smaller level, like when engaging with text, be each other's audience or be each other's like partners, and like I don't know if it was like literature circles or Socratic seminars. I'm trying to think of some of the protocols of like. How do we get students to engage and kind of learn from each other versus like the teacher directed? Yeah, that. 0:18:45 - Biz Thomspon I I used to more often sometimes when classes, so the seventh graders used to do like dystopian literature circles and I would get to facilitate some of them. And some teachers have like amazing, and they do it at my daughter's school to, where you know role assignments, you know, so someone's the historian and you know, and it's so great when you have kids who are really like well prepared to sit back and just watch them. There we had he's not here anymore, but we had a great teacher, andrew ahern, who his lit circles were something to behold, like sometimes I'd just be sitting there and like be like these kids are they really? They just got that on their own like this is amazing. They were reading ghost by jason reynolds, which I love, and I was like well, I actually never thought about that, you know like 11 year old, um, but I think there's for our students, there's a lot of skill that is required to get to that place and I think, um, just situations and framing have have made it so that we're really focusing on building those skills back. So I think we've sort of like we did these things and now we kind of have to build those skills back, whether it's language skills or self-monitoring or whatever. Um, some kids are ready for that and others need some more help, um, but when they get there it's like so amazing to watch. And, um, my daughter's school does a lit circle at the end of the year where they invite parents in to participate with them and again, it's so great because, like, the kids are smarter than us for sure, you know. And it's interesting, like at my daughter's school, what was the book we read? Interesting, like, uh, at my daughter's school, oh, what was the book we read? Um, we read a book I can't think of the name but I'll email you but about a student who was sort of non-verbal but very, very white and, um, she struggles to sort of get what she needs in school. And my husband and I were explaining that when we were in school we never would have seen a student like that. They would have been like closed off in a separate part of the school and the younger kids were like, well, why didn't you make friends? We were like that's a great, we should have, but there wasn't any infrastructure where we would cross paths. And isn't it great that now you understand that that's the right thing to do, right, and it's so hard to get. Like you know, as kids get older it's harder to get parents to come in. But I would love to do that and in fact I'm going to start back up again, after the pandemic, our staff book club. So sometimes we read YA. I have to send out a Google form to get it sent out. But sometimes we historically read middle grade and YA and then my integrate adult books, because then they get you know, we, we have those conversations with each other and then can extend them to the kids if they see the book on our desk or whatever. I went in a lot of directions. 0:21:44 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my God, no, not like. Let's talk about the staff book. There goes, oh yeah, like, so many, so many cool things about this. I just love the idea of like. I mean I'm just thinking of like a unit arc, that right where we're talking about like, how do we, if we're guided by the question of like, how do we heal together? Right, I'm sure there are so many entry points for students to your point of like people are coming in in different ways and I'm sure they're linguistically, there's like different, like streets of expression and in terms of English and like. I just think there's so many opportunities to either, you know, verbalize and translate, because there are other peers that maybe have the Portuguese background and like a higher English proficiency. At the time I taught in a high school with students with like 30 different languages and they were all using English. So it's like having the having people who are in the same class, who speak the same home language as you or first language, is really helpful and so you know, I'm thinking being able to access that or like, if you're written or verbal, literacy is like one of those is higher. Just giving multiple access points for whether you're sharing verbally or in writing, like a gallery walk or something. I think there's probably so much opportunity for people to grapple with that question even before getting to the text. Oh yeah, and then being able to see like how do the people, how do the characters, how do the people in the, the stories, novels and the non-fiction like, how are they grappling with this question, be such a nice like motivating launching point, as like a hook right, and then having maybe the, the base be some sort of central text about like I don't know, I'm envisioning like UN declaration of rights or like something right, that's like central to justice yeah, um, one of the eighth grade ELA teachers looks at that with her students when they're reading um, to kill a mockingbird yeah for sure that's beautiful. 0:23:29 - Biz Thomspon I actually know with For sure, actually, no, with night, I think they look at that. I mean, we've done, we've really tried, especially, I think, because I helped with the curriculum planning for that group and the teachers have stayed the same. We've been able to do some some pretty neat things with trying to bring that text to life, text to life. So, um, one of our eighth grade teachers, miss latine, has a, a relative who works for um, it was like a the aclu or something, and she had him come and talk to the class. Um, after uh, this was a few years or maybe two years ago um, after the students read To Kill a Mockingbird and Just Mercy, we invited the Framingham police to come in and do round circle discussions with the students, which was actually like wonderful, we were very scared about how that was going to go and students asked really pointed questions. Like one student came in and the chief of police is wonderful, he's really the best and he said you know, like, where do you stand on Black Lives Matter? Like first question, right off the bat and the chief was like I am in absolute solidarity. I almost quit my job after I saw the George Floyd which, and hearing that from the students, was just like so eye opening, I think, because you know, especially in the public, like you know, kids have these and it's fair. They have these perceptions of the police and just mercy, you know, paints a lot of injustice in the justice system. Mercy, you know, paints a lot of injustice in the justice system and some of the teachers were like well, this is one you know, like we have to, we have to round out the discussion. And so we just had these classroom based discussions and the kids would ask, you know, even just like questions like how fun is it to ride in a patrol car? But it was good, like relationship building and community building, like relationship building and community building. And fortunately the Framingham PD, especially the people at the top who come here, have like one, the Lieutenant, I think, is like a trained social worker, and there are a bunch of people who like went through Framingham public school to like, no, all our staff when they come in, who it's sort of like you're looking at yourself Like I was this kid too. We've had. We have a Holocaust survivor come and speak to the students after their reading night. So you know, we we've really been trying to do these things and of course, that's not always so student centered Right, but trying to round out the experience. But I I think that's what we need to get back to more often is like more deep thinking, more critical thinking, more connection building between disciplines and ideas and within, like the arc of your ELA year. Um, because I think sometimes we get lost in the like multiple choice questions and it's always more engaging if you're using your brain with other students, with the outside world, and making those connections oh my gosh, yeah, and I I'm hearing so much community building and like community tapping into community expertise and like the guest speakers and things. 0:26:43 - Lindsay Lyons That is so cool. I'm I'm kind of wondering one of the things that I usually ask at the end of these like kind of wondering. One of the things that I usually ask at the end of these like kind of like you didn't dreaming episodes is like what is, what is the thing that you think will help? Like a teacher who went and like teaches this right, this unit, like this, like how did, how do you see that being, or how was it for you being? You know the, the best kind of teacher version of yourself in that moment, right, like, or like thinking about the kind of fulfillment it brings you to be able to kind of facilitate those connections. And I'm just thinking of that kind of. I guess the question is maybe about the value of this, not to just students but to educators as well who are engaging in this work. 0:27:24 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, so our two eighth grade ELA teachers are just like really exemplars. So one of them works for Facing History. He's been on the board and he just does such a brilliant job of like scaffolding and building and pulling out like pieces of nonfiction and you know, and really walking along with students as they're sort of learning about the Holocaust, building background knowledge. My roommate here, and with like a very like sensitive lens, if that makes sense, he's really an expert in that regard and um, we also collaborate. All three of us collaborate very well together and, um, his counterpart, emily latine, is like she could rip up the greatest lesson in like 15 minutes. It would be greater than anything I had ever taught. Like she gets the, gets the, all the accommodations, all the, you know adjustments for language capacity, visuals, like the most beautiful slides, like perfectly organized and sensical like worksheets to accompany you know'll do um like round tables where students are walking around and looking at images and right, you know silent conversations just between the two of them. They are able to capture like all the humanity that's necessary, all the background knowledge building and the sort of like making everything as accessible as possible, and I think they're really the magic. Then they come to me and I just step in and say like, well, we could add this. You know, I'm like the car salesman. They really do the groundwork and like a super beautiful way, and they will also be the first to acknowledge when something is isn't working and see how, what they can do to make it work better. And I think that's always the key. I mean, this is nothing nobody knows, but there's nothing wrong with saying like this isn't working anymore. We need to take a new approach, or I found this thing that now is better than what we did before, and I think openness to that is also super important. 0:29:44 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. I love that you get to collaborate with awesome colleagues, and I also. The PSA embedded in that message is like talk to your librarian for those ideas of like right, where do we go with this? This text is getting old. 0:29:56 - Biz Thomspon Give me some ideas, yeah yeah, yeah, and that's the thing is that you know everyone's so busy. I understand that as a classroom teacher, but I often advertise them. Like I didn't have time to read books when I was an ELA teacher I didn't. I could read like a few. I was grading papers, I was doing all this crazy stuff like I didn't have time to read. And so I look at school library journals. So even if I haven't read it, like I know what's out there. I know what's good and not good for our students too. Right, like, because sometimes what critics think is good is like not at all what the kids here care about. Right. So I often advertise like you need nonfiction to support that lesson? I'll let me do it. You don't have to spend your time doing it. You need someone in the community to come. I'll do that. I'll definitely. If you have a good library, use them because I love it. Like I'm such a nerd. People are like I don't want to bother you. I'm like, no, this is my favorite thing to do. 0:30:59 - Lindsay Lyons You're not bothering me at all. I love this. I so love it and actually, yeah, if people want to like get in touch with you, connect with you if they don't have relationships with their library librarian if they ask you. 0:31:10 - Biz Thomspon I don't want to. 0:31:10 - Lindsay Lyons I don't want to be the job if people are curious to know, like some of, uh, the things you're working on. Is there a place that they could reach out to you or just see the work that the middle school is doing? 0:31:19 - Biz Thomspon so what's hard is that the school district decided to change our whole, the whole district's web presence this weekend, so but we can link later to the yeah so um, there is a link to my library page but it's sort of like the corporate school district stuff, but my email is there. Um, and you know also, I think, other credit too. To go back to John, john Garrigan and I started at the same time and a lot of people, like my roommate there, was just saying like, how does how does he? Because he comes in to our schools like once a month or whatever, and sets up a table and the kids know him. And she was like how does he get that to happen? But it's so natural, like it's just so we work together so nicely that even he I'll go to him and be like, okay, what's like? What manga do I need? What do you think about this? So you know also, your public librarians can be very, very helpful. If you don't have school librarians in your school, you know, get to know your public librarians, because they can be super helpful too, and especially as a community resource, because they also know everybody. 0:32:27 - Lindsay Lyons I love that because I actually didn't even know until I was on the Framingham library page. I was like a patron of Framingham yeah. 0:32:33 - Biz Thomspon I did not know that there was a teen, like person, like a specialist who specializes in teen and there's a children's specialist right so the children's specialist will go to the elementary schools and help them, like with summer reading, or they'll do activities or like they're really wonderful yeah. 0:32:52 - Lindsay Lyons That is so cool. You are a wealth of information and knowledge. Thank you so much for talking with us today, and I'm so excited for listeners to learn all of this from you when the episode airs. So, thank you, I'm just, I'm trying. 0:33:09 - Biz Thomspon I'm by no means a model. I'm just showing up. Transcribed by https://podium.page
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
November 2024
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