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In this episode, we talk with educators and authors Kassia Wedekind and Christy Thompson about insights from their recent book, "Hands Down, Speak Out." They offer a transformative vision for education that centers on student voices. The pair has spent time teaching and coaching together, and share big ideas on how to reimagine education while also working in the realities of the current system.
Kassia and Christy address the real challenges educators face in balancing prescribed curricula with authentic student engagement, advocating for small, actionable steps to create dynamic and inclusive classroom environments. The Big Dream Kassia and Christy’s big dream is that they want children’s voices and experiences to be the center of education—the place from which education grows and develops. They believe that teachers are the people who are positioned to listen to, understand, and capture those voices. Mindset Shifts Required Kassia and Christy recognize that fear often stops us from trying something new. Losing control or thinking of what things “should” be like can hold educators back from making big changes. So, a key mindset shift to embrace is that you can start small. Shifting toward a student-centered approach simply means looking through a lens of curiosity rather than critique or deficit. Action Steps Here are some key action steps for educators who want to shift to a more student-centered approach: Step 1: Reflect on current classroom practices and identify areas where student voices can be more prominently featured. This might involve rethinking traditional conversation structures to allow for more student interaction. Step 2: Start small by integrating open-ended questions into classroom discussions. These questions should encourage students to think critically and express their ideas freely. Teach students the skill of conversation, and how there are different types of “talkers” in each context. This helps students learn to share the conversational space and speak directly with each other. Step 3: Create opportunities for students to engage in collaborative projects that spark curiosity. Kassia and Christy emphasize that curricular materials need to be interesting for students. There has to be something engaging to discuss so that students can really engage and speak up with their thoughts and opinions. Step 4: Embrace ambiguity in your conversations and curricular materials. Things are not so black-and-white, so educators can become more comfortable with ambiguity, allowing conversations to flow based on various interests, viewpoints, and curiosities. Challenges? One of the significant challenges educators face is that people in power are not in classrooms but are still making decisions on behalf of educators. This means teachers often grapple with the constraints of curriculum requirements while trying to create space for student voices and interests. Another challenge is time constraints and making appropriate decisions in the moment that foster engagement. Educators must always be thinking about the actions that will lead to an outcome of engagement and learning. One Step to Get Started One small step for educators to embrace is to reflect on your school day and identify a moment where you can listen more to your students. For example, you might have a time when you are normally organizing paperwork, but could actually go over and engage with some students and their conversations instead. Another action step is to ask a question that you don’t know how the students will respond. It’s interesting for both the students and educators. Stay Connected You can find Kassia on X, Instagram, and Bluesky, and Christy on Instagram. You can also connect with them on their website, Hands Down, Speak Out. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Kassia and Christy are sharing several turn and talk micro lessons and The Why Chart from their book with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 214 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Katia and Christy, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. Thanks for having us. Absolutely, I am so excited about your book Hands Down, Speak Out, and I'm really excited to dive into it. But first, before we get to it, I'm curious to know is there anything you want listeners to know about you, you know, beyond the typical bio or anything that is kind of on your heart, on your mind in this moment? To kind of on your heart on your mind in this moment, to kind of ground our conversation today. 00:29 - Kassia (Guest) Um, I think that, um, well to know about us, um, Chrissy and I spent a lot of time teaching together, um, in elementary schools and also coaching together. Um, I'm a math coach and Christy was a literacy coach, so I think a lot of the things that we think about are, yes, sometimes we're thinking about big ideas and big ways to reimagine things, but also, as people that live in the realities of schools, we also like to think about the small details of change and how to work within systems that are not perfect, but are what we have and what children are going to and teachers are going to every day. And how do we make those spaces as as as good as we can, in the kind of everyday ways, in addition to the to the big picture ways, too in addition to the big picture ways too, Christy anything you want to start us off with. 01:32 - Christy (Guest) Oh, I think Kassia covered that very beautifully. I mean, I also think that it's important to know that, although Kassia and I agree on a lot of things, we do disagree on important things, like she and I like our opinions on mayonnaise and other big things like that. So you know, we spend a lot of time figuring out what things we can push back and forth on each other with, and I think having a partner that pushes you to try new things like I believe it's okay to eat on an airplane, and Kasia really does not so we um try to spend a lot of time, I think, like pushing each other's boundaries and um, as well as finding our common ground. I absolutely love that. 02:18 - Kassia (Guest) And I think in outside of our you know mayonnaise and airplane eating conversations, I think that um, like, uh, having the different lenses of, like, christy spent more time immersed in literacy and I've spent more time immersed in math and thinking about, like, where is there overlap? And we think there's lots of overlap in, um, good practices in elementary school and then where, sometimes things like oh, I would approach this a little bit differently in math or this is how I would approach it in literacy. So, yeah, it's nice to have a thinking partner and you know, we hope that we do that a little bit through the book be the thinking partners of readers, and we also hope that readers get a chance to have thinking partners of their own in schools. 03:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I have to say, as a major fan of the book, I think you guys do that really well. Like there are ways that it's like right, this is like the same type of micro lesson that I would use in both scenarios, but here is like a transcript for math and a transcript for like. It was really well done in the ways that it was different because it really pushed my thinking as, like a literacy history person. It pushed my thinking as like a literacy history person. It pushed my thinking around math and I'm actually coaching someone in math now and I'm like, oh, like, even though you're teaching high school math, like these moves are totally relevant and it was really cool to see that come alive. 03:33 So thank you for all of the that work you did in the book and I and I think the book itself and just what you, what you jumped into, already kind of speaks to. I think this next question I usually ask but I'm curious to know, if you want to expand on it kind of what your idea of, kind of a freedom dream you hold for education is. So Dr Bettina Love has a beautiful quote around this dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. So, with that in mind, what are those dreams that you each hold? 04:01 - Christy (Guest) I think our big common dream, amongst many smaller ones, is that we want children's voices and experiences to be the center of education and like the place where education grows and develops from, and I think that teachers are the people that are positioned to listen and understand and capture those voices no-transcript and that we you know that's not always easy and there are there are definitely roadblocks and reasons why that's very challenging and and so you know, as a classroom teacher right now, I'm often reflecting like how well did I do that today? And I'm often dissatisfied with my. You know I often have higher expectations for myself than I'm meeting, but it is like the thing that we keep coming back to together. 05:21 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) That's beautiful Kasia. Anything to add, or did that sum it up for you? 05:26 - Kassia (Guest) I think that's that. That sums it up for me well said. 05:31 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) That's beautiful. I think one of the things that I think a lot of educators that I hear from are, you know, saying is this is really interesting, I really want to do more of this, and I I have, you know, whatever feelings of pressure, whether it's time or covering curriculum or what's going to happen if I hand a conversation over to students. Right, there's just like fear or worry, and so I'm curious to know if you've seen any like kind of aha moments or like strategies you've used as coaches to kind of shift teacher mindsets around, like the possibilities for this work. 06:10 - Kassia (Guest) Yeah, I think. 06:11 I mean I think that is is often what stops us from trying something new is fear and fear of losing control or what we think we should be, how we think something should look or be, and so I guess like a strategy perhaps is just to particularly around conversation is just to start small. 06:42 Our book focuses a lot on hands-on conversations, which are whole class or larger group conversations, but we also do a lot of work in smaller turn and talks or small group conversations, and sometimes those can be safer places to try some of this work, where you're letting students or making space for students' voices to kind of lead the conversations and try some new things out. And then usually in those situations like I'm just so amazed by what students can do, even when it's imperfect and weird, things happen, like they just have so many skills that sometimes we underestimate have so many skills that sometimes we underestimate that, like when I have time to like reflect on what students do in those spaces, I'm always impressed and it always inspires me to like to keep going and keep trying to center students' voices in conversations because you know, we have to trust that students can do it and I think when we can replace some of that fear with trust in students' abilities. That helps us to continue on and helps us get over some of our own hangups as adults. 08:01 - Christy (Guest) I think, yeah, when you're in the middle of it and you're kind of in the trenches, it's very easy to look at all the imperfections from a deficit lens and to think this kid never, or this class always, blah, blah, blah. 08:22 And even you know in my case, sometimes to then put that on myself what's wrong with, what am I doing wrong? And that kind of thing. And I think whenever I am able to get a little snippet of a recording of what is actually happening or when I have the luxury of another person coming into the room who write down a little bit of what they see and give that to me, and then I can step back and get curious and think, oh, I wonder why that child is doing. That mindset shift from the critical eye to the curious eye really helps me then approach like what might be some next steps here, what are all the things that they are already doing and they already can do? And I think that it's very hard when you're on your own and you're in the middle of it, but it really helps to have, you know, either just your phone to take a little step back and watch or another person to come in and kind of give you that little bit of that observational perspective to shift your mindset. 09:44 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love those ideas. They're so concrete and actionable, which I think speaks to the larger kind of why I love your book as well. It's like there's the dream and here are the practical ways that we get to that dream, and so I mean one of the things that I think is really powerful. And you guys close the book beautifully too. I think I'm going to be paraphrasing wildly here, but I think it was something around, like you know, letting the students lead, as opposed to like having our plans in place and we're going to do this but we're going to let the students like kind of dictate where we're going. 10:13 And one of the things I really love is that you're cultivating and helping teachers kind of build capacity for listening to what's happening, taking those transcripts or listening to an audio clip or inviting observers to tell you what's going on, and then making a clear decision about where we go, based on what the students can currently do, which I think is what every educator wants to do. But it's just like it's really hard amidst all the things. So I love kind of the setup. You have ideas for how to, you know, start conversations and everything, but then you have these micro lessons that are, if you see this and you're ready for this move, I just I wonder if you all could either speak to how you came up with that, the creation of that, or even just like ones that you really love or have worked well in conversation. 10:58 - Christy (Guest) I think, a lesson now I'm not going to have the number off the top of my head, but a lesson that, depending on the conversation, you're a different, you're different kinds of talkers, and so it's important to have the skill of knowing how to step back and how to step up Because, depending on the circumstances and the topic, we all are one. You know, sometimes we're monopolizing a little and sometimes we're maybe letting others. You know, voices overrun us and we're having hard time getting our voice in. So that's definitely an actionable step that we've taken. I think, in every talk environment that we've been in, if I I don't know what you think, kasia, but in most of the cases that I can remember, that's definitely one that we start with pretty early on. 12:08 - Kassia (Guest) Yeah, I think if you're shifting from kind of a traditional classroom conversation where, like, every comment feeds through the teacher and you're moving towards the kids, like talking more to each other, whether it's one-on-one or in a whole group, you probably want to do some teaching around how to share the conversational space. And especially as you get to larger and larger groups, that's just harder by nature of having more people, more perspectives. You probably have fewer experiences talking in larger groups of people. Talking in larger groups of people and it's just being cognizant of your own voice in a conversation. 12:50 I feel like something that we're like working on for a lifetime. I know that it's something that I think about sometimes when I'm talking with adults, like have I done too much talking? Have I asked anyone else what they thought about this? Or have I just like steamrolled in with my goal? And I'm sure we could also think of like people in our lives that we wish would do a little bit more listening and conversation. So it's something that we're like kind of chipping away at for a lifetime. 13:17 And so to have like to get to like interact with children around learning to do that is challenging, but it's also like really rewarding to see. You know, maybe some, maybe a student who like, really like is dominating the conversation. For many, many conversations learn to like, ask someone, or just to notice that someone's trying to get their voice in and say, like so-and-so is trying to say something here, let's let them go. That can be a really rewarding part of the work too. So we often do like multiple lessons around sharing of the space, you know, at the beginning of working with a group of students, but also like throughout the time working with them. 14:09 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I mean to your point, I think so many of us would probably say just like our like, just the media, the social media, the news, political coverage, like all the things it's like. Could we do a better job about like being in conversations, like these literal kindergartners are doing in your classes, like I mean, yeah, it's like. These are kind of the lifelong skills that I hope that everyone in my community would have. So it's so cool that you can cultivate them at such a young age and and continue to grow them, you know, over over a lifetime. I think about, like, the importance of like priority standards or skills or something like these. These are it right. These are such a through line. 14:44 And one of the things that I loved is that in the back, you have kind of the nurturing debates and planning to disagree sections which are, I think, to the point that I'm thinking about right is. This is when communication often breaks down. Like. Often we can do the thing where we come in and we say our position and then the other person comes in and says their position and then we like, remain like, just that's it, that's the end, and I love this idea that we can cultivate and manufacture some disagreement around like which box is bigger, for example, right, and then go have a conversation where students are learning these skills in a really fun, interesting, like tied to ELA or math standards way. So I'm curious to know, like, what are your favorite parts of those chapters? Or if you want to kind of speak to any of those chapters for folks, because I think people are really curious of how to cultivate that. 15:37 - Kassia (Guest) I think one of the most important things about cultivating, you know, a conversation where people are going to have different opinions, disagreement or just cultivating any engaging conversation is there has to be something worth talking about and interesting to talk about, something where you actually care to listen to what the other person is saying and unfortunately so often we're given curricular materials or questions in our pacing guides that just aren't very interesting for kids to discuss and there's no motivation to really listen to what someone else thinks because it's about performing of knowledge rather than constructing knowledge together. 16:28 So the best thing I think I've learned from having those conversations is how to craft a question that people are really interested in talking about and has some ambiguity and doesn't have a right answer and is going to get at those things that we want to learn about. Like, of course we're interested in working towards the standards, but in a way that nurtures curiosity and kids' questions and like gets at the spaces of ambiguity, because you know, so much of the interesting stuff in life is kind of like ambiguous and could be. There's many aspects of it to think about and we want schools to be places where kids get to engage with those questions and not just the kind of knowledge regurgitation that unfortunately happens a lot in schools. 17:18 - Christy (Guest) Yeah, and I'm thinking about how a lot of the curriculum that we're asked to teach would like to pretend that there isn't ambiguity because it's it's cleaner and it's more efficient to just say you know so and so in history did this because of that and was you know that was the right thing to do, because this was the cause and this was the effect, you know, and just tie it up in a right, nice, neat bow, whereas a lot of you know social studies and science and like these fields out in the wild, like outside of the elementary school classroom, are really quite messy and like thrive on um the ambiguity and that's what like quote unquote, real people who are in these fields are focused on right, so like, even though the children that we're talking with are quite small, I think that they also are very curious and interested in that ambiguity and and it it's sort of insulting to them to just say like oh no, it was this way and we're moving on. 18:28 We've studied that person in history and we, you know we needed about 20 minutes to understand him or her and we're ready to go on or whatever the the topic at hand is like digging in on our own in the background and like finding out more about the topic until we uncover the ambiguity, is, like, both interesting to us as teachers, mentally, and it engages them right. It wakes the kids up and gets them into the conversation rather than just being the receivers of this neatly packaged knowledge. 19:09 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Absolutely. I mean, I was just thinking about you. You guys had the section on, like critical numeracy and critical literacy and like just so much of what you do is centered in justice, which I really appreciate as well, because I think any time that you're like, let's talk about this thing, and I think I think one of the call out boxes that you guys had was like, yeah, we're not going to like take on the perspective of a Nazi or something that you just you don't need to entertain, that both sides are not valid. Like I really appreciate the grounding that you had in both the engagement and also like there there are bumpers on this conversation and we are in the spirit of justice. So just wanted to name that before I forgot to go there. But I also think that idea of curiosity is so present and I can't remember where I read this. 19:53 Eric Francis maybe was citing some research around three to five-year-olds ask like 300 questions a day or something, and I have a three-year-old right now. So I'm like, yes, that is, we're there, 300 questions a day or something, and I have a three-year-old right now. So I'm like, yes, that is, we're there. And by high school, like when I had my students in high school. The curiosity has just I'm sure it's still there, but it is not coming out in the space of a class conversation. So I love that this is a place for them to grapple, because it is present and it actually is probably more present than in older grades where we might actually be willing to have those conversations around nuance more. 20:25 And I think, relatedly, one of the things I loved is I think it might've been in the math section you were talking about like a lovely entry point is often just what do you notice and what do you wonder. Like let's get kids talking about something. As well as all of the real projects Like I loved the target one where you got to print off all of the shoes and say like what, what do we notice about these shoes and gender and color and all the things around branding. So I just I think there are so many amazing things you guys are doing. I just want to like shout them all out for people who haven't bought the book. You need to. But I also wonder you know what is the biggest, maybe challenge that you've either faced as educators yourselves or in coaching teachers? What's like the biggest challenges? They enter the work and they're kind of doing the work that they grapple with and kind of what's that path through or has been the path through for you? 21:17 - Christy (Guest) I mean, I think one of the big challenges, especially right now, is that we're competing as teachers. We're competing with a lot of people in power who are not in schools and who don't know the children in our classes, making decisions for us, and if we're working to center the children that are in our classrooms, like we are the experts or we can work to be the experts on them, and so, you know, trying to find those spaces in our curriculum and in our policies and that is a really big challenge right now and trying to find, okay, like, where can I bend this part of the curriculum to represent the children's interests that I am observing? Where can I get my children's voices heard? And finding physical time in the day to do that as well, as sort of finding the space in all that we're being asked to quote, unquote cover, I think, is the really big challenge, right now kind of way to either mentally like be like okay, we're still doing it and this is why, or like practically kind of how do you, how do you find time? 22:52 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Cause you're, you guys, are clearly finding the time somehow, right. So what? What's a good tip for a teacher who is struggling with that exact thing? Cause I think that is probably many of our listeners and readers. 23:00 - Christy (Guest) So many of our listeners and readers. Well, one is that I know I'm going to have more engagement if I do that right, so I can make the argument that I don't have time for that. But then will my outcome justify speeding through and making sure that I've, you know, read every word of my script and I've made no time to hear anything that anybody said, like what actually went on in the child, children's brains, and what evidence do I have that there was actual learning? And so I think, when I'm like you know, I'm outcomes driven right, we are, as a profession, supposed to be outcomes driven. So I think, if we want to justify making time and making space, we need to look at, like, what is our evidence of engagement and of learning? And if we have more evidence that there was engagement and learning when students were actively involved, their voices were heard, their interests were reflected. You know, for example, I was just saying to Kasia yesterday that we are teaching, we have been reading a selection of different texts about robots and what, how they improve our lives, and one of the students kept interjecting by saying things about how robots are going to take over and robots aren't actually good and they're making people lazy and she was sort of detracting, you know, like it was not. 24:45 I had not asked for her opinion on the matter and we weren't having a debate per se, and so I sort of had to like kind of make this decision. Do I honor that? Do I, you know, chastise her for calling it out? You know, like that decision in the moment there when a kid is presenting like she was trying to come up with a debate and she has a valid point too, right? So, like, not every technological advance in the world of robotics has been unequivocally an improvement on our lives, or or it has at least the potential to go awry. So, um, you know, so I I'm making the choice then to say, okay, as we continue to like read these things, that's an interesting debate to be thinking about. 25:37 Like, here's a robot, is this an improvement? Is this making people's lives better in your opinion or not? Like, this child often is erring on the side of no, and so, like, giving her time to err her thoughts is increasing her engagement. And I know from knowing this child that if I was to just chastise her for that interjection, she would have shut down, like she literally would put her head on the carpet and stop engaging. So yeah, I think it's those like in the moment decisions where you're trying to decide, like what is the outcome that I'm going for? Okay, so then like, what is the action that will get me to that outcome of engagement and learning? 26:22 - Kassia (Guest) then, like, what is the action that will get me to that outcome of engagement and learning? I think, yeah, I guess one of like the challenges and ways through that that I've been thinking about, like working with, um, a group of teachers who are working with like a really restrictive text that's not designed for student centered conversation at all and all the texts that students are going to read are chosen for them and um, and and this particular group of teachers doesn't have a lot of choice there, so they're not like feeling a lot of agency or an autonomy, but they, they value students thinking and talking together and like and I guess something that inspires me is that even when teachers are served um crap better word like they're like brilliant and innovative at like finding ways through, even when, like what I want to do is like just like throw it out the window and be like you can't work with this, but like they're in charge of showing up the next day and figuring out like what am I going to do with what I have here? And so, like I've been very inspired by that group's like efforts to both bring like a lens of criticality to it and thinking about the text that they do have. Like thinking about like this is a text about ancient Rome. Like like whose lives in ancient Rome is this text representing? Is there anyone who's not here? I wonder what you know. I wonder if this is true about their lives. 27:59 And also, just from a more pedagogy perspective, like thinking about like often curriculums will like say, like you should ask your kids like these 15 questions, right, so if you were to just like go through that, you'd just be like peppering them with these questions and they'd just be like little robots like feeding answers back to you or at least like that's what the curriculum thinks kids are going to do. And and they've been working to like okay, how could I take like one of those questions, revise it to be a little bit more open and give chance kids to talk? And yeah, maybe it's not the text I would have chosen, ideally but how do we like swim through the time that we're in, in the systems that we're in, and like bring some light to it? 28:45 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love that. I'm curious to know. I feel like we as teachers have these moments or people I guess people in general have these moments in our lives that are like oh, that was like a very memorable experience, whether in the classroom or not. And I'm curious to know if you have a memorable experience of like either a favorite conversation topic, a favorite thing that a kid said, a favorite, like proud teacher moment, or even just like noticing the body language of engaged kids, like, is there some moment in hands down conversations that has been in your brains? 29:20 - Christy (Guest) I have a couple from last year. I mean, I think each year I'm like watching the trajectory of a class. So this year I'm still in the thick of it, but last year of it. But last year, um, one that I was very proud of is a student who I'd been working with for all year to try to hear others and to notice when he was monopolizing. 29:46 And, um, in one of our later in the year kind of May I conversations, he noticed a kid who had tried five different times to speak and the kid kept talking at the same time as others and letting the others go first. And this was a very, a very empathetic child who always would let others go first. You know, finally, this other child who had been monopolizing noticed that and made space for the more empathetic child to get his voice in and I, like I almost jumped up and down in the middle of the conversation like you did it, you did it. Um, like Kasia said, those are extremely rewarding moments where you think maybe if they forget a lot of the things I taught, they might just take that into their lives somewhere else at some other future moment and make, like humanity, a slightly more empathetic place where people hear each other where people hear each other. 30:54 - Kassia (Guest) I think I'm putting on my math teacher hat for a moment. One of the things that I try to make space for as a math teacher is for kids to get a chance to do more than just computation and math. Like a lot of school, math is about computing in elementary school how do you add and subtract and multiply, divide and how do you follow processes and rules and like. That's such a little tiny corner of what math can be and is outside of school that I want to make sure that kids get a chance to talk about like what is true in math, and is that always true? When is it true? When does it work? When does it not work? Why does it work? Some of those bigger questions. 31:41 So I think, like in my math class we would have a conjecture wall. So conjecture is like something you think may be true in math. It's like a hypothesis kind of, and so when we had like done enough of that that, a kid would say like I have a conjecture and like want to put an idea up there that felt like very rewarding, that they had like come up with like a generalization. They had like discovered something and figured something out that is like brand new knowledge for them, whether it's like you know, it might be something you know, very common knowledge to adults, but like the discovery of something and getting to have that experience felt like that was like opening up good space for children's thinking. 32:33 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) That is so cool. Thank you both for sharing. Those are beautiful stories. I think, knowing that we're almost out of time, I'm going to do kind of a three question speed round here. We'll wrap us up. I could talk to you guys all day, so we'll get to it. The one thing that teachers should or could not should could do once they're ending the episode what would you recommend? Like, if they're like I'm interested in this, I haven't bought the book yet or it's in the mail on the way. I'm going to try something small to start. 33:14 - Christy (Guest) What could that? One thing that we had thought of was to just kind of reflect back on your school day and find a place where you could do a little more listening to your students. So even if you didn't start off with like I'm gonna have a full hands-down conversation with my whole class, you know, just saying to yourself um, you know, at this time of day I'm usually kind have a full hands down conversation with my whole class, you know just saying to yourself you know, at this time of day I'm usually kind of shuffling paperwork or organizing, you know, which is obviously a big part of the teacher's job. But I could probably put that to the side for the moment and go over and listen to what you know these students are talking about as they're unpacking their backpacks or ask some questions. You know, even if it's just a kind of transition moment like that to find a time to position yourself as a listener, it's just one kind of small action where you start to like shift from the teller to the listener. 34:10 - Kassia (Guest) I think maybe try asking a question that you, that you don't know what kids will say too, and that there's many things to say, because that is like both so interesting as a teacher and interesting for students too. 34:23 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Love those ideas. What is something you have been learning about lately? Could be school related, could be different. 34:31 - Christy (Guest) Okay, so I've been digging into Donovan James's book Beyond February and I've been trying to learn and educate myself a lot more about teaching Black history all year, not just in February, and I've been learning a lot and a lot about very interesting people and history, and it's been exciting sharing that with my students. 34:59 - Kassia (Guest) Adding on a different book. I've gotten a chance to read a book that is not yet out yet but is wonderful, called Lessons in Community by Mari Dean, and it is about reframing behaviors in the classroom. That challenges us, but through an asset-based lens, but also through like, a very practical lens of like. How am I going to respond to this in the moment? And it's a wonderful book and I have so much to learn about that topic and I'm really enjoying it. 35:34 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Amazing. Now I have added to my to be read list, so thank you. I am curious to know where listeners can follow you. Connect with you will, of course, link to the book and the blog post and the show notes and everything will also link to an amazing resource that you guys are going to share with us for free. So thank you so much for that. If anyone you want to speak to that in addition, feel free for free. 35:53 - Christy (Guest) So thank you so much for that. If anyone you want to speak to that in addition, feel free. I think we're planning on sharing a little comparative table of just some of the things that are kind of going back to that what we imagine, you know, a conversation I mean sorry, a classroom that's rooted in conversation might be like. So we'll kind of share a little table comparing what traditional classroom discourse is like compared to one where this kind of conversation takes the stage, and then we're also hoping to share a lesson just for people to try out and get started. 36:34 - Kassia (Guest) And you can find us on our website blog hands down, speakoutwordpresscom, and then also at Cassia Wedekind on Instagram and Blue Sky. 36:59 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Instagram and blue sky and and um. You can find me on Instagram at ch thompson188. Thank you so so much, both of you. This has been an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you for having us.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
January 2026
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