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In this episode, we’re continuing to look at leading change in turnaround and low-performing schools by diving into a transformative book: “Pedagogies of Student Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency" by Shane Safir, Sawson Jaber, Crystal Watson, and Marlo Bagsik.
Lindsay talks about her key takeaways from the book, such as how to co-create educational environments where students transition from participants to partners. We look at themes of centering marginalized voices and leveraging meaningful street data, exploring how to elevate schools from “good” to “great” in the context of school redesign. Why? From the Research The book is anchored in a liberatory purpose of education, one where education is co-created with students. The authors’ research shows that by integrating pedagogies of voice and agency, we can enhance educational practices and address equity transformation. This is done by centering those who have been at the margins—collecting “street data”—and by embracing qualitative outcomes that are harder to measure but hold significant value. What? Action Steps for Educators To start working toward the vision of student-centered education spaces, educators can incorporate the following steps: Step 1: Understand and collect street data. You can read the book and listen to the podcast for more information, but educators can begin by collecting street data that goes deeper into the students’ experience. This could be looking at quotes and non-verbal cues that come up from student discussions. The goal is to get data from students, typically on the margins, that informs your decision-making and action steps. Step 2: Use good inquiry questions in your data. The characteristics of these include:
As an instructional leadership team or school redesign team, start by co-creating a question that is at the heart of your intended change. Step 3: Rid yourself of the “10 toxins.” The authors talk about “toxins” like the idea that “the teacher is the expert” or “containment” (i.e., no moving around the classroom). that educators need to know and remove from their mindset. Step 4: Instead, embrace the 10 ways of positively showing up. Some of these include deep listening, learning inter-generationally, and interacting with the whole person. Step 5: Integrate pedagogies of voice. The authors outline eight different areas to focus on, organized into the four agency domains:
Final Tip: Always anchor your educational approach in the core purpose of witnessing and affirming one another's humanity, ensuring that every practice reflects this liberatory vision. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Post-Unit Perception Survey with you for free. Also, pick up your copy of “Pedagogies of Student Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency,” or the first book by the authors, “Street Data.” And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 241 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:03 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 241, and so you can get the show notes and all of the info at the blog post, lindsaybethlyonscom, slash 241. Today we're talking all things pedagogies of voice. This is a beautiful, beautiful book. I loved Street Data. As you probably know if you listen regularly to this podcast, I am constantly citing Street Data because it's excellent and this is kind of the second version. That really not second version. What is it called? Sequel? There we go, that kind of follows up and says how do we situate this idea of Street Data in instructional realities, like within the classroom? What does this look like? 00:45 So this book Patagogies of Student Voice, Street Data and the Path to Student Agency was written by four awesome humans Shane Sapir, Saswan Jaber, Crystal Watson and Marlo Bugsyk. I'm really hoping I'm pronouncing everyone's names correctly. They are incredible and I would love to have them on the podcast, so stay tuned, Perhaps we will get them. I think they're very busy. They've been making the rounds of all the places, but this episode is really just going to keep in mind this idea of school transformation and school redesign, elevating schools from good to great. And how do we take some of the brilliant ideas in this book and apply them to perhaps a strategic plan, a kind of new approach or mental model to how we're going to move forth in partnership with students and not just as a team of adults. So here we go. 01:44 One of the things that I love is that they really anchor in a liberatory purpose of education. They have this beautiful, beautiful art throughout the book, um and and framework um, grounded in the olive tree, um, which is important to Palestine, and rooted as a symbol of justice, which I really appreciate. And this idea of this liberatory purpose of education being one that is co-created with students. Right, An educational experience where students are true partners and co-creators, where students can ask questions of society they live in, they develop critical literacy and numeracy, they shape the conditions of their lives, they develop their own moral compasses. Right, what do they think is right from wrong? What is truth from fact? And perhaps my favorite one although I do love all of them is to witness and affirm one another's humanity. Like, how cool would that be if all of our schools centered the witnessing and affirmations of one another's humanity? I think often we talk about student-led discussions and discussions of high emotion topics on this podcast and I think often we avoid or feel uncomfortable with topics of discussion that bring up high emotions because we are fearful that someone's humanity will not be affirmed, will not be witnessed, will not be like we will just not uphold someone else's humanity or dignity right or that someone in the class will not. But if that is a core tenet of who we are as a school community, then we are going to make sure that we approach all of the things, including the class discussion, but all of the things, all of the policies and instructional practices and ways of being with each other in that school community, with that mind. I would just love if that was, you know, stated and also like lived by right as a way of being, which they're going to talk about. 03:48 They talk about in the book and we'll talk about shortly here. Throughout there's, of course, tons of ideas of street data to gather everything from having student voice and report cards to noting nonverbal engagement in a classroom visit, tracking feedback that is both affirming and corrective, and I think there's so, so much that we often collect as data. And, of course, if you haven't read the book Street Data, please go back and read that because it's excellent If you are a podcast listener, listen to Street Data, um, which is with shane zephyr and alcee mumby as co-hosts, and they get into a lot of the concepts of the book in audio format with amazing guests. So that's great. But we often focus on this idea of you know satellite or map data, which is just a bit more removed from the day-to-day student experience of being in school, and so we want to make sure that we are as close as possible to kind of that street level view of what students are experiencing. I also just love that at some point they talked about how you know. Quotes and transcripts and also non-verbals from discussions, from discourse in the classroom are artifacts of street data, Like they are about the student experience. You can notice what the students are kind of all grappling with right and how learning is happening, which is just such a cool idea is like student-led discussion or discourse transcripts as street data just oh, it just made my heart sing, okay, so, uh, as we are thinking, you know, through this school transformation, school redesign lens, a couple things that I wanted to share. 05:32 Um, one they share four criteria of good inquiry questions, which does stem from the street data book with jimmy ledugan and, uh, shane zafira as co-authors. So one is that it needs to name the specific group of students or adults it could be like, I think, families or someone at the margins. So we have to, like, center the margins right. That's a key component of kind of their equity transformation cycle Should name an uncomfortable truth that doesn't blame learners and is in our locus of control. I do love this because I'm always looking for good language around this Adaptive leadership scholars I'm always citing Heifetz, Graschau and Linsky on this saying, you know, there's the kind of this underlying belief, habit or loyalty which is a thing that lies at the heart of adaptive challenges, and we have to get to that. 06:19 And so I'm always advocating for a root cause analysis that gets to that, and I just love the phrasing of uncomfortable truth. So good, Um, our good inquiry questions should allow for inquiry and probing, Love that, and it can be used to gather street data to reimagine our pedagogies. I love all of this. So thinking about as a leadership team, an instructional leadership team, a school redesign team, whatever your team is one I would and I said this in the previous episode a few episodes ago, but just you know, I always say there should be students and folks at the margins at the table on the team, but that also that we are first co-creating an inquiry, question right, and doing these things, naming the group we're looking at and seeking data from street data, from naming an uncomfortable truth and being able to ask additional questions and probe to learn more. So I think that is something that is often missing from school transformation efforts or kind of redesign efforts. They talk about the 10 toxins which also were in street data. 07:26 I won't give the whole book away. You need to get the book. There's so many things in here, but I'll just say some highlights that I think are things we talk about a lot and just want to emphasize. One teacher is expert right. Two, rugged individualism. This idea of sorting kids, ranking kids doing independent projects, when really in you know, in life we often learn and thrive with each other right as what we do together. I often feel like this as an instructional coach and PD provider what I do with colleagues is always better. It is always better than what I could do by myself. Could I do it faster by myself? Better than what I could do by myself? Could I do it faster by myself? Yes, it's better, no. So rugged individualism is a toxin Containment containing, whether it's students to desks in seated positions. 08:14 Don't walk around my classroom right. 08:15 Don't go out of the halls. 08:16 Containing within the school right, no field trips. That kind of thing we can't learn within the larger community. Schooling has to happen in, but in seat right. And this idea of scarcity mindset, which is common when we talk about pacing guides, or I don't have time to do circles and center belonging, I don't have time to do revision and resubmission on a project after I give feedback. I have to just give them feedback, give them the grade and then we don't do anything with it, right, Because of time constraints, time being the biggest scarcity mindset that I notice, but I think there's so many that come up in education. So just be wary of those toxins and, of course, get the book for all 10. They say kind of this complimentary or not complimentary, kind of like the flip side of this right 10 ways of being. Include 10 points. 09:09 I want to highlight five here. One is deep listening. This has been truly on my heart for a while now. But deep listening to one another, particularly at the margins. Intergenerational learning I recently listened to a MindShift podcast episode about a preschool that was co-located with an elderly community. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful and joyous and it just warmed my heart but also just activated my imagination to think about the possibilities here and to know that many homes and families are inclusive of like three generations and we often see that as a deficit. We don't often talk about the assets, the opportunities that provides for intergenerational learning, and how do we design classrooms and school communities with that in mind? How do we partner better with families and community members of multiple generations and truly have a partnership where we're learning in community with one another? That could be central to school transformation efforts. 10:16 Additionally, wholism like treating the whole person, schools as sites of healing and relationality as a core way of being right. We are in relationship with one another. We are not here to just, you know, put information in your brain and send you on your way. We are in true relationship. We are going to remember each other for years and decades to come. We mean something to one another, we are curious about one another's personhood and we are committed to healing harm, particularly harm that has been done by school systems to the kids that are in front of us, perhaps by previous schools. Perhaps the school we're in, perhaps the previous generations of schools excuse me of families, Like families, are going to have a hard time coming to institutions of schooling that were harmful to them. Right, there's so many opportunities and reasons for schools as sites of healing. 11:18 Now, the core piece of this book is pedagogies of voice. So they have eight kind of pedagogies they focus on, and I love their metaphor of like a seed store where you can find these different practices. They have so many links and QR codes to really specific practical resources that, again, are just amazing, as well as like videos of students being reflective, and it's so good, the book is so good, but they support four agency domains, these pedagogies of voice, so identity, belonging, inquiry and efficacy, and so I'll just name some of the pedagogies of voice and you can kind of think about, as you order the book and wait for it to be coming to you, ways that you might be able to do this, to make this happen, to make it core to your practice amongst adults as well as your practice instructionally with students. So this idea of story-entation, which is a word from Shane Safir coins for one of her earlier books, this orientation towards stories, I just I love it as being central to supportive of identity as well as other things of course. I think these are all kind of intersectional agency domains. 12:28 Micro-affirmations, right. Where can we just constantly be affirming of kids' strengths, right, and have an asset mindset? I love the idea of micro-affirmations and I've talked before about having values language present in the space in the classroom so that students, when given the opportunity, can share a value or an appreciation for another person in their class, Like this. Just this affirms that idea. So I love it. Belonging, radical inclusion and circle up I talked about circles a lot. I love them. I think it definitely amplifies a sense of belonging. 13:06 Inquiry I think this is the biggest place that I think for instructional kind of I wouldn't say it's like hardest, but I think there is such tension between how we've historically done things in this agency domain and where we could go with it that it feels sometimes like the biggest lift. So I just want to name here those two things are questions over answers, so having a curiosity stance, having inquiry stance to posing great questions and creating great questions. We talk about this when we're designing student-led discussions and discourse opportunities. We want to create a really thoughtful prompt so that students are interested and have opportunities to connect. They actually have a great list of what makes a good compelling question or discussion question, and I think that's worth taking a look at. And I think that that's worth taking a look at, but this idea of question over answers and centering student led discussion in trying to grapple with those questions and answers is is key and a huge shift away from and I mean they cite Joe Feldman. 14:22 We've also talked about Asao Inouye on this podcast and his work. I think there's so, so much here. We've done a whole series about go back and listen to those episodes, but being able to value the feedback, which is about, you know, growth and learning and the joy of learning and building on our skills and being in community and in relationship with one another over grades, which prioritizes, like these structures of traditional schooling and these principles, like rugged individualism where we rank each other. I mean that just right. It's a huge shift, though, because we are often operating in these really seemingly confining situations, but again, I'm thoughtful about the scarcity mindset and the toxins that we shared earlier. And then, finally, efficacy as an agency domain making learning public. 15:23 I love this idea, both like from the standpoint of when I was working in New York Performance Standards Consortium School in New York City, we would have portfolios that students would use at the end of the year to kind of that was about their graduation or moving on to the next grade and ultimately their graduation from high school was based on in lieu of regents exams in many cases, but even when it wasn't, we would still do them because they're so valuable to have a community of people giving you feedback and just having an authentic audience. But also this idea of kind of like place-based learning and being rooted in a place and being in community with people outside of your school system. I've been heartened to think deeply about be in spaces around civic showcases in Massachusetts and New York and this idea of being in community with young people who are striving to make change and that that partnership youth-adult partnership is critical for that and that's a way to make learning public and as well as this idea of reflection and revision is so critical and reminds me of Zaretta Hammond's work around kind of that reflection and I think about metacognition and metastrategic thinking and that coaching that happens student to teacher and teacher to student. So I think that's also really on my heart. I will finally share. 16:46 There's a last section in this book that I love. That is a nod to leaders and, as I am talking as part of this leadership series here and addressing school transformation and redesign, thinking about how we, yes, collect the data, yes, develop the inquiry question. But once you have that data, in response to that inquiry question that you have co-created, ideally with students and multiple stakeholders, like what do you do there? And so the authors share a really great 60-minute sample agenda and I'll just talk you through kind of the components of it and you can get the book to dig in a little deeper. But one there's like this very human check-in, to start right, Because we're whole humans. 17:29 Then when we observe the data, we have this opportunity to reflect as a group, but we stay low inference, we don't interpret at this point, we're just kind of noticing. And then when we interpret, we're naming patterns or themes on post-its I think they recommended like three words or less Like what are those high-level themes? And then think to yourself like what's most important and why? Like what do you think is the most important thing that is coming up in this street data that we're looking at? I love that there's a feeling section. So just having a few minutes to say what are the emotions that came up for you as you were engaging in this, and then you were, as you were engaging in this, and then you know, having a whole group discussion of, like, what matters, what's our greatest opportunity here, what's the entry point for shifting our pedagogy, so that equity transformation cycle is, is really important. So we're, we're doing the deep listening, we're uncovering, like, what is the data actually telling us? You know we're thinking about having how we're going to to move forward. I think this is something that could be truly transformational. It's just doing this 60-minute activity with your leadership team. 18:28 Once you have gathered some street data and learned about the experiences of folks you have identified as being on the margins in relationship to you know what do they have to say about their experiences related to your inquiry question? So all sorts of stuff to get from this book Pedagogies of Voice. But again, thinking about that orientation towards witnessing and affirming one another's humanity as part of a liberatory education is really something that I have been thoughtful about. So, yes, there's all of these ways of doing it and I think the book will be your guide here for this. But just to know what your kind of core purpose is. To have a great inquiry question, guided by identifying who's at the margins and being wary of those various toxins. Right Teacher, as expert, rugged, individualism, containment, scarcity mindset and instead doing some deep listening, intergenerational learning, healing and being in relationship with one another. 19:37 A final note I will share is that there was it's actually in a footnote in this book I was recently writing. I had to write a proposal for doing some work with a state and they said use an active verb. And I had written experience as the verb. And then I doubted myself and I was like, oh, they're not going to think this is an active verb. In this footnote, they say they're not going to think this is an active verb. In this footnote they say here's a note on experience as a verb. 20:06 Quote makes room for qualitative outcomes that are harder to measure but equally valuable. They go on to say the signals and orientation to identity development and belonging as core dimensions of learning. So, absolutely, experience is a verb. That is an important one and, in alignment with the street data principle that what matters isn't always what's easy to measure, I really think this is a valuable takeaway. So good luck with your transformation. Let us know how it's going. Let us know which of these pieces you gravitate towards and what you'd like to learn about next and what you're going to grapple with next as we go on and make our schools amazing places to be humans.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
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