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Kicking off season 7 of The Time for Teachership Podcast, host Lindsay dives into an overview of what’s new and upcoming on the podcast. She invites teachers, instructional coaches, curriculum directors, and principals to dive into an enriched focus on student-led discourse.
In this season, we're delving into discourse as a central theme, something that resonates deeply with Lindsay’s longstanding passion. Her PhD program focused on student voice, and continues to inform her work. It is now evolving into a broader discussion on student-led and staff-led discourse across leadership levels. Some focus areas for the podcast in this season will include:
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Lindsay Lyons: I'm educational justice coach Lindsay Lyons, and here on the Time for Teachership podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. [00:00:16] I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings. If you're a principal, assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach, or teacher who enjoys nerding out about co-creating curriculum with students, I made this show for you. [00:00:36] Here we go Welcome back to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. Super excited to be here in season seven with the season seven premiere. I cannot believe this podcast has gone on for so long, and yet I can because I love pursuing a long passion project and I continue to find interesting things in the world that people are doing. [00:00:59] [00:01:00] Some brilliant, gracious authors, teachers, leaders who have volunteered their time to come onto the podcast to share their wisdom with others. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you, audience, for making this endeavor so possible and, uh, uh, you know, allowed us to continue this great work. For some updates for season seven, we have been, as you may have noticed, longtime listeners, kind of niching down over the last year or so into my favorite topic, which is discourse, specifically student-led discourse quite often. [00:01:33] And just thinking about how everything that we do and all of the mini-series topics we have done kind of touch on this. They connect in some way back to discourse. And I remember on a personal note, when I was in my PhD program, I had a professor whose job was to kind of teach the first c-course of the, the program or the first one when we were starting to really to get into our studies, and it was like, "All right, so what do you want? [00:01:57] Like, you're up there, you're giving a presentation [00:02:00] of either your dissertation or something professionally in the future. Like, what do you want the theme or the topic to be on the banner or the PowerPoint slide behind you?" Right? Like, what is the thing? And mine at the time was student voice because that was what my research was in. [00:02:12] And I-- It's funny, that was, you know, years ago. It's almost a dec- a decade ago, and it is still to this day, uh, student voice in a sense, right? It's, it's very much student-led discourse in classroom spaces and, and staff-led discourse, uh, and shared leadership kind of versions of discourse at the leadership level. [00:02:29] And so really excited to continue this and just name it as a focus. You know, maybe-- I think we'll keep the podcast name the same, but we may see some changes to or updates to kind of taglines or images as we've done over the years, but really excited about this new focus. And so with that, let's talk a little bit about how that kind of maps on to our typical categories or what I've been calling mini-series episodes as we go throughout each school year. [00:02:54] Those will mostly stay the same. I think they-- I always reserve the right to kind of evolve [00:03:00] the thinking and foc-foci, foci of the episodes. But we typically do the following, and I'll kind of name the existing focus areas and then also share how that kind of meets the discourse focus and what that means moving forward in this current season seven. [00:03:19] Okay, so leadership. We've historically done some stuff around leadership. We have focused on Kind of like leadership roles, principal district leadership. We've talked about student leadership and shared leadership, which is how we really entered that first. As I said, it harkens back to my PhD work, um, adaptive leadership as really one of the prominent leadership theories and frameworks that we operate from in a lot of our change work. [00:03:43] We lead change So governance change, adaptive student leadership. I think all of this requires discourse, because if you are engaging with an adaptive challenge, you gotta talk about it. You gotta talk about hard things, right? You have to know how to design, [00:04:00] facilitate, and reflect on or repair harm from any discourse. [00:04:04] Um, that, that's really critical. And so while we think about leadership in this kind of big way, we're also thinking about the stakeholders in the room, and not in the room, but, like, in the room when we're having a discussion, and we're dialoguing or we're deliberating. Whatever we're doing, whatever we're talking about, the purpose of our conversation, um, can be varied. [00:04:25] But how we talk to one another and how we design intentionally for multiple viewpoints to be in the room, and to ensure there's equity of voice and just, you know, all the things we talk about with discourse, I think that's gonna be kind of the lens that we look out with leadership. Okay. The next one, which was a new one this year in season six, instructional coaching. [00:04:47] So we're speaking directly to instructional coaches in the space or, you know, teacher, team leaders, things like that. This is where we want to think about how we coach discourse, so either the planning for discourse, so what's the literal [00:05:00] prompt I'm going to give students, uh, responsive moves, so what do I do as the teacher, particularly coaching that adaptive change to I used to just deliver instruction and have my PowerPoint and go slide by slide, and now I am handing over control, so to speak, to the students, and, like, not sure what the teacher role is. [00:05:16] Like, there's some responsive moves to notice and coach on as you're, um, coaching. You could also do some modeling of how to facilitate that student-led discourse effectively. I think there's a lot of rich stuff there we could do with instructional coach series. Now, our culture of challenge used to be kind of like our culture of challenge and discussion, and that would be where a lot of our discourse stuff lived, and then it just kind of, like, overflowed into everything else. [00:05:39] So that will may, like, kind of be maintained as a cultural, class culture, school culture piece. And specifically, we wanna get into cultivating that culture of challenge that enables us to have really good discourse. So bringing in kind of Hammond's Learn to Learn skills. Read a Hammond's book that came out in 2025. [00:05:58] We've had her on the podcast. [00:06:00] Go back and listen to that episode if you're curious. Super good. But really thinking about rebuilding students' learning power as opposed to over-scaffolding, uh, letting students grapple, like, how to co-create discourse agreements and what that means to have that accountability to those agreements, right? [00:06:14] Like, a lot of themes there around the culture of the class and the space. Okay. We also have been doing social studies miniseries for the last couple of, I think couple of years now. Definitely wanna continue that. I do a lot of work in social studies. Also, we may consider bringing in, you know, a literacy focus or kind of embed that um, and do kind of a social studies/literacy or, like, humanities focus curricularly. [00:06:39] That might mean that we explore curriculum-specific topics for existing curricula or, like, designing curricula with the humanities lens in mind or s- or kind of practicing specific humanities skills. Um, that could mean a lot of inquiry, which of course, and much of the stuff that we do, I just wanna add this caveat, much of the stuff we do in the social studies [00:07:00] band is not specific only to social studies. [00:07:02] For example, a lot of the social studies work we do is related to inquiry. Inquiry is totally present in many science curricula, in, in a lot of, like, illustrative math curricula. There's a lot of other spaces where that is valuable, not just humanities. Um, talking about high-emotion topics, political topics specifically is very social studies and, and often, you know, could be literacy-focused as well. [00:07:25] So we'll, we'll continue that. This is Leah popping in to share the free resource for this episode, a new discourse playlist. You can find it at the blog post for this episode, www.lindseybethlyons.com/blog/273. Now back to the show. And then systems transformation, so lots of stuff here. I mean, we could talk about kind of like adaptive transformation, so again, that kind of leading change that was similar to the leadership series. [00:07:51] We could talk about equitable assessment, which we've done for years in the past. We could talk about kind of peer-to-peer learning and how that shift, like how you shift a culture of a [00:08:00] school to, or a district even, right, from teacher-directed instruction to peer-to-peer learning from even the example, I think, often of Socratic seminars where Students will just look at the teacher when they're speaking, right? [00:08:14] Or, or sharing, and we need to get that teacher or peer-to-peer focus going. We need to cultivate kind of a sense of, "I'm here to learn with my peers. My peers' ideas expand my thinking, deepen my thinking, challenge my thinking in ways that I could never do by myself or just my interactions with the teacher," right? [00:08:32] That there's a real value add in engaging. Um, so again, there's that a- adaptive kind of mindset shift of the system there. Um, also really excited this coming season we're gonna be talking in the systems transformation lens around intergenerational learning. So r- really valuing ways of learning that indigenous folks, for example, have been doing for thousands of years, right, since time immemorial. [00:08:56] That is a centerpiece of, of education and how it is done, [00:09:00] and it is far too rare in particularly US systems that I have worked in and experienced anyways. And like, how do we do that? How do we community partner? How do we partner with families and existing stakeholders within our current school communities? [00:09:16] That's gonna be a really good one, I think. Um, families. We are gonna continue this family series where we are kind of sharing directly with families, creating episodes where you could share them with family members or stakeholders, caretakers in your school systems if that feels good to you. Also recognizing that a lot of teachers and leaders wear two hats. [00:09:36] One is the kind of the family hat, um, and one is the this-is-my-professional-role hat, and noticing, uh, like, for example, I-- my experience has always been in teaching the older kiddos, like in high school And then having a younger kid, like those are similar skills maybe, but definitely different in their implementation. [00:09:56] And so wanting to also recognize that [00:10:00] for the kind of spectrum of things we talk about, there's value at all ages, and it looks different. And so what can families do to partner with the teachers? Um, and also just given my kind of bias towards the younger like parent, uh, experience of where I am, talking a lot about younger kids there. [00:10:16] So any of our early childhood educators, like feel free to tune into those episodes as well, um, as sharing them directly, but also for your professional, uh, role. So that will continue to be a space where we talk, uh, about ideas that families can bring. So current events, how do we talk about those in the family space? [00:10:34] Um, how do we, you know, read and help students engage with books and get that critical thinking going? Uh, are there thematic frameworks that we could work with both in school and at home, and kind of emphasize in both places so that we're kind of spiraling the learning scales? When we think about curriculum design for our final piece here that we talk about, uh, thinking about a unit arc, yes, but also playing with this idea [00:11:00] recently of a discourse arc. [00:11:01] And so what are kind of the discourse activities that could form the arc of a unit? Where does discourse show up within a typical unit arc? I don't think there's any one right way to do a unit arc, but kind of thinking about what that might look like, as well as question prompts. So the literal content selection and phrasing of a question that goes in front of students for discourse is really critical, so we'll do some practice with that. [00:11:22] Historically in the past, we have had people come in and do kind of building a unit live on the show. We could totally do something like that here. Um, discourse formats, talking more about those. Uh, I'm reading a great book right now, which we'll, we'll spotlight ar- around, um, discourse formats and what that [00:11:40] how those could be elevated and tips for those, um, as well as any other resources. We'll continue to, uh, parallel the podcast in our YouTube channel with our five-minute YouTube short tutorials, spotlighting resources that complement this of course as well. Um, and, and then I also wanna just kind of extend an invite here as we think about [00:12:00] panel ideas, um, or, or guest ideas I should say, more broadly. [00:12:04] I think it would be super cool to have a panel. I've had, uh, podcast friends who have done things like this, and it sounds so awesome. So if anyone is interested in, you know, coming on a panel, we are certainly going to be excited about episode 300, which will air in mid-April of 2027. Um, that could be a fun one to celebrate, but really at any point Around any of these topics, it'd be really cool to have a panel of folks on either to, you know, share their brilliance, uh, or y- have a particular focus around coaching conundrums. [00:12:36] So like I could take on kind of a coach role or any, any of us, right? Could take on coach roles and we'll do some peer coaching, and we'll just bring a question to the space or a series of questions around a topic to the space. I think that could be really neat. We could also, this would be so cool, and I think this could fit nicely in the curriculum one. [00:12:52] Um, one of the things that I think we forget about a lot, I have certainly forgot about a lot as a coach in the past and have been [00:13:00] really emphasizing it lately, is analyzing student work. And so when you are doing this for discourse, it looks a little different or is, is a little different. And so if we could model, demo, practice, I also think it's just great to know what other people are doing and how they're processing the pedagogy. [00:13:17] Please feel free to volunteer to come on and unpack a discourse experience on the podcast with us. We could bring a transcript, analyze the transcript. You know, where are the moves that we wanna highlight and celebrate? What are our kind of next teacher moves? Where do we want this conversation to go in the future? [00:13:32] So really, really exciting things. Okay, we have so much goodness for you in season seven. We are going to have our September kickoff, so the rest of this month is going to be the regulated classroom with Emily Reed Daniel, so pulling in polyvagal theory and how do we just create a culture of perceived safety and belonging. [00:13:52] Followed by Joe Schmidt, who is the incoming president of NCSS, and Nichelle Pinkney, who talk about their amazing book, Civil Discourse. We are gonna [00:14:00] have an episode, uh, from me, just myself, where we're talking about reframing discussion prompts, which is a resource created after doing some work with Dr. [00:14:08] Eric Soto-Shud and San Francisco Unified School District and some awesome teachers there. And so how do we like literally language the prompts that we invite people to discuss and talk about? Um, as well as a little bit of a synthesis of that awesome book I was talking about edited by Jane C. Lo. Um, what, kind of why and how we wanna start classroom discussions now, like in September. [00:14:30] Uh, so that's gonna be really cool. We're gonna do an intergenerational learning series, hoping to have Dr. Anton Troyer on. Um, Karen Foley talking about grandmother circles in schools would be so amazing. Ivy Mitchell, who is a Massachusetts eighth grade teacher who has done some fantastic work and continues to do fantastic work around bridging the generations. [00:14:47] Uh, started as kind of like a, a singular event or annual event and now is m- moving into a TV show, which is so cool. Um, lots of stuff. We got stuff coming up for families around, you know, book-based [00:15:00] prompts for conversation We are going to talk about some different, like, dinner table rituals and, and protocols. [00:15:06] We'll have our annual kind of like approach to holiday conversations piece. And then in January, Zaretta Hammond is having an amazing curriculum design event this summer, and we're hoping that we can invite some participants in that to share their amazing curricular creations with us for a January 2027 series. [00:15:24] So that will be super cool. Uh, and, and yeah, oh my gosh, there's, there's so much I could go on and on. I will stop there. Uh, actually no, one more. I just read this wording, and so this is gonna be super cool. We gotta touch base again in August, but, um, Dr. Jada Colmeyer has this great chapter in this book on, on discourse I've been reading where they talk about the Socratic seminars the teachers have been doing with the Pledge of Allegiance, and it's like the first one they do in the year, um, which is why I wanted to air it in, in this month, but it's not in the cards for us. [00:15:58] Uh, it is super cool, [00:16:00] and so thinking about Socratic seminars more broadly, but also what are the specific types of prompts you could play with both like ... I mean, yes, that's a social studies thing, for sure, but I think you could do this in any, uh, you know, kind of as an intro activity in any content area so that you can build the capacity for discourse throughout the remainder of the year. [00:16:19] Because e- like if you have any exposure to schools where pledges are said, this is an entry point for students. Uh, so it could be super cool, and if you're a content teacher who is not social studies, you could co-facilitate or have some sort of like debrief activity where like the social studies person debriefs most of the social studies pieces and themes, and then you as the non social studies teacher could, uh, debrief some more of the, like, discussion format and like- Configuration, um, ways that we interact with one another, agreement alignment, that kind of thing. [00:16:55] Okay, I have talked enough for this intro episode. Get excited. Let me know if you have questions, [00:17:00] suggestions for episodes for the coming season. Really excited to have you back, and our freebie, as always, we're gonna have a freebie for this episode. Our freebie is our Culture of Challenge and Discussion playlist. [00:17:10] I'm realizing as I'm speaking this that I probably should update this. Playlist has not been updated for a bit, but it is certainly kind of a, a best of in terms of the freebies that we have, the podcast and YouTube episodes that we have that all pertain to a culture of challenge and discourse, um, from our first, you know, five seasons or so. [00:17:26] So definitely encourage you to check out the back list of all of the episodes in the past, but that's a good starting place if you are interested in this focused topic. That will be at lindseybethlyons.com/blog/273 to go grab that freebie and get a summary of today's notes from the show. If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazzed as I am about my coaching program for increasing student-led discussions in your school. [00:17:53] Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book Street Data. They say students should be talking for [00:18:00] 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period? I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. [00:18:08] If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm how I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full-day trainings and discussion protocols like Circle and Socratic Seminar to follow-up classroom visits where I can plan, witness, and debrief discussion-based lessons with your teachers. [00:18:24] Sign up for a nerdy, no-strings-attached brainstorm call at lindseybethlyons.com/contact. Until next time, leaders, think big, act brave, and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast Network. Better today, better tomorrow, and the podcast to get you there. Explore more podcasts at www.teachbetterpodcastnetwork.com. [00:18:47] We'll see you on the next episode
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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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