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How are we effectively educating students through a lens of equity and inclusion? And how are we preparing students for a future filled with unpredictability? These are two of the questions that framed our recent conversation with Dr. Erik Youngman on episode 99 of The Time for Teachership podcast. As an educator, a father, and an author, Dr. Youngman draws from years of diverse experience to pinpoint some of the important goals and directions for educators today. We covered a lot in this interview, so make sure you have a listen. Here are some of Dr. Youngman’s key insights that educators should take note of. Preparing Students for an Unknown Future Dr. Youngman’s big dream for education is to see all students develop important life skills. He names a few of them: kindness, curiosity, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and continuous learning. Why these skills? Two reasons:
By focusing on skill development like critical thinking and problem-solving—through disciplines of social studies, math, science, and everything in between—students are better equipped for their futures. Bringing Equity to the Classroom There are two equity lenses that are important in the classroom. Dr. Youngman discussed equity of learning opportunity and justice and equity-focused curriculum. The first, equity of learning opportunities, is related to strategic decision-making, grading practices, and curriculum delivery. The key question here is: Are all students equally able to learn, contribute, and have a voice? Consider the difference between a talkative student who always speaks up in front of class and one who doesn’t—do they both have equal voice? Centering student voice is essential to effective education, so think through how you are providing equal opportunities for all. The second discussion on equity relates to championing justice and equity in the classroom. Dr. Youngman emphasized the importance of defining and using terms correctly and not simply throwing “equity” around as a buzzword. Instead, it revolves around the concept of empathetic understanding to create belonging. It’s about ensuring all voices are heard. And it’s about asking the question: who’s story is being told through the content that’s being taught. Effective Planning and Grading To grade or not to grade—the much-debated question in any educator’s circle. Grading, in Dr. Youngman’s perspective, is essential to track progress and provide objective standards. But grading is not about the grades. It’s about the learning. So, how do you set up your grading system, rubric, or method that promotes learning, encourages, growth through “failure,” and doesn’t penalize students as they grow. One example Dr. Youngman provided was giving students “zero” on an assignment—what’s the purpose? It skews their grade so dramatically and effectively penalizes them in the trial and learning phase. Instead, think of ways you can give students another chance to promote their learning and engagement with the material, rather than demoralizing them and halting progress. --- As you can see, we covered a lot on the podcast with Dr. Youngman! Make sure you listen to his full interview to capture all the nuggets of wisdom he provided. You can also follow him on Twitter at @Erik_Youngman, where he’s very active, or check out his website. TRANSCRIPT Today on the show. I have Dr. Eric Young man who's an education leader, passionate about topics such as homework growth mindset grading and leadership. Published books he's written include the magic of growth mindset and 12 characteristics of deliberate homework as well as a chapter for 100 no nonsense things that all teachers should stop doing. He's also written numerous blogs about growth mindset and grading. This is his 21st year in educational leadership eric is the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for Libertyville District 70 in Libertyville Illinois. Previous education experiences include being a principal in Libertyville as well as an assistant principal and teacher in Gurnee Illinois, let's get to the episode, I'm educational justice coach lindsey Lyons and here on the time for Teacher Ship 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. 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. 00:01:02 If you're a principal Assistant superintendent, curriculum director instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nursing out about co creating curriculum with students. I made this show for you. Here we go dr eric, Young man, welcome to the time for Teacher Ship podcast. Welcome, Thank you for having a conversation with me today. Thank you so much for being here. I'd love for you to just kind of frame for us, you know, what is it? What is important for listeners to know? I just read your bio, but is there anything else that you're kind of wanting people to keep in mind or want people to know about you before we jump into our conversation today, I'm the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning in Libertyville Illinois. I'm the author of two books, 12 characteristics of deliberate homework and the magic of growth mindset. I'm also the father of three daughters. And so when I'm talking about these different conversations, I really like to talk about growth mindset and grading and leadership. But now now I look through it at the lens of a father. So how does this impact my junior in high school, my freshman in high school, my seventh grader, they're all daughters. 00:02:10 How could this help them? Um what have they seen that helps me understand through the lens of a student, what it's like in the classroom. Um Also my wife is a speech pathologist in an elementary school, so she works with early childhood students. And so again, when we're talking about initiatives for a school district, I'm also cognizant how our teachers and staff receiving those. Um and then finally, um just being a parent, I think that's also helpful as we um talk about the clarity of communication. So sometimes we have a plan, but sometimes the timing of that communication is not as good as it should have been. And same with the clarity. And so when we're talking about all of these ideas, you know, you can have ideas but when you're going to implement them, I think you need to be aware of how other people are perceiving them and you need to be Collaborative. So again, I love talking about growth mindset grading and leadership, but also I try to utilize my experiences as a father um as a husband, and then I started as a first grade teacher, but that was years ago, um now I've been an administrator for 20 years. 00:03:15 Um but again, I think you can learn from every situation of how you could make something better, how you could modify the pasting or just get a little bit more collaborative or clear with communication. And I love that you mentioned collaboration in terms of your family structure, you just have so many stakeholder perspectives, just you know, in your own experience, but then also you have the students and the speech pathologist and and as a parent you kind of put that head on and so that's brilliant when it comes to being able to think through that shared leadership kind of collaborative venture um into kind of what we're talking about today and leading um some some large scale changes. So when you think about uh your dream for education really like what what would be the perfect scenario of, you know uh curriculum and instruction just going beautifully and I often ground this and dr Bettina loves quote about freedom, dreaming dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. So so with justice and minds, what's that big dream that you hold? A lot of it, I think focuses on skills that students should have. 00:04:17 Um when we talk about kindness, curiosity, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and continuous learning, um I joke, I wrote it in one of my books um but when I say goodbye to my daughters frequently I just say be kind curious um and collaborative because again or creative sometimes too, I just think they need to remember that when they're going to school, just be kind to people. Um you need to be curious um and you need to be creative. Um but along with those skills and I really like those skills because those can be connected to what you're learning about regardless of if you are early childhood student or a high school student or a teacher. Um So I think those skills, if we can focus on what skills would be helpful, those can kind of frame things, but then when you talk about the learning um I really believe that students should construct their own knowledge. Um but they need to do that with active learning, they can't just passively listen. Um they need to be able to do something. Um They need to have opportunities to be resilient problem solvers. 00:05:20 If we want our students to go out um and have a job and a life where they're contributing citizens, they need to be able to work through some of that resilience and they need to be able to problem solve. They can't just always be giving easy activities um they have to be supported um and be able to solve those problems. Um Also making connections I think is very important with learning where you can talk about even for social studies, what happened in history and then you can make connections of why that happened, whose story is being told, what are the implications. Um And then finally I think with all of this, my dissertation was on grading and it was really about standards based grading, but now I've really shifted to talk more about effective grading. Um But forget grades, let's really just talk about, it needs to be guided by feedback and reflection about some sort of success criteria. So you can be talking to a kindergarten student about science and you can just say the two quality factors that we're looking at our criteria and be. 00:06:25 And if at some sort in the process you're informally walking around and asking them questions, you can empower reflection and at some point if the students or yourself are giving them feedback, they then can improve it. Um I would sometimes read and hear about, you know, um graded and no grades well eventually to be accountable, you do need grades, but let's focus less on that and really focus on how can we get our students to reflect and how can we provide feedback and I think right now we're doing some professional development in our school district about engagement and so it's Kagan um strategies and I think the more we can get our students talking to each other um and asking those questions, you know, rather than You sitting in the class and you're the only one answering um that's maybe one out of 25, we can have all the students talking to a partner, so then we have the engagement and participation of 50% or we can have them talking in groups of four. Um but again the more we can get the students, the more people talking so they can't hide in our classroom. 00:07:29 Um I think in general I've probably listed about 10 or 15 things about it, but I think it starts with the skills that we can infuse, we can come back to and build off of. Um but really if we're talking about education, there needs to be some sort of academics that needs to be guided um and opportunities again to problem solve, but also act on feedback and reflect, Oh wow, that's so beautiful. And actually I think that aligns perfectly to what I was gonna ask you about next when I've been kind of playing around with the stages of curriculum limitation, so sometimes I'll work with the school district and they'll say, okay, I want to do this just a space curriculum thing, they'll jump right to what I would consider kind of the final stage, so we're kind of revamping lessons and we're pulling in really interesting texts and perspectives and we don't have any of the foundational things that you just described that are critical to be able to do this work. And so I heard you describe things like student voice, right? And thinking about embedding that student voice and hearing students speak for students talking to each other and getting that curiosity, thinking about how we grade, linking to standards, thinking about that assessment piece and that feedback and I think those are kind of pillars along the way to getting to, you know, affirming student identities through a particular texts in the curriculum. 00:08:42 I'm curious to know as kind of a district where do you feel like you are in that kind of progression of stages in justice center curriculum? I think with a lot of things, you kind of are at all of the stages at the same time. So I'm looking at your visual that talks about like the first stages mindset and relationships and I think mindset is critical um so you have some sort of common vision um or values or conversation and language. So I think the mindset is important and same with relationships. Um you have to be able to make people feel like they belong. Um you need to have empathy, you need to include people. Um so just at a surface level, I mean we are, we do have a common vision um and we are really focusing on relationships. The pandemic has been awful um but one of the things that it did highlight was the importance of relationships and I think schools and educators and families were reminded that that is a critical part, so um now we're making more time for that and we probably should have before um the next part of choice and voice, um I think the more we can provide our students with choice the better um kind of like a parent, you can just say there's three things you want to get done, you just give that child the choice of which one they want to do first. 00:10:02 Um you might want to say this is a mandatory task you must complete, but once you are done, choose between these or choose how, how you do it or how the product, so I think that choice is important and same with the voice where um you need to get that input, the students can't always be making all of the decisions. Um but at times you should allow them to provide feedback when we're talking about information or initiatives for a school district. A lot of the times it's just easy just ask the parents or even ask the students, the students are surprisingly extremely smart, they'll tell you how they see it. Um we added now to middle school students um to be on our school board as students and again, their first day was yesterday, but just listening to them talk. I'm really looking forward to their future conversations and input because they're experiencing it right now. Um The third part was about assessment, I think assessment is critical, I think we focused a lot on assessing academically and behaviorally, but I think now the bigger focus is how can we support, differentiate and empower. 00:11:07 So not just academics I talked about, we're focusing a little bit more on relationships now now how can we behaviorally understand how all students are doing to see if we can provide more support? Um so I really think that differentiation and support is going to be critical and then finally we're talking about affirming student identities, identities and experiences. Um I think we need to figure out what's developmentally or age appropriate. Um but really think of whose story is being told or left out when we're talking about social studies, how can we show and highlight experiences and characters and people in history who are different or are who similar to some of the people in our current society, our schools in our classrooms and I know Sims Bishop um worded it well about the mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors. So we recently have done some case studies to start talking about that a little bit more in our school district where again, I think we have to provide these opportunities for our students so they can see themselves and make connections with other people that we're learning about beautiful. 00:12:14 I love that response to, of just being in all the places at the same time. Right? And like even if you're kind of moving forward on a stage, you're consistently going back and refining. I think Covid is a great example of how many schools and districts have realized the importance of that. And it sounds like you guys are doing a phenomenal job. Super cool. How you're kind of tapping into each of those pieces and all that you're doing? I think a huge piece for this and I think you touched on this a little bit in terms of like working with the case studies and working with the content and alignment with developmental appropriateness and, and, and that kind of thing. Um, there are certainly, I think mindset shifts that need to happen when teachers or leaders or families even um are trying to see education in a way that is different than it's historically been done. And so making changes like this, especially large scale district changes can be, can be a challenge. Can face resistance and I'm curious to know what mindset shifts you have either seen helps people through, um, think are important for doing this work. I think ultimately we need to be respectful and really focus on relationships to really enhance belonging. 00:13:18 We need to help them understand that there are students in our town, in our state, in our schools um that we need to connect with and make sure that they belong. So I think you can do that in a variety of ways, um but also just, you know, empathy um and understanding different perspectives and experiences, you can say that you had an experience and that is your perspective, but how can you really value and appreciate and embrace some of those other perspectives that we might not have heard? Um same with connections, how can we empower connections um to people's history? You know what I asked them to learn about their family, so then they can build off that. So I think connections are important um equitable opportunities. I think we need to be cautious with that word, um but at the same time that can be a lens to analyze what we're currently offering. You know, can we make sure that it really is equitable um for everyone, there might be people whose parents are are less involved or who will not provide as much feedback or questions about it, but how can we just proactively support them um to really get them to perform the best they can, and then finally, you know, we can talk about a lot of things, but really how can we, when we talk about civics to how can we empower some of that positive change? 00:14:33 It doesn't need to be huge and drastic. Um but at the local level just with involvement or questions or just opportunities, I think ultimately talking about it is great. Um, questioning and reflecting it, but ultimately hopefully it can impact some positive change as well. I love that. Yeah, I think so many times we talk about, you know, preparing students for after they graduate and it's like, well what can they do now in this moment right to be leaders in their communities and have actual authentic opportunities. So we talk about assessment like, and like how can we assess from academic lens and and all of that, but also have the students make an impact right from civic engagement standpoints. I love that point. And just quickly go back to, I know you mentioned, um, being cautious, I think you said with the equity term, can you just say more about that for listeners who, who may not know? I just think it's with a lot of things. Sometimes people will put a word out there and it may not appropriately fit in. Um, but if it's set in the right way for the right purpose, um, or again, just used to to every now and then or as one of your areas to look at. 00:15:35 I think it can be helpful, but just still sometimes, um, there is terminology that is used incorrectly or used, um, incorrectly, really to leverage an impact and I think that has a larger negative impact when that is used, but without even asking the questions, we should be using that as a lens. How can we think of each of our students, How can we think of the environment and the world that they're growing up in? Um, just to understand those different perspectives. Yeah, that makes so much sense. I just think about how when people are like, yeah, adding equity to some to a practice for example, or a data analysis tool and they're not actually being thoughtful about equity and it's just like slapping the word on there doesn't make it equitable. And yeah, I think that's a great point. Um, and when we use language to be incredibly precise. I think diversity is another one that, that I often hear misused, right? When we talk about, I'll often talk about, you know, I I worked in a school that was highly diverse in a school that was not highly diverse. 00:16:38 One of the highly diverse schools with students from 50 different countries. That the diversity of countries and not highly diverse school where 99% of students were racialized as black and brown. That's not highly diverse. That's like the same racial Ization. Yet people will say, Oh, that's a diverse school, right? So it's like divers from what this kind of like treating whiteness as this norm that everyone else is deviant from and using diversity in that way is actually counter to what we're trying to do, right? When we're teaching for justice. So I really appreciate your call to be precise in our language and intentional with that. So thank you for naming that. And even with equity. Sometimes people talk about equity and diversity well, you can't create the diversity so it might be equity and inclusion, but choosing the correct words. Yeah, Excellent, Excellent point. Um, so in terms of like how we do this. So you, you talk a lot about, as you said, growth mindset grading leadership, I think you mentioned a ton of different practices kind of embedded in when you were talking about being at all the stages. What are kind of these actions that are required to get to the dream? 00:17:40 You described? What are the things that have been really successful for you as a leader in your district? What are the things that listeners could really learn from you in order to kind of bring to their own spaces? I mean, I think just awareness and collaboration and flexibility and patients are the most important because we need to be aware of the experiences of everyone, we need to work together. Um, but at the same time, some people are not ready to make a change and other people want to make an extremely fast change. And so again, I think we need to have a plan but be flexible with it and also just patients where it can't be good enough, but we need to continue to make progress and we need to continue to reevaluate, um, to just make a bigger impact on our students. I think some of the things we've been doing to do that, um We do have some district goals this year um that are helping with that emphasis. Um we're in the middle of creating a new strategic plan um where Equity was one of the key words that we wanted to focus on um for our values, so that will help guide some of these conversations more. 00:18:48 Um we're talking about different professional development, even if you just talk about equity within academics, um we have some different reading professional development happening right now. Um we're continuing to talk about engagement, like I said about Kagan, and I think that's important too, because again, it's just enhancing the opportunity and interactions of all the students in the classroom, and so Equity sometimes can look different, but it might even just be of participation. I'm sure my three daughters are great kids and they'll volunteer and they'll typically have the right answer. Um but if one of them is more shy than the other, I still want them to have the opportunity to talk with others. If someone is unsure, I would like them to first be able to talk about it with a partner um or in a small group and then they might feel more comfortable sharing. So I think some of those when we talk about equity, I think there's some academic opportunities that we can continue to build on. Um and then also we're doing some work with P. B. I. S. Where we're looking at classroom and building expectations and again, um I know there's another area we can look at within equity um regarding the equity, regarding the behavior and the consequences and the students that are involved. 00:19:58 So um again, I think there's a lot of areas, um a lot of areas for growth, but I think we're having a lot of positive conversations to kind of build some momentum and I love that. I'm just trying to think of like diving into a topic here. I love that you've talked about the strategic planning process a little bit and like what that kind of looks like what your goals are. And I also know that grading is a huge area of expertise for you. So I'm curious to know if there's one of those that sounds like you might want to dive in and kind of tell us a little bit about what that was like. So I don't know if you you know where the district was in terms of grading and we they are now and talk about how that process move forward, like what what did it look like in practice to have that collaboration be present or in the strategic planning process. I'm always interested in like how people are doing that and getting stakeholder engagement collaboration there as well. Um either one, either one I can talk about both briefly, I mean for grading events essentially we were looking at standards based grading at elementary, so because that was a need for our school district, that's what I wrote my dissertation about. 00:21:00 But as we implemented it, um it works well for k through five, but again there's that transition um of the parents based on their this is and what they are used to. Um So regardless what you call the grade, I think it really needs to be backed by effective grading practices. So now, to me it doesn't matter if it's standards based or not, what are some of those effective grading practices. And so some of the things are not penalizing students with zero that can completely decimate their grade if you're grading already on a scale from 0 to 100 that's 101 um Different options. And that's going to create some challenges too. But if you give them a zero and you average that with two nineties, you know, they're great, is is an f essentially and so they don't need to be allowed to redo every activity um or every assignment or every assessment, but you can provide a process of what they need to do and what they need to reflect. 00:22:01 And then they can make up portions of some assignments or assessments because again you want them to have the learning and the understanding more so than the grade. And so for those final assessments don't allow any reduce but building up to that um kind of like the athlete, you don't want to penalize them for practicing before their performance. And so I did my dissertation. I've been working on it for a long time. I think I've I finished it maybe five years ago, but even since then I continue to, you know, read literature about it. I really like what tom dusky um says with a lot of his recommendations. Um but a lot of it is just, you know, how can we also for example provide feedback during the learning process because if you have an assessment and you give the feedback and you move on to the next unit, they're not acting on any of that. So even if you could provide feedback at half or two thirds through the learning before you give that final assessment um That's another option, so I can talk about grading forever. 00:23:03 I'm passionate about it. Um and I think there's a lot of changes that we can make just to really get the focus on learning um for strategic plan, we're starting to build on one right now where we talked about our values and a mission statement um and then now we're going to be sending out a survey and then including stakeholders in the process and um new this year will also be involving um some current and former students. So I think it's good to get their voice um in the process as well. Um and again, the better questions we can ask up front um that can kind of guide some of our decisions and I think we really do want to be future focused. Um if we're talking about preparing students for jobs that aren't even available right now, we really need to think a little bit differently. And that's why I think having those um, core activities or skills um is really important to build off of as well. I love the idea of including former students too. I didn't even, I haven't heard anyone actually intentionally include former students, but what a brilliant source of ideas and you know, the student experience than someone who's been through the entire system. 00:24:14 I love it. So super cool. Thank you so much for sharing that and any time you want to Sprinkle in wisdom about grading, Happy to listen. So I think that was really, really helpful as well for people who are really grappling with the kind of do we grade and how do we allow retakes or or reduce? And I love the idea of not penalizing for zeros and not penalizing for the practice, Right? Because like why would you do it perfectly the first time you never try to skill you wouldn't And so why would we put that on your permanent record? I think that's a brilliant philosophy and and really grounded in uh in equity for someone who didn't have, you know, the additional resources, the outside tutoring all things and gets it perfect the first time because of all those things. Right. That's, that's why we do it. So I could also under doubt about grading all day. So I'll move on to my next question, which is, have you faced a, is there, I'm sure you face challenges. Is there a particular challenge that you have faced in doing this work and in shifting mindsets around grading for example, or or moving through the strategic planning process. Any of this work where you face a challenge and you're either in it right now and you want to just describe it and what you're trying or that you move through and you're able to kind of talk us through how you work through that challenge. 00:25:25 I think it's probably just a lens to look at, which also could equate to a challenge. So developmentally appropriate conversations, you know, what's appropriate for a first or second grade student compared to a middle school student and who's judging that. Um, so I think based on adults experiences, they may think it's not age appropriate. Well now some of the students are encountering scenarios at an earlier age. So maybe it wasn't then. Um, but to some capacity it is now. And even if you talk about the topic, what language vocabulary or depth do you go to, Um, which still allows you to talk about the topic, um, but not go quite into depth about it. So I think when we're talking about um gender identity and equity, I think that's something that's important to think through. I think we need to understand what do our students need to know. Um but also be aware of what um the thoughts and beliefs are of the stakeholders to, so we can kind of find that alignment, but I think finding and targeting that developmentally appropriate conversations and language is important. 00:26:34 And then the other thing is preparing students to live and work in a world that we don't um know how it is, yet we're preparing them for jobs that don't exist and so we can think about at this time, they may not need this, but they're gonna graduate high school pretty soon. A lot of them will be going on to college and graduate pretty soon. Um thinking of my daughter, she's a junior in high school, you know, in six years, she'll be working in another job um graduated from college. And so how can we prepare them? Because even as we looked at the pandemic jobs right now look very different. Um a lot of people are now working from home, not typically within education, but a lot of the other jobs and when you do that, you can have those conversations with those people as well about how maybe working from home is beneficial for someone who is a veteran who has been in that job for a while, but it might be more difficult for someone new because they can't build those connections. So I just think that's an example of how can we build different skills like collaboration and problem solving and creativity, because again we're preparing our kids for opportunities that we could not even anticipate. 00:27:45 So the more we can do within our classrooms, within our schools where the students feel comfortable um where they are resilient, where they do learn from Phil um again, I try to talk about learning from mistakes and challenges. I don't really talk about failure because if we just have a little mistake or a little challenge and we can embrace those and we expect to learn from them, it's not that big of a deal, but if we stigmatize it and we're having people be afraid of those, then that's gonna be a problem once they are in the real world and do have a job um because they're not used to making mistakes and learning from them, but if we can just show them that it's just part of the process um that's really where the growth happens most. If you just think of any learning that is occurring um and you're on a trajectory, you're just gonna kind of stay on that trajectory. But if you make a mistake, if you have a challenge and you have to think through it, you're then actually going to change some of your thoughts and your strategies and that's where the larger growth will occur. 00:28:45 So I think collectively um that would be my response to some of the challenges and ways to help with the challenges. Just pop it in quick to interrupt this episode, saying that the free resource for the episode which are links to blogs that dr eric young man our guest today has published can be found on our website. To access them. Just go to Lindsay's clients dot com slash blog slash 99. Back to the episode's intolerance. They have banded standards. So it's like if they're four categories of standards, they have like K I don't know if it's K three K five, you know, it's like really young kids and then all the way up to high school. And so they adapt the standards from um year to year band to band and then also um so my background is an intersectional feminist. So um sex education and K. 12 consent standards have been heavily worked on by a few organizations. And so that goes all the way K. To 12. Like what do we I know you mentioned gender identity, Like what do we talk about in kindergarten? Right? And so like consent is like a thing that should be part of kindergarten conversations and maybe you don't call a consent or maybe you do, but and the examples are very very diff from high school, but that concept is core to just being human, Right? 00:29:59 And so it's like yeah. How do we build on these and and talk about it and not write it off as inappropriate to an entire topic like you said, how do we make sure we are directing the information and the examples in a way that is targeted appropriately. So thank you for that. Um wondering what as we kind of go to our final call to action, I'm wondering what one thing would be that listeners can kind of start doing? So we were kind of all over the place and a bunch of different spheres of of things people can do. And so I'm curious to know like what's the starting point? What would you say would be a good place for people to really start and live in alignment with some of the things we've been talking about today if they could just do maybe one thing and when they stop the episode, I usually don't just have one answer, so I still combine a couple, but I think it's empathetically and reflectively valuing experiences and other perspectives. I think it's important, it's not just your own, but how can you understand others? How can you make them feel welcome? I think maximizing the capacity and capabilities is critical. 00:31:00 How can we maximize the capacity of our teachers um and also of our students um they may have different trajectories, but how can we look at each of their skills and abilities and just continuous improvement, help them to continue to grow. And then finally I mentioned it kind of in the previous answer. But again, how can we just help people reflectively persevere with a growth mindset? I think we all, every day face some challenges and just our mindset about those, about how we can become stronger, How can we reflectively learn from everything. Um My daughter's play a lot of soccer, basketball, and golf and I've finally grown up too as I'm getting a little bit older and I just asked different questions now. Um it really isn't if they win the game, if, if if they lose, it's, you know, what did you learn from your opponent? How can you get better? And I think they may have a tough game where they might get less playing time or are frustrated with a certain thing, but how can we build them up so they continue to be confident and understand how they're growing and that same with math, they might have one unit that's challenging. 00:32:07 Um, but how can we help them understand the growth that they've made and where they're improving. So I think that perseverance um is another part, Yeah, that's such a huge piece and I can never remember, I need to just figure out who this is. I can never remember this example, but somewhere in my, my leadership research at some point came across a company who does like, I think it's a $5 million mistake or something and they, they celebrate these people who in the company have cost the organization like at least a million dollars or $5 million dollars and they like put their name of and have this huge celebration because it's like if you're not doing that, then you're not kind of pushing us forward and off to the point where we're learning and actually growing and you're a valuable asset to the team, right? And so I think that's a huge when it comes to growth mindset always makes you think of that. Um I also love the idea of asking better questions, right? What a beautiful kind of thing that we can try to start doing as a call to action like as a next step, right? How can I ask better questions today, That's just so powerful. I mean of course maximizing capacity. 00:33:08 I think the more you can build capacity in your other stakeholders is the better you are as a leader able to do your your job right? And kind of steering the ship and and focusing everyone and kind of giving people what they need so that you're not just taking the the entire district and putting it on your shoulders, right? You have this built capacity and everyone's doing better and research has shown that that you know, we do better when we have that build capacity. So I think in the spirit of learning and growing and you have said that that is, you know, a key piece to this work into your district values. I'm curious to know just something for fun that you have been learning about lately, it can be related to your job, it could be totally different like golf for example, but anything that is interesting um that you've been learning about, I talked about strategic planning and the engagement structures, another one is um sometimes I'm able to read books before they're published and provide feedback to the author. Um so I'm reading one right now about assessment and the beginning of it talks a lot about john Hattie's um effective teaching strategies and so I think it reminds me basically anything I connect to, I I talk about effective T teaching and learning um and grading and growth mindset, but it's just a reminder that there are some really high leverage instructional strategies. 00:34:25 Um one of them being feedback actually a lot of them have to do with growth mindset, but I think just for good instruction, good professional development for our teachers, we can come back to that because if we're trying to help our students the most we should understand which instructor strategies have the largest impact and so again it wasn't purposeful, but as I'm reading that, that I'm making connections with that and same with growth mindset, I present a lot about growth mindset and I try to make a lot of images and I share them out on twitter, just try to promote some conversation or reflection that students ultimately can use because when I talk about growth mindset, I know teachers and educators, it's a challenging time and so sometimes I'll get some pushback when I'm talking about growth mindset and the teachers are going through a difficult year and so I've purposely the last year has just shifted the language to say, how can you empower your students to have a growth mindset? And typically the educators will be modeling that in the same capacity, but I think changing that a little bit um is also helpful, but I think as we're talking about growth mindset, we can also talk about looking at others. 00:35:34 And so I've been reading some articles lately about failure and it's hard to analyze your own failure. Um, but if you're looking at the mistakes or challenges of someone else, you can explain it and you're more open about it. So I think the more we can learn about other people's mistake and talk about it. Um if you're learning grammar or math and you provide an opportunity for the students to be the teacher, they can talk about what the mistake was and it's just a larger, more open conversation. So I think really learning from other mistakes as an area I want to focus more on and then also just different people within science. We talk about equity. Um, but same with resilience, what are some people we can learn from in history, um people of different backgrounds, um and really learn about how they persevered because the more if we're just reading a story when we talk about the character um or we're talking about someone in history, the more we value and analyze some of their skills and attributes, then hopefully our students can then try to emulate those and learn from those as well. 00:36:37 I love that. So I know you mentioned a little bit on twitter, where can listeners learn more about you connected? You see those awesome images and promised around growth mindset. Where would you direct, folks connect with me on twitter at eric underscore young men and it's er I k um I spend a little too much time on twitter, just trying to learn from other teachers and educators throughout the US and the world actually, and then I do have my own website. Um So eric youngman dot com. I have some of my blogs that I've written probably about 12 blogs up there about grading or growth mindset or parenting lately. I've been asked to write about parenting, so I have a couple of blogs about that. Um and then my books are there as well, awesome and as a new parent myself, I'm excited to check out your section on parenting. So I will definitely, I wrote two blog in the spring, so check them out. Excellent. Excellent. And thank you so much dr eric young man for being on the show today, I really appreciate all of your wonderful insight and we will link to all of those pieces that you mentioned in the blog as well as the folks can find them. 00:37:40 Thank you for your work Lindsay. I appreciate the questions and your areas of focus because I think they're important for our educators, our parents and most importantly our students, thank you. If you're leaving this episode wanting more, you're going to love my live coaching intensive curriculum bootcamp. I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. We leave current events into course content and amplify student voices which skyrockets engagement and academic achievement. It energizes educators feeling burns out and it's just two days plus you can reuse the same process any time you create a new unit, which saves time and money. If you can't wait to bring this to your staff, I'm inviting you to sign up for a 20 minute call with me, grab a spot on my calendar at www dot lindsey Beth Lyons dot com slash contact until next time. Leaders continue to 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, teach better dot com slash podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode Today on the show. I have Dr. Eric Young man who's an education leader, passionate about topics such as homework growth mindset grading and leadership. Published books he's written include the magic of growth mindset and 12 characteristics of deliberate homework as well as a chapter for 100 no nonsense things that all teachers should stop doing. He's also written numerous blogs about growth mindset and grading. This is his 21st year in educational leadership eric is the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for Libertyville District 70 in Libertyville Illinois. Previous education experiences include being a principal in Libertyville as well as an assistant principal and teacher in Gurnee Illinois, let's get to the episode, I'm educational justice coach lindsey Lyons and here on the time for Teacher Ship 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. 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. 00:01:02 If you're a principal Assistant superintendent, curriculum director instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nursing out about co creating curriculum with students. I made this show for you. Here we go dr eric, Young man, welcome to the time for Teacher Ship podcast. Welcome, Thank you for having a conversation with me today. Thank you so much for being here. I'd love for you to just kind of frame for us, you know, what is it? What is important for listeners to know? I just read your bio, but is there anything else that you're kind of wanting people to keep in mind or want people to know about you before we jump into our conversation today, I'm the assistant superintendent of teaching and learning in Libertyville Illinois. I'm the author of two books, 12 characteristics of deliberate homework and the magic of growth mindset. I'm also the father of three daughters. And so when I'm talking about these different conversations, I really like to talk about growth mindset and grading and leadership. But now now I look through it at the lens of a father. So how does this impact my junior in high school, my freshman in high school, my seventh grader, they're all daughters. 00:02:10 How could this help them? Um what have they seen that helps me understand through the lens of a student, what it's like in the classroom. Um Also my wife is a speech pathologist in an elementary school, so she works with early childhood students. And so again, when we're talking about initiatives for a school district, I'm also cognizant how our teachers and staff receiving those. Um and then finally, um just being a parent, I think that's also helpful as we um talk about the clarity of communication. So sometimes we have a plan, but sometimes the timing of that communication is not as good as it should have been. And same with the clarity. And so when we're talking about all of these ideas, you know, you can have ideas but when you're going to implement them, I think you need to be aware of how other people are perceiving them and you need to be Collaborative. So again, I love talking about growth mindset grading and leadership, but also I try to utilize my experiences as a father um as a husband, and then I started as a first grade teacher, but that was years ago, um now I've been an administrator for 20 years. 00:03:15 Um but again, I think you can learn from every situation of how you could make something better, how you could modify the pasting or just get a little bit more collaborative or clear with communication. And I love that you mentioned collaboration in terms of your family structure, you just have so many stakeholder perspectives, just you know, in your own experience, but then also you have the students and the speech pathologist and and as a parent you kind of put that head on and so that's brilliant when it comes to being able to think through that shared leadership kind of collaborative venture um into kind of what we're talking about today and leading um some some large scale changes. So when you think about uh your dream for education really like what what would be the perfect scenario of, you know uh curriculum and instruction just going beautifully and I often ground this and dr Bettina loves quote about freedom, dreaming dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. So so with justice and minds, what's that big dream that you hold? A lot of it, I think focuses on skills that students should have. 00:04:17 Um when we talk about kindness, curiosity, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and continuous learning, um I joke, I wrote it in one of my books um but when I say goodbye to my daughters frequently I just say be kind curious um and collaborative because again or creative sometimes too, I just think they need to remember that when they're going to school, just be kind to people. Um you need to be curious um and you need to be creative. Um but along with those skills and I really like those skills because those can be connected to what you're learning about regardless of if you are early childhood student or a high school student or a teacher. Um So I think those skills, if we can focus on what skills would be helpful, those can kind of frame things, but then when you talk about the learning um I really believe that students should construct their own knowledge. Um but they need to do that with active learning, they can't just passively listen. Um they need to be able to do something. Um They need to have opportunities to be resilient problem solvers. 00:05:20 If we want our students to go out um and have a job and a life where they're contributing citizens, they need to be able to work through some of that resilience and they need to be able to problem solve. They can't just always be giving easy activities um they have to be supported um and be able to solve those problems. Um Also making connections I think is very important with learning where you can talk about even for social studies, what happened in history and then you can make connections of why that happened, whose story is being told, what are the implications. Um And then finally I think with all of this, my dissertation was on grading and it was really about standards based grading, but now I've really shifted to talk more about effective grading. Um But forget grades, let's really just talk about, it needs to be guided by feedback and reflection about some sort of success criteria. So you can be talking to a kindergarten student about science and you can just say the two quality factors that we're looking at our criteria and be. 00:06:25 And if at some sort in the process you're informally walking around and asking them questions, you can empower reflection and at some point if the students or yourself are giving them feedback, they then can improve it. Um I would sometimes read and hear about, you know, um graded and no grades well eventually to be accountable, you do need grades, but let's focus less on that and really focus on how can we get our students to reflect and how can we provide feedback and I think right now we're doing some professional development in our school district about engagement and so it's Kagan um strategies and I think the more we can get our students talking to each other um and asking those questions, you know, rather than You sitting in the class and you're the only one answering um that's maybe one out of 25, we can have all the students talking to a partner, so then we have the engagement and participation of 50% or we can have them talking in groups of four. Um but again the more we can get the students, the more people talking so they can't hide in our classroom. 00:07:29 Um I think in general I've probably listed about 10 or 15 things about it, but I think it starts with the skills that we can infuse, we can come back to and build off of. Um but really if we're talking about education, there needs to be some sort of academics that needs to be guided um and opportunities again to problem solve, but also act on feedback and reflect, Oh wow, that's so beautiful. And actually I think that aligns perfectly to what I was gonna ask you about next when I've been kind of playing around with the stages of curriculum limitation, so sometimes I'll work with the school district and they'll say, okay, I want to do this just a space curriculum thing, they'll jump right to what I would consider kind of the final stage, so we're kind of revamping lessons and we're pulling in really interesting texts and perspectives and we don't have any of the foundational things that you just described that are critical to be able to do this work. And so I heard you describe things like student voice, right? And thinking about embedding that student voice and hearing students speak for students talking to each other and getting that curiosity, thinking about how we grade, linking to standards, thinking about that assessment piece and that feedback and I think those are kind of pillars along the way to getting to, you know, affirming student identities through a particular texts in the curriculum. 00:08:42 I'm curious to know as kind of a district where do you feel like you are in that kind of progression of stages in justice center curriculum? I think with a lot of things, you kind of are at all of the stages at the same time. So I'm looking at your visual that talks about like the first stages mindset and relationships and I think mindset is critical um so you have some sort of common vision um or values or conversation and language. So I think the mindset is important and same with relationships. Um you have to be able to make people feel like they belong. Um you need to have empathy, you need to include people. Um so just at a surface level, I mean we are, we do have a common vision um and we are really focusing on relationships. The pandemic has been awful um but one of the things that it did highlight was the importance of relationships and I think schools and educators and families were reminded that that is a critical part, so um now we're making more time for that and we probably should have before um the next part of choice and voice, um I think the more we can provide our students with choice the better um kind of like a parent, you can just say there's three things you want to get done, you just give that child the choice of which one they want to do first. 00:10:02 Um you might want to say this is a mandatory task you must complete, but once you are done, choose between these or choose how, how you do it or how the product, so I think that choice is important and same with the voice where um you need to get that input, the students can't always be making all of the decisions. Um but at times you should allow them to provide feedback when we're talking about information or initiatives for a school district. A lot of the times it's just easy just ask the parents or even ask the students, the students are surprisingly extremely smart, they'll tell you how they see it. Um we added now to middle school students um to be on our school board as students and again, their first day was yesterday, but just listening to them talk. I'm really looking forward to their future conversations and input because they're experiencing it right now. Um The third part was about assessment, I think assessment is critical, I think we focused a lot on assessing academically and behaviorally, but I think now the bigger focus is how can we support, differentiate and empower. 00:11:07 So not just academics I talked about, we're focusing a little bit more on relationships now now how can we behaviorally understand how all students are doing to see if we can provide more support? Um so I really think that differentiation and support is going to be critical and then finally we're talking about affirming student identities, identities and experiences. Um I think we need to figure out what's developmentally or age appropriate. Um but really think of whose story is being told or left out when we're talking about social studies, how can we show and highlight experiences and characters and people in history who are different or are who similar to some of the people in our current society, our schools in our classrooms and I know Sims Bishop um worded it well about the mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors. So we recently have done some case studies to start talking about that a little bit more in our school district where again, I think we have to provide these opportunities for our students so they can see themselves and make connections with other people that we're learning about beautiful. 00:12:14 I love that response to, of just being in all the places at the same time. Right? And like even if you're kind of moving forward on a stage, you're consistently going back and refining. I think Covid is a great example of how many schools and districts have realized the importance of that. And it sounds like you guys are doing a phenomenal job. Super cool. How you're kind of tapping into each of those pieces and all that you're doing? I think a huge piece for this and I think you touched on this a little bit in terms of like working with the case studies and working with the content and alignment with developmental appropriateness and, and, and that kind of thing. Um, there are certainly, I think mindset shifts that need to happen when teachers or leaders or families even um are trying to see education in a way that is different than it's historically been done. And so making changes like this, especially large scale district changes can be, can be a challenge. Can face resistance and I'm curious to know what mindset shifts you have either seen helps people through, um, think are important for doing this work. I think ultimately we need to be respectful and really focus on relationships to really enhance belonging. 00:13:18 We need to help them understand that there are students in our town, in our state, in our schools um that we need to connect with and make sure that they belong. So I think you can do that in a variety of ways, um but also just, you know, empathy um and understanding different perspectives and experiences, you can say that you had an experience and that is your perspective, but how can you really value and appreciate and embrace some of those other perspectives that we might not have heard? Um same with connections, how can we empower connections um to people's history? You know what I asked them to learn about their family, so then they can build off that. So I think connections are important um equitable opportunities. I think we need to be cautious with that word, um but at the same time that can be a lens to analyze what we're currently offering. You know, can we make sure that it really is equitable um for everyone, there might be people whose parents are are less involved or who will not provide as much feedback or questions about it, but how can we just proactively support them um to really get them to perform the best they can, and then finally, you know, we can talk about a lot of things, but really how can we, when we talk about civics to how can we empower some of that positive change? 00:14:33 It doesn't need to be huge and drastic. Um but at the local level just with involvement or questions or just opportunities, I think ultimately talking about it is great. Um, questioning and reflecting it, but ultimately hopefully it can impact some positive change as well. I love that. Yeah, I think so many times we talk about, you know, preparing students for after they graduate and it's like, well what can they do now in this moment right to be leaders in their communities and have actual authentic opportunities. So we talk about assessment like, and like how can we assess from academic lens and and all of that, but also have the students make an impact right from civic engagement standpoints. I love that point. And just quickly go back to, I know you mentioned, um, being cautious, I think you said with the equity term, can you just say more about that for listeners who, who may not know? I just think it's with a lot of things. Sometimes people will put a word out there and it may not appropriately fit in. Um, but if it's set in the right way for the right purpose, um, or again, just used to to every now and then or as one of your areas to look at. 00:15:35 I think it can be helpful, but just still sometimes, um, there is terminology that is used incorrectly or used, um, incorrectly, really to leverage an impact and I think that has a larger negative impact when that is used, but without even asking the questions, we should be using that as a lens. How can we think of each of our students, How can we think of the environment and the world that they're growing up in? Um, just to understand those different perspectives. Yeah, that makes so much sense. I just think about how when people are like, yeah, adding equity to some to a practice for example, or a data analysis tool and they're not actually being thoughtful about equity and it's just like slapping the word on there doesn't make it equitable. And yeah, I think that's a great point. Um, and when we use language to be incredibly precise. I think diversity is another one that, that I often hear misused, right? When we talk about, I'll often talk about, you know, I I worked in a school that was highly diverse in a school that was not highly diverse. 00:16:38 One of the highly diverse schools with students from 50 different countries. That the diversity of countries and not highly diverse school where 99% of students were racialized as black and brown. That's not highly diverse. That's like the same racial Ization. Yet people will say, Oh, that's a diverse school, right? So it's like divers from what this kind of like treating whiteness as this norm that everyone else is deviant from and using diversity in that way is actually counter to what we're trying to do, right? When we're teaching for justice. So I really appreciate your call to be precise in our language and intentional with that. So thank you for naming that. And even with equity. Sometimes people talk about equity and diversity well, you can't create the diversity so it might be equity and inclusion, but choosing the correct words. Yeah, Excellent, Excellent point. Um, so in terms of like how we do this. So you, you talk a lot about, as you said, growth mindset grading leadership, I think you mentioned a ton of different practices kind of embedded in when you were talking about being at all the stages. What are kind of these actions that are required to get to the dream? 00:17:40 You described? What are the things that have been really successful for you as a leader in your district? What are the things that listeners could really learn from you in order to kind of bring to their own spaces? I mean, I think just awareness and collaboration and flexibility and patients are the most important because we need to be aware of the experiences of everyone, we need to work together. Um, but at the same time, some people are not ready to make a change and other people want to make an extremely fast change. And so again, I think we need to have a plan but be flexible with it and also just patients where it can't be good enough, but we need to continue to make progress and we need to continue to reevaluate, um, to just make a bigger impact on our students. I think some of the things we've been doing to do that, um We do have some district goals this year um that are helping with that emphasis. Um we're in the middle of creating a new strategic plan um where Equity was one of the key words that we wanted to focus on um for our values, so that will help guide some of these conversations more. 00:18:48 Um we're talking about different professional development, even if you just talk about equity within academics, um we have some different reading professional development happening right now. Um we're continuing to talk about engagement, like I said about Kagan, and I think that's important too, because again, it's just enhancing the opportunity and interactions of all the students in the classroom, and so Equity sometimes can look different, but it might even just be of participation. I'm sure my three daughters are great kids and they'll volunteer and they'll typically have the right answer. Um but if one of them is more shy than the other, I still want them to have the opportunity to talk with others. If someone is unsure, I would like them to first be able to talk about it with a partner um or in a small group and then they might feel more comfortable sharing. So I think some of those when we talk about equity, I think there's some academic opportunities that we can continue to build on. Um and then also we're doing some work with P. B. I. S. Where we're looking at classroom and building expectations and again, um I know there's another area we can look at within equity um regarding the equity, regarding the behavior and the consequences and the students that are involved. 00:19:58 So um again, I think there's a lot of areas, um a lot of areas for growth, but I think we're having a lot of positive conversations to kind of build some momentum and I love that. I'm just trying to think of like diving into a topic here. I love that you've talked about the strategic planning process a little bit and like what that kind of looks like what your goals are. And I also know that grading is a huge area of expertise for you. So I'm curious to know if there's one of those that sounds like you might want to dive in and kind of tell us a little bit about what that was like. So I don't know if you you know where the district was in terms of grading and we they are now and talk about how that process move forward, like what what did it look like in practice to have that collaboration be present or in the strategic planning process. I'm always interested in like how people are doing that and getting stakeholder engagement collaboration there as well. Um either one, either one I can talk about both briefly, I mean for grading events essentially we were looking at standards based grading at elementary, so because that was a need for our school district, that's what I wrote my dissertation about. 00:21:00 But as we implemented it, um it works well for k through five, but again there's that transition um of the parents based on their this is and what they are used to. Um So regardless what you call the grade, I think it really needs to be backed by effective grading practices. So now, to me it doesn't matter if it's standards based or not, what are some of those effective grading practices. And so some of the things are not penalizing students with zero that can completely decimate their grade if you're grading already on a scale from 0 to 100 that's 101 um Different options. And that's going to create some challenges too. But if you give them a zero and you average that with two nineties, you know, they're great, is is an f essentially and so they don't need to be allowed to redo every activity um or every assignment or every assessment, but you can provide a process of what they need to do and what they need to reflect. 00:22:01 And then they can make up portions of some assignments or assessments because again you want them to have the learning and the understanding more so than the grade. And so for those final assessments don't allow any reduce but building up to that um kind of like the athlete, you don't want to penalize them for practicing before their performance. And so I did my dissertation. I've been working on it for a long time. I think I've I finished it maybe five years ago, but even since then I continue to, you know, read literature about it. I really like what tom dusky um says with a lot of his recommendations. Um but a lot of it is just, you know, how can we also for example provide feedback during the learning process because if you have an assessment and you give the feedback and you move on to the next unit, they're not acting on any of that. So even if you could provide feedback at half or two thirds through the learning before you give that final assessment um That's another option, so I can talk about grading forever. 00:23:03 I'm passionate about it. Um and I think there's a lot of changes that we can make just to really get the focus on learning um for strategic plan, we're starting to build on one right now where we talked about our values and a mission statement um and then now we're going to be sending out a survey and then including stakeholders in the process and um new this year will also be involving um some current and former students. So I think it's good to get their voice um in the process as well. Um and again, the better questions we can ask up front um that can kind of guide some of our decisions and I think we really do want to be future focused. Um if we're talking about preparing students for jobs that aren't even available right now, we really need to think a little bit differently. And that's why I think having those um, core activities or skills um is really important to build off of as well. I love the idea of including former students too. I didn't even, I haven't heard anyone actually intentionally include former students, but what a brilliant source of ideas and you know, the student experience than someone who's been through the entire system. 00:24:14 I love it. So super cool. Thank you so much for sharing that and any time you want to Sprinkle in wisdom about grading, Happy to listen. So I think that was really, really helpful as well for people who are really grappling with the kind of do we grade and how do we allow retakes or or reduce? And I love the idea of not penalizing for zeros and not penalizing for the practice, Right? Because like why would you do it perfectly the first time you never try to skill you wouldn't And so why would we put that on your permanent record? I think that's a brilliant philosophy and and really grounded in uh in equity for someone who didn't have, you know, the additional resources, the outside tutoring all things and gets it perfect the first time because of all those things. Right. That's, that's why we do it. So I could also under doubt about grading all day. So I'll move on to my next question, which is, have you faced a, is there, I'm sure you face challenges. Is there a particular challenge that you have faced in doing this work and in shifting mindsets around grading for example, or or moving through the strategic planning process. Any of this work where you face a challenge and you're either in it right now and you want to just describe it and what you're trying or that you move through and you're able to kind of talk us through how you work through that challenge. 00:25:25 I think it's probably just a lens to look at, which also could equate to a challenge. So developmentally appropriate conversations, you know, what's appropriate for a first or second grade student compared to a middle school student and who's judging that. Um, so I think based on adults experiences, they may think it's not age appropriate. Well now some of the students are encountering scenarios at an earlier age. So maybe it wasn't then. Um, but to some capacity it is now. And even if you talk about the topic, what language vocabulary or depth do you go to, Um, which still allows you to talk about the topic, um, but not go quite into depth about it. So I think when we're talking about um gender identity and equity, I think that's something that's important to think through. I think we need to understand what do our students need to know. Um but also be aware of what um the thoughts and beliefs are of the stakeholders to, so we can kind of find that alignment, but I think finding and targeting that developmentally appropriate conversations and language is important. 00:26:34 And then the other thing is preparing students to live and work in a world that we don't um know how it is, yet we're preparing them for jobs that don't exist and so we can think about at this time, they may not need this, but they're gonna graduate high school pretty soon. A lot of them will be going on to college and graduate pretty soon. Um thinking of my daughter, she's a junior in high school, you know, in six years, she'll be working in another job um graduated from college. And so how can we prepare them? Because even as we looked at the pandemic jobs right now look very different. Um a lot of people are now working from home, not typically within education, but a lot of the other jobs and when you do that, you can have those conversations with those people as well about how maybe working from home is beneficial for someone who is a veteran who has been in that job for a while, but it might be more difficult for someone new because they can't build those connections. So I just think that's an example of how can we build different skills like collaboration and problem solving and creativity, because again we're preparing our kids for opportunities that we could not even anticipate. 00:27:45 So the more we can do within our classrooms, within our schools where the students feel comfortable um where they are resilient, where they do learn from Phil um again, I try to talk about learning from mistakes and challenges. I don't really talk about failure because if we just have a little mistake or a little challenge and we can embrace those and we expect to learn from them, it's not that big of a deal, but if we stigmatize it and we're having people be afraid of those, then that's gonna be a problem once they are in the real world and do have a job um because they're not used to making mistakes and learning from them, but if we can just show them that it's just part of the process um that's really where the growth happens most. If you just think of any learning that is occurring um and you're on a trajectory, you're just gonna kind of stay on that trajectory. But if you make a mistake, if you have a challenge and you have to think through it, you're then actually going to change some of your thoughts and your strategies and that's where the larger growth will occur. 00:28:45 So I think collectively um that would be my response to some of the challenges and ways to help with the challenges. Just pop it in quick to interrupt this episode, saying that the free resource for the episode which are links to blogs that dr eric young man our guest today has published can be found on our website. To access them. Just go to Lindsay's clients dot com slash blog slash 99. Back to the episode's intolerance. They have banded standards. So it's like if they're four categories of standards, they have like K I don't know if it's K three K five, you know, it's like really young kids and then all the way up to high school. And so they adapt the standards from um year to year band to band and then also um so my background is an intersectional feminist. So um sex education and K. 12 consent standards have been heavily worked on by a few organizations. And so that goes all the way K. To 12. Like what do we I know you mentioned gender identity, Like what do we talk about in kindergarten? Right? And so like consent is like a thing that should be part of kindergarten conversations and maybe you don't call a consent or maybe you do, but and the examples are very very diff from high school, but that concept is core to just being human, Right? 00:29:59 And so it's like yeah. How do we build on these and and talk about it and not write it off as inappropriate to an entire topic like you said, how do we make sure we are directing the information and the examples in a way that is targeted appropriately. So thank you for that. Um wondering what as we kind of go to our final call to action, I'm wondering what one thing would be that listeners can kind of start doing? So we were kind of all over the place and a bunch of different spheres of of things people can do. And so I'm curious to know like what's the starting point? What would you say would be a good place for people to really start and live in alignment with some of the things we've been talking about today if they could just do maybe one thing and when they stop the episode, I usually don't just have one answer, so I still combine a couple, but I think it's empathetically and reflectively valuing experiences and other perspectives. I think it's important, it's not just your own, but how can you understand others? How can you make them feel welcome? I think maximizing the capacity and capabilities is critical. 00:31:00 How can we maximize the capacity of our teachers um and also of our students um they may have different trajectories, but how can we look at each of their skills and abilities and just continuous improvement, help them to continue to grow. And then finally I mentioned it kind of in the previous answer. But again, how can we just help people reflectively persevere with a growth mindset? I think we all, every day face some challenges and just our mindset about those, about how we can become stronger, How can we reflectively learn from everything. Um My daughter's play a lot of soccer, basketball, and golf and I've finally grown up too as I'm getting a little bit older and I just asked different questions now. Um it really isn't if they win the game, if, if if they lose, it's, you know, what did you learn from your opponent? How can you get better? And I think they may have a tough game where they might get less playing time or are frustrated with a certain thing, but how can we build them up so they continue to be confident and understand how they're growing and that same with math, they might have one unit that's challenging. 00:32:07 Um, but how can we help them understand the growth that they've made and where they're improving. So I think that perseverance um is another part, Yeah, that's such a huge piece and I can never remember, I need to just figure out who this is. I can never remember this example, but somewhere in my, my leadership research at some point came across a company who does like, I think it's a $5 million mistake or something and they, they celebrate these people who in the company have cost the organization like at least a million dollars or $5 million dollars and they like put their name of and have this huge celebration because it's like if you're not doing that, then you're not kind of pushing us forward and off to the point where we're learning and actually growing and you're a valuable asset to the team, right? And so I think that's a huge when it comes to growth mindset always makes you think of that. Um I also love the idea of asking better questions, right? What a beautiful kind of thing that we can try to start doing as a call to action like as a next step, right? How can I ask better questions today, That's just so powerful. I mean of course maximizing capacity. 00:33:08 I think the more you can build capacity in your other stakeholders is the better you are as a leader able to do your your job right? And kind of steering the ship and and focusing everyone and kind of giving people what they need so that you're not just taking the the entire district and putting it on your shoulders, right? You have this built capacity and everyone's doing better and research has shown that that you know, we do better when we have that build capacity. So I think in the spirit of learning and growing and you have said that that is, you know, a key piece to this work into your district values. I'm curious to know just something for fun that you have been learning about lately, it can be related to your job, it could be totally different like golf for example, but anything that is interesting um that you've been learning about, I talked about strategic planning and the engagement structures, another one is um sometimes I'm able to read books before they're published and provide feedback to the author. Um so I'm reading one right now about assessment and the beginning of it talks a lot about john Hattie's um effective teaching strategies and so I think it reminds me basically anything I connect to, I I talk about effective T teaching and learning um and grading and growth mindset, but it's just a reminder that there are some really high leverage instructional strategies. 00:34:25 Um one of them being feedback actually a lot of them have to do with growth mindset, but I think just for good instruction, good professional development for our teachers, we can come back to that because if we're trying to help our students the most we should understand which instructor strategies have the largest impact and so again it wasn't purposeful, but as I'm reading that, that I'm making connections with that and same with growth mindset, I present a lot about growth mindset and I try to make a lot of images and I share them out on twitter, just try to promote some conversation or reflection that students ultimately can use because when I talk about growth mindset, I know teachers and educators, it's a challenging time and so sometimes I'll get some pushback when I'm talking about growth mindset and the teachers are going through a difficult year and so I've purposely the last year has just shifted the language to say, how can you empower your students to have a growth mindset? And typically the educators will be modeling that in the same capacity, but I think changing that a little bit um is also helpful, but I think as we're talking about growth mindset, we can also talk about looking at others. 00:35:34 And so I've been reading some articles lately about failure and it's hard to analyze your own failure. Um, but if you're looking at the mistakes or challenges of someone else, you can explain it and you're more open about it. So I think the more we can learn about other people's mistake and talk about it. Um if you're learning grammar or math and you provide an opportunity for the students to be the teacher, they can talk about what the mistake was and it's just a larger, more open conversation. So I think really learning from other mistakes as an area I want to focus more on and then also just different people within science. We talk about equity. Um, but same with resilience, what are some people we can learn from in history, um people of different backgrounds, um and really learn about how they persevered because the more if we're just reading a story when we talk about the character um or we're talking about someone in history, the more we value and analyze some of their skills and attributes, then hopefully our students can then try to emulate those and learn from those as well. 00:36:37 I love that. So I know you mentioned a little bit on twitter, where can listeners learn more about you connected? You see those awesome images and promised around growth mindset. Where would you direct, folks connect with me on twitter at eric underscore young men and it's er I k um I spend a little too much time on twitter, just trying to learn from other teachers and educators throughout the US and the world actually, and then I do have my own website. Um So eric youngman dot com. I have some of my blogs that I've written probably about 12 blogs up there about grading or growth mindset or parenting lately. I've been asked to write about parenting, so I have a couple of blogs about that. Um and then my books are there as well, awesome and as a new parent myself, I'm excited to check out your section on parenting. So I will definitely, I wrote two blog in the spring, so check them out. Excellent. Excellent. And thank you so much dr eric young man for being on the show today, I really appreciate all of your wonderful insight and we will link to all of those pieces that you mentioned in the blog as well as the folks can find them. 00:37:40 Thank you for your work Lindsay. I appreciate the questions and your areas of focus because I think they're important for our educators, our parents and most importantly our students, thank you. If you're leaving this episode wanting more, you're going to love my live coaching intensive curriculum bootcamp. I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. We leave current events into course content and amplify student voices which skyrockets engagement and academic achievement. It energizes educators feeling burns out and it's just two days plus you can reuse the same process any time you create a new unit, which saves time and money. If you can't wait to bring this to your staff, I'm inviting you to sign up for a 20 minute call with me, grab a spot on my calendar at www dot lindsey Beth Lyons dot com slash contact until next time. Leaders continue to 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, teach better dot com slash podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode Quotes:
If you enjoyed this episode, I'd highly recommend you take a look at this video on getting teacher buy-in.
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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
March 2025
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