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In this episode we are talking about how education is adaptive—all pieces of it! Whether you’re talking about leadership, curriculum, or something else, education is an adaptive process. This is something to celebrate and embrace in our educational practices.
Here we’ll walk through the theory of adaptive leadership, specifically looking at what adaptive challenges are and how we can confront them in our educational environments. Why? According to researchers Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky (2009), adaptive challenges are “typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs, and loyalties rather than technical complexity and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis.” This is starkly different from a technical challenge that has a clear solution. Adaptive challenges are ongoing and require examining our own beliefs—they don’t have clear solutions. Educators face adaptive challenges daily. For example, each year most educators plan at least the first unit without knowing our students. As students respond in a particular way, we need to shift in response to them… and then keep shifting and shifting! So how can we prepare to be adaptive? There are a few things educators can focus on. 
What?
Preparing to be adaptive—to make decisions, shifts, and pivots in the moment—means taking a few preparatory steps. Educators can incorporate the following practices: Step 1: Get clear on what really matters First and foremost, we have to be clear on what truly matters to us—as a school community, but also to ourselves as individuals. Try breaking it down this way:
Step 2: Develop reusable frameworks & processes Ultimately, we want to spend less time planning and more time doing the important work. If you spend time upfront creating reusable frameworks and processes—aligned with your values and priorities—you can stop reinventing the wheel all the time. Teachers may focus on developing a unit arc with key protocols and text, while leaders may have a data analysis tool so you are always using the same process to look at any data. Step 3: Utilize decision-making tools It can be so helpful to have some tools, frameworks, or steps in place to make decisions. What you use will depend on the type of decision. For example:
Step 4: Practice being adaptive with intentionality Being adaptive can take some practice and you may need to build your capacity in this area. Here are a few practices educators can try:
Step 5: Design flexibly If you go into your lessons, meetings, or conferences with a flexible plan, you’ll be able to adapt and shift as needed. There are many options for flexibility, but here are two to try:
Final Tip This is difficult, challenging work and I’m still deep in the middle of learning this. Adaptive leadership is a lifelong pursuit, so give yourself grace in the process. Sharing space with kids keeps us on our toes! Embrace that as a gift, trying to change the dynamic from frustration to gratitude. To help you build your capacity for adaptive leadership, I’m sharing my Leadership Playlist with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 195 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Welcome to episode 195 of the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm super excited about this episode because its origin was so organic. I was talking to fellow coach, cara Prennikoff, and we were talking about how education is so adaptive, just everything, all pieces right. I was thinking about the leadership lens of adaptive leadership and how we just constantly have to be ready to pivot. And you know, even from a curriculum planning standpoint and CARB was just like no, all of it right, like you plan something and then you get in front of your students and your students do this thing or they respond in this way, and then you just got to like scrap the plan and go for it and it is so adaptive and it's something to celebrate, first and foremost. Wow, teachers, amazing. I was actually listening to someone on a podcast just today at the time of recording this is in early October here but I was just listening to someone who was a teacher and a leader and they were like well, I don't make a ton of decisions as a teacher, but as a leader, and I'm like wait, wait, the most decisions I've ever made, probably in a day, was as a teacher. You were deciding constantly how to respond to this student, how to respond to this student. Okay, now, five students just did this thing. How do you respond? It is exhausting, and so kudos to teachers, first and foremost right Amazing. And educational leaders as well. I mean just all of it. Responding to kids and being in dynamic relationship with people, with humans, with so many humans, is so impressive. So, number one celebration. And now thinking about this idea of adaptive challenges, I'm just going to kind of couch this conversation. In the research and the theory of adaptive leadership, I draw a lot from Heifetz, graf, schau and Linsky's 2009 book on adaptive leadership, and specifically this quote, which is my favorite and you've heard me say it before, most likely quote adaptive challenges are typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs and loyalties rather than technical complexity, and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis. End quote. So think about all that stuff. This is deep stuff. So, when we confront an adaptive challenge this is a longstanding problem that does not have a clear solution, right? It requires us to examine our beliefs and to co-create with fellow stakeholders the way forward. That is a tough thing. It is not a technical challenge where it's a clear solution and we do this thing and now we're done, right? Oh, we don't have computers, we get computers. Now, this particular problem of getting onto the internet is solved right, like it's not. That it is adaptive. It requires us to interrogate ourselves, which is often uncomfortable, to collaborate and co-create with many, many stakeholders, which is hard right. And so, as educators, right. As educators, wherever you are in the system of education perhaps you're a teacher right, you plan for at least unit one, without even knowing your students. On a daily basis, you plan a lesson, students respond to it in a particular way, and then you need to shift in response to that. Like it is all adaptive. So, regardless of where you are, what I want to offer in this episode is a way to prepare to be adaptive. Like, how do we prepare for those moments where you just have to figure it out on the spot, right, and so on? Its kind of surface level interpretation of that scenario. It out on the spot, right, and so on, its kind of surface level interpretation of that scenario of responding on the spot. You wouldn't be able to respond on the spot, right, but I'm going to share some things with you today that will hopefully get you ready for that moment. Okay, first and foremost, we have to be clear on what really truly matters to us, to us as a school community, but also like to us as a person. So right now, for the purpose of today, let's just think of you as an individual. Right, your values, what are they? My top three? Justice, efficiency and transparency. I know that about myself. They may evolve, but I will always check in with them and see if these are the top three. So right now, I am justice, efficiency and transparency, and those three things are really important to me. Importantly, I have noticed as well which one. Those are not necessarily in order. Justice is number one, but I might say transparency is two, and three is efficiency, because I will sacrifice efficiency for justice, right? I know that about myself too, so I think that's another piece like order them. Okay, I also want you to get clear on your top priorities as a human. Again, these evolve and shift in this moment. What are they? So right now? Number one for me is wellness. So this includes, like, my personal health and wellness, and it also includes kind of my family's wellness and my wellness and experience with my relationship to my family. So maybe this is four instead of three categories under the wellness. Next is are my clients. I just want to be super responsive and supportive to the educators and educational systems I'm working with. I'm really excited about that. And next is really just making sure that I help educators and the field of education more broadly, so even those I'm disconnected from, wanting to make sure that, like I can still support folks. And then I guess, if I were to add a fifth, I would say that five is making sure that I personally I guess this is connected to wellness, but can tap into my creativity I'd really like to create and I feel like I'm at my best when I am able to create. So that's five. I recommend closer to three if you can, but, as you can see, it's hard for me. So, thinking about what your top priorities are and again ranking them to say like, okay, my health comes first, like my family's health comes first, and that just has to right. And so naming like what they are in order will help you when we get to the decision making part later. And then also, if you are teaching or you are leading your staff, like I'm going to use a teacher example but you want to get clear on the key understandings or skills that you are building within your community of either students or staff. So for a teacher, this is a little bit more specific. So we'll use that as an example. Identify five skills that you will assess throughout the year. I've talked about this from a curricular lens. This is helpful also from an adaptive lens, because if you have to adapt, it's like okay, students are really interested in this side conversation. We're kind of like going down a rabbit hole. Is it worth it? Does it support a key understanding of this course? Does it support this particular skill? So what are your five skills that you measure throughout the year? What are the key understandings that you come back to again and again, regardless of the specific content you're teaching? That are just key understandings of your course. I recently heard Dr Gloria Ladson Billings on the Street Data Pod, which I love and I've been listening to a lot lately, and so this is not a direct quote but paraphrasing her. She was just saying all disciplines have key ideas and we have to identify those key ideas. If you're not doing that, you're just teaching minutia. I think that's so powerful. You're just teaching minutia If you are not identifying the key ideas. I think she made a reference to a colleague she had worked with who said you know, if someone, if anyone, everybody knew that actually physics was just like a few, a handful of key principles, like everyone would realize how easy physics is, right, so just like the idea of they're constantly just coming back to these key ideas. Those are the things we want to teach, not the litany of dates in a history class, right? Not the litany of names in a history class. Like, what are the key ideas? So, again, just getting clear, and it ultimately helps you to simplify, to make decisions, to be adaptive. So your values, your top priorities as a human and your kind of key understandings and skills that you're working to build. Next, I would also make sure you have a few reusable frameworks and processes so you're not constantly reinventing the wheel. So you spend less time planning, more time doing the important work, and so for teachers, this might be a unit arc with key protocols and key texts that are, like, really essential, and then the rest can be kind of co-created with students, leaders. This might be a data analysis protocol. So, regardless of what data you're looking at, you're constantly doing the same process. You're not reinventing that, spending time planning for each meeting, each data set. It's just. This is the way we do things. Again, I would also identify and practice like those. What are those key human and pedagogical skills that you constantly want to support teachers with, or teachers wanting to support students with, like? What are those like frameworks? What are those processes that we use to practice those skills? Step three have some decision-making tools or steps. Based on certain types of decisions, I have different ones. So, for example, if I'm co-creating with students, my guideline is usually I will adapt to any student ideas until it negatively impacts student learning or it violates justice in some other way. Right, I think it's a violation of justice to negatively impact student learning, but literally any violation of justice. Violation of justice to negatively impact student learning, but literally any violation of justice. So I will generally default to what the students want to do, unless it hurts their learning or imputes justice Policy decisions. I want to similarly default to the people experiencing the most pain. I get this from Ayanna Pressley, whose mom always talked about. You know, the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power. Like, if I have a different idea with the people who are experiencing a pain point around a certain policy. Usually this is the students right, what? What do they say what do they want? And sometimes, on the surface, like what they say they want may be to like uphold an oppressive system, or like a contingent of students want to do that. So I think, of course, digging into that a little bit, but to if, if truly, all cards are on the table and students are like no, actually, this is truly like what is in our best interest and like that is, it truly is like yes, there you go, let's do that, We'll make it happen as much as we can. Instructional decisions. My guide is usually the question is this lesson, activity or assessment, deepening or practicing one of my five key understandings or skills? Right, and so again, going down that rabbit hole in the discussion, great, like we're going to go there because it's developing this key understanding, it's practicing this key skill. I can make the decision to go there in the moment versus. This is a rabbit hole that has nothing to do with a key understanding and we're barely practicing this important skill. Let's like we're going to come back and we're going to do the lesson as planned, or we're going to deviate for two minutes and then we're going to come back and reflect together on how that actually wasn't a helpful deviation to continue. And finally, you know we get so many opportunities, there are so many asks of us, either from colleagues or from students in an educational environment. I think it's important to have a decision-making tool for saying yes to an opportunity or no to an opportunity, and so what I would do there is reflect again you can see how these really connect to that step one, identifying what really matters, getting that clarity, because if I should say yes to an opportunity, I have to first run it through my top priorities. So does it support my top priorities? Does it support me you know supporting educators Does it allow me to contribute to the field of education? Does it actively build my understanding that will contribute to a client's school district you know their wellbeing or does it contradict any of them? So, for example, if I take this opportunity, will it negatively impact my health or my family's wellness? Okay, so then that's, since that's a higher priority right, that maybe loses. So I think it's really just a really important thing to be able to have these decision-making tools and kind of guidelines so that you can expend fewer resources, time, emotion, energy into making them in the moments and you'll just have these to kind of go back to lean on. Okay, step four. I think you really want to practice with intentionality being adaptive. So here's a few ideas Anything around like adaptive challenges, adaptive leadership, the kind of that deep work practice. Those have a few ideas. So here's one Practice identifying the underlying values, beliefs or loyalties that might make you resistant to change or, if you can, what may make others resistant to change. So in conflict resolution, this works too. If you have a conflict at home with a partner, with a family member, with colleagues, when you're facilitating sort of conferences between student to student conflict, when you are maybe engaging with stories, books, tv movies, when you are witnessing political discourse like identify what is the underlying value that is at play here, for example, debate about Second Amendment rights Regardless of where you stand, you can probably identify the folks who are like we need gun control. This is nuts, are wanting safety for themselves and their students I'm thinking about school shootings and like safety is a core, core value there. Right, we want to reduce gun violence, we need safety. Safety is important, right, and I think everyone can agree that safety is actually a goal as well. Perhaps someone who wants gun ownership to defend themselves in case of a home invasion would also say that safety is actually a goal as well. Perhaps someone who wants good ownership to defend themselves in case of a home invasion would also say that safety is a core value. So we actually share the same underlying value. We disagree on approaches to get there and we can dig into the research et cetera, et cetera and go down that path, but we can at least come together around the underlying value. Or perhaps actually it's about freedom, the freedom to do whatever right, and so then we have a competing value of safety and freedom. I bet both folks would say that those things are both important. Freedom and safety are key to a healthy life Right and a healthy society. We need both. The disagreement comes in how we live them out or perhaps what the balance is Right. And so then you have identified the values. You can have that jumping off point. So just identifying those underlying values, beliefs, loyalty that is gonna be critical to being able to then identify them in the moment. Identify when you have an adaptive challenge. Facilitate really effective, healthy conflict resolution, all of that. Another piece to this is I would seek out and participate in conversations about important topics that generate high emotions, where disagreement is either present or possible, where you can't predict. But you could possibly say like, oh yeah, there's going to be some disagreement here. Often you can find that within the school building you know around policy or around a particular topic, you might do this in like a policy forum. You know a local governance body, wherever it is like it might be around the kitchen table, I don't know. So think about where you can participate and just practice engaging in those conversations and then, within it, right, being able to identify those underlying values. I'm not saying this is easy, I am not great at this, but I know this is a place where I can practice and so I'm going to try to at least make a concerted effort to do so. Also, this is a little lighter, but thinking about the responsiveness, the responsive nature of responding in a moment, first of all, I think, just tell yourself you don't have to immediately respond. You, in a moment, first of all, I think just tell yourself you don't have to immediately respond. You can always come back and say like, hey, I see, for example, in a class of students, I see we're really interested in this piece. I didn't plan a lesson around this and I'd love to do some research and let's come back tomorrow. If you are a leader facilitating some family meetings and families are saying, hey, I'm really concerned about this thing and this policy, and you're like, okay, I don't actually have the research on that, I will come back to you, I will make it a point to get back to you in our next meeting or I will follow up with you later this week. Right, you can always come back, even on a shorter note, like you can say I'm not thinking about that for like 10 seconds, take the silence and think about how you want to respond, even if it's just coming up with that sentence of I will get back to you on this. I'm not sure, but knowing that, that's okay. If you want to be more responsive in the moment, you can do something like improv. Right, take an improv class or do some sort of game that requires you to respond and react to other people dynamically. That will just improve your confidence in being you to respond and react to other people dynamically. That will just improve your confidence in being able to respond to a lot of things absurdity in the moment, all right. And the final step I'll share step five, I think, or idea five is really to design flexibly. If we go into any sort of planning for an event, for a meeting, for a conference with students, for a lesson, you know, whatever it is, if we go in knowing that it's going to require us to be adaptive, that this could be kind of our plans can be derailed, and that there actually might be a more fruitful direction to go based on the participants, I think we design more flexibly, we are less surprised and we are more agile and nimble and adaptive in the moment. So I always try to design with flexibility in mind. That could look like creating space for participant voices students, families or staff. It could be that you prioritize in your planning asking questions over sharing information or generating questions from participants so you might share in, for example, a launch of an inquiry cycle. Here's this key concept and here I'm going to give you an opportunity to generate some questions. That's a great structure. You can also embed choice time. This could be workshops, conferences, a choice board, kind of like student to student or staff to staff grappling with a concept. Like embed that space for discussion, for meaning making, for choice and pursuit of what is interesting into your plans and then you automatically have a bit of co-creation there, because they're leading the process, they're choosing what they want to engage in. That was a whole lot of things, and so, as a final tip, I just want to remind you to give yourself grace in this. Adaptive leadership is truly a lifelong pursuit. I have said multiple times in this episode, I am still really deep in the working of this. I do not feel like I am here at a place where I have arrived, and I think so much of this work is that it is constantly responding to reflecting on your needs for growth and pursuing that intentionally. I also think that we have such a lovely opportunity in educational spaces where we get to live in space and live in community with children who keep us on our toes. I mean that is awesome, and so I do think there's a bit of a mindset shift here that will help us embracing that as a gift, as opposed to oh my gosh, this is exhausting, which it totally is. I think it's a both and situation. It is exhausting and it's such a gift. I have felt that as a parent. It is so exhausting, and anyone who is like it's not exhausting you are a liar, but I think it is exhausting and such a gift that I am around this person who constantly is just like do better, like grow. Here's a growth opportunity for you, mom, right, like here is your opportunity to rethink your approach to this. Here is your opportunity to get better quick, because I need you to get better quickly and I need you to be adaptive. And so, just personally, seeing that as a gift, as opposed to this like very large burden, opposed to this like very large burden, I think we changed the dynamic from one of frustration to one of immense gratitude and, if not all the time, at least we tip the scales a little bit in that direction. To help you build your capacity for adoptive leadership, I am sharing my leadership playlist with you. You can get that at today's blog post for the episode at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog slash 195.
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In this episode, we’re talking about the concept of negative peace and positive peace. This impactful framework is not known by many educators but can be transformational for our educational practices as we work towards safe, inclusive, and justice-oriented classrooms..
Why? Educators often avoid high-emotion topics with our students. Areas like current events, politics, or racism are not talked about out of fear that they’re too triggering or upsetting. But this is a mistake, and something Gorski and Matias identify in their 10 elements of white liberalism. Students will always seek out other spaces to have these conversations, so educational settings should be safe, open environments to discuss hard topics. The concept of negative peace and positive peace can help us get there. The history of these terms is fascinating. Jane Addams was the first to use the concept of “negative peace” back in 1907. She talked about how there was a negative side to what people called “peace.” Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., further defined the terms in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in 1953: Negative peace is the absence of tension, and positive peace is the presence of justice. Johan Galtung published work on the concept in 1969, defining the terms this way: Negative peace is the absence of personal violence, and positive peace is the absence of structural violence. For educators, it’s important to remember how we are prioritizing each type of peace. We often want to eliminate personal violence—of course. But is this where we stop? And are we so intent on avoiding tension we ignore difficult conversations? As educators, we want to prioritize eliminating structural violence to achieve full justice. Understanding these concepts help educators prioritize the right thing in their teachings and classrooms. Specific Considerations: From an adaptive leadership lens, educators can start using this framework by digging into these action steps: Step 1: Which types of data are you collecting and analyzing? Office referrals, detentions, and suspensions are all related to personal violence (prioritizing negative peace). They’re important, but we don’t want to stop there. It’s also important to look through the positive peace lens, at structural issues. This can include:
Step 2: Do your conflict resolution or restorative practices have a structural question for adults or leaders? In restorative conversations after student-to-student conflict, you may address those involved by discussing personal responsibilities and impacts of the situation. But to dig deeper to that structural level, it’s important to ask about underlying causes of the conflict. You might ask an individual: what was the underlying need you were missing? It may be that they were hungry and, therefore, upset and lashed out at another student. There’s always a “why” behind each action, and we need to determine if it’s structural to address it properly. Then, follow up. How can you structurally support that student's needs? What needs to change in the classroom or school to do so? Step 3: Are our pedagogical practices generating a sense of community? If students don’t feel cared for and valued, there is no positive peace. So we can go back and evaluate our pedagogies and professional framework to evaluate how we’re upholding the student voice and empowering student agency to co-create their education. This may include changing pedagogical approaches or incorporating new professional development and coaching sessions for educators. Step 4: Where are we silent on or avoiding raising issues that matter? In his letter, MLK called out “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” Is this how we’re operating in our classrooms? Are we prioritizing our comfort and “negative peace” over uncomfortable and necessary antiracist change? Educators can start by identifying where they’re choosing “negative peace” by avoiding certain topics or conversations. By identifying that, we can start to change our frameworks to achieve true positive peace. Step 5: Make a plan to design effective environments for discussion that enable students to connect and grow Ultimately, students are hungry to build their skills in talking about really tough stuff. As a student (Harshan) put it on an episode of Street Data Pod: “If you keep saying they’re not ready, they never will be ready…I think that’s a pretty dumb sentiment…[adults are afraid of] control…it’s that power they want to feel…they’re scared that people will actually break free of that mold that they’re continuing to create.” But building environments where students can have challenging discussions that raise high emotions—and then the repairs and reconnections that may need to take place—is difficult. It doesn’t happen overnight—educators will need to be committed to this as an ongoing professional development and learning priority. To get started, here are two key resources to check out: Final Tip This week, identify one place where you or your staff may be choosing negative peace over positive peace. (Use the resource below if you need help!) To help you diagnose instances where you or your staff may be choosing negative peace over positive peace, I’m sharing my Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges Mini Workbook (based on the work of adaptive leadership scholars, Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky) with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 194 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT Welcome to episode 194 of the Time for Teachership podcast. In this episode, we're talking about the concept of negative peace and positive peace. Surprisingly, when I searched my Spotify account, I could not find a podcast episode on these concepts. I'm sure it exists, but those terms did not flag anything. So I am certain this framework will be new to some folks, given that it's not even in the podcast space yet. Specifically, I want to share the spark for this episode first. 00:37 So I was listening to Street Data Pod, which is one of my favorites. Street Data is one of my favorite educational books. It's awesome. Very much centers student voice and student leadership. 00:49 And so in that context of this podcast episode, in which high school students were talking about and responding to comments from educators, from adults, who were really feeling like, you know, we don't want to, and even outside of the education space, we don't want students to be talking about hard things. We don't want high emotion topics like current events, politics, racism, any of these things that raise emotions with students right, we shouldn't be talking about it. That's the sentiment they were responding to and this little student, harshon, had a beautiful answer and he said quote if you keep saying they're not ready, they never will be ready. Right, thinking about students here, he goes on to say I think that's a pretty dumb sentiment, I love kids. And then he goes on to say, really, adults are afraid of control, right, he's saying that they really want to feel that power and they're quote, scared that people will actually break free of that mold that they're continuing to create. So end quote. I think there's so much here that students are frustrated that adults don't believe in them to be able to have the conversations they're going to have. And in Harshon's comment he really talked about how, if we don't talk about it in school, like we don't talk about it. 02:09 And I also want to add kind of this extra layer here which I've talked about before on the podcast, which is students will find other spaces in which these topics are being talked about and they might not actually have an opportunity to engage within a kind of container of perceived safety and belonging to the extent that a classroom might be able to create that. And I was listening to another episode of that same podcast where Dr Django Perez is on there talking about this idea of community care and how, you know, as an activist and community organizer, he also has been thinking about this idea of his culturally sustaining pedagogy, which he has coined a term and built out lots of research and text around that. Really, he's kind of seeing this culturally responsive pedagogy as a kind of element of community care. Like are pedagogical practices generating community care? And I'm kind of getting ahead of myself here because we'll talk about that today. 03:02 But I think, in the context of all of this right culturally sustaining pedagogy, student voices and student leadership and what do students really want to do and what do we really want to do as leaders to create the container in which students are engaged citizens, helpful participants in a community of like, moving it forward right, like leaders now and in the future, and avoiding those high emotion topics like shouldn't be the thing right. We need to equip people with the ability to negotiate and navigate conflict in ways that our leaders and our adults in our society currently are not doing right, and I wanna be very clear that that is a tough ask. It is a very tough ask given so many things, given exactly what is happening with adults in our society, given legislation that is happening in many states and communities and the fear of teacher jobs Like. I want to caveat all of this with like it is. It is challenging. It is challenging to be good at this, even in places where the law is not an issue right, and I want to encourage and inspire us that it is worth it despite the challenge. And personally, I just want to constantly get better at this. It is something I'm always striving to do and maybe the circumstances dictate how I do it, but I want to try to always do it right. I want our students to be able to navigate their emotions and emotionalities with care and thoughtfulness and to be able to discuss things that bring up emotions like a critical life skill. I also want to frame that recently on the podcast a few months ago, we had Gorski and Matias' 10 elements of white liberalism list, and avoiding or kind of equating negative piece with positive piece and mistaking these two distinctions are number two on that list. So all of this to say we've been leading to this moment of needing this framework perhaps, so I'm going to share that today Very long intro, but here we go. So let's talk about these terms negative piece and positive piece. 05:02 There has been historically kind of this emergence of this term over the last century or so, and so Jane Addams is actually one of the first documented people to use, in 1907, the term negative piece, talking about how people have talked about peace or are using the term peace in a way that she was like I have some negative connotations around this. There are bigger things and the way you're using peace almost seems like it's just not what we want, right? This is kind of like my negative view of peace. Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, in his letter from a Birmingham jail, really brought it to the forefront in 1953. In that letter, talking about specifically white liberals and what he was calling white moderates at that time, defining the term as quote negative peace, which is the absence of tension, right. And he talks about quote positive peace, which is the presence of justice, right. So negative peace, absence of tension. Positive peace, presence of justice. I really like that framing a lot. 06:10 Johan Galton I hope I'm saying your name correctly popularized this distinction next a little later, where he really developed it into a theory right, of positive peace and negative peace, negative being the absence of personal violence and positive being the absence of structural violence. So these two things came about. This distinction came about, published in 1969. So we have kind of this evolution over the course of the last again about century of this term, and so now it is taught in peace studies programs and things like that. 06:52 I think the takeaway for educators here is we want to be thoughtful about the moments in which we are and the structures in which we are prioritizing perhaps negative peace with positive peace. And so what I mean by that, given all of these definitions and uses of the term, is that sometimes we want an absence of tension, right, or we want an absence of tension, right. Or we want an absence of personal violence. And like sure that sounds like absence of personal violence sounds great. But in that model, right, galton talks about how we actually we need both the absence of personal violence and structural violence, right, we can't have true peace without both. 07:33 And in Martin Luther King Jr's model, right, dr King talks about how the negative piece is the absence of tension. Right, in that definition, I would argue that we need the tension, we need the conflict. It is healthy and we need to learn to navigate it effectively and in a healthy manner, one that enables us to connect and grow. If we don't have the connection, if we don't have the growth, we don't have evolution of society. Right, we don't have solutions to longstanding adaptive challenges. So, from an adaptive leadership lens, we really want to make sure we are not conflating these two things. And I would say again, from an adaptive leadership lens, let's kind of ask the following questions so specific considerations, to kind of make this applicable to practice. 08:19 One which types of data are you collecting and analyzing? Are they around negative piece right? Are they around kind of like office referrals, detentions, suspensions, things that are about personal violence, which, again, I'm not saying don't collect that, but is it just that? Or are we bringing in policy analysis or bringing in student and family voices, which often surface structural issues we may not be aware of with our particular lenses and experiences? Do we have a protocol that lifts up the issues of structural violence or aspects of positive peace really being lacking Like? Are we looking at identity markers that would signify that structural issues are present? Right, the great disparity between, for example, these racial identities, between these gender identities, sense of belonging right Between AP access for students with IEPs or that don't have IEPs, perceptions of belonging for different nationalities in our school, the perception of belonging versus people who were born in the community that they're going to school in, versus, not right, social, emotional excuse me, socioeconomic status? You know what are the kind of identity markers we're pulling out and filtering the data through those lenses. Right, are we contrasting specific things to identify where structural issues may not be noticed so far and may be present? 10:00 Okay, the second consideration do your conflict resolution or restorative practices, conferences, whatever you have in place have a structural question for adults or leaders? So usually I will say that restorative conferences have a few questions. Right, they might just involve the participants of it's a student to student conflict, right, what was your experience of what happens? You know, what was the underlying need that you had, or the you know whatever. That piece is just identifying kind of like the root of the problem and then like, how am I taking responsibility for my impact? Right, how did it impact you? How am I taking responsibility for my impact on others? Something like that, some basic stuff. But I don't see in there that's very like personal, right, that could get at the negative piece absence of personal violence, part of Galton's theory model or whatever but it doesn't get at the structure that may underlie the conflict in the first place. 10:59 So if we have a trend of students, or even not a trend, but like some underlying thing that contributed to that problem, that maybe in student language, the way I usually frame the question is like what underlying need were you missing, right? So I might say, well, I was very hungry, right, I was needing a basic like survival aspect. Like I was hungry and so I got angry and so I lashed out in a way that if I wasn't hungry, I might not have right. That might be a way that a high school student responds to that question, for example. However, if we were looking structurally, if I as a leader, I don't need to hop into that conversation necessarily, but afterwards I say, wow, hey, I realize that you're hungry and I realized that other students might be hungry and I realized that structurally, we don't have an ability to give you free food for whatever reason, and maybe we make that possible. Like, maybe we look into grant funding for, like, a snack bar or something great, like I don't know what it is, but I'm just off the top here thinking about what you could say. 12:00 I think there are often structural things that underlie interpersonal conflicts that we could identify as leaders. Either looking at trends across these situations or in the moment that a restorative conference has finished. We note that on a form Are there. You know, we finished this thing. Are there structural pieces we want to identify or look into that could reduce the likelihood of something like this happening in the future? How do we structurally support? 12:27 The third consideration that I would think about is are our pedagogical practices generating that sense of community care that Dr Django-Parris is talking about? So what pedagogies are we employing? Are we infusing into our professional development, professional learning sessions, into our coaching? What are we modeling as leaders for teachers, right? What are those aspects of community care where everyone right under culturally sustaining pedagogies under that umbrella, thinking about everyone right under culturally sustaining pedagogy under that umbrella, thinking about everyone experiencing belonging. How do we make sure all students and teachers are experiencing that and feeling cared for, feeling like they are valued? And how do we do that? Because if we are not doing that, we don't have positive peace, right, we might not see, for example, or witness experience, we might not have an outpouring of students complaining, right, negative peace, right, absence of tension in MLK's definition. But we might have an absence of positive peace because we haven't created the space for students to be able to say the thing that they need, right. 13:42 So I've thought about other kind of student voice frameworks as well, applied to Mitra's student voice pyramid I've talked about before on the podcast, where when we have students respond to a survey saying there's a problem but then we don't actually address it and we don't work with them to fix it, we actually have increased turbulence, we have increased tension that builds because we invited the ideas and we didn't do anything with them. We didn't partner with students, we didn't support their agency in co-constructing a solution, right? So are we engaging in practices that truly enable students to feel like they belong, they are cared for, they are loved and they have a true voice that will be respected and listened to and actioned on? Right, that they have true agency in the co-creation of their learning experience. I think the big next one, right? 14:45 The fourth consideration is where are we silent on issues that matter? Or where are we avoiding raising issues that matter? Where are positive piece, the full, the kind of fuller piece, the piece that precedes those definitions is, quote the white moderate who is more devoted to quote order than to justice, who prefers a negative piece, which is the absence of tension, to a positive piece, which is the presence of justice, end quote. That's some context there, right, we are often in this space. I find myself often in a space of really being devoted to order, right, really being falling into the trap of negative peace, right, oh, everyone's quiet and peaceful and not complaining and great, everyone's happy, the end Versus digging in a little deeper and identifying injustices that are present. We have to be uncomfortable, we have to sacrifice order and silence and the negative peace idea, the absence of tension, for the larger positive peace. So we have to first be able to identify where this is happening, where we personally are gravitating to that lens or that preference, living that out, where our team is. I think there's so much. 16:18 I mean, dr King goes on to say a lot more, but talks about the quote we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. End quote. Like that is the theme here, right, it's not just this definition that comes from this. If you've read this text, it is robust with this and I'll just share another one. Right, he's talking about white church leaders who he's expecting to step in and work and labor for racial justice, and he says, quote all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows. End quote. 17:03 Great, again, hearkening back to this idea of Gorski and Mathias's 10 elements of white liberalism, this is number two on here. Right, we see this when we are laboring for racial justice. We see this in white liberals, white liberal spaces, and recognizing that the vast majority of educators are white females. I think this is a really important, as a white female, just naming this, this, that we, we we identify this as a thing that's happening and we determine where we personally or our staff are silent on these issues or avoiding issues of racial justice. Right, so are we prioritizing our comfort and positive piece over excuse me, a negative piece, over uncomfortable and necessary anti-racist change? 17:50 So, again, thinking about Harshon's words, I think this is really important to name that students are hungry for opportunities to build their skills in talking about really tough stuff, and so I think step number five, or consideration number five, is to really make a plan to design effective environments for really challenging discussions that raise high emotions, that enables students to connect and grow and learn from one another in community, to make mistakes and to recognize and take responsibility for the impact and the repair that those mistakes may have right and to truly live in community, to truly use their hearts and their heads. I will link to resources for your staff to build this capacity. I will link to resources for student discussion supports. But think about where in your professional learning as a leader, where have you identified places where this is something that staff can practice, because we're not just going to get good at it. Many, many adults, myself included, are not great at this. Naturally, it takes so much work, so much professional learning, so much experience just in the conversations and practicing and making mistakes and growing and learning together and being in community, and we can't just anticipate our teachers are going to be ready for it. Right, this is hard work and we need to support it with professional learning. So identify where in your professional learning calendar this lives, and it shouldn't be a one-off right. This should be like an ongoing, touch-based thing that I think actually is really best when leadership directs this or when leadership facilitates and participates actively in this as well. 19:33 Okay, my final kind of call to action here is that this week I'd love for you to identify one place where you or your staff may be choosing negative piece over positive piece, even just writing those terms up on a sticky note and having that present. Just have that construct front of mind. Try to identify where this might be happening. I'll link to another resource if you need help with this. That's from the work of Adaptive Leadership Scholars Heifetz, graschau and Linsky. It's my Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges mini workbook, which will help you identify where avoidance is present and what are kind of like the listen, experience, observe, things that you can try to use as a resource bank or a checklist of like ah, I just witnessed this happening. There we go. That's that in action. Now I can concretely identify it as an example of where we may have chosen to preserve the negative piece or the absence of tension over a positive piece or structural justice.
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In this episode, I’m discussing ideas for shared leadership and co-construction at the classroom level using concepts from Dr. Asao Inoue’s work, specifically his book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies.
In particular, we focus on the goal of disrupting hegemonic power (e.g., white, patriarchal) and the specific practice of co-constructing a grading contract with students as one way to achieve that disruption. Why? In his transformative book, Dr. Inoue cites research surrounding three key themes: 1) Grades are inherently flawed. In 1961, researchers French, Carlton, and Diederich conducted a factor analysis study in which 300 papers were given a grade from 1-9 by 53 graders. About one-third of the papers received every single grade (one through nine). In fact, all but 6% of the papers received at least seven different grades, and 100% of the papers had at least five grades. The study concluded that agreement among all the graders could only predict 9.6% of the variance in grades, meaning the system of grading is not reliable, and thus unfair. However, we operate in an educational system that requires these grades to progress forward, so what does creative disruption look like for educators? 2) The standards are often racist. Even when we try to assess more equitably—perhaps using assessment tools like standards-based rubrics—Inoue points out that we are still measuring from a “white racial habitus.” For example, grammar is often assessed based on the standard dominant form of English, which is part of the white racial habitus. Instead of focusing solely on grammar, educators can focus on the clarity of thought and how well learning is communicated. Another area we see this is in the over-emphasis on rationality and logic. In focusing only on finding the “objective truth,” we may miss marginalized perspectives and the heart component of our experiences, which is just as necessary for change and transformation. 3) Students learn better without grades. Kohn’s 1999 study found that students learn more when they are asked to reflect and self-assess their work but aren’t graded. Inoue summarizes the study’s findings, writing that students who are “led to think mostly about how well they are doing—or even worse, how well they are doing compared to everyone else—are less likely to do well” (p. 156). So, the self-reflection is positive, but the constant comparison and focus on their standing compared to other students can be harmful. What? These three concepts are big and may feel unwieldy for educators to approach. Let’s begin with some small action steps to implement this work in our educational environments. Step 1: Interrogate your beliefs about grades Your starting point is to interrogate your beliefs about grades: what should be graded and what shouldn’t. You can also invite the conversation with your students—what do they think is fair or unfair? Together, you can dig deeper to look at the “hidden path to success” that Joe Feldman talks about. These are the privileges and access some students have to resources and institutions that prepare them for higher grades in a way other students don’t get. Step 2: Determine where you can test ideas After you interrogate your beliefs about grades, you can determine where you can test some ideas. What’s in your locus of control? While you may still need to convert to A-F grades for report cards, what can you do before that? What systems are you using internally? Dr. Inoue talks about the seven elements of anti-racist writing assessment ecologies, including defining the purpose in the assessment, knowing the power dynamics inherent in it, and inviting reflection through your processes. Step 3: Invite student co-construction The first two steps are foundational in creating a safe environment that enables us to learn and grow together. We can only invite students into co-construction when they feel safe and valued. Even so, it may feel difficult for students who are not used to this. As educators, though, we can keep working to invite students into co-construction, normalizing the process and showing that you are working together in this. Step 4: Create the contract or rubric When you invite students to co-construct, what do you actually do with them? One starting point is creating a contract or developing a rubric together. It could be looking at a dimension-based rubric or something very flexible that doesn’t just use the standard language. One meaningful idea is to use labor-based components, so students track how many hours of labor they put into the project. It can be a component of the rubric that you’ve all agreed upon together and reflects a different metric than output or performance. Step 5: Normalize reflection & self-assessment as classroom practice To prioritize reflection and self-assessment, embed it into your schedule—every Friday, for example, you set aside time to work on this. Co-create protocols with students for how you’ll reflect and assess, and then use it regularly so it becomes a standard practice. Final Tip We covered a lot of ground in this episode, and this all is a massive undertaking! Be gentle with yourself and focus on trying just one piece to start. To help you more deeply consider and perhaps implement Dr. Anoue’s work, I’m linking a fantastic resource from a workshop from Dr. Anoue: Workshop Handout - Labor-Based Grading Contracts, which also includes examples of dimension-based grading. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 193 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes
TRANSCRIPT 00:00 Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 193. And in this one we're talking about anti-racist co-constructed assessment ecologies. So I am a little late to the game with Dr Asao Inoue's work and specifically I have been diving into his book Anti-Racist Writing Assessment Ecologies and it is profoundly interesting. So we're going to dive into it, specifically thinking about, you know, through the lens in this leadership series of shared leadership and what that looks like inside of a classroom and what it looks like to co-construct things that are as important as assessments and inviting student voice and co -creation in that Really, really excited about it. And also just to think about this goal that is underlying all the things we talk about on the podcast disrupting the hegemonic power where there's a lot of white, patriarchal, cis-hetero power that exists in classroom dynamics, that is steeped in education. There's the teacher-student dynamic, there's all sorts of power, and so how do we disrupt it and what are the practices as well as kind of keeping that goal in mind? And Dr Inouye's work really does this well and gives us some food for thought. So let's dive in. 01:16 First I want to take a look at the research. So the research that Dr Inouye cites in the book tell us a couple of things, three big ones, and I'll go through each of them. One grades are inherently flawed. Two, the standards we assess on are often racist. And three students learn better without grades. So let's look at the research on each. Grades are inherently flawed. 01:40 So in 1961, researchers French, Carlton and Yedrick, conducted a factor analysis study. So they gave 300 papers a grade. They had 53 graders and each of the 300 papers were given a grade on a scale from one to nine. All the grades are given, all the papers are graded. They take a look About a third of the papers 101 papers received every single grade, Like the same paper got a one, a two, a three, a four all the way through nine. A third of the papers received every single grade. That is bananas. All but 6%. So 94% of the papers received at least seven of the nine grades. So 94% of the papers received at least seven of the nine grades and 100% of the papers had five or more had at least five grades. The study concluded that agreement among the graders could only predict because this was a factored analysis study only predict 9.6% of the variance in grades. So in short, what this means is the system of grading was not reliable, right in this study. And clearly, if it's not reliable, it is not fair, right If the student writes something that someone grades as a nine and someone else grades as a one, someone else grades as a five, right, Like it's just not a system that we should be relying on and we can do things certainly to mitigate that bias, that multiple perspectives that the graders bring in, and we can do some like norming and things like that I think are certainly helpful, but it is something that we have to keep in mind. The process of grading, inherently, is not great, Though we are in a system that requires grades, requires grades for schools and children who are going from elementary to middle school, middle school to high school and high school to college and other spaces where grades are valued. And so, if we are to be working within the system, right, Dr Inouye is writing from the perspective of a college professor, and so I want to think through these things for through a K-12 lens today. 03:42 Next point standards are often very racist, and so when we try to assess even if we're assessing equitably right, we're using the Feldman's work, which I love, using tools like standards-based rubrics right, we are measuring the standards that are still coming from, in Dr Inouye's language, a white racial habitus. And so he specifically writes about the writing class that he teaches and assessing writing. Specifically he writes, quote conventional writing assessment practices rarely, if ever, dismantle the racism in our classrooms and schools because they do not address whiteness and the dominant discourse as hegemonic and students' relationship to it end. Quote One piece of this is grammar, even if it's not in the rubric. But people will assess grammar, they will assess ways of speaking the standard dominant form of English right, which is part of a white racial habitus. When we assess in this way, these other ways of communicating, these other phrases or grammatical schemes are, like, less valid or not valid here. For me, separating out the grammar pieces from is the writing effectively communicating, that is one kind of step in the process. I have seen and been in sessions with teachers who have assessed something where grammar is not even in, like nothing about. Even conventions of written English are part of the rubric and they're still assessing with it. So we have to kind of divorce our minds from like what do we, what are we really doing here, and is the goal? For me, the goal is usually like is it communicated effectively. 05:19 Dr Inouye also writes the cognitive capacity is the ability to think rationally, logically and objectively, with rigor, clarity and consistency, that is valued most. So the idea of being able to be hyper-rational doing, for example, one thing I've really started to unlearn myself is claim evidence reasoning. We teach it and it is good to be able to have a stance and back it up with evidence. Evidence is important and in times fraught with conflict, even with adults in our society, I think it's really important that we learn to seek to understand or that we might have kind of this convoluted route to understanding and it's not always linear. And I think this idea of the head and the heart both being critically important as social scientists, as humans, right when we're teaching things like history class, I personally have realized I don't always want to be in a society or around humans who are only rational and logical, who only think there is an objective truth, Because there's always marginalized perspectives. They're missing a complete component, the heart component of the work we live in, that intellectualizing space and that often inhibits us from feeling discomfort, which is necessary for change and growth and transformation of society and structure. So I do think this idea of the white racial habitus, informs things like grammar, informs things like rationality being supreme above emotionality, divorcing the head from the heart. These are just things that we see in standards and what we prioritize and what we measure. So recognizing that, going into this conversation, I think, is really critical. 07:05 The third piece students learn better without grades. So Cohn in 1999 did a study that found that students learn more when they are asked to reflect and self-assess on their work, but they are not graded. So Dr Inouye summarizes this study's findings in his book, writing that students who are quote led to think mostly about how well they are doing or, even worse, how well they are doing compared to everyone else, are less likely to do well, end quote. So this idea of how well am I doing? Where am I in the ranking? How's everyone like? Am I normal, right, Like this constant comparison which, given social media and just the culture that kids are raised in, is already hyper present in their awarenesses and engagement with the world. I think this is probably the study. Study was done pre-social media, as it is now 1999. So just imagine, right 25 years later, how more kind of intense that might actually be in a study. I'm not familiar with more recent research, but I bet it's out there. 08:08 So again, when students are given space to reflect and self-assess, great, that's actually really good. But the grade component and that comparative or like getting some sort of like label placed on where they're doing, how well they're doing, that's actually not helpful. That's really important, kind of going into this, that we want to distinguish feedback versus grades. Right Assessment can be many things it can be feedback, it can be grades. We truly benefit from the feedback and the self-reflection and all those practices, not from the grade itself. And I get that we might need to report it somewhere. But how can we internally, within classrooms, within our interactions with students, do the former and not the latter? 08:52 Okay, so now let's talk a little bit about what this actually looks like. The first thing we can do is interrogate your beliefs about grades what should be graded and what shouldn't. Another piece here is determine you know what your students believe about grades. So interrogate both yours and invite the conversation about what your students believe. What is fair, what is not fair. Joe Feldman's work on clarity, not having that hidden path to success that some students who are typical A students might be, partly how they've learned, but they've also had access to institutions or preparation in some way that enables them to be successful, whereas other students don't, right? So, again, thinking through the lens of equity, we really need to do some unlearning. 09:36 Dr Inouye talks about how quote tensions in the assessment ecology a product of its politics often come from an uncritical use of a dominant discourse in judging and assessing student writing. He goes on to talk about how, when we co-create with students and then we can actually see that as like participating in the counter-hegemonic by co-creating with students, by pushing back on maybe what we traditionally think should be graded, we actually can disrupt the hegemony present in classrooms. I think that's a pretty cool idea. There's a lot of things, though, again, that we might have to let go of in order to arrive there. The next part is where can you test ideas, Figure out where you might be able to do a little testing, a little piloting. Figure out what's in your locus of control so you still may need to convert A through F to report cards, to report out Totally understandable and like what do you do, though, to get that right? What is the conversion? But like what's the system you use internally? And I think part of that is figuring out right, like Dr Inouye writes about the seven elements of anti-racist writing, assessment, ecologies, and so he talks about one being power, right and so needing us to interrogate it a little bit of what I talked about in the first bullet point here and then next is like the parts, right, the parts of the system, the artifacts, the codes, the judgments made by people. 10:59 So a portfolio, for example, is kind of like a part. That's a part that we grade, and when we have the grade as a part, it's going to change students' attitudes, right, it's going to change how students respond to a particular assignment and it's going to change the whole nature of things, right, and so if we can't get away from grades, how do we get close enough to away from grades that we're centralizing the feedback over the grade itself? The third element of the ecology is purpose. What is the purpose of being here, of writing, of assessing? We're not doing this for a grade, we're doing this because assessment is actually really what's going to help you grow. Fourth is people, and all people have different powers. So, again, you can see some of these intersecting. Power and people are two different elements, Processes. So, again, like inviting reflection, awesome, and we want to make sure that that reflection process is not informed or dominated by kind of that white racial habit. 12:01 As you talked about products, so here he talks about direct and indirect consequences. So direct product would be like the score, the grade, the decision, the way that the teacher or the peer gives you feedback. And then indirect is a result of the direct thing. So you get feedback that talked about how you should change your grammar, and so now your focus is on superficial editing, right? You got a D grade, and so now you think you're not a great student and that's going to inform your future performance and your identity is like I'm not a writer, I'm not a good student, right? So we have products that are direct and indirect as the result of the direct. 12:39 And then, finally, the seventh element is place, and so this is rhetorical and material conditions and the production of judgment. So this might be a discussion board because that's where the judgment or the assessment or the feedback precisely is taking place. It might be a rubric. This is a material condition, it's a thing that we interact with to offer that feedback, whether you're a teacher, whether you're a student it might be student to student writing groups, that feedback, whether you're a teacher, whether you're a student it might be student to student writing groups Place is where we can make the hegemonic visible in Dobrin's words and so we are able to kind of name the thing in the space. And again, all of these elements interact with each other. So how people are interacting with these material conditions, the rubric within the writing group, how power is conveyed there, like all of those pieces, are really important and of course, to do this well right, we really need to be thoughtful about the community involved. 13:39 Step three what I would say after you've interrogated your own beliefs and determined where you might be able to test out some ideas, maybe playing with one of those elements of the ecology might be able to test out some ideas. Maybe playing with one of those elements of the ecology we want to make sure that we have laid the foundation that invites a perception of safety, that enables us to grow and learn and make mistakes and be uncomfortable, and that values feedback. So I think all of those things are kind of foundational to inviting co-construction. I also want to say that students may find it difficult to co-construct because they are not used to co-constructing. It is hard for students to come in and tell you what they want, partly because the older they are, the more they've been kind of indoctrinated into. This is how we do school. Just tell me, or I know how it works. We're not going to do this other thing. I don't. I've lost my kind of creative spark because school has taken it from me right and all of its rigidity of the system. 14:36 But also that when we invite student co-construction there's a power dynamic there and this is one of Feldman's responses to Inouye's work is that when you invite that co-construction, you can't ignore the power dynamics that are at play here and the societal pieces that we have just been consistently told like this is academic English, right, this is the way that things are graded, this is like this is the way, and so it's really hard to disrupt that and I think we do our best to. But I do believe in that invitation of co-construction with students and so a couple of things that you might be able to play with here in terms of you know what you actually move forward with, in terms of like a thing to do. So, once you've invited student co-construction, I think step four is really gonna be what do you do now? What are the things you like put some things into play, create the contract or developing the rubric together. Whatever it is that you are creating, like create the product, and that could be, for example, dimension-based rubrics. It's something that I really gravitate to as, I think, a beautiful blend of what Feldman talks about and what Inouye talks about, because, yes, you're still kind of speaking to the standard at large, but it is way more flexible, and I really like that. So that flexibility piece is critical, I think, to being able to not bring in all of the pieces that we bring in when we use the specific standard language. So that's one piece that's really really cool. And then another, I think, that labor-based component of a grade where Dr Noy grades his students based on how many hours of labor they put in and then they track that. That's a really cool piece to play with. And so perhaps, using that as like one line of the rubric, I know when we, when I was a teacher, we often had like a percentage like 85% were academic standards and like 15% were like process standards or we call them work habits. But I think about like the way in which we labor. We could be like labor based standards or something, and maybe that is co constructed with students to determine, like, what the language is. So I think that could be super cool. 16:58 And then finally, a last practice, once you've kind of created the contract whatever the kind of material product is step five is really thinking about the ways that you embed and normalize reflection and self-assessment into your classroom practice. So put it right in the schedule right, Every Friday is student self-reflection. We are going to use this protocol for peer feedback. So we're going to have all of the students use peer review, for example, where they look at the rubric and they annotate the rubric so that they could give feedback on a fellow student's piece of work very specifically and precisely related to how they'll get the assessed grade from the teacher. They're just kind of normalizing use of all of these pieces so that it's not we invite student co-construction and then we do nothing with it. Right, we actually co-create something that is a kind of living document or rubric or whatever it is contract in the class and then we use it regularly, Like every week. There's a protocol that involves us using it and self-reflecting and maybe not even giving grades right, Maybe just using that rubric. That like narrative feedback, qualitative feedback from peers and teachers and self feedback from peers and teachers and self, and then the grade comes later. 18:12 Right Now, this was a massive kind of episode with lots of research and lots of heavy kind of unlearning and big ideas. I want to say it is a massive undertaking and I just encourage you to kind of try one piece, one little piece to start, and I will link in the show notes a beautiful kind of summary of Dr Inouye's work. After listening to a podcast, I was led to someone's website that had this on there and it is so incredibly helpful. You can grab that at lindsaybethlyonscom. Slash blog slash 193. 00:35 / 18:48
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In this compelling episode of the Time for Teachership podcast, Kwame Sarpomenta shares his transformative journey from classroom teacher to influential consultant and author. He emphasizes the importance of discovering one's identity beyond professional labels, envisioning an education system where students can truly express their authentic selves without fear, drawing from Dr. Bettina Love's concept of freedom dreaming. Kwame also discusses the essential mindset shifts needed among educators, particularly those from dominant groups, and underscores the significance of critical humility in understanding diverse identities and addressing systemic inequities.
The Big Dream Kwame Sarpomenta articulates his big dream for education as a system where "every young person can go into a school as their unapologetic, authentic self, without having to leave any part of who they are at the door." He envisions educational spaces where students are welcomed and accepted for who they are, without any questioning or interrogation of their identities. This dream is grounded in Dr. Bettina Love's concept of freedom dreaming, which calls for an education system that does not perpetuate "spirit murdering" but instead fosters environments of acceptance and authenticity. Mindset Shifts Required To achieve this big dream, Kwame highlights several crucial mindset shifts: Embrace Self-Learning and Humility: Educators, particularly those from overrepresented groups, must undergo a process of self-learning and humility to understand diverse identities deeply. This involves recognizing the vast array of experiences and perspectives that exist beyond one's own. Critical Humility: Kwame emphasizes the need for critical humility, which involves questioning one's ideologies and biases around race, gender, and other identity markers. This is crucial for disrupting the status quo in education. Empathy and Active Listening: Developing empathy and actively listening to the experiences of marginalized communities is essential. Educators should engage in conversations with people from different backgrounds to understand their firsthand experiences. Action Steps Step 1: Affirm Student Identities Create an inclusive classroom environment where students feel safe to express their authentic selves. Affirm and celebrate the diverse identities of all students. Step 2: Combat Dominant Narratives Actively counter dominant narratives through counter-storytelling. Incorporate diverse perspectives and voices in the curriculum to challenge stereotypes and broaden students' understanding. Step 3: Foster a Collaborative Classroom Culture Co-create a compassionate and collaborative classroom culture. Encourage open dialogue, mutual respect, and a sense of community among students. Provide opportunities for students to work together and learn from one another. Challenges? One of the significant challenges in this work is the fear of making mistakes. Kwame acknowledges that perfectionism can be a barrier, as it perpetuates white supremacy and hinders genuine progress. Educators may worry about saying the wrong thing or not having all the answers, which can deter them from engaging in meaningful conversations and actions. One Step to Get Started To begin addressing these challenges, educators can start by engaging in self-reflection and seeking out resources to deepen their understanding of diverse identities. As Kwame suggests, the first homework is to do the deep digging and interrogate one's own ideologies and biases. By committing to ongoing self-learning and demonstrating critical humility, educators can take the first step towards creating more inclusive and equitable educational environments. Stay Connected You can find this week’s guest on their WEBSITE - https://identitytalk4educators.com INSTAGRAM - @kwam_the_identity_shaper TWITTER - @identityshaper LINKEDIN - https://linkedin.com/in/kwame-sarfo-mensah PATREON - https://patreon.com/kwamesarfomensah To help you implement today’s takeaways, Kwame is sharing Free learning resources from his upcoming book, "Learning to Relearn" with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 192 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Kwame Sarpomenta. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm so happy you're here. 0:00:09 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Thank you, Lindsay. It's an honor to be here. 0:00:12 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. We connected many years ago and now we're coming back full circle. You have the most incredible book that I have read in a while. I am so excited oh my gosh for sure, top book of the year. I am so excited oh my gosh for sure, Top book of the year. I am very excited. So I am really excited to just learn from you on this journey and this conversation. I want to also have space for you to say anything that you think listeners should be aware of, know about you keep in mind as we jump into the conversation today. 0:00:42 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Of course I'm ready. 0:00:46 - Lindsay Lyons Is there anything I feel like there's a lot of, you know, formality to bios, like there's, like here's the list of things that define me as a human. But is there anything beyond that, either like you as a human person roles outside of like the list of things that are traditionally in bios, or just kind of something that you've been thinking about as you have been writing the book and going through the very tedious process of publishing a book that you think people should be aware of before, kind of like our big first question. 0:01:18 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah I think, in terms of who I am, if you want to look for all the professional credentials and everything, you can go to my LinkedIn profile. You'll find it all there. So, beyond the profile, I will tell you that I am a father, I'm a husband, I'm Dorothy's son Dorothy is my mom's name and I'm somebody who is still learning what it means to be a human outside of being a teacher, because for about 13, 14 years, I was working in the classroom, either as a teacher assistant or at a lead teacher capacity, and then, when I finally moved abroad with my family and transitioned more into consulting, it gave me more time to spend with my sons, more time to spend with my wife and more time to spend with the people I love, and through that process, I was able to untap certain facets of my identity that allowed me to do what I do now. I discovered writing during that time, I discovered podcasting. During that time, I discovered just a lot of different things, and it's amazing what happens when you make that pivot and you allow yourself to be immersed in all these different worlds. 0:02:50 - Lindsay Lyons So much of your story resonates with me as a former teacher who became a consultant and podcaster and and, and just that, um still learning to be human, that deeply resonates. So thank you, thank you for that. Yeah, so I think one of the big questions I like to jump off with is, um Dr Bettina Love describing freedom, dreaming in terms of the dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, and I love thinking about you know, the big dreams we hold for education, but I specifically like thinking about them in that framing right, because without that, what are we really doing? And so I'm curious to know, like, what is that big dream? If you could encapsulate that big dream in a response here big dream- if you could encapsulate that big dream in a response here. 0:03:27 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Well, to use Dr Love's words, there's a lot of spirit murdering that happens in our schools, and I saw a lot of that during my time, whether it was as a Boston Public Schools teacher or even a teacher teaching at different schools throughout Philadelphia. I would say that the big dream for me is to see every young person be able to go into a school as their unapologetic, authentic self, without having to leave any part of who they are at the door. They're able to go into spaces where teachers and all others in that community welcome them for who they are and they don't question or interrogate any parts of their identity. That's what I want for every young person, including my sons, to have as an educational experience. 0:04:25 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you for sharing that. I think that's like. That is, that is the minimum right, like that is like we right, like this should be happening education community right. Yeah, thank you for naming that and and naming that. It's not right, that it's not, it's not happening now and so things need to shift right, things need to change and I'm curious, in your coaching and your consulting and in writing the book even, I think there's a lot of things that you that you name that are maybe different ways of operating, different ways of interrupting or disrupting oppression, different ways of positioning yourself, particularly for, like, as a white educator myself, right, thinking about what, what are the various mindset shifts that folks with various identities or particular identity that you have in mind? I know that most of the teaching staff in the US is white women, so I mean, I'm operating from that perspective and acknowledging that that is a very overrepresented group. But are there mindset shifts that you think and you coach on in terms of getting to that space, getting to that goal that you just described of like everyone being their unapologetic, authentic self in schools, that we need to kind of like, change our thinking around or operate from a different place? That's going to kind of unlock movement towards that goal or 100% success for that goal. 0:05:46 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Yes, for sure. And when I wrote this book Learn to Relearn I knew that this was going to be a book that was going to be about transformation. But I knew that in order for this transformation to happen, in order for teachers to actually do what the title suggests they do, they had to do their own self-learning and to get to that place of humility where you feel like there's so much that you have to learn about different people, different cultures, different backgrounds, all these different identity markers. You have to go to the source backgrounds, all these different identity markers. You have to go to the source and I had to go to the source in order to get the information that I synthesized for this book. So, when you look at those first five chapters of the book, that was hard research I had to do. That included a lot of call-ins from very close and trusted colleagues and friends of mine, who are also phenomenal educators, who were telling me about their firsthand experiences and what it was like to be in school and what life is like holding these different identities. Because the reality is, you know, being a cis, hetero, black, male, I can't speak about everybody's experience. Heck, I can't even speak about the experiences of all black people, because we know that none of these communities are monolithic by any means. There is so much diversity and there's so much nuance and there's so much nuance and there's so much beauty within each community. And in recognizing that, I knew that I needed to tap in to all the different people who contributed to the book. I actually ended up tapping into close to 50 different educators and out of the 50 educators, about 30 of them made the book. So I still have a whole bunch of interviews, a whole bunch of conversations that have not been leaked out to the public that I may use for a future book, who knows? But the biggest thing that I had to learn in that process is, in order to truly understand what it means to be a good human to somebody and this transcends the education space you have to have empathy, really have to have critical humility, and these are things that Dr Ilana Sibi-Ruiz talks about when she talks about the archaeology of the self, when she talks about her racial literacy development framework. She brings up these different things In order for you to get to the point of interruption where we're disrupting the status quo in education and all these things that we know are wrong and really bad in our system. We have to go through the steps. We have to have the empathy, we have to have the humility. We have to do that deep digging those excavations that she talks about, where we have to question our own ideologies and thoughts around race, around gender, around these other identity markers. We have to interrogate those experiences that we had growing up that led us to have these stereotypical thoughts and ideologies about what's going on. That's the work that we have to do. That's the first homework that we have. That's the work that we have to do. That's the first homework that we have. And then from there you talk to people who have the first experience. You talk to people in academia. You talk to K-12 teachers. You talk to people that are within the community who may not be in education, but guess what? They hold these experiences and they know what it means to have this identity like. I couldn't tell you what it feels like to be a queer person, because that's not an identity that I hold. But from listening to people who are from that community, they tell me because you are a cis-hetero male, you have privileges that I don't have. You're able to walk around in spaces that I'm not able to access. I had to learn that In addition to the language, to be able to articulate that and understand the nuance there. Matter of fact, one of the biggest inspirations for writing this book was a call-in, and I talk about it in the second chapter where I talk about Native perspectives. So I have a friend named Tricia Mokino. She goes by the Indigenous Educators on Instagram. I was doing a virtual conference back in 2020, 2021. And my goal was to try to make it as intersectional and as diverse as possible and hit all the different markers, and I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it. And then, when I posted the flyer for it, that featured all of the presenters and it's about 20 of them. I see this comment from Tricia and it says hey, are you inviting any indigenous presenters for this conference? And sadly, I said no. And at that point she said you know like I support your work, I love what you're doing, but we're going to have to have a conversation about that. I did. It still perpetuated the invisibilization of Native people in the country, which then perpetuates the settler colonialism that happens within the country, and so we went to a whole deep dive on that. She told me what it meant for Native tribes to get their land back, what it means to have a relationship with nature, the land, how that relationship is sacred. We talk about the responsibility of non-native people to To invest and give back to federally recognized tribal nations because we are on their land. So, understanding water rights and other indigenous rights and all these different aspects of the culture that helped me to have a more informed understanding of my own actions, of the culture that helped me to have a more informed understanding of my own actions. And then that got me curious about what else there was to learn about Native tribal nations. And it then just segued into a deep rabbit hole where I'm now trying to learn about the different nuances and the complexities within the Latinx communities and then the Asian American Pacific Islander communities, and then understanding whiteness to a great degree, not as someone who has been a victim of it, but as someone who is curious about why society functions in a way that it does and why, from the time they were born, we indoctrinate these different principles and ideas of what it means to live in the society, ie dominant culture and the different rules that they inform and impose on others who are in this space. So this was me learning as I'm writing. So, when I write those words, this is me sharing the learnings that I've acquired over this three to four year period some very traumatic events that happen in their lives. For them to be that transparent, it only brings an additional layer to the whole experience of the book. So it's a learning journey and it still is a learning journey because what I know now will probably be more in the next year or two, because I'm sure enough going to learn something new. I'm going to have to correct something that I wrote in the book, because it's not a book that is going to be perfect. There's going to be mistakes, there's going to be nuances and things like that, and it was something that I had to understand, because one thing that I learned through this writing process is that, even though people may be in that same historically marginalized community, it doesn't mean that they share the same language. It doesn't mean that they think about things in the same language. It doesn't mean that they think about things in the same manner, even like some of the words that I would use that you would think are universally recognized within the community. No, you get into a semantics conversation, and this is between people within their own community. Having this conversation so me being outside the community you want to make sure you're being respectful and using the right words to give it justice, but then you realize you can't make everybody happy. Somebody is going to be disappointed in the end in the end. So once I was able to get past that mentally, then it became a little bit easier to write the book. But I'll be honest, lindsay, that really hung me up a little bit. 0:16:19 - Lindsay Lyons That makes so much sense. And to speak to a piece of your book right, perfection is a tool of white supremacy, so I feel like that is a piece. Right, it's the culture that we're seeped in the water we're swimming in. Right, I think that's right. Yeah, there's so so much in there. I just want to say thank you for all that you just shared here on the podcast, but also so much in the book. You, you like. It is clear, you live what you're telling folks to do like you're living it, like you. The um, uh, trisha, you said her name was right. Trisha, is that right? yeah you included like the screenshot of the conversation so people could literally see this is what was said to me. This is how I responded, like that was so cool to me as I was reading it, just just like, wow, the the um. I think you use the term critical humility earlier in our conversation and and I just I can see that in in what you have put together in this book and I I love, like for the um, white supremacy section I think it was chapter one, but, like you, you literally name like each of the pieces and then you give so many concrete examples. It's almost like a little, not little, it's like a. It's a series of call-ins for educators to recognize that in themselves. It's like a little like coaching support and I I have not seen a book do that with such depth and specificity before and I just it was so cool. I just want to say thank you. I think it's what I'm saying, that you are just living out the learning. It is evident and I think it's going to be a great tool for others to kind of see what that looks like as they're engaging with the work. 0:18:02 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Thank you Because that was the biggest thing I noticed in other books that were in that anti-bias, anti-racist bent. They talked about it in generalities and there are a lot of good books out there. So this is in no way me talking bad about those books, because some of those books I used to help me write this book, but the one thing I kept asking myself was what if there was a book out there that really got into specific detail about how each of the different historically marginalized communities are impacted by the K-12 education system in the United States? I have not seen a book that has done that. Now you might have books that are exclusively about Native students in the K-12 system, books that speak about Latinx students in the K-12 system, black students in the K-12 system. There are a lot of those books out there, asian American students, pacific Islander students in the K-12 system, but there isn't one that brings them all together. Oh, we can't forget to mention LGBTQ plus students and understanding how Sith heteronormativity is something that permeates in just about every school in our country and beyond. Permeates in just about every school in our country and beyond. We know that. But how do we tie that to all the other communities. I just mentioned how that kind of spreads across the board. So I want to do something that brought all those different worlds together to really start to get people to understand when we talk about DEI, when we talk about being an anti-bias and anti-racist educator. This is what the work looks like. It's not the only way to do the work, but it's one way in which you can get the work done. So, as I'm going through the process, I'm writing these chapters, I'm talking to the people, I'm getting guidance, I'm getting counsel, I'm getting pointed to leads as far as documentaries to watch, publications to read, people to talk to. This is all happening simultaneously and this is what you have amazing. 0:20:37 - Lindsay Lyons I one of the things you just named too is, uh, just finding the resources right, and I it brings me to, um, you have a really great section. You have a lot of great sections. One of them I want to name first, actually is the intersectionality that you merge like the multiplicity of identities. You just you put that front and center as part of the kind of framing of the book. I really appreciate that and I think that, specifically, is lacking from a lot of other spaces, not lacking completely, but lacking in its expansiveness that you have it as, and so I really appreciate that. Lens I also am just thinking about, you know that, the section between allies and co-conspirators, like you really delineate, right, and you have a breakdown of like here's what this looks like being an ally, here's what this looks like being a co-conspirator. And the biggest difference I'm thinking of Dr Sheree Bridges-Patrick and I have like, talked a little bit about like in terms of like, racial justice discourse one of the ways you don't hit the mark is like you intellectualize it and so you stay up in this heady space that is not like the heart space, right, and so we're like oh, I read this thing or I heard this on this podcast. So, as I'm hearing you do that, I recognize in myself like, oh, I want to consume more information, but there has to be an and there has to be an. And what will I do with that information? To take action towards justice and, in community with folks who are going to take the lead, provide direction right? So I'm not running things right and so I think there's a lot of pieces in the book like that. That is just like some nice aha moments for people to be engaging with. I'm also thinking of, like the second section of the book, after they get all of the synthesized information which, as we talked about before, we hit record. It's like a dissertation level, better than most dissertations I've read like a level of detail you talk about like, I think, the let me make sure I'm doing this right, so it's starting to work with you which you mentioned before. And then you have affirmed the identities of your students, combat dominant narratives through counter, counter storytelling. You've been reading, and then co-creating a compassionate and collaborative class culture. Oh my gosh, I don't. I love these steps. I don't know if I just want to make space for if you want to touch on any of these or talk about, like, how you came to that process, Cause I think that's it's really helpful for people to think about. 0:22:57 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Yeah, I think well, I can't take all the credit. I got to give credit to my main editor, tracy Zager, who was with me from the not day one, but pretty much from the beginning, all the way through to the end when we got the production. She really helped me in formatting the book and the chapters. So when we decided that we were going to go in this direction, she was the one who said, hey, let's front load all the historically marginalized community chapters so that can serve as a primer for folks who may not have that background, knowledge or schema around those communities. And then, starting from chapters six through nine, the ones you just referenced we can then talk about the practical aspect of the work, how we can apply it into our classrooms and how we can do that while we're serving our students. So I give her a lot of credit for helping me with the formatting, because I had the ideas and I had the vision, but I needed somebody to help me map it out in a way that was sequential, in a way that made sense to the reader, and Tracy did a lot in terms of helping me conceptualize that. 0:24:26 - Lindsay Lyons And I think, like you know, know educators listening this is just grab the book and dig into it and and dig into these sections, because I do think it's. It's a beautiful thing to just see again all of this mapped out as you're doing all the things you've done, all of the things right that you've done, and you're describing this learning journey for people. It's just a it feels like a real, authentic invitation to, to, to learn and unlearn, right that that you've described for us, one of the things that I'm conscious of time. I don't want to take too much of your time. One of the last big questions I have is around like the kind of daunting nature of some of of of the work, like the fear of saying the wrong thing right, which you, which you name, like the, the um perfectionism piece, that that people sometimes are like they're stopped, they're stopping themselves from action, from learning, from unlearning, right, because of this kind of like fear piece. I'm thinking that's a challenge that I often hear people name. I'm wondering if that's a challenge you hear, if you, if you have a thought on that, or if there's like another challenge that folks that you coach and consults with face or are worried about that you could like kind of coach them through, and and what would that kind of coaching look like, or what's a thing for them to be thoughtful about as they engage? Does that question make sense? 0:25:42 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah it makes perfect sense. I think that's part of the work, though, as I mentioned earlier, there were things I had no clue about, and when people called me in and pointed out things I needed to read and study, I did just that. But what made it easy for me to do that was how they went about educating me. They didn't berate me, they didn't do anything like that. They saw that my intentions were good and I just needed a little bit of guidance. So the first thing is recognizing where people are and being able to pull them to the side and say, hey, you probably shouldn't say that, because X, y, z, here's an article that I recommend you read. Why don't you go ahead and read it? And then, after a few days, we can come back together and have a discussion about it and see how it connects to this issue. So these are things that I talk about in chapter nine, the last chapter, where we talk about co-creating a compassionate and collaborative culture, the call-ins, the educational piece that is so crucial, because there is no such thing as perfectionism in this work. I'm still going to make mistakes, I may end up misgendering somebody by accident, and I still may do it from time to time. But the difference between me now and how it was a few years ago is I have a radar. I recognize when I'm doing it and I'm able to self-correct myself because of the learning, because of all the call-ins. So my brain is programmed to self-correct. So it doesn't mean that I'm not going to make a mistake ever again. If that was a case that, that wouldn't be human. I'll be a robot, and we already got AI handling that, so no. So, for those who really want to engage in this work, don't deter from it because you're afraid of making a mistake. Or don't deter from it because you're afraid of making a mistake Because by you deterring from it, you're now being complicit to the spirit murdering that is taking place within schools. You're allowing more and more students, particularly those of color, black, indigenous and other students of color, to keep on getting harmed, and there's more than enough identity-based harm happening in our world right now, and I don't even need to get into all the examples in which it's manifesting itself. You all could read the news and watch what's happening. There's a lot going on, and I believe it is a paramount reason why we need a book like Learn to Relearn, because it gets us back to what matters the most, and that's treating people the way they want to be treated. Getting people to see that and this is an Audre Lorde quote it's not our differences that divide us, it's how we feel about the differences. That's what divides us, like the thoughts, the stereotypical notions, the implicit biases, all these things that those are the things that separate us more than anything, things that those are the things that separate us more than anything. Even the political rhetoric that's happening right now. It stems from implicit bias. It stems from messages that have been recycled over time with no type of empirical research or backing, empirical research or backing. So how do we get ourselves out of that mode? To learn about each other in a way to treat each other better, as opposed to listening to somebody with the purpose of getting a rebuttal in. We have to shift from that to this, and that's what this book is about. 0:30:19 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. Thank you for that. I think that's a beautiful note to kind of wrap up with, and I think I mean just my personal learning. Right now I'm going to ask you a question about things you've been learning. Despite your whole book being about things that you've learned, I'm curious to know if there's something you're learning about lately. Is there something like that's kind of front and center at the moment? One of the things for me is actually as a social studies teacher. I used to do a lot of claim evidence reasoning, like there's a lot of like argue based standards. That's like you have to hold your position, you have to find the evidence, you have to like stand strong in it and actually, now that I'm out of the classroom and coaching, I find myself coaching on. Wouldn't it be cool if we were actually assessing people on their ability to seek to understand others versus stand strong in your position and use you know? Right, like it's's I'm. I'm unlearning with you, so I just want to name that like that is that? Is there anything for you that's like front of center in this particular moment that you've been learning about related to education and this work? Or just like learning how to play an instrument, or something could be really. 0:31:21 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah yeah, I think for me, being being a married man, being a father, learn how to be a better parent. Learn how to be a better husband. What does it mean to be emotionally available for my wife? What does it mean to confront your own trauma? What does it mean to be present for your children, and not just present in the physical sense, but to be emotionally invested in your child's growth so that they know that you're really there and not just there in the physical form? So those are the things that I'm continuing to learn each and every day, just to get better. What can I do today to be a better father to my two sons? What can I do today to maintain and improve my relationship with my wife so that she knows that I'm still very much invested in her and I still love her, just like I did from day one? Like, what are the things that I can continue to do to really cultivate those relationships being a family man? So that's where I am right now. 0:32:40 - Lindsay Lyons That also deeply resonates. I have a two and a half year old and a partner that I am. I'm in the same space, so thank you that that means a lot that you shared that I. Finally, I just want to make sure people know how to get in touch with you and follow your work. We'll link to the book once it's it'll be published. Once we release this, where's the best place to find you? In online spaces? 0:33:01 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah I think honestly and not to be cocky or anything you can really Google me. If you Google me, you'll find all my social media resources. If I were to go through each one, it'll take too long, but you could also go to my website, identitytalk4educatorscom. Over there you'll find information about my services, my offerings. Like I said, I podcast. I also consult with K-12 schools, not just in the States but also other parts of the globe, and I do write from time to time blogs, books, other publications so everything identity talk related you can find on that website. Check me out, reach out, let's build together. 0:33:49 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing Kwame. Thank you. I am so, so grateful for your time today. Thank you for being on the show. 0:33:55 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Thank you, lindsay, this was awesome.
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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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