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In this episode, we sit down to talk with Mary Kelly, CEO of StrataTech Education Group, which provides adult education programs for trades like refrigeration or welding.
Mary shares the impact of her own high school teacher, who changed her life trajectory and ignited her passion for education. Together, we discuss the transformative power of education—including for adults—the systemic issues perpetuating inequality, and the potential of skilled trades to level the playing field. The Big Dream Mary’s dream is for education to be available to everybody, no matter where they’re from. She recognizes that many people were born into negative and challenging circumstances, but education is the way out—it’s the way for upward mobility. But the access to education has to be there. Mindset Shifts Required “Fixing the education system” or providing access to education is overwhelming—no one person can change it. But educators and leaders can consider what’s in their sphere of influence and where they can influence positive change. Another mindset shift Mary advocates for is around the trades. Those taking trades are not just the “dumb kids,” because many of them are making millions as plumbers or in other roles. There needs to be a shift in different paths and not putting students or people into only one category. Equity in Education: Exploring the Trades Mary discusses her experience managing trade schools and how they’re a space of equitable education for anyone interested in learning. Open enrollment means students don’t need to test to qualify for the classes; they just need to be willing to do the work. The student self-identifies their ability and interest in the program and then pursues it; this is a revolutionary approach to education, where we often rely on testing and putting students in a box rather than relying on their individual agency. Education in the trades is all related to the job—everything they learn applies to what they want to do. This can be a motivating environment because the students are learning an application rather than being “talked at” in some more traditional school settings. Mary also discusses the benefits of the for-profit model. Because students are paying, they’re committed. Further, they’re the customer, so the school works to support them in any way they can, creating a positive place for students to reach their goals. One Step to Get Started For educators striving to show up for their students better, Mary recommends starting with this question: Look at what you’re offering and see if you’re meeting every individual’s needs, or is it just based on the group. It’s important to work with each student individually and meet their unique needs. To connect with Mary, you can visit the corporate website, StrataTech Education Group, or email her at [email protected]. If you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 242 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Mary, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 00:03 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Thank you. 00:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I'm excited to be here, lindsay. Listeners will have just heard the formal bio at the start of the show, but I wanted to invite you to share anything else. That is something people should keep in mind as they're engaging with the episode and as we kind of jump into our conversation today. It can be personal, professional, what's on your mind today, anything you think, oh my God, a lot's on my mind today. 00:26 - Mary Kelly (Guest) There's a lot of craziness going on. We don't have time for all that. So I guess probably the one question I get a lot look, I'm a CEO of a very large organization in a predominantly male space, so I do get a lot of questions like how did that happen? And I have to tell you, lindsay, it's totally by accident. So I did not wake up one day and say, guess what? I want to be CEO. 00:54 I came from a very large family and there were problems in my family. My dad was an alcoholic and I kept getting these high IQ scores but I wasn't doing well in school and all they kept doing was testing me but nobody really kind of asked the question that needed to be asked, right? So I get into high school and I had an English teacher in high school who actually asked me the question. She said you're so smart, why is there something going on? Specifically said, is there something going on at home? And I cried and I tried. I never had had that conversation and you know what, for the first time in my life I felt like I was seen at school and it it changed the trajectory of my life. It really did, and at that point, subconsciously, I said to myself this is what I want to do. I want to help kids like me and I want to go into teaching. And so I went into teaching thinking I was going to be a teacher. Right, that's another story. 01:53 I did teach for a little while. I hated, to be honest with you. I hated the public system. I love my kids, but there was a lot of politics. I'm just not. What you see is what you get from me. I'm a New Yorker and I just couldn't do the politics and I spoke out too much and, uh, long story short, I was pretty miserable. 02:11 A friend of mine was working in adult ed and said have you ever thought of working with adults? And I'm like I don't know. I want to make a difference. They're already. They're already adults. I can't make a difference there. And I went to work for Bryan and Stratton, which is a business college in New York fantastic school and my very first job with adults was teaching English and math fundamentals. And, lindsay, I fell in love. These were my people. These were people that had been dismissed as troublemakers. You'll never be anything, but they were so smart. No one had ever given them a chance and no one had seen them. And so that was my foray into adult education. 02:50 Years later I ended up kind of a you heard my bio, I you know for a little. I was in there for a while. Then I thought I was working for a nonprofit, for a for-profit school. I said, oh, for-profit's bad. And I went to work for a nonprofit school Guess what they're the same. It's about getting people enrolled right. And I worked for a great. I worked for New School University in New York, which was great, but it was all the same. And I found that the for-profits, the good ones and there's a lot of good ones you never hear about A lot of people doing really good work. They're out there and they're responding to a need that nobody else is serving, and up until recently they were the only ones servicing a particular group. So, but long story short, I left there and I went into the nonprofit world. I said these people are crazy. I ran back to education. So you know what? And I you know I've been in it ever since and I found my. 03:44 I was working at Lincoln education. They had 38 schools up and down the East coast. Um, I, I became a campus president, a group vice president kept moving up, um, but I was in medical and allied health and I really wanted to get into the skilled trades. Uh, but I was really good at what I did and I just couldn't do it at Lincoln and the old CEO of Lincoln started. This company had been coming after me for a while and I said, yep, I get to go do the skill trades, let me do it. And you know, I had been teaching, I'd been in education for a long time at that point and I didn't think there was more to show me. But, man, I fell in love again. I fell in love again and I've been here for 15 years and it's been a blast and I work with amazing people here. So so kind of a long story, but that's, that's the story. And here I am. 04:29 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love it. Oh, I love that backstory and I love that it's grounded in kind of just a simple question. That was transformative for you right, thinking about the power that educators hold to influence students' sense of belonging and their life trajectories. I mean, it's a beautiful story that illustrates that potential and that positive opportunity that we all have in education space. So thank you for that. I think you know this is probably connected to what you were just sharing, but I'm curious to know. I often ask the question at the start of these shows. You know, dr Bettina Love describes the idea of freedom dreaming as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, and so I'm always curious what that big dream is that guests hold for the education space. So do you mind telling us about what that big dream might be? 05:16 - Mary Kelly (Guest) for you Right. I want education to be available to everybody, no matter where you're from, and to be the difference maker. For you Right? And I think there's a lot of people that have pointed that out. I think you know there's a lot of people that are born on the wrong side of the tracks. They didn't do anything wrong, they just were born in a certain area and they have access to the worst of everything. Right, but education can be that one thing that lifts them out of that. How many stories have we heard about people that come from there through an education? 05:52 That is the way for upward mobility, and I want that for everybody in this country, and unfortunately, right now, there's a lot of people that don't have that and aren't having access to it and don't know how to get it, and so my dream is that someday it'll be very easy for everyone to be able to access that and we can go back to being. Look, america is not an ideal. We were the American dream, right, it was come here and you can be anything you want if you work hard enough. It's not true anymore. You could work your butt off and you still may not be able to get where you need to get and that's not correct, like we need to look at that as a society and say where do we go off the rails here? And part of it is the education system. 06:34 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh my gosh, yeah, absolutely. There are so many pieces of the education system that are just not. Oh my God. 06:39 - Mary Kelly (Guest) I know, I just want you to look. I'm a huge fan of public education. I do believe that everybody should have access. So you know, I just want to throw that out. I do think that looking at the economy and having a free market helps make things better, having that competition I think all those pieces are important, right. When you base education funding on tax dollars, you're in trouble. There's always going to be inequality, like it's just an unequal system that was built from the start. So get rid of the system and figure out a better way. And it's not the lottery either. 07:17 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Great point. So, yeah, I'm curious to know, I guess in the rest of the time that we have together, like, how do we accomplish that, or how have you kind of accomplished that right? I mean, I think there's probably several things that go into it. I often ask about you know, mindset shifts for educators and ways that we kind of move away from that traditional mindset that like, oh okay, you're, you know, born with wealth, so you're going to have all of these AP opportunities or you know whatever it is, and there's also kind of like concrete actions that education systems and educators in classrooms can take. I'm curious, like, feel free to go either direction, both directions, like mindsets or actions. What have you seen be successful? 08:01 - Mary Kelly (Guest) I love how you're thinking and they're great questions. I think. I think that's a loaded, a loaded question in many ways Right, and so a lot of times, like you know, I will say this I'm going to go off track for a minute, but you know I have a lot of friends, we've been around for a while, you know, and we talk about stuff and and, and some of my friends are getting a little disenfranchised and like, oh my God, all these bad things are happening. My belief is that most people are good, most people are good and you see that, like when nine 11 happened, when there's a crisis that happens when the Houston floods came, I mean people all jump in. It doesn't matter if you're an immigrant or a non-immigrant. Like everybody was in Texas when they had the Houston floods, you had people that were jumping in boats and saving people, right, like everybody was in it together and for that moment we were together, right, and I think generally that's where people are, but they get so overwhelmed by how much there is to do. So your question is a little overwhelming Like, how do you fix, like, this whole broken system? And you asked me how I do it. 09:10 Like, for me, I obviously haven't, I haven't fixed it. But I come from a place of what can I do in my sphere of influence? Right, like I told you my story, if someone made a difference to me, how can I make a difference in the people that I'm around and that I'm exposed to and that I can affect? Right, the skill trades is, as part of that, has really spoken to me. Um, because you're getting a group of people quite honestly like, if you look at our country, like who took shot, people took shop classes. They said, oh, only the dumb kids take shop classes. You have millionaire plumbers. These people aren't dumb, they were actually smart, they were smarter than most of us. You know, I got out with an English degree. I wasn't making anywhere near what my friends who started their own business and were in the skill trades were doing, right, so I think that's part of it. Like in the edge, in the part of the, the story that we sold, we're seeing that it's wrong. You see Gen Z today and they're saying what am I going to spend for college and why am I going to spend it? Is it worth it? What am I going to get out of it? Right, and that's a legitimate question. And in the skill trades. You have a way of equalizing what education made unequal. Right Kids were put in track. I actually don't believe in track systems. I don't believe in that at all. I think you probably know this right. Research has totally shown that when you mainstream people, they do better. 10:40 My older brother is, I think, joe's 60. Well, maybe he's just 69. He's going to be 70. Joe's awesome. He was borderline when he was born, so they used forceps. He was in a military hospital. My father was military for a while and so at that time, I mean, he was borderline. If he had put in a mainstream classroom his life would have been very different, but he wasn't. He was put in special classes and so you know the Pygmalion effect right, he rose to what level they were expecting and his life turned out very different. I mean, he's great, he's married and all that. But what could it have been if we had just mainstreamed them, right? So I got totally off track and forgot where I was going. 11:27 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Great point. You're free to redirect me, yeah, so I mean I think the track system I'd love to jump on there. You're absolutely right. The research shows that there is only disastrous effects of that. It doesn't serve anyone. And so I think about that in terms of how you know, both like thinking about how people choose to enroll in the skills trades and in a school such as that or such as that. But I also think about you know how the school itself is operating right in the skills trades, like how, how you kind of do away with that. So can you take us kind of behind the scenes of like what is the structure of your system and kind of how do you kind of push back against that? 12:10 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Sure, well, listen, everyone's equal. Like, we have an open enrollment. So if you want to learn how to do welding and you've never done it before, come on down and we have. You know we put out over 5000 graduates a year, right, I have five schools soon to be another school, very large schools, so, like the Houston school is about 1,300. They all range about a thousand, but it's open enrollment. I mean, you're paying for the to go to school. So who am I to say you can't, right? I literally, to be honest with you, I have had in welding. We actually had two. Well, we've had three students. 12:45 I know just at my Jacksonville campus, um, that uh were physically handicapped and I was like, hey, are we doing the wrong thing by letting them in? And my people were like, they say they can do it. We got to give them a chance. Two of them were deaf. They're out working in the welding world, right, they knew what they could do. 13:06 So so there isn't, from the very get-go, there's not an inequality. Like you don't get tested and then put in a track, everybody's in the same track together and you're really just learning a skill. So part of it, too, is they're not spending a lot of time on academic subjects, right. I will say, though, like when you're in HVvac and electrical, there's a lot of theory there. I mean, you have to learn ohm's law, you have to learn quite a bit. So, and and students will decide where they want to go, like. If it's you know they, if it's someone who really doesn't want to, like, get into the books, they may go into welding, and so what's really cool for our guys is, if you're going to have to take some stuff, right, but if you're going go into welding, you're only going to spend. Out of five days, only one day is going to be classroom, right. 13:48 It's going to be online, which we pivoted during COVID for that, and our students don't want to have to spend gas money and go to school every day, right. So we try to create a robust online experience only for the didactic, because the skills you have to do inside, what are you going to learn on that didactic? You're not going to learn English composition you don't need to know that as a welder but you are going to learn about gases and how you use gases, right. You're going to learn to read blueprints, because you can't be a welder without reading blueprints. So what you're learning is completely relevant to what you're doing, and I think that's partly what we've missed, like I know, way back when I was in school and trying to look at it in an education classroom, they were talking about, you know, trying to integrate the curriculum. 14:33 I don't think we've done that at all. I mean, we've actually moved away from that and we've gotten told to teach it to the test. And so when you integrate the curriculum and something that's relevant for the student, they're going to be more interested. Right, the students aren't't good. Students don't want to sit there and have someone be Charlie Brown and wonk wonk wonk at them. Right, they want to know. How does this make sense to me? How can I apply this right? And that's our job as teachers to give them that Absolutely. 15:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I mean, I think so much about the ratio of being talked at and, like you know, learning new content versus application. Or just let me do the thing in traditional schools right, it's probably backwards, right, it's probably four times is the talking and then one day maybe is an application versus that one to four that you have, which is just so awesome. And I also am hearing, like you know, whatever someone's physical capacities or whatever someone's kind of limiting beliefs that you know adults or educators may have of of students, it's like, no, the student knows, like you said, like the student knows what they're capable of, what they're interested in. Let them do the thing. 15:40 I mean that is that is revolutionary in education, because that's not what we do, right? We, like you said, we do tracking or we test kids and then we put them in boxes and we, how cool would it be if everyone did that when it was like, oh, you want to take that course, great, go for it, we've got you Right, like I. Just that's not the way that it usually is. And think of how agentic students I mean I imagine you know or like how agentic students feel when it's like, oh, I get to decide. That's so cool, absolutely. 16:11 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Absolutely, I think. I think the good news is, I think we're trying to, we're starting to move forward as people are questioning there's more questioning of the traditional system than ever, right? I mean there's questions like why, why, first off, does a kid have to go to college right, and why, first off, does a kid have to go to college right and they may not even have to go to trade school? I mean there's places where in high school, you know they're creating employer high school relationships where the student can go right to work. I'm all for that right. 16:37 The apprenticeship model I mean that's used very well in other countries. We've not done well with that. All of those things are really important. I do think kids know and I think as parents I'm a parent I thought I knew better and you know, I'll tell you our youngest she just got her should be, but she knew, she knew where she ended, where she was supposed to be, she met her guy there, that's. You know she's been with a lot like. She just knew how to follow our path and I think we forget that our kids know right, that is so beautiful. 17:22 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I think my the start of my kind of professional journey really is rooted in student voice and, like the student voice, research field and all of that, and so that absolutely speaks, speaks to me, and I think about the capacity students have to, you know, pursue whatever educational course they want, but also to to do things that are meaningful in their communities. 17:44 So civic action or civic engagement. I think about, like you know, the welder who, or the plumber who is like an integral member of the community, cause what would the community do without access to that skill? Right, I mean thinking about that. Community connectedness and the agency students have, not in their own lives but in the lives of those around them, is so cool, and I think you've illuminated for me just different ways that your organization does things compared to traditional schooling. Is there anything else that we should know? You know, for those of us who haven't actually, like been in a school like those that you have, what else is different, you know, for the better, from traditional ways we might school kids? That is, you know, more equitable or more student oriented. 18:26 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Yeah. So I would say, well, look first off, we're for profit, right, and one of the beautiful things of the for profits that people never talk about is, if a student is paying their money, they're making a choice. So what that group of schools have done really, really well, and some of them there were bad actors there, just like there are bad actors elsewhere. Right, it's mostly at the degree level, it's not, you know, at the lower level, but what they've done well is being able to figure out how to keep there's a lot of student services. So you see, a lot of public education. Now higher education is all moving to student retention and bringing in student retention teams. We've been doing that for years. Right, like all this. If you look at like Southern New Hampshire, right, like big, big school, paul LeBlanc, who did a fantastic job taking that to where it was and becoming a big player, will tell you that he based his model off of University of Phoenix, right, and University of Phoenix out there now is getting a bad rap and people are saying, oh, they just took their money and da da da, university of Phoenix, and that's what it started at. It started as a way to help adult people be able to go to school and meet their schedule. The student's a customer. Everyone that works for me. We have over 500 and I think 540 employees at this point. Right, we've grown a lot. It's because they know the student is the customer, right, and I'm really lucky because I have a ton of people that work for me that are here for the mission and I'm really lucky because I have a ton of people that work for me that are here for the mission. They all understand that these students are coming to us somewhere. If they're right out of high school, they're doing it because you know they got to do something right or they've always wanted to do this. 20:06 If we've had people that are 60 years old, we get people that are you know, further on in adulthood, that are working in dead end jobs and they can't support their family and they're like I got to do something and somebody told them hey, the skilled trades is probably a good place. They come and talk to us and we're able to kind of direct them where they need to go, Right, like that's who's coming to us. My people all understand what a difference it makes. They're all here short term, they're about seven months in and they can work while they're here, because it's part-time right, because most of my people need to work. 20:36 I don't have really wealthy people going to school, right. I have a lot of pell grant students that are coming here and they can get out in seven months and they can completely change the trajectory for them, and not only them, but for generations to come. They don't have to make 15 an hour wherever. That is right. Like you've I'm sure you've seen the money that skilled trade people make. I mean, if you're willing to work, I mean if you're a welder and you're willing to travel, you can make six figures easily. So I mean that's the benefit of it. And so, and my people, a lot of them, have been here a long time and they've seen those stories where you know a kid was homeless and came to school and they were homeless, they were living in a tent, but they finish and then they come back a year later and they get I guess they call them these big dually trucks Like that's a big thing, a dually truck. It's like I don't know, it's like a big truck, it's all souped up. 21:47 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) It's all souped up, it's all got all kinds of stuff, but they'll come driving up in there and they'll, you know, or they'll, public school space. I imagine that if we were to think like that as educators in all of the education spaces right, like in a sense, like I'm getting paid as a teacher because I have a student in my classroom who needs my help, right, I mean you could do a little workaround, logically, but that I love that, right, we are here to make that kid's dreams come true. We're here to have that student be successful, be on the trajectory for life that they want to be a community member, to figure out, like, exactly what they want to do. I just love the idea that that we are here for them and I, I think the the you know like socialist in me or whatever it's like oh, it's so sad that it's like takes capitalism to like, you know, make us think that way, but it totally does, because we live in in a capitalist system, right, that it is. It is like this is where my money or my paycheck is coming from. Is these students like? 22:46 Of course, I want to support them as best we can and I hope that educators in public spaces can also take that nugget and and live that out, because that is uh so inspiring to, to be able to say, like you know I'm here for you guys. Like what, what do you need? Um, and and I think there's, there's probably a lot of um you know ways that you can build systems and and larger systems, like around some of the things you're talking about, and having students have agency and direction in all of their educational kind of journeys. I'm curious to know what's like one thing that you would recommend an audience member who's engaging with this episode to like do once they're done with the episode, that might be able to give them just a little bit, you know, more student agency or kind of the some of the things that we've kind of talked about in the episode today, like what's, what's one action they could take to kind of get them started on that path of like the larger transformation that we've we've talked about. 23:45 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Sure, and I would think, like your listeners are mostly teachers, right? 23:48 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, I would say teachers and leaders of schools. 23:53 - Mary Kelly (Guest) I would immediately look at what you're offering and saying. Is this meeting every individual's needs or is this just based on a group? Right, and so that's like that's another piece of what we do. They're in the lab a lot. We work with them. So, like say, you're learning TIG welding, right, and, by the way, I'm a horrible welder. I've gone out because I think it's important for people to see me do it and we all laugh about it, and everyone laughed at me because that's why I'm an administration, because I can't weld. But it was a great one and it's a lot harder than it looks. I will tell you that. So, but let's just say you know you're doing a phase on TIG welding. You've got 20 kids. We do 20 to one, no more than that on the lab floor, because that's the right amount for an instructor. And the instructor goes from booth to each kid has his own booth and they're working at their own pace and the instructor is dropping in and helping the student at their own pace, right? 24:46 The outcome is they have to be able to do it, but 20 kids on the floor doing it all in very different ways. The instructor will show them the demo. They all get together. It says, hey, here's how you do it, then go do it. But then each kid's going to do it and have challenges with doing it, and that's where the instructor's working one-on-one with them. Right, and every kid's going to have a different way that the instructor's going to have to talk to them. 25:08 I mean, we've got fantastic instructors because they understand that, right, like, not every kid's going to learn the same. Some it's a visual thing, Some it's, you know, showing them again something you may have to show them five times, whatever it happens to be. You may have to stand there right up with them as they're doing whatever that happens to be right. So, but if you're trying to learn TIG welding, the outcome at the end you have to be able to do it. Like you're going to be measured. 25:33 The assessment is you have to do it, and then in welding, it's basically like you look at the weld and you mark the errors, the imperfections, so, which is kind of cool, right, right, so all the kids have to have, like they have to graduate with a big. But the point is, is that everyone's going to be at a different level and sometimes we get super advanced students that come in there and they knock it out right away. They've been, you know, they've been working on their farm equipment or whatever it happens to be. We take those kids and we pair them up with the other kids that aren't doing well and say well, you know you've got to be here. So, like, why don't you get some leadership while you're here? So I think that's a good example of how putting something into practice. 26:12 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I think about the pedagogy of kind of coach, coaching almost right when it's like here's the model we all have to get to the same outcome. You're all going to tackle different ways and then I am responsive to you in the room like who needs what. I think that's like ultimately great pedagogy. I wish it was more classroom spaces were like that. That's incredible and that they get to apply it right away, right like I'm going to watch the model and now I'm going to do the thing. 26:37 - Mary Kelly (Guest) And in all honesty, to be fair, I mean skilled trades. The physicality of it requires that. 26:42 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Just to kind of wrap us up. I like to ask this question just for fun. It could be related to our conversation and kind of professional space, or it could just be personal, something unrelated to what we've talked about. What is something that you have been learning about lately? Ai? 26:57 - Mary Kelly (Guest) I am fascinated by AI. I haven't learned enough. Right, ai is not going to replace skill trades, but it's going to replace a lot of things. Right, but I think it's going to make us better. But I think all of us have a responsibility. You know, I wish I had seen I'm 62, so I've been around for a while. I wish I had seen how big the internet was going to be, back when it was starting. I would have done a lot more investigating, right, I understand where AI is going. I literally Lindsay in my LinkedIn box. You know we can save articles. I have 30 articles saved so that I can read them whenever I have time. I just find AI fascinating and I think, you know, it's kind of like a Charles Dickens thing. Right, it's the best of times. It was the worst of times because it could be not good, but I think what it could do that's good really excites me. 27:50 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) That's interesting. Yeah, I need to learn more as well. That is, that is definitely going to be something that, like you said, the internet. We look back on and be like, oh wow, that's where it went, right. 27:59 - Mary Kelly (Guest) I totally missed it. I was like, oh, that's no big deal. 28:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I think you're not alone. And then, finally, where can listeners learn more about you, learn more about your organization, connect with you online? What are those spaces? 28:17 - Mary Kelly (Guest) Sure, sure. So our our corporate website. So we are Stratitech Education Group. Our brands are Tulsa Welding School and the Refrigeration School. So if you wanted to go to a brand site and learn about Tulsa Welding School, it's twsedu, I believe, and just look up Tulsa Welding School and rsiedu for the refrigeration school. Stratatech is Stratatech, s-t-r-a-t-a-t-e-c-h, stratatechcom. That's our website. So and I'm available, I'd love to talk to people. Mary Kelly, k-e-l-l-y no E, please. That was a big thing in Ireland. They will fight over that. So, mary, please. That was a big thing in Ireland. That that that they will fight over that. 28:59 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) So, mary, Kelly dot at stratatechcom. So awesome, Mary. Thank you so much for this conversation. Oh, I had a ball, lindsay. 29:05 - Mary Kelly (Guest) It was a lot of fun and thank you for doing what you're doing. You're having very important conversations and I'm just going to say one last thing. Thank you to all your listeners, because teaching is a noble profession. You don't make enough money. That needs to change. There's so many unfair things about it. But if you heard my story, you can make the difference in a life. Don't forget that on a bad day, remember you're making a difference and God bless you for doing what you're doing. Thank you for that. That was a wonderful way to end.
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In this episode, we’re continuing to look at leading change in turnaround and low-performing schools by diving into a transformative book: “Pedagogies of Student Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency" by Shane Safir, Sawson Jaber, Crystal Watson, and Marlo Bagsik.
Lindsay talks about her key takeaways from the book, such as how to co-create educational environments where students transition from participants to partners. We look at themes of centering marginalized voices and leveraging meaningful street data, exploring how to elevate schools from “good” to “great” in the context of school redesign. Why? From the Research The book is anchored in a liberatory purpose of education, one where education is co-created with students. The authors’ research shows that by integrating pedagogies of voice and agency, we can enhance educational practices and address equity transformation. This is done by centering those who have been at the margins—collecting “street data”—and by embracing qualitative outcomes that are harder to measure but hold significant value. What? Action Steps for Educators To start working toward the vision of student-centered education spaces, educators can incorporate the following steps: Step 1: Understand and collect street data. You can read the book and listen to the podcast for more information, but educators can begin by collecting street data that goes deeper into the students’ experience. This could be looking at quotes and non-verbal cues that come up from student discussions. The goal is to get data from students, typically on the margins, that informs your decision-making and action steps. Step 2: Use good inquiry questions in your data. The characteristics of these include:
As an instructional leadership team or school redesign team, start by co-creating a question that is at the heart of your intended change. Step 3: Rid yourself of the “10 toxins.” The authors talk about “toxins” like the idea that “the teacher is the expert” or “containment” (i.e., no moving around the classroom). that educators need to know and remove from their mindset. Step 4: Instead, embrace the 10 ways of positively showing up. Some of these include deep listening, learning inter-generationally, and interacting with the whole person. Step 5: Integrate pedagogies of voice. The authors outline eight different areas to focus on, organized into the four agency domains:
Final Tip: Always anchor your educational approach in the core purpose of witnessing and affirming one another's humanity, ensuring that every practice reflects this liberatory vision. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Post-Unit Perception Survey with you for free. Also, pick up your copy of “Pedagogies of Student Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency,” or the first book by the authors, “Street Data.” And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 241 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:03 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 241, and so you can get the show notes and all of the info at the blog post, lindsaybethlyonscom, slash 241. Today we're talking all things pedagogies of voice. This is a beautiful, beautiful book. I loved Street Data. As you probably know if you listen regularly to this podcast, I am constantly citing Street Data because it's excellent and this is kind of the second version. That really not second version. What is it called? Sequel? There we go, that kind of follows up and says how do we situate this idea of Street Data in instructional realities, like within the classroom? What does this look like? 00:45 So this book Patagogies of Student Voice, Street Data and the Path to Student Agency was written by four awesome humans Shane Sapir, Saswan Jaber, Crystal Watson and Marlo Bugsyk. I'm really hoping I'm pronouncing everyone's names correctly. They are incredible and I would love to have them on the podcast, so stay tuned, Perhaps we will get them. I think they're very busy. They've been making the rounds of all the places, but this episode is really just going to keep in mind this idea of school transformation and school redesign, elevating schools from good to great. And how do we take some of the brilliant ideas in this book and apply them to perhaps a strategic plan, a kind of new approach or mental model to how we're going to move forth in partnership with students and not just as a team of adults. So here we go. 01:44 One of the things that I love is that they really anchor in a liberatory purpose of education. They have this beautiful, beautiful art throughout the book, um and and framework um, grounded in the olive tree, um, which is important to Palestine, and rooted as a symbol of justice, which I really appreciate. And this idea of this liberatory purpose of education being one that is co-created with students. Right, An educational experience where students are true partners and co-creators, where students can ask questions of society they live in, they develop critical literacy and numeracy, they shape the conditions of their lives, they develop their own moral compasses. Right, what do they think is right from wrong? What is truth from fact? And perhaps my favorite one although I do love all of them is to witness and affirm one another's humanity. Like, how cool would that be if all of our schools centered the witnessing and affirmations of one another's humanity? I think often we talk about student-led discussions and discussions of high emotion topics on this podcast and I think often we avoid or feel uncomfortable with topics of discussion that bring up high emotions because we are fearful that someone's humanity will not be affirmed, will not be witnessed, will not be like we will just not uphold someone else's humanity or dignity right or that someone in the class will not. But if that is a core tenet of who we are as a school community, then we are going to make sure that we approach all of the things, including the class discussion, but all of the things, all of the policies and instructional practices and ways of being with each other in that school community, with that mind. I would just love if that was, you know, stated and also like lived by right as a way of being, which they're going to talk about. 03:48 They talk about in the book and we'll talk about shortly here. Throughout there's, of course, tons of ideas of street data to gather everything from having student voice and report cards to noting nonverbal engagement in a classroom visit, tracking feedback that is both affirming and corrective, and I think there's so, so much that we often collect as data. And, of course, if you haven't read the book Street Data, please go back and read that because it's excellent If you are a podcast listener, listen to Street Data, um, which is with shane zephyr and alcee mumby as co-hosts, and they get into a lot of the concepts of the book in audio format with amazing guests. So that's great. But we often focus on this idea of you know satellite or map data, which is just a bit more removed from the day-to-day student experience of being in school, and so we want to make sure that we are as close as possible to kind of that street level view of what students are experiencing. I also just love that at some point they talked about how you know. Quotes and transcripts and also non-verbals from discussions, from discourse in the classroom are artifacts of street data, Like they are about the student experience. You can notice what the students are kind of all grappling with right and how learning is happening, which is just such a cool idea is like student-led discussion or discourse transcripts as street data just oh, it just made my heart sing, okay, so, uh, as we are thinking, you know, through this school transformation, school redesign lens, a couple things that I wanted to share. 05:32 Um, one they share four criteria of good inquiry questions, which does stem from the street data book with jimmy ledugan and, uh, shane zafira as co-authors. So one is that it needs to name the specific group of students or adults it could be like, I think, families or someone at the margins. So we have to, like, center the margins right. That's a key component of kind of their equity transformation cycle Should name an uncomfortable truth that doesn't blame learners and is in our locus of control. I do love this because I'm always looking for good language around this Adaptive leadership scholars I'm always citing Heifetz, Graschau and Linsky on this saying, you know, there's the kind of this underlying belief, habit or loyalty which is a thing that lies at the heart of adaptive challenges, and we have to get to that. 06:19 And so I'm always advocating for a root cause analysis that gets to that, and I just love the phrasing of uncomfortable truth. So good, Um, our good inquiry questions should allow for inquiry and probing, Love that, and it can be used to gather street data to reimagine our pedagogies. I love all of this. So thinking about as a leadership team, an instructional leadership team, a school redesign team, whatever your team is one I would and I said this in the previous episode a few episodes ago, but just you know, I always say there should be students and folks at the margins at the table on the team, but that also that we are first co-creating an inquiry, question right, and doing these things, naming the group we're looking at and seeking data from street data, from naming an uncomfortable truth and being able to ask additional questions and probe to learn more. So I think that is something that is often missing from school transformation efforts or kind of redesign efforts. They talk about the 10 toxins which also were in street data. 07:26 I won't give the whole book away. You need to get the book. There's so many things in here, but I'll just say some highlights that I think are things we talk about a lot and just want to emphasize. One teacher is expert right. Two, rugged individualism. This idea of sorting kids, ranking kids doing independent projects, when really in you know, in life we often learn and thrive with each other right as what we do together. I often feel like this as an instructional coach and PD provider what I do with colleagues is always better. It is always better than what I could do by myself. Could I do it faster by myself? Better than what I could do by myself? Could I do it faster by myself? Yes, it's better, no. So rugged individualism is a toxin Containment containing, whether it's students to desks in seated positions. 08:14 Don't walk around my classroom right. 08:15 Don't go out of the halls. 08:16 Containing within the school right, no field trips. That kind of thing we can't learn within the larger community. Schooling has to happen in, but in seat right. And this idea of scarcity mindset, which is common when we talk about pacing guides, or I don't have time to do circles and center belonging, I don't have time to do revision and resubmission on a project after I give feedback. I have to just give them feedback, give them the grade and then we don't do anything with it, right, Because of time constraints, time being the biggest scarcity mindset that I notice, but I think there's so many that come up in education. So just be wary of those toxins and, of course, get the book for all 10. They say kind of this complimentary or not complimentary, kind of like the flip side of this right 10 ways of being. Include 10 points. 09:09 I want to highlight five here. One is deep listening. This has been truly on my heart for a while now. But deep listening to one another, particularly at the margins. Intergenerational learning I recently listened to a MindShift podcast episode about a preschool that was co-located with an elderly community. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful and joyous and it just warmed my heart but also just activated my imagination to think about the possibilities here and to know that many homes and families are inclusive of like three generations and we often see that as a deficit. We don't often talk about the assets, the opportunities that provides for intergenerational learning, and how do we design classrooms and school communities with that in mind? How do we partner better with families and community members of multiple generations and truly have a partnership where we're learning in community with one another? That could be central to school transformation efforts. 10:16 Additionally, wholism like treating the whole person, schools as sites of healing and relationality as a core way of being right. We are in relationship with one another. We are not here to just, you know, put information in your brain and send you on your way. We are in true relationship. We are going to remember each other for years and decades to come. We mean something to one another, we are curious about one another's personhood and we are committed to healing harm, particularly harm that has been done by school systems to the kids that are in front of us, perhaps by previous schools. Perhaps the school we're in, perhaps the previous generations of schools excuse me of families, Like families, are going to have a hard time coming to institutions of schooling that were harmful to them. Right, there's so many opportunities and reasons for schools as sites of healing. 11:18 Now, the core piece of this book is pedagogies of voice. So they have eight kind of pedagogies they focus on, and I love their metaphor of like a seed store where you can find these different practices. They have so many links and QR codes to really specific practical resources that, again, are just amazing, as well as like videos of students being reflective, and it's so good, the book is so good, but they support four agency domains, these pedagogies of voice, so identity, belonging, inquiry and efficacy, and so I'll just name some of the pedagogies of voice and you can kind of think about, as you order the book and wait for it to be coming to you, ways that you might be able to do this, to make this happen, to make it core to your practice amongst adults as well as your practice instructionally with students. So this idea of story-entation, which is a word from Shane Safir coins for one of her earlier books, this orientation towards stories, I just I love it as being central to supportive of identity as well as other things of course. I think these are all kind of intersectional agency domains. 12:28 Micro-affirmations, right. Where can we just constantly be affirming of kids' strengths, right, and have an asset mindset? I love the idea of micro-affirmations and I've talked before about having values language present in the space in the classroom so that students, when given the opportunity, can share a value or an appreciation for another person in their class, Like this. Just this affirms that idea. So I love it. Belonging, radical inclusion and circle up I talked about circles a lot. I love them. I think it definitely amplifies a sense of belonging. 13:06 Inquiry I think this is the biggest place that I think for instructional kind of I wouldn't say it's like hardest, but I think there is such tension between how we've historically done things in this agency domain and where we could go with it that it feels sometimes like the biggest lift. So I just want to name here those two things are questions over answers, so having a curiosity stance, having inquiry stance to posing great questions and creating great questions. We talk about this when we're designing student-led discussions and discourse opportunities. We want to create a really thoughtful prompt so that students are interested and have opportunities to connect. They actually have a great list of what makes a good compelling question or discussion question, and I think that's worth taking a look at. And I think that that's worth taking a look at, but this idea of question over answers and centering student led discussion in trying to grapple with those questions and answers is is key and a huge shift away from and I mean they cite Joe Feldman. 14:22 We've also talked about Asao Inouye on this podcast and his work. I think there's so, so much here. We've done a whole series about go back and listen to those episodes, but being able to value the feedback, which is about, you know, growth and learning and the joy of learning and building on our skills and being in community and in relationship with one another over grades, which prioritizes, like these structures of traditional schooling and these principles, like rugged individualism where we rank each other. I mean that just right. It's a huge shift, though, because we are often operating in these really seemingly confining situations, but again, I'm thoughtful about the scarcity mindset and the toxins that we shared earlier. And then, finally, efficacy as an agency domain making learning public. 15:23 I love this idea, both like from the standpoint of when I was working in New York Performance Standards Consortium School in New York City, we would have portfolios that students would use at the end of the year to kind of that was about their graduation or moving on to the next grade and ultimately their graduation from high school was based on in lieu of regents exams in many cases, but even when it wasn't, we would still do them because they're so valuable to have a community of people giving you feedback and just having an authentic audience. But also this idea of kind of like place-based learning and being rooted in a place and being in community with people outside of your school system. I've been heartened to think deeply about be in spaces around civic showcases in Massachusetts and New York and this idea of being in community with young people who are striving to make change and that that partnership youth-adult partnership is critical for that and that's a way to make learning public and as well as this idea of reflection and revision is so critical and reminds me of Zaretta Hammond's work around kind of that reflection and I think about metacognition and metastrategic thinking and that coaching that happens student to teacher and teacher to student. So I think that's also really on my heart. I will finally share. 16:46 There's a last section in this book that I love. That is a nod to leaders and, as I am talking as part of this leadership series here and addressing school transformation and redesign, thinking about how we, yes, collect the data, yes, develop the inquiry question. But once you have that data, in response to that inquiry question that you have co-created, ideally with students and multiple stakeholders, like what do you do there? And so the authors share a really great 60-minute sample agenda and I'll just talk you through kind of the components of it and you can get the book to dig in a little deeper. But one there's like this very human check-in, to start right, Because we're whole humans. 17:29 Then when we observe the data, we have this opportunity to reflect as a group, but we stay low inference, we don't interpret at this point, we're just kind of noticing. And then when we interpret, we're naming patterns or themes on post-its I think they recommended like three words or less Like what are those high-level themes? And then think to yourself like what's most important and why? Like what do you think is the most important thing that is coming up in this street data that we're looking at? I love that there's a feeling section. So just having a few minutes to say what are the emotions that came up for you as you were engaging in this, and then you were, as you were engaging in this, and then you know, having a whole group discussion of, like, what matters, what's our greatest opportunity here, what's the entry point for shifting our pedagogy, so that equity transformation cycle is, is really important. So we're, we're doing the deep listening, we're uncovering, like, what is the data actually telling us? You know we're thinking about having how we're going to to move forward. I think this is something that could be truly transformational. It's just doing this 60-minute activity with your leadership team. 18:28 Once you have gathered some street data and learned about the experiences of folks you have identified as being on the margins in relationship to you know what do they have to say about their experiences related to your inquiry question? So all sorts of stuff to get from this book Pedagogies of Voice. But again, thinking about that orientation towards witnessing and affirming one another's humanity as part of a liberatory education is really something that I have been thoughtful about. So, yes, there's all of these ways of doing it and I think the book will be your guide here for this. But just to know what your kind of core purpose is. To have a great inquiry question, guided by identifying who's at the margins and being wary of those various toxins. Right Teacher, as expert, rugged, individualism, containment, scarcity mindset and instead doing some deep listening, intergenerational learning, healing and being in relationship with one another. 19:37 A final note I will share is that there was it's actually in a footnote in this book I was recently writing. I had to write a proposal for doing some work with a state and they said use an active verb. And I had written experience as the verb. And then I doubted myself and I was like, oh, they're not going to think this is an active verb. In this footnote, they say they're not going to think this is an active verb. In this footnote they say here's a note on experience as a verb. 20:06 Quote makes room for qualitative outcomes that are harder to measure but equally valuable. They go on to say the signals and orientation to identity development and belonging as core dimensions of learning. So, absolutely, experience is a verb. That is an important one and, in alignment with the street data principle that what matters isn't always what's easy to measure, I really think this is a valuable takeaway. So good luck with your transformation. Let us know how it's going. Let us know which of these pieces you gravitate towards and what you'd like to learn about next and what you're going to grapple with next as we go on and make our schools amazing places to be humans. 1/12/2026 240. Leading Change in Turnaround/Low-Performing Schools: My Takeaways from RSLP (Hammond)Read Now
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In this episode, Lindsay is continuing the series on school transformation, school redesign, school leadership, and leading change. This episode focuses on the key takeaways from a recently published book by Zaretta Hammond: "Rebuilding Students' Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice."
The book is grounded by three pillars of liberatory education: personhood, information processing power, and agency, which together form the foundation for revolutionizing education. This discussion focuses on the key takeaways from Hammond’s book, with some simple action steps educators can apply to their context today. Why? From the Research Hammond’s work is essential in today’s educational landscape because we’ve had, as she describes, a “pedagogy of compliance” for too long. This model relies on orderliness, low tolerance for mistakes, and minimizing opportunities for kids to talk. This approach limits possibilities in building classrooms full of engaged, thriving students. Instead, Hammond imagines the “pedagogy of possibility”—where we can go when we center student voices in education. Hammond focuses on the instructional core and how we are engaging students in learning through curriculum and classroom discussion. Amplifying student voice is not just about having feedback on cafeteria lunch, but is much deeper, sitting at the heart of our instructional practices. What? Action Steps for Educators To begin working in the pedagogy of possibility instead of a pedagogy of compliance, educators can draw from Hammond’s insights, including: Step 1: Embrace the pillars of liberatory education by focusing on personhood, information processing power, and agency. This shift allows for a more humanized learning environment where students are empowered to advocate for themselves. Step 2: Prioritize the instructional core—what and how you are teaching and engaging students in the classroom. Part of this is teaching learn-to-learn skills and encouraging “personal cognitive algorithms,” or how a student uniquely learns and engages with learning. Learn-to-learn skills Hammond discusses include:
Step 3: Embrace one-on-one conferences with students as must-dos, not something you do if there’s time. This allows educators to coach students independently and give them opportunities to develop meta-strategic thinking (i.e., how they think about their learning). Step 4: Avoid over-scaffolding by providing just-in-time supports instead of just-in-case measures. Empower students to recognize and utilize learning tools independently, enhancing their cognitive abilities for effective school transformation. Final Tip: There’s so much more to share! Grab the book for lots of practical hands-on ideas and protocols to implement in your classroom. One example is the implementation of talk and wordplay—we learn through talking, through dialogue. So circles, socratic seminars, small group discussions all help expand our thinking. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Leader Bundle with you for free. Also make sure to grab your copy of "Rebuilding Students' Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice” by Zaretta Hammond. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 240 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:03 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Welcome to episode 240 of the Time for Teachership podcast. Continuing the series of kind of school transformation, school redesign, school leadership and leading change. I want to talk to you about such an exciting book I mean a truly transformative book that was just released a few months ago and, as of the time of this recording was released like a month ago or less Rebuilding Students' Learning Power, teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice, by Zaretta Hammond. My goodness, this is incredible. So we're going to talk about kind of the key ideas from this book. I'm hoping to have Zaretta Hammond on the podcast. That would be so incredibly exciting and as we work out scheduling, you know, stay tuned for that. But here are kind of the big things that I got from the book and takeaways that I want you to have in preparation for listening and diving deeper with Zaretta Hammond herself. Here we go. So I really love that. 00:59 She grounds the work and the book itself in three pillars of liberatory education right from the get-go. One is personhood, which includes like humanized learning environments, like the whole self. Right, we're full people. Two and this is the kind of crux of the book information processing power. So this includes these learn-to-learn skills that she dives into in the book Just to get to, like you know, deeper learning, critical literacy, creative thinking like the foundation of all of that stuff are those learn to learn skills and being able to process information and finally, of course, agency. So connected, of course, to the student voice. We're always talking about self-directed learning and being able to advocate for meaningful experiences for themselves. So I think this idea of personhood, information processing power and agency as this three pillar stool that we're excited about and getting into is just a wonderful, I think, orientation to the work. 01:52 Now she talks also in the introduction of this idea of we've had a pedagogy of compliance for far too long. This is very common and it's a pervasive mental model that a lot of us have. So a couple of those hallmarks include favors, orderliness over productive struggle, low tolerance for mistakes and minimizing opportunities for kids to talk. I mean we constantly as teachers. I mean I myself have a podcast, I talk a lot, we are constantly trying to share information, teach by talking, and we've talked about a lot on the podcast and even pulled goal percentages from street data the book Street Data for how often kids should actually be talking. So I love that kind of student led discussion can actually be a disruptor of this pedagogy of compliance, in this or en route to this pedagogy of possibility that she calls it, or en route to this pedagogy of possibility that she calls it. And so, in order to get to this pedagogy of possibility she talks about a lot of different things and we'll dive into a few here, but I do just love that she focuses on the instructional core. 02:54 Like, we have to focus on the instructional core. We can't just have, you know, kids talking about, like, what they liked, about the cafeteria lunch, right? We can't just, you know, do all of these things that might satisfy a desire for belonging in the external school space but don't actually change anything about how we teach kids how to learn right. And so, in service of that, she talks about teaching students learn to learn skills and critically encourages teachers to reduce the excessive scaffolding. I'm going to say more on that in a moment, because I think this is really important and really make sure that there are many opportunities that we are actually coaching kids how to think, like we're giving them opportunities to develop their metastrategic thinking and metacognition and we're actually having one-on-one instructional conversations, which she says are required. Like these one-on-one conferences, they're not like a nice to have, they're a need to have. And we're coaching students. 03:50 I love that she calls it like kind of a personal cognitive algorithm. We're helping kids learn to figure out how they're learning and what cognitive tools they have that align with you, know what works for them, what's available to them, and get to learn on their own so that it's not just our class they're benefiting in right, it's all classes, it's all both in and outside of school learning experiences. And, of course, to do this well, we have to have the structural support from policy and administrators and be able to make sure we're all on the same page in terms of what the goals are regarding instructional coaching and instructional leadership. Ideally, what we have when we create this space for leaders is we have, excuse me, for students and learners is that we have independent learners, not dependent learners. And she talks about how really you want those independent learners to be able to perform their own kind of gap analysis where they're saying you know, like, how do I get from where I am to where I want to be right, what needs to change so that I can, you know, improve my skill, improve my conceptual understanding? I do love that she talks about conceptual understanding a lot. 04:57 Having just read James Nottingham and the importance of conceptual understandings and grasping a concept, this was really, really powerful for me and if you haven't listened to the James Donningham episode, please go back and listen. That was a few months ago. Really phenomenal conversation about his recent book, teach Brilliantly. The third question she says, you know, is like how well am I grasping this concept? So again, conceptual knowledge. And then where are my leverage points for adjusting my learning tactics? So again that metastrategic thinking what tools do I have that will support me? And I don't want to give the whole book away. I mean this is kind of like her introduction introductory chapters, but I just love this orientation. 05:38 As we think from a school transformation lens and a school design lens, are we focused on the instructional core? Are we thinking about cognitively coaching kids and making sure that they have a sense of how they process information and what cognitive tools they have to be able to get better at it? Are we taking time and making sure that, amidst all of the typical school redesign? Or maybe we're not, if we're lucky doing all the typical school redesign things, or maybe we're not, if we're lucky doing all the typical school redesign. Things like grabbing a high quality instructional curriculum, handing over a pacing guide and saying follow this to a T right. I love that Zora Haman gets into hazing guides and it says you know like we need to not just follow them rigidly right when we are actually responsive. Putting the responsive and culturally responsive teaching right when we are actually responsive. Putting the responsive and culturally responsive teaching right, which we often forget or sidestep or choose not to do because of these external pressures like pacing guides. We don't enable kids to figure it out at you know all at different paces, in different ways, because they have different personal algorithms. So we maintain the high expectations, but we take the time to responsibly coach students and have one-on-one conversations, even if they're just three minutes long. So I really love this idea. 06:56 I think the big thing I'm latching onto is this idea of cognitive coaching or this cognitive apprenticeship. She calls it, you know teachers as what she calls cognitive mediators and supporting students metastrategic thinking so that they can be better information processors. Like I love this thesis. This is what we are here for. This is what real school transformation is about and, as we are trying to grow structures and processes for great schools, I think this should be at the core. So ideally you are able to work with Zaretta Hammond for multiple years and in an ongoing way, because that's what this truly requires. If you are not, please buy her book and dig deep into this. But I think there are so many spaces for us to think about as individual educators, as instructional coaches and leaders, as teams, like departments, or in our team meetings and our PLCs. How do we center this work? And I've talked a lot about PLCs in the past year and had some great experts on and folks who have published wonderful books with concrete strategies around looking at student work and aligning expectations and standards. 08:03 I also highly encourage people to utilize the time, as Zaretta Hammond suggests, to practice that one-on-one coaching with students, because it is so unfamiliar. This is something that we have not experienced in our teacher prep programs most likely, and is going to require a big mental shift, a huge, you know, increase of skills in terms of being responsive and thinking about all of this, maybe new information that's new to us as well as students around information processing and how cognitively our brains work to, you know, take in new information and connect it to what we already know and make it stick right. So we'll just share a couple things from her book and I'll do a quick version because I think I want to give you a taste and I want you to actually dig into the whole book because it is. It was one of those books where I was folding down every other page and underlining like every other line. It was just like I've realized, like I've read it basically twice now, because you need to kind of go back in and use it as a living text and you learn something new each time. It's just that dense and it all the pieces are really necessary to go together to be able to actually move forward. 09:19 And she talks about that right For true change. You don't want to just like run right in with this stuff. You want to think about your approach. You want to reflect deeply yourself before you're implementing anything. So here we go. Here are some learn to learn skills that she talks about. And she prefaces this with like kind of what is information processing? I just want to dig into these learn to learn skills. 09:40 So she's like right, the first thing we do is we size it up and break it down. So does this seem hard? How do I need to organize myself In investigating history we talk about as part of the investigating sources routine. That first kind of step is like what kind of source is this right? What am I attuning to? Is there an author, right? What's the bias? So that kind of thing right. How do I organize myself, get ready, are there strategies that I'm already thinking I can use? Then we scan the hard drive. Have I seen something similar to this before? Have I seen this thing before? What's the opposite of the thing I'm looking at? So we're trying to access that prior knowledge. 10:21 If you will, my favorite part of this and I think the places where she offers the most support and I think could be the most transformative we could really lean into here, particularly based on some of the feedback we've gotten around investigating history is chew and remix. So this is the third step. So questions a learner might ask themselves here how is this connected to what I already know? Is anything confusing? How could I make sense of it? Which of the four cognitive routines can I use? She elaborates on this. But basically it's, like you know, distinguishing, like how are different things similar or different systems right? Whole to part, part to whole? What are the kind of interrelationships of this concept Relationships, action, reaction and perspectives right, these are kind of therelationships of this concept relationships, action, reaction and perspectives right, these are kind of the four cognitive routines distinctions, systems, relationships, perspectives. 11:15 But what I really want to lean into here is that one of the biggest pieces of feedback we've gotten from the grade three and four pilot in the state of Massachusetts for our investigating history curriculum that was just piloted in the school year 24-25 is our kids don't have enough background knowledge about this content to be able to engage the way they need to. And I think an expansive view and you've heard me say this a lot, so sorry, but an expansive view of background knowledge in the sense of, like, what experiences have we had? What metaphors and I love that she uses this as a tool what metaphors can we link to? How is this similar to something I have literally experienced in my life, or something that maybe is not a scholarly source quote unquote but is something that I am aware of? I know about this concept in this other space. 12:04 Like, how can I link to that so that I can engage in this step three of chew and remix? Like I am thinking about this thing, I'm connecting it, I'm remixing it in my brain, I'm making it my own. And then I can go on to step four and five, which are skillful practice, where I'm kind of like you know, practicing, applying. I'm kind of like you know, practicing applying, I'm making some small changes and stretching myself, monitoring my progress, you know that stuff. And then five, making it sticky. Making it sticky, so I am using the skill, I'm teaching someone else or telling someone else about it, maybe engaging in some retrieval practice. But that chew and remix, like how do I link it from, like the new thing coming in to what I already know? 12:41 I think is gold and such an opportunity, given all of the kind of frustration or kind of not knowing what to do with the fact that teachers are reporting that their students don't have quote the background knowledge for some of this historical content. So I mean, one of the things that I want to kind of name is that she talks about collectivist cultures and these five principles she lays out of collectivist cultures and then she links what she calls cultural learning tools or these cognitive tools in these four different categories to support kids in their information processing or in those kind of learn-to-learn skills. And so the four kind of categories of tools are around memory, so kind of building schema and connecting to those existing funds of knowledge that we just talked about Making a metaphor is an example that she shares. I love that, as well as talk and wordplay. I love the idea that she is connecting to collectivist cultures like gravitation, to oral histories and dialogue and connects to sociocultural learning theory. Like we talk and think as we talk. I am a verbal processor. I'm learning this more and more as I grow up, but I think a lot of kids I've seen it in circles, socratic seminars, small group discussions in my own classroom there is something that happens when we talk to one another we expand our thinking. 14:06 And talking to James Nottingham in that that earlier interview I referenced on the podcast, he kind of expanded my ideas of you know what is the purpose of a discussion? The goal should always be that we're expanding our one another's thinking right. So when we engage in a discussion we don't want to come out as being right. We want to come out as having kind of our minds blown right, like our, our an expanded sense or more nuanced sense of a concept than when we went in with our own original ideas. Right Patterns and puzzles is another kind of of thing. So this could be like an open source I've always loved open source or like drawing a concept map. So thinking about how different pieces are connected within a concept, as well as perspective taking, which we do all of the time in history. But something like a protocol, like World Cafe or, I've heard, like talking heads or something like this right is like ways that we could kind of bring perspective taking to the forefront. I also think about leading change for adults as well as students. 15:06 Thinking about facilitating and helping people come to the realization of a disorienting dilemma by just sharing a little bit of information that causes people to say, whoa, this isn't what I thought it was right. I am having a little bit of disorientation here because I thought things were this way and this new information is just kind of blowing my mind and making me think I need to rethink this. And research has shown that doing that in groups, having that disorienting dilemma and being able to verbally process it in a group setting, is actually most beneficial. Because you can quote try on other ways of thinking, which I absolutely love. Because you can quote try on other ways of thinking, which I absolutely love. 15:46 So thinking about, like how we coach students using some of Zaretta Hammond's ideas around learn to learn skills. Actually, I mean, she says you know, we literally teach this to kids. We teach them how the information processing kind of arc works and we teach them learn to learn skills and we help them become aware of this and we help them recognize and literally hand over to them Don't like control it as the teacher. We're all going to do this thing now, right, we're going to use this tool, but to say to students hey, these are some tools, recognize what works for you, recognize when you might use it and be able to use it on your own. And what I love is that she encourages people to just play. Just play with the tools, like low stakes. Just play with them at first right, figure them out. Don't try to control it as the teacher, but do prompt the reflection of the students. And I just think this whole thing is just so, so cool and so meaningful. 16:46 So I think the large piece here this is a little bit of a different episode because I'm kind of like just spewing ideas that I'm hearing, but I think the one big piece in terms of mindset is around cognitive coaching is key to school transformation, like doing this well as a teacher, as a team of teachers, as a school, is super important. And how do you do that? Well, one, you yourselves as educators, and we ourselves as educators, as coaches right, we need to know this information. We need to know how kids learn. We need to know the five learn to learn skills ourselves. We need to be aware of some cultural learning tools that students can use when they're thinking strategically and meta-strategically. We also have to be aware of the key concepts we want kids to grapple with, as James Donaghan says. 17:37 Zaretta Hammond also says this concept being able to conceptually grasp things is super important and she shares a conceptual grasp scale in the book that goes all the way from like a zero out of zero. It's a zero to six scale. So the zero is like I don't even know what I don't know, basically all the way to six, where it's called a symphonic grasp, which I love, which is like now I can use this concept in new ways. I can see the less obvious relationships. I can critique other concepts and ideas because I'm all the way here, right, and of course there's like different pieces along the way, but to just know one what concepts are important that I need my students to know, like what's most essential? Two like how do I know that they actually know? Like where are they in that zero to six scale and how do I know that? Right, and and then, when we are thinking about how they are learning and grasping those concepts, we are thinking about those learn to learn skills and those cultural learning tools we're exposing kids to and we're thinking about those one-on-one cognitive conversations that we have structurally made time for in the actual instructional, either period or school day for younger kids in elementary settings. And finally, I think again. I said I would return to this later, but this idea of over-scaffolding is something that every passing week, month, year, I am just more and more aware of. 19:07 And I love Zoraida Hammond's language around responsive right, we talk about culturally responsive teaching. We need to lean into the responsive part. What she says is we have too many just-in-case supports, right. So like sentence frames that don't ask kids to actually like make sense of these multiple, complex ideas, pre-written sentence sums that they're they might not even need overuse of note taker worksheets, excessive anchor charts. Like we have all of these things that we're like well, we'll give this and we'll give kid does need and turn over, ideally, the tools to a kid themselves to figure out oh, I need this, right, I need something, and this tool is available. This will work for me because I know how I learn Right. And so we want the just in time supports versus the all of the just in case supports. 20:01 So she has a ton of really helpful kind of quote, unquote look fors for over scaffolding. That's like, oh, are you doing this? You might be over scaffolding, right, and it's a beautifully laid out table with lots of details. So I highly again encourage you to get the book and check all of that out. Okay, this was basically a love letter to. This is a red I haven't in her book, but I hope that you got some concrete ideas out of it and, if nothing else, that you are thoughtful about how we center students cognitive processing power and rebuilding that up in your school transformation efforts. 
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode, we dive into different adaptive leadership strategies to drive change in a school redesign context. Though geared toward educators in “low-performing” or “turnaround” schools, this episode has practical insights for anyone who wants to make school a place where every student can thrive.
Drawing from the research, host Lindsay walks us through the intricacies of school redesign and change initiatives. She talks about how to incorporate youth and multi-stakeholder voices, capacity building, and community engagement. Mindset Shifts Required There are two common missteps when it comes to leading a change initiative at turnaround schools:
These can be addressed by mindset shifts and understanding what the research says about adaptive leadership and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Why? From the Research Drawing on the work of Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky (2009), adaptive challenges are defined as those “typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs, and loyalties rather than technical complexity, and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis.” Understanding that these challenges bring up emotions and deeply-rooted value systems, it makes sense that we need to take a totally different approach than a technical implementation of a new curriculum or program. Lindsay also draws on Zaretta Hammond's insights into student learning power and cognitive justice, underscoring the importance of focusing on students' cognitive development and equitable learning experiences. By centering marginalized voices and employing strategies like capacity building and strategic planning, schools can effectively address adaptive challenges and foster educational equity. What? Action Steps for Change After recognizing first that most challenges are adaptive and, therefore, need a multi-faceted approach, here are some steps leaders can take to implement change initiatives: Step 1: Identify the adaptive challenge. Be open to what the problem really is, digging deeper than looking only at technical issues. This leads to a “disorienting dilemma,” as Mezirow puts it, which is the starting point for real change. Step 2: Have a group dialogue. This disorienting dilemma is uncomfortable—so uncomfortable it moves us to action. Having a mutli-stakeholder group dialogue about the adaptive challenge lets each person be open to new ideas and perspectives to solve it. Step 3: Develop cycles of feedback and co-creation with stakeholder groups so everyone—families, students, educators, administrators, community members—have meaningful say in the change plan. Step 4: Empower stakeholders by fostering ongoing professional development, centering marginalized voices, and building authentic student leadership and family partnerships. Step 5: Enhance school capacity through coaching, providing instructional leaders and coaches with their own coaches. Professional learning and coaching can help everyone develop the knowledge, skills, and mindset to foster connections with stakeholders and collaborate effectively. This is not done in one-off workshops, but ongoing learning. Step 6: Build stronger partnerships with families by authentically engaging them. Ari Gersen-Kessler talks about how this is the difference between “good” and “great” schools. His book, On the Same Team, dives deeper into how and why to partner with families. Step 7: Center the stories of families and students who have been marginalized by traditional schooling, ensuring their voices are at the table and their data sets are what we’re looking at. Step 8: Focus on student learning and learning power by putting instruction and curriculum at the heart of what we do. Learning is the core of education, not the co-curriculars and “extras,” so the focus needs to be there. This includes high-quality instruction materials and the flexibility to develop personalized approaches for each student. Final Tip: Embrace a human-first approach that values the stories and emotions of students and families, moving beyond off-the-shelf solutions to craft responsive initiatives. The resources mentioned in this episode include the following books:
And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 239 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Linday Lyons (Host) Hello and welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. We are jump-starting episode 239 and this one is going to be about kind of quote-unquote school redesign. So if you are in a situation where your school has been designated as quote low performing or in turnaround status, which is what we call it in Massachusetts, this episode is for you. However, if you are not in one of those situations and just are aiming to make your school kind of a place for every single student to thrive and you just want to level up what's going on there, this is also for you. So here we go. When we are thinking about a school redesign approach, my vote is always for one that is grounded in adaptive leadership, in youth and multi-stakeholder voice and a capacity building approach. I will always vote for those three kind of organizing principles. Now, when we are thinking about what this actually looks like, this means being in multi-stakeholder community as a leadership team, having a representative kind of like leadership governance structure with feedback loops to different stakeholder groups, collaboratively making decisions, being just in a mode of co-creation and constant inquiry. That is what is going to lead to the real transformation. So it's going to take time. It is not an overnight. Here we go, but investing in the actual structures themselves and the process of doing things, which is likely going to be very different than you've done before. That's what's going to make the real difference and that's what's going to make actually any change that you would like to make work smoother, better, faster in the future. 01:59 So let's start with maybe some common missteps. So in my work in the past with turnaround schools and with schools who are just leading change initiatives in general, there are two common missteps that I have noticed and I just want to point them out, because you may be in the midst of leading a change initiative or a strategic planning team, an instructional leadership team at your school or district, like whatever the thing is, and you may be noticing yourself doing these things. One is that when we're identifying a challenge that is a major challenge, a longstanding challenge, we are, you know, disservicing many kids and we're trying to figure out how do we, you know, have educational equity, that kind of thing? Trying to figure out how do we have educational equity, that kind of thing. We are identifying too often challenges as technical and not adaptive. That's number one. The challenges we identify are not adaptive. We're saying that they are technical, so we are misdiagnosing them. The second misstep is that leadership structures are not shared across multiple stakeholder groups. They are held on to, maybe in what research often calls distributed leadership models, where we have admin and educators, but we don't have parents, we don't have students, we don't have, you know, broader kind of community members, families it's just people who are employed by the DOE. Okay, so as we get into these a little bit deeper, I'll reference a little bit of research and a little bit more detail and then we'll move on. 03:35 But just want to say Heifetz, graschau and Linsky they wrote a 2009 book on adaptive leadership that I cite all the time. One of the most common quotes that I use here is that they talk about adaptive challenges in this way. They say they are quote 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 you can imagine having a conversation changing things where we have intense emotions coming up right. That's probably very common in change leadership. You've probably experienced this many times and you can also imagine that when we get really deep down in our root cause analysis, for example, and we touch on someone's values, and that there's a value tension between what we're actually doing and what we purport to value, or we have a loyalty to a particular thing that is inequitable that's what the data tells us, right, or that's what the reality is, that's what the kids are telling us, the families are telling us. Or we get into a belief that needs to be unearthed, examined and reconceived because it is inequitable. Big emotions, big time emotions, and that is going to take a very different approach than than oh, we're going to adopt this new high quality curriculum. 04:46 Here we go, step by step, pd, we're all set now, beautiful school, right, that they're just, they're very different technical and adaptive challenges and almost always a long-standing problem is an adaptive challenge, or there's an adaptive component to it and we ignore that and therefore do not get results. Right, we do not enact transformation because we're ignoring this component. So when we are naming an adaptive challenge, we enable us to have what Mesereau calls a disorienting dilemma. Right, we can facilitate this as leaders, but basically that's a disorienting dilemma is when we have kind of this paradigm shift, or enables, I should say, a paradigm shift for transformative learning, where we have kind of this realization that disorients us, that kind of shakes up our way of thinking and we say, oh wait, a minute. 05:43 I was under the impression that we were doing this or that this was the experience of students in our school. I am now realizing from student stories that they are sharing with us, for example, this is not at all the case. Right Now I need to critically examine all the assumptions that I have, and I am so uncomfortable that I am willing to do that. Right, I am so uncomfortable with this disorientation. I am realizing the way I've been thinking about this isn't working anymore, and the best way to kind of try on other ways of thinking, according to change scholars, is that you actually can have a group dialogue, ideally multi-stakeholder, so you have multiple perspectives brought in already just from the stakeholder group and you can experience and witness other people's ways of thinking and enable yourself to try on something different. Right, I will link to a blog post where I talk more about this, but I just love this idea of we get to the adaptive challenge by having a disorienting dilemma and then we try on other ways of thinking because we're in a group, right, or we pull in, even if they're not live in the room, the experiences and stories of folks who have been, you know, proximate to the problem or the challenge. 06:53 The second step I just want to touch on is that only teachers and administrators are on the committee for school change. When you are absent from the conversation about creating change in your community, you then need to go down the path of quote-unquote buy-in, and we always talk about buy-in. Buy-in is not necessary when you are part of the creation, when you have an authentic, meaningful, active role in the co-creation right, then I don't need to buy into anything. It's my plan, right? I'm part of the construction and of course, we can't have, you know, 2,000 individuals in a room together writing the words of the plan specifically. But we can create a representative stakeholder structure that has multiple stakeholder groups represented in the leadership team and we build capacity, for which I'll get into momentarily feedback loops from those stakeholder groups, so everyone does feel like they have a role in co-creating. Where we're going and providing feedback on drafts of that plan. Then you eliminate the need for buy-in because you're not forcing a plan on anyone. You're saying we're in this together, we are here for all of you, we want feedback from all of you, we want input from all of you, we want to co-create and be in partnership with all of you. We're not doing this to you, we're doing this with you, right, and so I think that's the big kind of mental shift and the with, not for or to and how to do it. The structure is to create the multi-stakeholder group, to create the structure and support and professional learning for all of those stakeholders to be true representatives and be able to stay connected to their stakeholder groups that they represent and gather feedback regularly. So, knowing that these are the two missteps that challenges identified are not adaptive, they actually are and leadership structure is not shared across multiple stakeholder groups it should be what it could look like. I want to talk about that next, what it could be. There we go. 09:04 Capacity building is. I think, first and foremost, our approach to professional learning has to be one of capacity building. Even as a person who you know, my whole job is coming in and getting paid by school districts to support, I want school districts to work me out of a job. I don't. I would love to stay with people forever and and just go deeper and deeper and deeper. And, yes, that is possible to a degree. I love multi-year partnerships. I think we can go really deep there. But I don't want to be employed by a school or district for 20 years Like that is just not helpful to them and it is not the way that your school is going to thrive when you are constantly reliant on external people to say what's going on. 09:47 I think maybe being in an advisor capacity or a hey, let me run this by you capacity, after two or three years that makes more sense to me. But to constantly rely on we need all of the instructional strategies from you, we need the direction from you, we need the like. That doesn't. That doesn't seem ethical and it doesn't seem helpful to me. So here's what I mean we can support all stakeholders, but educators included, because we often talk about PL or professional learning. Through an education educator lens, we can help everyone develop the knowledge and skills to foster and I would also add mindset, to foster stronger connections with other stakeholders in the school community and collaborate effectively. If they can collaborate with one another, they have everything they need, as long as professional learning continues to build those skills and, of course, provide evidence-based information and research. But to be able to be in community with one another and be present for each other's experiences and to like, quote, listen deeply and to be responsive, like that is what's awesome, and Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues work that 2017 research that came out on effective professional learning Like. 10:55 One of those hallmarks is that it should be ongoing. It cannot be a one-off workshop, right. It has to be that the way we do things of professional learning and otherwise is ongoing. We are in it for the long haul, right. We're not going to stop this initiative after our strategic plan is up. This commitment to shared leadership and to unearthing and addressing effectively adaptive challenges that are holding our school back from success are holding our students back from success. Like we're not going to stop after three years, four years, five years, like that's our core. And so I think another note on this is particularly for overworked teachers. Teachers are totally overworked. 11:34 I find it most compelling to actually embed professional learning in the contracted school day and not require teachers to work outside of it, though you need to, for sure, find money to pay them. I also think you know another just nod to the brilliance of educators is identifying those positive deviants the classrooms or places or individuals where students are thriving in these spaces or in connection with these educators and investigating it as a team right and expanding what works. I think that's a beautiful model that honors the wisdom already present in the schools. So, after we have this kind of capacity building approach, we have this mindset going into professional learning and we have it threaded throughout the year and multiple years. I also think the structures of both student leadership and family partnership should really be in place. 12:21 So Ari Gersen-Kessler taught me that research has actually shown stronger partnerships with families is actually one of the five keys to moving from a good to great school or district, and authentic family engagement is one of those keys for system-wide change, and so I would argue that you should go get his book. He has made basically a how-to guide to making this happen in book form. Go get his book. He has made basically a how-to guide to making this happen in book form, and it's called the Stronger Together, I believe, is the name of the book, and it's about his fat teams, families and educators together, and so we can link to that in the blog post. It is excellent. 12:56 But again, structurally we need to know how do we collect information and gather experiential data from families, figure out what's going on in families' brains, what are their wants, desires, needs and work in partnership to get that accomplished. Similarly, student leadership structures should go beyond and I've talked about this ad nauseum. On this I guess I'll make this brief, but they should go beyond the typical student council that plans prom or field trips or whatever the thing is right. It should be connected to the instructional core, connected to school policy, like let's actually co-create and be in partnership around real, meaningful policy and instructional change. Third, and I mentioned this already, lean on experiential, or what Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan call street data. We draw on scholarship that really pulls extensively from street data and also Safiya and colleagues newest book, pedagogies of Voice. I constantly am talking about this, the people I partner with are constantly talking about this. 14:02 But to learn about the experience of students and I would also add, families who have been marginalized by traditional schooling and the designs and policies of traditional systems, like we need to make sure that those stories of people who have not been successful are the ones that we center, are the ones at the table, are part of the kind of data set that we are reading through sorting, through analyzing in making these decisions. That can't just be like an add-on. I think it needs to be central too Because, again, adaptive challenges let's unearth as we explore those stories and experiences, the beliefs, habits and loyalties that we might hold as educators, right, or even as adults that students are kind of unearthing for us, create our disorienting dilemmas through the words and experiences of students right. Fourth, I would say, focus on student learning and quote learning power which comes from Zaretta Hammond and her new book Rebuilding Students' Learning Power, which just came out in 2025. Incredible book Pedagogies of Student Voice actually also emphasizes both of these books I've just been reading, kind of in concert with one another and they both emphasize the importance of focusing our work on the instructional core. 15:18 We cannot do equity if we leave out instruction, if it is not intimately tied to instruction and learning about students' experiences with instruction, not just how they feel at school, although that is incredibly important, but learning about instructional related or curricular related things from and with students and then co-creating with students better instruction, like being in partnership around the instruction. That, to me, is at the heart of what we need to do. Often we bring in students for extracurricular conversations or again like the student council, like what's the fun thing we're planning, but it is separate often from the core of why we're there, which is learning. So Renna Hammond's book has really emphasized and changed my brain around thinking about cognitive justice and making sure that students are kind of getting this coaching one-on-one from their teachers to make sure that students have their own cognitive tools and know their own personal algorithm. I love all the words she uses to help them be better independent learners and information processors. That's real equity. Right. That someone knows their brain and their learning process well enough that they do well, not just in my classroom but next year and the next year and out in the world forever. Right. That they can constantly take in information wherever they are, whether they're reading the New York Times physical paper right or they are seeing a new data set presented in a documentary or whatever it is. That is cognitive justice, and strategic plans should include these goals and measure progress toward them and invest resources in building educators' capacity to do these things well. Measure progress toward them and invest resources in building educators' capacity to do these things well and also not to disserate a Hammond. 16:59 She talks about, you know, letting go of the rigidity of the kind of high-quality instructional materials pacing guide that you might have. While it's important to have high-quality instruction materials right. The rigidity of the pacing guide is something I have always rallied against and that teachers find the most confining in some pretty awesome curriculum that I've seen out there in the world. Like the pacing guide often inhibits its success and when I have helped to kind of coach districts on implementation, I have often coached a prioritization approach where it's like, okay, what is the most important pieces of this, what do my personal students need? So, again, a personalization approach, prioritization, personalization. We have to do this. Well, because we need I often say like one day a week, but we need certainly an amount of time to meet one-on-one with students, to give them individual feedback, to coach them cognitively, to support their information processing, to have a responsive workshop model, for example, in terms of what the individual students need based on their formative assessment earlier this week. Right, we cannot just do things that are laid out by curriculum designers that have no personal connection to the kids in your classroom. They have no student data to base the next decision point on. I have yet to see a curriculum, although I will say that some get close. El education has like a skills block, all block, kind of responsiveness to analyzing the data and then kind of making choices around grouping and instruction based on the data. But, like holistically, there are things that we need to do, to make space for and build into our instructional plans and time and pacing guides to say we need time to just respond to the kids and to give them feedback and to have conversations. 18:52 Now, possible strategic plan components. This is not like a grab and go strategic plan, but just some things to think about as you're building your strategic plan, keeping in mind all the things we just talked about. One we want to build shared leadership structures. So again, this means creating a multi-stakeholder leadership team and also figure out some equitable kind of processes or agendas for meetings that focus on the things that matter. Starting off, you might want to collectively dream the possible. I love the idea of kind of freedom, dreaming as a group. 19:21 I would use a protocol for perhaps like the ones in the book Practicing Futures I think the subtitle is a civic imagination action handbook. So land on clear vision together, connect with stakeholders' hearts and make it easy to remember, and that is going to have that quote-unquote buy-in right. Research has shown that we're going to have people be more committed, have more pride in and clarity around that goal and the vision and what we need to do to make it happen. Next, I would design and facilitate capacity-building workshops for student leaders, families and educators. So build capacity for street data collection and feedback loops so stakeholders can truly act as connected representatives of those groups. Action research for learning what's right and wrong and like what people's experiences are and making changes as a result. So the process of the structure is stable, but the actions that we're taking should not be set in stone. 20:24 This also might include like helping people design multiple formats for stakeholders to engage and give feedback. So it might be that some people can meet and prefer to be in person. Others need something digital or like on Zoom. Other people might need something asynchronous right Zoom. Other people might need something asynchronous right. There might need to be different access points for people. 20:41 And also build facilitator or administrator capacity whoever's actually doing the facilitating of these groups to identify narratives that are popping up in these conversations that are highlighting adaptive challenges. I think, similarly, if you're doing a root cause analysis, clarify the parameters of what truly is a root cause. I would argue in an adaptive challenge it's something that identifies a deeply held belief or loyalty that's inhibiting transformation and also that's in your locus of control. No blaming of other groups or structures, right, like what's in our locus of control. And what is that deeply held belief that is inhibiting our progress? Let's name it and then let's tackle that held belief that is inhibiting our progress. Let's name it and then let's tackle that. 21:22 Okay, the second big kind of overall piece I would have is to build internal capacity for instructional coaching. Give instructional coaches and leaders their own coach. Even if you, as the principal, are the coach, you don't have a separate instructional coach, or maybe it is a department lead. Those folks should have their own coach. Right, coaching is amazing at all levels. And also conduct learning walks with students and ideally, families, if you can like multi-stakeholder learning walks where we're co-developing and using an observational criteria tool that centers on student learning what are the students doing? And saying, not, what is the teacher doing. Then identify trends from there and develop a professional action plan to support the needs of teachers. Right, so we're building capacity. All the time we are learning what's going right in instruction, finding the positive deviance uh, you know, investigating how that was created and expanding that, noting what needs to be supported, supporting it, but constantly collecting data and getting coaching and building our instructional coaching capacity. 22:18 Number three launch and maintain a practice of reviewing student work and cognitive apprenticeship practice PLCs or department meetings or team meetings, whatever you call them. Teacher teams should look at student work. For sure, I adapted DESE Massachusetts DOE looking at student work tool and I like to use that. But whatever the clean, simple process is, use a simple tool that you can reuse again and again to align on standards-based kind of grade level expectations plan for instructional adjustments based on that student data. You know, co-draft, a definition of instructional success, observable criteria, list all the things and, of course, get feedback from multiple stakeholders on this draft as well. And what I love about Zaretta Hammond's book is she talks about how PLCs are a great place to simulate and practice the one-on-one kind of coaching conversations or cognitive coaching conversations with students. So practice the language of information processing, practice being responsive in the moment to students. That takes practice and this is such a beautiful place to practice. So I would use PLCs for those two pieces. And then, of course, to offer instructional and pedagogical support workshops as needed, to those teams as they are defining what the instructional next steps for them are, based on that student data. 23:36 I would also make sure it is so hard right, I think about the adaptive leadership idea of resistance. Is loss right? Resistance to change is actually a loss of potentially like an identity, for example. I would frame a lot of these discussions with appreciative inquiry. So, for example, I think there's a SWOT analysis that people usually do for strategic planning or other business things. I prefer SOAR. So, instead of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, it's strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results. So it's all kind of in the positive. We don't need to just say here all the things are terrible, but here are the things, where do we want to be? And let's focus on that and let's get there right. And also, you know, determining processes for highlighting and studying examples of positive deviance, as we mentioned. 24:24 Okay, the fourth and final piece of this list, I would say both capacity to collect student experience data. So, again, identify students at the margins, generate key questions to ask, design and facilitate data collection workshops for all those stakeholder groups, so everyone has the capacity to collect data. And also noting that everyone should have their own coach. Give family and student leaders their own coach too. The fact that we think, you know, we know, I think we know in education that every teacher is better with a coach, every instructional coach is better with a coach, every admin is better with a coach. Like, how would we put family and student leaders in these roles and not coach them right? I think we also wanna give coaching to them and ideally, as much as possible, use our professional learning budgets to be expansive. In our thinking about who gets professional learning, it should include families and students. Okay, this has been a long episode so I'll just leave you with some final tips. 25:18 Community created should be a hallmark of this right. These strategic plans should be community created. And, again, co-creation decreases the need for quote buy-in. It should be human first, connect with educators, family members, leaders, students, hearts and invite stories. Members, leaders, students, hearts and invite stories. 25:41 Often change initiatives fail because we don't connect to emotion and be responsive. Yes, evidence-based is important, but off the shelf and straight into implementation mode just doesn't work. There are too many considerations that we often ignore that end up making the initiative fail, whether it's a curriculum or otherwise. So, yes, evidence-based and then personalize it. Be responsive to the needs of your community and truly, deeply like be present for it. 26:09 I want to say listen, but I'm trying not to use ableist language Like take in the stories and the experiences of students and families, particularly ones that we have underserved in the past, and be responsive to those. If you are currently in a state of turnaround or redesigning a school, I would love to know what is working for you, what challenges are coming up. This is an area of deep passion. I've kind of got away from it for a while, but, noting that my scholarship initially started in leadership and changed leadership, really want to go back there. So please let me know, reach out and let me know what else you would want to learn about on a future podcast episode related to this topic. |
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AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
January 2026
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