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In this episode, we’re exploring a mindset shift for when you feel like you can’t move forward because you don’t have all of the answers. If you’re feeling stuck, have a sense of imposter syndrome, or fearful of making a misstep because you (of course) don’t know everything there is to know, this episode will give you an action plan for addressing those challenges.
Why? There is a lot of research on the value and organization of learning communities pursuing a common goal, including the connections to shared leadership, ongoing data collection and analysis, and learning in partnership with one another, both from failures and successes (Harvard). John Hattie’s work has highlighted Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE) as having the largest impact on student learning when compared with 251 other influential factors (visible-learning.org). I propose we treat not just school committees and teacher teams as learning communities (e.g., communities of practice, PLCs), but also majority-student spaces such as classrooms and student groups. How do we create a culture of learning (in pursuit of justice)? Step 1: Recognize you literally can’t do it alone. The answers to adaptive challenges lie in the community, not with you or any one person (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009). Step 2: Form power-sharing structures and processes. At the school level: Bring students and teachers together to lead school committees. Clarify the decision-making processes for each type of decision. For decisions that will be made collaboratively, specify the process. For example: options are created by the leadership team, shared with grade team committees, shared with all students and staff in that grade, grade-level feedback is collected by grade team committees and shared with leadership team, leadership team shares final plan for approval via consensus voting. This episode contains several concrete ideas for shared leadership at the school level. At the class level: Teachers identify regular opportunities to gather feedback from students about what’s working, what’s not, and ideas for change. This data can be specific experiences students have in class. Consider a range of modalities for how students can share this information. At the peer group level: Co-create group working agreements. Determine how decisions will be made (e.g., consensus vs. majority vote). Specify at least one time point to check in with all members about how the group is functioning and how each member is feeling. Step 3: Regularly practice inquiry cycles Ground it in a search for positive deviance (where things are going well) and experiential data, centering people and perspectives that have not been/are not being served by the current way of doing things. Step 4: Systematize experiential data collection Identify who data is collected from, in which formats, how often, and by whom. Consult Dugan and Safir’s book Street Data for some excellent ideas for implementation. This month, I reviewed several of these ideas on my YouTube channel in 5 minute videos. Step 5: Practice building skills of critical discourse. Identify when and for which topics the group avoids talking about or deflects responsibility. Name the type of discourse being discussed (Bridges Patrick & Lyons, 2022)—namely, polarizing, silencing and denying, intellectualizing, or generative mobilizing discourse. The latter is the ideal form of discourse. Final Tip No one can know it all. The best you can do is to surround yourself with brilliant people with diverse experiences who can help you and the community learn and grow. And once you create this culture, it helps address a wide range of challenges! To help you implement a culture of learning in your community, I’m sharing my Leadership Bundle with you for free. It includes my Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges Mini Workbook, a series of culture building agendas you can use for staff meetings, and my Learning Walk protocol. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 152 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. TRANSCRIPT Educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons, and here on the time for Teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Welcome to episode 152 of the time for teacher podcast. Today, we're talking about creating a culture of learning for justice. So in this episode, we're really exploring a mindset shift and this is for when you feel like you just can't move forward because maybe you don't have all the answers. If you are feeling stuck, have a sense of imposter syndrome or you're fearful of making a misstep because you of course, don't know everything there is to know. This episode will give you an action plan. 00:01:06 So not just the mindset shift, but an action plan as well for addressing those challenges. Here we go. All right. So let's talk about creating a culture of learning for justice. So, first of all, there's a lot of research on the value of and the organization of learning communities. So you may call a learning community A PLC or professional learning community. You might talk about communities of practice. You might have these already set up in your school in different ways. There's a lot of legitimacy to them. Uh Typically they pursue a common goal. They include kind of a either distributed quote unquote leadership approach or what I like to call a shared leadership approach, which typically is more inclusive, primarily were inclusive of students ongoing data collection and analysis and also really uh emphasis on learning in partnership with one another, both from your failures and your successes, right? So there's this just culture of learning in these communities kind of inherent in them. Now, John Hattie's work is another piece that I often reference. The number one largest impact on student learning from his research of over 250 influential factors is collective teacher efficacy or CTE for short, we know that this idea of CTE or collective teacher advocacy is highly impactful for a student learning more than anything else. 00:02:26 And so this idea of being able to figure it out as the team, as a collective, as a community, knowing that we will do right by our students, we will achieve our goal because we are a collective who learn from one another and we could do this together. That's what I would like to bring, not just to those staff level committees, but beyond teacher teams. Beyond those school leadership teams, beyond all the things that already have the PLC set up, we also bring them to spaces that are majority student spaces. This could be classrooms, this could be student groups that are working on a project within the classroom. This could be student groups that exist in extracurricular or after school activities, uh sports teams, you know, whatever space that it's primarily students numerically who make up the the group itself. Now, I also want to copy out here that I often talk about shared leadership and the structures of shared leadership, which of course we will touch on in today's episode. Typically those to do right by students to really shift the dynamics towards justice and bring in historically marginalized groups which are typically students, they're not usually at that level of leadership. 00:03:35 We actually do want to have an equal number, if not a slight majority number of students in student adults, mixed groups. Just because if we have a token student or we have fewer students because of that historical imbalance of power, the students are often feeling like they're silenced and they're not speaking up and they don't feel like they um are are truly on equal footing or in true partnership. With the adults. So with that caveat, I will say, let's try to think now about what this looks like, like how do we create this culture of learning in pursuit of justice in our spaces in our communities? So I think the first step is recognizing as the leader that you literally cannot do this alone. So the answers to adaptive challenges, which are the ones we usually struggle with. Right? I've talked a lot about adaptive challenges on the podcast before. Feel free to go listen to a prior episode if this is your first episode. But adaptive challenges, the ones we struggled with the longest we've been trying for years for decades to solve this problem to address this problem. 00:04:40 And we're not getting anywhere right. Then it's probably adaptive. It's connected to the hearts and minds, the beliefs, the long standing values that we hold and are clashing around. Technical challenges are OK. We're going to implement this new curriculum. I, you know, we, here we go, you're gonna study, you're gonna go to three PD days and study this math curriculum. And for the most part you're gonna be good. Now, there may be adaptive challenges in a curriculum implementation. But technical challenges are most likely fixed by like a quick fix. You know, the answer you just have to do it and move forward. Adaptive challenges are often cultural in nature, there is a cultural shift that needs to be made and what adaptive leadership scholars say is that you as one individual person cannot solve it by nature, these adaptive challenges must be solved in community, in partnership with other folks in your space. So you literally can't do it alone, right? If you're listening to something about leading through change or solving a long standing problem, it's the depth of a nature, you can't do it alone. Move on to step two. So what is step two, step two is form, power sharing structures and processes? 00:05:45 I've talked a lot about this at the school level. So I'll review that a little bit. But then I also want to talk about this at the class level. So teachers in partnership with students and then also at the peer group level. Now this could be teacher teams. I think we often have a lot of processes for these. So, so feel free if that's aligned to your role. So tune into that piece if it's not, and you're more thinking about supporting teachers and their instructional spaces at the classroom level, you might be thinking of peer groups like students or perhaps your role or you're in a supportive role for a person who's in a role that supports student groups holistically throughout the school. Then definitely kind of put on that hat. So let's first talk about the school level. We want to bring students and teachers together to lead uh in in the form of school committees. So this might be a literal school leadership team, but it could also be like our curriculum committee, it could be our grading committee. Um your your grade teams which are typically made up of teachers that teach in that grade. What about the students from that grade? Can they be on those committees? Then once you bring them into the literal structure, they are equal members of this committee, clarify the decision making processes for each type of decision that that group will make. 00:06:55 So for decisions that will be made collaboratively, there's not all of your decisions that are gonna be made by the whole group, getting feedback from every student who that group represents. So if grade 10 is going to make a decision that impacts all of grade 10, you know, you may decide, hey, we're gonna get feedback from all of our students before we make a concrete decision, uh we might do a couple feedback loops. So we get their first round of feedback, we put together two proposals, we have them vote on it and we clarify, you know, we're going with the majority vote rules or we're saying, you know, every student has to be able to live with this. This is a massive decision. You know, we're gonna uh do consensus voting. And so anyone who doesn't reach a three out of five, they have not reached consensus and we need to do another round of feedback, right? So you have to get really specific on which decisions go out to everyone for a vote or consensus or however you're making the decision and how that decision is decided. Now, there are some that are gonna be really minor. So for example, it might be, we are taking a field trip and we know that the students want to go. 00:07:56 We've already had the discussions about wanting to go. Now, we just have to like literally hit the date. And so we're gonna look at the school calendar as that grade team level community and we're gonna just choose the date and you know, hope it works for most kids because it can't work for every kid probably right or something like that. That might be actually something that you do throw back to the students. But you want to be specific, which types of decisions are things that are going to be made on the committee and which types of the decisions go to everyone. And what does that feedback loop look like? So that's something that you want to, to think about when you're talking about a school leadership, an example might be um that options for a major overhaul of a school policy are going to be first created by the leadership team, then shared with grade team committees. Then the grade team committees might share with all of the students and staff in that grade, gather a bunch of feedback, share that data back with the leadership team. And then the leadership team does maybe another round of that feedback loop. So they share, here's like a draft final plan. Let's get approval via consensus voting. 00:08:58 If we don't have consensus, then, you know, we're gonna move forward now, um move forward, sorry with the next loop. Now that probably that type of decision that does that level of detail and round the feedback is probably gonna be something that affects every student in a pretty monumental way. So it might be like we're shifting the grading policy or we're shifting some sort of thing that that every single student is going to be affected by. So again, you just wanna lay those out. There are other episodes where I've done a lot of deep dives on what this looks like. Uh The different things to consider the challenges of doing something like this, especially if right now you're very uh a top down organization and also different school and district level kind of examples of what this looks like or could look like at the various tiers like elementary, middle high school district level. So I'll link to that in the blog post for today. Now, at the class level, this could look like teachers just identifying regular opportunities to gather feedback from their students asking really simple things. It does not have to be a very long list of questions you ask and you can ask the questions in a variety of formats. 00:10:05 This could be a a Google form, this could be a whole class discussion that takes up a full class period or, or time. Um ask things like what is working for you as an individual, what is not working and what ideas do you have for me for change, right? It puts you as the teacher in a leadership position um that the students need to acknowledge, right? That, that you are in that leadership position and you ultimately have the final say, but you are willing to learn from them and that they have a role in really co creating what happens next. So if you have a teacher who's really excited to kind of do this work, this is probably going to be an easy lift. Um It's just a matter of like figuring out where this kind of fits in with like all the curriculum. If you have a teacher who's resistant to doing this, we might take some smaller steps uh like it might be at the end of each unit versus at the end of each week or the end of each day, right? Um where the the teacher really has an opportunity and they might want to make some more specific questions. Like I want feedback on this specific part because they maybe they're only open to change in that specific part, right? 00:11:08 Like the mechanism for like which protocol we use for discussion or whatever, but I don't want to change the class content or whatever, right? So So there can be this gradual process where you ask about a specific thing, get feedback and then because the students co created, it likely will go better next time. And then there's an opening kind of an of a willingness to do more co creation and more feedback from students. But a wider range of things I do recommend that this data and this kind of um invitation for feedback is grounded in specific experiences that students have had in class or with your class work. So I think that's something to just be mindful of that. We are grounding it and like you didn't like that. OK. Why? So maybe you felt really stressed out when I made that deadline and I said there's no uh late work accepted, right? And you had this family thing and you were stressed about it. And so you just felt like there was no flexibility and then you just didn't do the assignment because you're overwhelmed, right? Like that's a specific experience a student has, they can share that and then there's context, right? Because if that same student says, well, you should never have deadlines ever. 00:12:11 Like, then it's very um de contextualized and it's harder for the teacher, one to accept that feedback and two to fully for the teacher to fully understand it. And three for the teacher to understand it and then have the student see that understanding and be more likely to share in the future So I think there's all sorts of pieces there. I also just noted quickly the, you know, considering a range of modalities for how students share the information. I do think that's important, it can be written and it can be verbal in a, in a discussion, but it also could be like share with me um you know, photo voices, one of the things in the student voice world for research that's getting really popular or drawing, especially with young Children, right? Draw me a picture of your experience in this class and then then explain it to me maybe in a one on one conference or in a circle where you, you hold it up and you kind of share um ta take pictures if you're not really an artist or like I am not artistic at all. So I would be like, yes, I could take a picture but I don't want to make a drawing that feels like just totally not my jam. So do some photo voice, right? 00:13:13 Take some pictures that are maybe artsy or maybe just like literal that describe to me kind of your experience in this class and you can again walk me through them or add a caption to each picture and submit it via email, whatever. Now at the peer group level, this is uh again teacher, teacher, peer group or student studio, peer group. I'm I'm putting on like a heavy student hat here because I'm thinking you know, we talk a lot about these processes with adults. So what does it look like for students to kind of core this culture themselves with just a little bit of support from, from maybe the teacher, one of the first things I think is to core group working agreements. And so you can see again those parallels to adults, we want to know how to work together. So anytime there's group work on a project, for example, let's talk about how we do that, right? I think you can again do this in different spaces like sports teams or other sort of after school clubs. But like, how do we wanna work with one another? How do we want to disagree with one another? What are the phrases that we wanna use? We don't want to use all that stuff, then determine again how decisions will be made. So, in our group project, when we make a big decision about the project, are we gonna have consensus or is the majority going to win? 00:14:22 Right. And we think about all the interpersonal dynamics that happen in student groups and what often can like derail the project? My vote would often be consensus because we don't want kind of like a, a peer group who's like really good friends with one another, get paired up or grouped up with another student who's not part of that intimate peer group and then that person just gets out voted, right? We want everyone to feel like they have a good sense of voice. Um And then I would also specify at least one time point, particularly with longer projects, even honestly, if it's a group project that lasts like a class period or something, at least one time during that class period or during the course of the project, at least one, you're gonna check in with every member about how the group is functioning. Do you know how they often like assign roles to students and sometimes of arbitrary and like, you know, we have like the timekeeper and the secretary and the presenter and like often those are really helpful rules. Sometimes they are more or less helpful depending on the project or whatever. I really feel that if nothing else, we have a person who does this check in like they could be like the equity checker or something. 00:15:26 I don't know the experienced old person, you better names than I am probably. But I'm thinking about, you know, how do we check in and ask each individual member, how they are feeling and how the group is functioning and how it's best serving them or not serving them, right? And how it might change. Now, step three, once you've done step two and you really have those power sharing structures and processes in place where we have the decision processes, clarified we have equity of voice, then regularly practice inquiry cycles. So again, we wanna ground this in a search for the positive. Where are things going well, we want to ground it in experiential data centering people and perspectives that historically or currently have not been or are not being served by how we do things right now. Right. So at a school level, those students or the family members or even the staff who are not being heard, they're not being served, they're unhappy, they're not being successful. 00:16:31 Um, they don't have the academic achievement, they're not passing classes, whatever it is. Um Their attendance is low, like something is not working, let's hear from them first. And then if there's several groups, for example, uh let's say that in a high school with grades nine through 12 grades, um, you know, 9, 10 and 12 are struggling, but grade 11 is not struggling with a common challenge maybe attendance. So what's happening in grade 11 that is making students attend more than grades 9, 10 and 12, right? Or maybe out of all of the ninth grade classes, one teacher's class is excelling in attendance like really high attendance and others are not. So like what's happening in that class and having kind of an inquiry mindset, a question where we go collect that experiential data of that positive deviant of that teacher or that class or that community where things are going well, what do we learn from them? 00:17:32 And how do we really transfer that learning to the other spaces and communities now step four is kind of an offshoot of step three. When we gather that experiential data, we want to make sure we systematize the data collection and we wanna make sure we have ongoing processes that we can just repeat because we wanna consistently constantly collect that data. We don't want to do it just once in a while around a big project, we want a constant influx of what is happening for students in our educational community. We want that information. So identify who the data is collected from. Again, centering students and individuals in the community that are not being served in which format. So again, are we doing photo voice drawings, a Google form of opportunity for discussion like a focus group. How often we're collecting this and by whom? So who is responsible for gathering that information? If we want student data, can we train and ideally pay students to be trained, pay them in, you know, money or by class credit or something as like a research or independent research study or something course, you know, whatever it is. 00:18:42 But can we have students be the ones interviewing and collecting and gathering data from other students because they will be better received? Like try to figure all those pieces out. I highly recommend you consult Jamila Dugan and Shane Sapper Book Street Data. There are some excellent ideas for implementation. And actually this month, February 2024 I reviewed several of these ideas on my youtube channel in five minute video spurts. So if you want some concrete ideas for like, what might this look like in practice, feel free to check those out, check that book out. It is amazing. And then finally, step five, I really encourage for the sustainability of the project, for the justice centeredness of all of your leadership, all of your, you know, community endeavors. I highly recommend that you all individually and collectively practice building skills of critical discourse. So we have to be able to tackle the tough stuff. So this includes identifying probably first and foremost, identifying when and for which topics, the group and this could be any group, this could be like your leadership committee, this could be a classroom, um avoids talking about or deflects responsibility for, for particular topics. 00:19:54 So when this topic comes up, we say, oh, well, we can't do anything about that because that's so and so is like the families, the right issue or um you know, we, we make a joke when this topic is brought up because we're actually really uncomfortable talking about it or everyone's eyes kind of like look down at their lap when this topic comes up, right? Like we wanna first identify where are we kind of like crumbling and falling apart and not actually digging in. Also, um Juan Eicholtz has this fantastic kind of discourse quadrant which Doctor Sheri Bridges Patrick and I have adapted for uh adaptive leadership chapter, we, we co-authored and, and we talk about these four types of discourse, particularly around racial discourse where we have the polarizing dimension, right? We're on like separate teams and we're kind of entrenched in our positions. Um We have the silencing and denying which is kind of that avoidance, right? We're not going to talk about this. We have the intellectualizing type of discourse where we're just kind of in our heads but not our hearts. And then we have what we ideally want, which is generative mobilizing discourse. And so the this last one is really the ideal form of discourse. 00:21:00 It's very helpful to diagnose. You'll you'll notice there's a lot of diagnosis here, right? We diagnose what we're avoiding talking about. We diagnose the type of discourse being discussed a lot of critical discourse. It is difficult, it's difficult to build that culture of learning and being having that critical discourse as a venue for learning and censoring marginalized perspectives and experiences, right? In all the things that we need. So we first have to diagnose where we're going wrong and then we have to try to build our skills through practice and through redirection. Getting back on track when we try to avoid that or deflect responsibility, right? Recognizing when we're intellectualizing and not using our hearts, those kinds of things to get on the generative mobilizing discourse track. So that is an ongoing process and that's what makes it truly sustainable. Yes, we have these systems of kind of how we share decision making power and leadership. And yes, we regularly practice inquiry and we collect data, but we have to continue the practice every day of building skills of critical discourse because we can do all of those other things. 00:22:06 And when it comes to the actual discussion, if we can't say out loud, our thoughts around making the hard decisions around analyzing the challenging data, around digging into adaptive challenges, long standing problems, right? White supremacy, all of the things that are going to come up and be hard, then we can't actually move the needle forward. We can't actually make change and the change and be a a true culture of learning for justice. So to wrap this up, no one can know it all. And so if you're feeling that burden of like I can't do this thing because like I just don't have all the answers yet where I need to learn more before I act. Yes, I think we do need to learn more but not just as individuals. We need to create the community to learn together collectively, right? The best thing we can do is to surround ourselves with brilliant people with different diverse experiences who can help you as an individual leader and also the community as a collective learn and grow. And then once you've established this culture, you feel it, you foster it, you grow it and that's going to help address a wide range of challenges, like most hard things that you have to tackle are going to be served by this community that you've built. 00:23:19 So, in conclusion, I'm going to help you with uh establishing a little culture of learning in your community. I'm gonna share my leadership bundle with you where I've just kind of bundled my most popular resources around this idea of shared adaptive leadership. So this is going to include my diagnosing adaptive challenges mini workbook, a series of culture building agendas you can use for staff meetings and also my learning walk protocol that ideally involves a mix of stakeholders including students to do this work. You can grab that at today's blog post, Lindsay be lions.com/blog/one 52. If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane Sapir and Jamila Dugan. Talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book Street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period. I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. 00:24:31 Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better podcast network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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In this episode, we delve into the intricacies of school leadership and the transformation journey. We talk about equipping students with necessary skills, navigating staff dynamics, and the importance of self-awareness and emotional intelligence in leadership. Beth shares practical ideas including how to collect perception data to get the lay of the land and gain clarity on what to do next.
Beth founded the charter network Chicago Collegiate and served as Chief Executive/Academic Officer. Prior, she led a team to train 650 new TFA teachers. She deepened her people and instructional leadership skills at KIPP, and first started teaching in Washington Heights with TFA. She's GallupStrengths-certified and is now a coach-sultant for leaders. The Big Dream Schools that act as microcosms of society, preparing students to live the lives of their choice and contribute positively to the world. Schools that actively support and empower students by equipping them with academic, social, emotional, and interpersonal skills and all kids have the opportunities they want. Alignment to the 4 Stages: Mindset, Pedagogy, Assessment, and Content Adult mindsets and culture within the school is a priority for Beth. She emphasizes the importance of creating a culture of partnership, ensuring clarity of roles and responsibilities, and aligning around common goals. Moreover, she stresses the need to use tools like surveys and focus groups to gather data and inform decision-making. Mindset Shifts Required Shift from focusing on issues to taking a broader view that includes understanding the dynamics of the school community. Action Steps Context as relevant… Step 1: Gain a clear understanding of their school dynamics. This could be done by conducting anonymous staff surveys and using the data collected to inform decision-making. Step 2: Be transparent about the limitations and constraints of decision-making. From there, you can involve others in the process and share the decision-making power, which can help build trust within the team. Step 3: Invest time in self-awareness and emotional intelligence. These skills help you become more effective! Challenges? One of the major barriers to transformation for leaders is the lack of clarity and alignment. Beth suggests leaders be clear about what they believe in, what they expect from their teams, and what they consider important. One Step to Get Started One practical step to start addressing these challenges is to take Beth's two-minute leadership quiz. This quiz helps identify what you need most as a leader and provides a starting point for addressing your needs. It's a quick, easy, and fun way to gain some insight into your leadership style and the areas you may need to work on. Stay Connected You can find Beth on the following platforms:
To help you get started with what we talked about today, Beth is sharing her 2-minute quiz to help you figure out what you need most as a leader for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 151 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 here. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT Hi, everyone. Today on the Time for Teacher Podcast we have Beth Napleton. Beth brings 25 plus years of education experience to her work. She founded the Charter Network Chicago Collegiate and served as chief executive slash academic officer. Chicago Collegiate has annually had 100% of mostly first generation students accepted to college. And prior Beth led a team to train 650 new T FA or teach for America teachers. She deepened her people and instructional leadership skills at Kip and first started teaching in Washington Heights with T FA. Beth graduated from Barnard College and Pace University. She was an adjunct professor at Dominican University and completed relays National Principal Supervisors Academy. She is gallop strength certified and is now a coach, Sultan for leaders. Let's go ahead and meet Beth educational justice coach Lindsay Lyons. And here on the time for teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings. 00:01:08 If you're a principal, assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about co-creator curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Beth. Welcome to the time for teacher podcast. Thanks for having me, Lindsay. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited too. And so what some folks tell me is like, ok, you read the professional bio and there's like more to me than that, right? In a list of my accomplishments or something, or there's like, you know, things happening in the world or something on my mind. Like there's, there's sometimes like a place that I wanna create at the start of each episode for like any additional things to keep in mind as we have this conversation. And so I'm gonna throw it to you to let us know if there is anything people should know about you or things you're thinking about. Yeah, I mean, I think probably in my heart of hearts, I really wanna be teaching sixth grade English language arts and, you know, being a dean of instruction, which might have been my favorite job ever. Um But I currently have 1/6 grade daughter. So that's like enough sixth grader in my life right now. I have the 24 7 version of it. Um But I, I'm really like, you know, I, I am like an educator at heart, like I've been, you know, doing my own thing in my business for a few years and, and it kind of life has taken me in a different direction. 00:02:19 But I think that, um people often will tell me like you get schools, you get how they work. I'm like, yeah, these are my people. Like that's, I always like at home when I walk into a school, I like, know the challenges and I get, when you have time to go to the bathroom and I get how hard it is to figure out, you know, the Halloween dance scheduling or whatever it is. And so I feel like that's just helpful to know is that like sometimes when people talk about consultants, it's like, oh, they're so high in the sky or they don't understand what's happening. It's like, no, no, I'm one of you. I'm one of you. I promise, I love that grounding. And the former literacy teacher in me, it's like, yeah, 6 3d L A, it's the best. That's awesome. So one of the things that I like to start with in terms of the content we're talking about is, you know, every, every guest, every person I think in the field of education has a big dream for like what they wish the educational space would be. And I like to ground it in Doctor Bettina loves words around freedom dreaming. So she says their dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, which I think is just so beautiful. And I'm curious to know with that in mind. What is that big dream for you? What's the dream you hope for education? I mean, I think what I've spent my whole career working on and will unfortunately probably continue to work on until my career is over is how do we make schools places that ensure that kids have the opportunities that they want? 00:03:31 Right. How do we do our job preparing kids so that when they leave, you know, 12th grade, they can become an entrepreneur or go to college, be a doctor, you know, whatever they wanna be, be an athlete, go join the military, Terry. I just, I, I have worked in so many schools that, that was not the case um early in my career. And so I did a lot of volunteering in college and spent a lot of time in schools that were just kids, couldn't do basic math or reading or writing. And so I purposely spent the bulk of my career working in schools that were really actively working to support that paradigm and make sure the kids had the options that they needed. And also I think, you know, felt supported as people and were growing developmentally appropriately and we're developing those social emotional skills that are so important to, to making sure that we thrive in the world. And when I look at the world around us and all of the, I used to tell my students like we have so many problems in this world. Like we have really messed the world up and we need you to really come in and help. And that is the academics. It's also the social, emotional, it's the interpersonal skills. It's the vision for a better world. It's the justice, it's the advocacy and our schools should really be microcosms that prepare students to live the lives of their choices. 00:04:36 They work to make, make the world a better place. I really love that. I think that's so good and, and the idea of like the microcosms, right? I often talk about student voice and student leadership and my frustration is always when people are like, oh yeah, that's a just in the future. Like they're not ready yet, like it's like in the future. But I'm like, that is the word microcosm. It almost sounds like you're saying, right? Like it's now too, like they could do it now. They could do every, I mean, right. Like if you walk into there are, you know, pre K classrooms that do it? Amazing job of this. And so it's like if you're telling me, like, these three and four year olds can do this, like we also can make sure your 10th graders can help run the show. Right? It's hard, it's a hard change. It's a hard piece. There's like lots of elements of it. Um But I think that that's like, how do you make schools places where kids are really prepared for the world in some ways. It's ok. Like, we can take these problems and, and unfortunately we create them in our, our system to help you solve them. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Yes. And, and so I, I'm thinking now about all the, the different kind of pieces of that and, and how I typically coach and the things I coach around usually, like, ok, so we have like, the adult mindset piece and like, how do we approach this? We have the like technical, like, what's our pedagogical tools? 00:05:41 What is, how do we assess, what is the content that we teach? And so I'm curious how your work kind of intersects with either one of these multiple of these. Um what is kind of your approach to helping educators and leaders to really do this kind of work? Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, my background is such that I have a pretty strong instructional background and I also have a strong cultural background in terms of both adult and student culture and I know enough of the operations world to make sure that things can run on time. Um And so I've certainly work with schools on like choosing new curriculum or we'll work on, you know, how do we do more like blended learning? And, but what I often find is again and again is that usually like people will bring me into work on that. But actually the issue is like the team's not functioning well. Actually, the issue is that right, there's like these two factions that are deeply entrenched and they do like fight to the debt. And so really, most of my work now focuses on a lot of this kind of cultural partnership, making sure that there is clarity of roles and responsibilities, making sure there's alignment around common goals. And so usually people will kind of engage me and say, let's come in and talk about this and I'll say great. 00:06:44 But my first step is almost always let me just like get the lay of the land. Let's like, look at surveys, do focus groups, do interviews and like just make sure that what you're seeing, like it's the right, it's the right time to take this step. Like if we have these two factions that are so entrenched, like they're gonna stay entrenched this process of, of choosing a new curriculum. So maybe we actually want just like back up the truck a little bit and do some work around, like considering the views of others and what's important to you and what's our value statement and what's our mission and how do we tweak this to help us all be moving so that we can, you know, row in the same direction. Yes, I, I love this and I think that's exactly what I think a lot about uh adaptive leadership and adaptive leadership theory, right? And it's like the adaptive challenges are the ones that are persistent. They keep coming back, like we're not solving them with a new curriculum, like, and just kind of a PD on that and we're done. Right. And so it, I think I have, I don't know that I typically think about the, like, interpersonal team dynamics or like the alignment pieces, like the things you're talking about. Like, I love this because I don't necessarily think about them, but I know there's something deeper there and I love, that's where you shine. 00:07:47 So I, I'm wondering what are some of the like either mindset shifts for leaders or mindset shifts that you kind of coach leaders to help the the team members through to kind of remedy some of some of the stuff when we see it and we say we're gonna back that truck up, we're gonna address it. Like, how, how do we really do that or what are the things that are like, maybe some of the barriers that get us to the action steps? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm thinking about a client I had who I worked with um in Durham. He led a school, a charter school of about 650 kids. And he originally brought me in because his executive director was transitioning and they wanted some support for him and he wanted to figure out how to really coach and develop his assistant principal. And I said, ok, great. Let's like, come in and do this current state analysis and like, get the lay of the land and just, like, make sure that's the right thing to focus on. Just like, you know, I might go to my doctor and say, like, my leg hurts. I think my ankles twisted and say, oh, you're right. Go, go do this. Like they, they test it right. They, like, run some of their own tests to make sure that it's the accurate diagnosis. And so, you know, I went down and decipher it. We did a bunch of surveys. I walked around and I, I came back to him and said, look, I think that like, yes, that is an area that needs to be developed. 00:08:49 But if you try and do that now you're gonna really struggle and that's because there's a couple of issues. One is that you don't really have the strong, um it's like, not really clear what everyone's working towards. Like there's not alignment on common goals or what actually matters most. And I think a lot of times in schools, there can be a lot of disagreement about that and it's like very healthy disagreement, but like, you need to help people get to some point of like, this is what's most important or here's how these things complement each other. And I think frankly, you know, this principal took over as a leader during the pandemic. And so he started with this, I mean, he, I think his first year he started in school and then it went to the pandemic year. So he hadn't really had a normal school year. Um, you know, in his three or four years of school leadership. And I said, I think you're kind of fuzzy on what you think in and what it's ok for you to have strong opinions about and what you refer to others on. And I actually think that we need to spend some time getting clear on your vision as a leader. And you can do that alongside me as an experienced school leader and educator, like we can develop this and you can do this in a safe way so that then we can unveil to your team. Here's what I think as a manager, here's what's important to me. Here's what's not important to me. Here's what I expect of you and you have not only my own personal experience, but the experience I've gained by working with so much clients to say that's actually a super reasonable expectation. 00:09:59 And so now I can go in and say, actually, it is a reasonable expectation for me to say that you should come prepared to our check ins. And I believe this and I think this and I can enforce this um in a way that was helpful. And so I think that there's often issues like, are we clear on the vision? Are we clear on working towards? Um I think there often are just like some baked in dynamics from like, you know, we worked together for three years and this person has always done this and that. And so you have to kind of like unearth those and some conflict and work through them around a common point of alignment. But I think there's often a lot, um, that just makes it hard because humans are, are hard. Humans are complicated and leading adults, like, you know, almost everyone I know who works in leadership or administration is like, you know, give me the kids any day, like they're supposed to be seventh graders are supposed to be like tribal. I've got this group of 40 something and they're like, what are we talking about? So, yes. Oh my gosh, there's so, so many of the, the challenges, like, one of the things that we were just talking about before we hit record is like this idea of adult problems getting in the way of student success. 00:11:00 And so I think there's, there's so much of that and as you were saying, you know, like that resonates with a lot of people. I'm sure the leader listening right now is nodding their head. And so I, I'm thinking about the leader listening, who, who is interested in this idea of getting the lay of the land of their school. And so if they don't have the funding to hire an external consultant, what is an action that they could take? Like, uh I know you mentioned surveys, focus groups, like, what's, what might that look like to kind of do your own internal audit or like? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I would say that so one, I mean, I do say that one of the reasons that it can be helpful to bring someone external in is because people will always just like no filter in a way they are not going to be with their boss. And so, you know, I've been in the tight budget situation, I get sometimes you have to hack in Diy. And so I'll, I'll definitely go into kind of some of the things you can do. But I do find that a lot of my clients are like, oh my gosh, that alone was worth it because people would say things to you that they would never say to me. And by the way, I take all that raw material and like the 100 pages of notes and synthesize into like our three takeaways. So like you as a leader, don't have to like swim through all that and think about it. Um That said, I think, you know, one of the most important things is that a lot of what is really important in this work is knowing what people's perceptions are. 00:12:12 And I think what's tricky is that people can say, but their perception is not reality and it's like, but it, but it's their reality and you have to understand what their reality is because until you understand how they're looking at this challenge and at this organization of the school, you can't meet them where they're at and get them to a point. So people will say, but we have this policy and this policy says this and people say that we don't have this, but we do well, then you know, there's a gap, you need to do more, to educate people and to help bridge the the gap between perception and reality. So one tool that I'm a big fan of is I'm a big fan of staff surveys. Um I think they can be really impactful because they tell you, you know, you can use questions that have like on a scale of 1 to 10. It allows you to get averages means concentration of how strongly people feel these things. Um And you can have statements like, you know, I feel um you know, I'm trying to think of some examples like, you know, my workplace demonstrates caring, concern for its employees scale of 1 to 10 agree or disagree and then an optional place for comments. 00:13:14 Um You know, uh my feedback from my manager is helps me in my work, right? You just kind of have these like statements and people agree or disagree and you can aggregate them, they can be pretty intense. Um They can be really short and I sometimes I, I always tell people that you should do the survey where you're really prepared to squeeze the data out of. So people get really excited and do like 100 question survey and then you don't have the time to digest it. And it's like, I'd rather you just give the two question survey or the three question survey and really digest it, but, you know, easier said than done. And, well, actually I'm, I'll be curious by the time this airs, one of things I'm thinking about is like having some sort of like a survey service for people where they can use that kind of like a survey in a box where you could say, ok, let me like buy this survey and administer this. So we'll see if that where that comes to fruition by then. But I think you need to give a survey. I always recommend being able to make it anonymous. But then the key is you have to give people time to do it in a place where they're sitting down and ready. So it is like it, it is an in class test. This is not take it home and do it anonymously. You won't be able to track it down. You won't know who did it. 50% responded which 50%. So we're in an all staff meeting. The link is in your inbox. 00:14:16 I need you all to do this. Now, I'll put on music and there are snacks and go. And then I we also know as a leader Oh, we gave this survey at the Wednesday afternoon staff meeting and remember Wednesday morning, the fire alarm was pulled three times. So, ok, I now know the state of mind people were in when they took this because it was a very defined window. I gave it to everyone. You still, by the way, won't get 100% participation, which will drive you absolutely bananas. So, like you were in the room, but that's ok. That's normal. You'll get, but you'll get enough of an input to know and you'll be able to keep it anonymous. And you can ask things like, you know, what grade level do you teach on or what, um uh what subject you choose. But you should make sure those groups are generally like five or more people because people will feel wary about identifying themselves if I'm the only art teacher and you're gonna make me say I teach art. I know that like, is it anonymous? And that's not the point. But if you're gonna, if identify as a specialist teacher and there are six or seven specials teacher, I know that then, and then as a leader, I have the ability to look at that trend by the entire department. So I do think that that is like, you need to know where, what people think is happening and then look at what you believe is happening and figure out where that gap is and how you can start to bridge it. 00:15:19 Oh, so good. So I, I love the level of detail that you just want to do there. Examples, very practical, like I said, so good and like just even the sit everyone down, this is your time, like it is worth it to dedicate your staff, meeting, time to do something like this, right? I think that's like a big takeaway for me. Um And so thinking about once people have that lay of the land, right? What is maybe step two to figure out like we've kind of diagnosed what's happening, we've gotten the perceptions of staff and then how do we start tackling the adult problems? And I know it could be like obviously dependent on what everyone said, but like what's maybe one example of something that you've helped a staff kind of go through a helped a leader solve an adult problem in a school system or something that, that, that maybe someone could take away. So then the next thing I would say, so then here, so you've given it, you're in the meeting, you gave the survey out. OK? And what you should do really ahead of time is block out time that night or the next morning to be like, let me go in and digest this. I always recommend if you like a glass of wine, it does not hurt to digest survey results with a glass of wine, right? 00:16:22 It's there's always some stuff that could be about like, oh, my feelings are hurt by that or? Oh, that's a little bit harsh. And that's just part of the game. We've all been there. But how do you say go through, you know, how do you start to go through that and say like, what am I noticing here? And I think I tell people to pay attention to two things. Like what surprises you and what doesn't surprise you and you know, people will, you know, I've used various thought catchers with clients or ways to look through this. And then what I like to tell people is like, you, you have to go back to people at the next staff meeting. You have to say we gave the survey and you might, you know, like you're not gonna have all the answers and problem solved. But typically you can say here's what you said that we are well aware of already in this reinforced, here's what you said that, you know, we kind of thought and there's already some stuff that's in the works on this and here's what we're considering doing or thinking about doing as a result of this uh of what you said. And then I also tell people like lean in and be brave and say, here's what we're actually not gonna prioritize yet. So I think that that's where you as a leader know. I mean, people will, you know, look at these results and say there's so many places I could go and what do we want to do? 00:17:24 And like we actually really need this like full scale compensation analysis and we need to figure out this and benchmark. And it's like, you know, the thing that you're gonna do is better than the thing you're gonna say you're gonna do and never actually get done. And so know where your capacity is. And again, that's why some people bring in people to help because I can't do this. But how can I bring someone in? But you can say we're not going to do a compensation analysis this year, but we're thinking about it for next year. It's a big lift, it's expensive, it requires this piece and we just don't feel that way. But what we are going to do is look at our um PTO policy and see if we can be more flexible when it comes to, you know, COVID related leave, given the transition that many of you whatever, like, you know, you can say like this is a piece of the pie we can take off. So I think folks do that. And then I think a lot of my work with leaders and when they're kind of in that stage is like, you know, they're kind of like, well, what's the most impactful thing? What do I do? Where do I focus on it? It really depends so much on like what do you have the bandwidth for and what's working? I would recommend that you start with things that can be relatively quick wins because that will help people like build faith and build confidence and people will start to see some changes. 00:18:26 You'll also like learn from that process and that will allow to help you for some of the longer term pieces of it. Um But I think that that is, you know, it, it can be, it's a, it's a very useful tool to give and a very useful way to kind of understand and to help people navigate and to think about what to do with this because it is um you know, I just think that like, it's rare as a leader that people kind of will be give you their unfiltered opinion because they're a, you don't have time to talk to everyone b like it's not always meaningful. See, like they're running to go make their copies or do whatever. And so when you ask people these questions in a survey, you can really get a sense of it. Um and it can be really impactful just to kind of help you like batch process those pieces. I love that. I, I do also really appreciate, right? Like it is, it is totally like a huge endeavor to do some of these things. And so bringing someone in is just like, if you have the finances to do that, like do that, like it's just, yeah, it's just, it's like people always even like a lot of times I coach people, right? And so as an executive coach, like people come with the agenda and they leave with the to dos and we can have some great thought partnerships. 00:19:32 I can bring ideas that I can do this. But one of the reasons that I try to do more of this like coach salting, which is a combination of coaching and consult is because I should leave us some of the to dos you ha you have enough to do like week after. I know I should have done this, but I haven't had time or then we had this fire drill or then this teacher quit or this person went to labor early and it's like I get it, I've been there and like, you know, you can't replicate yourself. So like hiring someone externally is the way you, like, start to do that a little bit. Um And so I think it's always encouraging people, like, because you'll also be able to make traction more quickly, right? Um Which is ultimately what it's about to get to that vision of these schools that are doing right by kids and what they deserve. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and one of the things just to go back really quickly to the one of the things you're talking about with like the process of here's what you do once you have the data, right, you're going back, you're sharing, here's what we're doing, here's what we're not doing. I like I, that resonates a lot with me because I actually go to student voice data and this process is the same, right? So if a student is like, I, you know, we want pizza for lunch every single day and it's like, well, I love that. You love that. And here's what we're gonna do because XYZ or you know, we want this meter new playground, like here's our budget, look at the number, now, look at all of that allocated money and now look what we have left, right? 00:20:42 Like it's like just bringing people into that process just a little bit to just be able to say like I hear you and, and I think that's the thing, it's like, you know, people don't always have the perspective, right that we have. And so, you know, one thing that often will come up is, you know, like people will be like, well, I know we don't have any money for this and I really want this and actually that is covered by this funding. I actually can't allocate it to you. And so like you can do some behind the scenes kind of knowledge building. And I always encourage people like let people into this, like you are making these decisions in a vacuum. It's like I said, yes to the library and no to the stem curriculum. It's like, well, you did that because of the cost differences because of what allocated funds mean, because the rules about purchasing with this and that and the other and like it's OK to say this to people and they will start to say, oh OK, got it. You're working with like a different set of uh facts here and like you can bring people into that and start to build some shit, understand in that way. But it's the same process which I think is, is so great. Hey, everyone, it's Lindsay just jumping in here to tell you about today's episode. Freebie Beth has a quiz which helps you identify what you most need as a leader. 00:21:46 So when you're done with the episode, head over to the blog host, Lindsay Beth lances.com/blog/one 51 and take the quiz to find out what you most need back to the episode. Right. Yeah, that shared process piece. I think I, I worked in a school district or a network of schools who had this as one of their philosophies was like one learning model for. All right. And so it was like the adults have the same kind of learning model and processes and strategies that we go through and expectations as the students. And so what's really cool about that is when we do this as leaders with our teachers, the teachers could then do a, you could do a class survey. Absolutely right. You want to do free write every day and I get that and right, like it's the same as pizza for lunch. It's the same as, like, you know, no staff meetings any week. It's like, wow, we have these things to do these obligations. But I hear your desire for this, here's how I can honor that. Right. We'll do free. Right. Fridays. Or we'll do, you know, um, every, every first step of the month is a Wellness day or whatever it is. So, how do you kind of say, like, I can see that spirit and meet them there? But I think that is really powerful when it models the same piece. 00:22:49 Yeah. Yeah, there's, there's so many possibilities to like kind of like play off of this one idea, right? And there's this concept of a kind of data collection and then it kind of feedback looping like back and, and, and going um forward in kind of a shared leadership way and, and I think that's really powerful for, for a lot of things, even if you go into it with like, oh I wanted to address this problem, right? I think what you're speaking to is the process itself is one that can be done for any problem and will likely get at the root cause of whatever it is, despite what we go in thinking as you said, right? We may think it's one thing, it's actually we're not ready for that. And I, and I think if nothing else, if leaders take nothing else away um from, I mean, really like any conversation. I feel like that's it. Right. It's like you have to have that underlying process of what is the lived reality of people and how do we collect that data? And then how do we come back and make shared decisions in that way that is structured, like, so you can do anything with that? Well, and I think oftentimes I'll work like I was working with a leader of an alternative high school in Indianapolis who was like incredibly strategic minded to help like turn the school around, like got them off probations like an eight year renewal, like had really done great work but was struggling with some staff turnover. 00:24:01 Um and kind of like this perception about, right, like we can't maintain, you know, teachers or, you know, people from this demographic have a hard time working here. And so we kind of are going in like a very big picture culture lens and we instituted a survey. I mean, it was a two question net promoter survey. She does twice a year. She does it in May, I think like May and October, right? She does the same process, she does it. So like, you don't even have to go in and say like I have a problem with, let me give a survey. It's actually a great tool just to use periodically just to kind of get a pulse on what's happening. And actually, as you start to do over time, you'll start to see trends over time you'll start to be able to, like, it'll bottle up things you weren't sure about. And it's also demonstrating to your staff, like, I value your opinion. I take your feedback seriously. I honor your, you know, professional expertise and things that we know from research shows us that, like, helps people feel more connected and more committed to their workplaces, which also helps as a leader as, as well. Yes. Oh yes. To the ongoing like just this is part of how we do it, right? Part of what we do. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so, OK, so I am imagining that there are leaders listening who are like, I am game to do this. 00:25:03 Like I want to implement something like this. I love this idea. And then I imagine there are some people who are thinking in their minds like, OK, well, I have this challenge or I have like here's a barrier that I foresee in this work or something like that. And so I'm wondering if you can illuminate for us, like what is maybe one challenge that you've worked through with a leader? Like a, you know, a big challenge in doing the work and then like, how did, how did you work through it or what advice would you give to a leader who's thinking about that now? Yeah, totally. So I'm thinking about this principal Christina, the one that I just mentioned in Indianapolis, right where she had done all this amazing work to really turn the school around and get them to a place where, like, they truly, their survival was on the brink and like, then they got to a place and, and they do a really interesting model where their average student has been to three or four high schools before they go to them. It's an alternative school. So it like, looks different than a lot of other schools. But people will compare it to the high school down the block or the high school they went to. But like the high school you went to doesn't have the average student attending 4.5 schools before they get to you. So like there's just some deeper issues. They have a lot of kids in the foster care system and in juvenile justice who, you know, just have some additional needs and, and they really, she did an amazing job creating this model and thinking about how can we do this and how can we figure out where to go over the course of COVID? 00:26:15 There had been some high profile resignations of some black men. She was a white woman and she was like, I am both really concerned about this. I want my school to be a place where black men can really thrive. She had these barriers that I think a lot of leaders do where it's like, I can't quite point to exactly what it is, but it's clearly there And so there's this perception issue, there's this narrative, what are people saying behind closed doors, which is like, not a great place to be in as a leader too because it doesn't exactly make you wanna, like, open your arms up and make cookies for the staff when you're like, what are they saying behind my back? And by the way, I'm also like, working my butt off and by the way, I got our charter extended and like, have you turned your grades in? Like, let's turn this on you. And so it was like a little bit turning on itself in that way. Um And so we were able to go in, do the site visit, do the current state analysis, talk to people observe what was happening and what was really interesting there is that then, so we like started talking um earlier and then she also was pregnant with her first child. And so she's like, so I've got all these issues. I'm figuring out, I'm also about to go on maternity leave. I'm usually working 12 hour days. 00:27:15 How am I gonna go away for three months with this new baby and new role and be able to do this in a way that allows me to enjoy that time, unplugs me from what's happening day to day, but also make sure the school doesn't rate her. And so we kind of started doing this analysis, we started doing some maternity leave planning, we started thinking about her roles and responsibilities. We started thinking about how she could transition those over. Um And she ended up having a really successful maternity leave. She was told totally, like, what is exactly what was desired, which was like radio silence for eight weeks. And then she kind of did a step up back into the role. But I think often in terms of the barrier, it like can feel slippery like there's something here and what is it? And part of that because it is people's perception, part of it's because of like the rumor mill effect of some of these cases. Part of this is because um leaders will be concerned about A, like A and B and their teams will be concerned about X and Y. And so it feels like they're not on the same page because they're not on the same page. And so there's some alignment about like all of these things are important, but let's put them in order of priority importance and let's understand why. 00:28:18 And let me articulate this as a leader. Um And a lot of that as a leader means also saying things that, you know, are going to be unpopular and not well received and that is just challenging as a human and as somebody who's working with people and often, you know, principles are coming to this work, having had colleagues and having been on a team and all of a sudden, they're now the only person in the seat and it's really isolating. Um, and so I think that, that we were able to really both get her to the successful leave. And then, and I love the maternity leave as a mechanism. It was like a forcing mechanism be to have her, like, share responsibility, be clear on what people's like where their decision making power was and wasn't how these teams work together, who would function and then really strip back and prioritize what needed to happen because it was like, you actually don't need to have things happen exactly as they would have happened. If you were here at your team gonna be down a person, what are we going to do? Strip back what's most important? And I think that helped highlight what was essential and then that helped when she came back, we were able to really thoughtfully think about how to reintegrate it into the work she was doing. She's like, I don't want to go back into checking in with everyone every week when they actually spend three months without this. Can I go to every other week? Ok. Let's talk about what roles and why and what you might want to do and given your priorities while they're at. 00:29:22 So I think it can feel, um, a little bit like, um, you know, being like blindfolded in a dark room, sometimes I kind of like fumbling your way through and, and that often could be what's hard for leaders is because like if I can say this is the issue, well, then I can do something about it. But sometimes it's like getting to that clarity or because there's so many different factors that, that kind of form this nebulous idea that it can be hard to break through. And that's where we were able to kind of get to some clarity, break it down and start to just take it on piece by piece. That makes sense. And I, I really, I think that the, the kind of forced break that, that being a parent all of a sudden, like, makes you kind of take, take a step back. Um I think there are, you know, it doesn't have to be parenthood but it could be a lot of those things that, like, for whatever reason, you know, we, we have to do things differently. I, I love those. It's like testing grounds, right? So, like, I, when I was teaching and I was in a graduate program where I had to, like, be away from the classroom for like two days a week, like in a row every few months. And it was just like, ok, my students now know the process, they just got better about having subs because it was like, wow, we know how to do this, we know the project we're working on. 00:30:28 We know the, like, I just think sometimes it's scary to take that leap and like, you may not have a circumstance like that. So if you're not about to go on parental leave, right? Figure out what it is for you. But I do think that's a beautiful way to just be like, let's try something different, whatever that impetus is like let's just test it and see how it goes. And that idea of coming back and saying actually this didn't work for me before like let's try something new as I reintegrate is beautiful and I think can be very transformative for people testing kind of something similar. And I think sometimes like sometimes it's the external like the grad program or parental leave, sometimes it's medical issues and sometimes people are just like, I cannot keep going on this way. I cannot keep working in this way. And that is a moment too and it's like, OK, great. It's time to do something about that. Let's do this. You don't have to, right? Like I think it's for me really important to see, I know how impactful it is when leaders are able to serve for their communities for a consistent period of time. I know the difference that makes on the ground for kids. And so what can we do to help you get through there because there is a way you don't see it right now because if you did see it, you would go that way. But there are people out there who've done it, who know and can help you also not just do it while you also are maintaining what's important to you and what you don't want to give up. 00:31:35 Right? I don't want to give up that I make this big impact. I don't want to give up that I feel so connected to students. I don't want to give up this piece. And I also don't want to be working till 10 o'clock at night. I don't wanna be, you know, leaving after dark every day. I wanna be able to take care of my health. So how do I hold all these things at the same time and kind of forge a path to making it happen? Yeah, absolutely. I, there's so much in the, in the case study that you shared that I'm like, I want to dig back into that, but I'm recognizing our time as this. Um I'll just ask you a couple, a couple questions to close out. One of them is kind of like following this episode. A leader listening might be like, all right, I wanna like start with something like something small, a little bit of like a momentum builder perhaps to kind of start doing some of this work in the process that we've been talking about. What is one thing that they could do like tomorrow, for example, that could just get them started with this. So the one that I'm gonna tell them is I made a two minute quiz. And so I'm like, take the quiz, it's two minutes. And I mean, I will say I'm a big fan of quizzes of any kind, like from, you know, cosmo to like, you know, Harry Potter Buzzfeed House. I just think it's like a chance to like, share a little about yourself. 00:32:41 Look in the mirror and then reflect. And so my two minute quiz is leadership dash quiz.com. Um It'll bring you to my website and it'll be at the top of the page and it's what do you need most as a leader. And so I think that it's helpful because that will help you identify. Here's where my biggest gap is and I can start to think about, OK, since that's my biggest gap. Now, what do I do? Um And how do I, I actually might be tweaking the quiz a bit. So it might be slightly different by the time that this um episode airs. But I think that that's always a good place to start because you have to be able to identify your needs and think about where this is and what I like about the quiz, it's like kind of a fun whatever way to get to some of these issues that many leaders haven't struggle with and then helps you say, OK, that's what I need most. And so now how do I think about that in the scope of the problems that I'm considering? I love that because so many times I think like, I mean, and I do this too. It's like, ok, get on a call. We could, like, help identify the thing and this is like, doing it without getting on a call, you can do it on your own. And then I'm sure like, you know, it kind of leads them to like, ok, it's here, like the definition of wherever you are and maybe some suggested next action steps and then you can work with that. And so I think that is brilliant too. 00:33:44 Be able to just have a two minute quiz, right? That's really do it online at the grocery store, right? While you're like filling your car up with gas, like we're all about that. So love it. And then so the, the final two questions I have for USB close out, this one is fun. Does not have to relate to education or your work. But it can, what is something that you have been learning about lately? Um What have I been learning about? I have been learning um a lot about uh Judaism. So I actually have with all that's going on in the Middle East because I felt like my own education had some real gaps in like understanding like how have we come to be at this moment? I didn't have the well rounded global education in my K 16 experience. I recently moved to New York City and New York has a really um the part I live in has like a really distinct Jewish identity and flavor, which is really interesting. And so I feel like as I'm getting to know that and thinking about this and thinking about this global context, thank you. Finally, I think you mentioned this a little bit, but where can people learn more about you or connect with you? Yeah. So you can go to my website Beth naple.com and that has a bunch of um information on where we able to go. 00:34:50 And right around this time, this episode airs, I think we'll also have a new website leveled up leadership. I'm not 100% sure yet. I don't think we reserved the domain. Um So it'll, it'll direct to there, but that was a little bit more background. It has blog post, it has resources, it has the best time of the year to reset, how to think about using these pieces, how to react to surveys. So again, I try to make it full of really practical resources that people can use and serve as a reference point and there's lots of different ways to go. So my website Beth napton.com is a great place to go. And I also am on linkedin and a tiny bit on Instagram, but um more on linkedin. So awesome and we'll link to that in the show notes. So anyone who's doing something other than typing? Yeah, if they're not, they're listening and focus. Yes, they're folding laundry or driving home or doing all those good things that we know leaders cram for time are doing. Absolutely well, Beth, thank you so much for being on the show today. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me Lindsay. It was so much fun. I appreciate it. If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane Sapir and Jamila Dugan talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. 00:35:55 Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period. I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach better podcast network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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In this episode, Coach Carlos, explores the concept of performance-based relationships in education and highlights the importance of fostering a positive and healthy classroom environment for the success and well-being of both teachers and students. He delves into the pressing issue of teacher shortage and emphasizes the significance of parental partnerships in overcoming these challenges.
As a professional speaker, trainer, and author, Mr. Johnson, AKA “Coach Carlos,” is locally bred, but his work and research on culture and engagement have taken him national and international. His training and strategies have helped to change school culture and increase parental engagement, student enrollment, and staff and student retention. His driving belief: a highly engaged culture is the mother of high performance. The Big Dream Education is a holistic experience that goes beyond the traditional classroom. He dreams of creating a culture where performance-based relationships rule and teachers view themselves as life coaches who aim to bring out the best in each student. This transformative approach would pave the way for an inclusive, equitable, and fulfilling learning journey for all students. Alignment to the 4 Stages: Mindset, Pedagogy, Assessment, and Content Coach Carlos believes that the foundation for effective teaching and learning lies in cultivating a growth mindset that values relationships, embraces equity, and fosters resilience. This mindset should then guide pedagogical approaches, shape assessment methods, and inform content creation, ultimately resulting in a learning environment that prioritizes student well-being and success. Mindset Shifts Required One of the most significant barriers is the belief that some students are genetically incapable of succeeding, a misconception that can hinder teachers from building meaningful relationships with their students. Another barrier is cultural biases, which can prevent educators from connecting with students who have identities, experiences, and beliefs that are different from their own. Action Steps Once we address our biases, here’s what we can do: Step 1: Foster Healthy Relationships Coach Carlos encourages educators to cultivate healthy, performance-based relationships with their students and create a welcoming classroom environment that promotes student success and teacher well-being. Step 2: Involve Parents Involve parents in the solution and create a partnership between families and schools. Start by defining what “meaningful minimum” engagement looks like from families and school stakeholders. Step 3: Optimize Stress There is a specific kind of stress that is healthy: eustress. “That's the one we want. That's the basis for accomplishment, that is what gets us moving, that's what changes and that's what transforms.” Teachers can act like a “master chef in the kitchen…this kid over here, oh, I can turn the flame up…and here I better turn the flame down a little bit.” To do this well, we have to know each student well. One Step to Get Started Examine your biases and beliefs about their students' abilities and help your teachers do the same. Once we recognize and address these barriers, we can implement effective teaching strategies and create a positive learning environment for all students. Stay Connected You can find Coach Carlos at www.carlosjohnson.org and on YouTube. To help you identify some of the deeper culture pieces we discussed in this episode, I’m sharing my Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges Mini Workbook with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 150 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT Welcome to the Time for Teacher podcast as a professional speaker trainer and author, Mr Johnson A K A coach, Carlos is locally bred. But his work in research on culture and engagement have taken him national and international coach, Carlos and his team of consultants have utilized his experience and research to successfully turn around three failing public schools and one private Christian Academy. In addition, his training and strategies have helped to change school culture and increase parental engagement, student enrollment and staff and student retention. His driving belief. After 20 years of research, all evidence confirms that a highly engaged culture is the mother of high performance. Everybody get ready to meet. Coach Carlos, educational justice coach Lindsay Lyons. And here on the time for teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. 00:01:14 I made this show for you. Here we go. Coach Carlos. Welcome to the time for teachers podcasts. Oh, man, I, I am ecstatic. If this was video, you would see my big smile. I'm happy to be here. Thank you so much for being here, injury and all. I'm so grateful for your time and, and I think so, one of the things that people often think of, right, when they, we hear the bio at the start of the episode and everything, they're like, there's more to me than my official bio, right? Or there's something on my mind right now that's grounding our conversation today. Is there anything like that that you want people to know beyond the traditional bio? Just kind of where we're starting today? I just, you know, regardless of what my bio says, it can all be summed up with that. I have a, I have an overwhelming passion for um building healthy relationships between teachers and students. I mean, it's just teachers are stressed out now and one of the ways of helping them distress and or lower that stress is to be in an environment of culture that's comfortable, that's welcoming. 00:02:25 And it's tough to do that when the relationships are sour and toxic. So if there's anything else, I need to know, just know that I'm an advocate for helping you build a healthy environment in your classroom. I love the grounding in the healthy, I love the grounding in the relationships. And I also really appreciate it in your book. You talk about it. It's actually, yeah, Dres for teachers to be in positive, healthy relationships with students, right? It's, it's not just benefiting the students, it's benefiting everyone, which I think is great at a time of, you know, teacher retention being really low and there's, it's a really high stress job. So it really is, I mean, one of the things I say in the book and it was a shock when I learned this stat uh is, is that when officers are involved in shootings or tragic accidents, they literally get an opportunity or it's mandated for them to take some time off to even possibly get some mental and emotional support. Whereas when teachers, they have to go right back to the classroom. 00:03:30 And I'm saying, wow, and it's just, you know, there is a, we need, we need some help in this industry. The world needs to see us a little bit differently than what the, what we are we need help out here. Wow, what a, what a really interesting framing of that. Absolutely. I think every teacher and student should have mandated counseling. Like I think that would be like free access to counseling. I go to counseling every Friday, every single Friday. Now, my counseling may not be the traditional sit on the couch or talk with someone, but golf is my, I exhale. I relax. I get rid of the problems of the world for five hours. You can't call me. I'm not trying to call you. I mean, I mean, everybody's got to have a healthy way of just getting rid of the dirt from the world. And for me it's golf. Now, I, I, I'll do some professional therapy too, but for me it's golf. 00:04:37 Every Friday, every Friday. Unless something else is going on. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. If I don't start my day with like a run or a swim or something, it's just like I can't, we're not. Yeah, you gotta, you gotta find your thing unless you're gonna end up strangling. There. There was a song back in the day. Uh and the lyric to the song with Don't Push Me cause I'm close to the edge. I mean that should be the teacher's mantra right there. So right now we gotta find some way to destress yours as you say is a quick run. It could be a, some nice coffee before work. It could be, you know, exercise at your favorite gym, minus golf, whatever it is. Get it in. Yeah. Oh What a beautiful message to start with. So I think there's so much beauty in, in the book that you, you bring in from the, from the destress, you know, teachers and, and all of this that we've already been talking about too like the, the equitable impacts and the, the justice impacts for students when we do all this stuff. 00:05:46 Well, right. And so one of the first questions I asked is usually, you know, Doctor Patina writes about freedom dreaming in this gorgeous way. She says their dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. And so, right, I just love that phrasing and and I think about that for all the dreams we hold for education. So with that, what is, what is that dream for you, for education? The dream for me is to create a culture where performance based relationships rule, uh where teachers don't consider themselves as that one dimensional term teaching. It's just too one dimensional, but they really see themselves as life coaches. Uh It's the reason why I chose the name coach Carlos. I don't do that just for branding and for hype, I want to carry a coach's mindset and a coach looks at its players, his or her players in ways. How do I get the best out of this individual player so that we all can win? 00:06:55 And it my dream would be to have teachers adopt that coach's mindset so that they can indeed build healthy relationships based on performance in the classroom. Yes, I love this phrase, performance based relationships. And I know you get into that in the book quite a bit describing like what it's not what it is. Is there anything else you wanna say in terms of a definition or to kind of situate it in like what we often see in classes that is not performance based relationships. Well, um, every, every relationship is based on performance. There's not one relationship that we have. That's even if you were, ee, even if you had a coffee cup in front of you, that relationship with your coffee cup is based on performance. I mean, if it didn't keep your coffee hot and keep it, keep the heat away from your hand, you wouldn't use it. Uh Every relationship is based on performance. Um What I really want to emphasize in the book when, whenever I'm talking is that it's OK for us to be in performance based relationships. 00:07:58 We all are. But what does that performance look like? And what are we saying? And let's be clear with the relationships I have with parents, that's a performance based relationship. I want the parents to know, hey, I'm not, I wanna be your friend but it's not based on, it's based on my performance as a school administrator. It's based on your performance as an engaged parent. Let's measure each other that way. So at the, when, when you hear me, when you read it in the book, when, whenever you hear me say performance based, we're all in a performance based relationship. I don't, I don't know if we articulate it well enough. I don't know if we unpack it well enough. And then lastly, I certainly don't see, I don't see us evaluating our performances in such a way that it's not. And I got you. Oh, I got you. You didn't do that? Right. No, let's evaluate our performances so that we can support one another. And that's the way I look at it. 00:09:02 Yeah, there's so much, I mean, there's so much I want to get into, in your book. I might skip over my typical questions. But I think one of the things I really like is this idea of family partnership or parent partnership that you talk about. And I, I wonder if you can kind of talk us through this idea of like you talk about defining meaningful minimums, for example. And one of the things that really stuck out, I think I wrote an exclamation mark next to this when I was reading was that that parents sometimes when asked, they say, well, we don't even know the definition of what partnership is for you, right? How do we engage? Like, what does that look like on your end? And so I never even realized like as a, as a parent myself, right? Like I was like, oh, yeah, like, what is that engagement look like? I would love that answer. So I, I don't know if you want to walk us through any of that stuff around family partnership as connected to the relationships you brought up. I think that section of the book was brilliant. Yes, certainly. Let's, let's do that, that we're, I mean, we're at a crisis. 00:10:04 Now, every district is now we're at a crisis now with having the amount of people, the amount of bodies, the amount of instructors needed to have a healthy culture in the school. So that instruction can go forth where, I mean, every school, I'm in the number of substitute teachers if you will, is increasing. So what does a faithful teacher who gets up every single morning has her lesson plan ready? Who goes into the school? What does she do when she's always shorthanded? She gets there today and the administrator may have to say, well, Mr or Mrs Johnson is not here today. So we need to combine your class with theirs. We need help. So one of the best obvious places to get help is from parents. I mean, parents have got to be a part of the solution. We've got to have partnerships with them that are healthy and that are uh that are performance based. 00:11:15 Um So when I talk about parents being a part of the process, I mean, let's, I mean, let's be real about this. Students spend somewhere around 1300 hours per year with us. Wow. I don't know about you, Lindsay. But I've got, don't you tell anybody? I said this but I got a couple of friends who don't spend $1300 with their kids every day, every year. I mean, I mean, there, there, there are some parents who don't spend $1300. So, if we're gonna spend that much time with your child, what I say to parents, what I say to districts is that, let's do this. Right. Let's get this, let's get this partnership, this Copart thing. Uh Right. And oftentimes we, we have to take responsibility for the fact that we're not showing parents how to be a part of the process. I love this phrasing around co parenting. I think that's really fun and it is $1300. I think about my child in daycare right now. 00:12:22 And I'm like, oh, that daycare day is long, like, I, you know, I see him for like a couple hours a day during the week, right? Like, absolutely. And, and so I think about this and, and I, I love that you um you talk about the domino effect and, and the different things that you can do to kind of think about where, where we start, right? In terms of like, OK, we, we analyze the systems and we're like, we need to do something about this. Like, what is, what's the first place that you would suggest a leader listening to this kind of uh moves following this episode? Like what's, what's that first step? And then where do we go from there? Wow, great question. I love when we talk about the dominoes. I mean, that's a, that's a very, I'm from Michigan and um because of that, I've under, I, I have a, a keen understanding on how geometric progression works because we're a factory town and you had to know something about how, how, how it worked around there and what we learned very quickly, whether we call the geometric progression, whether we call it the domino theory, whether we call it the momentum, whatever what we learned very on as kids is that, you know, you, you start on this end of the supply chain and that thing carried supplies all the way down the assembly line. 00:13:35 Well, school is just like that. So when I'm working with, with uh school leaders, when I'm working with teachers, o oftentimes as they should be, they're looking at the end of the assembly line, they're looking at that big domino that they've got to knock down whether it be attendance, whether it be academics, whether it be behavior, whether it be school culture, that's the big domino. And that's OK. Put that big domino out there but don't attack the big domino. Let's find all the interrelated activities to that domino and then go all the way down to the smallest activity, line them up. And just like how Dominoes work, knock over the smallest one and that smallest one will hit the bi the next one will hit the next one, the largest one. And what we know from the Domino theory is that every domino can knock over the corresponding domino that is 50% its its weight or height. 00:14:40 So a small thing, knocks over a larger thing, that larger thing locks over a larger thing and that knocks over a larger thing. So when we do the exercise that my P DS and things like that, I literally take them from the big domino. What's your big domino? Well, it's attendance. Coach Carlos. Ok. Let's look at attendance. Now, let's back. What's the next thing that affects attendance? What's the next thing that affects attendance? And we go all the way down to the smallest thing and ultimately what we know from John Hattie and his research and by the way, John Hattie is crazy. I don't, I don't know how that guy does the research he does. I mean, that guy is crazy. I mean, the way he does uh the amount of research that he's given us a visible learning. I, I love his, his, his, his new revision. Uh he started off, I think around 100 and 95 strategies that had a different effect sizes. Now he's up to like 295 or somewhere around there. But what hasn't changed is the fact that all of those strategies they center around me being in relationship with you and vice versa. 00:15:52 It just doesn't work if you don't like me, I don't like you. There's no way for us to do any of those strategies. So uh if you look at his, his recent revision, his holy grail is uh CTE which is collective teacher efficacy. Um So that's just saying that the teachers believe in the uh ability of their students to complete the work. That's relationship. Lindsay, that's relationship. So the smallest domino in every school is, do you like the kids? Do the kids like you that changes the game? Now, how, how do we get to building those relationships? That's where the strategies come in is how do you build relationships with kids? How do you build relationships with parents? Um And that's where the, the work at, but you can't get there if you don't first mentally believe that I've got to care something about these kids and vice versa. Yeah, I love this idea of belief. It reminds me a lot of like adaptive leadership theory and stuff of like the root cause is often a belief, right? 00:17:01 And so when we get to that place, like I often do like a root cause analysis with schools, you know, when there's strategic planning or whatever and it's like if we don't get to the bottom and figure out it's a belief that we hold, then we're not deep enough, right? No, we have, we haven't gotten to the core yet. I mean, this thing is not rocket science in, in the sense that if you are, we are just relationship beings, we're relational and, and, and, and if you, when we want to punish someone, we lock them away and then when we wanna punish them further, even if they're behind bars, we incarcerate them in such a way where you don't get to see anybody that is the ultimate punishment is to deprive someone from a relationship. So if that's the ultimate punishment, it stands to reason that the ultimate pleasure is to be in relationship, that's the ultimate pleasure. And um if, if we, if we can bottle that, then I think we can, we can build some um not stress free stress less, but we can minimize the stress and increase the performance in our classrooms. 00:18:16 I I love that, that place you ended there because I it makes me think of the high why that you talk about. So in terms of a belief, I feel like that's kind of connected because you talk about the purpose, right? For what we do. But then there's also that like that action that moderate levels of cortisol, right? And, and we're like moving into that positive stress. So do you mind talking about that a little bit for a minute? If that was a blessing to me too when I was able to understand that? Because I knew, I mean, for a while, we've been talking about stress, we've been talking about stress and rightfully so. But what we need to add to the conversation is that there is some healthy stress out here, there's some good stress. I can't think of any important achievement that I've ever made. Like this book took me three years to write. It took me three years. That was stressful, but it was a good stress. It wasn't, it wasn't something that was overwhelming. It wasn't something that I was, my heart was, you know, I had to get on heart medication because of it. 00:19:24 It was, it was a good stress and, and what we know from the medical, communicate uh from the community is that there is a very dangerous stress and that is identified as distress. Everybody knows that. And that makes sense. We all have been there, but there is a corresponding healthy stress called you stress. That's the one we want, we want to be in that space of you stress because that you stress is what as the basis for accomplishment, that is what gets us moving. That's what changes and that's what transforms. So I'm ok with there being some stress in the classroom, I'm OK with there being some uh kids being under a little bit of stress as long as they're under stress in a healthy environment and they're not distressed. II, I love that section of the book. And I, I also like that you, you named that if there's too little stress, right? 00:20:27 Then then it goes towards like depression or right, we're not functioning there either. Yeah, I think about looking out at a classroom of students who, who fall into the whole continuum, right? We often have students who are like the head down like I don't, you know, I'm not doing and then we have the students who are like, so stressed out about accomplishing the thing and doing the task and, and then we have students in the middle who are like that healthy stress and it's like if we could just get everyone to that place, that's it. That's it. That's it right there. That, that'll move the needle. And that's what Angela Duckworth talks about in her book Grit. I love that book Grit. And we don't in schools, we don't talk about, we talk about it but we don't implement her values and her research enough because we want to, in a good way. We wanna protect Children and I understand that. But Children have a, they're a lot more resilient than we give them credit for. But it, it has to be under the oversight of a healthy adult who is just like a master chef in the kitchen. 00:21:31 Who knows how to turn up the flame here. But no, don't cook it too long. But let me turn the flame up a little bit over here. But then let me, but this kid over here, oh I can turn the flame up cause they can take it. But this kid over here I better turn the flame down a little bit but you've gotta know it. You a, a master chef knows the appropriate temperature that every food cooks at. And master teachers understand that. Or as I call master coaches. They understand they can, uh, a coach, a teacher who's a coach will look at me and say, Carlos, I know you can do better and I am not letting you get away with that level of work and, and will proceed to push me a little harder and, but also encourage me because they know, ah, he can handle that kind of stress, he can do it. But that takes a teacher who is not just someone who was regurgitating what they learned, but someone who says, I've looked at this child, I understand them. They can have. Yes. 00:22:35 And I, I love that. I love the idea that we have to first know all of our kids right to be able to do well by them. And so I'm wondering if there, you have so many strategies in the book. So I'm wondering if there's either a favorite strategy or something that you're, you're thinking of that's really successful in schools that you've worked with as that kind of relationship builder or, or way of getting to know all of your students. Yeah. Well, the first thing is, and, and, and, and teachers, educators, administrators listen to me, take a look at your butt first, take some time and look at your butt. And what, and what I mean by that is we have too many butts in our heads. We've got too many butts and the k, the three key buts that I have found or really the, the, the two key buts the other one is, is what the coach says, but the, the two key buts that prevent us from really engaging students, uh, is that we tell ourselves these stories that prevent us from really engaging and building a relationship. 00:23:41 So I would engage a relationship with this child, but I would engage in a relationship with this child. But, and those butts have got to get out the way. So teachers get your butt out the way. All right, we've got to get those butts out the way. But the two, the, the two biggest butts are, um, this kid, this kid could learn but they are not competent enough to do. So, there's still those of us in our industry who believe in some of those archaic philosophies that genetically, some kids just don't have it. They still believe in some of the fallacies of the bell curve. They still believe in some of the din uh, philosophies. We still have some that are still around. And so they, they feel like they can look at a child and assess that. Oh, yeah, that child won't make it here. They, they, they can't make it in this building nor in my class. That's a, but that will prevent them from truly engaging that child. 00:24:48 Um, the second. But is the cultural but, and that, but is when we tell ourselves, we just don't connect to that child because they don't talk the way I talk and I'm not just talking about ethnicity, but what I'm talking about are our personal biases and prejudices. You know, I would connect with that child but I don't connect with that child. But there, there's something about the single parents that you, you know, single parents do this s kids who come from parents who smoke weed, do that or whatever their butts are, their cultural biases are. And those two butts I find limit a, an administrator or educator's willingness, not ability, but their willingness to enter into a relationship with the child. And if they can get those butts out the way and become a coach, they'll be fine. 00:25:51 So that's that, that strategy right there. Strategy. Number one, you can't go much further if your mindset is stuck in. Oh, I can look at these 30 kids and I can already tell you the ones who won't survive. You know, I can look at these kids already and they're all, you know, I, there's a reason why I don't connect with Carlos because, you know, he doesn't have the right color eyes or he doesn't have the right diction with his language. Um But if a teacher can get past those, anybody can learn from him or her. Yeah, that's, I, I really appreciate how you break that down in the book and you give several examples of, of what the, the cultural, but specifically could, could look like. Um including, like, political beliefs. Right? Like, like, I, I think a lot of those were really, like, helpful for me to read through and be like, oh, yeah, I recognize those moments in class when I was like, I have a very different view of, like, what this policy should be and the student disagrees with me. Like, I feel the disconnect or I feel the connect because I agree with. 00:26:55 Yeah, exactly. Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, no, I was just vibing with you. That's one of the things that I was thinking about too is like, sometimes we have these cultural pieces where teachers who are like minded in that way, they share the same butts. Maybe, you know, they, they say things in a meeting or we hear something, maybe uh just person to person, we overhear in the teachers lounge or whatever and, and we can then step in and identify that and to be on the lookout for those phrases that people will sometimes speak out loud and you're just like this kid can't learn, they shouldn't be here like, ok, red flag. Let's, let's address it. And I think as a leader just being attuned to those phrases, I think would be so helpful. Now that right there might be a nice little add on book right there. The phrases to watch out for that might be your book right there. Yeah, because you're right when you, when those, when those phrases subconsciously come out someone's mouth then that lets you know right there that they're going to have difficulty building relationships with certain types of populations and that's what's going to hold. 00:28:05 And consequently, if you look at the numbers of kids who excel or don't, I guarantee you they're in line with their butts. Hey, everyone. It's Lindsay. Just jumping in to talk about our episode. Freebie coach Carlos and I talk a lot about culture in this episode, which is typically an adaptive challenge or an adaptive thing we talk about. So go ahead and grab my adaptive challenges mini work. We at the blog post for this episode, Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 50. Back to the episode. They're, they're right in line with those butts. So it's a, you know, it that right there if we could, that, that one strategy right there, understanding what your butts are can really catapult um a, a an educator into building healthy relationships with the majority of their kids. One of the things that really, um I would say kind of gives an example of this is again, iii I no longer live in Michigan, but I have Michigan roots. 00:29:07 So I, I tell the story about oftentimes having to go out in, in the uh winter time and get in and start my car and in Michigan, if it snowed real bad and your car was outside, it may not start no more. So, so this one time I went out to stop my car. It did not start and I had to call AAA and AAA came out and I, I told the guy that, hey, I was able to turn the radio on, I was able to turn the lights on. Um, so I don't understand why it wouldn't work. He got the car started and what he shared with me then really helped me understand some of the disconnects with us and, and kids. And that is what he shared with me is that there are some functions in the car that only need a small voltage to operate. But if you want that engine to turn over and you want it to roar, you need a strong battery to engage it. 00:30:17 Kids are like that. There are some kids who just need a little bit of juice and their lights will come on. There are some kids who just need a little bit of juice and the radio will start. But then there are others, they need a stronger boost. They just, they need a stronger charge and that's what we're for. We're the battery and we sometimes have to hook up our juice to their battery and give them a charge. But it's hard for a teacher to be able to do that if their battery is low, you know, if they're low and that's why we have to, we, we've gotta, we've gotta take, we gotta take care of teachers too. We can, they can't, we can't send, send sick people into a sick room and ask them to make those in there. Well, oh, I, I, that is so good. And I, I think about that from like a leader perspective. I worked in a school, uh, a network of schools once they're their model, one of their uh pieces of their model was one learning model for all. 00:31:26 So it was like, the teachers are expected to do the same things that we expect the students to do, right? And so it's kind of like the leader, supporting the staff and the staff and supporting students, right, in the same format. And so I think about that from that perspective as well, right? The teacher, sometimes we just need, we just need different degrees of juice or like, you know, this one class is coming in like I need a little bit more juice right now. You know who that class is too. My third hour class when they get here. Oh man, I need some help. I need some help. No, I'm I'm right there with you. I'm right there with you and you gotta, you know, you've gotta wherever you get that juice from, wherever you get that energy from. Uh And that's why you have to have different strategies, different techniques to um to empower. You might use um one of the power moves in one room, you might use one of the power moves in another room. You might have to use different things. And particularly if you have that one class, like you were saying this class right here and I, and they, and, and they're at the part of the day when my battery is low already and they're coming in here. 00:32:31 Oh, man, I need some help. So, yeah, you have to have, you gotta have strategies already preloaded and ready to go. I love like all the various things we've talked about is there one thing that you want to leave people with before we get to kind of our closing questions that they should kind of hold on to after this episode. Oh, wow. Um We talked about so many one things. Uh So you're, you know, you, you're putting, you're putting it out of me today. We talked about, I mean, really, it's, it's, I mean, if nothing else, the mindset you, we've got to start with the mindset that every kid that you see in your building in your classroom deserves the best version of you. They deserve the best version of you. How we get, how we get to that now is where the conversation really begins because I feel bad for uh instructional teams where someone like me walks in, I would never do this but somebody like me walks in and do a PD and we pretty much make them feel like the kids aren't learning because of them. 00:33:39 You know, they're not learning because if you do da da da, da, da, da, da da. And there are some things that we need to be better at. Uh but it's holistic kids have got to come to school ready. Parents have got to come to school ready. Uh Everybody's got to help out in this process that just makes me think of like as a leader asking the question to your staff at the next staff meeting, right? Like how do I help you show up as your best version of yourself? Right? I mean, like just a quick entry point to get us thinking about that. Yeah, that's that one, right? There is a question. I think that'll work right there. You, you hear that leader, she gave you a nugget there. So the final questions, I really like this next one and it is purely for fun. So it does not have to relate to your job or education at all. But it can, what is something that you have been learning about lately? Wow. What I've been learning about lately is I'm a performance psychology buff. I, I'd love to understand what makes people jump higher, what makes people run faster? And here's one, here's a nugget for everybody we all need. 00:34:48 There was this is it, there was this experiment with a mouse as it always is, they tied a spring to the, to the tail of the mouse. Um And they measured, they wanted to measure the force that he used to pull the string. So they put him in this tube and the front of the tube, they uh blew in the smell of cheese and watch this mouse pull on this spring to get to the smell of that cheese. Then they said, OK, how much harder will we pull? Would the mouse pull if we, at the same time, we, we blew in the smell of cheese in the front of the tube. At the same time, we blew in the smell of a cat at the back of the tube. How much harder would he pull? What we www what, what, what the uh performance psychologist found out with that experiment or theorized from this experiment is that high performers need both. 00:36:01 We don't need just what we're chasing after. We also need something that we're running from for maximum effort. We need both. It just can't be the higher paycheck. You know, if we, uh if we get these grades up, we get a bonus at the end of the year. That's the smell of the cheese. That's good. You want that? But you also want the smell of the cat at the back. It's almost like we endured. I gue I guess you wanna say endured, but we had no child left behind. If you were around when that came out, there were people were upset about it. People were happy about it. But the fact of the matter is our President Bush at that time and the Secretary of Education thought that he would, they would come in with a stick to schools that say if kids didn't do this, didn't do that. Here's your stick. The following. President Barack Obama, he chose a different route and I'm not saying one is better than the other, but here's a prime example of the cheese and the cat Barack Obama came with race to the top. 00:37:14 His deal was show me that you can get kids to learn and I'll give you more money. So, whichever one now, if we could have had both of them operating at the same time, maybe we would have saw some magic in education. But what we do know about human beings is that if we want maximum performance, we need both. We need to chase after the cheese, but we need the smell of the cat. So, so that's my, that's what I do in my spare time. Oh, I love it. Oh, this is so good. Now, I need to research more performance psychology stuff. It's a great, great study. Um I think the last question, I just, I think a lot of listeners are gonna want to learn more about you, connect with you follow what you do online and in all the places. So where would you recommend they get in touch with you or see the work that you do? So there are two places real easy. You can go to Carlos johnson.org. That's real easy. You can go there, you can go to everywhere from that place, my social media links and everywhere or go straight to my site and you'll see my three key programs that's power engaged for, for instructional teams. 00:38:24 That's future man prep for uh helping boys learn in a safe environment in school. Uh And then also power parenting you what I do for parents and you can go there at Image of success.com, Image of success.com. So either one of those two places you can find me brilliant and we'll link to all those in the show notes too. So if you're driving, don't worry, they'll be there. Oh, Coach Carlo. Thank you so much. This is such a great conversation. I appreciate you. Thank you. Great conversation with you all. You and I can do this anytime I say we, we're Kendrick spirits. Agreed. Strongly agreed. All right, be blessed. Now, if you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane, Sapir and Jamila Dugan talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period? I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action if you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. 00:39:28 How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time, leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast Network. Better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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In this episode, Dr. Daman Harris, the author of "The Anti-Racist School Leader," advocates for personal commitment, vision casting, and professional learning experiences as key components of antiracist leadership in schools. Daman discusses implicit bias and the role of homophily, suggesting that the tendency to gravitate towards the familiar can inadvertently foster discrimination. He also talks about the importance of continuous evaluation of the impact of professional development on student learning and growth and what this might look like.
Dr. Daman Harris is the manager of professional development schools and higher education partnerships in Anne Arundel County Public Schools. He is also a co-director of the Building Our Network of Diversity Project, a Maryland-based nonprofit that supports male educators of color. Dr. Harris has had a wide range of experiences as a teacher, instructional coach, administrator, author, adjunct professor, speaker, and consultant. He leads courses related to effective teaching methods, research protocols, antiracism, teacher recruitment, and teacher retention. The Big Dream Everyone belongs and can achieve. Daman wants to see schools where antiracist values are not just talked about but acted upon. He believes that antiracism is a behavior, not a static characteristic, and encourages all school leaders, teachers, and community members to actively contribute to creating change. Alignment to the 4 Stages: Mindset, Pedagogy, Assessment, and Content The Table of Contents in Daman’s book aligns closely with these four pieces. In terms of mindset, he advocates for recognizing and understanding our biases and committing to change. Pedagogically and curriculum-wise, he emphasizes the importance of creating an inclusive curriculum that encourages critical consciousness among students and teaches antiracism. We also talk about assessment of learning for adults, specifically that we should have ongoing evaluation of professional development and its impact on student learning. Mindset Shifts Required Rather than identifying our in-group as race, religion, language, or political beliefs, we can see our school community as our in-group and strive to give all students and families the benefit of the doubt. I absolutely LOVE this framing! Action Steps What are the early steps we can take? The following steps are aligned to the first 3 chapters of Daman’s book. Step 1: Educate Yourself and Commit Learn information about and recognize the dynamics of racism. Commit to making a change. Step 2: Cast an Anti-Racist Vision Develop a vision for your school where anti-racism is not just a buzzword but a lived experience. Share your ideas, and then co-create with stakeholders. Step 3: Plan Professional Learning Experiences Develop a professional development plan that promotes critical consciousness and equips teachers with the skills to promote anti-racism. Use backwards planning to start with the end in mind. For Daman, this is the development of critical consciousness for all students! Challenges? Sorting through competing priorities. So there's a lot to do as a school leader. Here’s Daman’s approach to address it: Antiracism is a part of the solution to all of the competing priorities. This is not one of the competing priorities, this is a part of all of them. So when you think about holistic remedies for the obstacles for your students and their families, this is where you start. One Step to Get Started Find an accountability partner. Begin having these conversations about what you claim you want to do or what you claim you are going to do. Be a sounding board for that partner as well, and push each other to learn more. Stay Connected You can email Dr. Daman Harris at: [email protected] You can find his latest book at www.SolutionTree.com/Antiracist. For additional information on the book, click here. To help you identify white supremacy culture and related adaptive challenges in your school or district, I’m sharing my Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges Mini Workbook with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 149 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT Welcome to another episode of the Time for Teacher podcast. Today, we have Dr Damon Harris on the podcast who is the manager of professional development schools and higher education partnerships in Anne Arundel County Public Schools. He is also a co-director of the building our network of diversity project of Maryland based nonprofit that supports male educators of color. Dr Harris has had a wide range of experiences as a teacher, instructional coach, administrator, author, adjunct professor, speaker and consultant through his speaking and adjunct experiences. Dr Harris leads courses related to effective teaching methods, research protocols, anti-racism, teacher recruitment and teacher retention. His first book, which we talk about in this episode today, I absolutely love it is called the Anti Racist school leader and it is on sale. Now, let's hear from Dr Damon Harris educational justice coach Lindsay Lyons. And here on the time for teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. 00:01:03 I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings. If you're a principal, assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go, Dave and welcome to the time for teacher of podcasts. Oh, thank you. I'm excited to be here. I'm so excited to have you. I am very excited about your book, The anti racist school Leader and very excited to dive into it today. I have read your bio, which is often very professional feeling and sometimes folks want just kind of say either what's on their mind at the moment or here's who I am before the professional bio or, or in addition to the professional bio, um feel free now to like take this opportunity to share whatever kind of thing you want to share, to ground our conversation today or I'd, I'd say that I am a son and grandson of 51 years. 00:02:07 I'm a, I'm a father of 23 years. I'm a husband of 27 and all of those folks and I'm a community member forever and all of those different stakeholder groups, including my own Children have poured into me. So they are the folks that are the the public facing, they affect the public face and view of, of me more so than any of my professional accomplishments. I love that grounding in relationship. That's beautiful. Thank you for that. And I think one of the, the coolest uh phrasings around freedom dreaming comes from Doctor Bettina Love. So I like to start each episode with this. It just, you know, she talks about dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. And so I'd love to know Damon, what is your big dream for education, for leadership? However you want to take it? Yeah, I I think my my big dream is likely attached to the visions and missions of most of the public schools, probably the private schools as well that, that I've been attached to. 00:03:15 So it is, I want a world in which everybody belongs. Um And I want a world where everybody can achieve. And um and so those two things are a part of the reason why I, I wrote the book because I don't see enough of that. But I see a lot of people who, who want, who want the same, who have the same desire as I do and they're not quite sure how to help their organization shift. That is brilliant just the way you put that. And I, I see that a lot too is that folks share that common dream and to orient all of the work around this common dream I think is a beautiful way to get people to be like, OK, let's do this thing, right? And I, and I think that that is a wonderful entry point to our conversation and to be able to talk about about your book today. So I think I just absolutely love this. I am anticipating, I'm not quite finished, but I am anticipating this. Honestly will probably be one of my favorite books of, of, of education. 00:04:19 Like top five. It is. Yeah, it is brilliant. And I absolutely love, I mean, just even, even looking at the table of content the way you broke down the sections just so good, it like captures all of the things. So if you don't mind, I'm just gonna like read off some of these sections. I'm good with that. Awesome. So there's the personal start rate where there's the educate yourself and commit. Then we have cast and anti racist vision. Then we have planned professional learning experiences, encourage and embrace resistance because you know, that's gonna happen and elevate anti racist curriculum and instruction. The fact that I mean, my heart sang when I saw that, that's part of this, right? Like it instruction is what we do, right? And then monitor your impact. I mean, my brain just went, I haven't read that chapter yet, but my brain just goes to like street data and lived experience and like all the things, right? So I am just really jazzed about this book and I'm wondering where you want to start the conversation because I think one of the things for me is that there, it's so action oriented and that the no say and do is kind of that way you wrap up each chapter. 00:05:27 And I, I love the action oriented. This, I also just love how you came up with each of those categories and decided to say like these are all important aspects to this work. Sometimes we may focus on one to the exclusion of the others. Like, so all of this. So I, I don't know if there's a place that you want to start from, like how you conceptualized that, how you kind of think through all of the piece. Uh What would make sense to start for us today? So I, I'd like to follow on the thread that you just uh tugged on a little bit about the action oriented um titles and the they are intentional because anti races is a behavior, it's not a static characteristic, right? And so the, the, the kick the spark for me to write this book was really around uh Ibram Ky's work with how to be an anti racist because I was doing some work. This, this book is in, in a sense, in one sense, a love letter to my former school community where I was a principal. 00:06:28 And so I, I write about not just my, a little bit about my upbringing to, to start, but it's more about the the activities we went through the journey my school began to take together when I was a, when I was a principal. And so been telling our folks all the time that we have agency. It isn't like a static characteristic that you are anti racist as the same as you can say you are tall, right? It's not like that. So you have agency, you can't make a change, you can't make a difference, you can do something. And when I travel around to have these conversations with different groups of folks, folks often say, I hear you say we, we can do something. I hear you say we have agency. I hear you say there are other people out there who are willing to join the the fight for us with us, but we don't know how to start. All right. So we don't know what we're supposed to know or what we're supposed to say or what we're supposed to do related to our desire to make change and, and that's where the different components of the book um began to take form. 00:07:39 And I love that you, you specifically name too, right? That a school leader doesn't have to be necessarily an administrator, right? But it's like, how do I do this as a paraprofessional? How, how do I do this as a teacher in a classroom? Right? How do I do this as a community member with the school? There is a range of options here which I, I love that frame is that everyone is a leader and needs to be a leader, right? For this work. Absolutely. Our kids need you, right. There's too much at stake for you to be on the sideline, waiting for somebody to give you direction. Yes. And if you need direction, read this book, there you go. And so I think one of the, one of the cool things that, that I loved is that actually a lot of the, those sections of categories and why I wanted to read them is actually closely mapped on to the questions that I usually ask on this, on this podcast. I was like, whoa, this is perfect. Um Where I typically think of the various elements of things we do related to mindset, which you kind of just touched on and I think it touched on in the the chapter about kind of that self reflection and, and in doing that internal work, uh the pedagogy pieces, right? That instruction, the curriculum, the content that we teach as well as the assessment, how do we assess student learning, but also how do we assess the systems? 00:08:47 Um And, and I think each of these are, are really important. I'd love to maybe dive into a couple of them if that's OK with you. Um I, I know that you share kind of like a um some ideas in the, in the mindset piece and, and kind of sharing this with, with teachers when you're getting into your vision, the the clarifying an answer, racist, racist vision. I'm not exactly sure the frame phrase you use, but I, I think the visual framework idea was really compelling and the idea that you shared that it is whoever's on the receiving end of that, who was hearing the vision um different communities may gravitate more to like a visual element or a metaphor, an analogy. I just loved that you shared that and then you also shared examples and then critiqued the examples to say nothing is perfect, but we don't need perfection just so good. Do you mind saying a little bit more about that? Absolutely dead. Oh I don't know if I could say it any better than you. But what um one of the things that I I'll add to what you said is, is really about the education part of this where the that first chapter to educate yourself and commit to the work is we don't always understand. 00:09:59 A lot of us have taken like the Harvard Implicit Association test or we've seen some of the images online and talked about implicit bias, et cetera. But a lot of us haven't sort of dug deeply enough to have a, a deeper, stronger understanding of why we act the way we act. And so they don't, we don't understand that, that the phrase IU or the word I use I highlight in here is um homophily, which is our gravitation toward the familiar. So we wanna be around people that we think are the most like us. And that could be a bunch of different in a bunch of different ways, right? That, that Wheel of Identity that a bunch of us who are listening and probably seen, right? Or that Wheel of Power and Privilege. Um That is also one of something that I'm sure your audiences has probably seen like, so we know a lot about those things like th those wheels, but we don't understand why we or why we, but also some of our other folks still gravitate towards those folks, those pieces on that wheel that are most like us and we want to be around them, we wanna join them, we we want to support that group because they become our in group. 00:11:13 And and so once that in group is established in your mind, you fight harder for them, right? You give them more of the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong. Like one member of your group doesn't speak for everybody. One bad behavior by somebody in your group is just one piece of a big uh puzzle for you. But that outside group, those folks who don't share the most the the strongest number of characteristics with us. That group, we tend to look at it differently. So we tend to say one bad thing is representative of that whole group. We don't give them the benefit of the doubt. We don't fight as hard for them in fact. And in some of the, the books that I reference in there like um Jessica Nordell is the end of bias or, uh, J Van Bels, um, the power of us or we talk about how we not, it's not enough for our group to win. The other group has to lose. We feel better. We get a bigger dopamine hit when we see our rivals lose than when we see our end team win. 00:12:20 So once we get a sense of that and then we, we add on the layer of, we are socialized to believe that race is the primary thing, the primary characteristic, even though race, I'm sure your audience know it's not a real thing, right? But it it is the implications are very real. Um And so once we see like we, I share this with my school staff to say, what about if, because those identities that we put in the forefront or background can change depending on the context we're in. So sometimes we can think about it as race because that's, that's how we're socialized. But we can also think about it when we're riding home listening to a political podcast. Now our political affiliation might move to the front, right on Sundays. Some of us are um doing religion, right? Or religious ceremonies or on Saturdays or Sundays or some other days of the week during religious ceremonies where that identity moves to the front. 00:13:22 And maybe later that day, the attended sporting events where that identity moves to the front, right? So what we share that with our, with my staff to say what if we said while we were here in our building and in our community, we moved that identity to the front. So if our school is our primary in group, now all our kids and their families get the benefit of the doubt. Now we wanna see them win at all costs, right? Like it, it it not only changes our mindset, it changes the world, right? Like and, and so once my school staff and it wasn't just me who developed this vision, right? I shared it initially, but all of my, my supervisor, my staff, my parents and my school community, everybody started talking about what they thought about this idea. Um And so we all bought in together and, and so that, that's really exciting for me once I shared with them sort of the vision, but then I, then we began to talk about why we think the way we think and why I'm taking this orientation towards our work or why I'm suggesting this. 00:14:38 Um then, then it was, we were gone, we were off and running. I, I really love that because I, I think a lot about adaptive leadership theory and I, I think, right, when we're, we're dealing with an adaptive challenge, right? Adaptive challenge, like institutionalized racism and structured racism and white supremacy, culture and all right, all the things that have been like, we keep talking about them and we keep like not making progress and they're long standing. Like this is a long standing challenge. We got to do something different. We're not going to go to one PD and then it's done, right? Like it's shared leadership, it's co creating with the community, it's pulling in and partnering with all these groups that you're describing. And so I just love that your school. Like I, I love you said that this is a love letter to your former school because I can see in it like just the the love and connection and sense of belonging that you were able to nurture to be able to even do something like that, which is just really powerful and cool to know is possible for people listening who are like, maybe that's not me yet, maybe that's not my school yet, but it can be. And, and one of the things that I love too is that you lay out a very clear action plan like the, the PD path that you described I think was super cool. 00:15:45 And I love that one of the end goals is, is critical consciousness, right? For students. But also that I know along the way, you know, you need teachers to have critic consciousness. It just, it like really spoke to my heart. So I'm wondering as we think about the actions of that PD plan, the, the goal itself. I mean, can you talk us through a little bit about either what that was like or advice you'd give to a leader who's considering something similar. Yeah. And so some of this, the folks who were in my former school district, they, they would recognize some of these elements as things that we were doing as a school district in terms of using backward design for some of our professional learning pieces um laying out what we call a professional learning progression. Um So it's, it's PD, right? But it's, it's a little more centered on, I guess the, the learner or the, the participant as the learner, but the person who drives the, the learning and it's not just someone else developing me, it is us growing and, and, and learning together. 00:16:48 Um So once we, we determined or the school district I was in had already said, hey, we can do backward design, we can back map the stuff from our end, from our angle to where we to where we are now that desired state to the current state. And then how, how can we have some steps along the way? And for me, it, it was a simple transition for our school to say we can do the same with anti racism and our thinking around this. And so Sharon was as a part of casting, that vision was to say, hey, here's a conceptual diagram that just says, here are some steps from our current state to our desired state. And here are the things I'm suggesting we hit on along the way here are a couple of things that are non negotiables. But everything else, you know, we can, we can shape together. And if once we were able to say, OK, we can do that, we get to step one, where do we go? Because that conceptual diagram was, was like you said, the end result was 34 years, we'd have our students who were uh critically conscious, right? 00:17:56 And I know your audience probably knows this. But is that that in my view of critical consciousness is that you have the ability to recognize when injustice is occurring um or some disproportionate outcomes in a negative way are, are manifesting. You also have the skills to do something about it, right? So if you, you have the knowledge to say here is what I can recognize. You have the skill to say I can change this, I can change these outcomes for the better. And then you have the motivation or the the self efficacy to say I am going to use my skills to make this change for the better. So we could do this with our students in a way in folks who are listening in some states where um my the book title won't really fit for your your school library shelf in, in some states. You can still use these principles to support your students in making change in any ways that are appropriate for the strategic use of your leadership. 00:19:06 Um When you're trying to, to do some social justice work. Yeah, I, I love that. You mentioned that because I think there's a lot of folks who, I mean, individual like parents and family members who, when, when I was just a teacher, uh who would come in and say like, you know, what are you, what are you teaching about? What are you talking and, and through conversation when we're talking about the, the skill of critical consciousness, when we get down to what it really is. A lot of folks are like, oh yeah, that sounds good. That sounds good, right? Like I want that for my kids, right? And it's just about the ability to be able to, you know, whatever, like, like navigate, I suppose we must navigate the legal, whatever even though the laws are been and we know that, right, that white supremacy in action. Um but like being able to really sit down and have those, those partnership conversations with the folks in our community to say like, don't we want this for our kids? I think it's critically important and the fact that like the ultimate goal is to have students identify in justice and remedy it. Like that is what we want for. 00:20:09 I think you right in here like ultimately a better society, right? Like that's the goal 100 years from now. And so I think that's, that's it. Right. Um Absolutely. And everybody's in many groups are doing this work. So even groups who think they are at odds, right? They are still saying, hey, we recognize some injustice sometimes with the racial lens um and sometimes they're looking at it from white, white students are feeling uncomfortable with work or with their conversations, right? But that's still the same recognizing injustice using a racial lens and saying we're going to organize and take action to remedy this, right? And these are members of our family, like thinking about that, encouraging, embracing resistance piece. The the school community is our family. The staff is our family. You, you don't cut grandpa, grandma, Aunt Susie out of your life because they say something that you don't agree with. All right. So we, we work together on that. Um And so that's what we do as a school and as a community, we try to say this isn't about um disagreement is not about us having less intelligence or somebody else need to be more informed or somebody else having uh more moral righteousness, right? 00:21:27 That's not what this is. This is different life experiences. Hey, everybody. It's Lindsay just jumping in here to tell you about today's freebie for the episode. So, since Dr Harris and I are talking a lot about anti racism and addressing that as a leader, I'm gonna share with you my Adaptive challenge mini work book because this is an adaptive challenge. It is a long standing issue. Let's figure out how to address it by first diagnosing that it is. There. Also, Dr Harris shares a one pager. If you are interested in getting the book for a leadership collective or a book study, you absolutely can check that out. These are both going to be on the blog post, Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 49. All right, back to the episode. So if we now say you have different life experiences than I do, let's work together to have some collective life experiences that can shape both our thinking. Um because I'm willing to change my mind a little bit, if you're willing to change your mind a little bit and we can operate on our values um to, to make our school and our community a better place. Right. 00:22:30 Right. And I love that you grounded all of this in belonging too, right? Because if we're committed to belonging, it's like every person has the right free from psychological or physical harm to be able to raise their hand in a class and share a thought, right? But with the understanding that we're, we, I, I usually use the word dignity, but like, you know, human dignity is central, right? Belonging is central. And so if we're all in agreement and, and that can be our foundation, then we can have, right? A lot of discussion and discourse that we might not have, were that not the foundation. And, and I think that's what's so beautiful about. Like, I think the way that you started this episode off is that, that is the ground and that's the goal and, and critical consciousness is, is a piece of that, right? Like that, that's, that's how we enact the goal. Um I think there's so many ways to like, determine and success and I love that you use Gus's um PD learning measures in there too. Uh I think for, for a lot of leaders, particularly those who might not have like trained in like different um like psychometrics or like methodological, like research methodologies, like how to like gain information about um learning metrics beyond, you know, your typical, how we do this in education? 00:23:39 I think that this was really illuminating. I mean, even for a person who has trained in that, I was just like, yes, this is so good. The breakdown of like, here's what we do and here's what it can look like in action was so good. And I wonder if you could just speak to us a little bit about that because I, I imagine there's a listener leading who's like, OK, so I did this PD or I'm trying to do this thing or I'm engaging in these conversations. How do I know if it's working? And what kind of information should I be collecting from folks in my community to figure out where to go next? What's effective, what's not effective? Does that question make sense? Yes. Yes. And, and I'd, I'd say that the um I put Gus's piece in there and earlier than the rest of the evaluation um mechanisms because I wanted people to say, even if they only took this one snapshot of a chapter and said we are gonna, we're gonna look at this book linearly and move one chapter at a time that you still start with the end in mind with the backward design of the professional learning plan. 00:24:45 But also the the ultimate end is kids learning and kids growing. And so Gusky that top level for him, that level five level is how is this impacting student growth? Right? And so that needs to be front and center. There are other pieces that are there as well that we are typically using where we uh we say, hey, at the end of this PD, let's have some the participants self report, how you felt about it. OK. That, that, that is just fine, the uh the outcomes were met. I've I was engaged, I strongly agree, right? That's awesome. So people were there, they complied and now we want to talk about how about are there pieces that you can tell they took away from the content? So maybe it's something as simple as we are having a conversation about getting clarity around vocabulary so that we can understand things like race is not the same as culture, which is not the same as nationality. 00:25:48 So I will no longer say the Ethiopian culture, right? I will no longer say the black culture, like those types of things, right? Um And we're able to say, OK, give us your definitions for those things, right? That's a different level of understanding. We're taking away some of the content we say, hey, here's a little case study. How would you respond to this? Right? And that, that's a different level of understanding. Now, we wanna be able to get into the classrooms or get into the the meeting rooms and hear these conversations and see if we see application, the stuff we've been, we've been discussing, right? We've been working on together, it's a different level, but ultimately, we want to get to that level where we can say folks have been in the now, you know, we won't be cause causation. But like folks who've been, we've been implementing these strategies for the last couple of months here are formative assessments based on that here. And then you can say, all right. So that's a, that's a piece of that, right? Um And then we can say over the years, we have some summative data that is sort of trending. 00:26:51 It says this stuff is working as well. Our kids are learning more. Um And it's correlated with our climate surveys that say our kids feel better connected to us, our kids feel better seen in our curriculum. Our kids feel more engaged with our instructional practices because they are more aligned with the things that they see in their home communities. So now we think we're making, we're making some difference. But once we get to that point, we also want to gain more uh more data than just the, the hard data. So like I named the test scores. That's awesome, right? But the observational data we got that, I mentioned climate surveys because we want to have some stakeholder voice data. And sometimes that's a one on one conversation, sometimes that's a focus group. Sometimes that's a that's a survey and that's awesome. Too oftentimes we use um academic interventions or sel um interventions or some other types of, of constructs to try to support um beyond the 9 to 3 class experience and sometimes within that 9 to 3 school day experience. 00:27:58 But those those supplemental supports, we also need to track, right? So we also need to say, hey, maybe we are incorporating, like we can just say the the number of supplemental supports that we are implementing is growing, right? So maybe there's a math group, maybe there's a parents club, maybe there's a, you know, um you name it uh a girls on the run group um to to for the physical health and well being. So and we can say those are there and we can measure the impacts of those. But we can also say or say that we have this number, but we can also say the students in this group. Now we can measure some of their other academic achievement outcomes and see if we see differences with the folks who participate in these supplemental supports um and the outcomes for, for the students. So there are a number of different ways that that you can, you can go about this, you can look at achievement climate well being. Um Yeah, you, you name it, everything can be measured, I guess was that Einstein said not everything that counts can be measured, not everything that measures can be counted, but there's a lot of stuff that can be counted um or measured that counts. 00:29:08 Yeah. And, and it makes me think of two things, one kind of the ongoing nature of measurement, right? And it's like you're saying, you know, this isn't just like right after the, the PD session or whatever, right? This is months down the road, what structures have changed? What impact have you had? How a student learning, like you're saying, over years, like how does this impact? And sometimes when we design PD experiences, I don't think we're always thoughtful about. And I say this too as a person who designs PD experiences, I'm not always thoughtful about what is the measurement plan down the road? Like how do I truly know the differences being made more than just like? Yeah, it felt, it felt positive to be and like I learned things like, OK, what's next and what is the impact? And then it also reminds me, I think this might have just been a brief anecdote, but there was a um researcher, I think that you, you quoted or cited that she um, was asking, she said that the best thing that comes from the best way to figure out what the staff needs is to ask the students or to talk to the students, right? And I was like, that's such a good point, right? 00:30:08 When you're talking about that student information, sometimes that PD plan also or like a, a modification of maybe an original PD plan comes from just like all right, students what's going on because, you know, best you're in those classrooms every day. So I think the idea of stakeholder voice that you're sharing, which represents so many of the things you just described in terms of how we collect the data, who we collect it from as well as that long term planning really resonates with me as you kind of talk through this stuff. And I'm hoping it's resonating with leaders who are listening as well because I think that's, that's really transformational, that potential. I agree. And there are some other pieces in the book that describe some data analysis protocols if, if folks need that as well. Yes, I, I mean, I am hoping every leader is like scrambling to grab this book now because I know I just want, I'm like excited to get to the last chapter and read that as well. Um One thing I'm wondering and I know we're, we're almost at time to start wrapping up here. But I'm curious to know like, what is, if you could categorize that there's probably multiple, but what is the biggest challenge that you think uh leaders or even school communities more broadly faced in doing anti racist work? 00:31:15 Well, and then how would you, how would you recommend people, like, you know, address that thing if you can slightly sorting through the other things. So I almost called it noise but it's not the um there, there's not often noise like the these are um competing priorities. Um So there's, there's a lot to, to do as a school leader, be that at the classroom level, at the building level, at the district level as a community member, even as a student, I mean, there's, there's a lot to try to juggle. Uh So I can see and I've often seen and heard in conversations with folks about this type of content. This is, this is great. This is cool, but I have school testing coming up, we're worried about security with um whether or not my kids can bring in clear backpacks or, you know, my parents are telling me that they, why do we have the safe space stickers up in my, in my um school building? I, I just, there's just so much going on. 00:32:18 I got, you know, you name the group screaming, screaming in the press or at school board meetings about these things and we're trying to, we're worried about free and reduced meals and we're worried about like you, you know, just sel there are so many competing priorities that this can get lost as another com competing priority. And the way I I try to help folks to frame this is that this is a part of the solution to all of the competing priorities. This is not one of the competing priorities, right? This this is a part of all of them. So when you think about holistic remedies for the obstacles for your students and their families, this is where you start. Um So Ivory Tolson wrote this book called No Bad Stats. And there's a, his piece is, it's a anti racist sort of bent to the book. I don't think he uses that word but is there's one piece in there one passage where he writes, don't believe when people tell you bad things about communities of color. 00:33:36 And his example was that there aren't enough people of color who wanna be teachers, it says check racism first, right? So I this is where we start and, and I love this country, right? I'm not going anywhere. All my stuff is here, right? Like I love this place. So this is my house too, right? So we wanna make it better for all of us. Um So, but I have to recognize that white supremacy is, is built into the foundation, right? If we were a computer it's a part of the hard drive. It's so no matter what operating system we lay on top. Right, the outcome is still set before we start. And so I think recognizing that this work, whether you call it anti racism or if you have to call it equity in your state or if you have to call it something else um belonging that you can still get there where everybody, everybody belongs. 00:34:42 Thank you so much for that answer. I, I think that that really hit the nail on the head. I think for a lot of folks who are listening and can and can resonate with that. And I, I think we've talked about a lot of things and your book goes into even more of those things and even more detail. So I encourage folks to, to check that out. I think one question that I have is as folks are kind of listening to the wrap up, what is like the one big first step that someone could take is like, I'm literally turning off the episode in five minutes and I'm gonna go do a thing right now. One thing, what do you think the best first step would be? You need to talk to somebody. So find an accountability partner, begin having these conversations about what you claim you wanna do or what you claim you were going to do. Um be a sounding board for that, for that partner as well. And, and push each other to learn, to learn more. That is great. I love that. So the final two questions I have for our wrap up, one is purely for fun. It does not even have to relate to education. 00:35:49 Although it can, what is something that you personally have been learning about lately? So I just finished the book um supporting and retaining support and retain Educators of Color by Andrea Terrero Gabbidon. I think she's a professor, I think at Temple in, in Philadelphia. And she writes very eloquently about creating culturally affirming spaces in schools so that more folks wanna stay in the classroom in the school building because we spend so much time thinking about the teacher shortage and it, it is not just a recruitment effort, it's a retention effort way more. And so that's where my head is now. My, my next um book is likely to be around affinity groups and affinity spaces and how they, they support students, staff and um community members. 00:36:53 Wow, that's gonna be excellent and keep a lookout for that everybody because that's gonna be great. Um And, and finally, I think people are going to want to keep a lookout for that book and other things connect with you, invite you to do PD all the, all the things where do you recommend people go to get in touch with you or to follow your work? You can find, you can email me at Damon or no at D Harris D, the letter D Harris at Bond educators.org Bond educators.org. That's by nonprofit um that supports the recruitment and retention of black and brown men in education. You can also find me on, on X at Damon D A ma N underscore Harris. You can find me on Instagram. Hopefully, by the time it airs, I'll have some kind of profile there. I I don't post often enough. My publisher is telling me so I'm working on it. Um But Damon D A Ma N Harris, no underscore lastly, I'm on linkedin. 00:38:00 That's where I'm the most active. So you can find me there. And Facebook has the the anti racist school leader is also a place there as well. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Damon. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you. It was great to talk to you li if you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane, Sapir and Jamila Dugan talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period? I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action if you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm, how I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time, leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast Network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
November 2024
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