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2/24/2025 199. A Culture of Personalized Learning & Reflection for Teachers with Dr. Frederick BuskeyRead Now
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In this episode, I chat with Dr. Frederick Buskey, a returning guest to the podcast. With 17 years of K-12 teaching experience and another 13 years in higher education, designing and teaching principal licensure programs, Dr. Buskey knows how essential the role of school leaders play in fostering an environment where teachers can flourish.
In our discussion, Dr. Buskey discusses the major perspective shifts we need to make in school leadership, underscoring the necessity of prioritizing teacher development and advocating for a personalized approach to professional development (PD). Further, he emphasizes the importance of building trust through coaching relationships, offering practical strategies for school leaders to enhance teacher support and growth. The Big Dream Dr. Buskey envisions an educational environment where teachers are empowered in their own PD journeys. This means that school leadership is intentionally creating a supportive environment that prioritizes self-reflection and growth, enabling educators to thrive. Mindset Shifts Required To realize this vision, several mindset shifts are necessary. First, school leaders must know and embrace the fact that their teachers know more about their teaching than they do as a leaders. Teachers are the experts on their teaching, so leaders can’t come in and change everything without first understanding each teacher’s unique context. Another crucial mindset shift for school leaders is the transition from being deliverers of PD to facilitators of reflection and growth. Teachers should be in the driver’s seat of their professional development, and it’s the leaders' job to focus on creating spaces for reflection and follow-up. Embracing a culture of trust and collaboration, rather than top-down instruction, is key to empowering educators. Action Steps For school leaders to empower their teachers to take charge of their professional development, they can: Step 1: Prioritize creating spaces for reflection within the school schedule. Leaders must shift from being the “deliverer of PD” to someone who creates space for reflection and follows up with teachers. To do this, encourage teachers to reflect on their learning and experiences, facilitating conversations that anchor their growth. This can look a few different ways and must adapt to the personal and professional needs of the teaching staff. Step 2: Implement personalized PD formats There’s no one-size-fits-all for PD, and it’s important to cater to the diverse needs of educators. Again, it must be built on self-reflection and led by teachers themselves. Consider integrating various formats such as book studies, peer observations, and self-paced courses to provide flexible learning opportunities. Ask your teachers what works best for them and help them implement it. Step 3: Build trust through coaching relationships To create a culture of self-reflection and ongoing learning, schools can adopt collaborative coaching methods. Hold space for people to reflect by making it a priority in everyone’s busy schedule. Follow up with your teachers after they attend a conference or engage in some other type of PD; by doing so, you’re holding space for them to reflect. Then, ask how you can keep supporting them in their growth. This fosters a culture of trust where teachers feel supported in their professional development journeys. Step 4: Provide specific information for teachers Leaders should be a source of information and resources for their teachers. Acting as a coach, you’re listening to what your teachers are interested in, following up with them, and then curating resources that can be useful on their journey. Challenges? One of the primary challenges is shifting the existing culture of professional development from a one-size-fits-all approach to a more personalized and reflective model. One Step to Get Started Because this all represents a big shift from the status quo, it’s helpful to start with a simple next step. Dr. Buskey recommends leaders begin by stopping by their teachers’ classrooms and have a simple check-in: “What went well with your lesson today? Was there anything that surprised you? Is there anything you’d do differently?” This starts building a relationship of trust, where you’re inviting them to take charge of their own professional practice. It invites reflection and growth, building an environment where teachers are driving their own PD. Stay Connected You can stay connected with Dr. Buskey and his work on the Assistant Principal Podcast, his website, and LinkedIn. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing Dr. Buskey’s Daily Leadership Email with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 199 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Dr Frederick Buthe. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 0:00:07 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Oh, thank you, Lindsay, I'm excited to be here. 0:00:10 - Lindsay Lyons I'm so excited and so you've been on the podcast before Guests may be familiar with you. I'll give you a moment to like kind of share anything that might feel relevant. But really this is going to be a special kind of episode where we are taking a look behind the curtain and really brainstorming some possibilities as to kind of like people in the space of education who do things around professional learning and kind of brainstorm and co-create and ideate the possibilities out there to make education a great place where teachers are supported and students are learning and excited to learn more. So who are you? What should people know before we dive into our brainstorm to learn more? 0:00:45 - Dr. Frederick Buskey So who are you? What should people know before we dive into our brainstorm? Wow, so I have 17 years of experience in K-12 teaching at most levels and county level administration, and then I was 13 years in higher education where I coordinated and helped design and teach in principal licensure programs, and that's where my passion especially for assistant principals, but also school leadership comes from and that's where a lot of my experiences and the things that I bring into what I talk about and what I work with. I think the big thing for me is I was never a building level administrator, so I was very conscious of that and I've been in hundreds of schools as part of my work in higher ed and as part of consulting, and I've tried to steal all of the best stuff from, you know, from everybody that I meet, because they're a lot smarter than me. So, you know, I like to think my superpower is being able to take some of these really complex things like growing teachers, which we're going to talk about today, and and trying to distill them into some really simple frameworks to make it more actionable, and I so I want to leave lead with this, lindsay, because we're talking about teacher development and I think there are some things that I think, some major perspective shifts that we need to make in school leadership. I think the first thing I'd point out is school leaders have three jobs Keep everybody safe, right, non-negotiable. Meet all your legal obligations so you're not fired and they don't shut the school down. Number three support and grow your teachers so you're not fired and they don't shut the school down. Number three support and grow your teachers Because in the end, if our teachers are 20% better at the end of the year than at the beginning, it was a great school year and intuitively, we all know that. But then we also all let all the other garbage get in the way and I think a lot of times, even when it comes to growing our teachers, we're tripping over our own feet, and I will dig into that. Times, even when it comes to growing our teachers, we're tripping over our own feet, and I will dig into that in a few minutes. But I kind of wanted to start there. If you're a school leader, you're keeping everybody safe, you're meeting your legal obligations, but every time, every minute that you spend not supporting and growing teachers, you are not improving your school. 0:03:05 - Lindsay Lyons I love that for so many reasons. I mean, obviously we're all here for the students, but I love that. Implied in that is, if we don't grow the teachers, we're not actually helping the students right. So it just really brings that top of mind and, given the realities of teacher shortages and burnout and all of the things right now, it's like wait, if we don't grow the teachers, you're not going to have any teachers left. 0:03:30 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Exactly, exactly. You know three of the top reasons that teachers lead the field is don't feel supported by administration, struggling with discipline issues and student behavior and poor culture Guess what. Every one of those is about the school leader. And if I'm a new assistant principal, the thing I want to focus on that first year is getting to know and support and grow my early career teachers. It's a natural pairing, right? We don't have to fight the new AP veteran teacher kind of battles. We go in. You've got new people who are thirsty, who want help. You're a neutral person. You just go in and start building a relationship and start working with them. And guess what? A teacher who knows they can call their AP, who knows that their AP is invested in helping them become a better teacher, that person's probably not going to leave. 0:04:28 - Lindsay Lyons What a great point and I so I love one of the things you said was you get to know the teachers and then right, and then you support the teachers and I think that's that's huge right. You have to first identify, like, what are the strengths and areas for growth for our teachers and then next part is identifying well, what can I offer or what can I connect them with to be able to support them in the ways that they specifically need, which is going to be different for everyone, right? Like the I don't want to say like old school, but the way that I initially was given PD in air quotes, heavy air quotes as a first, second and third year teacher was we come to a large staff meeting once a week and then you leave and goodbye, everyone gets the same thing and it's usually someone talking at you, right, and we probably know that doesn't work well. But if I'm a leader trying to change that dynamic that's always maybe been the dynamic at my school or district is like these large staff meetings, these PD opportunities that are not personalized, like can we brainstorm a little bit about what are the possibilities for either formats or things to consider that might be beyond the all right, everybody's going to get in one room and the leader's going to talk at you. Like what does that look like to support personally? 0:05:47 - Dr. Frederick Buskey talk at you Like what does that look like to support personally? Yeah Well, I want to drive that nail deep into the wood, because here's here's a couple of things that I think leaders need to embrace, a couple of perspective shifts. So number one is your teachers know more about their own teaching than you do. You may know more about teaching and learning, but when it comes to their teaching, they know more than you do. Just like I'm going to hazard a guess, by my education experience, I know more about leadership and change than most of the people listening to this podcast, but every person listening to this podcast knows a lot more about their own leadership than I do. So for me to just walk into your school and say, oh, you need to change the way you're doing things like that, maybe, but maybe not, because I don't know your context, I don't know your history, I don't know what you're wrestling with. So we have got to get out of the mindset that we're supposed to go in as leaders and tell teachers what they need to work on. That is so, so counterproductive, and so what the alternative is then is to put teachers in the driver's seat of their own professional development and let them tell us what they need and let them find the different kinds of resources that may help them. So we can start there. 0:07:13 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love that. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I love this mindset shift and it's truly kind of like, yeah, this journey of either co-creation or like, yeah, they're just totally in the driver's seat and I'm just like, I'm the GPS that you can ignore if you want, or you can tell me your destination, right, and I help you get there. I don't know why I'm into this analogy, but it's like into my brain and so I'm wondering, you know, once, once, teachers have said like, let's just imagine, okay, I'm just imagining the school. There's one teacher who is a brand new teacher and just needs help, like getting oriented to, like how, what is the teaching world? Like, right, what is my planning process? What is, how do I do all of these things? I'm going to orient myself to a new school. There's someone who's maybe like pursuing a new line of pedagogy, right. Maybe someone's like okay, now I've been teaching very like traditional lecture style and I want to try inquiry-based learning. There's someone who, to your point about behavior being a force to drive teachers out of the profession. Someone really wants to work on culture. How do you get all of those folks the thing they need when it's three completely different topics? 0:08:25 - Dr. Frederick Buskey So there are multiple things that we can do. I would also say that if we can shift from it's my job to deliver PD or even it's my job to connect my teachers with PD, right, even if I can let go of those, what's my job in professional development? It's to create space for teachers to reflect, and then it's to create space for teachers to reflect, and then it's to follow up with them to continue the reflection cycle, to gather data. If they're trying to, you know, if they're trying to implement more sophisticated questioning techniques, then as a leader, my role is to go in and observe and check the look like, sound like, get that data so that we can go back and have a discussion and I can can say here's what I saw and heard. Is this what you had in mind? Are you getting what you want out of that? If not, how can we tweak these? So if I move from the deliverer and the scheduler of PD, that gives me more attention especially, but a little more time to focus on the reflection and the follow-up pieces, because we could go to the greatest PD in the world and if nobody ever talks about it again, it's lost. 0:09:35 - Lindsay Lyons And so many of those, I've, I've been to so many of those great PDs, right, like that's been my experience. It's like the binder that sits on the shelf forever, right, and we just don't open it back up because it doesn't become part of daily practice. So I love this, and I love the idea, too, that there's like an extra, like a person in the room collecting the data. That's really hard to collect when you are the teacher, because you're doing all the instructional pieces, you're figuring out, okay, what's on the next slide? Is this person grouped with this person? And then really, it's hard to get a sense of what's a student experience here. Like, I have 30 people in the room. What's that kid's experience? I don't know, cause I'm not standing right next to that kid engaged in the learning or not engaged in the learning. So I do love that perspective and and I'm I really love that it's like not even necessarily our job to connect them with the PD. I wonder about teachers' familiarity with options available to them, and so here's what I'm thinking in terms of format, are there times? So, okay, two things. One is structure. So are there structured times within the day that, as leaders, you've built into the schedule opportunities for PD time or you can like kind of pursue your own goals, maybe that's like your independent planning time. But I also wonder like, is that the culture of the school, that independent planning time is a time to pursue PD, or is that time to just plan your lessons and then there needs to be a separate time? So that's kind of one wondering. It's like what does the structure need to be, or what? I guess not what it needs to be. What could it be? And then also wondering about you know the multitude of formats that I never thought of as PD, and now being in the PD provider space is like oh right, it could be like a book study, it could be a self-paced course, it could be I'm actually going to go visit this teacher down the hall that's doing the thing that I've always wanted to do, and someone's literally doing it. So I just need to like go during my planning time or ask for a sub for 15 minutes to see the thing in action, right when the admin could like step in and watch my kids. You know there's so many possibilities. I'm just wondering if you have favorites, if you've seen this stuff in action. If, what are your thoughts? I'm sure you have some really good ones. 0:11:50 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Yeah, I'm kind of thinking about these. The different scales isn't the right word, but we can look at synchronous, we can look at asynchronous, right, because maybe for you the best time to do professional development is nine, thirty in the night, after your kids have gone to bed, because maybe you need to bust out of school at three, fifteen so that you can get your kids up, you know from wherever, or go home and take care of your parent. So there's synchronous, asynchronous. I think we can think of internal to the school, external to the school and I missed the last one. There's another one out there, but it'll pop up later. So I think we can think in those multiple different ways. That lets us really expand out the kinds of opportunities. But just a really simple thing what if we have our hour staff meeting? What if the first 20 minutes are dedicated to one thing about teaching that you want to learn? I get 20 minutes and at the end of that 20 minutes you're going to have conversation and we're going to do some share out about what we learned. So now everybody's focusing on their own thing. I knew a elementary school principal who met with her teams and said I want you to come up as a team, a focus area for your team for this quarter and then you can drive the professional development in that and I can come in and support. So it's not wholly individualized, but that's a way to bring the team together, encourage team leaning, learning and right, they're taking the lead in that. So they have agency. Some districts will run the kind of a la carte. So we have professional development day, we have these six things, and what some districts do is they actually solicit that from teachers, like we're gonna have a pd day coming up, what are the things that are most important to you? And then they get all that information back and then they can say, okay, let's, let's then offer these six things and, like you said, you probably have experts in your building that you can have. Start to lead those. But I think we also there's all these opportunities. We also have to be mindful of making sure that we're following up. And I wanted to go back. I know you talked about this when we were talking earlier today and our friend Jen Manley has a big thing. We were talking earlier today and you know our friend jen manley has a big thing. How do you, how do you plan without selling your soul and spending 12 hours a day in school. There are a number of really high quality education sources now to help teachers learn how to be more effective planners. That might be the most valuable professional development that a teacher could get. So, yeah, I think if teachers can come and say, hey, I saw this, and show me as a leader, like I want to do this course, I think this is going to be really helpful for me. Great, go do it. I don't have to deliver that, but we need to schedule a time where we're going to have a conversation. I want to hear what you learned and then I want to help make sure that you implement it. 0:15:13 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love that so much. So two pieces there. One is this idea of the leader as, again, the person who's doing the follow up, who's who's connecting, who's keeping the person on the path. I mean, I think about just even in my business, right, like Mara, your daughter is actually like really coaching me to keep a lens on what are my priorities. Because sometimes when we're in it right, we're in it and we can't kind of lift ourselves out to be like what is actually most important right now, and without that kind of second set of you know brain or the second brain to kind of remind you of where it is you're trying to go, I often think, as a coach, that's what happens, right, I'm like, hey, remember this vision that you started the year with, like, I just wanna remind you of it. Like did we get so far off track that we have been doing cool things but we're not actually pursuing that, we're not actually collecting data on that thing anymore? That was the direction we wanted to go in and it's okay if we shift, but if, but just kind of here to remind you, here, to here to help you on the path, which I often find to be, again, like teachers know best what they need, so it's not us telling them yeah, we have to stick to this path, but it is a reminder of here was was really important to you. You have now spent 12 hours a day, you know, or whatever, for the last week working at school. Are we prioritizing the right things and I think from all the way from like planning, the balance or harmony of like life and work to what are we prioritizing in the curriculum? Because sometimes we get to the point where we're just covering content and we're not actually like focused on the right things, we're not seeing the students in front of us, we're not connecting as humans, right, whatever the thing is. 0:16:58 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Yeah, and I think if we just if I ask leaders that are listening just think for a minute what are 10 sources that you could get good professional development from? All right, if we pause for a minute, most of the people listening could come up with 10 sources ASCD, I got my Twitter, I got you know whatever else, linkedin, I go, articles here you come up with 10 different places to get good professional development. How will you reflect on that, on that learning? How will you reflect? Because it's kind of like we operate in a bathtub and if we, if we clear water out, like we clear out some space, the water just flows right into it. So if I create empty time in my schedule, other stuff is going to flow in. One of the things that we can do as leaders is we can hold space for people to reflect. So if I know you went to a conference, I can pop in that next day and say, lindsay, tell me what you learned, tell me all about it, let me hear, because you are not going to reflect. You know, maybe on the drive home, but you're not going to reflect. After that you can have all these ideas. You're going to get into school and get overwhelmed, and then it's done and maybe one or two things stick. But if I can say, let's reflect, let's create this time, even if I give you five minutes, reflect, think about it and then say, okay, what's the one thing that you want to implement from this? And then tell me when I'll come in and I'll watch, and then we can have a conversation about it. Now we're actually going to get some improvement, some growth from our professional development, because now we're anchoring it and we're supporting it. 0:18:48 - Lindsay Lyons I also am thinking about kind of the cultural shift of just how we do school and how we do professional learning, that I almost wonder if that's the norm, like that's what happens when we go learn, and then we always have that space, that container held for us, and we kind of almost start to do that ourselves in our own minds. Perhaps that right like there's going to be, you know, a follow-up I don't want to call it accountability, but like a follow-up, a container for me, as you said, like space being held. And so now I'm kind of proactively thinking about what I want to say in that conversation just in my own head before I get to that space, and I almost wonder if that then creates a dynamic where other teachers are then offering that space and holding that space for each other and as a whole school community. I mean, even to the extent that, are we holding space for learners after they go learn? The thing to reflect? I think it is also just this big cultural shift to prioritize making that space for reflection versus cram more content in right, like again like the same parallels to teaching and covering curriculum. It's like are we just cramming in PD ideas and hoping something sticks and it gets implemented? 0:20:09 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Yes, we are in a lot of cases and it's understandable. And one of the challenges is teaching is so complex just the act of teaching, and then you layer in curriculum and all the other stuff. It's so complicated and if I'm working with a teacher, there are probably 20 different things that teacher could get better at. And I think one of the challenges we have as leaders is we think there's this thing. Challenges we have as leaders is we think there's this thing, but we also know there's this thing and this thing. So we're trying to help that teacher grow in three different areas and, by the way, maybe none of them are the area that is causing the most pain for the teacher. And if we want to become partners with teachers in their professional development, I think we need to address their pains before we address what we think. The problem is Because the research is pretty consistent that as principals, assistant principals, we're actually not that good at identifying air quotes the thing. Like we're not. Most of us haven't had that kind of training right. It's this weird thing where, because you're the principal or assistant principal or instructional coach, you are expected to be able to walk in a classroom, assess, provide feedback and you're expected to be able to coach. Most principals and assistant principals have not had any depth of formal training in any of those things and a lot of instructional coaches haven't even had training on actually how you coach like real coaching. That's complicated, but they do them because they're supposed to and then we don't. You know we make a lot of mistakes, but I was. I was in a session, a presentation I did last week, and it was about this reflective process and asking reflective questions, and so I had school leaders in this presentation and I walked them through three reflective questions and some of them were working with people that they didn't know at all. Right, they had no idea. And one of the participants at the end said they reflected so much and they got so much out of this and I had no idea what they were talking about. Right, because they didn't know the situation. But the power for us is in asking the questions and creating the space to give that space to people reflect, because once they start to reflect now, they're going to start to anchor their learning. We can't anchor learning without reflection and we can get our learning from anywhere, but there's only a few people that can create the space for us to reflect. 0:22:59 - Lindsay Lyons This is so beautiful and it reminds me too. I keep going back to like the types and the formats still, because one of the things that I think I've seen at a classroom level even is we create space for things like revision, for example. So let's say, a student does a piece of writing and they get the feedback on rubric and then it's like, okay, we're going to give space to implement and then I'll come back. Right, or you're going to have time to revise this paragraph and then you come back, but then without the specific supports I'm thinking of like a brand new teacher, right, who maybe doesn't even know that something like ASCD exists or that there is like an educational space on Twitter or you know whatever, like without that kind of resource bank, then we are doing the same thing we're doing with students where it's like okay, do better. And then we're like okay, where's, why aren't you doing better? And so I am wondering about like, whether it is literally like a Google doc of resources that we kind of like co-create with fellow teachers or like things that have been interesting. Maybe it is like I think Jennifer Gonzalez called them pineapple charts of like, co-create with fellow teachers, or like things that have been interesting. Maybe it is like I think Jennifer Gonzalez called them pineapple charts of like the here's when teachers are doing things you might be interested in seeing in your own building so here's the times to sign up to visit their classes Like some sort of resource collection that people could tap into. That might be topical, that might be, you know, whatever it is Like. Have you seen kind of that model or could you envision kind of what? Either things could be in there or where leaders, if leaders feel stuck, like where leaders could go to get ideas about those kinds of things, and we've named several today. I'm just wondering about systems. 0:24:53 - Dr. Frederick Buskey I haven't seen that in practice. It certainly makes a lot of sense. I haven't seen that in practice. It certainly makes a lot of sense, and especially with the collaborative documents that are available now where we can all access that and put that in. I think it's really cool to the idea that if we all have goals like how we want to get better as professionals and that begins with leaders setting the example of being transparent, right and putting out there, yeah, this phenomenal source for how to cut my planning time in half and now I see that's the goal of a couple of my teachers I can go right there and say, hey, hey, y'all, you need to look at this. And I think that's another thing. We talk about informational power. One of the powers that leaders can exert is providing specific information for people. So instead of me going in and saying you need to do this, I can find that one page, two page, three page article, you know, with four bullet points, four steps to doing X, and I can put that in your box and just say, hey, you might want to read this and that's a source. And then those sources usually have other places that you can go as well. So I think we can, as leaders, we can see some of that and start to curate that, and I think that is one of the really important roles for instructional coaches is that kind of curation of resources. 0:26:36 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, I love that idea, the curation of resources I also was thinking about. I was talking recently to a preschool who was saying you know we have such turnover because you know they're. They're with us for like two years and then they leave. And so the the families they were working specifically with educating families around how to talk about social justice issues, which I love, but they were like it's hard because you know the families leave and then we have new families and we did this PD or whatever for them, but now they're gone and so either with students, with staff, with you know any sort of turnover, particularly thinking about the high turnover rates and teacher shortages. Now I'm almost wondering too about the institutional knowledge that either leaders have or veteran teachers have. That I'm new, maybe not even to the profession but new to the school and like could you kind of archive or synthesize you know brainstorming here but like you know what are what's kind of the ethos of the school, what are these kind of key resources to like put in your grades or like here's the go to person for this parent contact or something. If that was kind of like a loom video I mean as simple as a loom video. That's like now part of this course library of things, that like we have a shared google drive and I have this particular question is there a way that that? I mean, I'm totally just brainstorming, I don't know if something like this that exists now. Would that be like viable to have a kind of co-created resource bank of people, just like loom screen sharing and talking through ideas? 0:28:06 - Dr. Frederick Buskey I don't know. I think it's a great idea and I do know there are districts or schools that compile resources in that way so that it is accessible. I don't know how realistic it is in the pace of our world that people are actually going to take the time to go look at it Like I think it's a great idea, and maybe if you build in that time to create the opportunities and say, hey, this is a time to go look at these kinds of things I'm not sure how much utilization like uh, uh, you know we've had this experience. I think I know I have. I do have some online courses and everybody's like, oh, we want this, we want this, so you put it out and then everybody's too busy to do it. So it's a great idea and people want to do it. But the two scarcest resources are time and attention and most of us are stretched way too thin already and so anything no matter how good it is. 0:29:10 - Lindsay Lyons just one more thing oh my gosh, that's really good point because it's making me think of one the importance of structures, so like where's the structure in the day to go do the thing. But also I'm thinking about as a leader or even as a teacher. I think there are things that sometimes we know that we become the go-to person for. So people, colleagues, are like oh you know, go ask lindsey this or go ask Frederick this thing, and so we just keep like saying the same thing or directing people to the same resource. I wonder if there is kind of a time saver inherent in I'm going to document this thing for everyone Anytime you ask a question, instead of taking 10 minutes of my prep time or you know my time as I'm running out the door to go grab my kid from school or whatever like it now lives here, and so I wonder if that's actually a value. I mean, I'm thinking also of like coaching cycles. Right, if we can like. Cara and I have been kind of playing with this idea of asynchronous coaching cycles and having feedback that you can like do the reflection at nine at night if that's your jam, but that that kind of lives in either an email or a Voxer thread or somewhere, and then we can kind of continue the conversation as each of us is available, because time is so short, particularly in schools where we have different schedules and leaders are kind of in 30 places at once, it seems. Yeah, I mean, I just I think there's so much possibility in all of the things we've talked about today and I appreciate that you have really anchored us in some of those kind of like formats but also kind of what the leader's role is again is to, in whatever way possible, hold that space for reflection, prompt that reflection, be the kind of follow-up data collector and potentially link to or share different resources and be the curator, as you said, of those things. I want to like leave space for anything else you want to share, but I do want to, in closing, when we get to that point, just leave people with like what's one thing they could do as they end the episode, Because we've talked about like 50, maybe. 0:31:16 - Dr. Frederick Buskey So I think the other thing that I really wanted to share is doing some leadership development with nonprofit leaders and I was. We were always trying to teach them how you coach right. So I had them. They were working in kind of ABC, where A was coaching, b and then C was observing, and this was in the third of three all day sessions that we'd had. So we we had just wonderful collegiality. People got very close. In these sessions we do a lot of kind of deep work, not just learning stuff. And we were debriefing the coaching and one of the people said she said this was so easy. Like why, why was it she? And she said real coaching is hard. This was easy. Like why was it easy? Well, because I trusted her and I knew she this wasn't going to be a gotcha or I knew I could say whatever. And so I had this level of trust. And that was last year and that conversation has just stayed with me. If we don't have trust, you can't coach. You can tell people what to do. You can't coach them if there's not a trusting relationship. And so I think that when you go to the one thing like build a relationship, people are the purpose. That's why we're here. Build the relationship, get to know your people, and if you get to know your people, they're going to tell you what they need. If your people aren't telling you what you what they need. 0:32:48 - Lindsay Lyons You either haven't built trust or you're not having the right conversations. 0:32:50 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Yeah, that's it, that's it, yeah. So the the way I would have leaders start is I do my little five-minute coaching thing. It is the simplest thing, lindsey. Just stop by a teacher and say, hey, tell me what went well with your lesson today, and just listen, listen, and they'll go for about 30 to 90 seconds. And then the second question is was there anything that surprised you? And it's such an amazing question because you'll see people look up or look down. They'll do that pause to really kind of reprocess the lesson through a different lens. Like a lot of us will think about what worked, what didn't work, but we never think about what surprised us. So you're forcing them to kind of replay their whole lesson and think about it from the different perspective. And then the final question is is there anything you'd do differently? And how you phrase those questions is really important because we want it to be invitational. We want them to be able to say is really important, because we want it to be invitational, we want them to be able to say, nope, nothing I would do differently, because what they're used to is I come to talk to you about your teaching and I'm going to tell you what you did well, and then I'm going to tell you the grow. Right, I give you the glow and then I give you the grow. You don't even hear the glow because you're waiting for the grow and it's not helpful because I give you the grow. You might want to think about this and I walk away and we never talk about it again. If I just said, lindsay, tell me about how that training went, were there any surprises? Is there anything you'd do differently? That's the growth and that's what I think. If leaders well, a couple things One, we want them to take away that teachers need to be driving their own professional development, and there are all these different ways that that could work. But the other thing is to understand that your value is in creating the space for people to reflect, because if you don't do that, if you don't create that space, nobody else is going to. And in doing that space, you are building credibility, you are providing opportunities for your teachers, you're building a relationship and you're learning. You learn so much. 0:34:58 - Lindsay Lyons just listening to your teachers celebrate. That is beautiful. I'm going to use five-minute coaching. Those three questions, that's beautiful, thank you. Thank you for that offering to all of us. I love it. And if people want to connect with you I mean you talk about this stuff all the time. You speak publicly. You were just saying you were doing that last week. So how do people get in touch and where can they find you in the online spaces? What do you want them to know? 0:35:23 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Yeah, so my website is frederick at frederickbuskeycom and you can get to anything from there. I'm on LinkedIn a fair amount, so a lot of people find me on LinkedIn and send me a direct message. The biggest joy I have in this part of my career is just speaking with people and meeting people, so anybody that wants to have a conversation with me message me on LinkedIn. If you go to my website, you can find a place to schedule a call. My email's plastered all over the place and I do a daily leadership email and that comes out 300 words or less, monday through Friday, and it's just a way to think about some of these things, right, it's just a reminder. A lot of times it might be a little story or just something to think about and set an intention for the day. If we're intentional in our leadership in a day, the day is going to be a win, right? 0:36:20 - Lindsay Lyons So yeah, oh my gosh. Thank you so much, dr Bruschi. It has been so nice to have you on today. 0:36:27 - Dr. Frederick Buskey So fun as always, Lindsay. Thank you.
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2/17/2025 198. Wellness is Boundaries, Alignment, and Gaining Clarity with Dr. Daryll WhartonRead Now
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In this episode, I chat with Dr. Daryll Wharton, a passionate advocate for teacher wellness and empowerment. She introduces the innovative concept of "recess" for educators, aiming to inspire the same joy in teachers that they evoke in their students.
The episode explores redefining success through a health and wellness lens, the importance of supportive school communities, and practical strategies to prevent teacher burnout, particularly in special education settings. Dr. Wharton's framework emphasizes building boundaries, aligning mindsets, and gaining clarity to ensure personal and professional well-being. The Big Dream Dr. Wharton's big dream for education is that students are met exactly where they are and that every single learner is able to learn at their own pace. And, if we meet educators where they are as well, they’re going to be more equipped with the strategies to do that. This dream is rooted in the belief that personalization for teachers, similar to that for students, can lead to transformative change in education. Mindset Shifts Required To achieve the vision of empowered teacher wellness, Dr. Wharton suggests that educators and leaders must question established routines and embrace change. She highlights the importance of asking "why" to challenge habitual thinking and to consider different approaches. This shift involves rethinking traditional practices and prioritizing self-care, as well as acknowledging and valuing personal well-being. Leaders, in particular, need to support teachers by recognizing stress signals and promoting self-care, encouraging a mindset where teachers can balance their professional and personal lives effectively. Action Steps To shift toward a wellness mindset as an educator, Dr. Wharton suggests you “check your BAG.” As an educator, you carry a bag to work all day, every day, and it’s a metaphor for the weight you carry around—physically, emotionally, mentally. So it’s important to analyze what’s in your bag and make sure it only has those things that serve you. Educators should check their BAG by: Step 1: Building boundaries What will you or will you not accept for yourself? Build boundaries around those things so you are aligned with your personal and professional goals and values. Step 2: Aligning with your mindset Make sure your true beliefs and who you are as a person align with your mindset. You don’t want to be out of alignment with your true self because it will prevent you from reaching your potential as a person and educator. Step 3: Gaining clarity What exactly do you want? What are you working towards as an educator? Get clear on that and start working toward it. Decide what you want and then describe it—get very clear on your goals, personal and professional, by describing them accurately and writing them down. Challenges? One of the significant challenges teachers face is managing the overwhelming workload, especially in special education. The extensive paperwork and additional duties can lead to burnout if not properly managed. Educators often struggle with setting boundaries and may feel compelled to work beyond their contracted hours. Start by setting a hard boundary around your time; for example, “I’m leaving on Fridays right on the dot at the time my contract says I can.” Further, some educators are not supported by their leadership. There is also a structural element at play here, where everyone is caught up in the busyness of their work and doesn't prioritize time for wellness. One Step to Get Started To begin prioritizing wellness, Dr. Wharton suggests creating a clear, achievable goal that encompasses both the personal and professional. What does your perfect life look like as an educator and as a person? Start by writing it down and visualizing it. Meditate on your goals so you retrain your brain to see it as truly possible. Stay Connected You can find more of Dr. Daryll Wharton’s work on Instagram, her personal website, the Teacher Recess website, or her podcast, Teacher Recess with Dr. Daryll. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Dr. Wharton is sharing a meditation with you for free. You can text the word “RECESS” to 443-775-2325 to access it and begin reaching your wellness goals as an educator. If you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 198 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Dr Daryl Wharton, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm so glad you're here today. Thank, you. 0:00:10 - Dr. Daryll Wharton It's really really nice. The title alone it speaks volumes. 0:00:15 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you so much. I am so excited for what we're about to talk about. Is there anything that you want people to know before we really get into the conversation? About you, about the topic of wellness, anything on your mind at the moment? 0:00:30 - Dr. Daryll Wharton The main thing is that I create recess for teachers and you know, teachers deserve that same break. They deserve to wake up feeling absolutely amazing. And I came up with that because I thought about how excited the kids get when they know that recess is coming up and they know if their little name moves down on that behavior chart they aren't going to go. And I just feel like that excitement. I feel like teachers should be able to come to work with that excitement every day. So that's what I do I create recess for teachers. 0:01:06 - Lindsay Lyons What a cool line of work. That is amazing. I love it. I mean, I think this is kind of inherent. My next question is kind of like you're leading right into it already, but I love Dr Bettina Love's work and she talks specifically about freedom, dreaming as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, and so I'm curious to know, kind of in that context, what is that big dream that you hold for education or educators? However, you want to answer that. 0:01:33 - Dr. Daryll Wharton My big dream that I hope for is that students are met exactly where they are and that every single learner is able to learn at their own pace. And you know, my model when I was in the classroom was you know, if you can't learn the way that I teach, then I'm going to teach the way that you learn. And that means so much to me as a special educator and as a mom of a special needs you know child. And I just think that if we actually met the teachers where they are as well, then they are going to be more equipped, they're going to have more strategies to say that. You know, no, there are no failures in here, it's only learning processes. So my big dream is that every student just learns to be themselves and grow up and be a happy and productive adult. I know that's big, but we can do it. We can do it. 0:02:35 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, that is so good. I don't know if I have ever heard someone frame it in that way of like the same thing we do for students and desire for students we could do for teachers, like that same personalization. I love that, thank you. Um, now I think there's probably leaders out there who you know, or or even teachers out there who will hear some of of this and be like, okay, I'm in this particular way of doing things, I have been doing things in this particular way and I want this thing. I want you know if I'm a leader to support my teachers in this way. If I'm a teacher, I want this thing. I want you know if I'm a leader to support my teachers in this way. If I'm a teacher, I want to achieve kind of wellness and recess and that vibe, what are kind of the mindset shifts that people have to undergo to be able to make that a reality for themselves or their teachers. 0:03:17 - Dr. Daryll Wharton From the leader's perspective, I think that we, as humans, we are creatures of habits, and I think that you really have to start questioning yourself why can't I be different? It is one thing that I teach in my framework is when those limiting beliefs start to come in and you think, oh well, I've been doing it this way for so long. This is the only way that we do it. When you just say, well, why not? Well, why can't I do this? Why can't I start here instead of over here? Why can't I drive this way to work instead of that way to work, we become creatures of habit, where we just become robotic, and I think that the word why is such a beautiful word, and it's something that I think that we can instill in our students as well. It's okay to ask me why. It's okay to say, well, why, why do I have to stand in a straight line, which that's a whole nother show Cause I? I don't believe in that either. You know you. You have these kids that sit in the desk all day long. They got to walk in a line and to the cafeteria, and it's like I know, if I had to do that at work, I will be a problem worker. So I just think that if we all just start questioning ourselves about how we do things, then we can say you know what? Today I'm going to do this a little different, and I think that you would be able to step out of your box more often than not If you just question yourself about why you do things the way you do things. 0:04:56 - Lindsay Lyons That is so. The implications for that are really widespread too. I love that that is so simple and so powerful, so thank you for sharing that. I am really curious. You mentioned a framework, so I don't know if you want to kind of talk us through that piece or if there are other specific actions that you would recommend teachers think about or leaders think about, but I'm super curious to know, like, what is it that you help people to do, and how do we get there? 0:05:20 - Dr. Daryll Wharton I have a framework. I have my keynote speech is called what's in your Bag and you know, as teachers we carry a bag to work all day, every day, and that bag is a metaphor for the weight that you carry around. Whether it's physical, whether it's emotional anxiety, it's still that weight. So I teach in my framework that you know you have to analyze what's in your bag, you have to take out what doesn't serve. You put in some things that serve you and then you have to make sure that you constantly check. You constantly check. So that bag is also an acronym for, you know, building boundaries. What will you or will not accept for yourself? The A stands for aligning with your mindset, to make sure that your true beliefs and who you know you are as a person doesn't align with your mindset, because sometimes it doesn't, and that G stands for gaining clarity what exactly do you want? I often shared and this is the beginning of why I started doing teacher wellness. I used to weigh almost 700 pounds and I lost. You know people would say, oh my goodness, I've lost over 400 pounds, and I know that that sounds like oh my gosh, but what I really lost was self-doubt and self-hate, which is no comparison to the physical weight of what I've lost and what I've gained in just getting myself. And now I remember who I am all day, every single day. There's nothing that anyone else can say to me to make me feel different about myself. So that's my framework for just remember who you are. And we use the word teacher a lot, but I always tell teachers you know what in your head. Call yourself an educator, because it sounds different. You know, when you walk in and you say I am an educator, it makes a difference in how you speak to yourself, and so that is something that no one can take from you. And I often say to teachers remember who you are, and that way you can thrive inside the classroom and, most importantly, outside of the classroom as well. 0:07:40 - Lindsay Lyons I love how, first of all, thank you for sharing your own personal story and I really appreciate that you're doing this work, that you've developed this framework. I think what I love about your framework is that it's really holistic, like it's not just set a boundary and then just like that's the end, right. It's also that alignment of mindset and values I think is so important, right? We get into teaching for education, we're educators for these specific reasons, and then we might lose sight of them because we're in the minutia or whatever, right, and like that doesn't serve us. And then I also love the idea of gaining clarity. I'm just thinking about like I have a particular priorities note, like a post-it note, right behind the computer. It reminds me when I'm in the midst of things and feeling overwhelmed, like what is most important, and I'm wondering if there are either, like you know, key strategies like a posted, or kind of aha moments, as you've coached teachers to kind of go through that and kind of unpack what's in their bag. Are there moments, either stories, moments or strategies you'd want to share around that framework for listeners? 0:08:42 - Dr. Daryll Wharton So I would say first of all, you know, decide what you want and then describe it Just like you would tell your students to. We're going to draw a picture today and everybody's picture is going to be different. So, at weighing almost 700 pounds, I used to say I want to be skinny. But I didn't. I wasn't successful until I defined and got clarity what that skinny was and you know I'm still cute and curvy, I'm not trying to be skinny. I realized that my skinny quote unquote was to be well, it was to be able to walk up and down the steps without breathing hard, you know, to get down on the floor and get up to start running if somebody started chasing me. You know what I mean. So once I defined what that skinny was, the goal looked really more reachable. I was like, oh okay, because when you say to yourself, oh, I need to lose over 400 pounds, it's a rat if I would have thought of it like that. But when I thought of I just want to walk a little bit better, I don't want my knees to hurt, you know, I want my blood work to be better, my blood pressure to be better, those things are more measurable. So I would say to teachers you know, write down. You want that clarity of exactly what you want, and not just as a teacher. You know, I go back to remember who you are. You are a person and you're modeling for students all day long of what their adult life is going to be like, and so you know. I saw somewhere a quote teachers touch tomorrow. How powerful is that? So there is no world without us. Let's be clear. There is no world without us. We teach every single person that makes the world run, and so there's a huge responsibility in that, and you must model. How do you come to work and still be happy and go home and be a good mother and a good wife and a good sister and a good daughter? It's important that children know that and not just only one plus one is two. Yeah. 0:10:50 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, absolutely. And I'm thinking now about how beautiful this work is and how important this work is, and I'm also thinking about all of the pressures that teachers have to contend with to be able to like, deal with, like to do this important work right that you're describing and like how do they kind of like, keep out the other stuff or, you know, is it on my personal opinion, is it is also on leaders to create the space for right teachers to be able to do that. So do you have either specific challenges that you know teachers face and kind of suggestions to overcome it, or, like advice for leaders of how to create that space? What can you give us there? 0:11:30 - Dr. Daryll Wharton I would say I always like to tell leaders that you must make sure that you are building community in your school. And you know, sometimes we have principals that sit in their office all day and you know no shade to them because, guess what, they have so many things that they need to do. So then block out your schedule and say you know what? I'm going to get to work 15 minutes before all of the teachers and I'm standing in that office and I'm going to say hi to every single person. Or, you know, every Friday I'm going to put a little personal note in their mailboxes. I'm going to walk around and not just walk around in the halls, and you know you want your students to see you. I'm going to pop in my head and say hey, ms Teacher, how are you doing today? Do you need anything? And I think that if you build that community for teachers to have a safe space and for them to know that you are their coach, because you are coaching them, that may be your next assistant principal, it may be your next colleague as a principal, and you should be able to take a day off and your school run as if you are still in the building. You can only do that by building community and that mutual respect. 0:12:50 - Lindsay Lyons That makes total sense to me. I'm also thinking about like the kind of structure. Like the things that we ask of teachers is kind of wild, like we basically ask them to do the impossible to cover thousands of standards right, to have very little prep time in many schools, to do all of these things. And I'm wondering if you've seen any leaders be successful with kind of the structural pieces like reconfiguring how time is so you have more prep time. Or I know one of the principals that I admired for modeling wellness was she was like all right, everybody out. Once the kids had gone, it was like go home, like it's okay, whatever is not done, like let's be well, like go home, I'm going to leave too. And I thought that kind of modeling was really something that I have seen as a concrete strategy. Yeah, anything that structurally or time-wise. 0:13:41 - Dr. Daryll Wharton It would really be beneficial if leaders started to kind of. You know you have a process. Now I'm always going to speak from a special education point of view. You know we have a lot of paperwork. We're prepping for IEP meetings in addition to the other duties that we have. And I will always say to my special educators you know, because I also was an IEP meeting facilitator for several years and I would give out that IEP meeting like a I call it a year at a glance, so that you will already know in September if you had five IEP meetings in March. You already knew that. So I would say to teachers and I got my principal on board because I needed that message to come from my principal and you know he just basically told them go ahead and start your progress report in September and add to it. And how good is that? When you're at an IEP meeting and you're speaking, you actually have the documentation to back up what you're saying. So I think that you know you can't be a person on an island. I think you have to meet with your admin team to really say you know, look, we really need to find a way how we're going to do anything and also know your teachers. You know that if Miss Teacher B comes in every day and she's happy and she's bubbly, and she comes in one day and she barely speaks, oh, I'm going to her room or I'm going to send someone we need to go check on, so-and-so. So I think that you need to have procedures and policies in place, and I know that that is just Something that everyone says all day long, but I really think that you need to be very diligent in policies and procedures for everything, not just all of your district requirements. But how are you being a leader in your school and this is what we do in our school to make sure everyone is well. 0:15:46 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. I don't know if I've ever heard someone say that, like the idea of wellness policies, like what is the? Yeah, oh, that's good, okay. I am also curious about, like do you have anything around teachers coming to you saying, like you know what, I don't know how to do my work in a container of you know 35 hours a week, or something like I don't know how to not take the work home because there's just so much of it. I feel like that's constantly a struggle, that I constantly a struggle. 0:16:17 - Dr. Daryll Wharton Yes, yeah, so um, I talk about that in my bag framework of building the boundaries and at the end of the day and and that's what I say like, if you already know, you have and I'm sorry I'm always going to go back to special ed, but you know, I'm just going to use that as an example If you know you have five IEP meetings in March, don't start on February the 20th and writing your. You know, I think planning is very good and keeping a running log of everything and just creating the boundaries. And that may be hard, it may put you behind in some things at work, but you can say to yourself you know what, On Mondays and Fridays or whatever, on Fridays I'm leaving right at the time that I can leave per my contract and I'm not staying beyond that. And teacher burnout is real. It's at 51% right now and it's the number one teacher I'm sorry, it's the number one profession for burnout right now. And we're at a teacher shortage and people just don't understand that if you don't have any teachers, you are going to be in a bad shape, in a bad shape. So I would start with building those boundaries and saying you know to yourself yes, I want my job, I love my job. Most teachers don't do this because for the money. They do it for the love of teaching babies. But I think you also need to always put yourself first, because as teachers, we have things too. I might be in school as a special educator fighting and advocating for the students in the building, but guess what? I have a baby at home that has special needs, so I have to be in charge of that and make sure that I'm devoting that time to my own child as well. 0:18:12 - Lindsay Lyons I just love that that listener can like hear you or, if they're reading the transcript, read you saying those words right, you have to put yourself first, because I don't think enough people say that, especially in a profession which is all about giving right. We're always about the students and we're and yes, I just love how you broke that down. It's like and like you have a life, you have your family, you have yourself to think about and I think it's just so great to to get your your take on that leaders need to say that leaders need to tell the teachers that, um, because, let's be clear, the all school districts, they're businesses. 0:18:46 - Dr. Daryll Wharton You know what I mean. You can't take things so personal, because it is a business and if you decided to quit, your job is going to be posted. They're not going to call you and say, oh well, we wonder what happened. Now your leader, your principal, may call you, because hopefully that principal has a rapport with all of the staff members, but as a business, no, your job is going to be posted and it doesn't matter if you're out for surgery or if you're home taking care of a sick parent, it doesn't matter. So, at the end of the day, you have to say am I going to constantly give from an empty cup or you only get from my overflow and that is it? 0:19:30 - Lindsay Lyons That is a lovely reframe. I love that. I just think I'm again looking at my notes of your your bag framework. I love the idea of the concrete boundary that you shared. So like right Friday at the bell, I'm out, like that's it. I also think that idea of gaining clarity and values alignment is so. It's why I love the framework that you have, because I envision, like my big shift from working 80 hours a week to like 40 hours a week was a combination of those three things. Right, it was like I was a special education teacher also and so I think you know, yeah, and so when we like do all of this stuff right, it's easy to take on, take on, take on. And so I was like, okay, what is the most important, highest leverage things that I need to teach my students that I collect data on for my student IP meetings? Right, like, what are these most important things and what things are most values aligned? So when I'm designing the lessons or something, it's like, well, I really want my students to be really good at critical thought or our discussion or whatever the thing is, and it's like this is who I want students to be in the world. This is the thing that interests them. So I'm going to prioritize these things, because I can't do a thousand standards, so I'm going to just do this, and that way I have the boundary on my time and the alignment to my values and the clarity that, like, these are, these are my focus areas and now I can move forward. And so I just I'm just thinking about my own journey and its relationship to your framework, and it's so good. 0:20:56 - Dr. Daryll Wharton I may need, we may need a partner. Yes, that was perfect. That was perfect and it's so simple and it's like when I thought about it I said what teacher doesn't carry a bag to work Like? But what's in it? 0:21:13 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, there's. There's so much. I think so many teachers that would benefit from you know connecting with you and I'm I'm sure we'll share at the end kind of where people can connect with you and get in touch with you. I'm sure we'll share at the end kind of where people can connect with you and get in touch with you. I'm curious, too, if they are excited to you know, book your keynote, for example, but that's like a couple months out, what's something they could do like after they listen to this episode and they're like I want to just start now. I want to start with something like as soon as I end the episode today, I want to do something that's like a step in the right direction. 0:21:48 - Dr. Daryll Wharton What do you recommend for those folks? I, again, I would tell them to create your goal, whatever your goal is for, and I would do a combination goal of you for yourself and you in your profession. And, again, writing a picture. Paint a picture of what does it look like? What does your perfect life look like as being an educator? I'm going to say that word as an educator and as a person and be clear about it. So what I incorporate in because I also do workshops that is aligned with my keynote. And when I was in the process of losing all of that emotional weight and, like I said, the physical weight was a byproduct of that, you know, I started with just saying affirmations and the first one that I said was I am disciplined and focused. I have it tattooed on my wrist and, and that is what I went on, and even if I was not disciplined and focused, I kept saying it over and over and over again. This is how we retrain our subconscious mind. So I'm also trained in neuro-linguistic programming and so that is speaking to your subconscious mind. This is how you basically change who you are, because your subconscious mind is constantly working in a background and, whatever you tell it, it will do whatever it can do to make it come true. So if you tell yourself that you're not pretty, you tell yourself that you're not smart, all the time, it's just working in the background, making sure that you will never be pretty when you look into the mirror or never be able to achieve any goals that you want to achieve. So I'm going to give three things. I'm going to say write your goal out. Then you're going to I mean specifically define that goal. Think of yourself as your student. How would you give your student this assignment and list them out? And then sit with yourself for a moment. Just sit down and just visualize yourself. Visualize yourself walking in those shoes of who you want to be, what type of teacher you want to be, what type of person you want to be, and just meditate on it. And I'll share this at the end. I have a small gift for your listeners and it's a meditation for them to listen to in the morning, and what I did was. It is an active meditation. Because we're busy as teachers, I don't have time to sit down with my legs crossed and my eyes closed. You can listen to this in a car on your way to work. It helps you to set your intention and your tone of the day, but a bonus part of it is you're going to come in, relax and your students are going to feel the energy. Now, we all know that students know who you are. That's why they know what classroom they can act a fool in and what classroom they will not. 0:24:49 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh. Yes, that is definitely true. I love this idea of an active meditation. I'm a person who really struggles to sit still and like stop, and so that sounds beautiful for me. So thank you for sharing that, and we'll be sure to link to that in the blog post for the episode. 0:25:02 - Dr. Daryll Wharton Yeah, Okay, perfect. 0:25:04 - Lindsay Lyons And so I have two closing questions for you. This next one is just for fun. It does not have to do with anything we talked about, though it can. Everyone on the podcast tries to, like I think, learn and grow as a human being throughout their whole life, and so a fun question I have is what is something that you have personally been learning about lately? 0:25:24 - Dr. Daryll Wharton Oh, my goodness, I have several things, so I am a singer as well. I have an album out with its meditations and affirmations on the album, but I also have three songs and I've always wanted to learn how to play the piano and I want to get the other side of my brain working, and so I just signed up. Now it's just an app now, don't? I'm not, I won't be doing any concerts, you know, lately or recently or whatever, but yeah, so I am going to learn to play piano and it's something that I've always wanted to do and I'm going to do it. And yoga I want to be a certified yoga instructor. So those are the two things, my main things, that I am learning right now. And you know, as a teacher, you never stop learning. Never stop learning. 0:26:21 - Lindsay Lyons Those are beautiful and so seemingly aligned to everything else you do professionally that it's so like holistic and great. Thank you for sharing those. And then I think the last question is people are going to want to connect with you, learn more about you, just kind of follow the work that you're doing. Where is the best place for people to connect with you online? 0:26:40 - Dr. Daryll Wharton They can go to. I'm on Instagram as teacher recess consulting, and, of course, you can go to my website, drdarylcom, and so I'm kind of re-ramping my website right now. But drdarylcom is for if you would like to speak with me in regards to my keynote speech. But I also have teacherrecesscom and I have a podcast. My podcast is called Teacher Recess with Dr Daryl and I'm going to be sharing tips and a whole bunch of stuff that will be launching on February the 14th, because you need to have self-love and self-care. 0:27:21 - Lindsay Lyons That is perfect, because I believe this episode will be launched on February 18th, so it will be out by the time you're listening. Yes, it will, absolutely. Oh my gosh, dr Daryl, thank you so so much for your time today. I've so appreciated your wisdom. 0:27:35 - Dr. Daryll Wharton And let me give you because I want to give the free gift your listeners can text the word recess and that number is 443-775-2325. And you will get an instant download of the meditation. And, like I said, I love the active meditation. Number one. People want to be looking at me side eyes Like how can you have an active meditation? It just gets you to think and put yourself first and set your intention of the day. 0:28:07 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, that's so beautiful. Thank you so much, and we'll write out the directions for that in the blog post too, in case anyone is driving and can't write the number down. Yes, you're right, awesome. Thank you again, dr Daryl. 0:28:18 - Dr. Daryll Wharton I appreciate you having me. Thank you so much.
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2/10/2025 197. Liberatory, Equitable Pedagogy through Place-Based Learning with Micki Evans, Charity Marcella Moran, and Erin SanchezRead Now
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In this episode, I speak with educators and authors Micki Evans, Charity Marcella Moran, and Erin Sanchez. Together, they wrote the book, Place-Based Learning: Connecting Inquiry, Community, and Culture, which explores how we can transform classrooms into equitable and inclusive spaces through place-based learning.
Our three guests are passionate educators with many years of experience. We chat in this episode about their work that explores the necessity of decolonizing curricula and implementing liberatory assessment practices to empower students. Additionally, they delve into the practicalities of place-based learning, emphasizing community asset mapping and leveraging student expertise to create dynamic, student-led educational experiences. The Big Dream The big dream, as articulated by our guests, revolves around empowering students to consume, critique, and contribute to their world. Further, they seek to create an educational experience where students maximize their innate talents and challenge oppressive systems. This dream extends to envisioning the community as a classroom through place-based learning, encouraging students to engage deeply with their surroundings and to learn from diverse perspectives. Mindset Shifts Required To realize this vision, educators must embrace several key mindset shifts. First, educators can embrace an open mind, as place-based learning asks us to reframe and decolonize our curriculums, starting to look at it from multiple perspectives. This involves shifting from a binary view of learning to a dynamic one, where students have more control over their learning journeys. Additionally, educators can trust their students to lead, support them with appropriate scaffolding, and view assessment as a tool for empowerment and social justice, rather than mere ranking or evaluation. Action Steps Because adopting a place-based learning practice can be a major shift for educators, here are some actions steps you may wish to adopt to get started: Step 1: Examine your own place story. Educators can start by examining personal connections to your environment, and develop your place story which can help form identity and values. You may reflect on themes of, “Where did I grow up? Where am I living now? How do I connect with this place and space?” Step 2: Implement community asset mapping Start with your classroom and find out what your students are experts in. What assets do they bring into the classroom? How are you using that to build your curriculum? This can be a great starting point to find place-based learning journeys. Step 3: Start small and keep growing You don’t have to jump all the way in and try everything. Instead, pick one or two design principles of place-based learning and see how it evolves in your classroom before moving on to the next steps. You can learn more about place-based design principles in our guest’s book, Place-Based Learning. Challenges? Common challenges are often around partnering with the community, like the school structures and red tape that make it difficult to get students off campus or community partners on campus. Another barrier teachers face is the pacing—educators often feel they don’t have time for place-based learning—and the political landscape we’re in. Overcoming these requires a focus on educational aspirations and the big dream for students, as well as strategic planning and support from school leaders. One Step to Get Started Begin by adopting a flexible mindset and choosing a small, manageable place-based learning project. Reflect on your current practices, involve students in the planning process, and use available resources to connect with community partners. By starting small, you can gradually build confidence and skills to expand place-based learning in your educational setting. Stay Connected You can find this week’s guests on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and their website, PBL Path. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing the guests' free resources: a blog page, Blank Place Based Project Planning Tool, and free reproducibles. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 197 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:20 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you, you, as we have this conversation today, do we want to go? Mickey, charity, erin, does that work? Okay, sure. 0:00:28 - Micki Evans I'm Mickey Evans and I'm just so excited to be here with you, lindsay, and with my colleagues and good friends. I'm a passionate educator, have been for many, many years and a proud grandmother of four granddaughters who are all under the same roof this holiday. 0:00:50 - Charity Moran I'm Charity Moran and I almost forgot it's my turn to go, but I was like, yes, four grandchildren. But yes, I'm from Shreveport, louisiana. Most of my work and my education career had started in Louisiana. So, in addition to all the things in the bio, I think right now, today, just where we are historically, louisiana is in the center of my heart, right now. 0:01:21 - Erin Sanchez Yeah, erin Sanchez. Originally from a small farming community in Minnesota but now in Tacoma, washington, the ancestral homeland of the Puyallup Nation. And I have been an educator for 24 years, lucky enough to work with Mickey almost all of those years and Charity for the last decade or so and just love partnering and collaborating with these two and excited to talk about our work. 0:01:50 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you all. So much. Beautiful introductions, and so I think your book is so wonderful and so will align to, I think, this first framing question I usually ask guests. Dr Bettina Love talks about the idea of freedom dreaming in this way. She says their dreams grounded in the critique of injustice and I just really love that to kind of anchor the work we do as educators in the space of education. And I'm curious, either each of you can answer or kind of whoever feels called to answer, but I'm wondering what the big dream that you hold for education is in the context of that thinking about freedom dreaming. 0:02:30 - Charity Moran I'll go. I kind of this is Charity. I very much so. Love Dr Love first of all. And so this quote of you know, thinking about freedom, dreaming and the idea of critique. I think that for me, the biggest idea which is kind of crazy to have to say out loud for education is that whatever we do in this process of education, students and learners of all ages actually are able to, you know, consume, critique and contribute to their world. Like with those three things are happening and if we're doing what it takes to do that, I think that's kind of the big idea for me. 0:03:18 - Micki Evans I definitely have to agree with you on that. When I first came to education, it was really about how do we maximize the innate gifts and talents that all students have and it's evolved over time, especially with PBL because it's really getting into how do we break down those systems of oppression so that all children and students and learners can achieve their fullest potential. 0:03:48 - Erin Sanchez Definitely yes, that community as classroom being the big dream for me, I think, and to facilitate that really reckoning with the racist structures that we sometimes feel helpless and we end up perpetuating. But how do we? How is there just an indigenizing of our current system? In a life before this, I was a spoken word poet and when I thought about indigenizing education, it was like educating our children in the kitchen, you know, disinfecting canning jars and adding pectin to berry mash, and in the garage, tearing the transistor radio, limb from limb, you know. Or in the woods, you know, with showing asufficiency, in the hospital, on the building site, in the movie studio, you know, in places adults haven't even imagined children being or doing schooling kind of introduction to kind of the mindset shift that I'm thinking about when I pick up the book. 0:05:11 - Lindsay Lyons I am a person who, like, really connected immediately with everything you're saying and kind of had that head-on moment that you get with books, that you're like, yes, like these people are like connected to my brain and you've put words to the things that I've thought but haven't put words to, and you extend my understanding of this stuff because you're giving me concrete practices and examples of just wow, wow, it can be even more than I imagined, which is so cool. And then I'm also imagining there's some teachers who could pick up the book and be like, whoa, this is so very different from anything I've thought of, like I didn't even that I'm just teaching social studies from a book right now, you know, or whatever. And so I'm curious, particularly for those folks but even for someone like me who had a lot of kind of aha moments as I read the book and maybe have done similar things in the past, but not to the extent you've laid it out what are those kind of like aha moments or mindset shifts where people who are just encountering the book and just kind of sifting through all this stuff and making sense of everything you've laid out there what's really required of them to get the most out of this? 0:06:12 - Micki Evans to make some of those freedom dreams that you named come true. I think, for one is to have a really open mind, because place-based learning really asks us to reframe our curriculum and decolonize our curriculum. So we're looking at it from multiple perspectives, not just a single story or a single narrative. So that's a huge mind shift and turning over more of that control to the students to really give them a voice to make an impact on their community themselves. 0:06:50 - Erin Sanchez And I hope that the book is empowering for teachers and sends the message loud and clear that place-based learning isn't binary. You know where you're either doing it all or not at all right, but it's a spectrum and a teacher can start anywhere and grow their practice based on their students and their context and their own self-reflection and their journey, so that it doesn't feel so daunting or scary. 0:07:22 - Charity Moran And there's also this shift around the idea of assessment and we emphasize the liberatory assessment practices, and so it's just a shift in thinking about how are we assessing? What does it mean to assess? How are we leveraging assessments to empower students and community? You know thinking about even promoting equity and social justice. So really, you know thinking about all of the things that assessment could be, as opposed to really what it is now in terms of how it's used and even abused. But how can it become more of what, like Zaretta Hammond refers to, as you know, a tool towards this partnership, this learning alliance between teacher and student? 0:08:30 - Lindsay Lyons teacher and student, I definitely got that sense that this is. This is a shift very much away from assessment in that kind of hegemonic dominance that we often see assessment as like a tool for like you fail or you're better, or write this ranking or any sort right. I very much read your work as like it's the process, right, it's the process with engaging community, it's the reflection. I love so many of the reflection protocols that you all named and and that reflection process, that idea of expanding what a project is to include collecting data in community and with community, and inviting community in and truly being a partner, not just in name but in an actual process. And so I love to the intentionality between not just naming the word decolonize but to also cite, like Eve Tuck's work I think Tuck and Yang's work around decolonization, to name that like I always get this wrong, but like that it's not a metaphor, right, it's about repatriating indigenous land and life, right, they write about, and so I can see that idea present in all of your work as well, which I really appreciate. So there's so much in the book that I was like we don't have time to do all of this in 30 minutes, but I would love to invite you all to share kind of like what are your either favorite pieces of the book? We can talk about any of the kind of I think the original pieces being very much like the framework. We can talk about specific practices or projects, because I also love that you all share projects that you have done and kind of really flesh all of those out for us to understand. So, yeah, what are kind of your favorite actions and things that you want to highlight for listeners? 0:10:02 - Charity Moran Yeah, I know one of my favorite parts of the book is how we leverage the troubled waters project. We leverage a specific project, kind of connect in part one to each of the you know design principles that we present and so being able to see, you know, you read the theory about it, you get into the research, but then you have an actual project that's been implemented, that connects back to and gives you know a direct kind of line to say the thing we just read about this is how it looks in the real world. So that's one of my favorite pieces, for sure. 0:10:51 - Micki Evans I agree. And how Dr Delpit, who wrote our foreword, tied that in so well I mean the story that she shares in the foreword just speaks to Troubled Waters, the project that we highlight. 0:11:07 - Lindsay Lyons Do you guys mind giving an overview, just a little bit, for listeners who haven't read the book yet, of the troubled water? I know that it's very in-depth in the book, but maybe we could just give a little preview. 0:11:18 - Charity Moran Yeah, so it's a project anchored in the place of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where there was a protest around all of the swimming pools were being closed in the majority Black sides of town. And so, you know, leveraging that movement during the protests but connecting the place and the history to connecting the students to that event to then now, in current times, work to. You know, leverage that history and knowledge of place to propose new pool plans in new locations, you know, with this in mind, and so, along the way, students debunk myths about you know Black people as swimmers and explore, you know historical examples of that, and so it's really a lot that just ties into this one place, this one historical event along the way. 0:12:17 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you so much. That was perfect, erin, anything you wanted to contribute around your favorite pieces. 0:12:23 - Erin Sanchez Oh, my favorite pieces. Well, I mean, since this book's imaginings, when we were just thinking about what we wanted, we wanted it to. Well, I mean, since this book's imaginings, when we were just thinking about what we wanted, we wanted it to be a workbook, right, we wanted, like teachers in there using it, doing the reflections, planning a project, and we've always said, like, if you read it from beginning to end, you'll walk away with a complete, you know, project plan, which I think is really unique. But what I've grown to love about it, now that it's in my hand, is that there is a place for leaders in the book, for school leaders, for instructional coaches. The whole part three is using the practitioners round, which is a really beautiful, just like coaching cycle, but unique to place-based learning, for how to support teachers on this journey and how leaders can leverage their positional power to create this space for place-based learning, this space for teachers to be able to take risks and try this out and see the impact on their students. And so that's what I've, like, grown to love is also empowering leaders Like you have a role in this, and it forces them also to examine the existing systems too. 0:13:47 - Micki Evans Yeah, and the other thing I want to add to that is the power of storytelling throughout, in terms of being a leader, using stories to create that change and to leverage members of the community students, teachers and just sharing and uncovering the stories of the community as well. We just collaborated with a group in India, PBL Propel, and designed a conference that was for leaders from all over India and Nepal, and they walked away with a design, a vision and a design for implementing and sustaining place-based learning at their sites, using our practitioners round and storytelling. 0:14:33 - Lindsay Lyons It's so incredible because when I was reading through the leader pieces, immediately I thought it connected very well. I think chapter 13, maybe as your chapter on the barriers. And I I just feel like as a coach, there's a lot of teachers I've worked with that have said, you know, yeah, but the barrier is this or the barrier is this right. And I just feel like as a coach, there's a lot of teachers I've worked with that have said, you know, yeah, but the barrier is this or the barrier is this Right. And I mean we can, I can invite open the conversation here to talk about particular barriers and how you'd overcome them. But I think much of what you share in the leader piece addresses directly many of the barriers that I've heard personally teachers say, yes, but I don't have like the logistical support here, I don't have the family communication piece here, or you know I just there's a lot of moving pieces. I need time in the day for planning and whatever. There's so many pieces that I think are addressed by that leader point. So if there's anyone listening who's like, yeah, this feels like a lot like the things are addressed at towards the end of the book in that part three, which I really appreciate. So thank you for putting that in there, because I really really appreciate that as a coach. Are there specific barriers or kind of challenges that you have, I don't know, heard the most in your work, anything that has been something that's come up for either teachers, leaders or communities, and then maybe how did you kind of help people through that or what came out of that challenge, if that question makes sense. 0:15:57 - Erin Sanchez Oh yeah, we definitely hear. There's a pattern to the challenges we hear and one of them is, like the, just those school structures, like you know, sometimes it's really difficult to get students off campus Right, and there's a lot of just red tape and just paperwork involved in that or getting community partners on the campus, you know. So helping leaders really look at what is their realm of control and what is their realm of influence and how to make that process more simplified, you know. And also just things that they don't teach us in teacher school, like how to write a letter to a potential community partner, you know. So we include a template for that, just to you know, quickly dispel any notion that there's some sort of barrier between teachers and a potential community partner, that we can be reaching out to anyone or that we can turn that over to an instructional coach that might be able to help teachers create a community partner database and identify those potential partners. So just those small things that can be done. 0:17:12 - Micki Evans And students can be a great asset for connecting with community partners as well, sometimes more effective than the adults in the school. 0:17:23 - Erin Sanchez Yes, very true. And then I know another barrier that I'm going to let Mickey or Charity talk about is the pacing. We hear that a lot. You know like we don't have time for place based learning. How do we build that into our existing scope and sequence? To either of you want to speak to that? 0:17:43 - Charity Moran Yeah, so that's definitely sometimes one of those, you know, barriers or challenges that make themselves known. And so then you know, like you said in part three, there's a lot of designing the you know the amount of content that's being put in there and things of that sort, so that we can at least try to keep it aligned and make sure that we start with the standards in mind, so that the things that we are creating as we start spelling out those ways of knowing that we know we're anchoring in, you know, content as well as justice, you know, and as well as other ways of knowing that we want to make sure we attend to. And then you know, of course there's also the political landscape, because a lot of people hear things like, you know words like liberatory and decolonize and culturally responsive, and that opens up a can of worry that as long as we re-anchor in ideas, like your very first question what are our biggest dreams for education? And as long as we think about those big dreams and use that as our measure, then the things that we're asking folks to do, and, you know, supporting the work in this book, it's not a big leap, you know, if we really just re-anchor in that dream in our vision for education because, at the core, you know, we can put politics aside and focus on what do we want students to walk away with? Who do we want them to be as a result of this education? 0:19:34 - Lindsay Lyons And I feel like many times, especially the worrying that we are doing, we are thinking of usually not even our students. We're thinking of family members of students and we're usually thinking about a very specific group of families of students, right, Like the, usually like the white family members who are going to get like really stressed about whatever, and it's like, okay, first of all, we're only thinking our worries are contained usually to this small group. That's not, that's messed up. Right, it's not even the students. And, second of all, right Like we, the students, get so engaged when we do this work, Like they are so excited. Students are excited and I just I think about, like when I was a social studies teacher the first year I taught, I had no idea what I was doing and I was like all right, we're gonna do the textbook and we're gonna like kind of race through all the content, we're gonna cover it all and you're gonna do good on this final state test. No one liked my class. It was so boring, it was horrible. And then I have the same students in an elective where we did. One of the things that you guys talk about a lot is that students are collecting the data, they're interviewing. There's storytelling involved. I'm just wondering about the dynamics of that shift because I think that's probably hard for someone like me who went from. You know this, I'm going to teach the textbook to OK, this is way more expansive. I have to let go of control. My students are kind of taking ownership of this. Any kind of tips or thoughts to lift up from the book from that perspective of like students are really leading this journey. 0:21:25 - Micki Evans I think it really. We have to trust our students right, even if they're littles, right. We need to trust them that they can lead the way, and so you may have designed this amazing place-based journey and the kids may take it in a different direction. So being flexible because, you know, most teachers are control freaks I was, am, but by letting go and seeing what the kids can do just gives me great hope for the future. Truly, because they're taking action and they're engaged in things that mean it means something to them. 0:22:06 - Erin Sanchez Mm-hmm. And letting go doesn't in any way mean that the support isn't there, that there aren't scaffolds in place to teach them the skills like feedback and revision and reflection and knowing that that takes time. Context of the place-based journey. So they know why they're learning what they're learning and in many cases we encourage them to create the why, to set that why for themselves and for their peers, and so hopefully they feel supported at every step. And just like I said before about place-based learning not being an all or nothing, you know the process of students learning the skills that are going to set them up for success in their place-based journeys is also not all or nothing. It's going to take a little bit of time and teachers can say, oh, I really want to work in this place-based journey on students giving, receiving and incorporating feedback based journey on students giving, receiving and incorporating feedback, and that's going to be my priority, and so it feels more manageable and tangible. And then students do walk away with those skills that they then apply to the next project until they have much more autonomy than they did six months or nine months ago. 0:23:29 - Charity Moran Yeah, it's very much so. A journey and this kind of ongoing journey, which is why I think one of the features I really love around the reflection questions and that there are more questions than definitions in a lot of the things that we do, because that encourages this kind of ongoingness notion of the work. Like, okay, I did it for this project, now maybe I want to, like Erin said zero in now on building some of the reflection skills, so now I'm going to reflect, on reflecting to make sure that I'm building and baking that into the lesson with the students, so keeping those questions in mind as well. 0:24:08 - Micki Evans And I think the same is true for collaboration, because most place-based learning journeys ask students to collaborate and work together and that does take some intentional scaffolding with students. We can't just throw them into a group and expect that they're going to be working seamlessly. So that's part of that journey. So the first project you may be spending a lot of time on building those collaboration skills. 0:24:37 - Lindsay Lyons This makes me think of two questions, so feel free to answer either one. Whatever is most interesting to you. One question I was wondering is what is the most exciting skill that you've seen students build within a place-based learning project? And then the other question is I just love the reflection protocols you have, and I was wondering if you had a favorite reflection protocol from that list. There were many I had never heard of, and so I would love to lift those up for our listeners as well. Feel free to go either direction. 0:25:11 - Erin Sanchez Feel free to go either direction. As soon as you said a skill that students learned, I immediately went to empathy, like developing that habit of empathy over time, like with my high school students, and seeing it very acutely in one particular project where they were collecting oral histories from people who had experienced genocide in Africa, asia or Latin America. So it required this high level of empathy and thank goodness we did practice interviews first, like we spent a lot of time developing those interview questions and follow up questions and creating like question maps and fishbowling the questions, because I realized pretty quickly like wow, their questions are super inappropriate because, yeah, that skill had not been developed yet and so it was over the course of the project culminating in those interviews. In those interviews and just being able to see how students had both kind of evolved and internalized the stories of the folks that they were hearing from was a really beautiful thing, yeah. 0:26:38 - Charity Moran I think kind of aligning with, I think, aaron's answer earlier around this notion of self-sufficiency and this one of the skills in students that I love see happen, and even some of the student testimonials that we have in the book. They've said, they say things like you know, I feel I feel more empowered or I feel like I'm in control of what I'm learning, or you know, it's just that type of energy from the students has been one of the favorite, one of my most favorite pieces around almost all of these projects. We hear something to that effect. 0:27:20 - Micki Evans Yeah, really empowering kids to make a difference in their community and taking those skills beyond the classroom. So the protocols that we use some were created by us, and what I love about the practitioners round is teachers have an opportunity to get feedback on their project design. But we also involve students in the process as well as community members, so it's not just teachers doing the protocols. We're engaging all the different stakeholders in those protocols as a way to critique and revise and refine as we move forward in the journey. 0:28:06 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, I think the student experience triad was my favorite. I had marked that as my favorite. They actually. How often do you get to sit down with students and be like all right, like tell me about it, like what are your thoughts? 0:28:20 - Erin Sanchez And you just get to listen. That's so cool, I love. I also love the community partner review. That happens at the very end of a project, where you know both the community partner and the students, either asynchronously or in person, sitting down in the same room together, are like creating this artistic expression of their experience of the project and that's like so cool just to see what they come up with and how they communicate with each other and just the stories that they're sharing. Yeah, those interactions are really pretty awesome. 0:28:58 - Micki Evans And that really helps to sustain that partnership. So we're not just using the partners once and then bye, bye. It's really sustaining that and seeing how the work might evolve over time. 0:29:10 - Lindsay Lyons I also love that you named specific examples too about sustainability of projects. Like it's, the partners, but also the projects themselves kind of, could live on and in the next year students add to it. That's a super cool concept. I think Anything else that you all would like to add before we go to kind of our closing questions round? All right, if anything comes up, feel free to jump in. So the first question and we could just kind of go. Everyone can kind of share their thoughts here. What's one thing you would encourage listeners to do once they end the episode? I will vote that people should get the book and read that, but maybe, as the book is in the mail being delivered to them, what's kind of a thing they can do to jumpstart this type of pedagogy? 0:30:02 - Micki Evans I think one of the things is having individuals look at their own play story to be to begin to see how they are connected to place and how place help create their own identity, who they are today, what their values are, um, so kind of beginning with what's my place story, where did I grow up or where am I living now and how do I connect with this place and this space? 0:30:45 - Erin Sanchez And I think a next step that we outline in the book too, is that community asset mapping, starting with your classroom, like finding out what your students are experts in, um, what assets they bring into the classroom every day, um, and then using that as a basis to look at your, your curriculum, your content, um, and and figure out how those can be like little, little nuggets of place-based learning journeys. 0:31:20 - Charity Moran And then you've already got your book. So once you've done that, and considering what my colleagues have said as well, you don't have to jump all the way in. Try picking one or two of the design principles and seeing how does it feel, you know, for yourself as a practitioner, for your students, and again thinking about how are they responding to what's happening. And then from there, just fold in more, fold in more, until you get ready for that project that you design as you read the book. 0:31:51 - Lindsay Lyons These are great examples. Thank you all for sharing those. My next question is because everyone who comes on is like a lifelong learner, constantly learning things. I'm just curious. It could relate to education or not, could be totally different. What is something that you personally have been learning about lately? 0:32:16 - Erin Sanchez about lately. It was the holidays. I had two weeks off. I actually read a mystery novel so I'm like, oh, what was before that? No, but like, my favorite interactions in the past year, both through professional development and just through online conversations and reading, have been Caroline Hill's EquityX Design. She was the founder of 228 Accelerator. We quote her several times in the book and she just talks about equity as a verb and really like process as product and how we design at the margins, whether that design be, you know, making changes within our own community, whether it be designing a place based learning experience, but how we're designing at the margins and I just absolutely love her. And after the recent election, she's having these online spaces to just have dialogue with one another and care for ourselves and care for our communities, which I've really appreciated too. 0:33:33 - Charity Moran That's what I'm thinking about. I've kind of been knee deep in the thinking about the uses of AR and VR, so augmented reality and virtual reality and this connections to place-based learning so, yeah, just really enjoying that. Some of it's kind of scary and I'm walking through that to think about what my teachers think along the way, because a lot of people are this technology thing and are we going to go completely iRobot? Are robots going to control the world? And things of that sort. So really digging into AR and VR with a lot of that in mind, connecting it to place-based learning and helping educators get into it themselves to overcome some of those fears and give the power back to the students, basically. 0:34:29 - Erin Sanchez You're going to have to teach her Mickey, and I as well. I'm so intrigued, but no so little. 0:34:38 - Micki Evans Oh, I think for me really in getting ready for this conference in India was really understanding the Indian context and what's going on within their educational system. And I worked with the group to create the first book on project-based learning in India that aligns the teachings of place-based learning to the ancient teachings of India and how colonized their educational system became and now kind of moving back and making those connections between the ancient teachings and now, and in India at a federal level they are really shifting what the focus is and it's really looking at the strategies and place-based learning you know making not just that, testing and testing and testing. So for me I spent a lot of time having learning and thinking about that. 0:35:33 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, my goodness, we're going to have to have another like connection, just about all those pieces. That's fantastic, I think. My final question is and we will link in the blog post for this episode to the book specifically so people can get it but is there anywhere that you individually would want people to connect with you in the online space? 0:35:54 - Micki Evans So we do have an Instagram and a Facebook LinkedIn, we have our personal LinkedIn and then we also have a PBL Path LinkedIn and we have a website. So, yeah, any way, they would love to connect with us. We'd love to chat about place-based learning. 0:36:13 - Charity Moran And we're at PBL Path on all the things. So it's really easy PBL Path on Instagram, Facebook. You look us up as PBL Path and then the website is pblpathcom. 0:36:27 - Lindsay Lyons And I'll link to all that in the blog post as well. Mickey, charity and Erin, thank you so, so much for this conversation today and for putting your brilliant book out into the world. 0:36:36 - Erin Sanchez Thank you, Lindsay, Thank you. 0:36:37 - Micki Evans Lindsay. Thank you, lindsay, it was a pleasure.
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In this episode, I’m talking about a grading mindset shift toward a more equitable system, inspired by my conversations and coaching with school and district teams who want to pursue this.
I’m also drawing on concepts from a phenomenal book, Place-Based Learning: Connecting Inquiry, Community, and Culture by Micki Evans, Charity Marcella Moran, and Erin Sanchez. It’s shaped my understanding of common challenges in equitable grading shifts and what to do next. Why? The traditional grading system often fails to foster genuine motivation and growth among students. There’s a built-in idea that grades will be a motivating factor, rather than relying on the intrinsic motivation that’s in each student to learn. In their book, Evans, Moran, and Sanchez highlight the importance of self-assessment and self-reflection for students, arguing that when you know what you’re aiming for, you can keep working towards that goal. This approach focuses on providing specific, qualitative feedback that nurtures intrinsic motivation, much like adult learning experiences where feedback is more about progress and less about arbitrary grades. What? There are so many ways to build self-reflection into your classroom practices. The goal is to give specific, qualitative feedback to students so they know if they’re on the right track or where they may need to shift and pivot. Here are some steps educators can take: Step 1: Shift your mindset Consider how adults are often motivated by specific feedback rather than grades, and apply this insight to students. This is an important mindset shift that gets over the fear that students may not be motivated without grades. Step 2: Implement peer feedback and self-reflection strategies To help students self-reflect on their work, try new strategies that empower them by offering opportunities to gather specific feedback. For example:
Step 3: Normalize fear and failure Create a classroom culture that embraces failure as a learning tool. We want to break down the idea that there’s a right or wrong answer and school is all about being “right.” Instead, normalize “failure” and show students it’s okay to make mistakes and grow from them. One practice you can try is to have students write their failures (and how they’ve grown) on post-it notes on a board, taking time to acknowledge and celebrate them as learning opportunities. Step 4: Co-create with your students If your curriculum is not motivating and not interesting, this is all just a good idea but won’t shift things. You want to involve students in co-constructing their learning experiences. Allow them to take part in designing the curriculum and daily discussions, focusing on topics, social issues, and community matters that they care about and impact them. This type of purpose-driven inquiry empowers students and increases their investment in their education and community. Step 5: Communicate the shift to families To support the transition to equitable grading, provide families with clear communication about the benefits and rationale behind this shift. Use my freebie below to help with this! Final Tip: Remember, the key to all this is fostering an environment where students are motivated by their goals and supported through specific, meaningful feedback. Your first step may be simply incorporating a student reflection protocol into your classroom. To help you implement this, I’m sharing a draft letter to family members about shifting to equitable grading. It can be a big change and it’s important to communicate it well to students and families so they understand its importance. You can access that letter here. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 196 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 196. Today I want to talk about a grading mindset shift and this is inspired by my conversations with school and district teams who are shifting to more of an equitable grading system. This year, and also in conjunction with all of my coaching work with these teams, I have been reading a phenomenal book and soon on the podcast. Very soon you will get to actually listen to and learn with these three authors, mickey Evans, charity Marcella Moran and Aaron Sanchez, who have written Place-Based Learning, connecting Inquiry, community and Culture. I'll link to that book in the notes on the blog post as well, but it is amazing and it is so very much informed my understanding of this kind of common challenge in equitable grading shifts that I have encountered and making sense of kind of what to do next and what are those mindset shifts. So let's dive in to this concept. So when we are thinking about equitable grading, often we encounter or play with the idea of the kind of idealized version of grading would be going gradeless. Right, if grades just weren't a thing that we had to do, it would be so great because students could just learn and we could give them feedback and they would just love learning and all the things right. That comes up when we have this fantasy kind of named and then we say, oh, but here's. The reality is that we have a fear learners are only motivated by grades and so without the grades there is no kind of motivation internally that students are going to want to learn and actually read the feedback and all the things. So here is kind of one piece of this and I recognize that I'm excluding a lot of other pieces and dynamics, but the one I really want to get right down to is that you, as an adult human being who is listening to this podcast or reading the transcript of this podcast at this moment, is that you are not purely motivated by grades, right. You live in a world now beyond, unless you're in grad school and many grad schools don't even do grades, right. You live in a world now beyond unless you're in grad school, and many grad schools don't even do grades, right. You're not just doing things for a grade, and even if you are in grad school and have grades there, I would argue that you're not just there for the grade, right. So think of adult pursuits and I like to use art here, because I think those are often easier to divorce from, kind of the academic sphere, of course. Think of whatever it is that is interesting to you and you are excited to learn about. But think about painting, knitting, learning to play an instrument, like some sort of pursuit that you have invested time to learn right and you are making progress in right. What are you motivated by? I'm going to guess you are motivated by very specific feedback. So, for example, if I'm learning to paint, I don't want my teacher or my art tutor or whatever to tell me oh, this is an A painting, this is a C painting. That's not helpful information Because, first of all, what does that even mean? And, second of all, that doesn't help me get better. I don't have a better sense of my artistic ability or where I need to go. Next, if an art tutor said to me you know what your shading needs, work here and here's how to do it better. Watch me do this right or try this technique, that is helpful. I have a focused area of feedback. I'm working just on my shading. I'm not thinking about color or balance on the page or whatever else. I'm not an art teacher, as you could probably tell. But right. There's all these other components that I'm not focused on. I'm focused on one thing. I get very specific feedback. Here's what element of my shading needs work, and I have either a model, kind of think aloud whatever instruction, a path forward for how to do it better, right? So I have narrowed specific feedback. It is qualitative, it's about this specific thing. It's not an A or a B globally, and here is how to do it better. Here's my next step. I mean, people pay for access to coaching outside of the realm of academics, right. People pay for guitar lessons, for dancing lessons. As a parent, I am like eager to pay money to someone to help me be better as a parent, right, parenting coaches are a big thing. So I think about all of these adult pursuits that we have, right, where specific feedback, specific focused feedback with a next step attached, is really what motivates us and not that external grade. Now, again, I know there's other components that I'm kind of ignoring for the purpose of this one episode, but stay with me here. When we are thinking about our classroom culture or even our broader school culture, I think pedagogy really is going to help you support this shift and an intentional kind of thought about what pedagogies we have in place and what we can expand or do more of or do differently. That's going to help support this idea and this intrinsic motivation that we know is in students. Right, it's in all of us as adults and we're going to try to bring it out more because, of course, we're kind of contending with the fact that school is often about grades. Parents often want their kids and caretakers often want their kids to have really good grades, right. So so, trying to acknowledge that and stay focused on this piece, we want to invite as much student reflection as possible as possible. So, in their book, evans, moran and Sanchez say you are able to formatively self assess because you know what you are aiming for right, and they're talking about you, right, like adult learners who are motivated to learn some form of art or something. Right, whatever you're pursuing, you know what you want to accomplish. And so, because you know what you're aiming for, you're able to say, hey, I'm not there yet, I'm going to formatively self-assess, but if you know the end goal, then you can determine if you're there yet and where along that path you are right. Some sample strategies that they suggest in their book these are new to me, so I'm going to highlight these. Of course, there are so many self-reflection strategies I've talked about many on the podcast before but here are some cool ones that I'm excited about. They suggest a whole class tuning protocol. So this would be where one student is going to share their work, a presentation, a piece of written text, and then all of the students in the class are going to give feedback. So this could take the format of a like wonder, where students are writing on sticky notes something they like, something they wonder. This could be a fishbowl format, where students in the inner circle are kind of giving feedback to the student who is presenting and the students on the outside could kind of tap in when they're ready to share feedback, or they could take notes. I mean, there's a lot of different ways you could do this Gallery walk. I love this idea where the likes and wonders are kind of written on a back of a sticky note, so it's not visible to everyone, and then the teacher when they go to a gym class or whatever, in the previews, before the students actually collect it, the teacher is going to just check them all and, of course, take any out. I'd never even thought about this. Take any out that are not productive and, of course, teach students along the way. You know I've noticed some of these were not productive. Here's the better way to give feedback right. Of course, you can do many lessons on how to provide good feedback, but then what's super cool is when the student receives all the sticky notes about their work, all the feedback, they're going to sort it into categories, so they're still doing their own reflection. One category is I never thought of this, one category is I'll consider this, and one category is kind of I'm on the right track, like this really aligns where I thought I had to go next and so I know that I'm on the right track. And then a third option for student reflection is ongoing journaling. So this is, as the authors share, kind of a place to see potential for changes without becoming defensive, which I love, because it's hard to receive critical feedback right as adults as well as young people. So one option that they shared is not like kind of this arduous maybe it's arduous, maybe it's not, not this physical written journal where we have to collect things and just have them do what they call invisible journals or air writing, right, so they're just thinking the thing and they're kind of like writing the letters in space with their hands. Super cool, or maybe they're writing, but they do what the authors call a pre flexion they anticipate what their peers might say before they actually get the peer feedback. So, again, they're ready, they're prepared for it. They've already kind of made that analysis themselves and now it feels like it lands a little easier, it's a little easier to take in and act on and not be defensive about. Again, thinking of that category from the gallery walks option of I'm on the right track, it's aligning, I already knew that and it's affirming Right, it feels good. The authors also know that High Tech, high, has a bunch of questions to prompt students metacognition or reflection and they kind of share these four categories. So I've adapted from this. But kind of, what did you learn about yourself at the end of a project? Or kind of, as you go through a project or a unit, what did you learn about yourself? What do you want people to notice about your work? Learn about yourself, what do you want people to notice about your work? So kind of the internal right yourself, your work, your academic skill right. What processes did you go through? So again, that learning process is important, and what would you change or revise to your actual product, to the thing that you created? So I love that idea of kind of both the balance of the internal, the final product, the processes you went through, and like what you would do different next time or what you would change or revise. I think those categories are really cool and then you can play with what's the best for your students, to kind of use for specific questions if you want to get more specific than that I also have been thinking very much about. There's another teacher who I am constantly inspired by, who is always working hard to have his students have better discussions. Gabe Weaver shout out to you you are awesome, and one of the things that we were talking about with him is he's noticing, actually, that the students who are not in kind of the advanced or honors classes are more willing to be risk takers. The advanced or honors classes are more averse to failure, like they don't want to get a wrong answer, and so in student led conversations they are worried about, you know, throwing out something that their peers wouldn't like or that the teacher wouldn't approve of. I don't know, but it is a really interesting thing that I think, to the older students get, the more they find again there's a right answer, there's a wrong answer, and school is about getting the right one. And so I think it's really important that we normalize and reduce fear of failure. Right, we normalize that failure. So one of the things that I think is super cool is that Stanford has the Stanford Resilience Project, where they actually video people in the Stanford community get up and talk about how I have failed, I have done this thing, I have failed in this big way and here's what I learned from it, here's how I have grown. So just to kind of celebrate and lean into this idea of failure, you could watch some of those videos. You could have students make their own videos. You could do something like I think one of Gabe's ideas was kind of like a failure board at the back of the room and kind of having students write down how they have failed and you know, of course, how they're growing from that failure and maybe why it was like a good failure or a good risk to take on the back wall and really celebrating those post-it notes as you accumulate them I think could be really cool. Now the other thing is in addition to the class culture and the general pedagogy of kind of risk-taking and student reflection and all these things is that your instruction, your curriculum is going to support the shift as well. Because motivation is key. And if you're not motivated, like it's just not an interesting concept that you're learning about or not an interesting project that you're engaged with, it's going to be really hard. And I know there are, you know, for us high school teachers, you know we have like a hundred plus students who are engaging with our curriculum, like it's not going to be a perfect fit for everyone. So we do want to design with that lens of co-creation with our students, so students can tap into the thing that's really cool and exciting for them, and inquiry is a big part of that. Of course that's a whole bunch of other podcast episodes, but I do want to name here that in their book Evans, moran and Sanchez talk about Ron Berger's work and Berger Rugen and Woodfin talk about. They quote them actually in their book and they say motivation is in fact the most important result of student engaged assessment. Unless students find reason and inspiration to care about learning and have hope that they can improve, excellence and high achievement will remain the domain of a select group, and so what's really cool here is this is all in their chapter on revision and revision being equitable. And so when we give students feedback, when they get peer feedback, when they self-reflect and they revise as a result of that, it actually makes your classroom more equitable and that's what we're here for in this podcast and I know you all care about that. When we have students who come in getting the quote, unquote right answers and being on track with all, they're going to continue being on track with all the skills and getting the A and not taking risks right, and that's sad for them. Right, because we want them to take risks, we want them to grow to their capacity and not just kind of maintain. But then we also want the students who come in who do not have their grade level skills present at the moment right, they have been underserved by larger societal forces, by our schooling. That is often inequitable, and we want those students to be super engaged, to care about learning, to, in their words, have hope that they can improve so that they do improve. Right, they get that feedback, they apply that feedback, they're excited about the thing and they're going to grow leaps and bounds because that motivation is intact, and so when we think about what is going to make students excited, I love this book that I'm going to come back to by Ebbets, moran and Sanchez, because it is about place-based learning. It is about being in community, in where they live. They specifically have a section in the book on purpose-driven inquiry, and I want to talk about purpose-driven inquiry here because I think it really summarizes the key pieces of curriculum design and implementation that I have always loved and found most motivating to my students. I've talked before on the podcast of how I was given in my second year of teaching. Oh my gosh, there's so much I would change about my second year of teaching, but my second year of teaching I was given an opportunity to teach students an elective class, and I was given specifically the task of designing an elective class that would serve all of the students who were basically failing in their other classes, and so I was eager to do that because these are the students that I absolutely adore, and so many of them were my students with IEP. And so I was eager to do that because these are like the students that I absolutely adore, and so many of them were my students with IEPs. I was a special education teacher and I also had a few general education students who had like attendance struggles and different things, but got to design a kind of intersectional feminism course and my goodness, those students rocked it Like they did stuff that when I've taught at the college level like my college students struggled to do, it was like on par with college level work. And these are ninth through 12th graders who have historically been failing their traditional classes and you know why? It's because we were learning in a way where they got to co-construct the product. They got to co-construct the day-to-day discussions. They got to bring their brilliance and their ideas. They got to talk about things that were relevant to them. And so what the authors talk about here around purpose-driven inquiry is that when we have students ask questions or we have, you know teachers, sometimes as teachers we are getting nervous about you know the why are we learning? Learning this question or how is this relevant to my life question, like those questions don't even come up and if they do, they're super easy to answer when we design with purpose driven inquiry in mind, so let me define that for you. So Evans, moran and Sanchez define this as purpose driven inquiry is student driven, goes beyond research alone and includes interviewing, consulting experts, conducting surveys, undertaking field studies and collecting data, distinguishing between ideas and innovations that will have a positive social, ecological and political effect and those that won't. In the last point of that quote, they reference Pister and colleagues from a publication in 2023. And so I just I love so much about this. I love the idea. It reminds me a lot of YPAR or Youth Participatory Action Research. In the going beyond the research of like reading other texts and theories. It's beyond the theorizing to the local community. Right, we're interviewing, we are consulting experts in our community which, of course, also also are going to feel connected to our school, because now community members are like, oh, this is cool, kids are doing this, family members are brought into the conversation, students ultimately engage in kind of an action project at the end where we're bettering our community based on what the students and the community members think is the best way forward. And all of that is based in evidence, qualitative and quantitative, of the vast array of evidence they have at their disposal. When students are talking about social issues, they are passionate, they care, they are very much invested because this affects their day-to-day lives and, again, that co-construction of what we're focusing on and what we're doing about it is just the best motivator I have ever seen for students and, you know, for me as well as a teacher and as a learner. The other piece of this quote that I love at the end, where they talk about, right, there are some ideas that are cool but they don't actually have positive impacts on, like, society, the ecology, politics and the local kind of way we have access to power, and then there are those that do, and I've always gravitated towards the latter right. I've always gravitated towards the thing that's going to positively impact our community socially, ecologically and politically, and this quote just kind of summarizes it all up and gives it a name purpose-driven inquiry. And so this is the thing that I want us to design with. I want, of course, us to have a reflective culture where students are engaging consistently in peer and self-reflection. I want us to normalize failure and lean into it and notice that this is how we grow. But I also want us to have students that are motivated, so that it's not a struggle to kind of buy their motivation or acquire their motivation. We're just designing with a co-creation lens and we're designing around social issues leading to community engagement, interviewing, skills, interaction that leads to action. That's going to better the community because that's going to get you the motivation without the struggle right. Students are going to be more invested from the get-go if that's the curriculum. So all of this to say is that, if you are worried that learners are only motivated by grades, there's a few things we can do right. We can try developing a unit based on purpose-driven inquiry, and there's a lot we can do to support you in this, of course, reach out to me. We're going to have an episode on place-based learning and the projects you can design from those authors of this brilliant book I've cited so much in today's episode. There are other episodes on this podcast. Go back into the backlog and check those out around designing, around purpose, and the other thing you want to do is, if that feels like too large of a shift, I encourage you to start with a student reflection protocol. Use one from the episode today, use one you already use and just use it more often. Kind of release a little bit of that feedback from you yourself and invite students to give themselves and their peers some feedback and just see what that does to the dynamic of the class. For today's freebie, to support you in all of this, I am going to link to you a draft letter to family members about shifting to equitable grading. This can feel like a very big step, and part of the fear that I've seen a lot of teachers and teacher teams have at various schools that I've worked with this year is like how do we communicate this well to students and families in a way where they're not gonna be like what on earth are you doing and I don't understand this and what? That is all very understandable, and I have a template letter that will help you get started, so feel free to use it, to edit it and personalize it and then use it, and so all of that's going to be available at our blog post for today's episode lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 196. I'm so excited for you to put all of this into action. Let me know how it goes. Best of luck until next time.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
March 2025
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