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This episode helps you get the important things done—the things that you got into this job for. We’ll talk about what batch planning is, why I love it, how I’m using it, and how it can help you too. What is batch planning? It’s doing the work you have for a specific task that you have to repeat daily or weekly in one multi-hour chunk of time. Why? You can do the work faster. (Less task switching means saving hours of time!) You then have more time to spend on the important things (i.e., curricular and instructional leadership). Instead of this time-saving awesomeness, we often spend too much time putting out fires or playing calendar jenga. Then, we feel worse because we don’t get all the things from our never-ending to-do list done. This results in us having less energy and hope for ourselves, our colleagues, our students, and our families. This approach also makes us better at naming and upholding our priorities, which results in lots of good things—results for student learning, more efficiency and productivity at work, and more joy and wellness for ourselves. How do we make it happen? Start with a clean schedule. This approach of adding to the blank schedule is way easier to prioritize the important things rather than taking things off of your existing schedule. If you run out of time, we have to let go of the less important things. Coach and podcaster, Neill Williams encourages her clients to the question: “If I only had this much time, what would I do or prioritize?” This forced constraint of limiting how much time you have to do something—for a specific task or the total hours of your work week—forces you to prioritize and be efficient. Determine the tasks to batch. What are the 3 big tasks you repeat regularly (i.e., each week?) Coaching teachers? Engaging in professional learning for myself? Planning structures and PD opportunities for my staff? These can be tasks that require you to create something on your computer or activities that you want to be fully immersed in and not available for people to interrupt you. Schedule the batching tasks. Find a minimum of 90 minutes each day to allocate to a task that you will batch. You can schedule two batching sessions per day, but more than that may be unrealistic. Create a schedule that feels doable, but be honest with yourself and push yourself to find at least 90 minutes a day even if it seems too difficult. Then…don’t schedule over this time! Treat it like a meeting. Schedule wellness. Add “tasks” to your schedule like mental breaks, lunch, peace and quiet, and/or movement. If you’re like me, you may work through lunch to get a task done and then feel completely depleted and grumpy the rest of the day because you went 8 hours without eating anything. Put all incoming tasks in your calendar. Any tasks that come in—often, these come in via email—schedule the task in your calendar based on the estimated time it will take. I like this approach instead of adding it to a to-do list that only grows because it’s the forced constraint principle again. You only have a finite amount of time, so you need to ask yourself if it’s worth taking up space on the calendar. If not, you may decide to delegate it or you may decide it doesn’t actually need to be done at all. Final Thoughts In the last few months, I decided to reschedule all of my weekly tasks to one day per month. Instead of making one YouTube video for my YouTube channel each week, I now take one Monday per month and batch record all 4-5 videos that day. Then, I’m done with my video recording until the following month. Another great use for batching: You can coach teachers to use batching to plan more efficiently. Help your teachers break down their planning process and tasks. Then, help them use each of their planning periods for one type of task. Teachers lose so much time on switching tasks! This is also a reason to give teachers back to back planning periods whenever possible. If you’re ready to start creating your new batching schedule, grab my Batched Schedule Template. For more planning tips, you can also check out my 3-page Planner Preview for Leaders. The podcast episode on which Neill Williams was talking about forced constraints is here. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 108 the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript here. Quotes:
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About 30 high school students at the 6th Annual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Summit hosted by MIAA/MSAA created their own podcasts during a one-hour breakout session. This episode showcases their voices. Student Groups Discuss… Gentrification Creating Inclusive Sports Communities Unified Sports Programs “True Intentions” Misconceptions of Teenagers Gendered Issues at School (and Student Activism) Racism at School “Accepting” Others (with a focus on LGBTQ athletes) Perspective Lack of Representation in School Note: These topics are in order of how they appear in this podcast episode. Stay Connected You can follow the MIAA and MSAA organizations, which put on this event on Twitter. You can also listen to the podcast of one of these brilliant students (she was in the last segment), The Shy Girl Speaks. To help you bring podcasting to your students, I’m sharing my slide deck from the conference breakout session with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 107 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript here. Quotes:
Interested in making a student podcast your summative assessment as a civic action project? Check out this new video where I share the top takeaways from DESE's 80-page document on the Civic Project requirements...in just 5 minutes:
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The term “coaching intensive” is uncommon in the educational professional development space. So, in this episode, I’m sharing what it is, why it’s better than standard workshops, and how you can implement intensives in your school or district.
What is an intensive? An intensive is the name I use for any full day workshop that is hyper-focused on creating a usable product by the end of the day(s). It’s kind of like a “design sprint,” which is a term used in the tech world. It’s different from your typical workshop because there’s less talking at you and more building with you. And there's a finished ready-to-use product at the end! Why intensives? Reality: We often don’t implement PD because it requires additional time within our typical work day, which we typically don’t have. Brain Science: We lose hours switching tasks. We want to create the space for teachers to get into the task and a productive and joyful state of flow. Practical: Intensives make changes in practice more likely to be implemented! How? Make space for it. Set aside a whole day for teacher teams to work on an intensive task together. This requires creative allocation of funds (e.g., for substitutes). You may want to use your existing Professional Development days for this purpose. Get creative with ways to make this possible. (More ideas in the episode!) Specify what you’re creating. By the end of the intensive, what will participants have created? Consider what tasks are the highest leverage creation tasks. My top choices are: a shared protocol bank and unit arc, priority standards and a department-wide rubric, driving questions and projects for units, and lesson-level unit creation. Develop the process. Refine as you go and get feedback. Tip: Invite an enthusiastic team to try it out first and give you honest feedback. Then, refine the process based on teams’ feedback. You can reuse the task-specific process with all teams, each year (or each time they will need to create a similar product). For example, my Curriculum Boot Camp program has a clear step-by-step process for creating a new unit. Bonus: Once a team has gone through the process for one unit, the next unit is much faster to design. Final Tips If it’s impossible to do a full day, treat each week’s team time as one hour of a 5-hour intensive. If you do this, make sure the team has nothing else but the focus task to work on for 5 weeks in a row. It would also be helpful to create an online training course with videos and templates that gives teams the most essential need-to-know information and support in bite-sized pieces so they can continue to create each week. (Taking my own advice, I recently re-designed my self-paced Curriculum Boot Camp online course for department teams to be able to use it in this way!) If you are hiring an external consultant, co-create or clarify with the facilitator what the ready-to-implement products participants will create by the end of the time with them. Want to facilitate an intensive for your staff and need an agenda template? Get my Intensive Agenda Template here. If you’re stuck on how to make the time for intensives, grab my Make Time Quick Guide for Leaders. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 106 the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT Educational justice coach Lindsey Lyons, and here on the time for Teacher Ship podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings. If you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nursing out about co creating curriculum students, I made this show for you. Here we go In episode 106 of the time for teacher ship podcast, we are talking about a mindset shift in this. We're talking about coaching intensive versus your typical run of the mill workshop. Get excited. This is a good one. So your typical run of the mill workshop differs from what I call a coaching intensive. Lots of people don't use the term coaching intensive. So I'm going to define it for you first here and then I want to take you through what it actually is, why it's valuable and how you can implement this at your school. 00:01:09 Here we go. And intensive is the name I use for any full day workshop that is hyper focused on creating a usable product by the end of the day. Or if it's a multi day series of intensive, multiple days, it's kind of like a design sprint, which is a term I think that's used in the tech world. So you're kind of sprinting and doing this intensive design where you're hyper focused on the product they're creating by the end of it. So it's not something you have to create after a workshop ends. And it's different from your typical workshop because there's a kind of building with that happens when the coaches there versus kind of I'm going to talk at you and then later on your own, you're gonna figure out time in your typical school day in your typical week that you're going to actually put something together, create based on what I told you and then implement if we're lucky, right? So in this one, there's less talking at more building with and there's a finished ready to use product at the end. 00:02:13 So again, the hallmarks of an intensive are that we have a full day of focus and the focus is actually on creating something something that is ready to implement. As soon as teachers kind of walk away from that or leaders, right? If you're doing a p for leaders, as you walk away from this intensive, you're ready to put something into practice like the next day, It is ready to go. So that's what an intensive is. There's a finished product, there's hyper focused time, typically 1-2 days. Those are the hallmarks. Now, why would we use this? I know workshops are a very common kind of like 1-2 hour workshops are a very common type of PDF. There may be reasons for this financial time constraints. I understand that. But what I want to say is here is the value of the coaching intensive. And then can we prioritize and work through some of the other things to make sure we get that awesomeness, right? All the things that come with that coaching intensive. How do we get there if we're committed to, if we see the value in it? So my job in the next five minutes is to get a deal with the value of it. 00:03:17 So really what happens in a typical P D? And I've facilitated so many of these, so many workshops. I have been a participant in these workshops. I've seen colleagues participate in these workshops. What we often see is we go to this P D even if it's a great pp, we tell our friends about it. It was great. It was the best PD we've had many times. If we're not creating in the session itself, we don't actually implement what we learned even if we learned awesome things because it requires time within our typical work day after the fact. And so we have no set aside time for actually implementing it. We don't actually create a usable, ready to make, ready to use product in our actual workshop. And so they're in lives where we often talk about the joke of, you know, the binder sits on the shelf for years later, right? And so we get all the information, maybe it's great, maybe it's an engaging presenter, but we don't actually implement. And so what was really the value of it? Also brain science tells us that when we switch tasks, right, there's so many different tasks that as educators, as leaders that we have to do when we switch back and forth, like we constantly do, we are actually wasting time. 00:04:28 We're wasting mental energy on the switching, there's a switching cost and when we are able to actually get into the task, we are able to eliminate the other tasks that are constantly distracting us and forcing us to switch to them. And back again, we're giving teachers space and giving leaders space in these intensive to get into a flow state, right? Takes me high talks about the flow state, right? You can't get into a flow state if you're constantly being distracted and called away and kind of moving back and forth in and out of a task. That's how you lose hours of your day by just switching, switching, switching. So there's a lot of minor strategies of how to do this. I'll talk about a few. But really the goal is that an intensive creates the space, creates the container for a focused time where there aren't those distractions. And you can really enable educators to get into a state of flow. It is making that time more impactful. So something that may have taken a week to do or like 40 hours to do is now possible to do in maybe 10 hours because that's all we're focused, on. 00:05:37 right? When we also look at the practical side of things, we hire people to come in and do workshops, I'm often one of those people, right? Like so speaking from multiple ends of this, as leaders, we want people to do the thing, right? So if we're talking about things, even as facilitators of these short workshops, we want educators and leaders to go out and actually implement. If there is not a creative task that participants in a workshop are doing within that workshop. And to be very honest, there's very little that we can do that's going to make huge strides in terms of implementation in a 90 minute or two hour workshop. Honestly, those are more kind of really short clips of information that might be high leverage in terms of shifting, maybe a mindset shift, it's really gonna shift practice because we start thinking differently. But then we still need the concrete practical pieces where we apply that mindset into our practice. 00:06:40 And if we don't have that creative piece that we can do live while we're learning immediately apply it, it's likely not going to get implemented. So when we have this intensive space, we're actively applying it. Think about when we ask teachers to teach to students, we often talk about an application activity, right? That's part of a typical lesson. That's part of a typical arc of a unit. We ask them to like figure out a way to apply pretty immediately, right? And also something that is sustainable. Something that is long term, we might be working on a project or something where every day we kind of contribute to that project. What we learned today goes right in. So there is a clear meaningful forward momentum, we're applying it to something we see its value. We study this concept in various contexts that application piece is very critical. So we want to see that in our professional learning spaces as well. Okay. That is my pitch for intensive. That is the why if you are sold here is how you can do this in your own school or district when you're talking about leading professional learning, how do you create space for the intensive? 00:07:47 How do you facilitate the intensive? How do you make them the most that you possibly can? So first, we have to make space for it and often this is where the barriers kind of come in and people are like, I don't have the time, I don't have the money and I hear those and I want to think creatively about how some schools are in. Some districts are able to do this because it just becomes a priority. And we've got to get creative often about how we do this. But here are some thoughts. So when we set aside a whole day or days, sometimes you can only get one day, but if you can set aside a whole day, maybe it's just one day for the entire year. As you're just getting started, you have an intensive already created, you have that container space. Some people use existing PD days or in service days, P D as in professional development, right? So you have these days that are already embedded in the calendar, often their start of the year, maybe there's one middle of the year, maybe end of the year. If you use those already, often, what we see in many schools and districts is maybe a keynote speaker coming in or maybe a handful of workshops happening and those again can be great, but they serve a very different purpose. 00:08:54 So if we want something that's implemented, all we want to make sure that it's an intensive and we can use that time To turn maybe a workshop that was already planned into an intensive, that's going to require a lot of prioritization on our part to think about what is the most important if we were going to do 3-4 workshops that day, what is the most important or does each team get to choose what's the most important? But each one becomes an intensive. Another option is to get subs for the day. Again, subs are scarce at this moment. I understand that and that you may not have the budget to be able to see that immediately. Like this is where it's coming from. You know, you're not sure like the line. I'm hoping to get people on the podcast in the future that talk about how they creatively do this. But it is possible there are many districts and schools who are doing this work. So think about how you might be able to allocate funding for subs to come in. So teachers don't have to do this outside of their work day. They don't have to come in in the summer if they don't want to, but it's actually just part of their typical day and we get some subs for that one day. 00:09:58 I also want to recommend that as you're making space for this and you're setting aside this day also set aside the day for a team. So this ensures alignment. And honestly, I think it's very, it's better work and then comes out of it when it's working in groups. So that creativity is present that peer feedback as you're working is really critical thinking about the unit creation process, which is something I do a lot with teams so much better when we can get feedback and a driving question for a unit. And then it's a good question and then the students are way more engaged. It's just so much more powerful to plan in teams anyways. I don't want to digress too much here when we enable teamwork in that setting aside a day. It also makes it possible to say, okay, well, this day, the whole staff isn't going to be out this day that we have, we're going to just have this one team. So if you are able to in schools and districts have different schedules and abilities to do this. But if you're able to invite another team member, let's say you're pulling on the science team, right? 00:11:02 So all science teachers are going to come to this intensive for the day. The 10th grade science class or 10th grade science classes could be filled potentially by other 10th grade team members. They already are familiar with the students, they teach the same students, they might be offered per session rates if there's no subs available, offer a procession rate to cover one class and you might be able to do it that way where you invite teachers who already teach the same students to sub for that class on their prep for a per session rate. Again, this is something you want to offer to teachers not demand from teachers. And that's just a creative way to do it. If subs are not available, it also probably gonna be slightly more expensive than having subs come in. But if subs aren't available, that could be one option for you. Okay. So step number one is just to make space for it. Pick the days, figure out how we get teachers classes covered or use existing PD days as possible. Then what you want to do is specify what you're creating By the end of the day, you want to choose something that is super high leverage. 00:12:04 So I'm thinking of the things that I typically do, I will do an intensive on a unit arc on like so you would actually choose the different protocols that are high leverage. You would have each department map out what a typical unit. Art looks like that way they can reuse it every time they create a unit. I do them on priority standards and rubrics. So by the end of the day, everyone has a department wide rubric that has common language and is scaffolding and backwards planned from the highest grade to the lowest grade. I do them on D Q s or driving questions and projects. So we have everybody kind of brainstormed together a driving question in a project for each teacher's class. So again, that's that collaborative kind of creative brainstorming, build out the project, link it to the rubrics for all the things. And then I also have kind of that lesson level detail of the unit building process, which is typically two days, it's hard to do in one day. If you haven't done it before the second unit you create after you use the process the first time, I think you can do it in one day. But those are the types of things that are super high leverage. 00:13:06 Because if you create a unit arc as a department, there's alignment, students are benefiting, teachers are benefiting. I've talked about this in other episodes. So you can see more in that in other places or hear more about that. But you get to reuse every single time you make a unit. If you're focused on priority standards and rubrics, every single time you give an assessment, you get to use that rubric, you get that alignment grades grade and students are familiar with that repeated rubric over and over again, they know what's to be expected of them super high leverage. So figure out what it is that teachers are actually creating by the end of the day and choose something high leverage the next piece. So we're gonna make space for it. We're going to specify what they're creating by the end, then we're going to invest time in the process. So as leaders as facilitators of this work, we want to make sure that the process they're going through is efficient, we're not giving too much information, we're giving just enough information. And if there's a hiccup or a challenge. 00:14:06 We're kind of refining us. We're going, so we're getting feedback from the participants were making it better and better. Each time we're going to have like a really excited team go first. A really forgiving team go first. A really honest team, go first so they can give us some feedback on the next department that goes and does this process on their day for an intensive is going to just have a much smoother time because maybe we created a template or something that didn't exist for the first team, but we realized it needed to exist because the first team told us it would have been helpful to have this Google doc where we can just kind of fill in this. So invest time in the process, you're going to refine as you go, it's not going to be perfect the first time. Make sure you're asking repeatedly for feedback and encouraging and creating a space where people do feel like they can give you honest feedback and then you're going to reuse that task specific process with teams each year. So ideally, these intensive are going to be things like in my opinion, unit creations should happen fresh each year. There are different things that are happening in the world. There are different interests that are students year to year have we want to capitalize on that? 00:15:10 We want to co create with students who want to tap into what's going on in the present day to leverage that excitement and enthusiasm students can bring to the table. And when they do, honestly, it's so much easier to teach and so much more fun. So think about the tasks that are going to be repeated each year, think about the things that are high leverage and make sure the process is really good that way anyone coming in to the district, to the school that's new just happened and have this established product, product process. There we go for creating now, final tips before I let you go. If you are, I'm trying to think of situations or you're like, oh, this may not work for me. So if it's impossible to do a full day, what you can do is I encourage you to try to find it. But if you can't treat each week's team time, so ideally you're going to have each team meeting once a week for maybe an hour or something. Um Each school district is different, but I'm just approximating here if each team meets for one hour a week, think of five weeks in a row as the intensive. 00:16:15 So in an intensive intensive, I do, it's typically like a six hour day, maybe have a lunch break of an hour. That's five hours, we can get a lot done in five hours. It's not going to be the same because again, the switching costs at the beginning and the end of the session are going to maybe impact us. It's going to be a little bit harder to kind of get into the flow states. If you have 90 minute team meetings even better, you'll need fewer than five sessions. But think about how you can create a five hour intensive in as few sessions as possible. So that when you come into that meeting, you're like, all right, here's where we picked up here, we're picking up from last time. Here's where we left off and you're doing nothing else. The team has literally nothing else. That's the most important part. If this is really going to work, they can't, you know, need to talk about this student or fill out this paperwork. Any five minute task is going to continue the task switching cost and you're going to lose that focus in that flow state. Nothing else but the focus task for five weeks in a row or whatever, however many sessions it takes to add up to five hours. 00:17:19 Another thing you can do to support here is create a like I think of an online training course because that's what I have like videos and templates that gives the teams the most essential. Absolutely need to know information and support in bite sized pieces so they can continue to create each week. It will help them focus more quickly, it will give them what they need, it will chunk the task into smaller pieces. So that each week it's like, okay if I can do this one thing. I'm in a good spot. I think about this because I recently redesigned my curriculum bootcamp online course. And it just had too much in it before. It wasn't bite sized pieces. I was trying to say all the things and there were videos that were as long, I think it was like 20 minutes long and there were too many videos and there were too many templates and I was like, Okay, what does it look like? If it is just the most important thing, if the tasks are really chunked into just the most important, you know, maybe like 6-8 chunks, what does that look like? And so I completely redesigned with that in mind. I think this is going to be super helpful for department teams, for individuals even. 00:18:25 And I think you can do that same thing if you yourself or one of your coaches or something, your department heads wants to create something like this. I think it's really powerful to be able to give just like, you know, a 5 to 10 minute video at the start of each session to really draw people back in, focus their attention. Get clear on what is the active creation piece that's happening in this one meeting? And what is the information or template that they need to be able to implement? Lastly, if you're hiring an external consultant, I think it's really important to ask them or co create the ready to implement products. So ask them by the end, what are my teachers, one of the participants of the intensive, what are they going to be able to have ready that they can implement the next day? Right? Or minimally like maybe the next week? So what is the thing that they will have created by the end of their time with you? I think this is a very fair question to ask. And honestly, if you are booking a workshop because that's what is on offer from an external consultant or PD provider. I would ask if they have intensive, I would ask if they are able to lengthen the time and help talk with you, right? 00:19:34 Co create. This isn't something they've done before let them know like this is something I want for my staff. I want them to create something they can implement the next day and I want them to do it with you in the room, the virtual room, the physical room, I want you to help create a process that they can put this into action. You can answer their questions where they get stuck or help them brainstorm if needed. That is what a coach does, right? Coach lets you, I mean in the sports metaphor, right? Like you're on the field, you're on the court, like you're doing the thing and the coach is there to help you to call a couple plays to give you a framework to do your thing, right? That's what we want a coach to be. I think about these intensive coaching intensive versus a PD provider who is kind of like a speaker, right? I've heard that a lot like your booking a speaker and whether it's a keynote speech or a workshop, I think we use that language a lot because you're often being spoken at when you're participant in those workshops. And I want you to have a coaching experience where people get to do the thing. It's ready to go at the end of the session and you get all the coaching that you need in the live component. 00:20:40 So intensive. I love them. I think they're awesome. They're super high leverage. It is, I would say 100 times better to invest in 1 $5000 day with a coach or consultant versus 22 hour sessions at $2500 a pop or something. Right? I think you're going to get so much more out of pooling your resources for one day of intensive with your staff versus hiring someone to come in. And do you know one or two or two or three um PD workshops that are a couple of hours throughout the year. There is a possibility for those to be effective. And I think that requires a container that exists in your PLC meetings or your team time so that, that work can continue and you have created space for people to implement. So it is possible not writing off workshops. I do a lot of them, but I do think you need to create that container. So if you can't do intensive, that's kind of the backup. But I highly recommend intensive. Please let me know if you have questions on this. 00:21:41 This is something that I've heard from a lot of people in education is that this concept of intensive is unfamiliar. It is not something that happens outside of other spaces or certainly not in this way. I'm curious to know what you think about this questions you have, let me know, send me an email. I am so excited for you to get to this and for our freebie, I think one of the hardest challenges, the first initial hurdles I talked about is like making the time. So I have a time guide, I make time a quick guide. I think I call it for leaders to be able to find time. There's a lot of different ideas there. And I linked, I think three other resources that will give you a deeper dive into some of the strategies that you can use to find that time. That's gonna be at Lindsay dot com slash blog slash 106. Alright. Everybody see you next week. If you're leaving this episode wanting more, you're going to love my live coaching intensive curriculum, boot camp. I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. 00:22:46 We leave current events into course content and amplify, stewed invoices which skyrockets engagement and academic achievement. It energizes educators feeling burned out and it's just two days. Plus you can reuse the same process any time you create a new unit which saves time and money. If you can't wait to bring this to your staff, I'm inviting you to sign up for a 20 minute call with me. Grab a spot on my calendar at www dot Lindsey Beth Lyons dot com slash contact. Until next time leaders continue to think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast Network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better dot com slash podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode. Quotes:
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Dr. Gholnecsar Muhammad has held many roles in education from teacher to curriculum director to school board president to associate professor. She studies Black historical excellence in education, intending to reframe curriculum and instruction today. Dr. Muhammad’s books Cultivating Genius: An Equity Model for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy and Unearthing Joy are two of my favorite educational books of all time. In this episode, we talk about her latest book, Unearthing Joy! The Big Dream Our children, teachers, and communities deserve genius, justice, and joy. Defining Joy It’s more than happiness and parties. In studying what joy was for the ancestors: Happiness is more immediate. Joy is long-term, it’s sustainable. Joy is what you have when adversity continues to strike and you retain your happiness. The ancestors define joy as wellness, as healing, as abolition, as working toward a better humanity for all. Joy is the beauty, the aesthetics we recognize within ourselves and within humanity. It’s centering love and music and art in our learning experiences and our childrens’ voices. Joy is doing things as a collective. It is wide. There’s a beautiful relationship between justice and joy. Joy offers solutions and hope. We don’t get to joy if there’s no justice. Creating a culture of joy is anywhere from the way we greet students and what’s on the walls and the room’s colors, but it’s also how we make it a prominent goal, almost like a learning standard, in our curriculum and instruction. Teacher as Artist We are artists! We create from the world around us just like any other artist. We read the word, the world, and we create. Our art is our curriculum. I worked with Bisa Butler and saw how she creates. I watch my husband create music. I do the same things when I write curriculum! I get inspiration from everything. Even silly Netflix shows! I ask myself: What issues are most urgent to be taught right now? Out of all of the things, what must I teach? Sometimes I start with a text I read. Sometimes a learning standard. Sometimes a theme or concept. I try to create and design around our social times and what our children need today. A metaphor for cultivating teachers’ curricular fluency: fashion designer! We have to believe in the genius of our teachers. They’re not often given the time to do the work. Sometimes I’ll just share the model and give teachers 20 minutes to go into groups and create. The work that comes out of that is exhilarating! What I learned from that is teachers need time and space and each other to do this work. There’s joy, energy, and transformation when we collaborate. These spaces create possibilities and we hold one another accountable for teaching criticality, multiple identities, and justice. We need to give teachers more time. We still do education like we did in 1638 in this country. The way we schedule, train, prepare, and teach. It’s time for an overhaul. On Resistance We want to be excellent, we don’t want to be okay or basic. In response to resistance, I always respond with love. For the most part, people are against this work because they don’t know or they’re afraid. This is not new work. Black Americans have been doing this work since the 1800s. We have to build our capacity. Get uncomfortable. Lose our egos. Stop being so mean. Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz says this requires an archeological dig of the self. It starts with critical love and critical humility. Step back and listen, learn, and heal. We shouldn’t hire educators who don’t have a record of anti-racism. Hire people who are ready and prepared or at least willing to do this work. Then we don’t have to keep fighting folx who don’t want humanizing practices. One Step to Get Started Don’t just wait for something to pop up on the news. Do your work. Read. Be a scholar of education. Engage with multimodal texts (like podcasts!) and don’t rely on just one person for information. Also, use multimodal texts with students. For a joyful experience, dig into Unearthing Joy. There are songs, artwork, poetry, and coloring book pages. Stay Connected You can find this week’s guest on @GholdyM on Twitter and Instagram. To help you start building your curriculum designing capacity, I’m sharing my Curriculum Boot Camp Planner with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 105 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT Today's guest is so exciting. One of my educational and curriculum writing heroes, Dr Gholnecsar Muhammad. She is an associate professor of literacy, language and culture at the University of Illinois and Chicago. She has previously served as a classroom teacher literacy specialist school district administrator, curriculum director and school board president. She has done it all. She studies black historical excellence in education intending to reframe curriculum and instruction. Today, Dr Muhammad scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals and books. She's also received numerous national awards and the author of the bestselling book, Cultivating Genius and Equity Model for culturally and historically, responsive literacy. If you have not read this yet, you have to. It is one of my favorite educational books of all time. She also co authored Black girls literacy is an edited volume. Her cultural and historically responsive education model has been adopted across thousands of U S schools and districts across Canada. In 2022 she was named among the top 1% edgy scholar, public influencers due to her impact on policy and practice. She has also received new international organizations and universities. 00:01:02 She was named the American Educational Research Association division K early career award and the 2021 N C T E outstanding elementary educator in the English language Arts. She has led a federal grant with the U S Department of Education to city culturally and historically responsive literacy in stem classrooms. Amazing her forthcoming book which is out now as of the release of this episode. It is again, amazing unearthing joy. It's the sequel to Cultivating Genius. It provides a practical guide for putting culturally and historically responsive education into curricular practice and that is what we are diving in today. Get excited for an amazing conversation. I'm educational justice coach Lindsay Lyons. And here on the time for Teacher Ship podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal, assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nursing out about co creating curriculum with students. 00:02:16 I made this show for you. Here we go, Dr Gholnecsar Muhammad. Welcome to the Time for a Teacher Ship podcast. Thank you, Lindsay. I'm so happy to be here. Oh, my gosh. I am so happy to have you and I would love to just hear. Is there anything you want to share with us at the very front of the conversation to kind of frame what we're going to talk about today. We're gonna talk a lot about your book. And I think Joy, anything you want people to keep in mind as we have that conversation. Well, I just think that like, these ideals of like genius and joy are like crime topics, um, and justice. So, you know, we have been in like, dire need of these things across time and education. Um genius justice and joy. And so I know those words are gonna come up a lot as we talk and just know that like our Children, our communities deserve all three. Um And so, so does our teachers, right, our teachers deserve for their joy to be centered, for their genius to be recognized and acknowledged and for justice centered classrooms. 00:03:28 So that's what I'll say as we get started. I love that so much and, and actually I wanted to, I just finished everything during this morning. So I'm really excited to dive in and I wanted to just say this has been such a joy to experience as a book. So everyone who has not already purchased this book needs to go get it because there are so many multimodal texts as you talk about that. It's just like a display of what is possible just within the book. And I've colored, I've listened to music. It's beauty. So you had the full experience of the book that means so much to me. So, thank you. I mean, that's such great feedback. You know, when you love something and then you, you love it so much and you want to offer it to the world and you just like, hope they love it and an ounce of what you do. So thank you. Absolutely. And I think part of that is kind of what I want to talk about today is the first thing I wanted to find for people is like, what is joy? Because I, I think it seems like there sometimes when I talk to educators in my own work, there's kind of this misconception. 00:04:30 When I talk about this concept of joy, of what joy really is versus kind of what we think about or is kind of like the surface level version of it. Like your depth of definition is just far surpassing what I think a lot of people think it is. So I want to know if you would speak to some of that language you use. Yeah. So in my work, I define joy. It's more than just like having fun happiness, celebration parties, you know, that is joy that can be considered as related to joy. But I wanted to know what was joy for the ancestors. And so when I asked that question, I found that they had more expanded notions of what is joy. Joy was also wasn't just happiness, but it was like, a sustained happiness. If you think of happiness as like more immediate and think of joy as more like long term joy is what you have when adversity continues to strike and you retain your happiness, right? 00:05:37 It's like something that is very sustainable. They define joy as like wellness, as healing, as abolition, as working toward a better humanity. For all joy was the beauty, the aesthetics that we were able to learn and recognize within ourselves and, and within humanity. Um It was when we sent her love and music and art in our learning experiences and our children's voice enjoy is when we brought each other together and did things in a collective as opposed to individualism and competition and things like that. So joy was like all these things, it was like recognizing benefits and how we can make the world a better place and, and all the things that are good, beneficial and beautiful in the world. So it is, it is wide, I break that down in a shorter way in the book where I offer, you know, these ancestral joys um to readers so that they can go beyond just, you know, these more simplistic ways of looking at joy. 00:06:49 Yeah. And that, that definition is so expensive and I love that you cite all of these different passages and things from the ancestors. And, and I think one of the things that that was really helpful for me was you said you know, in the book, a balance of criticality enjoy is essential. So that kind of pairing of joy and justice and, and I think you also had passed ability is joy. And I think about that from the lens of a, you know, curriculum design and instructional coaching and, and thinking about what that looks like when we ask students to not just learn about oppression um and have this kind of criticality, but that, that we are enabling students as well. We're providing those opportunities for them to step into that leadership role, that activist role um that like creating a better possibility, role in their own communities. And I know you work with so many teachers where you get to see that in their lesson plans and in their unit plans. Um Is there anything you wanted to, to speak to you on that piece of what it looks like for students to engage in the side? Well, you're absolutely right. You know, there is a beautiful relationship between criticality and joy and it felt like from writing, cultivating genius, I needed to balance out the model because if criticality is this pursuit of helping Children to name understand disrupt oppression, how then can we balance it out with what is good in the world, with the solutions with the hope? 00:08:11 That's what joy offers. And we don't get to joy if there's no justice, right? If there is constant pain in the world, and people don't feel safe, don't feel empowered, don't feel happy. You know, how can we, how can we have complete and full joy? So there is that relationship and what I'm advising for educators is creating joy and a culture, a classroom of joy is anywhere from how we greet students, how we talk to them, what's on the walls, how they feel when they walk in is their color. I mean, it's like those aesthetic and simplistic things, but then it's also how we make it a more um prominent goal, like, like almost like a learning standard within our curriculum and instruction. I love that the idea of that as a learning standard, right? And, and I love that your frame of the five pursuits as a way to you share so many of these in both books really of, of how educators have taken it and, and mapped out an entire unit or a lesson with that framework with the five pursuits kind of housing it all in kind of like just half a pager, you know, and, and it's beautiful to think about that as the starting point, like we're going to design with criticality in mind. 00:09:30 Um And I think what I really love about this is the idea of teachers, artists, right? In the artistry that is required for doing that. And so I'm just curious about your process. I know you spoke to the joy that it brings you when you think about curriculum design and engage in that work. Where do you start when you think about designing units for joy? Like, what's your process in coming to think about the joy in, in any topic? Is it kind of natural? Do you kind of think about art first? I'm just wondering if we can help people who are unfamiliar with this way of planning. Think through how they might go about it. Well, in my heart and mind and who I am. And so many of the teachers I work with, we are artists we create from the world around us. Just like any other visual creative artists would do musical artists, we read the word, we read the world and we create. Our art is our curriculum is our lesson plans is our unit plans. And I do understand that some so many schools, they just follow more prescriptive lessons and units, they don't create their own. 00:10:38 And for the most part, teachers are either they're adapting those, right? And that still takes some artistry to adapt. So teacher, I, I started to see myself as a as an artist because my curriculum felt like artwork, the ways in which I would piece together lesson plans to tell these beautiful and rich stories that I felt my students needed to learn. And then um over the years, I had the opportunity to work with artists. Um One particular artist is Visa butler and I got to see her process and learn about her process um of how she creates. And I said that's what I feel like when I create curriculum or, you know, my husband's and artists and I watch his process of creation and writing lyrics and producing and all these things. And I'm like, that's what I do when I write lesson plans is different, but it's the same. And so my process of design is first like studying the world around me and reading again, books and articles and watching film. 00:11:42 And I get inspiration from everything. Even some of the Silliest Netflix shows that I just watch to take my mind off of things. But I'm like, oh, that's an idea for a lesson plan. And then um I asked myself what issues are most urgent to be told right now and, and out of all the things in the world, what must I teach? I really start with that question and sometimes I start when I am teaching Children, sometimes I start with a really great text that I've read. Um like I taught, I, I wrote a lesson recently on your name as a song and I love that book. And I'm like, I gotta teach a lesson around this. Sometimes I start with the learning standard of what Children need. And sometimes I just start with like a theme or a concept that I feel like Children really need to understand. But I try to make my curriculum not only responsive to the identities uh and the needs of students, but also to the social times we're living in. So I try to say like what words define our social times and it can be divisive, it can be pain, it can be words related to like oppression, but it's also words related to like hope, togetherness and so whatever it is, I try to create and design around our social times and what our Children need today. 00:13:09 I love that you talk about that here. And then also in the book, I think that idea of connecting artistry to that response to social times and then the legacy that we leave and the impact that that as is such a profound way of thinking about what we do as, as educators. And also just the the long term longstanding importance of our work. And I think we talked about that sometimes and you know, like, oh, we remember that teacher and how they made us feel or, but it's so much deeper than that, right? It's so much of like, what are you, what are you learning in? What ways are? I think you used the phrase in, in a lot of the questions you have for teachers to ask themselves or even to ask students. Oh my gosh, you guys listeners that are so much good stuff in this book. But like, yeah, of course, the list of questions that families can ask students or teachers can ask students post unit. Like how did this help you write, this idea of this should always be in service of students, everything we do should be helping them and, and see the immediate relevance of how does it help you today? 00:14:11 Not in some distant future. And I just think that that is just so beautiful. So thank you for putting that in there. Thank you for saying all of those things. Absolutely. It is, it is a profound piece of piece of art that you've created. And, and I think one of the things that I so connected with, just like I was like, oh my gosh, she is like speaking to my heart right now is when you were talking about how you have to have a personal goal of kind of cultivating teachers fluency in developing curriculum. Yeah. And I just love that you named several examples of how you would do that with teachers, find an object in front of you, create a unit or lesson around it. And so I love this. I wonder if you can speak a little bit more to that or any of the other strategies that you found effective in doing that work of like cultivating that curricular fluency. I'm about ready to go on a book tour with you. I would love to. Yes. So, you know, I was trained um like to as a reading specialist to teach Children how to read. 00:15:13 And you know, we are trained to like teach about you know, phonics, pandemic awareness, decoding, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency. And I learned in my program as an undergrad to, like, fluency is helping Children to read, um, like quickly, but at a nice pace with automaticity and they can look at a word and read it quickly. They don't pause. Right. And I, I started to say, well, what happens if we apply that same definition to writing a lesson plan, you know? Certainly. Um, And in the book, I talk about the artists as like fashion designers who so things and the more you become skilled at sewing, you can sew quicker, you know, like on project runway where they would have those challenges, like you have one hour for this is three days, you know, those who had the mindset and we're stronger in sewing, they sold faster. 00:16:15 And so we know that it is a gift of curricular fluency that will be developed just like with children's fluency, just like with an artist fluency. And so this is where I'm, I'm working with teachers to see anything, any object, like you said, an object in front of you and say, what curriculum could you see? What history do you see? What intellectualism do you see? What criticality, what joy, what identity do you see? And it doesn't mean everything in front of us. We have to teach, we wouldn't have enough time, but it does mean that we are ready and prepared to build, to create for our students. I love that. And I'm thinking of all the opportunities that an educator, educational leader, like a instructional coach could be a team lead principal that they would have been like a staff meeting or, or a P D to do some of these activities that might only take 10 minutes right to pick an object in front of you and think about a unit. Um I'm wondering if there are examples of leaders who have done this kind of thing? 00:17:16 Well, I guess this kind of thing is, is big but like, you know, made the space um given space and, and dedicated time and also funding to teachers to be able to kind of do this work. Well, is there anything that you would, I know you suggest a lot in the book? Is there anything that you would either emphasize from what you wrote or expand upon here? Yeah, I mean, there are lots of teachers first, we gotta believe in are the genius of our teachers. Our teachers are special, they know stuff and it's not like they can't do certain things. They just don't have the time to do it. And so, you know, I, I get to work with a lot of teachers and I like, give them a nice snapshot. Sometimes it's 90 minutes an hour or two hours. Sometimes I'll just like explain the model, show them examples and then immediately after that, They'll go together like in small groups and I'll say now create, you have 20 minutes because that's all the time we have left or something. 00:18:19 And the work that comes out of that is like exhilarating. It is phenomenal. They are, they beautifully create things that I could have never done by myself that maybe they could have never done by themselves. So what I learned from that is that they need time and space and each other to create because we can't always create. And there's some joy and some energy when I'm creating something with colleagues, as opposed to by myself, there's there's transformation when we have collaboration, transformation does not happen a lot by oneself. Um And you're talking about a model, you know, teaching across these five pursuits of identity, skills, intellect, criticality and joy. That's a bit of a departure from what we have been currently. Um like policy has currently been pushing the schools. We have largely been pushing skills only instruction. And so for, for teachers to be so brilliant to show up to do that work in such a short amount of time after they've been conditioned and been practicing typically skills only instruction. 00:19:30 I mean, that is just mind blowing the work that they can do. So those things I have found to be really strong for leaders to just give teachers time and this is not a new concept, right, Lindsay, we've been calling for more time, But maybe just maybe it's time to restructure education in the United States, we still do education like we did in 1638 in this country. The way we schedule the way we train and prepare in the way we teach. I think it's time for a bit of an overhaul. Oh my gosh, could not agree more. Yes. Yes. To all the things. And in that time piece and I often forget that collaboration piece that is huge because even when I would create as a teacher, I would create this really cool unit. And I have this beautiful driving question and then I would just be sitting in a room by myself just eking out about it and be like this is so cool and just wishing that I had someone else that also thought it was so cool and it might be the teacher next door, but the teacher next door is teaching because you're planning during the school day or you're at home on your couch. 00:20:36 You know, there's so much of that space that has, that holds so much potential when we can bring everyone in and just say the only thing you have to do right now is to create beautiful things and be an artist, right? You don't have to do all this other stuff. Yeah. And maybe it will, you know what else it does. It those people who did not want criticality or very were very uncomfortable with like teaching about different people's cultures, like black people, L G B T Q culture, gender cultures and or people who just did not want to teach about justice or thought it, it's impossible. Those those spaces create possibilities and hope we hold each other accountable in those spaces. So for somebody who is can be very hateful or can be very like neglectful of certain people and cultures, like we hold each other accountable for thinking very differently. Hopefully shifting what's in our hearts. That is such an excellent point. 00:21:39 And it, and it brings me to kind of this, this next part of the book that I wanted to talk about, which is you have this whole section on addressing resistance. Um And thinking about you have beautiful questions that just are, I think an amaze Using resource for educators to look through. How would you respond? What are the questions that you ask um with truth and love? I think you say, you know, asking these questions and engaging in this conversation, but really to get at the root of the resistance and then try to educate is, is what you would refer to. And, and I think there's, there's so much that you have already said that speaks to this, right? The 5% are more advanced than the skills only education like this is better for all Children. Um and I'm I'm very aware of the teachers and the departments who for whatever reason, overwhelmed fear, not knowing a lot. There is a tendency to do what I used to add diversity and stir. Um but I think it's called an additive type of curriculum from James Banks or like the contribution type of curriculum that you mentioned. 00:22:41 So do you mind talking to kind of like why those are actually not helpful for people who are listening and like, oh yeah, I kind of do that and why they could even be harmful to students. Well, we want to be excellent. We don't want to be okay or basic, right? So the first part of what you said, I put this, I tried to put in parts of the book that teachers kept asking me about. Um like they kept asking me like, what are the steps? What do you do when you have resistance? Every single meeting I would have with teachers, they asked me that question and so we have to build capacity, right? I I can't, I may not be in a place where I can answer all the questions. But if these questions keep coming up, let me put it in the book. So we all have access, right? In case people didn't make it to those meetings. And I wanted to include why people in my experience, why people have been resistant for culturally responsive work, black laboratory work or you know, work that includes black indigenous Children of color. 00:23:42 And I wanted to also include in the book, how do you respond? And in this response, I always start with love because even as people have been hateful towards me saying mean and threatening things to my life just for me talking about like joy and criticality and justice. Like I still do not engage. I still say, you know, like to myself, you know, I'm sorry, you don't love me but I won't, I won't go there with you and call you out your name because there's like people who just simply hate. But for the most part, people are against this work because they don't know, it's a, it's a high amount of ignorance and then they also have a lot of fear And I can say this work is new, but we have people Americans in this country, Black Americans who have been doing this work since the 1800s. And so, you know, we have to build our capacity. We have to be a bit uncomfortable if it means that we are growing and learning in ways that would be best for our Children. 00:24:48 You know, we have to lose our egos and stop being so mean. I mean, it sounds so simple but like people have been mean in some ways to me as I, as I talk about joy and it's like what's inside of you to be so mean to such a happy, beautiful person itself because I show up with joy and I show with love. So, you know, Dr Yolanda Sealey Ruiz, she says that this work calls for us to do an archaeological dig of the self. And she says it starts with two things, critical love where you love our Children and love each other in ways that you are fighting against oppression or hurt, pain and harm. And the second thing she says is critical humility, like, like, you know, like step back a little bit and listen and learn and heal. And so, you know, I, I really am pushing for those things and the work and then I'm also pushing that we don't hire folks that have, um that don't have a record of anti racism. 00:25:55 We want, we want to hire people who, who knows who's ready and prepared or at least willing to do this work. So we don't have to keep fighting folks who don't want humanity, you know, humanizing practices. Absolutely. And I think it was Dr Celia Ruiz who said on Dr Sheldon Akins podcast. Like you have to be able to put your job on the line for this work, right? Like in your book, you write about like we're accountable to students more than our bosses, right? Like this is why we do what we do, right? And this is, this is the call, this is, this is the action so beautiful. Oh my gosh, there's so much I can honestly talk to you for hours, but I know I talk to you too. I can feel your love and your spirit for this work. And I can also feel that you do your work, you listen, you don't just wait for something to pop up on the news you read. You know, that's what it means to be a scholar of education. We're not just listening to media. 00:26:58 Um, but we're also reading, we're going to uh multimedia, text and multimodal texts and primary source documents to do the work. We're not relying on one scholar or one person to tell us what something is or isn't. Yes, absolutely. Oh my gosh. I love that kind of like a call to action to you for, for listeners. Like I have just recently been playing around with and very much inspired by your work, Doctor Muhammad of this idea of like starting a unit spark at the end at the beginning of each week, just on social media or something. Like here's this really cool like podcast episode or a screenshot from a book or something that like inspired me to think about like all these unit ideas. So like, what does it inspire you to do? How would you create a unit around this really cool spark or inspiration? I think there's so much cool stuff that we could do with that. Yes. Listen, we'll probably be talking after this, of thinking ideas because once I get a co creator, a genius artist with me, I just want to create because what I've been doing now is like taking podcast like yours and having student teachers and scholars, like in my class, like, you know, like my phd students, like, read it, I mean, listen to the podcast instead of like, always just assigning books or articles. 00:28:15 But these are intellectual pieces. And how can you listen to a podcast and how does this shape, practice policy and research too? So, it's all kind of levels to it. Absolutely. Oh, my gosh, I love this. So, I think, is there anything else I want to give space to? Because I asked all the questions here. Is there anything else that we didn't talk about today that, that you would like to share? Well, you know, you, you kind of hit this early on. But you know, it was my hope that the book felt like a joyful experience. So there's, each chapter is layered with a playlist of songs and music that connects to the content of that chapter. So the meanings of the songs connect to the meanings of that chapter and they were, they're intended to be played softly in the background, hopefully choosing any like there are some songs that have like different versions, right? Like blowing in the wind. It's like one. And I'm like, oh, do I choose the Stevie Wonder Sam Cooke version? 00:29:19 So I just encourage readers to pick the versions and listen to it and see how that can add two layers of meaning. But each chapter also has artwork. Each chapter has poetry like you said, they have coloring book pages. And um you know, I start with, I start the book with inviting um extraordinary lee talented artist for real Williams to write the foreword, which was a cool experience to like see how he thinks about different forms of art from what he does and how my different forms of art from what I do, how these two combined towards this bigger idea of joy. I love that and I love that music is so central. I mean, an art is so central to all of the conversations about joy, the fat that you can literally read the book and experience those sparks, like just thinking about some of the text, the songs, the visuals that you shared, or even the activity of coloring, right? I think there's so much there that will spark a unit idea, right? 00:30:22 Or, or get us in that practice of what's right in front of you develop around it. I think that does it right? That's a practice in and of itself just reading the book. So it was a beautiful experience. Everyone should go buy that book. Absolutely. So I think everyone in addition to buying the book is going to want to, you know, follow your brilliance. I know you post so many really powerful things on like Twitter and I'm sure you're on other social media spaces around like here's what these great educators are doing. Let me highlight this, here's this unit idea, all sorts of things that, where can people find you or follow that stuff? Well, like at Goldie, M at G H O L D Y M um is my Twitter and Instagram. And yes, I'm always sharing, I mean, the things that teachers do with my model is so phenomenal like they'll take whole films like, you know, Black Panther or something, they'll create like a whole unit plan another. Um And I put a little excerpt of this in the book, another teacher did a whole play curriculum for, for early childhood. 00:31:28 Um, and um, three year olds. Uh So, yeah, I'm always sharing those things and um I also have a cultivating genius page on Facebook where we share a lot of this work too and it's just been really exciting and I think teachers have appreciated, like having their work spotlighted, like it's made them feel good. I'm like, is it okay if I share this? And they're like, oh my gosh, I would be honored, you know, like, because it's almost like they're doing a gallery of there are and like people get to engage and they've been enjoying it and then other teachers get to learn from them. Thank You so much. Oh, my gosh. I can't believe it's been 30 minutes, Dr. Muhammad. This has been an absolute joy for me. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you for having me. Wow. That conversation with Dr Muhammad was amazing. I am so excited and inspired to go ahead and develop some units. So first up, if you haven't go ahead and buy and consume and interact with her new book, unearthing Joy, it is phenomenal. 00:32:29 She is a true artist. It is an experience. You don't want to miss it. Next, once you're ready to develop your curricular practice and design units around those things in front of you Daily life, those podcasts that you listen to all that cool inspiring stuff. Go ahead and grab this episode's freebie. That's my curriculum. Bootcamp planner which is totally tied and connected to and brings in pieces from Dr Muhammad's HILL model. You can find that at www.lindsaybethlyons.com/blog/105. If you're leaving this episode wanting more, you're going to love my live coaching intensive curriculum. Bootcamp. I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. We leave current events into course content and amplify student voices which skyrockets engagement and academic achievement. It energizes educators feeling burns out and it's just two days. Plus you can reuse the same process any time you create a new unit which saves time and money. If you can't wait to bring this to your staff, I'm inviting you to sign up for a 20 minute call with me. 00:33:33 Grab a spot on my calendar at www.lindsaybethlyons.com/contact until next time. Leaders continue to think. Big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better podcast network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better dot com slash podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode. Quotes:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where I do things like walk you through how I approach student-centered, culturally sustaining unit design.
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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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