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I met today’s guests at the 2022 NCSS Conference when I attended their session on elevating and prioritizing teaching hard histories in the ELA classroom. Both curriculum specialists for the school district of Philadelphia—which includes about 250 schools—Christy primarily works with middle schools and Alison primarily works with high schools.
The Big Dream Christy’s dream is that all students can access grade level texts, and they are on the way to achieving that dream soon! In addition to Christy's dream, Alison’s dream is autonomy for students and teachers to make the best choices for their needs. Alignment to the 4 Stages: Mindset, Pedagogy, Assessment, and Content The culture of partnership seems to be in place in many places. Leaders share the vision of partnership. Sometimes it doesn’t happen in the way it’s envisioned. Paraphrasing Dr. Ibram Kendi, Christy shared that racist policies lead to individual racism, not the other way around. The hope is personal mindsets will shift when we introduce new curriculum and have honest conversations as educators wrestle with it. There is a legacy of heavy-handedness around pedagogical practices, so there is a bit of fear around having the autonomy to do things differently than they’ve been done in the past. Another tension is due to emergency certifications and the larger context of teacher training, teachers may not have been equipped with the tools they need to be culturally responsive to the needs of their students. Christy shared an analogy: We’re not trying to give people overwhelm with a bunch of dieting recommendations, we’re saying eat nourishing meals and eat a walk every day. We’re not inventing something brand new. We’re trying to take away some things that were added to teachers’ plates that were not helping teachers and students. Action Steps The simplified goal: Read good books. Talk about them. Write about them. Curriculum Created: For each unit, we share a core text and provide daily lesson guidance documents, which includes core components of a reading or writing lesson. Each unit comes with an overview, which includes Essential Questions, big ideas, and alignment to Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s HILL model (5 pursuits). Step 1. Try to align ELA novels and texts to grade-level History units and content. Step 2. Choose culturally relevant texts. Choose one canonical text and teach it critically. Step 3. Develop lesson guidance, not lesson plans. (This enables teacher autonomy and offers opportunities for personalization in response to students’ identities in each classroom.) Lesson guidance includes things like: an opening, mini lesson, shared reading, discourse, write in response to reading). Step 4. Develop a writing-based summative assessment (multimodal writing or traditional writing). Recommendations for Leaders Doing Similar Work An Approach to Implementation Challenges: Particularly in high school, teachers are often attached to the texts they’re teaching. There’s some sticky spaces around that. They’ve pushed it back to schools to determine what they were comfortable with and what their students needed with the lens of Am I just falling back on what I know? Am I pushing myself? They’ve learned to trust schools and leaders to make those decisions and honestly communicate when that’s a struggle. Being open to the conversation is critical. Not Starting From Scratch? If you’re working with existing resources, there is still room for shifts. ”We think that novel-based units are the way to go…We start with the premise that there is no wrong text to teach in a classroom. It’s how you teach it.” We have to work within our locus of control. For example, if there’s a short story with problematic messaging, relate it to the identities present in the classroom (the teacher’s and the students’ identities), and determine how to talk about the text. Positive Deviance: Parable of the Sower and Sula units were made and previously taught by teachers prior to this district-wide curriculum design work. These units were already received well, so it became part of the standard curriculum. In fact, all units were designed by teachers and coaches in the district, which helped build trust in the curriculum. Book “Home Runs” for Students: The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo and Born a Crime by Trevor Noah One Step to Get Started Shift conversations about ELA instruction to building knowledge. Books teach us about the world. What knowledge are we choosing to build? How is that built by the books we teach? Skills are very important to reading and writing, but without knowledge, they are kind of useless. There’s a lot of research on this coming out now! Stay Connected You can connect with Christy via email at [email protected]. You can find Alison on LinkedIn. You can also find the School District of Philadelphia’s secondary ELA curriculum here. To help you begin to think about leading teams to create new curriculum, 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 117 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 Welcome to episode 1 17 of the time for Teacher podcast. Today, I'm speaking with Christy Chang and Dr Alison mcmonagle. Christie is an E L A curriculum specialist with the school district of Philadelphia, specializing in the middle grades. In this role. She develops curriculum resources and professional development for teachers and school leaders at the district. Previously, she was a middle grades E L A teacher and K A E L A coach. Allison is an E L A curriculum specialist with the school district of Philadelphia, specializing in secondary literacy, particularly high school students. In this role, she develops curriculum resources and professional development for teachers and school leaders in the district. Previously, she was college professor and then a middle school and high school E L A teacher. I am so excited for this conversation. Let's get right to it. I'm educational justice coach Lindsay Lyons. And here on the time for teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula, grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning running baking, traveling and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings. 00:01:07 If you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nerd out about co creating curriculum with students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Christie and Allison. Welcome to the Time for Teacher podcast. Thank you for having us. I am so excited to get into this conversation today. I think to start us off. I would love to know what you think is important for listeners to know as we jump into this conversation. So there's kind of like the context in us meeting at N CS s and kind of the the presentations. I don't know if you want to share a little bit about that piece or, or kind of the origin of, of this project we'll be discussing but anything that feels relevant for listeners. Um Sure, Christie and myself were presenters at the National Council for Social Studies Conference in Philadelphia. We are both E L A curriculum specialists for the school district of Philadelphia. So the conference was just down the street from our office and we presented on our E L A curriculum that we are rolling out this current year that we're in right now. Um And we talked about how we wanted to elevate and prioritize hard histories within that curriculum. 00:02:17 So Lindsay, you were in our audience as we were speaking about that and then we just connected about how we wanted to continue the conversation around um these hard history. So Christy and I both work with secondary learners. Primarily Christie focuses on the 6 to 8. I focus on the 9 to 12, but we kind of moved back and forth. Just both of us talking about secondary literacy and particularly literacy for all students. But we spend most of our time talking about like E L A instruction. Anything I missed there, Christie. No, I think you did a great job. Awesome, beautiful. So I think thinking about being an audience member in that, that workshop, I was connecting with the reading that I had done by Doctor Patina Love. And she talks about freedom dreaming in this beautiful way that I always like to frame these conversations with. And I, I think there's such a connection here to what you were all working on where she describes dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. And I just love this as a sense of dreaming because dreams can be anything but when we ground them in the critique of injustice and we think about teaching hard history in an E L A context. Um I think there's so much potential to kind of describe that and talk about that and dream in that space. 00:03:22 So I'd just love to hear from you both if you want. Um You know what, what is that big dream that you hold for E L A instruction or any any interpretation of that question? I think for me, when I think about freedom dreaming for our students, like in our district, it's for them to be able to access grade level text, which sounds very not sexy. But like if they're able to do that, then they're able to develop as thinkers, not just in the classroom but beyond the classroom when uh I would say it matters even more. And so that to me is the dream. But I think that dreams kind of like, it's, it's like barely, it's like not in our grasp yet. Um And I think that for us in developing this curriculum, we kind of chipped away um a little bit of that dream. So I feel really grateful for that. Yeah, I think that makes me think about that makes me like reflect back on my time when I was a classroom teacher. 00:04:31 So when you're a classroom teacher and you're thinking about curriculum and what you're teaching to your students, particularly in the 9 to 12 or secondary space as an English teacher, you just have so much autonomy over making the right choice for the kids that are in front of you and responding to the students in front of you, responding year over year. If a new book comes out, if this, you can stop and talk about a cultural event if you want. And what I think I struggle with in this position over, I mean, I don't know how many schools we have Chris 250 something. So there's a lot of schools and in this position, you want to uplift that teacher autonomy and letting people respond to the students in front of them and respond to the world around them. But at the same time, you're tasked with sort of norm on what good instruction looks like. And so it's just this very strange tension that I kind of, I don't even think I've come to terms with yet for myself. So, but I'm thinking about freedom dreaming. It's that autonomy piece like autonomy for students, autonomy for teachers to make the best choices and like center those grade level text. 00:05:36 But what they do with those grade level tech and how they work with them reflects their needs. And so when I think about my dream for curriculum and instruction, it's really like the word autonomy comes up a lot. But that seems somehow a contrast with what my job is. Foundation. Like, it's a tricky, it's a tricky situation. I haven't made sense of. But yeah, so that like grade level tech thing, but also that autonomy to be responsive to our students because we have such a large district and we have so many different kinds of students and kinds of schools and there's not like one thing that we can all be doing, that's the one thing that will make everything get better, you know. So, yeah, that's what that's what I think about when I hear that. Yeah. And I, I love both of those responses because I think they speak to leading me into my next questions. I think often about like kind of the four pillars of, I don't know if they're pillars but things that I often talk about like buckets of, of ideas. Um And like two of those pieces. One is I, I often call it voice, but I think connected to autonomy is how do we kind of cope create, right? 00:06:38 How do we have this culture of collaboration between teacher and student and um central office or, you know, like family community, um local contact, all of the pieces so that it is truly personalized. So I, I always struggle with the kind of off the shelf curriculum like, oh yeah, as a teacher, like my joy was in creating for the students in front of me who changed every year and that contacts changed every year, the world changes every year. So how do we, how do we hold that tension? And like, like you, I think Alison, your, your point on that is like really um something something that I struggle with and I think something that, that a lot of um people in positions like this, I think a lot of listeners are instructional leaders. Um and, and thinking about that tension at the same time and then Christy to your point, I think thinking about the value of it in the world right beyond the classroom. Often, I think about what assessments we can have that are civic action projects or, you know, taking what you learn and actually applying it in some way that advances justice. Like that's a hard um lift sometimes when we're so used to write an essay, take a test, you know, what, whatever it is prep for the standardized test uh that you'll take at the end of high school or middle school or whatever. 00:07:44 So I, I think thinking about those pieces of kind of that culture of partnership, of that voice of, of student and teacher in autonomy of what is that authentic assessment and, and application to the world. And then also this piece of bringing in and centering um hard histories. And also I think I'm thinking about Dr Goldie Mohammed's work and, you know, the Hill Hill model of thinking about joy at the same time as we have criticality um and identity and all these pieces like, where do you feel like you are in all of that? Um as a, as a kind of district uh in your roles as a department. Um what feels like really strong and what feels like maybe an area that you're, you're kind of like working towards pursuing more. Um I'm gonna like, give you kind of a non answers a little bit. But so the mindset stuff, I would say, I probably spend 85% of my time thinking we have the mindset stuff down. Right. Because I'm like, up here and everyone around me has it down. 00:08:46 Or at least they know what to say to have it down. And a lot of the people I have teachers I work with and principals I work with, share those values with me and they have it down. But then you're, you have do professional developments, you go to visit schools and you're like, oh, no, we don't. Um And so that mindset and I don't even know if you can ever really get it to 100% you know, because you're talking about people, you know, and people are people, especially when you're talking about 250 plus schools full of people. Um So I would say the mindset we're doing really well with, I think we still need to continue to work. But I do think particularly with our English teachers, at least on the district level, we have made a clear shift in the way our district perceives like the function of an English classroom. Um And what kind of content should appear in an English classroom. I think we're all like, I don't know if you agree Christy, but I think we all like are in the same place for that. 00:09:48 Um ok. Um Yeah, I, I was thinking about how there's this parallel idea from one of in Aram Kendy books. So he says it much better. So, but I'm gonna like, synthesize it, this idea that like racist policies actually yielded like individual racism rather than the other way around. And so taking that kind of relationship, I think of like our curriculum as a type of policy or a type of system that we're introducing this time, hopefully for the better. And so then when we do that, then the hope is that personal mindsets will shift when they need to and that process isn't clean cut or smooth. There are gonna be times as we, as we've experienced this year where we see a type of wrestling or mindsets that are, you know, coming up on the surface that we need to address. But I think that those are really good signs actually because if we saw that it was a smooth process, then we're certainly not seeing what's actually happening in schools and, and these shifts that really need to happen, not just at the district level, but also with individual teachers in classrooms. 00:10:59 I absolutely love that idea of curriculum as policy. And so I, I just, I just want to pause and like, let that think in for listeners because that is so profound. And I also think when you think about the mindset piece that Alison you started talking about and then Chrissy, your, your addition to that I think really makes it feel to me like you do have like the, the full mindset even at all levels because my, my kind of perception of that is you have the policy or the kind of curriculum thing, which to me, in the way you're talking about is more of like a guideline and like a right, you still have that autonomy, you still have that flexibility to personalize for your class. And so we are, we're adopting the mindset of like these things are important to us as like kind of guiding pillars and please feel free to jump in and be like, no, that's not it at all what we mean. Um But that we are willing to co create and that the mindset is around working together collaboratively and honestly to co create what that looks like for our specific classrooms. I'd love to hear if that perception is lay off or if that feels no, I think I, because my next point is gonna be about the pedagogy like we, that is kind of what we're working on. 00:12:05 I would say the mindset feels more shifted again, not, not a perfect seamless shift, but it feels shifted the pedagogy. There's just such a, there's such a legacy in our school district of for whatever reason. I mean, we could speculate on it, but there was sort of like a heavy handedness coming from central office about what schools were allowed to do. And the legacy of the app runs deep like deeper than you could realize coming if you came because I did my teaching down in DC and then I moved back up um from here and I got into this position and so just like that, that tension and confusion, I'm like, what do you mean? You take 20 minutes to do a shared reading and you can't go over 20 minutes like stuff like that. And I think that legacy runs so deep that some people when we said, ok, there's some looseness here. We want you to make the best decisions. Um We want you to be culturally responsive to your students. We're like, oh yay, like I'm in and then there were people who that's terrifying for and I'm talking teachers um principals at some, at one point, assistant superintendents like it was just everywhere that fear. 00:13:17 And again, we could speculate on why that was there. We don't really know for sure, but it was like a fact of what we were working with so that pedagogy is like a, that's a tougher shift. And um you know, I think Christie and I both sort of struggle with how we can work to dismantle this fear of autonomy. We also work in a district where there is a lot of teachers working on emergency certifications. We have a lot of long term subs. Um It can be a challenging district to work in at times large urban district. So, you know, if you're talking about autonomy and making the best choice for the students in front of you, there's a assumption there that every teacher has the proper tools and training to make those choices and that maybe isn't necessarily true either. So, there's all of these sort of tensions that you're kind of working with at the same time. But we want to uplift autonomy. We want to be culturally responsive. So how to be culturally responsive in like the realities of the job? 00:14:21 I think that makes sense. Yeah, that definitely makes sense because you did you have something on? Um Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to say that like when we talk about our curriculum, it's not this like secret patented thing that no one else knows about. Um it's just simply like reading good books and talking about them and writing about them, which wasn't um systemically happening, I'd say in our district. And so like an analogy that I think of is like if someone wanted to lose weight and they were told follow this diet and that diet and wear this belt and do this exercise and there's just so much information overload of what they need to do that they feel very frazzled and then nothing quite works. But like we're just saying, eat nourishing meals and take a walk every day. And like that, like simplification of it is really what I think the shift is, I mean, even that is like a simplified statement, but we're really not inventing something brand new. We're simply really trying to um take away some of the practices in the classroom that were actually just being added on top of other practices. 00:15:36 And it wasn't really doing a lot of good for teachers and students. And that being said, there are absolutely teachers that we've encountered who have been teaching great books this whole time for decades. Just not listening to a word central office said and just teaching great books and having these wonderful lively classrooms like that absolutely was happening. But it's more so about like us lifting that kind of practice up to the forefront and being like, this is what it all could be rather than like no one here doing any of, you know, like it certainly was happening. Absolutely. Yeah. That makes me think about like the, when you're speaking about like, kind of the fear I often think of like adaptive leaderships, like, um, resistance as loss like that idea of like I'm resistant or I'm fearful. I actually perceive like a loss, like maybe a loss of my identity as a good teacher or something like, oh, I've been doing it wrong and I need to do it different and, but there's so much, like, wrapped up in that, that can be very intense to unpack for people. But I love that idea of kind of almost like a positive Deviance approach of like, here's where this is working really well, like, look at this teacher doing this great thing. 00:16:38 Like, how do we pick pieces from that? And emulate it, right? And personalize it in our own spaces. And, and that, to me feels like what you are both talking about and, and I'd love to, I think Chrissie thank you for kind of naming and this is a beautiful analogy and like kind of naming what this is, what it means to talk about. The curriculum. There is like eating nourishing food. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of those pieces that you have? Like? What does that curriculum look like? Is it like a suggestion of these books? These kind of essential questions? Um What is that kind of guidance around curriculum that you all because you all have been working on this really cool project around hard history? So can you speak a little bit about that? Um Sure. So um our 10th graders at the beginning of the year read Nella Larson's Novel Passing. And what we do is we provide, um we call them daily lesson guidance documents with the understanding that because of the realities of an English classroom, because the realities of a school, what you plan to get done in a day, it might take you three days or half a day, right? So we give some sort of um loose space there. 00:17:43 So we just guide you through the like core components of like a reading lesson if it's a reading lesson or writing lesson, if it's a writing lesson. Um Each unit comes with something we call an overview and the overview gives you essential questions, big ideas, we show how the text you're reading and the activities you're gonna complete are aligned with Goldie Muhammad's five pursuits. So like sort of like the, the things lift those things out for you while you're looking at the, the text. And so a novel like passing, I was talking about this act of passing um in the 19 twenties in Harlem and Chicago. And so if you're really going to dig into the deeper meaning of this book, you're going to need to understand the context around like what is passing, why would people pass? What was game play? What was lost in the, in the act? So it, it's a curriculum that really digs into this. What is a beautiful short novel by Nell Larson that makes very clever use of like flashback and narrative voice. 00:18:45 So all these traditional things you'd wanna find in a complex text at Gray level. But then it also uplifts this like challenging part of our history around, you know, systemic racism in um Chicago. And we, we're not talking about the South here, we're talking about Chicago and we're talking about Harlem. And so the unit is doing both of those things. So it's building that knowledge around this hard history, this challenging part of our past as a nation. But it's also asking students to think about like the function of a motif, the function of narrative voice. Um It, the, the way that it's structured, it's split into three parts and it's called, each part has a different name. Like all those, like different, typical literary things you'd expect a student to be able to do. So, what we want to do in the curriculum is bring both of those things together. Beautiful. I love, I just love thinking about what could that literally look like? What are the, what are the things that you're giving us guidance? And so that idea of the essential question, the key idea is the five pursuits the text to write the core, the core text. 00:19:51 Um And then the idea of like, I can't remember what you called it, but like the lesson pieces, like the suggested reading, writing activities, I think it's beautiful and and back to the point of simplification when we're so overloaded with all of the things, things that we have to do or learning a scripted curriculum or like all of the things that can feel like this added burden and how beautiful to just simplify it and think about it from that lens from, from the lens of like a teacher implementing or, or doing something with this and also from the curriculum director lens of like how do we design and put this together in a way that is helpful and and doing the most it possibly can for teachers and students. Um So just super cool stuff there. I'm wondering about, we talked a little bit about mindset in terms of, you know, this is the first year it's being implemented in terms of implementation and kind of teacher reception and, and what people are doing with this, what are the things that you're seeing in terms of the teachers who are really successful with this in terms of maybe a, a group of teachers or something that, that maybe initially struggled and are now doing great work. What kind of things can you tell listeners about to kind of give them a sense of hope and possibility for doing this? 00:20:54 I think, um maybe particularly in high school, you're gonna have teachers who are attached to the books that they're teaching. So if now we're saying now teach these other books. Um when in actuality, if you wanted to teach um Romeo and Juliet instead of the poet X, it's not the end of the world, right? Um The poet X is a little more culturally relevant to our student population, but Romeo and Juliet is a great book the ninth graders really enjoy. Um So like some sticky spaces around that and like really pushing it back to schools and networks to think about what they were comfortable with and what their students needed with that lens of like, am I just falling back on what I know? Am I pushing myself um certain some of the books we asked teachers to read and we struggled with this question of like opt out of certain teachers were like, I don't feel comfortable reading that book. Is it more harmful to students? Have teachers teaching a book? They don't feel comfortable teaching? Is that an excuse to not push yourself to teach a new book? It's, there's no way to really know in our position and you just have to trust schools and principals and we have um different networks led by assistant superintendents. 00:22:07 We have to trust them to make the decisions and what we hope and what we hope we've cultivated a spirit of is that they will just tell us when they're making those decisions. So maybe it can be a part of that conversation. So some people were like, great, I want to teach all these books and some people were like, oh, I wanna play with a little bit. Um and just kind of just being open to those conversations and not being like, this is absolutely what you were doing because we said you were doing this because then you lose that open conversation because frankly, they're probably gonna do it anyway. So if you shut down that dialogue, then you don't know what's happening and then you don't, perhaps there's a school that is not teaching any culturally relevant books and you've shut down that conversation with them. So now you have no idea that they're not doing that. Um So that is something we ran into sort of and again, that autonomy piece like. But what does autonomy mean when you have a district level curriculum for a very large district? And they don't know, I don't know what the right answer is there. 00:23:10 Hey, everyone, it's Lindsay. Just popping in to tell you about today's episodes. Free resource, my curriculum, bootcamp planner. If you're interested in outlining unit, whether it's about E L A and hard histories or something totally different. Go to Lindsay with clients dot com slash blog slash 117. Back to the episode. Yeah, I think that's, that's so important to be able to think about that. There are all of these tensions that exist, right? And there's not necessarily a clear path towards this is the right answer. And I think that's helpful for curriculum directors to, to think about as they listen to step outside and just really grappling with this, that, that tension is part of it. And what are some of the ways that you've kind of, you know, thought through it? It's helpful to hear someone else, you know, thought. So I think this is really valuable and, and I'm thinking about the actions that you have found helpful in terms of either navigating those tensions or from the perspective of how you designed. Right. So, so maybe someone is listening, I know several curriculum directors of, of in multiple spaces of different curriculum areas um or subject areas that are thinking about. We need to make that shift we need to basically do what you all have done, but we're just like it feels like an overwhelming task. 00:24:16 And so how do we even begin to approach it? Um Is there anything from either perspective like working on the implementation side or working on the just design side that you would say were really helpful or have been things that you, you've done that you think others should hear about? I think if I'm thinking about other people coming from other districts, they might not have had this context of needing to create a curriculum from scratch or being, you know, asked to do this. So if they um are already working from like with resources, like core resources and an anthology of short stories, for example, while, you know, we're biased and we think that novel based units are the way to go if you have core resources like that, I still think that there's a lot of room for shifts. Um especially when we start with the premise that there is no wrong text to teach in a classroom. It's really how you teach it. 00:25:19 Um And so let's say there's a short story that is, has maybe some problematic messaging the teacher can then think about, well, how does this message relate to the identities present in the classroom? And then how do we talk about this text? And so, um you know, we always have to work within our locus of control and I think that planning around any text um by first thinking about the identities in your classroom starting honestly with the teacher um is really important and I think we'll see some Dyna dynamic shift in the learning experience from that premise. Yeah, that's a beautiful idea because I do think there are people who are like we, we have this thing and can we adapt it then? And do we have to start from scratch? I think I love the, the beauty in what, what you all have done, which I'm not sure actually. Is that creating from scratch? Did you, did you all start from from scratch? Yeah, I think there's so much beauty and possibility in that too. 00:26:23 So I'd love to kind of hear what your process was if you're, if you're willing to speak on that because you chose all these texts, you have these essential questions and key ideas developed. Um How did, how did that work? How did you, what was your starting point or what was kind of like your process? Um We wanted to as much as possible. And again, it's, it's hard in a really large district where for a long time, there hasn't been necessarily like um norm on the pacing of classes in secondary. But as much as possible, we tried to over uh take our novels and align them with the content that they were learning in their social studies or history classes. So like 10th grade, they learned African American history, we use um novels that speak to that. And so that was a starting point with novel choices. We tried to pick a mix of culturally relevant and canonical text like at least one canonical text because what we wanted to do was show that canonical texts still have a place in the classroom. But they need to be, you need to critique how you're teaching them. 00:27:26 So it texts like of my men or death of a salesman or things fall apart. Like they've been around for a while. They have the power to move people. And um kids really respond to those texts, but like, how are you teaching it? Are you teaching it the same way? You've been teaching it for 20 years? Um And we know a lot of teachers in our schools have been teaching those books for a really long time. So we're like, OK, let's push the envelope here. So we did some of that. Um We knew we wanted them to be less in guidance, not less in plans because we wanted that autonomy. We talked about earlier. We wanted to give a space for teachers to make the right choices. And we, that was a decision very much supported by all the leadership in our district. Like they wanted the same thing we had on uh undergone a curriculum audit in previous years by uh a large research institution, then an educational nonprofit. And they both said the same thing like your materials are not responsive to your students. And your lack of achievement can be connected to that lack of cultural responsiveness. So we knew that we wanted to find a way to engage our students back in that English instruction and to give that autonomy and let teachers make the best choices for them, for their classroom. 00:28:37 So we design the lesson documents just the keeping in the main things that you do in a classroom, you have an opening, you have maybe you need a mini lesson to build content knowledge to do some vocab work. Um You have a shared reading, you have discourse, you write in response to your reading. We wanted every unit to end with a summit of assessment that was um writing either either a multimodal writing or traditional writing assignment. So we wanted to prioritize writing as well because Christy and I both like foundation, we believe that um in secondary E L A, you should be expressing yourselves in writing again, like opening up that definition of what you mean by writing, but there should be an expression of ideas in writing. Um So we just kind of work with those like simple principles. And then we started to build out documents and we had the privilege of working with teachers from our district. And some of the units that you'll see in our curriculum are units that teachers have been teaching like our powerful of the sewer unit was a unit, um, that was taught to, um, 11th graders at a high school here and we used it for 12th grade. 00:29:42 Um, or a unit was the unit that a teacher taught and I taught Sula for years as well as a teacher. So we had them take stuff that they've already used and kind of test it in the classroom and turn it around and just kind of give it out for us. And then we gave people the books and the materials and we're like, you know, here you go. And some people have completely hit the ground running and teaching all of the books. Some schools are like, right, we're gonna do two books and then we're gonna still use like an anthology or a textbook. And to us, you know, that's fine. I think we just wanted to shift this conversation around like we, we have to change what we're doing in the classroom because what we're doing in the classroom isn't working. And we know that building knowledge and we know that being culturally responsive and choosing culturally relevant materials and culturally relevant teaching strategies are going to improve instruction. So we wanted to build materials that do all those things. And I think generally the response has been overwhelmingly uh positive where it resonates with a lot of teachers. 00:30:45 Um Alison mentioned how, you know, sometimes we would take a book that's already being received well in classrooms and, and choosing a book like that. I think that's a huge part of like the trust. It's like teachers knowing that it's being taught already. And also um our units were developed designed by teachers and coaches in our district. And so I think that also um helped with this shift where teachers were like, ok, I could trust this. Um so, you know, no process is perfect, but I think overwhelmingly teachers have received it well and appreciated the the resources and just the opportunity to read good books with kids again. Like I said, there were some teachers that have been doing this for a while and either doing it against their principals wishes or doing it, you know, just because no one goes in their classroom and very much or maybe their princip was completely supportive. Like we also had um I know we had a couple of high schools that had started their own novel unit and book based unit projects. 00:31:46 And so, you know, this was the thing, things that were happening. So when we like put a stamp on it, like, yes, this is good. I think that was also pretty affirming for lots of teachers who are already teaching like this. And now they were like, yes, I'm gonna, this is my thing. I know how to do this. I'm gonna keep doing it. So, you know, sometimes it, it helps to have someone high up be like, yes, you're right. And I think there was also a lot of the buy in that came from a sort of affirming that these things that you thought were the right thing to do are the right thing to do. You may not have this in place yet. And I'm, I'm just wondering like, what your thoughts are. I love that you said what the teacher feedback has, has been and like that there's been a lot of positive, positive reception there. I'm wondering what it is like for students. Have you had any feedback yet or are you kind of look planning to see what that is at the end of the year? Um, I, there are certain books that have really been home runs with kids like that, we have our ninth graders read the poet X. Uh, and that has just been like, everywhere you look, there's incredible feedback about that. Um, we have our 11th graders were born a crime and people are really gushing about that. 00:32:51 Um There's other books where like, uh, you know, maybe that was like a bit of a mess. We should have rethought that. But then other teachers are like my kids love that. But if I say, like, we've definitely had teachers come to us and like, show us materials and be like, my kids absolutely loved this book. And I think that that's because they were like, oh, I didn't know kids could be interested in this book, you know. Um So, yeah, I would say we've seen from, from students, students will let you know real quick whether or not they think your ideas are good or bad. So, you know, that is amazing. I feel like just hearing that enables people to think about the possibility is that even if this is a really challenging process to go through and even if there is like tough, like um you know, partnering with teachers and, and, and that tough, like I, but I feel like there's a bit of fear here already, like all of it is worth it when that, that teacher who maybe initially was like, I don't know about this. Sees like all the students in her class now just like, oh my gosh, I love reading. Like what? Oh I love teaching now all of a sudden, right? There's kind of this like joy that is just exponential growth that happens when you do this. 00:33:54 Um So OK, so cool. I'd love to kind of move to, to the wrap up questions here where thinking about someone who has been listening to this and all of the possibilities for designing this, implementing um a new curriculum with teachers. What is one place you would encourage that they start what is kind of one action step that they could take, they're done with the episode, they're ready to do something like where would they begin this journey? I think shifting the conversations around E L A instruction at your school. To like this importance of building knowledge and that what knowledge are we choosing to build? Um And if people aren't talking about the importance of building knowledge and being thoughtful about what kind of knowledge you're building for your students and how that's built by books, I would say that that's a starting point because so much of what we did is driven by this idea that books can teach us about the world in which we live in. And like that, you know, windows mirrors sliding glass doors that like what are we choosing to expose them to and tell them about why are we choosing it? 00:34:58 So, but it all started with the fact that like books teach you about the world you live in. And if that's not a mindset that everyone shares, um then I would say that that would be, would be a starting point. I mean, I think along with that reframing where skills fall in the E L A classroom because I mean, it could be a whole another hour long conversation. But um with what Allison is saying about prioritizing knowledge building, uh that means that something that has been happening in the classroom has to be, you know, shifted to the side. And for us, I think that skill because like reading skills are very important strategies are very important to reading, especially independently. Um But understanding how without knowledge, those skills are kind of useless. Um And so having those conversations. And I think a lot of good research and articles are coming out right now that would help anchor um, discussions about that shift. 00:36:02 I love that and I love that you all use Doctor Mohammed's framework too to kind of situate skills and knowledge in that kind of five pursuits. Like we have five, it's not just these two. Um And then I also love the idea of kind of figuring out what books teach us and, and what knowledge we're we're pursuing because I, I think about that from the concept of like even restorative practices. Like often I, what I would do is like, um with in my own classroom and think about, you know, the shared values that we hold and if we can identify a shared value or at least identify the value that someone else is kind of like holding in a conversation or in an action like that resolves like 95% of conflict, right? And so there's like this shared value conversation that I think I'm connecting to in terms of what you all are talking about, like the books that we, books and text that we traditionally teach kids. What is that showing them about what we think they deserve to know and not know? Right. Um Are we telling them about the whole world in which they live or just a very specific slice of the world? And if we are just telling them about that slice of the world. Why are we, why are we doing that? Um I think about that as a starting place. 00:37:05 Yeah, that's beautiful. And so I, I asked these final two questions of, of all of our guests. Um just because I think it's super fun uh to ask this first one, but I think everyone on here is constantly learning and growing. And I mean, Chrisy, you just talked about like the research that's, you know, coming out and that you're a attuned to that. So what is something that you have been learning about lately? Now? It can be job related. It could also be like, I think someone had told me they were learning to fly fish. I, I guess like it could be anything. I am not learning to fly fish. Um Christy and I have both become increasingly invested like this project is still ongoing, the curriculum, but we're feeling a new shift, which is so cool um about literacy in general across content areas for adolescents. And that is really like what we both do that 6 to 12 space. So we've been spending more and more time talking about disciplinary literacy, talking about literacy practices across content areas. So me specifically a lot of what I've been spending my time working on and reading about is, you know, what do we do about older readers who are lack a lot of those foundational skills that they need to be effective. 00:38:13 And then like how does, what we think we should do? How does that fit in with the space that I work in? Like, what advice can I give people? Because this is kind of a burning question everyone's having and lots of districts are making moves about, you know, how to support literacy for all students, not just seeing literacy, that's something that sits in E L A. Um So that's really what a lot of time our time is being spent on these days and thinking about that question of like this adolescent literacy crisis, if you will like, what does that mean for us and how can we use our positions to help? I'd also add that we are really interested in unpacking writing instruction for 2023. And what shifts we need to make considering so many advancements since you know, the development of like, you know, these writing models that are good, but perhaps they need some um adaptation. So I think we're exploring that. Um But on a personal level, I'm very eager to learn how to use the cricket. 00:39:15 So that is my next goal. Amazing. I am so excited. Um I loved this conversation so much and honestly, I am just really excited to follow all the things that you all are doing. So I am wondering if when you can share where people can connect with you either as individuals or, or your districts. But also I'm I'm adding this additional question and is it? Do you have your curriculum somewhere that is public that people can see it? And where would they find that? Because I think people are going to be really interested in just taking a look. We have a um publicly accessible website where all the units are held. So maybe in your show notes, we can include that link. Absolutely. We'll do that. Yeah, because I think to get to the link, you have to go through something that's like pay, not pay wall, like it's a staff wall, but then you get out the other end and it's open. So just getting straight to the link would be the most effective way to get through that. Perfect. We can definitely add that. Do you want to share either your personal social media platforms or the, or the website for the district? What feels comfortable to share? 00:40:21 I'm not, I don't really do all those things because she's very active on Twitter. She's a Twitter person. So I'm sure she can, I do check Twitter very regularly, but I don't remember my handle because I never post anything. We will link it, share. Um Yeah, we could share that information in our email addresses in the show notes as well so that you could reach out to us. That's beautiful. Thank you so much. That will work perfectly. I will put all of those links in the show notes and then also the blog post that we'll write up for this episode as well. Thank you both Allison and Christy so much. This has been a pleasure to have you on and I'm so excited about the work you're doing. Thank you. It was fun. If you're leaving this episode wanting more, you're going to love my life, coaching intensive curriculum, boot camp. I help one department or grade team create feminist anti-racism curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. We weave 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. 00:41:26 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 w w w dot Lindsay beth lions 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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DESE is releasing their new (free) Investigating History curriculum for grades 5, 6, and 7 in the 2023-24 school year. In this episode, I walk you through what’s in the curriculum and how you can support your teachers to engage with the curriculum and prepare to teach it to their students in a relevant, personalized way.
Why I Like It and the Research It’s Based On: It’s grounded in justice-centered research and frameworks. The 4 Instructional Principles:
The 3 Pillars:
Content Covered in Each Grade: *Note: This curriculum is constantly evolving based on feedback from students and teachers, so this is the outline as of this episode’s recording (March 27, 2023). Grade 5:
How to prepare teachers to engage with this curriculum and prepare to teach it? Suggested outcomes for a professional learning experience:
Leading Curriculum Implementation Tip: Co-create ongoing structures of coaching support, success shares, and resource banks. For reference: DESE’s Design Specifications document for the Investigating History curriculum. To help you get started with preparing teachers to teach this curriculum, I’m sharing my Investigating History PD Agenda with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 116 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 I'm educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons. And here on the time for Teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings. If you're a principal, assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nerdy out about co creating curriculum with students. I made this show for you. Here we go and welcome to episode 1 16 of the time for teacher podcast. Today I am talking about the investigating history curriculum being released this year. So for the academic year of 2023 to 2024 in the state of Massachusetts. Now, I think anyone can get this outside of Massachusetts. But if you are a Massachusetts educator, particularly if you are a leader of grades 56 or seven, this is going to be for you. 00:01:05 They're gonna expand grades additionally in future years, they're gonna pilot those. I think this year. But for now if your teachers in 56 or seven are thinking about creating or kind of using new curriculum around history. And for social studies, I want to walk you through this and how you can prepare them to engage with this curriculum and get ready to teach it. So here we go. All right, everyone. So episode 1 16, here we're talking about D CS investigating history curriculum. So again, Massachusetts educators and leaders for sure. For you also, anyone else, I think that wants to tap in and has states or curriculum that has similar standards feel free. I think there's honestly a lot that I'm gonna review today and especially in terms of how to prepare your teachers to be able to engage with a new curriculum and to make it their own, make it relevant for students that you teach and that's going to be engaging and going to be project based and, and all the things a curriculum that you see may be good or like good adjacent and you might like it, but you might have things that you or your teachers might want to change about it or alter, make it better, make it more personalized for the students in front of you. 00:02:15 And of course, those students change year to year, the world changes year to year. So how do we take an existing curriculum and make it really responsive? I have been reluctant to support any sort of off the shelf curriculum because of that reason because if we don't adjust it to the students in front of us or the world that's ever changing around us, I just don't think it's that engaging. Now that said I recently did a bunch of training. I'm now one of the certified providers of learning how to use desi's investigating history curriculum for the state of Massachusetts. I'm one of a handful of groups or teams that are working on this and I decided to do this because I saw an opportunity to take a curriculum that was pretty good and personalize it more and give teachers the tools to personalize it for their students and make it even better. So we're gonna dive into what exactly the curriculum is. What are the foundational kind of principles and research base that they're going off of that? The creators kind of went off of to build it and then what is the thought process behind what I'm gonna share with you, which is kind of the approach for supporting teachers to use it and personalize it. 00:03:21 So what are the additional layers that we can kind of think about in our training that maybe in a typical implementation of a new curriculum we're not usually thinking about or, you know, maybe few people are thinking about. So here we go. Here's why I like it. This curriculum is based on four interconnected instructional principles. These are historical inquiry and investigation. So this is really making sure that the instructional methods, the things that we're doing day to day in this curriculum or that your students are doing is that you're gonna center inquiry based learning and questioning that's going to lead to investigation. So students are really gonna take on this role of researcher, they're going to engage with authentic source materials. This is pretty cool stuff. So we think about this, this the research base behind this idea of historical inquiry and investigation. There are significant benefits that research is found for students when classrooms are organized around quote driving questions that lead students to encounter central concepts or principles, focus on a constructive investigation that involves inquiry and knowledge building, focusing on problems that occur in the real world and that people care about ends quote. 00:04:29 And that's from Linda darling Hammond and colleagues in a 2008 publication. And so thinking about this, right? Taking informed action is the culmination of inquiry. This is from a concept from N CS S. So, a National Organization on Social Studies, we think of investigation as being much broader than inquiry actually. And and um really making sure that students use this process of investigation, inquiry and investigation when they craft arguments. So when sources are intentionally selected, which is what this curriculum does for us, right? Sometimes the hardest part is figuring out what sources we're actually going to present to students so that they can have this kind of scaffolded research approach that enables students to better able to do the work and to actively participate in democratic citizenship research, fines and of course to work to strengthen justice, which is what we are all about. When curriculum units involve inquiry cycles related to key disciplinary concepts that involve interpreting an event or exploring a problem, connecting the event or problem to prior knowledge, generating initial interpretations or stances, gathering evidence and constructing an argument, seeking new evidence and modifying the art as appropriate and developing questions that lead to further inquiry throughout the unit. 00:05:41 Then students are gonna have opportunities to do the work in this curriculum individually, in small groups and as a full class because we know each of these activities are really strengthening our core understanding and our core practices of historical inquiry. So a lot of this, I'm I'm kind of pulling some quotes from directly from research and then others from the synthesis of research that desi has done and and this is published on their website around this investigating history curriculum. So you can find the full documentation there. So that's kind of number one instructional principle, historical inquiry and investigation. Now the second one is historical empathy and human connections. So here we're thinking about the instruction that is used really the purpose of it is to deepen insight into human connections throughout historical empathy and effective dimensions of study. So we're thinking about historical empathy and human connections. We don't want to avoid hard history. So we, we really want this curriculum to help students recognize the agency of people who have experienced or are currently experiencing trauma and that they resisted and are currently resisting that trauma really drawing on healing and form of pedagogy. 00:06:48 We want students to engage in these perspective, taking activities and have that lead to historical empathy, civic empathy, geographic empathy, economic empathy, this is what we want students engaging with. And I think this curriculum does do a good job of shifting traditional narratives around historical events and groups of people. Of course, I think there's always more room to grow. But I do think this is a really good base of a curriculum to jump off with that and pursue it deeper for your students. So again, that's a focus area that you could deepen in your P D with your teachers. Number three, civic engagement and current world relevance. So this makes sure that we have drawn connections to contemporary world around us. Things are always changing. How do we bring that in and also foster civic engagement. So we're talking about that. I really like that. The Jesse documentation cites West Timer and Keynes Justice Oriented Citizenship. So they have four types of citizens. And I think this one of justice oriented citizen is really valuable to think about and to center in our classroom practice what we do here. 00:07:55 And in this curriculum, the goal is to nurture reflective patriotism leading students into neither excessive cynicism or excessive adulation about the past. This is from educating for American Democracy, a publication in 2021 and the history and Social science curriculum dey rates should engage students in contributing to and reimagining our democracy. The core of this concept is their ability to practice taking informed civic action. This is from Levinson and Levine in 2013. And as they develop in their ability to take informed action, it requires they interact with others within many different local national and global arenas, as well as delivery on what level of government and which methods are most effective in enacting civic change. Anytime I coach around, you know, uh a justice movement where we're learning about social movements or social justice movements, civics rights. I think this is a really big point. So we want to learn about the past, but we want to learn about it so that it can inform the present. So what worked then what will work now, what can we learn from the past to inform civic engagement currently, how do we kind of take stock of the different strategies at hand? 00:09:02 Also desi documentation talks about how students should be given opportunities to draw connections. Again, as I said, between the past and present world, understand the role people organize in movements and engage in social activism had in changing history. And today, some Martel and Stevens as I talked about on the podcast before and they've said themselves on this podcast before. They were guests in episode, I think one oh one is somewhere around there around 100. Um and they have regular practice and analyzing, evaluating current policies and actions and imagining the policies of the future. So this is what we want for our students really that our routines enable students to practice engaging with others in public problem solving. So Martel and Stevens often talks about, right, this idea of the collective as being more important than this mythical individual hero, right? So how do we engage students in this? We also want to make sure we're evaluating our decision making procedures. And I love any connection that you can make and have students make to the decision making structures of the school itself. Apply the same things we're talking about in the curriculum, about larger government structures to the government structure of the thing that they experience daily, right? 00:10:08 The thing that's happening in their school. All right. And then the fourth piece is culturally affirming pedagogy. So this is going to result in students academic achievement, cultural competence, sociopolitical awareness. We know this has so many benefits and there's so much research on this. But I'll just share a little bit here when teaching is disconnected from students', cultural backgrounds, there's negative impacts to academic achievement, to civic skills and dispositions when it's connected to the backgrounds of students from nondominant groups. There's evidence of increased academic engagement improved academic outcomes and a better sense of self and increased agency within communities. And that's what we want. Now, there's strong evidence that students from dominant groups also benefit from culturally affirming curriculum. It increases their perceptions of racial and cultural commonalities and differences among groups helps them better understand the role of race and racism in society and leads to increased engagement in the content being studied. So I know I'm actually currently reading how to Raise an anti racist by Doctor Abraham X Kendy. And it is talking about this even as young as preschool, there are enormous benefits to white kids as well, right? 00:11:14 We often talk about bipoc students and the value of taking a justice oriented approach for students in any sort of marginalized group or community. This is also really valuable for identities that have been historically centered. So when we think about this, right, we we learn about the ISMs. We also highlight the agency of groups by centering narratives of survival, resistance, joy excellence. These are asset based and they avoid centralizing. We have students examine issues of power, equity justice, make arguments around historical and current events. We critique the status quo. We bridge class to families and communities outside of school. The materials themselves challenge dominant narratives and amplify nondominant group experiences. We develop students concepts of race, gender, sexual orientation, all of our multitude of identities. And we facilitate academic discussion of racism in the past and in the present. We also in large and I love this quote from the desi documentation. We want to be enlarging their sense of what is possible in human societies. Yes. Yes to all of this. 00:12:20 And I think a creation based approach our students are creating that step forward is is what this could be about like that totally aligns now, in addition to all of these pieces, so as a summary, those were the four interconnected instructional principles, historical and Korean investigation, one, two historical empathy and human connection, three civic engagement and current world relevance and four culturally affirming pedagogy, there's also kind of these three pillars behind all this curriculum. So the social studies or sorry, the social science practice. So we have those seven practices and inquiry and research around these civic knowledge, dispositions, skills and skills of related professions are kind of all here. The content itself is integrated into our understanding of the world. There's a coherent progression. I'll tell you what the content is for each of these grade levels in just a moment and then also literacy skills. So reading, writing, speaking, listening, those are essential to learn in and of themselves. And it really helps us learn the content also. 00:13:22 So unit one for grade five as it currently stands. And so this is I'm recording this on Monday March 27th of 2023. This is an ever evolving and changing and updating curriculum. We constantly consult or the creator sessions maybe be the creators are constantly in consultation with teachers and students and how they experience the curriculum and what could be different. Of course, they're also in contact with academics in the fields, people in various countries and um groups that help inform the resources used in the narratives um highlighted. So let me just tell you what it currently is. Unit one, grade five starts with early colonization. Unit two goes to revolution and principles of us. Government unit three is growth of the Republic and unit four is civil war and civil rights for all sixth grade human origins. And unit one, there is currently not a unit two. I think they're actually finishing that up in the next couple of weeks. Unit three, sub-saharan Africa and Unit four, the Americas grade seven, we start with South and Central Asia, move to East Asia and then uh unit three and four I think are still being um refined at the at the moment. 00:14:34 But just to kind of give you a sense of of what is being learned at each piece. Now, the next big question is OK, cool curriculum sounds good. My teachers are in, I'm in whatever I want to know how to support my teachers in tackling and engaging this big thing, right? Like engaging this curriculum and figuring out how do I put it into action? So my freebie for the episode is going to be my first draft because I'm actually going to be, as I said, a trainer and a facilitator of kind of learning and implementing this curriculum. So feel free to reach out to get my whatever is current as you're listening to this um approach. But my first draft is kind of a rough outline before all the resources are linked in and things of how you might go about this. I'm gonna share that with you and I'll link to it as our freebie for the episodes. You can grab that at Lindsay bat lions dot com slash blog slash 1 16. But here is kind of the big, the big pieces that I want to think about for the outcomes of this kind of P D one. You want teachers to have a system for preparing to teach the first unit of the Investigating history curriculum. So they need a system in place where they are familiar with how it's all organized going in, looking at what is most essential to look at because it can be overwhelming. 00:15:49 So by the way, I absolutely need, how do I learn that each teacher is different? What are the resources I'm gonna go to? There's a lot of repeating information in different formats to accommodate that everyone is different. So make sure every teacher has a system. You want their, why each teacher to have their y for focusing on one of the four core principles of the framework. So I share those four principles with you, you want each one of them to choose a focus or you can, you can, you can have them do more than one. But I think if there's a focus for kind of day two of this training, I'm envisioning it as like a two day thing. You're inviting them to go on and then really focus on kind of honing one of those pieces, a list of Summit of assessment essentials, the students will need to be able to know and do these few things for the unit one summit of Assessment. I think it's good to backwards plan from there, know where we're going. So you wanna have them do some sort of activity where they're unpacking the summit. Also what I call a GPS outline which will be looking at what is most important in the unit and then figuring out, OK, this is the most important at a lesson level content, skill or activity. 00:17:04 Usually it's an activity that practices a specific skill. So it's kind of one thing there. I I use the P as protocol and then source, right? So we have kind of a goal, a content goal of the unit. So that's a G uh protocol that is an activity, practicing a skill, that's the P and then a source. So what are they actually looking at was the primary or secondary source? So GPS outline for each lesson in the unit. So kind of a a really kind of high level overview. And then finally the materials that you actually need to teach. Now, I would take a look at what's there. But then again, think about if a teacher wants to focus on one of those four core principles, maybe you can focus on um kind of one of those pieces and how I would do that is maybe looking at a piece of the inquiry process or using Dr Goldie Mohammed's Hill model, focus on one of the five pursuits there. So I have talked about that before the Hill model from Doctor Mohammed and she's talked about it herself as a guest on the podcast. 00:18:07 Feel free to go back and listen to any of those episodes, but really quickly five pursuits, the three I would recommend focusing on identity criticality and joy. Those are what you're not typically gonna find in every unit already and what teachers are typically not gonna do without a little bit of prompting. It's just not historically been part of how we plan. Now, the inquiry routine investigating history breaks it down into three pieces, launching the question, investigating the sources and then putting it together. So I would focus on one of those pieces to get really good at in the first unit and then you can build from there. So invite a teacher to focus on what do you need the most support in helping students launch the question and generate some questions for inquiry, investigating the sources and using maybe some text based protocols to actually get in there and, and think about it or putting it together. So how do I want to have discussion or share out protocols in my classroom? Be a place where they put it together? Maybe how do I want students to put it together in a way that advances civic action? 00:19:10 So what kind of action project can I have maybe to add a P D L component? So some of these have longer P D L kind of sum of assessment, some of the units and some don't. So if you want that in each piece, that's a level or a layer, you're gonna need to add in. And I actually think it just enriches it so much. So I think brainstorming around that, what's gonna bring your students that level of excitement, enjoyable and agency around advancing justice using what they're learning to advance justice in their community is so cool. Now, I would also as a leader, think about the ongoing structures of coaching, support success shares and something I've learned in doing some curriculum, coaching and implementation work with different districts across the nation in different curriculum is having a resource bank, a shared resource bank where anyone in the district that is teaching this curriculum can go into like a shared Google Drive or something and see what other people have created in preparation, preparation for teaching a particular lesson or unit or something. Having that just makes it so that every teacher doesn't have to do the full lift on their own. 00:20:14 You could have them have some teaming structures or collaboration approaches where people take on like certain lessons or certain approaches to different lessons. For example, Doctor Muhammad's Hill model, if you're really trying to apply that to each lesson, one person focuses on the joy, one focuses on identity, one focuses on criticality and then you have three teachers working together to make each lesson just even better and relevant for the students in your district. So just some ideas. Again, you can get all of this in terms of the P D agenda outline and some just initial thoughts that I have on this at the blog post to Lindsey Beth lions dot com slash 1 16. I really want to know what you're thinking about this. Are your teachers interested? Reach out to me if you like training but also just grab the freebie and support your teachers on your own. If that feels more helpful, I can't wait to hear how it goes and implementation. And I'm so excited to get your feedback. So let me know if you're leaving this episode wanting more. You're going to love my life coaching intensive curriculum, boot camp. I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. 00:21:19 We weave 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. Grab a spot on my calendar at w w w dot Lindsay beth lions 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. Darrin Peppard is a leadership coach, consultant, and speaker focused on organizational culture and climate. He’s the author of Road to Awesome and continues to be an educator at heart.
The Big Dream Every adult and kid in a school feels seen and valued and heard. Every single kid has an opportunity for a better tomorrow and to figure out what they’re interested in. No one gets put in a box. Mindset Shifts Required Develop portraits of a learner instead of portraits of a graduate! We can lead from the middle or the back. We don’t always need to lead from the front. Help teachers see what’s possible and give themselves permission to teach in innovative ways. Action Steps Hand over the curriculum decisions to teachers (e.g., to align curriculum and instruction to their three academies: Health, Energy, and Fire, Law, and Leadership). Dr. Peppard had three incredible leaders leading those academies, and just let them go. Of course, he was still in their classrooms all the time, but they led them. Protect and shield your staff from outside (and sometimes even inside) forces so they can do their work. Build a groundswell of interest. It can’t just come from just you; it’s gotta come from staff. Put a team together and invite someone who’s not an early adopter. Visit other schools doing great work with teachers. Ask: Who’s doing that well? Invite students from other schools doing the work you want to do to talk to your students and families. One Step to Get Started Have a vision. Be clear about that vision. What’s the shift in reality you want to see in your school for your kids? You can then make decisions about where to allocate your time and resources to make it happen. Stay Connected You can find this week’s guest on www.roadtoawesome.net or @DarrinMPeppard on social media. You can get the revised edition of Dr. Peppard’s book here. To help you be the best leader you can be, Dr. Peppard is sharing his free ebook on 5 mindsets to level up your leadership. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 115 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, I have the honor of interviewing Dr Darren Peppard who is a leadership coach, consultant and speaker focused on organizational culture and climate and coaching. Emerging leaders. Darren is the best selling author of the book Road to Awesome a title I Absolutely Love and is the host of the Leaning Into Leadership podcast. As a quote recovering high school principal daren shares strategies and lessons learned from 26 years in public education to help leaders gain clarity by joy in their work and walk and their purpose. He shares so many examples today, not just advice and tips and strategies which I love, but also how he actually saw them play out in his experience as a leader. I'm so excited for you to hear this conversation with Darren. Let's get right to the episode, educational justice coach Lindsay Lyons. And here on the time for teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings. 00:01:05 If you're a principal, assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nerdy out about co creating curriculum with students. I made this show for you. Here we go there and welcome to the time for teacher podcast. Well, thank you, Lindsay. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you today. Me too. And I'd love for you to just share anything that you want listeners to know prior to having that conversation, what's important to keep in mind. Yeah. So I think maybe the thing to keep in mind about me is I did spend 26 years in public education, like everything from, from middle school classroom teacher all the way up through superintendent. But even though I'm now, you know, in that leadership coaching space and the, the speaker space and, and that kind of thing, I still consider myself a public educator. I, I, I go to school in a different way now. I don't go to, you know, the same school or the same office every single day. I get a chance to go to schools all over the country. So, but, but I do still consider myself a public educator and I always will. I love that. Absolutely. It resonates a lot for me as well. Right. We're, we're working in and recording right now from our home offices and it is something that is, is really nice to still be in touch. 00:02:13 With schools. I think one of the big questions that I have around freedom dreaming, which is a concept that a lot of people have written about. But Doctor Bettina Love, I think describes it really well. She says their dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. I always love to hear what people's freedom dreams are for the system of education or, or if you have a specific school district in mind that you know, you worked in, that you want to talk about. Well, what's that big dream you had specifically around the area of, you know, curriculum and instruction and, and that day to day piece, I think a big part of that dream for me starts really with the culture of the school and, and in that culture, every adult and every kid feels seen and heard and valued and trusted in their school. Uh If we start there, so many amazing things can open up. Um I, I'll talk in a minute, I'll, I will jump a little bit on the curriculum and instruction piece and, and go back to my time as both an assistant and, and high school principal. But specific to um injustice, whether that's racial injustice or it's uh gender injustice or gender identity injustice. 00:03:22 If, if we see people as human beings, if we just simply start there, then I think that allows for, for any of those dreams to open up and it's not necessarily let's let's tear education to the ground and start over again. I think, I think some people, if you ask them, you know about the dream, it would be, oh, we do this different and this different and, and certainly there are things we need to do differently. But to me, it just starts with remembering that, that our work is about human beings. And if we see everyone as a human being and we value them and trust them and see them and hear them, then man, what a magical place, school can actually be. It could be a place where a kid every single day, every single kid has the opportunity for a better tomorrow. And that's what it's all about, you know, no more, no more. Trying to put everybody in a box and say, you know, this is what this is what a graduate should look like. Uh We, we actually did some of that work when I was a superintendent and if I stray too far, please pull me back to the curriculum piece I want to talk about. 00:04:24 But um we did some of that work when I was a superintendent around the profile of a graduate and many schools do this. There's a lot of great research work grounded in developing your profile of a graduate, but I never felt that that was appropriate and we ended up shifting and this wasn't an original thought in my head. I'd seen this actually in another district uh that I was doing some coaching with, we actually focused on the profile of a learner because to me, profile of a graduate is only about the end, the end product and a graduate, it's not an end product. A graduate is just simply somebody beginning their journey away from, from public school. Right? So if we focus on, you know, what do our learners, what are our learners look like? And, and I don't mean physical attributes, I mean, what does learning look and smell and feel and, and sound like? Um, that made a tremendous difference, I think in the work that we were doing because now a third grade teacher could really understand, OK, a profile of a learner at third grade, this is, this is what learning looks and smells and feels and sounds like same thing for a middle school teacher or high school school teacher or whatever the case may be. 00:05:36 So, as I said, I knew I was going to squirrel a little ways away. But I, I think the dream is really, you know, one, yes, everybody is seen and heard and valued and trusted and two, we're not putting people in a box. You know, we're actually giving people an opportunity to find out what they care about, what they're passionate about what they're interested in because that's really what education should be. Yes, kids need to be, to be able to do math and they need to be able to, you know, be literate and find a passion for reading and all of those different types of things 100%. But what it really is is we should all find what we care about, what we're interested in and look at, look at the jobs right now, like the big, big jobs they didn't exist long ago. Right. And a lot of that is because somebody kind of had a dream or an idea or a thought of this is where we could go and if we allow people to step outside of the box, we can get there. So now I'll, I'll use that. Um, my, my own dovetail there. Um, I can't believe I set myself up so well. Um, I must be a podcast host, right? 00:06:39 Um, I'll use that to, to talk a little bit about, um, some work that in the curriculum instruction space specifically as a high school assistant principal and then as a principal, we found that our students across the board were pretty disengaged and we weren't, we really weren't preparing kids for what was gonna come next. And, um, we started doing a little bit of research around. Um, this was the time when the, when the career or college readiness phrase came out. I hated the, or, um, I don't really like career and college ready either. Uh I'm not a fan of either of those phrases. Um, but I digress, we, we started to focus on what were the career interests that our kids had and we had been doing this interest survey stuff all the way back to the time they were in seventh grade. So we had longitudinal data for years on our students and ultimately created three different uh career pathways within our high school. 00:07:40 And we weren't a real big high school. We were about 13, 1400 students, a smaller community, 25,000 people. But we were able to connect with the passions and the interests of our kids around the health care industry, which is a massive industry. Um because this is Southwest Wyoming um uh natural resources um and energy huge if, if it comes out of the ground and we use it to, to power anything it's found in Southwest Wyoming. So um having that particular um career pathway for our kids was huge. And then a third one for our kids was um uh fire law and leadership and really giving kids the opportunity to pursue um whether it was, you know, law enforcement, military um government, you know, politics, all types of different, different interest spaces and a lot of people have done that and that's not the unique thinking. The unique thinking was turning it over to our teachers and allowing a language, arts teacher to shape their curriculum around the health care industry or shape their curriculum around fire law leadership or, or um energy and natural resources so that, you know, you don't have to read, you know, To Kill a Mockingbird. 00:09:00 Is there another book that, that can give you some of the same things? And I'm, I'm probably crossing, crossing the two books in, in the wrong spaces. But in, uh, the Natural Resources Academy as an example, instead of To Kill a Mockingbird, they read a book called The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind. And there's, there's some similar themes there. If those are the two books that, that were the crossover, I can't remember. But uh but nonetheless, the, the big piece was turning over the curriculum to those teachers. Again, our, our teachers see heard, valued and trusted. We believe in you go make this fit, go spend the time with the business partners, spend the time with the kids so that we can make this, you know, to where we're not just putting kids in a box and oh, by the way, their test scores went up and grad rates went up and all that kind of stuff. But more importantly, we got a chance to really touch kids, you know, in terms of finding their interests and the successes have been incredible for those kids. So I, I don't know if that was the dream or that was the outcome. 00:10:03 I don't know. But uh you let me go and I just kept going. I love it. And there's so much in there. I just think about a profile of the learner first off, like amazing shift from profile of a graduate, right? We what we want to be as human beings is learners. And I like love that human centeredness as well. I think if you ask any teacher to think about individual students that they're connected to, regardless of identity, they want the best for those students. And it's like seeing those students at the center of every decision is what enables us to do things like just a centered education. And then also like thinking about from an adult standpoint and, and a, a leader standpoint as a leader of staff, that idea of a profile of a learner for staff as well, right? Like for everyone in this community, not students. Yeah, like, oh my gosh, just like so cool. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, and, and maybe you should, you should consider having him as a guest on your show. There's a superintendent in Texas named Wade Stanford who took this work and he was a guest on my podcast very early. Uh I, I can't tell you what episode it was probably in the 1st 10, but the profile of a learner concept and actually put it on his head and said, now let's talk about a profile of a learner or rather a profile of an employee in our, in our school district. 00:11:18 And it's amazing how for him and for that particular district, it has become, you know, everything has turned over to them. Um You know, I, I talk a lot about leadership. Of course, that's my big passion. And um in my new book, I, I, I talk about three leadership positions leading from the front, the middle and the back when, when we can do that, that's really allowing us to lead from the middle and from the back. Because leading from the front, there are times when you really have to do that, but leading from the middle and from the back is where true leaders really stand out. And, you know, in, in the case of what, what Wade has done in his district, um What, what we were able to do um at Rock Springs High School where I was, the principal was, we turned it over to the staff, we let them run with, with what they cared about. Their passion started to come through and something that, that you said to kind of start this portion, um they built relationships, you know, it's, it's all about relationships again. I mean, if we're, we're in the people business and if we focus on really building, you know, those relationships where true trust exists, that's, that's when we start to see really cool and innovative things happening in our schools and really cool outcomes for our students. 00:12:32 You know, I mean, students are gonna to take risk in a classroom where they don't feel trusted and teachers are gonna to take risk in a, in a school where they don't feel trusted. So it's, it's all about relationships and I could talk about relationship for hours. Hey, everybody. It's Lindsay. Just popping in here to say that Darren Freebie for you is an ebook on leadership. You definitely want to check it out. You can grab it at our blog post, Lindsey Beth lions dot com slash 115. Back to the episode. I, there's so much in here that I want to unpack. So I think there are several components to, I imagine what a shift because I imagine, and I'm guessing here that you went from a shift of like maybe things used to be traditionally in that school or in the district kind of ben top down and leading from the front and then there was a shift to let's hand it over to the teachers and let's let them go or, or had it always been that way? Oh man, I'll tell you what I, that's, I love that question. Um And I'm gonna chase this all over the place. So first of all, I would tell you that there was still a lot of traditional, you know, school happening in our high school, even while this was happening. 00:13:40 And there was, it, it was a really interesting leadership balance for me which pushed me into that leading from the front spot quite often because we had very traditional thinking teachers that, you know, mostly stand and deliver. Um You know, we, you know, kids need to know this curriculum specifically, you know, I must teach Julius Caesar, you know, those types of things. And at the same time, I had this, this parallel of, you know, roughly half of my school in these three academies. Um but I also had other departments who had kind of taken the, hey, so will you let us do some of this with us, you know, with, with our department or with this or with this? Absolutely. You know, go for it. Now, as far as the leadership at the district level, I went through three superintendents in six years as a principal. So the first principal or the first superintendent. Absolutely, he was all about it. Um His third son was part of the very first health academy cohort. 00:14:43 He's actually now a doctor. Um And so, so he was all about it. He, he bought in, he believed in what we were doing. The second superintendent, he supported it. Um His leadership was, was really bizarre, but from, from that perspective, you know, he supported it. They even had some input on as we were developing that third academy, the uh fire law and leadership academy, third superintendent, not at all, 100% top down leadership. And that I think, I think that kind of made some things struggle. Uh and it made it a little bit more difficult to, to completely turn over or keep that, that leadership turned over. Um because in, in some ways as the leader of the building. Um, you know, you always want to protect and shield and maybe that's not the right words to use but protect and shield your staff from those outside, outside forces so that they can't do their work and having to protect and shield them from within. 00:15:45 Seemed a little bit odd. Um, and I think that that kind of pulled me in directions that made it a little bit complicated. Um, but all that said in those three academies, I had three incredible leaders leading those academies and I just let them go and just let them do their work and, you know, we stayed in contact all the time. It was in their classrooms all the time, but because I could really let them leave their space from the front, um, it, it gave me the opportunity to maybe kind of focus on those other things that were not necessarily trying to stop that work, but just cling to that old traditional way. And I, I'm not one who really buys in too much to the old traditional way. Although I will say this in, in all fairness. I was probably that teacher in the classroom at least until maybe my last year or two. You know, because I didn't know any better. Right. You know, but once we know better, we do better and, you know, going through that whole process, I was an anatomy and physiology teacher. 00:16:50 I would have loved to have taught in our health academy. Oh my gosh, I would have loved to have taught in our health academy but I, I think I'm way off the answer. Uh here on, on this one, not at all. I I two things I'm thinking so one kind of like situating yourself as like a leader who has a leader above them, who may or may not be supportive of the work and then also staff who are working within the school, who may or may not be into this kind of shared leadership dynamic where the teachers have kind of this control to pursue. And like it's really interesting because one thing that I think I I've always called it like admin as buffer and that you were kind of talking about the shield like, right, so this buffer space and then also this idea of like, didn't know any better yourself as, as kind of the rationale for like, well, this is why traditional practices happen. I'm wondering if you saw the same thing in your staff that were still the traditional mindedness. And if seeing the possibilities of what could be better in those academies was kind of the shift that some of those teachers needed. Did it work for everyone? Were there are some people who are still very much, you know, I'm just curious what that dynamic was like. 00:17:55 No, absolutely. I think that's a great question. And um let me just tell a really quick story and then I'll come back to that because it'll, it'll dovetail into both. Um, as a superintendent. Um, I, I came into a district that was really small, uh, under 450 students, two campuses and weren't gonna be able to necessarily recreate that work, which, which wasn't really what I had in mind, but we did end up going down a pretty beautiful road towards allowing our students into, you know, into internships into some job shadowing spaces and those kinds of things. But it began with a district wide shift to project based learning and same type of thinking, same type of leadership in terms of giving the giving the teachers permission to not say, ok, it's Tuesday. I have to be on page 78 of my book. But rather, you know, let's let our kids show us how they or what they have learned instead of let's just, you know, have them do it this way. 00:18:57 So in both cases, both at Beth, as the principal and as the superintendent, there were certainly those, those who were inside of the academies, those who were my, my, my lead team on the project based learning stuff. Absolutely. They were all in, I mean, they were, they were the proverbial choir right. There were times where at the high school level that I had teachers who, who taught in the academy and then, you know, taught classes outside of the academy, they didn't just teach health academy courses or, or Energy Academy courses, whatever. And some of them, their non academy courses still were very traditional. Um, and I, I think in some cases it was just, they needed permission to use that stuff somewhere else. You know, it, it wasn't, well, but these aren't my, these aren't my health academy kids or these aren't my, my, my fire law kids. So, what good teaching is good teaching and if it works for them, why wouldn't it work over here? Um, the, the PB L stuff was the same way. 00:20:01 Um, I think there were some teachers who thought, oh, because we've done all this, this training and stuff at PB L. I have to use PB L all the time. And first of all, if, if, if you're like in a district or, or somewhere where that, that PB L is just now starting to get off the ground, the answer to that is no, you don't. In fact, you can't, you can't, you know, even, even go to, you know, some of the absolute top PB L schools in the country and I, I've been to all of them. Um, they don't even do PB L 100% of the time, you know, they, they just don't, you know, I mean, there, there's always something in, in transition and some other ways that, that learning takes place anyway for, for both sets, uh, in both, in both settings. A lot of it was permission to, to do that outside of, you know, that specific setting and it wasn't necessarily permission from me or, or when I was as sued, permission from their parent or from their, their principal, it was like permission from themselves to do that. 00:21:02 I, I think that's like to me it was one of the coolest teacher efficacy things that, that I'd ever seen and, and just having some conversation, that's why I love this question. I'm thinking about two specific teachers, uh, that were academy teachers, uh, when I was at the high school level that did some amazing things inside the academy and outside it was back to the traditional and just having conversations with them. It was like this light bulb moment for them. Like, oh, I can do that. Why not? Why wouldn't you? Oh, ok. Oh, so if I do that then, and then here it came, you know, all of a sudden it was, you know what? I have an opportunity to do some cool things for my kids and the other challenge that they, that they would face too. I heard this from a couple of people, um, that were academy and then non academy classes, the students expectation of how they were going to learn, felt different in non academy versus academy classes because the academy kids, they just expected it. Everything we're gonna do. We're gonna do some kind of a presentation or we're gonna have, you know, we're gonna have to speak. 00:22:05 Usually we're gonna speak in front of business partners because I'll tell you what our kids that came out of the academy because public speaking was incredible for them, every one of them. But our, our non academy kids and we do this across the board in education. We, every now and again, we'll tell the kids. Yeah, they have to give a presentation and we grade their content. We don't grade their ability to give presentations. We don't really, really push for kids to be successful public speakers and that's a huge skill that can easily get overlooked. That's why I was in love with the PB L stuff. As, as a superintendent was, you know, kids are gonna have to speak about the work they're doing. That's why I love the internships and, and, and being able to do job shadowing and stuff. Kids have to be able to speak and communicate and I'm sorry, there's not a standardized test for that. They just have to do it and experience it. So there you go. Absolutely. I'm hoping my dog is not super loud in the background here. Um We will uh I, I wanna like dive into this idea of like actions, person listening right now. 00:23:12 They're like, yep, I wanna try that. What does the action, what actions did you take to kind of help support that transition or help, support the teachers who might be like, I don't know. Right. Yeah. So um Oh, man, that's, that's such a great question. I think, I think some of it with, with the career academy stuff. I kind of came into that. Um, we were just starting to take the steps into that and because the seed had been planted, I was able to just take the ball and run. Um, when I, so when we really moved forward, I had transitioned from being the assistant principal in charge of discipline and tenants to the A P in charge of curriculum instruction, special programs and, and that the academy work was gonna fall under that. So for me, it was sit down with the guys who are gonna be, um you know, leading this work, start to identify those people and say, ok, let's get after it, you know, let's, let's get to those schools that are doing this work, let's do our homework, let's get our teams together. Let's say, hey, we have a year of planning, but we are gonna roll this out in the fall. 00:24:17 Let's be committed. And now let's start to put the actions in place. Let's start to talk about what are the things that need to happen if, if there's somebody out there who's like, man, I'd really love to do career academy stuff. Just reach out to me. I, I'll walk you through exactly how we did it. I'll even tell you what schools we went to. Um and some schools that are doing it that we didn't go to that. I didn't know about at the time that I do, you know, uh happy to share those too. Um As far as the PB L work again, it was very similar and let's build a ground swell of, of interest, you know, if it just comes from me and leaders, this is so huge. I, I had a, had a great conversation with one of my former high school athletes that's now an assistant principal and she was struggling with. I know what I need them to do. But how do I, how do I? Yeah, it's obvious what we need to do. Why won't they do it if it comes from you, it just you, yeah, you got your people who carry the flag, they'll do it for you and you have your people who will never do anything because it came from you. 00:25:22 It's gotta come from them. And so in both cases, but I'll, I'll talk specifically to the PB L stuff. I loaded a team of eight or nine and we headed off to California. We went to either three or four different project based learning schools. Um And, and I was doing this across the district. So I had elementary teachers, I had middle school teachers and I had high school teachers. I had administrators at counselor. Um you know, and it was OK, let's go ask all the questions. I don't know all the questions, you know what my high school counselor asked, I wouldn't have asked those questions, but he asked some great questions. You know what, my third grade teacher who was on the trip asked, I wouldn't have asked those questions, you know, and, and so forth. So put a team together and, you know, find at least one person to invite onto that team and keep inviting until you get a Yes. That's not necessarily the people who carry your flag. You know, because if it's just the people who, you know, who are in that, that 10% you know, your, your, you know, your, your leaders, you know those ones who, who are, hey, we're gonna do this. 00:26:31 Boom, I'm, I'm back in my classroom doing that right away. You know, if it just comes from them, you know how this rolls Lindsay, right? I mean, especially the bottom 10% and, and by bottom, I mean, you know, when we, when we think about the implementation uh group, so the True Laggards, they're looking at that group like that ain't happening, you know. Oh, here they go again. Look, you know, it's Lindsay and Darren, you know, boy those two, those two brown noser. So, you know, make sure that you're getting somebody or a couple of some from kind of that middle group that, that group that will be kind of your mid to late adopters and get their buy in because if you have those people buying in, you know, that that increases the likelihood of success because it's not just your, you know, your bluebird group that uh that's doing that. So that would be my advice on that and get lots of help, you know, talk to other people who have done that work. Don't do it alone. 00:27:33 The road map exists for whatever it is you're trying to do the road map exists. Go find those people and learn from their road map. Oh my gosh, brilliant. And I love that it's like people are already doing this stuff, go seek them out, go literally visit and sometimes it's not even like another state. Sometimes it's a district down the road or something, right? Like reach out and ask who's interested in even doing a swap. Like we're doing some cool stuff too. Wanna see our academies, you know, like I think that idea of you can go beyond your own district or, or within a district, you can go to multiple campuses and there's so much brilliance, we can just seek out and learn from with like amongst each other. It, it just is so often overlooked and it makes me sad, but I'm happy. You said it. Well, yeah, it's, you're right. I mean, there's, there's so many incredible things that are out there happening and you know, with uh with our career academy work as an example, you know, we went and saw a whole lot of people and when we first we did our very first recruiting. So, like we had to recruit kids to, to be in this. And we were, um, we were gonna do two sections of, of each academy at each grade level and year one was only sophomores at, you know, and we had two academies. 00:28:42 So we're, we're talking, you know, 54 kids and 54 kids. So 100 8 kids total out of 1400 kids are gonna get into this. These first two cohorts in, in health and energy. And we were like, well, how do we get the kids excited about this? You know, we went to these schools, we saw them but we can't load our kids up and take them. So we reached out to a couple of those schools and said, is there any chance you could come to us? And so they did, you know, we had four people from, you know, from one of the, the health academy schools. We'd seen him when four from uh from an engineering uh academy school come to us. But even better, they each brought seven kids. And so we had kids on the stage, you know, sophomores through seniors from California. Both both of the schools were in California sitting on our stage, you know, and they're telling our kids their stories. We don't have to tell the stories, let those kids tell the stories and even better. That night when we held our very first parent meeting about this, the parents got to hear the stories from these kids. 00:29:50 I mean, they, they're seeing somebody who looks just like their kid telling that story. I'm, I'm getting goose bumps right now. Lindsay telling you the story and this was in 2009, 2010, something like that. And I'm, I'm getting goosebumps right now because of, of just that particular evening and, and I remember listening to those kids and I, I will never ever forget that I could walk to the exact spot in the auditorium with Ted Schroer, our first Energy Academy director, Bruce Metz, our first health academy director and myself watching these kids talk and Ted crying and Bruce saying, do you think we'll ever have kids who can speak like that? Lindsay the very next year we had kids who spoke exactly like that. In every single year our kids were speaking all over the place you know about, about that heck, the US Department of Education came and saw us, you know, and then we had Arnie Duncan in our building calling us an Island of Excellence. Yeah. 00:30:51 And my point behind this isn't, you know, hey, yay us, my point is back to what you said this is happening in other schools everywhere. We had people coming to see us like crazy, you know, word got out. Hey, spring has got some cool stuff going on. You know what? We were still going to see other people on other projects. You know. Yeah, this is going really cool. I want to do more in our A P programs who's doing that. Well, I want to do more in, fill in the blank, you know, who's doing that? Well, let's go see it. Let's go, whether we have to get in a car or get on an airplane or whatever it is. Heck, now we have zoom, we didn't have zoom then, you know, but go see it, go hear it because way back to something I said earlier when we talk about the dream, you know what, what, what learning looks and feels and smells and sounds like you go into those schools. Oh man, all of a sudden those people and this is why you get those, those kind of mid and late adopter people in the room, they feel it, they feel the energy, they hear the stories from the kids and unless you have a heart made of stone, in which case, you're probably not an educator. 00:31:59 That's, that's what gets you to say. Ok, I have a dream for my school. Now. I have a dream for my classroom now and it's powerful. It's super powerful. Yeah, I I just think about like again back to your initial point about humanizing like everything, right? And like we are, this is a human centered business or, or whatever the exact phrase love you use. That's it, right? Like how do we bring to life like the students at the heart of what's possible in these other schools center their voices. Like we don't need to do convincing, we just need the students to be able to talk and we need to get opportunities for that. Right. Like, oh, yeah, as we kind of go to wrap up the episode, I think there's so many things that you have shared. I'm wondering for the listener who's like, ready to go, ready to do something. What's like step one? Like, what's the first thing to get started on this path that you would recommend? Yeah, I think, I think the number one thing is to just get some clarity, you know, what, what is, what is your dream, what is your vision for, for your school? You know, just, just because at my school, we had this vision for, for those academies as, as an example and, and that one wasn't my vision. 00:33:08 I, I got to join in, but that honestly, that was a brilliant man named Ted Schroeder. That was Ted's vision and by the way, a classroom teacher, his entire career, brilliant classroom teacher, Ted's vision came to life. So it doesn't have to be a principal. It doesn't have to be an A P, it doesn't have to be an instructional coach. Um, it happened because we listened to Ted so be clear about that vision, if you can get really clear about, you know, this is, this is the shift in reality that I want to see happen at our school for our kids. If you get that, then you can start to be really intentional about the actions that you'll take, the behaviors that you'll have. The, the words that you choose to use and where you decide to allocate your time to try and make that reality come true. But if you don't have the clarity first, if it's just, oh, hey, I've got this cool idea. And Lindsay, I'm as abstract random as they come. So like I'm really good at, oh my God, I have this cool idea but I have to always make sure I get that clarity around. 00:34:10 OK. Here's where I, here's where I really see it. Now, let's, let's talk about what do I have to do to be intentional? And a big part. I I already talked about it so it won't be labored is you gotta get people who buy into your vision too as a part of that. Oh My gosh, love it. Um Our two final questions here. One just for fun. What is something you're learning about lately? I think everyone who comes on here talks about learning in some way. You talk about portrait of a learner. What is it? You're learning, you know, the big thing that I am learning, you know, now that I'm in this, this entrepreneur space or educ space. Um like you, I'm learning so much about the business side of this work, you know, the the leadership stuff. Yeah. I, I've learned a ton of that. I'm still learning that, by the way. I mean, it's not like, ok, I've got that. I'm good. You're always learning that. But I'm really intentional now around learning how do you build a successful business from the ground up? You know, and how do you, not only from, you know, understanding, you know, and how to, you know, do your taxes and, and pay for your insurance and I mean, those kinds of things. 00:35:24 But also like, right now I know you and I are, are part of a group that the rene group to, to teach better. And I'm really focusing on content marketing and learning about content marketing. Podcasting is a huge part of that. You are, you and I are both podcasters, but I'm, I'm really learning a lot and I'm loving it too around. How do you, how do you build this up? And what I love the most is there's not like a specific model, you know, I mean, we've read a plan, we've read, you know, Gary V, you know, we're, we're reading, you know, uh Joe Polizzi and there's a lot of commonalities there. But what I love the most and, and what I hear the most is it's all about being willing and this may be my biggest learning. It's all about being willing to view things as an experiment or view things as, you know, let's just see how this works, you know, what's resonating with, with people? What do, what do people really want support with, you know, um learning the lyrics is, is something that, that I know you and I've uh both been learning too, you know, what's, what, what are, what are the pain points and the pressures and the struggles for people now versus when I was in, you know, any of my leadership roles. 00:36:41 So that is really the big, the big thing I'm learning and, and obviously with, with the podcasting, I learn from my guests every single time I sit down and have conversations with them and, oh, there's so much learning there that it's too much to list. And speaking of where can people follow your podcast or, or what's the title of your podcast? Where can people reach out to you? And if you want to mention the ebook, I know we'll link to that in the show notes, but Darren has a resource for all of you listeners. Yeah, absolutely. So, um I'll just go in reverse order. So the e-book is uh walking in your purpose and what this really is is just five steps for leaders to gain clarity, to be intentional, to just find the joy in their job again, you know, to really walk in your purpose. That's, that's, that's where the title is, is actually coming from. And that, um I know you'll, you'll have the link for them um on that. Uh that can be found on our website just like everything else, which is road to awesome dot net. 00:37:45 Um That's a great way to get in contact with me. Every single page has a contact us button on it. So you can definitely do that. And when you first go there, um right away, you'll have a pop up, sign up for our email newsletter. Uh We, you know, we share a lot of content every single week and uh you know, a lot of good stuff there. Um social media, easy to get in touch with me on social media. I'm on every platform and it's at Darren M peppered on all of them. Um I tried to make that as simple as possible. And then the podcast, uh the podcast is titled Leaning Into Leadership. It's available on every platform out there. Um We are, let's see, as of the time of this recording, I think we just dropped episode 65. So we're just a little over a year uh in, you know, into this process and it just continues to grow and grow and grow. And um the purpose behind the podcast is great. Leadership is great leadership and it doesn't matter what walk of life you're in, we can all learn from each other. 00:38:48 Um So I've had law enforcement leaders, I've had business leaders, obviously, education leaders, higher education leaders. Um and you name it. Um And you know, it, it's so cool one of my favorite episodes is with, um, a county sheriff in Colorado who led his county through the second largest wildfire in the history of their state. Now in Colorado by proxy, uh, or by law, the county sheriff becomes the fire warden. And so he was in charge of this massive wildfire that, uh, just ripped, ripped through Grand Grand County Colorado. Uh, a couple of years ago, the leadership lessons in there are amazing and they're amazing for educators too. So that's the purpose and the premise of the podcast. And yeah, you can find that anywhere that uh that you have podcast. Amazing Darren. Thank you so much for being on the show. This is absolute pleasure. I learned so much. No, I did too. I really enjoyed it. Um It's, it's just always great to catch up with you and thanks for having me on. 00:39:53 If you're leaving this episode, wanting more, you're going to love my life, coaching intensive curriculum, boot camp. I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. We weave 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. Grab a spot on my calendar at w w W dot Lindsay beth lions 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:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where I explain how to co-create community values and agreements:
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Leaders, if you need to navigate challenging staff and/or larger community contexts or disagreements.
Origins of this Episode Leadership Coaching Question: How can we work with differing opinions among staff or between administrators and families? (How do you arrive at a common understanding?) Another Leadership Coaching Question : How can we bring our DEI team’s “theory” work to the whole staff in a practical way? What Can We Do? First, some grounding context: Upholding the dignity of all people and advancing justice are the goals. We can’t lose sight of those. Facts matter. Scholars, Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy distinguish between settled empirical issues (these are factual realities and we don’t debate them) and policy issues (we can debate what’s the best way forward). Action Step: Ground the work and discussions in shared values. In processing injustices and conflict, center human emotions and “BASE” needs (i.e., (belonging, autonomy, survival, and enjoyment) instead of personal opinions. When we disagree, if we can identify the underlying value that’s the reason that we take our specific position, it’s more likely we can connect and hear the other person. For example, if someone says the value that underlies my position is that I am afraid for me or my family’s safety. That is something we can likely all resonate with to some degree. Tip: If you haven’t already identified shared values as a staff, I recommend doing this as your next meeting activity! (You can get a sample agenda for such a meeting here.) Action Step: Collect data on students’ experiences and center staff conversations in “street data.” (Check out the book, Street Data, by Jamila Dugan and Shane Safir!) Action Step: Invite students to staff meetings and have students on leadership teams as much as possible. Action Step: Use staff meetings to practice via protocols staff can also use with students, families, teams, and/or community members, depending on their role. What’s in the 4 Staff Meeting Agendas Freebie? .
Tip: Check out the 5-minute videos for each of these available on YouTube. Sneak Peek: Next month on the podcast, we’ll be starting a brand new #UnitDreaming series featuring educators who create a justice-centered unit outline right on the show! To help you do this work with your staff, I’m sharing my Staff Meeting Agendas with you for free. (You’ll get one agenda per week for a month. Yes, slide decks and live links to all related resources are included!) And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 114 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 I'm educational justice coach Lindsay Lyons. And here on the time for Teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader, turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings. If you're a principal, assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nerdy out about co creating curriculum with students. I made this show for you. Here we go, everyone. Welcome to episode 1, 14 of the time for teacher podcast. Today we're talking about a practice we can put into action. This is for you leaders. If you facilitate team meetings, staff meetings and you're interested in leading for justice, but maybe half of your staff voted for Trump, right? Or you have some sort of political disagreement about the process of leading for justice or you disagree on terms like social emotional learning or there's this broader political context in the community that you need to navigate as you're doing this work and you're like what do I do next? 00:01:09 We're gonna talk a little bit about that today. And your free resource for this episode is actually going to be a series of staff meeting templates with agendas and slide decks and all the things you could just kind of grab personalize and go. So let's get to it. All right, everybody, let's dive into the practice episode where we're talking about leading for justice when maybe half of your staff voted for Trump. Right? So the context here is I've had multiple questions from leaders that basically mirror the title of this episode. But some are kind of how can we work with the differing opinions among our staff or between administrators or families or the community? And how do you arrive at a common understanding of these concepts so that you can really move forward? And, you know, I've heard phrases like walk the line or um try to advance justice well, uh maintaining neutrality and, and I've addressed a lot of these phrases like neutrality and, and this stuff before. So feel free to listen to some older episodes on those nuanced pieces. But today, I want to talk about like, what do you actually do when you're in that position as the leader in that community? And you're like justice is important. 00:02:10 We need to do this. I'm just not sure how to navigate the conversation or because I'm so uncertain as to how to navigate the conversation. I've been putting it off. So we haven't really done anything because I know that I want to do it well, and I don't want to create more chaos or harm. And we're kind of in that, in between phase where we're not doing anything because we don't want to because we're fearful of making it worse and all the things. So we're going to take a deep breath and we're gonna dive in today. Um, and the other piece of this too that I want to, to kind of bring to light is another question. This actually came from a leadership team. I believe it was the D E I committee who at, at a school district who was really interested in saying, you know, like we've done really good work in our committee. We've read a lot of books, you're definitely in like the theory and thinking about what is possible and reading all this information and thinking about maybe what we do next, but we haven't actually started taking action because we're not sure how to bring the theory to practice. And we're not sure how to bring the work of our D E I committee to the entire staff. 00:03:12 So these are kind of the two questions that are in my mind where clients or workshop participants or different people have, have asked these questions over and over. So we need to record an episode about it so that we can get the answer out to a bunch of people. And again, caveat that by saying that it's not one answer, right. There's not one right way forward. This is something that I've kind of played around with, have collected a lot of information on, have tested out some of these approaches and have received like a lot of positive feedback and success and you know, your community best. So you can kind of take what we talk about today, do a little bit more of your own research or talk to other people, test out some pieces, personalize it a little bit and then go forward and tell me, I would love to hear how this worked for you. What didn't work? What did you need to shift? What are the responses you got that were unpredicted, that kind of thing because we're all gonna learn together and we're all gonna move forward together and when we share that information and what we tried and what worked and what didn't that's gonna make us better collectively. OK. So here we go thinking about the why, right? I always like to start with the why. 00:04:14 And I think if you're listening to this, you already have the why, right? That justice is the goal. Justice is an important goal not to lose sight of justice for all students, justice for all identities. We frequently talk about in my workshops that dignity, upholding the dignity of all people is the line, right? So when we talk about neutrality and all kinds of things like that. We don't really strive for neutrality, right? We don't want to strive to be neutral when injustice is happening. We land on the side of justice, we land on the side of upholding everyone's dignity. We will not violate that whether that is a family member, a student, a colleague that's not acceptable. So one is just getting comfortable in that right? In that line, in the language that you use around that line, we will uphold the human dignity of all people in our community and and in the broader kind of world community as well. The other piece is facts matter. We are in an educational institution, facts matter. I've talked about this before again, feel your way through this, think about the language that's going to resonate with your community and also to not flex on that reality. It is important to maintain our goal of justice, to uphold the dignity of all people and to say that facts matter, right? 00:05:24 I really like uh Diana mcavoy and um I'm sorry, Paula mcavoy and Diana has these are two scholars who talk about their kind of the way they parse apart some of these disagreements or arguments is that there are settled empirical issues. Example, racism does exist, we can collect a ton of data and share a ton of data on that. We can't argue whether that's a fact. It is a fact versus a policy issue, meaning what policy should be put in place to advance justice, to eradicate racism, right, to be anti racist. So that's what we can disagree on. What's the way forward so that we can all achieve the better society. But we're not gonna disagree that there are problems currently and we can look at the data that says that. So we're not debating facts, facts are facts, we are debating what's the way forward and the way forward, The ultimate goal of that is justice on the way we will uphold all people's dignity. So I think that's kind of the grounding, get comfortable in that. Think about the language that works best for you and your community, you can core that language and we'll talk a little bit about how you can do that today. So how when we look at the conversations that we've had even informally with family members, when we see things like the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that exist after things like the Holocaust, um the uh violence in the north of Ireland, Apartheid in South Africa. 00:06:50 Uh There have been so, so many examples of this. I actually think this would be a fantastic thing to dive into as a staff and think about how we could talk to students about this because I think underlying all of this is are, it's p there are pieces there um that will inform us in our way forward as a local community, as a national community in the United States um as a global community and society, you know, with a lot of conflict, but often we center story, so we center our personal experiences, we hear and center the emotions of one another. We of course acknowledge facts and we ground the work in often, I I I like to ground the work in, in my um kind of restorative approach in classrooms, in schools, in my personal life in shared values. So when we think about someone who is kind of entrenched in their political view, and they're disagreeing with someone who has a different political view and we can think about versus the idea or the thought or the message that we're trying to get across, we're trying to convince someone else that we are right? 00:08:02 If we think about the value, the underlying value that we hold, that is a reason that we're in that position, it's often hard to disagree with a value. For example, if someone is saying, you know, the value that underlies my position is that I am afraid for me or my family's safety. Oh OK. Well, that is something that we can all resonate with, right? We all want to be safe. So versus focusing on the thing we're trying to convince someone else of or the policy we're trying to push right at the very beginning or as a way to kind of work our way out of that entrenched state, let's talk about the value that we share and what's going on. Underneath. Another way to think about this is the acronym I usually use is base because I like acronyms and this is an adaptation of Glasser's five needs. But base is belonging, autonomy, survival, or enjoyment. So usually one of these four things, belonging, autonomy, survival, enjoyment, underlie a lot of conflict. So I would see this in teacher to teacher conflict, teacher to student conflict, student, to student conflict in a school setting. And think about, ok, so maybe this child is not feeling a sense of belonging that caused this behavior that maybe was disruptive or unhealthy. 00:09:13 But the the source of it once we can name it as a lack of belonging or a lack of autonomy or voice, a lack of survival needs being met, right? The child is hungry, of course, or they're tired, of course, their head is down, right? Enjoyment. They need fun in their lives. We all need fun, we need joy, right? So thinking about the underlying needs that are kind of at the heart, at the root of what we're talking about in some of these conversations where we're disagreeing on things, we can center values, we can center our base needs and we can also sense emotions. So starting a conversation, but here's how I'm feeling. Not, this is what I think those three pieces values emotions and needs that underlie the situation, the perspective, those are all things that we can empathize more deeply with versus I need to put myself mentally in your shoes, particularly if you're spewing like hatred, right? That's not really an activity that we, we need to do. 00:10:14 But we can connect to the humanity of the other person, right? They can connect to our humanity, our shared values, our emotions that are shared by all people and the needs that are shared by under all people that underlie our conversation. So these three pieces I think are really key and have really shifted how I approach conversations. And I've seen a big change versus uh what I used to do is really keep it intellectual or ideological that often doesn't result in, in change. So considering that what I also want to add to kind of the layer of that, that's kind of the base, that's the foundation. And I'll, I'll share with you the, the resource, the free resource is actually a series of resources for this episode where you're gonna get access to a three part series and then 1/4 kind of bonus staff meeting, team meeting thing. And I'll talk about that a little bit later. But the first one is co creating community values and agreements. So you're actually having that conversation of what values are important to us collectively. Yeah, individually and how do we kind of navigate all of that? So that's gonna be a set agenda with a slide deck and, and all the things that you can actually just take and use and personalize to your community. 00:11:18 So you'll have that guiding, you'll have that language. Then when you go talk about the other important things that you're disagreeing on a policy issue. Uh The data point that students are, are bringing to like a student experience that is shared a family experience that is shared a community current event that is important in impacting the students and the families of your community, The teachers, then you have that foundation to dive deeper into that and have a generative conversation. OK. So the other piece of this is I I mentioned the student data point or the student experience. I highly recommend if you have not already read it Street Data by doctors Jamila Dugan and Shane Safir. Really, really good. They also have a podcast Street Data pod, which I absolutely love it is phenomenal. Uh but they talk about collecting student data and and specifically data on the student experience which they call street data and just getting at the fact that this is what students experience on a day to day basis. I would also encourage people to think about that from like teacher data and family data as well. But the student experience data needs to be primary, right? We're here for the students. 00:12:22 So since our conversations around, what is that street data that we're seeing? What is the student experience? What is that telling us? And then what's within our locus of control to, to do something. There's always something within our locus of control. Yes, there are structural issues we need to fix. We need to really make sure that we are thinking about what do we see in front of us? What are our students experiencing and what can we do right now ourselves to move the needle forward on that? So I think that's an element of kind of like thinking about the larger political landscape that we're part of and then bringing it local into the community. Like this is a student in front of me that I know that I care about regardless of my political like voting record. I see this student if I'm a teacher here, I am hoping that we have hired appropriately so that this teacher sees the students in front of them that they know they love those students, they care for those students, they can hear that student's experience and empathize and want to make a change to make that student's experience better. If that is not the case, that teacher should not be teaching at that school, that that's just it, right. 00:13:28 And that's a different conversation, but I'm going to go ahead and assume we have hired well and that teachers have those good intentions with the students who are in front of them, they care, they want to do better, right. So if that's the grounding, then we need to center student voice more often bring students to those staff meetings have students on the leadership teams and make sure that we're constantly inundated with student voices and student experiences. It's often a game changer in terms of the things that faculty and staff will think about will say, will advocate for. If there are students in the room, it's very different than if it is just adults. That conversation is different. What is said, what is suggested, what is just even considered? Right? Mentally, there's kind of like AAA I don't know if it's a filter but like there is what is important is the students and that becomes more front of mind than if the students aren't present in the room, right? So that's a dynamic that we want to think about. Also a final thought I want to share is we want to use staff meetings and team meetings. 00:14:29 So if you're like a content leader and you facilitate like a social studies department or, or something like that, that works the same way. But we want to use these meetings with staff to practice so much of this is so important because we, we kind of skip sometimes the conversation about how do we talk with staff, how do we lead for justice with staff, how do we have conversations about current events or politics or identity with staff? And we say staff, you should do this with students and maybe we'll give you a P D on how to do this with students but we don't actually do it ourselves. We don't actually facilitate those conversations as leaders with our staff. And the way that we get staff to do it well with students is to do it with the staff, right? So the the other cool piece of this is you could do a staff meeting or professional development, whatever you wanna call it. And the conversation can exist within the container of a protocol or activity that staff can actually do with students. Or if if a staff member doesn't actually work directly with students, it might be that they work with families so they can do this with families or they can work this, do this with uh community members or their team that they're part of. 00:15:42 So I think that's really critical too is we want to see staff meetings as the hub for practice, we want to constantly and consistently practice and we want that practice to be housed in a container or a protocol or something that they can take back in their roles in the school with students or otherwise and actually practice there, right? Or, or facilitate there in a way that builds student skills because we are as staff parallel parallel. I'm not sure if that's the word, but we are working in parallel. We're helping students do build these skills and have these conversations and talk about justice. We're also doing it ourselves. So when we do all of those pieces, we ground the work just to kind of recap here ground the work and shared values, the shared human emotions and based needs versus our opinions or academic intellectualizing. We center student voices by having them in the meetings on the leadership teams. We look at the street data, the student experience and we center those pieces of information in conversation and then we see staff meetings as an opportunity to practice, looking at that data, thinking about next steps, centering the student experience discussing and if we're disagreeing, especially thinking about the shared values of our community, our emotions and our needs and just doing that consistently, we are going to have a better staff culture. 00:17:00 That is one that doesn't get entrenched in political viewpoints, but one that advances justice sees the humanity in all of us in each of us as staff members sees it in our students, in our families identifies that we have a locus of control where we can do something we are not externally blaming, we are owning what we can do. We are intent on making the world better, making our school and our students experience at school better. And we are navigating those really critical conversations with empathy and upholding dignity of all people. So if you are interested in getting kind of the three part series with kind of there's a bonus one on unit dreaming also which I just absolutely love. But the three part series you can sign up for that we'll link it in the show notes and in the blog post, Lindsey Beth lions dot com slash blog slash 114. It's episode 1 14. So Lindsay Beth dot com slash blog slash 114. In the show notes on the blog, here's what you'll get. The first thing right away. You'll get the co creating community values and agreements, staff meeting, put that into action, personalize it as you need, You'll have the agenda to slide deck all the linked resources. 00:18:07 The next one is actually gonna be building community via circle. So circle protocol, great protocol to can house conversation both with staff and with students and families and anyone else. So an activity for example, and that will be like story of my name. So you'll learn Circle Protocol, you'll practice it by everyone sharing or being invited to share the story of their name. Then the third one, how to talk about race and current events with your staff. So there's a template, you insert the current event or the thing you want to talk about and you go forward and talk about it. So you're doing the practice and then you can reuse that one again and again because it's a template and then just insert whatever issue you want to talk about or student experience, data point, current event, blah, blah, blah. So that one, you could kind of reuse rinse and repeat. But everyone's used to the format we've done the grounding and values and agreements. We have the protocol of the circle if you want to use that repeatedly and then we can go forward and then the fourth one is a bonus. It's um on unit dreaming. So it's just thinking about how to increase that curricular fluency and build that muscle. That Dr Goldie Mohammed talks about in terms of curricular fluency that we want teachers to develop that being able to develop units and create curriculum based on anything, right? 00:19:13 Based on something that's right in front of us and just kind of get the practice with it and, and find the joy in it. So that's kind of a fun, fun one to balance the, the hard and the serious of the other three. If you're interested, go ahead and grab that freebie. Please let me know how you personalize it, how it goes. What's the response that you receive from your staff? I'm super excited to hear and I will see you next week. If you're leaving this episode, wanting more, you're going to love my life coaching intensive curriculum, boot camp. I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. We weave 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. Grab a spot on my calendar at w w w dot Lindsay beth lions dot com slash contact. 00:20:15 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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Author of Open Windows, Open Minds: Developing Antiracist, Pro-Human Students, Afrika Afeni Mills is back on the podcast! Afrika wants to build community and help folx keep their chins up through this challenging work.
The Big Dream
For us as educators to be courageous and strategic. (The kids are doing it, but they shouldn’t be alone doing it!) Mindset Shifts Required White-identifying people should do antiracist work for themselves. All people want to be whole and healed. We can look to white antiracist role models as guides and for motivation and encouragement to do this work. Many white folx have heard they need to decenter themselves, and so they may lean back. Instead, we can offer an alternative way to be. There’s a nuance to decentering. It doesn’t mean silence or to not be represented at all. It means what’s beautiful should be represented. Young white-identifying children don’t have great books to learn about people who look like them that have been doing antiracist work (both in the past and the present). Caterpillar to Butterfly Metaphor: The hard transformation happens in the chrysalis, and we can’t open it up early or the caterpillar will die. Actions Educators—Specifically White Educators—Can Take Pause and reflect. (Engage in these activities as you read Afrika’s book!) Write an obituary of the way we used to believe something. It’s hard to face this stuff! Write a letter to your younger self as part of your racial healing. Maybe even create a story to share with your students based on your story. Do these things to understand our own foundations and how things got to be the way they are before taking action. This will sustain the work. Leaders: Make space for teachers to 1) Do racial healing and identity work, and 2) Take action with students. Do this work yourself too! One Step to Get Started Use a framework. A great, free example is the CARE Framework! Also: Give teachers space to do this. Partner with families. Have the will to do it, have a plan for how we’ll keep this work going in the face of inevitable resistance. Stay Connected You can find this week’s guest on www.afrikaafenimills.com, on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Referenced Links:
To help you do anti-racist, pro-human, healing work, Afrika is sharing an amazing resource-packed Padlet with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 113 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 Everybody. I'm so excited for our returning guest today to the podcast on episode one, 13 of time for teacher shift. It is a, a Mills. She's a master's in education. She's the CEO of Continental Drift LLC. She is an author of an amazing book which we will talk about today, an education consultant and adjunct professor at Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development and Mount Holy College. She has been an educator since 1999 with a background as a class teacher, instructional coach, teacher developer and school administrator, Africa is the author of Open Windows Open Minds developing anti racist pro human students, as well as a viral blog post. A letter to white teachers of my black Children. Her ted talk having conversations about race is just another hard thing we can learn to do will be released spring 2023. I'm actually hoping it will be out by the time this episode drops. So we will see we are recording this conversation on March 27th, 2020 three. This will be released in May. So fingers crossed that it will be out by then our freebie for the episode is amazing. Africa has created a fantastic set of resources on a pale which we will link to in today's show notes, Lindsay Beth lions dot com slash blog slash 113. 00:01:08 Let's get to the episode. I'm educational justice coach Lindsay Lyons. And here on the time for teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings. If you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nerd out about co creating curriculum with students. I made this show for you. Here we go, Africa. Welcome to the Time for Teacher Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you so much. Yeah. And I think you were on an earlier episode. So this is like one of the very few repeats guesses we ever, I was so fun for this and we get to talk all about your new book, which is mind blowingly amazing. So I'm very excited about the baby. 00:02:12 The baby. Is there anything you want people before we dive into? Like the big questions? Anything you want people to know beyond, you know, the typical bio we read at the front of the episode anything that people should keep in mind during today's conversation. Well, I'm doing today. No, I really just, I'm, I'm my desire, like my heart genuinely is I feel the need and um I feel compelled to, like, just continue building community. I already felt that way as I was writing the book and was writing the book during the, like the height of the pandemic. And then now in whatever stage this is in whatever stage of pandemic this is, it's, it's just been so hard in so many ways. And I feel like especially when it comes to work that I focus on with regard to anti-racism and pro human ways of being. Um but there's been so much resistance and there is currently so much resistance to that. So honestly, I am just really excited to build community with folks and to connect and to help like lift each other up and inspire one another. I don't know if you've ever seen this. Like, I mean, my daughter was telling me yesterday, so she was like, it's not gift, it's just from like, you know what I'm talking about though, right? 00:03:20 The thing, right? The image. But there's one of these two and I don't know how old the the that they seem like like young people, maybe high school students playing on the same basketball team and one is walking down the court with their head hanging kind of low and then their teammate comes up to them and just pushes their chin up and just pass them on the back. And I was like, that's what we need, right. Because right now it's so easy to feel daunted and exhausted and kind of lost. But I think that spending time together in conversation could help with that. It won't solve for everything, but I think it could help. That is beautiful and we will try to find that maybe put that in the blog post moment, make a note to myself. So I think I asked you this question previously when you're on the podcast, but you know, dreams evolve and things change. And I'm just wondering right now in this moment when we think of freedom dreaming, right? Dreams grounded in the critique of injustice as a patina love says, what is that dream you hold? And, and specifically because your book is around instruction and more broadly, you know, curriculum, like, what is the dream that you have in that space? Well, right now, honestly, it's when I think about it, I feel like I really would like for us to support one another to be more courageous, right? 00:04:33 And so I want to contextualize that a bit because I think what's happening right now and I understand it right, from, from a human nature perspective is that there are we have a lot of polarization going on, right? So we have like there is um there is like really uh strident resistance against, um, what people are calling, like, anti C RT, um, instruction and parents rights and, and lots of book bannings and stuff like that. And I think there's a, a conversation where it could be like, oh, well, um, if, if, if this is what's most important, right. If we really believe that this is the right way to teach students, then we should just do it anyway. Right. And I'm like, I think that's, we really got at least the nuance of that, right? Because I think that yes, we do believe that those of us who do believe in anti bias, anti racist, pro human ways of being and, and teaching and learning, um we do believe that it is the right way. And also if someone is in a, in a position where it's like you might lose your job, you might be fined a, a high amount of like, you know, the fine might be something you don't, you don't have the ability to pay, you could in some places be charged with a third degree felony, right? 00:05:42 For, for teaching, which feels bizarre like we're in 2023 that's happening. So for me, I feel like my dream is that we become strategic and say yes, we do believe that this is the right way to teach with and this is the right way to be right. And because there are different places where legislatively, things are shifting in a way that it becomes more precarious to teach in this way, then how are we going to support people to push through? Right. So, and this, actually, this idea honestly came from something that I posted on Twitter and I was just getting really frustrated with, you know, some of the things and different legislative measures and things like that. And then, um, someone posted like, well, what are we gonna do? Like, how are we gonna get the bail, um the bail funds ready? And I'm like, yo, that's right. Right. This is what folks did like when it came time for, you know, for nonviolent resistance and civil rights and things like that, we were really very strategic about like, yes, we do believe we must push forward and how are we gonna make sure that people can think? That's my dream right now is if we actually and didn't instead of like wringing our hands and only because I mean, there's some hand wringing and frustration, understandably so, but then what are we gonna do about it? 00:06:50 Right. We need to make sure that we're, we're in tangible ways supporting one another to keep the work going. And so that's what my dream is too, is like that we will become aware of what's needed to keep going in different places and to really um show our solidarity, right? Like, not just talk about the importance of solidarity and being abolitionists of against things that dehumanize, but how do we do that in ways that are very clear and, and um in ways that people need that tangible support. Yeah, I love that from, from a strategic, courageous like standpoint, brilliant and brilliant ideas very specifically, like as an example, the bail funds, like if we find a link to something like that, I will link to that in the show notes, we can um one of the things that I try to do is donate 1% of all of our proceeds to a specific organization or cost for each month or each year. So that could be this year's like we'll, we'll yeah, really try to like start thinking about that. But from a financial and strategic standpoint, brilliant because I think, I mean, that's the thing too because along with that same thread that came out was someone said, and it's like sometimes I think things get sparked by just something that somebody just says off the top of their head. 00:07:59 But it's thoughtful and it's like, I didn't really think about that. Someone was just like, what if all the teachers in one building decided that they were going to push through anyway, they're not gonna arrest everybody. And I was like, you know what? See and that's the thing too. I think like being in this generation right now, there's a lot that I feel like we are aware of from different movements that have happened. But I don't know how well acquainted we are with the actual, like, strategy, right? And so I'm just like, that's so true. I'm just like, like, if everybody in the school, like, now you have to work on that to get everybody courageous enough. Right. But we know that though, right? Like when those of us who have been um in a, in a space where we've been working in a school where there's a union and when sometimes it's like, right. so the contract we're having an issue. So there's some things that we're gonna need to do to make sure that this, you know, that we're able to push this forward and you gotta have the right, the, the skill, the will and the, you know, and the ability to be able to do those things. So how do we support one another to make, you know, to make substantive moves because the kids are doing it. I'm like, look at the babies, the babies are walking out, right. They're having teachings and, right, they're taking over school board meetings and I'm like, the kids are doing it but they shouldn't be alone doing it. 00:09:07 Right. And I know that there are definitely some educators who are participating as well. But I'm like, I think more of us need to do it though. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Yes. That, and I, I think with that from a, from a, being a former social studies teacher too, in terms of curriculum, like we teach movements and we teach the strategies of the movements, but at such a surface level and we don't think about them from the standpoint of connecting to today, we're starting to just see people think about the connections today, more broad kind of ideas. But if you had a unit where the I think action project at the end of the unit was like, you're now taking the strategy you learned about and you're putting them into action in your community right now for a certain problem that you care about right now. Like that is a totally different level of like needing to understand what we're learning about in history to serve today. Like the possibilities are just really, really good. And I feel like I got really so like, I mean, I was already motivated but even more so so recently in um like it as part of um the Ted Ed cohort that I was part of Sharif Meki, who is the founder and executive director of the Center for Black Educated Development. 00:10:13 His talk was about like really looking at like the the strength of like the Black teaching approach, right? And how it's of benefit to everyone. And that's, he talked about that a bit too. He was talking about like really thinking about what happened during the Montgomery bus boycott and who like who trained Rosa Parks, right? And I think getting rid of that narrative of, oh, she was an old woman who was just I mean, that's ages first of all, like, she's, you know, if she's a certain age she's already old and tired. Right. There's that or tired. Um, but, but really he was talking about, like, who trained her and the other people who are part of that resistance movement. Right. And just really putting some shine on those folks. It wasn't like they just, just got up one day and decided this is what we're gonna do. People were moved to do it and then they had a plan, right? And support to fulfill that plan. Yeah. Yes. Oh my God. Absolutely. That's, oh, I, I want to go down to Rosa Park Drive. So I am curious in terms of, I know like the work that you do, there's so much around mindset pieces and you talk about some of that in the book. 00:11:22 And I'm, I'm just curious to know like, what are the big mindset shifts that have really moved the needle for educators and, and thus for their students and families in larger communities that, that you think everyone should be aware of or, or could be really powerful. Like if a leader is listening, like here's a mindset shift to try to encourage in, in your community. Yeah, I think, and I do end up like, I am someone who is very, very like, I'm really focused on like hope and really be like, how are we solution minded and things like that? And so I think one of the things that has been really that I've noticed and that I think we can do some more work around um um really investigating and exploring and kind of operational is there is. And I think it, it it kind of goes along with like racial identity development. There are for folks who are white identifying and who are identifying as anti racist, especially those folks who are the beginnings of their journey. There's a lot of um feeling of, oh we need to be better for black and brown people, right? And we need to do better. Like the systems need to be better. 00:12:24 And I'm like, yes, that is part of it. There's more though, right? And so I think part of one of the things that I'm really excited about like having more conversation about is like, it really is about all of us not dehumanizing any of us, right? And so for example, if I'm a white identifying person and I'm like, oh, I need to do better for a black and brown person, then there can be some saviors that comes from that there can be some other rising that's still part of that. It's like, oh, well, you this separate group you've been treated badly. And so how do we stop treating you badly? It's like, yeah, but what, what has the idea of, of whiteness as a social construct done to you as a person, right? And I'll tell you, I was like, this is something that I heard recently and I'm not gonna be able to trigger it because I don't remember specifically where I heard it from, but it's so good that I have to tell it here. So basically, it was like, you know, when that um racially motivated massacre took place in Buffalo at the top super supermarket and there was um a white identifying woman who I believe asked a, a black identifying woman like, how are you like in light of that shooting that took place like, how are you? 00:13:31 And she the the the black identifying woman was like, I am good. How are you, how do you, how are you processing the fact that someone in your name and representing you did this horrible thing? How are you feeling about that? And I think the woman gave to gave her pause. She was like, oh, I didn't really think about that, right? So I think when you like, when you ask the question, I'm like this piece too is thinking about yes. Do we want to be good for one another? Yes. And also we want ourselves to be whole and healed from this destructive thing, right? And so I think that's the piece to that really like starting to have more of those conversations has been really helpful. And I think in a way it's like it kind of causes a bit of cognitive dissonance honestly for some people because I'll be like, listen, if you're doing, say you're doing a multicultural celebration and you're just like, yeah, the black kids are gonna celebrate, you know, we're there from and the brown kids will too and the white kids are gonna do what, like we're saying, multicultural. But where is your place? 00:14:33 And you absolutely have a place in the human family. Absolutely. And yes, have that was their colonization and then, and oppression and subjugation and enslavement. Like, yes, all of those things happened and they're horrible and we, we're still living with the consequences of those things today and they're still in place in different shape, shifted ways and, but that doesn't have to be how you affiliate, right? That doesn't have to be who you see yourself having something in common with. And so just thinking about that conversation is like, who are the people that you look up to? Who are the people who look like you who have done things that you believe in? Right? And so how do we talk more and identify more of, of those like role models and folks who've been doing this work, who we can look to as guides, right? Who we can look to as encouragement and motivation, right? Yeah. That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Yeah. And I think you are one of the biggest voices in, in my mind and experience of like talking to white Children about white anti racist and abolitionists. 00:15:34 And, and I think that work is just, just fascinating and your responses that you've been getting. I know we were talking about before we started hitting record, you know, like uh to that work has been really fascinating as well. Do you mind speaking to that? And I'm like I said, I get it. I understand like, say if someone is white identifying and has come to the place of like, oh yeah, I believe that racial and racism is not good. The so systemic oppression is not good. Mass incarceration is not good housing inequality and access to resources and you know, and and the the ability to live the best, fullest life that you want to live, like have not everyone not having access to. That is not something that I want to see. Continue, right? So just thinking about that, right? So I'm like, OK, so that's, that's a part of the journey. And also alongside that comes some messaging around like, you know, if you're a white identifying person, you should stop speaking so much. You should be more of a listener, you should censor the voices of black and brown people and, and not, you know, censor yourself or even like in some of the presentations I've done or even in the book, you'll see the, the infographics about the representation of white identifying folks in children's books and you know how we want like it seems like that is um decreasing and that there, it looks like at first glance that it's because of the decrease in white characters that there has that we assume that there will be an increase in black and brown characters. 00:16:53 That's not quite the, the issue, right? It's actually a more of an increase in animals and inanimate objects and stuff like that. And so sometimes white identifying folks see that. It's like, yeah, I need to lean back and decent myself And I think that's not quite the thing that is effective to happen. It's like what we're trying to decent is the racial, the destructive racial concepts or the construct of whiteness. Whiteness was something that was created to oppress and to subjugate. So prior to that, prior to when that became a thing, right? Um In the like early 16 hundreds, people were identified by where they came from, right? Where they, where their ethnic, what nation they came from, what, what nation they were connected with. And so knowing that, you know, it's, it's the construct of race. I don't think a lot of us know that about when it was created, how it was created where it came from. So if I'm asking someone like, how do you identify and you tell me why I'm like, that's what you were, have been racially categorized as who are you though, right? 00:17:55 Like who, like what's your story? Who are you connected to, who are your people? And so when I asked that, what basically what I do is I push back and I'm like, I understand that you've been told to decent, but that does not mean silence, it does not mean not participating it when we're talking about de centering something we're trying to decent. The thing that takes away from our humanity, right? But if you're gonna affiliate with something different than that, then that's beautiful. Right? And so how are you going to engage? And we want to censor that. So for example, if I'm talking about white students in a classroom, I wanna make sure that like not only are all the books represented of lots of different people, people, especially now that there's such resistance that which is maddening in so many ways but also too to be like, well, how can you see yourself? Like, what is your identity? Who are you, what do you believe in? Right? Like what do you believe about people and life and you know, all the things like, how do we, how do we start to teach Children to have that identity? 00:18:57 And that's what I think is really gonna move the needle because I'm like, and this is like I said this before in different spaces, I don't say this to be alarmist but realistic that the natural thing that will happen with a human being if you don't see yourself, right? If you don't see yourself, you're gonna constantly look for that. And there are people who have um who, in some other cases are called bad actors. Folks who have ill motives who are waiting to recruit those Children who are looking to see themselves and what they're offering them is something very toxic, something awful and they're gonna keep being successful, right? We're gonna keep having like people being able to recruit folks to participate in things like a January 6th or something like that. Because what is the alternative? Right. What are we offering as a way to be? We can't just be able to decent yourself, not offer like what to do instead, right? So I really feel like if I could like a message that I could give to folks is like de centering has to be, there's some nuance to it, right? It doesn't mean to be silent, it doesn't mean to not be represented at all. 00:19:58 It means what's beautiful should be represented. Yeah. And yet so much of if, if folks listening are not following Africa on all of the places on social, we're gonna share those handles at the end because you should be. And I think one of the things that I have seen in just what you have posted too is also that white adults and and educators, people who are in spaces that have the opportunity to share these like abolition, white abolition role models with white Children don't know who the White role models are because they didn't like learn about it. So it is so like, it's such an interesting cycle and, and, and so, so if we have people listening right now, do you mind talking about? I know you talk about several in the book, you talk about several on social media, like who are the folks that people can just start kind of researching? Absolutely. The first people that I'll mention would be Jenna Chandler Ward and Elizabeth Devi, the co-founders of teaching while White and the coauthors of learning and teaching while White, they are the first folks who I saw note that like it was like, we don't have enough of these examples and then create a resource. 00:21:01 Like here, here, here is the collection. It's not an exhaustive collection, but it is a really wonderful collection of like of here are some folks that you can begin to learn about and think about and see what they did, what you know, what shifted things for them. Why did they choose to be who they were? And why did they choose to fight against, you know, against subjugation? And why did they, why did they choose to be abolitionist in their time? And this is not just folks historically, this is more like current folks now too, right? And then, so there if you, if you go to and we can definitely put a link into, but just to make reference to it, there is an actually like a PDF that um Elizabeth and Jenna created that has, it's like I think maybe like a four or five page document. And then it has some questions that like reflection questions for folks to be able to think about. And then someone who is newer for me is um Lynn Barnett. He has done. I mean, when I look at it, I'm like, whoa, I'm so happy. I don't even know how I found it because, you know, I'm always looking for stuff. Um but I found his resources and he has been compiling a list of white anti racist ancestors and on the website that he's created when you click on it, he has these biographies of all of these different folks who are white folks who engage in this work. 00:22:18 And so I'm like, so I definitely would, those are the, the two resources that come top of mind. And one of the things I wanna do, like I'll tell a story of one of my, one of my relatives who like his, what he said, both broke my heart but also motivated me. So my nephew is a black, young black man. He is married to a white woman who um whose son is also white, who was the son that she had before they became a relationship with one another. And um one, you know, after my book launch, I had given the books away to everybody because I'm like, I'm such a bibliophile and I'm like, they were like, this is not really a raffle because everybody's getting something I'm like, yeah, that's, that's an Africa raffle. Everybody wins, right. It's like Oprah, like, you get a book and you get a book, right? And so when they went home and started reading some of the books, like her son was, um, he was really excited to learn about white folks who were abol, who were abolitionists because he hadn't heard that before. And so I'm like, ok, so that broke my heart because she was asking like, are there other resources for him? Because he's eight? And I thought about it. I'm like, oh, not that I can think of this for him. 00:23:23 Right? There's some books that are like, you know, not my idea. That's a newer book where, you know, they're talking about a white child who was saying like, no, I don't, I don't believe in this, but I'm kind of in the middle of this thing. Um And then there's some books to like Nettie's trip South. It's an older book, but it's so good about a little white girl who traveled to the South with her family and saw enslaved Africans in her reaction to it as a child. I feel like everybody needs to read that book because I'm like, I think it, I mean, it's heartbreaking, right? It ends in such an ominous way. She's just like, since that trip, I've had a hard, I, I, I've have a, I have a hard time sleeping and I'm like, oh baby girl, right. This like breaks my heart anyway, like I feel like more of those types of stories need to be created so that students can see and Children can see what the possibilities are. I think we have lots of resources that are coming out where we talk about being anti racist and they typically have been, I think lately there's usually like a young adult version that comes out and then like a children's version and then maybe some a book, a board book for the Babies and things like that. And I think it's definitely great because it's highlighting how to be a part of a group of people who believe in this. 00:24:27 And also I think we need to do both, right? I think we need to have that have depict what it looks like for um for white identifying Children. Like yeah, to be able to say like here's who I am and here's what I believe. And here are some people who look like me who've been doing this. It's not, it's not new. I think a lot of times people think it's new but it's not. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yes, this is amazing. I will try to link to as many of these resources as I can in the show notes. So thank you for all of these resources and and your book is just a phenomenal resource. I know you also have like a companion like online portion with more resources. It is just like every educator should read this book. Is there like a kind of a favorite piece in here? I mean, there are pieces I can talk about if you don't have any that comes in mind. But I'm just curious to know like, yeah, like what? So he says that I'm, I'm thinking really? But one phase you said, like kind of the at risk idea, like, problem at risk and who is at risk? And aren't we all at risk if we're not kind of learning about like all identities and all people and how to connect it as a collective to take action against the justice? 00:25:39 Like just all of the pieces. Um you talked a lot about um like what the perspectives of uh white educators have fun and like the the idea of like writing letters to self and just these concrete activities that people can do as adults engaging with this and also very student facing instructional strategies. I mean, there is so much in here, is there, is there a particular piece that resonates with you? I think, I mean, structurally, I love the breathe and reflect um sections because I think I'm a big reflector, right? I think that, you know, it's really important to take in ideas and especially because some of it, a lot of it is stuff that depending on the reader's experience may not have heard before, may be new, right? And there's a process that we need to go through of unlearning some things and even mourning, right? I've been thinking about that too. Is that man? I this is like, this is kind of out there. But what I was thinking about this morning while I was just like, man, what if we like wrote an obituary for our formal way of thinking, right? Not in really like to honor it to be like, yeah, we miss you but to be like, yeah, you're, we're moving beyond this, right? 00:26:44 We're moving to something else. We're transforming into a different way of being. And so I think they're really taking that time to reflect and be honest and say like this is how I grew up. This is what my folks taught me. It feels hard to acknowledge that my parents taught me something that was harmful. It feels hard to really confront that my, the the place that I went to for to practice my faith actually taught me something that was not quite loving, right? Those are hard things. And now we, I think ideally we just like it shouldn't be hard. It's like, but it is right because even if we believe that something is true and good, we have to detach from that other thing that was attached to us and that separation process is not easy, right? I have a friend Luria. Um Barry is, is a good friend and she does this work as well and just this past weekend I had the opportunity to hear from her um at a conference that we, we went to and she was talking about like that going from caterpillar to crystal to butterfly the in the crystal list. I think we don't often talk about that either. 00:27:46 We're just like, yeah, the caterpillars is and it goes into this little space and then it comes out as the butterflies like inside the crystal is kind of rough in there. Like it's not, it's not easy but it's, it's good, right? It's ultimately good even though it's not easy. And so I think that's the piece too, is that being able to breathe and reflect on those things. One, I think they kind of undergirding the idea of trying to create other literature for Children, especially white Children to see what other possibilities are and to see themselves reflected in a not a fun house mirror way, which is I think like how Jenna and Elizabeth uh talk about the mirrors for white kids. It's like not distorted but like who you really can be and who you really are, right? I love the letters that educators wrote to themselves when they were younger because I feel like so many of us need to go through that racial healing and writing a letter back to yourself could even be a really great place like as an educator. How cool would that be if you're like, oh, let me think about this. Maybe I could like maybe create a story for my students based on even my own story and help them to have their own stories that continues from here. 00:28:50 So I think those pieces too like really being able to see examples of what racial healing looks like. Um But this, I mean, it was my book baby. So I'm just like, I love everything about that baby. I'm like, I like the color of its eyes. I like its little ear. I like its hair, right? Oh my gosh. There is, there is so much in here. It's hard to just use. But I think there's, there's so many, I, I mean, there's from information and things that I just, I learned from differing examples of things and activities and the breath and reflect, like you said, two instructional strategies that like, I think you could just use those in front of students. I'm wondering for the leader who's listening thinking about like maybe, I don't know, doing a book study um putting some things into practice, encouraging teachers to adopt some things. Is there somewhere that you would encourage people to start with like an approach to this book or, or you know, talking a little bit. I know you do some of that work with educators in schools. I think this piece is important even though i it's not always what we do, but I think it's what we need to be doing. 00:29:58 So when looking at like, you know, the model that Paula Ferri put forward about critical consciousness development and how that beginning is with that exploration of self, I get the temptation to jump into action, right? Because it's like, oh we recognize things are bad, especially when Children are involved, we don't want to continue to cause harm. So we want to do something immediately. However, if we try to act without knowing the foundation of our own foundation and actually being able to have an understanding of how things got to be the way they are, then it's gonna be really hard to sustain that work because you don't necessarily have a true understanding of where came from in the first place. And so when you start to get that pushback, which we will, right, then it's hard because like, I, I, I don't know, I don't really have that depth, right? And so I think like, you know, um um that, that Nottingham framework of the learning pit, I think about that a lot too. And a lot of times I talk about it in workshops where it's that, you know, like we start with the challenge and then we take the challenge and go into the pit and it feels hard and we're like, I don't know if I should have done this and man, I'm at the heart of it and it feels really hard. But then we work our way up to the other side, like we have to do that. 00:31:02 And one of the other images I try to do to help people not to do is like when you're on the one side, seeing a challenge, you can't throw a plank over the pit and walk to the other side because you're gonna be missing the shrink that you would have given in the pit. So going back to the butterfly example, um I heard the story a long time ago but basically where it's like, you know, I don't know if this actually happened or if this was like the story that was told. But where someone like, you know, like back to the caterpillar went into the crystal and it's like, oh yeah, they have to struggle to get out. If you cut that crystal open to let the caterpillar out so that it doesn't have to struggle, then it actually will die because the the thing that makes the the butterflies or the developing butterflies wings able to fly as a strength it gains through cracking through the crystal list. So we have to do that hard work so that we have the strength to persist. And so I would say like for leaders, it is hard because of course, we're really looking at like we want things that are measurable. We want to be able to say like we implemented this, we measured it, kids got better at this and that right? 00:32:03 And so I'm like, yeah, I get that at the same time, I think it's really important to think about from like, when you're looking at a broader view that we, if we really know Children and we know how Children develop and how we all develop as learners that in order to really teach them something meaningful, we have to get down to this foundational level. It doesn't mean that because I think some people get freaked out and they're just like, I don't want my kid just talking about race all day long. I want them to learn math and it's like, yeah, ok, good. Nobody's saying that we're just gonna talk about race all day, but we are going to integrate into who we are as a human family. All the important things we need to know to do, you know, to be good for one another and to take care of each other. And so I would say just really to, to invest that time in letting not letting because that, that's not quite the word. I mean, in um helping your staff to be equipped to do that self work because, and that, and it's not to say that because I think sometimes people just like, oh, if you're just thinking about yourself racially all year, what does that have to do yourself in the classroom? It absolutely will impact the classroom and it also will build in now that we understand how these systems developed. 00:33:09 Now we know as educators how to interrupt that but not just to interrupt, but how are we talking? We started talking about freedom dreaming, how are we building that thing that we always espoused that we build? Like if we look at anybody's mission and vision statement for a school, we always say these beautiful things, right? And they are, they're very beautiful. I think in a lot of ways it's still very aspirational. And so I think they really like allowing uh I keep going back to that, allowing but like just really providing opportunities for um for our staff to really delve into like, OK, let me see, like, what are my ideas and where are these things? Where, where, how was I shaped and formed with these ideas? And then, then we'll be prepared to be able to implement these lessons, which is the latter part of the book. So that's how it's structured. The first part of the book is racial healing and identity development and consciousness development. And then the latter part of the book is like, this is what this looks like in the classroom in different ways. So I would say to try to uh make to allot time for both so that it takes root and it's not surface because we know what happens to things that are surfaced that actually makes me think too of kind of like um when I was at the International Network for public schools in New York City, they had um what they call one learning model for all, which was where what we expect of students is like the same way we interact as adults in our professional learning. 00:34:20 And so it makes me think of that because if teachers and staff members are doing this racial healing identity work and they're then they're moving to implementation. Like I almost think of that in the same way for students. Like what racial healing and identity work can we give them front end of the year and build through out? They have the capacity then to also end of a unit, end of the semester, end of the year, whatever it is, like do the implementation, do that, like civic action project or something. I I think about, you know, Massachusetts S C Civic Action Project. It's a requirement that the work or the impact is sustained after the project ends, which is like, that's what we want that sustainability. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, and I will say this too, like, I think a lot of times when we think about or at least in the conversations that I have been a part of when it comes to talking about like leaders, a lot of times it's like, oh, well, what do we need to encourage leaders to do for their staff? It's like not just for the staff but for them too, right? So I'm like, like without getting into details some of the stories that I'm hearing from folks who are, who are teachers in schools trying to do this work are being led by administrators who have been fed a lot of misconceptions about race and are perpetuating that as administrators which is making the work harder for the teachers. 00:35:34 So for so like thinking about like, say, um I know someone who is a science teacher and um you know, was really trying to like talk about like science from, from a, like a, a scientific perspective. But because the, because what they were teaching, it happened to have some impact on race because the principal hadn't had that learning had actually pushed back on what was being taught. And I was like, well, this is killing me because a lot of times I get the question about like, what does this look like in the science class? And I'm like, and she was doing the work, doing the work, but because the principal hadn't had that experience, then they weren't able to make that connection, right. So I think that it's not just, oh, do this for your staff. It's like, do this for all of you. Yeah. Yeah. I just think about the importance of having a coach as a leader. We often give instructional coaches to teachers, but like, how helpful would it be as a leader? Yes. And to be able to have a space to be honest and be like, I'm not really sure what to do, right? Like this happened, someone said this thing, I thought this thing and it turns out that I was really wrong about that and I'm not, I got, I got called out right for this thing that I said and so just really being able to have a space to be like, yep, it's messy. 00:36:43 Right. This work is, it's, it's messy, especially in the beginning. Like any new thing is. But if you stick with it just like you stick with anything you learn. I talk about this in other spaces too. If you are someone who has learned a new language or you've learned how to play an instrument or you've learned how to ride a bike or drive a car, anything like big that you've learned how to do. It's messy in the beginning because you don't really know what you're doing frozen. So you swallow a lot. You sound pretty bad. Like, you know, I, I talked about this, this is kind of what made people laugh in the South by Southwest E D US, um, session. And I said, if you ever have been around a child who is learning how to play a quarter, you know, how painful it can be to support someone who is learning a new thing, but it doesn't stay like that. Right. It's, it's a little rough in the beginning but the more they practice, the better they get and it's really the same foundational principle for us. Yeah. Yeah. And just, I like thinking of that cultural container that all of this work happens in, right, to be able to prioritize that as the teacher level and at the staff level to create those spaces where mistakes are OK? 00:37:45 And we move forward from them and we see them as like, you know, we have gratitude for people who do correct us and tell us that you could do something different. Um Yeah. Is there, is there something, I mean, we've kind of gone all over the place. Is there something that you wanted to talk about that you didn't get a chance to or something that you wanted to highlight or, or share advice for, for leaders? I, I mean, like I, I could talk to you all day seriously, but I think, I think I've said the things that I wanted to say today. Um Yeah, I think it's just been, it's just really important that we keep the conversation going and then we get to a place where it's like where we can connect with one another and it's, and it's not like we, we gotta get away from this polarized way of being and I do wanna be clear. So there is, I think sometimes when I, when I say what I say and when I teach what I teach, some folks are like, oh, you're given a pass to people who are just like committed xenophobe. I'm like, no, I actually like, I do like not because I believe in other, I don't believe in others people, however, some people believe in other themselves and if someone has other otherwise themselves and has identified as somebody who is going to do harm to other people because they are different, who is going to, to hurt people or to docks people or to do like, you know, to, to threaten people. 00:38:55 I'm not talking about them because they have made a different choice. That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about which and I believe that that is the minority of people. I don't believe that's the majority of us. I will say though that I do believe the majority of us have the capacity and the curiosity, even if it's not quite the skill yet to be better. And also we need to have that courage though, to really, because I'm like, I think the people who are really determined to be hateful, they're very strategic, very, I mean, they have talking points and guides and here's what you do and here's how you do this and that. And I'm not saying that we want to be that way, but there's something to be said about being organized and about really, you know, supporting one another and working together and not being because when we are isolated and we're doing this work in pockets, it's easier to, to kind of stop it, right? But when we're more unified and in solidarity with one another, we can get a lot more done and it's, the stakes are so high. Like we're talking about Children. Right. And we're talking about our, our country. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And, and I think this sometimes can feel like a very big, like thing to take on to, to get into, to fears of missteps. 00:40:03 Right. All the things we've named so far. What is like a starting point for someone who is kind of like, ready to do the thing and like ready to engage in the work for themselves, for their staff and is listening to this on a two and it's like I want to do something like tomorrow like a Wednesday staff meeting or I, I wanna like go do this thing and, and just get me started in a way that's really gonna help build that foundation that we need to be able to make it sustaining and all the things that we talked about. What would you say that would be? Yeah. So there is a framework, the Center for anti-racism education framework or care framework, which is another thing you should link into the resources. Oh my gosh, it's one of the most beautiful tools I have seen. It has these, you know, the different principles that, you know, will support a school community to become an anti racist, you know, educational learning space. And it begins with humanity. And I love that because it gives us a space to be able to say like we need to get away from this dehumanizing that we've done for of one another and to be able to get to like, what is it that we share? 00:41:08 And because we fall in love with that, right? Then it's like, well, then we're gonna be willing to do all we can to hold on to that and then it builds, it's not like we're starting at like, where's the action that we can take? It's like, no, what is it? Who are we like? Who are we? And so I would honestly encourage a lot of folks to like take a look at that framework because it comes along with a, a lot of tools and self assessment guides and examples and it, and it builds, right? So it's like, you know, you start with humanity and you move on to talking about like historical truths and truths and then you talk about what it means to develop a critical consciousness and then you talk about race and racism and then it goes on to just action. And so I would just really encourage folks to be like, yes, it is like, OK, we gotta do something. It's like, yes, but the thing to do is to start in a place that's going to last, right? So I would highly encourage like using a framework because I think sometimes like without a framework, it can feel like I don't know, like am I starting to read this book? And people telling us don't just read a book and don't just listen to podcasts and I don't know what to do after that. 00:42:10 And my community is, is, you know, there's only white people here and if we have some resistance going on, like there are some, you know, there are some things that are on people's minds about this work. I think you using the tools and it's, it's free. Right. I think a lot of times people feel like, oh if we're gonna, you know, do this work, like we don't have the resources we already allowed, allocated this money from the budget. It's like, well, don't even worry about that because you can just download this right? And just be intentional about creating time and sustaining space for staff to work together. Have the discussions involve families, things like that. It has the supports there. And so I think, but honestly, it really is about having that will, right? The will to, to say we're going to do this and not to and, and to prepare ahead of time because like you're going to make the decision and then you're going to second guess it because you're going to face resistance. And humanly speaking, we don't like that, right? So have a plan in place already to be like when not, if, but when we face resistance, whether it's internally or externally, how are we going to keep this work going? Determine that ahead of time? Yeah, brilliant and I will try to link to that as well. 00:43:12 I'm just thinking from what you shared to it almost again, sounds like the parallels from doing this as a staff and then helping teachers see the connection to how you would do that in a unit or with students, right? It's just like one learning model for all. Again, like this is, this is so great to be able to practice as a staff and thus bring the same kinds of activities and ideas and frameworks into classroom space for students as well and and like you said, and with families as well. Yeah, that's the thing too is I think like we talked about a little bit before. It's not pausing the learning to do this. It is learning this as part of the learning, right? As you're implementing your con content, you're thinking about things to assign specific lens in the lens of a mathematician in the lens of, you know, of, of literature. You're looking at it through the lens of historian and how is this impacting our current times? Right. So it's all integrated. It's hard though because like one of the things I think about too, just being honest is that most of us didn't learn how to teach in this way in our prep programs. And so it is in the midst of being completely exhausted by the pandemic and demoralized as an educator because there's so much that has been coming at educators and so little regard for what it means to be a teacher and the value of being a teacher and like going through all those emotions, it's hard to be like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna take on another thing. 00:44:26 Right. I wanna just name that because I think that's real. Right. And also if we're going to continue because sometimes some people need to not continue and I totally respect that too. Right. If someone's going to continue is being able to find the spaces that are gonna allow you to continue in a whole way in a way where you can honor yourself and be cared for. Right? And finding those spaces where we can do this work together. Hey, everyone. It's Lindsay. Just hopping in here to say today's episode. Freebie is from Africa. It is a palette with, I cannot tell you how many resources. Absolutely amazing. Go check it out. Lindsey Beth lions dot com slash blog slash 113. Now, back to our conversation. Beautiful. Thank you so much for that. And, and I have two final quick wrap of questions. One is just for fun. What is something you have been learning about lately? It could be anything? Oh, ok. Oh, learning. Oh my gosh. I think this is the thing that has been on my mind a lot more recently. I am someone that although I am an introvert. Um and I do get a lot of energy through time. Apart from other folks, I don't think I truly understood until lately, the value of like, silence and solitude. 00:45:38 So, like being by myself, binge, watching a show is not the same as enjoying silence and solitude and really, you know, reflecting and just really being able to be in a space of just being settled and at peace as a person, I think probably, I don't know, like, if we were in a different time, I don't know if I would have felt as compelled, but because there is so much noise and so much rancor and stress, I'm just like, I, I won't, I won't live like that. Right? I won't live that I need to be able to maintain peace and joy. And so I think like really being able to lean into some times of just really getting quiet and not just being surrounded by distractions, but just being able to think and to be right, that's been something that I've been learning. So I'm like, I am not like I am really at the beginnings of this. Right? It feels uncomfortable for me. So I'm like, I'm definitely at that at that place where I'm just like, all right, I'm gonna be leaning into silence and then immediately I'm just like, yeah, I forgot to put that on my to do list. And so that's, that's on my head. So I'm like, oh gosh, but I know that the people I'm learning from, they just like, don't be hard on yourself. 00:46:39 Just kind of act like you're sitting on a calm body of water and a speed boat came by and you're just gonna let it speed and just keep on going. So I'm like, yeah, lots of speed boats, but they're, they're listening, they're listening. So just really trying to spend some more time and like learning to be like meditative and at peace. Yeah, I need to learn the same thing. So thank you for that. Yeah. And I think we previewed this earlier but where can people listen to just the wisdom that you have connect with? You? See all the things that you're doing? Yes. And so I really try to do a good job of keeping my website up to date. So it's my, my domain is Africa fans dot com. And so there are lots of resources there. But if you're on Twitter, I'm at a Fanny Mills. If you um search me on Facebook and Instagram, Open Windows, Open Minds has its own, that has its own um Facebook and Instagram pages. I also can be found on linkedin and I, I'm like, I haven't graduated really beyond that. You know, I like my, I have a nephew who was just like auntie, you gotta get on tiktok. I'm like, I don't know, I'm not there yet, but those are the spaces so far and I do have um I do try to keep up with folks through a newsletter and things like that too. 00:47:52 So definitely, really wanted to um talk about that because I, I do believe in the importance of developing and sustaining community. And so those are some of the things I think, yeah, some ways that people can get in touch with me. Beautiful and I know you do work with schools and districts. So can people reach out to you about that if they bring me in? You want me to connect with folks? I've been doing some really enjoyable work um both within schools. And like, even recently I worked with a group of staff from a community health center and that was awesome. So I'm like, so will, especially because we do this work as educators. And then also there's that racial healing part that I think is just really good for everybody. And so yeah, so if you, you want to work with me, I'd be happy to be in touch. Amazing. And we're gonna link in the blog post. We're gonna have the free resource from you as a pad full of like, I cannot believe how many resources are in there. So it's fun to make, I'm so excited for people to look at that. So check that out everybody that'll be at Lizabeth lions dot com slash whatever the episode number is, which I will edit in later Africa. 00:48:55 Thank you so much for being on this show. I have absolutely enjoyed this conversation. Absolutely. Thank you for having me and I have felt quite the same, quite the same. Hey, everyone. It's Lindsay just saying what the actual link is. It is Lindsay Bels dot com slash blog slash 113. To get that pilot resource from Africa. If you're leaving this episode wanting more, you're going to love my life, coaching intensive curriculum, boot camp. I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. We weave 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. Grab a spot on my calendar at W W w dot Lindsay beth lions dot com slash contact. Until next time leaders continue to think. Big act brave and be your best self. 00:50:03 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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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
November 2024
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