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In this episode, we continue to talk about the PLC at Work® framework with Dr. Chad Dumas! He discusses the importance of asset-mindedness, time constraints and the development of refined collaboration skills in teacher teams.
Dr. Chad Dumas is a Solution Tree PLC at Work®, Assessment, and Priority Schools associate and international consultant, presenter, and award-winning researcher whose primary focus is collaborating to develop capacity for continuous improvement. With a quarter century of successful leadership experience, Chad has led significant improvements for both students and staff. He shares his research and knowledge in his books, Let’s Put the C in PLC: An Action Guide to Put the C in PLC, and upcoming Teacher Team Leader Handbook, and consulting that includes research, stories, hands-on tools, useful knowledge, and practical skills. The Big Dream People see the inherent 'gems' in others, moving away from deficit perspectives to nurturing humanity's potential. He envisions a world where educators can identify and cultivate the qualities in people that may be hidden, leveraging education as the key to unlocking these treasures. Mindset Shifts Required Foster an asset-minded culture. Example: Instead of starting an IEP meeting with all of the problems that the child has, everyone shares characteristics or attributes or virtues that the student manifests. Action Steps Step 1: Begin by developing rapport with others, matching their physical behavior and intonation to build relationships effectively. Step 2: Align team focus and actions through shared agendas and strategies that maintain rapport, like the "third point" and collective note-taking. Step 3: Learn and apply effective collaboration techniques, ensuring that meetings focus on impactful practices that drive student improvement. Challenges? Finding time for collaboration: This is about prioritization. It has to be a priority. Learn from others and make it happen. Collaboration skills. Help teams learn how to collaborate well. One Step to Get Started See in others what they don't yet see in themselves…and get Dr. Dumas’s book! Stay Connected You can find Dr. Chad Dumas on the following platforms: To help you implement the lessons from today, Dr. Dumas is sharing his page of free resources with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 174 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Dr Shad Dumas, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 0:00:07 - Dr. Chad Dumas Thank you so very much for having me. 0:00:09 - Lindsay Lyons I'm really excited. I've already enjoyed all of the conversations like pre-hitting record that we've been having, so I'm excited to dive in and I think one of the things I like to frame the episode with beyond the very traditional bio that is, you know, sometimes feels like in 60 characters or 60 words or whatever, it's very limited in terms of who we are Is there anything that you want listeners to be aware of beyond that formal bio or to keep in mind as we jump in today? 0:00:36 - Dr. Chad Dumas Well, I suppose. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's been a mutual admiration in the few minutes that we've been able to talk and I'm so blessed to be able to join you and engage with your listeners a little bit today. In terms of what people might want to know about me other than the typical bio is I'm an educator first. Right. I was a classroom teacher, professional developer. Classroom teacher, professional developer. Even when I was a principal and went on to the really dark side of central office administration, I was still. I still considered myself an educator first and foremost. Right. And still to this day now, as a consultant working with designated leaders, teacher leaders, classroom teachers, the whole gamut of folks. Right, my focus is on building capacity and helping to draw out from people talent and skills that maybe they don't even know exists themselves. 0:01:34 - Lindsay Lyons I love that phrase building capacity. I think that'll be a good one to thread through the conversation. I think there's so much richness about building capacity in your book where you actually have ideas that are concrete, tangible reflective pieces for leaders. I'm getting a little ahead of myself here, but I think there's there's so much in there that is a testament to exactly that and how you help coach people to do that. So thank you. 0:01:58 - Dr. Chad Dumas Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. Building capacity is this fascinating thing because it's a. It's a term that's been thrown around I don't know a quarter of a century, maybe more. I think about Linda Lambert's work, right, I think 1999 was her first foray into building capacity, and since then people just like it seems like we use that term without a clear understanding of what it means, and so that's been a point of reflection for me. Recently is okay. So what does this mean to really build capacity in folks? 0:02:29 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, and I feel like we'll get into that a little bit today. Is there anything that you want to kind of share at this point? In the conversation to kind of tease for people what that looks like. 0:02:39 - Dr. Chad Dumas Yeah, kind of like as a hook. So my thinking has really gone along the lines of two different areas in building capacity. And many times when we think of building capacity, when we're clear about it, we think about what people need to do, like we build the capacity in doing X, y and Z, and that is important. Correlated with that, or on a similar, you know, parallel path, is also helping people to understand why we're doing that what and not telling them why, but helping them to craft their own why through reflective practice, through connection to their past experiences, to connection to actual practice and then reflection on that practice. So that's kind of where my mind has gone with building capacity is is not just the what which we think about right away, but the why we do what we do. 0:03:34 - Lindsay Lyons That is so good Cause when we get to thinking about like buy-in versus co-creation ownership right Like oh yes, so many things and we'll, I think, we'll we'll talk a bit about, like those action steps, the what as well as the why, today. But I think I want to take a step back first and think about, you know that, the big idea I often quote Dr Bettina Love at the start of these episodes. You know she describes freedom dreaming as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, which is poetic, beautiful, powerful. And I'm wondering, with that in mind, like what is that big dream for you that you hold for the field? 0:04:11 - Dr. Chad Dumas Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, just like that quote really resonates with you and I love that I have not heard it before, so I appreciate you raising that for me. You know, dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. One of the quotes that really has resonated with me throughout my career is a quote that comes from the 19th century, so about 200 years ago, right from the founder of the Baha'i faith, and he says that he says to regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value, man and you know we're talking 1900s, right? So human beings, right as a mine, like you know, like a gold mine or whatever. And he says that as a mine in in um, rich in gems of inestimable value, right, I mean. I mean I think about the, I think about my kids and and colleagues, and imagine, you know, the rubies and the diamonds and the pearls and all of these inestimable value gems. And then, and then Baha'u'llah goes on and he says education alone can cause it to reveal the treasures and enable mankind to benefit therefrom. So, you know, so each person has all these gems and only through education can we reveal those gems and then allow them to be put to service right, to make humanity better make the world a better place. So, in terms of that question, you know what's the big dream that you hold for education. My dream is that we're able to achieve that right To see each other and the children in front of us not from a deficit standpoint but from an asset. You know what are those gems and how do we go about uncovering them, and then how do we help those individuals put those to the benefit of humanity. 0:06:08 - Lindsay Lyons I love that and I think a huge piece of that being asset-minded right is thinking about that mindset shift for some folks right, we often identify challenges. How do we fix it in education? Can you speak a little bit more to that kind of shift and its importance in leading education spaces? 0:06:24 - Dr. Chad Dumas Oh man, it's huge. I remember I think I was a central office administrator at the time in Hastings, nebraska, and sharing with I'm pretty sure that's where I was. It may have been before that, when I was a principal, but I'm pretty sure it was when I was a central office sharing with colleagues the I don't remember what the exact strategy was called, but it's like a bullseye and every person in the room got a bullseye right, so it's got these many layers and the task was to write in the bullseye each level of the bullseye, characteristics or attributes or virtues that this one particular person manifest. And after this, then it was used in different places and I remember in an IEP meeting, instead of starting with all of the problems that the child has, they started with this and parents, and so they started with silence. Everybody got a bullseye and everybody in the room teacher, administrator, para, a parent I don't think students were in the room for this particular meeting, but they started with that and it completely shifted the way in which those conversations then flowed after that. Right Cause, then we were thinking from an asset based as opposed to your child can't read, they're only reading at this level, they're only computing at this level Right. Instead it was all asset based and genuine, like it wasn't sometimes. Sometimes we've been in IEP meetings where you can feel it going downhill quick and then somebody needs to throw a token praise comment in right. And it doesn't help, right. It's like, okay, yeah, thank you, token appreciation. Let's be genuine and authentic and, from the get-go, drawing out those great assets, those gems of inestimable value. 0:08:27 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, that's so good. And I love that example of the IEP meeting. I mean people could do that tomorrow, right, listening to this episode, like that's great, right, yep, yep, I love it. And I'm thinking too about this idea of building capacity and how a lot of times I'm just thinking about if there was a student in that meeting, for example, and being able to practice identifying their own strengths right, or even any of the stakeholders in the room like being able to routinely build that skill of identifying strengths pretty easily or quickly, because if we're not used to it, I imagine it could be hard. I think there's a tie there to that sense of building capacity, and so I kind of want to like use that as our segue to think about what are those action steps that a leader can take to build capacity, to lead in that way, to focus on assets, and I know that you list from your dissertation, I think, your 10 elements of principled knowledge. So I don't know if this is a space for that as well, but I just love to say, listening to this, buy it into the dream. People are eager to get something moving in their systems, in their buildings, like where do, where do they go? What's kind of the, the roadmap for them? 0:09:33 - Dr. Chad Dumas Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think the the the biggest thing is our own selves, right, you know, looking in the mirror, I don't remember who said it, but there was a particular quote that says something like our greatest fear isn't that we can't achieve something, the greatest fear is that we have all the power in the world to achieve it and yet we fail to marshal our own efforts to make it happen. Right? So, thinking about, and that starts with each of us, right, with each of us and within each of us, by being reflective about our own practices, by being intentional about our own practices. And so you mentioned, like you know, those 10 elements of what it takes to build a collaborative culture. From my dissertation, and then book, let's put the CMPLC. From my dissertation, and then book, let's put the C and PLC. And my mind goes directly to the first element which, by the way, they're not in any particular order. Like the research doesn't say start here and then go here. I put them in that order and I didn't put them in a particular order other than the first one and the last one. Those two were the first one is charismatic leader isn't, isn't necessary for long-term success, right, it's about relationships, relationships, relationships. And then the 10th one I put in that place because it's about okay. So how do you lead change After all of this? Now, what Leading change? So those two are I put in that space. Everything else just happened to fall where it is space, everything else just happened to fall where it is. So the first one of building relationships many times we think that we're really good at building relationships and maybe we're not as good as what we think we are, and so I share some specific skills and practices that maybe are helpful with that right, and so I refer to them as the three plus one, although I should have called them the one plus three, because really the one comes before the three and the one is developing skills and behaviors and really an attitude of getting into developing rapport with others, and so, again, that's, you know, people talk about. Well, I have rapport, what do you right, like? And so rapport manifests itself in our physical behavior, right. So when we're in rapport with each other, our behavior starts to mirror each other, not mimic, but mirror, right. So like you move your head, I move my head, you mirror right. So, like you move your head, I move my head. You know, I move my hands, you move your hands right, and there's, like these physical manifestations that people don't even realize when you're not in rapport. It's very obvious. And so the challenge is, especially with people that you don't have good relationship with, is to get into rapport with them so that then you can then start to build those relationships right. And so if I'm with someone who so, for instance, if you see me, my head tends to move a lot when I engage with folks, right, because I tend to have a pretty approachable voice and approachable sense to me, right, so that means my head moves a lot. So when I'm with people who don't move their heads a lot and they're very formal in their movements, I need to match that right, I need to mirror that, to get into rapport, and so that then enables them the three skills but that's the foundational like developing with rapport with people, paying attention to their intonation, to their body language and their gestures. 0:13:16 - Lindsay Lyons That's so good, and I think one of the things that I absolutely loved was that grounding in relationships in your book, and I saw it come up and the three plus one. Actually I I think I in my notes anyways this is probably not how it's organized, but in my notes was um, connected also to the section on teams and dialogue, which I love, that linkage of I mean you quoted fairy, which I also love with like dialogue, it's the act of creation, I mean lots of cool stuff in there. But I I was thinking about that too from a perspective of like plcs and teams and the uh power of being in real relationship with people in a team, and how high functioning teams are, like rocking, and and then the dysfunction of a team that's not in relationship with one another could just totally kind of scuttle everything. And I I'm wondering if there's either a story that you wanted to share or like a something to be aware of or mindful of or watchful of as a leader, as you're kind of creating these teams or nurturing the team's relationships, because I think that's a really tough thing to do. 0:14:22 - Dr. Chad Dumas well, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah, and I think what you're getting at is one-on-one. It's easier to do, right? I can get into rapport with you and I can pay attention to your movements and work really hard to match and mirror, not mimic Again. People don't, you know that ticks people off, but if I'm doing it well, nobody will notice that I'm getting into rapport with you, which then will enable us to then move forward in a productive conversation. Now, in a group it's a little bit different, right, because how can I, if I'm with six people, how can I get into rapport with five different people who have five different sense of body? You know hand gestures or intonation, and so, as a leader, you tend to be more with groups of people, right, when you're leading meetings and such, and so I'm really glad you asked this, because it's actually one of the first things I addressed in my next book that'll be coming out, I think, end of August, early September, and it's Solution Tree is publishing it and I'm really excited about it. I think it's I'm hopeful that it will have a significant impact on the field. It's called the Teacher Team Leader Handbook, so it's really focused on teacher team leaders, and then the subtitle is Simple Habits to Transform Collaboration in a PLC at Work, and one of the skills that I share in that book very early on is that of developing group rapport. Like, how do you develop group rapport, if I can call them? Colleagues Michael Grinder and Kendall Zoller really go after this and have figured out that synchronicity is really the key to group rapport. And so, as a leader, if you don't have synchronicity in a group and so synchronicity means like we're all looking at the same direction or we're all breathing from the same location, like that's really important to pay attention to. We need to do something to develop synchronicity. And so many times you walk into a meeting and you'll see one person's on their computer, one person's on a phone, one person's taking notes, one person's you know like like we're not in sync. And so it's really important early on in a meeting to develop synchronicity, and so that can happen a number of different ways. And basically synchronicity means we're all doing the same thing at the same time. That's it right. We're just doing the same thing at the same time. So what does that? That could look like we project the agenda on a screen and I say, if I'm the leader of the meeting, hey, hey, friends, glad to see you all this afternoon looking as brilliant as always. Really glad to have you all here. Let's take a look at the agenda that's posted on the screen and together let's identify which out of these elements of here are you most interested in today. And what you can see on the screen is I turned my head and looked at the agenda, I paused and I stopped talking, which felt probably awkward to your listeners and will feel very awkward to you as well. But what that does is, first of all, my people's eyes tend to follow each other's eyes, right? If you're having a conversation with someone and their eyes dart over to the side, what happens? You tend to look. It's just a natural reaction. Our eyes follow people's eyes. And so if my eyes now look at this screen and I stop talking, even if I wasn't paying attention, my brain now does, because something different is happening. The brain notices differences, and so just by that we have developed synchronicity. Now we can move forward. So creating so that's called the third point, right? Another way you can develop synchronicity is through laughter. Laughter is a magical tool, right? Because then everybody, people laugh from the same location. It's low and deep in their diaphragm. It gets endorphins going in the brain, it makes us feel good and it helps us be connected to each other. So laughter is a great way to be able to establish synchronicity. There's a little sticky note on the table in front of you. Would you take a moment and jot down what's the most important thing we need to be talking about today in the meeting? Please take 30 seconds about today in the meeting. Please take 30 seconds Synchronicity, now everybody is, and then we'll share it out. Right, or turn and talk. Turn to the person next to you what on the agenda is most interesting to you. Out of the outcomes that we've identified today, is there anything that needs to be added, changed or deleted to meet your needs today? So these are. I think I just gave you about like four or five different ways to establish synchronicity, to get that group into rapport with each other so that then the relationships are more likely to be sustained. Now that rapport isn't going to hold out the whole meeting, right? So as a leader, we have to be paying attention to that, because at some point we're going to go out of rapport. Then what do we need to do? Establish synchronicity again. Third point get some laughter, a turn and talk, write something down Everybody doing the same thing at the same time. 0:19:29 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, that's so cool. I was so excited that you went there, because that was unexpected and not in the book, the preview. 0:19:37 - Dr. Chad Dumas Yeah, preview of the next one. 0:19:39 - Lindsay Lyons It's incredible and it'll be good timing, cause when this is out, it'll be like a month away. Yes, yeah. 0:19:44 - Dr. Chad Dumas Everybody can put it on their calendar or they probably can pre-order it by the time it's gone. 0:19:48 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, that's cool, that's exciting. So I think one of the things that, as a leader, I think people are thinking or maybe thinking as they listen is okay, this is, this is super cool. However, for example, just throw this out there, cause, talk about the book a little bit. You know we don't have a lot of time, like time is a as a resource that we don't have enough of to be able to get people in teams to do this work, or which I think you, you share a beautiful resource from learning forward in the book, about which I was like oh yeah, this is great, you know, or there's, you know, there's a variety of challenges. I think is the point I'm trying to get at that people will say, yeah, but what about this thing? And I'm I'm curious to know what do you find is like the biggest challenge that people have leading this work, facilitating PLCs, putting the teams together, you know, whatever aspect of it we want to latch on to and talk about. But I'm curious to know what the challenges? And then, like, what have you seen people do to kind of overcome that challenge? Or or even preemptively, like get rid of the challenge? 0:20:46 - Dr. Chad Dumas Right, right, yeah, so so I've seen basically two. If I can boil it all down to two challenges that I've seen folks struggle with, one is you mentioned, like, the time. How do we find the time? And my question is, if we don't find the time, that's not a question, that's a statement we don't find the time. Here's the question Do we value the collaboration, anything we value? We will make the resources align to that value. Right? So, like I'm thinking about, like when I was first year teacher, making twenty thousand nine hundred fifty dollars a year, um, you know, back in lincoln public schools, and um, you know, with student loan payments and my wife was home with our kids and we had two mouths to feed, right, like there was no money, yet we found a way to go to Amigos once or twice a week. Right, we made it happen. Like we prioritized that, even though the funds weren't connected for right. And so it's the same in schools, like if we prioritize it, let's put our money where our mouth is and let's figure it out. And so that's the first challenge and it's really a mindset shift, because there are thousands of schools, maybe tens of thousands of schools all over the country and world, who figured it out. It's a matter of getting some people in the room to sit down to think creatively, to look at some other schedules, to look at some resources and let's together look at now our constraints and let's make it happen. So that's the first part of finding the time. Now, once the time is set, there is absolutely no research that says you get a group of people in a room breathing the same air at the same time of the day that you're going to improve student learning. It doesn't exist, right, and actually there's research that says that people are in the same room breathing the same air, doing the same thing. If they're not focused on the right stuff, it can have a negative impact on student performance and professional practice. Right, it becomes toxic. It can become toxic. So it's not just that people are meeting in the room, it's that what are they doing when they're in the room? And so that becomes. The second big challenge is to helping teams do the right work, because we're not trained in collaboration, right, we all are highly educated people. We've got our bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, doctorate, specialist degrees people who are highly educated, and not a single I don't. I've never seen a course at university level that says here's how to collaborate. We don't know. Nobody has taught us how to collaborate, and so we need to learn what that is. We have picked up over time how to figure out the Bs of schools, buildings, buses and budgets, but that's not going to improve student learning. Figuring out when the next field trip is and how to schedule the buses and communicating with parents and parent permission for like, those things need to be done and they do nothing to improve student learning. And so what? We that was a strong phrase, I shouldn't use it they field trips, please. I hope I am not being misunderstood. Field trips are really important, powerful part of our students learning experiences, and they don't improve our practice that results in student learning. Let me put it that way powerful part of of our students learning experiences, and they don't improve our practice that results in student learning. Let me put it that way. So, so, helping people to understand. Okay, so what? What is the work of collaboration? And then how do we navigate the interpersonal dynamic associated with that? 0:24:27 - Lindsay Lyons I yeah, that's, that's so good. And I also think I think about this phrase one learning model for all, which is um, the international network for public schools that I taught out in my last four years of teaching always said that like you do something as an adult, you do the same thing with students. Right, it's like one learning model, and I think about that with collaboration. If you learn as an educator, as an adult, how to collaborate with your peers, you're then able to passively address some of the this is group work is hard or my kids don't work well together issues, because you're like well, I know how to do it. Now I've done it myself and now I can teach it better. 0:24:58 - Dr. Chad Dumas Yes, yes, exactly. It's not the same as just getting, it's not the same as a meeting, right. 0:25:03 - Lindsay Lyons Right, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Oh my gosh, this is. There's been so many beautiful gems in this conversation. I've really really enjoyed and I think it has gone an interesting like. I think there are a lot of branches right, a lot of different directions, and so I'm curious for the listener who's ready to, like step in the school building, they're done with the episode, they're ready to possibly start the school year by the time they're listening to this. What is the one kind of first step Like? What's the thing they do when they end the episode and kind of like start laying the foundation, start taking action? What would you say that should be or could be? 0:25:44 - Dr. Chad Dumas Yeah. So I guess I would have two first steps. The one is tongue in cheek go buy my next book, because that would be that it really you know there, there, there isn't much literature in the field around teacher team leaders and, and and that's the title, but really anybody who picks it up and is in a collaborative environment, um, will benefit from it. Or if they're not in a collaborative environment and they want to learn how to make their environment more collaborative. So, even though the title is geared towards teacher team leaders, well, first of all of all, anybody's a leader, right, but second of all, there are people who are in those designated positions. So that's tongue in cheek, but it may be helpful. The second thing that I would say is not tongue in cheek is to really think about this. Coming back to that quote at the beginning right, regarding other people as minds with gems of inestimable value. Right, it goes for kids, it goes for colleagues. And how do we, through education, uncover those gems? And so, thinking for yourself and your mindset, like reflecting on what are ways in which I see those gems in other people and maybe help to draw those out, even though they may so. So one of my mindsets that I identify in the teacher team leader handbook. I identify three mindsets that I think are important, and the first one is to see in others what they themselves don't yet see in themselves. And I think that's this idea like shifting that mindset to see in others what they don't yet see in themselves. And I think that's this idea like shifting that mindset to see in others what they don't yet see in themselves, and then take specific actions to draw that out. And I think if we all could do that, that could really transform our meetings, our systems, our schools. If we thought of everybody from that lens of how could I draw out from them what they don't yet even see in themselves. 0:27:37 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, that's good. What a beautiful world that would be. That would be so cool. I love that, yeah, yeah, and so I think, as the kind of final questions that I enjoy, asking this is fun, but also, I think, in addition to fun, just like really, it genuinely piques my interest of all the things that are out there to learn about. So I'm curious to know what you have been learning about lately, and it does not need to relate to your job or this conversation, although it can. 0:28:06 - Dr. Chad Dumas Oh man. So one of the things so I view myself as a learner you know the Gallup organization has those strengths finder things and every time I've done it, learner is one of my top five things and so it's really hard to pinpoint like one thing that I'm learning about. And one of the things I love about being a consultant is I'm constantly learning. Right, like people think that you're the one who's presenting, yeah, but you know what I've got to be learning myself. So I'm constantly reading. So I love if your listeners have never seen the Marshall memo, look up Kim Marshall. He's in Massachusetts and he has a weekly memo and you can sign up, like I think it's. If you just do it by yourself, it's like 50 bucks a year. Well worth the 50 bucks. And what he does is he reads through all of the educational journals you can imagine, like Ed, leadership, jsd, mathematics, educators, education, like all things, plc, anything you can imagine. He's got like I don't know 100 different articles, journals that he reads through whatever comes out that week and then he pulls out, like from his perspective, and he's got criteria for it, like the top eight or 10 that he thinks are like the most important or really would be useful to the field, and then he does a summary on them. And so every Monday I get Kim Marshall's memo with it's a I don't know, maybe eight pages a Word document with these articles with summary. So I don't even have to read the whole article. Although he always links them, you can go back to them and find the full article, and it covers everything right From teacher evaluation to professional learning communities to the reading science of reading stuff, math, math, like anything you can possibly imagine, so that that really that's probably the best source of my learning that I have personally. But of course I'm also, you know, like learning more about. Of course I'm an associate for solution tree and PLC at work, so I'm constantly learning more about that type of thing, right. Every time you pick up learning by doing, you learn more right. And every time I pick up RTI, the RTI handbook, taking action or any of the tools, I learn more and so all of these things. But Kim Marshall, his stuff is really fantastic. 0:30:25 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, that's incredible. I did not know about this resource. I'm like jotting notes frantically. I will be looking into that. 0:30:31 - Dr. Chad Dumas I think it's marshallmemocom. 0:30:33 - Lindsay Lyons If you just like Google that, it'll yeah, yeah, we can also link that in the show notes for listeners too. That's incredible. 0:30:40 - Dr. Chad Dumas Thank you, and I'll reach out to him and let him know that he'll be getting some subscriptions and some cuts coming your way, awesome. 0:30:50 - Lindsay Lyons I think one of the things I want to close with is just how much, how much I really enjoyed the putting the C and PLC book and how much I'm looking forward to your next book. And I I do want to just highlight for our listeners, um, the, the resources that you have at the end of each chapter, in addition to all of the information in the book itself, which is great. I just think there's so much value in like the little surveys that you had at the end I don't remember if you called them a survey, but like the little statements and you have the agreement scale, I think there's so much value in taking those, using them, having them be a reflective tool that everyone literally just grabs and uses tomorrow. Again, so easy to just take it. And I just want to kind of highlight that that's not just the content of your book but the organization itself. I really enjoy books that are organized with things that are like easily usable immediately, and you have that. The listeners just know I'm sure that will be in the next book as well. 0:31:47 - Dr. Chad Dumas Yeah Well, thank you, and your listeners can actually those self-assessments. I have them all on my website for free. You can just go and get all of the websites directly and download them and that website is tinyurlcom and then slash, put the C in PLC, put the C in PLC, so those and then there's a few other resources. Are there too, totally free? 0:32:10 - Lindsay Lyons That's incredible, thank you. We'll link that in the show notes and the blog posts for this episode. That's incredible. Thank you for sharing that. And where else can people like follow what you're doing? Where should they look for the next book when it's about to come out? How do they be in touch? 0:32:25 - Dr. Chad Dumas Yeah, yeah. Well, my website is my business name, which is next learning solutions. So nextlearningsolutionscom is my website, but I'm active on Twitter and it's very easy. I must have gotten on early. Without any numbers or anything, it's just at Chad Dumas, c-h-a-d-d-u-m-a-s, and then Facebook and LinkedIn Chad Dumas as well on there. So those are the places to track me down. 0:32:54 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing Chad. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. 0:32:56 - Dr. Chad Dumas I so appreciate your time my pleasure, thank you.
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In this episode, Dr. Barbara Cirigliano discusses how PLCs are critical for early childhood educators and shares ideas on how to do them well. We talk about appropriate assessment methods for young children, the critical role of collaboratively developed standards and the transformative power of vertical alignment in curriculum planning.
Dr. Barbara Cirigliano has been in Early Childhood Education for her whole career, as a teacher, coach, and principal. She authored the book, Success for Our Youngest Learners, and she loves to work with schools and their youngest learners. The Big Dream Early childhood education is fully integrated into the professional learning community process. Educators assess young learners in developmentally appropriate ways, setting them up for high achievement from the start. All early educators learn the PLC process and use that process to develop teacher practice and to help kids learn at the highest levels. Mindset Shifts Required Leaders and educators of older children should recognize early childhood education as an integral part of the educational continuum. A big “aha” for teachers in this work is the importance of consistency and equity in standards across classrooms. Action Steps to Take in PLCs to Determine Essential Standards Step 1: Review state standards and essential standards with a team. Step 2: Individual teachers pick out the ones they really want students to learn. Step 3: Come together to reach consensus on what you will all teach. Step 4: Create job-alike, vertical curriculum teams and align curricula vertically from Pre-K to Kindergarten and up. (Early childhood educators should be part of these district-wide PLCs!) Challenges?
One Step to Get Started Arrange meetings where teachers can begin discussing essential educational matters, paving the way for trust and collaboration. "Just start teachers getting used to coming together at a certain time, being on time for that meeting and talking about important things," she advises. This initial step is crucial for setting the foundation for more detailed work on standards and assessments. Stay Connected You can connect with Dr. Cirigliano via email at [email protected] To help you implement these ideas in your context, Dr. Cirigliano is sharing several of the reproducibles from her book with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 173 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Dr Barbara Sirigliano, so nice to have you on the Time for Teachership podcast. Thank you for inviting me. I am so excited for our conversation today because I think the little ones don't get talked about enough, and so, thinking about the PLC process, particularly with educators of young children, and particularly as a parent right now of a two-year-old, I'm really, really in that space and so really interested in you know what does that look like for young learners? So before we even like dive into that conversation, I'm really curious to know is there anything beyond the traditional bio or anything that people should know about you that you want to kind of anchor our conversation in? 0:00:43 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Not really. I do. Now have three grandchildren five, three and one and so I really focus in on I'm really able to focus in on early childhood and in watching them develop. It just hits home to me and makes what I do seem more important than ever. 0:01:03 - Lindsay Lyons What a beautiful connection. I love when it goes beyond the professional bio to like we are full human beings with many people in our lives. 0:01:10 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Right, yeah, so just watching, you know. And my daughter-in-law says should he be doing this right now? He's only 18 months. How many words should he have? And you know, my daughter with her three-year-old should she go to preschool right now or should you know what should we do? Why is she doing this? Is this okay? So it's really fun to be able to see them grow and develop, because I love that age. That's my favorite age. 0:01:34 - Lindsay Lyons That's incredible and they have such a good resource to be able to ask you Right, I know. Oh, awesome. Well, one of the first big questions I usually like asking guests is this idea of freedom, dreaming. So Dr Bettina loves talks about it as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, which I think is a beautiful phrase. And so, considering that, what is that big dream that you hold for the field of education, either broadly or specific to the younger ages? 0:02:04 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano I think that it I would focus more in on early childhood. I think that early childhood has been forgotten, and especially in the. When you talk about the PLC process, because the in a professional learning community, you know we assess children and so many early child teachers says we don't assess that's developmentally inappropriate. We don't test kids, we don't do this. So you know, and I would have said that 20 years ago, before I started and before my school became a professional learning community and now I think you really need to assess and there's a right way to assess young children, and so my hope and dream is that all early educators learn that process and use that process to develop and to make kids learn to high expectations, to the highest levels, and it starts at early childhood. You know their brain is developing so fast and so much is going on that that's where we need to really really start. My middle school principal, whenever we had big team meetings or whatever, would always say tell your teachers, thank you, barb, for giving them all these kids such a great head start. So she understood that and she was appreciative of the work that the early childhood educators in my district did. 0:03:32 - Lindsay Lyons I love that you really that you shared that story, but also that you center so much of the early childhood in the continuum of the district right Like we're incorporating early childhood educators in conversations in PLCs that are district-wide or otherwise, and I think that's a huge, maybe mindset shift for leaders. I'm curious if you know what are the mindset shifts associated with this work. What's kind of the aha moment that you've seen, even in a district leader or someone who's maybe more of a building leader in this work? 0:04:06 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano I think that for so long, special ed and early childhood has been oh, they're down there, they're down the hall, they do this, they do their own thing. And I think what really comes to mind is I worked with a school in Atlanta and I had all the four-year-old teachers together and I said to them so what does it look like? Or I had the kindergarten teachers together too what does it look like when your students write their name, what is proficient? And one teacher said well, if I can read it, it's fine. And another teacher said no, no, no, no, no, it has to be capital letters, finger space, blah, blah, blah. And I said do you see what's happening here? This isn't equitable. And they're like oh yeah, when you tell a child to spell cat and you say spell cat. Or you say spell cat, it's not equitable. And so when you assess kids, we really need to work on that with young children, and we never did before because we never talked about assessing kids as a team. So I think it's the equity that the light turns on for some kindergarten teachers. And I had the principal at the school tell me well, when my child had this teacher, they said they knew the ABCs. And then the next year they didn't know the letters of the alphabet because they were assessing them differently. And parents notice that. Parents wonder and the principal's like oh well, let me check this out. 0:05:41 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, oh, my gosh, I love, I love that you went there, because one of my favorite chapters of your book was chapter four, where you talk about, like, literally breaking down that question of PLCs, of like what is it that we want students to know and be able to do, right, right. And I think that that really is a struggle for a lot of teams and a lot of you know schools and communities to just know how to even approach that conversation. Do you mind kind of walking us through, like what are the steps that a team could take to determine those essential standards? 0:06:15 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Well, what we did is. The first thing we did is we looked at the state standards for kindergarten and at that time there were no early childhood standards 20 years ago so we had to crank them down. So you need to look at your state standards for early childhood. Or you need to look at some people use creative curriculum and they have a ton of standards and you need to go through the process of individually teachers go through and mark what is most important Because I talk about. You can't teach all of the standards, they can't learn them all, so you need to pick out the ones you really, really want them to learn, and so the teachers individually go through that. They're on their own. And then they come together and say how about this one? Who said this 4.1 was most important? Nobody, okay, not one we're going to worry about. Or everyone agreed on this one. So this is one we're going to worry about Because you need to have about a third of the total number of standards as your essential standards. That doesn't mean you're not going to teach the other ones, but it means these are the ones you are assuring that students will learn, and that's important for going on to the next grade. My first year I had 15 kindergarten classrooms and I looked at the report cards and saw so much variance and these kids went to all different first grade teachers and they go. Some of them know this and some of them know that and some of them know this. So these are the things that you're going to tell the four year old preschool teacher, you're going to tell the kindergarten teacher. You can tell the first grade teacher. They know these, they know these. So you don't have to start over at the beginning. You don't have to obsess them to find out. I'm telling you they know these. So when you go through that process, you decide which ones are most important and you really have real. You have to do it as a team. You can't take mine from my old schools and use mine because you have to talk about them. My early childhood teachers talked about shapes for about 25 minutes. What are the most important shapes? A triangle, square, circle, you know? No, a triangle. They don't need to know a triangle when they're three. They need to know a triangle when they're four. There's no right or wrong. They just have to agree on what's most important and what. If it's a triangle, then it's a triangle and everyone has to agree to agree. It's not. It's more consensus than 100%, so I think that's important. 0:08:51 - Lindsay Lyons I love that and just the specific example about the shapes and I think in the book you talked about colors. Right Like these are tangible things we can talk about. 0:08:58 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Right, right, right. You don't think well, you know, I mean all those things. I have the background experience to know this works. I've, we've, done it. I know how the conversations go. Sometimes they're not pretty, but I've seen it in action and I've seen how kids do better. 0:09:22 - Lindsay Lyons So yeah, I wanted to touch on that because you brought it up about the assessments, right, and I think you shared in the story, just a story in the book, thinking about. I think it was your child who was really upset about the bubble filling out. Yeah, do you want to share that story? We're not doing that. 0:09:41 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano We're not doing the bubble choices. I mean, the teacher was shocked. How am I going to know what he knows? I go lots of other ways, surprise, surprise. So you know, assessment is important, but it needs to be done appropriately and everyone has to agree on how it's done, because it has to be done in a pretty similar fashion and at the same time similar fashion and at the same time. 0:10:09 - Lindsay Lyons So yeah, do you mind talking through a couple of those examples? Because actually, as I was a former high school teacher and I was thinking, wow, those assessment options are assessment options I could use in high school as well, like they're not exclusive to the younger grades. 0:10:18 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Right. So ways to assess children you're talking about. Lots of times we do observation assessments and children might be playing and you might say today I'm gonna have everyone go through this center where it's a math center and it's counting, and I'm just gonna sit and watch or give a prompt same prompt everybody's giving count this, these blocks for me, how many can you count? How many you see? And the prompt has got to be similar. It can't be one teacher says count the blocks for me. The other teacher can't say count one, two, three, four, five. It has to be similar. But while they're playing you do that and I used to just record things on a sticky note and pile them on my desk and by the end of the day I had a million. So you all kind of decide how you're going to do that. You can also do more, a more formal way of assessing young children in small groups and have them all sit at your table, like in a reading table in kindergarten. You can have them all sit there and you can, one by one, have them point to words or point to letters or anything like that. So you can do a small group, you can do observation and you can do an activity that's totally geared at assessing, but it's not a paper and pencil assessment, it's not a filling in the bubbles. So I think it's sometimes a lot harder for teachers of young children to assess, because some days a young child will know all the letters of the alphabet and the next day they won't. So I talked to teachers about part of it is your teacher education, your gut feeling too. They didn't get it today because you know they got off the bus crying and they were hungry and whatever you know. But I know in my heart they know them. The other piece is that when I talked to kindergarten teachers they did a letter recognition assessment and they wanted like 95% of the kids to know all the letters and when they did the assessment one teacher had four students that were on the cusp. They only missed one letter and they knew what that letter was and they were able to really focus on it for the next week to get them to that point. Instead of going over all the letters, you really get a specific item to really make sure that students learn. So you know. 0:12:44 - Lindsay Lyons I love those examples, I love how concrete they are. 0:12:47 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Just like this is doable right, we can, it is doable, it is doable. And that's me. I'm the example queen. I don't tend to know it all, but I, you know, and I think I'm more believable to teachers because I have that experience. I've been sitting there, you know. I sent 200 report cards off to first grade and it said your child does not know all the letters of the alphabet. Well, which ones? Which ones don't they know? You know? Right, yeah. So that became really important and that's why assessment is so great, it's so wonderful, it's so useful. It's so useful. It guides your instruction, it's telling you how we're going to continue on instructing these children. 0:13:34 - Lindsay Lyons So yes, I love that that's such an integral part of the PLC process and thinking about like coming together to look at the data to identify the things we need to do next right, like a little action research process, and that I think that's so important because a lot of teachers, I think, get in the weeds of this is particularly in the older grades. I'm not sure about this in the younger grades, but you know we have this curriculum to cover, so we must proceed right, as opposed to the pause. Let's understand what's going on. What does the data say? How do we respond? 0:14:10 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Right, when those kindergarten teachers got together about the letters of the alphabet, there were four classrooms and each classroom had two or three students that didn't know, like B and D, you know, because of the reversals and all that. So they took those four, two, four, six kids into a group and did interventions with those students, just those, and one teacher worked on those letters with those kids. So the other kids didn't have to suffer through that, you know, and that's how they learned them. 0:14:38 - Lindsay Lyons So that makes total sense. 0:14:40 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Yeah, and all kids all of them are all our kids. 0:14:45 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, Right Back to those equity roots. Right, that's so good. And I think the other big thing that I was an aha for me when I was reading your book was thinking about the organization of PLCs and thinking about the inclusion of early childhood educators in vertical curriculum teams, I think is what you were calling them. They're like the job alike teachers, right? You know, we all teach social studies, pre-K through five. We're in a team and if there's, you know, four pre-K teachers that you can have one go to each subject area if possible, and we did yeah. Right, can you talk through a little bit about that Cause I think that's a huge mindset shift for some district leaders. 0:15:29 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Well, I think it's important you can take the three-year-old essential standards, four-year-olds and five-year-olds and first grade ones, and you can line them all up on a wall, say in math, and see that there is a continuum. When we did that in our district we did it district-wide all the way up to eighth grade we found out that they were teaching the Civil War in third grade and fourth grade. It's like why are you doing this? Why you know? Oh, we didn't know you were doing that. So I think it's important to be able to share and talk about those types of things, and especially for preschool teachers and early childhood teachers, because so much is developmental. So I think the bottom line is not what do we want these three-year-olds to know and be able to do, but what do we want them to know and be able to do after kindergarten? To go to first grade, because that's where it becomes so much more concrete. And so for first grade, second grade teachers to know maybe they didn't know this at three but and maybe not at four, but they will know it before you get them. So I think looking at that continuum is really helpful and seeing how early childhood teachers teach it, you know. I think that because it's different and some of those strategies first and second grade teachers can use right High school teachers can you? I was going to say high school, probably. So I think for continuity of programming and curriculum it's important and for everyone to see what's coming and what's going, you know where are we going with. This is really important for that vertical alignment. 0:17:06 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, I love that example of right, like we're teaching the same social studies content into next door grades and we didn't even realize we didn't even know it. 0:17:14 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Yeah, Nobody's teaching this. You know, nobody's teaching this important piece. I thought you were. No, we thought you were so yeah, yeah, what. 0:17:23 - Lindsay Lyons what powerful work to be able to bring people together with that focus and then illuminate some of these things that otherwise, without the structure, you would never identify. Right, like that's right, you wouldn't you wouldn't. 0:17:34 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Yeah, I didn't. 0:17:35 - Lindsay Lyons I got that big scope and sequence when I started teaching and teach it and be on page 17 on October 30th or you're in trouble okay, right, right, I I'm curious to know I'm thinking about the listener who is interested in this, wants to do some of this work but feels like you know it's new, it might be scary, it's a different way of doing things. I'm wondering if you could talk us through, like maybe, a common challenge that you know you've seen educators or leaders face with this work and then like how did they overcome it or what was a strategy they used to kind of work through that or find the good in? 0:18:13 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano I think there's. I think there's a couple challenges. One is for leaders to give the teachers time. So many teachers are used to having their planning time and doing what they want and what they need to do and for some teachers that might be taken away and they're not happy with that because they have to do all these things, because we are overloaded as teachers. So it's up to the educate, the leader, the principal, whatever to find time for teachers to do this, and sometimes it takes throwing away the whole master schedule and starting over, and that's really hard for some teachers, really hard. I could not do the master schedule in my school, I didn't have the brain for it, but I had a team who did it of teachers and they did it and it worked out great. So, however, you need to do that, finding them the time. The other piece is that sometimes leaders have to monitor the work of the team because teachers aren't used to collaborating and talking to each other and new teachers might have the teacher who's been there for 27 years and they're not going to say anything because she's there and she overloads the conversation. So there might need some strategies to be put in place to facilitate those kinds of dialogues within a team meeting and sometimes the leader has to do that. You know if it's the talking stick or the, I don't know. Whatever you know, I want to get everybody's opinion on this and you can't say I agree with her. You have to say something else. So I think that can be really hard the time and talking openly. I had one teacher in a team meeting used to say okay, you guys, you're all going to be really mad at me for saying this, but you know she opened up with that because she was going against what they were talking about. But she was a speaker mind person and I really emphasize when I talk to teams is you cannot go in the school parking lot and talk about this. That's not being a true team member. If you're going to talk in the parking lot, you got to talk about it here and we're not going to go talk about you in the parking lot either. So that whole trust thing takes a while and there's sometimes where leaders of schools have to reshuffle the teams move teachers. You might have fourth grade that's got four bosses and two sitters or whatever, and sometimes you have to reshuffle that and that's hard for teachers to change is really hard for teachers. It's really hard, I'm you know, like we always did know, like we always did it this way. We always did it this way. Well, was that make it right? 0:20:57 - Lindsay Lyons Right, that's the question, right yeah. 0:21:00 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano And to be open. You know, I was like we did some bus thing one time and we did it for two days a bus lineup. It was a disaster. And so as a leader, you need to be able to say oh, this is a mess, I'm sorry, let's try something else. So to be able to teachers know that if it's not working, they need to tell you and they need to fix it. A schedule we didn't do at Arkansas. They started in January, hard for teachers, middle of the year, and they had teachers come for three weeks straight in a row talking about the schedule and what the problems were and what. Three weeks straight in a row talking about the schedule and what the problems were and what wasn't working and what they didn't like about it. Every single teacher and the leadership team fixed it, hallelujah. 0:21:44 - Lindsay Lyons That's such a good example. Yeah, I love that. I think the same with teachers and students, or you got to be able to hear the feedback and change course. 0:21:53 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Right, right, going in a different direction. So absolutely. 0:21:58 - Lindsay Lyons So there are so many I just want listeners to know too in your book. So the book is called Success for Our Youngest Learners and I think there's so many tangible things in there where it's like, oh, you don't have an agenda for your PLCs, like here's this data form right, like use this, or you're not sure what a schedule could look like to have people collaborate and meet. Here's an example of schedules that you have Like. You have like the Fist of Five protocol. You have how to create your missions and values. It's so good. I just want listeners to know, like, this is a microcosm of the book in this conversation. This is a microcosm of the book in this conversation. But people need to go get the book and I am wondering, you know for the leader who is, you know, ready to do this, got to go get the book, but wants to do one thing tomorrow before the book comes, that they would really start kind of the foundation building. 0:22:59 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano What would the one thing, as soon as they're done with this episode like they can do it tomorrow what would that one action be? To get started, I think if they could get their teachers at a grade level together to talk about just what they're doing, get them to learn how to come to a team meeting and have some kind of agenda and talking about specific things. Now, you know, so many times teachers go oh, we have a team meeting, what are we going to do there? I don't know. You know, because they have no agenda, even if it's not about PLC things in the beginning, come together, we're going to talk about these four things and then, you know and some teachers have to put the first five minutes as the bitch and moan section we're going to vent now, we're going to all complain and crab and then we're done and then we'll move on. So I think, just to start teachers getting used to coming together at a certain time, being on time for that meeting and talking about important things, so that they have, you know, kind of learned beginning of trusting each other and understanding each other's point of views, then to be able to dive into determining essential standards. So I guess it's finding the time for them to get together is the first thing principals need to do. 0:24:05 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, I love that. And maybe looking at different I know you link to different things in the book of examples of schedules and stuff maybe doing a little bit of research what could this look like? Or handing it over to your teacher teams, like you said, right? 0:24:16 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Yeah, yeah, you know, and maybe another important piece is forming a leadership team. You know, getting together grade level teachers and having a leadership team who can, who are behind it, who understand professional learning communities are, you know, gung ho about it, and so they can start, you know, working too. So it's not just a leader edict, it's coming from your peers as well, and I think that's that's helpful. 0:24:47 - Lindsay Lyons Definitely. Yes, I totally agree, and I and I just remember the phrase that I think you'd use in the book for one of the kind of come together to talk things that folks did was like shop and share, Like here's how I taught this thing, and then they all shared different ways. They taught something which I find such a cool thing that you could totally do tomorrow right, yeah, you can do that tomorrow. 0:25:07 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano And I always used to start meetings with what I called a whip, without hesitation, invite participation, and I'd throw out a question not school related, not anything just so teachers could learn more about their colleagues. You know, like, what's your favorite sandwich? Go around the table, oh, you like salami. You're kidding me. You know just those kinds of things. Just a crazy question. Your favorite movie, Favorite all-time movie? You know just those kinds of things. Just a crazy question. Your favorite movie, favorite all time movie? Just so we learn a little bit more personal, personal things about the people we work with. We're with them, all you know, in the same building all day, every day. 0:25:44 - Lindsay Lyons So I love that idea. I think about that with students and, you know, culture building at the start of a school year or something Same with teachers, right? Because when we see the humanity in our fellow teachers, if we get into a disagreement about a pedagogical move or this standard should be essential or not, you know we still see the humanity in the person. 0:26:04 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Right right, which I think is really important. You know we're all in this together and you're a human being and you have you had a crabby husband this morning, or a crabby two-year-old, and sorry to hear it. 0:26:14 - Lindsay Lyons So Exactly, exactly, yeah, so I guess this is my next question is a little bit more of the the humanity piece too, getting to know you. So one of the things I love asking every guest this could be related to work and the things we've been talking about, or it could totally be different. What is something that you have been learning about lately? 0:26:35 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Oh, I've really started to a couple things gardening, because I'm retired and so I'm doing gardening at home and I'm going to run out in the yard and do that, learning that. But I'm also doing a lot of learning and thinking about how young children's brains develop, like that cognitive development and how maybe because I've been watching a lot of Dateline too, you know murders and stuff is that at the age of 15, your brain's still not totally developed, your frontal lobe isn't totally developed. So I think that helps people and it helps teachers and helps me understand why young children do some of the things they do, why teenagers do some of the things they do, why young adults do some of the things they do. It's just become really fascinating to me that, just how that develops and what parts develop. 0:27:35 - Lindsay Lyons That is fascinating. Also very excited for your gardening life because I know nothing about that, but I am fascinated by the people who could do it well. 0:27:42 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano I'm working on it. You know it's time consuming but keeps me busy and I can share that experience with my grandchildren. We go out and pick, you know, tomatoes in the summer and things like that, and they really like it. It's down to earth, too, where they are low, low to the ground. 0:27:59 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, oh my gosh. Yes, I, my car was hit recently and we had it's in the shop, so we had got a rental and my, my kid is just like I like this new car because it's low to the ground. 0:28:10 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Oh, yeah you can get into it yeah. 0:28:14 - Lindsay Lyons We don't think about those things, I know. So the last question I have for you is just people are going to want to get in touch, learn more about you, get the book, that kind of thing. Where would you suggest that they go to learn more about you, connect with you, anything related to that? 0:28:31 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Well, probably through Solution Tree. I'm not, you know, I'm retired, I'm old. I don't have my own web page and my own podcast and my own all my boyfriend's like you need a Twitter account. You need a Twitter account, you know. I just don't have any of those things they can. So they can certainly email me and they can certainly get in touch with Solution Tree. 0:28:56 - Lindsay Lyons Perfect, and we can link to those things in the blog post for this episode. 0:29:00 - Dr. Barbara Cirigliano Yeah, I'm happy to. Why don't I turn my phone off? So I'm happy to. You know, I'm happy to talk to anybody and help anybody out, because I'm really passionate about this and have been for my whole educational career. So I'm I just think this is where it starts, this is where it begins, and if we don't get it right when they're little and give them this joy of learning and give little children the success of oh, I learned this, oh, I can say my ABCs, oh, I can read a book, we don't give them that spark and that joy when they're little, then I don't think they're going to get it for a long time. So I think it's really important. 0:29:42 - Lindsay Lyons Absolutely. Oh my gosh, this has been a wonderful conversation. Dr Strickland, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I enjoyed it. It was great. Thank you so much.
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7/15/2024 172. Action Steps for Effective PLCs with Bob Sonju, Maren Powers, and Sheline MillerRead Now
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In this episode, Bob, Sheline, and Maren share how we can effectively use Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) to elevate teaching through reflective practice. In our discussion of their book, Simplifying the Journey: Six Steps to Schoolwide Collaboration, Consistency, and Clarity in a PLC at Work®, they emphasize the importance of student ownership and co-creation in their academic journeys, and effective strategies for coaches and leaders (they list tons of great coaching questions in their book).
Bob Sonju is an award-winning educational leader, author, and speaker who is nationally recognized for his energetic commitment to coaching teacher teams and educational leaders in research-based processes and systems that create the conditions for lasting success. Bob has led two separate schools to national Model PLC at Work® status; one of his schools also received the prestigious National Breakthrough School Award from the National Association of Secondary School Principals. As a district leader, Bob led the implementation of the professional learning communities (PLC) process in a district composed of over 50 schools. He is committed to making the work of collaborative teams and school leaders both simple and doable. Maren Powers is a national award-winning teacher, instructional coach, associate and author in St. George, Utah. Throughout her time in the Washington County School District, she has worked at two Model PLC Schools. In 2020, Maren received the Rebecca Dufour Scholarship that celebrates ten women educators across the country who demonstrate exceptional leadership in their school community. Maren earned a bachelor’s degree in English education and a master’s degree in educational leadership with an endorsement in school leadership. Maren is passionate about helping other educators implement, coach and lead through the PLC process. Sheline Miller is currently an Assistant Principal for the Washington County School District. She has also been a Learning Coach and Social Studies teacher for the same district. She has worked successfully with teachers and teams to help establish two Model PLC Schools - Fossil Ridge Intermediate School (FRIS) and Washington Fields Intermediate School (WFIS). In her capacity as Learning Coach, she has had the opportunity to act as the lead Intermediate Coach to help bring clarity and consistency to schools in the district. Her presentations include Meaningful Goal Setting and Gaining Clarity. She is also the lead instructor for one of the classes offered for the district leadership certification titled, Leading in a PLC. The Big Dream The guests articulate a unified vision for education where every student, irrespective of their background, can achieve at high levels. They dream of a future where students are empowered to take an active role in their education, understanding the relevance and direction of their learning. The collective goal is to view all students as partners in learning, utilizing collective expertise to ensure every child's growth. Mindset Shifts Required
Action Steps There are six actions in the book. In this episode, we talked about the following actions: Step 1: Identify essential standards and skills, distinguishing between the critical standards and those that are less essential, and establish a common understanding within the team. Step 2: Gain shared clarity on what proficiency looks like, facilitating discussions that bridge differing opinions among educators and align on expectations. Step 3: Employ effective questioning and coaching strategies to support teacher development and reflection on data, ensuring that teams can articulate their learning targets, strategies, and what the data reflects. Step 4: Ensure time and support for PLC work. Leaders, validate and celebrate the work and student learning successes! Challenges? Teams need time and support to do this work. Identifying time for PLCs could be: creating common prep periods, finding flexible funding in budgets to purchase substitute teachers so teachers have the time to collaborate, utilizing instructional aids to cover. The authors remind me that we also need to be clear on what teams collaborate about (these are the 6 actions steps in the book), and there are several protocols and worksheets the authors made to help you navigate these challenges, ensuring that collaboration is effective and focused on student learning. (See the link to the free reproducibles below!) One Step to Get Started Gain shared clarity among educators regarding what proficiency looks like for essential standards, as this is “most often missed step”. Stay Connected Here’s where you can find this week’s guests: Bob: Instagram: @bob_sonju Maren: Instagram and X: @learningpowers and email at [email protected] Sheline: [email protected] To help you implement today’s takeaways, the group is sharing their free reproducibles from their book, Simplifying the Journey with you. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 172 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Hello everyone. We got Bob Shaleen and Maren today. How are you all Good? 0:00:10 - Bob Sonju Doing great. 0:00:12 - Lindsay Lyons So good to have you on the podcast today. Really excited about this. I think we'll just dive into the first meaty question of you know I talk about Dr Bettina Love writing about freedom, dreaming with her quote, dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, so really centering that justice and equity piece in our work. So, with that in mind, I'd love for each of you to just share what's that big dream that you hold for the field of education. 0:00:39 - Bob Sonju Erin, you want to take a? Take a shot at this uh, sure, okay. 0:00:43 - Maren Powers Um, I will say my dream, I think, for education especially, is just to be able to ensure that all students, no matter their backgrounds, are able to achieve at high levels. So I think, as especially from a teacher's perspective because I'm still a teacher and so especially from my perspective, being able to really support all of my students and in whatever needs that they may have, um, and keep um kind of just those expectations at really high levels for them, um, I think if we were able to do that in education across the board, I mean how life-changing that would be for all of our, all of our people. 0:01:23 - Bob Sonju So that's fine well, chalene, what do you think? 0:01:30 - Sheline Miller go ahead, um, I'll go ahead, um. So I think my big dream would be to have students be empowered um to be a part of their own education, so that they can understand and see why and where they're going, so that it's not just coming in and sitting in a class and trying to memorize dates or memorize something and spit it back out for the teacher, but to really understand how this might be applicable to our, to my future, how it might help me communicate with others. I don't know just any of that kind of stuff where students are empowered. 0:02:11 - Bob Sonju Love it so great and I kind of echo what my colleagues have said just this idea of just students being partners in learning that we see students, all students, as our students, not yours and mine, and we're gonna use our collective expertise, talents and experiences to ensure that all of our kids learn. That's my dream. 0:02:38 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love it and it's so aligned with all the things we talk about on this podcast, so what a beautiful episode this will be. I am particularly interested in reading through your book. I loved your book and I think I love the concept too of like we're simplifying the journey. Here are the things, here are the things you can do. There's reproducibles that listeners can grab online right and use immediately, which is so cool and tangible, and I think there's also, before we get to like those specific action steps, there's also kind of this first thing that needs to happen, where we're kind of shifting our mindset around some practices, or we're shifting our mindset around like what is PLC work really? Or there's a bunch of kind of mindset things I think that have to happen for this work to go well, and I'd love to know what your thoughts are on. Is that accurate? And if there are mindset shifts, you know what are those. 0:03:32 - Maren Powers Yeah, I think Shalene kind of touched on it but a big piece that we and it's one of the steps within our book but believing that kids can take ownership of their own learning and so being able to have themselves reflect and reflect on their learning and understanding that, you know, a grade isn't necessarily you know, this is my grade the end all be all, but it's more just feedback for us teachers to be able to say, okay, you're close, you don't quite understand it. Here is some feedback that I'm taking and then let me see what I can do to help you so you can learn at a higher level. So I think just that mindset shift of you know, students taking ownership and being comfortable to tell the teacher hey, I don't understand this, can you help me? Because inevitably that's our job. So I think that is one big kind of just shift that I don't think is necessarily a huge broad thing, because I think most teachers would also agree that that is super important and we see the most growth out of kids when they can do that. So Beautiful. 0:04:40 - Bob Sonju Yeah. 0:04:40 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah. 0:04:42 - Bob Sonju Kind of going along with that. I just think we need to. We advocate for just rethinking a traditional mindset regarding school. Just kind of that giving my kids, giving my class and leave me alone, I'm going to try to cover. There's an urgency to cover all of the standards. It's my job to teach, it's their job to learn, using assessment for a score in the book. Just rethinking all of those traditional, maybe antiquated, mindsets regarding school and see students as partners in learning. I love this idea and we write about this just students taking ownership in their learning. But that starts with the professional teachers and that team getting clear on what students have to learn. 0:05:32 - Sheline Miller So yeah, and, just kind of to add to that, the focus on learning. So we talk a little bit about learning progressions. That part of that mindset needs to change, with students as well as teachers. That it's okay not to know everything, as long as we know the path that's going to get us where we want. 0:05:58 - Bob Sonju Yeah, and I love that, Shaleen, it's not right or wrong, it's learning is a journey, right, and we take steps on our pathway to mastery of these absolutely critical things that all kids need to know and be able to do, grade level by grade level. And so less is right or wrong and more as learning is a journey. 0:06:21 - Lindsay Lyons I think this is a really good transition point to this next question of like what is the journey for educators then to like learn how to like what are you know what are those stages of kind of activities they're doing in PLCs? And also like what are kind of like any? I guess it's two questions kind of in one. Like as you identify places where challenges may come up, what you do in the book I love how the book is laid out, by the way like you know, coaching ideas and like leader questions and places where it lives. Also thinking about, like be wary of or be mindful of these things that could be challenges, super awesome. If there are things like that that stick out to you as we kind of go through these action steps, feel free. I'm wondering for the listeners. They might be familiar with the general PLC work framework, but I like how you all break it down into. I think you had like six steps. You conclude with this as well, like, which I think is really succinct. On that left one of the last pages of just like here are the six kind of bullet points of this work. Do you mind walking us through that, maybe to start? 0:07:29 - Bob Sonju Bob, I'll start the conversation, but these two really are experts in this. We felt like that just in our travels and our experience as practitioners in schools, that we know that the professional learning community process is best practice in the field. It's research-based, it's the science of our profession. But, that being said, there's four critical questions that drive the work of a collaborative team in a professional learning community. What is it we want them to know? How are we going to know if they learned it? How are we going to respond collectively if they didn't, and how are we going to extend the learning for those who already know it? I think most schools and educators know these questions, but what we've discovered is answering these questions. What does that look like? That's where we tended to struggle a little bit, in schools that we've worked in, as well as schools that we've seen around the country, and so the idea behind this book was based on this PLC framework how to answer these four questions in six action steps. Six clear and concise action steps, providing clarity for each action step, as well as examples and templates, and so on. So, maren Shaleen. 0:08:48 - Maren Powers Yeah, I want to add to kind of to that kind of and we talk about this a lot, just as like colleagues. But the L in PLC stands for learning and so we always ask you know, is that for student learning, adult learning, both learning, what is that for? And it's actually for teacher learning, and so kind of the idea of the PLC is for teachers to be able to learn what to do in order to get our students to grow at these high levels. So, for this book in particular, focusing on these six action steps, when we were setting them up, the biggest piece of it was we wanted to make sure that teachers and leaders and anyone in a school can take from our book and be able to implement it and have these actionable steps with the reproducibles and be able to implement it into any grade level, any subject, really anywhere, and so and be able to show that you know you can do this step-by-step in this process. 0:09:51 - Sheline Miller So yeah, yeah, and then, kind of just to add to that, if you think about a PLC, quite often as schools start to dabble in PLCs or even say that they're actually working as a PLC, it's usually a broad umbrella that we put a whole bunch of stuff underneath and say, oh, we're PLCing, this is what we're doing. And our book has kind of focused that in or focused down into, like we've said, like I think each of us have said, actionable steps. It's not some broad overarching idea. It's actual steps that teachers can do that will help them answer those questions very specifically. That can be drilled down to specific skills, specific students and specific strategies that teachers are using in their classrooms. 0:10:47 - Bob Sonju Lindsay along with that. I'm super motivated by quotes. I have just lists of quotes right from all of my reading, but one quote that's always resonated with me. That kind of you'll see it in our work. But Rick Dufour said that it's not the fact that you collaborate that will improve student learning, it's what you collaborate about. And I think far too often in schools we say, okay, I've given you a collaborative time, now go forth and collaborate, but it's what you collaborate about that will influence student learning and increase teacher efficacy. And so that was really one of the drivers. Let's get clear on when we collaborate, what do we collaborate about? So, Awesome. 0:11:32 - Lindsay Lyons I love this framing and so thinking about this for the listener who's thinking about the four questions. Thinking about what does it really look like? What are the actions rooted in teacher learning? Of course, great point, maren, about like that L is for teacher learning. Thinking about what happens in a PLC. Could you walk us through what some of those activities might be that you discuss in the book? Sure? 0:11:58 - Maren Powers I can start. So kind of my background is with as a teacher and so and a teacher leader and a team leader and so for me working with my teams and what that looks like. For each step we break down very specifically. So, for example, step one, identifying essential standards and skills, we have a way where you can break it down into what you think is essential. You know the like do or die essential standards versus you know maybe the standards that aren't as essential and we have a very specific way of doing it. And throughout the book I want to point out that we also acknowledge that there are inevitably going to be people that maybe disagree on teams. You know different levels of understanding. We have veteran teachers and first-year teachers and so being able to talk through and figure out how to get through each of these steps with a variety of individuals. We do try and kind of pinpoint in throughout the book but different activities. So, for example, like step two, for gaining shared clarity, me and Chalene figured that this like works really well with teams who maybe disagree on what proficiency looks like for a standard. Talking about how you know as a group, maybe you write down what proficiency looks like without talking at all and being able to then come together and you can have an instructional coach come in and support you and put everyone's up on the board and you might realize we actually are saying basically the same thing, maybe just a little bit different, and so coming together and being able to tighten that vocabulary and what the expectations are. So we go through each step and have very specific here's exactly how you would work each step as a team lead or a principal or someone who's leading it out. 0:13:57 - Lindsay Lyons That's one of the things I loved is there are very specific protocols and that specific challenge of team dynamics whether it's veteran, new teacher or just like we have a lot of different opinions. Those protocols directly address that challenge that I think a lot of folks are on perhaps a team, whether it's really a PLC or in that broader umbrella that, shalini, you're talking about. I think there are those challenges. So I love that your protocols really address that directly and inherent to the activity. Yeah, yeah. 0:14:30 - Bob Sonju Our first. Our first action step, obviously, is we got to get real clear on what kids have to know in this course, in this grade level, and so we're going to shift our focus away from trying to just cover everything and just ensure that students learn some high leverage things grade level to grade level. That's not saying we're eliminating standards, but we're just kind of reallocating our time. So our first action step is just simply let's get clear on identifying what those essential standards and skills are. But that's only a first step and what we've seen is that's where a lot of schools will stop. We've identified them and then we lit up the lamination machine and we'd laminate them, put them all over the walls of the school and then nothing happens. That's because we haven't our action step. Number two we haven't gained shared clarity and clearly defined what does mastery look like for that? So we know it when we see it. That's a critical step in this process. Once we're clear on that, that moves us right to action step three. Students can become owners of their own learning because they can self-assess their work as compared to mastery work, and so it just kind of works. It just connects together. So, Chalene, Ditto. 0:15:50 - Sheline Miller I was going to say you guys have just said everything, so I was going to say something about student empowerment by knowing that. But it's very important and it's I both people have covered this that we have to know what mastery looks like, like. There has to be something specific there. We have to know what that target is and it needs to stay like right there. It needs to be where teachers know what it looks like. Students know what it looks like. Something that hasn't been mentioned is maybe we've got some of those high-low examples we're giving. We're letting them know this is what success looks like. This is what it looks like if you make some of these common mistakes that we have seen, and so we can fix those mistakes before they ever occur or happen, and so I just think that that's part of what's really important, and then, again. That allows us to be very specific about what our kids are missing and what they are not understanding. It doesn't become this general well, you just didn't do well on your project. It becomes you didn't do well on this, this and this, you did well on this, this, this and this. We just need to work on this. It's a much more positive outlook. Students feel success regardless where they are, even if they still have to work on something, they're still feeling that success and feel like they can continue to work on something and do it because they know what it looks like. 0:17:23 - Lindsay Lyons That reminds me that I think one of the things that was really cool two things actually, bob related to what you were saying, I think the lamination, like problematizing the lamination and just leaving it it made. It pushed my thinking when I read that you all talked about like rethinking, like revisiting, re-plotifying each year at the end of each unit even and that was kind of mind-blowing to me because I had never thought about doing that I was like, oh, this is just kind of what it is and maybe if there's something wrong then you can go back and revise. So that is a really cool idea, I think, to keep it fresh, to keep it relevant, and also speaks to the idea of student ownership and co-creation. If every time you get new sets of students, you get more and more feedback from the students about does this make sense, is this clear? We'll get more examples of the high low, shall we to your point? And I love also that in the categories you have the categories of proficiency as, like one was supported. I had a teacher ask me that literally last week like what if they can do all the things? But it takes so much support? I'm like, right, that's just a level of proficiency. And then now you all have given me the language and the frameworks, be like right, that's level one on the proficiency. That is exactly what that is. 0:18:28 - Maren Powers So thank you, and I, and I want to add, kind of when you were talking about you know, we always have new students coming in every year. I also want to point out we also have new teachers that come in every year, and so when you get new teachers on a team and maybe you get another new teacher next year who hasn't gone through this work you want to go back through it every single year and kind of revisit it and see, kind of like you know, what do we need to fix, what do we need to tweak? Let's look at our data I think the biggest piece of it too, and we talk about this a lot. But if you have a team that has been a team for a while, you do still need to revisit it every year. But maybe the process is going to go quicker because you all already know what's going on. So just the idea of revisiting it every single year, no matter how well the team knows this, I think, is really vital to the success of the teachers and our students. 0:19:30 - Sheline Miller Absolutely, and then to piggyback off of that, the last part of each chapter is reflect to elicit change, and so every time we do something, we need to reflect on it. There's always going to be something that we through our learning, and it might be as simple as oh my gosh, I found an article that you to look at that and tweak it and see what the issues were with kids, with teachers, with understanding, with CFAs, with alignment, and it just helps us, as teachers, become better at our profession and that translates into higher student learning. 0:20:23 - Lindsay Lyons Bob, are you going to say something too? 0:20:25 - Bob Sonju Nope, I think that's great Okay. 0:20:28 - Lindsay Lyons One of the things I also Shalene your comment earlier about, like you know, student ownership and self-assessment made me think about the checklist rubric. I don't know what you all called it and I don't think it's maybe a reproducible, maybe just an example, but there was basically a rubric that you had turned into a checklist where at each kind of proficiency level, students could kind of check off where they were and what I really loved, and that part was cool. But what I really loved was then there was the question so it would be like what's my next step? So if I self-assessed at like a three out of four, like I'm not at a four, so what's my next step? And even at the level four you had like okay, so how would you apply this to the real world? So there's always that next step built into the self-assessment and I have never seen that and it's so simple and so great and thank you for that. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or any thoughts on your favorite, either examples from the book or reproducible templates from the book. I'd love to just hear what you think like. 0:21:42 - Bob Sonju We needed just a simple and doable framework for teachers and students to see learning as a continuum, not as right or wrong. And then we had conversations about what should it look like at each step? And so when we're clear on what mastery looks like, and then we can, as a team, sit down and say, okay, what's a student going to look like at each step of this learning journey? We can communicate that to students, and they can. They're amazing at self-assessing when we're crystal clear on on the steps you know, on their steps that they're going to be taking toward mastery. So, yeah, thoughts Maren Well. 0:22:18 - Maren Powers I, and I'll just add to it, because that rubric you're talking about specifically is for actually writing and as an English teacher, I mean us English teachers are notorious for bringing work home and grading and it takes forever outside of work, which is wild. Um, but what we found is because the mindset shifts from, instead of us grading students, it's now students self-assessing and taking ownership of their own learning. Um, our grading for writing has, I mean, cut down drastically because it's the students who are literally just self-assessing where they're at. And then I'm able to look at the rubric and I can kind of compare it to their writing and say, oh my gosh, you're absolutely right, here is the one piece, the one thing that you're missing in your writing. Just go back and fix that. You know exactly how to get there, because it's so clear, as Bob said, where mastery is and then above or beyond, and so being able to have that clarity for our students, it just it adds to student ownership. So I would say that, and the team reflection pieces at the end are my personal favorites. The coaching inventory is really useful as a coach to trying to get teachers to reflect. 0:23:38 - Bob Sonju So and Lindsay, just a plug for you, I was listening to your grading for equity, your competency-based learning episode, and I was like oh, she's speaking our language right? Yes, so well done. 0:23:54 - Lindsay Lyons I absolutely wanted to have you all on, especially as I was reading the book and like, oh my gosh, yes, there's such alignment here. So, thank you, this is amazing. So I, yeah, there's, there's so much that I love. I'm trying to be succinct in my questions here. I think another big question that I have is think of maybe a challenge it could be like a chapter of of the book, Cause I think you, as I said, a challenge, it could be like a chapter of of the book, Cause I think you, as I said, broke down what could challenges be in each section and like can you walk us through some of the leader coaching questions that you had for that specific challenge? Cause I thought those were brilliant. It really just for for listeners who have not yet read the book. They basically break down right, Like here's a potential thing that could happen and with a particular scenario, which also great scenarios, very real, See, I've seen most versions of them. And then it was like here's the leader you could ask these three questions to follow up or something right, Like so good, I don't know if you all have a particular favorite set of those, but I'd love us just to get a taste of one maybe. 0:25:01 - Sheline Miller I was going to say that's all. That's kind of learning coach stuff and it's what I was dealing with. So most of those are questions that I was just like okay, what are, what are we doing? So we have a question bank and I'm I'm thinking that's kind of maybe a little bit about what you're talking about is we have these question banks that you just can go through and ask, ask yourself these, and then our goals are what's something I can start, stop and continue. So those are things that I think were really good for me to be able to go into a team and look at them and say, ok, you say you have all this. Show me, can you articulate what those learning targets are? Do you articulate them as a team? Do you articulate them to your students? And just asking those questions can either tell me if a team is doing something or the team is going to be saying no, I can't, and that will lead us to where they need to be. So have you done this, have you done this? Oh, so you do actually have those, and sometimes they do actually have them, but they just don't know that they have them. And so these questions at the end um, and then the questions um, with the scenarios, just help us learn where teams are, because our teams within our buildings are going to be in all like all over the place. We're going to have some people that are hitting it out of the ballpark, we're going to have some that are still just learning, and so and that's fine, because just like our students are going through a learning progression, so are our teachers. So none of our teams are failing. They're just all in different places and different levels, and that offers us the opportunity to let other teachers come in and part of their celebration could be hey, this is what we've done. It's worked really well. It might work for you. Maybe we can have learning walks where our teachers actually go and observe other teachers who have moved into that mastery format. So it just opens up a lot of avenues for us to help our teachers learn by using those questions and looking at these scenarios and seeing ourselves in those scenarios and going oh, maybe I did that. Maybe some of those scenarios were me. 0:27:32 - Bob Sonju And we collectively believe that good coaching is just asking very quality, targeted questioning questions of teams, and so we've included a lot of just great coaching questions that elicit the work that you're looking for there From a leadership perspective. Oftentimes leaders don't quite know what to do in regards to these six action steps, how to lead it and questions to ask, and so we outlined just four steps that leaders need to take. They need to think about this pattern as they're leading. Number one we have to clarify what the work is. We can't just say, go and collaborate or go identify essential standards. We have to clarify what that work looks like or go identify essential standards. We have to clarify what that work looks like. And then step two is we have to support teachers and teams as they learn, together with time, with resources, with coaching, with all of these things. And then next we need to monitor, and that's not to say micromanage, but just like we constantly formatively assess in a classroom, so we can provide feedback, targeted feedback, for a student regarding their strengths and next steps. We need to do this as well with our, with our colleagues. We monitor by asking targeted questions, and that helps us identify strengths as well as next steps for teachers and teams, as well as next steps for teachers and teams. And then, finally, the fourth step I think is crucial for all leaders is to validate the work when you see it and celebrate that with teams. And I think sometimes we forget this in the busy of schools. We forget to take time to validate the hard work teachers are doing and celebrate. And so, yeah, those four things, maren. 0:29:25 - Maren Powers You know, spot on for both leaders and coaches. 0:29:32 - Lindsay Lyons I wanted to follow up too on that validate and celebrate. I love how you get very specific and you offer some language and concrete examples in the book of if you're a leader, who who is now to Jalene's point. A lot of times we look at scenarios and we're like, oh, that's me right. If you're a leader thinking, oh, that's me, I totally don't validate and celebrate enough. I'm maybe not familiar with how to even do that. Well, there's a ton of examples in the book, so, never fear. One of the things I also was thinking about as a challenge I've heard a lot with you know organizations that I coach like you know networks, district school level or just folks in general who are listening to the podcast, like, well, I'm not sure about where this lives a lot of times right, like we don't have the time built in currently to our schedules. Or you know how do we get PLCs like together at the same time? You all offer some different ideas in the book about this. Do you mind running down like a couple of things? Identifying where it can happen or when during the day it can happen is a really helpful kind of starting point for leaders to get over that initial challenge and get into the work. 0:30:38 - Bob Sonju Yeah, yeah, I can take a crack at it here and just share a couple of things that we've discovered, I think, as well as what we've seen in other schools. But just creating common prep periods, finding flexible funding in budgets to purchase substitute teachers so teachers have the time to collaborate, just utilizing instructional aids to cover just different ways, that you create time for teachers to collaborate I think is absolutely critical. But that's only the first step. Then we have to get crystal clear on when you have this collaboration time, what do you collaborate about? In chapter seven we just get real clear here's what you collaborate about and essentially it's our six action steps. But there's questions. There's questions that teams can ask as they plan their units of instruction, as they're in the middle of their unit and then at the end and they're reflecting on their unit, as well as questions that evidence based questions that leaders can ask of teams to monitor how they're doing. And so it's more than just creating the time. It's getting real clear on what happens during that time and then supporting teachers as they learn together. 0:32:13 - Maren Powers And I'll add to that too, what's nice about the reproducibles, because there's so many of them within the book and there's very specific kind of like goals or targets that we want to get to for each action step. Obviously it makes it really clear for learning leaders or principals to be able to say here's exactly what I want to see happen today. Are you getting through steps one and two? Just step one, what is it you're working on? And then for teachers to be able to say here's exactly what we worked on and here's all the evidence to show, kind of, where we got to. It then creates a way to have dialogue between teachers and principals and to talk about okay, what are our next steps, where do we need to go from here? For principals it's how else can I support you, do you need more time? Or it looks like you guys are really on the right track. You know so different ways. That kind of creates that dialogue back and forth between teachers, coaches and principals and knowing exactly where the support is needed within that collaboration time. 0:33:35 - Sheline Miller Well said, yeah. And within that framework it also allows for those critical conversations to occur without the judgment or the I'm the process in their learning, so that we can offer them specific help. 0:33:53 - Maren Powers that's not judgmental, but it is student learning focused what Shaleen's saying too, because we are practitioners and we literally did this at our school from my perspective as a teacher, when Bob, who was our principal, would come in and be like, where are you guys at, what are you doing? It made it so much easier to communicate to my boss here's exactly what I'm doing, here's what we're doing as a team, here's where we're going. And so it made it to where it was just really easy to be able to talk to my boss, rather than feeling like he's coming down hard on us, like you know, you have to do this and this. Instead, it was more of a conversation, and he held us accountable, but we were also able to reach those goals because we knew where they were. We could see the target. 0:34:47 - Bob Sonju So Boss sounds so harsh. How about colleague on a learning journey? 0:34:54 - Maren Powers You technically were our boss. 0:34:57 - Sheline Miller He's our friend boss, though. 0:34:59 - Bob Sonju He is. 0:34:59 - Sheline Miller He's our colleague boss. 0:35:03 - Lindsay Lyons I really I appreciate so much kind of that teacher perspective, one on, like this, accountability and the way that accountability happens actually is helpful to us as teachers, like versus threatening or imposing or whatever Like that is. I think a really helpful perspective saves teachers or ELA teachers in your example time when students right, there are like not just benefits for students, there are benefits for teachers in all of this work as well. And, shalene, to your point about really decreasing that judgment, I saw that show up a lot in your book when you were talking about how, when we look at the data, it's about the data and a leader. I really thought about this. One like a leader or a coach is helping teachers look through the data. Ask about what you are learning from the data, versus giving the kudos like your team is doing or your students are doing great Rah rah, you right, it's like what are we learning? It's not about the individual teacher's success or failure. It is about the student learning at the heart of everything, which really, I imagine takes a lot of pressure off of teachers as well, right, and so there's so many benefits to teachers in all of this, which is awesome, I think. In closing, I'm curious to know if you all will have one shared answer to this or if you have different perspectives. Would love to get this too. But what is like that one first thing? When the administrator or teacher person listening is done with the episode they're driving to work, they're like I'm going to start today. What is that thing? What is that first thing that they can do right away after listening to this episode to get started with some of the things that you lay out here? 0:36:51 - Sheline Miller with some of the things that you lay out here. I'll jump in. I think and I think we bring it up in the book the most often missed step is step number two, which is gaining shared clarity. So if I were to start with somebody, that's where I would go. I would look at and I and like, I think we're assuming that they, they, have these essential standards and skills and they, they, they're like I'm on my way, I'm on my way, but do you agree? As a class, is it going to look the same in teacher A, teacher B and teacher C? Because quite often we hear T. You know, and this is something that I heard friends would call me up and they're like hey, what language arts teacher should I put my kid in? And I, at our school, would literally say, well, yes, I would say Marin, but I would literally say you know what? You put your kid in any of my language arts classes, they're going to leave our school with the same knowledge base because our teachers are aligned and they understand what mastery looks like and so you're going to get the same education regardless of teacher. So that is the one skill, and I think Maren is going to agree with me I don't know if she can jump in here and I think, bob, because they they just don't, aren't aligned together with what mastery looks like, so it looks different, even though they've talked about what's essential and they've even talked about it. But then they go to their classes and all of a sudden, this person emphasizes this and this person emphasizes something else, and then we all take our cfa and they're all different because we've never come to what shared clarity is, what mastery looks like and what it means, and we're not on the same page and I think, and I agree and kind of adding on to Shalene too just even just the word clarity, whether it's clarity on mastery, clarity on expectations, clarity on collaboration. 0:39:19 - Maren Powers I think that clarity piece from principals, from instructional coaches, from team leaders, is vital in this process and just in PLC in general. So, starting off with getting really clear as a leader, especially if I'm a principal or a team lead, that's driving home, you know, after listening to this, getting really clear on what I want to do with my teams, where we want to go and then how I'm going to get there, which I think, at least in our book, through these steps, that's how you are going to get there. But that clarity is just so important. 0:40:04 - Bob Sonju Yeah, and I would say, gosh, as educators, you're doing good work, but we're bombarded Just the sheer number of initiatives and shiny things that we have thrown at us every year, that sometimes we build up this defense to what Doug Reeves calls initiative fatigue. We just are like, oh, what's the latest flavor of the month? And so if I could share anything, it would be just this. There's a lot of great things in education, a lot of things that are wonderful, but let's simplify and focus on some things, some research-based, high leverage strategies that we know make a difference in student learning and in teacher efficacy. And then let's just get really good at those things, and that's really at the heart of our book. These six action steps are just they're simple, they're and doable. They're not, they're not easy, but but simple and doable to move you forward in your learning, but simple and doable to move you forward in your learning. 0:41:07 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing answers, I love all of those. And, shalina, I will hold on to the example you used to indicate yours. Like whose class should my kid be in, right? Like whoa, that's a deep question. Like, thank you for that example. So this is going to be a little bit of a lightning round, I think, for each of you. So this question is just for fun. So this is going to be a little bit of a lightning round, I think, for each of you. So this question is just for fun. It could totally be unrelated to your job, to the book, to education in general, or it could be totally up to you. What is something that you have been learning about lately? We've been talking about learning a lot today. What have you been learning? 0:41:43 - Bob Sonju I can't wait, maren, let's hear yours. 0:41:47 - Maren Powers Well, I have a newborn and a two-year-old. I'm on maternity leave, so I am learning how to manage two small humans at the same time. So that is what I am learning at the current moment. That's a lot of learning. 0:42:05 - Bob Sonju I actually called Maren and I said hey, what are you reading right now? And she's like I'm reading about dinosaurs and sharks and cars and cars construction sites, yep, all of those fun things. 0:42:21 - Sheline Miller Shalene, I'm almost learning kind of the same things. I have a grand, a brand new little three week old grandbaby, but um, really what I'm learning is I just moved into from an intermediate school sixth, seventh grade into high school. So I'm an administrator now in high school and um, dealing with, uh, student behaviors and all sorts of stuff that has never, been like my wheelhouse. So I think I'm having to learn how to still think I'm an effective person when lots of parents and students hate me. So I'm still trying to learn how to navigate all of that. So that's kind of just that opening being real that as an administrator we have to wear a lot of hats and sometimes kids and parents are going to react well and love you and respond, and then at other times they're not going to agree with anything that you do, regardless of what you say or do. And I still have to believe I'm being effective. So I'm learning how to do that. 0:43:31 - Bob Sonju And Lindsay for me. I was introduced to this term a few months ago and it's really fascinated me, and so I've been doing a lot of reading and studying. But this idea of intellectual humility and it's a term, it's, it's really kind of cool if you check it out, but it's, I think it's something that we're losing in the fabric of our society, right, but it's a term, it's really kind of cool if you check it out, but I think it's something that we're losing in the fabric of our society, right, but it's recognizing and owning that our own intellectual limitations, right, that our opinions, beliefs, viewpoints, they may be flawed, but there's research saying that we all believe that 90 of the decisions we make are the right decisions, right? Um, and? And this intellectual humility idea is just being a just being able to recognize that your opinions and your thoughts may be flawed, your beliefs may be flawed, and we need to continue to learn, listen to opposing opinions and continually pursue understanding and truth and be more compassionate with one another. So there's intellectual humility. 0:44:40 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, those are all so deep. Very good answers. Wow, impressive, all of you All right. Final question Very good answers Wow, impressive, all of you, all right. Final question when can folks either connect with your book, engage with your book, get your book or follow any or all of you collectively or individually? Feel free to answer that in whatever way you'd like. 0:45:00 - Bob Sonju Yeah, you can find. We can find our book on on solutiontreecom and also for sale on Amazon, and, and I can be reached. I've got an Instagram. I know it's a miracle, you too. Wow, I'll finally create it, but Instagram at Bob Sanju. 0:45:17 - Maren Powers So and my Instagram learning powers and yeah. 0:45:25 - Sheline Miller I'm. I'm just in good old email, so if you'd like to reach out, it's mill M-I-L-L. Shaleen, s-h-e-l-i-n-e at Gmail. 0:45:36 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing. Thank you all so so much. This has been a beautiful conversation. Thank you all for being here today. Thank you so much for having us.
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7/8/2024 171. These Structures & Leadership Actions Will Improve Student Learning with Dr. Anthony MuhammadRead Now
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In this episode, Dr. Anthony Muhammad discusses his latest book, The Way Forward: PLC at Work® and the Bright Future of Education. We talk about how the PLC at Work® framework is a vital tool for educators to sustainably improve equity and his Time for Change framework, which he developed with Dr. Luis Cruz. It leverages behavioral science and leadership theory to help leaders effectively lead meaningful change in schools.
Dr. Anthony Muhammad is a best-selling author and international thought leader. He currently serves as the CEO of New Frontier 21 Consulting, providing cutting-edge professional development to schools all over the world. He served as a practitioner for nearly 20 years—as a teacher, assistant principal, and principal. He was named the Michigan Middle School Principal of the Year in 2005. Dr. Muhammad has been honored by the Global Gurus organization as one of the 30 Most Influential Educators in the world the last 4 years in a row. He is recognized as one of the field’s leading experts in the areas of school culture and Professional Learning Communities at Work® and serves as an Associate Professor of School Leadership and Culture at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Big Dream Dr. Muhammad's grand vision for education is one where the unique beauty of each student is acknowledged and celebrated. He wants schools to tailor their systems to highlight and nurture each student's talents, rather than merely comparing and ranking them. “PLC Right”: 6 Titans
Impact of COVID on students and educators Teachers’ mental health is suffering. “We are in one of the greatest teacher shortages in American history…The teachers we have are, by and large, dissatisfied and depressed. We're not attracting new people to the profession and people are quitting wholesale, but yet we haven't shifted our approach…just last week there was a report in the New York Times that chronic absenteeism has more than doubled since COVID.” In 2022, teacher job satisfaction was at an all-time low at 12%. Students have been reporting increased anxiety and depression. Girls and LGBTQ+ youth seem more impacted, possibly due to their increased time spent on social media influence. About 80% of students with anxiety or depression said they could not find help at school! African American boys’ placement in Special Education increased by 20% during COVID. Action Steps Step 1: Embrace the PLC at Work® framework to align teams with a focus on student mastery of essential learning targets. Step 2: Integrate the Time for Change framework to implement leadership strategies effectively, prioritizing observation and shared learning. Step 3: Strengthen communication and trust-building to reduce resistance and enhance the adoption of common formative assessments within the PLC framework. Challenges? Resistance to change can stem from poor communication, lack of trust, and insufficient skill development. When leaders communicate effectively and build trust, defiance and capacity issues diminish. One Step to Get Started For those looking to embark on this transformative journey, Dr. Muhammad recommends ensuring a strong, democratically represented leadership team. This foundational step can set the stage for sustained growth and improvement in educational practices. Stay Connected You can find Dr. Muhammad on his website. To help you implement these lessons, Dr. Muhammad is sharing his reproducibles and study guide with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 171 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Hi, everyone. I'm here to introduce today's guest, Doctor Anthony Muhammad, who is an author and international thought leader. He currently serves as the CEO of New Frontier 21 consulting a company dedicated to providing cutting edge professional development to schools all over the world. He served as a practitioner for nearly 20 years as a teacher. Assistant principal and principal. Doctor Mohammed is recognized as one of the field's leading experts in the areas of school culture and professional learning communities at work. Let's get 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 if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. 00:01:07 I made this show for you. Here we go. Doctor Anthony Mohammed. Welcome to the time for Teachers podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm really honored to be here and I, I appreciate you provide this platform you to share some of my thoughts with your listeners. Yeah, I'm really excited particularly because I just read the way Forward, which is a recent book that you wrote. And it is wonderful. I have so many questions about it, but I wanna start off the show with the first question I asked all the guests which is in line with freedom dreaming. Doctor Bettina Love describes it beautifully as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, which I love. Um What is your big dream for the field of education is that we could truly appreciate the beauty of each individual human being and schools, public schools are rather rather recent experience. Um There's always been schools but one of the uh uh old adages is that you never educate the poor. So people have been restricted from getting their gifts and talents, talents cultivated based upon income or gender or race or language or ethnicity. 00:02:19 And public schooling was a very progressive step in breaking down those barriers. But yet as we know, just because you break down barriers legally, doesn't mean it breaks down people's hearts. And by law, every child in America has a right to attend school. But as we know, their experiences tend to differ based upon who they are, where they lived, uh how much money their parents have in the bank or the color of their skin. My dream is is that we would really see the beauty of each individual and make our institutions uh calibrate them around bringing that out with comparing them and ranking them and uh being vitriolic because a student doesn't do we expect them to do. We got one life and school can help make that life more pleasant if we if if we change our para diet, I love that response. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that. I what a beautiful opening to this conversation. 00:03:24Edit I think one of the things um that I really love about your book is that you several things I love. One is that you use this idea of like the PLTO work framework to ground what's happening currently and what has been happening since the pandemic to highlight exactly what you just said and how it's just not been happening, not just historically, but like the pandemic was this beautiful opportunity to do things different and you know, how have we actually done things differently? Right? So, I mean, I think one thing that I want, I, I think maybe to start with is for folks who maybe are unfamiliar with the PLC at work process. Do you mind just giving us a brief overview, maybe like the the critical tenants or something of just what's that framework? And then we can dive into kind of the the specifics of your book? Absolutely. I wanna give you a view. It's kind of a little um history lesson because my mentors Rick Defoe and Robert Acre, while the architects of the PLC at work process did not invent the concept of PLC. Uh the concept actually had its birth with the research of Peter Singe and the book, The Fifth Discipline in the concept of learning organizations. 00:04:36Edit And then Thomas Ser Giovanni, who uh was an education professor was not enamored with the concept of organization. He said that that's too corporate. It's a little bit too cold and its schools are, are much more moral. And he coined the phrase learning community and Shirley H and Milby mclaughlin who are both education professors uh felt that it's nice to have a group of professionals learn together, but the whole focus is to improve professional practice. They, they coined the phrase professional learning communities. Rick Dafoe and Robert Acre took that foundation to the next level in 1998 when they wrote a book called professional learning communities at work. When they asked if you have a group of professionals who are learning and working and growing together, what would their work look like if they were doing it at an optimal level? And that's where the PLC at work process came in and they framed the work of the collaborative organization around six, what we call our six types, we call them, we call A PLC, right? 00:05:45Edit They would make a decision that learning would be the focus of the organization. We focus on the development of every child and we do it together as opposed to separate tight or tenant. Number two would be in order to do that, every member of the system will need to be a part of a strong collaborative team, whether it's an administrative team or a team of teachers or counselors who focus on their component of student learning. All those teams do type number three is that they would clarify down to a granular level, what every student would need to learn. So if we're on an algebra team, Lindsay and we're trying to improve our student position in al in algebra, what would that proficiency looked like in unit one for every job Marzano would call it a guaranteed and viable curriculum. The fourth tenant would be once that's been determined, then that team would frequently develop formative assessments, common formative assessments to gather evidence on students progress, to inform individual and collective practice and to move to the fifth tenant use that evidence to figure out who needs extra time and assistance to meet those guaranteed targets, who would be ready for enrichment or extension. 00:07:05Edit And then finally, we would agree that we would trust the evidence from this process to improve individual and collective practice. And that's PLC at work in a nutshell. It's not just meeting and talking about random pro professional topics. It would be a very specific set of work the teams would engage in and an institution would engage in that's focused on mastery and uh uh uh uh uh essential learning targets for every student that's determined by the collaborative team. Does PLC work in a few minutes? I love, wow, that was really distilled. It was beautiful and I loved you in the book, how you distinguish PLC right from PLC Light. And I specifically love that you name like if PLC Light is implementing only what doesn't make them uncomfortable, right? So this idea of discomfort as necessary for like true equity and truly centering and seeing like what are we doing and what can we do differently? And what does that impact on Children is so amazing? 00:08:09Edit Like I just, I really like how you frame that. And I love how the PL C at work process really gets down to like what is it actually that we are doing and how do we keep student learning in mind? Like the curriculum is very tied to the PLC. We're, we're unpacking the data of the student learning. We are unpacking all this stuff and it's not some like, yeah, Fluffy, let's all like get together and talk about a topic. Yes. Yes. And and that will be more what we consider a critical friends group, which isn't bad. It just doesn't have the same evidence from research and the impact of student learning. There's nothing wrong with teachers getting together and discussing topics of practice. But if you're really interested in improving student learning, it wouldn't be random, it would be intentional. I love that. And, and so I'm gonna shift now because I'm wondering uh about the research that you did in terms of the impact on students and educators that COVID had. There were so many things in here that I found fascinating and I mean, you even took, you know, like how these effect sizes when schools are closed. 00:09:15Edit Research, you talked about teacher satisfaction, you talked about the impact on students mental health. I mean, all sorts of things. What was most interesting to you most surprising to you as you were doing that research, that chapter was the most emotional work for me because you could sense it just from observation that things were different to dive into the evidence and the research on how basically pausing society for two years with uncertainty with fear with um even the battle of ideologies that emerge politically. Um and then telling people to leave the cave after two years of hibernation and saying ready set go and then wondering why people aren't as enthusiastic or as engaged. But one of the things that really intrigued me, um there's several things on educators was our history of not acknowledging our own mental health and how COVID made us uh in a way start to acknowledge it. 00:10:25Edit But there was a recent uh education week uh poll done on uh buzzwords in education that, that educators find unpleasant. Unfortunately, in that list of the top 10 self care was one of them that I don't want us to become so altruistic that we forget that we matter. Um If the teacher is stressed out, if the teacher is anxious or depressed, then what impact do you expect that person to have on Children or also anxious and depressed and stressed out? And what really bothered me is a lack of our top leadership at the state, the federal, at the district levels, their willingness to acknowledge that there's nothing wrong with taking a step back and thinking about how our institution, what it's doing to the mental health of our educators and to our Children. It's ok to pause for a minute and recalibrate for a better future. As opposed to we gotta catch up learning loss. 00:11:29Edit We need more time we need after school and you're just taking depression and anxiety and you're just enhancing it as opposed to addressing sometimes Lindsay, I feel sometimes lonely because I feel like I'm screaming in the wilderness to people. Things that seem like common sense. It, it is just not registered. I see teachers being pushed over the edge and we are in one of the greatest teacher shortages in American history. The data screaming at us, the teachers we have are by and large dissatisfied and depressed. We're not attracting new people to the profession and people are quitting wholesale. But yet we haven't shifted our approach. I was also taken by, um, the impact that it has had on Children, uh particularly insists it in long term virtual. And the, and the, the real gaps that have developed, uh just last week, there was a report on the New York Times that uh chronic absenteeism has more than doubled since COVID. 00:12:39Edit So kids are becoming more school phobic for two years. They were on a computer and sometimes they logged in and sometimes they did, sometimes they found the lessons engaging, sometimes they didn't and to see that that impact was greater in, in a negative sense for kids of poverty who we didn't think about. If there are five Children, are there five laptops now, are there five quiet places for them to engage? Is the bandwidth adequate for them to stay engaged? What are the distractions that are happening at home? Are they facing homelessness? And then you add that on top of that? Something that really hurt my heart was that for kids of poverty, the the the gaps were larger and their anxiety and depression. And for LGBT Q students who had to witness on the, the news, these adult debates about whether they even exist or deserve to be acknowledged. 00:13:42Edit So that chapter was it, it was emotionally, it took an emotional toll on me um to write it, synthesize it and then publish it. I'm sure it was emotional even just to read. I mean, yeah, that, that I had written down that exact thing as well. Just the increase anxiety and depression around girls in LGBT Q plus youth were impacted possibly with a social media like mediator influence. I, I thought that was fascinating. Right? Because it is, it's the news, it's also the, the um conversation that are happening with their peers that we like, usually don't touch in education. Right? Um That, that black boys were placed in special education at an increased rate of 20%. I mean, just like mind blowing things where we're just doing things worse, like things are happening worse. Like we were not pausing, like you said, and recalibrating and it's so necessary. I think that, I think the 12% was the teacher job satisfaction rate. That, that was reported. I mean, that's a single digits. 00:14:46Edit Like, but there's a problem now it did go up to 20%. Ok. Oh, not only 80% of teachers hate their job. So. Oh, that's rough. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. And so as we think about, you know, the all of the pieces, there's, there's so many things right that I think we, we can do, we can look at, we can, you know, almost be so immersed in, in all of this negative data stuff that it can feel maybe overwhelming at times of like, how do we address everything? Um, how do you see the appeal the at work framework? Really being an anchor for addressing a lot of the things that, that the research uncovered here. Hi, this is Leah popping in to share this episode's Freebie, a set of reproducible and a study guide at the solution tree. You can find it at the blog post for this episode, www dot Lindsay, Beth lions.com/one 71. Now, back to the word here. It, it puts the main thing as the main thing and we can avoid the external distractions and the self inflicted wounds, the external distractions. 00:15:57Edit I like to appeal to uh lawmakers and decision makers. I mean, how much research do you need to see that test based student accountability and comparison of schools and districts has been a miserable failure. Stop for two years. We didn't do it and nobody died. Nobody, you know, it, it schools didn't like explode because they didn't take all these standardized tests and there's nothing wrong with test based feedback. The government does have a right to gather evidence on how the citizens are doing. But would it make sense if they did that with fire departments or, or, or, or police departments and gave them letter grades? Wouldn't you want every fire department to be great when you want every police department to be great? Um The evidence is really clear. It's just a new form of Jim Crow. It's taking these ideas and covering them under the idea of school quality and it's debilitating certain systems and it's making cer some systems think that they're performing better than they really are. 00:17:03Edit So it helped her schools on all parts of the spectrum, student learning and the actual acquisition of knowledge and skills is what I'm asking the Federal state and local governments to focus. I'm asking us to get back to a foundation of, of how do we improve teacher quality future performance through collaborative teams that were not competing with each other. There's these really serious skills and, and, and, and knowledge that kids have to have to have to have to ascertain or again, how do we work together to get there? And I can learn from you, you can learn from me and we'll say talking about field day or hat policy or after school program for another team, but give teachers time and space to work on student learning, make the main thing the main thing and allow them to work as a real team and utilize one another, especially since we have so many alternatively certified folks going into the profession, we have to accelerate their growth because they're coming in at a deficit. 00:18:15Edit Wouldn't it be smart for them to be on a strong collaborative team as opposed to trying to figure it out by themselves and an administrator walking in with a walkthrough protocol and telling them how bad they are, they don't have any direction on how to get better. The evidence is just so crystal clear that it, it gets frustrating. Um When people can't see the writing on the wall, student by student skill, by skill, collaborative teams, time resources and support to get the job done. Yes. Oh my gosh. I, I love all of this and I think a lot of leaders listen to this podcast. And so I think that that structural piece of just where do we have that time built into teacher school day? How do we get teachers in each other's rooms to see how things are happening? And oh, I have that student in my class too. Wow, they're really engaging in your class. How is that happening? What are you doing? I think there's, there's so much that um we can do structurally that really enables teachers to thrive trust teachers that they, they have the motivation to thrive and and really increases that job satisfaction which you know, is going to make them want to keep going. 00:19:22Edit And even if we are struggling, give them support to help them grow to meet it, it doesn't have to be punitive or uh negative that if you give an assessment and most of the kids struggle, what can, what can, what can I do to help you to help them get there? So the trust is mutual between the leadership and the teachers, but their focus collectively is on students. I love that. I love that specific example of, you know, every kid fails the assessment, right? There's so many that's such a learning opportunity there's so many things that we can dig into. Maybe the assessment was flawed, right? Maybe, maybe we, we give them different ways to demonstrate they're learning. Maybe we go back and have it be more student centered and try this pedagogy, right? Like I, I love seeing that as a learning opportunity and not a failure of this teacher shouldn't be teaching or something. Right? Because I asked leaders of those are listing, who are you gonna replace her with? Nobody's going into teaching you, you're better off cultivating the ones you have. Instead of trying to separate capable from, from, from incapable, help, help them develop and grow and they'll stay, they'll be satisfied, they'll get the intrinsic satisfaction of seeing students develop and just create a much more pleasant system in a much more pleasant environment. 00:20:42Edit Absolutely. And I, and I think now that we're thinking structurally as well, I wanted you to share if you could a little bit about the time for change framework that you developed with Louis Cruz. And I, I just, there's so much I love about this. It really speaks to my heart. There's a ton of like surveys and rubrics and a bunch of stuff in the appendix that is so usable, like user friendly, ready to go. People can pick up this book and just use something tomorrow which I really love. And I also love, I think at the very beginning of, of you introducing it in this book you talked about how, um, reason Ager I think, found that change can happen in 100 days. We don't need to wait for like the 3 to 5 years that we often say. Right, let's go now. And I love that so much. It's really a nice call to action. Like we don't need to, um, uh Paul Gorski calls it something like pacing for something like comfort or something. And it's right. we don't need to slow this down because we're uncomfortable with like getting things moving, we can get things moving. Well, the last chapter of the book really is a call to action. 00:21:45Edit And the first thing that I recommend that people do and we've been saying this for years is to put together a leadership team. Some called it an instructional leadership team. We called it a guiding coalition. I don't care what you call it, but to have a team whose focus is to support teacher teams in the full implementation of the PLC at work process. And I I add in the book rubrics, each one of the six essential PLC elements for the leadership team to do an analysis of where they are as an institution as it pertains from as it, as it as we go from novice to exemplar ever. You find that you need to greatly improve, let's say it's formative assessment. They have good teams, they do a pretty good job on guaranteed and viable. But as you analyze the rubric, you find that your teachers are really reluctant about collectively developing assessments to use the evidence formative as a fear of comparison or whatever. 00:22:48Edit So there's a survey that's so you can gather that information from it and I include as a decision making framework. Uh something that Doctor Louise Cruz and I developed from a book called Time For Change, which is really rooted in behavioral science. And the premise is all human beings love improvement. We don't necessarily love change. This change is inconvenient. It's uncomfortable. So, but people tend to engage if they're given the right equipment and some of the things that make people reluctant to engage, we break them down from more of a anthropological perspective. We start with a meeting of the minds. So teachers are not engaged in common point of assessments. Maybe they don't understand why it's so important. Maybe there wasn't an intellectual discourse that they might think is just an imposition of power or authority. Maybe they don't understand the research around the power of common assessments. Maybe they don't understand um what the the the benefit instruction that the communist essence can bring. 00:23:57Edit So maybe it's poor communication. So maybe we need to show it up there. Others it could be emotion, they get it but there's fear. But will the results be weaponized? Will I get a bad evaluation of Lindsay's kids do better than mine? So it could be trust. It couldn't be it might not be intellectual at all. Maybe they don't trust how we're going to use this evidence and there's a sense of fear. So the second thing that, that we, we place is that if, if you've already communicated properly and there's not a misunderstanding, maybe there's an emotion gap, we call it a meeting of the heart and that's building trust. If they get it, they trust, maybe their apprehension is they don't know how to do that. It could be a real skill deficit. Maybe they don't know how to write a good assessment. Maybe they don't know what to do with the data uh in our framework. That's the easiest or the most straightforward of the breaches. It's just a, I just don't know how to do it. And the premise is that people know better than they'll do better. So maybe the t the leadership team looks at it and says, maybe these teachers just need more training on how to develop a common assessment, how to use the data, how to, how to help the students reflect on their own mistakes. 00:25:18Edit If you do those three things, our evidence is shown you've covered the vast majority of the reasons people resist change. But then there's this last level which is just defiance, they understand they trust, they know how to do it, but they've drawn a line in the sand and they've said you can't make me. So the last tool in our framework is accountability. Now, the best part, accountability is peer pressure if you develop strong teams and I'm the outlier and we're on a team, Lindsay and the other three team members saying come on, Anthony, we really need you on board. So creating a, a culture of peer pressure can be improved at the team level. But there's that last level of accountability if the team has tried everything they know. But Anthony's just being a jerk for lack of a better term. Somebody on that team, primarily an administrator, if you've tried the all the other stages has to go to Anthony because he's holding up the team's progress. 00:26:26Edit And they have to say at this point, Anthony, you know why it's necessary trust is not an issue, you know how to do it, the rest of your team is doing what's wrong with this picture at this point. I'm not asking you, I'm demanding and I'm gonna use my authority to push you into better practice. Not because I hate you. I'm trying to be malicious that your kids can't wait another day for you to somehow intrinsically uh you know, have this epiphany and to join and you're gonna get my full attention until you do. So we produce in the book um a framework that leadership teams can use as they're looking at the continuum of implementing fully all six of those PLC types and using the time for change framework that where there's a breach we can act with better communication or is it a trust gap is a capacity or people just being stubborn and you're gonna catch everybody with one or more of those four? 00:27:37Edit I love that. It almost makes my next question obsolete. I wonder if there's, it's worth that thing. But I, I was wondering about the biggest challenge that you see, I don't know if they fall maybe into one of those categories, but the biggest challenge you see in terms of implementing this authentically, like fully, you know, the PLC at work framework and, and just really thinking about the time for change framework as well from a leader lens. Well, doctor Cruise line in time for change, we found that about 90% this comes from the transforming school culture, book and study. Um but 90% is wrapped up in poor communication and lack of trust, uh lack of capacity and just stubborn resistance happen a lot less frequently, but they do happen. So a leadership team should focus a lot of their change uh energy around really, really strong communication and building trust with their family. And if those two are solid, those other two breaches because they're less frequent. 00:28:45Edit That is huge. I think, I, I mean, I that's really big. Number 90% is shocking to me. And I think that's going to be really heartening for a lot of leaders to think. Well, that's a lot fewer battles that I have to like, prepare for, I just need to communicate better. And that's something that I can have a little bit of control over. Right? Like I can prepare to do this and that must be freeing for people listening. So that's exciting. And if you do, if you communicate, you build trust. And we've seen situations where uh defiance just was non-existent our capacity. That is more concrete. I either I know how to unpack a standard or I don't in that situation. Um But we found that that happens a lot less frequently than people who develop bad attitudes and dispositions because of misunderstanding or mistrust. That's incredible. I think. So we've talked about a lot of things and your book covers a lot of things. One of the things that I, I like to offer our listeners at the end is just the question of, you know, if there's one thing that someone could do tomorrow. 00:29:54Edit So there these ideas are kind of swimming around in their heads and they're thinking this, this is a lot of stuff that maybe I need to take in digest, think about implement what's like the one thing I can do to get started tomorrow, that'll put me on the the right path to do all this stuff. Make sure you have a strong democratically uh represent democratic representation on your leadership. Make sure you have representative democracy at every grade level. The department has a representative leadership and start to collaborate model for your teachers. What good collaboration looks like around student work. I would recommend you get uh the book the way forward and read it as a book study and do some self analysis. So you can get very specific on the work that your school needs to get done because your school's needs may be different than the school. Around the corner school around the corner may be different in a school in another district. But the PLC at work framework is concrete enough. If you do that self analysis, you can tighten it up and make sure that you have evidence in all six of those critical areas. 00:31:06Edit So that would be my recommendation. Um We've rarely found the school improve at scale that, that, that they don't have strong leadership teams. Now, when you have a charismatic leader who um is kind of that superhero, you'll get results for a while until that person leaves. You want sustained leadership, you want sustained growth. It needs to be a collective effort. So district office quit looking for the miracle principles. The uh lean on me, the stand and deliver uh the freedom writers just go work together as a team. You don't need a superhero in leadership. You just need a leader that's humble enough to know that he or she can't do it by themselves. I love that a lot of my research and work is in shared leadership inclusive of students as well. So I'm just thinking about the representation on the leadership team too, of people who aren't even educators but, but the Children that we were there for. Right. So I think that's, that's a wonderful idea to be able to, to start there and that's something that you could reflect on tomorrow and, and get, get to work on tomorrow. 00:32:20Edit Beautiful. Um I, I'm wondering one of the questions I asked for fun at the end usually is just, you know, what's something that you've been either learning about or working on lately? Is there anything new in the works for you or something you're curious about? I'm learning how to relax. Um I'm, I'm a Taipei personality. I have two books that are already done. Another two more than I'm doing at its home. And I'm gonna take some time to just sit back and enjoy my life's labor and enjoy family. And really, it, it's one thing to advocate for the benefit of other people, but it's seems harder to advocate for my own leisure and benefit and I'm learning to be more balanced. So uh I've never read for pleasure. I've always read for information. Uh uh informational text is my thing, but I'm learning to get more into narrative text and fictional and just kind of lose myself and take walks on the beach. 00:33:28Edit And so that's, that's my new thing. II, I want a more balanced life. Hm. That's incredible. And I think a lot of leaders need to hear that because they're probably in similar positions to you and, and need that reminder. So I love that you're offering that. Thank you. And, and the last thing is people are gonna, I, if they're already probably following you, but people are gonna want to follow the work that you're doing. Connect with you. Um see what conferences you're speaking at all, the things, what's the best place online to follow the work you're doing for social media. Uh Facebook, I have a page under Doctor Anthony Mohammed and I have a Twitter or X whatever they call them these days. I don't use it as often, but that's at New Frontier 21. And I'm pretty active on linkedin if you want resources, books, conferences, Solutions read.com is the best place you just put in my name. I'll show you all of the PLC institutes. I'm speaking at. It has links to all of my books and resources and streaming videos and DVD s and uh so that's the best place for resources. 00:34:33Edit Get access to me. Social media is the best and my website is being revamped. Um That's New Frontier 20 one.com. It won't be up for again for another month, but check on that in another month and that'll be a clearing house for all of those. Awesome. I think by the time this airs that should be up and running and so we'll link to all that stuff in the show notes. And the blog post for the episode. Doctor Mohammad. Thank you so much for your time today. This is an absolute joy. Thank you. I appreciate you having me and you were, you were a great interview. So thank you. Thank you. If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane, Sair and Jamila Dugan, talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book Street Data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period. I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling yourself as you listen to right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. 00:35:43Edit Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time, leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach better podcast network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at, teach better.com/podcasts. And we'll see you at the next episode.
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7/1/2024 170. Partnering with Culturally & Linguistically Diverse Families in Special Education with Dr. Kristin Vogel-CampbellRead Now
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In this episode, Dr. Kristin Vogel-Campbell shares how we can make IEP meetings with families better. She emphasizes the importance of an assets-based mindset, the critical need for accurate language interpretation, and the value of direct communication with families.
Kristin Vogel-Campbell began her career as a Special Education aide at the Chinatown Head Start in New York City and was a classroom teacher for thirteen years in California. She has served as a district-level Program Specialist and Director of Special Education and is currently a Coordinator of Special Education for the San Mateo Foster City School District. Dr. Vogel-Campbell recently earned her Doctorate of Education from California State University, East Bay. She’s the author of Partnering with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Families in Special Education, which we talk about in this episode! The Big Dream Dr. Vogel-Campbell’s big dream for education, deeply influenced by Dr. Bettina Love's concept of 'freedom dreaming,' is that all education is Special Education (i.e., differentiated). Mindset Shifts Required Transformational change begins with the mind, enabling relational change and eventually influencing policy and practice. Dr. Vogel-Campbell shares many mindset shifts including: presuming competence of students and families, approaching family communication with positivity, refraining from assumptions about family involvement, honoring familial knowledge, and recognizing we (educators) need to earn families’ trust. She urges educators to engage directly with families, centering their voices in the educational conversation, and ensuring that the interpretation is accurate and culturally sustaining. Action Steps Step 1: Create concise, clear, and accessible summaries of complex educational documents, like procedural safeguards, and offer them alongside comprehensive versions. Also offer translations of the summaries. Step 2: Invest in effective language interpretation, ensuring interpreters have specialized vocabulary and share the same dialect as families. Step 3: Center the student’s humanity and strengths. One family brought a binder each year with the child’s smiling face on it (and updated the picture each year) to remind everyone why they were there. Challenges? A big one is precise interpretation and space for families to ask questions. Dr. Vogel-Campbell shared a heartbreaking anecdote about a misinterpretation that led a father to believe his child needed leg amputation instead of ankle-foot orthoses. Had the interpreter been trained in specific terminology and the father had space to ask questions within the meeting, this confusion would have been eliminated or remedied quickly. One Step to Get Started Engage in personal reflection to understand biases and past missteps. Commit to relationship-building with students and families, and take the time to ensure all families feel like valued, co-creators of IEPs. Stay Connected You can connect with or follow Kristin on LinkedIn and Instagram @drvogelcampbell To help you implement equitable practices, Dr. Kristin Vogel-Campbell is sharing her PK-12 school meeting accessibility protocol with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 170 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Hi, everyone. Today's guest is Doctor Kristen Vogel Campbell who began her career as a special education aide at the Chinatown head start in New York City and was a classroom teacher for 13 years in California. She has served as a district level program specialist and director of Special Education and is currently a coordinator of special education for the San Mateo Foster City school district. Doctor Vogel Campbell recently earned her doctorate of education from California State University, East Bay. She's the author of partnering with culturally and linguistically diverse families in Special education, which we talk about in this episode. Now, let's get 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 if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum, director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about co-creator curriculum of students I made this show for you. 00:01:15Edit Here we go. Doctor Kristen Vogel K. Well, welcome to the Time for Teacher Podcast, Lindsay. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. Um It's a huge honor. I am so excited. You have an incredible book, done some incredible research. And I'm really excited. I think that'll kind of house our conversation today. But I'm excited to know if there's anything else that you think is important for listeners to know either about you. I know sometimes the form mobiles can feel very formal and there's like, you know, we're whole people. So if you want to add anything to that or just have people kind of keep anything in mind as we jump into our conversation, say, feel free to share that. Yeah. Um One of the things that I like to always bring up when I'm in conversation about like the work that I do and my experience is that, you know, I've worn a lot of hats that people think of when they imagine a special educator. Um I've been a teacher's assistant, a student teacher, um special ed teacher in a variety of settings. Um, a program specialist, a director, a special ed and a coordinator. 00:02:18Edit But the two hats that I have not worn are a student with an IEP or a parent of a student with an IEP. And I'm very, very clear about my personality in this regard. So I let the voices of parents speak for themselves. Um I try not to uh presume or assume anything about parent experience. And I think that's a really critical piece kind of moving forward into this conversation. That's such a great point. Thank you for situating that. And I, I love how much you do that within the book too is just a real um situated this of like I am a researcher and in this work and working closely with a lot of these families and it just, it really comes through how thoughtful that you are in all of this. And so I, I appreciate that grounding because I think it is like an intro into just who you are and how you do things, which is phenomenal. Thank you. Yeah. And, and I think one of the things that comes really clear in the book as, as you kind of read it, but I wanted to ask on the podcast is, you know, I, I love Doctor Patina loves thoughts around freedom dreaming. 00:03:25Edit And so when she talks about dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, I think what a beautiful way to anchor the dreams that we hold for education. I'm curious, how would you describe that outside of the book or reading from your book however you want to do that? But like, what is that dream for you? Yeah. Um I, I was so excited. I'm, I'm so excited that you also sent her um this question in the work of Doctor Love. Um She's been a huge source of knowledge for me. Um I cannot comprehend doing my job without. Um So, you know, just really brutally honest, special education is one of the only legally sanctioned forms of segregation outside of our carceral system. Um And when we think about abolition, like Doctor Love talks about, um when we think about intersectionality and justice, disability always needs to be considered and included. Um you know, just thinking about that school to prison pipeline. So many of our incarcerated folks, persons of color are student uh are are folks either with, you know, a history of disability in school or with undiagnosed disabilities and kind of the dream that I hold for education. 00:04:38Edit I think about when I was a middle school resource specialist and I would share with my students that my ultimate goal was for them to exit my classroom. And I would always frame it and saying I adored them. I enjoyed working with them, but I wanted them to develop the skills and the agency to learn and thrive in a general ed setting. But at the same time, I also let them know that this was not something that was their sole responsibility that the adults in education need to shift their attitudes as well as learning new skills in order to make this happen. So my dream is that, you know, all education is special education. When we think about special education, it's, it's differentiated and all of our students learn in different ways. So why can't that happen in a setting where everyone is getting that at the same time? That that's equity and that's justice for me. Oh, that's so beautiful. Yes. And I, I love that you anchor your work in disability studies frameworks, um and disabilities studies in education framework. 00:05:44Edit And like, I think that's absolutely it, the, the ties to the carceral state that connections, you need the idea of the goal being to exit the classroom. I mean, how many, how many educators but also like lead and system wide leaders really articulate that goal or even honestly have it in their heads. Like I, I can say, I as an educator, like hadn't had when I was in it, you know, I had not had that kind of um thought process, right? And we're just kind of like, ok, this is your students are here and they are here forever, right? And we don't think about that, that dream, that extension. Mhm. And I mean, yeah, that, that's, it's a journey that I've been on and my, you know, 20 ish years in special education, that's not the mindset that I held at the beginning or even in the middle of my journey. But I think my, my doctoral program doing a lot of very like in depth research into, like you said, disability studies, but also, you know, uh abolition studies, uh critical race theory. Black feminist thought. 00:06:46Edit Um you know, abolition looking like our students being able to, you know, thrive in setting that the majority of our other students are, are in. It just, it just comes down to that. Um So, yeah, that, that's, that's kind of how I, you know, ground myself in, in, in the work that I do. Beautiful. Oh my gosh. I, I love it so much today. It really speaks to the idea that like our our system is set up to fail students versus that there is an individual, right? Like issue with students. It's just like our system has made it. So that differentiation isn't like just like go to thing for all students, right? Which it should be. And so I think there's a lot of structural things that you point out in the book which I, I think are so eye opening. I mean, even for me as a special educator who was like in it realizing for example, that 94% of the procedural safeguards documents from the 2012 research anyways were written in a post secondary reading level. 00:07:50Edit I mean, and you talked about how like the special education teachers sometimes were even like, I don't even know, right? Like what? And then so I remember being a first year special educator and just being like, whoa what on earth is this massive document we're sending home? Oh, we have to do it. Well, I guess I'll just send it home, but I don't really know what's going on here. Right. That's not, it's, it really, it doesn't make a lot of sense and, you know, procedurally, one of the things that, you know, we're obligated to do is to either send that home for parents to review beforehand or to present it to parents at the beginning of the meeting. And it always looks like here's this 19 page document. Do you have any questions? OK. That, that, that doesn't really set us up for a level playing field. Um So what we, what we've done in the past is, you know, taking that 19 page document first off providing our educators and our site leaders with um kind of an in depth like training on what, what that document looks like, what those rights uh look like what parents and students are entitled to um under I DEA and then creating kind of like a one or two page bullet point that we can share with families. 00:09:09Edit In addition to that 19 page document, it's a little bit easier for them to digest. Um And then, you know, the challenge is our procedural safeguards, I believe right now, we have procedural safeguards translated into 30 something languages um in our district and in the state of California, um the, the, the resources and, and the time and, and the, the skill to translate that. So we're making sure that all of our families regardless of language differences have that uh Chi or cliff notes, how I like to, I always like to preface it by saying that. But yeah, it's, it, it's not setting us up for a successful meeting if we're just growing a really important document appearance and expecting them to participate without having a lot of uh front loading. Yeah. And so yeah, I love that idea of the bullet point bullet pointed list. Brilliant and, and just thinking about, right, it is very resource intensive. But what are the ways that we can support, like the, the way that it's set up? 00:10:15Edit Like, I know you talked about how like in the book, there's, you know, really special education services in general are like it's a legal compliance model. So it's not, let's get creative, let's figure out what's best for students. It is like we are checking the box, we are doing this thing and that's kind of what the structure uh lends itself to. And so that's kind of what happens and there's all sorts of barriers. I mean, you talk about language translation being actually one of I I think Gonzalez and Gable uh said it was one of the most significant barriers to family engagement in the IEP process. There's, you know, the idea of gender, which came up, which was really fascinating to me that most of the research in this is actually done with moms, not dads. And there was like a dad in there who was saying, you know, there's a separation between me and the female teachers who talk to my wife, look at her and, and use mister when they talk to me. It's like a a removal like it, it's not, it was interesting to me reading that. I was like, oh I see that as a sign of respect but also problematic in a gendered way. But it's actually to him like you don't respect me in the same way or you don't connect with me, I should say in the same way. Um There's like, you know, lost wages that you cited from people taking work off just to be able to make it to the meetings. 00:11:19Edit Um All of these structural problems, like I I'm just thinking about maybe a leader listening who's not intimately involved with the IEP process who may not be aware of all of these pieces, but like that's just to paint the picture, that's what we're working in. And then given that, I mean, feel free to expound about any of that. But I I'm thinking, given all those challenges, you know, what is the path forward? What kind of brought you to this research? What advice would you give someone who is listening? Thinking like, well, well, we don't want to do that in our school or district. So like, where do we go now? Yeah. Um So when we think about systems and structures, we always think of that triangle that pyramid. Um And you know, information flows from the bottom to the top. And we usually think about it in, you know, resources and, and, and policy are the first things that need to happen when it's actually the opposite. Um And one of the, the visuals that I share with my teams and I I use in some of my research is that inverted triangle. Um Peter Senge and a couple of his colleagues developed it. 00:12:24Edit Um Transformational change needs to start with minds. Um that allows us to shift to the relational change with relationships and connections, policy practices and resources like A K A money that comes last. That's where we, we, we come into the problem of, well, we're just throwing money at a problem and nothing is really happening. If you're not, if you're not focused on mindset before you invest money in a, in a, in a problem, you're not really gonna see results. Um So my passion is really getting into the weeds with the mindset and the relationship building and repairing those relationships. Um And you spoke about it uh a little bit when you mentioned some of the dialogues that I engaged in with families. Um But the repairing of the relationships also goes into work with teachers and students. And, you know, I, you know, continue my work with dialoguing with families, even outside of the examples in the book, the most recent kind of conversation and vision planning that I had with uh a parent was a translation issue um where the parent only spoke Spanish. 00:13:39Edit Um And we brought in a Spanish language interpreter. Um A physical therapist was reviewing their report and was talking about how the student needs um braces um or A F OS in order to walk effectively, the interpreter didn't have the language and the knowledge of that very specific vocabulary and interpreted to the parent that the school team was recommending that he go to the doctor and that the doctor should fit the student with prosthetic legs. And we had uh yeah, like, and, and so this interpreter told the dad, well, you know, we think that his leg should be amputated because they're no good and he needs a prosthetic leg. We needed to pause the meeting because of time because IP meetings are stacked one right after the other. 00:14:46Edit We had a, we had a second part of this meeting two weeks later where we had a different translator come in and the dad was like, well, wait a minute, like I went to the doctor and the doctor had no idea what I was talking about. And we found out that this dad had been, you know, kind of starting over the fact that he thought that the school team was recommending that, you know, his son have his legs amputated and it was just, it was, it was horrible. Um And, you know, I found this out through talking with the dad. Um, and then touched base with the school team to kind of get their thoughts about. Well, you know, how did that sit with you when, when you found out that we had this interpretation different or, or, you know, just like the worst case scenario and, you know, several of our school team members, you know, broke down in tears. And so I think it, it comes to effective interpretation. First of all, making sure that, you know, our interpreters speak the same dialect as, as our families. 00:15:51Edit Um You know, I think about um all of the different languages um in India. So, you know, some of our educators might say, well, the parent that the family speaks Indian, OK, Indians and not a language, there are dozens of Indian languages. So making sure it's the right dialect and then making sure that that interpreter has the specific vocabulary to be able to convey like educational, like scientific based terms and then having the team stop and give the families an opportunity to ask questions. So yeah, that every time I come up to a situation where I hear something like that, it, I realized that, you know, the work isn't done that even if a successful day happens the day before. And I'm working on repairing and restoring a co uh a relationship with a family that we have so much more work to do. And the the, the week that that dad spent wondering what disconnect was, was happening. 00:16:59Edit Like, why does his son need this medical procedure? Like, we're never gonna be able to give that back to him. We're never gonna be able to give back the, the, the, the peace and serenity that the reduced stress. Um, that could have, it could have been easily preventable. Wow. That is bananas. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's, that's a really great descriptor of it. It's just, you know, we always say special education, you know, that there's always something new but, um, I would never imagine that it would be that, um, that horrible and I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it and talking about it again. Yeah, I mean, and thank you so much for sharing it. I think it really illuminates. I mean, that's a, that's a, like you said, worst case scenario version of a lack of the technical term in interpretation. But I, I do think that there are so many, probably smaller versions of or examples like that that are maybe not as extreme, but they happen all the time because that is such a, I mean, even just monolingual like English to English speakers talking about the technicalities of diagnosis, uh you know, an apparatus or something or a tech support piece to a student with an IP that it's very specific like a nuance, we might not even have that language in the same language. 00:18:25Edit Right. So, I think you're absolutely right there are nuances to this that we don't always think about. We're like, oh, there's a translator. We're, we're good. Yeah. And you know, even, even with monolingual English speaking families, you know, you're a former special educator, we have all of our acronyms and, you know, special educator sitting at a table, we can talk about IEPSSTAT A AC and if we're using those acronyms with, with parents and families and even general education teachers, their eyes are gonna glaze over because they don't know what the heck we're talking about. So we need to break down those terms. Um One of the things that I intentionally did at the end of my book was um a glossary of all the acronyms. So, you know, the first time that I use an acronym in the book, I, you know, spell out what the acronym is and, you know, just for the sake of space, acronyms are used throughout the book. But, you know, you can always go back and kind of see what, what that, what that is. Um And I think we need to be very, very specific about doing that. 00:19:31Edit We weren't just talking about accessibility in general. Absolutely. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And even even, and you mentioned a story about this actually in the book as a family who was like east coast to west coast, moving back and forth. Um or, or I made the move at least once and the differences between like the structures of the school and the policies of the state. And just even as a special educator myself, talking to people who are in different systems, like there might be a different acronym or a different platform to house the IP documents or whatever. And it's like this is so exclusionary to educators, even just within an educational space, it's not ab absolutely. Um You know, I started um I did my, my uh grad undergraduate and master's degree in uh New York, which is where I'm from. Hi, this is Leah from the podcast team. In this episode, Doctor Kristen Vogel Campbell is sharing the free resource of PK through 12 school meeting accessibility protocol. You can get it at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 70. 00:20:33Edit Now back to the episode, you know, special education spaces, we, we talk about special education as a service, not a place, but, you know, in reality, there are designated spaces that and I'm air quoting, of course, you can't see that. Um But there are spaces that are designated as special education spaces. Um You know, on the east coast, they're kind of uh called like self contained classrooms in California and in some of the West Coast, they're referred to as ST CS or special day class. Um So without being really uh specific and explaining all of these things, you know, parents are not able to effectively participate, which is one of the things that districts and schools are obligated to ensure um and it is more than just checking that box at the end of the IUP meeting, it's, you know, going back like, hey, do you have any questions? Hey, you know, just being very clear at the beginning of the meeting, if something doesn't resonate with you, if, if, if anyone on the team is saying something that does not sound like your child like, you know, feel free to, to, to ask or to probe or to question. 00:21:49Edit And when we're talking about families from, you know, other cultures who, you know, position educators, you know, kind of as like the, the, the, the sage and the end all be all they, they have part of their, their culture is to not question educators. And so in working with um like culture and linguistically diverse families helping them shift their mindset to it's OK and it's acceptable to ask a question or to say, hey, you know, that doesn't really sound like something my kid would say or do. Um so that those are some of the, the shifts that are really difficult. Um And I think, you know, I, I would put more of the onus on, on teachers and educators to, to shift their mindset, but in, in empowering families and making sure that their voice is centered. Uh Sometimes it does require them to go out of their comfort zone and to um shift away from some of their uh cultural beliefs and norms as Well, yes. 00:22:59Edit Oh my gosh, I love it. And I, I wanted to name that you distinguish too in, in the book involvement versus engagement of families. And so to be able to say, you know, involvement, I think you said is really just including them in these procedures, we have to kind of go through. But the school owns those procedures. It's not truly like engagement or partner chef. Whereas engagement is like the parents are actually leading that conversation. And I love how you are kind of started us down the track of thinking about this specific actions that educators could take or that we can do together with families. Um And, and you, you what I loved about this is you had all these dialogues with these family members and, and many of them actually suggested like either this is what we do and we, it has worked for us. So like learn from that or like educators, if you're listening, you know, here's XYZ ideas that I have as a family member and like, you know, we should try to implement them, which I love that those voices were really central to the possibilities. And I love that language that you use to possibilities versus recommendations. Uh The possibilities that you painted in in the book. 00:24:02Edit Do you mind talking us through some of them? Yeah, absolutely. Um Yeah. And, and, and possibilities is it's, it's open minded. Um I think recommendations, it's very prescriptive and you know, thinking about looking at more of a social model versus the medical model, like I'm not prescribing that you do this because your school community looks a lot different than the ones that I work with. Um So I think some of the mindset shifts that, you know, parents have recommended in, in the book, um assuming competence, you know, just in presuming competence in our students, presuming competence in our families and frame things through an assets based mindset. Um I think our families here about especially students in, in special education. Well, they, they can't do this, they're not able to do this. They struggle with this. Semantics are really powerful and, and framing things and they are working on or they thrive when provided with this support or even just starting it out with, they're able to do this, this and this and they are, you know, um developing their knowledge and being able to do this. 00:25:15Edit Um That's a really amazing way to capture uh parents uh and engage them in the, in the conversations being proactive. Um And just very simple as don't always touch base with parents when something bad happens, you know, when something amazing happens or if a student has a great day or they, you know, a fair, you know, speech and language session, send a parent a quick email or a phone call and just let them know that so that they're getting a balance of communication from school and also, you know, asking not assuming. And I think that's, that gets us into a lot of, um, a lot of trouble sometimes where we assume, for example. Oh, well, you know, parents not able to make parent teacher conferences or they, they really have a difficult time coming to the IP S that we scheduled according to our, you know, our niche schedule. 00:26:21Edit They, they don't care or they're not involved. Parents work two or three jobs, they have nontraditional work hours. Uh Sometimes, you know, expanding the definition of who family is um intergenerational families, having, you know, aunties or uncles or grandparents, older siblings. And, you know, parents can, you know, send those folks in as a proxy if they're not able to participate in meetings. And that kind of leads into just honoring familial knowledge and recognizing the wealth and the skills, especially those like second language skills that, you know, I think uh in English based schools that we are in America, you know, bilingualism needs to be honored more than it is. Um And then finally just, you know, speaking with families, not at families and then going back to the interpreter piece, one of my major pet peeves is when we have an interpreter in the room during a meeting and the parent and the, the staff are making eye contact with the interpreter when they're talking. 00:27:35Edit And I think it's a natural instinct because we're speaking to the interpreter. So that they're able to uh interpret to the parent in their home language. But that is really uh disinviting and disengaging to families. So making eye contact with parents or like making gestures and making sure that even if you don't speak the same language that you are connecting with them in, in your messaging, so that the interpreter is then able to use your words and pass that along to uh to families and trust is earned not given, especially when we are working with families who have been burned in the past or, you know, have encountered harm within education systems. A lot of our families, you know, maybe didn't have the best experience in, in schools themselves. Some of them may have received special education services and, you know, we've made a lot of progress in special education. 00:28:39Edit But if families were part of special education in the eighties or the nineties or the two thousands, we've come a long way. But their perception is that things are just the same as they were back then. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh my gosh. Yeah, you went through so much there. And I, I was thinking too about like the trust fees when you had said is not given. I was thinking, yeah, like for educators, right? Should have to earn the, the trust and, and I'm hoping that like educators can give the trust instead of making families earn their trust because I was thinking about that example. Um when a couple was speaking, the parents were speaking in Japanese to each other to translate a word. And the principal actually stopped the meeting and requested the translator, the family didn't even want, right? It's just like this display of I don't trust you, like you're speaking language. I don't, I don't speak and therefore there there's like a breakdown of trust. It was like what? Yeah. Yeah, that, that, that was, that was a pretty, that was a pretty difficult um dialogue to engage with. Also the father in that dialogue was a school site administrator and his wife was a parent educator. 00:29:48Edit So they were part of the school system in the in the district that their child went to school and there was still that lack of distrust. And the father went on to say like what a waste of resources, you know, bringing an interpreter in when it's not necessary like interpreters, you know, their, their services cost money and that money could have been allocated elsewhere. So that, that was, was definitely the school team not being trustful of families, which is really unfortunate. Absolutely. Yeah. So, so well said and, and I think there's, there's so many things I just could talk to you all day about this book. A couple of things that I I know that family members in the stories and the dialogue that, that you shared had just these incredible like things that they were doing that I just wanted to highlight like um there was a couple, oh, there might have been actually the same couple who were taking the IP S home. They would add things, request more things, they would add a parent statements. Like this is what we're talking about. 00:30:51Edit Like this is our stance and just like that, that eventually happened so often that the IEP team was just like, OK. Right. You do this and you know another family member going in with like a kind of a bidding war kind of thing where it was like, OK, I'm going in at 90 minutes of speech and like, I can go down to 75 like, yeah, really taking the advocacy stance. This is beautiful. Another one I loved was that um a student uh sorry, a family member who took a binder out of their bag and places it on the table with a photo of their child on it who was like smiling and like, right, just like this is a child we're talking about like this is brilliant and educators can do that. We don't have to wait for family members to do that one. Right. Like we could just do it and they updated the photo every year. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. The and and, and that little guy is in high school now and um he's, he's thriving and he had a really um successful like upper elementary and middle school team that was supportive of the families listened to the families and, you know, took families input in when and kind of developing goals and they struggled, you know, in the first couple of years, um, first with kind of like a medical diagnosis and then having the school team see that the student required some pretty intensive services at first. 00:32:15Edit But once that student, you know, received those services, they had, they had to go out and, and hire an advocate for them. Um because that, that was another one of the families that um uh they were Filipino and the, the dad has a very salient quote that I always highlight. He's like we trust the system, but we don't understand it. We're immigrants. So they're relying on the system to do what's right. And at some point like that trust broke, they realized they needed to get an advocate, things were set in place, the kid is thriving and those intensive services were able to, you know, decrease as the kid was making uh success. Uh So I think it's just, you know, again reminding parents that they have the agency to push back if something doesn't resonate with them and you not having to sign the documents at the meeting. I encourage families to go back and to review everything. Um And I think special education used to be very much. 00:33:18Edit Well, we have to get parents to sign right now. We have to get parents to sign right now that never sat well with me, um, because they can add a parent statement, they can, you know, look through what, what, what teachers have said, um, they can, you know, ask clarifying questions and, you know, yes, eventually we want parents to, to be in agreement so that we can move forward with services, but it doesn't have to be right away and, and that, and that's where, you know, school staff, uh really need to be supportive of parents to a answer those follow up questions and to be respectful of, you know, the time it takes to digest information that, you know, they may not have gone to school about, but at the end of the day, they are their child's number one advocate and they know their child best. Absolutely. Oh, so well fed. I want to, to move to start closing because this is such a good conversation. But I, I do want to do one more thing that I absolutely love. I think this is a family member recommending us but to do a post IEP survey about the satisfaction and understanding of the IP meeting. 00:34:24Edit I love that. It's, yeah, it's so good. Um, it, it's, it's not something that we have put into place yet in, in a formal survey, but even a call, a phone call and email, you know, asking like, hey, did anything come up, you know, that night at dinner or in, in the shower the next morning? Um, you know, sometimes my best thoughts come up in the shower. So, you know, just like that, that is, that, that's a qualitative survey, but as easy as a Google form or, you know, something through another data collection system. So that, that's, that's valuable data for districts to look at and to see overall um parent satisfaction. Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. Oh, that would be so cool if you create one, I'd love to share with folks if you're willing. Yeah. Absolutely. I would be more than happy to share that with you. Awesome. Um, before I ask kind of the, the typical closing questions, is there anything else that we didn't get a chance to talk about that you wanted to highlight today? Um Yeah, I think, I think we've kind of gone all over the place and, and, you know, we've, we've, we can talk for hours about this. 00:35:39Edit Um, but, you know, I, I would just, you know, if, if folks are, um, interested in learning more, you know, the, the book is, is absolutely available. Um, and, you know, I would encourage you to, you know, read that and either get it from your library or if you have the means to do so, like ordering it through like your local independent bookstore. Um, do some research, talk to, talk to families, like, ask them like, hey, like, what do you vision for your child? Like, where do you see your child? Um What, what are you hoping get out of this school year. Just, just start answering those asking those questions and start the reflection process of, you know, what, what are some things that I may have made a misstep in the past? And how can I rectify that? How can I stop the cycle of harm? Beautiful. Oh my gosh, you answered the questions that I was going to ask. This is so great. OK, this is so good. And then, yeah, I, I love that you, you named the book. So the, the book is called and I will link this and type out the full name and everything in the blog post for this episode. 00:36:44Edit But it's called partnering with culturally and linguistically diverse families and special education. It is so good everybody. So listeners just know it is excellent. And I also love, like you said, there's a ton of resources in the back, including an appendix with all of the, the glossary of terms there that is like so necessary even if you're in the field of special education. And I would love to know too. Um So 11 thing that I just asked for fun is something that you have been learning about lately. Now, this can totally relate to our conversation or not. It can be anything you wanna share. Yeah. Um Well, two things so not related to our conversation. Um I have been um learning how to uh play pinball. Um More uh just just better. Um I am um ranked in, in California and the world granted not very high, but that's been one of that. That's been one of my passions recently, but um connected to this conversation, um I just completed like my like year streak on um Duolingo Duolingo to begin to be more comfortable speaking to, to families in Spanish. 00:37:56Edit Um by no means, am I proficient but um you know, growing with confidence and I think that is something that really speaks strongly to, to families is when we make attempts and we learn to speak their same language. Um I apologize to uh to a parent last week that, you know, I was struggling with conjugating like future tense verbs. And, you know, in our conversation, he, you know, in Spanish said, you know, um your Spanish is better than my English and thank you for connecting with my language. Um So, you know, I'll call that a win, but, you know, it's still a growing journey. So I would absolutely recommend, you know, learning a second language, be it Spanish via a language in the community that you work with so that you can, you know, connect with families and students, even if it's just vocabulary words or if it's just like, hello, goodbye. It's great to, great to, great to see you. Um just teeny tiny things like that. But um yeah, I can, I can read uh early readers in Spanish. 00:38:58Edit So that's, that's what I've been uh really stoked about that is super, super cool. Oh my gosh. And, and so finally, people I think will want to get in touch with you, they'll want to follow your work at the book. All the things. Where can they find you online. Yeah. Um And I can Lindsay, I can also send you the um the links for this. So um I my website is still a work in progress. So it's not, it's not published yet. Um I'm pretty active on linkedin under my name and I'm on Instagram and my Instagram handle is Doctor Vogel Campbell. So, education related book related uh pinball related now and then just like kind of general life in San Francisco and I have a youtube channel um under Doctor KBC. Brilliant. I will link to all those in the blog post as well. And I think you're also sharing with listeners, a meeting accessibility protocol. So it was like a little checklist of like reflection questions which I think people will absolutely love. So, thank you for sharing that. 00:40:02Edit Yeah, absolutely. Um You know, there are a lot of things that, that, that site leaders can do to make meetings more accessible that don't cost any money. So, you know, if you have uh you know, money and resources that you can allocate through like your site plans or advocating um in, in the state of California through like your district like LCP, your local control accountability uh plan. You know, there are, there are baby steps that, that you can take, but absolutely, like, feel free to use the protocol with your teams and your sites. Amazing Dr Vogel Campbell. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation and thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Lindsay. It was a pleasure if you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane Sapir and Jamila Dugan talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book Street Data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period. I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. 00:41:07Edit If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time, leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the teach better podcast network. Better today. Better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
August 2024
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