Time for Teachership Blog

8/25/2025

225. Local Civics with John Rudolph Mueller

Read Now

Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:

In this episode, we chat with John Rudloph Mueller, the Head of Curriculum and Instruction at Local Civics. He is passionate about nurturing the next generation of changemakers and helping students see they do have power to make a change in their communities.

John discusses the importance of integrating design projects into educational settings and the role of educators as consultants, fostering authentic community connections and expanding students' horizons through partnerships with organizations like Local Civics.

The Big Dream

John's big dream for education is to create a space where students not only use their unique voice, but are able to step up and take action to see the change they want in their communities. He wants to see classrooms that empower students and inspire them to put in motion the things that they’re excited about.

Mindset Shifts Required

To successfully implement civics education and community engagement projects, educators need to embrace a mindset shift from traditional teaching roles to more of a consultation role. This involves guiding students through design cycles, encouraging them to embrace complexity, and fostering authentic connections with the community. It can be a major shift for educators who are used to teaching and testing the standards.

Action Steps

Local Civics’ curriculum starts with an important concept called “civic lenses,” which all educators can implement in their classrooms. The goal is to develop the skill of zooming in on different areas of the community to analyze what already exists and what gaps or opportunities there are to fill. You can begin to implement it with these steps:

Step 1: Have students examine their personal stories and connections to their community. This could be in connection to teams or clubs, a religious or identity community, and other things that are important to them.

Step 2: Get students to then map out different parts of the community and inventory its needs. For example, you may zoom in on transportation and notice a lack of bike lanes, or zoom in on healthcare and see there are very few senior centers.

Step 3: Encourage students to keep zooming in on different areas until they’re activated around a particular focus area. They will naturally connect with different parts of the community, so you can see what areas they are passionate about.

Step 4: Develop project opportunities that allow students to create solutions in their focus area. Connect them to community members, workplaces, institutions, or people who can help bring their ideas to life.

Step 5: Allow students to drive their projects forward, acting as a consultant to guide them rather than someone to hand out answers or tell them what to do.

John shares the example of a high school class that noticed how senior citizens struggled during COVID-19 to leverage technology to stay in touch with their loved ones. So, they developed—and delivered—a kind of “technology 101” course at a local senior’s center to help bridge that gap.

Challenges?

One of the main challenges in implementing civics education projects is overcoming the traditional mindset of teaching to the standards and testing. Educators may also face logistical challenges in connecting students with authentic audiences and stakeholders. Additionally, addressing complex societal issues can feel overwhelming, but focusing on achievable, localized solutions can help overcome this barrier.

One Step to Get Started

Start by conducting a community mapping exercise with your students. Encourage them to explore their surroundings, identify existing resources, and pinpoint areas for improvement. This initial step will lay the foundation for more in-depth projects and foster a sense of empowerment and connection within the community.

Stay Connected

You can stay connected with John through his website, Local Civics, or email him directly at [email protected].

To help you implement today’s takeaways, our guest is sharing their Civic Impact Project Curriculum Overview, Civic & Community Leadership Curriculum Overview, DESE Topics 3-4 Curriculum Materials, NY Pathways Overview, MA Partnerships Overview, and NJ Partnerships Overview with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 225 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:

2:55 “I always tell students when they use our curriculum it's like you could use this for anything. You know, if you want to make a lot of money someday, you could probably use the same skills that we're teaching you here—how do you put an idea forward in a way that acknowledges the different people in power and gets people on your side. I hope you'll use it for good, but it's really whatever you want to make it. I think when students hear that, it really resonates with them.”
9:30 “You can go back to the drawing board again. You might have students in the room or groups in your class who are all in different places. How do you move to more of a consultation role in your classroom, where you are getting a sense of where everyone is at and advising them in ways that push them forward rather than handing them the answers?”
25:00 “You’ve got to get students and teachers in that mindset of, ‘we have everything we need right here, we don’t need anybody else.’”

If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

TRANSCRIPT

00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
John, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast.

00:05 - John Mueller (Guest)
Thank you for having me. How are you, Lindsay?

00:07 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Good, I'm good, I'm really excited to talk today. I know our connection has been through the investigating history curriculum at the state level of Massachusetts here, but you do that and so much more. So really excited to learn about all the civics work that your organization has and diving into all that today. So I guess what is important for listeners to know right off the bat, or to just kind of keep in mind as we jump into that conversation today.

00:32 - John Mueller (Guest)
Well, I'll tell you right now we're local civics, so it's in the name, right. It says it does what it says on the package, and we are really excited about nurturing the next generation of changemakers and helping students see that they do have power and helping them leverage their voice and their viewpoint to make change in their communities.

00:55 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I love that and I think you're leading us perfectly into this next question. I like to ask about freedom dreaming and Dr Bettina Love speaks so expertly about this as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. So I guess, with that additional concept of dreams freedom dreams being grounded in the critique of injustice and your attention to youth as changemakers, what is that kind of big dream that you hold for education, if you want to expand on that a bit for us?

01:19 - John Mueller (Guest)
Yeah, it's really what I just said about the voice of students. I think there's a great Alice Walker quote about people not knowing the power of their voice and I don't have the exact words in front of me so I won't try to butcher it for you all but just that students really, when they're given the opportunity to actually put in motion something that they are interested in and they are passionate about, they come up with some of the most amazing ideas and they're inspired to actually take action on them in ways that I don't think we see often in the regular day-to-day curriculum.

01:55 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
So, so true, I love thinking about I mean, I don't love thinking about all of the turmoil nationally and internationally, but when? I think about it. I think about you. Know how students in a classroom have often been the closest that I've ever witnessed to coming to some sort of like different path forward. That is better because they're so creative, because they're not like bogged down and like this is the way we've always done things and it's like, yeah, let them, let them talk, let them think about these ideas.

02:22 - John Mueller (Guest)
There's so much opportunity in that regard. I think there's a lot of things happening structurally, also in education, that have been enabling this. So I think about the seal of civic readiness in New York state. We do a lot of work helping schools navigate that process. There's also the DESE department of elementary and secondary ed projects in Massachusetts for both eighth grade and high school, and so students are not just getting like one chance at this. Even In some cases they get multiple at-bats and they're building that muscle. And I always tell students when they use our curriculum it's like you could use this for anything. You know, if you want to make a lot of money someday, you could probably use the same skills that we're teaching you here. You know how do you put an idea forward in a way that acknowledges the different people in power and gets people on your side, and you know I hope you'll use it for good. But it's really whatever you want to make it and I think when students hear that, it really resonates with them.

03:20 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely right. It's like important life skills for wherever you're going. That's a great framing, and I love the idea of like having multiple at-bats throughout their educational journeys in these various states. That's so cool. And so you mentioned curriculum. Let's go there. So what is you know what's the curriculum about? Can you tell us kind of a story, maybe, of how you successfully implemented that somewhere? Or kind of what should we know about that civics curriculum successfully?

03:45 - John Mueller (Guest)
implemented that somewhere, or kind of. What should we know about that civics curriculum? Yeah, so we have our own call it proprietary civics curriculum, we call it a civic impact project curriculum. It's five units long, it goes for about 40 or so lessons and starts with a concept we call civic lenses, and so think of a camera. You know from my intro I'm a photography guy, so I love this, this analogy.

04:09
It's getting students the muscle of zooming in on different areas of community and starting to identify, well, what already exists, where are maybe some gaps or opportunities and and where do I fit into all of that and where do I fit into all of that? So we get students examining their personal story, their personal connection to the community and sort of uncovering even communities they didn't know they were a part of or didn't consider to be communities. So everything from just within your school building, within teams or clubs that you're a part of. Maybe you have a religious community or an identity community of some kind that is important to you, and then we get them mapping like, look at the places around you and actually inventory what do you see. So maybe they zoom in on transportation and they're noticing there's bus stops all around their neighborhood but there's no bike lanes. Maybe they're zooming in on health care and they're realizing there's lots of urgent care but there's not a lot of senior centers or things like that. That just to try and get the lay of the land. As students go further, they start to sort of activate around a particular focus area. So I'll give you a great example.

05:23
One of my favorite projects from a partner in the Bronx is a high school level project. They started to realize that, you know, coming out of the COVID era, that there are seniors who are in nursing homes, who have great access to technology but don't really have the skills to utilize it and to actually stay connected with their families and, you know, use all the splendor of the internet to enrich their lives. And so from that point they, after identifying that as a focus area, they started doing a lot of interviews. They started to try and talk to seniors, talk to the people at the nursing home, people who have the power to say, hey, you can come in or you can't come in. Talking to school leaders to give them an opportunity to get out of the building. All of these little steps and all the different factors that come together to help actually initiate action on something.

06:21
So this group I'm really proud of them. They ultimately designed a six-week course that helped on avoiding scams and phishing, on how to set up your phone, how do you take screenshots and photos of things and send them to people, how do you use FaceTime, how do you do all these different, all the amazing things our supercomputers in our pockets can do. You know and they actually delivered that at a local nursing home. So they took it beyond just planning and, you know, outlining the issue and trying to come up with a solution. They actually went out and did it, and that's when this work gets really special in my mind.

07:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely. It's so frustrating when we just contain things to a classroom and there's no authentic audience. When the ideas are so cool, it's like no, give them the authentic audience that's so cool. Wow, I love that story. Thank you for sharing it.

07:16
I'm I'm curious too. I'm just like backing up a bit, thinking about you know this clearly was an example of a teacher and probably structures that supported all of this work in this important curriculum and they were, you know, excited about it and supported it and it got done and it was great. I'm curious about you know we work with folks who are kind of given, for example, an investigating history curriculum and it's like, okay, but I don't have the structure to teach all the lessons. Or I am new to kind of this like inquiry-based thing, or I'm new to like student leadership, or I've never connected students with their idea with an authentic audience. Like I'm imagining there are some hurdles that you've kind of had to coach people through. Could you kind of maybe talk us through maybe a common hurdle you've seen and maybe what was a mindset shift?

08:08 - John Mueller (Guest)
That's a great question. We definitely see lots of different entry points to this work. There are folks who want to dedicate an entire senior year capstone course to doing this type of work and, believe it or not, for a 40 something lesson curriculum especially when you consider that this is basically a design project it certainly can fit into a whole year course. So we do a lot of coaching on just you know what is the outcome you're actually looking for at various stages of this project. Right, do you want students to just produce like a policy memo? Do you want them to just have a trifold or something like that? Or are you trying to expand this into an iterative design process? And a lot of teachers are not familiar or comfortable with that. Right, it's like I'm teaching the standards, I'm testing the standards, I'm responding to what I see and maybe going back and remediating some things. But we try to get across the point that this is a cycle and you can really do it as many times as you have time for. So start with this. You know, investigating the community, identifying a focus area, take it around to get feedback from folks with your prototype and you go back to the drawing board again in your class, who are all in different places, and how do you sort of move to more of a consultation role in your classroom, where you are getting a sense of where everyone is at and just advising them in ways that push them forward, you know, rather than wanting to hand them the answers or, you know, tell them they got it right or they got it wrong. So that's a big shift.

09:50
We also have done a lot to try and figure out ways to create that you said like authentic connections to the outside community. One thing we've done we have a sixth grade class doing projects in Georgia right now and working with them. In the past year we actually got them expert feedback on their projects. So we had all those sixth graders write. You know, here's our focus area, here's our proposal, here's what we want to do, and we put that out because we have a great network.

10:18
You know we're all. We all went to great schools. We have great friends who are professionals in all different fields now. So, you know, leveraging our team's personal network to reach out to lawyers, to doctors, to people who work in nonprofits or who have affected change in all these areas students are interested in. It's been great to make those connections even asynchronously. Those were all given as text-based feedback. Of course, we have all sorts of career speakers and we bring people into schools as well. We've done like town hall sessions with local representatives and various career leaders. So it's really cool to try and help schools who are excited about doing this work but don't necessarily have the capacity or the vision for it. We try and give them as many different opportunities as possible to get students some really enriching feedback and great connections to see that people are listening, people do want to engage in the work that you're proposing with you, even though you're 11, 12, 16 years old.

11:27 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh, that's so cool and I mean I think we've had guests on the podcast before that have talked about this type of work and that if you're one teacher doing this kind of thing from scratch on your own, like, yes, leverage your personal network, leverage the network of the school. But I'm just envisioning that it's so cool when you partner with someone like local civics, right. And then it's like now you are connected to all of the networks that you all have as an organization, in addition to the networks that people have in an individual classroom or school, that you are just connected to so many people and so much brilliance that, of course, we can kind of find, you know, an audience for whatever you're looking for, whether that's asynchronous feedback or a live guest speaker. I think that's just really neat, how there's such a relational basis for a lot of this work, and I think that's so real right. That's what like civics often is.

12:14 - John Mueller (Guest)
Yeah, and I'll just add I think I think there's a big push right now in corporate America as well to connect more with real students and and and really be a part of the communities where they are located.

12:28
I'll give you another example that we helped facilitate with a life sciences consulting company who had that exact mission.

12:37
They said you know, we have a giving arm or a philanthropy arm and we want to actually, you know, leverage all of the professional knowledge here to help bring more students into this field or at least make them aware you don't have to go into healthcare and be a doctor or a nurse, right, you can get into this consulting space.

12:55
That's really, really amazing. It's just one example, but we partnered with them to lead a whole healthcare exposure series, so a number of we had students from all five boroughs in New York, students from ninth all the way through 12th grade, at various stages of, you know, college preparedness and knowledge about their future career plans. But they were able to hear from career speakers from all across the company, people who work in marketing, people who you know were cancer research doctors before they moved into consulting to sort of show students. It's not a linear path to whatever career you're looking at. You know there's lots of different ways to enter various fields, and we actually brought them all into the office too, so the students got the full experience to share about their, their experiences and and how they got from from point A to point B, and and really enrich students' lives with that experience as well.

14:06 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I this is so cool.

14:06
I love all of the connection points and I just wish I had that kind of experience as a student, but I imagine there's you know there's so much work that goes into this right. You've obviously created this beautiful curriculum. You've helped make all these connections. I'm really interested too in that like pedagogical coaching kind of that you were talking about, where you're really helping teachers, you know, think of themselves more in that consultation role. Um. So I mean I'm curious about that. I'm also curious about at the curriculum level, you know, if there is a particular lesson or something that is kind of like a really successful lesson where you've had teachers kind of comment like, oh, this really cracked it open for students or this was where you know students lit up engagement wise. Or if even, as you know as coaches, if there's some particular teacher or success moment where you've seen that teacher kind of shift into consultation mode and had a big win, anything that resonates story-wise from your experiences here.

14:59 - John Mueller (Guest)
Sure, yeah, a couple of things come to mind I think about. We put together a document a while back. It's like a 60 slide show that takes teachers through multiple design cycles with one project and I think, seeing it in terms of you know, here's something that students proposed In this case it was a group of students. They identified a focus area of we want parents to be more involved in their students' learning at home. You know they hypothesized that if we get parents better connected to teachers somehow, then students who are struggling will not struggle quite as much, and so their original proposal was to have a teacher parent club that parents could come to school on certain nights, they could learn about what's happening in the curriculum, maybe get some tips on tutoring their students at home. And they took that all the way through one design cycle where they put a proposal out there, shared it with lots of folks, got lots of feedback and they learned a lot. First of all, they validated their original idea, which is, in fact, parents do struggle with helping their kids at home. That's overwhelmingly what they heard when they surveyed parents. They also found out that parents don't have the time or the wherewithal to come to school multiple nights a month and meet in person, especially in this particular location. It's, you know, we're talking about parents coming from all across New York City over an hour on the bus, sometimes, just to get somewhere. So they said, okay, great. So we know that this is an area we should remain focused on, but we're going to go back to the drawing board, into that design cycle again, and this time we're going to make it a digital offering.

16:46
So they took it through a whole nother design loop and this time they put together a prototype where for every lesson in the syllabus, they matched it up with some Khan Academy or some YouTube video that helped emphasize that topic for someone who maybe was just not familiar with it, and they shared that in a parent newsletter. And that was their next prototype, prototype that was massively successful and very popular and exciting for parents to say, ok, well, I don't know this topic, but let me sit down with my student and we'll pull up this lesson together and go through it. So that's just the design thinking guide for teachers. Seeing that go from one phase back to the drawing board. Do it again. Yes, it's the same lessons in some regard, but you're coming at it from with a whole different perspective and seeing how the sort of prompts for students can change in throughout that cycle. You know how do you push them to go deeper. We script out all sorts of questions for all these phases of the project that they can use to push students, and that sort of conferencing guide we put together helps a lot as well. You also asked about a particular lesson where it really kind of resonates with students and I think our we call it power mapping policy.

18:03
Power mapping we have one sort of general lesson and one that specifically zooms in on food insecurity. This is where students, I think, realize that there are lots of different people who touch any given issue that you want to look at. So for the food insecurity one, they dive into a group called FarmLink. They were founded out of Loyola High School in Los Angeles, who we've worked with for many years. We can't take credit for their activities. They got it together and we've used them as a model. They came before we started working with the school, actually.

18:38
But FarmLink is an amazing organization that brings food that is no longer ready for grocery stores because they demand very long shelf life of anything that they're putting out in a grocery store in a grocery store so they connect with those farmers who would otherwise be throwing food away and they bring trucks over and they bring food directly to food banks, where it can be rolled out to people much faster.

19:00
And you know students use that lesson to dive into, okay, so there's all the food regulation, health inspections. There's the grocery store owners, there's the farmers, there's the volunteers, there's people who work at food banks. There's the grocery store owners, there's the farmers, there's the volunteers, there's people who work at food banks, there's the individuals receiving food from food banks and it's like oh, wow. There's all these different people who touch this area and I think some of the most successful projects are where they find just one piece of the puzzle that is not working as best as it should or could and get really specific. That's really where the magic happens, in my opinion, and and that I think that process of going through the policy power mapping you know who touches this, how much influence do they have? What would they want to hear or need to see, to get on our side that's a really valuable skill for students.

19:54 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh, I love that example because I think often I mean I personally feel this just right in the current national landscape in the US. I've been recording this in April, so when this airs, what will be happening? But I just think like it often can feel overwhelming when you're like I want to take action and you know I have this niche set of skills and interests Like what can I do within that? Like what are what's the big picture of what's happening? And kind of like where's the piece where I can best fit to support, to leverage my ideas, my network of resources, whatever it is? And so I just love that that students can get into that complexity. I think sometimes in education we kind of simplify to the point where we take out all of that complexity and then we lose the perfect kind of niche fit that a student might find in a particular area and in their ability to make change.

20:46 - John Mueller (Guest)
Oh yeah.

20:47 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I love that you kind of framed it in that way and you give such a beautiful example. I love that farm link program. That's super cool.

20:54 - John Mueller (Guest)
You just brought to mind another example. You know there are lots of topics that students are drawn towards because it's what they see every day in their community, and unfortunately, a lot of these issues that students think of are intractable issues that adults you know the big kids have had a really hard time trying to sort out. And so, you know, one that comes to mind is homelessness, of course, and in many areas where we have partnerships, you know, students see homelessness every day. They maybe have experienced homelessness themselves, and so it's really common. I talk to a teacher Okay, kids really want to focus on homelessness.

21:34
They want to propose a new multimillion-dollar. You know shelter in this area and shelters do amazing work, but we just know that you know a bunch of sixth graders coming out and saying, hey, we need a $10 million. Shelter is not really going to fly, and so what we try to do is again find those areas where maybe there's a reason why the great shelters that already exist in our town are not being utilized. So by actually doing the stakeholder analysis, by actually talking to people and getting real people's opinions and thoughts on things, you start to uncover, for example, in many homeless shelters, people who are experiencing homelessness. They don't want to go because they don't think their belongings will be safe.

22:21
So, oh, maybe we don't need a $10 million new shelter. Maybe we need, you know, a couple thousand dollars spent on a locker system. Or, you know, you talk to people hey I'm, you know I want to be working, but I'm struggling with finding a place to just have a shower and, you know, get myself cleaned up. Or I need clothes that are professional. That can you know. Connecting people to services that already exist often can make some magic as well. So, yeah, just's in the name. When you get really local, when you really boil it down to the people and what they really need in any given focus area, you can find something that is achievable for young people to have an impact.

23:11 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Amazing, thank you. I feel like there's so many really great kind of tips and advice sprinkled throughout this episode already, but I'm curious is there anything else you would say to someone before we move to close here, like if they're just starting with kind of civics work, or or maybe they're in New York and they just are like oh, civil civic readiness, like what does this look like? Now in my class I'm the social studies teacher for seniors, like you know, and they're just kind of in their early years of figuring this stuff out. Maybe it's even not a social studies, maybe it's an ELA teacher who's like actually I don't have to do this, but I want to. I'm just interested, like someone at the beginning of that work. What would you say to them? Any advice that you would give in embarking upon this?

23:52 - John Mueller (Guest)
Oh yeah, well, we didn't even touch on this, but one of our main principles for this work is asset-based community development, this idea that we're speaking from strengths. I hope that I didn't even use the word problem once this whole time, because there are not really problems right. There really are just opportunities. There are areas we can focus on and improve on. But part of that philosophy of being an asset, developing the community with an asset-based mindset, is there are lots and lots of resources around you already that are unrealized.

24:26
So in your school community, you know, talk to all the teachers around you. Maybe there's someone who worked at an environmental nonprofit who can advise students on that area. Maybe there's someone who has experienced homelessness that can give you that, you know, unvarnished feedback on a project that some somebody else in the school might not be able to give you. You know, maybe you have resources in the school that are being underutilized. Maybe there's stuff in the community that that, that that's there but just not really being harnessed to its greatest use. And so for that reason, I think it's just you got to put students in that mindset, get teachers in that mindset of we have everything we need right here, we don't need anybody else. We don't really need anything else. We can make some I keep saying magic. We can make some magic happen with the resources right here in this community, maybe right inside these four walls of the school.

25:22 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Love that. Yes, because I think often what we do as educators I'm very guilty of this too, as a former teacher right, it's like, well, we don't have enough time, or we don't have enough money?

25:32 - John Mueller (Guest)
Oh, totally we don't right.

25:33 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
It's like all the things we don't have when, if it's asset based and you're just like you know, we have all these things with these brilliant students, we have passion, we have all all these relational connections. I love that. I love that frame of asset based. So thank you for that. Okay, so if you are kind of talking to people who are on their way into work, starting the new school year, for example, they're excited to end the episode and take like one action step to get like a little bit more civics in their life, in their curriculum maybe this year. What's one thing they could do to kind of start?

26:07 - John Mueller (Guest)
Well, we have seen teachers, especially in history and I know a lot of your listeners are probably history teachers that there's lots of opportunities for baking in some of these civic skills, no matter what grade level or what topic. I mean we had folks using the power mapping process to talk about Japanese internment camps, like it totally seems totally separate. You know we're talking 70 plus 80 years in the past. In the past you can use the same framework for understanding how people react and how they choose sides and all of this sort of. That's one skill that really is transferable. Same goes for just this notion of community mapping. And you know, you probably have even historical sites in your town that you don't even realize. So just knowing that you have more at your fingertips than maybe you realize and really digging into that, I think can be a great start to uncovering new opportunities.

27:06 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh my gosh, that's so cool. I'm just like interjecting quickly because I was reading this book about it's an ELA book but it's thinking about like narrative, personal narrative and narrative change narrative, all this stuff. And so I actually, if I were to go back in the classroom, it would be super cool to do a community mapping slash like photo essay narrative of your community as like a get to know you at the beginning of the year.

27:26 - John Mueller (Guest)
Love that there could be a lot there.

27:29
Yeah, absolutely All of this stuff, even just the thinking about a project as more of a design cycle and where you, you know you're, you're not just getting it to the finish line and calling it quits, right, how do you come back to the drawing board and improve on that? All those skills, I think, are super transferable. You know, whether you're an English teacher, science teacher, especially science teachers, have civic projects opportunities. So, yeah, just harness that energy that's in your classroom. Students want to have their voices heard, they want to share their ideas and you know even some of the students who might be checked out. When you start giving them something like this, they check in.

28:10
So, lots of opportunity.

28:12 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, so this last second to last question is just kind of for fun. So everyone on this podcast is always just like growing and learning. They're like doing awesome things all the time. So, whether it is professional or personal, I'm curious, john, what is something that you've been learning about lately?

28:28 - John Mueller (Guest)
Yeah, so I'll share. I think something that I've been knocking at the door of is. There's a book it's, I think it's called the art of gathering. I'll admit I haven't read that yet, but it's been recommended to me about a hundred times.

28:44
Um, I've been talking with a friend from college. You know how do you actually do do some of this community building in your own life, your own personal life, in your immediate area. Um, so, you know, you read, heard in my bio. One of the things I've been really passionate about is getting a photography community together in washington dc, here and uh, and it's just been so rewarding it's. It's truly an. If you build it, they will come, sort of thing. Um, I mean in the bio you heard it it has grown to over 300 people.

29:11
But it really started with me just wanting to get out on a regular basis and take photos and, and I started just telling everybody I met, going up to people who had cameras, who didn't look like tourists up on the street, and I did not have one negative interaction throughout all of that. You know, just going up to people hey, are you a photographer? Hey, do you post your photos anywhere? Well, I'm organizing these walks once a month. Would you be interested? People are effusive, like, wow, I'm so glad that that's an opportunity. I've been looking for that sort of thing, right? So what you're looking for, chances are there's other people looking for it. So I'm trying to lean into that whole. You know how do you organize your community in ways that are enriching to you and feel authentic, and so that book again I haven't read it myself, it's really on my list, but I'm definitely leaning into that sort of work here, just in my personal life.

30:09 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I love that and I love that story of photography and growing that just by organic conversation. Wow, that's so cool. Finally, I think people are going to want to connect with you, your organization. Where can people do that?

30:22 - John Mueller (Guest)
Sure, yeah, so we're LocalCivics. It's localcivicsio. You can find lots of information about what we do there. I'm always open to email and connecting outside of that. So if you want to just email john at localcivicsio, I'll get right back to you.

0 Comments

8/18/2025

224. Somewhere Beyond the Sea in a Creative Writing Activism Unit

0 Comments

Read Now

Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:

This episode is part of our curriculum series, and we’re looking at how to think creatively about the books that bring you joy to excite students and offer impactful teaching opportunities. Literature has the power to engage students in meaningful discussions, linking literature to real-world issues and promoting effective activism and resilience.

We are looking specifically at the novel “Somewhere Beyond the Sea” by TJ Klune to draw out some ideas to connect with activism and civics education, offering practical examples of what your ELA or other curricula may look like.

Why?

The big dream is to transform classrooms into vibrant hubs of creativity and civic engagement by leveraging the power of literature. And, it doesn’t have to be non-fiction or academic literature—joyful, fun reading also has the power to positively impact educational settings.

For example, TJ Klune dedicates “Somewhere Beyond the Sea” to the trans community around the world in the book’s foreword, writing, “For the trans community the world over: I see you, I hear you, I love you. This story is for you.” Given the current political environment and attacks on trans people, this book becomes a timely and important way to lean into what’s happening in the world through current events. Educators can connect literature with real-world issues, fostering a deeper understanding of activism and shared identity spaces.

What?
Using “Somewhere Beyond the Sea” as an example, here are some ways to use literature to connect with important real-world issues in your classroom.

Step 1: Pull out themes in books that make sense in the personal and cultural context your students are in. In "Somewhere Beyond the Sea," there are important themes around found family, voice and human stories, allyship, and queer representation.

Step 2: Develop curriculum components around the themes in your book to explore relevant issues. You can utilize literature circles, writer's notebooks, and student journals to facilitate discussions that connect literature to real-world issues. You may also choose to center your curriculum around current event connections, like using Pride Month to explore LGBTQ+ or queer studies, history, and current events.

Step 3: Design projects that allow students to apply their learning in creative ways, such as writing their own fantasy or literary pieces inspired by radical imagining and activism. There are lots of options here—you could have a current event day for the book, host a gallery walk, or have a Socratic seminar.

Step 4: Use guiding questions to participate in radical imagining. Some examples include:

What’s the formula for effective activism?
What’s the ideal balance of shared identity spaces and inclusion?
What would it look like if everyone were able to thrive?
What would it look like if communities interrupted harm every time it happened?
How do you imagine a thriving fantasy or literary community?

As you work to integrate creative literature and civic engagement, educators should be open to exploring the intersection of literature, current events, and personal stories, encouraging students to see themselves as active participants in shaping their communities.

To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Curriculum Playlist with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 224 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:

4:32 “People leave frustrated if there’s just dialogue, if there’s no action as a consequence of the dialogue.”
8:10 “There’s a very human focus in this book. Humanity is central, and they recognize the importance of stories.”
8:31 “I think that humanity is central, and it’s really important for us as humans to recognize, and students as they’re learning to have civic dialogue and speak in different ways than they see in popular news coverage of politicians. This is a way to paint that picture and keep humanity at the center.”
11:50 “I always love the idea of starting with a class circle and lived experience and creative ideas—surfacing those and grounding the unit in that.”

If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

TRANSCRIPT

00:01 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Hello and welcome to an episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 224. And today we're in the midst of a curriculum series and I want to encourage people to think creatively about what books kind of have brought you joy or what books out there are exciting or interesting to your kids, that connect to current events, that are kind of a blend of all of those things. And so some of the time I'm kind of giving ideas for how you might bring all of those things together or, step-by-step, how you might go ahead and do those things. And sometimes I think, as we do as educators, we want to model what the possibilities could be. And so today's episode is kind of a modeling of what was happening in my brain as I was engaging in some fun reading for myself. It's a good thing to engage in fun reading when we're always learning and growing professionally Fun to just get out of that and sometimes do things for fun. So I was reading book two in the House on the Cerulean Sea series, so this is called Somewhere Beyond the Sea. I really enjoyed the first one. I listened to the audiobook version as I was marathon training a year and a half ago or so, and really really liked it. Particularly the narration of the audiobook I thought was excellent and I just think TJ Klune's writing in this series, particularly this, was all that I had read at this particular moment in time. And then, since I've read some other of his stuff, it's just it's so well done and it really really just hooked me in the forward, and so let's just kind of dive in. I'm going to read the forward to you. I'll give you the gist without spoilers, and then I'm going to talk about what is happening in my brain as I'm thinking about constructing a unit around this, like where my brain goes. And then I also want to help us think whether you are a teacher or an instructional leader who might be supporting teachers to design curriculum and bring out the joy and the kind of creative activism and possibilities that are present. And like how do we tie? Tie, for example, I I think this is kind of the crux of this episode for me is like how we tie kind of a radical imagining as a phrase I learned from adrian marie brown, and the kind of activism or civics component of all the things that I love and I think many of us love to do we talk a lot about on the podcast, with something like an ELA course, right, like a curriculum, where you should have a book and you have to do these reading comprehension things and you have to do all these reading and writing skills, right. Like how do we kind of merge all of that together? I often talk a lot about social studies and I think civics is just naturally a component of social studies, but it's so possible to do this well in ELA that I wanted to kind of think that through just as another example. So here we go, somewhere beyond the sea.

02:51
Here is the foreword by the author, tj Klune, for the trans community the world over I see you, I hear you, I love you. This story is for you. And the book continues on to be be, as some reviews have called it, very heavy-handed in its connections to. I mean, I'm recording this in 2025, amidst a second trump presidency, where attacks on trans people legislatively, in social society, on social media, right in conversation amongst politicians, is just tragic and harmful and scary and frustrating and anger inducing and all the things. And so I think the original kind of new teacher in me or not even new teacher, but just like when I was a teacher, the way I would design curriculum would be around. Okay, here's this terrible thing that's happening in the world and current events and politics. We're going to kind of learn about it, we're going to get frustrated by it, and then we're going to maybe do an activism project, like in a future unit, or we might talk about you know how it makes us feel, and then we kind of like leave it. And I've just been learning a lot as a human, but also from these professional learning books and things that it's really important to do something with that.

04:12
Research shows this. But also I was just reading a book by Chad Dumas, who I will be interviewing on the podcast, I think at the time this will air you can go back and it will be a July episode, so it'll have already aired. But in it he quotes Paulo Freire, who actually I'm paraphrasing here because I don't have the text in front of me, but something like people who just, you know, have dialogue, like they leave frustrated if there's just dialogue and there's not action as a consequence of the dialogue. And so I want to keep connecting back to that civics idea of like, yes, we're dialoguing and dialogue is great, and I'm talking a lot about student led discussion this year particularly, but really apologies for all the dog noises. I have a puppy and sometimes we hear a lot of collar shaking, so collar is off. Now let's see how this goes. We can right Fuse all of these things. We can do this. Well, here we go. Let's dive in. Totally forgot where I was.

05:11
Here's the gist of this book. The series is about magical kids who live on a remote island. They are awesome and the audiobook version really gives them excellent voices. It's incredible. I highly recommend once more the audiobook version. And the larger community has really fear mongered and oppressed magical beings in this series, this book and the adults that run the orphanage. I don't want to spoiler anything from the previous book either, so I'll just say his treatment as a child and his public statements about himself, his kids and magical beings in general are all kind of part of this particular book, more so even than in the first book, although the first book touches on these things. The first book touches on these things, so I do think that you could teach this as a standalone. It's also nice as a series.

06:01
I think you could get a lot of the elements from the first book without the second book. However, I will say, as I indicated the review's language talks about earlier, there's a very heavy-handed connection to current events and people who are different, particularly queer folks. But I think honestly, like the connections are quite broad and applicable. I mean magical creatures being kind of the focus of this book, I think, would say right, this is not something that we have in our world. However, can be parallel to many things happening. So themes of the book that you could explore in this text and connect through discussion, connect, if you were doing this as kind of literature circles, and this is one of the options and connecting to other books, you know, however, you want to bring themes in. One is found family and so connecting experience for kids who have moved to maybe a new family or they have moved to a new school, right, so kids who maybe have been in foster care, military families who move a lot, just people who have, you know, their parents have changed jobs and they need to, or their caretakers have changed jobs, I should say, and they need to attend a new school now. So found family and kind of those are options for connections to the human piece of who students are and how they're showing up in the class and what they might be able to bring in as personal experience. If you're doing, for example, a circle share to connect to the book.

07:19
Radical imagining again a term I referenced, I learned from Adrienne Marie Brown and here's how she kind of talks about it and she cites I apologize for the pronunciation of these names, but Kasnavish and Haven 2014, who define it as ability to imagine the world, life and social institutions not as they are, but as they might otherwise be. It brings possible futures back to work on the present, to inspire action. So this idea of radical imagining happens in this fantasy book. It happens in any fantasy book really, but really well done here. And then, you know, connecting that to current events, there's a beautiful opportunity through dialogue and through project-based learning.

08:04
Here, I think, also themes of the book power of voice and allyship. So there's a very human focus of this book. Very, very much humanity is central and you know they recognize the importance of stories. They recognize that the main character talks to the media, talks to people, brings people's humanity out in understanding his story and connecting with the pain and the radical imagining of this person. Right, and I think that that humanity that is central is really important for us as humans to recognize, and students as they're learning to have civic dialogue and kind of speak in different ways than they see in popular news coverage of politicians. This is kind of a way to paint that picture and keep humanity at the center. And I say allyship very intentionally as well, because there are people who in this book are not magical and they are rallying around the magical community. Of course there are those who also are not, but there is, I think, a good attention to that aspect of the book as well that you don't need to be part of a community to kind of let them lead and support them in ways they want to be supported. Right, and so there's this true kind of allyship happening there or co-conspiratoriness happening there.

09:20
Also, themes queer representation, as I mentioned earlier, and those current event connections are really clear. So I think again, if you want to do anything really intentionally with LGBTQ plus or queer current events, like I mean to merge both of those or just like as part of you know, like Pride Month or as part of I mean to merge both of those or just like as part of you know, like Pride Month or as part of I mean, I like going beyond the months, but as part of kind of a unit on queer studies, queer history, queer texts and literature, or again as a current events connection where if you're doing this, as you know, a crossover unit with a social studies team or you are a humanities teacher, that kind of teaches both. I think there's very clear connections that you can pull up. Now how I might teach it. I've kind of touched on this a little bit so far, but I might say okay, so the unit topic like I'm teaching a unit on activism and radical imagining becomes an activist strategy option. So I'm reading this book through the lens of it being a piece of activism or a piece of civic engagement, and so I'm actually reading it for the strategy itself of like this author is radically imagining what life could look like through this kind of fantastical parallel world. So that could be an option.

10:28
I also could do a creative writing unit. If I'm an ELA teacher and I am pulling writing instruction ideas from, I would really like I've mentioned this before on podcast and we got to actually interview the authors, which was so cool their stories, their voices, and so pulling ideas from like, how do we use mentor texts to study them, to learn what they do well and then do it in our own writing. I think that would be super, super cool, both from like kind of a fantasy element, but also just from like a good writing element and how to kind of weave in current events and all the things. Now, another option for kind of thinking through how I would pace out the unit and kind of the lesson by lesson level of what I could do. So, unit arc wise, I could have a class circle on personal stories around identity, oppression and or activism or radical imagining, right.

11:14
So I could say, okay, you can bring in kind of your personal connections to the humanity of these characters. So either you've had a similar experience, you have identified with the non-magical beings and their allyship of an oppressed group. You have had this opportunity to share kind of your human story or your lived experience around an issue and we're heard, or we're not heard, and what did that feel like? You have a vision of what the world could look like other than what it currently is? Tell us about it. So I mean you could connect to characters, you could connect to the author and their arts.

11:47
I think there's a lot of things you could do here, but I always love the idea of starting with a classic circle and lived experience and creative ideas and kind of surfacing those and grounding the unit in that you could I mentioned this earlier but read the book whole class or read the book as a small group and kind of do literature circles. So again all those themes I like to do literature circles that come together around certain themes or have common, multiple common themes. I've listed those out. You could certainly run literature circles knowing without reading the book you can know kind of how this might sit among some of the other books you may choose or offer students to choose from. Know kind of how this might sit among some of the other books you may choose or offer students to choose from. You can this is a concept actually from their Stories, their Voices you could tell I absolutely loved that text. Thank you, authors.

12:31
You could read it as a reader and a writer, so you could read the text for the story itself, as you would typically read a fictional story, but you could also read it through the lens of a writer. So either we read the whole book through as a reader, experience the whole thing, and then go back and kind of pick out what we loved, or I love the idea of doing and I think this is Jeff oh, I always forget his name, anderson, I think. Mechanically Inclined is his book and he talks about kind of keeping a writer's notebook and identifying some interesting phrases or interesting things that writers do as you're reading, and then you can kind of talk about that within the literature circle, within the whole class, share out, you could do. I used to do like a Friday, Every Friday the lesson was something like a writer's notebook or kind of pulling out these interesting writing techniques that we would surface from the literature circles as we were reading. This could be part of individual student journals where they submit a journal every week in response to whatever book they're reading. So if they're reading this, they could kind of highlight what it is that the author is doing based on however much they read that week. Okay, those are all examples.

13:34
Literature circle activities. If you are doing this in a literature circle, you could prompt the student discussions by inviting connections. So I always really like this idea to just invite connections and so you might say, like connect to a personal live experience and share that with a group. You might connect to a current event story and you know that changes week to week. So students could bring up something one week and then three weeks later there's a brand new current event that they could connect to. So lots of opportunities. You could connect to another class, you could connect to a lot of different things, another book that you had read earlier in the year or last year.

14:10
You could use a protocol like ThinkTalk Open Exchange from Rhonda Bondi, where you're inviting each individual student to kind of or everyone, I guess has think time, but each individual student has a moment to think before they individually speak. They speak. All people get to do that. So you know, I have five seconds to think, 30 seconds to talk, and then the next person has five seconds to think about their idea in silence, 30 seconds to talk, right all around the circle and then we open exchange. So it's kind of an open dialogue, no kind of boundaries.

14:41
You can use another protocol like color, symbol, image, which comes from Harvard's Project Zero Thinking Routines, where you're inviting metaphorical thinking. I love this in a lot of ways, but I particularly love it when we're thinking about good writing techniques and abstract ways of thinking. And so, yes, you're reading this fiction, fantastical novel and we're abstracting ways that this actually connects to our lived experience in the real world and current events. That requires a level of abstraction that I think sometimes the color symbol, image routine or others like it can make a little bit easier. It's a nice scaffold and it is an additional scaffold for this type of thinking. I like climber cards which we can link to in the show notes and the blog post for this episode, because those are these cool kind of like deck of cards where there's images on them that you don't have to like come up with the images. But you could also Google search for some images or have students bring up images on their computers or devices, if you have that available. Okay, other things within the unit arc.

15:39
I think I would do a current event day for this particular book, and I mean you could all discuss the same one, like you could name it, or have a student name it and bring it in and everyone explores it and connects it to the book. Or students could research their own and then, either in some groups or kind of individually, turn and talk, or however you want to structure it. Students could say, hey, I've been reading this, I've found this current event, I'm bringing it in. I'm going to summarize it for my partner or the group or the class you could do a gallery walk. I mean there's a lot of different ways to share out here, but they're the ones doing that original research and they're bringing it in. So two different options there.

16:17
I think at some point I would do a Socratic seminar specifically on linking the book to current events, because it is so heavy-handed, because it's offering itself up to that and because current events are always changing. It'll be interesting, you know, if you were reading this several years from its publication date. How does the current world at that time connect to the time of publication and what was happening in the world, particularly considering the United States context of the author and that element? But I think it'd be really interesting to do a specific Socratic seminar on that. We can also link to the Socratic seminar template in the blog post that I've used with students A true collaborative effort for many of the students across many teachers, mostly in the social studies department of Manhattan International High School, as well as the different networks that we have been involved in Internationals Network for Public Schools and the New York Performance Standards Consortium.

17:11
So thank you all to those of you who have contributed to that and some discussion prompts that I would use within that Socratic seminar would be something like what's the formula for effective activism or effective civic engagement, or eradicating oppression, whatever. What's the formula for effective activism or effective civic engagement? Or, you know, eradicating oppression, whatever. What's the ideal balance of shared identity spaces and inclusion? So this idea of like affinity spaces and having this preserved space where you know you can be with people who share an identity that is, in really oppressive spaces, unwelcomed right, that is, in really oppressive spaces, unwelcomed right, and like wanting that inclusive, potentially healing space for allies and people who are identifying in these affinity spaces to really come together and heal together. Like what is that ideal balance and who gets to decide that right? That could be really interesting to explore.

18:01
What would it look like if everyone was able to thrive? You could probably. If you're familiar with my podcast and my resources in the past, you could tell I'm using some of these sentence starters that I often share. So feel free to use the beginning of any of these sentences as well and kind of make your own ending or create, of course, something completely different. Here's another one what would it look like if communities interrupted harm every time it happened. So again that radical imagining, like let's imagine that was really awesome. What would that actually look like? And so you can kind of name a really awesome element of society or community and say, hey, what would that look like? Or what would it take to get there?

18:38
And here's, I think, probably my favorite how do you imagine a thriving fantasy or literary community? And so I think that one really sets us up nicely to brainstorm collectively some ideas as a group. Because what I envision being the project for a unit like that would be that students then write their own kind of fantasy or literary piece, short story or something, and they could do it collaboratively. A small group, whole class, could do like an anthology, right, and kind of like do something together. Or it could be just like a purely individual endeavor. I think that's fine. But I love the idea of like we're going to study this kind of radical imagining, activist strategy as fantasy book connected to current events and you going to study this kind of radical imagining, activist strategy as fantasy book connected to current events and you get to do your own after the study and reading of this one. So I think that could be a super cool unit and I also want to name just the writing workshop process being really integral to something like that. So using all of those ideas from their stories, their voices super cool. I think I would totally love to play with that idea.

19:46
If someone does this, please let me know. I'd be really excited to hear how that goes and learn from you and also thinking about, of course it's always on my mind now Dr Asawa Noy's work on dimension-based rubrics and dimension-based assessment To really make sure that we are getting a peer response, not just the teacher's response. Based assessment, to really make sure that we are getting a peer response, not just the teacher's response, so the peers and you as the educator would be sharing. You know what was your reader experience of the student's writing and giving that feedback. So again, there's that interplay, like it's not just this one particular standard we are measuring on and that's what you get feedback on. It's actually the interplay of what I wrote down and how people are reading and experiencing that writing and what they're thinking about, what connections they're drawing is actually kind of the beauty of the piece of writing, specifically when we're talking about current events and oppression and radical imagining and activism and making the world and community a better place that we all are living in. I think this is such a beautiful opportunity to leverage an equitable assessment protocol like that.

20:45
So that is the episode we are going to link to the freebie for this episode in the blog post. That's going to be our curriculum playlist. So a ton of different things there for you. That is going to be located at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 224. Until next time.

0 Comments

8/11/2025

223. Accomodations, Modifications, & Inclusion Anxiety: Supporting Learners with IEPs with Toby J. Karten

0 Comments

Read Now

Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:

In this episode, we talk to Toby J. Karten, author of The ADMIRE Framework for Inclusion, with an extensive background in special education. Toby shares her practical ADMIRE framework for fostering inclusive education environments.

Key points in our discussion include the necessity of shifting educators' mindsets to focus on students' strengths rather than deficiencies, the implementation of effective co-teaching strategies to create dynamic partnerships, and the critical role of proactive planning in reducing "inclusion anxiety" among students and educators.

The Big Dream

Toby envisions an education system that prioritizes justice and equity, where all students have access to a learning environment that recognizes their individual strengths. Her big dream for education is one where injustices and inequalities, particularly those related to racial and educational disparities, are actively addressed.

Mindset Shifts Required

To create inclusive classrooms, educators need to shift their mindset from viewing students through the lens of deficiencies to recognizing and capitalizing on their strengths. Toby emphasizes the importance of thinking of students as individuals, not categories, and understanding that differences are not deficiencies.

Action Steps

To best support students with IEPs and build inclusive classrooms, educators can begin with these action steps:

Step 1: Build a learner profile for each child by assessing prior knowledge, strengths, challenges, etc. Use interest inventories and emotional check-ins to understand students' strengths and learning preferences. This helps tailor instruction to individual needs and promotes engagement.

Step 2: Implement proactive planning using the ADMIRE framework. By being proactive rather than reactive, educators can reduce anxiety and create a supportive learning environment. The framework stands for:

Assess and activate
Decide and delineate
Model and monitor
Instruct and involve
Reflect and revise
Engage and enrich

Toby’s book has actions and activities that fall into each category to help educators implement the model in their classes.

Step 3: Embrace effective co-teaching strategies. Recognize and utilize the diverse skill sets of both general and special education teachers to create a dynamic partnership. Rotate roles and share strategies to prevent stigmatization and enrich the learning experience for all students.

Challenges?

One of the challenges in implementing inclusive education is the presence of "inclusion anxiety" among students and educators. This discomfort or stress can arise from the fear of being perceived as different or from a lack of preparedness to address diverse learning needs. Overcoming this challenge requires proactive planning, collaboration, and a shift in mindset to focus on strengths and appropriate support.

One Step to Get Started

This can be a big topic with lots of areas for implementation. So, Toby has some simple advice for educators: Look at the person in the mirror and smile. You are a good person, trying to help students succeed. So take care of yourself so that you can keep doing great work to support students!

Stay Connected

You can stay connected with Toby by email at [email protected] and on her website, Inclusion Workshops. You can also listen to Toby’s podcast, Karten’s Inclusion Conversations Podcast.

To help you implement today’s takeaways, our guest is sharing their page of Inclusion Tools with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 223 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:

3:43 “We want to capitalize on strengths to minimize what might be viewed as a difference. It’s not a deficiency! It’s just a characteristic that might be different than the ‘norm’ of the class.”
15:35 “It’s more than just knowing the concepts, it’s wanting to know the concepts. It's the feeling that ‘I can’ and having self-efficacy.”
17:26 “Inclusion anxiety could be from the perspective of the student, ‘What do my peers think of me?’”
23:35 “Teachers are good at adapting, modifying, accommodating, and all of that, but when you have a general plan, it helps! It alleviates that anxiety because you’re proactive. Is it going to change? Probably. But at least you know…”

If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Toby, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast.

00:06 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Thank you for having me, Lindsay. It's a pleasure to be here and to share some knowledge with the listeners.

00:12 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I'm excited to learn, along with listeners, along from you, and I just finished your book, the Admire Frameworks. I'm really excited to talk about that today, so that's definitely on my mind. Is there anything on your mind, anything you want listeners to kind of know about you or kind of the audience to keep in mind as we jump into our conversation today?

00:29 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Sure, you said you're going to learn from me, but I learned from the people I work with, and that includes the administrators, the teachers, the students, the families, because even though we might have knowledge, like I have in the Envire framework for inclusion with Solution Tree, I don't have all the answers until we collaborate with others. So I think that's what we're doing here, and some of my background, just quickly, has been in special education since undergraduate, you know, before it was called IDEA. It was quite a few moons ago and it's wonderful to see things progress in a positive way and we want to make sure we stay on that track. That's why we keep having conversations like this one.

01:14 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh, that's a beautiful framing. Thank you for that. And so I would love to just dive in with this idea of freedom dreaming. So Dr Bettina Love talks about it as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. So, given that context, what is that big dream that you hold for education?

01:31 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yes, that word justice has a very broad definition. There used to be Southern poverty law. It's now called learning for justice, right, and it talks about a lot of inequalities that exist. And if the inequalities exist in a preschool, they're going to exist in post-secondary choices, and it goes on and it spirals. And as far as injustice, there's all types of things that would go under that umbrella, of things that would go under that umbrella, including students with different color right, who don't fit quote, unquote the norm.

02:16
Why should someone, and the statistics, point out that unfortunately, a lot of students of color are put in that SPED, special ed population, which doesn't mean that they are one of the IDEA classifications? But if you compare some of the behaviors of someone of color, a student of color, to someone not of color, and the same behaviors they exhibit, they might be tracked into special ed sooner than someone else who doesn't have that racial you know characteristic. And it doesn't mean that everyone is going to get the same treatment. We're not all the same. That's not what equity means.

02:57
But injustice means that we have to try to give everyone what they need to learn. Certain cultures learn better in groups, so we'll do more cooperative activities because they like that, whereas other cultures, families, don't question professionals because, la maestro, they're thinking that they have all the answers. But together we have all the answers to try to diminish some of the injustice that exists out there. Because, you know, especially in the Admire book, I have one of the chapters that talks about think individuals, not categories, and that means that, yeah, the kid might have ADHD, but that doesn't define who he, she or they are. You know, we want to capitalize on strengths, to minimize what might be viewed as a difference is not a deficiency, it's just a characteristic that might be different than quote unquote the norm of the class.

04:00 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Love that. I love that you're getting into all of the different things right, kind of the racialization of students and student bodies and behaviors and how that also influences who is in the classrooms, and not even meeting the idea of classification. It's like so fascinating. Thank you for naming that, and I do love so much of the pieces in your book, particularly that piece around individuals not categories, and the idea of strengths, not deficiencies, and so I. For me, that's certainly a mindset shift that I've seen in teachers I coach and even my own special education teacher journey, right is like this is really important to kind of shift that common perspective of like here's all these needs versus like here's actually all these strengths, like my students think brilliantly and maybe like the communication avenue is the struggle, but like let's harness that brilliant thinking, right. So I'm curious is that like the main mindset shift required, would you say, for educators? Are there other mindset shifts that are really helpful when we're talking about inclusion and students with IEPs?

05:07 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yeah, that's a great framework for it as well, and we want to make sure that we capitalize on strengths. That is essential and yours, mine and theirs. You know, and you know families might be overwhelmed. Know and and, and you know families might be overwhelmed but also they might have great strength that maybe they're going to come in and talk to the class or, you know, do something and help their child to learn. Same thing with a paraprofessional who's working with a special ed teacher. They might not know what to do but their strength is listening and following directions. So we need to direct people sometimes to maximize their strengths and set that situation with research-based practices. You know, like universal design for learning.

05:58
Right, the book has a lot of evidence-based practices. It's not just the flavor of the month, it talks a lot about how it looks in the classroom when I'm teaching blank, whether it's fractions, meiosis or the letter C has two sounds. You know we have to try to get learners to realize that maybe their strength is not auditory but maybe it's tactile, that maybe their strength is not auditory but maybe it's tactile. So we do silly stuff like you know salt to write letters, you know fun stuff. Nobody says this has to be difficult or boring for kids or the teachers. It just has to be that word in the legislation which is under broad interpretation and it's called appropriate. So I think it's appropriate, back to your original question, to just capitalize on strengths. Capitalize on the teacher's strengths, you know, whether they're veteran teachers or new to the field, we all have strengths and that's what we need to focus on to move ahead.

07:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely. And it makes me think again along this line of, like the strengths, like totally lean on those strengths, and also coupled with that kind of the idea that we still want to appropriately challenge students right, and like, have those high expectations that they can do things. I often see and I have certainly have been the person, the teacher, who has said, like oh, I'm just going to hyper scaffold this and I'm going to put in all these extra supports because, like, I'm not sure that they'll be successful versus more scaffolding in the moment. And like, what does each individual need? Right, like all that stuff. And, and what it makes me think of is this common question that I get from teachers of, like, okay, what's the, what's the difference between accommodations and modifications? And you have some really interesting language around this kind of concept as well. I'd love to hear just kind of your thoughts and talk through that.

07:51 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Right, we go back to a fairy tale, goldilocks, or a tale, whatever you know.

07:56
Not too much, not too little, just right. What does that look like? The researcher was Vygotsky the zone of proximal development. You know, you want the work to be a little bit harder, but not so hard that it's frustrating. But you want to challenge critical thinking skills. But what if the kid makes a mistake? Love mistakes, we call that error analysis.

08:21
There's a math thing in a middle school where it's a video. I love this one, it's called my Favorite Mistake. And they collect all the exit cards from, you know, the students at the end of the session and the next lesson begins with my favorite mistake. No names mentioned, no stigmatization, because we're going to learn that way. It's experiential, john Dewey, we learn by doing. We need to step away from the scripted lesson plan because kids don't exist there.

08:56
So, between an accommodation and a modification. So accommodation perhaps, you know, is where I am not diluting the original standard, but I'm helping you to access the standard. So let's say you had closed captioning put on for a child with dyslexia and it wasn't a spelling test where they had to write the words. You know that would be an accommodation, right. Or you would perhaps have a math test that had 20, but the questions in the child didn't have enough stamina to do those questions and they were all similar. So maybe you've narrowed it down to 10 or you put it in two sittings. But a modification might be, if everyone else is working on multi-syllabic words in reading, this student is working on just CVC words, consonant vowel, consonant one syllable, because that is their level and if it was more than that they'd be frustrated.

10:03
The caveat is we don't stop there. We do something called progress monitoring. We do something called assessment informal and formal assessment. You know four to six weeks every week, every other day. Sound drills. You know four to six weeks every week, every other day, sound drills. You know, whatever it takes, math quizzes. You know online tools, handheld tools. We do different things, but a modification would be if the child wasn't able to complete the same task.

10:35
But that doesn't mean if a child is in a chemistry class, he or she or they can't work cooperatively with peers under a scripted thing, if their academic level wasn't there, if they learned term taking, if they had a specific role that they were there. So it has to be. Even if it's a modification. It also has to be age appropriate and interest appropriate. You know there's a lot of caveats. I know I'm being greedy here, but you know you asked the question and you know first thing we want to look at accommodations and then, if not, modifications. And that goes back to the SDI, the specially designed instruction in a student's individual educational program, iep.

11:23 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh my gosh. I just want to lift up two things you said that were just so good. We don't stop there, right, Like we don't just stop and say, oh well, this is just their level, Guess that'll be that forever. Like that, I think, is very commonly what we do and we can't. So I love that you named that and I also love that you're just like.

11:40
You know the age and interest appropriate thing is really really important. And I think the interest piece I was just in a coaching call yesterday with people who were like we have to learn to know our students in our classes so that we can get the interests information so that we can then personalize. Again to your point of like the scripted is not going to work for all the students because everyone has different like motivations and interests and all of those pieces. They're individual humans, right? So I'm just resonating so much with what you're saying. Thank you for that. And, and I know you have a ton of tools you you even started naming some of them, but I'm wondering if you can share maybe like the admire framework or any specific actions that could support teachers, you know, when they're thinking about designing instruction and making it personal and thinking about those accommodations for students to help them be successful, leaning on their strengths, all that stuff.

12:34 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yeah, and one of my favorite I make people do things in the book right, because it's experiential. I said so. It's better than just reading the words, so you could have a piece of paper or a pencil next to it. I'm actually going out with this book in Arizona on Sunday and I'm excited because I know it sounds silly, I'm the author, but I'm excited to see it again in action and that's what we need to do is to put these things in action. So we say connect to students. So the book has something like a learner profile. You know what are the strengths, what are the challenges, what are what? V-a-k-t. Visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile. Some kids are movers and shakers and I'm tired of like.

13:20
I was a teacher for a very long time in a school district in New Jersey and Brooklyn, if you hear any accent there. But one thing that I always did you know that fake errand for the kid who needed to move. Well, there's ways to get movement in the classroom beyond that fake errand and having kids moving around, scanning devices, you know, using their devices to scan QR codes, talking to each other in centers and stations and having a classroom that's set up. So that's what the book invites people to do. And the ADMIRE framework is very basic. The acronym itself stands for assess, inactivate, decide and delineate, model and monitor, instruct and involve, reflect and revise and engage and enrich and you can enrich a child with an IEP as well, not just the gifted students. And the book talks about the inclusion paradigm and the fact that there's going to be mixed abilities in there. So it gives specific examples. Like one of the inclusion principles is step by step. I have you trying to do a step-by-step origami to just to create a level of frustration without enough instructions. But then I have you go to a video online that explains it, because some people like videos and like things repeated. You know, um, are students um working memories, uh, whether they have an IEP or not, and and professionals aren't the same.

14:56
So I came up with the ADMIRE framework to kind of house it and under that are 65 different actions that people could do under there. So, like, one of the things is assess and activate prior knowledge and we could do that. And the book has templates with interest inventories, you know, valuing emotional check ins. How do we do that? Because it's not just about the academics, but sometimes the, and often and anyone in the field of education is nodding their head now, just as you are, lindsay that you know it's more than just knowing the concepts. It's wanting to know the concepts, it's feeling that I can and that self-efficacy. And not having that, you know, inclusion, anxiety, whether you're a student in the class or whether you're a professional or a family member. But having that mindset, we're going to succeed. We are going to succeed and here's how.

16:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yes, thank you for that, and you mentioned just now inclusion anxiety. I was really interested in that part of the book and I would love if you could elaborate on that just a little bit for us and tell us what it's about and what the research is.

16:18 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yeah, it could be a feeling of discomfort, stress, worry. You know I work with so many students that were conscious of where I was standing in the room and if other students saw me standing near them because they didn't want to be viewed by their peers as being different. I was recently coaching a fourth grade class and they were reading I believe it was James and the Giant Peach, and they all had their copy of the book. But I found an online copy through the Sherlock Holmes Center in Rhode Island. They have great PDFs of literature and I'll give you that link that, if you want to include with that and a few of the others, are my favorite tips for our listeners because we need to spread the word Humminbird. So, anyway, I had that copy of it, but the specific student who needed that copy refused to take it Because none of the other students had it. You know he or she was feeling anxiety because of difference.

17:26
Inclusion anxiety could be that from the perspective of the student what do my peers think of me? Or I'm going to sit there and nod my head because when the teacher asks questions, I'm not going to ask a question. But what if the teacher flipped that and said everyone has to ask a question on an index card and collected them Right? There's ways to circumvent that. Inclusion anxiety also exists for professionals. You know I've been there myself where someone from the child study team in New Jersey came up to me and said here's the new kid. And I didn't know that new kid before. Should I have been prepped ahead of time? Yeah, did I experience some anxiety? Yeah, because I wanted to do that thing and the book is big on that and I have a ton of planners in there. I wanted to do the mega planning, the pre-planning, and be prepared, be proactive rather than reactive, and that deletes a lot of the anxiety. And you know, the reason that I keep writing these kinds of professional materials for educators, administrators and families is the fact that I want to delete the anxiety and I want to replace that with a way to do this step by step.

18:42
It's okay, I don't know everything I need to know about mitosis, right? So how am I going to teach this and support a student if I'm a special ed support teacher or co-teacher? Well, you know what Sal Khan makes great videos on mitosis, right? I could go to FET, p-h-e-t. They have excellent things, you know. It's sharing our knowledge with each other, whether the special ed teacher needs to know more from the gen ed teacher, gen ed teacher needs to know more from the special ed or the family or related service providers, such as an occupational therapist if the child has autism. And not everyone is the same. Strategies with the same label as we spoke about, because we have to think individuals, but we also have to think appropriate and I keep mentioning that word. And anxiety is inappropriate for anyone. It doesn't help. A degree of anxiety might get your juices flowing with brain research and all that, but too much anxiety, kids professionals are going to shut down and that negates collaboration and sharing awareness and knowledge yeah, absolutely.

20:04 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I think you said it in the book. The research that said, yeah, their, their academics, actually decrease as a result of inclusion. Anxiety and their well-being decreases. I mean like two things that were like we definitely want more of these, like, and they're going down right. Yeah, so in the book.

20:15 - Toby Karten (Guest)
There's a framework at the end of each chapter, and that one is it. You know, admire wellness is one of the frameworks. How are are we going to do that right? Beyond gold noodle, you know Just different ways to breathe without your device telling you it's time to breathe.

20:33 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yes, oh my gosh, I love that reference. So you had mentioned briefly kind of the mega, macro and micro planning just now. Do you mind talking us through kind of those differences and why you might do? I love that.

20:45 - Toby Karten (Guest)
I love that, that. That came from a former book of mine that's no longer in print now it is. It's in the admire framework. Right, I recycle that because I love this and I've used it on so many campuses.

20:57
With pre-service teachers, I once had a math program here. I was an adjunct professor at your university here and I made a master of arts in teaching and these were, uh, you know, teachers who graduated with spanish degrees and and history degrees and english degrees and they were going into teaching at the secondary level and I made them map out their whole school year, whether it was chemistry or whether it was world history, american history, english, french. They hated me, but I didn't make them do it totally before they went into the classroom, student teaching. I just made them do the mega, the big picture, each quarter or trimester. If your campus has that, then from there there each month and then from there thinking about maybe the weeks, right. So you, you, you break it down.

21:54
I know we have daily planners as well, but if you work in a school, you know that the evacuation drills and the and the nurse checkups and the assemblies, you know suddenly the day schedule gets changed a bit, right. But if you have a big picture in mind and it also the mega macro and micro planning it has, you have it in each part times. You're going to do repetition, enrichment, practice. So even though you did it in the first quarter, you're going to repeat it in the third quarter because they need those skills to move on and you don't have to do it in a big way but maybe having choice boards, centers. So maybe it was out of your protocol to do something like that. But kids need that, the kids who know the most, the kids who know the least. You know they can't forget about the stuff just because they got 100 on the test right. They need to review and practice because that's how we learn. Neuroscience supports that.

23:01 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely, and I think that's what really I struggle with with the scripted kind of curriculum. It's like there's no room for personalization, there's no room to be like ah, like I need this. I love that you plan out quarter by quarter, month by month, and then week by week because, like once you like before you have your students right and you're planning the year in July and you've never met one of them before, right, like, how do you know what they need?

23:25 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Like you, don't Right and things are going to happen in that place called a school that you never anticipated. Teachers are good at adapting, modifying, accommodating and all of that, but when you have a general plan it helps, it alleviates that anxiety because you're proactive. Is it going to change? Probably, but at least you know I am going to do, you know, decomposing of numbers zero through 19. The first quarter, you know, and then move on and maybe it'll have to be repeated. But it is a choice and you are having a proactive attitude rather than reactive. You know that's important.

24:15 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely. I think it strikes that perfect balance that we kind of were talking about earlier, like the high expectations and challenge, and not just like making things super easy. Right, we're accommodating and and and personalization, which kids need, so I really like that framework that you have. I also wanted to ask about I think there's a lot of like challenges educators, probably special educators, and educators in general education classes, and particularly here's one where it blends the two. I have heard a lot of challenges around co-taught classes, so where there's a special education teacher and a general education teacher in the same class. Um, that's certainly one I was curious to ask you about, just like any recommendations or things that you've found to be helpful. Or are there other challenges that you want to kind of name and talk through?

25:01 - Toby Karten (Guest)
No, that's, that's a great question. And uh, co-teaching is fabulous. I've been a co-teacher myself. I've supervised co-teachers, I've facilitated professional development sessions just on co-teaching, and no co-teacher is alike with their co-teacher. But if you do get on the same vibes, you know, and great years, you even end up wearing the same colors. You finish each other's sentences. You have so much fun.

25:32
I have a very dear friend who's a co-teacher and I have to share this. She said to me you know, it's my first year teaching and I'm going to make a lot of mistakes, right? And I looked at her and I said it's my umpteenth year of teaching and I'm not perfect either. You know, I might be here and I wrote a couple of books, but I don't have a halo over my head either. So the first thing is an awareness that we bring to the table as co-teachers. Each of us has different skill sets and different things we could do better. She taught me how to organize in world history class. I never made a better outline in my life or understood how to do it until she did it. However, I might have helped her keep her job because I reviewed the comments she was sending to the families, which she never did before and I said, yeah, that's kind of good, but you might want to edit it and soften it a little bit. Right, you know? And it's how we correspond with each other and how we get a vibe and how you're pairing teams together, listening to your staff, and that collaboration exists with families.

26:51
It exists with gen ed and special ed, and there's been situations where co-teaching has a broad definition and maybe the SLP, speech and language pathologist is there for a period of time or the guidance counselor. Think broadly in co-teaching. And co-teaching is not a way to save money. It's not a way for me to sit in the back of the room and mark papers while someone else is doing something. I mentioned centers. What a great thing. Someone could be circulating while they're doing centers. Someone could work with a small group gen ed or special ed for practice enrichment, and that's one thing about co-teaching that you want to always make sure that you do, that you don't create a special ed classroom within the gen ed classroom and stigmatizing students as being lower level because they're in the smaller group. The groups are there for random interest-based could be skill-based, right, but it has to be a situation where you're capitalizing on each of the strengths as co-teachers, and that has nothing to do with age or lack of experience or too much experience. It has to do with using our experiences wisely.

28:08 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, one of the things I love that you mentioned in the book is is that you could rotate right, like the enrichment actually the special education teacher is going to lead the enrichment today Like right, and just that it doesn't always have to be like you're helping the kids that are struggling and you're helping the kids that are doing great, like. I love that idea Super cool yeah.

28:25 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yeah, I love being a co-teacher and I used to have papers, like you know, with WHR, where, when, why, how, that as a graphic organizer, and I put it out there and then other kids go can we take one? And I say no, only if you have an IEP. No, I don't say that, you know I mean, but that's it. It's a strategy. Let's share our strategies with each other.

28:50 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh, brilliant example. That resonates deeply. So I think in the final kind of closing questions, I'll just ask I think there's three questions We'll do kind of like a lightning round to wrap up, okay, one thing you would encourage the audience to do once they end the episode. So we've talked about a lot of different things, what's like a good kind of. They're walking into work tomorrow and they want to do something small, to kind of put something into action. What would you recommend?

29:17 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Easy answer Smile. Look at that person in the mirror and smile because you are a good person and you are trying to help students succeed. And I'm not diminishing other professions, but take care of that person in the mirror, because if you don't take care of you, you're not good for everyone else as well.

29:39 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh, that's good. Thank you for that. Now, what is something you have been learning about lately? It could totally relate to education and work, but it could also be totally something not related to your work.

29:50 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Yeah, I'm doing a lot of work with. Well, let me think about this. If I want to do personal or professional, give you a quick lightning answer of both. Professional, I'm doing work with leveraging collaboration and I'm researching a lot about listening skills, because people think they're listening but they're not really hearing, and that's something to leverage collaboration. We have to better understand how to listen, and I'm guilty of that too. I've listened to podcasts where people ask me a question and I went off on something. We need to respond to each other appropriately and students need to learn that.

30:30
I acted out with them when they toss a ball and they have to speak when only if they catch it. So you catch what someone else does. And something I'm learning on a personal level is you know I spoke about movement, move more. So I mentioned I had an issue with my computer. So the good thing is that I've learned that if you're not on the computer as much, I average 12,000 steps a day. You know that is a nice thing as opposed to 2000 on the computer. So there's ups and downs of things and I'm learning not to judge yourself. Go back to that person in the mirror and get that yin-yang balance.

31:10 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Oh, that's great. I love that you shared one of each. That's really good. And then, finally, people are going to want to connect with you, get the book, which we'll certainly link to in the show notes, but how do they follow, kind of what you're doing?

31:30 - Toby Karten (Guest)
Do you have an online presence or a place where people could reach out to you? Absolutely, my website, inclusionworkshopscom. You will find my contact information. Toby at inclusionworkshopscom is my email. I also have KIC, k-i-c Cartons Inclusion Conversations podcast available on channels that you could listen to, and on my website I have several inclusion tools, especially. You also mentioned about co-teaching. I have several on there, too, so I'd be very happy to give you several of those links to share with everyone.

31:55 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely. We'll drop them right into the blog post and show notes. Toby, thank you so much for this conversation. It was wonderful, lindsay, thank you so much.

0 Comments

8/4/2025

222. Solution Tree author: Their Stories, Their Voices with Kourtney Hake and Paige Timmerman

0 Comments

Read Now

Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:

In this episode, we chat with Kourtney Hake and Paige Timmerman, co-authors of the book Their Stories, Their Voices. They bring real-world experience as English teachers to their book and this conversation, arguing for a shift from test-focused curricula to a more engaging approach that prioritizes students' personal experiences and creativity.

By exploring four distinct types of narratives—informative, analytical, persuasive, and reflective—Paige and Kourtney demonstrate how personal stories can enhance learning for students. The episode also emphasizes the importance of reflection in education, offering practical strategies for teachers to incorporate reflective practices into their classrooms.

The Big Dream

Paige and Courtney's big dream for education is to create environments where students have the space to tell their stories, preparing them for more than just a test. The dream is to empower them for real-life situations and scenarios, going beyond simply what’s covered on the SAT.

In an English class context, they envision classrooms that prioritize authentic writing, allowing students to blend genres and express their identities through narrative. Their dream includes teaching students to write in ways applicable throughout their adult lives, emphasizing the human element in education.

Mindset Shifts Required

To achieve this vision, educators must shift their mindset from a rigid, test-prep-focused approach to one that values narrative writing and creativity. Paige and Kourtney encourage educators to look beyond traditional genres and embrace the blending of different writing styles, as seen in real-world writing. It’s about pushing against being put in a box of how you can and cannot write, and having a more open mindset.

Action Steps

To start prioritizing student voice in narrative writing, educators can begin by understanding four different narrative types:

Informative narrative: The goal is to send a message, teach your audience something, and provide information. Personal examples can be used to illustrate what you want someone to understand.
Analytical narrative: The goal is to explore questions and answers, looking at information through different angles.
Persuasive narrative: The goal is to make the reader understand or believe something, eliciting change. This is where personal stories can be very powerful in persuading the reader.
Reflective narrative: The goal is to share a story for the sake of reflection and personal growth.

With these in mind, educators can implement the mini-lessons from Paige and Courtney’s book to allow flexibility and creativity, even within a rigid curriculum. These lessons help build relationships and provide students opportunities to express their identities through storytelling.

It’s also important to emphasize reflective practices in teaching, making reflection an explicit part of the curriculum to promote growth and understanding among students.

Challenges?

One challenge educators might face is picking or designing a unit that meets the needs of every student, as they’re all diverse. Educators may also find it challenging to break away from rigid curricula that dictate how you do things, and adapt to what students really need to spend time on to learn, even if it means forgoing the arbitrary deadlines that are set.

One Step to Get Started

To begin, educators can establish an environment where students know that their voice matters—there’s a place here for their stories. From there, you can begin integrating narrative writing into the classroom with the notebook prompts provided at the end of Paige and Courtney's book.

Stay Connected

To stay connected, you can find Paige on X at @TimmermanPaige or via email at [email protected]. You can find Kourtney on X, Instagram, and Blue Sky under the handle @whatthehake.

To help you implement today’s takeaways, grab your copy of Paige and Kourtney’s book, Their Stories, Their Voices. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 222 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:

2:24 “Our students deserve to have space to tell their stories. That’s an important part of education, but I also feel like I’m doing my students a disservice if I do not prepare them for more than just a test.” (Paige)
8:24 “I’m teaching about Anne Frank right now … I can tell the kids day in and day out about the events of the Holocaust, but until they hear it from a child their own age and hear what she went through, it does not sink in.” (Kourtney)
24:26 “Our students who are most motivated struggle the most with just marveling, because they’re looking for the answer. They’re thinking, ‘What do you want me to do? I’ll do it.’ … But stopping and pausing and admiring the beauty is a powerful experience we can provide them.” (Paige)

If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

TRANSCRIPT

00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Paige and Courtney, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. Thank you for having us. Absolutely so. I think you know the audience has just listened to your bios. What is important for you to have audience know as we kind of jump into our conversation today, I know for me it is certainly that your book, their Stories, their Voices, is incredible and everyone, all listeners, should grab it and we'll talk more about it today. But what is on your mind, or what do you want people to be thinking about?

00:33 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
I think for me. I just hate this tendency that we have to stop asking students about their own experiences. The older that they get, we're asking them to write about themselves a lot in the elementary level, but whenever they get into the higher grades we focus so much on test prep and getting them ready to take the SAT that we forget that they are humans having an experience and we should be giving them platforms to share those experiences. So I think just making sure that narrative becomes a cornerstone in the secondary classroom as well is sort of the idea that this book was born out of.

01:18 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
Yeah, I think also one of the things that I like to think about is how to engage our students. Middle school is where I'm at, and some days they're awesome, some days they're not. But getting them engaged in the writing and trying to get them excited about writing is really difficult, and so adding their voice back into it is a way to add that engagement, to get them to write about something that they actually care about.

01:50 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Such a good point and, like I cannot tell you times where my students were more engaged than when they were talking about themselves and issues they cared about, right, like that's how you do it, so I love that. And so one of the first kind of questions I usually ask is, in line with the idea of freedom, dreaming, which Dr Bettina Love describes as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice what is that big dream that you hold for education? And I think you both kind of started speaking to this. I don't know if you want to elaborate on it a tiny bit here.

02:18 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
Yeah, I will elaborate.

02:19
I mean to answer that I would reiterate, obviously, the fact that our students deserve to have space to tell their stories. I think that's an important part of education, but also I feel like I'm doing my students a disservice if I do not prepare them for more than just a test. I want to teach them to write in ways that may not be covered by the SAT, but ways that they're going to be exposed to throughout their whole adult life. So whenever I look at what a narrative looks like in the real world whether it be a blog post, a memoir, a social media post even I see all kinds of blending of genres that I don't see in schools. In schools, we tend to teach different genres in different boxes and you cannot blend them at all, but whenever you look at what real writers do, there's all kinds of blending going on and there's all kinds of rule breaking, and so I want to be the type of teacher that looks at what real writers are doing and isn't afraid to say, well, why can my students not do that too?

03:30 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
Yeah, I think whenever we were looking at what does narrative look like, we kind of found a lot of things that you wouldn't traditionally think of as a narrative. They weren't all just memoir, they just incorporated their own voice in some way, and so that's kind of speaking to that blending of genres, that that's what authentic writing is and that's what we can get our students to actually want to achieve.

03:54 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, one of the things I absolutely loved and like this was always my inclination as a teacher, but again, you guys have just like operationalized it.

04:00
You've done such a beautiful job.

04:02
It's like what does it look like in the real world?

04:04
Right, like so, even when I would teach test prep, I'd be like, okay, let me find some like really funny, like comedic, kind of feminist article and then we're gonna like learn how to answer these silly choice questions based on this awesome article, because this is like at least engaging, and so I love that you pull in all of the examples, the social media posts that you have, the professional authors, the student writers and kind of books and collections that you've had, and as well as your own students of early on, is kind of the mindset shift that teachers might have to kind of embark upon when they are thinking about including or really making the space required to do this work well, for writing narratives amidst all of the other pressures and curricula things that you've seen like what is it?

05:04
That either, for each of you was kind of like an aha moment, like yes, we need this because you know whatever your why is, or that you've seen like in people reading the book and kind of grappling with that prior mindset shifting over to like no, there is a need for this work and we need to make space for it.

05:25 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
Yeah, I think for me our curriculum that we currently use doesn't really teach narrative. And then the narrative that it does teach is the last quarter, which normally we don't even get to that because you know of state testing and all that stuff. And I've been looking at other curriculums because we're thinking about switching and a lot of curriculums use narrative at the end of the year and then on the state test they're asked write a narrative and so it's it's. They're not practicing the skills throughout the year and then they're expected to perform that on the state test. And so incorporating those skills throughout the school year has become a little bit more of my priority to make sure that the students are prepared for that test, because if they haven't been asked to do it, then how are they going to be performing that on a pressured state?

06:19 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
For me. I think it kind of just to go back to what I was talking about earlier, this idea of blending genres. I know I've really had to push against that in my own instruction because the way I was taught you don't use I at all in anything other than a narrative. So if you're writing a research paper, there is no space for your voice. However, whenever I read like these really beautifully written op-eds, which I would consider a, you know, a research writing, I don't want to call it assignment, but that's a genre that that requires research as well.

06:52
The most compelling op-eds to me incorporate a personal story. It doesn't have to be at the forefront of it, it doesn't have to be the main focus, but if there's like a small vignette in there of how the author relates to this issue, it makes me care about it more through that human element. So I know just kind of pushing back against this idea of you can't do this in this type of writing, and opening it up and allowing my students to explore different ways to write without putting them in a box, I think is what is probably the biggest challenge of this mindset shift, but also the part that comes with the most rewards.

07:39 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
That's so well said and it makes me think about our national political landscape and the way that that people talk to one another or don't talk to one another. And and one of the things that I have heard as a critique of like the democratic party is kind of like um ways of sharing information is like it is very statistics, it is very um facts, it's very research paper, as if you were to teach it in that box. Right, it is like here is that there's like the personal stories have been removed. It is not as engaging like that's fascinating, like I imagine like one of your students could actually be like a political consultant or something for someone to be like. When you are trying to get people to listen to, you incorporate personal narrative like that could be fascinating.

08:22 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
I'm teaching about Anne Frank right now. We're reading the play based on her and you know I can tell the kids day in, day out about the events of the Holocaust, but until they hear it from a child their own age and hear what she went through, it does not sink in.

08:39 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, that makes total sense too, right, like I mean, we're human beings, so I just I love that narrative is is in. It is the focus of your book, but it is weaved into like four different pieces too, which I really appreciate. I mean, maybe let's go there. Do you guys want to give us kind of an overview of what are the four types of narrative that you name? And then also just my curriculum writer brain is is on fire reading this book, cause I'm also thinking about you. Know, you guys suggest kind of a planning approach. You have like a kind of a um weekly, a three-week calendar sample of like how would you actually arc out a unit on narrative writing? Um, so I don't know if one of you wants to take each of those or how you want to divide it up.

09:19 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
I will say that those unit plans are all pages, baby, because she uh did so much work making sure that it works in an actual classroom, because I am I'm a little bit more tied to my curriculum of what I can do and she had a little bit more freedom, and so those were unit plans that were tested in an actual classroom and so Paige did a really good job on those. But as we were researching, we kind of found that all these different narratives that we were reading were kind of falling into four different genres, if you call them, or types of narratives, and so we kind of named them based on that. So we have the informative narrative, the analytical narrative, the persuasive narrative and reflective narrative.

10:17 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
So to expand on those, the informative narrative would be. Your main goal of writing is to send a message, is to teach your audience about something, provide them information. But again, don't be afraid to bring in that narrative element. So, for example, if you are trying to do like a cautionary tale and you're trying to warn your audience against the dangers of using social media too young, then bringing in that vignette of okay, well, here's what happened to me whenever I was a kid and I started using social media and here's what I went through and then using that to inform.

10:53
The analytical narrative is really that's where we brought in a lot of podcasting type assignments, because we feel like podcasts themselves are just an exercise in analysis. You're not necessarily trying to answer, you're exploring questions. You're not necessarily trying to come up with one concrete answer, you're just kind of looking at it through different angles and so in that chapter of our book you'll find lots of. I mean, we have different modes of projects in each chapter of the book, but this one especially. We love for podcasts because it's a way to explore something and bring in your own story as you're exploring, but more for the goal of just deepening your knowledge and your thinking and becoming smarter after going through the exploration, rather than just trying to find the answer, the persuasive narrative. That one is what I would formerly think of as my research paper, where I'm making an argument, I'm trying to teach my audience something or to believe something, I'm trying to elicit a change, but I'm doing so through the use of my own story. So if I've gone through an experience that was really meaningful and it's connected to what I'm writing about, I shouldn't be afraid to include that experience.

12:16
And then, finally, our last chapter focuses on the reflective narrative, which is what we think of whenever we traditionally think of narrative as just sharing a story for the sake of reflection and personal growth, because we still do believe in that, even though we're trying to blend genres, we still recognize and value the narrative in what it was traditionally seen as. However, we like to kind of look at well, what does the narrative look like today? Because you know we've all seen those journal prompts that we've given our students in the past what do you, what you do over the summer, or what's your favorite Christmas memory? And we're trying to kind of push back and find new experiences, especially for our older students. So in that chapter we really try to focus on multimedia type projects because narrative looks differently. We're seeing like graphic memoirs come out now. We're seeing people sharing their stories through podcasting and we want to give our students those experiences. They may not be comfortable writing about it, but they might be comfortable sharing in another way.

13:26 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, I absolutely love. I love how you've laid it out and the multimodal kind of pieces are fantastic. I mean I also think about a lot of so I was an ELA teacher and a history teacher and the history kind of coach side that I have I operated. Now a lot of the history teachers I work with are like oh, writing is such a challenge for students and, like you know, they can do the thinking in history, but the writing is the really hard part, and so I imagine that history teachers could also pick up this book and I'm just thinking of like that you know, analytical essays and stuff right, like we're doing stuff like that all the time, like merging the narrative, figuring out the multimodal piece. I mean there's such a level of access that you're providing teachers for their students who may not traditionally be successful in writing. That's really exciting. So thank you all for that.

14:15
I think there's so much else in here, I mean in terms of like the specific actions you guys get really specific in those sample units. Is there anything that was like a really I don't know exciting one to teach Paige? I know that Courtney said you've taught a lot of these, or is there a particular kind of lesson or part of like, kind of a staple part or component of the unit arc. That's kind of agnostic to any of the four categories. That is like exciting to you that you want to name Sure the analytical narrative narrative yeah, in the experimental narrative project we always.

14:57 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
We love to talk about this one I'm glad you asked yeah, uh, because it's also, even though it was my student that did it.

15:05
It's also courtney's favorite, so I did so it's also my favorite part of the book because I'm so proud of my students.

15:13
So one of the narratives that we that I had my students do we call, we ended up calling it the experimental narrative, and the idea was I wanted my students to learn something new or try something new that they had never done before and kind of document their progress of that journey. And we see that in several texts so the mentor texts we use for that little and often about a man who builds a boat to try to understand his dad better, so he builds a canoe by hand, dragon hoops. About a teacher that wants to learn more about basketball. He doesn't know anything about basketball, wants to learn more, so it's about his journey. And then the last one was what I'll have, what she's having, which is a narrative about a journalist who tries all these celebrity fad diets to see if they really work, and so we read excerpts from all of those. I have to mention we did not encourage the students to also try the fad diets. Courtney was very clear about that that. We need to make sure we make that clear.

16:17 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
The part about her book that was really good for the students I thought is like the first introduction or first chapter, where it lays out her ground rules of this is how I'm going to do it and if this happens then I'm not going to continue and that kind of thing, and that. That was the part that was really good in that one, because the diets were insane.

16:39 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
Yeah, really funny too.

16:42
Funny stuff going on there. So, anyway, we looked at a piece from each of those texts and I challenged my my own students. Okay, piece from each of those texts and I challenged my own students. Okay, I want you to make something new or learn something new or try something new. You have a few weeks to do it. Write down some notes as you're doing that and then we'll come together in a month or so and we'll hash out your notes and make it more of a narrative writing project, and it was just fun to see what the students came up with. Like, I still have a bench at the front of my room that was built as a result of this unit. It's really helpful because I put papers on it.

17:20
I had students do things in the kitchen that they'd never done, like connecting with family members, and I emphasize, like you don't have to spend money to do this. Like I had one girl that was really good at hair and she wanted to do this hairstyle, so she practiced it, watched tutorials and did the hairstyle on her sister. One of the projects that really stood out to us is one of my students is very skilled artist and she wanted to learn how to draw a more realistic face, and so she practiced, over the course of the time that I gave her, drawing different like. She zoomed in on different body parts the eye, the nose, the mouth and she really worked on it. And you can see the progression in the book of like what her face looked like at the beginning of the process and what it looked like at the end, and then she wrote about that experience. I don't know if, courtney, if you had anything else to say.

18:18 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
Yeah, my favorite part of it was she was really struggling, I want to say with the eyes and you know, instead of getting discouraged and quitting or just moving on, she went and watched YouTube videos. She asked her art teacher for help. She thought about different things that she could do to continue learning on that process, and that's a skill that a lot of our students struggle with. Whenever they're not doing well or they're not getting the results they want to, they want to quit it. But she had that kind of resilience to continue on and I loved her writing about that.

18:56 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I think in the spirit of that I'll ask my next question. So, thinking about challenges that we encounter in learning new things and trying new things, are there challenges that you all have faced in teaching or having students engage with narrative units, or for people who have kind of picked up the book, read it and tried to implement, like colleagues you've coached, or teachers you've talked to any challenges that they've faced and like how have you worked through it or coached someone through that challenge?

19:25 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
I would say for me, I know whenever I have students write with narrative and I think any ELA teacher can relate is sometimes it's a beautiful mix of like finding the right prompt at the right time for that student, and we're not always able to achieve that 100% of the time. I mean, we're not perfect, but that is why we structure our book the way that we did. I think you had asked about structure earlier and we didn't quite get to it, so I did want to come back around to that. Each one of our chapters is laid out kind of like a menu. We have like a menu at the beginning of each of our chapters with content, because we want to offer our authors or, I'm sorry, our readers lots of choices whenever they're planning a unit.

20:07
It's kind of almost like a build your own style book, and so we give lots of ideas for mini lessons at the beginning, like what skills at the sentence level of their writing do your students need to work on? Choose a few of these from here. Now, what are some different prompts that you can give to help them start thinking about topics in their life where they can utilize these skills? So then we have like different starter projects and then we have bigger unit projects. So I and I don't remember off the top of my head how many we give of each, but we wanted to make sure there was a plethora of choices. And so again, kind of going back to your question, I would think the biggest challenge is picking a unit and designing and building your own units so that it meets the needs of your students. It's hard to meet everybody's needs all in one unit, but we hope that through the choices that we offer, that we can reach everybody at some point.

21:13 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
I think one of my challenges is I get in my head about I have to follow the curriculum and I'm real bad about OK, the curriculum says Monday, I'm doing this, tuesday, I'm doing this, wednesday, I'm doing this and I lose track of. Ok, what are my students struggling with? And it's when I get into the weeds of that that I have to remind myself to stop and think OK, what are these students struggling on and what do they need help with? And that's where I pull in those mini lessons and those craft move skills, and so it's trying to kind of see the bigger picture rather than focusing on. I got to get through this because my arbitrary deadline says that I need to, and so my challenge in my own head is just getting out of my head and focusing on my students.

22:02 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
I love that and what I love about how our book is laid out sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off is that that challenge that you're talking about, courtney, is that you can go into our book really easily and find a small mini lesson that you could use to work on that skill. So somebody that is tied to a curriculum that may not be able to adopt a huge unit like we talk about, we feel like there's still something in there for them to help students, maybe in a smaller way.

22:34 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely for sure. I love the structures and just, yeah, the plethora of examples that you have that you could easily go in and pull. I highly agree and I think there's there's so much that you know, corny, what you were talking about in terms of seeing the bigger picture. I loved kind of in your I think it was in your epilogue that you were talking about the relationships just being so important and that we would always make time for relationships with students and learning about students. And they do that through narrative writing. Right, they tell you who they are and I just love that. That is often the bigger picture.

23:05
Often the thing that you know gets caught when we are trying to cram a lot of curriculum in. That is like missing, right, it's like a human element, and so I just love that this is curriculum and it gets at the human element. So it's really cool that you can do both. I also just love that I wrote the sentence down so I'm paraphrasing slightly, but that typically when we have students read that students are trained to look for an answer, not marvel at the craft, and you're like you're so right. Right, it's like we rarely invite students to just open up and marvel at the craft at the sentence level. What did you like? And that you have them actually create their own craft move chart. That's like student driven from the mentor text that you provide. I just a lot of what we talk about in this podcast is like student agency and student voice and how do we just like let the students drive the learning?

23:52
And I was recently in a PD where someone was talking about grammar and how it was so frustrating and I was like, oh, mechanically inclined, um, by jeff anderson. Thank you, anderson, yeah, and it's like, oh, my gosh, I saw that referenced in your book and I was like, okay, so they know what's up like. This is so fun to just kind of extract and read, to marvel at the craft and be able to let that interest kind of drive their own narrative pieces where they're writing about what's interesting to them in a way. That's interesting to them because you've structured it in a way that they can find something really interesting and then go for it. So I just I love all of the pieces of this. I don't know if that sparked any thoughts for you all. I just wanted to name all the things I loved.

24:32 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
Thank you, and you know it's funny. I think the the more high level our students are and I say that ironically because I don't like putting students in a box of honors and not honors but I think our students that are most motivated struggle the most with just marveling, because they are, they're looking for the answer, they're trying to do school. What do you want me to do? I'll do it. I'll jump through the hoops so I can move on and just stopping and pausing and admiring that beauty. I think that's just a powerful experience that we can provide to them.

25:12 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Absolutely, and so one of the things that I'm excited about is this episode is going to drop, actually, at almost kind of like the start of next school year. So as people are finishing up listening to this episode, they're like driving into work and like their first week or whatever. What do you think is something that they could do like right away, either from a planning lens or even like a teaching implementation quick activity lens, for them to kind of lean into more narrative writing this year?

25:40 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
I think a good place to start is the notebook prompts that we have at the back of the book. There's a. We just have resources to find different notebook prompts to get them jump started on thinking about writing about themselves and writing about their interests writing about themselves and writing about their interests.

25:58 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
Yeah, and I would echo that too. I think for me it's just a matter of establishing an environment where students know that their voice matters here, making sure we're having those conversations with them, making sure we're giving them an opportunity to share their own stories, even if it's not through a big, huge narrative unit, even if it's smaller ways, like if it's not through a big, huge narrative unit, even if it's smaller ways, like Courtney was talking about, through a notebook, just establishing that environment and showing them that you are important in here. And, yes, tests are important, but your story is more important.

26:33 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I love that. So this question just came into my head a little behind the scenes how do you all you have so many amazing resources in here for a mentor, talks and different ideas. How do you all kind of like organize yourself to do just kind of read for fun in whatever you will capacity you want, and then just like have a notes app or something where you jot all these ideas down? Like how do you come up with all these great resources?

26:57 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
A lot of the texts we were already reading and it was hey, this is this would work, this would work. And so most of the texts I had already read or page had already read, because we're just big readers to begin with, and so that that was a major part of it.

27:17 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
Courtney's a bigger reader than I am. I'm just going to. She gave me my flowers earlier, so I'm going to give her hers. She had all kinds of text ideas. So yeah, I mean and I think that's true of most teachers I mean we're naturally inquisitive, we want to learn, so we're all readers to begin with, and so you just never know when you read something like when it's going to take shape in your work later.

27:43 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
Yeah, I always had like a notes app or a Google Doc or something going or it's like just bookmark that for later.

27:47 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
Yeah, I just finished Dashka Slater's Accountable, like earlier today. I don't know if anybody's read that one yet, but I don't know what I want to do with it yet, but I know that it's. It has a space in my classroom in some way. I just think that it was really powerful, so that's one that I'm kind of marinating with right now.

28:07 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
All right, you're adding to my TBR list. These episodes always add to my TBR list.

28:22 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
It's about a sorry. It's about, like, a social media account that was posted in 2017 and some racist things were posted about some students at the school, and so then it follows the fallout that happened, how the teens that not only it was posted about were affected, the teens that posted, the teens that followed the accounts.

28:33 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
So I like how she's looking at it in all these angles counts, so I like how she's looking at it in all these angles, fascinating. Okay, I'm opening myself up here to add more to my TBR list, but what is something that you each have been learning about lately? So, paige, you can choose another one or you could be, like I've said, mine, but what is something, either professionally or personally, or in your reading life?

28:55 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
I've been diving into different instructional methods, books of trying to figure out, okay, how do we learn and how does that affect how we teach different things, and so I've been looking at Natalie Wexler's newest book, which I can't remember the title of, but something about the science of learning that is really fascinating, about focusing on not just the science of reading, but how do we learn in general.

29:27 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
And we're kind of working together on that a little bit. Courtney's looking sort of at the scientific aspect of that and I'm looking more, I would say, at the practical application of it. And how do we invite students to reflect a little bit more about what they're learning so that it's more meaningful, and what do those invitations to reflect look like in the classroom? So we're kind of looking at that together in different ways and sharing our ideas together in different ways and sharing our ideas.

30:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
One thing that I love about what you all do in this book is building that reflection so often that I often think is missing because we are trying to just get through things and then that critical piece of learning is just like vanished because we don't make time for it. So I do love that in your unit outlines you have those.

30:15 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
It's such an important part of instruction, Like being a teacher. We're just reflective individuals and I know I would be nowhere without reflection. That is what has taught me all the lessons. But when you look at your students, I mean reflection's a skill that needs to be built and a lot of them don't have that yet and they may not have an avenue to learn how to do that outside of school, and so it's interesting to us that it's not provided more explicitly in instruction.

30:45 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
So true, and I think people are going to want to get this book, so we will certainly link to it in the show notes and the blog post for this episode. But where else can people learn more about the two of you or connect with you online?

30:55 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
learn more about the two of you or connect with you online.

31:02 - Kourtney Hake (Guest)
I am on Twitter at Timmerman Page or X, I guess, and through email at TimmermanP at SalemHighcom.

31:16 - Lindsay Lyons (Host)
I am on Twitter, instagram and Blue Sky at what the Hake Amazing. Paige and Courtney, thank you both so so much. This has been a wonderful conversation and thank you for a brilliant book.

31:26 - Paige Timmerman (Guest)
Thank you so much for having us.

0 Comments

225. Local Civics with John Rudolph Mueller

224. Somewhere Beyond the Sea in a Creative Writing Activism Unit

223. Accomodations, Modifications, & Inclusion Anxiety: Supporting Learners with IEPs with Toby J. Karten

222. Solution Tree author: Their Stories, Their Voices with Kourtney Hake and Paige Timmerman

Time for Teachership is now a proud member of the...

Author

Archives

Categories

Support