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In this episode, we’re exploring a backwards planning approach that breaks down the summative and formative assessment points of a unit and visually houses all of the lesson goals in the context of the Essential Question and the course priority standards.
If you’re supporting teachers to develop their own standards-aligned units, this curriculum design approach may help! Why? This ASCD white paper summarizes McTighe & Wiggins’ Understanding by Design (UbD) framework for backwards planning. Simplified, it’s basically: What do you want students to achieve?; How will you know students have achieved these goals?; What learning experiences will best support them to get there? For more information on backwards planning, check out my blog post: Backwards Plan from the End of the School Year: The What. Hattie’s research shows giving students feedback—this is really what any assessment, especially formative assessment is—has a large effect size at 0.70! So, intentionally building in regular points of clear feedback to students based on a skill(s) they’ve been working on is important. Another piece to consider is how we share feedback on assessments with students. Proficiency-based rubrics that focus on a handful of priority standards are my suggestion. Here’s why: Haystead and Marzano (2009) found teachers who repeatedly measured the growth of the same skills over time using proficiency-based rubrics noted a 34% gain in student achievement. In these classes, students learned more, experienced less stress, and had better teacher-student relationships. This approach also decreased inequitable “achievement” gaps (Crescendo Ed Group). What? I developed this for a group of teacher teams who had already selected their priority standards, developed a competency-based rubric, and drafted a unit Essential Question (EQ). The next step was to plan the assessments that would assess the rubric skills and help address the EQ. This is the visual I designed to show how all of the pieces were coming together to form a cohesive unit outline. 
Step 1: Start with the guard rails: EQ and Priority Skills.
I like selecting the priority standards first, since these are year-long and the EQ is unit-specific, but if an EQ generates excitement to plan, starting there is fine! For more on how to create a priority standards-based rubric, check out my podcast episode: Developing a Course-Long Rubric. For more on developing an engaging EQ, check out this podcast episode: Crafting a Compelling Driving Question. Step 2: Determine the final project. Ensure you can use the full rubric—all or nearly all priority skills—to assess students’ work. I like to offer as much student choice and voice as possible here in terms of product (e.g., podcast, documentary, essay, presentation) and content sub-specialization (i.e., Which topic could they deeply dive into? or With which lens could they analyze the unit content?). For an example, check out my 5-minute YouTube video: Unit Planning Deep Dive: Standards-Aligned Projects. Step 3: Choose the length of the unit and cadence of formative assessments. Longer units enable more depth, so in the template linked below, I’ve included an 8-week and 10-week template. I recommend a more “formal” formative assessment happens about once a week in which students receive specific feedback on at least one line of the rubric. I like standard weekly activities, so Feedback Fridays could be a nice use of that cadence. It also sets standard expectations for students. Step 4: Fill in the formatives. What should students be able to do at the end of each week? What format will each assessment take? Each assessment should be able to be assessed using at least one line of the course-long priority standards rubric. Flag the skill (rubric line) in your planning, so you can make sure you’re building all skills over the course of the unit evenly or strategically (e.g., you may have skills that build on each other or appear in an arc like inquiry activities.) Step 5: Fill in the lessons. Determine what you will teach each day to build students’ content knowledge and skills over the unit, ensuring they are prepared for each assessment when they get there. I use quick phrases for big lesson ideas when outlining my unit in a template like this. Details can come later! Final Tip There is no one right way to plan. Find the planning strategy that works best for your teachers’ brains and go with that. As long as the key ideas of backwards planning and competency-based assessment are present and the unit is coherent and interesting, all is well! To help you start coaching your teachers to unit plan from assessments, I’m sharing my Assessment-Driven Unit Outline with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 187 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Hello everyone, welcome to episode 187 of the Time for Teachership podcast. Today we're going to talk through and share a planning, a unit planning approach, where you backwards plan from your assessments. I know I've shared many unit building approaches in this podcast so far. Just want to give you one more in case perhaps some of the previous approaches feel like there's too many steps or it doesn't work with my brain Always happy to share another one. So here we go. We're exploring a backwards planning approach that breaks down the summative and formative assessment points of a unit and then it's going to visually house all of the lesson goals in the context of the essential question and the course priority standards. So we really, truly have all the pieces there in this visual way that really leans into the backwards planning approach. So if you're supporting teachers to develop their own standards aligned unit, or if you are a teacher developing your own, this curriculum design approach may help. So let's look at the why first. Let's look at the research. So there is an ASCD white paper that summarizes Antigua Wiggins' understanding by design framework. You may have been calling this UBD for short. This is backwards planning and simplified. Basically, what it summarizes it to is what do you want students to achieve Right? What's the end goal? How will you know students have achieved these goals Right? How are you going to assess it? What learning experiences will best support them to get there? What are your lessons going to be? And you can read more on the on the white paper. I have linked to that in my blog post. Feel free, but I think these are the three big goals. So what does that mean? When we are planning, we need to make sure we have an end goal. So, like what are the skills they are developing? What can they do? How will we know what are the assessments in place and what learning experiences are going to help them build those skills so they can do the final assessment and feel successful and not overly challenged right? So what's the learning journey? What are the lesson level activities? I also want to bring in Hattie's research here. So John Hattie's research on effect sizes shows that giving students feedback and this is really what any assessment, especially formative assessment, is has a large effect size at about 0.70. So this is considered very high in terms of effect sizes, meaning that intentionally building regular points of clear feedback, ie formative assessments to students based on those skills that they've been working on is a really clear stamp of check for understanding in terms of their development. You can kind of level set their understanding of where they're at with your assessment of where they're at and it informs, ultimately, their ability to self-assess, it informs their progress and their next step. It makes them feel like there is a path forward where they will be able to achieve all the things that you want them to and hope for them right. Another piece of information to consider is how we share that feedback on assessments with our students and so, in terms of what it literally is that we are doing with students, the paper that they receive, for example, proficiency-based rubrics that focus on just a handful right. I've heard them called the Fab Five of priority standards. That's my suggestion. So here's the research on that. Hayes and Marzano found that teachers who repeatedly measured the growth of the same skills over time Again five is great Using the proficiency-based rubrics, where we talk about levels of proficiency and lay it out for students very clearly in student understandable, accessible language. Right here is meeting the standards, exceeding the standards, approaching the standards, whatever the categories, are Folks who use that. Teachers who used that measurement of the same skills over time, using proficiency-based rubric, noted a 34% gain in student achievement in these classes, more than their peers in classrooms that did not use this right. So that far surpasses I mean by like a third more, like 130%, you know. Whatever that is huge. So in these classes students really were learning more, they had the information, they retained the information longer, but they also experienced less stress in the classroom, which I find really important, given that we are experiencing or observing very high reports of student stress, anxiety, depression, all of the things, particularly COVID and beyond, but even before. So it was markedly higher than years prior and that students in those classrooms where that type of feedback and assessment was happening had better teacher-student relationships. So again, I think that's probably contributing right to the decreased stress or decreased anxiety around things and feeling more successful. Is that relationships might be even a mediator. I'm not saying they are, I have not looked at that research angle but this approach, it really is equitable in nature because one of the things that the research also found is that it decreased the inequitable quote achievement gaps which were, you know, racialized, economized, like all the things, and so noting that this is truly an equitable move to think about, assessing in this way to think about backwards, planning in this way, with intentional assessment and an opportunity to share feedback with students. That builds their skills, decreases their stress, increases equity in your school and ultimately fosters really great student-teacher relationships. Okay, given all of that context, let's go ahead and look at, like, what are we actually talking about? For you know, maybe, what form might I give a teacher that I'm coaching to help them plan in this way? So I developed this for a group of teacher teams who had already selected their priority standards, developed the competency-based rubric which we just spoke to in that Hazel and Marzano research and drafted their unit essential questions. So I do think that it's important that we first do those pieces and if you're looking for information or how to's on how to do this, check out my previous curriculum design series in the past podcast episodes of Time for Teachership. Okay, so once we have a clear understanding of what are my top five priority standards, build out that competency or proficiency-based rubric. What are the different levels of proficiency? What does that look like for each standard? I have kind of a one-pager that I can use for any assessment for the whole year. And then, when we look at the unit level, the big first step is to think what is that exciting, compelling, essential question where every lesson in that unit will tie back to and give students information on how to respond to that essential question. Once we have that and again there are past episodes on how to do that well the next step is to plan the assessment that would assess the rubric skills and help address the essential question. So you're thinking about what do they need to be able to demonstrate in terms of skills and what content do they need to be able to respond to that essential question? So we're thinking skills and content, which is usually how we plan. So I designed a visual that I will link in the blog post for this episode to really demonstrate how all these pieces were coming together to form a cohesive unit outline. So I will describe this to you if you are driving, if you are able to grab the blog post. This is linked at lindsaybathlionscom slash blog, slash 187. But we have along the top. We have a rectangle on top which says essential question and a rectangle on the bottom which says comprehensive priority skills rubric. So again, these two pieces are foundational At this point in the planning. Once you get the template I'm sharing with you today. Those should be done and we should know the essential question and we should know the priority skills as well as have a rubric with details of the proficiency. Now the middle really speaks to the rest. So, while the essential question is what content we're teaching, or related to what content we're teaching, and the comprehensive priority skills rubric is what skills we are teaching or assessing students on, in the middle you can imagine several kind of circles leading up to a big kind of star I'm not quite sure how to describe this as a visual star with many points. So that's kind of like a really big circle or really that's the summative All along the way. Those circles leading up to the big star are smaller formative assessments and this answers the question thinking about that UBD framework, how do you know that students know the content and the skills right on the top and the bottom rectangles? So what we're going to do is these are kind of thinking about the guardrails of the unit, right? We have our essential question, we have our priority skills and, again, these are going to be year-long priority skills. You can actually reuse this over and over. The essential question is going to be unit-specific, right? So if you would like more information on how to develop any of those. I've actually linked to those previous episodes and blog posts in this blog, so feel free to go ahead and grab the information there. Now the next step after we've figured out the guardrails, the EQ, the priority standards, we need to figure out what is that final summative assessment. So what I would first do is make sure whatever ideas you have whether you're kind of doing a brainstorm dump, talking with a group, looking at what maybe other folks do however, you're getting that inspiration. Your mental checklist here should be that you can use that full rubric of all, or nearly all, priority standards for the course, for the year, to be able to assess students' work. So I should see, for example, if I'm using a social studies rubric that's claim, evidence, reasoning, written expression or clear communication, some sort of like. Does your, are the words that you wrote down like organized and can I understand them right? Some people would call these conventions whatever. If those are my four for the year, I want to make sure that my task has something to do with developing an argument, because then I could say, okay, there's a claim, there's evidence, there's reasoning, and I wrote it down. Argument, because then I could say, okay, there's a claim, there's evidence, there's reasoning, and I wrote it down, so I have clear written expression. So I have actually covered all four skills and I can assess all four skills in this particular assessment. So make sure you can do that and I really like to offer as much student choice and voice as possible here Gives you room for that co-creation, that student excitement, student ownership of the product. So the product can vary, but the prompt itself is going to be the same, right? So you might say the essential question is and I am just going off the top here of my head, so it's not a great one, but like I always use, like safety or freedom, so does the United States in 2024 enable residents to have more safety or more freedom? Right? And then so they would have to choose one side of that argument and then develop out their argument Now how they demonstrate. That could be a podcast, it could be a documentary where they're interviewing different people and their responses to that question. It could be bringing in clips, right. Whatever documentary consists of, it could be writing a traditional essay, it could be putting something into a PowerPoint, it could be a visual art collage or series where they explain in the captions exactly what their argument is. It could also be that they sub-specialize. So in that specific example, maybe they sub-specialize into like, okay, in 2024, when, at the beginning of the year or the end of the year, 2024 compared to another time point in history, compared to another country currently or in history, what about the people? Right, for whom? Right, who has more safety and more freedom? Right, if we're talking about incarcerated populations, like they're going to have a very different story than folks who are not experiencing incarceration. So I mean, I think just being able to invite students to sub-specialize or take a particular lens to the overall topic that all students are covering really gets them excited. And so when you develop the final project, I'm thinking more that you're developing the prompt and it might just be answer the essential question, and then you have some product options or you have students kind of create their own ideas for product options as well as keeping the essential question or the summative prompt broad enough that they can say I want to sub-specialize in, like different areas, and there's room for them to do that. If you would like some examples of how to plan your unit, that is, standards aligned, I do have a YouTube video that I will link to this episode's blog post. Okay, step number three. So just a reminder we have put on the guardrails of the EQ and the priority standards, we've determined the final project and now we need to figure out the formatives. So at this point we want to choose how long the unit is going to last how many weeks, for example and the cadence of formative assessment. So how often are you going to assess? I think longer units enable more depth here. So in the template that I will link in this blog post as your freebie, I've included an eight-week and a 10-week template option. You can certainly adjust from here, but I do like the depth that this involves and it enables you to kind of average around one unit per quarter, which is nice in terms of assessments, you will have one summative assessment per report card if you are a quarter-based school in terms of report card issuing. Now I recommend a more formal formative assessment happens, I would say, about once a week. I think that's a good blend of being able to truly kind of quote-unquote grade or assess or give feedback to students as the teacher, right, but then also have students get it more frequently than like every two weeks, right. They need to know where they're at and have that feedback more regularly. So I don't think this needs to be the entire rubric. I think you want to determine, as the teacher, or you want to coach people, to determine, if you're coaching teachers to build this out what feedback they're going to get. So if I am building up to a four-line rubric right, let's use that example again of claim evidence, reasoning and written expression then I might say one week I am making sure that students get feedback on their claim, and the next week I'm making sure they get feedback on their evidence reasoning, and then the fourth week maybe we're doing some written expression, some conventions work, whatever. So that might be a cadence that you use. You can certainly assess and give feedback more often, but I think this is kind of the target, knowing that teachers are very busy and have to grade a lot of things. So weekly activities are great. I like building it into my schedule as well in terms of the student lens, of when students get to actually engage with that feedback, perhaps take action based on that feedback within the class and not making it something they have to take it home to do or leave it up to them to decide when and where they're doing it. So I like to do something like feedback Fridays or, you know, workshop Fridays. I used to use Fridays, but you can use Wednesdays, you can do alliteration, whatever you think works best. But I think that weekly activities that are embedded, you're not teaching a new lesson, but we're really giving students the skill building opportunity to review their feedback and take action based on it. Perhaps conference with the teacher, that could be a nice use of that weekly cadence and it sets that standard expectation for our students so they know that space to talk with a teacher or to get feedback specifically on their work is happening. All right, step four we've kind of figured out the outline of the formatives but we want to fill it in. So what should students be able to do at the end of each week? So, again, thinking about that skill, thinking about the content they should know each week, building up to be assessed, using, as I said, one line of that course long priority standards rubric. And I want you to, or coach teachers to flag the skill which is the rubric line in the planning so you make sure you're building all of them over the course of the unit either evenly, like we talked about, with like one per week. So if we have four standards for the summative that we're assessing, you know one week is standard one, two, three, four or strategically, so you might have skills build on each other or appear in an arc, that kind of continue. So you might actually do something like this. Let's say we have week one, claim, week two, evidence, week three, reasoning, and then we're going to go back to claim evidence, reasoning again. So we've done six weeks and now in the seventh week we're just introducing writing conventions, right, and then we might even have like a okay, I'm going to do your evidence with reasoning, I'm going to give you both at once. I'm going to give you a prompt that enables you to do both of those things and I'm going to see your evidence with reasoning. I'm going to give you both at once. I'm going to give you a prompt that enables you to do both of those things and I'm going to see how your evidence and your analysis are connected, because they are very interconnected as standards, right, and so you can kind of like play with it and build students up, right. Alternatively, you could say okay, claim, write a claim, claim evidence. Okay, now claim evidence reasoning. You could do multiple standards each week. You could also have students practice each standard each week, but you're just giving feedback on one of those pieces or your teachers are just giving feedback on one of those pieces. So just kind of saying that there's many ways to do this, but we want to be intentional, that we do cover all of the standards we're eventually assessing and we do give students at least one time point during the unit where we're giving them feedback on it and letting them do something with that feedback to grow that skill. Okay, number five this is where you fill in the lessons. So you're going to determine at this point what you will teach each day to build students content, knowledge and skills over the unit. So this is where teachers are really planning out the preparation students will have coming into the assessment. I usually plan really lightly here, so I will use a quick phrase for a big lesson idea when outlining my unit in this template, for example, that I'm sharing with you. Details can always come later. So that means if I'm saying, okay, we need to really like, explore possible claims, or we are going to look at what makes a good claim, we're going to look at mentor texts or something. Then I would just write mentor texts in my outline at this point. I'm not going to find my mentor text right now. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of Googling and finding some great mentor text. That's going to take me way too long and it's a different set of skills than outlining and planning. So you want to keep it real light touch here. Key phrases, key ideas we will go back and fill in the details later. That's a completely different mindset that you want to be in. It's a completely different skill set. So if we're bouncing back and forth, this is going to take way longer and people are going to be frustrated when your teachers are filling this out. If you're a coach like you, don't want to breathe the frustration. You want to build the. Yes, this is possible, we can do this, and so really stay on that high level. Just a word or phrase to indicate the general skill or content that you're building there. As a final tip. So we went through all five steps here. There is no one right way to plan. There are so many options for you and so this is one way if you want to adapt this way or go back in the podcast library here and find a different way, find a way that I haven't talked about at all, totally something that will work for you. Whatever your brain wants you to do, I think go with that, right? So if you have some teachers who are really excited to plan in one way and some teachers who are excited in another, great, and then you just set the parameters for, for example, you have to have these components, but they can come in any order and you can build them out in any way and your visual presentation of all this on one page can be very different, right? So the key ideas are backwards planning. We wanna start at the end. We wanna go to the beginning Again. If you wanna start with the essential question or something instead of the priority standards, that's fine, but we do, as we're planning out the formative assessments and the lessons, we do need to have the summative in mind. We do need to have kind of an idea first. Even if it's not the format, it's like the question they're going to answer, right, which could again be the essential question, which is fine if you're starting there. For that reason, as long as that key idea of backwards planning is in place in some way, and as long as competency based assessment is present and the unit is overall pretty coherent and interesting, I think all is well, great, go for it. So we've talked through a lot of our steps. If you would like to actually get the template that I was kind of talking through that you may use, you can grab it for free at the blog post for this episode. It's called an Assessment Driven Unit Outline and it is located at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 187. Until next time, everybody. Transcribed by https://podium.page
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In this episode, we speak with Biz Thompson to apply a step-by-step unit planning protocol to dream up a new book-based unit that will cultivate deep thinking.
Biz currently works as a middle school librarian in Framingham, Massachusetts. Previously a high school English teacher for eight years, Biz brings a teacher-oriented approach to her work and curriculum development. Unit Planning Step 1: Context/Spark In Biz’s experience, book-based curriculum design is best when it’s centered around identity. Both middle schoolers and high schoolers are finding out who they are and identity is where we inevitably end up, no matter what types of texts are chosen. So, selecting books that resonate with students’ identities and backgrounds is an important starting point. Unit Planning Step 2: Pursuits (from Dr. Muhammad’s HILL Model) Identity: The goal is to help students explore and understand their own identities and those of others. Middle and high school students are in a stage of discovering who they are, which makes it crucial to select texts that reflect diverse experiences and perspectives. For example, there are many students from South America where Biz works in Framingham. Though challenging, it’s important to find books that represent their experience but don’t pigeon-hole students or rely on harmful stereotypes. Criticality: Engaging students in discussions about power, equity, and the disruption of oppression involves choosing texts that challenge and expand their understanding of these concepts. Students can also give input on what texts are studied and how they should be studied. For example, Biz recounts a conversation in the classroom over the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. While there are some problematic themes of white saviorism and harmful language, students still wanted to study the book—just using a critical lens to analyze it and draw important insights. Joy: Biz reflects on how it can be difficult to find joyful texts that are seen as carrying literary weight, as many are full of serious and heavy topics. Still, it’s important to integrate joyful elements into the curriculum by balancing identity and critical themes while also providing moments of joy or hope. Unit Planning Step 3: Project Question A central question for framing units is, "How can students' personal identities and background knowledge be integrated into their understanding of complex themes like justice and systemic issues?" Another framing question can be how can we as a school community and class heal together? The goal is not to sit in the oppression, but move through it and repair it with the students’ voices and perspectives leading the way. Unit Planning Step 4: Summative Project (Publishing Opportunity and Possible Formats) Book-based units are most effective when students are empowered and equipped as leaders, participating actively in their communities. Culminating projects and activities can be designed with this in mind, offering opportunities for civic action and community involvement. Biz reflects on the eighth grade curriculum that requires a civics project in Social Studies, so ELA (English Language Arts) teachers can collaborate to align the curricula. Their civics projects can apply what they are learning to a real-life context and integrate literary studies with practical civic action. Unit Planning Step 5: Unit Arc While studying challenging topics such as the Holocaust or the justice system, educators need to be aware of how these difficult themes and ideas impact the students in their class. Before diving into them directly, there needs to be a sense of safety and community to learn, grow, and dive into challenging discussions together. Take time at the start of the unit to do this! Thinking of a unit arc that centers the question of “how do we heal together?” means providing various entry points for students coming from different backgrounds. Language differences, expression, linguistic ability, and personal experiences means students come to the unit from all different ways of approaching a text. So, educators can offer multiple access points to understand and learn what the book is talking about, such as sharing by writing, verbally, or doing a gallery walk. Another perspective in considering your unit arc is to consider how to bring the text to life. One option is to integrate literature with community-based projects, such as inviting guest speakers or organizing discussions with local officials, which really enhances students' engagement and understanding of the text they’re engaging with. Stay Connected You can connect with Biz on the Cameron Library page of the Framingham website. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Biz is sharing the link to Facing History & Ourselves which uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 186 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons biz. Welcome to the time for teachership podcast. Thank you, I am so excited to have you here. I am curious to know if there is um anything like right when we're jumping into the conversation, that you want to share with folks who might be listening or reading the blog post version of this conversation. That's like maybe the either impetus for our conversation or context for maybe some of the ideas you'll share books you'll share about today. Sure. 0:00:32 - Biz Thomspon So I'm a school librarian in Framingham, massachusetts. I was a high school English teacher for eight years before I transitioned into my role as a middle school librarian transitioned into my role as a middle school librarian. So I come from like maybe more of the teacher lens than other librarians do and I learned about you from our fabulous Framingham team librarian, john Garrigan Amazing. 0:00:58 - Lindsay Lyons I'm so excited as a fellow like high school literacy and social studies teacher, I'm very excited. 0:01:02 - Biz Thomspon Yes. 0:01:05 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, so cool. Okay, so if we are going to take the approach of kind of brainstorming a unit or like something that maybe a high school or middle school or whoever ELA teacher might be able to actually do in their class, I would love to start with, maybe, what you would like in this, what you envision students to be like learning or pursuing through reading, through texts, through books and I often ground us in things like the three parts of Goldie Muhammad's framework. So she talks about, like identity how will my instruction help students learn something about themselves or others? She talks about criticality, so disrupting power and oppression, and like kind of navigating conversations with that. And or joy, just like how do we find joy in right? Like those are three very different things, so we can focus on anywhere. 0:01:56 - Biz Thomspon your brain takes you Sure yeah, I feel like it's really hard to find joy in the texts that we choose for middle schoolers and high schoolers. There's not a lot of joy out there. Is there In things that are considered to have literary merit. There isn't. It's usually dark themes. It's actually kind of hard to find texts that are truly joyful. Kind of hard to find texts that are truly joyful. What's been interesting in my time in Framingham is so I was working at the high school it was basically like we had a book room and there were books and then you would build the unit around the book, and so much of that is shifting and in the last curriculum redesign we did, our focus was on building background knowledge and not necessarily in the literacy or in the you know all those things that you just mentioned. But I find that I look to identity a lot when I'm thinking about books, because for middle schoolers and high schoolers they're finding out who they are and that's where we always inevitably end up, no matter what types of texts we're choosing, and so that kind of becomes hard in a place like Framingham where a lot of the students at my school not necessarily in every school are from South America. They're from Brazil and there really aren't a lot of texts that center around even South American children, families, so it's really hard to match identity perfectly with that. And I think we've also talked a lot about in our learning spaces that some of the even if we're looking at them like a Latin American text, if we can't get to South America that we're looking for texts that don't pigeonhole or focus on harmful stereotypes, which can be difficult to do. So there are some instructors who will look at a book about, you know, students crossing the border and say this is relevant and it is. But we're at a point where we also have students who just like go to school and have families and do the regular things that teenagers do without all of that too, and there's not as much representation in that space. I think. Um, I've also worked sometimes with my avid 10 year old who's in fifth grade and she goes to a Montessori school, and we'll run ideas back and forth too, so like they've been working on topics of like, inclusion and thinking about cognitive differences, physical differences and how to learn and create empathy there, and so we'll bounce titles back, which is kind of fun, but then it's always like the teachers in our area are like reading all the books and I think there also has to be good writing right. We can have joyful books, we can have, you know, we can have books that sort of capture identity, but if they're not well-written they're not coming from a soulful place. The kids know that and they don't. They don't care for it very much. 0:05:13 - Lindsay Lyons I love that idea of becoming from a soulful place, being like the thing that's yeah accurate, like yes, amazing yes, we learned about holding Caulfields. 0:05:21 - Biz Thomspon We know who the ponies are, so that's so good, oh my gosh. 0:05:27 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, and I also just love who. So I also live in Framingham and just like the very like high Brazilian population, like wanting to name, but like you want to be able to like see yourself where and put yourself in that position of like I can identify with those main characters. And then, if you don't have texts that are translated to English, that are either written by Brazilian authors or, you know, centered in Brazil, or like having a Brazilian American identity, like it's like okay, right, how do we find something that's general, not oppressive and so connected, right? 0:06:01 - Biz Thomspon This is like such a multifaceted kind of thinking about identity that's so important, so I just appreciate you naming it, yeah, yeah and it's, and I think like, um, in some ways, publishing is so far ahead of where it was when I was a student, when so many of my colleagues were students, but sometimes, um, like educators will presume that there's something there that isn't there yet, right, even in non-fiction, like we need non-fiction books that don't have a lexile of, like high school for middle schoolers. Um, we need to look beyond. Well, I love, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there are other people that they're important, um to us, right, uh, that we need to be writing about, and I feel like publishers look to the same people and they just publish like book after book about those people or those experiences, and we're not like branching out so much. 0:07:00 - Lindsay Lyons So true, so true. I'm curious to know is there a particular like question that you find interesting for students to grapple with around either identity or just like reading books in general, or like to your point about building background knowledge? Is there kind of a framing question that comes to mind? If we were to like brainstorm this out, yeah, I think like oh, there's a student. 0:07:25 - Biz Thomspon I think usually when we're designing units in particular, we do have sort of a central question. So I keep thinking of when we were redesigning the eighth grade curriculum so our eighth graders read the Memoir Night by. Elie Wiesel and they had also traditionally read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and we revisit To Kill a Mockingbird frequently because it's, you know, we have the white savior story there and there's some, you know, harmful language that sometimes students of color have not been so comfortable with and I think our teachers do a great job of acknowledging that and sort of working through it and talking about that. And it was interesting. We were thinking of pulling it one year and I teach like a flexible class and the students in there. I asked them like should we keep this book? Should we not? Like this is what the conversations are and most of them actually said it's great, we should read adults um version, uh, to sort of tell lots of sides of that story of like justice, right, um, and all of that's very heavy and um. So we were looking for a book to start the year that um captured identity and we landed on Don't Ask Me when I'm From by Jen DeLeon and she's from Framingham and when I read her book it really resonated as like honest to me, right, this was an amalgamation of her experiences as a Guatemalan American growing up in Framingham, of her experiences teaching students in Boston, and the book deals with, you know, metco and what that looks like and microaggressions and things like that, and so I think when the teachers are working through that unit they're looking for students to make those personal connections and build their background knowledge and learn a little bit about Netco. You know they talk about sort of like microaggression, about code switching, things like that, and it also, I think, maybe gives vocabulary that they might not have for those experiences that they're probably having all the time in the world and I think it's a way for the kids to get to know each other and to understand what their spaces are. And there are some activities that students do. So in the book, the characters there's sort of like a mean girls moment where they have this like full school like assembly to deal with some of the racial incidents that have been happening. And there's been all this documentation about, like, building the wall on the border right, so the students decide to subvert it by creating a wall, but then everyone puts sort of like their own kind of experience in school what they want people to know. And some of our teachers have started doing that sometimes when they read the book and it's really eyeopening to see that, like it tends to be the moment when students say the quiet part out loud, they share the thing that like people might presume about them but isn't true. It's a sort of defy those stereotypes and I think there's a lot of power in that. And then, and when we first decided, kids were like oh, this is great. And now, because it's in school, they're kind of like oh, this is like, just okay, I'm like it's not, like I don't know. This is as close to you as we're getting. I forget what your original question was, but but that's sort of mind when we're thinking about how do we frame units and how do we add, weave identity, and then all that good stuff. 0:11:31 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love all of the pieces of that, all of the books that cover different aspects of identity and like to embed that kind of like disruption and building the background knowledge, like you're kind of like taking us through all the nuances of all the pieces which I love, yeah, the initial question was just kind of like is there a question that frames all of it like an essential question? 0:11:48 - Biz Thomspon yeah, I think from the educator standpoint, not necessarily from the student standpoint. The question we were asking ourselves is we are, when we are going into material like the holocaust, like the justice system, and students are also learning civics now at the same time so they're learning about the legal system, about how our government works how can we get them there from a place that is closer to where they are right? Because I think teachers were finding that when they just had to jump into the holoca, reading like Telltale Heart or whatever there wasn still feel very strongly about the content of the book and it's awful Like it's really hard to read and you need to have a community in place and you need to have some safety with each other in order to do that. In order to do that, and so I think we were trying to center it in their own identity and, kind of like, build towards. Okay, then we're going to move on to these really tough, hard topics together. 0:13:06 - Lindsay Lyons Two things I want to lift up from that. One is kind of right, there's kind of this base building of the foundational trust and community that has to happen as part of the unit or prior to the unit, because otherwise you're not going to get what you need out of it, right, students will have a harmful experience or something right. And then the other one I'm thinking I know you shared the teacher lens, right as like get them together as close as they are as possible. I was thinking the student lens of that or like the essential question of that that student facing might be. Like how do we like heal together? Because, oh yeah, right, it's almost like you're showing, I'm just thinking like right, like with the Holocaust, with like there's harm in there, just mercy, it's all about like the harm of the structures and the systems, the school assembly, or like the wall piece that you were saying from don't ask me where I'm from Like there's, there's all these confrontations of harm. And then it's like, how do these communities we're learning about? But also, how do we as a school community, as a class, like heal together? Because ultimately we don't want to sit in the oppression, we want to like move through it and repair, yeah, with our voice, with our own voices, not somebody else's. 0:14:09 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, yes. 0:14:10 - Lindsay Lyons I love the element of student leadership and youth leadership in that, so I love that. I'm almost wondering is there something that either you did when you did the curriculum revamp or that you're thinking now as we're talking through? That would be like a kind of culminating project or activity, that students are kind of putting all these pieces together into some sort of like civic action or like community piece. 0:14:34 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, well there is something kind of naturally embedded, not in their English language arts class but in their social studies class. So every eighth grader is tasked with completing a civics project. I think what would be great actually was if there was space for the ELA teachers and the social studies teachers to align and kind of look at what they've studied so far in ELA to try and focus there. And I think the civics project was rolled out in the 2020 school year, so they're still figuring out how to do it. So I don't want to fall. I had to teach civics then too, so I get it. But I think if, like down the the road, if there were collaboration time, that would be a great way to um, put those two things together. There have been been in what I've taught in eighth grade enrichment class, so students who are sort of like above grade level, where we've worked on some community advocacy, like I've asked them, like, when you look around, what do you think needs to be better? And then we try to find the points of contact or find and students have had like meetings with the superintendent and things like that, and it's not always related to like exactly what they're reading, but it is related to building that voice and, and it's funny like, sometimes they'll be like well, we need to change the time of school and then we'll go down and they're like, actually that's kind of impossible, but that's learning Right, you know, like, and it's in their hands. It's probably hard for me, but sometimes I try to take a step back. It's very hard for me to. Sometimes I try to take a step back and I haven't had a chance to do that in a while, but I look forward to doing it again. 0:16:19 - Lindsay Lyons I love all the whole process of that right Like so to be able to identify the issues and draw those parallels to what they might be reading. I love the interdisciplinary nature of social studies. The piece being like that project is such a nice organic way of like you're already doing this. What can you learn from? Or, yeah, um, the texts. And then, yeah, I, I love the goal of building voice that you named, and also just that that it is hard, that it's not easy, and that to really develop youth leadership, we have to just confront those challenges and and get familiar with them, and we also have to have it sounds like you do at Framingham have the audience that's authentic from the adult perspective, like we're willing to meet with you. Share the restrictions, talk through and kind of problem solve together. So I do think that's like I'm just thinking of foundational. If you're teaching something like this, right, these are that kind of foundational community wide things to just make sure, because you don't want the students to go into the superintendent and the superintendent's like I don't have time for this or anything yeah, and I think too. 0:17:16 - Biz Thomspon I think, as you know, when I have the occasion to sit in with teachers and they're developing assessments and things, I tried to and as a high school teacher I wasn't very good at doing this but just I find when students are each other's audiences, the quality of the work is better than when they think they're just submitting something to a teacher. If it's public, if it's an audience of your peers, I think that automatically sort of brings a level of persistence that might not be there. If you're like, oh, the same adult is going to read this again and I'll just admit it and they'll tell me how I did, and that's the end yeah, the authentic audience and project so incredible. 0:18:03 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, like to have um an assignment, feel like there's some real weight behind it and, yeah, yeah, change can happen. 0:18:11 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, that's really good so you remember to like put a period at the end of your sentence or whatever. 0:18:16 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, yes, oh my gosh, I, I like, I'm loving all of these pieces. I'm curious to know if there's any like ELA teacher activities that you particularly enjoy to have students almost like on a smaller level, like when engaging with text, be each other's audience or be each other's like partners, and like I don't know if it was like literature circles or Socratic seminars. I'm trying to think of some of the protocols of like. How do we get students to engage and kind of learn from each other versus like the teacher directed? Yeah, that. 0:18:45 - Biz Thomspon I I used to more often sometimes when classes, so the seventh graders used to do like dystopian literature circles and I would get to facilitate some of them. And some teachers have like amazing, and they do it at my daughter's school to, where you know role assignments, you know, so someone's the historian and you know, and it's so great when you have kids who are really like well prepared to sit back and just watch them. There we had he's not here anymore, but we had a great teacher, andrew ahern, who his lit circles were something to behold, like sometimes I'd just be sitting there and like be like these kids are they really? They just got that on their own like this is amazing. They were reading ghost by jason reynolds, which I love, and I was like well, I actually never thought about that, you know like 11 year old, um, but I think there's for our students, there's a lot of skill that is required to get to that place and I think, um, just situations and framing have have made it so that we're really focusing on building those skills back. So I think we've sort of like we did these things and now we kind of have to build those skills back, whether it's language skills or self-monitoring or whatever. Um, some kids are ready for that and others need some more help, um, but when they get there it's like so amazing to watch. And, um, my daughter's school does a lit circle at the end of the year where they invite parents in to participate with them and again, it's so great because, like, the kids are smarter than us for sure, you know. And it's interesting, like at my daughter's school, what was the book we read? Interesting, like, uh, at my daughter's school, oh, what was the book we read? Um, we read a book I can't think of the name but I'll email you but about a student who was sort of non-verbal but very, very white and, um, she struggles to sort of get what she needs in school. And my husband and I were explaining that when we were in school we never would have seen a student like that. They would have been like closed off in a separate part of the school and the younger kids were like, well, why didn't you make friends? We were like that's a great, we should have, but there wasn't any infrastructure where we would cross paths. And isn't it great that now you understand that that's the right thing to do, right, and it's so hard to get. Like you know, as kids get older it's harder to get parents to come in. But I would love to do that and in fact I'm going to start back up again, after the pandemic, our staff book club. So sometimes we read YA. I have to send out a Google form to get it sent out. But sometimes we historically read middle grade and YA and then my integrate adult books, because then they get you know, we, we have those conversations with each other and then can extend them to the kids if they see the book on our desk or whatever. I went in a lot of directions. 0:21:44 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my God, no, not like. Let's talk about the staff book. There goes, oh yeah, like, so many, so many cool things about this. I just love the idea of like. I mean I'm just thinking of like a unit arc, that right where we're talking about like, how do we, if we're guided by the question of like, how do we heal together? Right, I'm sure there are so many entry points for students to your point of like people are coming in in different ways and I'm sure they're linguistically, there's like different, like streets of expression and in terms of English and like. I just think there's so many opportunities to either, you know, verbalize and translate, because there are other peers that maybe have the Portuguese background and like a higher English proficiency. At the time I taught in a high school with students with like 30 different languages and they were all using English. So it's like having the having people who are in the same class, who speak the same home language as you or first language, is really helpful and so you know, I'm thinking being able to access that or like, if you're written or verbal, literacy is like one of those is higher. Just giving multiple access points for whether you're sharing verbally or in writing, like a gallery walk or something. I think there's probably so much opportunity for people to grapple with that question even before getting to the text. Oh yeah, and then being able to see like how do the people, how do the characters, how do the people in the, the stories, novels and the non-fiction like, how are they grappling with this question, be such a nice like motivating launching point, as like a hook right, and then having maybe the, the base be some sort of central text about like I don't know, I'm envisioning like UN declaration of rights or like something right, that's like central to justice yeah, um, one of the eighth grade ELA teachers looks at that with her students when they're reading um, to kill a mockingbird yeah for sure that's beautiful. 0:23:29 - Biz Thomspon I actually know with For sure, actually, no, with night, I think they look at that. I mean, we've done, we've really tried, especially, I think, because I helped with the curriculum planning for that group and the teachers have stayed the same. We've been able to do some some pretty neat things with trying to bring that text to life, text to life. So, um, one of our eighth grade teachers, miss latine, has a, a relative who works for um, it was like a the aclu or something, and she had him come and talk to the class. Um, after uh, this was a few years or maybe two years ago um, after the students read To Kill a Mockingbird and Just Mercy, we invited the Framingham police to come in and do round circle discussions with the students, which was actually like wonderful, we were very scared about how that was going to go and students asked really pointed questions. Like one student came in and the chief of police is wonderful, he's really the best and he said you know, like, where do you stand on Black Lives Matter? Like first question, right off the bat and the chief was like I am in absolute solidarity. I almost quit my job after I saw the George Floyd which, and hearing that from the students, was just like so eye opening, I think, because you know, especially in the public, like you know, kids have these and it's fair. They have these perceptions of the police and just mercy, you know, paints a lot of injustice in the justice system. Mercy, you know, paints a lot of injustice in the justice system and some of the teachers were like well, this is one you know, like we have to, we have to round out the discussion. And so we just had these classroom based discussions and the kids would ask, you know, even just like questions like how fun is it to ride in a patrol car? But it was good, like relationship building and community building, like relationship building and community building. And fortunately the Framingham PD, especially the people at the top who come here, have like one, the Lieutenant, I think, is like a trained social worker, and there are a bunch of people who like went through Framingham public school to like, no, all our staff when they come in, who it's sort of like you're looking at yourself Like I was this kid too. We've had. We have a Holocaust survivor come and speak to the students after their reading night. So you know, we we've really been trying to do these things and of course, that's not always so student centered Right, but trying to round out the experience. But I I think that's what we need to get back to more often is like more deep thinking, more critical thinking, more connection building between disciplines and ideas and within, like the arc of your ELA year. Um, because I think sometimes we get lost in the like multiple choice questions and it's always more engaging if you're using your brain with other students, with the outside world, and making those connections oh my gosh, yeah, and I I'm hearing so much community building and like community tapping into community expertise and like the guest speakers and things. 0:26:43 - Lindsay Lyons That is so cool. I'm I'm kind of wondering one of the things that I usually ask at the end of these like kind of wondering. One of the things that I usually ask at the end of these like kind of like you didn't dreaming episodes is like what is, what is the thing that you think will help? Like a teacher who went and like teaches this right, this unit, like this, like how did, how do you see that being, or how was it for you being? You know the, the best kind of teacher version of yourself in that moment, right, like, or like thinking about the kind of fulfillment it brings you to be able to kind of facilitate those connections. And I'm just thinking of that kind of. I guess the question is maybe about the value of this, not to just students but to educators as well who are engaging in this work. 0:27:24 - Biz Thomspon Yeah, so our two eighth grade ELA teachers are just like really exemplars. So one of them works for Facing History. He's been on the board and he just does such a brilliant job of like scaffolding and building and pulling out like pieces of nonfiction and you know, and really walking along with students as they're sort of learning about the Holocaust, building background knowledge. My roommate here, and with like a very like sensitive lens, if that makes sense, he's really an expert in that regard and um, we also collaborate. All three of us collaborate very well together and, um, his counterpart, emily latine, is like she could rip up the greatest lesson in like 15 minutes. It would be greater than anything I had ever taught. Like she gets the, gets the, all the accommodations, all the, you know adjustments for language capacity, visuals, like the most beautiful slides, like perfectly organized and sensical like worksheets to accompany you know'll do um like round tables where students are walking around and looking at images and right, you know silent conversations just between the two of them. They are able to capture like all the humanity that's necessary, all the background knowledge building and the sort of like making everything as accessible as possible, and I think they're really the magic. Then they come to me and I just step in and say like, well, we could add this. You know, I'm like the car salesman. They really do the groundwork and like a super beautiful way, and they will also be the first to acknowledge when something is isn't working and see how, what they can do to make it work better. And I think that's always the key. I mean, this is nothing nobody knows, but there's nothing wrong with saying like this isn't working anymore. We need to take a new approach, or I found this thing that now is better than what we did before, and I think openness to that is also super important. 0:29:44 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. I love that you get to collaborate with awesome colleagues, and I also. The PSA embedded in that message is like talk to your librarian for those ideas of like right, where do we go with this? This text is getting old. 0:29:56 - Biz Thomspon Give me some ideas, yeah yeah, yeah, and that's the thing is that you know everyone's so busy. I understand that as a classroom teacher, but I often advertise them. Like I didn't have time to read books when I was an ELA teacher I didn't. I could read like a few. I was grading papers, I was doing all this crazy stuff like I didn't have time to read. And so I look at school library journals. So even if I haven't read it, like I know what's out there. I know what's good and not good for our students too. Right, like, because sometimes what critics think is good is like not at all what the kids here care about. Right. So I often advertise like you need nonfiction to support that lesson? I'll let me do it. You don't have to spend your time doing it. You need someone in the community to come. I'll do that. I'll definitely. If you have a good library, use them because I love it. Like I'm such a nerd. People are like I don't want to bother you. I'm like, no, this is my favorite thing to do. 0:30:59 - Lindsay Lyons You're not bothering me at all. I love this. I so love it and actually, yeah, if people want to like get in touch with you, connect with you if they don't have relationships with their library librarian if they ask you. 0:31:10 - Biz Thomspon I don't want to. 0:31:10 - Lindsay Lyons I don't want to be the job if people are curious to know, like some of, uh, the things you're working on. Is there a place that they could reach out to you or just see the work that the middle school is doing? 0:31:19 - Biz Thomspon so what's hard is that the school district decided to change our whole, the whole district's web presence this weekend, so but we can link later to the yeah so um, there is a link to my library page but it's sort of like the corporate school district stuff, but my email is there. Um, and you know also, I think, other credit too. To go back to John, john Garrigan and I started at the same time and a lot of people, like my roommate there, was just saying like, how does how does he? Because he comes in to our schools like once a month or whatever, and sets up a table and the kids know him. And she was like how does he get that to happen? But it's so natural, like it's just so we work together so nicely that even he I'll go to him and be like, okay, what's like? What manga do I need? What do you think about this? So you know also, your public librarians can be very, very helpful. If you don't have school librarians in your school, you know, get to know your public librarians, because they can be super helpful too, and especially as a community resource, because they also know everybody. 0:32:27 - Lindsay Lyons I love that because I actually didn't even know until I was on the Framingham library page. I was like a patron of Framingham yeah. 0:32:33 - Biz Thomspon I did not know that there was a teen, like person, like a specialist who specializes in teen and there's a children's specialist right so the children's specialist will go to the elementary schools and help them, like with summer reading, or they'll do activities or like they're really wonderful yeah. 0:32:52 - Lindsay Lyons That is so cool. You are a wealth of information and knowledge. Thank you so much for talking with us today, and I'm so excited for listeners to learn all of this from you when the episode airs. So, thank you, I'm just, I'm trying. 0:33:09 - Biz Thomspon I'm by no means a model. I'm just showing up. Transcribed by https://podium.page
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In this episode, we speak with Laura Brenner, Chief Program Officer at Discovering Justice, a non profit in Boston, MA. She discusses her journey from an elementary school educator to a civic education leader, elaborating on the "Children Discovering Justice" curriculum, a collaborative initiative aimed at fostering classroom democracy and empowering young minds to actively engage in their communities.
Even before taking on her role with Discovering Justice, Laura has extensive experience in this space. She has spent the last 15 years working towards equity through public education—teaching students, coaching teachers, and developing curriculum. Laura began her career teaching elementary school in Boston, and has gone on to pursue both a Masters in Teaching and Masters in School Leadership as she pursues work outside the classroom. The Big Dream Laura’s big dream for education is to see all schools as places that equip students with the knowledge and skills to be engaged in their communities. She envisions a world where students, through inquiry and engaging practices, feel connected to their classroom community, school, and broader society. Laura believes this is possible by empowering young people to dismantle systems of oppression, embrace classroom democracy, and foster a joy of learning. Mindset Shifts Required A significant mindset shift that Laura highlights is recognizing that all educators are civics educators. She emphasizes that civics is not confined to a single subject but is embedded in everyday teaching practices. Whether it's teaching graphing using voting data or resolving playground disagreements, these activities all contribute to civic education. We need to start thinking of ourselves as civics teachers, especially early elementary educators, so it becomes something we all have a stake in. Action Steps To teach civics in our day-to-day classroom activities and begin a discussion around justice with students, educators must take brave actions. Here are three steps to put it into practice: Step 1: Prioritize time for civics education. It’s important that administrators and educators intentionally include instructional minutes for civics and social studies, the most marginalized subject. Studies have shown a correlation between social studies learning with student engagement, social-emotional learning, and literacy achievement! Step 2: Integrate civic skills throughout the day. In addition to intentional curriculum and teaching time, educators can also use daily practices to instill civic skills and language throughout the day. For example, you can create a classroom culture where you talk about taking different perspectives or practicing empathy. Step 3: Start a civics-based curriculum in your classroom. Educators can begin with Module Zero of the "Children Discovering Justice" curriculum, which focuses on foundational skills like identity, community, perspective-taking, and respectful listening. Challenges? One challenge Laura addresses is the misconception that discussing politics or civics in the classroom is inappropriate. There’s a fear from many educators and administrators around the topics, but avoiding them can only increase that fear. Instead, it’s important to foster inquiry-based learning, teaching students how to think critically and form their own ideas and opinions. Another challenge is the overloaded plates of educators. Laura asserts that civics education is not an additional burden but rather the foundation of all teaching, crucial for preparing students to be engaged community members. One Step to Get Started One practical step for educators to take is to equip themselves with tools and resources to incorporate civics language, concepts, and vocabulary into their classroom. Educators can start with incorporating just one lesson from Module Zero of the "Children Discovering Justice.” This initial step can help educators see the value and practicality of integrating civics education into their classrooms, setting the stage for a more comprehensive implementation. Instead of adding more to their plate, this is their “plate”—the foundation of everything we do as educators. Stay Connected You can connect with Laura by email, and learn more about her work with Discovering Justice by following them on Linkedin, Instagram, or their website. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Laura is sharing the Children Discovering Justice K-3 civics curriculum with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 185 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT Okay, laura Brenner, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 0:00:07 - Laura Brenner Thank you, thanks for having me. 0:00:09 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, I am really excited about our conversation because your job and what you do is like just makes my heart sing. So I'm really really excited to get into it and I think one of the big initial questions that I asked just kind of off the bat is a nice framing question. We will have folks who have just heard kind of your bio at the front end of the episode and so just wondering now, like is there anything else that's important for listeners to know about you, your work, anything you want them to keep in mind as we jump into our conversation? 0:00:40 - Laura Brenner Yeah, I think you know I have a really exciting job now being able to be at the intersection of civic education and nonprofits and schools and districts, and so you know the role I have now is chief program officer at Discovering Justice. But certainly at my core I'm an elementary educator and I think my lens for the work has just shifted a bit once I left the classroom. So now I get to work with educators and instructional leaders in schools and districts all across Massachusetts and it's allowed for our curriculum that we've developed to be what it is because it has so many different perspectives integrated into it, making sure we can meet the needs of students and teachers across the state. And I would just add that, like I'll be talking about this curriculum today called Children Discovering Justice, and I have the privilege of being able to talk about it a lot at professional development and, you know, at different meetings. But the collaboration that has gone into this curriculum, I think, is just a. It's a huge testament to the expertise and the passion of educators and administrators who've had a hand in it. So there's so, so many people from our staff at Discovering Justice. We have a curriculum developer, victoria Suri, who's really taken this curriculum to the next level, to consultants. We've worked with One in California, katie Henry's Meisners. These are all educators and district leaders who've really helped to conceptualize the units, teachers who've helped to give feedback. So it's such a collaborative joint effort and I think that's helpful to just consider as we start the conversation. 0:02:23 - Lindsay Lyons That is a beautiful framing. Thank you for that, and I and I think you spoke a little bit to this the idea of with all of that collaboration comes the ability to then make sure that all of students' needs and interests and passions and identities are all kind of reflected and appreciated. And so I'm I'm wondering this may or may not connect with what you had been thinking you were speaking to for the freedom dreaming question, but I love asking this question of right, like Dr Bettina Love talking about freedom dreaming as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, and certainly that's so critical to what you do. So wondering if you can share what is that big dream that you hold for education with that in mind, yeah, I mean absolutely. 0:03:03 - Laura Brenner I love that idea as well and often try to put that to teachers and some of the PLCs that I run is getting them to think about. What does a classroom look like, feel like, sound like, when students are empowered to do all of those things to speak freely, to be leaders, to analyze oppression, dismantle systems of oppression? I think for me it looks like kind of on a simpler, broader level, all schools being places that equip all students with the knowledge, skills and dispositions to be engaged in their communities, and I think that speaks to what you mentioned in terms be engaged in their communities. And I think that speaks to what you mentioned in terms of bringing in their identities and making sure that they are reflected in the units that they're seeing and the conversations that they're having, that it connects to their lives and interests. And then I think you know on a deeper level that every day in schools, students are, through inquiry, through engaging practices, through culturally responsive pedagogy, through the joy of learning, are just feeling connected, feeling connected to each other in that classroom community, or a classroom democracy, as I often call it, to their school, broader school community and democracy, and that they're taking those feelings and skills and enthusiasm and joy beyond the walls of the classroom and school as well, and applying that to you know, help heal some of our communities and leaders of generations who didn't have access to that type of learning and be able to bring that to their lives and ultimately affect a more just democracy at large. 0:05:03 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, there is so much that I love in the response. I mean from just the phrase classroom democracy, which I've never heard I love that To just that idea of helping heal communities right, that actually young people can and do often, you know, go out into the world and go into their communities, like today, and heal and heal things that are have not been healed, and I just think that's a huge framing around. I mean, one of the next questions they usually ask is around mindset shifts, and I think for me that has been a huge one in the last few years is thinking about do we, how do we both kind of study oppression and injustice and disrupt it and heal it and and not just kind of linger in the oppression but to enable students to be healers and kind of co-create that healing in spaces and community? And so I think for me that's been a mindset shift, certainly with this work, and I'm wondering if there are any that you've either noticed or coached folks on when doing kind of this curricular work and building those class democracies and teaching about justice. 0:06:06 - Laura Brenner If there's anything that you think listeners should know, yeah, yeah, I mean it's so interesting the idea of healing democracy and healing communities and whose responsibility is that. And I remember struggling as a new educator with this idea of it's on the youth to do do that or that. You know there's so much pressure today on students to really fix a broken world on so many levels. But you know, through my experiences working with students and in communities again through the lens of being a classroom teacher myself and then an instructional leader and a nonprofit leader and just being in classrooms every week now across the state, like I do see that it is whether we want it to be that way or not. It is where we're at. We need everyone to have a stake and everyone, to you know, be involved and have a voice. And I think that's part of the Children Discovering Justice curriculum is helping to facilitate the conversations around how can I use my voice to advocate for justice. But I think you know the other part of that is teachers' responsibility, and one of the mindset shifts that I will often highlight in my professional development to teachers and administrators is that all educators are civics educators and I know certainly when I was an elementary school teacher I didn't think of myself as a civics teacher. If people asked you know what subjects do you teach? I would definitely say math and reading. Maybe, depending on the semester, I would say science, potentially social studies, but I would never say civics teacher. But you know, thinking back now the lens that I have now, thinking back to my time in the classroom when my second graders were learning about sequential writing or details in their writing and they were showcasing that by teaching skills to their peers. So I would have a student write step-by-step instructions on how to shoot a basket or make a paper crane, like whatever skill they thought that they had to teach their classmates, that was civics. When my fourth graders were learning about graphing and math and they were graphing recent voting data in their community, that was civics. When my fifth graders were solving disagreements and coming to a compromise or hearing each other's perspectives after a blow up on the playground, that was civics. And I think as educators, we need to start thinking of ourselves as civics teachers, especially early elementary educators, because it's so much of what we do in every part of the day, no matter what subject we're in, we're teaching these skills and dispositions of civics. So I think that's a huge mindset shift for myself to just name it as that and I think, to lift up the expertise that naturally exists in elementary spaces, that elementary teachers have been doing forever but maybe haven't been calling it that. And then just that we all have a stake in this work, kind of circling back to what you know, what I originally said about, kind of our responsibility to to heal, and that in order for our democracy to be more fair, more just, for our policymakers to to be more representative of our community like we, we have to start with with civics and in and again seeing ourselves as educators of that work. 0:09:58 - Lindsay Lyons I love that idea that all teachers are civics teachers. This is so beautiful and you're right, like so much of it is just the way we do things, the way we do teaching, the way we do school, like it is built in, and just to name it is so powerful. I really, really like that, and I think so many people may be thinking you know, okay. So what does it look like to teach civics? Well, what does it look like to discuss justice with students, especially young students, right, and so I'm wondering about, like, the literal, brave actions that are required for this work, and either I don't know if you want to take this from kind of a broad lens or from like, what does the curriculum enable teachers to do with students? However you want to take it, I'd love to hear, like, what does it look like in practice? 0:10:41 - Laura Brenner Yeah. So, you know, I think the first brave action that comes to mind that has to be taken, that I see a lot more district leaders now doing, is prioritizing time. And that's a scary and sensitive and hard topic, like instructional minutes and scheduling and time, and you know it's. I think it's gotten even harder through the years. But I think that is a brave and necessary action. To make that you know dream a reality is prioritizing instructional minutes for social studies and civics. Social studies is the most marginalized subject. It's not tested until at least in Massachusetts, the eighth grade MCAS, a civics MCAS which was piloted last spring, and of course the communities that tend to focus mostly on tested subjects reading and math tend to be lower income communities that serve black and brown students and families, and those are the students that are often getting the least amount of civics and social studies. So I think prioritizing time and minutes in the schedule for it and then, you know, a brave action by educators is, even if time isn't given to you like to make the time to teach social studies and civics, knowing that not only is it important but it is so correlated to all these areas of success for our students. It's correlated, it's positively correlated to attendance, to engagement, to, you know, social emotional learning, to literacy achievement. They're the you know I always reference, especially the district leaders, the Fordham study a few years ago that shows more time, more instructional time in ELA does not enhance reading scores but social studies does enhance reading scores and that's primarily true for lower income students, multilingual learners and girls. Those are the three subgroups who it has the most dramatic effect on. So I think just prioritizing it, naming it as a priority, investing in, you know, quality curriculum, quality professional development for teachers to be able to further dig into civics as a pedagogy, and whether it's using, you know, our Children Discovering Justice curriculum or just integrating and embedding civic skills and language throughout the day. So you know naming the skills that you're practicing and deepening for students as an elementary educator, like perspective taking or empathy or debate. I think both of those things. It's the concrete you know time and minutes and it's the ongoing classroom culture and routines that you know time and minutes. And it's the ongoing classroom culture and routines that you know you're teaching and practicing and calling out to students on a day-to-day level. 0:13:43 - Lindsay Lyons I was just in a professional development workshop where a teacher named I said something about the election is a great opportunity to discuss, like what's happening in the world and current events and how do we frame that, and the response was we can't teach politics in school. And I was like, oh, we absolutely can like talk about politics and civic engagement and like there's a difference between political and partisan, and I think there's just a very big kind of narrative fear, avoidance, whatever around things now that are even more expansive than like who you're voting for right, and so I am imagining that that's a piece of a challenge. Like maybe teacher's face or admin face or communication with families comes up, whatever it is. I'm wondering, is that a challenge? How do you kind of coach folks through that? Or are there other challenges that maybe I'm not thinking of that might come to mind that we want to like prepare leaders or teachers for? 0:14:45 - Laura Brenner Yeah, I mean it's certainly a fear that I hear a lot from educators or from school administrators, from families even, and I think, like a lot of fears the more we away from you know a day post-election or pre-election, like we were. It's coming down to that idea of inquiry-based learning. We're teaching students how to think and not what to think, with the skills to be able to articulate their points with evidence, that we want them to have media literacy and to be able to critique the sources that they're getting inundated with, whether it's through social media or online or their family. We want them to be able to debate respectfully, agree to disagree, you know, hear and respect other perspectives. Like those things are the most important part of our work in the classroom and those are, I mean, we can see them lacking in our broader world. We can see them those skills lacking in adults that I'm sure we can all you know name in our lives. Where else will students learn that Like they? It has to happen in the classroom and we have to give space and time for that. Now, it doesn't happen in every grade level with a conversation about what reproductive right should look like. It might happen in our first grade lesson on voting. Students are voting for what pet they would want as a class pet or a favorite ice cream flavor, like they're just starting to understand the idea that they have choices and a voice and opinions that can be different than those in their classroom space then, can be different than those that they eat lunch with or play with at recess. That that's okay and actually valued, to have different perspectives, that we have reasons for our perspectives that can be shared with evidence that we can change our ideas. You know we'll do. You know we'll have the conversation of students might go to one side of the room or the other to vote with their bodies on something and then see if anyone can be convinced to move to another side and just again name that and lift up that skill of being able to change your mind when you learn more information. So those are the conversations and the activities that we have to have and be doing in the classroom and yeah, it just looks different in every grade level. 0:17:28 - Lindsay Lyons Do you mind speaking to us? I love all of these activities and just kind of that approach of it's going to look different at each grade level, content wise and the skills just kind of keep building. Do you mind taking us through, like what are some, either questions that kind of frame, some of these units throughout the grades or any sort of like particular lessons or activities that you personally love? That's part of the curriculum. 0:17:53 - Laura Brenner Yeah. So I would say our module zero in all the grades is probably my now favorite module and it's something that we didn't create originally. We started with module one, which was about justice justice in our lives and students thinking about what we call little J justice, so justice on the playground in their classrooms, and then eventually, through the modules, they end up in module four, which is the civic action module, where they start to explore that big J justice, so some type of systems level change. We push them to be thinking even as young as kindergarten about root cause by asking you know, why might this challenge exist, why might this problem exist? Module zero was something that we added through teacher feedback, which, again, I'll name as another kind of brave action required for this work is listening to teachers. I mean, much of my time is spent in classrooms, in PLCs, in, you know, collaborative work sessions and professional development, where teachers are sharing their feedback, whether it's on large scale or, you know, a small critique on an activity in a lesson and we're applying that the next day or week because it's a living curriculum. It's on Google Drive, you know we're constantly updating and revising. So you know, I think, just listening to teachers in that. But that's how module zero came to be, with teacher feedback on like we'd love something more foundational that we can use at the beginning of the year in September and October to just build those skills. So we have six lessons in that module on identity, community perspective taking, agreeing, disagreeing, listening and asking questions. So I think probably the perspective taking is my favorite one, just because I've seen, again as early as kindergarten, students really grabbing onto that vocabulary and applying it and integrating it into their daily life. I remember I was doing my principal internship actually at a school that a teacher was piloting our original CDJ curriculum a few years ago and she was having a student who was having a challenging time at recess, got into an argument with a peer. I took him into my office to kind of deescalate and he was just so mad and frustrated and he looked at me and said, through his like tears and bunched up face, he's like I just have a different perspective. And again, this is like a JK student. So you know that's the language is something that students are thinking like. They're thinking in that way anyways and I think giving them that language helps to empower them to then go the next step of you know understanding and applying what perspective taking means and how. You know having different perspectives can be challenging but helps our community or democracy actually be a better place. And again, some activities around agreeing, disagreeing. You know going to one side of the room or the other ways to just visually show students that we all have different perspectives is, I think, a great way to highlight that in early education. 0:21:24 - Lindsay Lyons I love all of this. I love that story. I just yes, this is so good and the power of, I think, particularly if so, I taught high school and so particularly for teachers or administrators who maybe taught higher grades like not knowing what is possible for the younger grades, it's so powerful to hear that story of, yes, this totally works with kindergartners. It looks different but it is. It's the same kind of values and practices and it's highly possible and valuable, and so I just really appreciate you naming that for even maybe even a principal of a high school who's like okay, let me advocate for the elementary schools in my district to have this so that when they get to high school you know like we are equipped with all of these skills and we don't have to kind of teach or patch things that haven't been used or practiced prior to coming into that space. 0:22:14 - Laura Brenner So I think this is kind of everybody's business that young children are getting this kind of education Absolutely, and my hope is that the more students that are doing this in an early age we're going to see the result and the effect of that when they're in middle school and when they're in high school They'll come in with this vocabulary, with the dispositions to really value their voice in their community, to believe that they have a say, to know some pathways to get their voice heard and that it won't be there won't be so many gaps when students do maybe have more formal access to that as they're older. 0:22:53 - Lindsay Lyons I hope there's a research study in progress at some point, because that would be super cool. I would love that. That sounds amazing. So one thing that I think sometimes we get these big conversations on this podcast and we're like, okay, here's this big goal of implementing this whole curriculum. For example, I'm wondering what is one thing that a leader or teacher could do as soon as they end the episode to just kind of get them started with either looking into the curriculum or doing a particular practice in their classroom, to kind of build the foundation. What do you suggest is like a good starting step here? 0:23:31 - Laura Brenner suggest is like a good starting step here. Yeah, I think you know we see implementation on a really wide spectrum and encourage that. I think you know part of being educators ourselves everyone who's had a hand in developing this curriculum has come from the classroom and I think that's very evident when you look at the curriculum and unfortunately a rare thing when we see curriculums. So you know there are many teachers out there who don't necessarily teach the lessons of children discovering justice but they're just grabbing resources or materials. You know a lot of pull out educators who might take the civil discourse sentence stems and use that in some of their group discussions. Or use our virtual read aloud library and just put a book on during snack time. Or, you know, might take our vocabulary word wall and and teach some of the words during their phonics block, even as a way to just integrate some of those civics vocabulary and concepts without having a specific social studies or civics block. So I think, looking at those additional materials, you can find them at the bottom of the teacher guide or if you click into individual lessons, you can find them at the bottom in additional materials. So I think that's a good starting place and then I would encourage folks to give one lesson a try in that module zero, especially in the fall, you know, september, october, even November, just reminding students what it means to be a community, to listen respectfully, to value all of our perspectives. Even trying one lesson, I think, will break some of that maybe fear or barriers that this is too either challenging to teach or that it's too much on our plate to teach. I think that, you know, can be some pushback we get sometimes of like, of course, our plates are so beyond full. As educators, as elementary educators, you know we're teaching every subject. But what I'll often say to that is like this is the plate, it's not something added to it really tried to make the resources as flexible as possible to integrate it smoothly into what you're already doing. But the work that this is like that is why I think most of us are educators is not that we necessarily like want our students to become mathematicians or to become, you know, the best authors, like that's great if they will do those things. Like we want them to follow their passions. But before all of that like at the foundation is that they're prepared, just prepared to be engaged people in their community, to be connected to where they live and who they live with. You know, we're in a growing interconnected world on every level, and just that we're preparing students to be successful in that, whatever they, you know, choose to do. So it is the plate, it is the work, it is why we're here. 0:26:43 - Lindsay Lyons I love that that it is the plate. Yes, that is such a common thought and, like you said rightly so, we have so much going on. It is the plate. Yes, that is such a common thought and, like you said rightly so, we have so much going on. It is the plate, though. That is great. I'm going to use that. If that's okay with you, I'll credit you. I think one of the things, too, that listeners might be thinking is, or readers of the blog might be thinking is, where do I access that curriculum? So we will link that. Thank you so much for sharing that with folks, and so we'll link that access to the curriculum in the blog post for this episode. So anyone driving and feeling like I need to remember to come back to this you can doing in their own lives and their either work lives, personal lives. I think we always, as educators, are kind of lifelong learners, and so this question can be work related or it can be completely separate just for fun. But what have you been learning about lately as a human? 0:27:40 - Laura Brenner Yeah, such a good question. And yes, I think the educators are ones that are constantly craving education themselves. That's, educators are ones that are, you know, constantly craving education themselves. And so, as tempted as I am to answer it in a work-related way with, like, here's all the books I've been reading and the research I've been diving into on civic action and elementary level, you know, I think a lot of us are at a point in our careers and in our worlds and lives where we're trying harder to focus on balance and how, you know, we can do that, we can sustainably do this work. And so something I've been learning about lately on that on that note is really just grounding, trying to do something every day that grounds myself. It's so easy, you know, even when you leave the classroom, it's so easy to get caught up in this work, feeling so so urgent that you know every second, every five minutes matters in it. But even taking 30 seconds, I'm trying to do 30 seconds every day where I just put my bare feet on the ground outside in the grass and just do three deep breaths in and out. So that is something I've been learning lately and trying really hard to implement in practice. 0:28:59 - Lindsay Lyons That is really, really good. Thank you for adjusting that in such a thoughtful way. That is going to like honor, where everyone is as they're engaging with this conversation, so thank you. And then I think folks are going to want to where everyone is as they're engaging with this conversation, so thank you. And then I think folks are gonna wanna follow up with you and get the curriculum, all of the things. But I know you're constantly doing really innovative work, so how can folks either learn more about you, connect with you, follow the work of Discovering Justice Generally? Where are the places? 0:29:26 - Laura Brenner Yeah, so I love that you're sharing the curriculum. Again, it's a free resource, totally open source on Google Drive. We're constantly adding to it, updating it. We're going to be creating some election focused modules to come out this October, so to be more focused specifically on the 2024 presidential election, so you'll be able to access those resources. On our website, discoveringjusticeorg, you can sign up either for our organization's newsletter or, if you go to programs, children Discovering Justice, you can sign up for the Children Discovering Justice specific newsletter and that will really focus on any updates to the curriculum. You know we're translating it now, so we're going to have it in Portuguese and Spanish as well as English and, like I said, those election modules will come out. So follow us on that. And then you know, certainly we have social media at Discovering Justice and folks are welcome to send me an email lbrenner at discoveringjusticeorg or connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more and just to collaborate. Again, this circling back to the beginning the product that is Children Discovering Justice is just. It is a shared child of so many amazing, amazing educators, administrators, staff who have just poured so much of their expertise and their time and their passion and joy for learning into this work, and so the more people that have their hands, their eyes on the curriculum, whose voice goes into it, I think, the better it is for that. So we welcome all the connections and all the eyes and ears and conversations. 0:31:11 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing, laura. Thank you so much. It has been an absolute pleasure, thank you. Thank you for having me, lindsay. Transcribed by https://podium.page
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We’re already over a month into this school year and season of the podcast—half a decade of episodes, here we come!—and want to share some of the updates for this season. Better late than never!
Mid-way through last season, I started experimenting with monthly mini series related to key topics I coach on and honestly just love learning about. I’ve tried to align the publication of these episodes with the time frame educators have typically expressed interest in discussing these areas. I’d also love feedback if you have topics for mini series I should add or suggestions for shifting when topics appear on the pod. With that, let’s explore the lineup for this season! Updated Topical “Mini Series”
For a personalized professional learning experience on one of the topics discussed in this episode, I’m sharing 4 playlists with you for free:
And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 184 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Welcome to season five. A little late we actually started a month ago but welcome to season five of Time for Teachership. I am so excited for episode 184. And although we're a bit late on the season premiere episode, as we've already premiered, we're back to school. We're in already a month, at least in the Northeast, but more in different parts of the country, least in the Northeast, but more in different parts of the country, and I just really want to name in this fifth season of the podcast half a decade of episodes. Here we go. I'm so excited I want to share some of the updates for this particular season. Better late than never. So midway through last season I started experimenting with monthly mini series. I started experimenting with monthly mini series and each mini series is related to key topic areas that I coach on and, honestly, I just personally love learning about and have lots of thoughts that I want to share and lots of things that I want to learn from guests on the show. So you might have noticed that that's been going on. I've tried to align the publication of these episodes with the time frame. Educators have typically expressed interest in discussing these areas. So, of course, at different time points throughout the year you're thinking about different things and different topics feel salient in different parts of the year more so than others. Now, I know that's not a perfect science and different folks are in different parts of their school year and different topics resonate with different people kind of across the board. So I'd actually love some feedback if you have topics for miniseries that I should add or suggestions for shifting when those topics appear on the podcast. With that, let's explore the lineup and the hopes and dreams for this particular season or the remainder of this particular season. Here we go. Updated topical miniseries will include one on systems transformation. Now in this series we'll learn about developing professional learning structures, developing equitable systems of competency-based assessment as one potential structure to build out, and advancing racial justice with an intersectional lens. So thinking about all three of these these are kind of all niche topics that kind of intersect around, as always, equity, and thinking about the system-wide transformation of maybe an entire school or an entire district, an overhaul of and co-creation of, an entire policy in a particular area, right. So there's a lot going on here, including a lot of adaptive leadership around justice, around change and leading change. Right, there's a lot of moving pieces in this part and so really excited to kind of keep bringing in specific topics within the umbrella of how to lead change and transform systems. In the last month you heard our mini series on systems transformation or you read the blog post on systems transformation. So you've gotten some insight too into kind of how broad and almost cerebral and like theoretical and also kind of the intimate like ways of being with one another, being in one another's community and how to engage with folks. So it's kind of big and it's kind of narrow and it's kind of atopical and it could be topical. So there's a wide range here that I'm really excited to explore with folks. The second mini series topic is curriculum design, and so we've had this one from the get-go. In this series we'll really learn about situating curricular thinking and planning within justice-based frameworks. So there is some theory. But it's also like how do we do this thing right? How do we make it really hyper-practical, how do we co-create units using a step-by-step process, for example, and thinking about how we explore those curriculum design possibilities. I'd love to, as educators are willing to share, share kind of success stories of what folks have created in terms of units that they have implemented in their class and want to share with others and or thinking about like a development on the show, as we've done before in our unit, dreaming series of ideas that we kind of co-construct and we can witness the process in the podcast episode of that creation. Also in this section, really excited about kind of leaders stories of facilitating teacher co-developed curricula. So if you are a school or district leader or a department chair thinking about how do we approach fueling, fostering, dreaming up this beautiful curriculum when you're leading a team or when you're leading folks who may create the same curriculum that you end up with and everyone ends up teaching the same thing, or you're leading a staff or a team that is going to actually develop a bunch of different curricula and what are kind of the key components or process steps of developing that so excited to hear both from educators and leaders in this space. Miniseries topic number three leadership. There are so many theories of leadership and so many aspects of leadership that I think honestly all of these pieces tie to leadership. But this mini-series specifically is thinking about shared leadership approaches. So in school sometimes we call this distributive leadership. I think shared is nice because it typically encompasses students and communities more than our distributive, which is typically teachers. So all of the things, all of the stakeholders involved in shared leadership and that kind of co-creation of change as opposed to top-down change that we ask everyone to quote, buy into and so kind of mindset shifts around this practical pieces, around this theory, around this, as well as adaptive leadership. And again, these pieces really touch all of the other topics. But adaptive leadership, really thinking about how we apply that theory of adaptive leadership and leading change and leading longstanding change where there's no clear solution and we actually need shared leadership approaches to co-develop the solution. So these really go hand in hand, which is why they're categorized together in this mini episode. So, when we're leading justice-oriented change in our educational communities, how do we kind of take the theory into practice in the effort of leading change in any aspect? Right, we talked about leading change in the systems, transformation, which is really transforming maybe one particular area, and leadership. It's kind of like how do I build these skills globally, build these structures globally in my educational community? So I'm ready for anything. So I've kind of built the system so that it is nimble and agile and whatever. The word adaptive, I suppose right, and we are ready for anything that comes our way because the system is already in place. I see that kind of as like a preemptive we don't know exactly what we're focused on yet. We're focused on building the structure, so we're ready, All right. Number four this mini series, is a culture of discussion, and I think about this one as really the foundational layer of a lot of things that you would do either in your class or your staff community. So in this series we're learning about creating a positive and not toxic positivity, positive but truly positive, values driven and appropriately challenging culture. This could again relate to class culture, which is typically how I conceive of it from my teacher brain first, but also, of course, relevant to that staff level culture or even again, if you're a department lead or chair your team level culture. So, creating that values aligned, appropriately challenging, right, Everyone's kind of in their zone of proximal development environments, where tasks are building my skills, Right, really feeling like I'm in that flow from chicks in the highs theory. I'm in that flow state. We've talked on the podcast before with Angela Watson about this idea of flow state. That was a great episode, Check it out. We want everyone to be there, staff and students alike. So that requires that positive foundation of values, alignment, and that all the tasks are appropriately challenging, not too much, but also not overly scaffolded, because then they're going to be easy and boring and we're just going to tune out right. So what this does ultimately is, when we lay this foundation of belonging and values and appropriate challenge, we are laying the foundation for things like generative discussions, which could include discussions of hard things that are often kind of high emotion topics. I've been calling them Things like political conversations, particularly in the midst of an election year excuse me, presidential election year which only happens every four years, right? So this is big, this is in the news, this is kind of in everyone's conversation. Kids are going to pick up on this. Staff are certainly going to be aware of this, so we want to be able to invite conversation. One of the things that I was recently talking to a social studies group about is you know, I've heard folks talk before about the distinction between politics or political classrooms and partisan classrooms. So someone shared that you know we shouldn't be talking politics in class and I said well, actually, especially in social studies, we should be. We can be a political classroom. Part of our standards are to talk about politics and political structure and have political discourse and be civically engaged, Like this is part of our standards, particularly in Massachusetts, very embedded in those standards now, and that's certainly one of the things in the framework Partisan, I believe, is what this teacher was talking about. Where it's. We're not telling students what to think, we're not saying you need to vote for this candidate because da, da, da, da, da right. And so I think we often avoid right thinking about adaptive and justice-based things. Right, we often avoid conversations that may bring up high emotions or we're not so sure or we're uncomfortable. What we really want to do is create foundations for generative discussions where our hearts and our heads are kind of full right, Our minds are, like, appropriately challenged, we're using evidence-based conversation, we are fueling change, opening up possibilities for justice, and we're not kind of entrenched in our positions, we are open to understanding and seeking to understand one another. Right, and we are creating and deepening those relations in our community, whether it's staff to staff, staff to student or student to student. So, again, this culture of discussion miniseries is all about laying that foundation that's going to enable us to get to those generative discussions of things like politics, current events, figuring out how we live together with one another in this shared community, all while navigating things that come up like high emotions, like that kind of fear of saying the wrong thing, like the fear of being harmed, like the navigating high emotions. All the pieces right. So we want to make sure that foundation is in place before we go there, and we do want to be able to go there. So this mini series is really taking you on the journey. Sometimes we'll start with the foundation pieces belonging, values driven stuff and then sometimes we'll talk about appropriate challenge and appropriate scaffolds and not hyper scaffolding, and sometimes we'll get to that kind of top tier, where we ultimately want to go, which is like what are those discussions looking like? What are the protocols for them? How do we literally engage and how do we support that engagement? How do we structure it so that it is something that we value and deepens our community and our capacity and not restrict it or harm it? Okay, and now our fifth one. This is a new one this year. This is our fifth mini series. Topic I love social studies curriculum. I'm always talking about social studies curriculum, but I also always want to speak expansively or share expansively about various topics, kind of the how to create curriculum, regardless of the grade or subject you teach, and I also really love social studies. So we have in Massachusetts the Department of Education, called DESE, here has partnered with organizations to create a Massachusetts aligned curriculum for social studies in elementary and middle school and that continues to be built out and I am very grateful to be part of the coaching work to prepare teachers to implement this and work with teachers to figure out like what this looks like and feels like and is implemented like with the students in the classroom. So really grateful to all the brilliant folks I get to work with on this project. And this curriculum is called Investigating History, so let's talk about what this might look like. In this series we'll dig into the Massachusetts created open source so anyone can access it social studies curriculum. It currently spans grades five through seven for the public. It is being piloted in grades three through four and we'll explore things that are relevant beyond folks in Massachusetts and beyond folks who are using this specific curriculum, because, again, I want it to be relevant for anyone who is listening and so, even if you don't teach social studies, I do feel like, again, the pedagogy behind it is really important. So I'm hoping in this series to partner up and have guests on the show who have implemented the curriculum with students. So these would be the teachers who are piloting and, for grade three and four, piloting and teaching the full curriculum for grades five through seven, maybe some students. If we're excited to get those students on and talk about what it's like to experience this curriculum. We could talk with folks from the state, from Massachusetts, from DUSY, and think about what they are thinking and observing. We could bring on folks from Tufts that they have a really cool research project over there around democracy in classrooms and they're doing a huge research study on this curriculum and its impact on students. I think that would be so fun to explore. We could also bring on curriculum writers. I mean, my hopes are high, so very excited. But again, I think relevant for social studies and wherever you teach, with whatever curriculum you teach. And again, just back to the pedagogy roots, what I'm really excited to do, because this is an inquiry-based curriculum, we can explore the inquiry routines, of which there are three, and core principles, or what they call key instructional principles, of which there are four that really form the foundation of the curriculum and are good for any curriculum and I hope to talk to all those folks and we'll keep you posted on that. We'll look for that in probably the spring. So that is the preview for season five for the remainder of the year. Get excited, I'm going to link in terms of freebies for this episode. I'm gonna link all the things that might be relevant to you related to each of particularly the first four miniseries I discussed. So in the blog post for this episode, which you can get at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 184, I'm going to give you a personalized professional learning experience based on whichever topic you are most interested in learning about. So I'll be sharing four playlists with you for free on that blog post. Those include my systems transformation playlist, curriculum playlist, leadership playlist and culture of challenge and discussion playlist. So again, grab those at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 184. And I'm looking forward to connecting with you in the next episode. Transcribed by https://podium.page
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
November 2024
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