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In this solo episode, we’re talking about unlearning Thanksgiving at home. Regular listeners of the podcast will likely know that the story of Thanksgiving taught to young kids in the US is often inaccurate, and yet, many of us struggle with how to talk about it — we’re either uncomfortable with the topic itself or don’t have the knowledge to really engage in it.
Here, we want to equip you to have conversations with your family and children, offering strategies to discuss politicized historical truths with family during Thanksgiving gatherings. The episode introduces resources you can use to guide conversation, aiming for a more inclusive and accurate representation of history. Why? This is an important topic to discuss simply because many of us don’t actually feel comfortable doing so! In a 2024 poll by CBS News, about 71% of Americans said they would try to avoid discussing politics on Thanksgiving, reflecting the discomfort many feel around these topics. However, the truth of history is often politicized, and it's crucial to seek the truth. We want to center Indigenous voices in our country's history, challenging myths or falsehoods taught to us as children. What? There are many ways and access points to begin having conversations about Thanksgiving — the truth of Thanksgiving — with your family. Here are some simple steps you can take to get started: Step 1: Visit native-land.ca with your child to see what land you’re living on and which Indigenous Nation it belongs to. You can engage them in a simple notice-and-wonder activity to explore Indigenous land history. Step 2: After acknowledging the land you’re living on, you can correct the Thanksgiving record. Pulling from the state of Massachusetts’ Investigating History Curriculum, you can use a tool like the Abbey Museum’s myths and truths cards to challenge ideas around Thanksgiving. For example, one card says:
Step 3: Going a bit deeper, start incorporating books by Indigenous authors into family discussions. Some great options for young children include:
For older children, some recommendations include:
Step 4: In addition to stories and books, you can engage in the following resources during Thanksgiving:
Step 5: As you read and engage in these books, you can draw on tips from episode 236 to engage your children in challenging conversations. You can also utilize our family coaching opportunities through EduBoost for support in handling these challenging conversations with your children. Final Tip: As you approach these sometimes-challenging conversations, model humility and a commitment to lifelong learning by admitting when you don't have all the answers and engaging in learning alongside your children. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my IH Curriculum Link with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 238 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:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 238, unlearning Thanksgiving at Home. We know that regular listeners and readers of Time for Teachership likely know the story of Thanksgiving taught to young kids in the US is likely inaccurate and we may not know how to talk about it with our kids or our families more broadly, or we may know the factual information but may be uncomfortable broaching the subject and want a little bit of support in doing so. That's what this episode is for. So here we go. In a 2024 poll by CBS News, about 71% of Americans said they're going to try to avoid discussing politics on Thanksgiving. That was reported in the Hill and we can link to that in the blog post. But that's like three out of four people just about that's a lot of people who don't want to discuss politics, and we know that the truth of history is often politicized, whether it should be or not, and so our goal in this episode is really to seek truth and center Indigenous voices in Indigenous history and in our country's history and unlearn kind of the myths or falsehoods that we have likely learned as young children living in the United States. If that resonates with you, if that was your experience. So here are some suggestions and again, speaking as a non-Indigenous person, I just I want to name that up front. And again speaking as a non-Indigenous person, I just I want to name that up front. We want to go find the resources written by, authored by, you know, advised by, created by Indigenous folks. And so first I'm going to direct us to native-landca, which is a website you can visit with your child and invite them to share just a simple notice and wonder what do you notice about this map of the land that we're occupying, that we're living on? Whose? Is it? Click into the Indigenous Nation when it names? What's really cool about the website is it names the Indigenous Nations that you're living on, many sometimes. There are many, right, it's not just one and you can click into them. They're usually live links to like the nation's page, like webpage, and so you can see like modern day tribal council and what initiatives are they into and what are some pictures of people living today. Just a whole load of resources to explore, to connect past and present. And if you feel like you need a little bit of support with how to get that conversation started, or you dive into the conversation and then you're like okay, I don't know how to bring this further A few episodes back, episode 236 of the podcast. We talked about some ideas for conversation starters or some prompts for question generation, so check that out if that feels like something you would like. Once you acknowledge the land that you're living on, correct the Thanksgiving record, I have a lot of resources in my brain from the Investigating History Curriculum which is the state's in Massachusetts, the state's Department of Education curriculum that they've co-created with EduCurious and Primary Source at different grade levels. 03:05 This one particularly is a unit from the third grade curriculum which was piloted this past school year, as we record this. So school year 24-25 is a pilot. It should be out for release soon but you can't access the pilot materials. You just have to complete a form and it's free to access. So I'm going to link that later in the blog post at the very end you can grab that. 03:26 But I want to first talk about an activity from the Abbey Museum. That are myths and truths cards. So again, this is located in Unit 2 of the IH curriculum, but it centers prominent myths or truth and your role is to guess whether it's true or false. So you could do this with children. You might do it with slightly older children. You might not do it with a preschool child. Also, just a content warning here. I'm going to read just three of them and in one in particular there is a lot of violence. So just a heads up if you want to kind of skim through the next two to three minutes of the podcast, if that is triggering for you, but also just want to name there. This is part of the third grade curriculum. So this is something that students should know happened and, depending on your background and your lived experiences and knowledge of history, this may be familiar and it may not. So if it's not, I want you to make sure you know that it has happened. Here we go. 04:26 The pilgrims invited the Indians to celebrate the first Thanksgiving. That's what's written on the first card, true or false? The answer card says false. The Wampanoag tribe, upon hearing gunshots from the Plymouth settlement, gathered approximately 90 men in fear that a battle was about to begin. Upon arriving at Plymouth and seeing the quote festivities, they then went out and brought back five deer and several turkeys. Again, native and Europeans alike were very familiar with harvest feasts long before 1621. So that's the card and I'm reading word for word what is on the card. So this might not be the same language that I would use, but it's part of the Abbey Museum's language. I'm just's also part of it, right? It's kind of this, oh right, like we need to be aware of even the language in the initial card or statement that we may hear in popular culture being something we need to actually rethink. 05:37 Okay, second card, and again the content warning for this one, if you want to skim through for a minute. The pilgrims and Indians became great friends. True or false? False Answer false. About a century later, theft of Indian lands by European settlers forced the Wampanoag to go to war to keep their homes. In 1637, english soldiers massacred some 700 Pequot men, women and children at Mystic Fort, burning many alive and shooting. Those that fled the colony of Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay Colony observed a day of Thanksgiving commemorating the massacre. A day of Thanksgiving commemorating the massacre, heavy stuff. And so you know, take care of yourself as you listen, take care of yourself as you introduce these ideas to children and again, consider the age of the children. This is from a third grade curriculum. Third one I'll read Thanksgiving has been celebrated every year since the first Thanksgiving in 1621. True or false? This is false. 06:32 Our modern celebrations of the Thanksgiving quote holiday date back only to 1863. President Lincoln named a national holiday during the Civil War in an attempt to promote solidarity and unity between the warring states. So just sit with that a minute. There are layers upon layers to unpack here. So again, especially with older students, students who have learned about the Civil War and enslavement in their curricula, in their social studies classrooms, that is a lot of layers to unpack there, right? So we're not only talking about the traumatic history of how white settlers are treating and massacring right Indigenous people, but we are also unpacking the fact that in a debate about the right to enslave people, we are seeking to lie about a nation's past and have this holiday that celebrates all of that violence, when we're talking about perpetuating violence in, you know, hundreds of years later. Layers upon layers. So of course there's a lot to unpack and that may feel very daunting, particularly if you yourself, as an adult, are just learning some of this history. There is certainly a lot. So, again, I highly recommend a couple things. 08:01 One, to go back to episode 236 for some just general conversation starters and how do you kind of approach conversations like this. I'll also link in that episode, excuse me, is also linked a resource about how to stay and give difficult conversations with children. So there's kind of a one pager that Kara Pranikov and I created actually for preschoolers and, you know, the adults and parents and educators of preschoolers, but can be used at any level. And the big kind of thing just want to name is that sometimes you don't know how to respond in the moment and if that is the case, that's okay. You can pause, say, hey, that's a really interesting question. I don't know the answer, I'm going to look it up and we'll come back to it. Or hey, I actually want to sit with us for a little bit. That's a really interesting point you're making. I want to sit with us. Let's return to this conversation later. 08:46 That is totally okay for your kids to know that you don't have all the answers, but you're honestly and authentically engaging with them and that maybe you're going to find the answers together. I think that's such a big piece to this right. If we're not willing to learn, if we're not willing to admit that we don't know the answer or we made a mistake or we used to say this term and now we've realized that was terrible and hurt someone's feelings. And you know, like all the things we do as parents and you know, like all the things we do as parents, as family members, as adults around young people, we want to model the humility, the desire to grow, to learn and be community members that seek justice and truth and, you know, perpetuate a sense of belonging in folks in our community. So the other piece of that and I'll talk about this at the end as well, but the other piece of that is that we are now offering family coaching. So live support, like fairly live as live as we can get asynchronously, but ask us a question and within 24 hours we'll get back to you with a possible response. So if you are in that moment, you could say we're going to pause the conversation and within 24 hours I will get back to you. Kiddo, I'm going to consult somebody to think about. You know my game plan here for the next few minutes. Okay, let's continue with our resources Now. 09:57 The rest of the episode is very resource heavy, so I highly recommend opening up the blog post or committing the blog post named memory. So, as always, it's lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog. Slash the episode number. So in this case it is 238, lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog slash 238. And then you can go ahead and access all of these great links. 10:18 So the Investigating History Grade 3 Resource List for the unit Unit 2, that we've been talking about, has a list of books by Indigenous authors that are excellent. I'm just selecting my favorites from that list right now, so I wanted to just name those. For kiddos, these are predominantly picture books. Berry song by Michaela Goad keep on them up. We actually won thanksgiving story, which is our family's favorite, by Daniel Greendeer, anthony Perry and Alexis Bunton, if you live during the plummet. Thanksgiving by Chris Newell excellent, excellent in terms of content, learning, less pictures. Pictures there's like a higher text to picture ratio than these other books in the list here. 10:55 But particularly for older kiddos or for your own learning, I mean, it's a quickly digestible. I think I read it in like an hour, hour and a half, maybe two hours, but it's like a. It's like 100 pages of, not a ton of text per page. There are some visuals. So you know you're thinking about again that like third grade, fourth grade, that's going to a good one to read together. Remember by Joy Harjo and we Are Water Protectors by Carol Lindstrom. These are all excellent for kiddos and, again, centering Indigenous stories, indigenous authors. 11:24 For older kids I would say middle high school as well as adults, I always like the young people versions of a people's history because I can read them and then hand over the same text to a young person like a teenager. For example, when I taught high school, this was always a really good thing. As a, it's like faster for me to read than the adult version, but it's also something I could say hey, look on this exact page, see my annotations, or let's have a conversation around the same exact text that is accessible to a younger person. So for that reason, I highly recommend An Indigenous People's History of the United States for Young People by originally by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who wrote the adult version, I think, and then it was adapted for young people by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese. Debbie Reese is phenomenal. She's an author and scholar viewer of children's books and she has an amazing website where she has just an unreal amount of commentary and just extensive reviews and it's called American Indians and Children's Literature. So we will link to that webpage as well in this blog post. 12:33 Okay, in addition to all of those stories and resources. We're just going to link a couple more things. There is a page on the National Museum of the American Indian website that are suggested activities for Thanksgiving or discussing Thanksgiving, and so I think the most compelling one to me because this excerpt was actually part of the grade three curriculum for investigating history that I got to see and experience this year and just was so thought-provoking personally is to read and discuss the Haudenosaunee's Thanksgiving Address. So you actually read through it. It's about two pages and it's about giving thanks right, like it's the actual giving of thanks to you know, nature and everything. I really think that that is worth your time to check that one out. But of course there's a lot more activities in there. Feel free to go through all of them. 13:28 And then I also want to share one that's actually on an educator webpage. It's an article that was shared by NEA so National Educators Association from Dr Star Yellowfish, and she has ideas for how to stop harmful kind of quote unquote traditional Thanksgiving activities. So if you are a family member who's like, yeah, I want to do this in my family, I want to talk about the real truth, I want to make sure we're not doing harmful activities, but actually, I also want to bring this to my kiddos school community, so that no kid has to learn like the fake history, the insulting quote, unquote history that is taught historically, taught in elementary schools, for example. You might have some language and even some activities and just even a landing page to go back to and share the link itself with school administration or teachers who you know are just maybe unfamiliar or just don't know exactly what to do, how to switch activities, like do we still talk about Thanksgiving? In what way do we Like all of that? She gives a lot of specific language scenarios and links to activities. For example, she talks about how making a feather headdress is actually offensive and feathers are sacred to indigenous communities. You do not want to do that. However, she gives a substitute activity for making something and kind of links to directions and like how to do that and what materials you would need to do that, and so she's like this is actually a way that is much more culturally accurate and also inoffensive, and so you know, do this instead. So she offers some nice replacement things if you're like oh, we set aside time to do this activity. Okay, well, here, check this out right. So I think that is another great resource. Again, that's ideas from Dr Star Yellowfish posted on the NEA website. 15:13 As a final resource, I've been talking about it a lot. I've been talking about it a lot over the last year, but the Investigating History curriculum has been really good at, I think, teaching a lot of people in Massachusetts, including myself, a lot about Indigenous communities, particularly in the grade three and four communities. Excuse me curricula, and while they're still in pilot mode, you can, as I said earlier in the episode, access them for free. You just have to complete a quick registration page earlier in the episode. Access them for free. You just have to complete a quick registration page. 15:44 And so just to note that today's resources that we named that were links within the IH curriculum, came from the grade three, unit two, cluster two set of lessons, and so we will link to that in a blog post as well. So today's blog post, one more time, can be accessed at lindsaybethlionscom slash blog, slash 238. And I do want to remind you one more time we are opening EduBoost up to families, so please feel free to check out that page for more information on the website as well, that's lindsaybethlionscom slash families, for more on family coaching and how we can help you with any conversation that you are encountering with your kiddo and wanting more support with. Make sure you reach out, ask us a question, share what's going on. We've got you.
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In this episode, we talk with Dr. Eric Soto-Shed and Kara Pranikoff, who have both been guests on the podcast before (see episodes 138, 175, and 216 to hear more from them). Together, we discuss the art of engaging families in meaningful discussions that foster education and growth.
The episode highlights the role of families as co-creators in education, integrating structured home conversations to enrich children's learning with diverse perspectives. As educators, researchers, and parents themselves, Dr. Soto-Shed and Kara also share practical insights for families to establish rituals and routines that boost communication, empathy, and understanding. Sparking Family Conversations It is so important to engage with children and teenagers around high-emotion issues, but many parents don’t know where to start. Leading with curiosity and vulnerability is a great way to open those conversations. Adults can ask: “I’m curious, what do you think about this? How are you feeling about it?” This opens the conversation with curiosity—there’s no right or wrong answer. Parents and caregivers can lead a conversation by sharing their thoughts and emotions. For example, “I was reading this article today and I’m feeling this way—here’s how I’m wrestling with it. I’m curious where you are, too.” As you begin The goal is to transform challenging conversations into opportunities for growth and to create a safe space for dialogue. Mindset Shifts Required To spark and embrace meaningful conversations, families must view themselves as integral partners in education, not just passive observers. This means embracing the role of co-creators in the learning process—parents and caregivers actively participate in discussions, model open communication, and foster curiosity. Further, educators and parents or caregivers need to communicate openly about what is happening in the classroom. This means educators can share openly about curricular areas and what conversations are coming up, and parents/caregivers take an active interest in that, responding with strategies at home that continue the conversation. Action Steps Meaningful conversations don’t usually just happen out of nowhere—they’re intentionally created. Parents and caregivers can create safe spaces for open conversations, playing the role of co-creators, supporters, encouragers, and others as outlined by Dr. Soto-Shed in this episode. Here are some action steps to get started with: Step 1: Begin by incorporating curiosity-driven conversations at home. Encourage your child to take the lead on discussions about high-emotion topics, such as politics or current events, while remaining open about your own emotions and thoughts. Step 2: Name the value of this work. It’s important for parents and caregivers to recognize and communicate the value of having these conversations, both for how they support their child’s education and their development as an individual. Step 3: Establish family rituals and routines that promote communication and reflection. A simple method like "onions and orchids" has everyone, adults and children, discuss daily highs and lows. This helps incorporate feedback and gratitude into your conversations. Another approach is to talk about articles or news stories from around the world. It brings up current events and allows natural conversation points to arise. Step 4: Actively engage as educational partners with your child's school. Know what they are learning in school and, instead of generic questions like “how was your day,” ask tailored, specific questions about what they are learning: “tell me more about XYZ. I know you’re reading a book about ABC—what is it like?” Stay Connected You can stay connected with our guests online. Find Eric on his Harvard faculty page or by email at [email protected], and contact Kara by email, [email protected], or on her website karapranikoff.com. To help you implement today’s takeaways, our guests are sharing Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships and Staying Engaged in Difficult Conversations handout with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 237 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:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) erica, welcome to the time for teachership podcast. 00:05 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) I'm so excited, you guys are here. 00:08 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) So first let's just talk about. I mean, we're all educators, we've I think common listeners have heard your voices or read about your ideas on on the podcast before. But what should people know about you beyond kind of the professional educator bio? What are you bringing into the space today that you want people to know? 00:28 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) So, first of all, I'm so happy to be here and be in conversation with you, Lindsay, and you, eric, so thanks for opening up this conversation. I think that it would help listeners to know that I have two college age kiddos One is 23, one is 20. And so I have lived through lots of really difficult conversations and I would say that I continually learn how to be in conversation around the topics that are happening in our world with my kids, even at age 23 and 20. So I just want to name it's a long life journey, eric. What about you? 01:16 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) I would say that I've been in education and teaching and teacher education for 25 years and I've been a parent for two. So I come to this with a great degree of humility and respect for parents. We have one child, that is, I think about a second child. I just have an awe of what parents do and so recognize, I mean, the true wonder of it, love it, but also the true challenge and just what kind of every stage, the wonders and challenges that it brings, and so that's just been really on my mind a lot, and so that's one thing. And then the other thing is that you know, I've been at universities and working in academia for the past 15 to 20 years. I think there's a lot of wisdom in the world, a lot of wisdom and experience, a lot of wisdom in the ground and a lot of wisdom in our day-to-day interactions, and so I hope to both learn from that and draw on that as well as sort of the traditional academic frameworks as well. 02:13 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Super appreciate broadening that horizon beyond, like the White Towers, like academia and all of that stuff. 02:19 That feels very untouchable sometimes for, like, what do I do now as I'm in the car, going to get my kid, and talking about this thing. So yeah, I really appreciate both of your perspectives and I think this is going to be a really cool conversation. So I think the first question I kind of have is like what are the possibilities for opening up conversation with your kids around? I mean, anything could be politics, current events, could be an interpersonal conflict that kid is having in their life, could be around kind of a quote unquote, controversial issue, or I like to call them like high emotion issues, as like a broad umbrella, but what's kind of possible? And or, if you want to take it from the perspective of like, not necessarily fear, but like a wondering of like, oh, if I'm in this moment or maybe I've had this moment with my kid where I'm like, oh, I don't know what to do here Like what comes to mind as you think about parenting and caretaking children at any age and having these tough conversations that bring up high emotions? 03:22 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) So, first of all, I love that language, high emotion issues and I love that it kind of encapsulates the emotions that we bring to things that are happening in our community, but also that interpersonal space, or even, I think, kids as they grow up, kind of figuring out their own identity. There's a lot of high emotion around there. So I think, first and foremost, I think it's really important to get curious right, To really ask your kid you know, I'm thinking about this thing. Or you brought up this thing yesterday. I want to go back to it and I'm just I'm kind of curious what are you thinking about that issue? How are you feeling about that issue? 04:03 I think it's important to let them have the space to lead the conversation where they want to take it. And then I would also say the corollary is to be honest about your own emotions. So I also think it's okay to say I read this article this morning and I'm feeling this way and here's why. And I'm trying to figure out how to wrestle with that. I'm wondering if you are too. So I think both things is where I might start. 04:32 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) And one thing you said there, cara, that I thought was really interesting and I just want to kind of amplify it is also maybe leading with what you're thinking about, right. 04:41 So when you invite curiosity, you kind of say like this is what I'm thinking, so it's not just sort of like me probing you for what's on your mind, but really a conversation and sort of starting with the sharing I think can be a really way to invite kids into the conversation. So I think that was just a really like subtle but important point. And then it also relates to sort of a broader way I was thinking about it, where I was thinking about just listen, the importance of listening, and so I think curiosity is a really active way to listen and I really appreciate that. And other times your kids might be talking, your kids might be writing, your kids might be communicating in ways where you can become aware of. Okay, let me get a sense of what's on their radar and then use that as a springboard into the conversation. So I just think it's really kind of listening, either with some active curiosity or just some attuneness to what students or kids are sharing I think is really important and useful. 05:35 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) And I love the way you just named all the different ways that kids might share right. It's not just verbal, so that's a really good thing to keep in mind also. 05:43 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I was really thinking the same thing that attunement is. So it like sometimes I just notice in my parenting world, like that my kid will get very quiet. Like just there's just like. This quiet stillness is like a like unsettled look, and it's like normally really talkative not talkative right now, like ooh, something's, something's there. So like that, and can we I think hard to your point like, can we also like, maybe we let it linger, maybe there's nothing to be said today, but I'm gonna ask the question anyways, I'm gonna let you think on it, and then I can return tomorrow and I can check in tomorrow, or that kid's gonna bring it back up on their own in the interim, which is so common, right, and and that there's space for that, and there there's not necessarily like, oh, I'm going to ask this question and then there's going to be this wonderful conversation Like that's not always how it goes. 06:29 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Does it ever go that way? I mean, I just would like to say that. 06:34 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) Yeah, and you know what that makes me think of too is this other point around this. You know, when you begin that conversation, just be ready for a range of responses. If we're talking about emotions, a range of emotions if we're talking about an engagement, a range of engagement, right, and part of that, you know, lindsay, again I think was kind of you stated I want to amplify is around. Let's revisit this right and see if what I heard yesterday would seem to be disengagement or brush me off was just an initial sort of reaction and there's more there. Maybe there's just not much of a response there. Right, that is possible. 07:07 There's so many issues in the world I think of myself, right where sometimes something just hits me unbelievably hard and I'm shocked by that, and there's sometimes there's really intense stuff happening in the world where I'm like, wow, I'm not really having a response to that and that kind of shocks me too. And so I think that as humans, we just have different responses and so, like, let's not just pretend that we're going to say, hey, what's going on, and there's going to be this unbelievable flood of things, we can be prepared for the rains, but like, what are the different ways? We can kind of continue to follow through, ask about different issues or follow up with the same issue and, just you know, expect a wide variety of possibilities. 07:44 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) You know, also thinking about we're all like former social studies teachers in the social studies realm things that come up curricularly, that I mean we all were in that third and fourth grade space last year in the Massachusetts pilot for investigating history and thinking about. You know things that might even be things that you can plan to almost talk about, right. So current events are one thing, or interpersonal relationship issues with your kid. It's like, oh, that pops up Now. I got to respond immediately in the moment and that can be a challenge. 08:14 But then there's also these like units that teachers are teaching and prepping for and can notify you in advance. Or you know, you see, like this is going to come next week in our class, like this is a text we're going to read. I mean, ideally there's that kind of communication between school and home. But if you see that you know, like what are, what are kind of those actions that you can think about, either from the teacher lens of what would have been helpful for families or what has been helpful for families to engage with you and support, kind of from the home perspective, to support the work in the classroom, or from the family perspective, like how might you support or have you supported any work that's going on in the classroom or in the school more largely? More broadly, um does that question make sense? 09:00 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Yeah, we're thinking from both hats, right? Yeah, so I'm going to take the teacher hat and then I'm going to do the parent hat, is that okay? So I think, from the teacher perspective, I think, especially right now, teachers can be very afraid of communicating with their families, and I actually think that what we want more than anything is communication and is awareness, and so I would always encourage a teacher to write about something that's coming up in a unit, or even share. Here's a little bit of a transcript from this conversation that happened in the classroom. Here's what it sounds like when third and fourth graders are talking about this current event or this historical injustice that we're learning about. 09:46 I think if you give families a sense of what's actually happening in the classroom, it's helpful. They can't imagine it. How could they? Right? They're not in that space. And then, from the family point of view, if you do get information about a unit or about a conversation that's happened in the classroom, I think it's important A to kind of study your own self before you have a conversation with kids, right? So if we're talking about some historical injustice or you're not sure about how to talk about race with your child, I think you want to kind of study your own self and do kind of some of your own work before you enter into the conversation, and then again I think you can lead with. I heard this is happening in your classroom. Tell me about it, right, like what's going on? How's that feeling for you? Like what are you talking about? I'm curious. So I think those are my two spaces that I went. 10:46 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) Eric. What about you? You know I really appreciate that response, cara, and I'm going to do something I rarely do, which I'm going to cite some scholarships. So really I think it's practitioner-facing scholarship that I really like, and this is Karen Mapp's dual capacity framework for parent and community engagement, and really what it talks about is both teachers and educators building up their capacity to build and partner with parents, and also us thinking about parents and their capacity and what they can do. 11:15 And in the revised framework, map lays out these sort of six roles that we can think about families as schools are engaging them, and I think they provide some really nice buckets for us to think about all sorts of possibilities, and so I'll just name those six roles. The first would be think about parents as co-creators, next, as supporters, third, as encouragers, fourth, as monitors, fifth, as advocates and sixth, as models. And I think, when you think about those potential roles that families can play, caregivers can play, I think there's a lot we can do, and so I'm thinking specifically around some work that the three of us did when we were working with some elementary curriculum that had some pretty charged topics. One of the things we were saying is not only sort of send that letter home. This is what we're doing, but like checking on your students right, checking on your children right, like monitor, see what's going on with them, how are they responding, ask them what happened today in school, with a real specific lens of, like whoa we were dealing with some pretty hard history in a particular lesson, and so I think those various roles can be helpful. 12:30 So the monitor piece, but then I also get really excited about the co-creator, like what is the um, the wisdom that families have around engaging young people that we can bring into school, given the stuff that we're talking about, um, what are, what are, what does that look like? Right? Or what's the experience at home that we can kind of build off of and share? And so that idea of co-creator, I think is really exciting for some possibilities, and so know that both schools and parents need to be thinking about, or schools and families need to be thinking about these multiple roles that families can play. 12:53 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh my gosh, I love all of your ideas, love the research. Thank you for citing that, and I actually was just thinking like very initial idea of BrainsRound. But how could it be if there was actually a circle where we are sharing the conversations that we maybe had at home about said topic, like the homework is literally just go home and have a conversation? Now I also want to like ask this, because I know a lot of my high schoolers like maybe don't have family, like they are the only ones at home at a particular given time and it's hard to like time-wise communicate. 13:23 But if you gave them enough lead time, like in the next week, have this conversation, right, and then you can either audio record, bring a transcript, just like give a summary, and then we get to just like dive into and kind of analyze and unpack, like I mean, there's so many things you could do there, right, but like unpack and talk through, like here are all these varied perspectives and where might they come from and what's the most generous interpretation of each and what are the values that underlie this. Like there's so much richness that could happen. And in a sense, that's like a little bit different from maybe co-creating curriculum, but it is co-creating the experience of like talking about a thing that could be so cool and as a family member, I would be really excited to I don't know have our family's voice, like somewhere in an educational space as well. I don't know, this is just like an idea, but other ideas, thoughts. 14:12 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) I love that idea If I could just build. I just have two like maybe sort of additions to that I want to kind of build off of. It's really exciting. The first is one just to name the value of it, because by far the most valuable experience I did in my education was like the immigration history of my family, right, and my father told me all this stuff which was so cool. My mother had passed, I was able to learn about you know her story as well and it's just been profound. It sticks with me. 14:34 Talk about a valuable um project that I called it, I think, from Lithuania, from Lithuania to Louisiana, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot something, the story and I got all this like cool little background. And so what you're doing here, lindsay, is you're saying there's other possibilities around current events, other issues. So it's not the sort of big sort of research like what's your thought on X, what's your thought on Y, whether it's an issue, a values question, and so I love just having sort of these smaller, sort of focused conversations around timely issues or underlying things such as values. So that's really exciting. Then the second thing, just in terms of you mentioned some of the challenges in terms of how to do that right. I think we can think about discussions also being, like you know, text messages or notes. 15:18 I know that much of my youth was mediated by, like me leaving something on the counter for my dad and him getting home at 11 and filling out the form, and me waking up in the morning and the form filled out, and so you know what could that look like. So I think there's, you know, with technology or the old school note, there's many ways you can have this sort of exchange of ideas between you know, families, caregivers, parents and children, and then bring those into schools in very intentional ways. So I think that's just a really exciting thing. I'm proud not to hear your thoughts too. 15:49 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) No, I mean, I love everything that you named and I also really love the capacity for kind of role modeling, what a kind of intergenerational conversation could look like. I think there are so many of us who would benefit. I mean, actually all of us would benefit from intergenerational conversation, and I think folks sometimes don't know where to look or what that could look like. And so I also think like the capacity for learning from each other, be it from a note or an actual space or from a transcript. I think the recognition of the importance of that and here's how to do it would make people hungry for more and also would help people see what that's like, feel what that's like, and the capacity for learning from each other across generations. 16:40 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) As I've been thinking about the Massachusetts civ civics showcases too, I've also been thinking about this idea of like civics it both in school and at home, and thinking about, like how do we as families, like either in conjunction with the school or separate from the school, like feel agentic enough or like informed enough to to know, like what does civic action look like and how can that look in different communities, at the family level or like the city or town level? 17:10 And also thinking about the Mindset what is it Mindshift podcast, which I just like was sharing, I think, with maybe both of you listen to it. 17:19 It was just so powerful to hear, like the co-located preschool and like elderly community living like in the same space and sharing space together and having like four-year-olds reading with people in an elderly community, like that's so beautiful and just makes me think of what is possible and also what is happening in many homes, like many multi-generational homes. What is possible and also what is happening in many homes, like many multi-generational homes. And to really leverage that and to say like hey, this is an actual act of civic action and engagement to like go, like, hear stories and like bear witness to the testimonies of older folks and for older folks to do that with younger folks and just be like let's be in community with one another, but like a beautiful space both for like current events and controversial issues, but also just the power of story. I think there's so much there that can be learned and applied to novel situations, including just ways of interacting and ways of thinking. 18:17 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) I mean, I think that idea about narrative is really possible, right? So, eric, you mentioned from Lithuania to Louisiana and that narrative and how powerful it was for you, but also I think about how powerful it would be for other classmates right To hear that story, right, and then get curious about the stories that are in their families. We know the power of personal narrative for just kind of understanding each other and drawing connections, and so I think you're right. Anytime we're in space and able to hear about experiences that are similar and, more importantly, different from each other, I think we just build our capacity for understanding and just like appreciation for the way people move in the world and just like appreciation for the way people move in the world, All right, any final thoughts before we go to our last little bit of like lightning round questions. 19:19 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) I do have. It's a half a thought and then it's half a question. Some are geared to you, cara, but, lindsay, you could also weigh in with the infinite wisdom and that's around like rituals and routines for engaging kids at home. And so I'm thinking about this in two ways. One is I have an amazing teacher educator friend, katie Reiser, who runs the teacher education at Brown. We used to work together and she's just an amazing parent and would have these rituals and daily routines with her son where she would ask him questions about things that they did. But it was like very specific and you know she was a former ELA teacher and I was like wow, this is. And her kid was super engaged and I was like this is super dope, it's like really intentional and it's awesome. 20:10 So I'm wondering about like, any like, if there's any thoughts around rituals. You know I'm just trying to figure out the ritual of changing a diaper right now. And then the other aspirational thing I have is last week I was listening to a great podcast interview with the historian David Blight talking about history and the current sort of challenges we have around history. But he was talking about the declaration of independence and really what a beautiful document, as fraught as it might be in some respects, what a beautiful document is and how that he has, on every 4th of July, he will listen to it, a reading of it, and it brings tears to his eyes and it's, like you know, I'm all about the barbecues, I'm all about the chills. I don't want to get like super duper, like you know, but I'm wondering about like kind of ritualizing, like some sort of family ritual where we do something together, not daily, but, you know, sometime on a special holiday. So, carmen, I'm just wondering, like, as a veteran parent, what are your thoughts around like rituals and routines? 21:15 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) So, first of all, I do love thinking about rituals and I think it we don't often share them right outside. 21:23 So so I can think of a few that that we did. So the first was just the understanding that when we sat down at the dinner table together we would do onions and orchids so what's something that was good in your day and what was something that was not good in your day. And having that ritual every day A you got some information. B we all shared, so adults shared also, and you could model how, you know, it might be a big thing, it might be a little thing, right. So both positive and negative, right? You know, my orchid could be a really good cup of coffee or it could be something really big, right? So I think there's that. And then the other ritual that I can think of two more. The other one that we did was we would often talk about happy and thankfuls, so like what are you happy or thankful for? And I think that that kind of cultivated again, like just an awareness of the world. 22:22 And I would say the third thing that we did always as a family was we talked about articles and the news and the things that were around, right. So the newspaper we had hard copy, it was on the table. We would share things that we read in magazines. Hey, I just read about this. What do you think? Um, and so from a young age, I think just talking about world events was, um, was typical in the house, and I, my kids still talk to me about world events. So, um, I think that was just I don't know, there's three different things that we did that helpful, so helpful. That is amazing, totally thank, eric, brilliant question oh, my goodness. 23:05 And now you two need to come up with your rituals and tell me what to be doing now, because whatever age will work. 23:11 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I have been thinking about this question and I never thought to just ask anyone. So this is so good, eric, that you actually asked the question and Cara, you're brilliant, so that's awesome. I have been thinking a lot about like feedback, like the, the act of like learning through feedback, and like learning from mistakes, and like not seeking perfection, and so I was. I we have not instituted this. 23:32 This is not a ritual I do, but it's an one I aspire to is like what's one thing you learned today, like what, what is one thing you like made a mistake around and can learn from, kind of thing. I don't know how I'll phrase that for a three-year-old, but you know something like that. And then also I think like this might not be a ritual for the dinner table, although dinner table I just want to share. I was recently with my dad and he was like you know what the best moments of my life were like sitting around the dinner table when you guys were all in high school and able to like share stories of your day, and I was like that is beautiful. 24:03 And I'm sure there are many like more positive things to come, but like I just was like that's great, and also I just want to like go back in time and be like what did we share? And like how did you start that conversation? Because as a parent, I'm like, hmm, like that seems like a really cool environment you cultivated, like how did that happen so awesome? Um, dinner table conversations. But I also think about these moments of frustration, or like, um, like I think about driving the most. 24:29 Like someone cuts you off in traffic, right, and you're, you're in the moment, you're frustrated and we have tried to ritualize, um, my kid and I, like you know what in the moment can we do to empathize with that person, as opposed to to being like they are terrible human being. 24:43 They have like wronged us and now we will rage, like I'll just be like okay, that person must have like uh, maybe they have a person who's like giving birth right now in the back and they really needed to get to the hospital, right, or like that person was just like thinking about something that like maybe they just got fired from their job and their mind is somewhere else, so they just missed that red light and they just went right through it, like and it's really cool to see that at three years old, my kid is starting to actually be like well, maybe they have that, and I mean right now it's just repeating things that I've said in the past, but it's really cool that the response is like huh, that person did something to me, but maybe it's because of this other reason, so that's's a cool ritual. 25:23 So thank you again for asking the question. Thank you, guys, for your brilliance. I realize we're almost at end of time, lightning round. What is one thing you would encourage someone engaging with this episode to do, like today or tomorrow, like a very small start. I know we talked about a lot of things, so like what's like one easy thing they could do to get started here? 25:47 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) Can I jump in? Cause I got a thought, cause I'm about to do this. In two hours and 10 minutes, when I go pick up my child, my two-year-old, I'm gonna ask his teachers at daycare, like what did y'all learn today? Like what did y'all do today? And then, instead of asking my son, like how was today? Like tell me a little bit more about groceries, or tell me a little bit more about dinosaurs or whatever it is. And so it's this idea of going back to like getting a sense of like what's going on in the school setting, so you can kind of at home, talk about it more specifically. That's one thing that I'm going to do as a parent, I think as an educator, I would also then think about how can I share what we're doing with parents a bit more? 26:27 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Okay. So, eric, I'm going to piggyback on that. When I was in the elementary school classroom and wrote a note home to families every week, at the bottom I would give three things Ask your kid about da-da-da-da-da-da, ask your child to know exactly that. Like, I fed some information, so educators can do that really easily and I think from my parent hat, the thing that I would do is pick up my kid and share something that I had read or heard or was on my mind or heart, and just open a conversation and see how it feels to share that. 27:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Love it. Amazing answers. One thing you're learning about lately. It could be parenting related or it could be just totally for fun. 27:14 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Oh my gosh, there are so many things. What am I learning about lately? Um yeah, parenting related. Lately, Parenting related, I am thinking a lot about how to support my kids in executive function and what does it look like to try and set them up for independence and give them a sense of moving forward and being able to thrive executive functionally on their own. That's what I'm learning about. 27:51 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) I am learning a lot about the value of turmeric extract for joint health and that is because I am a father of a two-year-old that I'm picking up and tossing around in pools and oceans and my shoulders are not liking life a lot recently and I tried this extract from Whole Foods three days ago. I've had it for the past three days and it's been really impressive and I did know a little bit about the science and the anti-inflammatory backed by science effects of turmeric, but I've experienced it for the past few days and so it's been really cool. 28:18 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Love that. Yeah, that's awesome. 28:20 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) And finally, where can people connect with you or learn more about you? 28:26 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) So you can connect with me through my website, karapranikoffcom. My email is there. I would love to like talk shop with any teacher or parent, basically any time in the day Love to talk shop. 28:44 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) Yeah, in my day job I am on the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. So if you just look out for Eric Soto-Shed, harvard Graduate School of Education, hgse for shorter, you can get all my contact information, a little bit more about my work and also really open to engage folks. 29:03 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Thank you guys so much. This is absolutely wonderful. I appreciate you both. 29:06 - Dr. Eric Soto-Shed (Guest) Thank you. 29:07 - Kara Pranikoff (Guest) Thanks for having us Lindsay Love talking with both of you. 
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this solo episode, Lindsay talks about how to approach current event conversations with your children at home. We delve into the importance of guiding your children through these conversations instead of letting them go to other, potentially unsafe, spaces to talk about things.
Using research-backed strategies and tools, we talk about creating an environment where kids can express their emotions and align their understanding with family values. Listeners will discover how to inspire active family engagement in social issues and nurture curiosity through creative outlets like sci-fi and fantasy. The goal is to equip families to enrich their dialogues and support their children's development in our complex world. Why? Kids need us—both parents and educators—to talk to them. If we don’t, they will find other places to go, including online spaces that are unsafe and might radicalize them. By fostering home environments where children feel a sense of belonging and emotional safety, children can have authentic, real, and honest conversations. This preserves humanity and prevents potential harm from predatory online communities. What? Lindsay promotes the head, hand, heart model when approaching conversations with children about current events. This refers to the idea that a child is a whole person, a whole human, and their mind, emotions, and actions are all engaged with these big topics. Keeping that framework in mind, here are some ways to begin conversations with your children: Step 1: Begin conversations by naming feelings. Ask children how they feel about a topic and where in their bodies they experience these emotions, especially if it’s hard to put language to their emotions. This helps create a safe space for dialogue. Step 2: Discuss values. Encourage children to identify how a topic aligns or conflicts with their values. Ask: Why is this important? How does it support or go against your values? You can also remind them of things they value and bring relevant connection points (e.g., “I know you think it’s important when your friends and family are honest with you. How does this relate to honesty?”). Step 3: Encourage questions. Ask children what questions they have about a topic. By encouraging them to ask questions, you are opening up a space for them to process and dig a little deeper into a topic. This promotes critical thinking, even as they grow older. Similarly, parents can ask open-ended questions back to their child to keep the conversation going. Step 4: Take action. Explore ways to engage in community initiatives or brainstorm creative solutions, especially those you can do together as a family. Encourage reading; sci-fi and fantasy are great ways to open up conversations about new ideas and possibilities, because they break free of the realistic constraints of our current society. You can dream with your children about what things could look like in your own context. Step 5: Use the color question brainstorming strategy, developed by Dr. Laura Lipton (listen to her interview on episode 220). If you’re in a conversation with several people, brainstorm your questions based on three colors. Green is for imagination and possibility (e.g., “What might happen if this policy is pushed through”), red for facts and data (e.g., “How many people have benefited from this initiative?”), and blue for opinions and values (e.g., “What’s the best way to address this issue?”). This can help spark vibrant family discussions. Final Tip: If you get stuck during a conversation, it's okay to be transparent and take time to reflect or research before continuing the dialogue. Be truthful and honest about where you are—it’s always okay to come back to the conversation again. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Staying Engaged in Difficult Conversations handout with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 236 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:
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TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Hello and welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 236. And today we're talking about approaching current event conversations with your kid at home as part of a month-long family series to support families, and thinking about how to support kids in all sorts of things Current events, topics, how to discuss politics or quote unquote controversial issues, social studies, content they may be learning about in school, ela, book themes that are emerging from books they're reading in school, interpersonal conflict, conflict with friends, conflict with family members, conflict at school or with the institution of schooling or with a specific teacher, other life things like what's going on with their bodies as they go through out of lessons, like whatever the thing is that you want to talk about with your kiddos. We want to support you in talking about that thing with your kiddos, and so let's dive into today's episode and keep in mind again, it's going to be a month-long series and I think you know we'll see how everyone feels. But I would like to bring it back as a recurring series as well, because we want to support holistically everyone in a child's life, not just educators, but families as well, so that we can truly partner as a family school partnership. So let's dive in. Kids need us to talk to them, otherwise they're going to find other places to go. Basically, I'm talking about online spaces that are unsafe, that might radicalize children, and there is going to be a link in the blog post version of this podcast episode to some research. It's summarized nicely in an NEA Today article, so I'll link that one. 01:33 But the person being interviewed here in this, amara Stapik-Araez, says when educators fail to engage students on issues that matter to them, students will look elsewhere, and I say this a lot in terms of education and teachers, but I also want to say it to family members. Right, I think, wherever we can have conversations in spaces that we perceive as relatively safe, in spaces where we have a sense of belonging or we are connected emotionally, relationally, to others, that's the space that the kids are going to have the most ability to be honest, to be curious, to really investigate what they're feeling or thinking, think about what others in the conversation might be feeling or thinking, and have like authentic, real, honest conversations that get at truth and preserve humanity. Online spaces do not always do that and in fact, many are predatory. Many communities or communities are used as kind of hubs, like YouTube or TikTok are used as hubs to radicalize particularly young boys. I think there's a lot of research on that, but I would imagine everyone who does not feel a sense of belonging and an opportunity for conversation in spaces in their daily lives, their families or their school systems, and so they turn somewhere for those conversations and ultimately are harmed right, or are harming others, or both right. So, keeping all of that research in mind and knowing that we want to create spaces for real conversation where students can explore and children can explore what they're thinking and feeling, let's talk about some practical entry points. So I've been thinking a lot about kind of like a head, heart, hands model that has been present in education and people have talked about this with teachers a lot. We talk about the whole child and the head, heart, hands, elements of just, you know, being a human. I mean let's kind of use that framework to approach the conversation. 03:33 I think often not always, I will caveat this not always, but often it may be easier to start with, just like name the feeling. So how are you feeling about? This is a question that you could ask a child. Right, they bring up a topic, or even you bring up a topic. There's like hey, I noticed this was happening or I saw this in the news, like how are you feeling about this? And obviously all of these questions are dependent on the age of the child, but I will say that they're generally applicable, with some modification. Or you know, selecting particular questions from this list, that we'll go through all ages. You know, like preschool to college, and so I think about you know I want you to think about you know, whatever kid of your age currently is as you're listening to this or engaging with this blog post, you know what would work best for your kid and then go from there. But generally, name the feelings. How are you feeling If you can name the feeling and if you can't, or even if you can, it's also an interesting companion question, I think, to think about. 04:31 Where in your body do you physically feel it? So sometimes I can't name the emotion but I can say, oh, I feel that in my stomach, like I feel that in my gut. My gut is like churning. My stomach feels like it's on a roller coaster. It's flipped upside down right or wow, my head hurts. Even trying to think about that intellectually is like what, like I'm so confused or kind of in a disorienting dilemma. As the change researchers say, you know, my head hurts or I'm feeling, like I may be, my fingers are tingling, like I'm really energized to like do something physically, like I want to make change happen or whatever the thing is Right. So you might be able to anchor in where in your body you're feeling it and then a kid might be able to identify how they're feeling, like name a motion, but I think, name the feelings first. 05:17 You could ask students and children about their values. I say students because I'm always talking to educators, even when I'm talking to families. Children, students, identify your values. So, for example, okay, the topic has been broached, why is this important to you? So, if a child brought it up to you, why is this important? Or how might it go against or support a value of yours? So I know you value, you know your kids, or you can invite them to name what they value but I know you value honesty. You really think it's important that me and your friends and your family are honest with you. So how does this, you know, relate to honesty, right? Or how does it violate honesty? Oh, someone lied to you. Oh, I know honesty has a core value of yours. Gosh, that's really frustrating. I could see why this is important to you, right? So, again, as much as they can lead the conversation, great. And then at times you may want to jump in and kind of, in that example that I just went through, kind of help them along or model for the first kind of time you're thinking through this and you'll all find your way. Right, we're learning this, as they're learning, and we're all learning how to engage together. So those are some heart questions, right, name the feelings, identify your core values. 06:25 We'd also get into some head questions. So, literally, ask the question what questions do you have? So, oh, yeah, I saw that on the news. What questions do you have about that? Or I heard that, yeah, you and your two friends got into an argument at lunch today, like what questions do you have about that? Or the school made this new policy. Oh, I bet there's a lot of questions that are coming up for you, like do you want to share some of them? You also can engage the head by thinking critically. 06:51 So what might be the underlying need? So maybe you're talking about a quote-unquote controversial issue where there's kind of a polarization of two sides or two political parties, maybe in the news, around a legal issue or some sort of policy initiative. So you might invite them to think critically and again, think about what age they are. But what might be the underlying need? What does that person maybe need, that person who's pushing that policy, or that person who demanded that thing or took that action? Like, what did they need? Like what do you think that they were missing? Or feeling like they didn't have? What were they trying to get through? That action, right? So again, scaling for language based on how old your kid is or how ready they are to engage with this. You could also do this with an ELA text, right? Oh, you're reading a story in your class. Yeah, that character took that action. That's interesting, you know. You might be reading the book along with them, so you may have a little bit more insight into all of these pieces. But what might be a reason why that person did that right? What might they need? What might that person value, right? 07:46 So, kind of at a higher level high school level I always talk about like safety versus freedom is a very big uh kind of like. Both needs are necessary or both values are necessary for society. We want to have safety. We want to have freedom. So in a conversation about gun control, right, like, okay, so this person seems to be valuing safety. Well, safety is really important. This person seems to be valuing freedom. Freedom is really important. Like where? And then that's an entry point, right to the conversation where can we find an optimal balance, what's a good balance between those two things? What does that look like for you? Right, Okay, we also can engage the hands in the conversation. And again I say, the heart isn't easiest and I go heart to head to hands, like just how I work. But other kids might want to start with hands and then kind of bounce around, like to head to heart and, you know, enter wherever your kiddos are. 08:34 So hands, you know, maybe think about what can we do as a family to take action about this? So this is really upsetting you. Is there anything I can do or we can do together? Is there anything you can do in your local community that you can think of? How could we address this problem? Right, if it's a social issue, for example, often I find that it's helpful to support a local community initiative versus to kind of start your own. There's usually something in your local area that is already in existence that you can contribute to or volunteer at or contribute money to or raise awareness of through whatever relational or social media platforms you have. 09:10 You could rate an op-ed so you can kind of process your feelings with your kiddo, and then you know, particularly if they're younger you could be the person writing it, or the kiddo could be the person writing it if they're older, then publish that or send that to a local outlet. You can also just explore or brainstorm creative solutions. If you're not quite ready to take that step to action, or you're just not even sure, maybe, what that action looks like, or all of the action plans that seem in front of you just feel like they don't quite meet the mark and you're like I think there's something different we should do, to actually do something that hasn't been done before, or creatively think about an approach to this problem, then you could just simply, you know, hang out in the explore or brainstorm creative solutions phase first. So that might mean reading together. 09:53 I often like sci-fi and fantasy novels as a way to open up conversation about what is possible, because often they break free of the realistic constraints of our everyday society and they come up with some amazing ideas, right, and then we just have to think about how do we bring those to real life, how can we take elements of that? What do we like about that? We could also just dream, right, just like dream up what that could look like and create our own, you know, short stories or novels. If you're very ambitious and kind of like creatively dream up what is possible without the confines of reality, because art is also really important, and that's another way you can do it. Right, it doesn't always have to be writing. It can be drawing, painting, some sort of art and creative art project where we're envisioning the possible together through art. 10:43 Now I had an awesome conversation with Dr Laura Lipton, who was the co-author of Groups at Work, a book that we featured on this podcast earlier, and we talked particularly to teacher leaders in school systems. But I want to bring a strategy that they recommended in their book to this conversation, because I think one of the hardest things, right we said this at the top of the episode. I said this invite students to think about the questions that they have. So if you ask your child, what questions do you have about this? That, in my experience, particularly with the investigating history curriculum implementation in Massachusetts this past year in school year 24, 25,. That was one of the hardest things that the researchers at Tufts University, part of the Circle Project, found in their research of this curriculum implementation around grades three and four specifically, but also grades five through seven. Search of this curriculum implementation around grades three and four specifically, but also grades five through seven, generating questions for kiddos was one of the hardest inquiry-based routines to do out of all of them. So looking at hard sources like yeah, that was hard but actually not as hard as creating questions, synthesizing and putting it together, making a claim, that was hard but not as hard as generating questions. And I think about you know all the research for you know three-year-olds, for example, ask however many it is now I can't even remember 300 questions a day or something like that and after a lot of schooling and society and let's be honest, I will raise my hands here to say that as parents we can't always answer all of the questions so through all of that lived experience, students and children kind once they get older, and so knowing that, you may want to think about an approach to inviting questions or modeling questions for your kiddos so that they are more able to do something like that. 12:29 So here is a strategy that Dr Laura Lipton suggested, so it's called color question brainstorming, and I can envision this at, you know, like a dinner table or something with a family where you have like two or three people or more, kind of taking turns and rounds here. So, brainstorming, they suggest a group of four. So if you can, great group of four. If you can't, you know whoever you have and you're going to list, kind of all of your questions based on these three color categories and then you're going to highlight the most relevant questions. So there's a little bit of critical thinking as kind of a part two, but the first part is to write questions on these three categories. 13:08 Green, green questions are about imagination and possibility. So a nice sentence starter for a question that's green might be what might happen if, right. What might happen if this policy gets pushed through, right. What might happen if we, you know, contribute to this local community initiative, right? Next color is red. Red questions are facts, figures or data. So question sentence starters here might be how many or how much, right. How many people have been affected by this social issue? How much money will this cost our city or town to invest in this cool project that I dreamed up. 13:54 Blue questions are opinions, values or needs. So why is this? What's the best way to Our question? Sentence starters here so why is this? What's the best way to Our question? Sentence starters here so why is this important to me? Why is this important to that person? Right? What's the best way to address this issue? What's the best way to hear from and gather input from many community members to make an action plan to move forward, right? 14:17 So again, this is color question brainstorming from Dr Laura Lipman and Bruce Wellman, and the categories are green for imagination and possibility, red for facts, figures and data, and blue for opinions, values and needs. And this is awesome because they're all different types of thinking. Your brain is activated in different ways. I can even actually see them now, literally as I'm recording this. I did not think about this prior to talking through this in this moment, but it actually, I think, mirrors some of the head, heart, hands as well, like what kind of things are you talking about? Are you in your head like the red facts, figures, data? Are you in your heart where you're thinking about the blue kind of opinions, values, needs the blue kind of opinions, values, needs. Are you in the green of like taking action with your hands, like what's the imagination or possibility? Oh, that's so funny, okay, well, there we go. It all comes back together. 15:12 So, as you have these conversations, if you get stuck, I just want to say, as a kind of final piece here it is okay if you get stuck, if you don't know what to say, if you just want to take a minute and say, hey, I'd love to talk more about this with you. I'm not sure what to say here. Just be truly transparent and honest. I need to do a little research or I need to think on that. That's a great question. Come back to it. You can always do that. 15:30 In fact, I will link a free resource that we developed for a nursery school, actually for preschool, preschool and for the family members there. It's called Staying Engaged in Difficult Conversations. It's a quick handout, so feel free to reference any of the tips on that sheet. You'll find that at today's blog post, lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 236. They also want to say we are opening EduBoost, our Slack-based coaching community for educators up to families, and we're super excited about it. So me and my colleague, cara Pranikoff, are here for you If you have any questions and you get stuck. You want to return to the conversation. You want to even take a brief five-minute pause from the conversation and Slack us and see if we're on in that moment. We'll get back to you in 24 hours with a response or relevant resources for your questions. So, families, we are here for you. Let's keep supporting one another. I'm so excited to learn more about how these conversations are going at home with you and your kiddo, and stay tuned for the remainder of this month's series on families. 
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In this episode, we talk with returning guest Ari Gerzon-Kessler (check out our other discussion on episode 155). Ari has been an educator since 2000 and is currently an educational consultant working with schools and districts committed to forging stronger school-family partnerships. Ari is the author of On The Same Team: Bringing Educators and Underrepresented Families Together.
We frame this conversation about relational family engagement in light of the current political and educational climate we’re in. Drawing on personal experiences, research, and professional perspectives, Ari showcases how small, intentional efforts can profoundly impact school communities. Building a Foundation of Trust Ari opens our conversation by telling an anecdote about his daughter’s first day of school. After dropping her off when she was teary and worried, Ari, naturally, wondered how she’d settle in. Then, just a short while after, he received a text message from the teacher saying she was having a good morning and was able to pivot and settle into the class. That moment of intentional communication fostered a sense of trust, connection, and gratitude—creating a strong foundation for the parent-teacher relationship. This is a simple story to illustrate how important relational family engagement is in creating better education environments. Shifting Our Understanding of Family Engagement Ari wants to see a conscious shift from seeing family engagement as an outcome to a strategy—something we intentionally do. There is a lot of scholarship on what types of outreach, such as relationship-centered home visits, achieve positive outcomes like lower absenteeism. Beyond the mindset shift to family engagement as a strategy, it’s important to engage with the question, What is the purpose of family engagement? Many still see it as events, and whether or not the families attended. But this can be expanded to include day-to-day communication, relationship-building, and trust. These are the things that have more impact on children’s educational outcomes. It’s a shift to human-to-human connection rather than traditional event-based family engagement. Action Steps To build positive family-educator relationships, Ari draws on his scholarship and experience to offer a few action steps educators can take: Step 1: Break barriers and build trust by using team-building or ice-breaker activities at the start of any gathering instead of “talking at” parents. This is a great way to get people talking and laughing together. In a parent gathering, share names and something about their lives to connect on a personal level and build psychological safety. Step 2: Keep communication simple. A short text or photo to a parent can mean the world of difference and build a relationship of trust. Step 3: Implement relationship-centered practices, such as home visits or virtual meetings, to build meaningful connections with families. These interactions should prioritize listening and understanding family perspectives instead of the educator talking the whole time. Step 4: Follow through by creating a sense of continuity and being concrete with what you are changing as a result of gathering and hearing from parents. Without the follow-through on ideas and changes, you won’t build long-term trust. Step 5: Set aside time for positive outreach. Educators and administration can set aside time each month to send calls or text updates to families with children who are struggling to establish that open line of communication. Challenges? One of the main challenges is overcoming time constraints and existing structures that prioritize traditional engagement methods. Educators may also feel overwhelmed by additional responsibilities. However, by integrating relational practices into existing workflows and emphasizing the long-term benefits of trust and collaboration, schools can gradually shift towards more inclusive and supportive environments. One Step to Get Started To begin cultivating stronger educator-parent relationships, start with a simple step and ask families how they would like to communicate. This simple step demonstrates respect and consideration for family preferences, while also setting the stage for more personalized and effective interactions. Stay Connected You can learn more about Ari and his work on his website, Same Team Consulting, or connect with him on LinkedIn or by email at [email protected]. You can also grab a copy of his book, On The Same Team: Bringing Educators and Underrepresented Families Together, to get more practical resources and strategies for strong relational family engagement. To help you implement today’s takeaways, our guest is sharing 6 Practical Ways to Develop Authentic Family Partnerships Playbook with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 235 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:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:00 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) We're not on video at all, right. 00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Sorry, hold on, ari. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast, or I should say, welcome back to the Time for Teachership podcast. It's good to have you. 00:12 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) It's great to be here. Thanks, lindsay, I always enjoy our conversations. 00:16 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Absolutely. I am really excited for kind of the frame for today. We won't ask the same questions as before, so people should go back and listen to the other episode, but you know, so much has been happening in the world with us individually, and so I kind of want to frame the context for us today. What do you think is important for folks to know in the audience, both in terms of, like, the hats we're speaking to today, but also kind of this idea of where we are as a nation and kind of as an educational kind of society or sphere of life here at this moment of recording in August 2025. 00:52 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, yeah, well, and I think most folks who've been following the news and feeling the impact of the shifting climate since just the last six months since inauguration, we know that attacks on education funding massive threats to kind of the safety and well, each month a lot of families are afraid and educators don't know how to support them. And you know, the heart of my work are these teams that bring immigrant families and educators together and there's this sense of, oh well, we, we can't deepen relationships, they're afraid to just come to school. And it's been fascinating to see that actually, as we've built initial rapport over the last year or two, that we're often getting more families that are afraid to come to school actually coming out, and I think that's in most communities. Speaking to the need, of course, the attack on DEI and the sense that, regardless of people's political beliefs around DEI, I think we all are on the same page of wanting to build cohesive school communities where everyone feels a sense of belonging, and that's really the heart of the work that I care about. 02:22 So that piece I hope is common ground, that all best practices that foster better relationships and trust are beneficial across the board, regardless of anyone's political affiliation. So, yeah, so those are some just quick reflections on the national landscape and how it's impacting, I think, our day-to-day work. And then I know you and I have talked over the years about the intersection of like being closely in connection daily with educators and then being parents working with the educators in our kids' schools, and I've had some a couple of just really meaningful, powerful experiences. Now wearing that parent hat, that's giving me insight on how to actually help other educators better support our families. 03:11 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, you had mentioned kind of the day one experience that you had with your child's school. Do you mind sharing that story? Yeah, no absolutely yeah. 03:20 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) So something that I often one of my top practices, I support schools with is increasing two-way communication and this piece that families are feeling flooded with too much communication and or they're feeling like the communication is not through the right channels. And I'm working on a piece for Agitopia right now on those two themes to themes. And so what I got to experience powerfully as a parent was day one, april 10th, my daughter's two and a half birthday. She was allowed to start school and she was nervous, pretty introverted at the time. I brought her to her first day of school and she was in tears not uncommon and I walked away feeling, of course, sad and anxious, really curious, like how her first day was going to go, and I jumped in my car, was driving to a meeting with all of our family, community liaisons, and as I arrived at that meeting I get a text from her teacher saying hey, selah is having, you know, like a wonderful morning. Now she was able to kind of pivot after a few minutes. I'll loop back with you again later in the day with an update. 04:37 So to get this text on day one built this sense of trust, connection, deep gratitude, that, like the teacher, in the middle of that morning was so thoughtful and aware that she reached out with a text instead of sending me an email five days later or whatever. And I shared that with the liaisons moments later at the meeting and said, hey, we've been working for a couple of years on trying liaisons at moments later at the meeting and said, hey, we've been working for a couple of years on trying to increase texting and reduce emails, because that's what our parents have been telling us again and again. Here is kind of proof in the pudding of what it feels like as a parent, and I now trust my daughter's school, you know, probably for years to come simply from that really positive start. So I just think that speaks volumes to intentionality and being proactive and why things practices like in the summer, calling all new families to welcome them for 30 seconds makes such a huge difference. 05:39 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh my gosh, thank you for telling that story and, in the spirit of Shane's Affair, called it story and teaching. I'll share kind of a similar my kids first school. When he was three months, he brought into kind of like the you know infant center or whatever and didn't ask like my name, his name, it was just kind of a drop off and it felt horrifying like he was fine, it was a great school, all the things, but like just that lack of communication. That lack of that contrasted with just around the same time, april of this past year, he switches to a new school, has the tears that drop off, is really nervous and they it was an email but I actually preferred email, so it was, it was perfect. And they sent me just like a picture of him playing with a toy and it was like he's fine, like you know. 06:23 You know it was a phrase, it was short, sweet, but it was like five minutes after drop off or something and it was like thank you, because now I don't have to worry all day long. And it's just the power of like where my mind went. It's funny, your mind went to like you were just going to something around family engagement. I was sitting there thinking, as an educator in a classroom, how great would it have been had I had the thought to be able to share directly with parents and family members to just say, hey, I know your kid came in having a tough day and like here's the great thing that they did today. Like even as a high school child right to be able to share that. I'm sure parents and family members would have totally appreciated that. 07:04 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, yeah, well, and you're sparking just two quick connections. One is positive outreach, which is the other in my top three practices. Positive outreach at any level. And I remember in the pandemic we established, you know, like here are the 150 high school students at this particular school, we want to re-engage and we did, you know, 20, 30 minutes a week of positive calls and that is so incredibly impactful. Yeah, and then, just you know, to your story of like the initial outreach, just that proactive piece can make such an initial difference. 07:42 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Absolutely. And I think this kind of spins into our next thing about kind of the why. Why is it so important that family engagement is a priority amidst budget cuts, amidst all of the competing priorities that school districts have? And I know you know a lot of the research on this. Do you mind speaking to kind of the benefits of doing stuff like this? 08:00 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Sure, yeah, yeah, I think, lindsay, it's a conscious shift from seeing family engagement as an outcome and something we can kind of check boxes around to. You know, dr Karen Mapp and many others in our field have said it needs to be a strategy, not an outcome, and it's a strategy that drives all the outcomes we care about out. The third practice of my three actually comes up naturally now. You know, relationship centered home visits. That's not only the research has proven, it's great for academic learning and obviously for relationship building and trust. But when a few districts in California a year ago embraced that as one of their practices to reduce chronic absenteeism, it was remarkable. I mean, I read about this in New York Times last year they knocked their chronic absenteeism rates from 30 percent of their students down to 14 or 15 percent. So that's hundreds of students and families where those home visits made a pivotal difference. 09:07 Hands out to me is our paradigm around. What family engagement is that? I think to this day in most schools we still see it about events and did they attend. And the reality is, as you were just speaking to, like the day-to-day communication, the relationship building, trust is much more impactful, as well as things like the research shows that if we get parents talking about education with their kid at home and the value of learning, that does more than anything else to predict academic success, more than socioeconomic status, parents' education level host of things. So that's one piece. 09:42 And yeah, and I was sharing this with colleagues this week that you know, I worked with some teachers and principals in Boston last summer and we brainstormed what does family engagement look like at your school? 09:54 And when I was on my flight home to Colorado I looked at the list and it didn't surprise me but it really was stark. More than 90 percent of what they put on their list of what is family engagement were events. Of what they put on their list of what is family engagement were events. So it's really seeing the value of how do we shift towards more relational communication practices, which I know we'll dive a little deeper in. And I would say, on the event front, many of us can go to school events and not forge a stronger connection with the staff or with other families. So a lot of our family and educator together teams at 31 schools now in Colorado are looking at how do we reinvent events like back to school night, parent teacher conferences, to make them much more relationship building oriented and mutual and human to human, versus the traditional approach that's just not working for families and is usually unsatisfying for educators when we create spaces to hear their experiences of these events. 10:58 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh, wow, that is. My mind is exploding right now with all sorts of ideas, but that that is so profound because I think about, you know, again, as a parent, showing up to preschool activities. Like there are some activities that I don't integrate, interact or engage with like another parent, a teacher or another child that my child is friends with, and it's like what, what was that versus? You know, having like a text thread or like a Slack coaching space or something, or, you know, whatever it is, some other means that's asynchronous. It might not be live, but it is. 11:27 You know, I often think about, like you know, I want to be seen as a person, as a family member as well, like I kind of want my child teacher to be, like hey, what do you do? Or like what's important to you, or you know these kinds of relational things because I feel like, without knowing them, you know, how do you, how do you best like have a values alignment when you're teaching my child? Right, how do you know that? Actually, I kind of reject the gender binary and I don't want to raise my child in a way that's very gendered, and like I have to actively write that in the forms when there's not a space for them, because that's not a question that someone asks, right, or there's no opening to have those kind of conversations, and so that relational versus like attendance at an event. I mean, we know with students at school you can attend school and not get very much out of it, right? Like where's the relationship, where's the engagement? That's deep and thoughtful. I love that shift. That's brilliant. 12:20 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Well, and I appreciate you sharing about wanting to be known and seen, because my older brother visited last week. I hadn't seen him in three years and he was in Canada the last seven years and we briefly talked about family engagement and what he said, you know, affirms what you were sharing and was really helpful for me because I'm always learning in this field. He said to me yeah, I went to an event at my kid's school and I wanted to get to know other families. I wanted them to ask about my hobbies, my strengths. I wanted to be able to share. I coach tennis. 12:58 I'd love to help the school, but instead the educators really, just as is commonplace at so many schools, followed the traditional mode of we're going to show we're experts and share a ton of information with you and not create the space. Um, and when I, you know, when I commented on that, he said I don't even think it was in their mindset that that they could create a more collaborative, humanistic space for sharing. And I also get as a former principal, there is this element of ooh, I'm going to have to release some control and that's tricky. Yet I also know that if we're intentional in creating nice structured spaces to hear more voices, that can also be fruitful and not, you know. Get off the rails. 13:49 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, that's a perfect segue. I would love to know from all the work you've done, like what are those ways that we do create those structured spaces for more relational dynamics and engagement with families and educators? What action steps do you have for us? 14:14 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, yeah. Well, in terms of the in-person gatherings, I mean, I think, one huge learning. What action steps do you have for us? The essence of these family and educator together teams that you know, I wrote about in depth in my book on the same team and they have really illuminated over hundreds of gatherings, what makes a difference for families. So instead of them coming into the meeting and listening to someone talk to them or at them, you know, for 10, 20 minutes this is so commonplace we start with a quick team building activity that you know some might call an icebreaker but gets everyone laughing often is a paired activity that goes across language, cultural, other boundaries and barriers. 14:57 And then we've learned again over the years to apply SEL best practices to parent gatherings, where we do an introduction circle where everyone shares their name, their child's name and something about their life and that builds the sense of okay, we're all humans here and have both rich differences and similarities, and it also creates much more psychological safety when everyone's brought their voice in. Briefly. When we're then inviting families in to share their input, they feel much more comfortable and since most of the families I work with have been marginalized in our school communities, it's just so important for us to be very thoughtful in the initial, say 20, 30 minutes of gatherings. And the last thing I would say that's really the essence of doing connection better is privileging relationship building, not going to content right away in initial meetings and then making sure that families' voices comprise as much or more of these gatherings than educators' voices, which really flips the traditional paradigm. So, yeah, I would say those have been some of the core pieces. 16:07 And a final one is you know, parents will lose trust in us if we don't show follow through. So, like creating some sense of continuity and getting concrete around, what are we changing as a result of what we learned from hearing everyone's perspective tonight? Because one of my failures as a leader of this work in the early, I'd say, three years was that we built great relationships and trust and that was a win in itself. But if we walked down the hallway to a random teacher's classroom and said, hey, it's April now, how are you doing family engagement different If they had not been a part of those gatherings? There weren't systemic changes. So I'm really keenly aware of like what can we easily and efficiently change at any given school that will have multiple benefits for ideally all members of the community. 17:01 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love that. 17:01 I think that is something I'm trying to work on as well as like how can we, both as a reflective opportunity but also as a measurement opportunity, just like reflect on and kind of codify like this is the change, and like report that right Of the family members and the educators? 17:29 Is there anything that you have found to be particularly successful in terms of like engaging family members who might have, like you talk a lot and write a lot about linguistic, like linguistically affirmative spaces and affirming spaces and having like translation and things like that. I'm wondering also about like time constraints and people who you know are like oh, I don't know if I have the time to like come in and be part of that. I know you've talked about like a childcare as like actually part of the whole setup and kind of infrastructure. I'm just thinking about some of the other constraints that educators might have in their minds or families might have in their minds. It's like, oh, I'd love to be part of this and I'm thinking about this challenge and wanting to know how do I overcome it or if there's like an alternative means of relationship building that might not be synchronous. I don't know. I'm thinking about a lot of questions at once. 18:19 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, no, absolutely I mean. Yeah, I mean one thought is that we're shifting our perspective as educators to appreciate more, you know, the linguistic capital and other capital that we often, you know, we often assume like, oh, that family speaks Spanish or Hmong, they're going to have a hard time connecting with us. Instead shifting to, like they have a bilingual, multilingual child, how can we connect with them and build a bridge to them, which means concrete things like that. They get a positive call too, because I, as an educator, tap the translation line to make sure that we're building that relationship. In terms of time constraints, I'm glad you brought that up, because if we're moving away from an event focus, um, and the reality is I'm busy in in my, my two jobs as an educator right now I can't go to, you know, this saturday's event at my daughter's school, which is like the welcome back community service thing, because I'm happening to take her to like an art class, which is not I'm not normally that kind of like ambitious parent on the weekends. It's usually about rest and hang out at home. But that transparency aside, my point is the small back and forth texts, powerful one line of like, like you were saying. 19:41 You also mentioned earlier the photograph. When I was with moms at one FET team gathering a couple of years ago and we said what would be most helpful, three out of three moms in that group shared stories of yeah, when the teacher just sent me a photo with a couple words, that meant the world. And I don't need all these long emails necessarily about curriculum. So that's one example. And and then I'm also thinking about other relationship building strategies that, again, referencing my recent experience as a parent, my child's teacher emailed me for the first time, you know, since last school year ended, and just asked two questions like what are you most excited about for this coming school year and what are you curious or concerned about this coming school year? And what are you curious or concerned about? 20:29 And I sat out, you know, at night for 20 minutes after my daughter was asleep, and it sparked deep, deep reflection I was able to share with her. You know, hey, I'm an educator too. You might be interested in connecting and and. So that was great that she didn't just inform me, she posed questions and and so, and between that, home visits, which again also can be virtual. I mean, they're not the same, but I've seen the power of identifying five families in your class that didn't come to back to school night and laying out, you know, a schedule of OK over the next two weeks. Here's some blocks where I'm going to try to connect for 15 to 20 minutes to do a virtual visit with families. I think those are some of the ways to ensure we're building trust with all of our families. 21:19 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love that. I think one of my takeaways from this conversation already that's such a simple shift is like, instead of talk, just invite a question. Like ask a question and invite a response. Like what a small shift, but what a powerful one. This seems like a good starter. I was going to ask you that's my one thing, what is your one thing? That like, if someone is like this feels really big, this feels like you know it's a big thing. 21:42 It's a long process to build like relational trust and all of the pieces. But you can start the momentum right. You can start with something. What would be that one thing for you that you would recommend to someone to just kind of start tomorrow? 21:55 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, no, I love that question and the timing is perfect because you know we're talking in mid-August, as school year kicks off in many states. I always say in August, the easiest and best thing you can do is just ask families how would you like me to communicate with you? And I've seen teachers leverage that information to realize okay, half of the parents want this info in an email, the other half want it in a text. It also just starts sharing power with the family where they can say you know like I'd love to be able to connect with you for five minutes once a month after school when you're saying goodbye to your students or shortly after. So I think that would be the one easy, easy question to ask families and, ideally, doing an inventory. 22:47 I talk about this when I do trainings on parent-teacher conferences. The word that comes to me is like and I did it myself the arrogance of us as educators to five, six weeks into school year to even say phrases like well, let me tell you about your child's strengths, and it's like OK, I've had my daughter or son at home for nine years and you're telling me about their strengths. So you know those inventories that make them easy on. You know families maybe ask five questions Like what are you most proud of your child about? What are your greatest hopes for their school year? Tell me a little about what they enjoy doing outside of school. Those can open up doors to just be a better teacher and support to that child and so that I guess that would be a parallel. What's one easy thing you can do. 23:41 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love those. I love that they're specific as well. Right here, if you're really like I've never asked families questions before like there you go, there's a bunch, you can just ask those now. I love that and I also am thinking that those are kind of some quick things that you can do for some longer things. I know you do coaching, you support school districts, you do kind of one-on-one stuff. What are some of the kind of range of things as an educator is listening or a family member who wants to advocate on behalf of, maybe, their child's school or school district, like, what are some of the ways that you or folks like you are kind of like supporting schools to do stuff like this? What are the options available for them? 24:19 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, yeah, and that's a great question. I mean, I would say we've touched on a number of these great practices right that can be woven in a principal can give teachers and teachers can advocate for this, or parents can 15 minutes once a month. The staff makes positive calls or they send text updates to kids who are struggling academically in a class, and I've seen it. Some of our middle schools, you know, that's a couple hundred families that get a call that afternoon. So there's all these practices that I, you know, coach and embed into trainings around. I know we're overwhelmed as a profession. How can we work smarter, not harder, and weave them in so it's not add-ons for educators to do, you know, in the evening and after school. 25:01 The other major piece that you know, I truly think is the game changer, is starting teams and creating these somewhat unique spaces. 25:11 Because what I found, lindsay, is that schools that do family engagement kind of a la carte or don't have a built-in space to discuss family engagement and to listen to families, just stay stuck in a traditional family involvement approach. 25:30 And these teams just literally creating 90 minutes once a month to come together, break bread, have dinner together, ask great questions, listen, you know, engage in team building activities is utterly transformative and I see these schools make five years worth of progress in six months compared to neighboring schools that don't have teams and don't create these spaces. So a lot of my coaching work is how do you launch a team? And you know my book is a step-by-step guide because after five, six years at 15 schools, I was like, wow, we have kind of a special sauce here. This is really needed in pretty much every school community to have this space. So I think that would be the heart of what I would encourage schools to really think deeply about and, if they have some sort of existing team, getting more clear on its purpose. And I'm doing some work this fall with some schools where they have a family engagement team, but they're doing so much around theories and frameworks and data and not doing the story-centered approach you were talking about at the beginning of our conversation. 26:42 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh, that's a really good thing to highlight just that difference, right and like oh, we're just looking at data, we're just looking at right Versus. We're listening to stories, we're inviting conversation. It is very stark that you put it that way and that, I think, is going to resonate with a lot of people. So thank you for that frame. I think, too, this is a fun question that I asked you last time. I'm curious now also, like what is something that you have been learning about lately? Either, uh, something related to our conversation or something completely not related to our conversation. Take it wherever you want. 27:15 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, um, no, that's great. 27:17 Um, I'm reading a book that my Zen teacher and one of our you know, my peers um just published and just read last night about the shadow and how much we can learn, you know, and and this new concept of like the golden shadow, which I didn't know about, which is like when you look at other people and deeply admire something about them and then you don't necessarily see that capacity and that gift in yourself enough. 27:48 Um, and so both there's the projection side of like oh, that person seems really like overly ambitious, and then turning towards like well, where do I actually have that ambitious part in myself as I judge them for their overly ambitious approach or style? So, yeah, I would say, you know, that is resonating from last night's reading. And then I continue to learn from other walks of life about family engagement, and so that's been really fascinating the last year or two to really take this lens of wherever I travel, wherever I go, can I look for examples of big systems creating more of this authentic care approach versus the more transactional, institutional way of doing things? 28:40 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) That's such a good lens for just everyone, whatever your thing is, whatever. Yeah, oh, that's really good. Okay, thank you, I'm glad I asked that question again. Where can listeners learn more about you? Connect with you? I know you have a new website, which we will, of course, link to, and we'll, of course, link to the book as well in the show notes and blog posts for this episode, any other place that you would recommend people reaching out, or anything else you want to comment on before the close of the episode. 29:06 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Yeah, in terms of reaching out, yeah, I spent much of this summer creating a website that just was released last week sameteamconsultingorg. I'm really excited about that. Easy to find on LinkedIn. People can email me directly at ariagurzon at gmailcom, and I'd say those are the easiest pathways. And then, you know, my book on the same team is right now it's 47% off on Amazon, so it's a steal. Right now it can be found at the publisher Solution Tree site as well. 29:39 Yeah, and I think I would just close, lindsay, I was mentioning to you like there's been some powerful experiences lately. I'll just share briefly a story I had. That was one of those. Oh, we could bring this back into schools and make it an easy thing we do in terms of how we approach interactions with more intentionality. 29:58 I got on a flight a few months ago to Sacramento and usually we don't see the pilot, right, they don't come out. And pilot came out and said hi, welcome, I want to thank you for putting food on my family's table. For 27 years I was in the Air Force. I've now been a pilot for 27 years. I have 10 kids. I think they're all mine. So bringing humor, right, humor and connection. And then he took it further and he said here's my team and we count on each other. You all are part of our team as well and we count on each other. You all are part of our team as well. And then, you know, I just was moved and I thought about wow, imagine if the front office person at a school, the principal and they're welcome, the teacher and they're welcome made that sort of relational we're all one community took them all three minutes to do intentionality and purpose. 30:56 And the final part of the story, you know, is 10 minutes later we had some insane turbulence out of Denver and I have had a couple rough flights over the years and I started to get anxious and then I just paused and I was like, wait, 27 years plus the Air Force, he's got this. And that totally settled my nervous system and I had high trust and I think we can think of all the families in our nation schools that don't come in with trust or have had that trust broken and what those kinds of couple minutes can really do to shift the level of trust. So yeah, I think that's the one story I felt moved to share with you today. Oh, my gosh, that's that's the one story I felt moved to share with you today. 31:37 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh my gosh, Thank you. That's a beautiful story and I am just reminded there's been like a thread of airplane related stories that I've heard lately. I'm just reminded how, like airplane stories if you have them there are many parallels to education and life. 31:51 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) Absolutely. 31:52 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Ari, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for coming back on. 31:55 - Ari Gerzon-Kessler (Guest) A delight, Lindsay. Thanks so much for. |
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AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
November 2025
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