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In this episode, we are diving into three inquiry routines that frame the Investigating History curriculum, which is currently being rolled out in fifth through seventh grade across Massachusetts.
The three routines are: launching the question, investigating sources, and putting it together. These routines not only equip students with essential historical thinking skills, but also promote civic engagement and analytical discourse. By fostering student-centered learning, educators can guide students to develop focused questions, critically evaluate sources, and synthesize their findings into well-reasoned arguments. Why? Today, students are inundated with information, so it’s critically important to learn to evaluate diverse sources and understand what’s factual and what’s false. This Investigating History framework enables educators to teach students to use inquiry routines to think critically and analyze information well. What? The Investigating History framework has three key steps: 1) launching the question, 2) investigating sources, and 3) putting it together. Here are some steps an educator can take to bring this to life in your classroom: Step 1: Spark student interest. Introduce your topic with a compelling question, statement, video, image, or other source that will prompt their thinking around the topic. You want it to be unique and engaging to capture interest from the start. Step 2: Introduce a question Your question should be broad enough to cover a series of lessons. One example from Investigating History’s curriculum is to show students a map, sparking their interest. The question then, is, “what do maps tell us about people?” This guiding question can cover several questions or a whole unit. Step 3: Create an inquiry chart. After introducing a broad question, students will start asking smaller questions and breaking it down further. Ask students what other questions come up, what they’re curious about, and what they need to discover to answer the big question. You might use one of these strategies:
Step 4: Investigate sources—observe, read, and connect. The Ingestivating History curriculum invites students to first observe the source—what kind of source is it? What skills do we need to evaluate it? Then, read (or view) the source, looking at it in-depth. Finally, connect it to the larger question you previously identified. This process can be repeated for several sources related to your main question. Step 5: Synthesize and put it all together. After working through various sources, start bringing them together to answer your main question. Track key ideas and draw conclusions. You’ll want to build a formative or summative assessment process here as well. For example, you may want students to submit a claim-evidence-reasoning paragraph that shows how they’ve analyzed a source to answer the key question. Final Tip Empower students to lead their discussions and inquiries, fostering independence and critical thinking that extend beyond the history classroom. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Inquiry Routines Resource Bank with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 206 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.
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In this episode, we are continuing the mini-series from the last two episodes on supporting students to critically analyze power dynamics, specifically looking at socioeconomic class.
We introduce McGregor's Marxist-inspired conceptual framework to dissect authority, consumerism, and individualism within popular children's TV shows. The discussion emphasizes the importance of valuing students' prior knowledge and lived experiences to analyze this topic. Why? Socioeconomic class is another important, but challenging, topic for educators to bring up in class. By offering students tools to critically think and analyze inherent power dynamics, they can better engage with complex topics and enhance cultural literacy and awareness. What? Educators can structure their curriculum on analyzing power dynamics and socioeconomic class by following the same four steps we have walked through in this mini-series (episodes 203 and 204): Step 1: Select a theory or framework that works for your context. When looking at socioeconomic class, you can use Iris Young’s Five Faces of Oppression framework or the NYU scorecard we discussed in episode 204. You can also introduce McGregor's Marxist-inspired conceptual framework, which was developed in relation to TV shows for young children (2-6 years old). McGregor’s framework covers:
Step 2: Simplify the chosen framework to make it accessible to students. McGregor’s framework is rich and complex, so you may want to break it down and simplify things. For example, you can combine the five sections into just three simplified categories: “Rules, “making money,” and “I can do it myself.” Step 3: Engage students with captivating media. McGregor’s framework was originally developed around children’s shows that had gender and racial diversity of characters (e.g., Arther, Curious George, Doc McStuffins, and Sophia the First). Educators can also use these shows, or choose other media. Step 4: Consistently apply the framework to other course content, connecting it to other curricula you are teaching. You can also use visual reminders or anchor charts to reinforce learning throughout lessons or units. Final Tip Embrace students' diverse perspectives and experiences as valuable assets in discussions on power dynamics and societal norms. Their lived experiences are valuable prior knowledge that informs their analyses and understanding, and it’s just as—if not more—important than traditional memorization of facts or regurgitation of things. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Critical Analysis Resource Bank with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 205 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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In this episode, we’re continuing a mini-series that looks at how to support students to critically analyze power dynamics, specifically looking at how they relate to race, racialization, and nation.
We explore Iris Young's critical framework, Five Faces of Oppression, and other strategies and tips to bring this important conversation and understanding to your classroom. Why? Students today need to be equipped with the skills to critically analyze power dynamics. These conversations, though, can be challenging to work through. Educators may benefit from taking a systematic approach to these topics in their classrooms. By understanding frameworks like Iris Young's Five Faces of Oppression, educators can provide students with the tools to challenge societal structures and empower marginalized voices. What? Educators can use the same four steps discussed in episode 203 to analyze power dynamics related to race, racialization, and nation: Step 1: Select a theory or framework that works for your context. Iris Young’s Five Faces of Oppression is a useful one for this topic. The five faces are:
Step 2: Simplify the language of the framework for accessibility. Ensure all students can engage with the material regardless of their language proficiency. With the Five Faces framework, you may:
Step 3: Apply the framework to engaging and high-interest media. This allows students to practice critical analysis in a relatable context. You may show a short news clip, talk about a movie or TV show, or bring in a viral social media trend to analyze these concepts. Step 4: Integrate the framework with course content, such as historical sources or novels, to deepen understanding and application. For example, NYU has a culturally responsive curriculum scorecard, which you can use to analyze different content. Some metrics to look at include:
Step 5: Bring in other resources and tools to your curriculum. For example, the Stanford History Education Groups (SHEG) outlines historical thinking skills such as sourcing and contextualization. Both skills help students better analyze and understand historical sources. Further, Facing History has great lessons around stereotypes that help students grapple with and counter stereotypes. Final Tip Frame the analysis of power dynamics with an understanding of intersectionality. It will vary based on language and age levels, but you want to ensure we’re not just looking at one thing while ignoring other aspects of identity. There’s nuance in the intersection, and it’s important to this conversation at all grade levels. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Critical Analysis Resource Bank with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 204 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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In this episode, we are talking about empowering students to analyze power dynamics, using the example of gender identity. We explore some strategies that can engage learners from preschool to high school and facilitate this important conversation.
This episode is part of a mini-series that’s designed to help educators design curricula for students to understand and analyze power dynamics at any age. Why? Equipping students with the ability to analyze power dynamics and challenge societal norms is crucial for fostering a socially just and inclusive learning environment. Engaging students with relevant and modern media allows them to practice these analytical skills in ways that resonate with their context and empower them to think critically and openly about power dynamics at play. What? Students of any age can analyze power dynamics. Educators can adjust their units to be age-appropriate by choosing the right framework and engaging media for analysis. Here are four steps to follow: Step 1: Find a Theory or Framework That Works For Your Context The first step is to find a theory that is suitable to you and your students, fitting the classroom’s needs. You can find one that’s quite broad or specific to an identity group. Choose one that’s suitable for you as a place to start. For example, if you’re looking at power dynamics and gender, you may look at Nussbaum’s theory of objectification. Step 2: Break Down Complex Theories Depending on the age of your students, you may need to break down the language used in your theoretical framework into simpler concepts. You can simplify language, condense the number of attributes, or just think about how your students will understand these complex ideas. Continuing with the example of Nussbaum’s theory, you can identify what terms are relevant to your setting and which ones weren’t. When I taught using this framework, I broke it down into three simplified categories that connected back to Nussbaum’s theory: Women as “powerless,” “property,” and “disposable.” Step 3: Invite Students to Apply Frameworks Bring these topics to life by applying the framework using modern, interesting media. This is so key in engaging students in the topic, so think of media like advertisements, TV shows, or music videos. Eventually you can apply the framework to historical texts or other documents, but it’s important to start with something that’s highly engaging and interesting to your class. With my activity using Nussbaum’s theory, I used real advertisements that related to each category, and students did a gallery walk to assign them appropriately and analyze the representation of women in media. You could also do a “gender box” activity that gets students to generate ideas of traditional gender “roles,” looking at how they’re reinforced in media and popular culture, and then discuss how to break out of those boxes and why it’s important to break stereotypes. Step 4: Create a Visual Reminder Use something like an anchor chart and hang it in your classroom to reinforce learning and encourage application to course content. Final Tip Once you’ve decided to approach this conversation on dynamics, be on the look out for positive examples of justices, joy, and equity. Curate and share examples of gender expansiveness (or other social justice themes) with your students to inspire and fuel their imaginations and critical thinking. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Critical Analysis Resource Bank with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 203 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) Welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. We are digging into kind of my favorite new miniseries and this is inspired by a lot of different people being like. I want to help students at all ages, all the way from a pre-K we're working with a preschool right now and family members and educators in that preschool to help pre-K level students in like three, four years old, all the way to high school students who I have taught and have helped with the same exact thing. And what we're talking about is analyzing power dynamics. So when we support students' criticality, when we get them to analyze power dynamics, I want to first introduce kind of the steps to this and kind of a broad level how I would approach this, and then I want to give some concrete examples to you and I'll be throwing a bunch of links into the blog post for this episode as well. So if you're a person who wants to follow along or just write it down and come back to you later, that's going to be at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 203. All right, let's get to it. So here's the very first thing that I would do I would find a theory or a framework that works for you. Now you can find one that's really broad. You can find one that is specific to an identity group and kind of go from there. But find some theory or framework that speaks to you and I'll be sharing several over the next couple of episodes. Then I would break it down as needed. Some of your students are not going to need the breakdown and some of the theory is going to need to be broken down, especially for your younger kiddos. So, simplifying language, condensing the number of attributes, that's the kind of thing I would do for a breakdown. And again, you may break it down. And then your students are like actually, I like the nuance of the other thing, I can do that and great. But again, I'm thinking very intentionally about the broad range of a three-year-old all the way to an 18-year-old who might be doing this, or above. You know, you might have some students who are 20, 21. So, thinking about all of this and I mean even at the college level I think it's helpful to think about this. So do what's best for your age range. 01:59 Now, find theory or framework, step one. Step two break it down. Step three invite students to apply it and here's the kicker using modern, interesting media, something that is interesting to them. I have often used things like advertisements or TV shows or movies. Music videos particularly for older students, is really exciting Anything that is relevant to them. It could be a story you're reading in class, but just make sure it's a really interesting story and something that students are excited to do. Now, of course, you can use it in anything you write. You can apply these to historical documents, you can apply these to a novel that is not super interesting, but I think to practice it at first, we want to do it with things that are really high interest for students, so that they're talking about it, using it, figuring out the nuance. High interest for students, so that they're talking about it, using it, figuring out the nuance. And then you'll hang your visual reminder like an anchor chart in the classroom somewhere and you will invite application to more of the course content or texts that you ultimately want students to be able to grapple with and apply these frameworks to. So again, find the theory framework, break it down for students, invite students to apply it using really interesting things, interesting media. Then hang the visual reminder and apply it to course content. That's the flow we're working with. 03:08 So let's actually just dive into an example. We'll start with a high school example that I used in my gender studies class. Now I use because I was familiar with it with my gender studies background Nussbaum's theory of objectification, so I will link to that in the blog post for this episode and I kind of broke it down. I taught multilingual learners who are fairly new to the English language at the high school level, so I wanted to keep the concepts really rigorous. I wanted to have interesting media that they have seen in their lives or could easily connect to conceptually, but I didn't want the barrier to be the really high academic words that, to be honest, I had to look up. I mean, like she uses words like fungibility and I was like I have no idea what that means. You know and at this point I had a master's degree I'm like this is just something that needs to be broken down for most people. So, all of that considered, and maybe I would do this differently were I to do it again, but here's what I did and I will actually link to a PDF version of the slide deck that I use with my students. 04:04 Again, this was like your three of my teachings, so perhaps not my best work. Feel free to critique. But this is what I did. I showed the exact kind of wording that Nussbaum uses. So I think she has like seven or eight elements and I put those on the screen for students and then I said, okay, listen, we're gonna break it down. I'm gonna give you a visual and kind of a more simple word to understand kind of the three categories that she's talking about and that I want you to be able to apply, and then we're going to look at print advertisements that relate to gender and you're going to analyze them for the applicability of any of these categories. So how I broke it down were three categories as follows One, powerless. 04:43 So the idea of women being depicted as powerless in these advertisements was something they were looking for. The second was property women being treated as property, something that is owned, something that is kind of used as a tool of instrumentality, and women being disposable. So again, this is like considering the gender binary, considering presentation of gender. Right, there's a lot of stuff here that we're like asterisking, but just for like simplicity's sake, we have powerless, property and disposable. Now you can think about how to go beyond the gender binary in applying these, but these are kind of the three categories that we put up there in connection to Nussbaum's theory of objectification of women. 05:21 So again, I presented Nussbaum's language, broke it down into these three categories, had a clear visual with each one, one per slide, and then invited students to go on a gallery walk where I put printed advertisements around the room and then they had to label. I can't remember if I did this on their note sheet or they had to put like a sticky note up. I don't think I was flush with sticky notes at this point, so they might have just written on a note sheet which you know like station one or advertisement one was which one of these? Or are there multiple kind of categories present in this advertisement? And then we would discuss it all at the class. So again, this was during a media critique units and we did a gallery walk of those high interest visuals and use the theory, broken down into those three categories, to apply. 06:05 Now, if I were teaching elementary school, this would look probably a little bit different. I actually love the idea and I've done this with I think it's always fifth grade, but I think it could work even lower. I would do a student-developed framework and I would invite students to do the gender box activity where students are going to list like traditional gender expectations and again, I would be very specific in my framing of this Like this is not what we in this class believe, but what we often see in advertisements, in people talking about this, that we're like oh, this is such an old, gross idea of, like women have to be this or girl I would actually use girls and boys language, probably but girls are this and boys need to be this, and so really naming that like this is something we're actively working to change. But like, here are some of the gross messages that we've kind of heard. So with girls, I might kind of like cue them if they need a prompt. They probably don't, they're probably eager to talk about this, to be honest. But if they needed a prompt, I might cue them to like beauty standards or kind of like physical weakness or whatever right. Like I might invite them to think about like what about sports? Like what do people say about girls in sports? And maybe it's all positive and that's actually awesome, that's really exciting. And then you can kind of select some advertisements that might counter that and be like wow, that's a really old, outdated thing. Like look at all this great stuff that we brainstormed. So feel free to like, go with the flow of whatever your students are saying, um, but you know, like boys, often we have like the physical strength or like violence being prevalent, and so what I would do at that point is, once you have kind of the boxes of genders and, again I think, problematize the fact that this is like a gender binary construct and to be like actually like boys can be all of the things, girls can be all of the things and we don't even have to identify as one or the other whatever. Wherever your students are, wherever you are in this kind of language, please feel free to lean into any of that. Now what I would do is, once students have kind of identified their own framework or kind of considerations or elements of kind of gender oppression, because it's bad for boys, it's bad for girls, right, it's bad for non-binary folks, it's like bad to even have the boxes. 08:03 Once we have kind of developed that student impression framework, then we're going to have an activity and I'll link to some examples in the blog post again of inviting students to analyze some sample advertisements. Now, the sample advertisements I'm going to link are actually really interesting. They are video advertisements of toys targeted towards girls or boys, and they are some of the examples used in a study of, most interestingly, music that was very gendered in toy advertisements for children. So I just think there's so much richness in this. Students can analyze the music elements. They can analyze the visuals, the color palettes, who's in there, what are they doing, all sorts of things. But they can use their own framework to analyze those advertisements, which I think will be so cool because it's co-constructed with students. So again adds that motivating factor and that usability factor. 08:55 So then, once you are done with that, I would if they didn't come out organically in the gender box activity, I would invite students at this point to share any examples of either stories. I mean, think about the stories they read. It could be a picture book, a story they've read on their own. It could be an advertisement, a movie, a TV show, any sort of examples. It could be like their friends who are, like you know, just living examples of gender expansiveness and joy. But invite students to share any examples of gender expansiveness and joy. But invite students to share any examples of gender expansiveness, you know, going beyond the binary gender, bending like all of the, just like breaking out of the boxes and invite students to share that. And, you know, come up with your own too. Just in case students are maybe not having examples at the ready, you can be ready to share some of yours, to show them what is possible. Because I think one of the things that I did when I was teaching early on that I would like to do better if I were to go back and reteach those same students in that same unit would be to think about the ways in which we counter oppression that could be fueled by joy, right, and could be fueled with like. This is kind of the way that we like things to be. 10:13 I think often about the interview with the creators of Schitt's Creek and how they very intentionally wanted to develop something that doesn't have homophobia as like part a one of the main characters who identifies, as I think he identifies as pansexual in the show. I think he identifies as pansexual beyond the show, but anyways, I think that that is a really important component is that we make sure that we envision a world and then, of course, work in our lives to create that world and make that come to life that is fueled with joy and not oppression. So I think the the next piece of this is to invite that. If students generate, it, great. If you can add some ideas, great. 10:59 One of the resources I will link to in the blog post for today is a clothing company called primarycom. I didn't realize they existed until someone recommended them for toddler clothes, which I absolutely love because they are very intentional in designing gender neutral clothing. They have a whole article about gender neutral clothing design and the principles behind it and the why and the how. It's super fascinating. So I'll actually link to that article in the blog post. 11:24 But like that's an example, and so something as simple as like, from a design standpoint, considering gender expansiveness or the intentional selection of a male presenting child to, or a male identifying child to wear a dress, to model their dress, that they have right, like that is a choice, that is a gender expansive, socially just world, beautiful, making choice right. And so just maybe to have a couple things in your mind that you've identified. And one of the beautiful things about this right is that as teachers, we can be on the lookout for things like this. We can be kind of constantly collecting and curating these examples to be able to share with our students when we're ready to do a unit like this or as it comes up naturally in student conversation. And I think that's just one of the really fun parts of being a human and a person who is constantly learning and on this learning journey of life. But that's something that you know, you can consistently look out for, now that you're kind of thinking about it, curate that ready to share. 12:29 So, again, I will link to all of those resources I have named in this episode in the blog post. I will also link to a free resource which is a slide deck for promoting students' critical analysis in general, so you'll see things like an intersectionality wheel. You'll see some of the questions posed by Dr Goldie Muhammad from her book Cultivating Genius, where she defines criticality for us. There are so many resources in here. I want you to go grab all that stuff and that's going to be at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 203. I'm super excited to learn how you're going to use these frameworks in your class and what kind of activities you'll go through, but I'm also really excited to learn how your students engage and what kind of cool conversation and observations and creations come up. So please let me know how this goes. 
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In this insightful episode, Erik Francis delves into the transformative power of inquiry-based learning and the role of belief in education. Erik is an educator and the author of Deconstructing Depth of Knowledge and several other titles. He believes that kids can do anything, and it’s often the adult’s limiting beliefs that prevent a child from achieving, excelling, and succeeding.
Erik emphasizes the necessity of nurturing curiosity to help students excel, advocating for a shift from traditional cognitive methods to contextual learning, which is significantly enhanced by Depth of Knowledge (DOK) strategies. He further discusses the importance of teaching through questioning, which encourages students to ask meaningful questions and become active participants in their education. This approach not only transfers instructional responsibility to learners but also fosters a dynamic and empowering learning environment. The Big Dream Erik’s dream for education is that students love to learn—that they live through and beyond their potential. His belief is that answers come free, so ask questions! Curiosity and asking “why” is central to a good education that enables students to thrive. This dream extends to reevaluating educational standards, both in design and purpose. Mindset Shifts Required To embrace inquiry-based learning, educators must adopt a student-centered mindset. Inquiry and curiosity is an experience, a process—not a program that you can do on demand. This shift involves rethinking traditional teaching methods and embracing a questioning lens. Educators must be comfortable transferring instructional responsibility to students, encouraging questions for the purpose of teaching and learning. Action Steps Inquiry-based learning draws on students’ natural curiosity and desire for understanding. You can cultivate this in your classroom by taking these steps: Step 1: Start small by incorporating inquiry into everyday lessons. Begin by asking students how they can apply their knowledge and encouraging them to explain their understanding. Welcome questions from students and engage in your own process of questions and exploration, too. Step 2: Utilize Depth of Knowledge (DOK) levels to structure questioning, ensuring students progress from recalling information to applying and creatively using their knowledge. DOK levels include:
These won’t be all captured in one classroom setting, but will get deeper over time as knowledge grows through curious questioning. Step 3: Transform educational standards by using curiosity and questioning to demonstrate learning, not just for the purpose of assessment (i.e., right or wrong answers). Get students to just start explaining—talking about their observations and understanding. Let curiosity be a driving force for knowledge instead of rigid assessment models. Challenges? One of the challenges educators may face is the fear of losing control in the classroom when turning over responsibility to students. There is also the challenge of re-teaching students how to ask effective questions, as traditional classroom settings often discourage this natural skill. Additionally, educators may struggle with differentiating instruction to cater to diverse learning needs and overcoming the constraints of rigid educational standards. One Step to Get Started To get started, educators can begin by transforming their standards into inquiry-based questions using simple question stems like "How can you…?" or "How could you…?" This approach not only engages students but also encourages them to take ownership of their learning journey. Your goal is to have the students start explaining their thoughts and sharing their questions and ideas about the topic with you. From a book, for example, instead of them identifying a core theme (i.e., “family”) get them to start exploring family—what it is, who the family members are, how they’re related, how they feel about those characters in the book, etc. It’s about questioning and exploration. Stay Connected You can find this week’s guest on their website, Maverick Education or on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and YouTube To help you implement today’s takeaways, Erik is sharing a video for free: Deconstructing Depth of Knowledge - Discard the DOK Wheel. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 202 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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In this episode, we are talking about transforming classroom dynamics by designing discourse opportunities that build overtime. This concept, “threading,” is from Matt Kaye’s book, “Not Light But Fire,” and is useful in creating open conversations in your classroom. It’s a vital approach for fostering empathy and understanding—especially before addressing emotionally charged topics.
This method emphasizes foundational communication agreements and intentional curriculum design to empower students and center their voices. It can be used in whole-class discussions and discourse experiences, as well as small-group conversations. Why? Topics like race, injustice, and any sort of identity-based injustices can be high-emotion conversations in the classroom. Learning to navigate those conversations effectively is an important skill for educators to develop. Using protocols to design discourse opportunities that build overtime is one way to foster empathy and understanding, leading to effective classroom discourse. What? Better classroom discourse comes by design. Building out a curriculum, unit, or activity around a high-emotion conversation requires careful thought and intention. Here are steps you can take to do so: Step 1: Start with the Foundation of Discussion Before introducing high-emotion conversations into your classroom, practice the art of discussion with other topics. You want to build this skill with your students so that they are comfortable to speak with each other. Do this by co-creating communication agreements about how you’ll speak with each other and making sure everyone knows the baseline assumptions surrounding the conversation (i.e., “we never debate someone’s right to food and shelter”). Step 2: Design the Conversation Prompt Once the foundation of conversation is established, you’ll design the conversation prompt—what are you asking students to engage with? Depending on the format, you’ll likely start with some kind of prompt—a text, image, video, infographic, etc. This is the factual basis that kicks off your conversation together. Step 3: Select Protocols There are a variety of protocols you can implement over the course of a discussion, and having them “build” on each other is a great way to go deeper while ensuring safety and openness in the conversation. Here are some protocol options to try during class-wide conversations:
These are just a few of many protocols you can use, but the idea is to use them in a progressive way, deepening the conversation by building trust and empathy in the classroom. Step 4: Build Time for Reflection It’s important to allow students time to reflect on the conversation that just took place. They can provide self-feedback or feedback to others, based on a rubric you’ve co-designed with your students. You can also dive deeper to understand their experience with the conversation by having students share their feelings through drawing, photos, text, talking, or any other format they’re comfortable with. Final Tip When preparing for classroom discussions that can be emotionally-charged, focus on designing protocols in succession. You build your base of trust, comfort, and empathy, then go a bit deeper through facilitated conversation, until eventually students are leading and sharing what they’ve learned. To help you continue implementing discourse, I’m sharing my Discussion Resource Bank with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 201 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
00:01 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 201. Today we are talking about designing discourse opportunities that build over time. They build on top of one another, and so you don't have for thinking of Matt Kaye's concept of threading. You don't have the idea that this is the only conversation about this topic that you will have. I've kept that concept from Matt Kaye in my brain for a while, since reading Not Light but Fire, which is his phenomenal book about talking about race in classrooms. And, of course, this is not the only conversation you're going to have about high emotion topics. Topics like race, like injustice any sort of identity-based injustice is really what my heart goes to, and so we have talked on the podcast a lot about general steps of building curriculum and class culture around discussion of injustices and striving towards justice. So in the context of all of that, I want to name there are many, many resources previously on the podcast that you can listen to for other components, but today what we're focusing on are the specific protocol options for discussion and discourse in your class, particularly, for the most part, whole class discussion and discourse experiences, although I will name at least one that is a smaller group level piece, of course, always using things like turn and talk as well. But I think the large classroom pieces are where we sometimes struggle for ideas for how to build and at what point of the unit we use which type of protocol. So that's what we're getting into today. I'll kind of go through the general steps first and then you can always reference previous podcast episodes for other components that you want to dive deeper into. So, general steps here is the overview of how I would build out kind of curriculum and a unit specifically around a particular topic. 01:52 First, of course, you want to have the foundation of a culture of discussion built. Before you introduce any high emotion topic. You can discuss things and practice the art of discussion with some lower intensity topics. So you want to build the foundation. You want to have things like baseline assumptions or agreements in place. For example, we never debate that people have a right to life and water and housing or something right. We want to have communication agreements. So this is how we will communicate with one another. We will not talk over someone else, whatever the things are right. 02:26 And then, once you've kind of built the foundation for culture discussion, you design the prompt what is the particular question that we are asking students to engage with and discuss. Potentially, depending on the particular discussion format, you will select a text or texts. I always use texts in air quotes, so that could be a video, it could be an infographic, it could be a lot of things, but it's kind of the fodder for conversation, the factual basis. Then you will select the protocols. So, again, you want to thread them over time. That's the focus of this episode. So what protocols are you going to do? We'll talk more about that momentarily. 03:01 And then, finally, after students have had conversations, you want to build in time for reflection. So build capacity for student discourse by giving them feedback and having them give feedback to each other and self-reflect, giving themselves feedback. And this should be based on a rubric that you design, and ideally co-design with students, and or a framework which I've talked about before. The discourse analysis framework that Dr Shrubry, bridges, patrick and I have used and published is a good one. We also want to make sure that we're gathering student experience data in multiple ways. So having students share their feelings, drawings, photo, voice, whatever kind of format it takes. We want to make sure that students are sharing their experience in the classroom, in the class discussions, specifically with you so you can make adjustments based on their experience. We don't know students' full experiences until we ask, so we want to make sure we build in time for that. 03:52 Okay, that was a very fast overview of all of the pieces. Now we're going to dive deeper into the protocol options. So that was step number four selecting the protocols to thread throughout the unit all around a particular topic. So what we're going to talk through are kind of general protocol options and then I will give you an example of how these kind of come to life in a particular unit based on identity and I'm pulling from Boston Public Schools has a really cool identity unit. I think they call it like unit zero for the start of the year, and so I love this concept and have been working with them. And so just thinking about how do we maybe apply this concept of discussion threading and discourse threading, building a conversation on a previous conversation around the concept of identity, because we're talking about identity-based injustices. Those can have heightened emotions and it's even more important to be intentional about how we design the curriculum. So possible protocol options, again thinking about specifically class-wide conversations Whenever I am building a unit or starting a topic where we haven't gone there before, we haven't discussed this topic, it might be unfamiliar or it might cause high emotion. 05:06 I like to start at the beginning with building some empathy and some emotional engagement and censoring students' experiences and stories. Now, my favorite protocol for this is circle practice, and so I like to come together in circle right no desks, chairs in a circle, ideally. Obviously, different people have different spatial requirements in their classrooms and spaces, but we see each other's bodies. We are connected to the stories students are sharing and we invite students to share a story connected to the topic, but maybe a story about their own lived experience or feelings on a particular topic. So we're really centering in students where they are in the moment they're coming into that first class discussion. They are not concerned with necessarily like factual things. It's more of kind of an emotional lived experience thing. However, students can certainly bring in facts that they know and we want to honor and value that expertise. But if we have misconceptions here, know that we have time to address them later. We're not engaging in debate here, we're just learning about each other and again, I think it's really important when we're giving feedback to students to identify specifically what the purpose of each discussion is, I would say, at least for you as an educator. What we want to know about the beginning stages is we want to encourage and foster curiosity, a deep understanding of others, a practice of listening deeply, of emotional engagement Like that's the beginning stages. We also I think we also want to make sure that students see value in what they are bringing. Their current experiences Often particularly for students who feel very disconnected from traditional schooling have not maybe been successful, quote unquote, in a traditional way, in a grading way in school. 06:57 I think a lot of that brings itself into class conversations and when you see the students who might be shutting down a lot of times, that might be because they're fearful that they're going to get an answer wrong or they don't have the correct background knowledge. And I think sometimes we use the phrase and I've talked about this before background knowledge as like this very specific set of factual things that students must bring in with them from, like the previous years of formal schooling. And we don't value as much I'm saying this as a we, because I've done this as well, of course we don't value as much the things that students are bringing from their own lived experiences and lives and things outside of formal schooling and so when we invite all of that, we also invite that engagement. That might not happen if we introduce this topic in a more formal discussion setting where we're citing evidence immediately and that kind of thing. Okay, so after the beginning stage we have built community with circle. We have emotionally engaged students, we have valued their experience. 07:58 Coming in Then kind of along the middle parts of the unit, we could vary these, we could use several different protocols. Here's my two favorite for kind of the middle portion of a unit or discussion kind of thread. One is human barometer. This is great for inviting students' initial thoughts. So take a position and we're going to discuss your reason for taking that position in small groups wherever you're standing. 08:22 So imagine a classroom where one side of the room is agree and one side of the room is disagree, and then I have recently come to love the part in the middle. So I think sometimes we particularly part of, I think, us culture we are like you know. We're going to create arguments, we're going to stand firm in our position, and I think students have seen a lot of that in the political landscape lately. They are very familiar with take a position and defend it and I want to foster and encourage kind of a nuanced understanding of topics and the ability to change one's mind based on deeply listening to others. So I have renewed my interest in the middle standing in the middle, not fully agreeing or disagreeing, but you have to explain why and it has to be kind of a thoughtful nuance and, honestly, many times when students stand there and explain that nuanced opinion, I really I think that is sometimes the most thoughtful opinion or the most thoughtful stance is like one a person who really truly understands the depth of the topic. So I don't want to exclude that. 09:31 And if it turns out that everyone in your class stands in the middle, you know you might have to be like, okay, where are you like 75% leaning towards stand on that side of the room just to like, foster a better discussion. But, human barometer, take a stance. So you would share a statement. You would have them take a stance on one side of the room and then, wherever they're standing, turn and talk to the people next to you. Why are you there? And then you're going to have one person be the spokesperson to kind of share out to the larger group and you can invite students to move where they are standing, based on whatever the group said, if they are convincing, so, encouraging that deep listening. I also want to name, of course, if your students are more comfortable or if there are physical considerations to take into account, like you don't have to physically move about the room. You could do this digitally. You could do this on like a scale. I've done this via Zoom where we annotate like a line. You can hold up fingers one, two, three. There's a lot of different ways that this could look, but just envisioning kind of one example how I've used it in my class. 10:32 The second example of a protocol in kind of the middle range is a discussion diamond. I get this from Investigating History, which I think this protocol specifically was written by EduCurious, which is an organization out of Seattle, I believe Washington, and they I just I love the opportunity for written and verbal discussion in groups of four. So they propose that students get a question. Usually it's like the question for what they call a cluster or a set of like five lessons or something where they've been learning about things. They can certainly cite evidence at this point and they are asked to think about their response to the cluster question or the kind of like mini essential question or driving question for the week and students will have some think time. They will get a piece of paper with a diamond drawn on it and because there's four people, the diamond will be divided into four quadrants and each student gets to write in one of those quadrants On the paper. You could also do a chart paper, you could also do post-its that go on the paper. So whatever you need for accessibility, students will think, write the response on the post-it or the square of the diamond and then, after everyone has written, they will verbally kind of share and explain a little more deeply because maybe they just wrote one sentence or two sentences, their idea. They will have about one minute to share and then they will have a few minutes after everyone has shared their initial idea, to come to consensus or at least synthesize their understanding, and they will write that in the middle of the diamond, in the center of the paper. And so that's just another example of a way to engage with the discussion diamond. 12:07 Now there's with a question, excuse me, is a discussion diamond. There's a ton of other things you could use in this middle kind of format where we're starting to base our opinions and ideas of things on factual information. We've already started examining sources and that kind of thing. You could certainly do something like a collect and display. Everyone gets a Post-it. What are your thoughts on this? Write it on a Post-it, come stick it on the wall. We're going to cluster our collectively, our class's, ideas into different categories and group them based on themes we're seeing emerge. There's a lot of different things you could do, but these two are my favorite. 12:42 Um, finally, to kind of end the unit, I really like Socratic Seminar and I specifically like it because it's very student-led. The teacher ideally does not even sit in the seminar itself. They sit kind of behind the seminar. And I'm encouraged by a recent book I've been reading. I think it's called Hands Down Conversation. I'm interviewing the authors on this podcast. I'm very excited about it, so stay tuned for that episode. But this is something that is possible even at the K through five level, because that book is specifically about elementary students in kindergarten through fifth grade and how this is possible there as well. 13:16 But students are really leading the conversation around a question. This is really good for nuance. This is great when students can cite sources so they've really done a deep dive not just looked at one source, but they've been looking at sources for weeks now. They have fully developed their kind of opinions as much as they can in a unit of study right, and this is where they have enough that they can just kind of take the conversation and go with it. They do not need constant teacher intervention or redirection or further kind of active questioning in the sense of oh, they don't understand this and they need to clarify. But this is where they really thrive and so I like some sort of structure that gives them the ability to run with it. And, of course, as a teacher, you are on the outside right, or as a coach, you are collecting information, maybe writing a transcript, identifying misconceptions to, of course, address later. 14:08 Or what I love about that hands-down conversation book is that there are several mini lessons where it's like, okay, if this is happening in discussion, this is a skill students need to build or this is a gap in the skills. Here is a three to five minute mini lesson where you can teach them this idea of, for example, building on one another. Here's a poster that's like step one, two, three, that you can teach them this idea of, for example, building on one another. Here's a poster that's like step one, two, three that you can have as an anchor chart for this mini lesson or skill and then we can teach it to them in the next day. And then we come back to this idea where we're constantly building skills. So all that say Socratic Seminar are some sort of whole class, completely student-led conversation where we can get to nuance, where students can cite a plethora of sources and, of course, having more sources or even opportunities where students have like a kind of like a jigsaw, but even more like students do their own research or we have a ton of sources and students can take on the ability to be like the quote-unquote expert in a particular, like niche area of this topic, so that we have a lot of students bringing very different sources to this conversation and we're not all citing the same three sources. I'm sure we've all engaged in conversations where we're like, okay, yes, we got it, we've heard the source cited and this specific sentence of the source cited like 10 times in this conversation, like let's get something new going. So again, also a testament to your selection of texts and make them varied and make Socratic Seminar come at the end of like a really robust unit where students have had many chances to find sources. Okay, that's enough talking about all of the protocol examples. 15:41 What I want to do now is take you through a specific kind of progression for an identity based unit. So here's an example. Again, we're starting at the beginning. Let's do a circle. I might do an opening ceremony. So circles have opening ceremonies, closing ceremonies and kind of a full circle round, or more than one. So here's what I would do to start the circle In one word or movement or image, if you have, I like using climber cards, which are just I'm sure there exist in different iterations, but then these have some art from the author and they're just kind of like metaphors for how you might be feeling, and so I like giving students the option to pick one up and say that you know, this is how I'm feeling in an image. So how do you feel right now? Get everyone participating in some form, perhaps not verbally, but some way, so we kind of get to experience everyone's where they are. 16:31 Then for the full circle, I might invite students to say what is the story of your name? I might give some sentence starters. My name means I like my name, because the person who gave me my name is my name makes me feel right. So tell us about your name. Every student is going to have something to contribute, at least in conceptually right. Content-wise, we might have some supports available for students who need a translation partner or think time to be able to translate, but the story of their name, like all students have an opinion about their name, or maybe it's. I totally don't have an opinion about my name, but that is something I can share. Right. 17:09 Then, as a closing ceremony, I would invite students again the practice of deeply listening is what's important here to share something, just one thing that they learned about someone else during that circle. Okay, and then from there, what I would do is I would maybe move on to a human barometer protocol. Right, I might say, you know, actually, first I would do maybe an adaptation of this where we're doing four corners. Okay. So when I'm describing who I am, the most important thing I first say is about my hobbies or skills. If that's true, go in quadrant one of the room my family or friend groups. Go in quadrant two. If the most important thing to you is your race or gender, go in quadrant three. Most important thing is the language you use or where you were born or where you lived growing up. Quadrant four, right. And so then we're kind of seeing what's most important to people. So, again, kind of a witnessing and building on of our previous conversation, learning about students' names, then formally start human barometer, perhaps with agree, disagree or like even more basic, like a yes, no, do you think would be how I would start these questions. 18:19 Do you think people are treated unfairly because of their race in the United States? So again, we're building on these identity concepts, yes or no? Right, move your body to one side of the room, stand with the people nearby. Why are you standing there? Right, do you think people are treated unfairly because of their gender in the United States, because of their language or nationality in the United States? Right, you would keep going with this progression. Then you might say do you think people are treated unfairly because of their race in this school, their gender in this school, their language or nationalities in this school? Right, we're kind of building conceptual understanding and starting to get to some more perhaps high emotion or kind of intense, maybe uncomfortable topics, particularly for the teacher or school leaders. But we are inviting students to share these opinions and they are based, again, in student experience, predominantly at this point. But then I think that the last one I would do for human barometer again, we're building on previous human barometer questions Do you know of any news or current events that relates to people being treated unfairly based on their identity? So now we're inviting students to bring in factual understanding and things that they've noticed, their lived experience outside of class right. So we are kind of inviting a wider variety of things there. 19:31 I would do an emotional check-in after this. I think that would be really important. And then you know, I would do obviously several other pieces throughout the unit. But then to just skip to the culminating piece, once we've really engaged in lots of texts and understanding and grounding in facts, built our skills over time, I would do a Socratic seminar. So, socratic seminar usually I push all the desks together. 19:55 I like to give students, unlike Circle, some space to write. I would want them to have something, whereas Circle we're just truly listening, purely listening. And Socratic we might be taking notes, we might be preparing a response to something someone else said. We might be like, ah, that's so good, I need to like remember that concept. So light, if any, facilitation by the teacher desks together. Teacher sits outside of that kind of desks together, circle or square and students are really leading us. And again, I would give a worksheet to kind of track your thinking in real time. Also, some students just really like the idea to pause and think. So there might be moments where you pause the discussion, the Socratic seminar, and say all right, we've, you know, we've heard from half the class. At this point I'd like others to speak. Maybe we need a little quiet think time. If you already spoke, feel free to, like you know, write down something that you heard or kind of engage with the worksheet during some quieting time. So my discussion question for the Socratic seminar might be what would it look like if the United States enabled people of all identities to thrive? Right, so what would it look like if is a really good question starter, because you are inviting students to envision a future that does not already exist. So again, there's not a right or wrong here. All possibilities are welcome. The other thing I really like about this is McAvoy and Hess. 21:10 Diana Hath and Paula McAvoy have written and I've interviewed them on the podcast, about how, when we discuss political topics, it is better not to discuss, like the factual things, but and I'm totally forgetting exactly what they call this but kind of like, oh, policy, policy issues is like where it is most fruitful to discuss because we can agree that something is an issue. We don't need to debate the facts about whether all people are thriving in the US. We know that people are not. I imagine we have built that understanding over the course of our unit and now we're inviting students to say like how could, how could it be better? Right, what would it look like if there's no wrong answer? Like what would it look like if, as long as we're holding to our baseline understanding or assumption that all people deserve life and you know water, food, shelter, healthcare, all the right, whatever your baseline understandings are in your class? 22:10 Within that context, and remembering our agreements for communication that we have built the foundation for in previous conversations, discuss this question right. And so we have some generative, creative ideas where students are building on a factual understanding not to be right or wrong about something, but to create a possible future that is more free, that is more just, beautiful, more desirable. I guess is what I'm going for. So I think in that progression and of course it's not perfect, of course it's not fully fleshed out. You can kind of see the building from the initial circle to the human barometer, to the Socratic of ways that we center student voice and leadership in the conversation, to ways that we grounded students experience and imagination and the possible, and we are thoughtful about our own kind of actions or interactions as we are kind of pulling out or designing some of the questions to surface student discussion in ways that are not super teacher driven in the moment but are really thoughtful in the design principles of how we create the space for students to really thrive and lead conversation once the class starts and once the discussion begins, because we've set them up for success in that way. 23:22 So, as you are heading out today to go do your thing, I want to leave you with a resource which is the Discussion Resource Bank. Several of the examples shared today, including Human Barometer, which could be a new setup for some folks have these kind of template slides that I use and I share with folks who want to engage in those. So lots of templates for discussion-based activities in this slide doc. I'm gonna link it in the blog post for today's episode. You can access that at lindsaybethelyonscom slash blog slash 201. 
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this enlightening episode, Allison, a dedicated librarian who transitioned from teaching high school English, shares her passion for empowering students and fostering a lifelong love for reading. She highlights the unique role librarians play in guiding students to make their own reading choices and offers heartfelt anecdotes, along with top book recommendations like "Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship" by Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo. Additionally, Allison explores the transformative power of empathy in education through Jamil Zaki's "The War for Kindness," and discusses the importance of diverse perspectives with works by Jen DeLeon, such as "White Space," "Don't Ask Me When I'm From," and "Borderless."
The Big Dream Allison's big dream for education is to empower students to make their own choices and cultivate a love for reading. She envisions a world where librarians play a pivotal role in guiding students and teachers toward discovering the right books, helping them design a reading life tailored to their own curiosity and interests. Allison emphasizes the importance of librarians in education, not just as keepers of books, but as connectors of essential resources and support for the entire school community. Mindset Shifts Required Empathy as a Skill: Understanding that empathy is not a fixed trait but a skill that can be nurtured and developed over time. This mindset shift can help educators focus on building empathy in students and themselves, preventing empathy burnout. Literature as a Tool for Understanding: Recognizing the power of literature in navigating multiple cultural identities and fostering empathy. Books like Jen DeLeon's "White Space," "Don't Ask Me When I'm From," and "Borderless" can provide valuable insights and should be included in school curriculums. Librarians as Educators: Viewing librarians as integral educators who support teachers, students, and school staff by connecting them with valuable resources and guidance. This shift can lead to more collaborative efforts and better utilization of the library's offerings. Action Steps Step 1: Explore Diverse Literature Incorporate diverse books into your curriculum that reflect various cultural identities and perspectives. Start with recommended reads like "Letters from Max," "The War for Kindness," and Jen DeLeon's works. Step 2: Cultivate Empathy in the Classroom Use literature to teach empathy. Create activities that allow students to explore characters' emotions and situations, helping them understand and connect with different perspectives. Step 3: Leverage Librarian Expertise Collaborate with your school's librarian to find resources that align with your teaching goals. Librarians can provide valuable recommendations and support for both fiction and nonfiction texts. Challenges? One of the main challenges educators may face is overcoming the perception of librarians as mere keepers of books rather than integral educational partners. This mindset can limit the collaborative potential between teachers and librarians and restrict students' access to a wealth of resources. One Step to Get Started Reach out to your school's librarian and start a conversation about your current curriculum needs. Ask for book recommendations or resources that could enhance your lessons. This simple step can open up new avenues for collaboration and enrich the educational experience for both you and your students. Stay Connected You can find this week’s guest on Facebook. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Independent Reading Selection Guide with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 200 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.
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TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Allison, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited. Thank you, I am incredibly excited. I am an avid reader and just very excited to be talking to a real-life librarian. I'm very into this conversation we're going to have today. I'm wondering if, just to kind of ground our work today, I think people love hearing the why behind why people chose education or why people chose specific professions, and so I love. Dr Bettina loves thinking about freedom, dreaming, and she says you know their dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. And so, with that in mind, what is that big dream that you hold for education? 00:47 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) in mind. What is that big dream that you hold for education? Well, if you know, if all things could be magical and true, I the reason that I ended up in the library world is because I love being able to guide kids to making their own choices and helping them to learn all the options that are out there in the world and then giving them the structures to be able to make choices that work for them in terms of their own curiosity and interests. And all of that and I felt like being in the library was a place that allowed me to have that kind of a teaching life and get to know what kids were interested in, without the boundaries necessarily of like. Here is the curriculum that we must follow to be able to work with kids to design their own curriculum of. I'm interested in this enough that I want to follow this particular path, or this dream or this interest, whether it's fiction, nonfiction or non-book resources. To be able to help kids to design a reading life for themselves is the most exciting part of education for me. 01:51 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Wow, that is super exciting. I feel like there's a quote out there somewhere that I saw once no idea who to credit, but it was like you basically just haven't found the right book yet. Like no one hates reading, you just haven't found the right book yet. Yeah, strong believer in that. So that is so cool. So you get to work with students and I imagine you also kind of coach teachers in a sense of like you have all of this knowledge of all of these books and teachers might be kind of head down. 02:18 Here's like the thing that I'm teaching, and I'm teaching like looking for those resources, and I'm I'm curious to know. You know there are teachers who listen to this podcast. There are leaders, there are instructional coaches who are supporting teachers in that same way. There may be fellow librarians, I'm not sure, but I think you know I'm wondering for them if this episode could be kind of a go-to place for, like here are some super cool texts that are out in the world, and if you're designing a new unit or you're doing the same thing, guiding to students to figure out what they want to read, maybe we could give them some ideas of kind of where to go. And so I will just kind of open it up. I know you have some books in mind, and so do you want to take us through some books that you are just like loving lately, that you would recommend high schoolers check out? 03:05 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Yeah, I'd love to, and absolutely. And my first thing before I recommend any particular books is don't be afraid to ask your own librarian, because they probably know you better than you realize. So I know you know when I'll always be listening for people dropping a little piece of intel about what they're interested in or what they're thinking about next or what they heard about, and so and I'm always thinking about how I can help find somebody finds like the just right book for them, whether it's a kid or a grownup or anybody. So here's some books that I like. But ask your librarian they they might say something like oh I'm so glad you asked, because they've been dreaming up some good recommendations for you too. So I brought with me some ideas both in fiction and nonfiction. 03:53 Before I was a librarian, I used to be an English teacher, also in high school, and so I pretty much exclusively taught fiction when I was teaching English, and becoming a librarian gave me this whole new world of resources and nonfiction that I've loved reading and learning about, and so I'll give you some nonfiction and then I'll like go back to my comfort zone and give you some fiction as well. So the first book is called Letters from Max, a poet, a teacher, a friendship, and it is coauthored by Sarah Rule and Max Ritvo. And Sarah Rule you, if anybody, is a theater fan. She's a playwright and theater is one of my first loves. That's, like you know, my happy place. And she is a wonderful playwright. And I came across this book this summer while I was doing some research work for a friend and colleague who was directing a play by her. So I was looking into her life and her background and this book came up and I tore through it and I think I never would have necessarily found it otherwise. 04:53 But it's a book of letters between Sarah and Max. And she was a professor at Yale, and still is, and was teaching a playwriting class. And Max, who is not a playwright but was a poet, a student, walked into the class and said I know I'm not a playwright, but I would really love to take this class, can I take this class? And she was charmed by him and said sure. And that began this friendship between the two of them that started in class and her being his teacher and mentor in terms of playwriting and developed over the years into this mutually wonderful colleague relationship as writers where they would share their work with one another and comment and it really developed into this beautiful friendship. 05:41 And unfortunately Max passed away young from cancer. So this book she put together of their letters and emails and text messages to memorialize the work that he had done as a writer, but also as a memorial to their friendship. And it was so moving because so often teachers, we have these really, really special relationships with kids that in media I've never really seen great portrayals of healthy adult relationships where you can really share with your students. This happens more obviously in high school than elementary school, but I've developed friendships with my students that have lasted into our adult lives. We live in the same community and this book was such a celebration of those kinds of relationships and it was, you know, a tissue vest it was. It was so very sad but also so heartening to see this friendship between these two people. 06:37 So in terms of its use in school, it may be one of those books that it just. It's the book that you need as a teaching human being to validate like, yes, I am doing something in this world that is important to me, but I can also really imagine it being useful for an ELA class as a way to look at texts that are structured as, as a dialogue, as letters, as emails, as and as a way to help kids replicate that kind of text creation. Like, maybe imagine, like, take a text conversation between you and a friend and like, with their consent, see how could you turn this into a story or something like that. So there's also lots of SEL component stuff you know each letter you could take and excerpt a little piece of as a way of starting off a conversation about maybe a difficult topic, or it was beautiful. I absolutely loved this book and it was such a special find. 07:32 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh my gosh, that sounds amazing and it reminds me. I love the structure idea because it reminds me of I just started reading Oye and then I put it down because I was like I actually want to listen to this. There's an audio book version by Melissa McGolan, I think, and so it's. It's the same idea of like it's a structured, it's conversations, like a one-way phone call, and then so it's like her version, but she's like talking to her sister and it's so. It's so cool and innovative that I love the idea of just not just content wise, but unpacking structure too. Super, super cool. 08:05 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Yeah, and it's always fun to feel like you're peering in on somebody's life, like the fact that we get to read somebody else's emails feels so private and intense in a way that just reading a straight up you know prose nonfiction doesn't feel so I feel really connected to both of them as writers and as thinkers. 08:26 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Those are so good, awesome. I'm sure you have more, so I will stop talking. What else you got? 08:32 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Yeah, no problem. Okay, I have two books by one author. Her name is Dashka Slater. We had her come to visit our school a couple of years ago and she was a fantastic speaker. The books are called 57 Boss and Accountable and these could be looked at from lots of different perspectives Social studies, ela, social, emotional psychology. Like runs the gamut. Sarah I mean sorry, not Sarah Doshka Slater is a journalist. She's a magazine writer, newspaper writer. She writes for lots of different publications and these books, oh, she also is well-known because she writes a series of picture books about gosh, that snail I forgot the name of it, but it's a French-speaking snail. It's very cute. So this is a totally different side of her work. 09:22 57 Boss is a YA nonfiction. Ya means young adult, young adult nonfiction work, though it was read by lots of adults in our building and it was well liked by everybody, and it's lots of short chapters where she expands on the reporting that she did on a particular story for the newspaper in California that she was working at at the time and she followed this one case and the case. She's changed the names of the people involved because they were underage Sasha and Richard and Sasha. They were a student who was riding home from school on a public bus and wearing a skirt, even though they were male presenting, and Richard is an African-American boy who was also riding home on the same bus from public school and, for reasons that he has trouble articulating after the fact, decides to light Sasha's skirt on fire and Sasha is deeply injured. And Sasha is deeply injured and it kicks off a criminal case that ends up with Richard not being able to finish school and ending up incarcerated. And so she follows both of these young people through the process of the case and the emotional process of the healing and grieving and forgiveness or lack of it. 10:46 And because we're looking at these two figures, who are so marginalized in so many ways, you really start to understand the complexities of the situation and it doesn't give you any easy. 10:57 Well, like that's right and that's wrong because facts. So the chapters are super short and it really gives the reader and the teacher, the kid, whoever's participating in this text, lots of ways in and lots of possible angles that you could talk about. So that's 57 bus, and then a couple about a year ago she came out with a book called accountable, which when she came and talked she said well, I wasn't planning to write a second book about hate crimes but like I became the hate crimes lady, so she followed this case for several years, also in California, about a high school student who started a social media account. It was a private social media account explicitly for the purpose of making memes that this kid thought were funny, but the butt of the joke was often like racist content and so he thought it would be fine because it was like just private to a few friends who also thought this was like wry and ironic and because it's the Internet, nothing stays private for long. 12:06 And this became public and he used pictures of other kids in the school as the base of the concept, the school as the base of the content. And so the book is called Accountable because it's again one that seems like on the surface is like an easy open and shut. You did an awful thing, you have to leave our community kind of situation. But then when you start to understand like all the nuances of the situation is not nearly as clear. So this one is, I would say it's met, it's totally readable by students. 12:39 But I would hope that teachers would read this one for their own knowledge, because it gave me a greater insight into the workings of kind of aspects of social media and the internet and the way that it's being used in ways that I did not grow up with. So it was really helpful for me to have like a line of sight into that. And also it was one of those like bury your head in your hands slow moving disasters of how the administration handled it and like if there was a wrong move to be made, they made it, and it was just such a cautionary tale that I thought about a lot since, in terms of our tale that I thought about a lot since, in terms of our our as teachers and administrators way of approaching a situation, that it would be really great if other people could read it before this kind of thing happens at their school, or maybe it already has and you have a different way of thinking about it. 13:31 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, oh, my gosh, I love both of these sound fantastic. I love that you chose them, or or maybe I don't know if this is why you chose them, but I love that you chose them. Or maybe I don't know if this is why you chose them, but I love that they have complexity in them. And I totally see how that could be like a social studies ELA crossover or something where you're investigating, especially because they're like actual, it's actual reporting, to be able to unpack the themes from that in an ELA class, for example, and then have like an interdisciplinary unit where in social studies, they're unpacking events either current or past. I just feel like that could be so interesting. And the other piece that I love about that is that the same, you said, the same author writes like a fun children's children's series. Like I just love the example of range right, Like I think in high school particularly, there's kind of this feeling of this is the person you will be forever, and it's like no no, you can have an evolution of the thing you're into. 14:23 You can have both. I think it also just speaks to like the human soul being capable of many things. 14:29 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Right, and a writer's life isn't just one thing. Our interests change over time, and that's true of our kids. Like there's plenty of freshmen who come in loving one kind of thing and leave as seniors being totally interested in something else, and that's the way things should work. We shouldn't just be interested in one kind of thing forever and ever, the end. 14:47 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Absolutely. Oh my gosh, these are amazing. Okay, I can't wait to hear more. What else you got? All right? 14:53 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) My next book is by Jamil Zaki. It's called the War for Kindness. The subtitle is Building Empathy in a Fractured World. This one came out a couple of years ago and he has a new book that just came out like days ago, called Hope for Cynics. And I haven't read Hope for Cynics yet because it's literally just had its birthday. But the War for Kindness is. 15:17 He's a psychologist from Stanford who runs a lab and he focuses on the study of empathy, so how empathy works in human beings. And a lot of people in the past thought that empathy was a trait. So you were born with X level of empathy and that's just that's the way that you were. But his work and a lot of other recent work with psychologists looks at empathy more as a learned skill and as, like he uses the example of it being a muscle that you have to continually work in order to build that skill. So he talks about certain situations being like an empathy gym and how you can like work out. 16:02 So it's not as much a how-to book but more a summary of recent research and he's a great writer, so a lot of science writing. It can be a little bit challenging for people to access if that's not their field, but this is really accessible. If that's not their field, but this is really accessible. And so each chapter has its own kind of focus, and one that I think is super interesting for teachers is about kind of like empathy burnout. So it focuses on people who are in our field and in nursing and medicine and what we have to do all the time in terms of our empathy work and what happens when that muscle gets overworked. And I thought that was a particularly interesting thing for those of us who live in this empathy gym all the time to think about what that means for our own mental health and well-being. 16:59 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Wow, yes, I mean there are people who leave the profession for that reason. Right, I mean that's just Wow, yes, and I also just love that the so much of I'm doing a lot of work with the younger students kind of social studies curriculum that the state is doing investigating history, and so much of that is like one of their core state is doing investigating history and so much of that is like one of their core pillars is called historical empathy and human connection. And so it's how do we cultivate this empathy, like it can be cultivated one, and how do we cultivate it as we're looking at historical events and different things, and so I see so many ties again to like the possibility of I think this is my social studies heart but like the possibility of looking again past, present, current events, historical events and just the day-to-day, like the empathy gym that is school, right, right. 17:49 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) And this has a lot of ways, different ways, of looking at ways that you can help others to develop empathy, as well as yourself. So, yeah, I would definitely recommend that for people who are who are doing SEL work with any kind of kids or or young adults. 18:06 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh, that's incredible and I know a lot of schools particularly. I mean I think this would be a great read for high schoolers. And I also know that, like I think even middle schools have like wind blocks or what I need blocks where it's like, yeah, like what can we work on, or like sometimes they even have like SEL blocks specifically. But having those spaces be opportunities to read a text like this would be so cool. 18:27 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) I think that'd be a good one, right, and to know like no, really it's science, like this can be done, right, we're not just making this up. 18:36 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Exactly, exactly, oh my gosh. Okay, I love it, I think. The next one, I think you had what is related to both categories of fiction and nonfiction. The next author right, I'd love to hear kind of that crossover of like how you might be able to use an author's multiple text as like a set perhaps. 18:53 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Yeah, yeah. So the next author's name is Jen DeLeon and she teaches at a university near us, so she teaches at Framingham us being folks in Massachusetts. So she teaches at Framingham State University. And I'm going to talk about first her series of essays. It's called White Space and these are personal essays where she talks about different moments in her own past. 19:22 She grew up in suburban Massachusetts and is from a family who emigrated from Latin America when her parents were younger. She grew up in Massachusetts, so she has the experience of being in multiple worlds and talking about, like, her sense of feeling, like she does and does not fit in in different situations, which is definitely something that many, many of my students at our high school can really relate to. So these essays are short, they just look at like a minute slice of life, and a lot of them are from when she was in high school and college, so they're really, really relatable for our younger high school students and even middle school. A lot of them would be, I think, really accessible for middle school students. And she's also the author of several YA novels which we've had on our summer reading list and we've also had white space on our summer reading lists for our high school students. 20:22 So the novels are called Don't Ask Me when I'm From and Borderless. And Don't Ask Me when I'm From takes place in a suburban Massachusetts high school and it focuses on a young woman who is bossed to that school from her, where she lives in Boston, through what in Massachusetts is called the METCO program I imagine there's similar kind of acronyms in different states so she is, similarly to the author in her own personal essays, dealing with similar feelings of fitting in in one aspect of her life and not in another. So that one's called Don't Ask Me when I'm From. And then the other book, called Borderless, takes place. The first half of it takes place in Guatemala and the second half in the United States. 21:12 And the young woman who is the protagonist in that novel, she is a fashion design student. So she's in college and she is studying fashion design and she's at the studio and she's making new designs and then, through a series of unfortunate events, ends up in a dangerous situation and has to leave the country and has to make a lot of really challenging decisions about who's going and how am I leaving, and so it really gives you a wonderful perspective on the choices that she does and doesn't have available to her. And then we follow her through the complexities of being a refugee and dealing with the American immigration system and so that one's called Borderless and that one just came out, I think about a year ago Don't Ask Me when I'm From is a couple of years back. So both of them would be such a nice text pairing with like any one of Jen DeLeon's white space essays and you could see a really beautiful connection between the nonfiction and fiction. 22:18 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) That is super cool. I also imagine I mean my teaching when I was a teacher was in a New York City high school that was designed to be all students who had just recently immigrated to the States, and so I imagine working with those students. For example, my students would have a lot of things to say and wanting to say about their own experience and contrasting or finding similarities to these stories. So imagine, depending on the population of students people teach like that could also be a nice entry point of like are there things you'd like to share, or or not, but like are there? That's an invitation. I think that would be kind of cool too. 22:53 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Absolutely yeah, and being able to see that done by someone who has has multiple different works to their name and is really like aiming to share. Jen also spoke at our school once and she was phenomenal speaker and is is really, really generous with her, her work with students, so she really reaches out and it's important to her that students feel seen. 23:20 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, right, and I I I almost feel like that's my students. We would also do these like projects where we would choose a line of activism, for example, and kind of like pursue that. And this is one of the topics that would usually come up, like how do I use like my life understandings that I have? And I use like my life understandings that I have and I would like to share with others that may not have had that experience, or I need to like be essentially what Jen is doing, like being this model right Of like this is what it could look like to use your lived experience to like help and support these other people. I imagine there's like a tone of activism there as well that students could kind of unpack there in her writing absolutely yeah super cool. 24:01 All right, the next one I think you had on this list I am very intrigued by, because I hadn't heard about it. But as, like a literary nerd and as a feminist scholar, I'm like yeah, this sounds cool yeah, this one was like written for you then. 24:15 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Um, this book is called enter the body and it's by Joy McCullough, and you don't really need to have read a lot of Shakespeare in order to enjoy it, but it definitely would crack open a new line of inquiry for you about Shakespeare if you're a Shakespeare nerd. 24:32 So it takes place in the imaginary space underneath the stage where the bodies fall. So you know, like, if you imagine, like when the Wicked Witch melts right, she like melts into a trapped door and falls under the stage Like surprise, that's how it really happens. So it's set in this trap space, which is kind of like this netherworld, in between life and death and also the space underneath the theater, and it focuses on four female characters from Shakespeare plays who all die young and all in like unfair, grievous ways. So it's um Cordelia from King Lear, ophelia from Hamlet, juliet from Romeo and Juliet and the last one very few people have read is Lavinia from Titus Andronicus, and she goes in the worst possible way. So we have these four young women whose lives were cut short by pretty much the violent actions of men, whose lives were cut short by pretty much of the violent actions of men no-transcript space in between worlds, underneath the stage, and they start telling their own stories out loud to one another. And the act of telling the story is like you're talking about before, like this act of self-determination, um, and the way that it's written is in, uh, it's inverse, which could be really intimidating because sometimes people feel like they don't know how to read poetry. 26:09 But this is really really it grabs you. There's a lot of white space on the page. It's easy to read verse, um, and so you're flipping the pages really fast because you're getting through them really quickly and it's really, really gripping. A lot of it is actually verse that's found text from the play itself, um, so it has a fun extra layer if you're reading that play, to read, like juliet's real thoughts that she didn't say out loud perhaps in the play. So this one is awesome. If you're a fan of the musical six I know a lot of people love six, I do this kind of has a feel of like six, like the six wives of Henry VIII. Speaking back to history, this is like that, but for Shakespeare. 26:57 Okay, this might be like my favorite book and just haven't read it yet, I know it got wonderful reviews when it came out, but I think it's a hard one for people to understand if, if you don't get that sell. So, yeah, I really love this. We had this one on our summer reading list and in fact, our staff book club is going to be talking about it tomorrow, because we always try for our staff book club to read at least something that the kids read over summer reading, so that we have a way to chat with them about a book that maybe we crossed over with them. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what everybody says about that one tomorrow. That is super exciting. 27:32 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I also love the connection to sex because I do think you could do like. I mean, this is from a former New York city teacher, so I get. There's maybe not quite as much access in other spaces, but imagine you could do a field trip to like actually see a play and do do that. 27:47 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) That would be so yeah, romeo and juliet is going up at the art in cambridge, near us in massachusetts in a couple months, so this would be a great tie-in also in terms of um, if there was a theater teacher who was looking for something. These make great monologues, like they're. They're basically a contemporary version of of shakespeare, so there would be a really neat monologue pairing with like here was the original monologue or here was a man's monologue in the play. 28:12 And here was the um, the monologue that didn't get spoken in the play by the, the female character so yeah, there's a lot of really fun stuff with that book that you could do. 28:21 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I am also imagining like something student written, where they're reading other books that don't have the, the here's the female perspective, like you write that or like that, doesn't have the. The here's the female perspective. 28:29 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Like you write the or like the, it doesn't have to be female, but it could be whatever missing characters. 28:32 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, absolutely Okay, someone build that out and then get back One more. 28:36 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) And this one is like a little bit outside of my wheelhouse Cause it's sort of more designed for a middle school reading audience. But this one is because my daughter and I both read it and she was like you have to talk about this one. So so the last one on my list is the Probability of Everything by Sarah Everett. So this is a novel that is aimed at a middle grade reader, though honestly, I found it fascinating as an adult and I think that most of my high school kids would really love it too. It's from the perspective of an 11 year old young woman named Kemi Carter, and she understands everything. She's a she's a science brain and so she understands everything in terms of, like it's, numerical space in the world. So she's fascinated by statistics and probability and so she has this like wonderful family and they're really supportive of her. Even though, like science isn't necessarily the thing that most black girls are encouraged to love, this is the thing that she does love and she's really supported in that. 29:41 And then, um, this asteroid shows up over her town. It's called and plus 68. And she starts calculating, like, the chances that it's going to implode the world and, um, she doesn't understand why everybody else around her isn't reacting to it in her same like, well, there's an 84.7% chance that this is going to do that and she's processing it really differently than everybody else around her. Um, and we follow her for four days and she's not understanding why she's seeing the world right now so differently than everybody else. And I don't want to spoil the the ending of it, so I'll just say that perhaps perhaps it's not an asteroid. Say that perhaps perhaps it's not an asteroid. 30:35 And so this book is really underneath, about social justice and about issues in the way that young Black people have to behave with the police. There's a lot that's going on underneath the surface that she doesn't necessarily understand, and the way that she's processing it is the way that that she can process something through math. But as a reader, you start to pick up on clues about that. There may be a different problem that she's dealing with in her community. So it's so, so good. My daughter and I both like when I I finished the book and I gave it to her and and I was like, just it's a little bit sad. And then she, after she finished, she's like but it was a lot more sad that you thought you know puffy eyes. So, um, we both got a lot of out of it and we ended up having a lot of really big conversations after we read it, so this would be a really good one. 31:30 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) And you were saying for a lot of different angles middle school. 31:33 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) right, this is, yeah, it's aimed at middle school, but I think it could be right in high school, Right? Um yeah, but it's definitely at a reading level that middle schoolers would be absolutely into. 31:42 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) You know it reminds me of, um, my life as an Ice Cream Sandwich by Evie Zaboy, which is a middle school book and also very much like. This, is like kind of she's very into NASA. The main character, who is a young black girl and like raised a lot by her grandfather, her grandfather's like well, I don't want to give things away either, but like very into NASA and there's just a lot of themes of science there, but there's also that underlying, like what is actually happening in the world piece. 32:10 And there's also the piece of about like how to be a black girl but that's into science, and like other peers are not right. And then also like how do I exist in a world where I might be it never comes out and says this, but a lot of things are very much like like she might be on the spectrum. It's like also just how she's interacting with people and like how it can be so hard to be interested in different things and just be a different like way of operating, way of looking at things as part of your processing of part events. So I think there's some really cool text that could happen there. 32:43 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) That sounds like a really good combination, yeah. 32:46 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I imagine I'm thinking, so many of these have such similar themes, I'm also imagining literature circles across these books. For, like, an ELA teacher who's like let's just get students excited about things like reading, get a few copies of each book and say to your students, like, read the one you want to read, but we'll have conversations in groups or a whole class about the overarching themes that don't all need to be related. Like, I think a lot of times we think literature circles have to be related to the specific book but they could be thematic and I think there's opportunity here for this to be like your list, to use that with. 33:28 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Definitely. Yeah, that was that used to be. One of my favorite things to do in my ELA classes was to do book clubs and then to all come together and talk about how, how the connections happen between the books, even though they hadn't necessarily read that book, and then they had the benefit of becoming interested in reading that other book and having that cross-pollination. 33:46 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, oh, my gosh. This has been such an absolute joy to learn about all these things from you, allison. Thank you so much. Is there any kind of like final librarian wisdom that you would like to impart? 33:56 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Oh boy. 33:57 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, I'm thinking about. Like me, as a teacher, I don't think I ever thought to seek out a librarian and maybe didn't even know what that would look like or when I should go see a librarian. Is there a specific example or like an idea of like? Here's a moment when you can come to me. 34:13 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Yeah, so often people say I'm really sorry to bother you and it's like no, literally this is my job. My job is to help you do your job better. And because there's almost nobody in a building whose job is to help the other teachers do their job, we're not always comfortable with asking for help because we think that it will mean somebody else is taking their time to do it. And it is actually my job to help you figure out, like I have this idea for a research project but I'm just not sure where to go with it. And I've seen lots of people do similar projects and I have examples of ones that might work and the kinds of questions that would elicit good interest. And so, like, if you ever have that instinct of saying like I'm really sorry, don't start with I'm really sorry, start with like I'd like to ask you this question, and your librarian will be just like yay, this is my purpose. 35:11 I see my role as a librarian to be kind of like the chaplain for the school, and not in any way in a religious way, because I'm not religious at all, but as the person who can be available to help anybody, no matter what their role is in the school, whether it's a kid, a custodian, a teacher, a administrator, parent, I I'd like to be available to help them connect with the information resource or whatever other resource they need to be successful. So that's how librarians see our role. So always ask us, because it makes us feel like we are needed and we are loved. 35:48 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Amazing and I imagine, like you said, reach out to your own librarians people who are listening or reading this blog post and if people want to see some of the work at the Framingham High School Library, is there somewhere where they can go or to either connect with you or just the school space? 36:04 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Sure, I mean, framingham High School Library has a Facebook page, which I sometimes am really good about updating and sometimes I forget about for a little while. Also, the Framingham Public Library. We all do a lot of like cross work with them and yeah. 36:23 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) That's great, perfect. Thank you, oh my gosh, thank you so much. This was really really fun for me, so I really appreciate you coming on, allison. 36:31 - Alison Courchesne (Guest) Yeah, my pleasure. It's been great to talk to you. 2/24/2025 199. A Culture of Personalized Learning & Reflection for Teachers with Dr. Frederick BuskeyRead Now
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode, I chat with Dr. Frederick Buskey, a returning guest to the podcast. With 17 years of K-12 teaching experience and another 13 years in higher education, designing and teaching principal licensure programs, Dr. Buskey knows how essential the role of school leaders play in fostering an environment where teachers can flourish.
In our discussion, Dr. Buskey discusses the major perspective shifts we need to make in school leadership, underscoring the necessity of prioritizing teacher development and advocating for a personalized approach to professional development (PD). Further, he emphasizes the importance of building trust through coaching relationships, offering practical strategies for school leaders to enhance teacher support and growth. The Big Dream Dr. Buskey envisions an educational environment where teachers are empowered in their own PD journeys. This means that school leadership is intentionally creating a supportive environment that prioritizes self-reflection and growth, enabling educators to thrive. Mindset Shifts Required To realize this vision, several mindset shifts are necessary. First, school leaders must know and embrace the fact that their teachers know more about their teaching than they do as a leaders. Teachers are the experts on their teaching, so leaders can’t come in and change everything without first understanding each teacher’s unique context. Another crucial mindset shift for school leaders is the transition from being deliverers of PD to facilitators of reflection and growth. Teachers should be in the driver’s seat of their professional development, and it’s the leaders' job to focus on creating spaces for reflection and follow-up. Embracing a culture of trust and collaboration, rather than top-down instruction, is key to empowering educators. Action Steps For school leaders to empower their teachers to take charge of their professional development, they can: Step 1: Prioritize creating spaces for reflection within the school schedule. Leaders must shift from being the “deliverer of PD” to someone who creates space for reflection and follows up with teachers. To do this, encourage teachers to reflect on their learning and experiences, facilitating conversations that anchor their growth. This can look a few different ways and must adapt to the personal and professional needs of the teaching staff. Step 2: Implement personalized PD formats There’s no one-size-fits-all for PD, and it’s important to cater to the diverse needs of educators. Again, it must be built on self-reflection and led by teachers themselves. Consider integrating various formats such as book studies, peer observations, and self-paced courses to provide flexible learning opportunities. Ask your teachers what works best for them and help them implement it. Step 3: Build trust through coaching relationships To create a culture of self-reflection and ongoing learning, schools can adopt collaborative coaching methods. Hold space for people to reflect by making it a priority in everyone’s busy schedule. Follow up with your teachers after they attend a conference or engage in some other type of PD; by doing so, you’re holding space for them to reflect. Then, ask how you can keep supporting them in their growth. This fosters a culture of trust where teachers feel supported in their professional development journeys. Step 4: Provide specific information for teachers Leaders should be a source of information and resources for their teachers. Acting as a coach, you’re listening to what your teachers are interested in, following up with them, and then curating resources that can be useful on their journey. Challenges? One of the primary challenges is shifting the existing culture of professional development from a one-size-fits-all approach to a more personalized and reflective model. One Step to Get Started Because this all represents a big shift from the status quo, it’s helpful to start with a simple next step. Dr. Buskey recommends leaders begin by stopping by their teachers’ classrooms and have a simple check-in: “What went well with your lesson today? Was there anything that surprised you? Is there anything you’d do differently?” This starts building a relationship of trust, where you’re inviting them to take charge of their own professional practice. It invites reflection and growth, building an environment where teachers are driving their own PD. Stay Connected You can stay connected with Dr. Buskey and his work on the Assistant Principal Podcast, his website, and LinkedIn. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing Dr. Buskey’s Daily Leadership Email with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 199 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Dr Frederick Buthe. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 0:00:07 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Oh, thank you, Lindsay, I'm excited to be here. 0:00:10 - Lindsay Lyons I'm so excited and so you've been on the podcast before Guests may be familiar with you. I'll give you a moment to like kind of share anything that might feel relevant. But really this is going to be a special kind of episode where we are taking a look behind the curtain and really brainstorming some possibilities as to kind of like people in the space of education who do things around professional learning and kind of brainstorm and co-create and ideate the possibilities out there to make education a great place where teachers are supported and students are learning and excited to learn more. So who are you? What should people know before we dive into our brainstorm to learn more? 0:00:45 - Dr. Frederick Buskey So who are you? What should people know before we dive into our brainstorm? Wow, so I have 17 years of experience in K-12 teaching at most levels and county level administration, and then I was 13 years in higher education where I coordinated and helped design and teach in principal licensure programs, and that's where my passion especially for assistant principals, but also school leadership comes from and that's where a lot of my experiences and the things that I bring into what I talk about and what I work with. I think the big thing for me is I was never a building level administrator, so I was very conscious of that and I've been in hundreds of schools as part of my work in higher ed and as part of consulting, and I've tried to steal all of the best stuff from, you know, from everybody that I meet, because they're a lot smarter than me. So, you know, I like to think my superpower is being able to take some of these really complex things like growing teachers, which we're going to talk about today, and and trying to distill them into some really simple frameworks to make it more actionable, and I so I want to leave lead with this, lindsay, because we're talking about teacher development and I think there are some things that I think, some major perspective shifts that we need to make in school leadership. I think the first thing I'd point out is school leaders have three jobs Keep everybody safe, right, non-negotiable. Meet all your legal obligations so you're not fired and they don't shut the school down. Number three support and grow your teachers so you're not fired and they don't shut the school down. Number three support and grow your teachers Because in the end, if our teachers are 20% better at the end of the year than at the beginning, it was a great school year and intuitively, we all know that. But then we also all let all the other garbage get in the way and I think a lot of times, even when it comes to growing our teachers, we're tripping over our own feet, and I will dig into that. Times, even when it comes to growing our teachers, we're tripping over our own feet, and I will dig into that in a few minutes. But I kind of wanted to start there. If you're a school leader, you're keeping everybody safe, you're meeting your legal obligations, but every time, every minute that you spend not supporting and growing teachers, you are not improving your school. 0:03:05 - Lindsay Lyons I love that for so many reasons. I mean, obviously we're all here for the students, but I love that. Implied in that is, if we don't grow the teachers, we're not actually helping the students right. So it just really brings that top of mind and, given the realities of teacher shortages and burnout and all of the things right now, it's like wait, if we don't grow the teachers, you're not going to have any teachers left. 0:03:30 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Exactly, exactly. You know three of the top reasons that teachers lead the field is don't feel supported by administration, struggling with discipline issues and student behavior and poor culture Guess what. Every one of those is about the school leader. And if I'm a new assistant principal, the thing I want to focus on that first year is getting to know and support and grow my early career teachers. It's a natural pairing, right? We don't have to fight the new AP veteran teacher kind of battles. We go in. You've got new people who are thirsty, who want help. You're a neutral person. You just go in and start building a relationship and start working with them. And guess what? A teacher who knows they can call their AP, who knows that their AP is invested in helping them become a better teacher, that person's probably not going to leave. 0:04:28 - Lindsay Lyons What a great point and I so I love one of the things you said was you get to know the teachers and then right, and then you support the teachers and I think that's that's huge right. You have to first identify, like, what are the strengths and areas for growth for our teachers and then next part is identifying well, what can I offer or what can I connect them with to be able to support them in the ways that they specifically need, which is going to be different for everyone, right? Like the I don't want to say like old school, but the way that I initially was given PD in air quotes, heavy air quotes as a first, second and third year teacher was we come to a large staff meeting once a week and then you leave and goodbye, everyone gets the same thing and it's usually someone talking at you, right, and we probably know that doesn't work well. But if I'm a leader trying to change that dynamic that's always maybe been the dynamic at my school or district is like these large staff meetings, these PD opportunities that are not personalized, like can we brainstorm a little bit about what are the possibilities for either formats or things to consider that might be beyond the all right, everybody's going to get in one room and the leader's going to talk at you. Like what does that look like to support personally? 0:05:47 - Dr. Frederick Buskey talk at you Like what does that look like to support personally? Yeah Well, I want to drive that nail deep into the wood, because here's here's a couple of things that I think leaders need to embrace, a couple of perspective shifts. So number one is your teachers know more about their own teaching than you do. You may know more about teaching and learning, but when it comes to their teaching, they know more than you do. Just like I'm going to hazard a guess, by my education experience, I know more about leadership and change than most of the people listening to this podcast, but every person listening to this podcast knows a lot more about their own leadership than I do. So for me to just walk into your school and say, oh, you need to change the way you're doing things like that, maybe, but maybe not, because I don't know your context, I don't know your history, I don't know what you're wrestling with. So we have got to get out of the mindset that we're supposed to go in as leaders and tell teachers what they need to work on. That is so, so counterproductive, and so what the alternative is then is to put teachers in the driver's seat of their own professional development and let them tell us what they need and let them find the different kinds of resources that may help them. So we can start there. 0:07:13 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love that. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. I love this mindset shift and it's truly kind of like, yeah, this journey of either co-creation or like, yeah, they're just totally in the driver's seat and I'm just like, I'm the GPS that you can ignore if you want, or you can tell me your destination, right, and I help you get there. I don't know why I'm into this analogy, but it's like into my brain and so I'm wondering, you know, once, once, teachers have said like, let's just imagine, okay, I'm just imagining the school. There's one teacher who is a brand new teacher and just needs help, like getting oriented to, like how, what is the teaching world? Like, right, what is my planning process? What is, how do I do all of these things? I'm going to orient myself to a new school. There's someone who's maybe like pursuing a new line of pedagogy, right. Maybe someone's like okay, now I've been teaching very like traditional lecture style and I want to try inquiry-based learning. There's someone who, to your point about behavior being a force to drive teachers out of the profession. Someone really wants to work on culture. How do you get all of those folks the thing they need when it's three completely different topics? 0:08:25 - Dr. Frederick Buskey So there are multiple things that we can do. I would also say that if we can shift from it's my job to deliver PD or even it's my job to connect my teachers with PD, right, even if I can let go of those, what's my job in professional development? It's to create space for teachers to reflect, and then it's to create space for teachers to reflect, and then it's to follow up with them to continue the reflection cycle, to gather data. If they're trying to, you know, if they're trying to implement more sophisticated questioning techniques, then as a leader, my role is to go in and observe and check the look like, sound like, get that data so that we can go back and have a discussion and I can can say here's what I saw and heard. Is this what you had in mind? Are you getting what you want out of that? If not, how can we tweak these? So if I move from the deliverer and the scheduler of PD, that gives me more attention especially, but a little more time to focus on the reflection and the follow-up pieces, because we could go to the greatest PD in the world and if nobody ever talks about it again, it's lost. 0:09:35 - Lindsay Lyons And so many of those, I've, I've been to so many of those great PDs, right, like that's been my experience. It's like the binder that sits on the shelf forever, right, and we just don't open it back up because it doesn't become part of daily practice. So I love this, and I love the idea, too, that there's like an extra, like a person in the room collecting the data. That's really hard to collect when you are the teacher, because you're doing all the instructional pieces, you're figuring out, okay, what's on the next slide? Is this person grouped with this person? And then really, it's hard to get a sense of what's a student experience here. Like, I have 30 people in the room. What's that kid's experience? I don't know, cause I'm not standing right next to that kid engaged in the learning or not engaged in the learning. So I do love that perspective and and I'm I really love that it's like not even necessarily our job to connect them with the PD. I wonder about teachers' familiarity with options available to them, and so here's what I'm thinking in terms of format, are there times? So, okay, two things. One is structure. So are there structured times within the day that, as leaders, you've built into the schedule opportunities for PD time or you can like kind of pursue your own goals, maybe that's like your independent planning time. But I also wonder like, is that the culture of the school, that independent planning time is a time to pursue PD, or is that time to just plan your lessons and then there needs to be a separate time? So that's kind of one wondering. It's like what does the structure need to be, or what? I guess not what it needs to be. What could it be? And then also wondering about you know the multitude of formats that I never thought of as PD, and now being in the PD provider space is like oh right, it could be like a book study, it could be a self-paced course, it could be I'm actually going to go visit this teacher down the hall that's doing the thing that I've always wanted to do, and someone's literally doing it. So I just need to like go during my planning time or ask for a sub for 15 minutes to see the thing in action, right when the admin could like step in and watch my kids. You know there's so many possibilities. I'm just wondering if you have favorites, if you've seen this stuff in action. If, what are your thoughts? I'm sure you have some really good ones. 0:11:50 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Yeah, I'm kind of thinking about these. The different scales isn't the right word, but we can look at synchronous, we can look at asynchronous, right, because maybe for you the best time to do professional development is nine, thirty in the night, after your kids have gone to bed, because maybe you need to bust out of school at three, fifteen so that you can get your kids up, you know from wherever, or go home and take care of your parent. So there's synchronous, asynchronous. I think we can think of internal to the school, external to the school and I missed the last one. There's another one out there, but it'll pop up later. So I think we can think in those multiple different ways. That lets us really expand out the kinds of opportunities. But just a really simple thing what if we have our hour staff meeting? What if the first 20 minutes are dedicated to one thing about teaching that you want to learn? I get 20 minutes and at the end of that 20 minutes you're going to have conversation and we're going to do some share out about what we learned. So now everybody's focusing on their own thing. I knew a elementary school principal who met with her teams and said I want you to come up as a team, a focus area for your team for this quarter and then you can drive the professional development in that and I can come in and support. So it's not wholly individualized, but that's a way to bring the team together, encourage team leaning, learning and right, they're taking the lead in that. So they have agency. Some districts will run the kind of a la carte. So we have professional development day, we have these six things, and what some districts do is they actually solicit that from teachers, like we're gonna have a pd day coming up, what are the things that are most important to you? And then they get all that information back and then they can say, okay, let's, let's then offer these six things and, like you said, you probably have experts in your building that you can have. Start to lead those. But I think we also there's all these opportunities. We also have to be mindful of making sure that we're following up. And I wanted to go back. I know you talked about this when we were talking earlier today and our friend Jen Manley has a big thing. We were talking earlier today and you know our friend jen manley has a big thing. How do you, how do you plan without selling your soul and spending 12 hours a day in school. There are a number of really high quality education sources now to help teachers learn how to be more effective planners. That might be the most valuable professional development that a teacher could get. So, yeah, I think if teachers can come and say, hey, I saw this, and show me as a leader, like I want to do this course, I think this is going to be really helpful for me. Great, go do it. I don't have to deliver that, but we need to schedule a time where we're going to have a conversation. I want to hear what you learned and then I want to help make sure that you implement it. 0:15:13 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love that so much. So two pieces there. One is this idea of the leader as, again, the person who's doing the follow up, who's who's connecting, who's keeping the person on the path. I mean, I think about just even in my business, right, like Mara, your daughter is actually like really coaching me to keep a lens on what are my priorities. Because sometimes when we're in it right, we're in it and we can't kind of lift ourselves out to be like what is actually most important right now, and without that kind of second set of you know brain or the second brain to kind of remind you of where it is you're trying to go, I often think, as a coach, that's what happens, right, I'm like, hey, remember this vision that you started the year with, like, I just wanna remind you of it. Like did we get so far off track that we have been doing cool things but we're not actually pursuing that, we're not actually collecting data on that thing anymore? That was the direction we wanted to go in and it's okay if we shift, but if, but just kind of here to remind you, here, to here to help you on the path, which I often find to be, again, like teachers know best what they need, so it's not us telling them yeah, we have to stick to this path, but it is a reminder of here was was really important to you. You have now spent 12 hours a day, you know, or whatever, for the last week working at school. Are we prioritizing the right things and I think from all the way from like planning, the balance or harmony of like life and work to what are we prioritizing in the curriculum? Because sometimes we get to the point where we're just covering content and we're not actually like focused on the right things, we're not seeing the students in front of us, we're not connecting as humans, right, whatever the thing is. 0:16:58 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Yeah, and I think if we just if I ask leaders that are listening just think for a minute what are 10 sources that you could get good professional development from? All right, if we pause for a minute, most of the people listening could come up with 10 sources ASCD, I got my Twitter, I got you know whatever else, linkedin, I go, articles here you come up with 10 different places to get good professional development. How will you reflect on that, on that learning? How will you reflect? Because it's kind of like we operate in a bathtub and if we, if we clear water out, like we clear out some space, the water just flows right into it. So if I create empty time in my schedule, other stuff is going to flow in. One of the things that we can do as leaders is we can hold space for people to reflect. So if I know you went to a conference, I can pop in that next day and say, lindsay, tell me what you learned, tell me all about it, let me hear, because you are not going to reflect. You know, maybe on the drive home, but you're not going to reflect. After that you can have all these ideas. You're going to get into school and get overwhelmed, and then it's done and maybe one or two things stick. But if I can say, let's reflect, let's create this time, even if I give you five minutes, reflect, think about it and then say, okay, what's the one thing that you want to implement from this? And then tell me when I'll come in and I'll watch, and then we can have a conversation about it. Now we're actually going to get some improvement, some growth from our professional development, because now we're anchoring it and we're supporting it. 0:18:48 - Lindsay Lyons I also am thinking about kind of the cultural shift of just how we do school and how we do professional learning, that I almost wonder if that's the norm, like that's what happens when we go learn, and then we always have that space, that container held for us, and we kind of almost start to do that ourselves in our own minds. Perhaps that right like there's going to be, you know, a follow-up I don't want to call it accountability, but like a follow-up, a container for me, as you said, like space being held. And so now I'm kind of proactively thinking about what I want to say in that conversation just in my own head before I get to that space, and I almost wonder if that then creates a dynamic where other teachers are then offering that space and holding that space for each other and as a whole school community. I mean, even to the extent that, are we holding space for learners after they go learn? The thing to reflect? I think it is also just this big cultural shift to prioritize making that space for reflection versus cram more content in right, like again like the same parallels to teaching and covering curriculum. It's like are we just cramming in PD ideas and hoping something sticks and it gets implemented? 0:20:09 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Yes, we are in a lot of cases and it's understandable. And one of the challenges is teaching is so complex just the act of teaching, and then you layer in curriculum and all the other stuff. It's so complicated and if I'm working with a teacher, there are probably 20 different things that teacher could get better at. And I think one of the challenges we have as leaders is we think there's this thing. Challenges we have as leaders is we think there's this thing, but we also know there's this thing and this thing. So we're trying to help that teacher grow in three different areas and, by the way, maybe none of them are the area that is causing the most pain for the teacher. And if we want to become partners with teachers in their professional development, I think we need to address their pains before we address what we think. The problem is Because the research is pretty consistent that as principals, assistant principals, we're actually not that good at identifying air quotes the thing. Like we're not. Most of us haven't had that kind of training right. It's this weird thing where, because you're the principal or assistant principal or instructional coach, you are expected to be able to walk in a classroom, assess, provide feedback and you're expected to be able to coach. Most principals and assistant principals have not had any depth of formal training in any of those things and a lot of instructional coaches haven't even had training on actually how you coach like real coaching. That's complicated, but they do them because they're supposed to and then we don't. You know we make a lot of mistakes, but I was. I was in a session, a presentation I did last week, and it was about this reflective process and asking reflective questions, and so I had school leaders in this presentation and I walked them through three reflective questions and some of them were working with people that they didn't know at all. Right, they had no idea. And one of the participants at the end said they reflected so much and they got so much out of this and I had no idea what they were talking about. Right, because they didn't know the situation. But the power for us is in asking the questions and creating the space to give that space to people reflect, because once they start to reflect now, they're going to start to anchor their learning. We can't anchor learning without reflection and we can get our learning from anywhere, but there's only a few people that can create the space for us to reflect. 0:22:59 - Lindsay Lyons This is so beautiful and it reminds me too. I keep going back to like the types and the formats still, because one of the things that I think I've seen at a classroom level even is we create space for things like revision, for example. So let's say, a student does a piece of writing and they get the feedback on rubric and then it's like, okay, we're going to give space to implement and then I'll come back. Right, or you're going to have time to revise this paragraph and then you come back, but then without the specific supports I'm thinking of like a brand new teacher, right, who maybe doesn't even know that something like ASCD exists or that there is like an educational space on Twitter or you know whatever, like without that kind of resource bank, then we are doing the same thing we're doing with students where it's like okay, do better. And then we're like okay, where's, why aren't you doing better? And so I am wondering about like, whether it is literally like a Google doc of resources that we kind of like co-create with fellow teachers or like things that have been interesting. Maybe it is like I think Jennifer Gonzalez called them pineapple charts of like, co-create with fellow teachers, or like things that have been interesting. Maybe it is like I think Jennifer Gonzalez called them pineapple charts of like the here's when teachers are doing things you might be interested in seeing in your own building so here's the times to sign up to visit their classes Like some sort of resource collection that people could tap into. That might be topical, that might be, you know, whatever it is Like. Have you seen kind of that model or could you envision kind of what? Either things could be in there or where leaders, if leaders feel stuck, like where leaders could go to get ideas about those kinds of things, and we've named several today. I'm just wondering about systems. 0:24:53 - Dr. Frederick Buskey I haven't seen that in practice. It certainly makes a lot of sense. I haven't seen that in practice. It certainly makes a lot of sense, and especially with the collaborative documents that are available now where we can all access that and put that in. I think it's really cool to the idea that if we all have goals like how we want to get better as professionals and that begins with leaders setting the example of being transparent, right and putting out there, yeah, this phenomenal source for how to cut my planning time in half and now I see that's the goal of a couple of my teachers I can go right there and say, hey, hey, y'all, you need to look at this. And I think that's another thing. We talk about informational power. One of the powers that leaders can exert is providing specific information for people. So instead of me going in and saying you need to do this, I can find that one page, two page, three page article, you know, with four bullet points, four steps to doing X, and I can put that in your box and just say, hey, you might want to read this and that's a source. And then those sources usually have other places that you can go as well. So I think we can, as leaders, we can see some of that and start to curate that, and I think that is one of the really important roles for instructional coaches is that kind of curation of resources. 0:26:36 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, I love that idea, the curation of resources I also was thinking about. I was talking recently to a preschool who was saying you know we have such turnover because you know they're. They're with us for like two years and then they leave. And so the the families they were working specifically with educating families around how to talk about social justice issues, which I love, but they were like it's hard because you know the families leave and then we have new families and we did this PD or whatever for them, but now they're gone and so either with students, with staff, with you know any sort of turnover, particularly thinking about the high turnover rates and teacher shortages. Now I'm almost wondering too about the institutional knowledge that either leaders have or veteran teachers have. That I'm new, maybe not even to the profession but new to the school and like could you kind of archive or synthesize you know brainstorming here but like you know what are what's kind of the ethos of the school, what are these kind of key resources to like put in your grades or like here's the go to person for this parent contact or something. If that was kind of like a loom video I mean as simple as a loom video. That's like now part of this course library of things, that like we have a shared google drive and I have this particular question is there a way that that? I mean, I'm totally just brainstorming, I don't know if something like this that exists now. Would that be like viable to have a kind of co-created resource bank of people, just like loom screen sharing and talking through ideas? 0:28:06 - Dr. Frederick Buskey I don't know. I think it's a great idea and I do know there are districts or schools that compile resources in that way so that it is accessible. I don't know how realistic it is in the pace of our world that people are actually going to take the time to go look at it Like I think it's a great idea, and maybe if you build in that time to create the opportunities and say, hey, this is a time to go look at these kinds of things I'm not sure how much utilization like uh, uh, you know we've had this experience. I think I know I have. I do have some online courses and everybody's like, oh, we want this, we want this, so you put it out and then everybody's too busy to do it. So it's a great idea and people want to do it. But the two scarcest resources are time and attention and most of us are stretched way too thin already and so anything no matter how good it is. 0:29:10 - Lindsay Lyons just one more thing oh my gosh, that's really good point because it's making me think of one the importance of structures, so like where's the structure in the day to go do the thing. But also I'm thinking about as a leader or even as a teacher. I think there are things that sometimes we know that we become the go-to person for. So people, colleagues, are like oh you know, go ask lindsey this or go ask Frederick this thing, and so we just keep like saying the same thing or directing people to the same resource. I wonder if there is kind of a time saver inherent in I'm going to document this thing for everyone Anytime you ask a question, instead of taking 10 minutes of my prep time or you know my time as I'm running out the door to go grab my kid from school or whatever like it now lives here, and so I wonder if that's actually a value. I mean, I'm thinking also of like coaching cycles. Right, if we can like. Cara and I have been kind of playing with this idea of asynchronous coaching cycles and having feedback that you can like do the reflection at nine at night if that's your jam, but that that kind of lives in either an email or a Voxer thread or somewhere, and then we can kind of continue the conversation as each of us is available, because time is so short, particularly in schools where we have different schedules and leaders are kind of in 30 places at once, it seems. Yeah, I mean, I just I think there's so much possibility in all of the things we've talked about today and I appreciate that you have really anchored us in some of those kind of like formats but also kind of what the leader's role is again is to, in whatever way possible, hold that space for reflection, prompt that reflection, be the kind of follow-up data collector and potentially link to or share different resources and be the curator, as you said, of those things. I want to like leave space for anything else you want to share, but I do want to, in closing, when we get to that point, just leave people with like what's one thing they could do as they end the episode, Because we've talked about like 50, maybe. 0:31:16 - Dr. Frederick Buskey So I think the other thing that I really wanted to share is doing some leadership development with nonprofit leaders and I was. We were always trying to teach them how you coach right. So I had them. They were working in kind of ABC, where A was coaching, b and then C was observing, and this was in the third of three all day sessions that we'd had. So we we had just wonderful collegiality. People got very close. In these sessions we do a lot of kind of deep work, not just learning stuff. And we were debriefing the coaching and one of the people said she said this was so easy. Like why, why was it she? And she said real coaching is hard. This was easy. Like why was it easy? Well, because I trusted her and I knew she this wasn't going to be a gotcha or I knew I could say whatever. And so I had this level of trust. And that was last year and that conversation has just stayed with me. If we don't have trust, you can't coach. You can tell people what to do. You can't coach them if there's not a trusting relationship. And so I think that when you go to the one thing like build a relationship, people are the purpose. That's why we're here. Build the relationship, get to know your people, and if you get to know your people, they're going to tell you what they need. If your people aren't telling you what you what they need. 0:32:48 - Lindsay Lyons You either haven't built trust or you're not having the right conversations. 0:32:50 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Yeah, that's it, that's it, yeah. So the the way I would have leaders start is I do my little five-minute coaching thing. It is the simplest thing, lindsey. Just stop by a teacher and say, hey, tell me what went well with your lesson today, and just listen, listen, and they'll go for about 30 to 90 seconds. And then the second question is was there anything that surprised you? And it's such an amazing question because you'll see people look up or look down. They'll do that pause to really kind of reprocess the lesson through a different lens. Like a lot of us will think about what worked, what didn't work, but we never think about what surprised us. So you're forcing them to kind of replay their whole lesson and think about it from the different perspective. And then the final question is is there anything you'd do differently? And how you phrase those questions is really important because we want it to be invitational. We want them to be able to say is really important, because we want it to be invitational, we want them to be able to say, nope, nothing I would do differently, because what they're used to is I come to talk to you about your teaching and I'm going to tell you what you did well, and then I'm going to tell you the grow. Right, I give you the glow and then I give you the grow. You don't even hear the glow because you're waiting for the grow and it's not helpful because I give you the grow. You might want to think about this and I walk away and we never talk about it again. If I just said, lindsay, tell me about how that training went, were there any surprises? Is there anything you'd do differently? That's the growth and that's what I think. If leaders well, a couple things One, we want them to take away that teachers need to be driving their own professional development, and there are all these different ways that that could work. But the other thing is to understand that your value is in creating the space for people to reflect, because if you don't do that, if you don't create that space, nobody else is going to. And in doing that space, you are building credibility, you are providing opportunities for your teachers, you're building a relationship and you're learning. You learn so much. 0:34:58 - Lindsay Lyons just listening to your teachers celebrate. That is beautiful. I'm going to use five-minute coaching. Those three questions, that's beautiful, thank you. Thank you for that offering to all of us. I love it. And if people want to connect with you I mean you talk about this stuff all the time. You speak publicly. You were just saying you were doing that last week. So how do people get in touch and where can they find you in the online spaces? What do you want them to know? 0:35:23 - Dr. Frederick Buskey Yeah, so my website is frederick at frederickbuskeycom and you can get to anything from there. I'm on LinkedIn a fair amount, so a lot of people find me on LinkedIn and send me a direct message. The biggest joy I have in this part of my career is just speaking with people and meeting people, so anybody that wants to have a conversation with me message me on LinkedIn. If you go to my website, you can find a place to schedule a call. My email's plastered all over the place and I do a daily leadership email and that comes out 300 words or less, monday through Friday, and it's just a way to think about some of these things, right, it's just a reminder. A lot of times it might be a little story or just something to think about and set an intention for the day. If we're intentional in our leadership in a day, the day is going to be a win, right? 0:36:20 - Lindsay Lyons So yeah, oh my gosh. Thank you so much, dr Bruschi. It has been so nice to have you on today. 0:36:27 - Dr. Frederick Buskey So fun as always, Lindsay. Thank you.
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2/17/2025 198. Wellness is Boundaries, Alignment, and Gaining Clarity with Dr. Daryll WhartonRead Now
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In this episode, I chat with Dr. Daryll Wharton, a passionate advocate for teacher wellness and empowerment. She introduces the innovative concept of "recess" for educators, aiming to inspire the same joy in teachers that they evoke in their students.
The episode explores redefining success through a health and wellness lens, the importance of supportive school communities, and practical strategies to prevent teacher burnout, particularly in special education settings. Dr. Wharton's framework emphasizes building boundaries, aligning mindsets, and gaining clarity to ensure personal and professional well-being. The Big Dream Dr. Wharton's big dream for education is that students are met exactly where they are and that every single learner is able to learn at their own pace. And, if we meet educators where they are as well, they’re going to be more equipped with the strategies to do that. This dream is rooted in the belief that personalization for teachers, similar to that for students, can lead to transformative change in education. Mindset Shifts Required To achieve the vision of empowered teacher wellness, Dr. Wharton suggests that educators and leaders must question established routines and embrace change. She highlights the importance of asking "why" to challenge habitual thinking and to consider different approaches. This shift involves rethinking traditional practices and prioritizing self-care, as well as acknowledging and valuing personal well-being. Leaders, in particular, need to support teachers by recognizing stress signals and promoting self-care, encouraging a mindset where teachers can balance their professional and personal lives effectively. Action Steps To shift toward a wellness mindset as an educator, Dr. Wharton suggests you “check your BAG.” As an educator, you carry a bag to work all day, every day, and it’s a metaphor for the weight you carry around—physically, emotionally, mentally. So it’s important to analyze what’s in your bag and make sure it only has those things that serve you. Educators should check their BAG by: Step 1: Building boundaries What will you or will you not accept for yourself? Build boundaries around those things so you are aligned with your personal and professional goals and values. Step 2: Aligning with your mindset Make sure your true beliefs and who you are as a person align with your mindset. You don’t want to be out of alignment with your true self because it will prevent you from reaching your potential as a person and educator. Step 3: Gaining clarity What exactly do you want? What are you working towards as an educator? Get clear on that and start working toward it. Decide what you want and then describe it—get very clear on your goals, personal and professional, by describing them accurately and writing them down. Challenges? One of the significant challenges teachers face is managing the overwhelming workload, especially in special education. The extensive paperwork and additional duties can lead to burnout if not properly managed. Educators often struggle with setting boundaries and may feel compelled to work beyond their contracted hours. Start by setting a hard boundary around your time; for example, “I’m leaving on Fridays right on the dot at the time my contract says I can.” Further, some educators are not supported by their leadership. There is also a structural element at play here, where everyone is caught up in the busyness of their work and doesn't prioritize time for wellness. One Step to Get Started To begin prioritizing wellness, Dr. Wharton suggests creating a clear, achievable goal that encompasses both the personal and professional. What does your perfect life look like as an educator and as a person? Start by writing it down and visualizing it. Meditate on your goals so you retrain your brain to see it as truly possible. Stay Connected You can find more of Dr. Daryll Wharton’s work on Instagram, her personal website, the Teacher Recess website, or her podcast, Teacher Recess with Dr. Daryll. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Dr. Wharton is sharing a meditation with you for free. You can text the word “RECESS” to 443-775-2325 to access it and begin reaching your wellness goals as an educator. If you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 198 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Dr Daryl Wharton, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm so glad you're here today. Thank, you. 0:00:10 - Dr. Daryll Wharton It's really really nice. The title alone it speaks volumes. 0:00:15 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you so much. I am so excited for what we're about to talk about. Is there anything that you want people to know before we really get into the conversation? About you, about the topic of wellness, anything on your mind at the moment? 0:00:30 - Dr. Daryll Wharton The main thing is that I create recess for teachers and you know, teachers deserve that same break. They deserve to wake up feeling absolutely amazing. And I came up with that because I thought about how excited the kids get when they know that recess is coming up and they know if their little name moves down on that behavior chart they aren't going to go. And I just feel like that excitement. I feel like teachers should be able to come to work with that excitement every day. So that's what I do I create recess for teachers. 0:01:06 - Lindsay Lyons What a cool line of work. That is amazing. I love it. I mean, I think this is kind of inherent. My next question is kind of like you're leading right into it already, but I love Dr Bettina Love's work and she talks specifically about freedom, dreaming as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, and so I'm curious to know, kind of in that context, what is that big dream that you hold for education or educators? However, you want to answer that. 0:01:33 - Dr. Daryll Wharton My big dream that I hope for is that students are met exactly where they are and that every single learner is able to learn at their own pace. And you know, my model when I was in the classroom was you know, if you can't learn the way that I teach, then I'm going to teach the way that you learn. And that means so much to me as a special educator and as a mom of a special needs you know child. And I just think that if we actually met the teachers where they are as well, then they are going to be more equipped, they're going to have more strategies to say that. You know, no, there are no failures in here, it's only learning processes. So my big dream is that every student just learns to be themselves and grow up and be a happy and productive adult. I know that's big, but we can do it. We can do it. 0:02:35 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, that is so good. I don't know if I have ever heard someone frame it in that way of like the same thing we do for students and desire for students we could do for teachers, like that same personalization. I love that, thank you. Um, now I think there's probably leaders out there who you know, or or even teachers out there who will hear some of of this and be like, okay, I'm in this particular way of doing things, I have been doing things in this particular way and I want this thing. I want you know if I'm a leader to support my teachers in this way. If I'm a teacher, I want this thing. I want you know if I'm a leader to support my teachers in this way. If I'm a teacher, I want to achieve kind of wellness and recess and that vibe, what are kind of the mindset shifts that people have to undergo to be able to make that a reality for themselves or their teachers. 0:03:17 - Dr. Daryll Wharton From the leader's perspective, I think that we, as humans, we are creatures of habits, and I think that you really have to start questioning yourself why can't I be different? It is one thing that I teach in my framework is when those limiting beliefs start to come in and you think, oh well, I've been doing it this way for so long. This is the only way that we do it. When you just say, well, why not? Well, why can't I do this? Why can't I start here instead of over here? Why can't I drive this way to work instead of that way to work, we become creatures of habit, where we just become robotic, and I think that the word why is such a beautiful word, and it's something that I think that we can instill in our students as well. It's okay to ask me why. It's okay to say, well, why, why do I have to stand in a straight line, which that's a whole nother show Cause I? I don't believe in that either. You know you. You have these kids that sit in the desk all day long. They got to walk in a line and to the cafeteria, and it's like I know, if I had to do that at work, I will be a problem worker. So I just think that if we all just start questioning ourselves about how we do things, then we can say you know what? Today I'm going to do this a little different, and I think that you would be able to step out of your box more often than not If you just question yourself about why you do things the way you do things. 0:04:56 - Lindsay Lyons That is so. The implications for that are really widespread too. I love that that is so simple and so powerful, so thank you for sharing that. I am really curious. You mentioned a framework, so I don't know if you want to kind of talk us through that piece or if there are other specific actions that you would recommend teachers think about or leaders think about, but I'm super curious to know, like, what is it that you help people to do, and how do we get there? 0:05:20 - Dr. Daryll Wharton I have a framework. I have my keynote speech is called what's in your Bag and you know, as teachers we carry a bag to work all day, every day, and that bag is a metaphor for the weight that you carry around. Whether it's physical, whether it's emotional anxiety, it's still that weight. So I teach in my framework that you know you have to analyze what's in your bag, you have to take out what doesn't serve. You put in some things that serve you and then you have to make sure that you constantly check. You constantly check. So that bag is also an acronym for, you know, building boundaries. What will you or will not accept for yourself? The A stands for aligning with your mindset, to make sure that your true beliefs and who you know you are as a person doesn't align with your mindset, because sometimes it doesn't, and that G stands for gaining clarity what exactly do you want? I often shared and this is the beginning of why I started doing teacher wellness. I used to weigh almost 700 pounds and I lost. You know people would say, oh my goodness, I've lost over 400 pounds, and I know that that sounds like oh my gosh, but what I really lost was self-doubt and self-hate, which is no comparison to the physical weight of what I've lost and what I've gained in just getting myself. And now I remember who I am all day, every single day. There's nothing that anyone else can say to me to make me feel different about myself. So that's my framework for just remember who you are. And we use the word teacher a lot, but I always tell teachers you know what in your head. Call yourself an educator, because it sounds different. You know, when you walk in and you say I am an educator, it makes a difference in how you speak to yourself, and so that is something that no one can take from you. And I often say to teachers remember who you are, and that way you can thrive inside the classroom and, most importantly, outside of the classroom as well. 0:07:40 - Lindsay Lyons I love how, first of all, thank you for sharing your own personal story and I really appreciate that you're doing this work, that you've developed this framework. I think what I love about your framework is that it's really holistic, like it's not just set a boundary and then just like that's the end, right. It's also that alignment of mindset and values I think is so important, right? We get into teaching for education, we're educators for these specific reasons, and then we might lose sight of them because we're in the minutia or whatever, right, and like that doesn't serve us. And then I also love the idea of gaining clarity. I'm just thinking about like I have a particular priorities note, like a post-it note, right behind the computer. It reminds me when I'm in the midst of things and feeling overwhelmed, like what is most important, and I'm wondering if there are either, like you know, key strategies like a posted, or kind of aha moments, as you've coached teachers to kind of go through that and kind of unpack what's in their bag. Are there moments, either stories, moments or strategies you'd want to share around that framework for listeners? 0:08:42 - Dr. Daryll Wharton So I would say first of all, you know, decide what you want and then describe it Just like you would tell your students to. We're going to draw a picture today and everybody's picture is going to be different. So, at weighing almost 700 pounds, I used to say I want to be skinny. But I didn't. I wasn't successful until I defined and got clarity what that skinny was and you know I'm still cute and curvy, I'm not trying to be skinny. I realized that my skinny quote unquote was to be well, it was to be able to walk up and down the steps without breathing hard, you know, to get down on the floor and get up to start running if somebody started chasing me. You know what I mean. So once I defined what that skinny was, the goal looked really more reachable. I was like, oh okay, because when you say to yourself, oh, I need to lose over 400 pounds, it's a rat if I would have thought of it like that. But when I thought of I just want to walk a little bit better, I don't want my knees to hurt, you know, I want my blood work to be better, my blood pressure to be better, those things are more measurable. So I would say to teachers you know, write down. You want that clarity of exactly what you want, and not just as a teacher. You know, I go back to remember who you are. You are a person and you're modeling for students all day long of what their adult life is going to be like, and so you know. I saw somewhere a quote teachers touch tomorrow. How powerful is that? So there is no world without us. Let's be clear. There is no world without us. We teach every single person that makes the world run, and so there's a huge responsibility in that, and you must model. How do you come to work and still be happy and go home and be a good mother and a good wife and a good sister and a good daughter? It's important that children know that and not just only one plus one is two. Yeah. 0:10:50 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, absolutely. And I'm thinking now about how beautiful this work is and how important this work is, and I'm also thinking about all of the pressures that teachers have to contend with to be able to like, deal with, like to do this important work right that you're describing and like how do they kind of like, keep out the other stuff or, you know, is it on my personal opinion, is it is also on leaders to create the space for right teachers to be able to do that. So do you have either specific challenges that you know teachers face and kind of suggestions to overcome it, or, like advice for leaders of how to create that space? What can you give us there? 0:11:30 - Dr. Daryll Wharton I would say I always like to tell leaders that you must make sure that you are building community in your school. And you know, sometimes we have principals that sit in their office all day and you know no shade to them because, guess what, they have so many things that they need to do. So then block out your schedule and say you know what? I'm going to get to work 15 minutes before all of the teachers and I'm standing in that office and I'm going to say hi to every single person. Or, you know, every Friday I'm going to put a little personal note in their mailboxes. I'm going to walk around and not just walk around in the halls, and you know you want your students to see you. I'm going to pop in my head and say hey, ms Teacher, how are you doing today? Do you need anything? And I think that if you build that community for teachers to have a safe space and for them to know that you are their coach, because you are coaching them, that may be your next assistant principal, it may be your next colleague as a principal, and you should be able to take a day off and your school run as if you are still in the building. You can only do that by building community and that mutual respect. 0:12:50 - Lindsay Lyons That makes total sense to me. I'm also thinking about like the kind of structure. Like the things that we ask of teachers is kind of wild, like we basically ask them to do the impossible to cover thousands of standards right, to have very little prep time in many schools, to do all of these things. And I'm wondering if you've seen any leaders be successful with kind of the structural pieces like reconfiguring how time is so you have more prep time. Or I know one of the principals that I admired for modeling wellness was she was like all right, everybody out. Once the kids had gone, it was like go home, like it's okay, whatever is not done, like let's be well, like go home, I'm going to leave too. And I thought that kind of modeling was really something that I have seen as a concrete strategy. Yeah, anything that structurally or time-wise. 0:13:41 - Dr. Daryll Wharton It would really be beneficial if leaders started to kind of. You know you have a process. Now I'm always going to speak from a special education point of view. You know we have a lot of paperwork. We're prepping for IEP meetings in addition to the other duties that we have. And I will always say to my special educators you know, because I also was an IEP meeting facilitator for several years and I would give out that IEP meeting like a I call it a year at a glance, so that you will already know in September if you had five IEP meetings in March. You already knew that. So I would say to teachers and I got my principal on board because I needed that message to come from my principal and you know he just basically told them go ahead and start your progress report in September and add to it. And how good is that? When you're at an IEP meeting and you're speaking, you actually have the documentation to back up what you're saying. So I think that you know you can't be a person on an island. I think you have to meet with your admin team to really say you know, look, we really need to find a way how we're going to do anything and also know your teachers. You know that if Miss Teacher B comes in every day and she's happy and she's bubbly, and she comes in one day and she barely speaks, oh, I'm going to her room or I'm going to send someone we need to go check on, so-and-so. So I think that you need to have procedures and policies in place, and I know that that is just Something that everyone says all day long, but I really think that you need to be very diligent in policies and procedures for everything, not just all of your district requirements. But how are you being a leader in your school and this is what we do in our school to make sure everyone is well. 0:15:46 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. I don't know if I've ever heard someone say that, like the idea of wellness policies, like what is the? Yeah, oh, that's good, okay. I am also curious about, like do you have anything around teachers coming to you saying, like you know what, I don't know how to do my work in a container of you know 35 hours a week, or something like I don't know how to not take the work home because there's just so much of it. I feel like that's constantly a struggle, that I constantly a struggle. 0:16:17 - Dr. Daryll Wharton Yes, yeah, so um, I talk about that in my bag framework of building the boundaries and at the end of the day and and that's what I say like, if you already know, you have and I'm sorry I'm always going to go back to special ed, but you know, I'm just going to use that as an example If you know you have five IEP meetings in March, don't start on February the 20th and writing your. You know, I think planning is very good and keeping a running log of everything and just creating the boundaries. And that may be hard, it may put you behind in some things at work, but you can say to yourself you know what, On Mondays and Fridays or whatever, on Fridays I'm leaving right at the time that I can leave per my contract and I'm not staying beyond that. And teacher burnout is real. It's at 51% right now and it's the number one teacher I'm sorry, it's the number one profession for burnout right now. And we're at a teacher shortage and people just don't understand that if you don't have any teachers, you are going to be in a bad shape, in a bad shape. So I would start with building those boundaries and saying you know to yourself yes, I want my job, I love my job. Most teachers don't do this because for the money. They do it for the love of teaching babies. But I think you also need to always put yourself first, because as teachers, we have things too. I might be in school as a special educator fighting and advocating for the students in the building, but guess what? I have a baby at home that has special needs, so I have to be in charge of that and make sure that I'm devoting that time to my own child as well. 0:18:12 - Lindsay Lyons I just love that that listener can like hear you or, if they're reading the transcript, read you saying those words right, you have to put yourself first, because I don't think enough people say that, especially in a profession which is all about giving right. We're always about the students and we're and yes, I just love how you broke that down. It's like and like you have a life, you have your family, you have yourself to think about and I think it's just so great to to get your your take on that leaders need to say that leaders need to tell the teachers that, um, because, let's be clear, the all school districts, they're businesses. 0:18:46 - Dr. Daryll Wharton You know what I mean. You can't take things so personal, because it is a business and if you decided to quit, your job is going to be posted. They're not going to call you and say, oh well, we wonder what happened. Now your leader, your principal, may call you, because hopefully that principal has a rapport with all of the staff members, but as a business, no, your job is going to be posted and it doesn't matter if you're out for surgery or if you're home taking care of a sick parent, it doesn't matter. So, at the end of the day, you have to say am I going to constantly give from an empty cup or you only get from my overflow and that is it? 0:19:30 - Lindsay Lyons That is a lovely reframe. I love that. I just think I'm again looking at my notes of your your bag framework. I love the idea of the concrete boundary that you shared. So like right Friday at the bell, I'm out, like that's it. I also think that idea of gaining clarity and values alignment is so. It's why I love the framework that you have, because I envision, like my big shift from working 80 hours a week to like 40 hours a week was a combination of those three things. Right, it was like I was a special education teacher also and so I think you know, yeah, and so when we like do all of this stuff right, it's easy to take on, take on, take on. And so I was like, okay, what is the most important, highest leverage things that I need to teach my students that I collect data on for my student IP meetings? Right, like, what are these most important things and what things are most values aligned? So when I'm designing the lessons or something, it's like, well, I really want my students to be really good at critical thought or our discussion or whatever the thing is, and it's like this is who I want students to be in the world. This is the thing that interests them. So I'm going to prioritize these things, because I can't do a thousand standards, so I'm going to just do this, and that way I have the boundary on my time and the alignment to my values and the clarity that, like, these are, these are my focus areas and now I can move forward. And so I just I'm just thinking about my own journey and its relationship to your framework, and it's so good. 0:20:56 - Dr. Daryll Wharton I may need, we may need a partner. Yes, that was perfect. That was perfect and it's so simple and it's like when I thought about it I said what teacher doesn't carry a bag to work Like? But what's in it? 0:21:13 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, there's. There's so much. I think so many teachers that would benefit from you know connecting with you and I'm I'm sure we'll share at the end kind of where people can connect with you and get in touch with you. I'm sure we'll share at the end kind of where people can connect with you and get in touch with you. I'm curious, too, if they are excited to you know, book your keynote, for example, but that's like a couple months out, what's something they could do like after they listen to this episode and they're like I want to just start now. I want to start with something like as soon as I end the episode today, I want to do something that's like a step in the right direction. 0:21:48 - Dr. Daryll Wharton What do you recommend for those folks? I, again, I would tell them to create your goal, whatever your goal is for, and I would do a combination goal of you for yourself and you in your profession. And, again, writing a picture. Paint a picture of what does it look like? What does your perfect life look like as being an educator? I'm going to say that word as an educator and as a person and be clear about it. So what I incorporate in because I also do workshops that is aligned with my keynote. And when I was in the process of losing all of that emotional weight and, like I said, the physical weight was a byproduct of that, you know, I started with just saying affirmations and the first one that I said was I am disciplined and focused. I have it tattooed on my wrist and, and that is what I went on, and even if I was not disciplined and focused, I kept saying it over and over and over again. This is how we retrain our subconscious mind. So I'm also trained in neuro-linguistic programming and so that is speaking to your subconscious mind. This is how you basically change who you are, because your subconscious mind is constantly working in a background and, whatever you tell it, it will do whatever it can do to make it come true. So if you tell yourself that you're not pretty, you tell yourself that you're not smart, all the time, it's just working in the background, making sure that you will never be pretty when you look into the mirror or never be able to achieve any goals that you want to achieve. So I'm going to give three things. I'm going to say write your goal out. Then you're going to I mean specifically define that goal. Think of yourself as your student. How would you give your student this assignment and list them out? And then sit with yourself for a moment. Just sit down and just visualize yourself. Visualize yourself walking in those shoes of who you want to be, what type of teacher you want to be, what type of person you want to be, and just meditate on it. And I'll share this at the end. I have a small gift for your listeners and it's a meditation for them to listen to in the morning, and what I did was. It is an active meditation. Because we're busy as teachers, I don't have time to sit down with my legs crossed and my eyes closed. You can listen to this in a car on your way to work. It helps you to set your intention and your tone of the day, but a bonus part of it is you're going to come in, relax and your students are going to feel the energy. Now, we all know that students know who you are. That's why they know what classroom they can act a fool in and what classroom they will not. 0:24:49 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh. Yes, that is definitely true. I love this idea of an active meditation. I'm a person who really struggles to sit still and like stop, and so that sounds beautiful for me. So thank you for sharing that, and we'll be sure to link to that in the blog post for the episode. 0:25:02 - Dr. Daryll Wharton Yeah, Okay, perfect. 0:25:04 - Lindsay Lyons And so I have two closing questions for you. This next one is just for fun. It does not have to do with anything we talked about, though it can. Everyone on the podcast tries to, like I think, learn and grow as a human being throughout their whole life, and so a fun question I have is what is something that you have personally been learning about lately? 0:25:24 - Dr. Daryll Wharton Oh, my goodness, I have several things, so I am a singer as well. I have an album out with its meditations and affirmations on the album, but I also have three songs and I've always wanted to learn how to play the piano and I want to get the other side of my brain working, and so I just signed up. Now it's just an app now, don't? I'm not, I won't be doing any concerts, you know, lately or recently or whatever, but yeah, so I am going to learn to play piano and it's something that I've always wanted to do and I'm going to do it. And yoga I want to be a certified yoga instructor. So those are the two things, my main things, that I am learning right now. And you know, as a teacher, you never stop learning. Never stop learning. 0:26:21 - Lindsay Lyons Those are beautiful and so seemingly aligned to everything else you do professionally that it's so like holistic and great. Thank you for sharing those. And then I think the last question is people are going to want to connect with you, learn more about you, just kind of follow the work that you're doing. Where is the best place for people to connect with you online? 0:26:40 - Dr. Daryll Wharton They can go to. I'm on Instagram as teacher recess consulting, and, of course, you can go to my website, drdarylcom, and so I'm kind of re-ramping my website right now. But drdarylcom is for if you would like to speak with me in regards to my keynote speech. But I also have teacherrecesscom and I have a podcast. My podcast is called Teacher Recess with Dr Daryl and I'm going to be sharing tips and a whole bunch of stuff that will be launching on February the 14th, because you need to have self-love and self-care. 0:27:21 - Lindsay Lyons That is perfect, because I believe this episode will be launched on February 18th, so it will be out by the time you're listening. Yes, it will, absolutely. Oh my gosh, dr Daryl, thank you so so much for your time today. I've so appreciated your wisdom. 0:27:35 - Dr. Daryll Wharton And let me give you because I want to give the free gift your listeners can text the word recess and that number is 443-775-2325. And you will get an instant download of the meditation. And, like I said, I love the active meditation. Number one. People want to be looking at me side eyes Like how can you have an active meditation? It just gets you to think and put yourself first and set your intention of the day. 0:28:07 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, that's so beautiful. Thank you so much, and we'll write out the directions for that in the blog post too, in case anyone is driving and can't write the number down. Yes, you're right, awesome. Thank you again, dr Daryl. 0:28:18 - Dr. Daryll Wharton I appreciate you having me. Thank you so much.
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2/10/2025 197. Liberatory, Equitable Pedagogy through Place-Based Learning with Micki Evans, Charity Marcella Moran, and Erin SanchezRead Now
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In this episode, I speak with educators and authors Micki Evans, Charity Marcella Moran, and Erin Sanchez. Together, they wrote the book, Place-Based Learning: Connecting Inquiry, Community, and Culture, which explores how we can transform classrooms into equitable and inclusive spaces through place-based learning.
Our three guests are passionate educators with many years of experience. We chat in this episode about their work that explores the necessity of decolonizing curricula and implementing liberatory assessment practices to empower students. Additionally, they delve into the practicalities of place-based learning, emphasizing community asset mapping and leveraging student expertise to create dynamic, student-led educational experiences. The Big Dream The big dream, as articulated by our guests, revolves around empowering students to consume, critique, and contribute to their world. Further, they seek to create an educational experience where students maximize their innate talents and challenge oppressive systems. This dream extends to envisioning the community as a classroom through place-based learning, encouraging students to engage deeply with their surroundings and to learn from diverse perspectives. Mindset Shifts Required To realize this vision, educators must embrace several key mindset shifts. First, educators can embrace an open mind, as place-based learning asks us to reframe and decolonize our curriculums, starting to look at it from multiple perspectives. This involves shifting from a binary view of learning to a dynamic one, where students have more control over their learning journeys. Additionally, educators can trust their students to lead, support them with appropriate scaffolding, and view assessment as a tool for empowerment and social justice, rather than mere ranking or evaluation. Action Steps Because adopting a place-based learning practice can be a major shift for educators, here are some actions steps you may wish to adopt to get started: Step 1: Examine your own place story. Educators can start by examining personal connections to your environment, and develop your place story which can help form identity and values. You may reflect on themes of, “Where did I grow up? Where am I living now? How do I connect with this place and space?” Step 2: Implement community asset mapping Start with your classroom and find out what your students are experts in. What assets do they bring into the classroom? How are you using that to build your curriculum? This can be a great starting point to find place-based learning journeys. Step 3: Start small and keep growing You don’t have to jump all the way in and try everything. Instead, pick one or two design principles of place-based learning and see how it evolves in your classroom before moving on to the next steps. You can learn more about place-based design principles in our guest’s book, Place-Based Learning. Challenges? Common challenges are often around partnering with the community, like the school structures and red tape that make it difficult to get students off campus or community partners on campus. Another barrier teachers face is the pacing—educators often feel they don’t have time for place-based learning—and the political landscape we’re in. Overcoming these requires a focus on educational aspirations and the big dream for students, as well as strategic planning and support from school leaders. One Step to Get Started Begin by adopting a flexible mindset and choosing a small, manageable place-based learning project. Reflect on your current practices, involve students in the planning process, and use available resources to connect with community partners. By starting small, you can gradually build confidence and skills to expand place-based learning in your educational setting. Stay Connected You can find this week’s guests on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and their website, PBL Path. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing the guests' free resources: a blog page, Blank Place Based Project Planning Tool, and free reproducibles. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 197 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:20 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you, you, as we have this conversation today, do we want to go? Mickey, charity, erin, does that work? Okay, sure. 0:00:28 - Micki Evans I'm Mickey Evans and I'm just so excited to be here with you, lindsay, and with my colleagues and good friends. I'm a passionate educator, have been for many, many years and a proud grandmother of four granddaughters who are all under the same roof this holiday. 0:00:50 - Charity Moran I'm Charity Moran and I almost forgot it's my turn to go, but I was like, yes, four grandchildren. But yes, I'm from Shreveport, louisiana. Most of my work and my education career had started in Louisiana. So, in addition to all the things in the bio, I think right now, today, just where we are historically, louisiana is in the center of my heart, right now. 0:01:21 - Erin Sanchez Yeah, erin Sanchez. Originally from a small farming community in Minnesota but now in Tacoma, washington, the ancestral homeland of the Puyallup Nation. And I have been an educator for 24 years, lucky enough to work with Mickey almost all of those years and Charity for the last decade or so and just love partnering and collaborating with these two and excited to talk about our work. 0:01:50 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you all. So much. Beautiful introductions, and so I think your book is so wonderful and so will align to, I think, this first framing question I usually ask guests. Dr Bettina Love talks about the idea of freedom dreaming in this way. She says their dreams grounded in the critique of injustice and I just really love that to kind of anchor the work we do as educators in the space of education. And I'm curious, either each of you can answer or kind of whoever feels called to answer, but I'm wondering what the big dream that you hold for education is in the context of that thinking about freedom dreaming. 0:02:30 - Charity Moran I'll go. I kind of this is Charity. I very much so. Love Dr Love first of all. And so this quote of you know, thinking about freedom, dreaming and the idea of critique. I think that for me, the biggest idea which is kind of crazy to have to say out loud for education is that whatever we do in this process of education, students and learners of all ages actually are able to, you know, consume, critique and contribute to their world. Like with those three things are happening and if we're doing what it takes to do that, I think that's kind of the big idea for me. 0:03:18 - Micki Evans I definitely have to agree with you on that. When I first came to education, it was really about how do we maximize the innate gifts and talents that all students have and it's evolved over time, especially with PBL because it's really getting into how do we break down those systems of oppression so that all children and students and learners can achieve their fullest potential. 0:03:48 - Erin Sanchez Definitely yes, that community as classroom being the big dream for me, I think, and to facilitate that really reckoning with the racist structures that we sometimes feel helpless and we end up perpetuating. But how do we? How is there just an indigenizing of our current system? In a life before this, I was a spoken word poet and when I thought about indigenizing education, it was like educating our children in the kitchen, you know, disinfecting canning jars and adding pectin to berry mash, and in the garage, tearing the transistor radio, limb from limb, you know. Or in the woods, you know, with showing asufficiency, in the hospital, on the building site, in the movie studio, you know, in places adults haven't even imagined children being or doing schooling kind of introduction to kind of the mindset shift that I'm thinking about when I pick up the book. 0:05:11 - Lindsay Lyons I am a person who, like, really connected immediately with everything you're saying and kind of had that head-on moment that you get with books, that you're like, yes, like these people are like connected to my brain and you've put words to the things that I've thought but haven't put words to, and you extend my understanding of this stuff because you're giving me concrete practices and examples of just wow, wow, it can be even more than I imagined, which is so cool. And then I'm also imagining there's some teachers who could pick up the book and be like, whoa, this is so very different from anything I've thought of, like I didn't even that I'm just teaching social studies from a book right now, you know, or whatever. And so I'm curious, particularly for those folks but even for someone like me who had a lot of kind of aha moments as I read the book and maybe have done similar things in the past, but not to the extent you've laid it out what are those kind of like aha moments or mindset shifts where people who are just encountering the book and just kind of sifting through all this stuff and making sense of everything you've laid out there what's really required of them to get the most out of this? 0:06:12 - Micki Evans to make some of those freedom dreams that you named come true. I think, for one is to have a really open mind, because place-based learning really asks us to reframe our curriculum and decolonize our curriculum. So we're looking at it from multiple perspectives, not just a single story or a single narrative. So that's a huge mind shift and turning over more of that control to the students to really give them a voice to make an impact on their community themselves. 0:06:50 - Erin Sanchez And I hope that the book is empowering for teachers and sends the message loud and clear that place-based learning isn't binary. You know where you're either doing it all or not at all right, but it's a spectrum and a teacher can start anywhere and grow their practice based on their students and their context and their own self-reflection and their journey, so that it doesn't feel so daunting or scary. 0:07:22 - Charity Moran And there's also this shift around the idea of assessment and we emphasize the liberatory assessment practices, and so it's just a shift in thinking about how are we assessing? What does it mean to assess? How are we leveraging assessments to empower students and community? You know thinking about even promoting equity and social justice. So really, you know thinking about all of the things that assessment could be, as opposed to really what it is now in terms of how it's used and even abused. But how can it become more of what, like Zaretta Hammond refers to, as you know, a tool towards this partnership, this learning alliance between teacher and student? 0:08:30 - Lindsay Lyons teacher and student, I definitely got that sense that this is. This is a shift very much away from assessment in that kind of hegemonic dominance that we often see assessment as like a tool for like you fail or you're better, or write this ranking or any sort right. I very much read your work as like it's the process, right, it's the process with engaging community, it's the reflection. I love so many of the reflection protocols that you all named and and that reflection process, that idea of expanding what a project is to include collecting data in community and with community, and inviting community in and truly being a partner, not just in name but in an actual process. And so I love to the intentionality between not just naming the word decolonize but to also cite, like Eve Tuck's work I think Tuck and Yang's work around decolonization, to name that like I always get this wrong, but like that it's not a metaphor, right, it's about repatriating indigenous land and life, right, they write about, and so I can see that idea present in all of your work as well, which I really appreciate. So there's so much in the book that I was like we don't have time to do all of this in 30 minutes, but I would love to invite you all to share kind of like what are your either favorite pieces of the book? We can talk about any of the kind of I think the original pieces being very much like the framework. We can talk about specific practices or projects, because I also love that you all share projects that you have done and kind of really flesh all of those out for us to understand. So, yeah, what are kind of your favorite actions and things that you want to highlight for listeners? 0:10:02 - Charity Moran Yeah, I know one of my favorite parts of the book is how we leverage the troubled waters project. We leverage a specific project, kind of connect in part one to each of the you know design principles that we present and so being able to see, you know, you read the theory about it, you get into the research, but then you have an actual project that's been implemented, that connects back to and gives you know a direct kind of line to say the thing we just read about this is how it looks in the real world. So that's one of my favorite pieces, for sure. 0:10:51 - Micki Evans I agree. And how Dr Delpit, who wrote our foreword, tied that in so well I mean the story that she shares in the foreword just speaks to Troubled Waters, the project that we highlight. 0:11:07 - Lindsay Lyons Do you guys mind giving an overview, just a little bit, for listeners who haven't read the book yet, of the troubled water? I know that it's very in-depth in the book, but maybe we could just give a little preview. 0:11:18 - Charity Moran Yeah, so it's a project anchored in the place of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where there was a protest around all of the swimming pools were being closed in the majority Black sides of town. And so, you know, leveraging that movement during the protests but connecting the place and the history to connecting the students to that event to then now, in current times, work to. You know, leverage that history and knowledge of place to propose new pool plans in new locations, you know, with this in mind, and so, along the way, students debunk myths about you know Black people as swimmers and explore, you know historical examples of that, and so it's really a lot that just ties into this one place, this one historical event along the way. 0:12:17 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you so much. That was perfect, erin, anything you wanted to contribute around your favorite pieces. 0:12:23 - Erin Sanchez Oh, my favorite pieces. Well, I mean, since this book's imaginings, when we were just thinking about what we wanted, we wanted it to. Well, I mean, since this book's imaginings, when we were just thinking about what we wanted, we wanted it to be a workbook, right, we wanted, like teachers in there using it, doing the reflections, planning a project, and we've always said, like, if you read it from beginning to end, you'll walk away with a complete, you know, project plan, which I think is really unique. But what I've grown to love about it, now that it's in my hand, is that there is a place for leaders in the book, for school leaders, for instructional coaches. The whole part three is using the practitioners round, which is a really beautiful, just like coaching cycle, but unique to place-based learning, for how to support teachers on this journey and how leaders can leverage their positional power to create this space for place-based learning, this space for teachers to be able to take risks and try this out and see the impact on their students. And so that's what I've, like, grown to love is also empowering leaders Like you have a role in this, and it forces them also to examine the existing systems too. 0:13:47 - Micki Evans Yeah, and the other thing I want to add to that is the power of storytelling throughout, in terms of being a leader, using stories to create that change and to leverage members of the community students, teachers and just sharing and uncovering the stories of the community as well. We just collaborated with a group in India, PBL Propel, and designed a conference that was for leaders from all over India and Nepal, and they walked away with a design, a vision and a design for implementing and sustaining place-based learning at their sites, using our practitioners round and storytelling. 0:14:33 - Lindsay Lyons It's so incredible because when I was reading through the leader pieces, immediately I thought it connected very well. I think chapter 13, maybe as your chapter on the barriers. And I I just feel like as a coach, there's a lot of teachers I've worked with that have said, you know, yeah, but the barrier is this or the barrier is this right. And I just feel like as a coach, there's a lot of teachers I've worked with that have said, you know, yeah, but the barrier is this or the barrier is this Right. And I mean we can, I can invite open the conversation here to talk about particular barriers and how you'd overcome them. But I think much of what you share in the leader piece addresses directly many of the barriers that I've heard personally teachers say, yes, but I don't have like the logistical support here, I don't have the family communication piece here, or you know I just there's a lot of moving pieces. I need time in the day for planning and whatever. There's so many pieces that I think are addressed by that leader point. So if there's anyone listening who's like, yeah, this feels like a lot like the things are addressed at towards the end of the book in that part three, which I really appreciate. So thank you for putting that in there, because I really really appreciate that as a coach. Are there specific barriers or kind of challenges that you have, I don't know, heard the most in your work, anything that has been something that's come up for either teachers, leaders or communities, and then maybe how did you kind of help people through that or what came out of that challenge, if that question makes sense. 0:15:57 - Erin Sanchez Oh yeah, we definitely hear. There's a pattern to the challenges we hear and one of them is, like the, just those school structures, like you know, sometimes it's really difficult to get students off campus Right, and there's a lot of just red tape and just paperwork involved in that or getting community partners on the campus, you know. So helping leaders really look at what is their realm of control and what is their realm of influence and how to make that process more simplified, you know. And also just things that they don't teach us in teacher school, like how to write a letter to a potential community partner, you know. So we include a template for that, just to you know, quickly dispel any notion that there's some sort of barrier between teachers and a potential community partner, that we can be reaching out to anyone or that we can turn that over to an instructional coach that might be able to help teachers create a community partner database and identify those potential partners. So just those small things that can be done. 0:17:12 - Micki Evans And students can be a great asset for connecting with community partners as well, sometimes more effective than the adults in the school. 0:17:23 - Erin Sanchez Yes, very true. And then I know another barrier that I'm going to let Mickey or Charity talk about is the pacing. We hear that a lot. You know like we don't have time for place based learning. How do we build that into our existing scope and sequence? To either of you want to speak to that? 0:17:43 - Charity Moran Yeah, so that's definitely sometimes one of those, you know, barriers or challenges that make themselves known. And so then you know, like you said in part three, there's a lot of designing the you know the amount of content that's being put in there and things of that sort, so that we can at least try to keep it aligned and make sure that we start with the standards in mind, so that the things that we are creating as we start spelling out those ways of knowing that we know we're anchoring in, you know, content as well as justice, you know, and as well as other ways of knowing that we want to make sure we attend to. And then you know, of course there's also the political landscape, because a lot of people hear things like, you know words like liberatory and decolonize and culturally responsive, and that opens up a can of worry that as long as we re-anchor in ideas, like your very first question what are our biggest dreams for education? And as long as we think about those big dreams and use that as our measure, then the things that we're asking folks to do, and, you know, supporting the work in this book, it's not a big leap, you know, if we really just re-anchor in that dream in our vision for education because, at the core, you know, we can put politics aside and focus on what do we want students to walk away with? Who do we want them to be as a result of this education? 0:19:34 - Lindsay Lyons And I feel like many times, especially the worrying that we are doing, we are thinking of usually not even our students. We're thinking of family members of students and we're usually thinking about a very specific group of families of students, right, Like the, usually like the white family members who are going to get like really stressed about whatever, and it's like, okay, first of all, we're only thinking our worries are contained usually to this small group. That's not, that's messed up. Right, it's not even the students. And, second of all, right Like we, the students, get so engaged when we do this work, Like they are so excited. Students are excited and I just I think about, like when I was a social studies teacher the first year I taught, I had no idea what I was doing and I was like all right, we're gonna do the textbook and we're gonna like kind of race through all the content, we're gonna cover it all and you're gonna do good on this final state test. No one liked my class. It was so boring, it was horrible. And then I have the same students in an elective where we did. One of the things that you guys talk about a lot is that students are collecting the data, they're interviewing. There's storytelling involved. I'm just wondering about the dynamics of that shift because I think that's probably hard for someone like me who went from. You know this, I'm going to teach the textbook to OK, this is way more expansive. I have to let go of control. My students are kind of taking ownership of this. Any kind of tips or thoughts to lift up from the book from that perspective of like students are really leading this journey. 0:21:25 - Micki Evans I think it really. We have to trust our students right, even if they're littles, right. We need to trust them that they can lead the way, and so you may have designed this amazing place-based journey and the kids may take it in a different direction. So being flexible because, you know, most teachers are control freaks I was, am, but by letting go and seeing what the kids can do just gives me great hope for the future. Truly, because they're taking action and they're engaged in things that mean it means something to them. 0:22:06 - Erin Sanchez Mm-hmm. And letting go doesn't in any way mean that the support isn't there, that there aren't scaffolds in place to teach them the skills like feedback and revision and reflection and knowing that that takes time. Context of the place-based journey. So they know why they're learning what they're learning and in many cases we encourage them to create the why, to set that why for themselves and for their peers, and so hopefully they feel supported at every step. And just like I said before about place-based learning not being an all or nothing, you know the process of students learning the skills that are going to set them up for success in their place-based journeys is also not all or nothing. It's going to take a little bit of time and teachers can say, oh, I really want to work in this place-based journey on students giving, receiving and incorporating feedback based journey on students giving, receiving and incorporating feedback, and that's going to be my priority, and so it feels more manageable and tangible. And then students do walk away with those skills that they then apply to the next project until they have much more autonomy than they did six months or nine months ago. 0:23:29 - Charity Moran Yeah, it's very much so. A journey and this kind of ongoing journey, which is why I think one of the features I really love around the reflection questions and that there are more questions than definitions in a lot of the things that we do, because that encourages this kind of ongoingness notion of the work. Like, okay, I did it for this project, now maybe I want to, like Erin said zero in now on building some of the reflection skills, so now I'm going to reflect, on reflecting to make sure that I'm building and baking that into the lesson with the students, so keeping those questions in mind as well. 0:24:08 - Micki Evans And I think the same is true for collaboration, because most place-based learning journeys ask students to collaborate and work together and that does take some intentional scaffolding with students. We can't just throw them into a group and expect that they're going to be working seamlessly. So that's part of that journey. So the first project you may be spending a lot of time on building those collaboration skills. 0:24:37 - Lindsay Lyons This makes me think of two questions, so feel free to answer either one. Whatever is most interesting to you. One question I was wondering is what is the most exciting skill that you've seen students build within a place-based learning project? And then the other question is I just love the reflection protocols you have, and I was wondering if you had a favorite reflection protocol from that list. There were many I had never heard of, and so I would love to lift those up for our listeners as well. Feel free to go either direction. 0:25:11 - Erin Sanchez Feel free to go either direction. As soon as you said a skill that students learned, I immediately went to empathy, like developing that habit of empathy over time, like with my high school students, and seeing it very acutely in one particular project where they were collecting oral histories from people who had experienced genocide in Africa, asia or Latin America. So it required this high level of empathy and thank goodness we did practice interviews first, like we spent a lot of time developing those interview questions and follow up questions and creating like question maps and fishbowling the questions, because I realized pretty quickly like wow, their questions are super inappropriate because, yeah, that skill had not been developed yet and so it was over the course of the project culminating in those interviews. In those interviews and just being able to see how students had both kind of evolved and internalized the stories of the folks that they were hearing from was a really beautiful thing, yeah. 0:26:38 - Charity Moran I think kind of aligning with, I think, aaron's answer earlier around this notion of self-sufficiency and this one of the skills in students that I love see happen, and even some of the student testimonials that we have in the book. They've said, they say things like you know, I feel I feel more empowered or I feel like I'm in control of what I'm learning, or you know, it's just that type of energy from the students has been one of the favorite, one of my most favorite pieces around almost all of these projects. We hear something to that effect. 0:27:20 - Micki Evans Yeah, really empowering kids to make a difference in their community and taking those skills beyond the classroom. So the protocols that we use some were created by us, and what I love about the practitioners round is teachers have an opportunity to get feedback on their project design. But we also involve students in the process as well as community members, so it's not just teachers doing the protocols. We're engaging all the different stakeholders in those protocols as a way to critique and revise and refine as we move forward in the journey. 0:28:06 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, I think the student experience triad was my favorite. I had marked that as my favorite. They actually. How often do you get to sit down with students and be like all right, like tell me about it, like what are your thoughts? 0:28:20 - Erin Sanchez And you just get to listen. That's so cool, I love. I also love the community partner review. That happens at the very end of a project, where you know both the community partner and the students, either asynchronously or in person, sitting down in the same room together, are like creating this artistic expression of their experience of the project and that's like so cool just to see what they come up with and how they communicate with each other and just the stories that they're sharing. Yeah, those interactions are really pretty awesome. 0:28:58 - Micki Evans And that really helps to sustain that partnership. So we're not just using the partners once and then bye, bye. It's really sustaining that and seeing how the work might evolve over time. 0:29:10 - Lindsay Lyons I also love that you named specific examples too about sustainability of projects. Like it's, the partners, but also the projects themselves kind of, could live on and in the next year students add to it. That's a super cool concept. I think Anything else that you all would like to add before we go to kind of our closing questions round? All right, if anything comes up, feel free to jump in. So the first question and we could just kind of go. Everyone can kind of share their thoughts here. What's one thing you would encourage listeners to do once they end the episode? I will vote that people should get the book and read that, but maybe, as the book is in the mail being delivered to them, what's kind of a thing they can do to jumpstart this type of pedagogy? 0:30:02 - Micki Evans I think one of the things is having individuals look at their own play story to be to begin to see how they are connected to place and how place help create their own identity, who they are today, what their values are, um, so kind of beginning with what's my place story, where did I grow up or where am I living now and how do I connect with this place and this space? 0:30:45 - Erin Sanchez And I think a next step that we outline in the book too, is that community asset mapping, starting with your classroom, like finding out what your students are experts in, um, what assets they bring into the classroom every day, um, and then using that as a basis to look at your, your curriculum, your content, um, and and figure out how those can be like little, little nuggets of place-based learning journeys. 0:31:20 - Charity Moran And then you've already got your book. So once you've done that, and considering what my colleagues have said as well, you don't have to jump all the way in. Try picking one or two of the design principles and seeing how does it feel, you know, for yourself as a practitioner, for your students, and again thinking about how are they responding to what's happening. And then from there, just fold in more, fold in more, until you get ready for that project that you design as you read the book. 0:31:51 - Lindsay Lyons These are great examples. Thank you all for sharing those. My next question is because everyone who comes on is like a lifelong learner, constantly learning things. I'm just curious. It could relate to education or not, could be totally different. What is something that you personally have been learning about lately? 0:32:16 - Erin Sanchez about lately. It was the holidays. I had two weeks off. I actually read a mystery novel so I'm like, oh, what was before that? No, but like, my favorite interactions in the past year, both through professional development and just through online conversations and reading, have been Caroline Hill's EquityX Design. She was the founder of 228 Accelerator. We quote her several times in the book and she just talks about equity as a verb and really like process as product and how we design at the margins, whether that design be, you know, making changes within our own community, whether it be designing a place based learning experience, but how we're designing at the margins and I just absolutely love her. And after the recent election, she's having these online spaces to just have dialogue with one another and care for ourselves and care for our communities, which I've really appreciated too. 0:33:33 - Charity Moran That's what I'm thinking about. I've kind of been knee deep in the thinking about the uses of AR and VR, so augmented reality and virtual reality and this connections to place-based learning so, yeah, just really enjoying that. Some of it's kind of scary and I'm walking through that to think about what my teachers think along the way, because a lot of people are this technology thing and are we going to go completely iRobot? Are robots going to control the world? And things of that sort. So really digging into AR and VR with a lot of that in mind, connecting it to place-based learning and helping educators get into it themselves to overcome some of those fears and give the power back to the students, basically. 0:34:29 - Erin Sanchez You're going to have to teach her Mickey, and I as well. I'm so intrigued, but no so little. 0:34:38 - Micki Evans Oh, I think for me really in getting ready for this conference in India was really understanding the Indian context and what's going on within their educational system. And I worked with the group to create the first book on project-based learning in India that aligns the teachings of place-based learning to the ancient teachings of India and how colonized their educational system became and now kind of moving back and making those connections between the ancient teachings and now, and in India at a federal level they are really shifting what the focus is and it's really looking at the strategies and place-based learning you know making not just that, testing and testing and testing. So for me I spent a lot of time having learning and thinking about that. 0:35:33 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, my goodness, we're going to have to have another like connection, just about all those pieces. That's fantastic, I think. My final question is and we will link in the blog post for this episode to the book specifically so people can get it but is there anywhere that you individually would want people to connect with you in the online space? 0:35:54 - Micki Evans So we do have an Instagram and a Facebook LinkedIn, we have our personal LinkedIn and then we also have a PBL Path LinkedIn and we have a website. So, yeah, any way, they would love to connect with us. We'd love to chat about place-based learning. 0:36:13 - Charity Moran And we're at PBL Path on all the things. So it's really easy PBL Path on Instagram, Facebook. You look us up as PBL Path and then the website is pblpathcom. 0:36:27 - Lindsay Lyons And I'll link to all that in the blog post as well. Mickey, charity and Erin, thank you so, so much for this conversation today and for putting your brilliant book out into the world. 0:36:36 - Erin Sanchez Thank you, Lindsay, Thank you. 0:36:37 - Micki Evans Lindsay. Thank you, lindsay, it was a pleasure.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
March 2025
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