Make Time for Current Events
I regularly talk about the purpose of creating a justice-centered curriculum that talks about current events but today I am going to explain how that’s done. For a quick refresh, this is important because what happens in the world largely impacts our students’ understanding and problem solving. Having discussions about recent issues also connects students to larger themes throughout history. Furthermore, many of these occurrences are likely already affecting students who identify with groups that are continuously targeted based on race, class, gender, and other parts of their identities. Now that we’ve covered that, here are the steps you need to make this work for your units.

Step 1: Pick a protocol for discussing current events with your students

The goal is for students to be able to process their thoughts and emotions about the event through discussion. You may find it helpful to start with providing a piece of content about the event. Students would be able to read/listen and then engage with the information by annotating or journaling. Then when it comes time to connect as a group, I recommend either a verbal or written protocol where students are speaking with each other about the event or perhaps writing down thoughts in a virtual chat setting. 

“My favorite has always been circle protocol: a conversation where every student has the opportunity to weigh in and just share something in response to the current event or the topic at hand.”

I’ve seen some teachers use additional student centered protocols as well. Student presentations are a great example of that. 

Step 2: Build the protocol into your flexible unit arc

A unit arc is the progression of lesson activities that occur over the course of a unit. There’s a “hook” you want to have at the start of this arc. Your hook can be introducing the event to the class. Then on a different day, you could naturally have that discussion built into the unit. This means you won’t have to put your schedule of lessons on pause like you would without that flexibility. Rethink how you can deliver the objectives without pulling everything out of a textbook. When you switch from memorization of pre-made curriculum to a 4 unit model that’s project-based and centered in current justice events, the outcomes are phenomenal! For one, it enables more deep diving into a specific topic rather than just skimming the surface. Secondly, it will strengthen engagement because students are naturally more focused on what’s happening now in their lives. So leaning into that means you’re now able to go with the tide of attention instead of against it. 

Step 3: Let Students Lead

Now that you’ve figured out how you want to set it up, you can give students the opportunity to lead discussions, choose the current event, and pick the media that they will interact with in the first stage. It’s so fun to see how much variety there is when everyone gets to bring in something they thought of themselves. If you would like some more ideas, the template that I’m sharing with you today is specifically made for student-led discussions around a current event so be sure to check that out! 

Step 4: Connect the Curriculum to Justice

It takes work to relearn your curriculum design because traditional methods do not incorporate enough social justice. But it is so much easier than you think, you just have to be willing. So let’s make a goal right now: In every unit, I will teach for justice. 

This Is a Major Benefit of Planning Your Own Units
When I say that this model gives you room for current topics, I mean it. In one of my classes, current event circles made up 25% of class time each week. I had the freedom to plan on the spot for things that came up. This might not sound like an easy thing at the moment because many teachers haven’t had the PD or clear administrator support to make their planning more flexible. Something that’s really given me more time to be present during class discussions is giving students more opportunities to handle things like outlining the discussion and filling in as moderators. It was powerful to see them facilitate these parts of class and practice those leadership skills.

“We’re all sitting in this conversation together and we all get to see each other in these different lights of stepping up to lead or stepping back to be a participant.”

Now that you’ve learned the four step process to creating more flexible curriculum with current events, click the link below to access the Circle Planning Template that you can give to your students for holding important conversations in the classroom. 

To continue the conversation, you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.
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​Boston-based musician, educator, and arts advocate, Christopher Schroeder is a catalyst for social change through music and arts education. With nearly 15 years of arts leadership and teaching experience, he has successfully established programs and influenced music ecosystems within the Boston community and throughout the United States. 

Schroeder currently serves as the Executive Director of the Boston Music Project, Module Director for the Global Leaders Program and is a guest conductor and education clinician with Conn Selmer, Inc. Most recently, he was recognized as a Boston Future Leader by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and a quarter-finalist for the 2019 Grammy Music Educator Award.

The Power of Music
​Music is a great way to unlock students’ creativity but did you know that it can be utilized for social justice and activism? There’s been surprising scientific research done that reveals students who play and listen to music reflect not just more self confidence and creative energy, but also higher drives to change the status quo. The exercises that Chris teaches in his music classes are aimed at deepening students' sense of identity. 

“The work that we do at the Boston Music Project is centered around ensemble-based learning, social emotional learning, civic action, and creative self expression.”

The idea that inspired one of their main projects was what if we could use our knowledge of music to communicate messages about social justice. What if our music could inspire people to take action? So that’s exactly what Chris and his music group set out to do. One of their pieces was heard by families of victims from school shootings. This type of musical activism gives children a chance to build and expand their own identities. But then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and he was presented with a new challenge—how do they keep the mission going? He started small, asking students questions to generate more conversations that could keep engagement circulating even while everyone was stuck at home. Then, the music advisors in the project started leading sub groups of the class to foster closer communities. The secret ingredient was incorporating poetry into the work. Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” became a valuable resource for creating their next music project. He shares,

 “We established a pulse that was associated with the mood. And then we started to get into the text. Which lines of text connected with a child more than another?”

Embed Social Emotional Learning
Over time, they created a digital music production that was able to flourish with support from teaching artists from the Boston Music Project. Chris shares that he made sure the routines that were done in person stayed the same during virtual class time to help students make a smoother transition. The students had the same clear expectations, mindfulness practices, warm ups, etc. He recommends that students should be given more opportunities to voice their ideas. If they have more control over their projects, they are much more likely to want to stay involved. In addition, SEL plays a big role in these processes. The Boston Music Project hires SEL specialists to help translate concepts and inform their practice realizing how social emotional learning drives self-awareness, awareness of others, and responsible decision making.

I hope this talk has inspired you to think outside the box with your teaching methods and social justice based learning. If you want to connect with Christopher, you can find him on the Boston Music Project Website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and email.

To continue the conversation, you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.
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​Today is the last installment of the Planning Series! Over the past few weeks, I hope that you’ve not only picked up on some great planning strategies, but have renewed your mindset by throwing out those old limiting beliefs so that you can show up as an empowered leader in your school community. 

First, a necessary mindset shift
From personal experience, I know the following to be true: “Covering” content lowers engagement and achievement. 

And I believe the quickest way to drive up student engagement and build students’ skills is to stop trying to cover the traditional curriculum map and, instead, create 4 justice-centered units. Student engagement is way more likely to come from creating lessons that have students explore their skills, make mistakes, revise their work, learn from feedback, collaborate, and learn deeply. The mindset shift we need to make is to have a goal that is more than “fit it all in”. How about we instead find what really motivates students to explore what they're interested in?

So before doing anything else, the most important shift is to move your lesson plan goal from “covering content” to developing independent learners.

I found when I used terms like “cover content” and “get through,” the students weren’t retaining what I wanted them to anyways. It was better to focus on doing less, but make sure students were actually learning it. The things that may have been important to teach 50 years ago are Google-able now. Therefore, it’s more important students are able to find, analyze, and apply new information than memorize a predetermined list of facts.

“Once I made that mindset shift, that was a huge shift in advancing my student’s learning and definitely an increase in their engagement.”

Cut down on time

If you find yourself spending hours making mini lessons, you might ask yourself: How could I teach the same content and have the students practice a different skill than listening and note-taking? For example, when I prepped for lectures, I would read through a textbook, make a slide deck, and create a guided worksheet. This took about 4 hours per lesson.

But if you want to make this lesson more student-centered then you need to find a text(s), generate 1-2 big questions to answer, and choose a text-based protocol from my resource bank. This process only takes about 30 minutes which saves you 3 and a half hours compared to the original method! If you stay dedicated to student-centered learning, planning will be easier, and your students will develop great text analysis skills.

If you feel like your lesson plans need to be formal or by the book, you might be spending too much time on the surface when you need to dig down to the root of your curriculum, the purpose of it. We want to plan from the lens of hitting the broader course goals. To me, an effective lesson plan is one that works for you. It’s an outline of your ideas and a check for alignment with your larger unit or course goals. It is the basis from which your lesson materials emerge.

A more streamlined lesson plan
You get to put your own spin on it, but here are the core elements of a lesson that I think serve the needs of both teachers and administrators:

The End Goal
Know exactly what students need to do for your summative assessment at the end of the unit. What are you working towards?

Lesson Focus
Narrow it down to ONE thing you want students to walk away knowing or being able to do. Students who are able to focus on 1 or 2 topics are going to learn more deeply than trying to get them to take on several skills. If the goal is to help them master and retain the knowledge, then giving them too many things will work against this goal.

Phase of Learning
Make sure there’s at least one lesson per phase for each unit. Consider whether students’ students are new to this skill or have been previously introduced. If they have been previously introduced, there are multiple ways you can have them practice or expand so that they feel they are really advancing in this area.

These guidelines will help keep your expectations for student performance in line with the amount of time students have had to work on a skill. There’s a tendency to provide less time than is needed for students to really master a skill, and cite a need to “cover content” as our rationale. 

Don’t have time? Focus on fewer skills and content. Depth over breadth!

Lesson Flow [The Activities]
These are your core protocols for the lesson. Stick with one main activity for student work time. Then, you can add in a hook and assessment activity to bookend the main activity.
Within this section of the plan, you may want to note 1-2 key questions that students are answering during each protocol. For example, how much time do you think each activity will take, and what resources are needed?

If you like to lecture, you may want to decrease your talk time so that students can have more time to do independent work where they can apply what they’ve learned. I have found that trying to limit my number of slides helps me narrow my focus to one core concept—try using 10 slides per mini lesson with a maximum teacher talk time of 15 minutes. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but pick numbers that work for you and stretch yourself to streamline your mini lessons.

Certainly, there are more things that could go into your lesson plan, but odds are, you’re probably already thinking about those things as you plan. If not, add them to your lesson plan, but only write down what you need to organize your ideas and ensure this lesson gets students where they need to go.

To help you write a lesson plan with just the essential elements, I’ve made you a template called the Streamlined Lesson Planning Template. 

Thanks for following along with this series. Please share some of your highlights from this episode and the past episodes or something you were excited to learn.

And if you want me to take you on an in-depth walkthrough of how I saved 700 hours of planning time in one year as a teacher, my self paced online course, Work Less Teach More, is now open for enrollment. The course is $197. What's your professional and mental wellbeing worth to you? For me, my wellbeing is worth way more than $200. Enroll in the self-paced online course today at bit.ly/wltmcourse 

If you’re a school leader wanting to help your teachers free up the time and energy to tackle big transformative things, you can purchase this course for your teachers as a pilot for one department or grade team or for the whole school. Want to chat to see if the course would be a good fit? Connect with me at hello@lindsaybethlyons.com
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​Why is wellness something we should dig deeper into? Well-being is critically important for school culture and student success. Researchers found that employee health directly impacts the success of organizational success. The second reason is that a principal’s sense of well-being is related to the well-being of students and teachers. Similarly, educators report that they flourish when their students flourish. So many schools have high turnover rates and are feeling the time crunch to improve scores quickly. Schools that are flourishing are doing these five things: 1.  Filling the culture with trust, hope, compassion, and purpose 2. Engaging in their work and connecting purpose to it 3. Having a shared leadership mindset 4. Adapting to any situation and 5. Prioritizing their well-being. 

How wellness contributes to high performance
The well-being of an entire organization can only come from the bottom up. So an individual stakeholder’s well-being is an essential part of the process. Schools that are performing at an amazing level are:

• Fostering nurturing relationships
• Elevating other’s ideas
• Bringing the organization’s vision to life
• Making the capacity for school stakeholders that focused on holistic well-being
• Approachable, accessible, aware, & resilient!

All of the work that school leaders put into their own growth and helping others around them can have a profound ripple effect on the school as a whole. That’s why it’s important to also support the well-being of those around you. Make sure your organizational environment is reinforcing healthy behaviors (not as an add-on, but as part of the fabric of how you do things). Foster well-being through positive interpersonal communication.These teachers and leaders are not afraid to have difficult conversations and speak up for social justice. So lean into your own values, because they will get you far. 

​You have a choice as a school leader, you can choose to promote well-being, or you can choose to harm well-being and perpetuate oppression. The reality is that many schools today are facing high turnover rates. The turnover rate in the nation’s K–12 schools is an increasingly acknowledged but still poorly understood crisis. Teachers are feeling more crunched for time. There is high demand to get students to retain their information and perform well on standardized tests. There’s too much focus on making sure the public data looks right. Teachers can definitely get stressed out by following this model too closely. We know that teacher stress has a big effect on student’s performance and well-being. So there is good reason to turn to wellness. If schools instead put more energy into cultivating wellness in teachers, there is more potential for them to feel supported and meaningful in their work.

Types of Wellness
The National Wellness Institute breaks down wellness into 6 dimensions. Those are:

1. Physical
2. Social
3. Intellectual
4. Spiritual
5. Emotional
6. Occupational

Here’s what they say about wellness: “it is an active process through which people become aware of and make choices toward a more successful existence.”

It is simply making choices consistently towards a healthy and fulfilling life. It’s important to remember that a single habit like exercise, only fulfills one or a few dimensions of wellbeing. So the key is to think about how you can achieve wellness in each area. For example, to work on my emotional well-being, I check in with how I’m feeling in my body. I lower my shoulders and try to connect to emotions that are coming up. 

These could look completely different for you. You could hit multiple pieces of wellness by engaging in movement and socializing at the same time. You could connect spiritual to emotional with deep reflection and writing. Or perhaps think of something you’ve done an incredible job with this week to really fuel yourself up. Once you’ve thought about what types you want to hit, set a monthly wellness goal with three concrete actions that are listed underneath it. After that, how will you plan to track that progress? If you don’t have something set up, feel free to use my wellness tracker below! Think about how you can fulfill each month’s goal. There are plenty of opportunities to merge one well-being with another type so that you don’t have to spend more time than you have trying to hit all of them. Let it come naturally and in all the ways that bring you happiness or peace. This entire planning series was made to help you reconnect to wellness and plan ahead for more satisfaction and growth. Make wellness the priority more consistently and you’ll be so excited with the results you get.

Be sure to come back for the last part of the planning series next week!

And if you want me to take you on an in-depth walkthrough of how I saved 700 hours of planning time in one year as a teacher, my self paced online course, Work Less Teach More, is now open for enrollment. The course is $197 and I don’t know about you, but my professional and mental wellbeing is worth way more to me than $200. You can enroll today at bit.ly/wltmcourse 

​If you’re a school leader wanting to help your teachers free up the time and energy to tackle big transformative things, you can purchase this course for your teachers as a pilot for one department or grade team or for the whole school. Want to chat to see if the course would be a good fit? Connect with me at hello@lindsaybethlyons.com
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​A clear mind can provide you with so many great benefits. Two big ones that we would all love to have are more energy and more creativity. We want to have a mind that’s not so cluttered with all the crazy to-do lists and worries, but how do we achieve this when there’s so much to think about? Let’s take the same approach as schools who have a 4 day school week or those entrepreneurs that inspire us with their 4 day work week. First you need to figure out what is essential in your work and your goals. Greg McKeown’s podcast episode 23 talks about the magic of a 4 Day Workweek using essentialism. Essentialism is the view that certain properties of things are an essential part of that thing’s identity and function. 

“By having a culture focused on essentialism, it actually democratizes the workplace.”
Ask: What’s essential?

Make sure your school leaders are on board with helping you increase your productivity and reduce stress. So the next time your boss asks you to stop what you’re doing for another task, you can ask whether it’s more important than the project you’re trying to get done. This can change the culture and help everyone realize what’s really moving the needle forward.

I coached a leader last year who did an exercise with her team to determine what tasks are in alignment with their goals. All it requires is writing on some post-its or a padlet of all things you are doing. Once you’ve done that, categorize what is essential and in line with your purpose and categorize what can be taken off the plate. If it’s something you still want to get done you can move the task to someone else or automate it.
Team brainstorming will still have a time and place for you and your team. Just be thoughtful about when that’s most helpful vs. just meeting to meet. 

A Productivity System
David’s Allen’s Getting Things Done approach involves having a place that each idea is documented. To figure out how to document these, he tells us to ask: Is it actionable? If it's not actionable, it goes into a long-term list we look at less frequently. If it is actionable in 2 minutes, do it now. If it will take longer, you can delegate it or defer it (on a next action list or—my favorite—on your calendar. Multi-step actions go in a projects list. 

“You need no new skills to increase your productivity and reduce your stress—just an enhanced set of systemic behaviors with which to apply them.” - David Allen
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​Here’s my approach: 

• Projects: Life Tracker Planner—monthly brain dump

        -Can also use a Project Management tool like Asana

• Things that get deferred: “Put it on the calendar”

        -Caveat: cannot overschedule (must conservatively estimate time it takes and not go past working hours you decided on)  

• Delegate: immediately ask or make a note in notes section of calendar for next scheduled meeting
• Not Actionable: Google Docs

        -Someday (review weekly) → strategic planning hour on Mondays
        -Reference - appropriately categorized Doc in relevant folder 

If your tasks will take less than two minutes, then do it now. But for everything else that takes longer, you can either delegate it or put it into a system that you will come back to next week. It’s good to put those deferred things on the calendar because otherwise, you’re not going to have it fitted into your day like everything else on the calendar. These are all going to contribute to a mind that is more clear. When you have things on your mind, get it onto paper or into your files so that it has a place to go besides taking up valuable space in your brain. David Allen, the creator of Getting Things Done says that 80% of the things you keep thinking of can be resolved with just listing an outcome and next action while the other 15% will require a little brainstorming first. Only the last 5% will take longer project planning steps. This practice is called distributed cognition and it will help you cultivate more creativity overall.

To help you get your energy and creativity back in hand, I’m sharing the Productive Planning Template as this week’s freebie. Next week we will talk about advancing wellness in part 5 of the planning series.

Also, if you want me to take you on an in-depth walkthrough of how I saved 700 hours of planning time in one year as a teacher, my self paced online course, Work Less Teach More, is now open for enrollment. The course is $197 and I don’t know about you, but my professional and mental wellbeing is worth way more to me than $200. You can enroll today at bit.ly/wltmcourse 

​If you’re a school leader wanting to help your teachers free up the time and energy to tackle big transformative things, you can purchase this course for your teachers as a pilot for one department or grade team or for the whole school. Want to chat to see if the course would be a good fit? Connect with me at hello@lindsaybethlyons.com
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Have you ever told yourself that there isn’t enough time to get to professional development or create original curriculum? You imagine that your students will suffer if you don’t spend more than 2 hours grading and planning lessons. But here’s the thing: you have the time, you just don’t believe in using it for the possibilities. This is something I still struggle with too. There’s that tunnel vision telling you to focus on the concrete—on whatever’s in front of you demanding attention. 

Excuses keep you stuck
I’ll share the 2 most common responses I hear from teachers when presented with a PD opportunity. Here’s one: 
The “I can’t take time from grading/lesson planning” response. So, how can we reframe that initial response? Try asking yourself these reframing questions: What if the professional development I spend time on teaches me how to plan efficiently and grade faster and it actually saves me time in the long run? What if it helps me build engaging learning activities so that students are on-task and excited to learn every day? What if it means I would be able to stop taking work home—the planning/grading work and the mental stress?     

Here’s another one:
The “I can’t miss class for PD” response. When teachers are offered a chance to attend a school-day PD (like visiting another school or a curriculum planning day or a workshop off-site), I often hear teachers say: I can’t leave my kids; they’ll miss out on a day of learning. How might we reframe this? Try asking yourself these reframing questions: Would I sacrifice one day of student learning and the time it takes to prep sub plans (which is often harder than prepping your own lessons) if it meant me and my students would be energized and engaged for the rest of the year? What if it just increased engagement for a semester? One unit? What if the thing I could accomplish by missing ONE day of class could drastically improve student engagement and achievement? ​My biggest growth spurts as a teacher came from taking the time to learn a new approach and try it out. 

“Don’t underestimate the power of investing in your learning, even if (or maybe especially if) it seems like your time or energy is stretched too thin to take on one more thing!”

In general, we only have so many hours in a day, so it really comes down to spending our time in ways that get us the big results and the life we ultimately want.
Another belief that might be holding you back is thinking that you owe your time to other people. Remember, there is always an opportunity cost to saying, “Yes.” You need to determine if the cost is worth it. For example, if I agree to stay after school, I won’t be able to run today or cook dinner with my family or fill-in-the-blank-here. Am I willing to sacrifice that? Learn to say “No” so that you can say “Yes” to something else. That something else may be spending time with family, exercising, sleeping, whatever it is, your “No”s make room for “Yes”es in the areas that matter most to you.
David Bayer talks about the limiting beliefs we hold put us in a state of inner conflict, which steals our time, energy, & presence. We can lose hours of time each day here, years of our life! We’ll talk more in the next episode about clearing the mind to create more energy and creativity.

Determine Your 3 Priorities
Take a moment to brainstorm and list your top 3 priorities. What do you want to spend more time doing? This list will help you say “No.” You can use the list as a litmus test by asking yourself if saying ”Yes” to something will take too much away from your priorities.
Consider how your list of priorities can help you actually say, “No” to something.

Write your script! 
I’ve heard different iterations of the following script:
Thank you for asking. I’m excited about what you’re doing. My current priorities are: ____, ____, and ____. I’m unable to say yes to anything outside of these right now. Most people are not going to feel rejected by this kind of answer. In fact, most people I’ve heard share their feelings of this experience say they felt inspired. I should note, you can suggest a way to integrate one of your priority areas with the ask if it’s possible. Here’s an example: If you want to join me on my afternoon run/walk, then I would be able to have that meeting.
Alternatively, you could say “No” as a full sentence. Count to 10 in your head afterwards to fill the awkward silence if it bothers you. In Emilie Aries’ book, Bossed Up, she notes a moment when Anderson Cooper asked Hillary Clinton if she wanted to respond to a comment, and she simply replied, “No.” Complete sentence. Boom. We don’t always need to explain ourselves! As we begin doing this work for ourselves, we’ll also be modeling for those around us, this is a great additional benefit! By doing this for YOU, you can transform your workplace culture. 

Transform your limiting beliefs
David Bayer suggests rewriting a limiting belief (e.g., “I can’t say no to people”) as an empowering belief, and checking our thinking and decision-making against that belief. What are the beliefs getting in the way of you living the life you want to live? How can we take action on the beliefs that limit us? Take a moment to rewrite your limiting belief to an empowering one or list out the top 3 priorities in your life right now and use this list to make decisions for the rest of the month.

To help you, I’m sharing some Boundary Reminder Images as this week’s freebie. You can print or save on your phone or computer to remind you of living into your values. (bit.ly/boundaryreminders). Next week we will examine the topic of clearing the mind.

Also, if you want me to take you on an in-depth walkthrough of how I saved 700 hours of planning time in one year as a teacher, my self paced online course, Work Less Teach More, is now open for enrollment. The course is $197 and I don’t know about you, but my professional and mental wellbeing is worth way more to me than $200. You can enroll today at bit.ly/wltmcourse 

​If you’re a school leader wanting to help your teachers free up the time and energy to tackle big transformative things, you can purchase this course for your teachers as a pilot for one department or grade team or for the whole school. Want to chat to see if the course would be a good fit? Connect with me at hello@lindsaybethlyons.com
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​Welcome back to Planning Series part 2. When getting started with behavior change, many have said to start with one change or one step. It’s what you may gravitate towards because one sounds easy enough. But here’s why I’m recommending you take three steps instead: when you take just one step, your motivation and enthusiastic energy to get to your goal is more likely to fizzle out. If you commit to three steps, you can keep up the momentum and give yourself a better chance of making some changes. So when it comes to creating these three habits, here are some guidelines you should follow:

• Set a deadline
• Make the actions doable
• Write out your plan
• Connect these steps to your identity

Set a Deadline
One week is generally enough time to get your three steps completed without feeling pinched for time. For example, you decide to have a 30 minute reflection time with a journal for one of your steps. On Monday you have such a busy day and realize you won’t be able to get to it, but because you stayed flexible with the deadline, you know you can still get it done the next day. Whatever you choose as your deadline, make sure it is soon enough that you won’t put it off until “tomorrow,” which in my experience quickly becomes much later.

Make the Action Doable 
When thinking about your steps, make sure you feel like each is something that feels manageable within your day, week, etc. You don’t want to commit hours of your time to learning or doing something if you still have errands to run, dinner to cook, and other things that you need to get done still. Aim for actions that will take 2 to 5 minutes. For example, if my desired habit is to practice on Duolingo every day, I can complete a lesson in two minutes and still continue my daily streak of practice. This will help prevent you from staying up later or getting overwhelmed.

Write Out Your Plan
I used to write down two big things I wanted to accomplish each day and focus on completing those tasks. Now, it feels more powerful to tie each of those tasks to a larger goal. Pinpoint the big overarching vision you have in mind today and ask yourself what tasks are directly contributing to that? Connect to your purpose!

Connect These Steps to Your Identity
James Clear talks about linking our habits to our identities as a way to ensure we follow through on our goals. He talks about conducting a yearly “Integrity Report” in which he asks: What are the core values that drive my life and work? How am I living and working with integrity right now? How can I set a higher standard in the future? He says this work helps “revisit my desired identity and consider how my habits are helping me become the type of person I wish to be.” Think about your own core values. How will your steps connect back to who you want to be?
Day to Day Work/Scheduling Tips
Wondering how to manage your to do list when it keeps growing? Here are some tips:

1. Set boundaries
2. Schedule in alignment with your energy
3. Batch your work
4. Take breaks
5. Put it on the calendar

Boundaries
Working from home is tough because it’s easier than usual to just keep working. You never leave your place of work! (If you can, designate a space just for work or put your work-related papers out of sight at the end of the day.) Scheduling-wise, try to limit yourself to 40 hours a week. That means 8 hour work days and no-work weekends. I know this is hard—I’ve launched an entire course around this premise, but the goal here is to set boundaries, so choose boundaries that work for you.

Energy efficiency
For me, aligning my day with my energy means tackling creation-based tasks in the morning when my energy is fresh, and saving my meetings and menial tasks, like email, for the afternoon. Your energy may be the opposite, so you may want to make time for lesson or activity creation towards the end of the day. We’re all used to a school day that starts early in the morning, but if you don’t have live classes to host or meetings to attend at that time, start your work day later if you’re more productive later in the day! 

Batch your work
Batching your work is productivity gold. My preference is 4-hour chunks of time, but that may not be realistic if you have scheduled times you need to host a live class or staff meetings to work around. I recommend spending at least one concentrated hour on a task (aside from something like email or short “check the box” kinds of To Dos). Batching is great because once you get in the zone, you are far more efficient than when you first start a task. We often restart when we’re interrupted (by ourselves or someone else) to do an unrelated task. 

“I like creating in the morning. When I was teaching full time, I liked having back to back prep and lunch time because I was often able to finish what I started working on instead of wasting 10-15 minutes later on to remember where I left off and what I was doing.”

Remember to get breaks in
During your breaks make sure you get up and move. Emilie Aries, the host of the Bossed Up podcast, did an episode on Zoom fatigue in which she shares the expert recommendation for breaks is 10-15 minutes of break time for every 2 hours of work. I’ve been scheduling at least one mid-day walk break for myself to make sure I get up and move around and get out of work mode. To be transparent, this is still a struggle for me. I often listen to educational podcasts during this time so I’m still doing research for work, but this is how I convince myself to take the break! 

Keep calm and add to calendar
Here’s what you can do to keep the to do list small and complete everything on it: put it on the calendar! There may be big goals for each day, but the specific tasks you need to accomplish can go in as events on your calendar. First, estimate the amount of time it will take to complete the task. Once the day’s filled up you can add any remaining tasks to the next day. If something comes up that absolutely has to be done today, move the tasks that got ousted to open slots later in the week. This practice will allow you to get things done without deleting anything or extending the work day.

Our freebie for the week is a Scheduling Template (bit.ly/workfromhomeschedule) that you can use to write down your steps. Stay tuned for the next part of this series!

These were just a fraction of the time-saving techniques I teach in my online course Work Less, Teach More. The course is $197 and I don’t know about you, but my professional and mental wellbeing is worth way more to me than $200. If you want to learn the same strategies that saved me 700 hours in a single year as a teacher, you can register for the course today at bit.ly/wltmcourse. 

If you’re a school leader wanting to help your teachers free up the time and energy to tackle big transformative things, you can purchase this course for your teachers as a pilot for one department or grade team or for the whole school. Want to chat to see if the course would be a good fit? Connect with me at hello@lindsaybethlyons.com
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What does it mean to be strategic with your time? Strategic is the word of the year for Lindsay and today she’s reporting on all the benefits of tracking your planning so you can shift your planning practice. 
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How much of your work is generating your results?
How you choose to spend your planning time as a teacher is crucial because it determines how much time you’ll devote to each piece of your planning. And since time is already so precious, we have to have a strategic approach to planning that gets you results with less paperwork, researching, etc. In order to be more efficient with it, you need to first know how much time you’re currently spending on each activity. The 80/20 principle says that 80% of your outcomes are from only 20% of your work. So that means that certain things you’re doing are driving the majority of your results and that the rest is really something that should be reassessed and perhaps cut down on in order to save you more time for what’s working. 

The 50/40/10 Strategy
The strategy that Lindsay started using is based off of her resource the 50/40/10 Planning Bundle. This bundle is composed of eight pages of documents of synthesized research with a step by step checklist along with planning templates that you can fill out in a variety of ways. This strategy asks you to first identify the “buckets” or categories that your tasks align with. These are those high leverage activities but can also include those that are low leverage as an "other" category. Then you split your time into specific ratios and allocate certain activities to those ratios. The most ideal ratios that Lindsay found after research and experimenting is 50% for planning, 40% for professional development, and 10% on student feedback. These percentages can be played with to find what works best for you. But these ratios are shown to increase the quality of teacher instruction and raising quality instruction means that student achievement levels start to go up as well. 

“This is all about really removing the unnecessary things that don't produce as big results as we could be producing in order to get to a place where we're really thinking strategically and making those big powerful high leverage shifts.”

So 50% percent of planning can look like designing the content, researching, gathering resources, and writing out the lesson plan. The reason that 40% goes towards personal development is because the research shows how closely connected student success is with you, as an instructor, developing your capabilities and skills. If you want to go beyond staff meetings, you can also consider attending a colleague’s class (even on zoom) or listening to a relevant podcast as a method of personal and professional development. And then that last 10% is focusing on providing students qualitative responses to their assignments rather than a simple grade. If you aim to give the majority of feedback during class time then you won’t need very much time for this outside of class. Lindsay says that before using this strategy she was spending so much time outside of class on planning with no room for professional development and it wasn’t getting the results she wanted.

“I could see that it wasn't producing results. And so when I shifted over time and experimented pretty boldly, actually, with different approaches to planning, and tinkered with that formula, it ended up saving me about 700 hours per school year, which is monumental! So it reduced my time spent planning outside of school to just zero to two hours a week, which is a world of difference.”

Identify what is needed and get rid of what isn't
To get the same benefits, you should first take one week to track what you’re doing. Time yourself for every activity you do during planning time. Next, categorize these activities into three to four themes. After that, take a look and find the thing that’s using up the most time inefficiently. Make a plan for how you can either outsource that work or automate it. Once you’ve done all that you can set a weekly time limit for each bucket activity and use that new space for your goals and opportunities for professional development. You may find that it’s tough to stick to this the first week. But don’t think of it as “I don’t have enough time to finish this.” Be determined and use creativity. Think of some low-prep strategies that deliver high impacts. Also use the 50/40/10 Planning Bundle as a helpful resource that divides your percentages into your three buckets, makes suggestions, and reminds you of your goals and your big thinking for the semester. 

To continue the conversation, you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Lindsay can be found on LinkedIn and Instagram. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.
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​Leah Urzua is the founder and CEO of Results by Riviera which is an online business that serves other service-based entrepreneurs who are looking to streamline their business so they can leave their stress behind and work within their passion. She specializes in systems and overall business management. In addition, she’s a racial justice advocate and activist who is eager to dismantle systemic racism and white supremacy in today’s society.

The problem with the way we run our businesses today
Many entrepreneurs and CEOs tend to treat their business like a completely separate world from politics, social justice, and everything that triggers strong feelings. But just as a school is a small representation of what goes on in the rest of society, so is the workplace. It’s time we take a closer look at just how connected business is to the systems of racism. The way capitalism was built was to lift up anyone with white skin while forcing the Black diaspora to be the ones who labor to keep it running. So think of it as a large gap that started during the era of slavery and never really closed since. So now we have normalized white businesses as being the go-to. We seek out white coaches and hire white candidates. We collaborate with other white entrepreneurs. The list goes on and on. 

When you’re searching for new business accounts to follow and connect with on social media, have you ever looked at an Black owned business account who shows up with expertise on social media and then ended up following a white owned business account with more followers and pretty branding? You’re not the only one who has experienced those feelings of internal bias. They are more a part of our decision making process than we care to admit. But continuing to give in to these biases is what perpetuates the inequality and racism that affects Black and Brown entrepreneurs. Leah tells us if you want to start being a better, more equitable leader in your business, it’s time to make yourself aware of the privileges you hold and be more mindful of what you can do to be a more justice-centered business and human. 

“[My] dream is to have a marketplace that's liberated from oppression and inequality and racism. And ideally, that would be, because all businesses and corporations are collectively deciding to do the work—to take action.”

Things to pay close attention to:

• When hiring, how much do you rely on experience vs “perceived” experience? The way you think of qualified and nonqualified candidates may be skewed so aim to be more objective.
• Do your team members look and behave just like you or is there diversity present? 
• Do you allow for your team members to really show their true selves at work?
• Is there any difference in the amount you’re willing to pay a white mentor vs one of color?
• What types of people do you have on your podcasts or invite to speak at a conference?

Creating an anti-racist business
These are just some of the ways to hold yourself accountable. The hardest part of ending racism will be changing our world on an individual level. We have to be able to all take responsibility whether you're in education, business, or any other constructed institutions. Consider how it affects the people of color who follow you and buy from you when violence and oppression hits their communities and they hear no one talk about it. Being silent or neutral is never the right answer. You can do a lot of good by staying up to date on what’s happening in the real world and make an effort to be supportive to those who might be affected by systemic racism. Leah shares how much she strives to integrate more justice in her own business. She says,

“I said in the beginning that I work with systems and usually, my job entails building and implementing systems. But if there's one system that I really want to be known for working against, in my business and my life, it's systemic racism and oppression.”

Some of the things that Leah does to make this a reality is that she makes sure she is very clear about what her values are, she openly talks about injustices and demands action. In addition, she amplifies Black and Brown voices as well as learns from women of color who teach people how to make change. To get started on your own journey with intersecting racial justice and your business, Leah created a resource made called “Strategies for Justice” that you can access at the link below. As a final note, this is possible for everyone no matter what type of business or field of work you're in. I hope you feel inspired to take more action for justice in your own career and business.

To continue the conversation, you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Leah can be found on her website, Instagram, Facebook, and Email. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.
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Lindsay considers the moments leading up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol and what she decided to talk about with her white teachers teaching mostly white students after realizing it was an important learning opportunity. 

What happened that day
On Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the United States experienced a domestic terrorist attack on its government for the first time in history. An angry mob composed of thousands of white supremacists stormed up the U.S. Capitol and passed Capitol police officers with ease. A dozen of the men from the mob made it into the building These rioters occupied, vandalized, and looted parts of the building for several hours. The events of this day led to much damage, disorder, and stress about how to handle the situation and all those responsible. In the weeks leading up to the attack, there were multiple social media groups and far right organizations that discussed plans to occupy the Capitol after a tweet by President Trump urged his supporters to gather on the 6th for a rally and protest. On the morning of January 6th, Trump provoked everyone there to march to the Capitol and fight to disrupt Congress’s certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election. It took hours for the national guard and extra officers to clear everyone out and yet all the members of Congress still came back together at the end of the night to do what they had set out to do.

Creating options for our students
Lindsay was in the middle of a virtual teacher training when news of the insurrection broke out. Everyone took a 10 minute pause to catch their breath and do whatever they needed for their own wellbeing before reconvening. Once they came back together, there was an unstructured talk where they could talk about what it was they were feeling. And once that had passed, they moved on towards ideas for students and their curriculum. She knew that what was happening needed to be at the front of their session, so they adjusted the workshop to incorporate a discussion about how to talk to the group's classes of mostly white students, specifically about the attack on the capitol. 

Bringing up heavy or difficult content is something that many teachers are used to at this point given all that has happened last year alone. Lindsay published an article for BetterLesson about talking to students about the U.S. presidential election in November. We've talked about this on a previous episode of the podcast. Many educators had some helpful advice on how to have these conversations. One educator that spoke said that students should get enough space to process their thoughts and emotions. They might talk it out with someone, journal, step outside, or just have some quiet time. Discussions are an option that many like to use because it gives students the chance to express their internal emotions and gives teachers the chance to sit in the “listening” position and consider their student’s frustrations and thoughts. Any discussions that come up should have a reminder of some agreements for engagement preceding them in order to make sure there are opportunities for everyone to be heard and validated. In these discussions, it’s also important to center dignity.

“I love Donna Hicks’s book” Dignity”, [as] another great source.. to really center dignity in everything that we do and discuss in our class and name that a person's humanity, either in our class or beyond our class, it's not up for debate in our conversations or disagreements.”

Sudden events like this one are important to include in your classroom because of the large effect they have on your students and their communities but some teachers don’t feel like they can just pause their curriculum with the fast pace it’s set at. Almost everything is planned out for the year way in advance. One of the ways a teacher can make it easier on themselves is to adopt a flexible curriculum already based around racial and social justice. This ensures that these important issues that come up have a place in your class and schedule. 

Another thing you can do is help white students develop antiracist identities within this justice-forward curriculum. It’s important for white students to see examples of white folx as co-conspirators advancing racial justice. If they don't see racism as their issue or they don't see examples of how to challenge it, white students may avoid talking about or acting against white supremacy.  Curriculum can also give students space to take action within the class. Examples include: 

• Giving students the opportunity to lead conversations about race, injustice, or current events
• Developing creative projects that ask students to think of solutions to these injustices 
• Inviting students to be a part of school governance and use their voice to create a better environment

And lastly, remember to deconstruct and analyze the event itself. As educators, we have to take what we’re seeing on screen and in the news and help students make sense of what it all means. Take all this surface level information and help them figure out how white supremacy is present. Why did it happen? What allowed for this event to happen? How would it have been different if these people did not have white-skin privilege (i.e., advantage)?

To recap these points: 

1. Give students enough space to process their emotions 
2. Design your curriculum with foundations in social justice 
3. Help white students develop antiracist white identities 
4. Analyze the event itself

If there’s one takeaway from this conversation it’s this: “The question that I came to ask myself every day to address this question for my own practice is this: what does it do to my humanity if I don't teach for justice, and is my humanity a price I'm willing to pay?”

To continue the conversation, you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. You can follow Lindsay on LinkedIn and Instagram. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.

​Morgan Atkins is a third and fourth grade teacher in Rochester, NY. Morgan specializes in Social and Emotional Learning in the classroom. SEL defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning as “the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.” She is currently also the head of the General Studies department there where she helps plan events and lead teachers in their creation of curricular scope and sequence documents.

Morgan opens the conversation with the urgent message that children who don’t have their mental health needs met are more likely to struggle with attention to content in the classroom. Education needs to reach all students not just white children. That’s what drove her to apply an anti-racist curriculum for her class. It’s important to educate all people on the history and current reality for everyone. But all of this requires the right energy from school staff who may not feel like they have that kind of time or energy. Morgan acknowledged that many teachers are drained and just trying to make it through the day. The way things are currently isn’t going to be sustainable for teachers or their students long term. There needs to be a change with the way we assist teachers and give them the tools they need to support their students in return. So the question that comes up is: How do we improve mental health? What techniques or methods can be used? 

Putting mental health at the forefront has always been a big dream for Morgan. She believes schools are capable of finding a way to blend social and emotional learning with academics in order to really support these future leaders. She joined a charter school after graduating and was impressed by the school’s attempt to close the achievement gap for low income students and students of color.  But even with those attempts, there was a link missing with considering students’ needs. So it was time to head off to another school that had shared leadership and allowed her to choose a behavior management system for each student. During this period, the one thing that Morgan says made a big difference in her teaching life was being introduced to mindfulness. 

Benefits of Mindfulness
Mindfulness is defined in one way as the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something. Another way to think about mindfulness is a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique. Mindfulness is something anyone can benefit from, teachers and students included. It gives students and teachers some powerful ways to cope with stress and find an inner calmness. Not to mention it boosts self esteem. Some teachers across the country have been using mindfulness in their classrooms, hoping to see these changes in their students. Research shows that mindfulness for teachers has reported teachers feeling more successful in their work and having more emotionally supportive and organized classrooms. In the case of children and teens, the results have been impressive. Students who practice more mindfulness show:

• Better capacity for attention
• Develops empathy
• Improved social skills
• Lower test anxiety
• Decreased depression
• Less symptoms of PTSD

After realizing these benefits, Morgan decided to share her practices with her own students. She shares, 

“I want to give them that tool to cope with their emotions and past, current, or future trauma and I think that adults deserve that, too,”.

Educators who are inspired to get more mindful can start this journey is to try some popular resources like the CALM app, Headspace, or Mindful.org. Leaders and admin can also take initiative by hiring outside contractors to guide professional development sessions. There’s a lot of value in having an external organization or consultant who can drop in on virtual classes and offer some objective feedback. This is all connected to the idea of instructional coaching and how it can really help teachers develop their practices in a way that feels manageable. With instructional coaching, there’s no pressure to apply all these things that a coach and teacher discuss. Instead, it’s a way to ignite creative energy and name goals whether that’s a personal goal or a goal for your students. The last thing Morgan recommends is to find some time for journaling. Writing down your thoughts is a simple but effective way to release some emotions, find extra gratitude in your day, and change your mindset. 

If you want to connect with Morgan, you can find her on her LinkedIn account Morgan Atkins or on Instagram @mindfulwithmorgan.

To continue the conversation, you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.

In the Time for Teachership episode, host Lindsay Lyons shares specific strategies for working with students with Individualized Educational Plans or IEPs.

“Supporting students with IEP was my job for seven years when I taught high school in New York City public schools. This is such an important aspect of teaching: supporting all students with all kinds of approaches to learning.”

Although students with IEPs or 504s need a good level of support, she says that all students have different needs regardless of the labels. So learning about teaching special education classes is something that can be applied to a wider scope. In education, differentiation means tailoring instruction to meet individual needs. But how does a teacher know which route to go? It can be quite overwhelming when you start thinking of all the different ways to personalize learning. When breaking down the types of differentiation, Lindsay refers to a template and the words of Carol Ann Tomlinson. Tomlinson says “Differentiation is a teacher's proactive response to learner needs. [Those needs] [are] shaped by mindset and guided by the general principles of differentiation.” It’s about supportive environments and getting to really know your students. Also assessment is a big part of getting the necessary knowledge for differentiation. It gives students the ability to voice their needs and suggestions. That’s something that would be very useful for teachers when creating lessons and instruction. Understanding students from a qualitative perspective breaks the idea that they should only be measured by how well they’re performing on tests, or what their grades are, etc. Lindsay explains differentiation is not tracking your students. It’s not being rigid or limiting choice. It’s not calling your students “low skilled” or saying that they have an “ability” for this one thing because that doesn’t recognize the fluidity of student’s skill development. A great example is Tomlinson’s use of the phrase “readiness” over those other terms. 

“So instead of saying students have a particular ability, right, they're “high skilled” or “low skilled” or something like this...we instead say “readiness” they’re at the readiness for this type of skill at this type of level. And if they are not there, that just simply means they're not ready yet.”

One thing that Lindsay shares from her experience is that she used to take out all the information from a textbook and just break it up to give to students, not seeing a better way. But she saw that student’s didn’t find that method helpful and realized that it’s not about dumbing down anything. There can still be high expectations for students but there needs to be the right level of support from the teacher for them to succeed. 

Secondly, there are the four types of differentiation to consider. The four types are content, process, product, and affect or environment.

Content 
Content centers around the information that is reaching students. What topics get picked to present to them over other ones? The goal is to keep students engaged and teach them about what they have a lot of interest in. And it can be tricky when some students have already seen this content, so there are those different entry points.

Process
When it comes to process differentiation, reading text, watching a video, writing notes down, creating a hands on project or diagram, etc. are some of the ways students can interact with the content and remember it the best. Perhaps some students will want to have discussions about it because they get to process and make sense of what they’re seeing or reading.

Product
The third type is about how students are expressing what they have learned in the class. Traditionally, we assign final papers or assessments to students to determine this. But it can be a struggle for many students to summarize their learning in that way if they are much more verbal with expression. So it is important to give more options and think a little creatively about how students can show you what they know and their analysis of those key concepts.

Affect/Environment
Finally, environmental differentiation is the way the classroom works and feels. Examples of making the environment personalized for IEP and other students could be: making sure there are places in the room to work quietly and without distraction, providing a space for collaboration, adding elements to the class that represent diversity and cultures, and the option to discuss one on one with the teacher.

All these ideas together show that choice is a crucial part in the process of differentiation. That’s why there is a choice board template Lindsay created that allows you to write down things for content, process, product, or environment. Remember, “You do not need to differentiate in all four ways for every student every single day. Please keep that in mind. Everything that you create around differentiation is one step forward for the personalization of your students learning and for your larger classroom community as a whole.”

To continue the conversation, you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.

Links: 

• Lindsay can be found on: 
  • LinkedIn: @lindsaybethlyons 
  • Instagram: @lindsaybethlyons

In this episode, it’s all about learning to disrupt structures of racial inequality and advocating for children. April Brown is a trauma informed specialist, curriculum developer, writer, and instructional coach . One of the biggest beliefs for her is that education should be rooted in liberation. The systems of oppression that she’s trying to dismantle are ableism, racism, capitalism, and sexism.


“I'm always asking myself, who has been validated here. Whose voice perspective is being amplified and held as the truth and who is being erased and dismissed.”

Her journey started when she came across an article while pregnant with her daughter. The article’s message that white parents are perpetuating white supremacy by not teaching their children about it left April stunned. From there, she sought out more resources to keep unlearning racism and how it showed up in her body and life. As an educator, she knew it would be a disservice to her diverse group of students if she did not do the work of educating herself first. 

“It’s also super, super important for me, is just stepping back, listening, learning, and just shutting up sometimes. Just think, like, this is my time to learn. I have a whole lot of unpacking to do.”

She credits some of her favorite educators and organizations such as The Disability Visibility Project, Debbie Reese of American Indians in Children’s Literature, and Ashia Ray of Raising Luminaries. April’s response to how school leaders can bring antiracism to the classroom is to realize that it’s not going to be an easy, simple task. It will take small sustainable changes to really be able to understand what’s working and what’s not. The key is to constantly reflect on those actions and responses from your students. She encourages us to learn about systemic racism and what effects it has had on a macro level but also a micro level in schools. School environments often reflect how racism and inequality plays out in larger society. So there needs to be opportunities for white teachers to educate themselves and understand how it shows up where they work. Another important part is making sure student voice is amplified. Student voice should be present in everything that’s going on within curriculum planning and the classroom. In addition, educators should focus on balancing the power dynamics between themselves, students, families, and the community. In order for there to be true social justice, schools need to have intersections of creating welcoming spaces for LGBTQ students, disabled students/faculty, etc. and then making sure that there is accountability when harm is done to these groups. It’s important to remember that it isn’t just Black and Brown students that need to feel supported, but BIPOC faculty and teachers as well. It’s not enough to just hire more BIPOC teachers. How can you as a school principal or leader create a welcoming space where these BIPOC teachers feel heard and valued? 

In the next part of the episode, April talks about a quote that inspires her. The quote from the activist Myles Horton says “I was beginning to see the contradictions between what I had read and what I had come to believe and what I learned experientially.” April commented “Kids know what the truth is. They know when we're sugarcoating things. They know when we're not telling them the truth and I think that when we do not speak truthfully to children, we are doing them a great disservice and they're going to learn not to trust the grown ups in authentic and real ways.” She explains how she makes it a point to have difficult conversations with her four year old because politics are really a big part of life and it’s important that children are prepared for the role it will have in their own lives. The events of this year created many intense political conflicts and conversations on white supremacy and government which has certainly reached children yet teachers are still not sure how to address it or stay neutral in their classes. It’s important to realize that neutrality is actually silence and being silent does not mean the students won’t know what’s going on, only that they won’t have a safe space to process their thoughts and feelings. So the right thing is to have these difficult conversations. Let the students ask their questions. Be honest with them and let them know when you don’t have answers but let them know you will find them out together. When it comes to putting together academic assignments for students that include these topics, instructors should put some thought into making sure they are framed in a way that does not call the validity of these injustices and systems into question. For example, asking students to debate on the topic of whether same sex couples should be able to get married would be asking them to debate on whether they should have human rights which isn’t something that’s debatable. Instead, you can examine data and facts to determine whether a situation is happening or not. You can say here’s a problem that needs to be addressed and then debate on potential solutions. So those are some ways that educators can go about adding it into their curriculum. 

Finally, April shares how her training as a trauma informed specialist helped her to create her own mini course titled “Trauma Informed Teaching Microcourse”. This course is made for those who want to commit to cultivating trauma informed teaching practices in their classroom and school. You can connect with April Brown on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/aprilbrownconsulting,
the FB group https://www.facebook.com/groups/StudentIgnitionSociety/, her website www.parentingwithheart.org, her Twitter at @abrownconsult, and her email at parentwithheart@gmail.com.

To continue the conversation, you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.

Resource links:

• Raising Luminaries
• Revolutionary Humans
• EmbraceRace
• Raising Race Conscious Kids
• Reflection Press
• The Neurodivergent Narwhal
• April’s article, “Talking with Young Kids About Elections, Democracy and Justice for All”
• Teaching Tolerance's Social Justice Standards (not mentioned in the episode, but highly recommended by April) 
• Four core goals from an anti-bias education (not mentioned in the episode, but highly recommended by April) 

Additional Resources curated by April:
Ibram X. Kendi How to Be an Antiracist - https://bookshop.org/…/how-to-be-an-antiracist/9780525509288
Ijeoma Oluo So You Want to Talk About Race - https://bookshop.org/…/so-you-want-to-talk-ab…/9781580058827
Layla F. Saad Me & White Supremacy - https://bookshop.org/…/me-and-white-supremacy…/9781728209807
Revolutionary Humans by Hold the Line - https://htlmagazine.com/…/line-leaders-socially-conscious-…/
Dr. Kira Banks - http://kirabanks.com/
Rethinking Schools - https://rethinkingschools.org/
Teaching Tolerance - https://www.tolerance.org/ 
Zinn Education Project - https://www.zinnedproject.org/
Britt Hawthorne - ABAR workshops https://britthawthorne.com/
Montessori for Social Justice & Tiffany Jewell - ABAR workshops https://www.anti-biasmontessori.com/
Ijumaa Jordan - ECE Consultant - ABAR workshops https://ijumaajordan.com/
The Conscious Kid - https://www.theconsciouskid.org/
Woke Kindergarten - https://www.wokekindergarten.org/
EmbraceRace - https://www.embracerace.org/
Raising Race Conscious Children - http://www.raceconscious.org/
Raising Luminaries & Books for Littles: Raising Luminaries Kidlit - https://booksforlittles.com/
Student Ignition Society: Raising Luminaries Educators - https://booksforlittles.com/student-ignition…/sis-resources/ (I'm the Dean of Rebellious Educators & we create free family action toolkits - these are helpful classrooms as well)
Latinx Parenting - https://www.latinxparenting.org/
Rachel Elizabeth Cargle - https://www.rachelcargle.com/ (unpack your how you are complicit in upholding systems of oppression such as white supremacy)

Books for teaching little ones how to be anti-bias/anti-racist:
Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves: https://bookshop.org/…/anti-bias-education-fo…/9781938113574
Don't Look Away: Embracing Anti-Bias Classrooms:
https://bookshop.org/…/don-t-look-away-embrac…/9780876598436

Book Collections:
https://booksforlittles.com/racial-diversity/
https://booksforlittles.com/racism-and-power/

Book subscription boxes for parents & teachers:
Little Feminist Book Club - https://littlefeminist.com/
Little Justice Leaders - https://www.littlejusticeleaders.com/​

This episode, I’m excited to share with you both the tool I used to get student feedback on my first semester of fully remote teaching as well as what I learned from my students and what I’m doing moving forward. 
Hi, I'm Lindsay Lyons and I love helping school communities envision bold possibilities, take brave action to make those dreams a reality and sustain an inclusive anti-racist culture where all students thrive. I'm a former teacher leader, turned instructional coach, educational consultant and leadership scholar. If you're a leader in the education world, whether you're a principal, superintendent, instructional coach, or a classroom teacher, excited about school-wide change  like I was, you are a leader. And if you enjoy nerding out about the latest educational books and podcasts, if you're committed to a lifelong journey of learning and growth, being the best version of yourself, you're going to love the Time for Teachership podcast. Let's dive in.

​Lindsay Lyons (she/her): For this episode. I'd love to talk to you about the survey that I gave to students at the end of my remote teaching semester including the questions that I asked them. And what they told me and what I learned from them through their feedback, is that as educators, we’re always inventing and creating and adapting and iterating our course content. And so I think that's a really important piece, is listening to my students and what worked for them, what didn't work for them and what I can do moving forward. So I thought it might be helpful to just share with you one of my processes and also, two, just some student voice. I think it's really powerful whenever I'm listening to a podcast or reading an article and I can see some quotes from students. I just feel like I get to hear a little bit more of the student voice, even if they're not mine. And so while this may not reflect what your students, particularly thought about learning, I think it is helpful to just hear from some students and think about how that process goes and what that means for us as reflective practitioners. So the first thing I did was I gave them what's called a pre then post test. And this is important because in the research, we found that people who assess where they are around a particular skill set or outcome at the start of a semester, or the start of any period of time before getting the intervention or the lesson or whatever it is, they often underestimate just how little they know. And so it's not really a great depiction of where they are starting. When you do a pre than post test, what you do is, at the end of the course or intervention, you ask them to reflect back to where they were when they started. And because they've learned so much, they have a better sense of where they were at the start, in comparison to where they are at the end of the course. So the pre then post has been asked them on a horizontal scale of one to four where were you at the start of the class around each standard for the course, where are you now at the end of the course. And so we just want to share, I won't share everything, but I'll share the biggest growth areas for standards. So where the biggest shift was from start to finish with the course and the area or the standard that had the least amount of growth.

So the biggest amount of growth was the learning target or the standard “I am aware of the advantages and disadvantages I have in society because of my membership in different identity groups and I know how this has affected my life”. So for context, this is a gender, race in society course. It is the introduction course to Merrimack colleges Women's and Gender Studies Department. So about 82% at the start of the year said, I am probably at a two, very few people said that they were at one, so a two is, you know, “I need help, but I can do it. I just need, I need support to be able to do it.” A couple students said “I'm okay with it, I just need some more practice.” And one or two students said, “I knew I needed a challenge or I could teach someone.” By the end of the course, about 73% said “I need to challenge. I'm at a four. I am feeling really, really confident with this." And then the other 27% said they are a three, they just need some more practice. So that was the biggest growth, again, that was just that self awareness of advantage and disadvantage in society because of identity membership. And the other biggest one was, I can apply a feminist lens to a conversation text event or issue. And this makes sense because of the way I structured the class. Every time we met synchronously in our one hour and 15 minute course on Wednesdays, we would actively apply whatever the readings were for the week to a current event. And so we got a lot of practice with this. So that makes sense that that was a big growth area, just, kind of, putting that reflective cap on and so at the start of the year about 73% said that they were at a two, 9% said they were at one, then the other 18% were split between two, three and four. At the end of the year, we had 82% of people saying they're at a four and about 18% of people saying they were a three. So again, that's big growth, the least amount of growth was on the Intersectional Standard. And so this was, I can ask, what about women and also which women? So we're not just analyzing for gender, we're utilizing for other aspects of identity as well. We're not assuming a single identity or story or experience. We're not assuming that the group of women is monolithic. And so that's really important. There wasn't as much growth there, there was some, but that is an area that students still feel like that's, that's the biggest challenge for them moving forward. If we look at the numbers there, we had a lot of people, almost 50% of the class, who were at one at the start of the class, 9% who were at a 2, 36% who were to three and 9% who had a four. And at the end of the class, we had about 55% who were at a four which is excellent and 36% who were at a three. We still have 9% who were at a two, so just a lot less growth in, in the other standards, but still growth, which is good, but obviously an area that I want to focus on moving forward in terms of course development.

So now I'll just share the rest of the questions I asked for students to reflect on and share with me their thoughts which will, I think, really help me inform my course moving forward. So the first question I asked was, what did you learn? And this includes a lot of things: content, skills, and I also specifically wanted to know if they were willing to share what the biggest change was for them. So there was a lot of different answers here of course, but I'll just share three that stick out. One student said “I learned in the semester, about a whole new way of thinking. I never really thought of these kinds of things before this class. Now I put a whole new lens on how I think.” So this quote was powerful to me because this is what I would like. I would like kind of an opening of the minds and mindset shift, if you will, in the class. And if I can just provide a new lens to look through the world and look at events, I think that's really helpful for students to be able to use that lens in looking at different events and self reflecting. That's something that I was really excited to hear. Another student said that “I became more self aware and more educated on these topics which helped me start more discussions outside of the class.” This highlighted another piece for me. I think my goal is not just that the things that students learn and experience, and the skills they develop, stay in the class. I want them to move outside of the class. It'd be really relevant and applicable to life. So again, this was heartening. The third student used words that I just wanted to highlight in their response so “Power, privilege. analyze, advantage, self awareness". So the key themes we already talked about in those other two responses, but these are words that I think, if I set a goal for myself at the end of the year to hear students reflect in a particular way use certain vocabulary or have certain prioritization of skills they develop, these terms would definitely be a part of it. So we think that's helpful for me and just setting goals for the future of what I would like for students to be able to accomplish and think about at the end of the course. And this also helps me set the stage for how I want to frame my class for my incoming students in the next semester. 

​Another question I asked was what was your most memorable experience from the class? And these ranged a lot. So some students talked about specific topics that they thought were really interesting. Some even talked about specific facts that they found interesting. So intersectionality was a big one. We talked about first hysterectomies which was really powerful for students. We talked about hidden teachings in school and things that are not covered in school that are factual truth historically, but are just not part of the curriculum. And that was really enlightening for students, particularly because I had a lot of freshman, college freshmen, who had just come out of the high school setting, who were thinking reflexively about what was last year like for me? What was I learning and not learning? The fact that Black Lives Matter founders are women was really powerful for a lot of students. Again that intersection of gender and race being really an important component of the class. Some students talked about specific projects they like the media critique is one that is always a crowd pleaser. I use that in high school I use it still in college. So I definitely will hold on to that project. Specific activities they liked: they liked the discussion we, had a guest speaker, Dr. Sherry Burgess, Patrick. They loved when she came in so that was really helpful and will just kind of remind me to, again, use those same topics, despite every year, you know, I change up my curriculum a bit, but I will try to go back to those topics and those projects and those class activities that were really resonating with students from this class. Now here's a huge one that I think it's beneficial for me. Certainly, because this was the first full semester of remote teaching that I've done. And I think for people who are thinking about remote teaching specifically, this was really fascinating to hear students responses and, obviously, again students vary. These might not be reflective of what your students are thinking, but for my class. I just want to share what they said. So one student said that “I thought the experience was really good. Classes for each week were very organized and easy to follow with the syllabus.” So I think what the student is referring to is in my syllabus, I use that as a one stop shop for every class resource. So projects, documents, each week's course tax readings, podcast, different things that they needed to interact with, all of the standards for the course, the project descriptions, the specific links to course slides, when we were having live classes were in the syllabus. So students knew if they just had to keep track of one document, they could return to that document again. And again, they could bookmark it, they wouldn't have to juggle a bunch of different documents for the class. So I think that was helpful to know, that was helpful for them, it certainly helped me as a teacher just knowing that I bookmark that document myself and just continue to add to that throughout the course. 

Students also reflected positively on win time. So what I did for my course we had two meeting times for the course. And that was Monday and Wednesday, I decided to use Wednesdays class as our synchronous session and Monday's class as win time. So I would be there in the zoom room and students can drop by if they have specific questions about projects, if they wanted to meet with me about their grade, if they needed that teacher-student connection and just that personal facetime with their instructor, they could have that. And so there were students who met consistently every week because that's what they needed to learn and other students who just dropped by when they had a project question or at the end of the year, or around mid term grades, a specific grade related question. So around this. I'll share a couple quotes from students, students said “I liked to have in-class on Wednesdays and Monday’s optional. It gave me more time to complete my weekly journal.” So that student really is referring to the ongoing work that we had. Each week we had a weekly assignment, which was a reflective journal and they really liked just being able to dedicate that time. It helped them structure their time when, you know, everything is a little chaotic this semester to be able to say, okay, this is the time that was allocated for class instead of being in that live zoom meeting I now will dedicate this power and 15 minutes to doing some of the reading to working on my journal and posting it before the deadline for the week. Another student said “It was good and it was helpful that there was a day, specifically for extra help or questions and knowing I had access to that if I ever needed it.” So I think that's interesting. I don't know who the student was because this was an anonymous survey, but this is helpful to know that even the students who didn't go because I'm guessing the student probably didn't go to the Monday workshop time or the win time. There were several students who didn't attend win time on Mondays for the entire semester but it's good to know that. Maybe someone who didn't ever attend still liked having the option they like the flexibility of being able to get some face time one on one or in a small group with the teacher. 

A lot of students talked about their personal learning challenges based on their learning styles with the remote classes in general. So, for a lot of these students, they were purely remote, working from home, learning from home. And this was the first time they've done that, not out of choice, but because they really needed to stay home for one reason or another due to covid. And so, some students said, “It was sometimes hard to pay attention, just because of so many distractions, but when I got myself in a quiet space I was able to listen and easily pay attention.” Another student said “I would definitely pick class in person rather than online just because of how I learn.” Another student said that “I personally do not like staring at a computer screen for hours at a time and it's hard for me to pay attention.” So a lot of students are really reflecting not about this class, specifically, but on their own self awareness of how they learn which I think is a helpful activity. Again assessment has many different purposes. And I think it's important to note that it's not just assessment for me to improve my learning in the future, right, assessment for learning. But it's also assessment as learning. So just by nature of answering these questions that I've asked students are deepening their self understanding of how they learn and maybe we'll help them make informed choices moving forward in the future. Other comments students said about the remote learning, “Even though remote learning wasn't my favorite thing I found the setup of this class easier to deal with.” I'm guessing that means easier in relation to other classes so it would be great to know who said that cuz I can follow up, but I'm going to use some of these other quotes to kind of help me paint a picture of that. “It was hard and different, but I was able to adjust as the semester went on.” “I liked this remote learning experience. It was easy to follow.” So some students really did enjoy remote learning more than in person learning. It may have saved a lot of driving time because we have a lot of commuters at the college and I think also that easy to follow piece is really important. So having those streamlined processes, every Monday we do this, every Wednesday we do this, the things are always posted on this one document for any resource you will need. I think that was a really important part of my setup that contributed to the comments about positive organization are easy to follow. So I'll continue doing that moving forward because it sounds like that resonated with students. Another student said that “I thought that the remote learning experience for the class was the best out of all my remote classes. I liked the surveys, at the beginning of the class as well as the breakout room discussions.” So just some context for how I framed the class, surveys were self assessments on Marzano’s, on a scale of 1 to 4 that I mentioned earlier, for every standard that the specific class was about. So I would usually have one, maybe two standards for each class that we're focusing in on. And at the beginning and end of the class, I would ask students where they were in that moment on a scale of one to four. I would use Zoom's pull feature and I used the same poll just logistically, if you're wondering, I use the same poll with the same scale of one to four and I would write out what a one meant, what a two meant, etc. and I would just ask the two questions: On the first learning target, on the second learning target, how would you rate? And so I could change the learning targets on the screen. And I would be sharing my screen with them and so that way I didn't have to create a new poll every single class. 

For the breakout room discussions, what we would do is we would have about, 50 minutes of a whole class conversation. We would divide it usually into maybe two different activities. The last activity, being a case study where we looked at a current event and thought about how we could apply the week's readings to the current event. And so, we would analyze that. First, I would present some information to the whole class and then I would usually take about 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes, for students to go into breakout rooms in a group of about four or so. And they would be able to answer maybe two or three key questions in response to the case study, and then we'll come back together and share. The next question I asked is what could I improve when I teach this class next semester? So I really want specific feedback. I've kind of inferred from some of the other questions what I could do, but now I'm just asking students to tell me what should change. So here are some things they said: one, less video projects and possibly more papers. So I did a lot of video projects. I didn't want students writing a paper for the three projects. One was a one page written paper and the other two were video projects or audio projects. So that's good information to have. And I've had feedback in the past. So I think I want to expand a little bit of more choice for students. I want you to be persuasive, so, you know, pick what works best for you. But if you're a persuasive writer and that is your strength, I want you to be able to play to your strengths. I don't want you to write a paper because it's easier. I want you to write it, because it is where your strength lies and you can capitalize on that. So I think the framing of it is important, but I'd like to expand that and see what that looks like in the future. The reason I got away from papers to start with is because I have them “publish” their papers or their projects, I should say to other students and other students will read and comment on theirs. So it's nice to get that peer feedback. I felt like students might not want to read a lot of papers because they're already reading the journals each week and engaging in conversation around those, it would have been a lot more reading, and viewing a video might be more engaging. But, I think I can just ask students that question after giving students the option to respond and have the students say, you know, this one was really engaging because it was a well written paper. Or, you know, this movie was more interesting to engage with because it was audio visual and that's how I learned. So having that discussion, as opposed to just making that decision for students, I think, is a key learning here.

Another student said “The only thing I think should change is that there should be project due dates. I think that because there is no set due dates, students can fall behind and get overwhelmed because they're pushing projects off.” So context for this. I said there are specific dates within the semester that I had as quote unquote suggested due dates. And so I said, if you're pacing yourself, I really would like to see this project at this time. However, due to covid and due to a lot of uncertainty in the world, I'm going to be flexible with deadlines this year. And so I positioned it as a flexible due date. A lot of students, far more than I thought, really saw that as not a real deadline at all and ended up turning in all three projects, the last week of the semester. So moving forward, I will definitely set concrete deadlines and then I can be flexible with them, but maybe not advertise that flexibility as much. Another student said that “I think the only thing to improve is responding to emails.” So absolutely. One of the things I did for my like just self care and ability to be able to turn work off when I needed to was I took notifications off of my phone. And so I don't think I'll put those back on. But I do think what I can do is dedicate time each day, maybe just 20 minutes each day to be able to go through and check my email. What I was doing was only checking email on the days of class because I was already in work mode, I was in that particular email I have set up on my computer, different browsers configured to different email settings, because I have about six different emails for different contracts that I work on. And so I was only responding on Mondays and Wednesdays. And so I think some students were frustrated with that. Absolutely fair point and so I'm going to really think about how I can build that into my schedule next year. A student said that “I think that some of the directions for the projects were kind of confusing.” And so I definitely want to go back and make sure that those are streamlined. I also provided links in the syllabus in that singular document. They had two other Google docs that had rubrics, that had examples of previous projects that were good, but I think that double click, like, having to click into a document and then click into another document was too much. So maybe directly linking those could be more helpful. I mean of course streamlining those directions is something I'll do moving forward. Another student said, “I think one thing that could be done to improve this class is getting grades for the journal assignments. It was hard to tell how I was doing in this class because there was no feedback given about what was right and what I might have been doing wrong for the journals.” Another student said something similar feedback for the journals, just so people know how they can improve them each week.

So previously, in the previous two semesters, I graded journals on a quarterly kind of basis. So every kind of four weeks or so I would give students a grade and I would explain the grade. This year again for flexibility sake I wanted to make sure students weren't stressed about grades specifically and so I would go in and I would comment because we use the journals as prompts for conversation for the whole class. And so I would just comment in those discussion threads, not for every student every single day, or every single week, I should say but occasionally. And I would try to get to every student every few weeks or so just to say, you know, I'm really missing some information here or, you know, here's what I think, in response to your discussion question you asked. I want to highlight and emphasize the quote you referenced. More qualitative in response to what they wrote as opposed to from a teacher lens, here's what I like about this and what I don't like in terms of meeting the assignment criteria. So that was really helpful to hear because I did not at all think that that was going to be something that students wanted. I thought the flexibility and the response to the content as opposed to the criteria for the assignment would be more helpful and so moving forward. I think that's something that I will think a little bit about, maybe, again, go back to a quarterly read with qualitative here's why so that students don't feel stressed about not knowing whether their journals were productive or not. And the final thing students said for this question was, “One thing I would suggest when you teach this class next semester is to limit the amount of breakout rooms. I know I personally do not get anything out of these and I know that many people agree with me. This is not only for this class, but for every other class that does breakout rooms. I find that more times than not, the breakout rooms are just filled with awkward silence amongst the students in them.” This was really helpful for me to learn because in my facilitation of adult learning I often times leave space for people to go into breakout rooms and not feel watched by me as the facilitator, so that they can have time to catch up or talk to people that they actually don't know that well. In many cases, these were freshmen who had never met in person. They didn't know one another. So I thought that may be some nice privacy for students to be able to talk without that monitoring. However, I think this is really powerful. While an earlier student had said they love breakout rooms this student did not. And so what I think it means for me in terms of my course design next year is that I really want to play with various discussion protocols, just like I would, in the physical classroom and then the class can determine which is best for them because each group is really unique. So for example, I could do a virtual disagree/agree discussion. So in a classroom that looks like sit on this side of the room if you agree with this statement and on this side, if you disagree. And then we call on people from each group. So I tried on something like that this year in a virtual setting with zoom annotation. And so I just set up the slide and then I had them in a team where they were. And then we're calling someone from each group to share why they were there that worked. Okay. I would also add, you know, virtual circle. So again, instead of passing the talking piece, passing the mic, when I am done speaking, I'm gonna pass the mic to and then name the person. Maybe breakout rooms could work, but with an accountability task or maybe I need to pop in more and accountability tasks might look like a Google slide deck where you know in your breakout room you're speaking about these questions and you're jotting some of your responses in a shared Google Doc or a shared Google slide and your group has this slide to fill out so you can also see what other people are saying maybe for inspiration and motivation to complete that assignment. I could also do something like a live paddling or a jam board where people are annotating the typing we're all seeing live without needing to go into different breakout rooms so people just, again, have a different mechanism. If they don't want to speak, a lot of my students do not want to unmute their mic and speak. A lot of students also choose not to show themselves on video, which I think is something that they should have the choice to do. But it made it for a difficult conversation because they weren't as comfortable unmuting because we couldn't see them, because their default was to be on mute. And even when they entered into the chat, the chat feature usually they use the private setting and so other students couldn't see a public message. And so I think this is really interesting and maybe a path that would actually help this a little bit. So students are generating again with options they could record and pilot, you can record an audio, you know, or do a drawing, or you could just type. And we can see that live so that might generate some more responses that people don't feel comfortable sharing verbally.

Other things that I just wanted to pull out from some of the responses to various questions that I didn't share are things like “I enjoyed the class and the expressive freedom that came with it, whether it was in the journals or the projects. I really liked how approachable you are and that it's not intimidating to email you with questions or concerns." One person said she was excited to teach and that was important to them. And then another student said, “I do like how you provide choice boards for the journals. I, along with many other students find it much easier to complete journals, when we are given inspiration as to what to write about. I also like how you provide the ability to veer away from these topics too. I enjoyed reading my classmates’ journals over the course of the semester each week because everyone’s is different.” So I think this is really important to name at the end because as I go forward and share my takeaways, well, I'm thinking about a lot of ways in which I was trying to be flexible was not working for students. It is also important to remember, I often focus on what I could do better, that some of the things I did were working for students and that flexibility that showed up in different ways was actually helpful. And so I should continue to do that.

So just to summarize some key takeaways, I’m going to set deadlines and I'm going to be flexible with them, but I'm not going to publicize that. I'm going to clarify directions for projects and I'm going to try linking rubrics and examples for each project directly into the syllabus, so they don't have to double click through. I'm going to give some more choice in writing versus video, really make space for students to reflect on how engaging different types are in their peer responses and let students play to their strengths. I'm going to give qualitative feedback on journals, perhaps with agreed, perhaps not, but feedback around the criteria of the assignment, maybe quarterly. I'm going to dedicate time to email each weekday. I'm not going to put notifications on my phone, but each weekday should suffice. I'm going to rethink breakout rooms. So play with those various discussion protocols, I talked about and figure out what's best for the group. And I'm also going to continue with a lot of things, Monday, Wednesdays that flex time to just be able to drop in and chat, text choice for reading and listening each week. I’m also going to keep the projects, especially the media critique. That's usually everyone's favorite but I'm going to clarify the directions for them so they're more streamlined and open up that choice in terms of how they're presenting that information, papers being an option next semester. I also want to continue to bring in fresh lessons that talk about current events which will change each semester, of course, and really center the concepts that keep my energy high and my ability to engage with that high effect and positive effect that students need and can sometimes be contagious for student learning. Now that I've shared all the things that my students have said, I'd love to hear what your students say. And to help you collect some of that information from your students, I can go ahead and share, as the freebie for this week, a template of the semester reflection Google Form that I use for my class. I'll try to make it pretty generic so you can add in specific standards for your class for the pre then post section at the start, and you can keep, add, or edit to any of the reflection questions in the second half of the form. I also encourage you to share forums like this with students more than just at the end of the semester. Another thing I want to do next semester is ask these questions halfway through or even on a biweekly basis to generate some of this information before I lose the students to another class. With that, I will leave you thinking about what you want to ask your students, what you want to do differently next semester, if you're remote teaching, if you’re hybrid teaching, or if you're in person. And again, please share any information or learnings or aha’s or student quotes that you would like with us and the Time for Teachership Facebook group. 

Thanks for listening, amazing educators. If you loved this episode, you can share it on social media and tag me at Lindsay Beth Lyons, or leave a review of the show so leaders like you will be more likely to find it. To continue the conversation, you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.

In this episode, I got to talk with Afrika Afeni Mills. She is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with BetterLesson, and an Education Consultant. I have had the pleasure of working with her at BetterLesson as one of their coaches. She is amazing. She works with colleagues, teachers, coaches and administrators to develop and sustain student-centered learning experiences that are diverse, inclusive and equitable. Afrika has been featured on podcasts, blogs, facilitated sessions at conferences across the US. She believes that all educators can be motivated, engaged, dynamic practitioners and leaders when provided with the support needed to create student-centered, anti-bias, anti-racist, culturally responsive learning environments that inspire wonder and creativity and nurture diversity, belonging, equity, and inclusion. I’m so excited for you to hear our conversation today which talks about a variety of things including Rudine Sims Bishop’s Windows & Mirrors strategy as well as what she’s been calling “performative partnership.”

Hi, I'm Lindsay Lyons and I love helping school communities envision bold possibilities, take brave action to make those dreams a reality and sustain an inclusive anti-racist culture where all students thrive. I'm a former teacher leader, turned instructional coach, educational consultant and leadership scholar. If you're a leader in the education world, whether you're a principal, superintendent, instructional coach, or a classroom teacher, excited about school-wide change  like I was, you are a leader. And if you enjoy nerding out about the latest educational books and podcasts, if you're committed to a lifelong journey of learning and growth, being the best version of yourself, you're going to love the Time for Teachership podcast. Let's dive in.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): Afrika, welcome to the Time for Teacher ship Podcast. I am so excited to have you on today. And I'd love it if you could just start us off by introducing yourself for our audience in whatever way feels relevant to you.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm so grateful to be able to share this space with you and I love your question. I've actually been listening to a podcast recently called Reclaiming my Theology. And the way that that host asks the questions when guests come on is: “Tell us what it means to be you.” And I'm like, I like that. Right? I like that. Because so often we really just launched into, like, you know, whatever our professional statistics about ourselves. So how I would introduce myself is that I'm a Christ follower, who was exploring what it means to practice my faith without advantaged or privileged culture characteristics which has been really, really very important for me. Very, very important part of my journey with regards to my faith. I consider myself an equity guardian. I am absolutely an introvert. People do not usually believe that about me because I present differently. But, well, for folks who are into Myers Briggs, I am an ISFJ. Legit like all the ways that that's described is really true of me. I am a writer. I am a wife to my best friend. My husband I've been married to for 23 years and you would think that we just met yesterday. I am the mother of young adults, which, like my son is about to be 18 in like a week and our daughter just turned 19 and so I’m  like whoa, this is like, we would be empty nesters kinda but the pandemic. So, like, not quite. But we're getting there. We're getting there, and then  also I’m a mom to my first baby rabbit. She is our beautiful—I think she's about eight years old. We rescued her and she is a pitbull boxer, and she's fantastic. So this is my fur baby. And then I'm also someone who loves stories, I love singing and laughing. And professionally, I'm the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion for BetterLesson.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): I absolutely love that introduction. And I learned so much about you and you just sharing it in that way. Actually, I have a question. To follow up on one piece when you used the phrase equity guardian. Could you say more about that? I think this is my first time hearing that phrase.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah, so I think I got the concept of initially I was thinking about, there's been a lot of talk about being an equity warrior. And so that's how I used to describe myself like yes, I'm going to war against systemic injustice and oppression and like, no, It doesn’t feel like it fits. I read a book a while ago by a man named Jim Wallis, who talks a bit about, like, you know, with regard to, like, race in Christianity. And he talked about the difference between being a warrior and a guardian. In that definition, I feel like there's an important distinction between the two because going to battle against something... I'm not saying that there's not a place for that and that people who described themselves that way. Or that's in any way wrong. Like, I think it's true for whoever it’s true for. But, for me, I'm just like, if I'm saying that I want to, to help to create and sustain equitable learning experiences or environments or any type of community. Then I want to be the one who's helping to guard that thing. There's another—there's a friend that I had a chance to meet a couple of years ago, named James Ford. He's an amazing, amazing educator and he talked about the importance of not focusing so much on what we want to tear down, that we don't spend enough time thinking about what we want to build. And so that's where that shift for me came from,  from equity warriors, equity guardians.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): Thank you so much for explaining that.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): No problem. 

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): And so, the thing I want to start with here in terms of our questions for today, is this idea of thinking big. I think it’s really, really important to me and really important to folks who listened to the podcast. And I love Dr. Bettina Love’s idea of freedom dreaming that she describes as “dreams grounded in the critique of injustice.” So I'm curious to know, what is your big dream that you hold for the field of education?


Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yes, that's such an important question and I think I'd like I have so much love and respect for Bettina Love and her work. So I'm so glad to be able to—it's a privilege to be able to really like engage with that question. So for me, I feel like one of the things in, like, I'm very big you'll hear more about this a little bit more as we talked with them. I'm very big into Brene Brown. And so I'm like, so not in a way of like shame and guilt because I think in some ways, depending on how, like, people were thinking about that, it can be immobilized and so not in that way. But I feel like, with, it's only within the past couple of years, that I started to really think about what took place after the Brown versus Board of Education decision right so I—As you know, learning about the trauma that existed around that, around integrating black and brown bodies into white spaces and you know, communities that decided that they would rather close schools completely for every child than have any type of integration. Or how violently some, you know, some students were integrated. Or even thinking about Ruby Bridges as a six year old child what she faced going into the classroom and being her teachers only student for so long. Like I spent some time thinking about all of those things. But what I haven't thought about and I think I didn't start thinking about it honestly, until I I listened to a presentation by Chris Emden Who was talking about, like, the power of, like, the black community and black teachers. And he was the first one who, like, I'm not saying he's the first one to introduce the concept, but in this session was when I first started to think about what happened to the black teachers who are teaching black children after integration. And I was like, Oh, I've never thought about that. And I felt, like I said I'm not trying to be filled with shame, but like, I'm like, why didn’t I think about that? Right? But I'm really trying to think about that. I'm like, not only did black kids go through the trauma of being you know forcefully integrated if it even went that way. Right, depending on if they're actually able to go to school, Into white spaces. I think about how that manifested, even in Boston. Right? You know, in the 70s, right, like there's a lot of violence around that. And I'm like, yeah, and then trying to make the connection between, like, so many of us think about, like, We need to increase the pipeline of teachers of color. And how can we have so few black men in the classroom and how can we have some like so few black teachers? And I'm like, yeah, because what we did was, we disconnected that authentic learning that teaching and learning community that existed in the black community pre-Integration like we've never been able to recapture that and I think that we can with intention, because there's a lot that, that was so ingrained into, like, just really investing in kids and community. So for me, when I think about big dreams for me. I'm like, It's really getting to a point where we actually have a partnership between the schools and the students and the families and the communities. It's not about, like, coming into a community and rescuing children or, you know, like, trying to save children from their families and community. It's about, like, going alongside children and their families and communities and being like, we're going to engage curiosity and wonder and thinking and creativity and we're going to do that together. I would love to see learning go into that space. I think for it, like, for example, for me, when my kids were much younger, my husband and I put them in so they, they were enrolled in Montessori school. And I love them. I’m not saying that every school should be Montessori. I'm not saying that. But what I did appreciate about it was, that there was so, there was so much of a concept of, like, following the child. And they just loved school like it was just so you know, fill with exploration and just like what is it that the child is naturally curious about, following that and let them be the, the ones who were leading the learning and unfortunately, we weren't able to keep them in Montessori school because financially we shifted  And we didn't have money like that to keep them in without assistance. But yeah, I think that it is possible to stay engaged in learning that actually is filled with wonder and joy. So that's what my hopes are.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): That that's such a powerful hope and dream and what it makes me think about, are all the mindset shifts that are required to get to that place because that is describing a place that doesn't exist for most schools and many communities that are really, traditionally focused on how we've always done education. So I'm curious to know, what do you think are some of those mindset shifts that people have to kind of get through and buy into, and really adopt to fight for that dream?

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah, I think a lot of it has a foundation and some of the things that we talked about just a second ago. Because if we, like so many educators, if we, and I,  honestly, I want to say this. I think it's important to say.  Because I think there's so much teacher bashing that can happen. So I just want to be clear that I'm not trying to be, like, educators, like, there's just so many floors. I'm not saying that. What I do believe still, feel like in my soul, I feel this Is that, like, in any group, there's going to be like a percentage of folks, who will be like, I'm not sure why you became a teacher. It doesn't seem like you like kids. But I really believe that doesn't show the minority of folks in that group, I believe that most of us enter into the field of education for really, very beautiful reasons. Right, whether it be because we enjoyed school or  We love kids or we really believe in the power of education and opportunity like there are so many reasons why so many of us became educators that are so pure and beautiful. Unfortunately though, like when we become teachers, a lot of what's not, what has not happened for us is that we haven't had most of, like, unless we had some type of extraordinary learning experience. Most of us did not have the opportunity to engage like anti bias anti racist culturally responsive and sustaining diverse equitable inclusive types of money experiences. And so, and we also don't get it in our teacher prep programs for the most part. And so then we come in with these really beautiful motivations around why we want to be a teacher but if we don't have the support in place to be able to really create these, you know, these experiences that they teach in the first place, then it's going to be really hard to put those things into practice. And so for me, I'll speak to my own experience like when I became a teacher, I'm like, I felt like I originally was in graduate school to become like a creative writer. I was working on a novel. And then I realized that I really wanted to teach. And I'm like, I went to graduate school to become a teacher. I did really well in my head PREP program, but when it came time for me to have my own class I was like, oh, there's a lot of stuff that I don't know. Like, it's not just this like knowledge transfer like you have to be able to build and sustain a community and all of these things. I think that the biggest mindset shift is really for us to be able to recognize that we're not becoming teachers to, like, save children from their families and communities. We're really trying to join alongside them as partners in a learning experience and building a learning community. And we also have to hold the fact that we didn't receive what we needed. And so, we have to do some co-learning with students. We have to learn the things we didn't learn. And then we have to be able to provide those things for our students as well.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): I love that you called that co-learning because I'm also, I'm usually thinking, we have to unlearn, we have to undo all the things. But it's really a co-learning because a lot of times, I mean one, we're learning from our students in the same ways that they're learning from us, and that's important to name. But also this idea of, you know, students, depending on how old they are, I know I taught high school, they have been told this is what education is for so long. This is how teachers respond to me like we're learning or co-learning that together and we have to create that new reality that is really different from what we may be thought or saw on TV, for example of what education looks like.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Right so true.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): And so I'm curious about how we get there. So what are, kind of, the steps that we can take to make that dream happen to get teachers, I'm thinking about how we do all of that work that we've been talking about so far, what would you say is kind of the, the thing that you talk to teachers most about in this regard?

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah, I think, aside from like just really exploring that love, like, adopting that level of awareness about what it is that we did not receive. I think that's a really big shift that we have to initially, we have to take those steps to realize that that's what happened to us. And then also giving grace to the people who told us as well because it happened to them too, right, it's just been generationally. We have not been leaning into this type of work, but I think once we get to the level of awareness and in can do that in a healthy way without you know, like, I was talking about before, like not feeling shame because I honestly I think back to some of the things I did with the students that I taught, and I'm like, Oh my gosh, like I really wish I could go back and undo, undo like some of the things that I did. I had good intentions, but the intention doesn't always lead to great outcomes. Right? So just really being able to recognize going beyond that awareness. So really saying like, Okay, well, what does it take, not only do I have to go through my own learning, but if I am honest about the fact that I really have not, you know, aside, like some sometimes, I will talk about, like, family, community partnership, but a lot of times it looks more like okay, like before pre-COVID was more like, oh, make sure that parents come business chaperoning class trip so that they're contributing to the bake sale or selling gift wrapping paper. No. Cookie dough or whatever it is we're using to like raise funds, while we want them to come to conference night and literacy night and math night and to pick up the report cards and hear about all the things their students are not really doing so well necessarily. Like, that's not partnership. And so I think those steps are like really trying to operationalize our learning. So it's like okay well if learning, if what we've been trying to do all along has not been effective. And it hasn't been largely, right, when we talk about the goals that we have and how we try to get there. There's been a lot of misalignment. So if we realize that it's like, well, what do we need to do? What structures do we need to put into place to make sure we have the opportunity to continue that learning and to change our practices? Right? So if that looks like it could look like something so basic and I know some people might feel like this is not enough. Honestly, I feel like this is a massive first step. I think back to when I was a new teacher. And as a new teacher. I don't even mean just my first year. I mean, like, the first several years, because whenever you come into a space, you always like we're human beings, we want to belong. We don't want to be the one who's like, the wrong person doing something different, like, we want to be part of the community. And so I'd be in the teachers room or making copies and I would hear veteran teachers saying something—and not everybody, so I just definitely want, like, I totally am genuinely not trying to teacher bash. But there are some folks who are, who have gotten kind of jaded around the way they think about teaching and learning and kids and their families. And so, there'll be a lot of times where people will say things to me about kids in their families. And in my heart I'd be like, that's not right. That's like mean, or like if that, if there was something about me or my family. I would feel a certain type of way or even feel genuinely like if they knew me well enough, they would know that they actually were talking about me and my family. Because my thing, like, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, my family was beautiful. I just, you know, and they still are. And I think that, but that's not something that was always celebrated In my school community. Like there was a lot more focus on like the deficit and the challenges. And something like, a lot of times people will say things and I'm like, you don't even really know that you're talking about, like, my cousin or my uncle. Right, like or like a sibling or something like that. So I think just even having the courage to speak up in the face of people saying things that are not necessary, like, that like deficit based just really having the courage to try to shift the narrative. I think even something, like, that can be really powerful because it lets people know who you are, what you stand for. And then you will also find your allies right or your co conspirators or your, you know, your comrades. Your accomplices and you'll start to really be able to work together to really get that work done. But I think we have to have courage to speak up against messed up things.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): I can relate to so much of that just hearing it. And then for me, remaining silent and then feeling like, why was, why didn't I say something where, where was that? And I think it's so powerful what you're speaking to, that idea of belonging, like, wanting to fit in, especially as a new teacher and you know, being taught the rope, so to speak, right. And just having to follow that versus this is what I truly believe in, this is what I need to say, this is what I want the school to become and I believe it can become that. And trying to find that community of people who will kind of be with you and that is, is critical and also difficult, especially as a new teacher.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Really, so I think about that too, like this, like I talked about hearing from Chris Emden before he tells a story like that. So, and when he became a teacher that people would come to him and tell him like don't smile at your students until December. And he'd be like, that seems messed up. Right? But you're a veteran teacher. Oh, like, well, you know, I'm new. Maybe there's something you know that I don't know. But then, as he goes he’s like no, that is messed up! That’s just unkind. Like, how are you going to connect with somebody if you just wouldn't even show them something as basically decent as a smile. So you're so right, so right.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): That's such a great example of another one that we've all heard, I think. So I know that you talk a lot about the importance of students having both windows and mirrors and the curriculum so referencing routine Sims bishops windows mirrors inside and sliding glass doors. So I'd love if you could just share a little bit more about this framework, you know, what, what you think the value is that it brings to the table and how educators specifically can, can use it in their lens of designing curriculum and teaching classrooms.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah, I think probably, like, we were talking about a little bit earlier was, I think we need to first recognize what are our own windows in here. So just, like, going into the concept a bit more, the windows are what we gaze through to discover other perspectives and other experiences and other, you know, other ways of being and other histories, right. So that's why we’re looking through the window. To see something other than ourselves or what, you know, other than what we've experienced. And then the mirror being what reflects who we are not different parts of identities back to ourselves, right. So we need to make sure that students have the opportunities to experience both in our, in our, in our learning communities. But before we can do that. It's just like, well, no one really ever asked me what my windows and mirrors were, like, I need to really spend some time thinking about that. Like what are things that I feel like represent me and all the different things that make me Afrika. Right? And what are some things that I really would like to have learned that I never had a chance. Tomorrow I should just really like thinking about that. And then thinking about what that night. I'm not only thinking about what that means for our students, but also, asking them, because I think that's a big part of what we're missing in education. We don't ask kids anywhere near enough questions and I don't mean assessments, like, I'm totally not talking about like state assessments or even like, the one I feel like all the more helpful and informative like formative assessments. Those are really important. But I don't even mean that I mean like, how are you experiencing this learning community and what do you think about what we have one deck to learn this year? And is what do you think might be missing or how would you want to learn this? Right, if this is something that you feel like you would want to learn. So I think we'll be hearing from students because of some of the mistakes we can make. I know I've made it where I get a new concept or framework. I'm just like, yes, students, the windows and mirrors. Let me determine them for the students. I'm like, No, that's not the right way to go. We need to hear from them, right, because otherwise we're imposing our own view of who the students are on them and it's still not authentic. So I think that's the piece, too. But I think one of, it’s not enough to just be like, yeah, because, because we can think about it, when it comes to black and brown kids with students who are from marginalized backgrounds. Marginalized backgrounds, where we can say, okay, yeah. Like, we want to make sure that we provide those opportunities for them. But it's like, yeah, we need to think about it a bit more deeply that Black and Brown kids and kids from marginalized groups are oftentimes looking through way too many windows. Right. It's like you're learning about all types of people I think about this to like even because I grew up in a family that was like, working class and my family. Now, I don't even know we are because of student loan debt. Like we still have a we have a house. But we got to doing the subprime mortgage crisis. So I don't even know what I am economically, but when I think about it, even with, like, I binge watch shows and I watch like you know people in different houses and sometimes it's like I want to live in a house that big! Like, I want to go on vacation, like when we have the opportunity to go on vacation again. And so that kind of stuff to like just really being mindful of like how those things show up for me. But so just, just knowing too, like, just hearing from students like what are some of the things that you would like to learn more about. And then I think when it comes to making sure Black and Brown kids get to see way more representation of themselves and not just from the perspective of like oh yes, like your people went through such hardship and enslavement and civil rights and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman it's just like, true, those are parts of the story and very important parts of the story, but those are not the only parts of the story. So, right. So if we're talking about black and brown cases it can only be about oppressive things and suffering and needs to be about like, what does it fully mean to be you. Which is why you're opening the question. It resonates still with me. Like, what does it mean to be you? But then also thinking about like our white students too it's just like, yes, you know, I don't know. You probably have seen that graphic that talks about the lack of diversity in children's books like between 2012 right? In 2015 and 2018 how it went from like, like, white kids in like 93% of children's books in 2012 about, like, featuring white kids. And then even when we got like, the data shifted it more. So it didn't go to black and brown kids it went more like animals and trucks right like less about white kids, but not quite about other kids too. But just really giving white students an opportunity to like, to really see, like, they need more opportunities to look through windows and hear more and learn more about other perspectives and histories and you know, and interest and all those things. But not only that, it's also to hear like, to learn more about themselves. Like, what does it mean to be white? And I think about that too because we talked a lot about being culturally responsive there. You know, the black and brown kids like, they really need to be able to enjoy being proud of themselves and where they come from. I was like yeah but then when we need to explore more. What does it mean for white kids because they're like, can I say that I love being white? No, that would not go well. I said I like being white, but then what does that mean with something like diversity, am I not part of that? Right? And so it's just like really being able to show why students, like, yes, not trying to, like, you know, so water it down. Like when we look at colonization, when we look at some of the things that have happened It's not good, right, some of those things are really, we still are seeing the effects of systemic oppression. And at the same time, there are white people historically who have fought against white who have worked alongside folks and who have been abolitionists, and who have been really fighting for, you know, really, the humanization of all of us, right? Because we think about how racialization has harmed us all. I think, like the concept of windows and mirrors provides us with such a powerful frame.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): I love so much of that because it goes deeper than what is typically shared when we talk about windows and mirrors. So that self awareness piece right off the bat, I'm just thinking and conversations I facilitated with educators, we don't usually start there. We don't usually start with this introspective, you know, series of questions. And it's interesting because I know in some of the work you're doing, you're asking, you know, white educators who grew up in predominantly white neighborhoods like, what was that experience like? And when you asked me, it took a while I remember. I remember, I think you had said maybe 30 minutes to answer these questions. And it took me a few hours because I was, like, the mental energy to go back and actually think about it, when it wasn't being, these questions weren't surfaced in the moment like when I was in school. And to be able to retrospectively with what I know now, go back and say, huh, what was that experience actually like? What were we talking about? What weren't we talking about? What media was I consuming? It was really difficult. And I think that just speaks to the need for what you're saying. You know we need that self reflection first before we dive in and say, again with that teacher lens, here's exactly what the windows and mirrors will be, I will tell you. So that voice of students also being critically important. And I also think about that to some of the things that you were talking about like, the broadening of the experience, also just Crenshaw’s idea of intersectionality too. So, that idea that rate, like all people of a particular race are not monolithic, like, there are these varied experiences and so sometimes I hear teachers say, oh, well, there was this really great book. You know that, that centers, whatever race they're trying to center, but it's still heteronormative. It still says gender. It's still all the things that now we have a slice of, like, this,  this other window. But there are so many more still reflecting probably mirrors for different folks that have always had mirrors, you know, and I think that's an interesting component to that. Like, how do we dive deeper into what windows and mirrors actually mean? And how do we encourage educators to think about it even deeper than just that surface level that I think has been popularized a bit more lately.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah, I think that's when I think of the other piece. This is something I've really been thinking quite a bit about, and I don't understand why this is a push, but I think we need to really explore the way that this can manifest, is that there's been a lot of conversation about like diversifying the teaching staff diversifying like students need to see people who look like them. Like, I totally agree. And, right, so we need to be able to hold them to it on both ends. We also need to be mindful of how rationalization and internalized oppression shows up in people from marginalized groups. And I'll just keep the focus on myself and everybody has to tell their own story. But for me, I grew up in, like, you know, like where school was like a space for me like I love school I did so well in school. And I just grew up with that perception of myself. Like I had, you know, gone into first grade early, so I was like a five year old first grader and then I skipped the eighth grade. So I was really young graduating from high school. So, of course, it was like Afrika you’ve done this before, I started, like, challenging the concept of smart, but it was like, oh, I forgot. You're so smart, you're so smart. So in my head, I'm like, oh, that's it. What you have to do is focus on school then everything will be fine. And then, so when I went into being a classroom teacher, that's the perspective that I brought in with me, and so I'm just like, yeah. So now, what does that mean? That means classroom management. That means you are controlled in my room in my space right it's happened to me pretty quickly. And it was like when I look back, I'm like, I hate that that's how I approach creating like, well, I don't even know what to call it like an effective learning space. Thankfully, I was able to really still have really strong relationships with my students with them so they are so gracious, so gracious to me and I really like I still maintain relationship with a lot of my former students, but I think it's really important for us to think about like as Black and Brown people if you're in that if since we are in school systems that are largely based on like an advantaged or privilege, you know, culture characteristics and if those of us who are people of color who are marginalized folks have bought into that we bought into the system and how to play the game. Then that means that we're not quite equitable either right or we're not necessarily seeing things the way we need to either. So I think it's about all of us really being able to make sure we have the right mindset when it comes to how we think about teaching and learning.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): I love that. And I, I want to go back to, to a point you made about the importance of asking the students about the windows and mirrors. How do you strike that balance between asking students for, you know, what are your book recommendations? What are the stories that you want to hear? And also, like, not putting so much of the work on the students to come up with that because Hassan Kwame Jeffries, does the teaching hard history podcast. And there was that one episode where he was talking about his child being asked to like, the teacher taught something about a historical figure that was inaccurate. I think it was Rosa Parks and he that he had his child actually spoke up and said, after a conversation with dad, and was like, hey, this isn't quite right. And the teacher offered the opportunity to teach the class. Which to him at first was like, okay, great, but then later, he was like, I actually realized that that's the teacher’s work that she needs to do. And then bring, like, the student was able to shout it out. Now, the teacher needs to go do the work. Bring it back presented and invite conversation. But I guess my question is, how do we achieve that balance of inviting student voices? And then also not putting everything on students?

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah, I think that's an important consideration because so much of what I'm mindful of about this work is that once you know once you awareness is right, it's kind of like, I don't know if you watch the movie “The Matrix”, like, once you're aware of what's happening like, wait, this is terrible. And we got to fight this. Right? And you just, you want to end it immediately. It's like, y eah, but you can't go. You're not going to be able to because something that has taken centuries to set up is when it takes some time to reimagine, right. And to dismantle and reshape right. So I think part of it is that students and their families and community, I think that's why we also have to make sure we're balancing is not on the students what we want to hear from their families to and from the communities too is being aware of, like, what the topics are right. And even, like, you know, I think it's great that the student was able to help the teachers to raise their awareness and be like, actually, this is not accurate with that because it takes a lot of, you know, humility and vulnerability to be able to get that feedback from students. But I think a lot of it is that like not trying to, I think, sometimes it comes up where it's like, oh, well, this is the mistake I made, and we're really trying to make sure things are relevant. Let's go ahead and give the opportunity for students to engage. It's like, yeah, but like their parents said, my child is not being paid to teach this class, that's your job. So I think there's part of it where it's like we're going to need to be able to accept that we’re not be able to change the whole curriculum all at one time. That's why I think it's so important when we think about doing this work that we're not thinking about doing it alone. I really believe that it has to be the work of like grade level teams and content teams and instructional coach teams and administrative teams and the school site council, which hopefully in the most, like, in the best circumstances, involves family and community members, where we can set up a plan to say alright, so here's how we would like to shift things over the next three to five years. It is hard because we're not trying to say we want to do messed up things to kids in part and then do, like, better things. Like we're not trying to say that, but I think also just really holding ourselves to the fact that it's going to take some time to really, to address a lot of the things that have happened that are unjust and that are, that are oppressive. And so I think holding that and just being able to determine like here's how we're going to roll this out over time. Because I think when we start, you know, trying to, like, change things immediately. That's what we started doing making some of those moves and it's not really the best people. It reminds me, so I'm like, I don't know if you've ever seen that it was on the Internet by, I think the boy's name is King and he's a fourth grader and he wrote this paper about Columbus and he was just like, I'm not, you know, like, you’re teaching me the wrong thing about Columbus and I'm not, this is wrong, my parents told me that Christopher Columbus did all these things wrong and he was in fourth grade. I was like alright little man, I appreciate that. But the teacher's response was the way she actually, like, her response was not supportive. Let's say she had had the right, let's say she had had a response, which was like, all right, King tell us what you know about Christopher Columbus. King could have been, like, not my job, right. So I think it's about, like, raising awareness and then it might be when can we start to, when can I, as an instructor, when can I work with my team to restructure what we're going to read or how we're going to approach this content. And trying to look at, look at doing it together and not just putting it on the students and their family to do the teaching because that's not a partnership, passing it off to someone else to do, is not a partnership. So I think really thinking about what does partnership look like?

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): There's so much there too, in terms of what you said with, like, the vulnerability of the teacher to be able to say, yep, I was wrong. You're right. Thank you. And creating the space to be able to have that student say that without fear of reprisal from the teacher, you know, teacher, you are wrong. So there's that dynamic there. And then I love that, that returning to partnership, what is truly a partnership is not, “This is on you”. It is collaborative, it is sustainable over time. It is that work in teams. It is the commitment to do better. Like, absolutely. I love that. I feel like that's the theme of the episode is this partnership.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): I'm curious to know about just, you know, the, the overwhelm that, that something like that could and has I think a lot of teachers have said this has felt for them. This is an overwhelming shift because our, our entire education system is steeped in white supremacy and just having to unpack that, dismantle that, recreate and build, and all of that stuff is, is a lot. And so, in terms of a starting point of feeling, like, momentum building, where do you recommend that teachers who are interested in doing this work actually start? What resources would you suggest they check out to kind of get the ball rolling?

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah, I think, I mean an ideal world, and I know we're not in an ideal world, especially right now because I definitely want to name that in the midst of a pandemic, like, that it's completely overwhelming to think about, like, just in general what teaching and learning. Like what it means to create an effective mind community without there being a worldwide pandemic and then we add the pandemic. On top of that, like, my god. Wow, like where to even begin. You know, my, I'm just trying to make sure that my students are actually being able to—whether in a hybrid way or what way—like trying to make sure that I'm able to connect with my students let alone, trying to shift the fundamental way that I'm teaching. I think the main lesson, so ideally what would be great is if teachers had the support of administrators. So I do want to just definitely make a plug for administrators, being able to create those spaces for teachers to be like, yep, I know that things are challenging. I know that things are hard. But what we are going to do is we're going to dedicate a staff meeting per month, or we, I would like for the focus of a content, you know, team meeting or grade level needs to be about like taking a look at a specific unit or specific lesson is coming up in like how what is a shift that you can make to make sure that this content is, you know, is considerate and inclusive. And just really being able to have a dedicated time and space to do that because I think a lot of times, educators whether it be like adopting a new set of standards or new writing curriculum or math curriculum or social stuff like all the different shifts that we make, or you know what new way of assessing students or, there's so many shifts that we make. So we know what that feels like to have something that we need to become you know acclimated to that it is hard. And at the same time, we are so like, we are, we have done these hard things for a long time. And so we are, I think, my thing is that I would really encourage folks to not think of anti racist education as something that is actually the hardest thing among other hard things we've done. I think it is hard in the sense that we have not been practiced in it. So there is some nature of it that is more difficult, especially emotionally because we have to navigate with us. I'm not saying that that part isn't hard, but I think that once we get to that final, that, that foundational awareness and we can do it just like we've done other hard things. So, like, okay, not ideal to have to just hold out a whole new set of standards, but, good. So, but we can do it right. So what does it look like to create structures. And then when I think about resources, one of the resources I love so much is teaching tolerance. And I want to just name this too, because I'm, I know this came up before in a way that surprised me. And I'm like, oh, I probably should have seen this coming but there was actually a time that I was in a conversation with a potential partner and she was like, yeah, I don't really want to do this work with you because you use teaching tolerance resources and I don't want to just be tolerated. I don't think that that's enough. And I was like, oh, unfortunately, that message came to me through someone else. I didn't have a chance to really talk about it with her. And I'm like, actually, teaching tolerance is grappling with their name right, like, when, when they were created when they're the first, the organization first started tolerance was progressive right but now that we're in this time when we like, I think about the two. I don't want to be tolerated. But what they're facing as an organization is like if we change our name, do we lose connection with the people who have come to rely on these resources if we call ourselves something different. So I do want to name that the word tolerance can be off putting. But know that the organization itself is grappling with what does that look like for them for the future? But just having said that, like the fact that they create so many supportive resources, whether it be the social justice standards that you know K through 12 was, really spells out what does it mean to support students around identity diversity, justice and action? And it’s modules like, everything's free right? Like, you can just, like, download all these resources and really take a deep dive into it. So I think even something like that. It's like saying, okay, this grade level team is going to take a dive into identity. This grade level team might take a dive into diversity, like we're all going to like, jump the jigsaw. This and then we're going to find some ways to like, share with us that we're learning so that we can move this forward and I really do appreciate when they are like free high quality resources. I know some things are free and not great but, these are resources that are like, it's like the articles that come out. All the different like all the different curricular pieces that, are they, I think, trying to, like, look into those resources and see, like, what, what can we choose that we're going to use to try to make a shift. And then we work on those things together, we keep doing that. Yeah, we keep doing that work.

​Lindsay Lyons (she/her): That is so interesting. I did not know that teaching tolerance was grappling with their name because I've had that same thought of, interesting choice of name for such a progressive organization that does grapple with these things in the content they put out. Yes, super interesting to know.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah, I just sent you the link. They actually have a link to a letter that was written by one of the directors. Where there's a Google form like a Google form you can fill out. So give your thoughts about the name and anything that you think that you might recommend. So yeah, I can send you, I can send you that link. I think that's really helpful. Yeah.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): Oh, that's awesome. And then I can include it in the post too. I can get in here.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah, that'd be awesome.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): So in terms of this idea of living out our values of justice and equity as as educators, I think so much of so much of this work is, kind of, that balance of introspection, which you've been talking a lot about like looking inside deepening that awareness, I think, is the language you use is awareness and also taking action. I think sometimes there's a rush to action without the awareness that is not helpful, but you know, that idea of awareness plus action or awareness, then action right is really important. Once people end this episode, and they go into their educator lives, what is something that you would recommend that they do, or can do right away in terms of moving from awareness to action?

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): I think one of the main things is it could be something formal. Like, I know the panorama has these resources around like you know, surveying students and finding out like, how they're feeling about, like, equity in the school and how families are feeling about, you know, so there's, there's those free resources as well. But it doesn't even have to be like that formal i don't think. I think they really, just reaching out if educators are not already doing this because I definitely want to like, definitely want to just say that I know that there are educators who are already doing this. Sometimes, though, when folks are newer on their journey about this topic in particular. One of the really important steps that can be taken is to find out like okay well what is it the students, like, how are you experiencing this one and community. It's going to be interesting responses, I think, in the midst, obviously, in the midst of a pandemic. But I think even outside of that, like, not just about the pandemic, but just thinking about, like, what it is that we're learning? What excites you about this? Well, there's some things that you're learning about outside of the classroom that you wish were parts of what we learned about here. Like I know like, you know, I talked about my own children. But they would always come home and tell me all kinds of stuff. And of course, they were like, we don't want you to email the teachers, Mom. It’s like look, I'll do it sometimes and sometimes I won't. Right, sometimes I can't help myself. But I think they will come home and they have so many opinions about how the learning community could be better or who could be different or things can be emphasized or deemphasized, right? So I think that really, a really good first step is just asking the question because I feel like there's a couple of things that are accomplished there. Not only do you get the information that you might not have had otherwise, or sometimes we get, I don't know if you went through it too back when I first became a teacher. I'm just like, yeah, you give the students a getting to know you survey at the beginning of the school year. But then I never did anything with it. I just, like, collected them, put them in a drum, like what, why did I even, right, if I'm not going to use it. But I think, so there's the benefit of actually learning authentic things from students and potentially their families. If you go into the teachers lower educators, going to the families as well, not only do we get the information, but we also send the message that I care what you think. And I care how you’re feeling, and I care how you feel in this space. And do you feel like this is, like, you're part of what we're doing? Or do you feel like you're just the recipients? Right. It's like you just want to, you want me to come and sit in the zoom room or in the classroom, like all those different other things. Do you just want me to sit and quietly listen to you or you want me to collaborate with my classmates when you tell me to collaborate? Or even like, some of the things that I saw was, like, heartbreaking. You may have seen some of these things to when we started going into a remote approach to teaching and learning where there were like these big lists of, like, you may not wear pajamas, you may not eat food, you must have your camera on, you must have a blank wall and back. And you're like, how, how, like is a child supposed to feel. So just like just really taking the steps to ask you this, how they're feeling and what, not only how they're feeling, but what is it that you want to learn that’s missing? And just actually like listening to them and trying to see where like, you're not going to be able to incorporate everything but you can incorporate some right? So I think that's a really great, like, easy next step right. It's not going to take too much, it just takes will. It takes will and time to ask those questions.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): One of the things that sticks out to me is, I was just reading about adaptive leadership and turbulence theory. Which I am from the student voice field of scholarship and so Dana Meter has this pyramid of student voice. And she's like, at the bottom, we have this most frequent thing which is serving with students at the in between. We have this idea of, like, partnership between youth and adults and at the top we have building capacity for student leadership and I always loved that pyramid. But then, after years later, I think she partnered with another scholar to map onto this idea of turbulence theory which I was not familiar with. And basically what they came up with is when you just survey your students, when you leave it, like, as the first, you know, beginning day, here's the survey to get to know my students, and then I don't do anything with it and I don't build capacity and I don't partner with students, it actually increases the turbulence or discomfort, because you're enabling students that have this place where they think they have voice and then they share their ideas and it goes nowhere and then you just have kind of chaos ensue, because you've given them the platform and then not built any capacity for yourself or them to do anything with it versus when you partner or you build capacity for students to take on a regular leadership role like on an ongoing basis. Here's what I want to learn. This is how I want to choose to learn today. You actually decrease the turbulence, because there's this idea of you know I'm constantly knowing ways that I can lead in the class and I know that there's action taken as a result of what I'm saying. So I just connected with what you were saying so much because that's, I think that's exactly what's been happening in classes when it's like, oh, we give them voice, but it's like what type of voice, and in what way? 

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): It was like you didn't really mean it, like you just said. You know what it reminds me of? Like, I know we've heard this term quite a bit, especially since you know the murders of like Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd is, you know, people just like, yeah, I'll put up a black square on Instagram or on my social media. Or I will, I will, you know, put out a Black Lives Matter statement. And we started hearing a lot more about, like, performative ally ship. Right? It's almost like that's, like, performative partnership was just like, I gave you a survey. It's like, yeah, but you didn't really, like, I told you I poured my heart out about how much I love learning about dinosaurs and you never mentioned it to me again, we never learned, like, what was the point of asking right? Yeah.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): Oh my gosh, I'm so sad for that hypothetical child, he loves dinosaurs now. So I know that you have been working. You're always working on things you've been working on so many things and one of the things I know you've been talking about a bit more is about, and you mentioned that in, in the podcast today, but this idea of teaching white students and I just wanted to pause and give you a moment to say anything else that we didn't get to talk about today in this work. And this stuff you've been thinking about in regard to that specific domain of teaching.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah, I think, I mean, for me, I feel like there's so much like possibility and promise there because like I was talking about before, it’s really important for teachers to go through this foundational learning as well. And it's just like yeah, like, when we talk about racialization, or we think about systemic oppression or how that shows up in learning spaces, it's just like yeah you, and I'm not saying, William Ward Garrison didn't have his challenges because there was a lot of paternalism going on with him. I get that. But I'm just like, when we think about, like, the abolitionist movement or we think about like you know, like Sarah and Angelina Grimke or we think about, like, all the different folks like Jane Elliott. There are so many white folks who were just like, yeah, no, this is not okay. Right? And at great risk to themselves as far as like their societal standing or their connection to their families or any of those things. Like in the face, like we're willing to sacrifice that because they believed in something more important, right, that it was more important that they, they really fight to make sure that we are not supporting oppression right? And the different ways that that manifested by the different people who were able to do it to different levels, depending on the times we were in, are going to do a bit differently now than it would have done it in the 1850s. Right? And so, thank God, right? Like we progressed and things like that. But I think that's the piece, too, is like showing white students that it's possible. So really challenge this narrative that they're often given right that, you know, basically, it's not even necessarily. It's not like in some places intentional, but I think a lot of time. So, like, if you're a teacher, and you're just picking a whole bunch of children's books and the children's books happen to have all white kids in it, I don't think a lot of teachers are sitting down and being like, I only want children's books with white kids in it, but the impact is that it shows white kids like okay like basically I'm the one that is to be centered and everyone else is not quite normal. Right? And then we can try to do things to kind of you know, like, try to make folks feel included somewhere. But that's the thing that we do in February, right, like during Black History Month. Oh, we talked about that on, you know, in January on Martin Luther King's birthday or maybe you know, around, now, when we're thinking about, like, oh yeah its indigenous peoples day instead of Columbus Day, like we are right now it's like, okay, what do we really think about Thanksgiving is, you know, like, all that type of stuff. Like, we don't want it to be incidental with white students being able to have a different understanding or an accurate understanding of their place in the world right and so it's not. And I think that's the piece, too. I think some people get afraid when we think about, like, antiracist education. Even just, like, seeing like, the executive order that came out around, like, that it's not okay. Like, it's not even permissible for federal, you know, organizations to even have this PD. And this is like, no, we're not trying to tell white kids like you're horrible or like you’re bad, like, we just want you to be able to see the world as it truly is and should be. And so I think that's the thing that I would say that is so much promise and being able to, you know, to have kids have the opportunity to really see themselves in others in the most beautiful way that they should. That's what I really feel like, that's why I feel excited about that work.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): James Tyson and Bree Newsome is like a great example of modern day, like, what does that look like to decenter yourself and still work for racial justice? And I think, you know, the teachers, especially white teachers, teaching white students, like, that's that's you. Right? You are the person who can be and, like, a person that they know who lives into this idea of whiteness, not as an oppressor but as a co-conspirator. 

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yes, I’m excited about, like you mentioned, James Tyson and Bree Newsome like those are my people, just like even because I didn't realize the extent of the story until I read between the loves book. And once I read the account, I was like, what, oh, yes, yes, this is it. Like these are the stories that we need to be selling. Right? 

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): Yeah, absolutely. And I know there are so many different things that you have mentioned today in terms of resources, what other resources or podcasts or things that you've been listening to or learning through would you recommend for listeners?

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Yeah. So for me, what I've been thinking a lot about, I mean, there's a couple of things with regards, like I mentioned in the beginning about me explain, like, what is Christianity absent white supremacy culture characteristics, that's a big part of what I'm doing and what I'm listening to and reading. So there's a podcast called Reclaiming my Theology for other folks who might be curious about what that looks like as well. But when it comes to, like, thinking about myself as, like, an education leader, I've been really enjoying, like, I enjoyed reading Brene Brown Dare to Lead when it first came out, but then also listening to the podcast, because I feel like being able to you know, like, you read something like, yeah, that was great. But then you could forget a lot, right, if you're not applying it actively. So really I’ve been, like, listening to that podcast but then her Unlocking Us podcast as well. And it's just been really so phenomenal. Even the one that I listened to most recently was when she interviewed Priya Parker, who wrote The Art of Gathering and was talking about, like, what does it mean to gather. What does it mean to engender belonging. And so those are a couple of things that I've been like reading and listening to lately. And one of the things that I downloaded that I haven't read yet but then I'm excited about is Priya Parker like thinking about what it means to gather, particularly during a pandemic, where a lot of our gathering is taking place remotely. Like what is, how is remote gathering different than in, different and the same in a lot of ways, than in person gathering or as in person gathering? So those are some of the things I've been thinking about most recently, and so, like, some of it goes beyond, you know, the education in particular, but as for me, it's like I said, it’s the foundation of who I am as a person and then I bring that into the work that I do with educators. So I think all of that connects for me.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): Awesome, so there's, there's so much that we've talked about and I imagine that listeners are going to want to continue to touch base with you. So just to kind of quickly recap, we've talked about the ideas of partnership, we've talked about that self awareness as being really critical before we take that action, right, awareness, then action. We've talked about the importance of teamwork and administrators, creating the space for the work. We've talked about, kind of that depth of windows and mirrors. We've talked about the importance of white students and redefining whiteness in a way that is anti oppressive and I love that you reference, like, I think I wrote down we can do hard things. Right? Like this is hard work, but we can do hard things. So I think so many listeners are gonna want to continue these amazing conversations with you and continue to follow your work, which I know you're always sharing on social media. So I'm curious where can listeners learn more about you or connect with you online?

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Oh, absolutely. So for folks who are on Twitter, my Twitter handle is AfeniMills so A, F as in Frank, E, N as a Norman, I, and my last name Mills, all one word. You can definitely reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn. You can just look up. If you look at my name, you'll be able to find me there. I've also created for folks who are on Facebook. I have the Afrika Afeni Mills Equity Guardian Facebook page that if you're on and look that up, you should be able to find me. And I do try to keep, like, I'm like, I don't have my own website yet, but that's where I do like, put a lot of my work so that people can find it. Those are the main places I will say that people can connect with me.

Lindsay Lyons (she/her): Thank you so much. I know we're probably over the time that we planned to talk, I just appreciate all that you have shared today, Afrika. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Afrika Afeni Mills (she/her): Well, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.


Thanks for listening, amazing educators. If you loved this episode, you can share it on social media and tag me at Lindsay Beth Lyons, or leave a review of the show so leaders like you will be more likely to find it. To continue the conversation, you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.
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The name of this podcast is Time for Teachership. But what is teachership? Today, we're diving into the scholarship and the practice behind this term.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Lyons and I love helping school communities envision bold possibilities, take brave action to make those dreams a reality and sustain an inclusive anti-racist culture, where all students thrive. I'm a former teacher leader, turned instructional coach, educational consultant and leadership scholar. If you're a leader in the education world, whether you're a principal, superintendent, instructional coach, or a classroom teacher, excited about school-wide change like I was, you are a leader. And if you enjoy nerding out about the latest educational books and podcasts, if you're committed to a lifelong journey of learning and growth, being the best version of yourself, you're going to love the Time for Teachership podcast. Let's dive in.

I'm so excited to talk to you today on this solo show about my dream for teachership. I use the word teachership in the podcast title, and I'd love to just comment a little bit on what that looks like and why it's a dream for me. So here is the dream. I think it would be great if all educational institutions had teachers along with other stakeholders (students, family members) have leadership roles in the school. And then also the leader roles like administrators in the school are deeply connected to what's going on in the classes in terms of class instruction and pedagogy and curriculum. So I get this from Steinbacher-Reed and Rotella who came up with this term “teachership.” This is not a term of my own making. They say, and this is a quote from them. I'll read their description. 

“Teachership weaves exceptional, leading with exceptional teaching. It emerges when administrators engage in classroom based professional learning and exemplary teachers lead from within the classroom by working together to tackle the unique challenges of teaching and leading administrators and teachers can develop a deep level of understanding for other roles. The end result is administrators and teachers who work with one another to improve school culture, teaching practices, and student learning.” 

That's the end of the quote, but I just wanted to share a little bit about what teachership actually means. And I love that it's this idea on the one hand that everyone can be leaders. Teachers are leaders, certainly in this space, all stakeholders can be leaders, but there's also this idea that people in formal positions of leadership, administrators, principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches, superintendents are also intimately connected to what is going on in the classroom. They're part of those coaching conversations. Part of defining what our curriculum and pedagogy should look like and really working closely with educators to help them achieve the dreams that they have for themselves. And they're able to articulate it for themselves. 

Now, in terms of how we actually make this happen. I think it's great to have big dreams, but I always want to go through kind of a step-by-step what does this actually look like in practice so that it can be actionable for us. I pulled again from Steinbacher-Reed and Rotella's research in scholarship, and they talk about “professional sandboxes.” So they refer to professional sandboxes as these learning opportunities for teachers and administrators to develop this practice of teachership, here's a quote from them on these ideas of professional sandboxes and what they look like in practice. 
They say, “Sandboxes are designed along a continuum of intensity, focusing on improving culture practice and learning. Professional sandboxes are a shift from traditional professional development activities towards intentional and systemic professional learning. No two professional sandboxes are the same yet. They all share the following key characteristics: [they’re] Intentional, Contextual, Sustainable, and Evidence-Based.” 

So this idea of sandboxes that Steinbacher-Reed talks about here—this is a quote from her work actually in, in 2016—she talks about this idea of professional sandboxes to really say, we're not talking about a regular PD workshop here. A one-time I attended it, check the box kind of thing, where the binder of paper kind of lives in your desk or closet for years. And it doesn't really get translated into practice. That's not the kind of professional learning we're talking about. It's more intentional, she says, and also systemic. So when we think about those key characteristics, that it's intentional, that it's sustainable, which I think connects to that systemic piece, that it is contextual. So every person, every educator is going to need something different and unique. That is context dependent. It might be the grade that they teach or the content area that they teach, or just, you know, what is interesting to them or where they need to grow.

Everyone has different areas for growth. So that context is also really important there. The idea is that it should be evidence-based. It should be based on what we know from the research works for our kids. It shouldn't be this full-on innovation with no research backing, but it's kind of a blend of creativity, innovation, thinking outside the box and what works for each individual learner. We talk about personalized PD on the podcast, you know, what does that look like? But also how does that balance with what we know from the research base? What we know is rooted in educational evidence as we move into this episode, and we think about this context of teachership and professional sandboxes as a way to develop teachership and our school communities. Let's first dive into this idea of teachers as leaders in the field. Teachers, I think, have great potential to lead as they say “from their classroom.”

So this idea of teachers leading professional development in their own schools, I have had a lot of success as a teacher leader in that position where I was invited to lead numerous PDs at my own high school that I was teaching at. And I've also seen teachers present to me and, and received PD from other teachers, both in my school and outside of my school. That was some of the most powerful PD that I had ever experienced because it was specific to what I needed because I was often asked to sign up for it or let people know what I was interested in. And then I was connected with a person who could help me with that particular goal of mine. Often, this person was in a similar context, teaching a similar grade level, or just had similar ideas about pedagogy and what that could look like in the classroom.

These were incredibly helpful things for me in my experience. And I'd love to see them really flourish in other school communities. So inviting teachers to lead PD and encouraging teachers to attend PD led by other teachers. Another piece here where teacher-led PD really flourished both in, in my experience of delivering PD and facilitating it as well as my ability to, as I said, connect with teachers that were doing things that I wanted to do were conferences. So these conferences could be kind of those large paid-for conferences that we might think about when conferences first come to mind. But for me, I was luckily teaching at a high school that was part of a network, two different networks, actually that had really unique characteristics. One was focused on project-based learning and less standardized testing. And then another was specific to the population of students that we were teaching in our schools, but both of them led very specific context-based, very relevant, conferences that were inevitably, always led by teachers in the field from these other schools.

So conferences are a great way to highlight teacher successes to build up that kind of formalized sense of teacher leadership in the sense that you're sharing and facilitating and being really a thought partner with other teachers in the field, connecting with teachers and leaders in other spaces across school districts, states, countries, and a great way to, to hear other people's strategies and share your own. Also, engaging in PLCs (Professional Learning Communities). These could be formal in the sense that, you know, grade teams and department teams are often spaces where teachers can connect with one another and really be part of a weekly or monthly kind of regular ongoing conversation that's set up by the school. But it could also be that you find three colleagues at your school, or even, you know, three colleagues that are not part of your school community, but just people that, you know, maybe you went to school with them.

They're now teaching in different schools and you engage in ongoing meetings with them to talk about whatever it is you're interested in talking about. And it could be that you meet up with these folks from different schools to focus on a topic of interest. Maybe you're all interested in a particular tech tool or a particular book that you want to read and have kind of a book club about whatever it is engaging in that work together can be very powerful work. Another option is inviting teachers into your class to visit. Now this can work in a physical setting, but it could also work to pop into someone's Zoom classroom if you're remote or in kind of a hybrid situation, but inviting someone into your class and letting folks know you are interested in being a teacher leader in modeling something that they might be interested in trying, and also demonstrating that component of leadership that is so important of learning as leading and leading is learning.

So being able to go into someone else's space to learn from them and really modeling what that looks like for other teachers is a great form of teacher leadership. I would also add here that teachers are part of the school governance structure, which I talk a lot about, but this idea of shared leadership in a formal sense—Are teachers part of the decision-making process for the school? So we know from the research that organizations that embrace shared leadership structures in this formalized kind of decision-making, they see the better results for the school for organizations more broadly when we have diverse representation in the decision-making table. And also we know that people who feel supported in this sense, so teachers who are supported to be teacher leaders, they're more likely to work towards collective goals. So that idea of teacher buy-in around particular initiatives comes a lot easier when we invite and include teachers as part of how leadership functions at the school.

Now let's look at the flip side of this. So the other piece of this is administrators being aware of and being connected to what is happening in classes. I mentioned this, some of these ideas briefly at the start of the episode, but when we think about the ways that administrators can coach teachers, they can take a formalized coaching role, or it can be something a little bit less regular or less formalized, but this idea of consistently providing feedback. So when you receive feedback from a formal administrator, be it your principal, assistant principal, instructional coach, I'm probably talking more about the first two in this regard, but this idea that you don't get feedback until you get your year-end review or your formal observation, is just not helpful in terms of creating a culture of coaching and thriving and growth in the school.

If an administrator is only in your classroom to do that formal observation. And that's the only time that you're having conversations about what's happening in class, how you teach, what you teach, what your kiddos are learning that really disrupts this sense of constant growth and thought partnership around instruction and pedagogy from an administrator lens. And so this is a—I know administrators are super busy, but I think this is a really powerful shift around where the priorities lie particularly in a year that’s really been disrupted. I'm recording this in 2020, and things are still incredibly uncertain and teachers have been having a tough time adapting. So I want to be very clear that I'm not saying administrators should go in and start giving critical feedback all the time and go in uninvited to classrooms. What I'm suggesting is that we have this ongoing conversation around: How's it going?

What are we trying in your class this week? Well, what didn't go well, last week, let's actually talk about that. Not from a punitive punishment kind of perspective, like you're a bad teacher, but what are we identifying as trends? How can I support you? What can I connect you with? What resource or strategy might we be able to try and then be able to touch base again to say, did it work? And if it didn't, I'm going to help you find something else. I'm gonna help you track that progress over time. And when I see that it has worked, when I see that you've successfully solved this really challenging problem, I want you to share your wisdom and your experience with the other teachers in the school. And I want you to take on that leadership role. So again, being connected to the classroom enables administrators to select key teachers who have really found powerful strategies and solutions to ongoing problems that most likely many teachers are facing. Not just that one teacher who had it. 

So that idea of creating that culture of coaching, providing feedback, I think also helping to analyze data that informs teacher practice can be really powerful. A lot of times when we think about—as teachers being asked to make sure we're analyzing the data, make sure we're making data-based decisions, that is sometimes difficult when we're not taught explicitly how to analyze data or what sources of data or what types of, of data are actually supposed to be used on a regular basis. It also can feel sometimes a little disconnecting when teachers are analyzing particular data. But again, if the administrators are disconnected from knowing what's going in everyday classes and recognizing the data that teachers are exploring in their grade team meetings or their PLCs, that sense of support, that's absolutely helpful for teachers, from administrators is maybe missing there if there's that disconnect.

So I think analyzing and looking at data together can be really, really powerful in addition to developing a culture of coaching and learning. I think leaders can also organize the school behind a clear, shared vision while also personalizing support for individual teachers. And so what I mean by this is leaders in research on leadership really need a clear vision if they don't have clear vision of usually one to two kind of key ideas or key goals or overarching goals per year, there's a big chance that that school year or that organization as a whole is not going to be as successful as a leader with a clear vision. So clear vision is critical, but also within that clear overarching vision, we want to personalize the support because teachers are going to need different things. They're going to be interested in different things. They're going to have different students in their classes and teach different grades and content areas.

Again, that balance of personalization with that clear shared vision. For example, the last school that I was a teacher at, our principal would share with us two big ideas or two big kind of school-wide goals for each. For example, one year we got an iPad grant. So, we got devices for each student and that was a really critical shift that we needed to make in order to best serve our students. We needed to be able to use that technology. And so one overarching goal for that year was thoughtful technology integration. And so that was kind of this broad overarching goal for us as an organization, as a school, but each individual teacher is going to support that goal in unique ways. So I was doing documentaries in my classroom, through iMovie, and that was thrilling and exciting for me and for my students.

Another teacher might've said that is absolutely nuts. I'm not touching documentaries, but I am using an iPad app like Explain Everything, for example, as a whiteboard for my math class. And we're going to have students really practice these, solving these equations and demonstrating their learning, with a voiceover. And then we're going to have them submit this to a bank of resources where when we're studying for tests, I can highlight as the teacher, some really amazing key ideas that students shared and be able to share those as resources for students to kind of study with their peers, as opposed to just listen to me or review their notes that I gave them. So there's some really unique ways that we as individual teachers can support a shared goal, but that shared really organizes us and focuses us. So that as an administrator, my principal could say, we're going to make sure that X number of PD days for the rest of the year, we would have weekly PD, are going to be around this topic of tech integration.

But as teachers, I will invite you, or you can invite yourselves to lead these PD workshops based on whatever it is you're actually doing in your class. You can show us the end product. You can help us work backwards, teach us the steps to get there. But we are personalizing while also moving towards this clear shared vision. Another thing I'll add about kind of administrators being connected to the instruction is that connection piece of being able to connect the teachers with the resources that they need when they need them. So that there's this consistent learning and growing process. And of course, as they said, I think administrators model this with their own learning and their own growth and, and be really transparent about what they're working on, but in order to do that, well, principals and instructional coaches, folx who are in positions of formal authority in schools are going to need to have that linkage to a variety of resources in a variety of types, right?

We don't just want blog posts if some teachers are not going to benefit from reading blog posts. We don't just want podcasts if that's only what some of the teachers are interested in in learning like, you know, I think having this broad sense of: Do we have self-paced courses? Do we have something interactive? Do we continue to have those two hour workshops once a week for teachers to kind of show up as like a staff meeting, whether it's in-person or virtual, and just make sure that we have not only a variety of types, but also a variety of resources that span different topical areas, different content, in grade resources and part of being an administrator and an instructional coach. And I use those words kind of interchangeably because I think that's another piece of teachership right, is this idea that principals are still instructional coaches, even though their title doesn't say instructional coach anymore, right.

That connection to the classroom and the instruction that's happening there, makes them inevitably an instructional coach. I will also say that the idea of teachers as leaders also makes teachers instructional coaches to their peers as well, right? Thought partners, people who are modeling as a coach might just this idea of everyone kind of taking on this instructional coaching role in this realm of teachership and making sure that if you don't have a resource, or you're not sure where to go, that you at least have identified a couple of key sources of folks that you can ask now, as they think about our next step. So after we finished this episode, you know, how do we go implement this idea of teachership? How do we live out the value of teachership in our school systems? I invite you to identify one way to systematize professional growth in your school.

And so if you're a teacher, this might look like inviting other teachers to visit your class, to see something you've had success with, or to set up a success share meeting with your grade team or your department or whatever your PLC is. But to say, we're using this particular time, this one hour of time to be able to discuss a problem of practice or whatever phrase you use, or just share, it doesn't even need to be based on a problem of practice, but just share. This is something I've had great success with, my students have responded to incredibly well, especially during a pandemic, perhaps, and we're just going to go around and share. Each teacher has five minutes, you know, share a tech tool or a strategy or an approach or a mindset, whatever it is that has worked really well for you. And I find those meetings to be really exciting and energizing because we're not always focused on the problems.

This conversation might have stemmed from a problem with practice we identified and we wanted to fix. And so we tried some things and some things worked, but it's really celebratory. And it's saying, you know what? A lot of things are tough this year, but here's the good stuff that's happening. I often come out of meetings like this really energized and ready to plan my next lesson or unit because that energy level is really contagious. It's what prevents burnout, right? It's what keeps me going. At least for me as an individual. Now, teachers, again, you might want to invite folks to visit your class, perhaps without that follow-up success share meeting as well. So even extending that opportunity, if someone in passing says, “Oh, I haven't used that tech tool,” or “I haven't used that strategy. I'm curious how you do that.” You know, it could be something as simple as an exchange like that, where you just welcome them in and say, “Oh, well, here's when I'm teaching.”

I don't think you have a class at that time. If that's your prep time, come on over. You know, here's my Zoom link. If you're online, whatever that looks like, and it could be that informal, it doesn't need to be an email to the whole staff to say, you know, I invite you formally into my class to invite teachers in set up a success share meeting with your PLC or some, some fellow teachers, administrators, what you could do to help systematize professional learning might be getting each teacher, a coach that could be you, maybe you offer to meet with each teacher depending on the size of your school, or you identify leaders in the school, assistant principals, you know, other people with leadership roles that are similar to instructional coaching to act as instructional coaches, perhaps that's just once a month, once a quarter, but just making sure that everyone has someone that they can go to, to ask questions with that they can use as a thought partner, or it could even be other teachers, right, who are interested in taking that slightly more formal position of leadership that want to be a peer coach that wants to have those energizing conversations with peers.

But kind of set up, you know, everyone that is a teacher currently in your school with some sort of thought partner or “coach,” even if that's not their formal role. And now another option for administrators could be to use PD time. What might typically happen as a whole staff meeting that lasts an hour or two, and let teachers use that to share their successes. So I talked about this in the teacher example, but if you just have each teacher—and you could do this in a whole staff setting where teachers sit at tables, if you're in person or in a breakout room setting on zoom, that they are in small groups, maybe around themes, maybe around grades, maybe around departments or content that they teach and they just share, you know what it is that they are excited to share. You could also do this on a rotating basis.

So let's say you have a school where there's 30 teachers in the school. If you wanted five teachers to share each week, over the course of the year, you could say every other month, each teacher is going to present just something. And then you have one week, every, you know, eight weeks that is a success your week and teachers sign up and they can just identify ahead of time what their success share is going to be. And people can sign up for that particular topic, or if it's in a Zoom room, or if it's in a physical room in the school, they can attend again, whatever is interesting to them because we want to have that shared vision we're working towards, but we also want to make sure the teachers have options. So they attend the PD that is most helpful for them.

I am going to link to a couple different things at the bottom of this episode in the show notes. One is a newsletter from the 2016 International Literacy Association conference. This is where Steinbacher-Reed and Rotella, share a lot of their information about teachership and professional sandboxes. And I also want to share with you a free resource that I've created to help you get started with this idea of systematizing professional development. And this is my Peer Visitation Starter Kit. So if you're interested in creating a culture of visiting other teachers and signing up for those visits and having a more systematized way of letting other teachers know you're interested in hosting and what topic you're interested in hosting on, this is a great, kind of a two pager, one being a note taker of like what people can kind of jot notes on if you want it to systematize that when they're actually in the visit. And then another page that really just helps structure the signup portion, where it can connect folks who are hosting with folks who are visiting and what topics and what times and all that. 

So I will link to those in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening to another solo show from the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm super excited to hear all of the great things that you are doing in your classroom to highlight teachership to foster professional learning. And I'm so excited and grateful to you for continuing to be amazing educators in this trying year. I know you are awesome, and I can't wait to hear all the innovative things that come out of this year. 
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Thanks for listening, amazing educators. If you loved this episode, you can share it on social media and tag me at Lindsay Beth Lyons, or leave a review of the show. So leaders like you will be more likely to find it. To continue the conversation you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best.

In today's episode, I'm talking to Annalisa Holcombe, the founder of Connection Collaborative. Annalisa is dedicated to providing safe and brave spaces for human beings to connect and discover who they are and what they want out of life. She founded the coaching and mentoring center at Westminster College, establishing and scaling a suite of programs aimed at providing every student with access to a mentor. These programs significantly increased student retention among participating students thanks to effective student-alumni, mentoring relationships, and monthly group coaching sessions. She has completed her coach training through the Coach Training Institute, and she is currently training for an International Coaching Federation certificate. She holds a law degree. She holds a degree in business management, and she's currently pursuing her PhD in leadership and change. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation with Annalisa Holcombe.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Lyons and I love helping school communities envision bold possibilities, take brave action to make those dreams a reality and sustain an inclusive anti-racist culture where all students thrive. I'm a former teacher leader, turned instructional coach, educational consultant and leadership scholar. If you're a leader in the education world, whether you're a principal, superintendent, instructional coach, or a classroom teacher, excited about school-wide change  like I was, you are a leader. And if you enjoy nerding out about the latest educational books and podcasts, if you're committed to a lifelong journey of learning and growth, being the best version of yourself, you're going to love the Time for Teachership podcast. Let's dive in.

Lindsay Lyons
Welcome Annalisa Holcombe to the podcast. I am so excited that you are here to talk with us today. I am a huge fan of your podcast, 92,000 hours, which I highly recommend that everyone listening goes and listens to. It is like the best part of my day when I listen to it. And normally at this point, at the beginning of this podcast, I would ask you to introduce yourself, however you would like, but I am so incredibly fascinated by how you ask people on your podcast to introduce themselves. If you could talk to our listeners a little bit about that question that you typically ask them, and then answer yourself to introduce yourself here. I would love that.

Annalisa Holcombe
Oh, that's so exciting and scary because I get to ask that question rather than answer it for myself. And so the big question that I ask people that really does go to how I think of us as you know, I want to know, I want, I don't want to know what you do. I want to know who you are. And so I asked the question that sets it up in a, in a it's kind of a negative space, but I don't mean it to be that way. So I set it up with, if you remove all of the things in our lives that we usually list when we're saying this is who I am. So you take away school, all of your education, your work, not your job title or what you do, sports or volunteerism, or any of those types of things that we usually list.

You can't count what I say. So not counting any of those things. What is your greatest accomplishment or what are you most proud of as yourself as a human being? And so thinking about that question, I am particularly proud of the both safe and brave space that I was able to create for a period of 15 years in a college setting, in which we brought students from all different majors and different areas. They were all of course at the same institution, but we brought students who wouldn't normally know each other, put them all in a room and said, we're going to talk about hard things like, fear, real fear, your existential stuff that you're not comfortable talking about to other people. Or priorities, what do you actually prioritize? And are you living it, and how do you self-reflect on that? Or, empathy or vulnerability and courage.

And how do we make sure we know that the fact that courage that we highlight all the time, the antecedent to courage is vulnerability? And we have to actually understand that we are vulnerable humans. And let's think about what those vulnerabilities are so that we can act with courage when, when we feel that vulnerability. And so having had the experience of 15 years of those types of conversations is—I'm really proud of it—but I'm also very selfishly sad that those particular times are over because it created these really fulfilling, purposeful, meaningful moments for me, that created my deep belief in humanity and in people who are different, being able to talk to each other. And if I could just say, like, there were some moments that watching peers educate each other about their own humanity was some of the best, like the, the most joyful, best moments of my life.

And they came in difficult times. So for example, there was a time in which we met monthly and we are halfway through a year and I was in a group. Usually the groups had about 12 students in them. And one student, they were really like talking honestly and openly with each other one student who was, you know, a business finance major who played sports at the university, spoke to a mathematics/performance art major who was, very outwardly gay. And this, this one guy asked his peer. He said, you know, I am so sad that I've never been friends with a person who is gay and I don't know how to do it. And I feel really awkward. Can you educate me on how to do it? Like, what do I do? How do I do this? I want to know you better.

And I want to be a friend, but I don't even know how so I avoid it. And then they had this conversation. The one guy was like, first of all, don't think we all want to be with you. That's answer number one second. We're still human. So don't think of me as different from you. And so like having them have that honest conversation with each other that was scary and vulnerable and brave, changed how they're now going out in the world and talking to each other, but it takes a long time to create those spaces. And so I'm really proud. That's a long answer, but I'm really proud of having been a part—with a bunch of other people who facilitated with me—to create those spaces for people to have those conversations. That I think are, I think they come back to you years later, maybe even decades later where the learning is still real.

Lindsay Lyons
Oh my gosh. I love that answer because I think it speaks to all of the people in education who  are listening to this podcast and thinking about creating those spaces. One of the first questions that I usually follow this up with is what is kind of your big dream for educators or for education generally. And I don't know if at all your answer is connected to that, but I, I almost see connections to that just in my own thinking of being able to create those spaces for people and have that space for education, that's going to hold everything kind of that holding environment to be able to have those tough conversations and real conversations.

Annalisa Holcombe
I think that's right. But I also, I mean, those types of tough and real conversations, I don't think our systems are built for, right. They weren't at my, at the, at the higher ed institution that I was at. It wasn't built for it. We created this out of whole cloth and then, did it ourselves with volunteers like and I then went out to people and said, by the way, I want you to know that these students are showing up at 8:30 on a Saturday morning for four hours, and I'm not giving them college credit, and I'm not paying them they're coming because they are getting something intrinsically that we need as human beings that they are finding valuable. And, and they show up at the beginning, not knowing what they're in for just knowing that there's some kind of mystery about it, because over time that that program ended up having like this, this, you know, this kind of, you know, the Vegas thing, right?

Like, I can't tell you what happens there, but it's really kind of cool and you should probably go. And so students had this, it was this mystery about, Oh, I want to be part of that program. What they got out of, it was just, it was only what they put into it. But I do think that what I really want for educators that they don't have is the ability to do—which I didn't have either. I had to create that at a separate time on a Saturday morning, not during course time, not with giving them college credit, because it didn't fit the structure that the system wanted me to fit. And it was a scary piece of learning that was about learning about ourselves and how we connect to each other as humans. Rather than, you know, a specific thing that we say that we can do, I wasn't even in the student life office, which, however, later I brought in people from student life, our Dean of students ended up doing it as well.

But what I wish people were able to do is because I think teachers clearly have a calling, right? I mean, if you are, if you are doing this work, you care deeply about the learning and about the people that you are engaging with every day. And to be able to provide those teachers with the freedom, to truly educate, to truly teach to the student in front of them and to make sure that person is learning, rather than having to respond to the system that is requiring them to do certain things that may not even be the, the learning that, that the students right in front of them are asking for. That's the, my dream would be that we could do that, that we could actually provide that, that learning that I know inherently, the teachers were called to do and have specific understanding of the needs of the people right in front of them, that we may not be allowing them as a society to connect appropriately and to give our students and our children, and like all of us as humans, what we need to fulfill our own purpose. That's a long answer.

Lindsay Lyons
I love that answer though, because I think it speaks to my experience personally, as a teacher, I was never actually a teaching major. And then I did a program kind of like Teach for America. It was called New York City Teaching Fellows. And immediately after I graduated with degrees in Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies that I was like, okay, this is going to be great because I'm going to teach for that purpose. I'm going to teach for those conversations and that real learning that kids are going to be running to my class. And then two years later, looking back on those first two years of my teaching, it was, I'm going to teach this test. I'm going to remove all emotion and joy from the classroom, because I have to teach this test. And it took a couple of years to actually hit that moment where I was just like, this is not what I signed up for and find my way back to it. So that's super interesting that you say that.

Annalisa Holcombe
I think that that also can happen to us in all of our lives. It's one of the reasons that I talk so much about mentorship, which, and the reason I talk about that so much is because I find that when, so I've, you know, I've run a mentoring program for so long that I automatically can tell the good mentors. And they are the people who asked me if they're good mentors, right? Like, it's that simple? It's the, it's the person who says that they care so deeply about making sure that their mentee is getting the, what they need, that they come to me as the, as the organizer of the, environment and say, I hope I'm doing a good enough job. I'm really, I really want them to get something. And I think then I don't have to worry about you because it's those people who are striving, who are the people who continue to strive in all of the different areas of their lives.

Like those are the people who do, who, you know, you can count on, and it's not necessarily the people who are at the top of their game and have the, have the best title or making the most money or drive the best car. It's the people who you meet, who are curious and striving, who are the best mentors. And I think that those, that, that opportunity for mentorship is another way that we can also, however, find joy, be brought back to the joy that you said that, you know, for two years it was gone, but when you have to be a mentor and talk to somebody who's coming into whatever it was that you were, you know, in some ways called to do it can remind you of what your why. And it can remind you of the joy that you found originally in doing the work. Because sometimes we just all get into the, you know, the spinning wheel of our lives and forget that actually, I really love this. Let me stop for a minute. And remember that I actually really love what I'm doing. And so I think mentorship can help us remember why we are doing what we do.

Lindsay Lyons
Let's maybe dive in a little bit more to that because you have so much experience with mentorship. And I know you're passionate about people having mentors and being mentors. Could you talk a little bit more about if a teacher or a school principal is listening to this right now, thinking that sounds great. How do I set that up? We don't currently have anything, either a mentoring program for their student or for themselves as adults. How did you get that started? Or what would you suggest for them to have those conversations?

Annalisa Holcombe
I think we have to, so I have to tell you that the very first time I tried to set up a mentoring program, it fell flat. It was a failure. In fact, I even had this like, you know, get together at the end. It was a pilot program for a summer. And at the end we were going to have a little party and we'll, I mean, I even had wine at my party. I was like, we're going to have wine, we'll have a little party and talk about how we did. And only one other person showed up. I was like, wow, that did not go well. And what was great about that, however, is that we did have to create some, some structure to it. And what I have learned, I have to tell you the most important thing that I've learned over time with regard to mentoring programs is that we have to be, we as human beings get so busy that we set up our lives.

And, and we're so nice to each other, like in many ways, kind of fake, nice to each other that we, that we say, Oh, it's okay. I know, I know you're busy. And so when we, later, when I set up the mentoring program, I particularly told all of the students and all of the mentors don't do this. If you can't commit, I'm going to give you the exact requirements of what we want from you, how long it will be, what here's, what we want you to do. And it's not like, you know, do this many things, but it is this much time commitment, et cetera, here are the days. And particularly for the students, here are the days. And I have to tell you a kind of a story that might be interesting is that we set it up with the students at the beginning, where they come up with what their own, you know, rules, ground rules are, or however you want to phrase that, which I'm sure teachers do in their classrooms.

You know, that's like, and you have the, the individuals who are participating, create what those are and provide the opportunity for feedback. And everybody has to agree that those are the, those are the rules. But then somebody has to actually enforce them. And I know that probably teachers are better at this than most people. Because once you get into the workplace, we're terrible at it. We tell each other that's okay, no big deal. I understand. But we, in our mentoring program, we would literally tell the students, so here's the deal. You signed up for this. And without judgment, if you cannot do it, then you cannot do it. And you're going to be asked to leave because you can't, you can't opt in and out. You have to either be in or out. And, and it's, it's okay, because we all have to, you know, make our choices and have our priorities.

And so we won't judge you if you leave. And I think that's part of why we say we'll do stuff when we really can't do it, because we feel like we're being judged. But the truth is if we take away the judgment, allow people to really truly say their truth about whether they can do something or whether they want to even do it and let them be there without judgment. Then you can have those conversations. And, and honestly, every single year we ended up, you know, voting someone out who couldn't be there and it could be for all sorts of reasons, but the truth is we'd have, we'd have the people in the program talk honestly and openly truly about when we say it's okay, that somebody isn't here, is it actually, okay, you were here. This person, you know, rescheduled their jobs so that they could be here.

This person, you know, didn't go to their great grandma's funeral or something like people would make sacrifices to be there. Let's honor those and make sure that we are doing that hard work. I think in society, we say it's okay when we don't mean it, because we're afraid of conflict and having those difficult conversations. But that's what we learned with our mentoring program. And every time when I didn't run one of those programs and I had other facilitators, and they'd say, we have a bunch of students who seem to be dropping out. And I would say, how often are you reinforcing that this is important and that you committed to this, and it's not okay if you make a commitment and then you don't show up for it. So, but it is okay to say, I don't, I no longer have time for this commitment, but let's just be honest about who we are and where we are in our lives.

So I would say if I was a teacher, that's a long way of speaking. If I was a teacher or a principal, and I wanted to create a mentoring program, several things, one create the structure and the system of what the expectations are, and then stick to them. If you don't stick to them, it'll fall apart. And to look to the people who are automatically mentoring anyway, because there are people who are—every single school knows the teachers who are always the teachers that everybody goes to. Every single university knows the professors who every student goes to for advising. Those are the people that we are putting so much extra work on, in an unfair way, because it's real work. And it is incredibly emotional labor that we're putting on people who are automatically good at it, but we're not compensating them for it. We're acting as if, because you're good at this, you must love it. Not understanding that the reason they're good at it is probably because they are, they have one, the ability to do it well, which comes from the ability to truly listen, which means they can actually empathize with the people in front of them. And that is hard work that takes time for recovery. And we don't give people that. So that's what I tell a principal, give people that.

Lindsay Lyons
The structure piece I'm using is very similarly structured and linear. And so I think that makes a lot of sense. I love that there's a voice in that too, of the participants. So it's not something that you're just mandating, top-down, it sounds like that's something that's generated bottom up, which I think just leads to a lot more buy-in and commitment. Right. And like, I'm going to come back because this is where I want to be. And I think ultimately, as you were talking about earlier, right? I think this is where we want education to be in a place like I'm coming, because this is really helpful for me. I am deriving joy from it. I'm feeling good, mentoring others, I'm feeling good, being mentored. And I think for students and adults, that's like, that's what we want to connect with. Where is that joy coming from? And how do we create spaces where people, it sounds like you're saying, like they can really opt into it. Like it's a voluntary thing. It's not like everyone has to do it.

Annalisa Holcombe
I think that, required mentoring programs can be very, they can be actually detrimental for people because, and for both the, the person who is being mentored and for the mentor, because people are, if you, if you're required to be there, that doesn't mean that you bought in. It doesn't mean that you're ready to be part of it. And I think that over time, just like the program that I started, it became something that ended up, you know, we had to set up more, more courses, even though they weren't real courses with lots of people in it, because it became popular and more people wanted to opt in because the, you know, the results were appropriate, but at the beginning it was who wants to do this? And then we kept it that way because you want to serve the people who are ready for it and not tell people they have to have it and have them become jaded about what mentoring actually means. And I think also, I have to say during that process, one of the groups that I had the most difficult time recruiting to have to be in the mentoring program, where student teachers,

Lindsay Lyons
Wow. That's surprising to me actually,

Annalisa Holcombe
Well, in some ways it isn't right, because all of the business students were on it. Give me a mentor. I want that. And how can I put that on my LinkedIn page? The teachers were not interested in their LinkedIn pages in any sense of the word, but what, what they would tell me is I'm a, I'm a student teacher. So it means I already have a mentor. And so I would say to people—here's something that I think is a takeaway for all of us, which is to get yourself a mentor. Or, as one of my friends described to me, in fact, get your own personal board of directors, right? If you are a leader of a corporation, you're going to have several people, whom\ you have asked to be on your board because they have different areas of expertise.

One mentor cannot be the, be all and end all for you. They don't know everything, but if you get somebody that you can go to for interpersonal relationship advice, or somebody else that you can go to for, how am I going to get to the next phase of my career? Because you've been there before, or somebody else who you can just go to for educational opportunities, what school should I go to? Why did you choose that one? Like if you could, if you could get a handful of people who you can ask honest questions, and they're not either your boss or could be your boss so that you can really be vulnerable with them. I think that's a, I think that's a really good way for us to build our own independent mentoring programs that we do for ourselves is by finding our own personal board of directors. And I think that there are people out there in the world who would feel honored if you ask them to be, would you be willing to be on my own personal board of directors?

Lindsay Lyons
I love that idea of the board of directors thinking from even just a student lens, you know, I could pinpoint some different teachers that I gravitated to as a student myself, but certainly like the ones that I look back and say that that was my favorite teacher or one of my favorite teachers. They have not taught me the things that I now really value and totally learned from someone who was not a teacher or was a teacher much later. And so I think it speaks to that, like people are contributing in these various ways and, and that you don't have to put so much pressure on each individual teacher to be everything for every student. Maybe part of our work is helping students to find those people for themselves, perhaps by modeling how we do it in our own lives. Right?

Annalisa Holcombe
I think that's absolutely right. The best way that we can, that we can teach is to model, right? To say, this is what I've learned. This is how I'm using this. This is what's good. And this is what's bad. And this is how I am iterating as I go, because everything needs iteration. And it's going to be okay if you fail with your first mentor, right? Like it's, it's going to be okay, because there are other people out there that have something to offer you.

Lindsay Lyons
Yeah. And in the spirit of that, I hate to put you on the spot here, but would you mind modeling for us a little bit about your own? Do you have your own board of directors? And could you talk a little bit about what that looks like, like the process of finding them, but also kind of what they provide for you?

Annalisa Holcombe
I have a different board of directors for different purposes. Here's an example: one person who's on my board of directors, I don't talk to all the time. It is, but you know what, he, he actually, I actually ended up having him speak at my wedding about what friendship really looks like. Because friendship is important in relationships, right? But this person, he models for me how to prioritize. And the reason I picked him on my board of directors is because I struggle with my ability to say no. And I know that about myself. I go, wow, that looks cool. I want to do it. Oh, that looks cool. I want to do it. And then I have way too many things on my plate. I worked with volunteers in my old work and, and he was a person that I wanted to volunteer because he's a leader.

Annalisa Holcombe
And I spoke with him and asked him if he would be willing to volunteer. And he said, not this year, but you can talk to me next year because I only have time for three things in my life. And here's the order of their importance. First, my family, they come first always, and I need to dedicate time to them second, my career. And that's really important to me. And third, one way that I volunteer and I've already committed to one act of volunteerism this year. So come to me next year. And it was just so clear the way he said that to me, that I had no reason to tell him, “Oh, come on,” which I would do with people otherwise. When he was so clear with here are my priorities and I'm sticking to them and I expect you to honor them as well.

I go to him now as my, he helps me with my prioritization because it's a struggle for me and he has real clarity about it. So, I picked him because I found someone that I think I'm going to be like in this area. I don't want to be like him in other areas. In fact, he would know I would tease him that he prioritizes money far more than I do. And I think it's hilarious. But I do want to learn from him with regard to priorities, other people for different reasons. And I think the first aspect of me finding my own personal board of directors first comes with self-reflection on who I am and what is it that I need, because I should not pick someone just because they have a cool title. I shouldn't pick someone just because they look, you know, something about their lives is attractive to me, I would need to understand really what it is that I need and who it is, who I am and where I'm trying to go to see how they might be able to fit into what I need. So, the act of self-reflection first is really important.

Lindsay Lyons
I love that. And thank you for sharing that personal story. I think what's interesting about that particular example is I think it speaks to a lot of people generally, but teachers that I work with specifically about that idea, right? Like saying, no, it is so difficult. Cause you're just like, yep, sure. I'm serving, I'm serving, right? I'm doing all this stuff for the kids. I can't say no to that. And then it just leads to teacher burnout, which looking at the statistics, it's unlikely for someone who jumps into teaching five years later to still be teaching, which is nuts, you know, with no support system, no PD for how to say no and how to prioritize. Of course, that's going to be really difficult. So I know you talk on your podcast a lot about work-life integration and I'm not sure that I have a full handle on what exactly work-life integration is, but I would love for you to talk a little bit if you'd like, just about what that is and what it means to you and, and how that connects really, to not feeling burnt out and feeling excited about it.

Annalisa Holcombe
I think it has to do with a lot of the things I talk about. So it's of, for me, work-life integration in some ways, it's my reaction to people telling me that I needed to have a work-life balance. Right? People would tell me, you need to have a work-life balance. And then I think I work so much. Why is that something different than my life, right? Like how, why are you separating my work from my life? Because, we all know, and that's why I call my podcast. 92,000 hours is that out of everything we do in our life, the only thing we do more than work is sleep. And it is, we have less screen time, by far spending less time with our family and our loved ones than we do at work. So let's tell the truth about the fact that our work is in fact, our life.

So how, like how do we make sure that we integrate it in a way that honors its place in our life and honors that it is part of who we are. It isn't everything we are. We shouldn't, that's why I don't, you know, I don't start my podcast with, what do you do? I start it with who are you? And what really matters to you? Because in fact, I want to bring that piece of me. And I think that's why we talk about it differently. I want to bring that piece of me, that part of what matters to me and who I am as a human being. I want to bring that to my work. I don't want my work and particularly my role as a leader to be, some performative idea of what a leader is supposed to be. I want to be me and know that I'm also a leader and I don't have to look or act or say or speak the way that somebody tells me a leader is supposed to be.

I want to be myself and integrate what makes me special to my children and my husband and my friends into my work, because that's a part of my being. And it's a part of my humanity. And it's really like the only way that I'm going to actually find joy and purpose in my 92,000 hours is if I get to know people in that way as well, I don't want to be somebody different at my house and somebody different at my office. I want to be this. I just want to be me. And I want to be honored. And given, like, I want other people to see me as me and know that I get to be that person and be a professional. That's what it means to me.

Lindsay Lyons
That is so powerful because I've resisted this idea of work-life integration, because I thought that it meant that you had to be just “on” all the time. I thought it was, you never have a time where you could turn off work and just like be gone from work and you just have to be “on.” So that makes a ton of sense because I love what you said honoring that it's part of who we are. Like, I always joke about this with my partner, about our priorities. He is very clear. He's like family is his number one priority, work is way down that list. And I'm like, work is a very high priority for me because it's who I am. It's part of my identity. I don't want to give that up. And I always felt like that may be wrong. Like that was—so something was wrong with me that I loved work that much, but I also feel like I do have a tendency to go kind of too much in that direction of like I'm in the work zone, no time for family, no time for anything else. And so I feel like part of what you're saying too, is that there is that ability to say no to prioritize, to be clear on that.

Annalisa Holcombe
Your boundaries. Absolutely. This is my time for this. And, and my work is not coming into it and you get to do that, but you also get to be Lindsay who is fun, and who's funny at your job, right? Like you, you don't have to be two different things. And I, the reason it's important to me is because I struggled so much with it. I had, before I went into higher ed, I was a lawyer. And the pressure that I had, which I don't know if society put on me or if I on myself or, you know, how that worked. But I had this pressure that I was going to be, you know, tough as nails. I had to be like, I had to work all the time and I had to be tough and I had to negotiate. And, and I was really unhappy.

And as part of why I started my mentoring program, because, you know, I'm 10 years into my law career and I hated it. And I think that, and I was so confused about why do I hate this when I thought it was supposed to be me, and underneath it, I learned that one of my, one of my biggest strengths is that I am inherently nurturing. And I struggled with finding a way to be a strong leader with being a nurturing human. And I didn't know what to do with that. And it felt really uncomfortable until I allowed myself to integrate those together and I can be a nurturing leader and that's okay because that's how I bring my whole self and how I integrate who I am as a whole person into all the things that I do. And at home, when I'm nurturing, I'm also a leader. And, you know, like I'm, it's like both of those are important parts of my identity, and I don't want to give up one or the other in who I am as a, and how I bring myself and show up for people in my life.

Lindsay Lyons
That actually brings me to what we were talking about before we started recording about this idea of teacher neutrality, of this idea of when we're teaching for justice. And we're talking about justice, I think for me, that's why I got into the classroom. And then having two years in realized, I'm not bringing that part of myself to the classroom. And also I think that pressure of not being tenured and teachers wondering, you know, can I bring that part of myself? What does it look like to bring a justice-focused sense of leadership and teaching into the classroom without getting fired? And, and sometimes I definitely butted up against that, “I'm going to get fired today.” But I think like that's so powerful to frame it in that way as this is who I am. It's who I am at home. Of course, it's going to be who I am in the workplace. It has to be, if it's going to be sustainable, at least that's what I'm hearing you say.

Annalisa Holcombe
Absolutely. And if you're going to continue to find joy, if you take away those pieces of you that bring you joy, because they're part of your identity, then of course the joy is going to go out of your work. It's going to go out of your teaching because you didn't allow yourself to bring those pieces. But I think it's also important that you talked about the worry that you would have about, am I going to lose my job if I do these things? And I think it's important to acknowledge when we have the privilege of being able to bring our full selves. And also if we do have the privilege, how important it is that we do it. So that we do—we start to change the conversation about how people can bring their whole selves to their work, to their classroom, et cetera. It does take the people who already are in a position of privilege to start to do that work so that people who are not can, because it's, if we expect people to do that. And I think we might often do that in our society—we look at people and in some ways like other them and say like, well, you're the other. So we'd like you to bring that to this classroom rather than being courageous ourselves, as leaders and bringing our whole selves to our classroom first.

Lindsay Lyons
Absolutely. I think about that in all of the racial justice work that I'm learning about trying to be part of this idea of this is a person who is Brown or Black or Indigenous, and they are a teacher. That means this is something they should tackle, right? Or this is something that they should be taking the risks on when in reality teachers who are Black, Brown and Indigenous are most likely to be fired for speaking out and things like that. Right? And that's something where if we take, I've been thinking a lot about language and like, if we take that idea of “issues of race,” right? Or racism, and we flip it to be, we're talking about white supremacy here, right? This is like a white person's like we are embedded in this problem. This is our responsibility to step up and take that risk and speak out and say these things. And to no other—that, just when you said that, I'm like, I see that every day and this example, right?

Annalisa Holcombe
I find myself worrying about this a lot in my work now. Because in addition to the work I do with 92,000 hours, which I have to tell you is part of my own, like you talk about my own professional development. In my other work, I am a fundraiser and I'm asking people for money all the time, but I know that what I'm doing and I feel really good about it. People will ask me questions like, don't you feel uncomfortable asking people for money? And I say, no, because I, in fact, believe in what I'm working on. If I didn't, I shouldn't be doing this work. And I'm asking people to invest in changing society through this investment. And I will provide them with information about the impact that they're making in society through it. And if it fits their values, which is, you know, what we do with our money is we express our values. However, we're spending it, whether it's, you know, restaurants or education or social justice, we're expressing our value, what we value in the world. And I'm happy to help direct some people to express their values.

Lindsay Lyons
Wow. That is powerful. Especially transitioning from a teacher role to a business owner now where I'm like selling, you know, courses and things. And I'm like, I feel very uncomfortable asking people for money, but I'm like, if you are where I was, this type of stuff is going to change your life. And I know that, and I believe in that. And I think that's such a great reframe of, let me introduce you to something that could be life-changing versus I'm going to ask you for money.

Annalisa Holcombe
That's right. And no judgment. If you choose not to do it, I need to choose it. I think you should. I like, it's great, like, it's a great way to be able to express your values. And that's when I reframed, I read this great book is called The Soul of Money. It's a great book about how our money—money has a soul and that it just flows through us. None of us get to keep it forever. It's just going to flow through us. What's the direction that you want that flow to go. Like, how are you going to make that money flow through you? And so what are you going to do with it? and when you look at your budget, how are you spending it? That'll tell you what you value. That goes only if we have additional funding, right? If we have only enough to cover our basic needs, then it is completely unfair for us to say, what do you value? So it's only when you have additional funding that you can do something with it.

Lindsay Lyons
That makes a lot of sense. And I was even thinking from the school perspective, right? Of a principal or a superintendent, like we have X amount of money. If you can cover like basic student needs, everybody's fed, everyone has a teacher, right. Where's that extra money going? Is it investing in mentorship programs or coaching programs or things like this, or is it going to, you know, I don't know, like a hundred textbooks that we may or may not use, right? I think about that. 

Annalisa Holcombe
I say that all the time. Look, if you, if you wonder what people value, whether it's an individual, a school, a business, a society, a government, look where they spend their money. That's how, like where you spend your money, shows what you value.

Lindsay Lyons
I love it. I hate to cut this conversation short, because I think this has been amazing in our kind of wrap up. I'd love to know of all the things that we've talked about. We've talked about so many things, I'm just going to tie it up. Recap some of the amazing things that we have talked about. We talked about how, when we set up these mentorship programs, we want to make sure that students or participants are creating those norms. We're making sure it's voluntary and people have that commitment. We’re talking about how we create our own personal board of directors and model how to do that with students? Priorities and how to make sure that when we are saying yes to something we're actually fully saying yes to it, and we're making sure that the nos have their own category for now, based on those three priorities, perhaps honoring that work is a part of who we are. And so that work-life integration is really critical. And I love this last point, too, right of expressing what we value through money. I think through, through so many things, right through our actions, through how we spend our time. 

Annalisa Holcombe
Time is our most precious resource. Far more than money. And so how you spend your time. I think that priority list is the most important thing, because it's the thing you can't get back. You can always make more money, but you can never get your time back. So really like really being very serious about your time and thinking critically about it and not allowing other people to take it from you because, because it really it's just fleeting and it will go away. And so how are you spending it and how do you make sure that, as we say, at Connection Collaborative, how do you make sure that the, that the time you have is spent well, rather than just spent? Because it's going away regardless. So how are you going to spend it that you look back and say, I expressed my values through that. I was true to myself through that. I had some purpose or some meaning in the time that I had.

Lindsay Lyons

Absolutely. I love that idea. And, and I think about too, you know, some of those shifts that are required to free up some of that time is big. Like that's a big shift that we have to make from how we have been doing things maybe for a decade, right? And like, this is what it takes to get that time back. Sometimes that can feel really scary to kind of jump into that abyss of what does this new life look like for me? But it's totally worth it, right? Because that time is something that we don't get back. And I, I love that, that you just said that it is more valuable than money.

Annalisa Holcombe
It's absolutely more valuable than money. Absolutely. I do want to also say that maybe like the last thing to talk about would be that I talk a lot about vulnerability. It's a, it's a real thing for me, it's really important to be able to acknowledge what our vulnerabilities are before we can be courageous or brave. And I also think that what I learned during the course of all of these years of mentoring is that some of the best gifts that we can give each other is to see each other, like really, truly see each other in our whole humanity. And to know that my act of courage might be different than your act of courage. And that we, as a society often see courage in those great grand, expectations of, that person was courageous. They jumped into the water, or they ran into the building, but acts of courage can be the small thing that nobody else would know is courageous.

Annalisa Holcombe
Like, and I use examples, like I called my mom today. And so for some, one person that might be an incredible act of courage for them. And if you can have a person in your life that notices or knows you well enough to acknowledge those small acts of courage, those are so important. And I think that if we want to make big systemic change in, in terms of how students learn and how teachers are allowed for that to happen, I think a big act of forward momentum would be to acknowledge the small acts of courage that teachers are doing in their classroom every single day. My youngest daughter is currently, you know, learning online, via Zoom every day. She is six years old. If I could acknowledge the incredible small act of courage that her teacher does every single day by showing up for those six year olds, I see that bravery and I am in awe of what she is doing every single day.

Annalisa Holcombe
I think that if more people reached out to their teachers and say, I see what you’re doing showing up for these students, particularly right now, I think it’s incredibly important. I think that because our systems have failed us, so that the decision-making about what we're doing in the time of COVID for our learners has gone from, you know, not our federal government, not our state government, it's down to every single school district so that those people have to make these decisions in vacuums, where they can, they're never going to make enough people happy, for us to just acknowledge for those people, regardless of the decision that they're making right now, that they are, they're engaging in courageous aspect, continuing to just show up is, is important to us particularly right now. And sometimes the biggest act of courage we have is to just keep showing up when it's hard.

Lindsay Lyons
That was so good. Thank you for sharing that. I think that is a perfect kind of wrap-up for our call to action. Like how do we really think about living out our values that we have, and that, that is a perfect one that encompasses so many different values. We might hold in terms of, you know, connection and collaboration and all of that good stuff. Oh, amazing. So as we close, we know that leaders are constantly learning and growing. Folx who listened to this podcast, love learning. I am curious, Annalisa, what is something that you are currently learning about or kind of diving into lately? It could be, you know, a book you're reading something that you're working on in your free time. What would you want to share for us that you've been learning about or that you would direct people to learn about if you're, if you're jazzed about it?

Annalisa Holcombe
Oh goodness. I have—I'm jazzed about so many things. Here's one, if you, if people are wondering about like, how do I even know what my values are? If you go to my website, in my blog, we have core value cards, which can help you identify those. And I think the most important thing to do with that is here's your core values. It helps you, there's some directions on how to get to them and how to like limit them. But then also how to define them for yourselves, because every single person's idea of what, you know, justice is, is different. And so how do you, how do you, how do you get clarity on what those are? The second would be to define your priorities, take some time to do that, do the act of self reflection and then notice and give yourself credit for your own small acts of courage, right? Because if you don't have time or you haven't figured out what those are if you could, first of all, define them. And second, after having gotten your own personal board of directors and you had the courage to share with them, what some of those vulnerabilities are, then share with other people who have your back, what you're doing so that they can give you that credit that you need to keep showing up.

Lindsay Lyons
Amazing. I love that you just linked all the different things that you've been talking about throughout the episode. Perfect close. And as people are curious about you and Connection Collaborative and your podcast, could you just tell us how they could find you, in either a social media, your website, where could they learn more about you?

Annalisa Holcombe
Yeah, sure. So connectioncollaborative.com is our website. If you go there, you can also find the links to the 92,000 hours podcast. New episodes come out every Tuesday and they are related to big picture issues that we talk about. So we have priorities, and coming up, we just did fear. And how, like how to handle fear in your professional life. We're doing one on vulnerability right now. So, that's, all of those I think are, are helpful and they're, they're fun to talk about, even though they're hard. So there's even an episode on failure and we have one coming out right before the holiday season, which is about love and how we can actually acknowledge that love is okay to talk about at work.

Lindsay Lyons
Wow. Those sound amazing. And thank you so much for doing that work. Like this is important stuff. And every time I listen, I take away so much and I feel it in my gut, like, I'm like, this is the stuff that I wish people were talking about. So it is really nice.

Annalisa Holcombe
Nice. That's really nice of you to say. And I'm so thrilled with what you're working on. I'm already taking away all of your work on PD and how I talk about it with the people that I work with so that we can make that a bigger lesson for people who are not necessarily teachers, but people who work and, and what that might mean. Awesome.

Lindsay Lyons
Thanks Annalisa. And thanks for being on the podcast.

Annalisa Holcombe
Thanks for inviting me.

Lindsay Lyons
Thanks for listening amazing educators. If you loved this episode, you can share it on social media and tag me at Lindsay Beth Lyons, or leave a review of the show. So leaders like you will be more likely to find it, to continue the conversation you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best self.

​In today's episode, I'm talking to you about a practice that is common to schools and turnaround or schools who have been told by the state that they need to rethink how their school works and design an intense strategic plan. The root cause analysis is a key practice that is often part of these strategic planning conversations. What I do today in this solo episode is dig into what really makes a good root cause analysis to truly uncover what is at the heart of this system. Not serving all students. How do we get there? We'll talk about that today.
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Hi, I'm Lindsay Lyons and I love helping school communities envision bold possibilities, take brave action to make those dreams a reality and sustain an inclusive anti-racist culture, where all students thrive. I'm a former teacher leader, turned instructional coach, educational consultant and leadership scholar. If you're a leader in the education world, whether you're a principal, superintendent, instructional coach, or a classroom teacher, excited about school-wide change like I was, you are a leader. And if you enjoy nerding out about the latest educational books and podcasts, if you're committed to a lifelong journey of learning and growth, being the best version of yourself, you're going to love the Time for Teachership podcast. Let's dive in.

Today. We are talking about root cause analysis. Root cause analysis is a process for identifying the underlying cause of an identified problem. When schools are in need of change or the school is struggling to implement a change initiative, a root cause analysis can help determine where the problem lies, which informs our proposed action. So in my professional life, I've seen a number of root cause analysis performed. And even as a teacher, I encouraged my students to conduct a root cause analysis of problems, trees of issues that they found, in the world. So teachers, this can be done not just at a school level, but also at a classroom level, to really promote some critical thinking and analysis and your students. But for today, we're going to be talking about it from the perspective of school change and what is also called a school reform.

So these types of analyses are commonplace for schools in turnaround schools that have been given a failing grade by the department of education. And so they need to make big changes to turn around their schools. I have both witnessed and participated in root cause analysis in which the group reached what they thought might be a root cause, but no one was really sure. I would love to see school stakeholders, a variety of school stakeholders coming together, teachers, administrators, students, families, community members. I'd love to see them come together to perform this kind of root cause analysis and actually reach a root cause that they can feel to be true in their bodies. There's a visceral knowing that this is it. And if we address this, we can turn it all around. And so my vision for today, what I'd love to kind of help us think through and think about a little bit more concretely is this idea of root cause analysis and how we transform schools that have been struggling that have not served all students.

And in order to do that, we need to dig deep. We need to identify what's really going on far below the surface level of what may appear to be going on, but we know there's so much more below that. And so I'd love to talk you through some examples of, and the process of how to use a root cause analysis in a way that I find to be more effective than I've seen it used in my professional consulting experience with schools and turnaround. The thing is that you'll know it when you see it approach to root cause analysis is so vague and it's unlikely to be helpful because it is so vague. And this was actually the guidance, this phrase we'll know it. When we see it is often the guidance that I heard from folks in charge of leading these analyses at the department of education level.

And so what I'd like us to do today is to go beyond that, to get a bit more concrete on what we're actually looking for when we conduct these root cause analysis. And we engage in this in-depth conversation about what is actually happening in our school system. So we've spoken before about adaptive challenges on the podcast, adaptive challenges are longstanding challenges that cannot be addressed with a technical fix. So a technical fix is something where the solution is really laid out. It's step-by-step, it's like using a new textbook, purchasing a new textbook or having a one-off staff PD workshop, right? These are things that's like, Oh, you just do this. And the problem is solved. Adaptive challenges cannot be fixed with technical fixes. Adaptive challenges are difficult precisely for that reason, we don't know what the solution will be. It's going to take a lot of people coming together to dig into the problem, identify what's going on, and then collectively form a path forward.

So the adaptive challenge is difficult to address because the path forward is unclear from the start adaptive leadership scholars Heifetz Grashow and Linsky are clear about one thing, though, when it comes to adaptive challenges, they right, quote, adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people's priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties. That quote is something that I will repeat again and again, because I just feel like it captures the essence of what we're talking about and the importance of a deep root cause. So to me, something that is a deep root cause, something that lies beneath a lot of that surface level stuff, it's likely going to be an adaptive challenge. The problem as a whole, right? And in the root of that, what Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky say needs to change in order to address that larger adaptive challenge is that underlying priority belief, habit, or loyalty that people in the system hold onto.

This is very informative, I think, for the work of root cause analysis. So a common tool for conducting root cause analysis is what they call a Five Whys protocol. Basically, you name a cause of the problem. The first one that maybe comes to mind, and then you go down five levels. So you ask, okay, well, why is that cause—that I just named that's causing the problem—why is that happening? And then you keep going for, again, five layers, five whys. And I like this approach, but only if we know what we're actually looking for in that final why. Because I have seen five whys analysis just kind of go off the rails and end up in a totally different, completely irrelevant to my mind. A lot of times we played then where we could have gone. If we had had a bit more focus in really knowing what we were looking for as we continue down that five whys path, here's an actual example.

And I'm paraphrasing a bit because I didn't write this down word for word, but here's an example of the five ways that I watched a school leadership team of a school that was in turnaround actually come up with in the root cause analysis meeting. The problem was that their school was in turnaround more broadly, right? And they got into some more specifics, but here's the first reason that they came up with when they did the five whys, the first reason why their school is failing was because according to them, they had a discipline problem. So their school's failing because they have a discipline problem. Then they said our cause is that we have a discipline problem. Well, why do we have a discipline problem? We have a discipline problem because, (and this is their second why of their five whys) students are not following the rules about no hoods, hats, or earbuds.

So they're getting a little bit more specific here. And they said, well, why are students not following these rules in particular, the no hoods, hats, or earbuds? And they had a conversation and they said, okay, well, to us, it seems like that's happening because students don't understand it's disrespectful. Why number three to them was that students don't understand it's disrespectful. Hence they're violating the dress code rules. Hence we have a discipline problem. That's why our school is failing. Now there are two more levels to go still. So they said, why do students not understand that it's disrespectful? So why is this happening? So layer number four is the students don't understand because the teachers don't tell students that is disrespectful. They said okay, let's go a level deeper. The teachers don't explain to students that it's disrespectful because, and this is layer number five here, teachers don't see hallway, dress code policing as part of their job.

And that's where they ended, that was their fifth why in the five whys activity, and they said, this must be our root cause. Which means if you do the check again, the check for a root cause analysis is if that lowest level, that thing you determined to be your root cause is fixed, will it fix the larger problem? So if we did a check here, we would see that this says, if teachers don't see hallway, dress codes, policing as part of their job, if that's a root cause, that means that if we convince teachers to see hallway dress code policing as an integral part of their job, our school will no longer be in turnaround. We will be effectively serving all students. Our discipline problems will go away and we will be a school that thrives and all students will be served. As you can tell, as we think through this, you know, they did end up with a belief of sorts.

If we kind of use that language of Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky to think about adaptive challenges in this way and connect it with a root cause analysis process, they did end up with a belief, right? Teachers don't believe it's their job to do policing of the dress codes in the hallways, outside of their classroom. In that sense, you know, that's great that we're, we're digging into a belief. And I think this discussion, if pivoted in a slightly different direction, could have been really fruitful here. What I want to pose now is going back to number one, that first layer that first, why is this happening? The reason our school is failing is because we have a discipline problem. That's what was said. That may or may not be the case, but let's say for the sake of this exercise, that it is. The next why says the biggest discipline issue is students not taking off hats and earbuds and hoods in the hallway.

So right here, I think is the pivotal moment that I wish I could go back and step in and ask, let's check our own beliefs, habits, and loyalties around this statement. And the next one, that next level was that it's disrespectful to wear hoods, hats or earbuds in the hallway. That was kind of assumed within that statement of students don't realize it's disrespectful. It was just kind of assumed that it was disrespectful behavior. So I would love for that self-reflection moment to really be highlighted in this discussion so that it wasn't just let's see where we can pinpoint other people who are not us in this room. And might I add, this was just a room of administrators and teachers, to my knowledge, no one in that room was a family member and there certainly were no students in the room. So just to kind of note that this was a limited stakeholder group of people who were deemed to be leaders on some level in the school building.

But if we could introspectively take a moment to look at that point in the conversation and say, let's check our beliefs that are showing up in this statement right here. The question that we might encourage teachers or leaders to discuss at this moment might actually be: Why do teachers think that it's disrespectful? Why is that the belief there what's going on there? Or another question might be to discuss why is this dress code so important? Why is it seemingly more important than achieving the school's goal of reducing disciplinary incidents? Or why is this a rule in the first place? Why is that rule for no hats, no hoods in existence? Where did that come from? Who created that rule? Because I am willing to bet that students were not a part of that conversation in creating that rule. So here's what maybe another version of this five whys activity for this group of educators might have looked like if we started digging into these other questions and we obviously don't know for sure, because only the school stakeholders themselves would know what actually feels true for their school itself.

So, because number one, might've been the same—again for argument's sake, let's just say that was the same. So our school is failing because we have a discipline problem. Why is that happening? Well, discipline is a problem because students are not following the rules about no hoods, hats, or earbuds. Okay, let's keep that the same. Now. Here's where it shifts. Why is that happening? Why are students not following the rules about no hoods, hats or earbuds? Well, maybe students don't follow these rules because they don't agree with them. And again, here, it would be really helpful to have students stakeholders in this conversation. So we're not just assuming what students are thinking, but let's just for sake of argument, go there for the exercise. So students, maybe aren't following these rules because they don't agree with them. Why is that happening? Why are there even rules that students have to follow that they never agreed to in the first place?

So that next level is there are rules that students don't agree with because students were never asked to help make the rules. Now we're in a different place. Okay, let's go one level deeper. So why is it that students are never asked to help make the rules, layer number five could say maybe adults in the school believe again, we're getting another belief here, adults in the school believe students are incapable of making decisions like that decisions that affect their learning or their learning environment. Now that's probably a bit unsettling. It's a very different root cause than the first one. And this one really hits me in the gut. This one is hard to process as an educator who can connect with that, who doesn't like connecting with that, but who at times in my career have definitely noticed that belief coming up in myself.

It's I think a product of how we are taught in teacher school to be as teachers, right? We know what's best; students obey. That's the, that's the game, right? So this one is really different and it's really uncomfortable. But I think to me, when we're thinking about adaptive challenges and addressing those head on, it requires that belief change. It requires an acknowledgement that there's a problematic belief and that needs to shift. And it requires that critical introspection. So no longer pointing fingers and saying, this is where the problem lies outside of me, but how am I contributing to the system to the problem that is being perpetuated by my underlying beliefs, habits, loyalties? What's going on there with me? When we look at the root cause of the first example, the initial actual example that happens and then this hypothetical example that we went through second, the first root cause, shifting teacher beliefs...

So they see it as their job to police hallway dress. That root cause may result in higher disciplinary referrals because now teachers are hyper policing the hallways and they are perhaps writing students up or sending students to the office or getting in altercations in the hallway with students they may or may not know. And now teachers are feeling stressed about that. I'm sure students are feeling stressed about those interactions and we're increasing disciplinary referrals. We're increasing student and teacher stress. I'm not sure that that solves the larger issue of why the school is not serving all students. If that's the ultimate goal. Not sure that that root cause actually solves many of those things. Now in the second one, again, this is not perfect and it is a hypothetical scenario. So we'd have to really talk to the stakeholders in the school itself to figure out what's true...

That second root cause? Shifting adults' beliefs that students can be a part of policy decisions, like the creation of dress codes may result in students following a dress code they helped create. So there's buy-in when diverse stakeholders are part of the process. If we're looking to change student behavior, are students involved in the creation of the rules that they're expected to follow in the first place? Do we have actual stakeholder engagement? If we expect stakeholder buy-in, I would argue that that is necessary. And I talk a lot about that, with shared leadership and student voice. But I think that's something that was kind of missing here that first, that internal reflection of the stakeholders in the space doing the root cause analysis. And then also just to think about once we hit on that belief, does it also speak to the larger way in which we're trying to lead the school?

Is it one of inclusion and shared decision making or is it one in which we're going to tell you what to do and we expect you to follow it. And then if you don't, there's, there's a problem. I also want to talk about an Ishikawa diagram, which is frequently known as a fishbone diagram. It's often used during root cause analysis, and it helps the folx engaging in the root cause analysis to organize their brainstorming by different categories for each cause. So participants can make their own categories or they can use generic headings. These are usually something like methods, machines, or equipment, people, materials, measurement, and environment. In most analyses, I've been a part of, people have used the predefined categories. And again, the idea here is if we're having trouble getting started with just generating some possibilities for those causes, those categories can sometimes prompt some more nuanced or specific discussions of causes.

And also when we use an Ishikawa diagram, because there are so many categories, we're able to see multiple examples of the five whys. So we might have a whole set of five whys around a particular category. For example, people, or even getting more specific students or teachers is another category of people or families, you know, whatever it is. And those might be very different from one another. They also would be very different, likely from materials and thinking about the root causes of materials or, you know, sometimes they might be the same, which is what's so fun about this. I think comparing, do we see multiple root causes showing up in those separate five whys conducted for each category? And if we do, that's probably something. So this is another example and really just a structure to help us with this conversation about root cause and to engage in the five whys so you can use them overlapping.

So now I'll share another example from another school, a different school leadership team that conducted a root cause analysis. Again, this school was in turnaround, and this time they were really focused on the materials part of the Ishikawa diagram. So the problem that they had determined was that the school is failing because our ELA standardized test scores are really low. And so then the cause of that—right, why are our ELA standardized test scores really low—their response in the materials category of the Ishikawa diagram was our ELA curriculum  doesn't address two key areas that are always on the state tests. And so then digging into that, they said the next layer of the why, why does our curriculum not address those two key areas on the test? Well, teachers don't want to change curriculum again every year. So far teachers have had to change curriculum.

There's this constant change and they don't want to change again. And when asked, you know, why don't the teachers want to change curriculum again, the response was the new curriculum will take time to learn. And we just don't have a lot of time. We're very limited in the time that teachers have. They don't want to devote even more time to learn a curriculum when they already know one that they're familiar with and feel comfortable with. And so if we look at this root cause if we think about our solution to a root cause like that one, it might be a decision that the administration makes like we're going to reserve two days at the start of the year. And we're just going to have some, some PD on this new curriculum and that's going to address the problem. We're going to give you those two PD days.

You're going to learn the new curriculum in those two days and you'll implement it throughout the year. Problem solved. Now let's look at that same problem again, from the people category of the Ishikawa diagram. So again, the problem is the school is failing because our ELA standardized test scores are really low in the people category. We say that the cause for this low standardized test score in ELA is students have repeatedly said they find the curriculum boring. Again. I just want to highlight here that we have different stakeholder perspectives, right? The last one was about teachers. This one is about students. It's going to be really helpful to have students be a part of this conversation, but okay. Our cause is that students find the curriculum boring. That's what they tell us. So why is that happening? Why do they find the curriculum boring? Well, the next level is they don't see themselves or the topics they care about represented in the curriculum.

Okay. So now let's go a layer deeper. Well, why don't they see themselves or the topics they care about in the curriculum? Because teachers have used a curriculum designed by someone who doesn't know their students. So they don't know their students' identities, what their students are interested in. We could probably go a lot deeper. And in particular directions— they're talking about Euro-centric materials and white supremacy in historical, traditionally taught textbooks and things—but let's for now just say, teachers are using curriculum designed by someone who doesn't know their students and we'll leave it at that for this example. Now, why are teachers using a curriculum that's designed by someone else that doesn't know their students? Well, the reason for that is, they say, or maybe they would say—this is a hypothetical rewrite. Teachers have always been given curriculum or told to find curriculum, but they've never been supported to create original curriculum.

They've never walked through the process of what that looks like? Where do you go? How do you find resources? How do you make it manageable? How do you invest in student voice and co-construct curriculum with your students? So in this example, the original materials based example, and then my hypothetical rewrite of the people category example, the habit of finding versus creating curriculum is really long standing. This second piece around the people category, I think hits a little bit deeper. I can connect to that. I can connect to the fact that I had been handed curriculum maps early on in my teaching career and was told, “Do this, make it work, but never really walked through the process of, until I got a coach in my third year.

And I was able to just use that coach’s wisdom moving forward year after year, despite only having that coach for about six months of one year of, of my seven years of teaching. That support in creating my own curriculum was a pivotal moment in me being able to engage students and see academic success that I had never seen before with a standardized curriculum. So it really connects me on some level, that this may be true. Now it may not have been true for this group. I'm just trying to kind of highlight how different categories lead us to, to different places. But administrators and teachers may believe, right? Again, that belief idea is crucial here. If we're using that language of adaptive challenges, there may be an underlying belief here that curriculum developed by professional curriculum, authors or companies is actually better for students.

But here's the thing I think about. If students are not engaged in the curriculum, then it's not going to do much. Even if it is amazingly designed, research-based, all of the things...if students aren't engaged in it, it's not doing much for those students. And so the path forward in this case, maybe doing some action research to see if the data confirms or rejects the claim that store-bought lessons or units are more engaging than teacher designed lessons or units. And by teacher design, I mean, co-constructed with students to some degree, and I've talked about that in other podcasts, but just this continuum of designing with students and advancing student voice in these designs now, of course, technical fixes. So for example, training, removing other tasks from teachers’ plates so they have time to create the new lessons would definitely be part of the plan moving forward.

But technical fixes in and of themselves can not fix adaptive challenges. So there's much more work that needs to be done on an inner level, a mindset shift, belief shift level that are going to be required if we want results. Right? If people still believe, if teachers still believe that standardized curriculum is better, there's not going to be buy-in for any of those training that you may offer or the support that you may provide, or the time that you might give for teachers to create original curriculum. If there's not a belief that that's going to be better for their students, as we think about all this stuff, as we think about root cause analysis and what that means for us as we lead schools, either leading schools through transformation, if you're in a school that has been identified as a turnaround school or a school that is not meeting standards, according to the state or a school that is doing really well, according to the state, but you know, there's more work that you want to do.

We're always growing and learning as communities. There's a lot here to kind of unpack and to think through and a root cause analysis is an incredibly powerful tool that you can use when used, well, I think it can really be used powerfully to identify and then work through some of those underlying beliefs, habits and loyalties that you can kind of dig into as a multi-stakeholder group. Now, in terms of putting this into practice, as you go forth and tackle those adaptive challenges in your school and conduct your root cause analysis, I encourage you to remember that key question that helps you really realize and recognize when you've reached a true root cause, which comes from again, the adaptive leadership scholars, Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky, what are the habits, beliefs, and loyalties we're holding on to? Do those need to shift? And when I say we're holding onto you, I mean, the people doing this analysis, the stakeholders in the room, right? We don't want to always assume for other folks that we want to make sure everyone who needs to be in the room is in the room for this conversation. And what's so amazing is if we can identify and address those underlying habits, beliefs, and loyalties that need to shift, then the technical fixes, which are also useful, have a chance to finally work their magic.

In the show notes, I'm going to link to a freebie for you, which is an adjusted copy of what I actually created for my students when I was encouraging them to create activist based projects in my class as a teacher. But what I think can also be really helpful for school stakeholders and leadership teams in thinking through these different activities, the five whys, that Ishikawa diagram, the root cause analysis as a whole. And so I'll link to that template with the different activities to help you work through the stuff with your team. Thank you so much for listening to another episode. I am so excited to hear what comes out of this. Please share any root cause analysis stories or root causes that you identify as you do this work together as a leadership team, connecting with multiple stakeholders in your community. I can not wait to hear exactly what you come up with, and if you have any questions along the way, please feel free to reach out. 

Thanks for listening, amazing educators. If you loved this episode, you can share it on social media and tag me at Lindsay Beth Lyons, or leave a review of the show. So leaders like you will be more likely to find it. To continue the conversation you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best.

Today, we are bringing back frequent guests to the Time for a Teachership blog and podcast. Dr. Cherie Bridges Patrick. If you've listened to a previous episode, you already know all about her, but a quick summary. She is the founder of paradox Cross-Cultural Consulting, Training and Empowerment, LLC. She is a racial justice consultant, leadership coach and psychotherapist. She works with social workers, counseling professionals, educators, and organizational leaders. And she uses a trauma focused lens in her work to build leadership capacity for racial justice. Cherie holds a PhD in leadership and change, and her research is in racism, denial, discourse, racial justice, social work and the helping professions like education. I can't wait for you to hear this episode of a conversation between Cherie and I diving into the organizational nature of how we create a culture in our schools for fostering racial justice.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Lyons and I love helping school communities envision bold possibilities, take brave action to make those dreams a reality and sustain an inclusive anti-racist culture where all students thrive. I'm a former teacher leader, turned instructional coach, educational consultant and leadership scholar. If you're a leader in the education world, whether you're a principal, superintendent, instructional coach, or a classroom teacher, excited about school-wide change like I was, you are a leader. If you enjoy nerding out about the latest educational books and podcasts, if you're committed to a lifelong journey of learning and growth, being the best version of yourself, you're going to love the Time for Teachership podcast. Let's dive in.

Lindsay Lyons:
Welcome back, Dr. Bridges Patrick, to an episode of Time for a Teachership. We were together in a previous episode talking about the primacy of discourse, the need for building the muscle for personal and interpersonal discourse capacities. You talk to us about readiness and willingness, vulnerability, adaptability, and the importance of a liberating dialogic environment. For those of you who haven't listened to that episode, please go back and listen to that one. That one is absolutely amazing. I just want to introduce you to Dr. Cherie Bridges Patrick, if you haven't already heard that episode and you are going to dive right into this one Dr. Bridges Patrick is a racism denial and discourse scholar, and she is here to talk to us about how we identify and dismantle systemic racism in educational systems. So today's episode is more focused on that organizational level. We previously talked about the personal and the interpersonal today. We're going to that organizational level. So I'll actually hand it over to Cherie to start us off with the first question. 

Dr. Bridges Patrick:
This is exciting for me because I get to ask you some questions in this. So my first question for you, Lindsay is, at the organizational level, how can schools build capacity for generative dialogue and continuous learning more broadly?

Lindsay Lyons:
Yeah, so I think one of the things that I love about working together is really putting adaptive leadership at the core of all that we do. When we think about that capacity building that is really central to really systematizing a lot of things, systematizing the process of diagnosis, as we talked about really identifying so that we can dismantle so many of the problems that are, you know, general across the system, educationally, nationally, globally, but also very particular to the individual schools that we're talking about. So my first kind of thought whenever I hear this, and I think about organizational capacity building is really to set up structures that enable us to really sustain these conversations that we talked about in our last episode that bring in diverse perspectives of different stakeholder groups and truly share in the leadership and the decision-making of an organization. So we can get a better understanding of the problems and challenges we encounter as well as what solutions and policies would actually address those challenges in an equitable manner. What do you think, Cherie?

Dr. Bridges Patrick: 
Can I just add to that? I think we have to, because we're a society with attention challenges and short-term thinking like, you know, we want things done quickly. I want to just touch on that process that you just talked about, the setting up the structures to sustain. To be able to start shifting mindsets and when mindset strips sets are shifted, then you know, we can get into the policy work and how we change that because it all starts with us as individuals. Just talk briefly the length of time that it takes and so I say that,  I hesitate as I hear myself say, there's something because this has been going on for so long,  it is entrenched because we are entrenched in this.

There has to be some time and I know that there are some things that need immediate change. And for those people who think they can make that happen quickly, Great. But I think we need to understand that this process takes time, the time that the process of shifting mindsets of changing policy. Just think of our political system and all the steps that need to happen to make laws change. Right? So if you go into an organization and similar that you've got, you know, you've got your policies and practices, so it takes time. But in that time though, you're always practicing. You're always engaging because of the power of discourse because of its ubiquity as a social practice that is in every aspect of our lives.

Lindsay Lyons:
Excellent points. I absolutely  love those contributions because I particularly love that you're talking about the time piece and how it kind of hits you as you say it, because we have seen people on the one hand rushed to action without the process that needs to be shared. The dialogue that needs to happen among key stakeholders that represent different stakeholder groups. So that rush to action and kind of skipping over the democratic process is problematic. But then we also need to recognize that, you know, we need  to sit in some things with the balance of the urgent call to action, right? So like, we need to take action, because like you said, it's been happening for so long we need to address it. We can't wait a long time to do that, but we also need to make sure the way that we're addressing it really speaks to our priorities as well.

Dr. Bridges Patrick: 
Yes. And for me, it goes back to just that primacy of discourse and the need to learn how to engage in generative dialogue. If we can't talk about the issue, we can't talk about race and like you said, sit in some stuff, sit in that discomfort and navigate through it and, you know, and build the capacity to do it. How are we going to solve something that we cannot talk about that then we cannot see because we're not talking about, it's like this elephant in the room that is always there. So we have to be brave enough and bold enough to see the elephant and then to figure out how we are gonna,  do this. So then Lindsay, that takes me to another question. Can you talk a little bit about shared leadership? Like what is shared leadership? Where does this approach come from?

Lindsay Lyons:
Absolutely. So I love shared leadership. I think that's my answer to pretty much everything. But I will talk a little bit about the powerful women who have actually inspired and held up and practiced shared leadership through history. I think it's really important to acknowledge that because when I was first researching shared leadership or when I was first exposed to it in our leadership program, we had this little handbook of leadership theory. And it's interesting because it was a man that was credited for this idea of shared leadership. When in fact, if we go back further, we will see that is not necessarily the case. So it actually came up in the early 20th century, 1924, Mary Parker Follet wrote about shared leadership and the idea of power versus power over. And so this idea of, she says, first by pooling power, we are not giving it up.

And secondly, the power produced by a relationship is a qualitative, not a quantitative thing. She says that this is a "freeing for both sides and an increased total power or increased capacity in the world," and I think that really speaks a lot to the rooting of intersectional feminism, first. And kind of in this approach, when we look out a few decades later, we see Ella Baker a racial justice activist and community organizer who really prioritized developing the leadership of others as opposed to positioning herself as the leader of a movement. It's that selflessness and the nature of building capacity for really young people, students that she was working with, I think is probably why a lot of folks don't know her name as much as a lot of male leaders that we may point to. And she is just, I think my role model in terms of shared leadership development. We also see people today, like U.S. Congresswoman Ayanna Presley her quote, "people closest to the pain should be closest to the power."

That to me is just like, yes, that's what we're, that's what we're trying to do here! If we're talking about ending systemic racism and we don't have people who have been directly impacted by systemic racism that are in the school community as part of that conversation of how to end it, what are we really doing here? So I think these are the powerful women that have really taught me what shared leadership is. I've tried to learn from them and learn from their practice around how we move forward. So really we think about it in a school setting. I look at it from a structural perspective of how decisions are made, who is at that decision-making table? And are there feedback loops because we know the decision-making table is small, right? It has to be kind of representative just in how things are organized and to be able to hear everyone's voices, but we need those feedback loops to be able to go back to the stakeholder groups that the representatives represent and collect that feedback, not just speak for the group without that kind of cycle of going back and getting more data.

And so I'm interested in your perspective, Cherie, of how this idea of shared leadership really supports folx who are laboring for racial justice and the centrality of this idea in racial justice work.

Dr. Bridges Patrick:
Well. So as I was listening to you and, you know, all these things are just jumping out at me. So I'm writing an article about white supremacy and social work and, you know, just  the dominance and the pain and the ways that systemic white supremacy operates is challenging. And those of us that are going to be fighting for working, for laboring towards racial justice. There's a part that I explore this need for like self care and accountability. I want to touch on that self care part and how it ties into shared leadership. So it may not necessarily be self care, but it's this, this collective care, maybe. This work is hard. This work is more challenging than we can ever imagine.

So as an individual, you can get burned out very quickly because the work is very hard, it requires you to take this real deep look at oneself. And then at an organizational level, we're looking for—we're talking about shared leadership. I get to share some of that difficulty, some of that challenge, right? And so in that I'm building relationships with other people, right? We're building intelligence, we're building new knowledge because of our experiences, right? They can then contribute to how do we, you know: How do we actually do this? And you know, we're leaning on the work of Ella Baker and the other women that really brought this, this concept forward. But so shared leadership offers this place of collectivism of just being together with like-minded people who are, who are working towards the same thing.

So then it supports the need  for care. We can call, we can say to one another, "Hey, you know what, I think you might need to, you know, take a little break." So, having that structure allows for some time, for us to sometimes step back. So then there's also this energy that comes with that. I know I have enjoyed tremendously working with you because when we get together, you know, we have our conversations and all these ideas start to generate. So it's shared leadership, you're sharing ideas, and they feed off of each other and they contribute to that feedback loop, which, you know, continues to build. So ultimately shared leadership in terms of racial justice is like this, the support, this, a leveling of the weight that is carried because of the difficulty that it entails. So I, I like to ask you a little bit about the student voice, which is, you know, the area of research that you looked at, what wisdom can we pull from that body of research Lindsay?

Lindsay Lyons:
I absolutely love the field of student voice. This is a relatively kind of emergent, I would say the last three decades kind of emergent field.  I say emergent, because this has always been something historically that different groups of people have practiced. But in terms of the larger or I guess more, maybe more mainstream student voice, like research in journals and such like that. This has become something that is more studied heavily in the last few decades. So we get to see all of the brilliance that schools for a long time, these different pockets of individual schools have been practicing. And so one of the things that I love is Dana Mitra, who was one of the leading scholars in the field. She created a pyramid of student voice, and she talks about these three levels of student voice that exist in schools.

I think this is relevant for students. I think this is relevant for teacher voice and family voice when we're talking about shared leadership and all those stakeholders, but she talks about the bottom level being probably the most common, hence, the kind of pyramid shape it's the largest, but it's also kind of the least effective in some ways. It's merely listening. So we might ask students or families or teachers to fill out a survey, but then that doesn't necessarily mean we do something with that survey. So we listen but that's kind of it. And at the middle level, that next level up is slightly less common but more impactful is a kind of partnership among students and adults. We're working together in concert with one another to accomplish those school goals. At the top, the least common is really building capacity in students. (And again, I think this is relevant for all stakeholders) in themselves to lead. 

And so when we think about students, as leaders, as folks that we can listen to and learn from as adults in the school community, I think this is really that idea of radical collegiality, that the student voice field talks about this idea of partnering and seeing students as equals as people that we can help them learn. Then we also learn from them. This I think is really at the heart of why shared leadership is so helpful and so important. And in order to do that, we need to give students multiple opportunities to be able to take on those leadership roles, to develop the personal and interpersonal capacities that you were talking about, Cherie, in our last episode to engage in racial discourse and to engage in discourse you know, in a generative way about all topics, including oppression of all kinds.

And what's interesting about this. I think when we're talking about sustainability Dana Mitra partnered with another scholar to actually apply turbulence theory to the pyramid. And what they realized was the lowest level of the pyramid that just listening part, it actually increased individual and organizational turbulence because what was happening was they were just surfacing those problems. They were just identifying what was wrong, but they weren't actually doing something about it. They were just kind of bringing them all to the surface and that bubbling up of identification without the follow-up was actually de-stabilizing the schools. Whereas when we look at the top level, when students are able to kind of come out as leaders and say, we're here, we can learn from them, the adults are listening to us. There's actually a reduction in turbulence because we're talking about organization-wide communication.

And that mindset shift that really helps us collectively work towards addressing those problems. And so there's actually an increased stability in terms of where schools can go when we partner with other stakeholders, which I think is really fascinating. So I'm interested in your perspective of Cherie, when I'm talking about these things, I'm thinking about the conversations we've had about why racial justice initiatives have historically failed in schools and organizations more broadly. Particularly we talked about accountability in our last episode, and I'm just thinking about all of these kinds of different pieces for sustainability and identifying and dismantling some of these problems that are identified. So what does that actually look like in terms of what are the problems that have kind of been barriers to success for racial justice initiatives in the past, and then where do we go from there? Like what does accountability, for example, maybe look like at an organizational level?

Dr. Bridges Patrick:
Let me try to tackle this. That's a big question. So then how do we begin to do this? So what I'm tying this turbulence to is—the notion of the concept of turbulence—to Heifetz disequilibrium, right? And so it just jumped out right at me. But then, you know, you often talk about this too. This is the system of diagnosis, right? Adaptive leadership says, you know, one of the most frequent causes of failure is that, you know, the leaders fail to, to really examine the system that they're working within. So, like you said, earlier, folx just jump into the work without really exploring what's happening. So a focus on diagnosis. That means to really drill down and under, you know using that pyramid to like using a combination of those things, but recognizing that the higher up you go in that pyramid, you know, the more progress you're going to make.

So I'm trying to combine those things there in terms of accountability. So this gets hard because there's all these barriers, right? So you know, there's the barriers of just racism itself and what that really means, and white supremacy. So you've got, you know, a group of people who are in power, white people who, come together with these, beliefs, these ideologies, these like lifelong commitments to being white, because that brings what it brings. When we're talking about accountability, there's a lot to dig into because the people who have those ideologies are typically the ones that are in the power. So who's going to want to give up, you know, what they see as, as power you know, as beneficial to them. So then you start asking questions like, okay, so how does this harm the organization?

How does this harm, you know, people within the organization? To bring it through a relational level. And how do we hold people accountable to really seeing the universal harm, of white supremacy of racism, so that there can be this collective effort towards, you know, dismantling and changing our policies and changing. It practices. So understanding that why that I talked about earlier is like what's the why for the organization you know, why are they doing this? And a lot of times organizations are engaged because everybody else is doing it. That's a lot of what I think is happening now in the larger sense of what we're looking at. So, you know, it's like, okay, so everybody else is doing it. It's becoming a practice, but we really don't explore. So organizationally, we need to explore and understand what is our why, and it too needs to be grounded in, you know, something that's going to help keep the organization going, because there's going to be a lot of fatigue, a lot of effort put into this. So that's one area of accountability. 

Offering people support from individuals who are trained and who understand how racism operates. Not the ones that, you know—cause I still, like I said earlier in the other episodes, I still don't know a lot about racism, although I've studied it right. Because it's that complex. So you know, we have to be able to really educate people. And to do that again, it requires these mindshift changes getting through these barriers so that we can do the work. So that accountability is a constant work of breaking down the mental, the ideological, the social barriers  that come with the weight of white supremacy. 

​I'd like to touch on just a little bit about what you said about the student voice, because it was interesting. I don't think he said it this way, you talked about the collegiality between students and teachers, right? So if I remember my days as a student, that teacher was definitely like, you know, he, or she was the one in power and you had to, you know, you had to operate you know, in a construct that was like, they were over you and you were under them, so you have this hierarchy.  I think that's in me, and in my continued experience, I think that's still true to some degree. So now we're shifting from, you know, a position that doesn't necessarily relate to race. But if we take this in the direction of racial justice and your experience as a teacher, as an educator, how do you narrow the gap between, you know, "I'm in charge," the power, to bring it more towards this collegiality to allow students to have this voice. If we're honest, we see young people are the ones doing this heavy work out there, right? There's all kinds of ideas and information that we can get from them. So I'm curious to know, and I know I'm throwing you a curve ball because this is not what we talked about. Could you touch on that a little bit?

Lindsay Lyons:
Absolutely. I think, as you were talking about radical collegiality, maybe not explicitly tied to race, I actually was thinking about the statistics of just who are the teachers, what is currently known as the United States. Most of those teachers are white. Many of whom are working in schools where the population of students are predominantly black and Brown children. So it's interesting that we have both that teacher authority piece, but then we also have that racial piece and the white supremacy piece that plays a role. And so when we're talking, and I know not everyone is in that position, but when we're talking about these kinds of schools, where we have white teachers teaching Black and Brown students, I think that adds a level to that idea of radical collegiality that makes it that much more important. I know we've talked about the idea of kind of white liberalism and one of those practices, or one of those kinds of tenants or aspects of white liberalism being a devaluation of Black and Brown people's expertise on racism.

And so just not enabling students to be part of that conversation. I think ties in there and I just wanted to comment on that really quickly before answering your actual question. But I think there are so many ways as teachers, we talk about having a student centered culture, but if we were really to reflect on what that student centered just meant, if we were really to think about the, the four things I typically ask is: Do your students have an opportunity to decide what they learn? So the content (when they learn), where they learn, and how they learn, if we can't enable students to have voice and choice in those things. And of course sometimes, you know, that's us kind of providing some choices and they choose from that. But other times, and listeners probably will recognize this particular anecdote...

That one time I tried an entire semester, an entire, like, you know, five months of school of students designing their own units. I had 80 different units going at the same time. And just kind of following that path of a personally designed unit that brought them joy, that fed into their creative spirit that enabled them to follow their curiosity. I think that is kind of that radical end of what that might look like. But, you know, if we are truly committed to engaging in this radical collegiality with students, it's going to be a co-construction of what and how we learn. And a lot of times, as teachers, we are told in grad school, when we're getting our teacher's degree, you must have a hundred percent of students quietly, obediently listening to you and following directions. That's what makes a good teacher. When in fact, that does not make a good teacher, that's going to isolate a lot of students.

That's going to send a lot of students to the principal's office when there's this disobedience of weird rules that we think we have to Institute, but that student voice really comes to life. When we use practices like circle, which was really common for me. And I know some people have been taking that to the virtual space where we pose a question about something relevant to students' lives. So for example, we just did this in my college class, but I've done similar things with my high school students around the decision coming in of the Breonna Taylor murder. And so having students have an opportunity each one of them to answer and to just have everyone listen to students' answers,  particularly when those students are kind of seeing their own experiences reflected back at them in current events, like that's what radical collegiality is. It's not coming in with a pre-made lesson plan and telling students what they need to believe it's honoring their experiences and their expertise. So I know that's just one example, but I wanted to, to share that anecdote.

Dr. Bridges Patrick: 
As I said, there's all kinds of things just running through my mind as I'm listening to, cause you're saying you know, that last example of the circle experience where those voices that are typical, everybody gets a voice, right? So then they're sharing their experiences. So then that leads to vulnerability, one of the discourse capacities. But it also just keeps me connected to what you said earlier about first, you've got this power dynamic between, you know, teacher and student, and then you've got the other power dynamic of race. You know, it just speaks to the complexity of how all this stuff works together to maintain structures. So what you're asking for, I think the word radical is like on point because it's truly radical and what then do organizations, schools need for their teachers to be able to come into a radical space, you know, mentally, right?

And to create  these spaces where this can happen. Cause as I listened to you talk about how you did this for a semester, you did the student voice. Hey, how would you learn? But to show me what you did and what you would do and you stayed with it. What did it take for you to stay engaged? What did it take for you to really, you know, not lose sight of what you were trying to do? I wondered, like, does that take you to your why? How can you talk to that experience just a little bit? Cause, we overestimate what's involved, but then we also under-estimate. That takes a lot of physical work. Administrative work, but it also takes this work of, of the shift in the mindset. We're talking about the ways that we have been trained, teachers are trained to come in and, you know, you have this information and you give it to people. You are not trying to hear anything. So can you speak to that experience of what did you, what happened in those times? How did you hold on and, and just share with the audience? Like here's some things that are real and here's how I dealt with them.

Lindsay Lyons:
Absolutely. So full transparency. I will not do what I did again, because it was just too long. And the reason I knew that was because students told me, so I think a huge piece of this is those feedback loops of asking the students, checking in with them, how is this going? And the biggest piece of feedback I got from them was "This was an amazing project. However, I would prefer it to be shorter," because they even said they were losing steam, just themselves, trying to orchestrate and follow this complex unit that they developed, even though it was, you know, their passion project, their interests, they were just like, I really wanted it to be done sooner. It was half the length of time. So parsing out all of the student feedback at the end was really valuable to me, what it taught me was not to throw away the project as a whole, but just to make some adaptations.

Another piece that I think is really helpful is that I did not do this by myself. There were 80 different topics, many of which I had no idea about, like some of, one of them was stand up comedy. I am not a standup comic. I am not a particularly funny person, but I do know other people who are really interested in comedy in the school, or, you know, personal connections. What I did was, I tried—I think I got about 50 or 60 students to be connected with people, either in the school or connections that teachers in our school had to outside sources that were experts in those fields. So they became like the content mentors. So I think the first thing was realizing I didn't have to do it alone was huge. And so when we talk about shared leadership and student voice and co-constructing curriculum, we're also talking about how we leverage family members that are experts.

One of the students actually went to her uncle because he was an expert in the topic that she was exploring. And so her uncle got to be her teacher, which is so cool because a lot of times we invalidate the expertise that family members have. And we say, we are the teachers who know how to do school. I think that was a huge realization for me. And I think another thing that supported me was an administrator who was like, go for it. Who said, I will support you. I will show up to the final expo where the students are sharing what they did, and I will celebrate that win. And I'm going to come in occasionally, but I'm not going to say if students are, you know, being very loud, that that's something you're going to get penalized for. I'm going to see that loudness as excitement and energy and things that we typically don't associate with loudness when we're looking in a school and that's often what it was, it wasn't off task loudness.

The students were more focused than ever, and they were just really excited to dig into the work. So I think that admin support was really helpful. And specifically within that admin support, and for me to, to, to kind of realize what was going right, and what I would change is changing the measurement. Like, what am I actually measuring? So instead of measuring student obedience, for example, or discipline rates or something like that about following directions, I instead was measuring, you know, for example, how excited students felt on a day-to-day basis, how valued or heard they felt in the class itself you know, different pieces like that, that are student-reported metrics that we typically don't measure in classrooms was what kept me on track was what kept me energized and what was also something that my admin valued. So I think being able to be in that space that was really set up for me to do an experiment like this was really what made it possible.

Dr. Bridges Patrick: 
Thanks, Lindsay. I think your example is like a perfect example for adaptive leadership, right. Combined with shared leadership. Because you had this project, you engaged the students and then you listened to them. You've got that feedback loop and have to have that. So, adaptive leadership talks about that. They talk about not like you start talking about not throwing away the entire project when you realize, Oh my gosh, this is too much, you took what you learned from it. And you narrowed it down and you made adjustments. This was because you didn't have structures in place. You didn't have practices in place that were there to to help guide you through this truly adaptive leadership. Adaptive practice, I mean that there's no rule book for it, right?

There's no policy book that says, this is how you do it. So you went in blindly. Another piece of that, that you talked about is that that support, that organizational support, right? So when we're talking about changing organizations and helping them understand how racism is impacting, you know, all of, all of them, everybody and engage in embedded in their practices and policies, because it's just part of our system that this notion of having the support of the organization is critically important. Because if you don't have that experience, and I know yours was not specific to race, I believe it wasn't, but I mean, there's great lessons. So having that support allows for you to really live into your potential so that you could bring your students into their potential. So it's got all these benefits. And so then it's, it's this process of, of practice, of reflection in a practice that is absolutely essential to the continuation of racial justice and sustaining it over time.

Lindsay Lyons:
Thank you for summarizing, that just feels really nice. Nice to hear how that was connected to adaptive leadership. That's not something I would have immediately thought about. So thank you. Is there anything else that you wanted to add to this conversation before we go through a quick summary of key points here?

Dr. Bridges Patrick: 
No, but I do want to say that these are the kinds of conversations that just generate so much energy. You have all these ideas that come together between two people. I wonder what it would be like if you had another person with a different perspective. Who could bring some other insights to how we're looking at things. You know, that's a dream that I have expanding the possibilities by bringing in different perspectives. So that's all I would say. Thanks.

Lindsay Lyons:
Awesome. Thank you. I'm just going to go through a quick summary of some key points that we talked about, and then we'll do a closing call to action. And so we talked a lot about shifting mindsets as a prerequisite for this work and policy change, and specifically radical collegiality when we're talking about students, but also with families and seeing them as true partners in the learning, these things take time. So in that time, as Cherie said, right, the power of discourse, you're always engaging in this. So of course it will take time, but we're constantly doing that work. We're constantly laboring for racial justice on this path. As we kind of co-construct policy and things in a shared leadership setting, the need for self care and collective care, which brings me back to, you know, Audre Lorde's like initial calls for it.

Self care is, I think she says an act of political warfare, right? It is about caring for the self so that we can, as you said, Cherie, support the collective. We're not turning away. We're turning inward for a moment, recharging, and coming back together. And so that shared leadership enabling us to share the weight and building relationships with another in generating energy is a critical piece here. Using that combination of Dana Mitra's pyramid levels to properly diagnose and really systematize the process of diagnosis, as well as dismantle and actually act on the information we're getting in things like surveys to dismantle barriers to racial justice is critical. Tying the accountability to the organization's "why" is really how we sustain the labor through fatigue, which will happen, and really making sure that we're getting support from folx who've studied and are knowledgeable about how racism operates when we're talking about accountability.

We can't just be accountable to ourselves in just kind of our limited mindset of what accountability means, but we're pulling in experts to help us be accountable to our larger community. And finally, just listening to students, measuring what matters, and remembering that adaptive practice does not have a rule book. And that praxis that reflection and action is really what gets us through those adaptive challenges, of course, with organizational support, which is really a huge key there. So as we talk to leaders, as we invite them to take action after this particular episode, what would you say, Cherie, is something that you would encourage leaders to do after listening today?

Dr. Bridges Patrick: 
Wow. I think I'm probably going to sound repetitive here. So from an adaptive leadership lens, that parallel process of examining oneself, you know, that inner glance and inner look/view and while doing that at the same time examining the system. So you've got that parallel process going on, particularly in the context of, of addressing racial dominance in the workplace. Right? So this interior journey is really important to be able to navigate through the external organization. The internal part of oneself. So I recommended this the other day or on the other podcast, but I still think it's very relevant. Some of the things that we can do right away, you know, a lot of times people think that there is something grand that has to be done. But if we're talking about changing mindsets, that means you have to get engaged with your mind. You have to know how it's operating.

So in order to do that, spending just three minutes a day. Observing as just a third party. You're observing what's going on, so you can become familiar. You can make it as easy as what's happening in this interaction with this person what's going on with my body. What am I feeling? What am I noticing, or this is bringing in that somatic aspect of it, which is a big piece of how we continue to disengage from conversations around race. So it's just bringing some attention to how we're functioning as individuals within an organization, which makes us this, you know, the collective place, how are we, how are we working together? You know, you can take that data and apply it to, well, how does it impact, you know, our practices. Cause I, when we can begin to explore those things and become familiar with them, I think that can take us a long way. So that's one thing.

Lindsay Lyons:
Excellent. Thanks. I actually want to say too by the time this episode airs there will be a previous episode that I actually created for free before that is a daily journal for 30 days. And so you can use that journal to do exactly what Cherie's saying, where you're journaling for three minutes about that critical reflection. And again, bringing in other, other folx in other resources that we kind of talked about in our previous episode as well to kind of deepen your critical self-reflection there. So thank you for bringing that up again. I'm glad you did. I would say that you know, I was actually inspired by what you said earlier. I would actually recommend that you find someone to talk to like Cherie and I do. We have a standing weekly meeting and we just kind of brainstorm. Really amazing things come out of it, I think.

Lindsay Lyons:
We are doing a lot of professional work together, but it's also, I think just the ideas that flow when you have someone to talk to you and think through some of the adaptive leadership work with. So I think that's something that you can potentially do. Another thing, if you're interested in kind of the student voice element and trying to seek out students' ideas and perceptions of their leadership opportunities in your school is that you can use my, a statistically validated student leadership capacity building survey. So I'm going to link that as the freebie for this episode, just so you can start to kind of collect some data around whether or not students actually feel like they do have an opportunity to lead in schools. And in what ways do they have, you know, an opportunity to make decisions at the school level, at the curriculum level, in their classes?

Lindsay Lyons:
Do they have the professional development for themselves as leaders where they're building those personal dialogic capacities that should be talked about in our, in our recent episode? So these are some of the things that we might want to know about students, and I will link to that in the show notes. So thank you all for listening to another episode, there was so much in here, please let us know what you got from this. We have Time for a Teachership Facebook group. If you want to go in there and chat through your takeaways, we will see you next week.

Lindsay Lyons:
Thanks for listening, amazing educators. If you loved this episode, you can share it on social media and tag me at Lindsay Beth Lyons, or leave a review of the show. So leaders like you will be more likely to find it. To continue the conversation you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best.

Today's podcast was recorded the day of the 2020 election. In it, I talk about pushing back against this notion of teacher neutrality. This is a solo show. Just me, no guests pushing back against this entrenched concept of neutrality that I think we need to unpack to do right by our students, right by ourselves, and right by our society. I hope you enjoy this episode.
​
Hi, I'm Lindsay Lyons and I love helping school communities envision bold possibilities, take brave action to make those dreams a reality and sustain an inclusive anti-racist culture, where all students thrive. I'm a former teacher leader, turned instructional coach, educational consultant and leadership scholar. If you're a leader in the education world, whether you're a principal, superintendent, instructional coach, or a classroom teacher, excited about school-wide change, like I was, you are a leader. And if you enjoy nerding out about the latest educational books and podcasts, if you're committed to a lifelong journey of learning and growth, being the best version of yourself, you're going to love the Time for Teachership podcast. Let's dive in

Today, I want to talk about teacher neutrality or the concept of teacher neutrality. I want to push back on it. I'm recording this episode on Tuesday, November 3rd. So the day of the US 2020 presidential election. And I'm thinking back to 2016, when my colleagues and I effectively suspended our regular course content for the year in helping our students process the results of the election and the feelings that they had around, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. And thinking about preparing to teach my  college class tomorrow, and also not knowing if we will have a definitive answer as to who the president will be for the next four years. At that point, I'm thinking about all of the other teachers in that same position, wondering what exactly they're going to say and how to approach the conversation about the election results in the coming day, the coming week, the coming months, as we continue being in our classroom spaces together and fostering a culture of anti-racism and productive generative dialogue that digs into issues of oppression.

And so I guess my dream here is that as we digest the news about the election, whenever it does come, that we don't try to adhere to this notion of neutrality that I see as truly a false notion of neutrality. So some folx may say, Whoa, Lindsay, that is way too radical or way off base here. I just want to share why I don't believe in this idea of teacher neutrality and why as a teacher, I took risks that at times I thought might get me fired, because I felt like it was the right thing to do. And when we teach, you know, this, this idea of civil disobedience and we glorify it breaking the unjust laws, right? We're talking about laws there. If teacher neutrality is just a norm, or kind of an unspoken norm that we believe exists, it's not necessarily a law.

And if it is in our contracts,  again, I go back to that notion of glorified, civil disobedience, and we teach it. We talk about activists who are powerful and made a difference. And I suppose the question I have is: Are we willing to be the people that we glorify in teaching history classes and teaching this content to our students? Are we willing to push back against a regulation in our contracts, or if not an unspoken norm or agreement that we should remain neutral. And that's what a good teacher does. So here's why I think this idea of neutrality is not something that I want to adhere to nor do I hope that you know, others do. The first reason is because it's just not accurate, this concept of neutrality. If it means how we've always done things, how we've always taught history, how we have always centered whiteness and cis-genderedness and maleness, if neutrality is that, it's not neutral. That's just not neutral.

Supporting the status quo is not neutral. When we know that supporting the status quo means that students who are Black, Brown, or Indigenous or transgender or students with dis/abilities when they don't get the same results as white cis-gendered rich students get. So if it's not accurate, if this concept of neutrality truly isn't neutral, I think we have to push back against this idea that speaking against injustice and teaching about politicians or the election or particular rules or Supreme Court decisions, pushing back against some of them as unjust, right? I think that is what we need to do to advance justice in our country and in our classrooms. The second problem I have with the concept of neutrality is this idea of neutrality being just neutrality in the way we conceive of it. If it means what I just said, it's not just the way we've always done things.I love Archbishop Desmond Tutu's famous quote, "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

I think this is so poignant when we're thinking about the fact that we are serving all students in education. That is our purpose. That is our mission. When it comes down to it, if asked to choose to remain "neutral," supporting the status quo, the way things have always been...

To speak out and speak for justice at perhaps a great risk to ourselves in our careers at perhaps a risk of having really uncomfortable conversations with parents who don't agree with your stance on the false notion of teacher neutrality with bosses, perhaps colleagues or family members who disapprove of your decision, that's truly what justice means, right? To reject the status quo. It is not just. So, staying neutral or "apolitical" is also an advantage. If you say that you are neutral or apolitical you're effectively sharing that your humanity and your human rights are not at risk here. And so you have the privilege or the advantage to remain neutral in a particular political conversation or situation. If your rights are not as risk as an individual, then you can opt out of a conversation with little risk to yourself. You can avoid that discomfort, which is a manifestation of white supremacy, right?

As a tool of white supremacy, to avoid the discomfort, to not take risks, to not jeopardize the status quo that has served you. The reality is, most teachers, about 80% of teachers in the United States are white. Most students at this point in the United States are not white. And so there's this additional dynamic of who are we serving and who are we? What are we willing to risk to serve our students properly? Now you might be wondering well, this idea, in theory, of pushing back against neutrality, I'm with you. I agree, but how does this actually happen? How does this play out so that I walk the line between not getting fired or not putting my career in jeopardy and my livelihood on the table, and am also pursuing justice?

And I will say that there are no easy answers here. That absolutely is a risk. And I just invite us to have that conversation first and foremost with one another about what that means. And if we can talk about it as colleagues, as adults, even with students, about what neutrality means in a broader sense, not necessarily as in the teacher sense—as a responsibility of teachers—but just generally, if we can have those conversations and produce generative dialogue about what this means for our conversations as a school community and as a larger community as well, I think we're getting there, right? We're making progress if we can do that. Well, I also want to say different teachers and different people have different degrees of risk. So for folx who can say, I am apolitical, or I am staying neutral on this because it doesn't risk your individual rights. Those folks have less risk typically in cases like this. And therefore it is more important that those folx step up to the plate here and take on some of that risk that other folx who have not been advantaged by our systems have been having to keep on their shoulders and have had to shoulder those risks far and above anyone else. And so it's time those of us who are at less of a risk in that scenario to step up and take on that risk and to voice our resistance to this concept of neutrality, which does not serve our students.

Logistically speaking in the classroom, this looks like conversational agreements, that center justice, that center dignity and ensure that a person or a group's humanity is not up for debate. This is a central tenet of having these conversations. We cannot ensure a space in which students are going to want to return to conversations like this in a space in which students feel loved and supported in a sense of belonging, if we don't agree that a basic guideline that is foundational to productive conversations about oppression is that we cannot disagree with who a person is. We cannot say that their identity is invalid or their experiences are invalid.

So we can honor the dignity and the experiences of people and disagree about where we're going to make a better world for everyone, but not about the dignity of the person themselves. In addition to setting human guidelines—guidelines for the conversation that center human dignity and make sure that we are not going to violate that—academic guidelines can also be established. So as an educational institution where your purpose is to support students, to have a better academic understanding of things like research and data, and fact versus fiction, academic guidelines can be established for the conversation because where conversations can get derailed is if we say everyone's opinion is valid without the consideration of factual information and where that information is coming from. So source quality, quality of research design, things like that. You can absolutely look at a research design and interrogate its sample, representativeness, all of that stuff. That's actually a great way to apply some key ideas about research and think about the applications of things you might be studying in the real world. Absolutely do a source analysis, do all of those things, but we cannot ignore data and statistics. We cannot ignore facts. That is part of our responsibility as an educational institution in this conversation.

So again, you can disagree with how to solve problems. I think that's what politics really should be all about. How do we create a better world for everyone? How we get there might look different and we can disagree about that, but we can't disagree with people's humanity and the necessity for people to have their full set of human rights. And we can also not disagree with the fact that problems exist when data points to the fact that those problems exist. And so the next step in terms of getting started with this work, of course, this is going to look different for every community, depending on what grade level you teach, where you teach, the population you serve in terms of student demographics, geographic nature of your school, teacher readiness and teacher demographics as well.

But as a leader, if you are a school leader, a principal, superintendent, assistant principal, you can bring this issue up with your staff. Many staff members have been thinking about it. They may be thinking differently about it. They may be thinking similarly to you, different from others, but they have been thinking about it in one way or another, this election and just current events in general affect everything we do. They affect us as individuals, as people, as teachers, they impact our pedagogy and our considerations when we determine what and how we are going to teach.

What you can do as a leader is prepare how you want to talk about it with your staff and offer some shared language, to provide opportunities for teachers to talk about how they're going to talk about issues in their class. So provide some language around discussion agreements or values to uphold in class conversations. What are the guidelines? What are the shared parameters that our school can come up with to say, we are not going to violate another person's dignity. What does that language look like for your school, for your grade level? And maybe co-construct that with your staff. Another thing to consider is conversations with families. So consider that shared language that you want to have with staff so that if a family member comes in and addresses what they see as this issue of violating teacher neutrality, you can provide a buffer between the teacher and the parent.

So you're kind of the first stop. So that family members aren't directly calling teachers, and you can provide that information and share that this is a school-wide initiative. This is our set of guidelines that we collectively came up with to have conversations about important issues. You can also support teachers and provide professional development opportunities, coaching support in the form of observations of these classes, not to judge or grade teacher performance, but to take in what's happening and collectively brainstorm where teachers can go from there or how to address problems that may arise. Now as a teacher, you can determine your guidelines for your class. Of course, you can bring it up to the larger school. You can ask your boss about creating opportunities for a larger staff wide conversation, but you can also, if you feel isolated in this journey, if you're the only one that seems to be doing this, you can determine the guidelines and the language that you will use in your own individual class to talk to students, to talk to family members who may come and talk to you about what you're teaching students and what you're talking about in your class.

You also may want to prepare for colleagues—if you are on this journey alone—who may tell you that it is your job to stay neutral or remain apolitical. So you might want to prepare exactly what you want to say to those colleagues, to have that language ready to go, to share some additional resources, which I'll be sharing with you at the end of this episode, so that they can kind of explore those questions and push back against that notion of teacher neutrality as it fits for them. And as always, we need to build up our collective and individual literacies around various identities and forms of injustice so that we can facilitate conversations with our students, but also with adults, with our colleagues, with our families, with our bosses, with our students' family members on issues of racism and white supremacy, on issues of nativism and sexism, on issues of ableism and homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, all the topics that may surface in conversations around the election specifically, or more broadly around any current events that happen throughout the year and not just in this moment in time.

In the show notes today, I'm going to link to a bunch of resources to support you in further exploring this concept of neutrality. So you can kind of get started. You can share some of these resources with your colleagues or with family members, and it might provide you a kind of shared language to figure out exactly what we are trying to do here in the field of education. What are we trying to do as teachers? Why did we get into this field and who are we trying to be as individuals? How are we bringing our whole selves into the class? If you're an activist outside, if you're going to Black Lives Matter protests, but you are showing up in class to remain neutral...that does something to you, right? That does something to you as an individual.

It prevents you from being able to show up and bring a lens of justice, a centering of justice, a core of justice into how you teach and what you teach. And as a clear caveat here, I am not at all saying that you need to tell students how to think and that students all need to agree with you. I think that is something that I continue to work on because I am very clear in my passion for feminism, for anti-racism, but I also don't see those passions as something that is political, because again, they center people's dignity. They say, I am fighting for justice for all students, for all people. If I was pushing a particular agenda for a policy or for some sort of, again, solution to how we attain justice for everyone, that's not something I need my students to agree with me on, but I need students to center the justice of all people in our conversations.

And if there is a trans student in the room, if there is a student who is gay in the room, if there is a student who is Black, Brown or Indigenous in the room, if there are a bunch of hetero, cis-gendered white kids in the room, I need them to know that they matter, their peers matter, and that everyone's dignity and humanity matters. So I see that as the clear difference between pushing my own beliefs and making sure that we center justice and humanity for all folx in our class. So the resources I will link today include a resource from Teaching While White, which is a podcast. The episode is called "No Neutral Zone" and features a wonderful interview with a teacher who shares his own personal identity—for a while. He found himself kind of covering up who he really was in the class. And then now being open about his identity with his students and how he teaches and sees the concept of neutrality. It's a fascinating listen.

Also, April Brown wrote a blog post called "Talking with Young Kids About Elections, Democracy, and Justice For All." There are a bunch of great resources in terms of texts that you could use to center conversations around elections, democracy, and justice for young kids. I think this is particularly powerful because a lot of times in conversations about social issues about racial injustice, about, sexism or consent or all these things that are really central to how we live as human beings and absolutely are important to talk about in, you know, the young grades sometimes feel like either they shouldn't be talked about, or they should, but they're not sure exactly how to go about that conversation because of course, it's going to look different from a conversation with a bunch of high school students when you're talking to a bunch of first graders or kindergartners. And so this is a powerful blog post to check out.

And finally, a resource from the Teaching Tolerance website. This is an article written by Corey Collins called "Teaching the 2020 Election: What Will You Do On Wednesday?" So specifically speaking about the election and thinking about that notion, which it references in the posts, I'm thinking about pushing back on that notion of teacher neutrality, and it actually links to another blog post—tons of blog posts, actually—within that article, from Teaching Tolerance, one of which does directly address a teacher kind of reckoning with that notion of neutrality and, and kind of walking the line, so to speak, between having students believe exactly what he believes and centering justice in conversations with students. And so I thought that was a powerful rate as well. I'll link to all of those resources in the show notes for today, so that you can check them out.

If you have any resources that you would like to share about how you are addressing the election or current events more generally in your classes this year, how you're fostering these conversations with colleagues in staff meetings, in department meetings in just kind of "water-cooler" conversation moments (if those moments exist via Zoom or in-person)., and how you're talking about them with students, if there are activities that you want to share or shared language that you want to let us know about, please Let me know. 

You can find me on social media, or you can drop a link to one of your resources if you're willing to share, or just a comment about how that's going in your class and the approach that you've been taking and how you're thinking about this notion of teacher neutrality in the year 2020.

Thanks for listening, amazing educators. If you loved this episode, you can share it on social media and tag me at Lindsay Beth Lyons, or leave a review of the show. So leaders like you will be more likely to find it. To continue the conversation you can head over to our Time for Teachership Facebook group and join our community of educational visionaries. Until next time leaders, continue to think big, act brave, and be your best.