![]()
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode, I’m talking about a grading mindset shift toward a more equitable system, inspired by my conversations and coaching with school and district teams who want to pursue this.
I’m also drawing on concepts from a phenomenal book, Place-Based Learning: Connecting Inquiry, Community, and Culture by Micki Evans, Charity Marcella Moran, and Erin Sanchez. It’s shaped my understanding of common challenges in equitable grading shifts and what to do next. Why? The traditional grading system often fails to foster genuine motivation and growth among students. There’s a built-in idea that grades will be a motivating factor, rather than relying on the intrinsic motivation that’s in each student to learn. In their book, Evans, Moran, and Sanchez highlight the importance of self-assessment and self-reflection for students, arguing that when you know what you’re aiming for, you can keep working towards that goal. This approach focuses on providing specific, qualitative feedback that nurtures intrinsic motivation, much like adult learning experiences where feedback is more about progress and less about arbitrary grades. What? There are so many ways to build self-reflection into your classroom practices. The goal is to give specific, qualitative feedback to students so they know if they’re on the right track or where they may need to shift and pivot. Here are some steps educators can take: Step 1: Shift your mindset Consider how adults are often motivated by specific feedback rather than grades, and apply this insight to students. This is an important mindset shift that gets over the fear that students may not be motivated without grades. Step 2: Implement peer feedback and self-reflection strategies To help students self-reflect on their work, try new strategies that empower them by offering opportunities to gather specific feedback. For example:
Step 3: Normalize fear and failure Create a classroom culture that embraces failure as a learning tool. We want to break down the idea that there’s a right or wrong answer and school is all about being “right.” Instead, normalize “failure” and show students it’s okay to make mistakes and grow from them. One practice you can try is to have students write their failures (and how they’ve grown) on post-it notes on a board, taking time to acknowledge and celebrate them as learning opportunities. Step 4: Co-create with your students If your curriculum is not motivating and not interesting, this is all just a good idea but won’t shift things. You want to involve students in co-constructing their learning experiences. Allow them to take part in designing the curriculum and daily discussions, focusing on topics, social issues, and community matters that they care about and impact them. This type of purpose-driven inquiry empowers students and increases their investment in their education and community. Step 5: Communicate the shift to families To support the transition to equitable grading, provide families with clear communication about the benefits and rationale behind this shift. Use my freebie below to help with this! Final Tip: Remember, the key to all this is fostering an environment where students are motivated by their goals and supported through specific, meaningful feedback. Your first step may be simply incorporating a student reflection protocol into your classroom. To help you implement this, I’m sharing a draft letter to family members about shifting to equitable grading. It can be a big change and it’s important to communicate it well to students and families so they understand its importance. You can access that letter here. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 196 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Welcome to another episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 196. Today I want to talk about a grading mindset shift and this is inspired by my conversations with school and district teams who are shifting to more of an equitable grading system. This year, and also in conjunction with all of my coaching work with these teams, I have been reading a phenomenal book and soon on the podcast. Very soon you will get to actually listen to and learn with these three authors, mickey Evans, charity Marcella Moran and Aaron Sanchez, who have written Place-Based Learning, connecting Inquiry, community and Culture. I'll link to that book in the notes on the blog post as well, but it is amazing and it is so very much informed my understanding of this kind of common challenge in equitable grading shifts that I have encountered and making sense of kind of what to do next and what are those mindset shifts. So let's dive in to this concept. So when we are thinking about equitable grading, often we encounter or play with the idea of the kind of idealized version of grading would be going gradeless. Right, if grades just weren't a thing that we had to do, it would be so great because students could just learn and we could give them feedback and they would just love learning and all the things right. That comes up when we have this fantasy kind of named and then we say, oh, but here's. The reality is that we have a fear learners are only motivated by grades and so without the grades there is no kind of motivation internally that students are going to want to learn and actually read the feedback and all the things. So here is kind of one piece of this and I recognize that I'm excluding a lot of other pieces and dynamics, but the one I really want to get right down to is that you, as an adult human being who is listening to this podcast or reading the transcript of this podcast at this moment, is that you are not purely motivated by grades, right. You live in a world now beyond, unless you're in grad school and many grad schools don't even do grades, right. You live in a world now beyond unless you're in grad school, and many grad schools don't even do grades, right. You're not just doing things for a grade, and even if you are in grad school and have grades there, I would argue that you're not just there for the grade, right. So think of adult pursuits and I like to use art here, because I think those are often easier to divorce from, kind of the academic sphere, of course. Think of whatever it is that is interesting to you and you are excited to learn about. But think about painting, knitting, learning to play an instrument, like some sort of pursuit that you have invested time to learn right and you are making progress in right. What are you motivated by? I'm going to guess you are motivated by very specific feedback. So, for example, if I'm learning to paint, I don't want my teacher or my art tutor or whatever to tell me oh, this is an A painting, this is a C painting. That's not helpful information Because, first of all, what does that even mean? And, second of all, that doesn't help me get better. I don't have a better sense of my artistic ability or where I need to go. Next, if an art tutor said to me you know what your shading needs, work here and here's how to do it better. Watch me do this right or try this technique, that is helpful. I have a focused area of feedback. I'm working just on my shading. I'm not thinking about color or balance on the page or whatever else. I'm not an art teacher, as you could probably tell. But right. There's all these other components that I'm not focused on. I'm focused on one thing. I get very specific feedback. Here's what element of my shading needs work, and I have either a model, kind of think aloud whatever instruction, a path forward for how to do it better, right? So I have narrowed specific feedback. It is qualitative, it's about this specific thing. It's not an A or a B globally, and here is how to do it better. Here's my next step. I mean, people pay for access to coaching outside of the realm of academics, right. People pay for guitar lessons, for dancing lessons. As a parent, I am like eager to pay money to someone to help me be better as a parent, right, parenting coaches are a big thing. So I think about all of these adult pursuits that we have, right, where specific feedback, specific focused feedback with a next step attached, is really what motivates us and not that external grade. Now, again, I know there's other components that I'm kind of ignoring for the purpose of this one episode, but stay with me here. When we are thinking about our classroom culture or even our broader school culture, I think pedagogy really is going to help you support this shift and an intentional kind of thought about what pedagogies we have in place and what we can expand or do more of or do differently. That's going to help support this idea and this intrinsic motivation that we know is in students. Right, it's in all of us as adults and we're going to try to bring it out more because, of course, we're kind of contending with the fact that school is often about grades. Parents often want their kids and caretakers often want their kids to have really good grades, right. So so, trying to acknowledge that and stay focused on this piece, we want to invite as much student reflection as possible as possible. So, in their book, evans, moran and Sanchez say you are able to formatively self assess because you know what you are aiming for right, and they're talking about you, right, like adult learners who are motivated to learn some form of art or something. Right, whatever you're pursuing, you know what you want to accomplish. And so, because you know what you're aiming for, you're able to say, hey, I'm not there yet, I'm going to formatively self-assess, but if you know the end goal, then you can determine if you're there yet and where along that path you are right. Some sample strategies that they suggest in their book these are new to me, so I'm going to highlight these. Of course, there are so many self-reflection strategies I've talked about many on the podcast before but here are some cool ones that I'm excited about. They suggest a whole class tuning protocol. So this would be where one student is going to share their work, a presentation, a piece of written text, and then all of the students in the class are going to give feedback. So this could take the format of a like wonder, where students are writing on sticky notes something they like, something they wonder. This could be a fishbowl format, where students in the inner circle are kind of giving feedback to the student who is presenting and the students on the outside could kind of tap in when they're ready to share feedback, or they could take notes. I mean, there's a lot of different ways you could do this Gallery walk. I love this idea where the likes and wonders are kind of written on a back of a sticky note, so it's not visible to everyone, and then the teacher when they go to a gym class or whatever, in the previews, before the students actually collect it, the teacher is going to just check them all and, of course, take any out. I'd never even thought about this. Take any out that are not productive and, of course, teach students along the way. You know I've noticed some of these were not productive. Here's the better way to give feedback right. Of course, you can do many lessons on how to provide good feedback, but then what's super cool is when the student receives all the sticky notes about their work, all the feedback, they're going to sort it into categories, so they're still doing their own reflection. One category is I never thought of this, one category is I'll consider this, and one category is kind of I'm on the right track, like this really aligns where I thought I had to go next and so I know that I'm on the right track. And then a third option for student reflection is ongoing journaling. So this is, as the authors share, kind of a place to see potential for changes without becoming defensive, which I love, because it's hard to receive critical feedback right as adults as well as young people. So one option that they shared is not like kind of this arduous maybe it's arduous, maybe it's not, not this physical written journal where we have to collect things and just have them do what they call invisible journals or air writing, right, so they're just thinking the thing and they're kind of like writing the letters in space with their hands. Super cool, or maybe they're writing, but they do what the authors call a pre flexion they anticipate what their peers might say before they actually get the peer feedback. So, again, they're ready, they're prepared for it. They've already kind of made that analysis themselves and now it feels like it lands a little easier, it's a little easier to take in and act on and not be defensive about. Again, thinking of that category from the gallery walks option of I'm on the right track, it's aligning, I already knew that and it's affirming Right, it feels good. The authors also know that High Tech, high, has a bunch of questions to prompt students metacognition or reflection and they kind of share these four categories. So I've adapted from this. But kind of, what did you learn about yourself at the end of a project? Or kind of, as you go through a project or a unit, what did you learn about yourself? What do you want people to notice about your work? Learn about yourself, what do you want people to notice about your work? So kind of the internal right yourself, your work, your academic skill right. What processes did you go through? So again, that learning process is important, and what would you change or revise to your actual product, to the thing that you created? So I love that idea of kind of both the balance of the internal, the final product, the processes you went through, and like what you would do different next time or what you would change or revise. I think those categories are really cool and then you can play with what's the best for your students, to kind of use for specific questions if you want to get more specific than that I also have been thinking very much about. There's another teacher who I am constantly inspired by, who is always working hard to have his students have better discussions. Gabe Weaver shout out to you you are awesome, and one of the things that we were talking about with him is he's noticing, actually, that the students who are not in kind of the advanced or honors classes are more willing to be risk takers. The advanced or honors classes are more averse to failure, like they don't want to get a wrong answer, and so in student led conversations they are worried about, you know, throwing out something that their peers wouldn't like or that the teacher wouldn't approve of. I don't know, but it is a really interesting thing that I think, to the older students get, the more they find again there's a right answer, there's a wrong answer, and school is about getting the right one. And so I think it's really important that we normalize and reduce fear of failure. Right, we normalize that failure. So one of the things that I think is super cool is that Stanford has the Stanford Resilience Project, where they actually video people in the Stanford community get up and talk about how I have failed, I have done this thing, I have failed in this big way and here's what I learned from it, here's how I have grown. So just to kind of celebrate and lean into this idea of failure, you could watch some of those videos. You could have students make their own videos. You could do something like I think one of Gabe's ideas was kind of like a failure board at the back of the room and kind of having students write down how they have failed and you know, of course, how they're growing from that failure and maybe why it was like a good failure or a good risk to take on the back wall and really celebrating those post-it notes as you accumulate them I think could be really cool. Now the other thing is in addition to the class culture and the general pedagogy of kind of risk-taking and student reflection and all these things is that your instruction, your curriculum is going to support the shift as well. Because motivation is key. And if you're not motivated, like it's just not an interesting concept that you're learning about or not an interesting project that you're engaged with, it's going to be really hard. And I know there are, you know, for us high school teachers, you know we have like a hundred plus students who are engaging with our curriculum, like it's not going to be a perfect fit for everyone. So we do want to design with that lens of co-creation with our students, so students can tap into the thing that's really cool and exciting for them, and inquiry is a big part of that. Of course that's a whole bunch of other podcast episodes, but I do want to name here that in their book Evans, moran and Sanchez talk about Ron Berger's work and Berger Rugen and Woodfin talk about. They quote them actually in their book and they say motivation is in fact the most important result of student engaged assessment. Unless students find reason and inspiration to care about learning and have hope that they can improve, excellence and high achievement will remain the domain of a select group, and so what's really cool here is this is all in their chapter on revision and revision being equitable. And so when we give students feedback, when they get peer feedback, when they self-reflect and they revise as a result of that, it actually makes your classroom more equitable and that's what we're here for in this podcast and I know you all care about that. When we have students who come in getting the quote, unquote right answers and being on track with all, they're going to continue being on track with all the skills and getting the A and not taking risks right, and that's sad for them. Right, because we want them to take risks, we want them to grow to their capacity and not just kind of maintain. But then we also want the students who come in who do not have their grade level skills present at the moment right, they have been underserved by larger societal forces, by our schooling. That is often inequitable, and we want those students to be super engaged, to care about learning, to, in their words, have hope that they can improve so that they do improve. Right, they get that feedback, they apply that feedback, they're excited about the thing and they're going to grow leaps and bounds because that motivation is intact, and so when we think about what is going to make students excited, I love this book that I'm going to come back to by Ebbets, moran and Sanchez, because it is about place-based learning. It is about being in community, in where they live. They specifically have a section in the book on purpose-driven inquiry, and I want to talk about purpose-driven inquiry here because I think it really summarizes the key pieces of curriculum design and implementation that I have always loved and found most motivating to my students. I've talked before on the podcast of how I was given in my second year of teaching. Oh my gosh, there's so much I would change about my second year of teaching, but my second year of teaching I was given an opportunity to teach students an elective class, and I was given specifically the task of designing an elective class that would serve all of the students who were basically failing in their other classes, and so I was eager to do that because these are the students that I absolutely adore, and so many of them were my students with IEP. And so I was eager to do that because these are like the students that I absolutely adore, and so many of them were my students with IEPs. I was a special education teacher and I also had a few general education students who had like attendance struggles and different things, but got to design a kind of intersectional feminism course and my goodness, those students rocked it Like they did stuff that when I've taught at the college level like my college students struggled to do, it was like on par with college level work. And these are ninth through 12th graders who have historically been failing their traditional classes and you know why? It's because we were learning in a way where they got to co-construct the product. They got to co-construct the day-to-day discussions. They got to bring their brilliance and their ideas. They got to talk about things that were relevant to them. And so what the authors talk about here around purpose-driven inquiry is that when we have students ask questions or we have, you know teachers, sometimes as teachers we are getting nervous about you know the why are we learning? Learning this question or how is this relevant to my life question, like those questions don't even come up and if they do, they're super easy to answer when we design with purpose driven inquiry in mind, so let me define that for you. So Evans, moran and Sanchez define this as purpose driven inquiry is student driven, goes beyond research alone and includes interviewing, consulting experts, conducting surveys, undertaking field studies and collecting data, distinguishing between ideas and innovations that will have a positive social, ecological and political effect and those that won't. In the last point of that quote, they reference Pister and colleagues from a publication in 2023. And so I just I love so much about this. I love the idea. It reminds me a lot of YPAR or Youth Participatory Action Research. In the going beyond the research of like reading other texts and theories. It's beyond the theorizing to the local community. Right, we're interviewing, we are consulting experts in our community which, of course, also also are going to feel connected to our school, because now community members are like, oh, this is cool, kids are doing this, family members are brought into the conversation, students ultimately engage in kind of an action project at the end where we're bettering our community based on what the students and the community members think is the best way forward. And all of that is based in evidence, qualitative and quantitative, of the vast array of evidence they have at their disposal. When students are talking about social issues, they are passionate, they care, they are very much invested because this affects their day-to-day lives and, again, that co-construction of what we're focusing on and what we're doing about it is just the best motivator I have ever seen for students and, you know, for me as well as a teacher and as a learner. The other piece of this quote that I love at the end, where they talk about, right, there are some ideas that are cool but they don't actually have positive impacts on, like, society, the ecology, politics and the local kind of way we have access to power, and then there are those that do, and I've always gravitated towards the latter right. I've always gravitated towards the thing that's going to positively impact our community socially, ecologically and politically, and this quote just kind of summarizes it all up and gives it a name purpose-driven inquiry. And so this is the thing that I want us to design with. I want, of course, us to have a reflective culture where students are engaging consistently in peer and self-reflection. I want us to normalize failure and lean into it and notice that this is how we grow. But I also want us to have students that are motivated, so that it's not a struggle to kind of buy their motivation or acquire their motivation. We're just designing with a co-creation lens and we're designing around social issues leading to community engagement, interviewing, skills, interaction that leads to action. That's going to better the community because that's going to get you the motivation without the struggle right. Students are going to be more invested from the get-go if that's the curriculum. So all of this to say is that, if you are worried that learners are only motivated by grades, there's a few things we can do right. We can try developing a unit based on purpose-driven inquiry, and there's a lot we can do to support you in this, of course, reach out to me. We're going to have an episode on place-based learning and the projects you can design from those authors of this brilliant book I've cited so much in today's episode. There are other episodes on this podcast. Go back into the backlog and check those out around designing, around purpose, and the other thing you want to do is, if that feels like too large of a shift, I encourage you to start with a student reflection protocol. Use one from the episode today, use one you already use and just use it more often. Kind of release a little bit of that feedback from you yourself and invite students to give themselves and their peers some feedback and just see what that does to the dynamic of the class. For today's freebie, to support you in all of this, I am going to link to you a draft letter to family members about shifting to equitable grading. This can feel like a very big step, and part of the fear that I've seen a lot of teachers and teacher teams have at various schools that I've worked with this year is like how do we communicate this well to students and families in a way where they're not gonna be like what on earth are you doing and I don't understand this and what? That is all very understandable, and I have a template letter that will help you get started, so feel free to use it, to edit it and personalize it and then use it, and so all of that's going to be available at our blog post for today's episode lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 196. I'm so excited for you to put all of this into action. Let me know how it goes. Best of luck until next time.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
0 Comments
![]()
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode we are talking about how education is adaptive—all pieces of it! Whether you’re talking about leadership, curriculum, or something else, education is an adaptive process. This is something to celebrate and embrace in our educational practices.
Here we’ll walk through the theory of adaptive leadership, specifically looking at what adaptive challenges are and how we can confront them in our educational environments. Why? According to researchers Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky (2009), adaptive challenges are “typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs, and loyalties rather than technical complexity and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis.” This is starkly different from a technical challenge that has a clear solution. Adaptive challenges are ongoing and require examining our own beliefs—they don’t have clear solutions. Educators face adaptive challenges daily. For example, each year most educators plan at least the first unit without knowing our students. As students respond in a particular way, we need to shift in response to them… and then keep shifting and shifting! So how can we prepare to be adaptive? There are a few things educators can focus on.
What?
Preparing to be adaptive—to make decisions, shifts, and pivots in the moment—means taking a few preparatory steps. Educators can incorporate the following practices: Step 1: Get clear on what really matters First and foremost, we have to be clear on what truly matters to us—as a school community, but also to ourselves as individuals. Try breaking it down this way:
Step 2: Develop reusable frameworks & processes Ultimately, we want to spend less time planning and more time doing the important work. If you spend time upfront creating reusable frameworks and processes—aligned with your values and priorities—you can stop reinventing the wheel all the time. Teachers may focus on developing a unit arc with key protocols and text, while leaders may have a data analysis tool so you are always using the same process to look at any data. Step 3: Utilize decision-making tools It can be so helpful to have some tools, frameworks, or steps in place to make decisions. What you use will depend on the type of decision. For example:
Step 4: Practice being adaptive with intentionality Being adaptive can take some practice and you may need to build your capacity in this area. Here are a few practices educators can try:
Step 5: Design flexibly If you go into your lessons, meetings, or conferences with a flexible plan, you’ll be able to adapt and shift as needed. There are many options for flexibility, but here are two to try:
Final Tip This is difficult, challenging work and I’m still deep in the middle of learning this. Adaptive leadership is a lifelong pursuit, so give yourself grace in the process. Sharing space with kids keeps us on our toes! Embrace that as a gift, trying to change the dynamic from frustration to gratitude. To help you build your capacity for adaptive leadership, I’m sharing my Leadership Playlist with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 195 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Welcome to episode 195 of the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm super excited about this episode because its origin was so organic. I was talking to fellow coach, cara Prennikoff, and we were talking about how education is so adaptive, just everything, all pieces right. I was thinking about the leadership lens of adaptive leadership and how we just constantly have to be ready to pivot. And you know, even from a curriculum planning standpoint and CARB was just like no, all of it right, like you plan something and then you get in front of your students and your students do this thing or they respond in this way, and then you just got to like scrap the plan and go for it and it is so adaptive and it's something to celebrate, first and foremost. Wow, teachers, amazing. I was actually listening to someone on a podcast just today at the time of recording this is in early October here but I was just listening to someone who was a teacher and a leader and they were like well, I don't make a ton of decisions as a teacher, but as a leader, and I'm like wait, wait, the most decisions I've ever made, probably in a day, was as a teacher. You were deciding constantly how to respond to this student, how to respond to this student. Okay, now, five students just did this thing. How do you respond? It is exhausting, and so kudos to teachers, first and foremost right Amazing. And educational leaders as well. I mean just all of it. Responding to kids and being in dynamic relationship with people, with humans, with so many humans, is so impressive. So, number one celebration. And now thinking about this idea of adaptive challenges, I'm just going to kind of couch this conversation. In the research and the theory of adaptive leadership, I draw a lot from Heifetz, graf, schau and Linsky's 2009 book on adaptive leadership, and specifically this quote, which is my favorite and you've heard me say it before, most likely quote adaptive challenges are typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs and loyalties rather than technical complexity, and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis. End quote. So think about all that stuff. This is deep stuff. So, when we confront an adaptive challenge this is a longstanding problem that does not have a clear solution, right? It requires us to examine our beliefs and to co-create with fellow stakeholders the way forward. That is a tough thing. It is not a technical challenge where it's a clear solution and we do this thing and now we're done, right? Oh, we don't have computers, we get computers. Now, this particular problem of getting onto the internet is solved right, like it's not. That it is adaptive. It requires us to interrogate ourselves, which is often uncomfortable, to collaborate and co-create with many, many stakeholders, which is hard right. And so, as educators, right. As educators, wherever you are in the system of education perhaps you're a teacher right, you plan for at least unit one, without even knowing your students. On a daily basis, you plan a lesson, students respond to it in a particular way, and then you need to shift in response to that. Like it is all adaptive. So, regardless of where you are, what I want to offer in this episode is a way to prepare to be adaptive. Like, how do we prepare for those moments where you just have to figure it out on the spot, right, and so on? Its kind of surface level interpretation of that scenario. It out on the spot, right, and so on, its kind of surface level interpretation of that scenario of responding on the spot. You wouldn't be able to respond on the spot, right, but I'm going to share some things with you today that will hopefully get you ready for that moment. Okay, first and foremost, we have to be clear on what really truly matters to us, to us as a school community, but also like to us as a person. So right now, for the purpose of today, let's just think of you as an individual. Right, your values, what are they? My top three? Justice, efficiency and transparency. I know that about myself. They may evolve, but I will always check in with them and see if these are the top three. So right now, I am justice, efficiency and transparency, and those three things are really important to me. Importantly, I have noticed as well which one. Those are not necessarily in order. Justice is number one, but I might say transparency is two, and three is efficiency, because I will sacrifice efficiency for justice, right? I know that about myself too, so I think that's another piece like order them. Okay, I also want you to get clear on your top priorities as a human. Again, these evolve and shift in this moment. What are they? So right now? Number one for me is wellness. So this includes, like, my personal health and wellness, and it also includes kind of my family's wellness and my wellness and experience with my relationship to my family. So maybe this is four instead of three categories under the wellness. Next is are my clients. I just want to be super responsive and supportive to the educators and educational systems I'm working with. I'm really excited about that. And next is really just making sure that I help educators and the field of education more broadly, so even those I'm disconnected from, wanting to make sure that, like I can still support folks. And then I guess, if I were to add a fifth, I would say that five is making sure that I personally I guess this is connected to wellness, but can tap into my creativity I'd really like to create and I feel like I'm at my best when I am able to create. So that's five. I recommend closer to three if you can, but, as you can see, it's hard for me. So, thinking about what your top priorities are and again ranking them to say like, okay, my health comes first, like my family's health comes first, and that just has to right. And so naming like what they are in order will help you when we get to the decision making part later. And then also, if you are teaching or you are leading your staff, like I'm going to use a teacher example but you want to get clear on the key understandings or skills that you are building within your community of either students or staff. So for a teacher, this is a little bit more specific. So we'll use that as an example. Identify five skills that you will assess throughout the year. I've talked about this from a curricular lens. This is helpful also from an adaptive lens, because if you have to adapt, it's like okay, students are really interested in this side conversation. We're kind of like going down a rabbit hole. Is it worth it? Does it support a key understanding of this course? Does it support this particular skill? So what are your five skills that you measure throughout the year? What are the key understandings that you come back to again and again, regardless of the specific content you're teaching? That are just key understandings of your course. I recently heard Dr Gloria Ladson Billings on the Street Data Pod, which I love and I've been listening to a lot lately, and so this is not a direct quote but paraphrasing her. She was just saying all disciplines have key ideas and we have to identify those key ideas. If you're not doing that, you're just teaching minutia. I think that's so powerful. You're just teaching minutia If you are not identifying the key ideas. I think she made a reference to a colleague she had worked with who said you know, if someone, if anyone, everybody knew that actually physics was just like a few, a handful of key principles, like everyone would realize how easy physics is, right, so just like the idea of they're constantly just coming back to these key ideas. Those are the things we want to teach, not the litany of dates in a history class, right? Not the litany of names in a history class. Like, what are the key ideas? So, again, just getting clear, and it ultimately helps you to simplify, to make decisions, to be adaptive. So your values, your top priorities as a human and your kind of key understandings and skills that you're working to build. Next, I would also make sure you have a few reusable frameworks and processes so you're not constantly reinventing the wheel. So you spend less time planning, more time doing the important work, and so for teachers, this might be a unit arc with key protocols and key texts that are, like, really essential, and then the rest can be kind of co-created with students, leaders. This might be a data analysis protocol. So, regardless of what data you're looking at, you're constantly doing the same process. You're not reinventing that, spending time planning for each meeting, each data set. It's just. This is the way we do things. Again, I would also identify and practice like those. What are those key human and pedagogical skills that you constantly want to support teachers with, or teachers wanting to support students with, like? What are those like frameworks? What are those processes that we use to practice those skills? Step three have some decision-making tools or steps. Based on certain types of decisions, I have different ones. So, for example, if I'm co-creating with students, my guideline is usually I will adapt to any student ideas until it negatively impacts student learning or it violates justice in some other way. Right, I think it's a violation of justice to negatively impact student learning, but literally any violation of justice. Violation of justice to negatively impact student learning, but literally any violation of justice. So I will generally default to what the students want to do, unless it hurts their learning or imputes justice Policy decisions. I want to similarly default to the people experiencing the most pain. I get this from Ayanna Pressley, whose mom always talked about. You know, the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power. Like, if I have a different idea with the people who are experiencing a pain point around a certain policy. Usually this is the students right, what? What do they say what do they want? And sometimes, on the surface, like what they say they want may be to like uphold an oppressive system, or like a contingent of students want to do that. So I think, of course, digging into that a little bit, but to if, if truly, all cards are on the table and students are like no, actually, this is truly like what is in our best interest and like that is, it truly is like yes, there you go, let's do that, We'll make it happen as much as we can. Instructional decisions. My guide is usually the question is this lesson, activity or assessment, deepening or practicing one of my five key understandings or skills? Right, and so again, going down that rabbit hole in the discussion, great, like we're going to go there because it's developing this key understanding, it's practicing this key skill. I can make the decision to go there in the moment versus. This is a rabbit hole that has nothing to do with a key understanding and we're barely practicing this important skill. Let's like we're going to come back and we're going to do the lesson as planned, or we're going to deviate for two minutes and then we're going to come back and reflect together on how that actually wasn't a helpful deviation to continue. And finally, you know we get so many opportunities, there are so many asks of us, either from colleagues or from students in an educational environment. I think it's important to have a decision-making tool for saying yes to an opportunity or no to an opportunity, and so what I would do there is reflect again you can see how these really connect to that step one, identifying what really matters, getting that clarity, because if I should say yes to an opportunity, I have to first run it through my top priorities. So does it support my top priorities? Does it support me you know supporting educators Does it allow me to contribute to the field of education? Does it actively build my understanding that will contribute to a client's school district you know their wellbeing or does it contradict any of them? So, for example, if I take this opportunity, will it negatively impact my health or my family's wellness? Okay, so then that's, since that's a higher priority right, that maybe loses. So I think it's really just a really important thing to be able to have these decision-making tools and kind of guidelines so that you can expend fewer resources, time, emotion, energy into making them in the moments and you'll just have these to kind of go back to lean on. Okay, step four. I think you really want to practice with intentionality being adaptive. So here's a few ideas Anything around like adaptive challenges, adaptive leadership, the kind of that deep work practice. Those have a few ideas. So here's one Practice identifying the underlying values, beliefs or loyalties that might make you resistant to change or, if you can, what may make others resistant to change. So in conflict resolution, this works too. If you have a conflict at home with a partner, with a family member, with colleagues, when you're facilitating sort of conferences between student to student conflict, when you are maybe engaging with stories, books, tv movies, when you are witnessing political discourse like identify what is the underlying value that is at play here, for example, debate about Second Amendment rights Regardless of where you stand, you can probably identify the folks who are like we need gun control. This is nuts, are wanting safety for themselves and their students I'm thinking about school shootings and like safety is a core, core value there. Right, we want to reduce gun violence, we need safety. Safety is important, right, and I think everyone can agree that safety is actually a goal as well. Perhaps someone who wants gun ownership to defend themselves in case of a home invasion would also say that safety is actually a goal as well. Perhaps someone who wants good ownership to defend themselves in case of a home invasion would also say that safety is a core value. So we actually share the same underlying value. We disagree on approaches to get there and we can dig into the research et cetera, et cetera and go down that path, but we can at least come together around the underlying value. Or perhaps actually it's about freedom, the freedom to do whatever right, and so then we have a competing value of safety and freedom. I bet both folks would say that those things are both important. Freedom and safety are key to a healthy life Right and a healthy society. We need both. The disagreement comes in how we live them out or perhaps what the balance is Right. And so then you have identified the values. You can have that jumping off point. So just identifying those underlying values, beliefs, loyalty that is gonna be critical to being able to then identify them in the moment. Identify when you have an adaptive challenge. Facilitate really effective, healthy conflict resolution, all of that. Another piece to this is I would seek out and participate in conversations about important topics that generate high emotions, where disagreement is either present or possible, where you can't predict. But you could possibly say like, oh yeah, there's going to be some disagreement here. Often you can find that within the school building you know around policy or around a particular topic, you might do this in like a policy forum. You know a local governance body, wherever it is like it might be around the kitchen table, I don't know. So think about where you can participate and just practice engaging in those conversations and then, within it, right, being able to identify those underlying values. I'm not saying this is easy, I am not great at this, but I know this is a place where I can practice and so I'm going to try to at least make a concerted effort to do so. Also, this is a little lighter, but thinking about the responsiveness, the responsive nature of responding in a moment, first of all, I think, just tell yourself you don't have to immediately respond. You, in a moment, first of all, I think just tell yourself you don't have to immediately respond. You can always come back and say like, hey, I see, for example, in a class of students, I see we're really interested in this piece. I didn't plan a lesson around this and I'd love to do some research and let's come back tomorrow. If you are a leader facilitating some family meetings and families are saying, hey, I'm really concerned about this thing and this policy, and you're like, okay, I don't actually have the research on that, I will come back to you, I will make it a point to get back to you in our next meeting or I will follow up with you later this week. Right, you can always come back, even on a shorter note, like you can say I'm not thinking about that for like 10 seconds, take the silence and think about how you want to respond, even if it's just coming up with that sentence of I will get back to you on this. I'm not sure, but knowing that, that's okay. If you want to be more responsive in the moment, you can do something like improv. Right, take an improv class or do some sort of game that requires you to respond and react to other people dynamically. That will just improve your confidence in being you to respond and react to other people dynamically. That will just improve your confidence in being able to respond to a lot of things absurdity in the moment, all right. And the final step I'll share step five, I think, or idea five is really to design flexibly. If we go into any sort of planning for an event, for a meeting, for a conference with students, for a lesson, you know, whatever it is, if we go in knowing that it's going to require us to be adaptive, that this could be kind of our plans can be derailed, and that there actually might be a more fruitful direction to go based on the participants, I think we design more flexibly, we are less surprised and we are more agile and nimble and adaptive in the moment. So I always try to design with flexibility in mind. That could look like creating space for participant voices students, families or staff. It could be that you prioritize in your planning asking questions over sharing information or generating questions from participants so you might share in, for example, a launch of an inquiry cycle. Here's this key concept and here I'm going to give you an opportunity to generate some questions. That's a great structure. You can also embed choice time. This could be workshops, conferences, a choice board, kind of like student to student or staff to staff grappling with a concept. Like embed that space for discussion, for meaning making, for choice and pursuit of what is interesting into your plans and then you automatically have a bit of co-creation there, because they're leading the process, they're choosing what they want to engage in. That was a whole lot of things, and so, as a final tip, I just want to remind you to give yourself grace in this. Adaptive leadership is truly a lifelong pursuit. I have said multiple times in this episode, I am still really deep in the working of this. I do not feel like I am here at a place where I have arrived, and I think so much of this work is that it is constantly responding to reflecting on your needs for growth and pursuing that intentionally. I also think that we have such a lovely opportunity in educational spaces where we get to live in space and live in community with children who keep us on our toes. I mean that is awesome, and so I do think there's a bit of a mindset shift here that will help us embracing that as a gift, as opposed to oh my gosh, this is exhausting, which it totally is. I think it's a both and situation. It is exhausting and it's such a gift. I have felt that as a parent. It is so exhausting, and anyone who is like it's not exhausting you are a liar, but I think it is exhausting and such a gift that I am around this person who constantly is just like do better, like grow. Here's a growth opportunity for you, mom, right, like here is your opportunity to rethink your approach to this. Here is your opportunity to get better quick, because I need you to get better quickly and I need you to be adaptive. And so, just personally, seeing that as a gift, as opposed to this like very large burden, opposed to this like very large burden, I think we changed the dynamic from one of frustration to one of immense gratitude and, if not all the time, at least we tip the scales a little bit in that direction. To help you build your capacity for adoptive leadership, I am sharing my leadership playlist with you. You can get that at today's blog post for the episode at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog slash 195.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
![]()
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode, we’re talking about the concept of negative peace and positive peace. This impactful framework is not known by many educators but can be transformational for our educational practices as we work towards safe, inclusive, and justice-oriented classrooms..
Why? Educators often avoid high-emotion topics with our students. Areas like current events, politics, or racism are not talked about out of fear that they’re too triggering or upsetting. But this is a mistake, and something Gorski and Matias identify in their 10 elements of white liberalism. Students will always seek out other spaces to have these conversations, so educational settings should be safe, open environments to discuss hard topics. The concept of negative peace and positive peace can help us get there. The history of these terms is fascinating. Jane Addams was the first to use the concept of “negative peace” back in 1907. She talked about how there was a negative side to what people called “peace.” Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., further defined the terms in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in 1953: Negative peace is the absence of tension, and positive peace is the presence of justice. Johan Galtung published work on the concept in 1969, defining the terms this way: Negative peace is the absence of personal violence, and positive peace is the absence of structural violence. For educators, it’s important to remember how we are prioritizing each type of peace. We often want to eliminate personal violence—of course. But is this where we stop? And are we so intent on avoiding tension we ignore difficult conversations? As educators, we want to prioritize eliminating structural violence to achieve full justice. Understanding these concepts help educators prioritize the right thing in their teachings and classrooms. Specific Considerations: From an adaptive leadership lens, educators can start using this framework by digging into these action steps: Step 1: Which types of data are you collecting and analyzing? Office referrals, detentions, and suspensions are all related to personal violence (prioritizing negative peace). They’re important, but we don’t want to stop there. It’s also important to look through the positive peace lens, at structural issues. This can include:
Step 2: Do your conflict resolution or restorative practices have a structural question for adults or leaders? In restorative conversations after student-to-student conflict, you may address those involved by discussing personal responsibilities and impacts of the situation. But to dig deeper to that structural level, it’s important to ask about underlying causes of the conflict. You might ask an individual: what was the underlying need you were missing? It may be that they were hungry and, therefore, upset and lashed out at another student. There’s always a “why” behind each action, and we need to determine if it’s structural to address it properly. Then, follow up. How can you structurally support that student's needs? What needs to change in the classroom or school to do so? Step 3: Are our pedagogical practices generating a sense of community? If students don’t feel cared for and valued, there is no positive peace. So we can go back and evaluate our pedagogies and professional framework to evaluate how we’re upholding the student voice and empowering student agency to co-create their education. This may include changing pedagogical approaches or incorporating new professional development and coaching sessions for educators. Step 4: Where are we silent on or avoiding raising issues that matter? In his letter, MLK called out “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” Is this how we’re operating in our classrooms? Are we prioritizing our comfort and “negative peace” over uncomfortable and necessary antiracist change? Educators can start by identifying where they’re choosing “negative peace” by avoiding certain topics or conversations. By identifying that, we can start to change our frameworks to achieve true positive peace. Step 5: Make a plan to design effective environments for discussion that enable students to connect and grow Ultimately, students are hungry to build their skills in talking about really tough stuff. As a student (Harshan) put it on an episode of Street Data Pod: “If you keep saying they’re not ready, they never will be ready…I think that’s a pretty dumb sentiment…[adults are afraid of] control…it’s that power they want to feel…they’re scared that people will actually break free of that mold that they’re continuing to create.” But building environments where students can have challenging discussions that raise high emotions—and then the repairs and reconnections that may need to take place—is difficult. It doesn’t happen overnight—educators will need to be committed to this as an ongoing professional development and learning priority. To get started, here are two key resources to check out: Final Tip This week, identify one place where you or your staff may be choosing negative peace over positive peace. (Use the resource below if you need help!) To help you diagnose instances where you or your staff may be choosing negative peace over positive peace, I’m sharing my Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges Mini Workbook (based on the work of adaptive leadership scholars, Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky) with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 194 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT Welcome to episode 194 of the Time for Teachership podcast. In this episode, we're talking about the concept of negative peace and positive peace. Surprisingly, when I searched my Spotify account, I could not find a podcast episode on these concepts. I'm sure it exists, but those terms did not flag anything. So I am certain this framework will be new to some folks, given that it's not even in the podcast space yet. Specifically, I want to share the spark for this episode first. 00:37 So I was listening to Street Data Pod, which is one of my favorites. Street Data is one of my favorite educational books. It's awesome. Very much centers student voice and student leadership. 00:49 And so in that context of this podcast episode, in which high school students were talking about and responding to comments from educators, from adults, who were really feeling like, you know, we don't want to, and even outside of the education space, we don't want students to be talking about hard things. We don't want high emotion topics like current events, politics, racism, any of these things that raise emotions with students right, we shouldn't be talking about it. That's the sentiment they were responding to and this little student, harshon, had a beautiful answer and he said quote if you keep saying they're not ready, they never will be ready. Right, thinking about students here, he goes on to say I think that's a pretty dumb sentiment, I love kids. And then he goes on to say, really, adults are afraid of control, right, he's saying that they really want to feel that power and they're quote, scared that people will actually break free of that mold that they're continuing to create. So end quote. I think there's so much here that students are frustrated that adults don't believe in them to be able to have the conversations they're going to have. And in Harshon's comment he really talked about how, if we don't talk about it in school, like we don't talk about it. 02:09 And I also want to add kind of this extra layer here which I've talked about before on the podcast, which is students will find other spaces in which these topics are being talked about and they might not actually have an opportunity to engage within a kind of container of perceived safety and belonging to the extent that a classroom might be able to create that. And I was listening to another episode of that same podcast where Dr Django Perez is on there talking about this idea of community care and how, you know, as an activist and community organizer, he also has been thinking about this idea of his culturally sustaining pedagogy, which he has coined a term and built out lots of research and text around that. Really, he's kind of seeing this culturally responsive pedagogy as a kind of element of community care. Like are pedagogical practices generating community care? And I'm kind of getting ahead of myself here because we'll talk about that today. 03:02 But I think, in the context of all of this right culturally sustaining pedagogy, student voices and student leadership and what do students really want to do and what do we really want to do as leaders to create the container in which students are engaged citizens, helpful participants in a community of like, moving it forward right, like leaders now and in the future, and avoiding those high emotion topics like shouldn't be the thing right. We need to equip people with the ability to negotiate and navigate conflict in ways that our leaders and our adults in our society currently are not doing right, and I wanna be very clear that that is a tough ask. It is a very tough ask given so many things, given exactly what is happening with adults in our society, given legislation that is happening in many states and communities and the fear of teacher jobs Like. I want to caveat all of this with like it is. It is challenging. It is challenging to be good at this, even in places where the law is not an issue right, and I want to encourage and inspire us that it is worth it despite the challenge. And personally, I just want to constantly get better at this. It is something I'm always striving to do and maybe the circumstances dictate how I do it, but I want to try to always do it right. I want our students to be able to navigate their emotions and emotionalities with care and thoughtfulness and to be able to discuss things that bring up emotions like a critical life skill. I also want to frame that recently on the podcast a few months ago, we had Gorski and Matias' 10 elements of white liberalism list, and avoiding or kind of equating negative piece with positive piece and mistaking these two distinctions are number two on that list. So all of this to say we've been leading to this moment of needing this framework perhaps, so I'm going to share that today Very long intro, but here we go. So let's talk about these terms negative piece and positive piece. 05:02 There has been historically kind of this emergence of this term over the last century or so, and so Jane Addams is actually one of the first documented people to use, in 1907, the term negative piece, talking about how people have talked about peace or are using the term peace in a way that she was like I have some negative connotations around this. There are bigger things and the way you're using peace almost seems like it's just not what we want, right? This is kind of like my negative view of peace. Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, in his letter from a Birmingham jail, really brought it to the forefront in 1953. In that letter, talking about specifically white liberals and what he was calling white moderates at that time, defining the term as quote negative peace, which is the absence of tension, right. And he talks about quote positive peace, which is the presence of justice, right. So negative peace, absence of tension. Positive peace, presence of justice. I really like that framing a lot. 06:10 Johan Galton I hope I'm saying your name correctly popularized this distinction next a little later, where he really developed it into a theory right, of positive peace and negative peace, negative being the absence of personal violence and positive being the absence of structural violence. So these two things came about. This distinction came about, published in 1969. So we have kind of this evolution over the course of the last again about century of this term, and so now it is taught in peace studies programs and things like that. 06:52 I think the takeaway for educators here is we want to be thoughtful about the moments in which we are and the structures in which we are prioritizing perhaps negative peace with positive peace. And so what I mean by that, given all of these definitions and uses of the term, is that sometimes we want an absence of tension, right, or we want an absence of tension, right. Or we want an absence of personal violence. And like sure that sounds like absence of personal violence sounds great. But in that model, right, galton talks about how we actually we need both the absence of personal violence and structural violence, right, we can't have true peace without both. 07:33 And in Martin Luther King Jr's model, right, dr King talks about how the negative piece is the absence of tension. Right, in that definition, I would argue that we need the tension, we need the conflict. It is healthy and we need to learn to navigate it effectively and in a healthy manner, one that enables us to connect and grow. If we don't have the connection, if we don't have the growth, we don't have evolution of society. Right, we don't have solutions to longstanding adaptive challenges. So, from an adaptive leadership lens, we really want to make sure we are not conflating these two things. And I would say again, from an adaptive leadership lens, let's kind of ask the following questions so specific considerations, to kind of make this applicable to practice. 08:19 One which types of data are you collecting and analyzing? Are they around negative piece right? Are they around kind of like office referrals, detentions, suspensions, things that are about personal violence, which, again, I'm not saying don't collect that, but is it just that? Or are we bringing in policy analysis or bringing in student and family voices, which often surface structural issues we may not be aware of with our particular lenses and experiences? Do we have a protocol that lifts up the issues of structural violence or aspects of positive peace really being lacking Like? Are we looking at identity markers that would signify that structural issues are present? Right, the great disparity between, for example, these racial identities, between these gender identities, sense of belonging right Between AP access for students with IEPs or that don't have IEPs, perceptions of belonging for different nationalities in our school, the perception of belonging versus people who were born in the community that they're going to school in, versus, not right, social, emotional excuse me, socioeconomic status? You know what are the kind of identity markers we're pulling out and filtering the data through those lenses. Right, are we contrasting specific things to identify where structural issues may not be noticed so far and may be present? 10:00 Okay, the second consideration do your conflict resolution or restorative practices, conferences, whatever you have in place have a structural question for adults or leaders? So usually I will say that restorative conferences have a few questions. Right, they might just involve the participants of it's a student to student conflict, right, what was your experience of what happens? You know, what was the underlying need that you had, or the you know whatever. That piece is just identifying kind of like the root of the problem and then like, how am I taking responsibility for my impact? Right, how did it impact you? How am I taking responsibility for my impact on others? Something like that, some basic stuff. But I don't see in there that's very like personal, right, that could get at the negative piece absence of personal violence, part of Galton's theory model or whatever but it doesn't get at the structure that may underlie the conflict in the first place. 10:59 So if we have a trend of students, or even not a trend, but like some underlying thing that contributed to that problem, that maybe in student language, the way I usually frame the question is like what underlying need were you missing, right? So I might say, well, I was very hungry, right, I was needing a basic like survival aspect. Like I was hungry and so I got angry and so I lashed out in a way that if I wasn't hungry, I might not have right. That might be a way that a high school student responds to that question, for example. However, if we were looking structurally, if I as a leader, I don't need to hop into that conversation necessarily, but afterwards I say, wow, hey, I realize that you're hungry and I realized that other students might be hungry and I realized that structurally, we don't have an ability to give you free food for whatever reason, and maybe we make that possible. Like, maybe we look into grant funding for, like, a snack bar or something great, like I don't know what it is, but I'm just off the top here thinking about what you could say. 12:00 I think there are often structural things that underlie interpersonal conflicts that we could identify as leaders. Either looking at trends across these situations or in the moment that a restorative conference has finished. We note that on a form Are there. You know, we finished this thing. Are there structural pieces we want to identify or look into that could reduce the likelihood of something like this happening in the future? How do we structurally support? 12:27 The third consideration that I would think about is are our pedagogical practices generating that sense of community care that Dr Django-Parris is talking about? So what pedagogies are we employing? Are we infusing into our professional development, professional learning sessions, into our coaching? What are we modeling as leaders for teachers, right? What are those aspects of community care where everyone right under culturally sustaining pedagogies under that umbrella, thinking about everyone right under culturally sustaining pedagogy under that umbrella, thinking about everyone experiencing belonging. How do we make sure all students and teachers are experiencing that and feeling cared for, feeling like they are valued? And how do we do that? Because if we are not doing that, we don't have positive peace, right, we might not see, for example, or witness experience, we might not have an outpouring of students complaining, right, negative peace, right, absence of tension in MLK's definition. But we might have an absence of positive peace because we haven't created the space for students to be able to say the thing that they need, right. 13:42 So I've thought about other kind of student voice frameworks as well, applied to Mitra's student voice pyramid I've talked about before on the podcast, where when we have students respond to a survey saying there's a problem but then we don't actually address it and we don't work with them to fix it, we actually have increased turbulence, we have increased tension that builds because we invited the ideas and we didn't do anything with them. We didn't partner with students, we didn't support their agency in co-constructing a solution, right? So are we engaging in practices that truly enable students to feel like they belong, they are cared for, they are loved and they have a true voice that will be respected and listened to and actioned on? Right, that they have true agency in the co-creation of their learning experience. I think the big next one, right? 14:45 The fourth consideration is where are we silent on issues that matter? Or where are we avoiding raising issues that matter? Where are positive piece, the full, the kind of fuller piece, the piece that precedes those definitions is, quote the white moderate who is more devoted to quote order than to justice, who prefers a negative piece, which is the absence of tension, to a positive piece, which is the presence of justice, end quote. That's some context there, right, we are often in this space. I find myself often in a space of really being devoted to order, right, really being falling into the trap of negative peace, right, oh, everyone's quiet and peaceful and not complaining and great, everyone's happy, the end Versus digging in a little deeper and identifying injustices that are present. We have to be uncomfortable, we have to sacrifice order and silence and the negative peace idea, the absence of tension, for the larger positive peace. So we have to first be able to identify where this is happening, where we personally are gravitating to that lens or that preference, living that out, where our team is. I think there's so much. 16:18 I mean, dr King goes on to say a lot more, but talks about the quote we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. End quote. Like that is the theme here, right, it's not just this definition that comes from this. If you've read this text, it is robust with this and I'll just share another one. Right, he's talking about white church leaders who he's expecting to step in and work and labor for racial justice, and he says, quote all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows. End quote. 17:03 Great, again, hearkening back to this idea of Gorski and Mathias's 10 elements of white liberalism, this is number two on here. Right, we see this when we are laboring for racial justice. We see this in white liberals, white liberal spaces, and recognizing that the vast majority of educators are white females. I think this is a really important, as a white female, just naming this, this, that we, we we identify this as a thing that's happening and we determine where we personally or our staff are silent on these issues or avoiding issues of racial justice. Right, so are we prioritizing our comfort and positive piece over excuse me, a negative piece, over uncomfortable and necessary anti-racist change? 17:50 So, again, thinking about Harshon's words, I think this is really important to name that students are hungry for opportunities to build their skills in talking about really tough stuff, and so I think step number five, or consideration number five, is to really make a plan to design effective environments for really challenging discussions that raise high emotions, that enables students to connect and grow and learn from one another in community, to make mistakes and to recognize and take responsibility for the impact and the repair that those mistakes may have right and to truly live in community, to truly use their hearts and their heads. I will link to resources for your staff to build this capacity. I will link to resources for student discussion supports. But think about where in your professional learning as a leader, where have you identified places where this is something that staff can practice, because we're not just going to get good at it. Many, many adults, myself included, are not great at this. Naturally, it takes so much work, so much professional learning, so much experience just in the conversations and practicing and making mistakes and growing and learning together and being in community, and we can't just anticipate our teachers are going to be ready for it. Right, this is hard work and we need to support it with professional learning. So identify where in your professional learning calendar this lives, and it shouldn't be a one-off right. This should be like an ongoing, touch-based thing that I think actually is really best when leadership directs this or when leadership facilitates and participates actively in this as well. 19:33 Okay, my final kind of call to action here is that this week I'd love for you to identify one place where you or your staff may be choosing negative piece over positive piece, even just writing those terms up on a sticky note and having that present. Just have that construct front of mind. Try to identify where this might be happening. I'll link to another resource if you need help with this. That's from the work of Adaptive Leadership Scholars Heifetz, graschau and Linsky. It's my Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges mini workbook, which will help you identify where avoidance is present and what are kind of like the listen, experience, observe, things that you can try to use as a resource bank or a checklist of like ah, I just witnessed this happening. There we go. That's that in action. Now I can concretely identify it as an example of where we may have chosen to preserve the negative piece or the absence of tension over a positive piece or structural justice.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
![]()
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode, I’m discussing ideas for shared leadership and co-construction at the classroom level using concepts from Dr. Asao Inoue’s work, specifically his book, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies.
In particular, we focus on the goal of disrupting hegemonic power (e.g., white, patriarchal) and the specific practice of co-constructing a grading contract with students as one way to achieve that disruption. Why? In his transformative book, Dr. Inoue cites research surrounding three key themes: 1) Grades are inherently flawed. In 1961, researchers French, Carlton, and Diederich conducted a factor analysis study in which 300 papers were given a grade from 1-9 by 53 graders. About one-third of the papers received every single grade (one through nine). In fact, all but 6% of the papers received at least seven different grades, and 100% of the papers had at least five grades. The study concluded that agreement among all the graders could only predict 9.6% of the variance in grades, meaning the system of grading is not reliable, and thus unfair. However, we operate in an educational system that requires these grades to progress forward, so what does creative disruption look like for educators? 2) The standards are often racist. Even when we try to assess more equitably—perhaps using assessment tools like standards-based rubrics—Inoue points out that we are still measuring from a “white racial habitus.” For example, grammar is often assessed based on the standard dominant form of English, which is part of the white racial habitus. Instead of focusing solely on grammar, educators can focus on the clarity of thought and how well learning is communicated. Another area we see this is in the over-emphasis on rationality and logic. In focusing only on finding the “objective truth,” we may miss marginalized perspectives and the heart component of our experiences, which is just as necessary for change and transformation. 3) Students learn better without grades. Kohn’s 1999 study found that students learn more when they are asked to reflect and self-assess their work but aren’t graded. Inoue summarizes the study’s findings, writing that students who are “led to think mostly about how well they are doing—or even worse, how well they are doing compared to everyone else—are less likely to do well” (p. 156). So, the self-reflection is positive, but the constant comparison and focus on their standing compared to other students can be harmful. What? These three concepts are big and may feel unwieldy for educators to approach. Let’s begin with some small action steps to implement this work in our educational environments. Step 1: Interrogate your beliefs about grades Your starting point is to interrogate your beliefs about grades: what should be graded and what shouldn’t. You can also invite the conversation with your students—what do they think is fair or unfair? Together, you can dig deeper to look at the “hidden path to success” that Joe Feldman talks about. These are the privileges and access some students have to resources and institutions that prepare them for higher grades in a way other students don’t get. Step 2: Determine where you can test ideas After you interrogate your beliefs about grades, you can determine where you can test some ideas. What’s in your locus of control? While you may still need to convert to A-F grades for report cards, what can you do before that? What systems are you using internally? Dr. Inoue talks about the seven elements of anti-racist writing assessment ecologies, including defining the purpose in the assessment, knowing the power dynamics inherent in it, and inviting reflection through your processes. Step 3: Invite student co-construction The first two steps are foundational in creating a safe environment that enables us to learn and grow together. We can only invite students into co-construction when they feel safe and valued. Even so, it may feel difficult for students who are not used to this. As educators, though, we can keep working to invite students into co-construction, normalizing the process and showing that you are working together in this. Step 4: Create the contract or rubric When you invite students to co-construct, what do you actually do with them? One starting point is creating a contract or developing a rubric together. It could be looking at a dimension-based rubric or something very flexible that doesn’t just use the standard language. One meaningful idea is to use labor-based components, so students track how many hours of labor they put into the project. It can be a component of the rubric that you’ve all agreed upon together and reflects a different metric than output or performance. Step 5: Normalize reflection & self-assessment as classroom practice To prioritize reflection and self-assessment, embed it into your schedule—every Friday, for example, you set aside time to work on this. Co-create protocols with students for how you’ll reflect and assess, and then use it regularly so it becomes a standard practice. Final Tip We covered a lot of ground in this episode, and this all is a massive undertaking! Be gentle with yourself and focus on trying just one piece to start. To help you more deeply consider and perhaps implement Dr. Anoue’s work, I’m linking a fantastic resource from a workshop from Dr. Anoue: Workshop Handout - Labor-Based Grading Contracts, which also includes examples of dimension-based grading. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 193 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes
TRANSCRIPT 00:00 Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 193. And in this one we're talking about anti-racist co-constructed assessment ecologies. So I am a little late to the game with Dr Asao Inoue's work and specifically I have been diving into his book Anti-Racist Writing Assessment Ecologies and it is profoundly interesting. So we're going to dive into it, specifically thinking about, you know, through the lens in this leadership series of shared leadership and what that looks like inside of a classroom and what it looks like to co-construct things that are as important as assessments and inviting student voice and co -creation in that Really, really excited about it. And also just to think about this goal that is underlying all the things we talk about on the podcast disrupting the hegemonic power where there's a lot of white, patriarchal, cis-hetero power that exists in classroom dynamics, that is steeped in education. There's the teacher-student dynamic, there's all sorts of power, and so how do we disrupt it and what are the practices as well as kind of keeping that goal in mind? And Dr Inouye's work really does this well and gives us some food for thought. So let's dive in. 01:16 First I want to take a look at the research. So the research that Dr Inouye cites in the book tell us a couple of things, three big ones, and I'll go through each of them. One grades are inherently flawed. Two, the standards we assess on are often racist. And three students learn better without grades. So let's look at the research on each. Grades are inherently flawed. 01:40 So in 1961, researchers French, Carlton and Yedrick, conducted a factor analysis study. So they gave 300 papers a grade. They had 53 graders and each of the 300 papers were given a grade on a scale from one to nine. All the grades are given, all the papers are graded. They take a look About a third of the papers 101 papers received every single grade, Like the same paper got a one, a two, a three, a four all the way through nine. A third of the papers received every single grade. That is bananas. All but 6%. So 94% of the papers received at least seven of the nine grades. So 94% of the papers received at least seven of the nine grades and 100% of the papers had five or more had at least five grades. The study concluded that agreement among the graders could only predict because this was a factored analysis study only predict 9.6% of the variance in grades. So in short, what this means is the system of grading was not reliable, right in this study. And clearly, if it's not reliable, it is not fair, right If the student writes something that someone grades as a nine and someone else grades as a one, someone else grades as a five, right, Like it's just not a system that we should be relying on and we can do things certainly to mitigate that bias, that multiple perspectives that the graders bring in, and we can do some like norming and things like that I think are certainly helpful, but it is something that we have to keep in mind. The process of grading, inherently, is not great, Though we are in a system that requires grades, requires grades for schools and children who are going from elementary to middle school, middle school to high school and high school to college and other spaces where grades are valued. And so, if we are to be working within the system, right, Dr Inouye is writing from the perspective of a college professor, and so I want to think through these things for through a K-12 lens today. 03:42 Next point standards are often very racist, and so when we try to assess even if we're assessing equitably right, we're using the Feldman's work, which I love, using tools like standards-based rubrics right, we are measuring the standards that are still coming from, in Dr Inouye's language, a white racial habitus. And so he specifically writes about the writing class that he teaches and assessing writing. Specifically he writes, quote conventional writing assessment practices rarely, if ever, dismantle the racism in our classrooms and schools because they do not address whiteness and the dominant discourse as hegemonic and students' relationship to it end. Quote One piece of this is grammar, even if it's not in the rubric. But people will assess grammar, they will assess ways of speaking the standard dominant form of English right, which is part of a white racial habitus. When we assess in this way, these other ways of communicating, these other phrases or grammatical schemes are, like, less valid or not valid here. For me, separating out the grammar pieces from is the writing effectively communicating, that is one kind of step in the process. I have seen and been in sessions with teachers who have assessed something where grammar is not even in, like nothing about. Even conventions of written English are part of the rubric and they're still assessing with it. So we have to kind of divorce our minds from like what do we, what are we really doing here, and is the goal? For me, the goal is usually like is it communicated effectively. 05:19 Dr Inouye also writes the cognitive capacity is the ability to think rationally, logically and objectively, with rigor, clarity and consistency, that is valued most. So the idea of being able to be hyper-rational doing, for example, one thing I've really started to unlearn myself is claim evidence reasoning. We teach it and it is good to be able to have a stance and back it up with evidence. Evidence is important and in times fraught with conflict, even with adults in our society, I think it's really important that we learn to seek to understand or that we might have kind of this convoluted route to understanding and it's not always linear. And I think this idea of the head and the heart both being critically important as social scientists, as humans, right when we're teaching things like history class, I personally have realized I don't always want to be in a society or around humans who are only rational and logical, who only think there is an objective truth, Because there's always marginalized perspectives. They're missing a complete component, the heart component of the work we live in, that intellectualizing space and that often inhibits us from feeling discomfort, which is necessary for change and growth and transformation of society and structure. So I do think this idea of the white racial habitus, informs things like grammar, informs things like rationality being supreme above emotionality, divorcing the head from the heart. These are just things that we see in standards and what we prioritize and what we measure. So recognizing that, going into this conversation, I think, is really critical. 07:05 The third piece students learn better without grades. So Cohn in 1999 did a study that found that students learn more when they are asked to reflect and self-assess on their work, but they are not graded. So Dr Inouye summarizes this study's findings in his book, writing that students who are quote led to think mostly about how well they are doing or, even worse, how well they are doing compared to everyone else, are less likely to do well, end quote. So this idea of how well am I doing? Where am I in the ranking? How's everyone like? Am I normal, right, Like this constant comparison which, given social media and just the culture that kids are raised in, is already hyper present in their awarenesses and engagement with the world. I think this is probably the study. Study was done pre-social media, as it is now 1999. So just imagine, right 25 years later, how more kind of intense that might actually be in a study. I'm not familiar with more recent research, but I bet it's out there. 08:08 So again, when students are given space to reflect and self-assess, great, that's actually really good. But the grade component and that comparative or like getting some sort of like label placed on where they're doing, how well they're doing, that's actually not helpful. That's really important, kind of going into this, that we want to distinguish feedback versus grades. Right Assessment can be many things it can be feedback, it can be grades. We truly benefit from the feedback and the self-reflection and all those practices, not from the grade itself. And I get that we might need to report it somewhere. But how can we internally, within classrooms, within our interactions with students, do the former and not the latter? 08:52 Okay, so now let's talk a little bit about what this actually looks like. The first thing we can do is interrogate your beliefs about grades what should be graded and what shouldn't. Another piece here is determine you know what your students believe about grades. So interrogate both yours and invite the conversation about what your students believe. What is fair, what is not fair. Joe Feldman's work on clarity, not having that hidden path to success that some students who are typical A students might be, partly how they've learned, but they've also had access to institutions or preparation in some way that enables them to be successful, whereas other students don't, right? So, again, thinking through the lens of equity, we really need to do some unlearning. 09:36 Dr Inouye talks about how quote tensions in the assessment ecology a product of its politics often come from an uncritical use of a dominant discourse in judging and assessing student writing. He goes on to talk about how, when we co-create with students and then we can actually see that as like participating in the counter-hegemonic by co-creating with students, by pushing back on maybe what we traditionally think should be graded, we actually can disrupt the hegemony present in classrooms. I think that's a pretty cool idea. There's a lot of things, though, again, that we might have to let go of in order to arrive there. The next part is where can you test ideas, Figure out where you might be able to do a little testing, a little piloting. Figure out what's in your locus of control so you still may need to convert A through F to report cards, to report out Totally understandable and like what do you do, though, to get that right? What is the conversion? But like what's the system you use internally? And I think part of that is figuring out right, like Dr Inouye writes about the seven elements of anti-racist writing, assessment, ecologies, and so he talks about one being power, right and so needing us to interrogate it a little bit of what I talked about in the first bullet point here and then next is like the parts, right, the parts of the system, the artifacts, the codes, the judgments made by people. 10:59 So a portfolio, for example, is kind of like a part. That's a part that we grade, and when we have the grade as a part, it's going to change students' attitudes, right, it's going to change how students respond to a particular assignment and it's going to change the whole nature of things, right, and so if we can't get away from grades, how do we get close enough to away from grades that we're centralizing the feedback over the grade itself? The third element of the ecology is purpose. What is the purpose of being here, of writing, of assessing? We're not doing this for a grade, we're doing this because assessment is actually really what's going to help you grow. Fourth is people, and all people have different powers. So, again, you can see some of these intersecting. Power and people are two different elements, Processes. So, again, like inviting reflection, awesome, and we want to make sure that that reflection process is not informed or dominated by kind of that white racial habit. 12:01 As you talked about products, so here he talks about direct and indirect consequences. So direct product would be like the score, the grade, the decision, the way that the teacher or the peer gives you feedback. And then indirect is a result of the direct thing. So you get feedback that talked about how you should change your grammar, and so now your focus is on superficial editing, right? You got a D grade, and so now you think you're not a great student and that's going to inform your future performance and your identity is like I'm not a writer, I'm not a good student, right? So we have products that are direct and indirect as the result of the direct. 12:39 And then, finally, the seventh element is place, and so this is rhetorical and material conditions and the production of judgment. So this might be a discussion board because that's where the judgment or the assessment or the feedback precisely is taking place. It might be a rubric. This is a material condition, it's a thing that we interact with to offer that feedback, whether you're a teacher, whether you're a student it might be student to student writing groups, that feedback, whether you're a teacher, whether you're a student it might be student to student writing groups Place is where we can make the hegemonic visible in Dobrin's words and so we are able to kind of name the thing in the space. And again, all of these elements interact with each other. So how people are interacting with these material conditions, the rubric within the writing group, how power is conveyed there, like all of those pieces, are really important and of course, to do this well right, we really need to be thoughtful about the community involved. 13:39 Step three what I would say after you've interrogated your own beliefs and determined where you might be able to test out some ideas, maybe playing with one of those elements of the ecology might be able to test out some ideas. Maybe playing with one of those elements of the ecology we want to make sure that we have laid the foundation that invites a perception of safety, that enables us to grow and learn and make mistakes and be uncomfortable, and that values feedback. So I think all of those things are kind of foundational to inviting co-construction. I also want to say that students may find it difficult to co-construct because they are not used to co-constructing. It is hard for students to come in and tell you what they want, partly because the older they are, the more they've been kind of indoctrinated into. This is how we do school. Just tell me, or I know how it works. We're not going to do this other thing. I don't. I've lost my kind of creative spark because school has taken it from me right and all of its rigidity of the system. 14:36 But also that when we invite student co-construction there's a power dynamic there and this is one of Feldman's responses to Inouye's work is that when you invite that co-construction, you can't ignore the power dynamics that are at play here and the societal pieces that we have just been consistently told like this is academic English, right, this is the way that things are graded, this is like this is the way, and so it's really hard to disrupt that and I think we do our best to. But I do believe in that invitation of co-construction with students and so a couple of things that you might be able to play with here in terms of you know what you actually move forward with, in terms of like a thing to do. So, once you've invited student co-construction, I think step four is really gonna be what do you do now? What are the things you like put some things into play, create the contract or developing the rubric together. Whatever it is that you are creating, like create the product, and that could be, for example, dimension-based rubrics. It's something that I really gravitate to as, I think, a beautiful blend of what Feldman talks about and what Inouye talks about, because, yes, you're still kind of speaking to the standard at large, but it is way more flexible, and I really like that. So that flexibility piece is critical, I think, to being able to not bring in all of the pieces that we bring in when we use the specific standard language. So that's one piece that's really really cool. And then another, I think, that labor-based component of a grade where Dr Noy grades his students based on how many hours of labor they put in and then they track that. That's a really cool piece to play with. And so perhaps, using that as like one line of the rubric, I know when we, when I was a teacher, we often had like a percentage like 85% were academic standards and like 15% were like process standards or we call them work habits. But I think about like the way in which we labor. We could be like labor based standards or something, and maybe that is co constructed with students to determine, like, what the language is. So I think that could be super cool. 16:58 And then finally, a last practice, once you've kind of created the contract whatever the kind of material product is step five is really thinking about the ways that you embed and normalize reflection and self-assessment into your classroom practice. So put it right in the schedule right, Every Friday is student self-reflection. We are going to use this protocol for peer feedback. So we're going to have all of the students use peer review, for example, where they look at the rubric and they annotate the rubric so that they could give feedback on a fellow student's piece of work very specifically and precisely related to how they'll get the assessed grade from the teacher. They're just kind of normalizing use of all of these pieces so that it's not we invite student co-construction and then we do nothing with it. Right, we actually co-create something that is a kind of living document or rubric or whatever it is contract in the class and then we use it regularly, Like every week. There's a protocol that involves us using it and self-reflecting and maybe not even giving grades right, Maybe just using that rubric. That like narrative feedback, qualitative feedback from peers and teachers and self feedback from peers and teachers and self, and then the grade comes later. 18:12 Right Now, this was a massive kind of episode with lots of research and lots of heavy kind of unlearning and big ideas. I want to say it is a massive undertaking and I just encourage you to kind of try one piece, one little piece to start, and I will link in the show notes a beautiful kind of summary of Dr Inouye's work. After listening to a podcast, I was led to someone's website that had this on there and it is so incredibly helpful. You can grab that at lindsaybethlyonscom. Slash blog slash 193. 00:35 / 18:48
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
![]()
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this compelling episode of the Time for Teachership podcast, Kwame Sarpomenta shares his transformative journey from classroom teacher to influential consultant and author. He emphasizes the importance of discovering one's identity beyond professional labels, envisioning an education system where students can truly express their authentic selves without fear, drawing from Dr. Bettina Love's concept of freedom dreaming. Kwame also discusses the essential mindset shifts needed among educators, particularly those from dominant groups, and underscores the significance of critical humility in understanding diverse identities and addressing systemic inequities.
The Big Dream Kwame Sarpomenta articulates his big dream for education as a system where "every young person can go into a school as their unapologetic, authentic self, without having to leave any part of who they are at the door." He envisions educational spaces where students are welcomed and accepted for who they are, without any questioning or interrogation of their identities. This dream is grounded in Dr. Bettina Love's concept of freedom dreaming, which calls for an education system that does not perpetuate "spirit murdering" but instead fosters environments of acceptance and authenticity. Mindset Shifts Required To achieve this big dream, Kwame highlights several crucial mindset shifts: Embrace Self-Learning and Humility: Educators, particularly those from overrepresented groups, must undergo a process of self-learning and humility to understand diverse identities deeply. This involves recognizing the vast array of experiences and perspectives that exist beyond one's own. Critical Humility: Kwame emphasizes the need for critical humility, which involves questioning one's ideologies and biases around race, gender, and other identity markers. This is crucial for disrupting the status quo in education. Empathy and Active Listening: Developing empathy and actively listening to the experiences of marginalized communities is essential. Educators should engage in conversations with people from different backgrounds to understand their firsthand experiences. Action Steps Step 1: Affirm Student Identities Create an inclusive classroom environment where students feel safe to express their authentic selves. Affirm and celebrate the diverse identities of all students. Step 2: Combat Dominant Narratives Actively counter dominant narratives through counter-storytelling. Incorporate diverse perspectives and voices in the curriculum to challenge stereotypes and broaden students' understanding. Step 3: Foster a Collaborative Classroom Culture Co-create a compassionate and collaborative classroom culture. Encourage open dialogue, mutual respect, and a sense of community among students. Provide opportunities for students to work together and learn from one another. Challenges? One of the significant challenges in this work is the fear of making mistakes. Kwame acknowledges that perfectionism can be a barrier, as it perpetuates white supremacy and hinders genuine progress. Educators may worry about saying the wrong thing or not having all the answers, which can deter them from engaging in meaningful conversations and actions. One Step to Get Started To begin addressing these challenges, educators can start by engaging in self-reflection and seeking out resources to deepen their understanding of diverse identities. As Kwame suggests, the first homework is to do the deep digging and interrogate one's own ideologies and biases. By committing to ongoing self-learning and demonstrating critical humility, educators can take the first step towards creating more inclusive and equitable educational environments. Stay Connected You can find this week’s guest on their WEBSITE - https://identitytalk4educators.com INSTAGRAM - @kwam_the_identity_shaper TWITTER - @identityshaper LINKEDIN - https://linkedin.com/in/kwame-sarfo-mensah PATREON - https://patreon.com/kwamesarfomensah To help you implement today’s takeaways, Kwame is sharing Free learning resources from his upcoming book, "Learning to Relearn" with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 192 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Kwame Sarpomenta. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm so happy you're here. 0:00:09 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Thank you, Lindsay. It's an honor to be here. 0:00:12 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. We connected many years ago and now we're coming back full circle. You have the most incredible book that I have read in a while. I am so excited oh my gosh for sure, top book of the year. I am so excited oh my gosh for sure, Top book of the year. I am very excited. So I am really excited to just learn from you on this journey and this conversation. I want to also have space for you to say anything that you think listeners should be aware of, know about you keep in mind as we jump into the conversation today. 0:00:42 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Of course I'm ready. 0:00:46 - Lindsay Lyons Is there anything I feel like there's a lot of, you know, formality to bios, like there's, like here's the list of things that define me as a human. But is there anything beyond that, either like you as a human person roles outside of like the list of things that are traditionally in bios, or just kind of something that you've been thinking about as you have been writing the book and going through the very tedious process of publishing a book that you think people should be aware of before, kind of like our big first question. 0:01:18 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah I think, in terms of who I am, if you want to look for all the professional credentials and everything, you can go to my LinkedIn profile. You'll find it all there. So, beyond the profile, I will tell you that I am a father, I'm a husband, I'm Dorothy's son Dorothy is my mom's name and I'm somebody who is still learning what it means to be a human outside of being a teacher, because for about 13, 14 years, I was working in the classroom, either as a teacher assistant or at a lead teacher capacity, and then, when I finally moved abroad with my family and transitioned more into consulting, it gave me more time to spend with my sons, more time to spend with my wife and more time to spend with the people I love, and through that process, I was able to untap certain facets of my identity that allowed me to do what I do now. I discovered writing during that time, I discovered podcasting. During that time, I discovered just a lot of different things, and it's amazing what happens when you make that pivot and you allow yourself to be immersed in all these different worlds. 0:02:50 - Lindsay Lyons So much of your story resonates with me as a former teacher who became a consultant and podcaster and and, and just that, um still learning to be human, that deeply resonates. So thank you, thank you for that. Yeah, so I think one of the big questions I like to jump off with is, um Dr Bettina Love describing freedom, dreaming in terms of the dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, and I love thinking about you know, the big dreams we hold for education, but I specifically like thinking about them in that framing right, because without that, what are we really doing? And so I'm curious to know, like, what is that big dream? If you could encapsulate that big dream in a response here big dream- if you could encapsulate that big dream in a response here. 0:03:27 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Well, to use Dr Love's words, there's a lot of spirit murdering that happens in our schools, and I saw a lot of that during my time, whether it was as a Boston Public Schools teacher or even a teacher teaching at different schools throughout Philadelphia. I would say that the big dream for me is to see every young person be able to go into a school as their unapologetic, authentic self, without having to leave any part of who they are at the door. They're able to go into spaces where teachers and all others in that community welcome them for who they are and they don't question or interrogate any parts of their identity. That's what I want for every young person, including my sons, to have as an educational experience. 0:04:25 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you for sharing that. I think that's like. That is, that is the minimum right, like that is like we right, like this should be happening education community right. Yeah, thank you for naming that and and naming that. It's not right, that it's not, it's not happening now and so things need to shift right, things need to change and I'm curious, in your coaching and your consulting and in writing the book even, I think there's a lot of things that you that you name that are maybe different ways of operating, different ways of interrupting or disrupting oppression, different ways of positioning yourself, particularly for, like, as a white educator myself, right, thinking about what, what are the various mindset shifts that folks with various identities or particular identity that you have in mind? I know that most of the teaching staff in the US is white women, so I mean, I'm operating from that perspective and acknowledging that that is a very overrepresented group. But are there mindset shifts that you think and you coach on in terms of getting to that space, getting to that goal that you just described of like everyone being their unapologetic, authentic self in schools, that we need to kind of like, change our thinking around or operate from a different place? That's going to kind of unlock movement towards that goal or 100% success for that goal. 0:05:46 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Yes, for sure. And when I wrote this book Learn to Relearn I knew that this was going to be a book that was going to be about transformation. But I knew that in order for this transformation to happen, in order for teachers to actually do what the title suggests they do, they had to do their own self-learning and to get to that place of humility where you feel like there's so much that you have to learn about different people, different cultures, different backgrounds, all these different identity markers. You have to go to the source backgrounds, all these different identity markers. You have to go to the source and I had to go to the source in order to get the information that I synthesized for this book. So, when you look at those first five chapters of the book, that was hard research I had to do. That included a lot of call-ins from very close and trusted colleagues and friends of mine, who are also phenomenal educators, who were telling me about their firsthand experiences and what it was like to be in school and what life is like holding these different identities. Because the reality is, you know, being a cis, hetero, black, male, I can't speak about everybody's experience. Heck, I can't even speak about the experiences of all black people, because we know that none of these communities are monolithic by any means. There is so much diversity and there's so much nuance and there's so much nuance and there's so much beauty within each community. And in recognizing that, I knew that I needed to tap in to all the different people who contributed to the book. I actually ended up tapping into close to 50 different educators and out of the 50 educators, about 30 of them made the book. So I still have a whole bunch of interviews, a whole bunch of conversations that have not been leaked out to the public that I may use for a future book, who knows? But the biggest thing that I had to learn in that process is, in order to truly understand what it means to be a good human to somebody and this transcends the education space you have to have empathy, really have to have critical humility, and these are things that Dr Ilana Sibi-Ruiz talks about when she talks about the archaeology of the self, when she talks about her racial literacy development framework. She brings up these different things In order for you to get to the point of interruption where we're disrupting the status quo in education and all these things that we know are wrong and really bad in our system. We have to go through the steps. We have to have the empathy, we have to have the humility. We have to do that deep digging those excavations that she talks about, where we have to question our own ideologies and thoughts around race, around gender, around these other identity markers. We have to interrogate those experiences that we had growing up that led us to have these stereotypical thoughts and ideologies about what's going on. That's the work that we have to do. That's the first homework that we have. That's the work that we have to do. That's the first homework that we have. And then from there you talk to people who have the first experience. You talk to people in academia. You talk to K-12 teachers. You talk to people that are within the community who may not be in education, but guess what? They hold these experiences and they know what it means to have this identity like. I couldn't tell you what it feels like to be a queer person, because that's not an identity that I hold. But from listening to people who are from that community, they tell me because you are a cis-hetero male, you have privileges that I don't have. You're able to walk around in spaces that I'm not able to access. I had to learn that In addition to the language, to be able to articulate that and understand the nuance there. Matter of fact, one of the biggest inspirations for writing this book was a call-in, and I talk about it in the second chapter where I talk about Native perspectives. So I have a friend named Tricia Mokino. She goes by the Indigenous Educators on Instagram. I was doing a virtual conference back in 2020, 2021. And my goal was to try to make it as intersectional and as diverse as possible and hit all the different markers, and I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it. And then, when I posted the flyer for it, that featured all of the presenters and it's about 20 of them. I see this comment from Tricia and it says hey, are you inviting any indigenous presenters for this conference? And sadly, I said no. And at that point she said you know like I support your work, I love what you're doing, but we're going to have to have a conversation about that. I did. It still perpetuated the invisibilization of Native people in the country, which then perpetuates the settler colonialism that happens within the country, and so we went to a whole deep dive on that. She told me what it meant for Native tribes to get their land back, what it means to have a relationship with nature, the land, how that relationship is sacred. We talk about the responsibility of non-native people to To invest and give back to federally recognized tribal nations because we are on their land. So, understanding water rights and other indigenous rights and all these different aspects of the culture that helped me to have a more informed understanding of my own actions, of the culture that helped me to have a more informed understanding of my own actions. And then that got me curious about what else there was to learn about Native tribal nations. And it then just segued into a deep rabbit hole where I'm now trying to learn about the different nuances and the complexities within the Latinx communities and then the Asian American Pacific Islander communities, and then understanding whiteness to a great degree, not as someone who has been a victim of it, but as someone who is curious about why society functions in a way that it does and why, from the time they were born, we indoctrinate these different principles and ideas of what it means to live in the society, ie dominant culture and the different rules that they inform and impose on others who are in this space. So this was me learning as I'm writing. So, when I write those words, this is me sharing the learnings that I've acquired over this three to four year period some very traumatic events that happen in their lives. For them to be that transparent, it only brings an additional layer to the whole experience of the book. So it's a learning journey and it still is a learning journey because what I know now will probably be more in the next year or two, because I'm sure enough going to learn something new. I'm going to have to correct something that I wrote in the book, because it's not a book that is going to be perfect. There's going to be mistakes, there's going to be nuances and things like that, and it was something that I had to understand, because one thing that I learned through this writing process is that, even though people may be in that same historically marginalized community, it doesn't mean that they share the same language. It doesn't mean that they think about things in the same language. It doesn't mean that they think about things in the same manner, even like some of the words that I would use that you would think are universally recognized within the community. No, you get into a semantics conversation, and this is between people within their own community. Having this conversation so me being outside the community you want to make sure you're being respectful and using the right words to give it justice, but then you realize you can't make everybody happy. Somebody is going to be disappointed in the end in the end. So once I was able to get past that mentally, then it became a little bit easier to write the book. But I'll be honest, lindsay, that really hung me up a little bit. 0:16:19 - Lindsay Lyons That makes so much sense. And to speak to a piece of your book right, perfection is a tool of white supremacy, so I feel like that is a piece. Right, it's the culture that we're seeped in the water we're swimming in. Right, I think that's right. Yeah, there's so so much in there. I just want to say thank you for all that you just shared here on the podcast, but also so much in the book. You, you like. It is clear, you live what you're telling folks to do like you're living it, like you. The um, uh, trisha, you said her name was right. Trisha, is that right? yeah you included like the screenshot of the conversation so people could literally see this is what was said to me. This is how I responded, like that was so cool to me as I was reading it, just just like, wow, the the um. I think you use the term critical humility earlier in our conversation and and I just I can see that in in what you have put together in this book and I I love, like for the um, white supremacy section I think it was chapter one, but, like you, you literally name like each of the pieces and then you give so many concrete examples. It's almost like a little, not little, it's like a. It's a series of call-ins for educators to recognize that in themselves. It's like a little like coaching support and I I have not seen a book do that with such depth and specificity before and I just it was so cool. I just want to say thank you. I think it's what I'm saying, that you are just living out the learning. It is evident and I think it's going to be a great tool for others to kind of see what that looks like as they're engaging with the work. 0:18:02 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Thank you Because that was the biggest thing I noticed in other books that were in that anti-bias, anti-racist bent. They talked about it in generalities and there are a lot of good books out there. So this is in no way me talking bad about those books, because some of those books I used to help me write this book, but the one thing I kept asking myself was what if there was a book out there that really got into specific detail about how each of the different historically marginalized communities are impacted by the K-12 education system in the United States? I have not seen a book that has done that. Now you might have books that are exclusively about Native students in the K-12 system, books that speak about Latinx students in the K-12 system, black students in the K-12 system. There are a lot of those books out there, asian American students, pacific Islander students in the K-12 system, but there isn't one that brings them all together. Oh, we can't forget to mention LGBTQ plus students and understanding how Sith heteronormativity is something that permeates in just about every school in our country and beyond. Permeates in just about every school in our country and beyond. We know that. But how do we tie that to all the other communities. I just mentioned how that kind of spreads across the board. So I want to do something that brought all those different worlds together to really start to get people to understand when we talk about DEI, when we talk about being an anti-bias and anti-racist educator. This is what the work looks like. It's not the only way to do the work, but it's one way in which you can get the work done. So, as I'm going through the process, I'm writing these chapters, I'm talking to the people, I'm getting guidance, I'm getting counsel, I'm getting pointed to leads as far as documentaries to watch, publications to read, people to talk to. This is all happening simultaneously and this is what you have amazing. 0:20:37 - Lindsay Lyons I one of the things you just named too is, uh, just finding the resources right, and I it brings me to, um, you have a really great section. You have a lot of great sections. One of them I want to name first, actually is the intersectionality that you merge like the multiplicity of identities. You just you put that front and center as part of the kind of framing of the book. I really appreciate that and I think that, specifically, is lacking from a lot of other spaces, not lacking completely, but lacking in its expansiveness that you have it as, and so I really appreciate that. Lens I also am just thinking about, you know that, the section between allies and co-conspirators, like you really delineate, right, and you have a breakdown of like here's what this looks like being an ally, here's what this looks like being a co-conspirator. And the biggest difference I'm thinking of Dr Sheree Bridges-Patrick and I have like, talked a little bit about like in terms of like, racial justice discourse one of the ways you don't hit the mark is like you intellectualize it and so you stay up in this heady space that is not like the heart space, right, and so we're like oh, I read this thing or I heard this on this podcast. So, as I'm hearing you do that, I recognize in myself like, oh, I want to consume more information, but there has to be an and there has to be an. And what will I do with that information? To take action towards justice and, in community with folks who are going to take the lead, provide direction right? So I'm not running things right and so I think there's a lot of pieces in the book like that. That is just like some nice aha moments for people to be engaging with. I'm also thinking of, like the second section of the book, after they get all of the synthesized information which, as we talked about before, we hit record. It's like a dissertation level, better than most dissertations I've read like a level of detail you talk about like, I think, the let me make sure I'm doing this right, so it's starting to work with you which you mentioned before. And then you have affirmed the identities of your students, combat dominant narratives through counter, counter storytelling. You've been reading, and then co-creating a compassionate and collaborative class culture. Oh my gosh, I don't. I love these steps. I don't know if I just want to make space for if you want to touch on any of these or talk about, like, how you came to that process, Cause I think that's it's really helpful for people to think about. 0:22:57 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Yeah, I think well, I can't take all the credit. I got to give credit to my main editor, tracy Zager, who was with me from the not day one, but pretty much from the beginning, all the way through to the end when we got the production. She really helped me in formatting the book and the chapters. So when we decided that we were going to go in this direction, she was the one who said, hey, let's front load all the historically marginalized community chapters so that can serve as a primer for folks who may not have that background, knowledge or schema around those communities. And then, starting from chapters six through nine, the ones you just referenced we can then talk about the practical aspect of the work, how we can apply it into our classrooms and how we can do that while we're serving our students. So I give her a lot of credit for helping me with the formatting, because I had the ideas and I had the vision, but I needed somebody to help me map it out in a way that was sequential, in a way that made sense to the reader, and Tracy did a lot in terms of helping me conceptualize that. 0:24:26 - Lindsay Lyons And I think, like you know, know educators listening this is just grab the book and dig into it and and dig into these sections, because I do think it's. It's a beautiful thing to just see again all of this mapped out as you're doing all the things you've done, all of the things right that you've done, and you're describing this learning journey for people. It's just a it feels like a real, authentic invitation to, to, to learn and unlearn, right that that you've described for us, one of the things that I'm conscious of time. I don't want to take too much of your time. One of the last big questions I have is around like the kind of daunting nature of some of of of the work, like the fear of saying the wrong thing right, which you, which you name, like the, the um perfectionism piece, that that people sometimes are like they're stopped, they're stopping themselves from action, from learning, from unlearning, right, because of this kind of like fear piece. I'm thinking that's a challenge that I often hear people name. I'm wondering if that's a challenge you hear, if you, if you have a thought on that, or if there's like another challenge that folks that you coach and consults with face or are worried about that you could like kind of coach them through, and and what would that kind of coaching look like, or what's a thing for them to be thoughtful about as they engage? Does that question make sense? 0:25:42 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah it makes perfect sense. I think that's part of the work, though, as I mentioned earlier, there were things I had no clue about, and when people called me in and pointed out things I needed to read and study, I did just that. But what made it easy for me to do that was how they went about educating me. They didn't berate me, they didn't do anything like that. They saw that my intentions were good and I just needed a little bit of guidance. So the first thing is recognizing where people are and being able to pull them to the side and say, hey, you probably shouldn't say that, because X, y, z, here's an article that I recommend you read. Why don't you go ahead and read it? And then, after a few days, we can come back together and have a discussion about it and see how it connects to this issue. So these are things that I talk about in chapter nine, the last chapter, where we talk about co-creating a compassionate and collaborative culture, the call-ins, the educational piece that is so crucial, because there is no such thing as perfectionism in this work. I'm still going to make mistakes, I may end up misgendering somebody by accident, and I still may do it from time to time. But the difference between me now and how it was a few years ago is I have a radar. I recognize when I'm doing it and I'm able to self-correct myself because of the learning, because of all the call-ins. So my brain is programmed to self-correct. So it doesn't mean that I'm not going to make a mistake ever again. If that was a case that, that wouldn't be human. I'll be a robot, and we already got AI handling that, so no. So, for those who really want to engage in this work, don't deter from it because you're afraid of making a mistake. Or don't deter from it because you're afraid of making a mistake Because by you deterring from it, you're now being complicit to the spirit murdering that is taking place within schools. You're allowing more and more students, particularly those of color, black, indigenous and other students of color, to keep on getting harmed, and there's more than enough identity-based harm happening in our world right now, and I don't even need to get into all the examples in which it's manifesting itself. You all could read the news and watch what's happening. There's a lot going on, and I believe it is a paramount reason why we need a book like Learn to Relearn, because it gets us back to what matters the most, and that's treating people the way they want to be treated. Getting people to see that and this is an Audre Lorde quote it's not our differences that divide us, it's how we feel about the differences. That's what divides us, like the thoughts, the stereotypical notions, the implicit biases, all these things that those are the things that separate us more than anything, things that those are the things that separate us more than anything. Even the political rhetoric that's happening right now. It stems from implicit bias. It stems from messages that have been recycled over time with no type of empirical research or backing, empirical research or backing. So how do we get ourselves out of that mode? To learn about each other in a way to treat each other better, as opposed to listening to somebody with the purpose of getting a rebuttal in. We have to shift from that to this, and that's what this book is about. 0:30:19 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. Thank you for that. I think that's a beautiful note to kind of wrap up with, and I think I mean just my personal learning. Right now I'm going to ask you a question about things you've been learning. Despite your whole book being about things that you've learned, I'm curious to know if there's something you're learning about lately. Is there something like that's kind of front and center at the moment? One of the things for me is actually as a social studies teacher. I used to do a lot of claim evidence reasoning, like there's a lot of like argue based standards. That's like you have to hold your position, you have to find the evidence, you have to like stand strong in it and actually, now that I'm out of the classroom and coaching, I find myself coaching on. Wouldn't it be cool if we were actually assessing people on their ability to seek to understand others versus stand strong in your position and use you know? Right, like it's's I'm. I'm unlearning with you, so I just want to name that like that is that? Is there anything for you that's like front of center in this particular moment that you've been learning about related to education and this work? Or just like learning how to play an instrument, or something could be really. 0:31:21 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah yeah, I think for me, being being a married man, being a father, learn how to be a better parent. Learn how to be a better husband. What does it mean to be emotionally available for my wife? What does it mean to confront your own trauma? What does it mean to be present for your children, and not just present in the physical sense, but to be emotionally invested in your child's growth so that they know that you're really there and not just there in the physical form? So those are the things that I'm continuing to learn each and every day, just to get better. What can I do today to be a better father to my two sons? What can I do today to maintain and improve my relationship with my wife so that she knows that I'm still very much invested in her and I still love her, just like I did from day one? Like, what are the things that I can continue to do to really cultivate those relationships being a family man? So that's where I am right now. 0:32:40 - Lindsay Lyons That also deeply resonates. I have a two and a half year old and a partner that I am. I'm in the same space, so thank you that that means a lot that you shared that I. Finally, I just want to make sure people know how to get in touch with you and follow your work. We'll link to the book once it's it'll be published. Once we release this, where's the best place to find you? In online spaces? 0:33:01 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah I think honestly and not to be cocky or anything you can really Google me. If you Google me, you'll find all my social media resources. If I were to go through each one, it'll take too long, but you could also go to my website, identitytalk4educatorscom. Over there you'll find information about my services, my offerings. Like I said, I podcast. I also consult with K-12 schools, not just in the States but also other parts of the globe, and I do write from time to time blogs, books, other publications so everything identity talk related you can find on that website. Check me out, reach out, let's build together. 0:33:49 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing Kwame. Thank you. I am so, so grateful for your time today. Thank you for being on the show. 0:33:55 - Kwame Sarfo-Mensah Thank you, lindsay, this was awesome.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below: In this episode, we chat with Angie Freese who is an educator, author, mom, and founder of the Meant for More Collaborative. Angie shares her transformative vision for creating equitable and inclusive learning environments, emphasizing the importance of focusing on strengths instead of deficiencies. Coming from a family of educators, Angie now travels around the country, working closely with educators and administrators. Her joy is in helping them deepen their understanding of strengths that they already have, and apply them to create positive learning environments and real change. Angie’s recent book, Meant for More: Real Talk About Classrooms Built on Dignity, Authenticity, and Connection applies her years of experience and insights to practical classroom settings. The Big Dream Angie’s big dream for education is to reclaim the dignity of the teaching profession and elevate the people within it. She envisions designing sustainable learning environments where people notice what’s working, why it’s working, and how to apply those principles to other areas. Angie dreams of schools and systems that honor and dignify the individuals within—spaces of inclusion and authenticity where each learner can receive the quality of education they deserve. Mindset Shifts Required To build these inclusive and authentic spaces, Angie believes it all needs to start with a conversation that looks at the inequities that exist for both the adults and the students. To start this discussion, Angie shares how we need to value the adults who facilitate learning experiences in our classroom, realizing that most are fierce, brave, and bold—they’re competent and committed to changing schools and education for the better. A key mindset shift in all this is realizing that no one person is responsible for carrying the emotional or organizational weight of this transformation—everyone is part of it, and everyone has important strengths to create real change. Action Steps Angie believes that educators want to create change and do what’s best for students. But, it can be overwhelming to implement change in a system that isn’t always set up for your success. So, here are three key action steps any educator can implement today: Step 1: Start with yourself. Spend some time reflecting on your unique gifts and talents, and how you can cultivate these into strengths. Embrace your authentic self and give yourself grace in the process. Step 2: Foster collaborative inquiry. We sometimes hold back from asking questions because the system constrains or stifles creative problem-solving. But educators can do anything they put their minds to, especially when collaborating effectively together! Create opportunities for meaningful dialogue and collaborative inquiry within your educational community. Use practical strategies, such as sentence stems for curiosity, to facilitate empathetic and productive conversations. Step 3: Believe in value, not just potential. Each person in the education system already has inherent value and worth, and they already possess strengths and skills. Identify them, recognize them, and raise them up. By believing in the value of every person, we can rehumanize our profession, rejuvenating educator’s passion and focusing on the good we can do rather than the negatives of a faulty system. Challenges? Angie believes that the biggest challenge is not the belief that it can be done—educators know, we know what we’re capable of. Instead, the biggest challenge is the shared commitment to implement the things that we’ve said we’d do. The challenge is acting on agreed-upon behaviors and practices that will move the needle on collective goals. This is why Angie encourages educators to start with self and start with strengths—it’s honoring where you are and what you can contribute to this collective effort. One Step to Get Started For educators who want to start the journey to strengths-based education, Angie recommends one simple step to get started: engage in a reflective practice. Begin by looking inward and understanding your own strengths and areas for growth. You can identify one strength to amplify and share with your team, using it as a starting point for a conversation about how to foster a culture of collaborative inquiry and continuous improvement. This builds confidence and empowers you and those around you to take necessary next steps for growth. Stay Connected You can connect with Angie on Instagram at Meant for More or via LinkedIn. To dig deeper into what we discussed in this episode, grab a copy of Angie’s insightful and practical book, Meant for More: Real Talk About Classrooms Built on Dignity, Authenticity, and Connection. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Angie’s sharing reproducibles from her book with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 191 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Soraya Ramos. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I'm so excited you're here. 0:00:08 - Soraya Ramos Hi Lindsay, Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. 0:00:11 - Lindsay Lyons I'm really excited for we were talking about, before we hit record like all of the ways that our paths have like almost intersected and I think our work aligns very closely as well. So really excited for our listeners to hear from you today, and I just want to know if there's anything that folks should keep in mind as they are engaging with this podcast episode today. 0:00:31 - Soraya Ramos I thought about this one and I think one of the main things for me that I try to remember is that I'm always a learner and that I'm always learning and that I don't always have it or need to know everything or need to have the answer. So I think that, being really forgiving to myself and gracious, I like I'm always learning, we're always learning and it's just part of like life. We're always evolving, making mistakes and then learning from them and coming back from it. So I want to, like you know, hold whatever I say now at this point in time might, might evolve in the next years or decades of my life. So I'm really excited to capture where I'm at right now with you. 0:01:09 - Lindsay Lyons I absolutely love that framing because just this morning I was looking back from like four years ago. I wrote a blog post and I'm like hmm, wouldn't, have done it the same way Would have changed that Like that's so true. I love the snapshot in time idea. 0:01:20 - Soraya Ramos It's true, it's true. I think it's what we want to do with kids too, right, we're always. They're always evolving and physically growing and like we, see the difference. 0:01:32 - Lindsay Lyons So, um, I'm glad that that you, that it resonates with you as well, deeply, yes, thank you for that framing, and I think it'll also be, um, really nice for listeners to hear it, just because I think in our days we can often be unforgiving of ourselves, and so it's a, it's a nice reminder. We're in it together, we're all learning. I love it, and so I guess kind of to think about the continuation of this, like the place we're all trying to go as we learn. I like to ground this or all episodes really and Dr Bettina loves the words around freedom dreaming, where she says you know their dreams, rounded in the critique of injustice, and so I'm curious to know what is that big dream that? 0:02:09 - Soraya Ramos you hold for education. I love her work. I will say that this question got me thinking of like what my freedom dreaming was. Maybe 10 years ago is slightly different, but still similar to the core. But one thing that came to mind around what is that dream that I have for kids, for my younger self, for the kids that come after me, is that all children, all young learners, get to access high quality learning experiences that help them feel like they can shine and that they can tap into their brilliance and their their genius that's so good. 0:02:49 - Lindsay Lyons I love that and it really I love that there's like aspects of you know, goldie Muhammad's work in there and just like that the genius is part of all kids, right, this is not something that we as educators give to them, but like this is there and we're just like helping to cultivate and helping to shine and like I love that framing absolutely, and I think you're right. 0:03:08 - Soraya Ramos Like it's like where did I get all this from? I'm like I've learned from people who have, who have taught me right, or that I've learned in my roles in the past, and, um, I think one of the things that that would add to that is like how do we allow kids to just be kids, to learn to fumble and then get back up without them feeling like there's some kids have higher stakes than others and I'm just curious of like how do we just have them all feel like they can play and have fun? 0:03:39 - Lindsay Lyons I love that. That's, that's so, so good. Thank you for that. And and I think so, sometimes we maybe lose sight of the things, the reasons that we kind of get into education and that knowing that kids have this genius, they have this light, they have they, they should be able to be kids all this stuff and we get into like the nitty gritty and all the things on our plate right. And so I'm wondering if there are specific mindset shifts that folks kind of go through to be able to do the work that you do, for instance, around kind of equitable assessment and all of those pieces. Are there things that we may be no going in lose sight of along the way and need to really kind of reframe our thinking around that you've noticed either people be successful with or that you would just advise folks just entering the work to think about? 0:04:31 - Soraya Ramos My own mindsets have. I've had to go through my own and I'm still going through those shifts now and like really believing in those. I will say some of those mindset shifts that have inspired me in the last few years have come from the work at the National Equity Project around liberatory design, and I think they were able to provide a language to what I already felt to be true and some of those mindsets it's all about. I think the arc of it all is that it's human centered, that we're centering anything, any experience the design of a summer school program, the design of an assessment system on the state level or even a local level is that we're really truly centering humans and putting them at the center. So I would say one of the things that the Libertarian Design Framework says is one of the mindsets is building relational trust is how do we invest in relationships with intention and especially across difference, and we have to honor people's stories and practice empathetic listening. So if I'm going into your home, into your community, what is my role is to to be there as humble as I can, to listen to your expertise, because that is your lived experience. So I think that that's a really powerful piece that I always try to hold is that we're not the I am not the knowledge holder. I am here to listen and I am in your home, your home, and that is in my culture. There's something really important about I respect where, when I'm, when I'm here and you're in your space. So that's one build a relational trust. I think a second one for me is practicing self-awareness, is understanding like what mirror is in front of me, who am I and how do these experiences that I grew up with influence the way I see things, the way I'm understanding an issue, and our perspectives impact our practice. So I think that practice of awareness is constant and so necessary for me, because sometimes I feel like, oh, i'm'm the hero in this story and I'm gonna, and I'm gonna save, and I'm gonna save these kids, or like when I was, you know, entering teaching um, but it wasn't. It wasn't that no one needs saving um. So self-practicing self-awareness. And then I would say I have a lot that I could share, but I'm going to keep it short. But the one I really feel like that I haven't mentioned is embracing complexity, that the equity challenges are really complex and they're messy and they stay open for possibility. And one thing that I have the cards in front me and one thing that it says here in the card is that powerful design emerges from the mess, not from avoiding it, and so I think that's where sometimes we put pressure on our leaders to have the answer, that one right way. We actually respect people who speak with a lot of confidence in that one solution when it's actually a lot more complex. And how do we do this together to figure it out with the humans that we're trying to serve at the center? So those are, I think, some of the top, but I could keep going, but I'll stop there. So I would say building relational trust, practicing self-awareness and embracing complexity. 0:08:07 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, all of those are so good. And also just tying it to that liberatory design piece, I think is really important and food for thought for folks who are listening now and are like, oh, I haven't heard of that or I want to dig deeper into that. Like there's richness there to dig into. And I love the idea of the last piece really reminds me of both the complexity piece around, like adaptive leadership and recognizing that it is really messy, and also I think you're speaking to the like a shared leadership element as well of right like the leaders are not necessarily the people who have admin titles right, they're the people in the community and the students, right, and the people at the center who who, as you said, have a lived experience and are really informing the change. And to uh, think through how to navigate so many voices when we're talking about all the students and all the families is messy but so worth it, and so I appreciate that framing and that grounding in those, in those three specifically. 0:09:03 - Soraya Ramos Yeah, thank you, thanks for summarizing that in in such a in those three specifically. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for summarizing that in such a nice way. 0:09:09 - Lindsay Lyons I just love connecting it to like. Sometimes I'll use these like leadership reasons. My background is in leadership education and so I think through like things I've said in the podcast before. 0:09:17 - Soraya Ramos I'm like, right, here's the through line, right it's true, there's like these mindsets yeah, it could keep going on, because I'm also a leadership nerd and I'm like learning all these things. And how do we create a culture? Right, how does our leadership impact the culture that we're trying to build here? And I think these elements, these mindset shifts, have to be in there. Um, because we have to live it so that it can. It's almost contagious, it's part of the space that you come into. Yeah. 0:09:45 - Lindsay Lyons I like the idea of contagious. That's good, that's really good. So I guess, thinking about that right, like what does that maybe look like? Feel like what's you know the actions that we, we take to kind of cultivate that and and and live that out and make that contagious and I mean I think about the work that you've done with equitable assessment and like systems of assessment, I mean that's, that's really big work. So thinking about maybe a leader or a community who is like oh, this is such a cool idea and it feels big, it feels messy, it feels like like how, how, really, how do I get started and what does that potentially look like? Could you describe for us a little bit about those like brave actions required to get there? 0:10:29 - Soraya Ramos That's a really good question and I think that it's. I'm always in pursuit of figuring that out. This is a tangent which we can include or not in the podcast. But recently I started working the second, the second job with my mom and it's called. It's a delivery service and we're shoppers at a store and we're shoppers at the same store every single time. And so I started doing it as like a side gig on the weekends and just trying it out with my mom. And what I realized is like every single time that I went into the store and you let me know if I could, if I could tell you, but it's one, it's one of my favorite. So I go in there and I'm like I know people have such a good experience at Target and it's like a very much like a good experience, and so, but going in there as a shopper, I noticed that there was a pattern. I'm like why are the workers so disgruntled and unhappy? Is it just that one location? Is it just that one person? That one day, and I started noticing a pattern in the ones in my area where it's like no, I think there's something going on in the culture of this company. What is going on that? Are we treating our, how are people being treated while they work here? And it's almost and again it was very contagious and like my experience as a consumer versus a like kind of a shopper right beside these employees was a lot different and not as joyful either. So I think that also communicates into schools. Right, like, culture is everywhere. When we go into a place of business, when we go into a place of education and I know that this is something that you know many educators in the field have already said like the first, the first signal of what a culture is at a school is when you step in the front door and you and you experience what it feels like to be in that space. It's, it's like an energy thing. I don't know much about energy, but I could feel it. And right, it's like um. When you, for example, and no one really greets you, um, or when they do, it's it's kind of like what do you need? Um versus good morning, how are you Welcome to our school? You know, here's our protocol, sign in. And it's a different um experience when you go into these spaces. So I would just say, like, what is the culture in this, in this space? And so I would say how do you make the? I think your question was how do we start? What are the brave actions that we need to make sure is we really need to be the, the creators of that, of creators of that energy, right, like, if a school is off that morning, like how can I go in there and try to? I'm not gonna change it, but I can say just remind them like hey, I'm new to this space, what do you wanna show for your school and your community? But one of the things that the brave actions that needs to happen is the way that I work with other people, whether it's building an assessment system at a state level or building an assessment task with a teacher is what kind of, what kind of relationship are we building around my responsibilities, your like and our accountability to each other? I think the reciprocity is a word that I've used a lot in the work I've done with in the past few years is it's not transactional but it's reciprocal. Is, you know, if we do these for these things for each other, without keeping tab on what it is right, like tip for tat? And so one of the brave actions is really holding that reciprocity part. The other part is recognizing oppression, like always being aware that power can always come in, and being able to like balance that out and calling it out. I think there's something really important about calling it out. If we're gonna partner with each other, let's talk about what the power dynamic is or isn't. So I would say that's super brave action to mention it, because it's an uncomfortable and fearful conversation, especially if you're working with teachers all the way up to superintendents or state commissioners. So that's the brave action. So I'm thinking about another one. I think one is knowing the culture and like reading that Working from a place of reciprocity the one that's really challenging and it goes against maybe the way that our country works is and our system works is we need to come from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. I think when we're trying to build systems or create solutions for education, we think that there aren't enough, like we're actually in some way conditioned or convinced in some ways, like some of us may be able to note why, but that there's always enough resources. This is really hard for me to actually understand it right, because in my own life it's like well, I grew up with very scarce resources, financial resources. So I think like understanding, like there are resources out there. We may not have access to them right now, but we know that they're out there. That's the thing. They just may not be right in front of us, and so I think, knowing that no one's here to steal my job, we're not trying to do the work of another organization in competition with them. It's we're all playing in the same sandbox and in service of the same communities, people, learners, etc. So those are just a few that come to mind, and I'm sure there's more profound other actions, but those are actually super hard. It's like the power, the power piece. How do I work with others in ways that are loving and actually honest and authentic, without my secret agenda, and while also knowing that, like, the resources are real, there's some. There's a perceived notion that there's scarcity out there, but there really is an abundance, and maybe the abundance comes from a different type of resource, not not the financial one. Maybe it, the abundance, is the community that we work in and that's our superpower. So that is where I'll leave it, cause I think that was a lot, but and I'm sure I'm sorry that it's a little bit scattered, but it was my best attempt to try to put them into words- it was perfect. 0:17:02 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love so much of this, and I think I mean even just the abundance versus scarcity. I love what you said at the very end of you know, maybe the resource is just something that's not financial Absolutely. Source is just something that's not financial Absolutely. I mean we even from. So the last few years I taught, I worked at a school with 100% students who were learning English at the high school level, and so a lot of times in like multilingual learner education spaces, people like, oh, you know that the scarcity mindset of we need to build English language proficiencies right, and it's like, look at the abundance of linguistic knowledge and proficiency in other languages. I mean some of these kids are trilingual. Like what on earth? This is nuts. Like that is incredible. And we just don't think of the abundance frame, we think only in scarcity. And so I love that you mentioned like it can be financial but it can be otherwise, that we think about these things and what a huge mindset shift to be able to to get to that side of abundance. 0:18:03 - Soraya Ramos And I love that example that you're mentioning, because that's where we miss it. We're conditioned to believe that these other metrics are actually more important than the richness in the culture, in the, in the multilingualness, in like the community, that that they come from, their worlds or realities is. It's like that's where that, that there's richness, there, that we I think the last part I'll say is like I don't know where this fits in the questions you asked me, but there's a, an element of critical consciousness that it's like almost seeing behind the like someone's pulling the curtain, that like these assessments are important but I could see through them that they are problematic, that they can cause harm, that they're imperfect, that they're a measure, but not the measure of our kids and our and our young people. So I think that's where I'm, my role is like how do we get people to see, recognize oppression? Right, but like within? That is like how does this assessment work within that Like it's not the ultimate truth? And, like you said, let's not ignore these beautiful like humans that we get to work with every day, and then their multilingualness and get them to shine. 0:19:15 - Lindsay Lyons I just want to double down on that phrase. Like a measure, not the measure, right, yes, and not the ultimate truth. Yeah, we put so much stock into things that we can measure and put numbers or letters on and it's like no, I'm a human child, like this is a person, totally yes, I mean, I'm curious, you've done such powerful work with so many communities. I'm wondering if there's maybe a success story or kind of quote unquote case study that we can use to just illuminate the possible, like what are the great things happening out there and what can we celebrate? 0:19:50 - Soraya Ramos I appreciate that question and it's the success stories. I feel like you don't see it in the moment. I feel like when you work in schools or in education, sometimes it takes years for you to see your impact as a teacher, for example, and then the kids come back, you know, and they let you know like this is the impact you had, or it could take more than five, ten years to see it. But I think in in I've been really fortunate to have this position as like third party kind of uh roles in my in education now. Uh, where I get to support school districts and I have this different viewpoint, a lay of the land where I can, I can kind of see who the players are and what the strategy is and the vision and et cetera. One of the things that I have not done this alone and I think I've been put into really wonderful teams where I've been able to co-construct these different ways of how to assess kids, how to think about assessment in a more human centered way. Um, you might have I believe that some of the previous speakers on this podcast um Ms Rita Harvey and Charlie Brown, they were. They're some of my uh, they're. We started our journey together as assessment design partners. Uh, in new England, and we had, I believe, a lot of really wonderful case studies that we got to see from the teacher level. So we got to travel to different districts across New England and design assessments, performance assessments, with teachers at an individual school, while also working with their superintendents to build a arc of learning around their pd. So that year, for example, what I I think this is um, we're getting to that that success story is what makes it successful is that you had buy-in from the, from the, from the teacher role all the way up to a superintendent role, and the board as well is how do we get everyone on board about around this one thing and that one thing for one district in particular was how do we get everyone on board around performance assessments? And so year one was what is performance assessments? What are we doing? Why don't we bring in students that have worked with our coaches hence me and my other colleagues to come in and share their experiences with a standardized test versus a performance assessment? And so they got. We have this all happened in one particular district in Attleboro Public Schools, and so that was one of the things is we have support from all folks we get to coach in individual schools and they all have design teams. So the admin at the school had already pre-selected some people that they felt were going to be champions of this work. So that was a huge element, while at the same time, we are facilitating meetings with a consortium of superintendents who are all trying to work towards the same goal, which is how do we build an alternative assessment system that we can apply for a waiver for in the state of Massachusetts? So we have superintendents engaged through the consortium. So we have superintendents engaged through the consortium. We have assistant superintendents supporting us with designing an arc of learning for all teachers in the district around performance assessments year one, and we also have board meetings where that could be like our performance assessment per se, where teachers and students can come in and demonstrate their work. So I would just say like those are some of the levers that this district was able to pull and were super successful because after year two, performance assessments didn't go away. Performance assessments, we went deeper. We said rubrics 101. So part of a performance assessment is a rubric right, like how do we know that you've met? How do you know that you've met the target? So rubrics was like. We noticed that there was. Maybe we needed more literacy around that. How do we build everyone's capacity? So, yeah, every year the learning arc. So everyone was doing the same thing. During those teacher learning days we had multiple opportunities for them to come and present to the consortium and to their boards. So I would just say like those are some of like a really effective leadership moves and decisions that were created in this particular district in Attleboro that we were really proud of. They were so committed and people were not confused around initiatives. It felt like they all knew what we were doing and we were able to reach all teachers within three years around performance assessment. Unfortunately, things were paused because of the pandemic, but the fact that we have such good momentum and people were just like champions and it was like this groundswell of support I remember that's a word that Charlie would mention a lot. We need to get the groundswell of support and I think that was a really powerful thing, instead of it coming down as a requirement. 0:25:01 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, another kind of tied to that shared leadership piece. Right, it doesn't come from the top, it has to be that ground salt. That's so good. There is so much here that I appreciate you have just kind of laid out. I'm thinking of a leader listening who's like how long does it take and what happens each year? You've just laid out what is possible and I just really appreciate that clarity for someone who's kind of new to it. I also want to speak to if someone's unfamiliar with that consortium in Massachusetts, like New York has one as well. But just the idea of schools coming together to say like we can do better than standardized assessment, is this really great way to not do it alone? And so I'm wondering if there is. I don't know if this is speaking to the next question I was going to ask or not, but just thinking about the challenges of the work Sometimes I wonder if it's like oh, we're on our own and kind of this island of we think it would be a great idea to do this, but we don't have a consortium to tap into or something like that. Is there any kind of school model that you've worked with there where it's like they're not part of a larger organization, but they're just choosing to do it because they know it's what's fast and they're going to move forward. 0:26:07 - Soraya Ramos Absolutely. I think there's folks that are connected to a wider net and others are doing it within their own district. I think that it's really helpful when you are part of a group, a consortium, or whether it's a learning group or anything else. I know that there's some here in California as well, where you just get to learn around practice with each other. It's like what are you all doing? Oh, this is how we're choosing to implement graduate profiles right now is a really is a really big thing, and it actually is very trendy to have a graduate profile, or you know these learner outcomes of what we want kids to learn and competencies we want them to have by the time they graduate. But how do you know? And how do you know that? How do if you're doing it right, right, like? A lot of people are like, okay, great, we have really cool posters, now what? So that's where people turn to these communities, where they're like this is how we're learning how to bring this poster to life and it's super beneficial. I'm part of this. I'm really glad that I'm part of this group called Scaling Student Success, and then we get to learn from each other around best practices of how to bring graduate profiles to life and everyone's at a different stage, so there's different groupings of districts. So it is a really cool opt-in opportunity that I've seen on the West Coast. But what about folks that aren't connected outside right Like? We know that this is best practice period and I think that's why they bring some of these districts, bring in third party technical providers, and that's where people like myself come in third party technical providers and that's where people like myself come in and envision learning partners who we may not be creating the space for everyone to come in as a consortium or a learning space, but we are the communicators of oh, you have also shortages with subs. This is actually a trend that's happening across the country and people are actually some of the people are actually very surprised when we tell them that they're like really, I thought we were the only district, oh no, I'm like this is going on across the country. Um, you are not the only one. And how do we get creative so um around like pds, right, if you can't have everyone out on the same time? Like, how do we, how do we create this more flexible uh plan? So I don't know if I kind of lost track of your question, lindsay, but that was perfect. 0:28:31 - Lindsay Lyons I guess are there any other like either challenges that folks have faced and you wanted to talk through, or is there just anything else that you wanted to share before we move to wrap up? 0:28:42 - Soraya Ramos Yeah, okay, so I don't. I'm like I was like thinking, I'm like how honest can I be? And and I think I've realized how naive I've been in most of my career as an, as an educator, and in the best way, like my, my naivete is more of like I don't think people would be capable of doing this or, you know, like we're all in it for the kids and and and it's a very naive way of thinking and and um, one of the things that I realized at a different level of is through, uh, bowman and deal, the, these folks have these, these four frameworks of what it means to be a leader, and one of the frameworks that they say that leaders have to learn how to navigate is the political, is the, and that's like they call it, the jungle, where it's like people have different agendas and people have different ideas of what they want from a project or from a collaboration or whatever it is. And I think that for me has been this language, this world, where I have to think about understanding humans in a different way that the political realm introduces a not so flattering side of of humans and our motivations and and our behaviors, and also attached to people's wellness, right, like if, like they are reflections of who they are internally is kind of what they project at work. So one of the things for me is like how do I read situations, what is being said that isn't being said out loud, and how do I move accordingly? Because sometimes being honest is not the way for me Speaking. Sometimes spaces aren't ready to hear that, sometimes spaces aren't ready to hear that, especially when you have power involved. And so that, for me, is something I'm still learning is how do we navigate the political realm and understand humans and not letting it get too personal, like taking it personally is understanding, like what people are and aren't capable of, and knowing who to trust. I think that for me right now is how do I learn to build trust and who to trust in, especially when we're doing this kind of work in education? 0:30:55 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, that's such an important challenge to name because I think a lot of folks I've certainly been there felt that and I love that you trace the arc of similarly me but going and being like everyone's awesome and for the right reasons. And there is no political agenda, there is, and so I think it reminds me of Heifetz, Graschau and Linsky talk about in their adaptive leadership. Stuff is like naming the stuff, like having an activity as a leader where you kind of sit in the meeting and like, okay, observe what's not being said, like observe where the avoidance is happening, where a joke's being made to deflect, like that kind of thing, Right. And and so it's like that's a cool tool for for folks listening to this episode, like just try it, like try that out and just kind of notice, or invite folks to notice like what is not being said, right, what is being avoided. And I think that's a nice opportunity to kind of, like you said, it might not be that in the moment we shout it out, but it's a nice like jot it on a post-it note, hand it in at the end of the meeting, right, We'll like we'll get there because we should, Absolutely, I agree, yeah, and so I think just to close this out, this is a wonderful conversation. I don't want it to end but I recognize everyone has things to do and I'm sure you have a busy schedule. So what is one thing as we kind of wrap up that listeners have been listening tons of ideas shared but they want to kind of take one next step as they end the episode, kind of going into their day or getting ready for next week or whatever that they can kind of world do. 0:32:33 - Soraya Ramos I want to live in, how do I want it to feel, how do I want it to sound for for myself, for kids, for young people, etc. And how can I be the creator of that? How can I contribute to a world like that? So I think that self-awareness piece goes back to that is, if I'm walking into this meeting, how do I want to walk in, what do I want to contribute in terms of my own energy, my motivations? How is this contributing to the world that I do or don't want? And I think being that is a start and something that can feel like it's a forced, but like how can I be that light, or how can I be that positivity or that understanding mind in the workplace where I don't have to get to the point where I'm disrespecting people and I'm still living by my values? So I think it really begins with the self and the world that you want. So then, how are you going to start being that in that next meeting, in that next, in whatever collaboration you're in? So it's really difficult because we have difficult days, but like, how do I, how do I still stay with, with dignity, right, like dignity and respect is for me really important. So knowing what people's values are and making sure that they're actually living aligned to those values, and catching yourself when you don't, because we're also imperfect, so the misalignment will happen. But just knowing that, like what am I contributing to this world and how can I, you know, be self aware. 0:34:09 - Lindsay Lyons I love that for multiple reasons. One just for the leader lens, but also, like this could be a guiding question for schools, like how do teachers engage with that question? How do students live out that question Right? Like how can we just be in community with one another in alignment with our responses to that question? So good. And so I think the final two questions I have for you one is super fun just could relate to education, but could totally not. So, whatever direction you want to take it, you mentioned, like we're all kind of learning. We're on a lifelong path of learning all the things about life. What is something that you have been learning about lately? 0:34:44 - Soraya Ramos Oh, have been learning about lately. Oh, I have not been learning any hobbies recently, but I think what I'm learning is just my role. As I get, as I'm getting older, my roles are changing in my life and who I take care of, and and and being a caretaker this past month. And for me it's just understanding that, like life will always be lifing, it's always going to be doing what it wants to do. But at the end of the day is, how am I centering myself to and my needs first, so that we're all, not we're all, so that I'm strong enough to care for others when I, when I can and I need to? So I think that's one thing that I'm really learning how to practice, whether it's an acupuncture appointment, whether it's that massage that I've been like thinking about months ago, a walk has been huge. I think learning how to slow down is the biggest lesson for me, because I used to be a runner and it felt like if I didn't do 10 miles, I didn't do anything like it, like it had to feel hard for it to feel like it mattered. And now I'm like a walk and being patient and being in silence, like that's actually hard for me too. So maybe those are some of the lessons that are coming Like. Life is always evolving, my role and my responsibilities are with that too, so how do I always remember myself though? And it could be, and a walk is enough, sufficiency, yeah. 0:36:14 - Lindsay Lyons Everything you said deeply resonates. Thank you for that, and I think, finally, folks are going to just want to get in touch with you or follow your work, so what's the best place to get in touch or see what you're doing? 0:36:25 - Soraya Ramos I am on LinkedIn, so that would be one way. I'm trying to be better at staying on it every single day, but that could be that is one way to reach me as well on LinkedIn, and I would say that's the best way. Like is more reliable way to reach me, so I'm happy to connect with anyone who's out there who'd like to just kind of be thought partners or like if folks are going through similar things that that I shared some of the things on this podcast. I would love to just even having like a mirror or a window into like what are? you experiencing OK, how did you resolve it? Or et cetera. So I would love to get in touch with folks if they're they're willing to. 0:37:02 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing. Sorry. I thank you so much. This was such a wonderful conversation. I appreciate your time thank you, lindsay. 0:37:08 - Soraya Ramos I appreciate you having us and me and my other colleagues that have also come up in the episode, but thank you so much for inviting me into this conversation. I really appreciate you absolutely. If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below: ![]()
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
Leading change is challenging, and resistance is part of the work. To support you in leading change thoughtfully and effectively, I’m turning a blog post I wrote 5 years ago into a podcast episode! Enjoy the (slightly adapted) original blog post below, and check out the podcast episode for additional ideas I’ve learned from brilliant teachers, coaches, and leaders in the field over the past half a decade.
Principals, assistant principals, instructional coaches, team leaders, have you ever had an exciting idea that you just know will be so good for teachers and students, but the biggest barrier is a lack of buy-in from teachers or other stakeholders? The phrase, “but this is how I’ve always done it,” may have become your greatest nemesis, right along with “I don’t have time for this.” Getting buy-in to a new initiative is hard work. In this post, I share 4 research-based strategies school leaders can use to effectively lead change. The first few suggestions may sound familiar. I’ll repeat them over and over because they are critical to successful change management. Have one clear vision. Choose 1-2 goals for the year (or more years—3 to 5 years is ideal for major initiatives). Research on Massachusetts turnaround schools found the schools who did not make gains lacked prioritization of a couple key areas, instead focusing on too many things at once (DESE). These 1-2 goals should be data-informed, high-leverage, and co-created with stakeholders or a representative stakeholder team. Manderschild & Kusy (2005) write about vision, citing Kouzes and Posner’s finding that a clear vision leads to “higher levels of [employee] motivation, commitment, loyalty, esprit de corps, and clarity about the organization’s values, pride, and productivity,” (p. 67). They also note it is important to measure progress towards the vision within performance evaluations. If it’s a priority, make sure your feedback to teachers and evaluation of their growth reflects that priority. Make space on teachers’ plates. We can’t add to teachers’ plates without taking something off. If it’s a priority, something else can go. I talk more about this in my post on how to support teacher leadership, where I share a free quick guide on how to carve out time in the school day for teachers to grow, learn, collaborate, and invest time in new initiatives. I’ve shared blog posts and podcast episodes to support teachers in re-thinking how they spend planning time to make space for individualized professional development. If it’s helpful, use the search bar of this website to find these resources and send them to teachers to help them make that shift. Connect with teachers’ hearts. The prominent adaptive leadership scholar, Ronald Heifetz, says, “What people resist is not change per se, but loss,” (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009). Teachers’ identities are tied up with their jobs. With the role of teachers shifting from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side,” it’s reasonable to expect there may be a bit of a loss of identity. Ultimately, we want to help teachers see the value of this shift—that students benefit more when we teach them how to be learners, not simply what to learn. However, immediately after introducing this shift, it’s important to empathize with and speak to that teacher identity and sense of loss. Use that to paint a picture of how the new initiative or vision speaks to their passion for student learning (because, if it’s a good initiative, it definitely will). If teachers don’t seem ready for a change, Anderson (2012) says, talk (and listen) to them, share the data to let them discover the issue and urgency themselves, and share research on the topic to lend credibility to what you’re trying to do. Just don’t forget the heart! Kotter & Cohen (2002) warn that many change initiatives fail because they rely too much on the data end of things instead of inspiring creativity by harnessing the “feelings that motivate useful action” (p. 8). The image of the Kübler-Ross change curve below may help you recognize where teachers are, emotionally, during the change process and how you can support them during each stage. (Retrieved from Dave Saboe, 2018) Create dissatisfaction with the status quo. I love Dannemiller’s adaptation of Gleicher’s formula: change = dissatisfaction x vision x first step > resistance. This formula accepts that resistance happens, but it can be overcome as long as teachers can recognize their dissatisfaction with the way things are now, there is a clear vision for how this can change, and there are acceptable first steps we can take. These variables are multiplied, meaning if any one of them doesn’t exist, resistance will win (because any number multiplied by 0 is 0). If there is no dissatisfaction, leaders must create it! Mezirow (1990) notes adults need a disorienting dilemma to jumpstart transformative learning (learning that requires a paradigm shift and asks us to critically examine our assumptions rather than just learn a new skill). A disorienting dilemma forces us to examine our assumptions. Presenting teachers with information that makes teachers just uncomfortable enough to realize, “the way I’ve been thinking about this isn’t working anymore,” will help them try on other ways of thinking and be willing to rearrange how they see the world. This is most effective in the context of group dialogue, as folx are able to briefly “try on” others’ ways of thinking. So, go ahead and create a disorienting dilemma! Also, remember that major transformation is usually made up of a lot of little changes over time. You won’t shift mindsets in one meeting, but you can present the disorienting dilemma and let the disorientation start to sink in. When teachers are sufficiently disoriented, they will be seeking new ways of thinking, and you’ll have an opportunity to introduce those new ideas. To think about possible disorienting dilemmas for teachers, consider presenting a situation in which two values that teachers hold are in direct competition. For example: A teacher finds themselves working 60 hours each week to complete lesson plans and grade student work. This positions their personal well-being in direct conflict with their love for student learning. Let teachers recognize the discontent, explore the underlying assumptions, come to the conclusion that transformational change is the way to overcome the discontent, and start exploring different ways of thinking that could address this dilemma. Once teachers get here, you can take them through the final steps of making an action plan, testing it out, building capacity for this new approach (through PD, coaching, and other support), and integrating this practice into teachers’ lives and ways of being. (The summary, “Mezirow’s Ten Phases of Transformative Learning” has a bit more detail on the transformative process.) Change is difficult, and it takes time. These research-based ideas will get you started, but the real work is in how you bring teachers into the change process. You’ve got this! To help you lead change using the principles of shared and adaptive leadership, I’m sharing my Leadership PD Playlist with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 190 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Welcome to episode 190 of the Time for Teachership podcast. Today we're talking about leading change and getting quote buy-in, and we'll talk about why buy-in is in quotes in the title of this episode in just a moment. So first I just want to name that leading change is challenging and resistance is part of the work, I'm sure, as a leader whether you are a teacher leader, a team leader, a school or a district leader, a leader of your community, a leader of fellow students, whoever is listening leadership is challenging in all of its facets. And to support you in leading change thoughtfully and effectively, I'm actually going back to a blog post that I wrote five years ago and so we're going to turn it into this podcast episode today, thinking through the lens of both shared and adaptive leadership, which are concepts I talk about and try to think about how to apply in specific scenarios throughout this podcast and blog. So enjoy, feel free to check out a slightly adapted initial version of the blog post in the show notes or the blog post. There we go For this episode today at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 190. Okay so, leaders, if you have ever had an exciting idea that you just know it's gonna be so good for teachers. It's gonna be so good for students, but people are not buying in and the biggest thing you need to do is, in your minds, convince them right, get that buy-in. So this phrase buy-in is an interesting one and I've heard since writing this blog post. I knew at the time to put it in quotes because I wasn't a fan, but I have learned a lot of other different phrases in the intervening five years, just really leaning into words I used in other spaces. But I have learned a lot of other different phrases in the intervening five years, just really leaning into words I used in other spaces like co-create design together, thinking about the idea of shared leadership. But in more regular kind of verbiage, thinking about Ayanna Pressley is like the people closest to the pain it should be closest to the power, right, those are the folks who have the solutions, the ones who are living it. So when I think about this, I think about you know, the phrases that we also typically encounter that make us think well, we just need people to kind of come over to the good side and see the path forward and get in line right. So we often hear things like maybe this is how I've always done it and it's going to take a lot to change. I don't have time for this. Right, there's a lot on people's plates, particularly when we're talking about education. Right, it seems often that there is a scarcity of time, right, and we've talked about that actually in recent podcast episodes about kind of mind shifts around that. But I think looking at the research, specifically the leadership research, and identifying four research-based strategies that you can use to effectively lead change in a very, you know, sustainable but also really justice-centered and kind of shared leadership way, is where we're going to go today. So the first few may sound familiar and I'm just going to keep naming them because they're super important in the change management and what I prefer the term leadership in leading change literature. So first is to have one clear vision. So if you choose one goal for the year maybe two, you know, or even you know, not even just the year three to five years out, one goal for three to five years, the same one. That's really ideal we found in the literature from major initiatives. So research on Massachusetts turnaround schools actually has found that the schools who did not make gains it's in part because they lacked prioritization of a few key areas. So they actually were trying to do too many things at once, really. Now DESE, specifically Massachusetts Department of Education, is saying if you're in turnaround, if your school needs a revamp, a turnaround plan, whatever, one goal, one to two goals, right. And those goals, of course, should be data informed, they should be high leverage and here's the clincher they should be co-created with stakeholders. Or, because often we maybe lead districts or schools that have hundreds, if not thousands, of stakeholders. When we include students and staff and family and community members, right, and all the people, at least a representative even, are there a proportionate number of students or young people relative to adults? That is actually the case in the school or the district or the community, right? So if we actually are proportionally, as a school community, majority students, we should have the majority of students on our representative leadership team, right? Of course there's a lot of nuances to getting folks in the space for having those conversations, making sure that students are compensated for that work and family members are compensated and teachers are compensated for this work, and that's a whole other episode. Feel free to tap back into the archives to find that, but today we're going to stay focused on this piece, so also want to bring in the research from Mandischild and Kuzi, who talk about vision, and they cite big leadership names, kuzi and Posner, who find that you know the clear vision really leads, to quote, higher levels of employee motivation, commitment, loyalty, esprit de corps, employee motivation, commitment, loyalty, esprit de corps and clarity about the organization's values, pride and productivity end quote. So lots of things come out of that clear vision. We have this kind of energy surge that generates more energy and a ripple effect across the staff. I would also say this probably extends to stakeholders. They were writing specifically about leading employees in a business environment in this research, but also, just you know, stakeholders in general are going to be really excited when they co-create the vision, which means if you have students co-creating the goal, students are then going to act in ways that support the goal right. So we have less of a behavior issue or whatever issue, because it's do this, as I say so, and it's really hey, you co-created this thing that we wanna work toward together. Let's do it Like, let's do the thing you helped create this. You're gonna work harder, right? It is a little bit of seemingly like a duh kind of moment for lack of a better phrase off the top of my head, but also I think it needs to be said in the research for us to truly kind of believe it, particularly when we're working with young people. Like oh right, yeah, like just a reminder that this is how human motivation often works right. So that shared leadership base again, we're coming back and back to that. These researchers also note that it is important to measure progress towards the vision within performance evaluation. So if it's actually a priority, this is really our one goal. We want to make sure that your feedback as a leader to teachers and your evaluation of teacher growth, your evaluation of student growth, the kind of like observational criteria you're looking for or listening for or wanting to experience and witness in classroom spaces and school spaces, are reflective of that priority. So it's all in alignment and doesn't feel like the separate thing. People do get initiative fatigue. That is very, very real, particularly in the intervening five years since COVID has happened and lots of things have changed and we just want to make sure we're doing kind of the less is more idea that I tell teachers all the time. We want to do that as leaders as well. Ok, next, and again, I think this is an obvious one. That's the word I was looking for obvious Make a space on teachers' plates. If we are asking teachers to do things Similarly with students or with families, right, we want to make space for them to do that, right. So we already are overloading people with things to do. So we can't really add to teacher's plates without taking something off. Right, if it is a priority. Same for us, right, if it is a priority for you as a leader. Something else needs to go so you can devote the appropriate amount of time and energy and resources to it. We can't just keep adding on. That's a recipe for burnout and in a time right now where teacher shortage is a very large issue, we don't want to contribute to that problem. We want to make space for the priorities and not add to the to-do list. There are several resources that I've shared blog posts and podcast episodes about thinking about prioritization versus adding to your to-do list. How do you spend appropriate planning time making space for all the things that really help move the needle, and what does the research say are the things that move the needle? All of that? So feel free to use the search bar of my website, lindsaybathlionscom, to find these resources. Forward them to teachers, whatever is helpful, but I do think the big takeaway here is prioritization, not adding to the to-do list, right? We all have the same amount of time in the day, so it's really about what do you want to make the priority today? We're not going to add time to your workday leaders and teachers talking to everybody here, right, but we instead want to see what is the most important, I also think on a student level, on an instructional level. We don't want to just keep giving students more and more and more things and overwhelm them. We're seeing really high rates of anxiety and lots of things from students that we don't want to add to it, but we want to maintain that curricular challenge. The thing there is again prioritization Do fewer things better, right. The thing there is again prioritization do fewer things better, right. As I have heard the brilliant folks say Angela Watson, there we go at her podcast. So that's two, all right. Just to recap, these are have one clear vision make space on teachers' plates. Now. Number three is to connect with teachers' hearts. I'm consistently referencing teachers here because I think in traditional mindsets around leadership, it is feeling sometimes like teachers need to buy in and the resistance leaders face in leading change is with teachers, but I actually am talking about all stakeholders here. Again, this was a blog post written five years ago, so, going off of this, we really want to update my language here. Again, this was a blog post written five years ago, so, going off of this, we really want to update my language here. So the prominent adaptive leadership scholar, ron Heifetz, says, quote what people resist is not change per se, but loss, end quote. I think this is hugely important. Even just a recognition of this fact is important. So I've actually had someone comment on this blog post just to say that this is the thing that resonated with them and to just say you know that's. I really appreciate that being brought up right. This idea of resistance is lost huge in the adaptive leadership space. And again, that just that simple acknowledgement that teachers' identities are tied up with their jobs right when they shift, for example, from like stage on the stage mode, when they're talking at the students, when they're imparting knowledge right to a more effective pedagogy of the quote guide on the side approach right, or coaching students. I'm helping facilitate student ownership of the learning. That's hard and for a lot of teachers there's going to be maybe a feeling of a loss of identity. Well, what am I even doing if my students can do it all by themselves? Right, but we ultimately want teachers to see the value of the shift, that it is not about their loss as kind of the sage on the stage of the imparter of knowledge, of the kind of know-it-all person, but actually you're moving into a more important and challenging. Really, you got to be like on your feet to do this. Well, you have to. That's not a great phrase. What am I thinking? On the ball, on the you know, on top of things, ready for anything, just kind of quick to respond. And you have to have this confidence and breadth of experience to be able to respond to what's happening in the classroom. Right, we can't prepare for it all when students learn the learning. So we want to coach teachers to see the value of this shift specifically and that students actually benefit more here when we teach them how to be learners, not just what to learn. And it is important to empathize with and speak to that teacher identity and sense of loss of that right. So again, we just want the humanity coming through here. We can use that empathy to kind of paint a picture of how the new initiative or the vision or the change. Whatever is happening speaks to their passion for student learning. Right, because of course we won't be doing things that are bad for student learning in terms of our change efforts. And you know, ultimately we are going to connect with why they became a teacher in the first place and just helping them kind of co-create that vision of what that looks like in their classroom, with the research backing, but also with kind of their hearts as part of it, kind of their hearts as part of it, and so we can kind of counteract that loss of identity and almost like recreate a new, better, stronger identity, if that makes sense. Now, if teachers don't seem ready for a change, anderson says talk and listen to them, share the data, let them discover the issue and the urgency themselves. So kind of share that research, share the student data, kind of create that disequilibrium of oh okay, I want this, but my current actions are producing these results. Right, I see research out there on this topic that's saying we should do this and then write that the kind of path is created for them. You're basically just bringing them up to speed with what you have witnessed, seen, reviewed, whatever, and making sure that you're kind of showing. This is the stuff in front of me, this is the stuff that I'm noticing, that I'm learning about, like, join me on the journey and, of course, don't forget the heart, right? So leadership scholars Cotter and Cohen warn that many change initiatives fail because they just rely too much on the data. Fail because they just rely too much on the data. They are incredibly data focused to the extreme so that they actually lose and don't inspire. They fail to inspire the creativity that is necessary for change initiatives by quote, harnessing the feelings that motivate useful action, right? So when we're motivated to do something, when we're excited about the possibilities for change, when we're feeling really creative and feeling like we can affect change efficacious I believe that word is then we are motivated to action, we are motivated to co-create the plan. It just kind of erases any of that resistance or at least drastically reduces that idea of resistance to change. So again, pulling people along, not pulling people go creating kind of lifting each other up, inspiring each other, motivating each other, connecting with our hearts and our creativity, is the way to go. So in the blog post I have added an image of the Kubler-Ross change curve so common in kind of leading change spaces and it may help you if you want to take a glance at it. It may help you recognize where teachers are emotionally during the change process and how you can support them during each stage. So I'm just going to narrate this so so folks who may not have access to the blog posts or have difficulty viewing the image can understand. So we have kind of this change curve that starts with like denial and our impact kind of is going to go kind of down and then up in terms of negative, positive. So we are in kind of in a denial state. We're kind of like medium impact. We are in a state of kind of maintaining the status quo. Our reaction is kind of shock, it's not happening. The approach here the recommendation for leaders at this stage, when people are in a state of denial, is to communicate information. Next, after communicating information, people might move to a frustration space where the impact is even less right. We're not impacting much. We may have kind of a state of starting to enter a state of disruption, though still perhaps in a little bit of a status quo state. We may see some of that remaining shock and denial, but we're also entering anger and fear territory. The approach for folks entering this space is to really watch, listen and support. We're going to continue watching, listening and supporting when folks may move into the next stage, which is depression. That is kind of the low point of the impact. So we're in kind of the negative swing and then we're going to start going back up. So imagine, kind of like a U curve here, we're at the bottom of the U, we're going back up the other side. Now people are moving into the experiment phase of the change curve and this is a state of exploration. The reaction is okay. I've accepted that this is what's happening and as a leader, you want to give time and space here to explore, for people to test out things, really truly experiment, have that informed risk-taking be celebrated, not penalized right, and then folks will move to decision, which is where we're just starting. We have a little bit of that exploration stuff but we're just starting to rebuild. We are in a state of rebuilding. We are committed that is folks' reaction. We are committed to the path forward and your approach as a leader is to celebrate. We are celebrating that co-creation that's happening. We've had folks co-creation that's happening. We've had folks kind of move through all these phases. There's a lot of emotion involved. We're kind of connecting to their joy of learning to experiment, trying things, taking risks and kind of coming to that decision I'm going to co-create and eventually move to integration. We're like, yes, this is the path forward, it's part of how we do things. I am fully so. That's the Kubler-Ross change curve. Again, speaking to that idea of connecting with teachers or, more broadly, stakeholders' hearts. Okay, the fourth strategy here, that is, research informed is create dissatisfaction, create dissatisfaction. There we go with the status quo. So I love Dana Miller's adaptation of Gleicker's change formula quo. So I love Dana Miller's adaptation of Gleicker's change formula which states that change equals dissatisfaction, times, vision, times, the first step. All of those three things dissatisfaction, vision and first step need to be larger than resistance. So what this formula does, just to break it down, is it accepts that resistance happens but it can be overcome as long as teachers or stakeholders more broadly can recognize their dissatisfaction with the way things are. Now there's a clear vision for how it can change, how it can be better. We know it's possible and there are first steps that are acceptable to us that we can take. So the fact that the formula for our math folks out there is includes multiplication right. Change equals dissatisfaction times, vision times. First step is all greater than resistance, right? Multiplication then means that if any one of those dissatisfaction, vision or first step is zero, like it doesn't exist, then resistance will win, because any number multiplied by zero is zero, and so of course, any resistance will be greater than zero, right? So I love that kind of formula, noting all three of these things are critically important for change dissatisfaction, vision and first step. If there is no dissatisfaction, if people are like, yes, I'm good with the status quo, they're in that kind of denial stage of the Kubler-Ross change curve, then leaders can create it, and in fact Mesrose says they must create it. Right that adults actually need a disorienting dilemma that's what he calls it to jumpstart transformative learning. So this is learning that requires a paradigm shift, like a totally different way of looking at a problem or engaging, I should say, with a problem, and it asks us to critically examine our assumptions rather than just learn a new skill, right? So imagine I'm thinking of a parallel here to curriculum. You give your teachers a new curriculum and you say, okay, learn it, do it. Okay, that might be fine if that curriculum is the same kind of pedagogy, the same kind of way of teaching they've been teaching. If that curriculum is actually drastically different they've been lecturing history lessons, reading from a textbook, and now we're learning through inquiry whoa, that's going to be different. That's actually going to require a paradigm shift. It's not just like a new skill that. It's like okay, boom, boom, boom. It's like I need to view learning and the act of teaching differently than I have before, right, so it's got me critically examining assumptions. It's got me in a disorienting dilemma, right, like I see the way I've done things and I see the way I'm going to do things and I see the research saying that actually, that new way is going to generate student learning, more student learning, better student learning and I need to kind of have that moment of whoa, okay, change needs to happen. I need to recognize that. I need to examine my assumptions. That's what the disorienting dilemma does. It forces us to examine our assumptions and so presenting teachers with information that makes them and this is the key just uncomfortable enough to realize that quote according to Mesereau, the way I've been thinking about this isn't working anymore. End quote that idea, that aha moment. Oh, the way I've been thinking about this isn't working anymore. That's going to help them try on other ways of thinking Again. Think about that experiment phase from the Kubler-Ross change curve and be willing to rearrange how they see the world. So this is the most effective when we're actually in group dialogue in a context of like a team, for example, a whole staff, where folks are just able to briefly try on other ways of thinking. Sometimes it can be really, really challenging when you do anything with adults, with students, that is brand new and you're like, okay, go ahead, do the thing. We're like I don't even know where to start, like I've never had this opportunity, I've never tried this thing before, I've never even witnessed other people doing this. So I'm not sure how right and so being in that group space is going to give folks just time and possibilities to kind of experiment and be in that experiment phase of trying on other ways of thinking. Okay, so go ahead and create a disorienting dilemma for your teachers and remember that major transformation is usually made up of a lot of little changes over time. So you won't shift mindsets in one meeting, you just won't. So reduce that, lower that expectation of this is going to be real easy, but you can present the disorienting dilemma and let the disorientation start to sink in. When everyone is sufficiently disoriented, then they're going to be seeking new ways of thinking and you're going to have an opportunity to introduce those ideas right. So, again, we're presenting the data, we're creating the disorienting dilemma, we're presenting the research and we're remembering to connect with people's hearts and we're going to invite them to ask questions to seek out new ideas. We're going to put them in a group right. Invite them to ask questions to seek out new ideas. We're going to put them in a group right. Try on different ways of thinking, experiments, celebrate the risk-taking and to think about possible disorienting dilemmas for teachers. If you're like I'm not sure what that even looks like, lindsay consider presenting a situation in which two values that teachers hold, or stakeholders again more generally hold where those two values that teachers hold or stakeholders again more generally hold, where those two values that they hold are in direct competition. For example, teacher finds themselves working 60 hours each week to complete their lesson plans, graded student work, all the things they have to do. This positions their personal well-being, which is important to them, in direct conflict with their love for student learning important to them, in direct conflict with their love for student learning. So let teachers recognize the discontent there, right? That's not good. I want to be personally well and I want my students to be helped. Explore the underlying assumptions. Example this is the way it has to be. There's no way I can be personally well and help my students Aha, let's explore that, critically, examine that. Let them come to the conclusion that transformational change is the way. We need a paradigm shift. We need to do something differently to overcome the discontent and then start exploring different ways of thinking that could address this dilemma. Share what other teachers who do have a better balance of well-being and student learning right. See what other schools are doing structurally right. Start exploring different ways of thinking. Once teachers get here, you can take them through the final steps of making that action plan collectively. Make it. Don't put it just on the teacher right. But how can I help? How can the structures help? Test it out, build capacity for the new approach, provide support, provide structures, provide coaching, pd, whatever is needed. And then it becomes integrated again Kugler-Ross curve integration into a daily practice of the teacher's lives or ways of being or the person's lives, right? So I'll link to Mesereau's 10 Phases of Transformative Learning if you're more interested in that in the blog post. But that is kind of where we're kind of pulling a lot of this stuff from is Mesereau's work with disorienting dilemmas. In conclusion, there was a lot there and change is challenging, it's difficult and it takes time. And these research-based ideas they're going to get you started. The real work is in how you bring teachers, students, families, all stakeholders into the change process right. The process is just as important as the final action plan or whatever is implemented right. It is about the process. It's about community shared leadership, adaptive leadership. Get at those underlying beliefs, do it together, co-create right. And to help you with this, to help you kind of build up your shared leadership, adaptive leadership muscle, I'm going to share with you my leadership PD playlist. It has videos, it has podcast episodes, it has templates and resources and activities that you can grow your leadership capacity. So to grab that resource you can go to lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash one, nine zero. Until next time, everybody.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
![]()
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode, we speak with Jason Tate, who is from the UK and works in an American International School. In this conversation, he dives into the critical aspects of creating safer and more inclusive educational environments by actively listening to student voices.
Jason brings a unique perspective as an educator and co-founder of The Student Voice, an innovative reporting tool that helps students share their experiences of harm so educators can implement appropriate interventions. This tool works to fulfill the UK’s statutory requirements for safeguarding—ensuring student safety at school, online, and in the community—but its concepts can be widely applied in all educational settings. The Big Dream Jason’s big dream is to cultivate an educational environment where we safeguard students by doing things with them and listening to their voices (instead of telling them what to do and ignoring their perspectives). He believes this can be accomplished by building strong, trusting relationships between educators and students and deeply understanding the lived experiences of each individual. Mindset Shifts Required One key mindset shift for educators is to shift from a traditional top-down approach to one that values and integrates student voices. This involves recognizing that listening is a process aimed at understanding, and interventions should be designed collaboratively with students. Additionally, educators need to see safeguarding students' well-being as an ongoing, cyclical process that requires continuous learning and adaptation. Action Steps To create an educational environment that prioritizes the student voice, Jason recommends the following brave action steps: Step 1: Focus on ways to include the student's voice and commit to the process. This requires authentic buy-in from leadership, teachers, and all educators in the system. Models like Laura Lundy’s pathway to encourage student participation or Hart’s Ladder of Participation can be an excellent starting point for schools to prioritize this. Step 2: Implement practical tools and models in your school and classrooms. For example, Jason shares a discrimination reporting tool used at his school, where students can offer information about their lived experiences at home, school, or in the community. This lets students have a voice and share when they feel comfortable and the information they give helps educators understand patterns and implement interventions. Step 3: Develop and execute interventions collaboratively with students. Harm can often happen away from adult supervision and in the community, and it’s not always realistic or practical to simply increase supervision in community spaces. Often, it’s equipping students as active bystanders to reduce harm amongst their peers, or it could be equipping community members. Interventions need to be collaborative, reviewed often, and targeted specifically where harm happens. Challenges? Educators need to be authentically committed to this work. Just paying lip service or being tokenistic will not work—students see through it straight away and it can damage the culture. So, true buy-in amongst educators and staff members is key to ensuring everyone is committed to safeguarding. Authentic engagement means listening to students, getting their feedback, and continually revising things in response. One Step to Get Started The first step is an obvious one: ask your school—why do we want to do this? What’s the purpose of this? Start by identifying and working with champions within the school who are enthusiastic about integrating student voices. Then, begin with small, manageable initiatives, such as pilot programs with specific grades, to gain early victories and build momentum for broader implementation. Stay Connected You can learn more about Jason’s work to safeguard students on The Student Voice website. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Jason is sharing a page of case studies from The Student Voice with you for free to see how it works in action. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 189 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Jason Tate. Welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 0:00:06 - Jason Tait Great thanks for having me. It's really a real pleasure to see you and to talk about what we're going to go through. Thank you. 0:00:11 - Lindsay Lyons Absolutely. I'm really excited and I think you bring a really interesting perspective. Being for primarily United States-based audience, like an external to the US perspective, is really, I think, going to help a lot of folks listening. So I'm curious to know, before we actually dive into the main conversation here, what is important for listeners to know about you or just keep in mind about the topic in general before we dive in. 0:00:35 - Jason Tait Yeah, so I actually have quite a good connection with America and the States, although I'm from the UK myself. I work at an American international school, so I'm fairly familiar with the American education system and all the differences that means compared to the UK system. But because I'm based in the UK, we have a series of statutory requirements that we have to follow in and around the whole area of what the UK would call safeguarding, which essentially means making sure that schools keep young people and children safe, both in school but also deal with any online issues, and also I was sponsored for helping them to stay safe in the community and also at home. So there's a fairly extensive framework which is statutory. So it's an English education law that schools are required to do this and look after the children under their care, and all that through all their different lived life experiences. 0:01:28 - Lindsay Lyons I love that framing for today's conversation and thank you for defining that for us. I think that'll be really powerful to think about, especially in line with like this next question I usually ask them. Dr Bettina Love talks about freedom dreaming in the following way. She says it's dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, and so when I think about safeguarding and I think about, I think there are clear ties here and I'm curious to know, like, with that in mind, what's that? What's the dream that you hold or or, um, that you kind of aspire that students will experience in this? Yeah, sure. 0:02:02 - Jason Tait I think that's a really, really good connection with the work we do. So, um, specifically with the area safeguarding, my own sort of philosophy and view is is that if you're going to safeguard and look after anybody but in our case with education, it's obviously young people and children that you need to work, not you don't do stuff, you don't do things for them, you don't do things to them, but you do things with them. And if you're going to work with our young people and children and students to safeguard them, you need to listen to their voice. But listening is a process, not an outcome, and the outcome of the listening process is to understand their lived experiences. So schools, quite rightly, have sets of rules and regulations young people and children have to follow. So you've got to be on time to class, do your homework, be respectful, all those things which means a school runs as a decent organization. There's no anarchy, otherwise we'd be able to function as a school. But for children, they have a whole set of lived experiences which may or may not be impacted by those rules. So what is their home life like? Are they popular on social media? Have they been bullied? Have they been harassed? Are they experiencing discrimination and if they are experiencing all of those harms, or a variety of those harms, what are they doing differently to keep safe and to live their own life? And we need to understand that before we can help, support them and intervene in a meaningful way. Because the real danger is that adults will interpret a young person's behavior and get that interpretation wrong and then they get the intervention wrong as well. Instead of being a source of support and help, they can actually become a hindrance and also can add to the harm and certainly not build trust. Because all of this it's central to all of this any effective safeguarding framework. You need to be built on a culture of trust between the very strong, healthy, trustful relationships between the adults responsible for safeguarding the young people and the young people themselves. 0:04:10 - Lindsay Lyons There is so much here that is so good and I think a lot of times are not part of our default thinking as educators, at least not in my default thinking as an educator formerly trained. So I want to highlight a couple of things and I'll ask a mindset shift question in a moment connected to them. But I love that you mentioned the with them like that. I love listening as a process, not an outcome, and I love the idea of if you don't understand and you don't seek to understand you, you're actually probably not helping. You're actually doing the opposite, like that's. That's fascinating to me and I think about a lot of times we say things like student voice but we don't actually mean deep understanding and seeking to understand and work with in community and partnership. And so I'm curious to know is that a big mindset shift? Or how do you kind of like coach educators or folks in the space around that, taking on that mindset? Like where are they coming from? How do they get to this appreciation of? 0:05:12 - Jason Tait like we're doing this with students. So we have a very specific model that we use to help educators with that and we have a very clear guiding principle and one rule. So a guiding principle is that we seek. We will not understand a young person's life unless we understand the social rules that govern that young person's life. So we seek to understand the social rules that govern that person's life. So why say, if you take like online life and social media, why do they behave the way they do online? What are the rules that's governing their lives to help keep them safe online? They might take part in an online bullying because they see someone else doing it and they don't want to be the target of that harm. So they will join in with the harmer. But they're doing that not because they agree with the person carrying out the harm. They're doing that because they don't want to be the target themselves. So if you can understand that, then you can have a more effective intervention. And our rule and this ties in with teaching and learning is that we seek to understand and if you understand something, therefore you're learning. So if you go back to what all schools are about their teaching and learning approaches to teaching and learning. Safeguarding in this way is just like teaching and learning in terms of science, math, english, anything else you do in a school. We're looking to learn all the time about the young people we're looking after and if we learn then we'll understand. So, having that growth mindset, we're tying it back into what makes a good teacher. A good teacher wants to learn right. So hopefully teachers can make that connection with well safeguarding is just the same as me teaching English or math or science, whatever it is, history, whatever it is. I teach and our cyclical model which comes out of all of that is that schools provide brave spaces for young people to share information on their terms. So it's when the young person is ready to share, not when we need them to. It's when they're ready to share and then we seek to understand the information they've shared. Then we work with them to develop the intervention on whatever level. That is. So if, if you have a culture of bullying in grade seven, work with grade seven to overcome that culture of bullying. So it might not be working with one kid and one case of bullying. You might have a culture of harassment or a culture of discrimination. So work with the students who are involved in that Work with them to fix it. And then the final part of the cyclical model is that you go back and check to see if that's worked. So has your intervention been successful? And all the time, in all four stages of the model the cyclical model you're using the voice of the young person, so you're being really authentic about what you're doing. It's not tokenistic at all. It's saying to young people you are part of this community and without your voice and in every aspect of the process of supporting them, oh, that's such a great process and I love that it's cyclical right, Because you're constantly doing it. That's perpetual. It's always in motion. Yep, amazing. It's not linear. There's no start and end, because a school is an organic community. It's always growing and developing. That's why schools are great places to work. They change all the time. It can be the same place, but in a different school year on year because the new set of kids, new teaching, new issues, new new curriculum everything changes all the time, so they're organic and they're constantly growing. That's why your process needs to be constant makes so much sense. 0:08:46 - Lindsay Lyons I I also love how you reference a lot of lundy. I mean in indirectly. 0:08:51 - Jason Tait I feel like here yeah, sure, well, lundy's a big influence on the work we do, for sure. 0:08:55 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, Do you mind speaking to that just a little bit yeah absolutely For people who might be unfamiliar. 0:09:00 - Jason Tait Yeah. So going back to your early question about how you support teachers actually supporting your community with empowering the voice of the student, laura Lundy's work is I was lucky enough to talk with her and meet with her a few times and read her work obviously and her model is very, very it's very straightforward. It's very straightforward, very easy to understand but gives a clear pathway for institutions to develop a culture of student voice. And her big thing is participation. So it's rather that student voice, it's student participation in how you can involve young people in the community and view a school as a community and more than just a school, because I think all schools would recognize that you are a community of learners and Lundy's model really gives you a really nice framework in which you can do that and guide you in how you can do that and assess that and put that in place. Another good model which you may be familiar with is Hart's Ladder of Participation. So Hart's Ladder is really great. So I don't see the ladder as hierarchical. But where Hart's Ladder is really useful is you can look at the issues you might be facing so young people share information. Where hearts ladder is really useful is you can look at the issues you might be facing. So young people shed information and we often go back to hearts ladder and pick the rung on the ladder that we think will match the issue that we're facing. So that's a really that's a really nice guide to to deal with issues sort of case by case hearts. 0:10:26 - Lindsay Lyons I can give you that guidance, we feel on specific issues and cases I love the of heart's ladder as just kind of something you can pick a rung of, as opposed to a hierarchy. That's really wise. I like that a lot very cool and, and so I think you've done a lot of things with the student voice, with different different things in terms of what does it look like when we put some of the big ideas that you've talked about into practice, like, how do we literally do it? um, can you talk through a little bit about what schools can do to make this a possibility in their their communities so, um, let me give you a case study we're working on right now at my school. 0:11:05 - Jason Tait So we give our, so our tool. We provide the young people and children in our school with a map of their school, a map of the community, a generic map of a home which matches the socioeconomic background of the young people, and a discrimination reporting tool so they can share information on any of their lived experiences school, in the community in which they live, at home and in relation to any forms of discrimination, and so we've been running that since 2018 as a tool that the kids can use. Over the last couple of years, we've really picked up on a pattern of, because when you get the context of where harm happens, you can understand patterns right, so you'll deal with an individual case, but when you get a series of cases which have a similar context, then you have the ability to change the context to prevent future harm, and that's the really exciting stuff for us. So the case study we're working through right now is that we we've seen a pattern of um, we call it child-on-child relationship harm, so issues of bullying, sexual harassment and discrimination. The common theme is it takes place away from adult supervision, it takes place amongst groups of students and it can take place online and in person and it's very rarely one-on-one, it's very often in group situations. So what we've started to introduce is an active bystander program for our whole community. So to disrupt the context because adults aren't there, we need to empower young people to deal with it there and then. But they need the skill set to do it safely and the confidence to do it safely. But research has also shown that if you can have a successful active bystander program, it can really reduce instances of harassment, discrimination and bullying. So we spent the second half of the last school year and we'll really strengthen it going into the first semester of the coming school year and training our community to be active bystanders and so they will have a skill set to disrupt the context of child and child relationship harm, as it happens. And then we'll track the data to see. We'll go back and say go back to our young people, say, has this approach worked? Have we managed to support you in managing those relationship harm issues that you've you've shared with us, that you experience? In other words, have we changed the context to prevent future harm? So if we go back to that model, we've got the information through the brave space. We think we understand the issue. We've developed our intervention and provided training, and now we're halfway between the training piece and checking if we've been successful. 0:13:56 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, that is so good. And I'm thinking about the default. My default response just the way that I have been experiencing schools and thinking about how people usually intervene in something like that was oh, we just add adults so that students are never alone. Right, we just add adult supervision. That's not it. We have to empower the students and support the students to be able to do it themselves. That's so good. 0:14:20 - Jason Tait But I think in this particular case that because the type of harm happens away from adult supervision, that solution seemed the right one for us. In different contexts, with different issues, adults may be part of the solution. So it's so. We work one of the schools that I work with. They have a mcdonald's restaurant on the corner of the street opposite the school. So they provide and there's harm happening in that restaurant, with the kids pouring out of school, going into the restaurant. So they provided training to the mcdonald's staff and safeguarding, so they they then report back to the school if any harms happen. So it's, it's working out, understanding where the context of where the harm happens, then develop your intervention from there. So, and because you have, then, because you then have community safeguarding, your community gets involved and that strengthens your culture because you're saying it's not just the teachers, it's our community. You know it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a town to change a generation that is brilliant, okay, I. 0:15:30 - Lindsay Lyons I love this idea of training community members and truly partnering. We talk a lot about being connected to community and stuff that's legitimately connected to the community. You are on the same page there. I love that, and I'm wondering about folks who are doing this work or who maybe are at an earlier stage of that cycle maybe they're, um, just starting to get information and have never been through that cycle of partnering with students to determine the action step like are there challenges to this work that you've seen? 0:16:04 - Jason Tait oh, yeah, 100, yeah, yeah, you have to be um, you have to want to do authentically so. So if you pay lip service or tokenistic, that will not work and kids will see through you straight away and that can actually damage your culture. So you have to be genuine about it and be prepared to listen, and maybe listen to things you don't want to hear, because kids will tell you if you. But then also you have to be prepared to act on what they've said, because it's almost, it's almost better not to ask if you're not, if you don't act on what they've said, because you've asked the question, you've done nothing. That's almost. That's. That's really negative, that's that's. That's the road you shouldn't go down. I'd suggest um, yeah, so you need to be authentic about it, um, and be prepared to listen and be prepared to be surprised, right? So there's things the kids will tell you. We learned. So we always ask kids what's going well as well. That's really important, and so we were shocked by what they thought was going well and there's good stuff. But we never. We just took it for granted, but it meant so much to them. So those little things, you can make a really big difference in a school community's life by just doing the little things, understanding them and do more of them. 0:17:21 - Lindsay Lyons So, asking the good, stuff as well as what's not going so well, is really important as well. I'm curious just to infuse listeners with a bit of joy. What are some of the things that people? 0:17:29 - Jason Tait said. One of the things we learned was um, this is crazy. So our we have a really lovely art department at our school and at recess and at lunch times they stay open and we'll have some light supervision. They'll be there but in the background and they do some art material. That's, the kids can go to hang out and do a bit of art if the weather's not nice outside, and stuff like that. The kids loved that and we thought that was okay, so okay. But they just like that was the best thing in their day where they could do art together, hang out, use a teacher there, but they could just do art, chat, talk and they just loved that. We never knew that, we never appreciated that, we never came close to understanding that. I was sure we just said, right, we'll do, we'll do more of that and just a simple thing like that, which doesn't mean much to us but meant the world to those kids yeah, it's, it's just. 0:18:20 - Lindsay Lyons I think that's a. That story is so emblematic of why it is so important to just ask the question of the students, to just listen to what they have to say, because they teach us so much more than what you were mentioning earlier the false interpretation yeah, for sure that kids are my best teacher. 0:18:38 - Jason Tait No doubt about that absolutely, absolutely okay. 0:18:41 - Lindsay Lyons So now I'm envisioning someone listening who is really excited about this idea but might not be certain about how to get started. Or, you know, maybe seeing that you know there's there's um, like a statutory element to being in the UK and there's like this kind of community support or expectation of this, whereas it might not exist as much in the US like what is kind of the very first thing you would encourage someone to do to get started and get the ball rolling here, or more than one thing if you think yeah sure. 0:19:11 - Jason Tait So I think the first it sounds like a really obvious question. But just work with your school and your school leaders and say why do we want to do this? Yeah, what's the purpose of this? And link it back to your mission and your school values so it becomes part of your mission, becomes part of your strategy, becomes part of your school. If you can identify the clear and everyone thinks yeah, student voice, you should listen to kids, that's obvious. Well, sit down and unpack what that actually means and how that can benefit your community. So if you recognize that you have relationship issues, if you have issues of bullying substance, misuse all the stuff that kids experience, like the risks that we know they go through. If you want to understand that, then student voice is a very good vehicle which gives you that level of understanding. And once you make that almost a philosophical, strategic commitment, then the rest can take care of itself. You can look at my tool, the student voice tool. You can look at Lundy's model for participation, hart's ladder. You can work out what it is that you do. A lot of schools do surveys and there's a place for surveys, but they're point in time right and kids' lives move on very quickly and the influence of their lives move on very quickly. So what's going to be your means for young people to be able to use their voice and what's the vehicles in which they can use their voice in your setting, and how can you develop that and work with the young people to develop it as well? Because if you can work with them to develop your student voice, they will see that you are serious about it and they will feel you're authentic about it. 0:21:04 - Lindsay Lyons So once you've got your systems and processes set up and your approach set up, they will buy into it and they will work with you on it don't want to use the term buy-in, but like buy-in from a teacher level, right, like the commitment or the authentic you were saying authentic authenticity, right, like of of the teachers. And so I'm wondering about a leader who has a staff that's kind of mixed. There are like some people are really excited, want to authentically partner with students, and some folks are like I am not really ready to hear the hard things, like I'm ready to listen but only to maybe some things and I'm not really prepared to hear the full truth that students are speaking or maybe to follow up on that. How would you advise a leader to kind of negotiate that dynamic in their staff? 0:22:03 - Jason Tait Yeah, I think that's a fairly common reaction to a lot of initiatives in schools and and you start with your champions. So start with the people who back that and start with the people who want to buy in with you. And maybe start with your juniors and seniors. Start with a couple of grades, work with them, get your early victories right. So when, when you have an issue, come in, deal with it really well. And feedback. So with all the student voice stuff that comes into our school an advisory, every thursday, I will feed back to the advisors and advisees and say this is what we're looking at this week, this is what's come in, this is what we're doing. Have a discussion about that, talk about it. So you're just really transparent, get the elephant out the room as far as possible without breaching confidentiality. But I'll be straight. So if we have an issue of a culture of, say, misogyny or sexual harassment, we'll say in these grades this is what's coming through, guys, what do we think we need to do about that? So it's all out in the open. You discuss it, you talk about it and then you start to develop as a community so those teachers that may not be buying into it can start to see right, okay, this is what's happening in the place where I work. Do I want to work at a place that has that? No, maybe I don't. How can? How can we fix that? How can we do something about that? So you bring people slowly along, but start with your champions, start all the people that buy into it, and then give yourself the gift of time and then plan and develop your action plan, your strategic plan and and review that constantly and look for your indicators of success and your timelines and just keep reviewing that as you go along. 0:23:55 - Lindsay Lyons I love that your tool and the idea of constantly having that information, that input from students, of here's what's going on, here's my lived experience, gives you the opportunity to share the information regularly. To say I think it was Mesereau who says, like you need a disorienting dilemma when we're trying to lead change. Right, we have this. Whoa. I thought I was living in this community and working in this community everything was peaceful, right. And then I just remember, um, in one of my classes I used to teach feminism to high school students and one of the boys was like, yeah, but like, sexism doesn't really happen here. And then all of the girls were like here. Let me tell you about these yeah, that's right. 0:24:25 - Jason Tait Yeah, that's true. But also you like, we're talking about the harmless kids experience. They will tell you I get too much homework for my ap classes. I don't like pizza on a friday, you know you, you get everything. So we talk about everything, right and soon. We've had to work hard, but we've got kids moving from complaining to advocacy and starting to appreciate the difference, because we will kick back and say stop complaining. It's a privileged environment. The pizza is great on a Thursday, so you get them to. But it's also a really good social media tool as well. So we will get kids who will say things that they shouldn't say. Well, not that they shouldn't say. They express themselves inappropriately, right, so you can hold them to account safely for that. It's a safe form of social media as well. So they'll learn how to use their voice. So when they go onto platforms and go into the real world, hopefully they don't get in trouble with their employer, because they've had the support from us on how to use their voice correctly. 0:25:26 - Lindsay Lyons So there's lots of educational benefits, as well as all the safety pieces we've talked about as well I love that so much when we think about student voice, as often people you know describe a student voice or leadership building in youth as like this future benefit. But it's like both right it's the future benefit and it's like because you're doing it now, you're enabling students to have that voice and participation in the moment they're in school and it benefits the later because they did it authentically when they were there. 0:25:53 - Jason Tait Yeah, that's a big part of our vision with this work is that if you can teach kids to use their voice appropriately and see the action is taken when they do, then hopefully they can take that learning into the society they live in and the community they live in so they can be a positive, contributing member of the community they go on to live. So the real, really important we feel obviously we're buyers, but really important educational value in the work we're doing as well. 0:26:21 - Lindsay Lyons That's amazing and, oh my gosh, there's been so much. I think listeners are going to get a ton out of this episode. As we move to close, I I ask one question just for fun. This can be related to our conversation and your work, or it could be something totally random, but because everyone that listens and tunes in really is a lifelong learner, I'm curious to know what's something that you have been personally learning about lately wow, like I say, I love to learn. 0:26:46 - Jason Tait There's so much that's going on right now. So we've just gone through a general election in the UK, so what I've been really learning about is our political system and different, what democracy means, what that looks like, again, how people can use their voice. Uh, is democracy simple? Is it straightforward? How that can be abused and does the real picture come back out, how to get clear information, clear understanding and how people may abuse or use that system. And is democracy a resilient enough process to provide the freedoms that we all enjoy? So that's what I'm really been thinking and reading about and reflecting on right now um, right there with you. 0:27:29 - Lindsay Lyons The united states is a kind of similar similar position right now interesting times oh yeah, and what powerful times to learn alongside students. I always think about students, like you said students teach us so much. Students can are going to teach us how to like get through this, because the same old way is not working. So it's like give us something new. Let's go. 0:27:53 - Jason Tait Yeah, that's right. I'm on board with you with that one for sure. 0:27:57 - Lindsay Lyons And the last question I have for you is really, I think people are going to be very interested in the tool you have. It is. I have not heard of anything like this and I work with different survey organizations and people who do the point in time but not the ongoing system. So how do folks connect with you? Learn more about the student voice, all of those things? Yeah, sure. 0:28:16 - Jason Tait So just jump onto our website, the studentvoicecouk. You see all of our stuff there and you can sign up for demos. We've got lots of our case study page. We have lots of live videos about things, how our schools have used it. We've got tons of blogs about the work that we do. Um, we're very accessible. We do lots of video, lots of online work, with people around the world talking about it. So go to our website, check us out, have a look and then get in touch through the website. We'll happily talk to you and share all that information we can transparent about what we do excellent. 0:28:49 - Lindsay Lyons I will link to the page and also the case study page so I think people will get a really a nice vibe of what you do and what is possible for their communities by looking at that yeah, sure, yeah, absolutely, that'd be great jason, thank you so much for this conversation today. 0:29:02 - Jason Tait It was such a pleasure yeah, lindsey, it's been great talking to you. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you for the opportunity. It's been really kind of you, thank you.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode, we speak with Charle Peck, a former high school teacher turned mental health professional. She shares her professional insights and personal stories that sparked the need to dive deeper into mental health practices, and how she’s seen it transform students and schools.
Charle was a high school teacher for 18 years and saw how students struggled with their mental health. She was led to get a Master of Social Work degree to understand what was going on, jump-starting her career in mental health. Her teaching experience informs her current work, blending the teacher and mental health professional perspectives. Charle is the co-creator of Thriving School Community and the co-author of Improving School Mental Health: The Thriving Community Solution. The Big Dream Charle has a lot of hope for the future because she’s focusing on the solutions to the mental health problems we face in schools. Charle believes that by addressing the root causes of mental health challenges and integrating sustainable practices into daily routines, educators can create a balanced and supportive atmosphere for both teachers and students. Mindset Shifts Required To create an education system where mental health is front-and-center, Charle identifies a few mindset shifts that need to occur. The first is that we need to stop getting stuck in language—some states don’t allow words like “trauma” or “SEL,” and the focus on words takes away from what’s actually going on. So the mindset shift is focusing on what’s going on beneath the behavioral issues like absenteeism. Another mindset shift is focusing on practical solutions—what are solution-oriented approaches that fit into your daily classroom practice? Instead of adding more and more to educators' plates, the mindset shift is around integrating mental health practices into your daily routine. Charle shared some real-life stories of students she worked with and the lessons she learned, namely to humanize each person and understand where they’re coming from. It’s an important mindset shift: take time to see people where they are and help them from that place. Finally, Charle talks about the mindset shift of educators seeing this as a skill to learn. With the right tools, they can be equipped to support mental health in their classrooms. Action Steps Improving mental health in the school system can seem complicated, but there are actually some very practical steps educators can take to prioritize it. Charle recommends these action steps: Step 1: Ask yourself and other educators what you need to make your jobs better. Mental health starts with the educators, with the adults, before you can make an impact on the children. So check in with yourself and other colleagues to find solutions to problems and meet needs that improve your work environment. Step 2: Humanize others and understand their “story spiral.” There’s always more to the story—behind each bad behavior is someone’s home life, relationships, traumas, etc. So, humanize them, and take time to see what’s going on, getting to the route of a problem and not just focusing on the behavior. Step 3: Equip yourself with knowledge and skills. Mental health practices, tools, and strategies can all be learned and improved on. Be intentional about learning them for yourself and your students. Charle’s 9 Essential Skills Course is a great place to start. Challenges? One common challenge—perhaps the biggest one—is the feeling of overwhelm among teachers and leaders. Decision fatigue is a very real experience, and educators are overwhelmed with the decisions they face and how to make the right decision. Charle believes that impactful professional development sessions will help reduce overwhelm and decision fatigue. The other challenge educators face is how to help others make decisions quickly. Teachers need to be equipped with the tools and dialogue to use with students to help them make the right decisions for themselves. One Step to Get Started One practical first step for educators is to identify and reflect on what you need for yourself to make your job better and do better. What keeps coming up over and over again? What’s the emotional charge you get when you just think of something? Identify the problem and the unmet need underlying it. Then, bring it to your first professional development session at the beginning of the school year, discuss it with colleagues, and use your collective wisdom to find solutions to these problems. Stay Connected You can find out more about Charle and her work on her website, Thriving Educator. There, you can also access resources, a podcast, and self-paced courses like The 9 Essential Skills Course. To help you implement today’s takeaways, Charle is sharing a School Mental Health Audit with you for free. It helps you identify strengths and areas of growth in your school to better prioritize mental health. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 188 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript here. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Charlie Peck, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. I am thrilled to have you today, thank you, Lindsay. 0:00:09 - Charle Peck I am so happy to be here. Truly, this is going to be such a great conversation with you and your audience. 0:00:14 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, and I am just so excited about the topic that we're talking about. Mental health is so important for everyone, and I just think a lot of people are looking for sustainable answers to how do we actually do this well, so I'm very excited to get your expertise on this. The first question I have, though, is like what should people know about you or kind of keep in mind in our conversation today, beyond the traditional bio sense of things? 0:00:40 - Charle Peck Yeah, that's important because I think what's unique that I keep hearing about my lens is that I was a teacher for 18 years in a high school classroom, which led me to this work and because my students were struggling so much with mental health. I didn't understand why. So I kept asking why, which led me to get a master of social work degree so that I could understand structurally what was going on, historically, what was going on the generational trauma and all those contributions from society, childhood, that were contributing to their struggles. So when I was one of those teachers sitting in a PD session and I heard mental health professionals speak to us, I was one of those people, one of those teachers rolling my eyes because I thought you don't have the teacher lens. So it's important that you understand I do have the teacher lens and the mental health professional lens. 0:01:29 - Lindsay Lyons That is so critical. I think they're just, in general, pd can really just gloss over the top of people's heads when they're like I just you don't know what it's like in my shoes and it's like, oh, I know I do, I'm speaking right to it. So that's, that's really incredible. I love that you framed that to start. And then I think, conceptually, regarding the content, I one of the big things I really love to ground the episodes in is the sense of equity and justice, and so Dr Bettina Love talks about this idea of freedom dreaming with this quote that I am in love with dreams grounded in the critique of injustice is how she describes freedom dreaming. And so, with that, what is that big dream that you hold for education? 0:02:09 - Charle Peck Well, I'm hopeful. I mean, a lot of us get stuck in the problem. Many of us get stuck in the problem and, trust me, I understand what those major issues are contributing to mental health in our education system. It's stemming from society, from education, and it's stemming from our families, and they're all meshing together. But I'm hopeful because I'm focusing on solutions for that, and so what that means to me is we've got to meet the needs of everybody, and I do believe that there's a way to do that, lindsay. So that's what I'm excited about. 0:02:38 - Lindsay Lyons Nice, oh, that's great. Okay, so I think with that there's a lot of things that maybe people have their minds wrapped around in terms of mental health that maybe needs a little unpacking, and so I'm wondering if there's any kind of key mindset shifts that you have noticed either teachers or leaders go through and you're like, ah, that's the thing that kind of unlocks the transformation. Is there kind of a mindset shift that you coach on or that you've seen work with folks? 0:03:08 - Charle Peck Yes, oh my gosh, there's actually so much there. So let me simplify in a couple of ways. Number one we need to stop getting stuck in language. So there are some states I can't use the word trauma, I can't use the word SEL, I can't. I mean equity, you know. I mean DEI. It's like a bad word in some states these days, and so I said listen, let's not get stuck in that language, let's just understand the importance behind it and how we're going to function better. So it's not getting stuck with all the semantics and all again the problems. It's how do we shift our mindset into focusing on solutions that will meet the needs of the people who have an unmet need? So it's showing up behaviorally, it's showing up in absenteeism. So we need to look at what those problems are and shift the mindset about what's going on underneath, and that's really no secret. I mean, we've been talking about that for a long time, but sometimes we need to be reminded about that, Lindsay. And so we need practical solutions for this, something that's just going to integrate into our daily practice, and that is the mind shift that usually helps me capture leaders and their educators I'm working with, because they're like oh yeah, so it's not one more thing that I have to do and I said, no, it's not. It's let's wrap our head around something that will integrate right into your daily practice to attack this problem that keeps showing up for you, and then they're ready to adapt it and then actually use it, and then remember how to use it. So that's the key. Those are a couple of things that I coach on all the time. 0:04:37 - Lindsay Lyons I love that you said that, because one of the things that I think people in in a lot of spaces, but in equity spaces particularly, it's like initiative fatigue where it's it is one more thing I'm already like my plate is full, I'm already doing too much, and so to just say, well, we're doing this thing, how do we do it better, makes it sustainable so that we don't have to. I mean it. Also really, I think the beauty of our jobs is like it works us out of a job when people can just do it really well, right, like we stick with them, we coach them, and it's like you got this, you don't need more PD because it's now part of how you do things, which I think is beautiful. Like that's the, that's like what we hope for as coaches. Right, it's like you can go do this thing and do it well forever now. So I think, thinking about those actions, I would love to know, like, what are those practical things that teachers can do? That Like if a leader is thinking okay, I want my teachers, I want my staff to have these practical strategies. Like, what can they do? What are the things? Tell us all the things, yeah. 0:05:34 - Charle Peck So it is based on a framework of nine skills, and those nine skills came out of. Well, what are the nine? Nine just happened to lead to a number in a matrix that we use, but it's like what keeps showing up with regards to mental health. What are the problems? So, if we identify the problem and understand why that's not working, then we can come up with a new solution. So that was the approach we took. So one of the problems is negative self-talk. Okay, oh my gosh, if you're a leader, how often do you hear negative self-talk? And, by the way, you might be that person stuck in negative thinking too. So one of the ways we attack that is what is your story? Spiral, what are you telling yourself about a situation that's based on a lie? Typically I mean typically these spirals we get into those narratives. You've heard the word narrative a lot. Same idea story, what story are you telling yourself does make you spiraling out of that control and saying and doing those things that you walk away regretting that you've done. So when we carry that around with us, that affects our function. So the approach I take, lindsay, is how are we functioning and how can we function better? What's keeping us from functioning at our best. So I bring it right down to the human level and that's what their skills are. So the story spiral is one, and then we help people unravel their story spiral and I'll tell you a quick story about that. To help and this is what I talk about in my sessions I always tell about a student named Madison who was that troubled kid right, and one day she got up out of my class, went to the bathroom, I think, didn't come, didn't ask my opinion, she didn't ask me to do that and she certainly didn't sign out and she was gone almost the whole period and then eventually came back. I tried to talk with her. Long story short, we had a tumultuous relationship, student-teacher relationship and it didn't feel good. I was kind of not nice to her and she certainly didn't work for me and do all the things she needed to do. It just wasn't good. So at the end of the semester, when it changed over, I went to our school counselor and I said Beth, can you please tell me where Madison is in her next class, because I want to go find her and make amends. And Beth said well, she passed away. Madison passed away, okay, and so I didn't get to make those amends with her and, more importantly, I didn't get to create a space that she could have done well in and had a positive experience in her short time left with us and this is a teenager. She had a terminal illness the whole time and I had no idea. So there's a lot of problems with that, about communication and all that confidentiality. But here's what I learned, and this is what led me to thinking about the story spiral and thinking about how can we reflect better upon our teaching practice as a result of something like this. Thank goodness I learned this early on and it was. There's always more to the story. If you think about the kids that are sitting in front of us, or leaders. If you're thinking about the staff who keeps coming back with the same, similar problems, what is it that's underlying that? You're missing something, and here's the key is that we may never know what that is. So we need to give grace to everybody and humanize them, and that's what changed my entire career, so that reframe was huge. I actually, in workshops, we use a story spiral. We have people identify their story spirals, or at least one of them, because we're walking around with a bunch of them and then we walk them through a process to unravel that story spiral, say they need to do it in the moment and that way they're not bobbled down with all of those stress hormones all day long. So there's others like power dynamics. It's really crippling us in our roles as leaders is when we feel like there's a power imbalance. By the way, teachers feel that, parents feel that, we all feel it. But when I work with principals specifically, we identify with that power imbalances and I help them realize that they've reached a limit, how they've reached their own limit, and not to expect other people to respect that limit, that they need to do that themselves so they can eradicate all of this expectation and disappointment that they feel. So there's just simple ways to get through it like that and it's actually all based in evidence. It's just a way to simplify it in practice. 0:09:51 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, I love so much of this. I have several connections. If it's okay with you, I just want to ask you. 0:09:57 - Charle Peck I know that was a lot too. It's a lot. 0:09:59 - Lindsay Lyons It's so good. I thought about the unmet needs first of all, like how easy is it to you're reading a picture book with your first graders or something or you're reading a picture book with your first graders or something, or right? Or you're reading a novel in high school, right? And to be able to like unpack what is this character Like? Why is this character acting this way? What is their unmet need Right? Like there's ways to do this in so many spaces and I don't think it's always necessarily like, like you said, it could just be the personal, like adults do this introspectively. It doesn't always have to be like there's this huge conflict with this child and like you know, like I have to do it right now. Like there's so many ways to sustainably practice this and familiarize students with the practice as well. As what is your story spiral? Oh, I just love the possibilities. Also, I love the phrase story spiral, very cool. I also was thinking about Dr Becky. I've been listening to her a lot because of Becky Kennedy, because of the toddler situation I'm in right now, and she's always saying MGI, most generous interpretation of like a situation right, like what is the most generous interpretation of this behavior, right, and it sounds like that's what you're saying, right. So like if I can reframe what's happening in the moment, like what possibly could be happening, or, like you said, if I don't know what's happening, what is the thing that I could possibly like generously ascribe to this behavior to then make me able to respond in a way that is caring and supportive? Does that feel like aligned to what you're coaching on? 0:11:27 - Charle Peck It's definitely aligned and I will say this because this is a problem that we all have too is well, I don't want that kid getting away with this, or I don't want that adult, that teacher, getting away with this, and so it's not. It's not about that. It's about let's humanize them, because that way we all soften our approach, and I don't mean we get soft and allow people to walk all over us or the system. That's not what I'm saying at all. In fact, I have a background in trauma and the first thing I say is we don't let trauma be an excuse for behavior and decisions. Right, we do have to have some accountability there, so I'm not taking that away. It's important that we understand that. It's about leadership is about how do we grow people we're working with and let them flourish in the strengths that they have and not have all of these expectations of them to be great everywhere all the time. It's what are they good at? What do they need to do their job better? I mean, how many leaders ask their teachers what do you need to do your job better? When I ask teachers this, it's usually nothing huge. Now sometimes they're like well, I need a smart board and that's expensive or I need a 10 day vacation in the middle of the school year. Well, we can't do that. But often I will tell you it's supplies Like it. It's really simple things and they love that. They're just asked and considered it's so it can be so simple. It's really investing in human capital again. 0:12:50 - Lindsay Lyons Yeah, even just acknowledgement or, you know, a gratitude like thank you for doing this thing that you're doing, working hard, yeah, totally Like very free, very easy, not super time consuming things. 0:13:02 - Charle Peck That's exactly right. We just need the reminder and permission to do some of those things again. 0:13:07 - Lindsay Lyons Absolutely. I love the phrase that you've been using with like humanize, and it makes me think a lot about the story you shared, and thank you for sharing that story. That is hard on all accounts for you, for the student, for you know the whole dynamics. I really appreciate you, your vulnerability and sharing that with us and with listeners, and so I'm thinking about the humanity that sometimes we do lose in the power dynamics in the. I'm overwhelmed with tasks and I'm just thinking about a to-do list of things in the pressures of. You know, my administrator is in my room and the thing that they are probably looking for is obedience from students, maybe not like sense of belonging or other things, and so I appreciate that you named the communication and all of the other pieces, but I love the humanizing portion as like the central piece of that. When we engage with individuals as if they are human beings, right, and have things going on. Like you said, everyone's got a ton of story spirals going on. I feel like if there's a takeaway from this episode, it is like at least remember the humanization of all people, right, that's. 0:14:12 - Charle Peck I just really appreciate that, Thank you, oh, I'm glad, and I'm glad you said that, because what's hard is when we get we get wrapped up in all of the things to do and we get stuck in our own insecurities. That's one of the things we address is our own insecurities. We're stuck in our own heads there and that keeps us again from engaging in the role the way we need to do it effectively. So if we could just realize that we're all trying to make these connections and try to create a culture of connectedness and support of each other Boy, imagine what kind of place that would be to thrive. I mean, imagine if we did that in every environment. When we try to do that at home, we need to do it in our schools. I believe we have an incredible responsibility to help raise our kids and help share the burden with parents, and that's where we're going to do that is in our school system. So not everyone agrees with me, but I'm challenging that. 0:15:11 - Lindsay Lyons I totally agree with you. I think about the number of times that my toddler says the teacher's name instead of my name. They're like no wait, mom. Or the number of times I've been a teacher and they've called me mom. It's just like interchangeable. 0:15:23 - Charle Peck Yes, yes. And imagine, if you're, if the parents in your community knew that you had their back and said listen, I'm going to help you with this. Not you're the problem, You're the reason they're behaving this way. So I mean we've got to look at the different environments that they're engaging in. How many times have you heard of that teacher that that kid really behaves well in that class but not in the other classes? So something in that environment is different, and typically it's the adult leading that environment, and you know that too, as leaders. You is different, and typically it's the adult leading that environment, and you know that too, as leaders. You know that from school to school, you know how people respond to you, and so if we could just check ourselves and be humbled and then reflect on that a little differently than we're used to. 0:16:08 - Lindsay Lyons That's kind of what we do. I love that idea of being humble, being reflective, like this idea of curiosity. I mean I think of how many teachers have faced that exact sentiment like oh, it's not happening in this class, and have gotten defensive over that, like, oh well, I'm not doing anything wrong because we take such pride in our work, we work so hard. Right, that makes sense, sense. And if we approach it with all of those attributes that you just described and we're like, hmm, let's go over there, Like let me learn, let me be curious, I think it's a very different vibe for the student and ultimately, for the teachers too. 0:16:41 - Charle Peck It really is. They will appreciate that leadership, that style of leadership. And, oh my gosh, so many people are walking around just angry I mean angry holding on to so many things. A lot of that stems from childhood. That is now showing up in their role. I'm telling you, insecurity is a huge piece to this and we work with leaders and excuse me, and help them identify those insecurities that they have brought into their role with them and help kind of just take those away, help them process that. It's not a therapy session, it's a let's take a look and it actually doesn't take that much time to do. And it's practice over time where we build proficiency in doing that. And then we do that with our teachers, and then we do that with parents and build these bridges, and then we teach this to students. I mean, this stuff is all applicable to kids too. So that's the reason I know this and the reason I came up with this is and, by the way, Dr Cameron Caswell and I she's an adolescent psychologist she and I came up with the skills together, we wrote the book together, but I remember being a teacher and thinking, gosh, I'm not a therapist, I'm lacking tools, but as I taught in some of those reframes I did on my own and some of those things that I learned to do and then incorporated them made my teaching practice so much better. And in a leadership role I was like, wow, look at the adults who are just engaging with me in a different way. And so here's what I say. When those kids got to come to my class you know those kids who are placed in certain teachers' classrooms I was kind of that teacher. I had an elective class and they were put in my class, sometimes because they didn't really have any other place to belong, and I always said it's not because I was awesome, it's because I became skilled. And so I think our educators I know our educators just need some more skills to deal with this, to have that practice. I mean, when I'm working as a therapist, I'm thinking why is this so easy to teach kids and adults in a therapy session that they're now using in their lives? Why are we not equipping teachers better in teachers' colleges in their courses as pre-service teachers, and why are we not giving them the tools now so they can show up more confidently? That's what they're lacking. When they're having these problems with student behavior, it's because they don't know what to do. So we need to equip them with things that they can easily do. That infuses into their everyday practice. I know it, I've lived it myself. So again, that's a little bit of a rant with all of that, but there's just, it all connects and it's also possible. 0:19:13 - Lindsay Lyons I love that approach of this is a skill thing, right, Like I just have decided to build up these skills and I had the ability to find how to do it. I love that frame and everyone is capable of then doing it, which allows us all to grow and flourish together. Which is like everyone got into teaching because they love people and children and have care in their hearts. So like we just need the skills and then we'll be all set. 0:19:38 - Charle Peck Yeah, I mean, think about when you need to take a test. If you haven't studied and prepared, then you're not going to do well on it, but when you are, wow, you walk in there like let's do this. I want teachers feeling good about that and I want administrators feeling good about that, and I want administrators feeling good about their teachers showing up to their classrooms that way. 0:19:54 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing. Oh, what a beautiful dream and what a beautiful, like you said practical way to go about that. So I'm curious I think we've talked through a lot of different challenges. I'm wondering is there one kind of big challenge that you've seen people face that's fairly common, and how have you helped, kind of coach them through it or kind of what happens, or what happens with that kind of challenge? 0:20:16 - Charle Peck Yes, there's always two. The very first one is overwhelm. Teachers are overwhelmed, leaders are overwhelmed, and one of the things I already mentioned is insecurity. But one piece to this and that negative self-talk is another piece. But one of the pieces is decision-making. We have so many decisions to make in a day. We all know this. This is not new, but it's how do you make decisions that are not mindless? How do you make decisions that still align with who you are as a human and how you want to be seen to the world, and how you can go to bed at night not ruminating on what you did in that day? So part of it is let's have PD, where we help teachers do that well, and I do a lot of leadership conferences too and a lot of leadership workshops. We do this with leaders too, and it is so helpful because it's like it takes that weight or kind of all those cobwebs that are just kind of sitting in your mind and held in your body, right, and it lets those just kind of be released to have clarity, and so now you have a way to respond to that effectively. So one of the things, for example, if you know that you always want to lead with kindness and honesty. There's a process you can go through to constantly make a decision that leans back to that, and then you can create those neural networks in your brain to keep leaning back and make it more reflexive and, rather than having to practice it so much, it can be a reflective or, I'm sorry, very reflexive response, so that you don't have to spend too much time doing it and all those decisions you have to make. And the second one I will mention. So that's about us. So I always look at like, let's manage our own mental health and wellness. Let's start there as adults. That's how we're going to make the biggest change and transformations in our schools. The second one is kind of unique, where, when you have to help kids or somebody else as a leader, how do you help someone else make a decision quickly? A lot of times this can be done in crisis situations too, but sometimes you just need simple tools to do this, and so the very first one I just explained was informed decisiveness, and I wanna just like give you a picture here. It's about thinking about what you want versus what you don't want, and so the decision you're going to make in that moment is it leaning towards what you want or don't want. So you can use this for yourself, but you can also help others make this decision. Okay, so I'll tell you about Mason real quick. When I was working in the crisis unit in an adolescent hospital and this is acute care, like this is really tough stuff kids are dealing with and the cops dropped Mason off and they said this guy, if he does not comply to you and your mental health team, then we're taking him back to juvie, like we're just going to take him there. And we're like, well, that's not good mental health practice, so we're going to help him with that. So I said Mason, he was very impulsive, as we know a lot of teenagers are. It's very impulsive, and so he would hit things if he was upset. So I said let's think about what you want. What do you want? And he said well, I want freedom, and what don't you want? Well, I don't want to go to juvie, of course. Okay. So I said the next time you feel like you want to do something, come to me. So sure enough, not too much, not too much time had passed he came to me and he said oh my gosh, charlie, I want to punch this kid in the face and I'm like, well, that's not going to help you. So, but I didn't say that out loud, I wanted him to figure it out. And I said well, what don't you want, mason? Well, I don't want to go to Juby. What do you want, mason? I want freedom. And I said If you punch him in the face, is that going to lead you to the direction you want to go? And of course he said no. So I said what do you need to do? He said I'm going to. I need to go into my room and use the stress ball, calm down, use my breathing exercises, whatever works for him. And I said great, I will meet you in group in five minutes. And he did. And he showed up and he didn't punch back in the face, the face, and it's so simple. We have to have a simple tool and simple dialogue that we can use it with young kids, adults and anyone who's in the midst of stress and strain, so that it will work and they will remember to do it. And that's exactly what this particular tool did. 0:24:24 - Lindsay Lyons Wow, that is so good. I absolutely love that. I love it for a variety of reasons. One, because someone who is listening can just go implement that today, right, like something super easy to do. And also I just love to circle back to your first point too that it seems like very values aligned, right, that decision-making, that's values aligned. And I think about the decisions I've made that I didn't feel good about afterwards. And it was never like a values agnostic decision. It was always like, oh, I feel bad about that because it violated one of my core values, like those are the ones that stay in my head, that stay in my body, right, and so that's. I love that approach because I think that that preemptively avoids all that additional like stress and weight because we didn't think about the values in making the decision. 0:25:09 - Charle Peck That's exactly right, and a lot of times people don't take the time and space to think about their values and so they don't have alignment back to them because they haven't taken the time to do that. It actually doesn't take very long, and that's what I love about doing the workshop. So there's a workshop that I do about. It's called Managing your Own Mental Health and Wellness pretty simple for educators and leaders, and it pulls in a few of those skills All about me, right, it's all about me. And how do I, how do I rest with that now, so that when I show up when it's busy and crazy, that I can manage it, and part of that is identifying what those values are and how do I get alignment with my decisions there, and so it does so much, it does so much. So, yeah, that's just one of the pieces, yeah. 0:25:51 - Lindsay Lyons Oh, I love it. 0:25:52 - Charle Peck Oh my gosh. 0:25:54 - Lindsay Lyons Okay, I feel like everyone listening is going to be like all right, give me Charlie's number, Like let's do this thing. So we'll talk about how you can do that in just a moment. But one thing before we move to that close what is one thing that you would encourage listeners to do once they end the episode? I feel like we've talked about a lot of things that they could do right now, in the next 10 minutes, but what's like kind of the one you want them to hold on to? 0:26:15 - Charle Peck I want them to identify the need for themselves that would help them make their job better and do better. So what is it that's keeping them over and over? There's a pattern there, there's a an emotional charge they get when they even just think about that thing. So what is the problem? And then, what is the unmet need underlying that for themselves? So, because they're leaders, I'm going to actually say two things. I want them to do that for themselves and I want them at the start, in August, or whenever they're going back for their first PD session, at the very beginning, I want them to ask their teachers what is it that you need to do your job better and you can even say under $10 or that doesn't cost anything, something like that. No-transcript no-transcript. It really is. 0:27:34 - Lindsay Lyons It's so simple and and I think it speaks to you know Mason's need for freedom, right, like it's just like everyone just wants the freedom and autonomy to be able to like get what they need and decide things and have a voice in their own like space what they need and decide things and have a voice in their own like space? 0:27:50 - Charle Peck Yes, and, and your educators will want to be in your space when you do this more, and it doesn't take much at all to do so. Yeah, it's, it's pretty simple. 0:27:57 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing. Okay, so my final two questions for you. One, super just for fun, does not have to relate to work, but, ken, what is something you've been learning about lately? 0:28:13 - Charle Peck Oh, my goodness, I have been throwing myself at a lot of different things. I keep throwing myself back at new practices with trauma and more neural connections of what's going on in our brain and body connection. A lot of it is refreshing, but there's a lot of new data out there. So that's kind of general. But to me and some people I know you can't use the word trauma, so just think of stress and how it shows up in your body. 0:28:31 - Lindsay Lyons So I know that's not that exciting but that's what I keep going back to. I think it's super exciting. Stuff like that relates on just like the day-to-day level very relevant, so I love relevant. 0:28:41 - Charle Peck Yeah, it shows up everywhere, everywhere. 0:28:44 - Lindsay Lyons Totally, and so the last question that I think folks are probably waiting for is where can listeners learn more about you, connect with you? I think you have resources to share, so if you want to talk about those, feel free to use this time. 0:28:55 - Charle Peck Oh, I would love to share the resource because it's absolutely free, of course, and it's a document. It's a 15-page document. Don't be overwhelmed by that. You can section it off. It's for you, as an administrator, to use with your mental health team members, so that's, with your school counselor, your AP, your school-based social worker and that rockstar teacher that has a great voice and a pulse on your whole school. Bring them into that darn meeting. And what it does is it has you do checklists of like, what is your school climate like now? So, as you're starting the year, it doesn't matter where you are in the year you still need to look at this, but you can just do checklists. And what it's there for is not to solve all your problems, but it's helping you identify the areas of need, more importantly, what your areas of strengths are, because you're doing a lot of things right. And then it helps you whittle down, kind of like okay, what is it that I need to focus on next or first in order to create a shift that we need desperately? So that is, it's called the school mental health audit. And, again, use it with your team. You also get some posters in the path of possibilities A poster of that. A visual is there that you can just hang up on the walls too. 0:30:00 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing and that's free for people, right? They can grab that for free, absolutely free. 0:30:04 - Charle Peck Yes. 0:30:05 - Lindsay Lyons Awesome. Did you want to talk at all about your course that folks might want to take as well? 0:30:13 - Charle Peck Yeah, I actually get a lot of people asking about this, because when they learn about it in the workshops, they're like how can I learn all the skills? So it's called the nine essential skills course. It's all self-paced. Some administrators are either handpicking people to take it because it's all self-paced. It's worth between nine and 12 credit hours. It's about how long it takes. There's a workbook, the slides are there. There's a video of me walking you through the slides. It's got all like some bonus items too. So if anyone wants to do that, just go to my website, thrivingeducatororg. That's thrivingeducatororg. Just click on courses and it's there. There's a few packages. People are asking me about coaching them through that course too, and that's an option as well. And some people and these are a lot of school counselors and APs actually want to learn how to facilitate this information to their staff. So there is a plan for that. They just have to ask me about it, because that's in production now. But yeah, just go to thrivingeducatororg. You can check out all that we do. We do speaking. There's courses, there's workshops, but click on the courses page. 0:31:15 - Lindsay Lyons Amazing and I'll link to that in the blog post version of this episode for folks, and I have to say this has been so exciting. I am so grateful for your time today and just all the thoughts that are immediately applicable to people's daily lives, no matter what role they hold, so I think people are going to get a lot of value out of this. Thank you so much, charlie. I'm so grateful. Thank you so much, lindsay.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
![]()
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode, we’re exploring a backwards planning approach that breaks down the summative and formative assessment points of a unit and visually houses all of the lesson goals in the context of the Essential Question and the course priority standards.
If you’re supporting teachers to develop their own standards-aligned units, this curriculum design approach may help! Why? This ASCD white paper summarizes McTighe & Wiggins’ Understanding by Design (UbD) framework for backwards planning. Simplified, it’s basically: What do you want students to achieve?; How will you know students have achieved these goals?; What learning experiences will best support them to get there? For more information on backwards planning, check out my blog post: Backwards Plan from the End of the School Year: The What. Hattie’s research shows giving students feedback—this is really what any assessment, especially formative assessment is—has a large effect size at 0.70! So, intentionally building in regular points of clear feedback to students based on a skill(s) they’ve been working on is important. Another piece to consider is how we share feedback on assessments with students. Proficiency-based rubrics that focus on a handful of priority standards are my suggestion. Here’s why: Haystead and Marzano (2009) found teachers who repeatedly measured the growth of the same skills over time using proficiency-based rubrics noted a 34% gain in student achievement. In these classes, students learned more, experienced less stress, and had better teacher-student relationships. This approach also decreased inequitable “achievement” gaps (Crescendo Ed Group). What? I developed this for a group of teacher teams who had already selected their priority standards, developed a competency-based rubric, and drafted a unit Essential Question (EQ). The next step was to plan the assessments that would assess the rubric skills and help address the EQ. This is the visual I designed to show how all of the pieces were coming together to form a cohesive unit outline.
Step 1: Start with the guard rails: EQ and Priority Skills.
I like selecting the priority standards first, since these are year-long and the EQ is unit-specific, but if an EQ generates excitement to plan, starting there is fine! For more on how to create a priority standards-based rubric, check out my podcast episode: Developing a Course-Long Rubric. For more on developing an engaging EQ, check out this podcast episode: Crafting a Compelling Driving Question. Step 2: Determine the final project. Ensure you can use the full rubric—all or nearly all priority skills—to assess students’ work. I like to offer as much student choice and voice as possible here in terms of product (e.g., podcast, documentary, essay, presentation) and content sub-specialization (i.e., Which topic could they deeply dive into? or With which lens could they analyze the unit content?). For an example, check out my 5-minute YouTube video: Unit Planning Deep Dive: Standards-Aligned Projects. Step 3: Choose the length of the unit and cadence of formative assessments. Longer units enable more depth, so in the template linked below, I’ve included an 8-week and 10-week template. I recommend a more “formal” formative assessment happens about once a week in which students receive specific feedback on at least one line of the rubric. I like standard weekly activities, so Feedback Fridays could be a nice use of that cadence. It also sets standard expectations for students. Step 4: Fill in the formatives. What should students be able to do at the end of each week? What format will each assessment take? Each assessment should be able to be assessed using at least one line of the course-long priority standards rubric. Flag the skill (rubric line) in your planning, so you can make sure you’re building all skills over the course of the unit evenly or strategically (e.g., you may have skills that build on each other or appear in an arc like inquiry activities.) Step 5: Fill in the lessons. Determine what you will teach each day to build students’ content knowledge and skills over the unit, ensuring they are prepared for each assessment when they get there. I use quick phrases for big lesson ideas when outlining my unit in a template like this. Details can come later! Final Tip There is no one right way to plan. Find the planning strategy that works best for your teachers’ brains and go with that. As long as the key ideas of backwards planning and competency-based assessment are present and the unit is coherent and interesting, all is well! To help you start coaching your teachers to unit plan from assessments, I’m sharing my Assessment-Driven Unit Outline with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 187 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02 - Lindsay Lyons Hello everyone, welcome to episode 187 of the Time for Teachership podcast. Today we're going to talk through and share a planning, a unit planning approach, where you backwards plan from your assessments. I know I've shared many unit building approaches in this podcast so far. Just want to give you one more in case perhaps some of the previous approaches feel like there's too many steps or it doesn't work with my brain Always happy to share another one. So here we go. We're exploring a backwards planning approach that breaks down the summative and formative assessment points of a unit and then it's going to visually house all of the lesson goals in the context of the essential question and the course priority standards. So we really, truly have all the pieces there in this visual way that really leans into the backwards planning approach. So if you're supporting teachers to develop their own standards aligned unit, or if you are a teacher developing your own, this curriculum design approach may help. So let's look at the why first. Let's look at the research. So there is an ASCD white paper that summarizes Antigua Wiggins' understanding by design framework. You may have been calling this UBD for short. This is backwards planning and simplified. Basically, what it summarizes it to is what do you want students to achieve Right? What's the end goal? How will you know students have achieved these goals Right? How are you going to assess it? What learning experiences will best support them to get there? What are your lessons going to be? And you can read more on the on the white paper. I have linked to that in my blog post. Feel free, but I think these are the three big goals. So what does that mean? When we are planning, we need to make sure we have an end goal. So, like what are the skills they are developing? What can they do? How will we know what are the assessments in place and what learning experiences are going to help them build those skills so they can do the final assessment and feel successful and not overly challenged right? So what's the learning journey? What are the lesson level activities? I also want to bring in Hattie's research here. So John Hattie's research on effect sizes shows that giving students feedback and this is really what any assessment, especially formative assessment, is has a large effect size at about 0.70. So this is considered very high in terms of effect sizes, meaning that intentionally building regular points of clear feedback, ie formative assessments to students based on those skills that they've been working on is a really clear stamp of check for understanding in terms of their development. You can kind of level set their understanding of where they're at with your assessment of where they're at and it informs, ultimately, their ability to self-assess, it informs their progress and their next step. It makes them feel like there is a path forward where they will be able to achieve all the things that you want them to and hope for them right. Another piece of information to consider is how we share that feedback on assessments with our students and so, in terms of what it literally is that we are doing with students, the paper that they receive, for example, proficiency-based rubrics that focus on just a handful right. I've heard them called the Fab Five of priority standards. That's my suggestion. So here's the research on that. Hayes and Marzano found that teachers who repeatedly measured the growth of the same skills over time Again five is great Using the proficiency-based rubrics, where we talk about levels of proficiency and lay it out for students very clearly in student understandable, accessible language. Right here is meeting the standards, exceeding the standards, approaching the standards, whatever the categories, are Folks who use that. Teachers who used that measurement of the same skills over time, using proficiency-based rubric, noted a 34% gain in student achievement in these classes, more than their peers in classrooms that did not use this right. So that far surpasses I mean by like a third more, like 130%, you know. Whatever that is huge. So in these classes students really were learning more, they had the information, they retained the information longer, but they also experienced less stress in the classroom, which I find really important, given that we are experiencing or observing very high reports of student stress, anxiety, depression, all of the things, particularly COVID and beyond, but even before. So it was markedly higher than years prior and that students in those classrooms where that type of feedback and assessment was happening had better teacher-student relationships. So again, I think that's probably contributing right to the decreased stress or decreased anxiety around things and feeling more successful. Is that relationships might be even a mediator. I'm not saying they are, I have not looked at that research angle but this approach, it really is equitable in nature because one of the things that the research also found is that it decreased the inequitable quote achievement gaps which were, you know, racialized, economized, like all the things, and so noting that this is truly an equitable move to think about, assessing in this way to think about backwards, planning in this way, with intentional assessment and an opportunity to share feedback with students. That builds their skills, decreases their stress, increases equity in your school and ultimately fosters really great student-teacher relationships. Okay, given all of that context, let's go ahead and look at, like, what are we actually talking about? For you know, maybe, what form might I give a teacher that I'm coaching to help them plan in this way? So I developed this for a group of teacher teams who had already selected their priority standards, developed the competency-based rubric which we just spoke to in that Hazel and Marzano research and drafted their unit essential questions. So I do think that it's important that we first do those pieces and if you're looking for information or how to's on how to do this, check out my previous curriculum design series in the past podcast episodes of Time for Teachership. Okay, so once we have a clear understanding of what are my top five priority standards, build out that competency or proficiency-based rubric. What are the different levels of proficiency? What does that look like for each standard? I have kind of a one-pager that I can use for any assessment for the whole year. And then, when we look at the unit level, the big first step is to think what is that exciting, compelling, essential question where every lesson in that unit will tie back to and give students information on how to respond to that essential question. Once we have that and again there are past episodes on how to do that well the next step is to plan the assessment that would assess the rubric skills and help address the essential question. So you're thinking about what do they need to be able to demonstrate in terms of skills and what content do they need to be able to respond to that essential question? So we're thinking skills and content, which is usually how we plan. So I designed a visual that I will link in the blog post for this episode to really demonstrate how all these pieces were coming together to form a cohesive unit outline. So I will describe this to you if you are driving, if you are able to grab the blog post. This is linked at lindsaybathlionscom slash blog, slash 187. But we have along the top. We have a rectangle on top which says essential question and a rectangle on the bottom which says comprehensive priority skills rubric. So again, these two pieces are foundational At this point in the planning. Once you get the template I'm sharing with you today. Those should be done and we should know the essential question and we should know the priority skills as well as have a rubric with details of the proficiency. Now the middle really speaks to the rest. So, while the essential question is what content we're teaching, or related to what content we're teaching, and the comprehensive priority skills rubric is what skills we are teaching or assessing students on, in the middle you can imagine several kind of circles leading up to a big kind of star I'm not quite sure how to describe this as a visual star with many points. So that's kind of like a really big circle or really that's the summative All along the way. Those circles leading up to the big star are smaller formative assessments and this answers the question thinking about that UBD framework, how do you know that students know the content and the skills right on the top and the bottom rectangles? So what we're going to do is these are kind of thinking about the guardrails of the unit, right? We have our essential question, we have our priority skills and, again, these are going to be year-long priority skills. You can actually reuse this over and over. The essential question is going to be unit-specific, right? So if you would like more information on how to develop any of those. I've actually linked to those previous episodes and blog posts in this blog, so feel free to go ahead and grab the information there. Now the next step after we've figured out the guardrails, the EQ, the priority standards, we need to figure out what is that final summative assessment. So what I would first do is make sure whatever ideas you have whether you're kind of doing a brainstorm dump, talking with a group, looking at what maybe other folks do however, you're getting that inspiration. Your mental checklist here should be that you can use that full rubric of all, or nearly all, priority standards for the course, for the year, to be able to assess students' work. So I should see, for example, if I'm using a social studies rubric that's claim, evidence, reasoning, written expression or clear communication, some sort of like. Does your, are the words that you wrote down like organized and can I understand them right? Some people would call these conventions whatever. If those are my four for the year, I want to make sure that my task has something to do with developing an argument, because then I could say, okay, there's a claim, there's evidence, there's reasoning, and I wrote it down. Argument, because then I could say, okay, there's a claim, there's evidence, there's reasoning, and I wrote it down, so I have clear written expression. So I have actually covered all four skills and I can assess all four skills in this particular assessment. So make sure you can do that and I really like to offer as much student choice and voice as possible here Gives you room for that co-creation, that student excitement, student ownership of the product. So the product can vary, but the prompt itself is going to be the same, right? So you might say the essential question is and I am just going off the top here of my head, so it's not a great one, but like I always use, like safety or freedom, so does the United States in 2024 enable residents to have more safety or more freedom? Right? And then so they would have to choose one side of that argument and then develop out their argument Now how they demonstrate. That could be a podcast, it could be a documentary where they're interviewing different people and their responses to that question. It could be bringing in clips, right. Whatever documentary consists of, it could be writing a traditional essay, it could be putting something into a PowerPoint, it could be a visual art collage or series where they explain in the captions exactly what their argument is. It could also be that they sub-specialize. So in that specific example, maybe they sub-specialize into like, okay, in 2024, when, at the beginning of the year or the end of the year, 2024 compared to another time point in history, compared to another country currently or in history, what about the people? Right, for whom? Right, who has more safety and more freedom? Right, if we're talking about incarcerated populations, like they're going to have a very different story than folks who are not experiencing incarceration. So I mean, I think just being able to invite students to sub-specialize or take a particular lens to the overall topic that all students are covering really gets them excited. And so when you develop the final project, I'm thinking more that you're developing the prompt and it might just be answer the essential question, and then you have some product options or you have students kind of create their own ideas for product options as well as keeping the essential question or the summative prompt broad enough that they can say I want to sub-specialize in, like different areas, and there's room for them to do that. If you would like some examples of how to plan your unit, that is, standards aligned, I do have a YouTube video that I will link to this episode's blog post. Okay, step number three. So just a reminder we have put on the guardrails of the EQ and the priority standards, we've determined the final project and now we need to figure out the formatives. So at this point we want to choose how long the unit is going to last how many weeks, for example and the cadence of formative assessment. So how often are you going to assess? I think longer units enable more depth here. So in the template that I will link in this blog post as your freebie, I've included an eight-week and a 10-week template option. You can certainly adjust from here, but I do like the depth that this involves and it enables you to kind of average around one unit per quarter, which is nice in terms of assessments, you will have one summative assessment per report card if you are a quarter-based school in terms of report card issuing. Now I recommend a more formal formative assessment happens, I would say, about once a week. I think that's a good blend of being able to truly kind of quote-unquote grade or assess or give feedback to students as the teacher, right, but then also have students get it more frequently than like every two weeks, right. They need to know where they're at and have that feedback more regularly. So I don't think this needs to be the entire rubric. I think you want to determine, as the teacher, or you want to coach people, to determine, if you're coaching teachers to build this out what feedback they're going to get. So if I am building up to a four-line rubric right, let's use that example again of claim evidence, reasoning and written expression then I might say one week I am making sure that students get feedback on their claim, and the next week I'm making sure they get feedback on their evidence reasoning, and then the fourth week maybe we're doing some written expression, some conventions work, whatever. So that might be a cadence that you use. You can certainly assess and give feedback more often, but I think this is kind of the target, knowing that teachers are very busy and have to grade a lot of things. So weekly activities are great. I like building it into my schedule as well in terms of the student lens, of when students get to actually engage with that feedback, perhaps take action based on that feedback within the class and not making it something they have to take it home to do or leave it up to them to decide when and where they're doing it. So I like to do something like feedback Fridays or, you know, workshop Fridays. I used to use Fridays, but you can use Wednesdays, you can do alliteration, whatever you think works best. But I think that weekly activities that are embedded, you're not teaching a new lesson, but we're really giving students the skill building opportunity to review their feedback and take action based on it. Perhaps conference with the teacher, that could be a nice use of that weekly cadence and it sets that standard expectation for our students so they know that space to talk with a teacher or to get feedback specifically on their work is happening. All right, step four we've kind of figured out the outline of the formatives but we want to fill it in. So what should students be able to do at the end of each week? So, again, thinking about that skill, thinking about the content they should know each week, building up to be assessed, using, as I said, one line of that course long priority standards rubric. And I want you to, or coach teachers to flag the skill which is the rubric line in the planning so you make sure you're building all of them over the course of the unit either evenly, like we talked about, with like one per week. So if we have four standards for the summative that we're assessing, you know one week is standard one, two, three, four or strategically, so you might have skills build on each other or appear in an arc, that kind of continue. So you might actually do something like this. Let's say we have week one, claim, week two, evidence, week three, reasoning, and then we're going to go back to claim evidence, reasoning again. So we've done six weeks and now in the seventh week we're just introducing writing conventions, right, and then we might even have like a okay, I'm going to do your evidence with reasoning, I'm going to give you both at once. I'm going to give you a prompt that enables you to do both of those things and I'm going to see your evidence with reasoning. I'm going to give you both at once. I'm going to give you a prompt that enables you to do both of those things and I'm going to see how your evidence and your analysis are connected, because they are very interconnected as standards, right, and so you can kind of like play with it and build students up, right. Alternatively, you could say okay, claim, write a claim, claim evidence. Okay, now claim evidence reasoning. You could do multiple standards each week. You could also have students practice each standard each week, but you're just giving feedback on one of those pieces or your teachers are just giving feedback on one of those pieces. So just kind of saying that there's many ways to do this, but we want to be intentional, that we do cover all of the standards we're eventually assessing and we do give students at least one time point during the unit where we're giving them feedback on it and letting them do something with that feedback to grow that skill. Okay, number five this is where you fill in the lessons. So you're going to determine at this point what you will teach each day to build students content, knowledge and skills over the unit. So this is where teachers are really planning out the preparation students will have coming into the assessment. I usually plan really lightly here, so I will use a quick phrase for a big lesson idea when outlining my unit in this template, for example, that I'm sharing with you. Details can always come later. So that means if I'm saying, okay, we need to really like, explore possible claims, or we are going to look at what makes a good claim, we're going to look at mentor texts or something. Then I would just write mentor texts in my outline at this point. I'm not going to find my mentor text right now. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of Googling and finding some great mentor text. That's going to take me way too long and it's a different set of skills than outlining and planning. So you want to keep it real light touch here. Key phrases, key ideas we will go back and fill in the details later. That's a completely different mindset that you want to be in. It's a completely different skill set. So if we're bouncing back and forth, this is going to take way longer and people are going to be frustrated when your teachers are filling this out. If you're a coach like you, don't want to breathe the frustration. You want to build the. Yes, this is possible, we can do this, and so really stay on that high level. Just a word or phrase to indicate the general skill or content that you're building there. As a final tip. So we went through all five steps here. There is no one right way to plan. There are so many options for you and so this is one way if you want to adapt this way or go back in the podcast library here and find a different way, find a way that I haven't talked about at all, totally something that will work for you. Whatever your brain wants you to do, I think go with that, right? So if you have some teachers who are really excited to plan in one way and some teachers who are excited in another, great, and then you just set the parameters for, for example, you have to have these components, but they can come in any order and you can build them out in any way and your visual presentation of all this on one page can be very different, right? So the key ideas are backwards planning. We wanna start at the end. We wanna go to the beginning Again. If you wanna start with the essential question or something instead of the priority standards, that's fine, but we do, as we're planning out the formative assessments and the lessons, we do need to have the summative in mind. We do need to have kind of an idea first. Even if it's not the format, it's like the question they're going to answer, right, which could again be the essential question, which is fine if you're starting there. For that reason, as long as that key idea of backwards planning is in place in some way, and as long as competency based assessment is present and the unit is overall pretty coherent and interesting, I think all is well, great, go for it. So we've talked through a lot of our steps. If you would like to actually get the template that I was kind of talking through that you may use, you can grab it for free at the blog post for this episode. It's called an Assessment Driven Unit Outline and it is located at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 187. Until next time, everybody. Transcribed by https://podium.page
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
|
Details
For transcripts of episodes (and the option to search for terms in transcripts), click here!
Time for Teachership is now a proud member of the...AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
November 2024
Categories |