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In this episode, we tackle adaptive challenges, which often impede systems transformation and change leadership. Specifically, I’ll explain how you can use a diagnostic tool to identify what exactly is going on and how to get unstuck and finally move towards transformation.
Why are we talking about this? Adaptive leadership scholars, Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky (2009) write, “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.” In summary, a typical workshop or other means of sharing information is not going to work. There’s something deeper that’s resisting the change, and we have to unearth that before transformational change can happen. However, it is quite difficult to get everyone on your staff or in a classroom to share where the resistance is really coming from. It’s a struggle—even for the individuals that hold these values, beliefs, and loyalties—to diagnose the challenge. So, how do we do it? For today’s episode, our starting point is a school discussion. Whether it’s a challenge within the staff (start by paying attention to a discussion in a staff meeting) or a classroom (observe students’ talking), you can follow this list of suggested steps. Step 1: Determine which type of discourse is present.
Step 2: Invite imagination and possibilities. Invite teachers/stakeholders to tell you what they wish their classrooms/schools were like. (Often, the change we’re trying to lead is a way to get to that outcome. People just need space to share and be valued) What does it actually look like for you? Paint a clear picture of your dream. Co-create the dream. Make this the focal point. Root it in shared values. Step 3: Create disequilibrium. (Name the avoidance.) Avoidance is a hallmark of adaptive challenges. Often, we’re avoiding conversations about the things that matter. We like to be comfortable! This could look like diverting attention (e.g., making a joke or making it personal to deflect from the real issue) or displacing responsibility (e.g., “That’s the family’s responsibility, not ours.”) Mezirow (1990) says 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. Present information that makes participants just uncomfortable enough to realize, “the way I’ve been thinking about this isn’t working anymore.” This will help them try on other ways of thinking, which is most effective within group discussions! (The dialogue is both a tool for diagnosis and for change, as. Dr. Cherie Bridges Patrick has told us before.) Step 4: Practice discourse. Engage as a participant. Encourage all school stakeholders to do the same and notice aspects of the experience (what skills are you using, what is avoided, what feels good, what doesn’t feel good). Make space for reflection individually and as a group (e.g., staff, class). You can use these reflections to co-create community discussion agreements or adapt them if you’ve already created these. Step 5: Build your skills.
These come from Dr. Cherie Bridges Patrick’s research, which she talks about in depth in this previous episode of the podcast. Final Tip Pick one meeting or class to observe this week. Take notes using the Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges Workbook linked below. To help you identify adaptive challenges in your school, I’m sharing my Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges Workbook with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 161 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 Educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons, and here on the time for Teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nerding out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Welcome to episode 161 of the time for leadership podcast. Today, we're tackling adaptive challenges. So, in this mini series on systems transformation, we're really looking at what impedes that transformation and change leadership. And specifically in this episode, I'll explain how you can use a diagnostic tool to identify what exactly is going on and how to get unstuck and finally move towards that transformation you've been working towards. 00:01:07 All right. So let's dive in, let's talk about diagnosing adaptive challenges in school discussions where to look for those, what tool you can use. And before we get to the step by step process. I wouldn't just situate this conversation in adaptive leadership scholarship. So Heitz Grass and Linskey, who I referenced all the time, write a quote that I share all the time. And here it is 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. So in summary, a typical workshop or other means of sharing information is just not going to work. You can't just talk your way out of RPD your way out of an adaptive challenge that's been lasting a very long time. There's something deeper that's resisting that change. We have to unearth that before the transformational change can happen, but it's really quite difficult to get everyone on your staff or in a classroom to just share honestly where that resistance is really coming from. I mean, it's a struggle even for those individuals to even know what that is, right? 00:02:13 What are the values that they hold the beliefs or loyalties that are holding them back from this change? Diagnosing that is something that individuals probably have a hard time doing within themselves, let alone you doing it as a leader for everyone in a space. So it can be challenging. There are multiple ways to go about this for today's episode. We're talking about really focusing on a school discussion. Now, this could be uh if you have a challenge with the staff or an adaptive challenge that you're working through and trying to lead change around with the staff. You might start by paying attention to a discussion in a staff meeting or maybe it's a team within your staff. So a grade team, a department team, you might want to just kind of pop into one of those meetings and observe what's going on there. And that can be your starting point if you are trying to support a teacher who was having a really tough time in with a particular class or a particular grade of students. Um as they come into that class, you might just want to observe those students talking either in a formal class discussion or just as the class is pro out of control. 00:03:16 And we were just kind of talking about nothing related to life and that talking right or talking about the challenge if you can do it, that is a really good opportunity to observe, reflect not what's going on. And then you can really have the diagnostic criteria to move forward and actually help make the change. So think about which option or which group you would want to pay attention to and go ahead and think about an opportunity where you can jump into that meeting, observe what you can and follow these steps. So here we go. Number one, as you listen or as you are engaging, I'm trying not to use a list language. Uh as you're engaging and observing what's happening in this conversation, I'd like you to think about which type of discourse is present. I'm gonna give you four options. Now, this comes originally from one Equis work, Doctor Chie Bs Patrick, and I have made this into a small adaptation for our work and our publication on adaptive leadership specifically talking about leading racial justice initiatives and, and work in communities. 00:04:29 So as we think about these discourse types, I want you to think about whatever team you have seen operate, whether that's a class based team full of students or again like a a whole staff, you can though also think about interpersonal conversations in your family in your friend groups just to kind of internalize these discourse types because I know just hearing this um or reading about it later on the blog post is going to not be quite the same as as fully experiencing it. Now, I will say there's a youtube video that I will link to the bottom of this blog post that you can actually see these four quadrants as a visual and I walk you through them there. So if that's something you're looking for, feel free to grab that link, that's gonna be again at the blog post for this episode, Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one, 61. OK. Here are the four types of discourses. One polarizing. I think we see this a lot. We see this a lot in the political atmosphere of the United States, particularly during presidential election years. 00:05:35 But really all the time. So polarizing discourse, when we're talking about this type of discourse, we are talking about being rooted in our positions, being very defensive. We are probably a little uncomfortable, right? It's it's uncomfortable to like be in that space. We're in a bit of disequilibrium. But what we're doing is we're not looking for change, we're really just reinforcing those past patterns, right? So these ways of being in a group or at a staff culture level or a class culture level, right? Those really are just standing in the way of change. They're just reinforcing. This is the way we do things and we just kind of repeat that we reinforce this way of being. Now, the next piece is silencing and denying. So in this space, we really have a willful avoidance, right? We are not happy to be uncomfortable. We're going to preserve that comfort, we're going to avoid that risk at all costs. We don't want um really to build any capacity because we don't want change, right? 00:06:44 We're perfectly fine with the way things are again reinforcing past patterns and in contrast to polarizing discourse really sitting in that equilibrium. Now, the next piece is intellectualizing this course, I see this a lot in kind of white liberal conversations. So um we might have some insights, some thinking about imagination and possibility. But what we're really seeing here is that it's very didactic. We are in the head, not the heart, so to speak. So we are talking about things, academic resources or research or a podcast I listened to and here's this idea and we're ignoring the root cause we're ignoring the emotion that makes us human and we're not connecting the head to the heart. We're not really getting into the root cause the source of where all of this is coming from. Um Sometimes this particular type of discourse or discourses in this kind of quadrant reveal historic patterns of dominance, right? And, and they, they might um invite that imaginative possibility for change, right? 00:07:50 They might um offer a limited set of capacity building. But at the core, we are divorced from emotion and that whole list that invites us to experience enough of this equilibrium that we move into the fourth quadrant, which is what we really want. And that's generative mobilizing discourse. So this is where we see racial justice, intersectional justice. This is where we see engagement of the head and the heart. This is where we really mobilize folks to grapple with um any sort of discomfort and disequilibrium, we lean into that and it comes with that imagination and possibility. So, in contrast to the polarizing discourse, where we are feeling that disequilibrium, we're not doing what they're doing in the polarizing discourse, which is reinforcing the past patterns we're looking forward in inviting change. So we have these four types of discourse and I'm sure that as you're listening, you're like, oh, yep, I can think of a time where I was a part of or I was a witness to a discourse that resembled, you know, any one of these, right? 00:08:52 So, again, polarizing, silencing and denying, intellectualizing, generative mobilizing. These are the four, ideally, we want to have generative mobilizing, but polarizing, silencing and denying and intellectualizing are all too common. So what we want to do next, I'm going to go ahead and assume based on what I've heard from folks uh in schools, both thinking about students and thinking about staff um at all levels of, of this kind of school districts spectrum ecosystem, polarizing and silencing and denying quadrants are the most common. This is not to say that the other two are not but polarizing and silencing and denying are the ones that often come up when I present at conferences. When I present in P DS, when I'm just asking folks to individually think about this, these are the two. So I'm gonna kind of go in that direction but feel free to use any of these strategies um to support an intellectualizing discourse as well to try to get it degenerative mobilizing. So, polarizing again, when we're thinking about this, we're thinking about um the fact that we are not inviting imagination and possibilities, right? 00:09:59 When we're in polarizing, also silencing and denying is also on the left hand side of this quadrant So if you can imagine kind of a mathematical graph in your head, I believe that uh quadrant one is the top left. So that's you're polarizing. And then we go counterclockwise around where generative mobilizing is kind of our point in quadrant four in the top, right. So, polarizing and silencing and denying are on the left hand side of this, which means that they are on the opposite side from inviting imagination and possibility. So what's the first step we're gonna invite imagination and possibility. So how do we do this? We can invite teachers or stakeholders of any kind, right? If we're talking about students, whoever it is families to tell you what they wish, their classroom or school experience was like often the change that we might be trying to lead or the aha moment we're hoping folks have is a way that ultimately gets them, that outcome that they want that dream, that wish can come true if we can do these things. Um Here's what we're trying to kind of talk about and engage with, right? 00:11:01 And that resistance we're coming up against and we have to work through that to be able to get there, right. So oftentimes people just need that space to share and be valued, right? They just need to tell you their wish and their wish probably if they're working at the same school as either an educator like you, right? They probably have that deep down value set and that deep down wish and hope for the school or class experience is going to be the same right students I imagine are going to want much of the same things if we dig down deep into the core of what we truly want and what the real wish is. Right. It's probably I'm thinking of like Glasser's needs. So it's probably a sense of, you know, belonging or autonomy or enjoyment or survival, right? These, these core pieces of just what every human wants. So again, dig down deep, invite that wish and people can dream up the wish, right? However they want, if they're like, it looks like pizza every day for lunch. Ok. Great. Awesome. And like, what is that? That's joy for you. OK, cool. So you can kind of facilitate a little bit. 00:12:04 Um But what does it actually look like for you? I think if you're trying to lead a specific initiative or you have a thing that you're, you're trying to like get folks to quote unquote, buy into, I do think the best way to address a lack of buying is co creation, right? So it's not actually buying into something that you create, but it's co creating with everyone like core the dream. Um Ultimately, but first, if you have a particular vision, share it and paint a clear picture of what the dream is because a lot of times that resistance um that unwillingness to engage that avoidance, the silencing, denying anything is even happening, right? That can come from just confusion about what we're even talking about. So get real clear on, here's what we're talking about. Here's what I'd like to talk about. Here's the dream, we get to engage with this kind of content, right? And here's the why so co create the dream ultimately make that the focal point root it in our shared values, which I imagine are going to be very similar. Um If you don't have shared values already, you kind of kind of create them from the ground up uh as you have this conversation. 00:13:06 Now, step three is going to be to create that disequilibrium. Remember the silencing and denying the avoidance super common. And so in order to get to generative mobilizing discourse, we don't just create the imagination, a possibility, sense of things, we also have to create the disequilibrium. So avoidance, which is very popular. Hallmark of adaptive challenges is super common. Often we're avoiding conversations about the things that really matter because we like to be comfortable. And so what it could look like in practice is either diverting attention. So this might mean a topic is brought up that we're uncomfortable with, right? And we want to preserve that comfort. So we're just gonna make a joke or we're gonna make it personal so that it's now about, oh, you've attacked me versus deflecting or in order to deflect from the real issue, right? Versus like, actually we're gonna stick with this issue and I'm gonna deal with my discomfort. We also could have it look like displacing responsibility. So there's a lot of times in and I talked about this before on the podcast, there's a lot of times in strategic planning meetings or something where we're getting at the root cause of something. 00:14:16 And we're really trying to dig deep. Often a displacing responsibility phrase will be something like that's the family's responsibility. That's not mine, right? Or that's not ours as the school. So this idea of like we can't do anything about this. We're gonna just like put that responsibility on someone else is a popular category of things that is going to highlight for you as the observer of this discourse that avoidance is happening, that we're moving into that silencing and denying quadrant. So what do we do then when we see this happen? So if folks are like, I'm cool with the comfort, I'm good. I don't want to rock the boat. Uh who is a um leadership scholar says that actually, we need a disorienting dilemma and that's gonna jump start this transformative learning, which is a little bit different from like a technical learning learning, a new skill. For example, in that it requires a paradigm shift. It really asks us to critically examine our assumptions which is going to be a little more uncomfortable than learning. 00:15:23 You know, this this new formula for math or something, right? So presenting information that makes folks just uncomfortable enough to realize. Whoa the way I have been thinking about this, the current paradigm I'm operating under, it's just not working, it's clearly not working. The data does not support this. So consider what sort of data sets or information you might be able to share with a group that's like, hey, heads up, this is not working something new needs to happen. And what enables what this enables them to do is really just trying on other ways of thinking. And the research has shown that this is actually most effective within group discussions. So being in that group space is super cool because not only are we using dialogue as a tool to diagnose what's going on. But Doctor Cherie Bridges, Patrick has talked about this on the podcast before. It's also used as a tool for change and working through some of this stuff, right? So we diagnose it in a in a discourse in a dialogue, right? We diagnose what's going on and then we work on it through dialogue. We try on those different ways of thinking because folks around us will present different ways of thinking than what we have internally in our heads. 00:16:30 We need to get out of our own heads to practice all that stuff. So on an ongoing basis, I don't think there is really an end point to any of this. But I think the four and five are really, how do we continue this work? One is to practice engaging in discourse, engage as the participants facilitate when and where you can but encourage all school stakeholders to do the same and notice aspects of the experience. For example, what skills did you use in that discussion? Are there certain like verbal moves that you need? Um what is avoided? What is someone like really uncomfortable with? And you notice a displacement of responsibility or a joke was made? What feels really good to you when someone you know, acknowledges what you said and repeats it back, like it doesn't feel so good. Uh This person just kind of talked right over you or didn't let you have the space to share or just dismiss what you said without any sort of um explanation, right? Like what are those things? Just kind of notice the experiences that you're having and what all encouraged all the other folks to do the same and then make space for reflection individually, but also as a group. 00:17:35 So as a staff or a class of students, you can use these reflections to then core discussion agreements if you don't have them already or if you've already created these at the start of the year, for example, and you want to adapt them based on what's coming up in terms of our noticing as we engage in, in discussion. Awesome. And I will say I said this before, but I do think discussion of any kind discussion in any group. For example, discussion with friend groups in the cafeteria on the playground, discussion with families at dinner time. Totally relevant. Those are discussions that is discourse, you can practice there, you can encourage students and families to practice there. It doesn't need to be a formally you know, structured facilitated event. Now, step five is similar in that practice and in that noticing and reflecting you're going to be engaging with certain skills and noticing that you might want to grow certain skills some more than where they're currently at. 00:18:39 So the skills, the four skills or four kind of features of high quality generative mobilizing discourse that Doctor Cherie Bridges Patrick found in her research, she talked about them before on the podcast, I'll link in the blog post to a previous episode where she goes in depth here. But these are the things that you want to be practicing and just be aware of. So one is kind of a readiness and willingness to do the thing, right? So in those moments of I can opt out of this conversation, it's happening or I'm going to kind of lean in and and really do my best to be willing to engage even though it's uncomfortable, right? That is is key number one, right? I have to do the the active like stepping forward and um stepping forward might be able to English, sorry, uh being willing to uh engage, right? And and lean into that. Now, the next piece is vulnerability. This is similar, there's a element of vulnerability. I think that goes with your willingness to have a conversation. But I also think vulnerability in what you share in how you show up in how you respond with emotion to other folks who are sharing in a discussion or dialogue that's vulnerable, right? 00:19:56 That's being vulnerable, particularly in the realm of school where you are a leader interacting with staff, right? There is a power dynamic there. If you are an educator interacting with students or families, there are power dynamics there. When we think about teachers in a classroom with students, right? We often talk about not over sharing, right? I do think there's a degree of vulnerability that is appropriate as a human to foster those human connections without being unprofessional, right? The next piece after vulnerability is adaptability, we have to be able to be thrown a curveball and and still swing the bat, right? So we have to be able to adapt and just kind of be on our toes. That is life, right? That is a life skill that we want to constantly practice and get better at. So as we engage in these, there are going to be folks who say things in discussion that are kind of out of left field, so to speak, there are going to be moments where you are feeling an influx of emotion and you have to figure out what the next step is. 00:21:02 Do I take a breath? Do I respond? Do I leave the room because it's overwhelming, right? Like what is going to help me, what is going to be adaptive? Um And what is going to help me stay committed to this journey for the long haul? That is adaptive, right? So readiness, millions vulnerability adaptability. The fourth one is to really work on your skills of developing, contributing to as a participant, but also as a facilitator, a positive encouraging liberating environment for dialogue. So if we don't have those co created agreements, if we don't have the uh physical space set up, so everyone can be literally uh acknowledged, seen, heard, whatever, whatever it is. However, we're acknowledging folks in that space like we're not creating an environment where we can have liberated dialogue. We need to think about all of these things. We need to think about. What's the moment you step in as a facilitator. What's the moment you step back and let folks resolve things for themselves? 00:22:07 Um What are those agreements? How do we hold folks accountable once we've created the agreements, these all take practice and they all take a concerted effort and and real focus on the fact that you're approving these skills specifically. So as a final call to action, I suppose I want you to pick one meeting or one flash to observe the speed, take notes, you can use the diagnosing adaptive challenges workbook links below. Uh When I say links below, I mean in the blog post below. Uh So that's Lindsay, Beth lines.com/blog/one 161, I'll link it in there. There are a bunch of kind of things to observe or check out as you're engaging in these meetings. Eventually, you might be able to or depending on the stakeholders, you might be able to just hand a paper over to folks in the meeting and say, hey, what did we notice? Did we notice any of these things? And you can have them individually reflect? Um You can reflect on your own, but I'd love for you to identify one place where this happens. Do the observation, learn what you can and then move forward by naming what you see, inviting imagination and possibilities, creating this equilibrium, encouraging ongoing practice of discourse and building your own skills. 00:23:26 If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane Sapir and Jamila Dugan talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period? I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time, leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast network. Better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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In this episode, we’re continuing to talk about transforming the systems that uphold inequity in our schools. Specifically in this episode, we’re addressing classroom, school, and district grading policies.
Why? A-F, 0-100 grades work for a small number of students. Meta studies show that kids who get high grades are the ones that know how to do school, and these are often students who have inequitable access to that information. (Joy Nolan in a Competency Collaborative presentation). Averages penalize students who enter the class without already knowing the content and skills. A student who is struggling with a skill in the first month of school has a grade from when they were first practicing the skill count equally with a grade they received in the last month of the school year? That’s nuts when you think about it. 0-100 scales seem to me to be based on the percentage of recall-based questions a student gets right or wrong on a test. We know from the research that tests are inequitable and not super effective at measuring transferable skills. Project-based assessments are much better, as students in PBL classrooms understand the content on a deeper level, retain content longer, and still perform as well or better on high-stakes tests than students in traditional settings (BIE research summary). What? Step 1: Discuss the why with staff Share the research. Invite questions and concerns. Interrogate deficit language or harmful beliefs that arise in the discussion. Bring it back to equity, and ground it in your shared community values. Step 2: Discuss the why with families and students This is new for students and families too! Have conversations with families and students about the new practice, what it is and is not, and why you are making the shift. Use the same key ideas as listed in Step 1 above. Step 3: Learn from those who’ve done it Competency Collaborative is an organization in NYC. They are an excellent resource for relevant research, examples, and stories of equitable grading shifts across many schools. Check them out! The Crescendo Ed Group developed guidelines that emerged from their research, which includes:
Ashley, a teacher who worked with Competency Collaborative, discusses her shift to competency-based teaching and assessment in this video (from 34:41 to 37:00). Step 4: Co-create an equitable grading policy Create a policy that works for your community in partnership with students, families, and educators. Consider the why when making decisions, and be sure to leave with the structures that will need to be put in place to support implementation of the new policy. Step 5: Implement with solid systems for feedback and revision Specific Skill-Based Rubrics: Embed specificity and feedback into the rubric with which you assess all of your students’ work. For more details, check out the previous episode) Resource Banks: When students receive feedback that they have not yet met the standard, give them a next step. Share with students: instructional videos or texts as well as activities or mini projects so they can improve specific skills. Workshop or “Upgrade” Days: Revision or feedback cycles are important and take the place of typical “grade inflation” practices such as homework or completion grades. Get Metacognitive: As you implement or after a specific amount of time, gather feedback from stakeholders on your new system of feedback and grading. Adapt as needed. Final Tip If this is absolutely a no-go for you this year, try this as a stepping stone: All feedback, grading, and rubrics use competency-based categories, but the grades are translated at the end to correspond to a 0-100 scale. For one example of this, check out the “JumpRope to Transcript Grade Conversion” table on this webpage. To help you facilitate the adaptive conversations mentioned in steps 2 and 3 above, I’m sharing my Root Cause Analysis Worksheet with you for free. Use this strategy when you are digging into the beliefs around grading and the inequitable distribution of grades among your students. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 160 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 Educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons, and here on the time for Teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Welcome to episode 160 of the time for teacher podcast. Today, we're continuing the conversation in our series about transforming the systems that uphold inequity in our schools and districts. And specifically in this episode, we're continuing a conversation from the previous episode, episode 159 on grading for equity. Today, we're talking about rethinking averages and 0 to 100 scales specifically. 00:01:03 So let's take a look at our grading policies together. Here we go. Before we jump into our conversation on grading for equity, rethinking averages and 0 to 100 scales I do want to go through the why as I usually do, I like to cite the research and think about like, why are we even doing this because it's going to be a hard shift. This is certainly as I talk about often an adaptive leadership challenge. So a through F 0 100 grades, they only work for a very small number of students. And these are the students that do well in school already. So we don't need in a conversation about equity and transforming systems to prioritize and center those students wellness, they are going to be just fine. I promise you. I was one of those students who did really well and meta studies back this up, they show that kids who get high grades are the ones that know how to do school. And these are often the students who have inequitable access to that information. I had access to that information because my parents were both teachers, right? I knew how to do school. Well, I was also just like I think skilled at specific things that made me do school. Well, I uh maybe surprisingly just I'm listening to the podcast. 00:02:07 I'm a rule follower in many aspects of my life. Of course, not all I push for justice and resist rules that, that contribute to injustice, but I just did school well because I was trained to do school. Well, I had access to that information. I had access to the cultural capital of having an educator in my school district. That was my mom and another educator, my dad in, in a, in a neighboring district. So that is first and foremost, right? Like we're privileging the students who already do well, if we use that as an excuse that like it's working for some kids, it's working for the kids who are already advantaged. The next thing is when we talk specifically about averages, averages penalize students who enter the class without already knowing the content and skills. Now, that's just silly. Right? If we think about a class, it is designed to teach something. So on the first day or the first month of that class, you do not expect the students to know all the things right? 00:03:10 When we think about and we talk about this in the previous episode, but this idea of competency based grading and grading for skills that are transferable and have a long duration. They last the whole year. We are consistently working on a handful of skills building those up the first time I tried that in September in United States schools anyways or the northeastern of the United States schools are usually in September. I am probably not going to be that good at it. That's an expectation that I should have as a teacher and as a student that should not be a surprise as a family member of that child, I should not be surprised. Right. This is the first time they're trying it. But a student who's struggling with that skill, of course, in the first month of school, they have a grade under an averaging system from that first practice, that assessment from quarter one month one that counts equally with the grade that they received an assessment in the last month of school. That is bananas like that is absolutely just confusing to my brain when I really break it down and think about it. 00:04:16 And I think most folks would agree. It's just that this is one of those systems and structures that we haven't questioned or maybe some folks have been questioning it, but we're fearful of maybe what other folks might think and we're fearful of disrupting the status quo. So I think this is a perfect topic for this podcast, which is why we're spending two episodes on it and probably will do more in the future. All right, one more piece on the research that I wanna share before we move on to. How do you actually address this? 0 to 100 scales seem to me to be based on the percentage of recall based questions that a student gets right or wrong on a multiple choice test. Like that's what 0 to 100 is right? It's like a percentage. I literally was just doing a coaching call with folks who were working on skill based rubrics and this is a new skill for these educators. So of course, there's going to be some questions, some confusion. And one of the things was kind of a default to that traditional mindset of like I am assessing not the skill but the content memorization. 00:05:19 And so this teacher was basically trying to put a 0 to 100 scale of like what's the percentage that I got correct? Or that a student got correct on a content based factual recall test and just kind of putting it into the competency category. So like three or four categories. So like the range of like 0 to 50 is here and the R 50 to 75 is here whatever. And so it it just, I think is very emblematic of like this traditional way of how we think of things and how it's easy for us to create percentages out of. OK. There is 10 questions on this test. You got eight, right? You got an 80. But what does that mean? Right. And what are we actually assessing? So tests are inequitable. We found this in the research, they're not super effective at measuring transferable skills, which is what we know we should be prioritizing. And we look at the research that specifically targets project based assessments and PB L classrooms versus traditional high stakes testing environments. Those students in the PV L classrooms, they understand the content on a deeper level, they actually retain the content longer. 00:06:24 And this is a great like punch line to this for people who are high stakes test advocates, which I don't honestly think there are many in terms of the educational world, but they still those students in PB L classrooms, they still perform as well or even better on the high stakes tests than students who have been educated in a traditional setting where they're like practicing a lot of multiple choice and things. So I think there is a lot to say for rethinking averages and 0 to 100 scales just based alone on the research. But now let's get to like, what do we do about this? So I think the first step is really to discuss the why with your staff. So share the research, share this podcast episode if that's helpful, but invite questions and concerns interrogate any sort of deficit language or harmful beliefs that arise in the discussion. So there might be a lot of, well, if I don't grade it this way, then students aren't going to do it or the student is highly motivated by being valedictorian. And what if this ruins their average? And I think these are all valid questions, right? I think we should, we should dig into them a little bit but interrogate kind of what underlies that so who are the folks that we're concerned about that are taking up space in our brain in these conversations that are making us hesitant to move forward? 00:07:38 Typically, in many conversations, not just conversations about rating anything that has to do with inequity, the resistance to change. And the folks in our heads as we're thinking about them and thinking about making the change. They are the folks who are currently benefiting from the system. And if we are bringing the conversation back to equity, if we're grounding in inequity, we are thinking about who is not benefiting from the system. And typically it's a much higher number of students than the students who are excelling under the current system, right? So even just in a numbers game, it's like, OK, this is like across the board, we need to have this conversation and we need to flip the script here. And I I do think it's really important here to ground this in your shared community values. If you do not have shared community values, go back and listen to an episode on that. It is really important to establish those in order to have these really critical conversations about adaptive challenges. Like that's at the heart of this and that's why today's free resource actually is going to be about adaptive challenges. I'm gonna link to you in the blog post version of this episode, you can grab it, but I'm gonna link my root cause analysis worksheet go through like the five wise, has a little bit of like data analysis, questions, different things that you can do. 00:08:48 I love it for strategic planning. And I do think this evolves into kind of a mini strategic planning session. When you talk with the staff, we're identifying a challenge, right? Our current grading system is inequitable. These are the students who are disservice, what's going on? How do we fix it? How do we make it better? Right. That's an adaptive challenge. We need to make sure that our values are central in that, right? If we value equity, well, then that that's going to inform our decision if we value humanity, right, that's going to impact our decision. I think there's all of those values that you have laid out and it's like now we really test them out. Now we see how they come to life. I think after you discuss with the staff or even parallel to or you know, you could flip the order of these. But I think you also want to discuss the why with families and students, this is going to be a shift for students and families too. There may be some students and families who are really interested in this idea of this shift. There are probably gonna be honestly most that are not interested because they probably don't know like the full extent of what you mean. So you need to communicate really clearly like what is this? 00:09:50 What is the research on this? And once they hear all of the information, we'll probably be excited. But initially, it's like, ok, this is something very different or maybe I heard things about this in the news and I am fearful for my child getting into college because like you grade on a different system or whatever, right? Like there's so many fears and they are grounded in like, I'm not quite sure about this, but my gut is to protect my child. And so I'm just gonna like share my initial gut reaction. So bring folks into a conversation again. Same thing you want to do with the staff. Invite questions, invite concerns, interrogate any of the beliefs that arise center it in your shared community values and by community, I mean, yes, you probably created staff values and school community values, like extend those and expand those to include the values of family and students as you discuss this. So you can discuss the students in like a a larger platform, you can discuss this with students in classroom size groups where they've already probably built shared community and community values. 00:10:53 You definitely want to um think about what clearly do we want? Why is it currently not working? What is the thing that we want and what is it not? So like, let's get clear about like it's not gonna be this, it is going to be this and why you're making that shift. And I think knowing and this is kind of step forward, I'll get to this in a minute but knowing that you have the opportunity to core what the new grading policy actually looks like with families, with educators with students like in partnership, there's going to be more ownership of the final product and also reduced hesitancy at the first kind of, hey, this is what we're thinking about doing because we want to pose it in a way that's like we're thinking about doing this together, not to you, right with you in community. I think also we wanna make sure that we learn from folks who have done this. There are many, many schools and districts who have done this work already. So let's learn from them so that, you know, they've already made the mistakes, they've already gone through the hard things. 00:11:57 Like let's learn from them. One huge resource that is really my go to helped me with this work when I was a teacher, helped the school I was in, we did really well with their guidance. But I also even as a coach, just go to them all the time. That is competency collaborative. I'll link to them in the blog post. They're an organization based in New York City. They're an excellent resource for all sorts of relevant research for leading to graded, for equity. They have a beautiful model. They have tons of examples of what is this rubric look like. What's a grading policy this school has. And also they have tons of stories of equitable grading shifts that schools or individual teachers have kind of gone on. And so they'll actually share stories of like here's where I started in year one. And this is the shift that we made first and then we got to the second year and then this is what we decided as a school community, right? It's it's super cool, especially if you're kind of hesitant or your stakeholders are kind of hesitant about this big shift, just look at what other folks have done and the journey they've gone on. And I believe competency collaborative will say this as well, but there is no one right, concrete path. 00:13:03 It is like let's have these underlying shared principles of grading for equity and assessing and feedback being prioritized over grading. And let's move forward with our community members to figure out what works best for us. There are guidelines from a crescendo ed group. I believe that basically are taken from this big study they did where they figured out that there are a couple different things to consider and I just want to name them here again, learning from those who have done it before. So in their research, they said use a 0 to 4 scale instead of a 0 to 100 point scale and avoid giving students any scores of zero, right? So a zero is like, I there is no effort made. Um And I think really important here too is like there were many, many opportunities to get it done. It wasn't like you miss the deadline, it's over, right? So we really decrease um the idea of giving a zero if any were is completed and we give multiple opportunities for that work to be completed, right? That's not to say that if a student is just not ever showing work that like you need to give a zero, this is for a student who is is trying um is putting in work. 00:14:13 And when I say trying, I mean, like at all ever after multiple opportunities not like, oh they didn't turn on the deadline, they're not trying, right? So I think, I think there's these are really important points to consider it. You wanna weigh recent performance more heavily. This is super important. What I was saying before month one very different from month nine in your school year. We want to we the month nine way heavier. Like if you still want to count the month one fine and there are actually models that are like we don't even count month one, right? We don't, we certainly don't count a practice time. Maybe we count the summit of assessment from quarter one. But we actually there are some extremes where it's like you don't even count anything aside from like what is done at the end the last summative project, right? I'm not necessarily advocating for that. I'm just saying like give it as a thought experiment, give it some thought, right? It makes sense theoretically. So wait the recent performance more heavily. I think this also gives students a chance if they're like sitting in December, like, wow, I'm still, like, not doing well in my grades. And certainly my students early on were thinking this like, ok, well, this is nuts. 00:15:17 I am sitting here at like a, a two out of four. This, like, I am a student who really typically does well and like our first year of doing this and I was like, ok, you need to know that the next few months are actually gonna count more. So I need you to keep on like you are doing great. You are on the path and I've seen the growth, you're only gonna grow more. You are gonna be pleased with the end of the year's final grade, the way that we average and wait more recent stuff and, and they were, but it was a conversation to certainly have in, you know, December, January and where there's usually at that low. Um there's that reset, right? Um Another, another thing to get back to their list is to grade content, not subjective effort, like attendance or homework, grading for completion is far more. Um kind of like fluffy grade inflation, uh grading for like efforts. Um Attendance is super inequitable, right? Because you can't like determine who had the success to be able to attend today. You don't know what's going on in their home, right? All these things, your grade should be emblematic of what they can do with the content and skills, right? 00:16:23 That's what the grade should be not like button seat time allow retakes. We talked about that replace previous scores with current scores, right. So if they did poorly in the first draft, second draft do better. Great that just completely replaces it, create effective grade based on standard aligned rubrics. So the grades are are based on standards aligned rubrics, excuse me. So that's what we talked about in the previous episode. 159 that you are sharing with students. So right up front, here's the assessment, here's how I'm going to grade you. And again, when you create a year long rubric, they already know what it is, especially when you're in uh like a grade team that really collaborates. Well, you might have an assessment and and the um competency collaborative has shared this before in a video which I can link to this episode. But they share an example of, I think it's the young Women's Leadership Academy of Astoria in New York that has like school wide standards, nine through 12th grade, regardless of subject area. And they are all content agnostic. 00:17:24 So they know, like argue as the standard is gonna look different in a math class than a social studies class. But like it's still the same like sentence that we recognize as like here's the standard. So I think there's a ton of cool stuff there um that you can do with that. I also think another thing they were saying, I think this is a really interesting one is using self reflection, peer feedback and supporting uh self regulation to support independent learning skills. So you don't want to necessarily in their, in their research, they found you don't necessarily want to grade the independent learning skills. I know competency collaborative does um say that's OK and they put it under like work habits, like a can't be more than 20% I think is typically um the advice but I could be wrong. But that is I think really important. And when we have that leverage of self reflection and pure feedback, we open up opportunities for teachers to then conference with students one on one and do a lot more of uh what I believe, competency collaborative calls the cognitive coaching, which I love um for students, step four is to co create an equitable grading policy. 00:18:29 So you have discussed with staff families and students you learn from who's already done it. Now you're co creating the policy, something that works for you. You're in partnership with all your stakeholders, you're considering the why of equity when making all of your decisions again, considering shared values, you're sure to leave the meeting or leave the whatever with the structures you need to put in place to make sure you're successful in implementation. There's a lot of structures. So actually, that's step five, I think you should implement with some solid systems and structures specifically around feedback and revision. So give departments and teams the time to create department wide or team wide skill based rubrics that could take an entire year but like just give them the time, right? And that way you have embedded specificity and effectively feedback into the rubrics with which your teachers are assessing all of your students work, right? These are year long rubrics. Awesome, less work for them, more consistency for the students, more reliability for tracking skill progression over time. Again, check out the previous episode for that. 00:19:31 If you're interested in some more information there, next, I would create resource banks. So each teacher should have or department or team again, you can kind of crowdsource these as a group if you'd like resource banks. So when students receive feedback, they have not yet met the standard, don't just leave them with that, right? Like what can they do to progress? Give them a next step. So you are going to want to share something with students, an instructional video list. You can even link those right into the rubrics themselves, which I love texts as well as activities or many projects. So they can improve their skills. But you wanna make sure that they have what they need to continue to progress. Not just leave them up now, you're not there yet that's going in the grade book, right? You can have like weekly or biweekly, whatever it would be for you, workshop or upgrade days that your teachers have put into place on their calendars, on their pacing calendars. And they say these are days for revision or, you know, taking that feedback I gave you on the last assessment and working on one of those many activities that's in the resource bank. 00:20:35 So this idea of giving revision opportunities, giving feedback and then giving something for the students to do and having time in class to do that work super important. And that's really making sure that you are not doing your typical grade inflation practices like the homework or completion grades, attendance effort grades because it's like you don't have to p you, you no longer see grades as penalizing students, right? It's just you will have as many chances as you can get every week, you will have a new chance to upgrade something to uh revise something based on feedback, right? So you no longer need the inflation practices like grading for effort for a kid who is putting in the effort, right? They're gonna get there because you've helped them build a scale. And finally, I would really get me meta cognitive years. So as you implement, you're asking for feedback on your feedback systems, right? Adapt as you need, but make sure maybe after a set amount of time, you're collecting the experiential data from students, families, educators, how is it going? 00:21:40 What can we shift if we need to shift something? And then my very final tip is that this is definitely like the dream we're creating here. I want you to have that dream grading policy that's rooted in equity if it is absolutely like a no, go for some reason this year, here's what I suggest. You try, whether you are leading a school where there's just a lot of resistance in some dimension, um resistance from above, like whatever what you can do, even as an individual classroom teacher who's like, ah, the school's not going with this. But I wanna try this. Maybe even as a leader, you can maybe have this piloted with a few teachers. I think that would be super cool and really by, have some quote unquote by and, or like a true ownership over the policy in, in that core group of teachers and like the belief really spreads itself out. Ok. So here's what you do. All feedback, grading and rubrics use the competency based categories. But at the end, if you have to convert it into a 0 to 100 scale, convert it, there are examples of this. And I actually, in the, the first couple of years we did this in one of the schools I worked at, that's what we had to do because the New York City rating system at that time, I think as of the school year 2324. 00:22:52 So this school year currently, as we're reporting, the doe in New York City has shifted to include the four point grading scale for competency categories as an option to put on report cards. But until then there had to be a conversion. So I'm gonna link on the blog post. Uh an example of what one school, not New York City, but one school um just as a web page up with that convergence, you can check out what it might look like, but that's a way to still kind of check the box. Yeah, we did 0 to 100 but really on the ground, super feedback driven super competency based um and all of the language that students and teachers and families are using is that language. So again, all the things, all the links to all the research that table I just talked about my root cause analysis worksheet all there for free for you on the blog post for this episode, which is located at Lindsay Bath, lions.com/blog/one 60. Thanks for tuning in. If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane, Sapir and Jamila Dugan. 00:23:55 Talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book Street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period? I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now. Grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time, leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast Network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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In this episode, we continue our mini series of episodes focused on transforming the systems that uphold inequity in our schools. Specifically in this episode, we’re addressing competency-based learning and using competency-based rubrics as a tool for increasing equity in feedback and assessment.
Why? Typical grading policies lead to grades that are often inconsistent, inequitable, and don’t relate closely to students’ competency in a subject. They also cause many students high levels of stress (Ed. Magazine). Haystead and Marzano (2009) found teachers who measured skill growth over time on competency-based rubrics noted a 34% gain in student achievement. In competency-based classes, students showed increased student learning, less stressful classrooms with better teacher-student relationships, and decreased grade achievement gaps (Crescendo Ed Group). And if you’re not grading for students’ competencies in subject-specific skills, what are you grading for? Likely, a student’s ability to memorize, fill out a worksheet, or have their butt in their seat. (A little tongue in cheek, but I’ve seen it—I’ve even done it as an early-career teacher!) Why rubrics, specifically? What’s helpful to learning is actually feedback, not necessarily grades. Feedback that provides actionable next steps to improve a competency is what rubrics can give us! How do we do this? Step 1: Ask teachers to reflect. Here are some sample questions from Competency Collaborative:
Step 2: Share the above research and the hallmarks of competency-based learning. Teachers have transparent learning outcomes that inform their lessons and assessments, and the criteria and expectations for meeting these outcomes are shared with students. This helps teachers plan more efficiently and effectively. It also helps students know what’s coming and reduces anxiety. When giving feedback around a specific competency, the teacher gives specific next steps for students to improve. The feedback is useful and timely. (So, don’t give all the feedback at once. Instead focus on the first next step.) Again, helpful for students and teachers! Assessments are opportunities to demonstrate competency over time. Mindset shift: Think of assessment as an ongoing dialogue, not a “one-and-done” act. If students will be revising their first try on an assessment or doing a lot of similar assessments, this again helps students and teachers (fewer assessments and rubrics to create!) Step 3: Consider categories of competency. A typical scale is four points or categories. One example Competency Collaborative has shared can be remembered with the acronym NAME: Not yet, Approaching, Meeting, and Exceeding. I think you can also use the first three or use a visual, non-linguistic category name like the example on the first page of my Skills-Based Rubric Templates. Step 4: Use team time to have departments create subject-specific rubrics. Ask each department or team to select 4-8 discipline-specific skills that are taught across units and grade levels. Define what each category of competency looks like at the highest grade level, and then backwards map competency for each grade level or grade band. Step 5: Have teachers use these shared rubrics for every assignment. For summative assessments, use the whole rubric (all skills). This also helps teachers design assessments align with the complete rubric. For formative assessments, teachers can use one row of the shared rubric (just the specific skill the student is demonstrating in the formative assignment). Final Tips and Implications for Teaching To ensure students have time to revise and improve their skills based on feedback on a previous assessment, embed regular “Competency Upgrade Days” into the course. During this time, students can determine which activities will be best for them based on the feedback provided. They can also ask their peers for feedback because all students will be familiar with the rubric language. This frees teachers up to be what Competency Collaborative folx have called a “cognitive coach.” In terms of pacing, a big shift for teachers will be moving from a “coverage mindset” of speed and breadth to prioritizing deep learning and skill transfer across contexts and content areas. This is likely a desired shift, and the development of competency-based rubrics will help get you there! To help you create your first department-wide rubrics, I’m sharing my (recently updated!) Skills-Based Rubric Templates with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 159 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 Educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons, and here on the time for teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Hello, everyone and welcome to episode 159 of the time for teacher podcasts. Today, we're talking about grading for equity, specifically focused on competency based rubrics. And we're also kicking off a mini series of episodes that are going to be focused on transforming the systems that uphold inequity in our schools. So again, today, we're talking about competency based learning and rubric specifically as a tool for increasing equity and feedback and assessment in your school or district. 00:01:07 Let's get to it. All right. So we're talking about grading for equity and specifically competency based rubrics in this episode. So I first want to start as usual with the why typical grading policies lead to grades that are often inconsistent inequitable and don't actually relate to the students competency in a subject area which is bananas. They also incidentally cause many students very high levels of stress. I have heard this, I have seen this firsthand in my students. It is not a fun thing. Grading itself. I would love to throw out the window. But if we have to do grades, let's talk about how we do grades. Well. So Hay said and Marzano, two researchers in their study found teachers who measured skill growth over time using competency based rubrics noted a 34% gain in student achievement versus traditional classrooms that do not use competency based rubrics, 34% gain in student achievement. Yes, I will take that also in competency based classes, students showed increased student learning, less stress in the class along with better teacher, student relationships. 00:02:14 Always what we're going for. I have heard so many teachers and leaders say that their teachers really want better relationships with students and also a decreased grade achievement gap. So again, if we're focused on equity as the goal, there is a decreased grade achievement gap in the use of competency based rubrics and competency based learning and teaching. So super good and a couple more things just off the top of my head here. But if you're not grading for students competencies in subject specific skills. Like what are you actually grading for? Very likely it's a student's ability to memorize, fill out a worksheet or have their butt in a seat. It's a little tongue in cheek, but I have seen it happen and I've even done it shamefully as an early career teacher where I knew better so to speak. Right. Where I really saw it in action and saw the possibilities for how to do it. So that's my error. I have made the mistake, learn from me and learn from this episode and the blog post that's gonna come alongside it. And as we move into rubric specifically, I just want to say what's helpful to learning is actually feedback, not necessarily grades. 00:03:21 Again, we could do away with grades completely and I think we would be better off but feedback is critical. And what rubrics do is provide the language on the rubric itself that gives us the specificity of feedback where students can identify. Oh, this is why I'm not completely meeting the standard right now. This is the difference between my work and that exemplar our work, right? It also kind of intrinsically, but you could also make it extrinsic or um I guess, I mean, implicit and explicit, implicitly. Uh but you can make it explicit, it provides actionable next steps for how to improve. So how to make it explicit. I think I have done this in the past where I have taken a youtube tutorial on if, for example, the skill was something like grammar. Um I would use like a three minute youtube video that already exists or I could create one on my own and I would link it into uh the rubric to say like, hey, if you weren't quite there yet, um This is a common challenge that a lot of you face. Here's what I want you to do. 00:04:23 I want you to watch this three minute video. And if I find that I've been seeing the same challenge over and over again, just to embed it right into the rubric. Um is I think a lot, a lot more effective both for students to immediately get that feedback and to have a next step. But also for the teacher to be like, I don't have to share this with individual students. I can just say if you got this on the rubric, it's going to save me time from one on one telling each student like, oh, this is the issue and now you can go ahead and watch the video, right? It's just embedded in the ongoing rubric I use for every assessment. OK. So how do we do this step? One? I would ask teachers to reflect, this is so powerful because often we don't even have a moment to just pause and reflect on our grading practices. So here are some sample questions that I totally pulled from competency, collaborative and I love competency collaboratives work. I will link it to them and I, I do think that, you know, using their resources is awesome and a lot of the language that I use in this episode probably pulls from them because I just use their resources so often. 00:05:29 And they are who trained me and helped train me in a competency based education and rubric practices. So here are some sample questions that you can use with your staff. One, how do you know whether and how much each student is learning based on what evidence? Two, how clear are your students about the criteria for success? Three, how do learners get actionable feedback in your class or school? Four? How do grades connect you and support learning at your school? Five? What are grades based on in your class or school in an ideal world? What would grades be based on? Now? I also love inviting students and families to think about these questions. And so you might need to slightly adapt the literal text of each question. But I think you could have a really generative conversation and really identify similarities, differences, uh directions for moving forward based on how everybody's answering the same types of questions. Now, step two, after you've had everyone reflect now, we're ready to kind of move into what do we do next with these reflections? Because likely there will be kind of many, I think aha moments of, oh, this feels wrong, but I'm just not sure what to do with this. 00:06:43 And I've literally heard teacher say this to me, remember reflecting in grading policies, like I don't love this, but I also just don't have a better way. So what do you want me to do? Right. And and there, right. Like, so let's talk about what is step two, step two would be to share the above research, right? All the stuff that you just talked about and I say above because literally on the blog post, it's going to say above and then scroll up and you will see all of the research of the links and all the things and the hallmarks of competency based learning. So you wanna give them all the info, the research that's like, yep, this is a good idea. We also to tell them like what is competency based learning, what is this direction we might be moving in? So three key points I think really define it. And again, these are pulled from competency collaborative. They have a lot more. I I like these um just because I think they really illuminate the the stark differences and the things that people uh struggle the most with and also benefit the most from when they switch over. So first teachers have transparent learning outcomes, right? They inform their lessons and assessments these outcomes do and the outcomes become built out into a rubric inclusive of the criteria and expectations for how to meet them and those rubrics, that language, the criteria expectations, all the things that's shared with students, right? 00:08:03 This not only helps students to know what's coming, reduce anxiety, have clear expectations, all the things, but it also helps teachers, right? It helps teachers to plan more efficiently and effectively everything is backwards planned from those outcomes and the rubric itself. Now, secondly, when giving feedback around a specific competency under competency based learning and teaching, the teacher is giving also a specific next step for how to improve. So this feedback is supposed to be useful and timely, this is really helpful for me as a teacher in in my teacher hat, right? Like I'm thinking, OK. So this means I don't have to give all the feedback at once. So if there's like four things happening right now that I want to tell you to do this different, do this different, this that's gonna be overwhelming to the student. And it's also gonna take me a ton of time to communicate, to teach, to find a resource for if I'm not actively teaching that student one on one, but need them to watch a youtube video or something. Instead I can focus on the first next step. And again, this is also super helpful for your students to just focus on one thing at a time. It's going to move them along the learning progression faster to focus on one thing at a time. 00:09:08 Now, the third key hallmark I would say is that assessments are opportunities to demonstrate competency over time. This is a huge mindset shift. So we have to think of assessment as an ongoing dialogue and this is language again from competency, collaborative, ongoing dialogue and not a one and done act. So this is gonna shift how we plan how we assess students, how we think about assessing students if students will be revising their first try on an assessment or doing a lot of similar assessments. This is also super helpful for educators, right? Not only does it help the students, it helps the teachers because now they have to create fewer assessments, right? And they have to create fewer rubrics because we're just working on the same ones. And if we're not working on the exact same ones, they're still very similar in their construction in what they're assessing in the kind of um fabric of the assessment itself, right? And we're just pulling in different content, but the fabric, the skill, the types of questions, the rubric itself, they all say the same, so much less work. 00:10:17 All right. So in these steps, we have reflected, we've asked teachers to reflect stakeholders to reflect. We've shared the research, we've talked about what competency based learning is. I think you're gonna start to generate a lot of excitement about this. And the next thing that you wanna do, step three is to consider what categories of competency you want to have in your rubrics, in your language, in how you grade, if you're shifting the actual grading structure as well as a school or a department or even if you're an individual teacher, right? Or you're a leader who's kind of helping an individual teacher or a set of small set of teachers to pilot something like you still want to think about these and have kind of a shared discussion about them. I don't think there is a right answer to this. Like how many categories of competency? I have seen four as the most typical, I have seen five, I have seen three. I think those are probably the range of 3 to 5 is probably what you want to go for. But one example, competency collaborative has shared can be remembered with the acronym name N AM E and that is all around this idea of competencies, right? 00:11:22 So not yet approaching meeting and exceeding the competency, right? So I have not yet got there. I am approaching. So I'm almost there and meeting it and I am above and beyond. I'm exceeding it. So that is something that you can use, you can switch it up in the language, you can, I mean, I've even, you know, like I said, I had people use just the first three because they feel uncomfortable saying that like the A if you're again, I think this is very still traditional minded. But like if you're thinking about the A as exceeding like, do you need to go above and beyond what I am asking of a grade level performance to get an a or should an a be just like, yeah, you met the standard, right? So there's a ton of discussion embedded in this and also a ton of traditional mindset that kind of comes through for better or for worse. Um And I, I think that that's like a really cool discussion that you can have and a really powerful one that kind of un a lot of the deep seated beliefs that are gonna inform what you're going to decide on. Now, another is that you can use a visual, non linguistic category name. 00:12:27 So I use bicycles and so I'll link to that in the blog post. The freebie for this episode is my skills based rubric templates. And if you've gotten this before, I've recently some recently updated this. So you can see the first page is actually a learning progression version where you're not actually saying this skill is uh you know, not yet approaching or meeting the standard, but it's actually like here is the stepping stone skill or the supporting skill that you need to learn before you get to the next one before you get finally to the skill itself. So for example, before I can analyze, I need to first decode the text. What is the text telling me? Then I need to be able to understand or comprehend the tax and make sense of it, then I can analyze and add my own spin and interpretation, right? So play with those, there's a bunch of different templates. That's why that's plural. Um But this is going to be located on the blog post version of this podcast episode, which will be located at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 59. So in that, I I said that the bicycle, it's like the first category is like just a bicycle, that's it, standing still, took it out of the garage, so to speak. 00:13:31 The next one is looking like a kind of a a family member like a parent, maybe uh pushing a child on a bike, right? So you have kind of the quote unquote training wheels or I can do this with support category. And then the final one is like a bike going on like a mountain bike ride or something, right? So I can do this on my own. I'm doing tricks with it. This is great. So just an option. I've seen many and you can Google like Pinterest has a ton of cool visuals of people using like competency based uh scales that are actually like in visual metaphor format. Um So, OK, once you've decided the categories of competency step four is to use team time, super important that you have ongoing team, time, department wide or grade, team wide. However, you do teams to create subject specific rubrics. So I would ask each department or subject team to create. I think first you want to select like 4 to 8 is usually the range I suggest discipline specific or subject specific skills that are like we teach the these regardless of the unit we're in, regardless of the grade level, these transcend contexts and grades and once you choose them, have them select um uh the sorry. 00:14:46 So like the 4 to 8 and then have them define, excuse me, which category they're gonna start with? I like starting with the definition of like the highest. So whether that's exceeding or meeting standards, the bike on the mountain, whatever, this is what it looks like when it's great and then kind of work backwards from there and then define each category of competency. I would start because you're across grades here. I would start with the highest grade level. So if you're doing like K five, start with 1/5 grade and then work backwards to K. Um If you're, you know, K 12, same, same thing, I would start with 12, work backwards, but you might wanna band it as well. So you might say that actually, um K five, this is what competency looks like across like across levels. Um Maybe we're not getting super specific if you're doing K 12 and then within K five teams, you can get even more specific later. But to have a banded, here's elementary school, middle school, high school, what each of these looks like would also be a great resource to have and definitely a good place to start without getting too granular in the K 12 space step five is to have teachers use these shared rubrics for every single assignment. 00:15:54 So for summit of assessments, they're using the whole rubric, which is all of the skills 48, whatever they came up with. This also is going to help teachers once again to design assessments that align with the complete rubric, right? So if they're like, I designed this assessment, but actually, it doesn't have the ability to assess these three skills. Well, we're gonna redesign the assessment or we're gonna rethink like, is this actually a skill that gets assessed all the time? Does it need to be on the core rubric that's shared across the department? Now, for formative assessments, teachers can use one row of the shared rubric. So they're just taking the row of the rubric that has the specific skill the student is demonstrating competency in within that formative assignment. So again, you can use it for all assignments. You just not might might not be using all of the rubric for every assignment, you're taking a piece here and there. But summative again, I think I would do the full thing. OK, final tips before I leave you and really implications for teaching is what this section should be. So to ensure students have time to revise and improve their skills based on feedback that they got from the, their last assessment, I would make sure teachers embed regular sessions, they can call them workshop days. 00:17:10 I believe competency collaborative has somebody call them upgrade days um into the course. So I used to do workshop days every Friday. Um I've also called them what I need or win days. Like every Friday win day, you get to work on whatever you need to work on. Check your last assessment for, you know, whatever feedback that you got, where is a skill you didn't get meets standards or meets the competency on your rubric, work on it. Given the resource bank of things that I have either linked in your rubric or I have given you and revise that assessment or work on something else. This is great because students having the feedback and then determine which activities will be best for them based on the feedback. You don't have to go around and say, ok, you're here and you're here, right? They know or should be able to internalize that as you work through this, maybe not the first week, but by the 1st, 2nd month, right? End of the first month, end of the second month, they're gonna be cruising, right? Because they know this is how we do things. I'm used to this rubric. I've seen it many times. Another beautiful thing about this is that students can ask their friends, their peers for feedback because all the students are familiar with the rubric language they learn and get familiar with this as a class. 00:18:22 And what this does is it frees up the teachers to be a competency, collaborative folks have called a cognitive coach. So I as the teacher can meet, I can talk one on one in small conferences uh with groups of students, I can help coach, students versus teach or talk at students, right? Like OK, here's our struggle. You have the instructional video, you had the instruction from the lesson the day before I can coach you on any sort of confusion, same as I do with instructional coaching, right? Any time I have shared an idea or a practice or a resource and teachers have tried it out have come back to me said this didn't work. Ok, let's figure out why and where do we go to next? So we're truly in coach mode, which is far more effective. It's a far more valuable use of our time, especially when we have things like youtube videos and things that are already out there, especially when we have already delivered, so to speak the initial new content lesson in a lecture in a video. 00:19:23 However, we did it the first time students had that opportunity now they need something different, right? And that's what it frees us up to do in terms of pacing. Also a big shift for teachers is going to be moving from that coverage mindset of speed and breadth like more is better, right to prioritizing less is better. We're doing deep learning, we're doing a hard focus on skills that transfer across contexts and content areas. This is likely something both of these, the cognitive coach idea and the pacing for depth of overbreadth, likely something that you as a leader have wanted that maybe many of your teachers have wanted to shift to. But the development of the competency based rubrics is going to be the tool that really helps you get there. All right, try it out and I'll meet you back here next week. If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane, Sapir and Jamila Dugan talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book Street Data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period. I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. 00:20:27 If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time, leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast network. Better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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In this episode, I’m inviting you to dream big to support student achievement, teacher retention and educator well-being. Teachers are overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted. The educational system is not set up to support teachers’ mental and emotional wellness. Since we are focused on systems transformation, we’re thinking about the systems we can revise to stop putting the burden on individual educators to to self-care their way out of burnout. Why focus on teacher schedules? From Hattie’s research, we know the thing that has the largest impact on student learning is collective teacher efficacy. How do teachers’ build efficacy? Professional learning. This includes opportunities to collaborate, learn from and with peers, and have enough time to thoughtfully and effectively plan instruction. In many schools, this is not possible during the school day, given the schools’ schedule. This excerpt from “Reimagining the School Day” highlights some interesting data. “Teachers in the United States reported spending 27 hours teaching out of 45 hours of work per week compared to teachers in Singapore, who teach for only 17 hours per week and teachers in Finland, who teach for a total of 21 hours per week. Schools in these countries prioritize time for planning and collaboration, recognizing that developing and executing lessons take time and preparation…In another analysis of more than 120 school districts, the most common length of time allotted for planning was 45 minutes per day,” (American Progress). Not much time at all, and certainly not for collaboration. What can we do? There are many innovative scheduling models out there. Check them out! Visit those schools or hop on a call with educators who teach in or lead those schools. Seeing what’s possible is a great start. You can find links to several examples at the end of my Make Time Quick Guide freebie. Here are some specific ideas to consider that can increase teacher planning time: Step 1: Early Dismissal/Late Start Half-Day PD days or early dismissal Thursdays are becoming more popular (e.g., MA) Step 2: Reallocate Tasks Hire community members to do recess, lunch duty, or other circular 6 tasks. Administrators, teach one class! Step 3: Intervention, Enrichment, or Club Time Blocks Staff an enrichment/intervention block with paraprofessionals/aides, social workers, media specialists, instructional coaches, or community partners. You can also use this time for clubs, projects intensives, internships, or community service. Example: Urban Academy’s Community Service Block on Wednesday afternoons
Step 4: Project-Based Intensives Example: Generation Schools’ secondary schedule gives teams 2 weeks of professional collaborative time staggered throughout the year when students are in intensives with the college and career intensives team.
Example: Urban Academy’s twice per year intensives.
Step 5: Leverage Existing PD Time for Collaboration & Peer Learning Peer Visitation Time Vertically Align Rubrics & “Norm” Expectations Invite Teachers to Share a Promising Practice as the Staff Meeting Final Tip Invite teachers, students, families, non-instructional staff to creatively brainstorm scheduling ideas. Give them the legal parameters, and let them dream. To help you implement one new PD structure within teachers’ schedules, I’m sharing my Peer Visitation Starter Kit with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 158 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 Educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons, and here on the time for Teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Welcome to episode 158 of the time for teacher podcast. Today, we're talking about teacher schedules that leverage team time and enable class visits. So in this episode, I'm really inviting you to dream big. There are some big asks around scheduling that may be unfamiliar to you. New to you feeling a little daring. And I'm excited to share a lot of key studies and tips and strategies that will support you in this endeavor. If you are ready to create that space for teachers within the work day to work in teams, collaborative planning, do some awesome innovative td things like visiting each other's classes during their prep period. 00:01:15 All right, let's get to how. So in this episode, I, as I said, I'm inviting you to Dream Bank to support student achievement, ultimately to improve teacher retention, to improve educator well being all the things teachers right now and really always have been overwhelmed, stressed, exhausted all the things that are hard, the educational system of course is not set up to support teachers mental and emotional wellness, let alone pay them well. I understand that. And since we are focused on systems transformation in this mini series here on the podcast, this month, we are going to think about the systems that we can revise to stop putting the burden on individual educators to really self care their way out of their burnout and figure out how to teach well on their own time. Um When they are not afforded the opportunities within the school day, taking a lot of planning home, taking a lot of grading home, doing all these things. So this is a huge topic to tackle. We're gonna focus on teacher schedules today. So why are we focusing specifically on teacher schedules? Well, again, these are the structures. Um but also that from Hattie's research, we know the thing that has the largest impact on student learning is collective teacher efficacy. 00:02:20 And so when we think about how teachers build that efficacy, it's through professional learning, this is going to include opportunities to collaborate, learn from and with peers, have enough time to really thoughtfully and effectively plan instruction. It's hard to do that in 10 minutes, but right before the lesson. So in many schools, this is just really not possible at this moment, the way their school schedules are set up during the school day. This is expected of teachers outside of the school day, which contributes to 80 hour work weeks and teacher burnout, right? So this excerpt from a article reimagining the school day, which I have found very insightful and I will link in the blog post for this episode. There's gonna be several things I'm gonna share that are gonna be linked in here. So it may be a good blog post to check out after you're done listening or alongside listening, depending on how you're listening. And that's gonna be at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 58. So here's the quote from this article, teachers in the United States reported spending 27 hours of teaching out of 45 hours of work per week compared to teachers in Singapore who teach for only 17 hours per week, that's 10 hours less per week. 00:03:27 And teachers in Finland who teach for a total of 21 hours per week. Schools in these countries prioritize time for planning collaboration, recognizing that developing and executing, executing, excuse me lessons, take time in preparation. Later in the article, they say quote in another analysis of more than 100 and 20 school districts, the most common length of time allotted for planning was 45 minutes per day. End quote. So we're really giving teachers a ton of time in front of students, which theoretically is not a bad thing, but when we only give them 45 minutes per day to plan, whoa, that is not much time at all. What is that for less than four hours a week? Three hours, 45 minutes a week. Yep. That's right. Three hours and 45 minutes to teach 27 hours. And honestly, like that's, that's the average, right? Or on average. This is how much they spend. I can remember a school where I was working far more than that in front of students. So lots of time in front of students and not a lot of time to plan. And where is the collaborative teacher team time? 00:04:32 Right. Grade team department team. Where is the embedded PD where I get to go see someone else's class? It doesn't really exist in a lot of spaces in the current way that our school schedules are set up. Now. This is not to say that folks don't do this. There are so many examples. I'm gonna share a lot of them in the episode today where they do it better and we're going to learn from them. So innovative scheduling models, let's check them out. Let's visit schools that do this. Well, if we can, if you know, of some check them out, go see it in action, interview, their leaders, their teachers um hop on a call with them if you can get on Zoom. That's great. Even email them and ask them a question like how did you come to this? How is it working for you? Where did you reallocate this time? How are you funding this? Does it cost more? Maybe we're making some assumptions that it's not possible when it is. We're just not sure the logistics behind the scenes. So seeing what's possible, great start, you can find a ton of those links to examples either within this blog post or also within the blog post. 00:05:38 I'm gonna, I'm gonna link to uh make time quick guide freebie that you can check out as well. That has even more examples in there. Now, here are some specific ideas to consider that can increase teacher planning time. So let's start with the strategies and then I'll share a case study when relevant step one or idea one is really early dismissal or late start. So there are a lot of folks but it's becoming, I think a lot more popular, particularly in Massachusetts, Framingham, which is where I live in Massachusetts. Their school district has like early release, Thursdays and they just do like every Thursday is early release as far as I know and they do the kind of early dismissal that's, you know, maybe an hour or so earlier and that's just like students go home. Teachers are doing this. Other schools in Massachusetts have seen do like four half day P DS on, for example, Thursdays every couple of months, you have like a half day PD. So they're kind of just reallocating some time so that it is chunked more thoughtfully. 00:06:40 Um and they can do it in that way. Another idea is to reallocate tasks. So, so many teachers miss out on planning time or collaboration time more specifically because they're doing things like recess duty, lunch, duty, other um circular six tasks or whatever you call them in your school or district. I have seen and I have worked in schools where community members are hired as staff members to do these duties. So not requiring the teacher degree to do this, right. We're, we're really just building community. We're hiring a member of the community that might need a job. We are enabling teachers to take their lunch and use the time the kids are at lunch to actually plan as a separate thing from taking their own lunch. Um We are inviting recess to be a time where yes, they can go out and play and you get to plan. So if you have, you know, whoever the teachers you see at recess time are out and about and you're kind of chatting with them on the the outdoor space that you have. 00:07:50 Um think about having that opportunity to chat with them in a structured space that was like a o team meeting, right? Another option for reallocating tests or taking some tasks away from teachers is administrators can teach one class reallocate like an E A intervention period or a math intervention period. Or um I know a lot of administrators who want to kind of stay connected to the classroom. I think if I were ever to, that got to be part of the classroom, I would be interested in a formal leadership role. I just never wanted to be completely divorced from like the actual teaching component, the instructional component. I think there's a lot of leaders who crave that and so try to find that balance, right? And that also might mean taking some things off administrators plate. So there's a, there's a kind of a ladder of shifting here but help teachers out, take a class even if it's, you know, um an sel block or an intervention block or an elective um that you're qualified to teach for another option. You can use intervention enrichment or club time blocks. 00:08:54 I kind of was getting into this a little bit in the last one where we staff those intervention blocks exclusively with paraprofessionals, aides, social workers, counselors, uh instructional coaches, media, specialist, community partners. So like someone like uh a nonprofit organization, I know someone does this with girl scouts, um or the scouts, you could do this with uh a local. I I know in the student voice research. They have done this with um local universities and students come in and they support the high schoolers or middle schoolers, elementary schoolers, whatever grade band you're teaching to learn research skills, to be effective leaders in their school communities. So you could also use this time of course for clubs, project intensives, internships, community service. There's a lot of different things that you could do where folks are, students are taken care of by other folks, right? They are being educated and supported through these other mediums and in community service and internships, right? They're actually out in the community connected with these organizations take some time up front to set all of that up and get those connections in place. 00:10:00 But they're really effective once they're done. So for example, um at a Hamilton Elementary school, this is a sample third grade schedule and and Fridays 10 minutes before dismissal, they have a 40 minute club time block. So they have that time where the students do their club routines and the teachers have that time to do cross team vertical planning. So like a department team. Another example is urban academies community service block every Wednesday afternoon, all of their students leave and the teachers do like a full like, I think it's like a three hour planning block where they have like their staff meeting during that time, they do PD, they do like team planning, but they're just like hyper focused students are out of the building. Um And this is, this is actually what their website vin Hows website says about this time. He said every student must participate in community service on Wednesday afternoons. This participation permits students to learn about careers and college opportunities through real life experiences at their placement. Students learn how to work with adults productively assume responsibility for tasks, both menial and challenging and report back to the school community about their placement and its focus. So there's also kind of this hub for uh a space to kind of come back and reflect within the school as well. 00:11:06 1/4 option project based intensive. I mentioned this briefly in the last one. But here's an example, generation schools in New York City, their secondary school schedule gives teams two weeks of professional collaborative time that it is staggered throughout the year. This is super innovative. I love this idea. So students are actually in intensive with the college and career intensive team. So in this model, in the school, the teachers are organized into grade level teams and then there's also a college and career intensive team that college and career intensive team rotates from grade to grade over the course of the year and they end up spending a month with students exploring college and career pathways. So teachers in that team where the the grade that the college and career type of team is is working with that month, they're not responsible for students that month at all. And so they can use that time for their school breaks. They do a little bit of a longer school year and for their team collaboration time. Now by staggering the teacher break, the really, you know, the instruction is much bigger. You don't necessarily have to do that that way. But think about a college and career intensive team coming in for two weeks where if you don't have students, right? 00:12:10 And you just get to plan out the next, you know, several months of school. Oh, it would be so, so cool. Um Urban Academy also does something similar where twice per year they have schoolwide intensives. I think you could do this with like different classes, like an arts class or a really in depth like lab portion of a science class or like, you know, anyone could do this project where it's like, oh, I'm taking this, think of it as like a super large field trip or something, right? Where we're doing that where we could go out in the community, but we could also do it in a classroom. I think it would be super cool to reallocate time in that way. OK. 1/5 and final idea, leverage existing PD time for collaboration and peer learning. So if you already have time, right, like once you have kind of the space and this is the ultimate goal, you've created the space within the schedule for teachers to be able to learn and collaborate, create the structures that enable them to use it well and in innovative ways that might be different from a team meeting. Although I do love the idea of team meetings, but structure those team meetings. So if you have a team meeting vertically align a rubric that lasts throughout the grade band, um bring student work and quote unquote norm expectations of this grade level acclaim looks like this. 00:13:18 So this grade level, well, it looks like this, right? And really get clear on how we assess students and the expectations of students across grade levels on the same priority standards. That would be a huge help for many school districts that I know if, if we were able to use time purposefully in that way. And that just really takes some thought, some agenda planning a commitment to doing that work and of course, that ongoing time to meet with that team, you can also invite teachers in like a typical staff meeting time to lead PD and it might not need to be like, you know, full slides and everything, but just share a promising practice. Here's something I tried in my class. Here's how it went. Here's some samples of the student work, take some questions, uh run teachers through an example, share whatever resources or worksheets or tech tools, whatever that you use in those lessons or types of lessons. So really just centering like the the job embedded PD stuff, right. That's like you did this this week. Just share it with the larger staff. That's all we need for a PD. It doesn't necessarily need to be, we're hiring someone to come in or we're having the principal create something, right? 00:14:19 It needs to be meaningful. So let's just focus on what's already working and just try to do it more in more spaces around the school. Another amazing thing that I love and I'm gonna give you a kit for this. Um So you can pick up this freebie again at the blog post, Lindsay, Beth lines.com/blog/one 58. This is a pure visitation starter kit for pure visitation time. And what that's gonna do is it's gonna give you some structure to create a schedule to have folks say, hey, I'd love to have people come in and see this thing in action. Here's what I'm working on. Here's the time of my class, the location of my class, you can do this interdistrict. So it doesn't even have to be someone at your school. But if you have like back to back planning periods or something, you can create space for that and then you're, you there's like a sheet in there of like, what do I do when I'm in there? What are the things I'm looking for? What's the question I have that I wanna follow up with the teacher on or something that I'm going to plan to use in my class once I go back to my classroom. So I really think that this is, talk about job embedded PD. Right. Like I have a prep period, I'm gonna go down the hall, I'm gonna see something in action where this teacher is teaching the same students and it's going well for them. 00:15:24 Even though I'm struggling, I'm gonna learn what's out there or I'm planning to do more discussions. I'm not really sure we're getting stuck. This teacher does really good discussions. So I'm just gonna check it out. They work in the same school or they work in the same district. Like, let's just see what's working for them and learn from them. Um It would be so cool and it doesn't cost you anything else because you're not bringing anyone in, right? You're just leveraging the brilliance that's already in the space. So as a final tip, I would invite teachers and I speak from experience here. I was a teacher in a school where I got to do the like quote unquote master schedule for everyone and play with these, right? I was, I had like a committee that was giving me ideas and stuff and then I got to like, run with it and like, share out these ideas and then we voted as a staff on which one we wanted to do. So invite teachers, students, families, non instructional staff, invite as many folks that are interested that are innovative as you can to creatively brainstorm scheduling ideas, give them the legal parameters, of course. So whatever schedules you come up with, you have to make sure there's X amount of, you know, minutes or hours of instructional time in this subject and, you know, school days can't be shorter than this amount of time, whatever all the parameters are. 00:16:32 But then just let them dream, let them dream it up because those big ideas, like you may not get to do all of them. But if you can find one of them where it's like, yep, that meets the parameters. Yep, this is all right. It's gonna take a little reallocation. Let's find someone who's done something similar. Let's interview them like let's ask them how they did it. It is possible and sometimes you just need the dream to get you started on that path to making it happen. So once you do that, I'd love to hear back from you. Come on the show, tell us how you did it. But go ahead, start dreaming if you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane sapper and Jamila Dugan talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period? I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling to yourself as you listen to right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. 00:17:36 Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better podcast network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about my student experience data strategy here:
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
We’re kicking off a mini series of episodes focused on transforming the systems that uphold inequity in our schools. In this episode, we are specifically exploring the structures that enable us to meaningfully partner with students and families on a regular basis. We’re grounding the conversation in a powerful theoretical model which directly addresses the common barriers to success in our student voice endeavors. Why are structures needed? In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker writes of how adaptive leadership professor Ron Heifetz starts his class without speaking for 5 minutes. She points out that when we step back and don’t facilitate at all, we are not democratizing the space, but instead handing control to someone else in the space—perhaps the loudest, confident, or extroverted person. (We can democratize the space with skilled facilitation.) When we step back from our intentional facilitator role, we also are likely to create confusion and anxiety for the participants of our gathering. Many students will respond to an open invitation to share their ideas and experiences with understandable skepticism, confusion, and perhaps anxiety. Consequently, you may get zero student responses after extending the invitation. Certainly, we need to develop trust in relationships with students (and families) before real sharing will happen. However, we also need effective structures for how and when we can listen to folx share their experiences. Student voice scholar, Laura Lundy (2007) developed the Lundy Model of Participation, which includes four features that are required to enable students to authentically share their ideas: SPACE: Children must be given safe, inclusive opportunities to form and express their view VOICE: Children must be facilitated to express their view AUDIENCE: The view must be listened to INFLUENCE: The view must be acted upon, as appropriate How do we provide students with each of these features at a school level? Create Spaces: In addition to creating the relationships necessary to make this happen, we want to design our school schedules to provide students with as many opportunities as possible to share their ideas. From co-constructing curricula to co-creating school policy and all the things in between. Possible ideas to explore include:
Facilitate Voices: Use discussion and listening protocols such as Circle in all levels of school/district life (e.g., classrooms, school committees, after school clubs, advisory, family nights, staff meetings). Co-create community discussion agreements. Use them regularly. Normalize this way of being in community and listening deeply. Gather an Attentive Audience: If anyone (particularly adults) struggle to do this, do some adaptive work. Invite them to share challenges and interrogate deeply held beliefs that may be holding them back from partnering with students. Sometimes, inviting the adults to share their experiences is enough to build trust that listening is a community experience that is not unidirectional. They feel valued and cared for, and this may give them the capacity to do the same for others. (This has certainly been true for me in relationships! Everyone wants to be valued and listened to.) Partner for Influence: Invite students to attend relevant meetings or discussions about their proposals so you can work collaboratively to make the idea happen. Commit to respond to each suggestion or concern by a specific date. If it’s not possible to implement the proposal, clearly explain why to the students and invite students to brainstorm additional ideas to address the underlying issue. Final Tip You don’t need to implement a ton of structures tomorrow. Keep Lundy’s 4 principles in mind as you engage with students and ask them to share their ideas and experiences with you. Commit to building up structures and practices as you continue this work. To help you implement one structure for amplifying authentic student voices in your community, I’m sharing my Setting Up Structures of Shared Leadership worksheet with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 157 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 Educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons, and here on the Time for Teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go, everyone. Welcome to Time for Teacher podcast. This is episode 157 and I'm super excited because today we're kicking off a mini series of episodes that are focused on transforming the systems that uphold inequity in our schools. In this episode, specifically, we're going to explore the structures that enable us to meaningfully partner with students and families and educators, right, a multi stakeholder partnership on a regular basis. 00:01:06 We're grounding the conversation in a powerful theoretical model which directly addresses the common barriers to success specifically in our student voice endeavors. I love it. I'm excited for it. Let's get into it. All right. So how are we doing this thing where we're prioritizing student voice, family voice, we're prioritizing gathering experiential data or street data as Jamila Dugan and Shane Sappier call it, I specifically am focusing on students today, but I do want us to keep in mind, family voice, educator, voice, all the stakeholder voices that are important because I think a lot of this applies. But the model we're specifically using it focused on Children and youth voice. So what are the structures? Right? And before we actually even get into that, let's talk about why the structures are needed in the art of a gathering. Pria Parker's book, she writes of how adaptive leadership, Professor Ron Heet, who have quote a lot of the B and podcast start this class without speaking for five minutes. And her point here is that when we step back from leadership roles and we don't facilitate at all, we're actually not democratizing the space. 00:02:11 We may think that we're giving up leadership and the leadership disappears. Everything is democratic. But instead, what we're doing is we're handing control role without that facilitation, we're handing control to someone else in the space. Perhaps that's the loudest person, the most confident person or the most extroverted person. She gives a bunch of other examples in her book of like parties where the host is not facilitating and you get stuck with a drunk uncle or something that's like someone you're really not thrilled to be talking to for two hours. So there are things that we think like we're stepping back, we're democratizing. Awesome. And there are things that happen in that space of un facilitation or lack of structure, right? What she actually says is we can democratize the space with the skilled facilitation when we take ownership of that facilitator role. And we skillfully facilitate the conversation and the opportunities for voice and sharing, right? When we step back from our intentional facilitator role, we're actually also likely to create confusion and anxiety for in her words, the participants of our gathering, right? With our students, we often create confusion and anxiety. 00:03:16 When we say, OK, we want to hear from you. Go no boundaries. We I've done this so many times with projects, I'm like, let's co create the project. What kind of project do you wanna do? Nothing's off the table? Go tell me what you want. And there's just like crickets and confusion and stress of like not coming up with the right answer all the things right that we learn as students is like we do school this particular way. And now after years of that training, we ask students to open up and share with us and there's a lot necessary to create a foundation where students are actually able to do that well, right. So many students will respond to an open invitation to share their ideas and experiences with us, with understandable skepticism, a lack of trust, perhaps a lack of, are you even going to take me or an idea of, are you even going to take me seriously? They might be confused and anxious as I said, and consequently, you might just get zero student responses after you're like, hey, everyone, tell me what you think, just crickets, right? 00:04:19 And so we need to develop trust, of course, in relationships with students and families and all stakeholders before real authentic sharing, that is honest and vulnerable will actually happen. But then we also need the structures, right? The facilitation for how and when we can listen to folks to have students, for example, share their experiences. So the theoretical framework that this episode is situated in comes from Laura Lundy, who is a student voice scholar, she developed what is known as the Lundy model of participation. So there is uh the convention on the rights of the child which has been upheld by almost every country in the world. The United States has not ratified this which is bonkers. But this idea of youth voice and participation in things that affect them is widely recognized as a way for Children and schools are a wonderful place for us to be able to facilitate this and bring it to life. She recognizes that there are many barriers, two students authentically sharing and participating in the way that we dream up in the way that we think of when we think of authentic meaningful student voice, right? 00:05:32 And so she says this model of participation actually includes four features that are required to overcome these barriers and enable students to authentically share their ideas. And so here they are first, space, Children must be given safe, perceived safety, right? They have to perceive the space as safe. It's not something that we dictate, right? But they perceive the space as safe, inclusive opportunities to form and express their view. So we need many opportunities, right? Plural, it's not one opportunity, plural, many opportunities. They need to have the students experience safety in those spaces and they perceive that they are safe to share psychologically physically that they are inclusive of all voices, particularly students who have historically been marginalized or excluded from these types of conversations. And that it's not just space to express their view, but also a space to form it. When you ask students who haven't been asked before, what do you think? There's often a long lull, a long silence, there's a lot of questions they have to work through. 00:06:39 I know just as an adult, there's a lot of times where someone asks me what I think about something, even if it's what do you want for dinner. And I literally have to stop and think for multiple minutes because I'm I'm not sure I have to have the space to think about it to form my ideas. And if I'm being asked about something or a student is being asked about something that they haven't had real connections with or experiences with or haven't even thought about certain topics, right? We need to allow them to have more experiences with that topic, to grapple with it, right? To form their view and, and express their view. So that's one that's space. The second piece is voice. Children must be facilitated to express their views. Again, we have this facilitation idea. This is an active thing. We enable the the voice through thoughtful participation in the creation of these opportunities for students to express their view. Again, I would say multiple opportunities. She uses a plural here. The third component is very adult centered. I think maybe also youth centered in terms of like youth also need to provide an audience. 00:07:46 But it's it's audience is the third one. And the idea here is that the view the child is sharing must be listened to. So students must be listened to and perceive that they are being listened to authentically meaningfully like we care what you say. We are not on our phones, we are not rolling our eyes, we are not um not taking you seriously because you're a child and we're adults or whatever it is, right? But the view must actually be listened to. So we create the space, the opportunity, we facilitate the voice, the sharing, we have the audience, we're actually listening. And the fourth one is influence, the Children have to have real influence. So here is described as the view must be acted upon as appropriate, right? So if it makes sense to act on it, if there's no real reason, we shouldn't, we should act, we should act, they should have real influence. I love this model. So let's actually use this model to go into the structures that would provide these students with each of these features at a school level. 00:08:52 Because of course, I think you can do this in classrooms. It might even be easier sometimes in classrooms. Um diff different, I should say maybe not easier across the board but different. Um and perhaps easier in the sense of you have a smaller community. So you have more opportunities to build trust in one on one relationships, teacher to student and student to student um in a larger school with a lot more um stakeholders, stakeholder types, right? We have families, we have educators, we have students, we have just a higher number of everybody. It might be harder to build that kind of trusting relationship. But here we're thinking about a school level and of course, let your mind wander to how this applies to the school as well. I'm sorry, the classroom as well. All right. So first, let's dive into spaces. So the first thing we want to do is create spaces. So in addition to creating the relationships, of course, that are necessary to make sharing happen. We want to design our school schedules to provide students with as many opportunities as possible to share their ideas. So from cot constructing curricula, again, that's a classroom example to co creating school policy and everything in between. 00:10:01 Here are some examples of ideas that you can use to create these spaces. And of course, this is not exhaustive, this is just like what's in my brain, you could do regular learning walks to get a pulse of what's happening in the school. And of course, that leads to deciding on your next action steps. Now, the kicker here is that we do these with students, right? So we're scheduling them, we're scheduling them in alignment with when students can do them with us. We are inviting students to share their experiences as we're going into the different classrooms, student voices centered, we could level up our student government. So it frustrates me to no end particularly as a high school and college student who was um in student government myself, that student government is seen as an often limited to in terms of influence planning social events. It is so much more than prom and the class trip. And what kind of like fun things are we doing? Encourage the student government and and of course, I think train and support and help them build the skills for advocating for and co creating policy change in their schools and also in the larger community, right? 00:11:10 Truly level up their leadership and give them those opportunities change the narrative of what student government can be and is in your community. Another idea include students on all school and district committees that includes things like curriculum assessment discipline committees. These are not just limited to some kind of fluffy student experience committee that is, you know, just after school clubs or sports or whatever. Another idea create in class and after school opportunities for participatory action research and civic projects. So again, you'll see some of these do transcend into the classroom as well. But I think if you have this larger system where you as the leader are connecting classroom teachers and after school teachers providers, whatever with folks who can help facilitate this work with students versus a toy action research, they're training students and how to do this. They're creating the space for students to go do this research and kind of report to or present to an authentic audience at the end for meaningful change. Um Local college students, I think are a great source of partnership in this work. 00:12:15 They're often really into it, right? They're, they're learning about participatory action research in their courses and they're excited to help others learn as well. It's great for them and internalizing the material, but it's also great for students to see other youth, although slightly older youth of course, um doing this um right. Uh another option is to make advisory period if you have advisory period or something similar like a concrete space for students to share their experiences, which it often is, but also to from those experiences when appropriate, when you know, acknowledged by students as something that they want action taken on that these experiential share outs are being used to recommend policy and practice changes, right? We're turning them into advocacy. So we're not just, oh this was a really tough part of my day because of this school structure. But like what does that school structure have to exist? And what can we say to have this changed? Another option is to develop family and educator together teams or fet teams that meet regularly in alignment with Ari Giron Kessler's advice, which was actually shared in a few episodes, two episodes back episode 155. 00:13:22 So you can get that at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 55. So these are just some ideas, but these are all kind of structured spaces that have a regular time and place and opportunity. There's a structure there that makes it sustainable. There are multiple opportunities on a regular basis in all of these different types of spaces and structures of spaces for students to share their experience and advocate for themselves, having meaningful influence in those spaces. Now, the next piece, when we think about that with space, her number one principle and then the number two is voice. So we need to facilitate voices. We can use discussion and listening protocols. My favorite, of course, as I always say is Circle protocol and use them in all levels of school and district life. So of course, you can use them in classrooms, but you can also use them in school committees in after school clubs. You can have students running after school clubs, you can train students how to do these circles and and facilitate themselves. Um do it in advisory. I think advisory is a great place for Circle Family nights. 00:14:27 You know, the the fet teams that you're creating potentially with families and educators together staff meetings, right? Model that one learning model for all model, how we do this as a staff, this is how we interact and now go do this with your students, right? This is just how we are in our community, of course, as part of Circle or any sort of discussion protocol core, your community discussion agreements, use them regularly, refer to them regularly, hold everyone accountable to them regularly and really normalize this as this is how we are in community and deeply listening to one another. The third piece is audience. So we need to gather an attentive audience. So if anyone particularly adults struggle to do this, this is where I think the adaptive work is critical. So as a leader, what I'm thinking is OK, I think a lot of folks, a lot of educators and and leaders in our space are gonna be like, yeah, I wanna listen to students. So I'm just gonna be attentive. You just need the reminder that like this is part of student voice and meaningful voice is there is an attentive audience. It's part of this framework. I'm gonna listen, I'm gonna put my phone away. 00:15:29 Cool. If there are some who are like, I am feeling the eye rolling, I am not taking this seriously. That's where the adaptive work has to be done. And as a leader, you want to step up and do it there, right? So we wanna invite those folks to share what are the challenges coming up for you? Let's deeply interrogate those beliefs that may be holding you back from partnering with students sometimes just literally inviting the adults to share their thoughts, experiences, fears, that's enough to build trust that listening is what we do in this community, right? You will be listened, it's not unidirectional. You don't just have to listen to students, right? Students are listening to you all the time. We may not feel like that. Um But the leaders and your peers are also listening like that's what we want to stand for. That's what we want to do here, right? And so in feeling valued and cared for by being listened to this may give those folks the opportunity and the capacity really, right? You're feeling like your cup is filled up. I now have the capacity to do the same for others. I was in a group once that uh uh participant names a beautiful metaphor of having like a rope or a string day, right? 00:16:37 Where a string day is like, I'm hanging out by a thread like you cannot put more on my plate. And a rope day is like, yes, lay it on me. I am here for you. I can deeply listen and empathize and do all the things, right? So we want to equip our teacher and any adults in the space that might be inattentive in the audience of student voice. We want to equip them with the capacity to do these things for students. So let's give it to them first and let's get them to have a bunch of rope days, right? I think this has certainly been true even for myself, I talk a lot about student voice but in in relationships for sure, like everyone wants to be valued and listened to and sometimes if the other person can be the person to value and listen and hear me, then I'm like, oh yeah, I got you like I can do this back, right? I just, I am feeling like my cup is not filled up yet. I need it filled up and then I can do it right. Ideally, we can just be ready all the time. In reality, we're real people. And I, I think this may just be something that helps us um to do this work. OK. Fourth thing influence. So we partner for influence here. 00:17:42 So we in in line with data Mitra student voice pyramid, which I've talked about before on the podcast and in the blog, we wanna make sure that we are partnering, right? And then ultimately, students are leading but through the support and structures of the school, right, we've done the the kind of middle of the pyramid work where we have come together and use adult partnership teams. And I genuinely think like this is where the transformation happens um and enable students to kind of take on their own projects because we've done the work, we've built the community, we have built the sense of partnership. So what does that look like? Invite students to attend relevant meetings or discussions about their proposal? So if they're like, hey, there's this cool idea. I have you invite them in and say, OK, that actually works well with this committee. So come on over, we're gonna talk more about it there. You can work collaboratively with us to make it actually happen. And if they can't or they decide, I don't want to do that, that's fine. Make sure that you are the person or someone is the person who's bringing it to the appropriate committees and you commit to that student to respond to their suggestion. 00:18:49 So each suggestion that you get from each student, right, I'm going to respond to you by a specific date and even if they don't even come up with a proposal, right? They're not saying this should be changed in this way, but they're just voicing a concern like we hear your concern, we're gonna talk about it at this meeting and therefore I can share out the next steps or things that questions that maybe came up for you so that you can kind of help us and and think through it and think about next steps, right? Whatever by this specific date. So just commit to that specific response date. So you can kind of circle back so they know where it's going. And you know, if it's not possible to implement the proposal, sometimes it's just not literally explain why to the students. So you'll remember maybe in Lundy's uh model that she says under influence rate, it's it's not that we always take action, we take action as appropriate. And so sometimes it's not appropriate, it's not possible, but we need to explain the why we need to circle back and say like, hey, we looked at this from these different lenses, like unless we're missing something, it's just not either relevant right now. It's not in alignment with our values. 00:19:50 Perhaps we don't have the financial resources and you can invite students to brainstorm additional ideas. So you're not just saying end of discussion, we're not doing this unless it violates your values in some way. And then we're, we're talking about that, of course, but invite students to brainstorm additional ideas of how we might address the underlying issue, right? Ok. So really surface level example, I, I don't think this is like a big thing. I think this is used usually as like, what is actually what is actually like a really fluffy example to your voice, but I'm using it now just because I can't think of anything else off the top of my head. If students are like, hey, the, we should have pizza every day at the, in the cafeteria, right? Ok. Well, pizza every day might not actually be nutritious and in alignment with our values we want what's best for the health of the whole child. Right. So we can't do pizza every day. However, if you're feeling like there are not a lot of good food options in the cafeteria, like I will walk you through. Um and the committee that, that designs that menu every week, we can walk you through. So some of like the budgetary constrictions or whatever we can brainstorm other options together. Um Perhaps you can find like a different supplier for us. 00:20:53 We can look at what schools have really great lunches and we can kind of do some of the digging in the research to try to think about how do we make lunch better because maybe it's not actually pizza that you want every day. Maybe it's just like you want delicious food. And so far like pizza is all that we've really done well. Right. And so I think bringing students in identifying the underlying cause and partnering with them to figure out, OK, what are the options to move forward? Um And, and showing them the work that goes on behind it, we have to research all this stuff like pitch in and help if you'd like, if that's really a passion for you, like we're welcoming the ideas. Um But we're just kind of stuck here and so maybe you can bring a new lens or bring a new idea, maybe you're connected to students at other schools who know how to do it differently and you can kind of bring that to us. OK. So those are our four kind of components of her framework. As a final tip, you don't need to implement a ton of structures tomorrow. And you know, this feels like this big thing. It's great to have all the things, all the structures. What I really am hoping that you take away from this episode is that Lundy's four principles are in your mind as you engage with students and families really and ask them to share their ideas and experiences with you. 00:22:07 So when you make that ask, keep the barriers in mind, keep the principles in mind and just commit to recognizing them, considering them, committing to building up the structures and practices that are gonna enable those four components and to help you implement at least one structure for ample amplifying authentic student voice in your community. You can grab by setting up structures of shared leadership resource for free at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 57. Until next time. If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane Sapir and Jamila Dugan. Talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book Street Data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period. I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. 00:23:18 Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast Network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there. Explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about my student experience data strategy here:
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
Teaching is demanding, and questions arise throughout the day, every day. Improving teaching practice is best with a thinking partner—which might be you—but you can’t be in every teacher’s class all the time. So, how can you offer instructional coaching when your teachers need it (without overworking yourself)? One strategy is to set up an asynchronous coaching option.
Why? A meta-analysis found that instructional coaching had a greater impact on instruction than many interventions including teacher pre-service training, merit-based pay, general professional development, and extended learning time. They found instructional coaching has a greater impact on student achievement than “the degree to which teachers improve their ability to raise student achievement during the first five to ten years of their careers.” While resources can be a constraint to providing teachers with an instructional coach, the authors suggest virtual coaching as an option, given the “lack of any statistically significant differences in effect sizes between in-person and virtual coaching,” (Kraft, Blazar, & Hogan, 2018). How might I set this up? Step 1: Pick a platform. Slack is the one my co-coach Kara and I like and chose for our EduBoost coaching service, but teachers may be more familiar with a platform your school uses such as Microsoft Teams or Google Chat/Google Classroom. Consider accessibility and modality features such as the ability to type a message or leave a voice note. You may also consider whether the ability for teachers to access the platform via an app on their phone is important or relevant for your community. Step 2: Establish expectations. What can teachers expect from you with regard to response time? (e.g., You will get a response within 24 hours or by the end of the school day.) What types of questions are best for asynchronous coaching? Perhaps feedback on a worksheet they developed or a suggestion for a “text” to use in an upcoming lesson are great for this platform, but you would rather do a live class visit for a teacher working on improving their student-led discussions. Step 3: Build an FAQ space. You might create a simple Google Doc with common questions or categories of questions and your response(s) to those questions. If teachers look at the FAQ first, this will save you time answering the same questions and give the teacher an answer faster. If the teacher asks you a question that’s on the FAQ doc, you save time by copy and pasting your response. Step 4: Decide if you want to offer “leveled up” options. I love creating Loom videos for teachers to give in-depth feedback. Is this something you’d want to offer to teachers? Consider whether it would be fun for you and how much time it would take you (versus hopping on a Zoom call or visiting the teacher in person). Hopping on a quick Zoom call (e.g., 5-10 minutes) may also be an option you want to offer. Perhaps you only offer this during pre-determined “office hours.” Or you may want to stick to the messaging format. Step 5: Do a small pilot. Invite a handful of teachers who are really excited about this idea. Test what works and doesn’t, getting feedback from teacher participants. Also evaluate your capacity and adjust any boundaries or promises for response time that may not be feasible. Final Tip If you have a district-wide coach traveling to multiple schools, in addition to setting up an asynchronous coaching option, you may also consider recommending the coach meet with teachers virtually to reduce travel time and the associated stresses of travel as well as increase professional learning time for teachers. To help you implement effective coaching structures in your community, I’m sharing my Coaching Call Template with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 156 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 Educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons, and here on the time for teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Welcome to episode 156 of the time for teachers podcast. In this episode, we're talking about setting up alternative ways for you to coach the teachers, instructional coaches, whoever it is that you are responsible for as an instructional leader. So specifically, we're going to dive into a strategy around setting up a synchronous coaching so that teachers can have professional learning really on demand. 00:01:04 Given that your resources are so limited. What does that look like for you to be able to provide the support to them without necessarily meeting them in person and giving responses to them live. So let's dive into the episode. So we all know teaching is super demanding, any sort of educational leadership is super demanding and everyone is gonna benefit from a coach. Right? There are so many questions that arise throughout our day, every single day, I can think of 100 questions even as an entrepreneur in this space now that I want to ask people and would love to just be able to send that question quickly to someone and get a response pretty immediately, right. However, we just don't have the resources to be able to necessarily provide that for every single teacher who we're responsible for, right, improving teaching practice and improving instructional leadership practice is really best with a thinking partner, right? We know this to be true, but literally being in each teacher's class all the time is just not possible. 00:02:05 I work with many instructional coaches who work district wide across several schools and the majority of their day is actually spent commuting, finding parking, being able to just get to the place where we can be in the teacher's classroom to provide the support in person vastly reduces the amount of teachers and the degree of support that that coach can then provide. Right, if that's the scenario, even within a building, just walking to that teacher's classroom, setting up a time that works for you both. Right. There's a very resource intensive process that is kind of our default here. So the question is, how do we offer instructional coaching or instructional leadership when your teachers or staff members need it without actually overworking yourself or under providing to those teachers one strategy. And this again is just one, but I'd love to add it to your repertoire is to set up an asynchronous coaching option. So I've definitely had those moments where I've been preparing for a class as a teacher. 00:03:08 I want someone to talk through my idea with me. And I think, you know, what about this resource? I want a resource that accomplishes X, right? Is there another way to approach this? Does this discussion question actually excite and energize people or is it just cool in my head? But it's gonna lead to crickets and the discussion, right? Whatever it is, it might be after school hours, it might be during the day, but all the teachers next door are busy. I don't have an instructional coach assigned to me. I don't wanna bother anyone. Right. There's all sorts of stuff wrapped up in that scenario. So we know there is a need, I think we've all probably been there. Now, the the question first is why do we wanna make sure that we are investing time and energy into developing a solution for this instructional coaching problem? Like, yeah, instructional coaching is great, but like is this really where I wanna spend my time and energy setting up something new to be able to serve teachers in this way or is my time and energy better spent somewhere else. So I wanna quickly share the research with you. 00:04:12 So a meta analysis which is basically a study that studies all the other studies out there on this topic found that instructional coaching had a greater impact on instruction than many interventions including teacher Preser training, merit based pay, general professional development and extended learning time for students. They found instructional coaching has a greater impact on student achievement than quote, the degree to which teachers improve their ability to raise student achievement during the 1st 5 to 10 years of their careers. End quote. Wow. 5 to 10 years of teachers learning and adapting and figuring out how to teach instructional coaching has a greater impact on student achievement than that. That is nuts. To me, this meta analysis also found that while resources can be a constraint to providing teachers with an instructional coach, they have reviewed the research and found that a, a high quality suggestion really is virtual coaching as an option. Given the quote, lack of any statistically significant differences in effect sizes between in person and virtual coaching. 00:05:21 End quote. We'll link to that actual meta analysis study on our blog post. So that's Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 56, if you want to check that out in more detail. But this is pretty astounding to me. So there's no difference between getting on zoom and coaching someone virtually versus being in their classroom or sitting with them in person. There is such intense student achievement gains from having an instructional coach that it is the equivalent of if not more than what a teacher is capable of doing and improving for students over the 1st 5 to 10 years of their career in education. Wow. Like there is such a valuable need and I think rationale for investing the time and resources into figuring out how to get every teacher an instructional coach or access to some kind of instructional coaching opportunity. And so because we don't have probably all of the monetary reasons and certainly not all of the time resources that you yourself can provide or if you have instructional coaches on your staff, they provide all of the teachers. 00:06:28 Let's think of how to optimize this. How could we set up an asynchronous coaching platform for on demand professional learning? So certainly one of the things that you might want to do before we even, I, I wanna say this quickly before we even get to this next piece is you could in that scenario, I shared earlier where you have an instructional coach working in multiple schools throughout the district. They're spending a lot of time literally commuting, just try to have them hop on zoom instead. So you still have the kind of face to face quality. You still have the back and forth, you can still have a screen share up. There's a lot of similarities than sitting next to a person. Right. But you're optimizing that coaches time to be able to serve more folks or just to be like more resourced themselves. So they're not overworked and then burning out and then quitting the profession. So that I think is kind of like step one. That's a really easy, easier maybe in transition than setting up something completely new. You're just kind of changing where it happens. But the other thing I would recommend after that, you still may have an unmet need. 00:07:35 You still may have a ton of teachers that don't have that service or their schedules conflict with when you or the instructional leader who is responsible for coaching them can actually meet with them, for example. So let's talk about how to set up the asynchronous coaching option. First thing I want you to do is pick a platform. Now slack is the one that my co coach, Kara and I like and we chose that for our edgy boost coaching service. But teachers may be more familiar with a platform that your specific school or district uses a lot of schools, use something like Microsoft teams or the Google suite of apps. So it might be that you have a kind of Google classroom classroom almost, right that all of the coaching exists in or you kind of house shared resources on it. And I'll get to that in just a minute and the direct message feature within Google classroom is how you're gonna communicate. Like the one on one questions or it could be that like, ok, everyone has a Gmail account. We're gonna use Google Chat or G Chat, whatever you call it. And that kind of immediate messaging the fact that it's gonna ping me on my computer. 00:08:39 Like that's what we want because we're all on laptops anyways, I'm not positive about the Google Chat feature on a phone. But I think it's the same because one of the things I would say too is to consider accessibility and modality features. Like, do you want teachers to be able to access the platform via an app on their phone or just have their laptop open? So I think different school and district communities have different rules around this. Like if you have a rule where no teacher can have their phone out during the school day, you probably don't need or maybe even want something that has a specific app on the phone. You just want it to be laptop based or maybe you're like, well, they can't have it in the school day, but most of my teachers want the support or do their planning after school. And if they're in the grocery line, they're not going to have their laptop out and they have five minutes to write me a quick question. Absolutely. Fine. So consider that it may be something where you want an app to be available it may not matter, you may just want a laptop based thing. 00:09:42 Whatever you think the other piece of accessibility and modality features I would consider is the ability to share a message in multiple ways. For example, type a message or leave a voice note, be able to link to a Google doc or other documentation that you want the the person to review, right? So like here's the thing I want to share with my coach and get feedback. I need to be able to link that embedded in the message. So just make sure we have some different features in whatever form of communication or platform that you're using. That teachers are not going to find it, unable to do the things they wanna do. I know personally if I have an idea. Well, I am like running, for example, I might want to just share it in a voice note like I'm gonna take a quick stop or I'll just keep running and share it depending on my relationship with my coach and whoever's receiving the message, I can just voice note it. I am not going to pause when I run type out this whole like correctly punctuated message and then restart. 00:10:43 Like that's just not how I would want to leave a message. Other people are like, I would never want to leave a voice. No ever. I need the ability to. So just kind of consider your audience and consider all the ways that you would want to provide options to share questions. Then I think the next step is to establish expectations. So what can teachers expect from you with regard to your response time to them or to the instructional coaches, response time to them? For example, you might say, you know what, you're gonna get a response within 24 hours or by the end of the school day or within kind of like one full school day cycle, right? So if you email me at or message me on whatever platform at three pm and our school gets out at four, I might not respond to you by four, but I'll respond to you by three pm the next day, the next school day perhaps, right? So if you say the next day and then it's like they send you that message at three pm on a Friday, are you going to respond by three pm on Saturday or are you responding by three pm next Monday? Because that's when school opens again. So kind of consider the expectations you want to set staff wide or if you are thinking about from the perspective of how your availability, how often you want to be available in your own. 00:12:00 Well, being, that's what I would kind of think about. So you want to balance the teachers need to get a quick response with your ability to kind of juggle all of this. You want to consider, you know, how many questions? Are they going to be asking? What types of questions are there certain questions that are really best for this kind of asynchronous coaching platform? Perhaps something like feedback on a worksheet that developed, you can have them send that to you and you can record a loom video and link that back or a voice note or maybe they're looking for a suggested text that they want to use in an upcoming lesson And they're like, OK, I wanna teach on this topic. Is there any sort of resource or quote text? Right? Could be like a song. I use text very liberally. But like, what would you suggest? I use as something that we can unpack as the class in this lesson on this topic. That might be great for this type of platform. But perhaps if a teacher is working on improving their student led discussions, and this is really kind of a question about like, what should I do differently that might require a live class visit? So kind of think about the types of questions that are best for the platform and also kind of the number and depth of response that are gonna be required. 00:13:07 And you're kind of guessing when you first of course, start this off. But think about the capacity that you have for answering all of those questions. If you have 10 teachers who are going to ask you 10 questions every day and they're all requiring a lengthy response or a loom video where they're screen sharing and you're kind of giving feedback on a worksheet that they shared with you. Like that's pretty intense. It's going to take a lot of time versus hey, off the top of your head. What do you think of this question for my discussion tomorrow? Is it engaging? Boom, you could give your two cents on that probably within a minute. So just kind of think about those expectations you want to establish next. I would build a frequently asked questions space. So again, we're thinking about your capacity to be able to field all these questions. And I think it's a pretty good guess that you're gonna have some common questions or questions that fall into particular categories where if you just created something like a simple Google Doc with all of those questions and your typical responses to those questions, they can go there first. 00:14:16 If you want to kind of recommend that practice, that'll save you time answering the question at all and get the teacher an answer even faster. Or if the teacher kind of skips over that you don't want to make it part of your practice. If the teacher asks you that question anyways and you know, it's on the fa Q doc, you can just save yourself some time by copying and pasting your response from that FA Q doc. So either way it's gonna save you a bit of time and it may even get the teacher their question answered faster. I think the next thing you'd want to do and I kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier, but there's a lot that you could possibly do within the asynchronous coaching kind of landscape. And so I think of this kind of as a leveled up series of options that you wait, you might say, hey, this actually is great. I wanna offer this or you might say if I turn down this road and I offer these things, I'm gonna get so overwhelmed with requests for these specific styles of kind of leveled up coaching options that I am not gonna be able to sustain this anymore and it's just not even worth it to start. So two ideas that I'm thinking right now, one loom videos, I absolutely love creating loom videos for teachers. 00:15:26 When I want to give in depth feedback. There's the screen share. I can share my face if I want to or not. I can have that voice over. I can highlight or change things in the moment. It might be something that you wanna offer your teachers. It might not, but consider a couple things. Will it be fun for you? Are you going to actually enjoy this platform? And how much time is it actually gonna take you? Right. Versus just waiting until the next meeting that you have scheduled with the teacher. If you're still doing those kinds of meetings or hopping on a zoom call, visiting the teacher in person and kind of making a separate meeting out of this. It may save you a ton of time. I think it usually will. But if you're not a tech person or you just absolutely hate this platform or you're like, you know what, I'm gonna limit it. I'm gonna say I'm gonna take one kind of question that requires a loom video response per month, per week, whatever it is like, go ahead and, and put that into your expectations document or the communication that you're gonna have with that teacher about. What kinds of questions can you send me? And what kinds of responses can you expect from me? The other option? I was thinking of was kind of a leveled up thing is hopping on a quick zoom call once in a while. 00:16:35 There is a question that's just like, you know, it's gonna take maybe five minutes, 10 minutes tops to answer. It's pretty short. It doesn't require a full visit or meeting with the teacher, but it's not gonna be as efficient to kind of go back and forth in the asynchronous venue. We need to just kind of have a quick back and forth live. So maybe that you wanna offer that like, OK, and again, in your expectations, five minute zoom call on demand when you need it, ping me and message me whatever. Tell me you want this five minute zoom call option and maybe you only have, you know, 11 per month or two per semester or whatever that you kind of put again in your expectations. But then you, you know, also let them know any other expectations affiliated with that. For example, you might only offer it during predetermined quote, office hours, right. If you have your typical office hours where you could kind of drop in and get support here, great. Otherwise I might be in a class, right? You can't always expect the instructional leader to be available for a five minute zoom call. 00:17:40 So it also may be an expectation that's like you can ask for this. I'm gonna tell you yes or no because then whether I can but like that could also be a natural evolution from OK, we're going back and forth. You asked me a question, I sent you an answer. There's some confusion, you know what I can make the call in that moment as the instructional leader that I'm going to say, hey, if you're free now, let's just hop on this call. And again, I think you also wanna consider platform wise from step number one. Do you have a platform that enables you to get on a call quickly? So if you have the Google speed of apps, you can use something like Google meets. Do you have Zoom integration? If you're using something like Slack, you have an ability to huddle, right? And do the the kind of slack based video chat that may also be a consideration that you have or you might say, you know what I never want to do that. The whole point of this is asynchronous. If they want a full meeting with me live, they can book that on my calendar, like using a calendar link or some other sort of system that I have, right? Or a typical coaching call. Totally fine. And then the last thing I would say, we've talked a lot about like you kind of got a guess at the beginning of this launch and you might not know yet and you might learn as you go. 00:18:52 So I recommend doing a small pilot and just naming is that looking for a handful of teachers who are really excited about this idea. I'd love for you to help me test what works, what doesn't I want you to give me some feedback and then that will also help you evaluate your capacity and then you can adjust those expectations or boundaries, promises, whatever you give them for what kinds of responses and the time that it will take you to respond if your initial guess was not as feasible. So I do think there is an opportunity for again those early adopters, those really excited teachers who are like, yeah, I've been waiting for something like this my whole life. I'm ready, right? Do something like that with them. OK. So that is all we have for today, set up your asynchronous coaching platforms. Let me know how it goes. I am so excited for you to just free up some more of your time and serve more teachers now to help you implement effective coaching structures in your community. I am sharing a related resource which is my free coaching call template. 00:19:55 You can grab this at today's blog post for the episode at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 56. See you next time if you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane, Sair and Jamila Dugan talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book Street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period? I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time, leaders think. Big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the teach better podcast network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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3/18/2024 155. The #1 Structure for Sustainable Family Partnerships with Ari Gerzon-KesslerRead Now
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode, Ari shares tons of insights on building Family-Educator Together (FET) teams. These teams aim to deepen the connections between schools and families, creating a dynamic and inclusive space where voices from historically marginalized backgrounds can share insights and drive transformative change. Ari shares practical ideas, specific examples from actual FET teams, and gives us a link to several of the ready-to-use resources in his book.
Ari Gerzon-Kessler leads the Family Partnerships department for the Boulder Valley School District (Colorado) and is an educational consultant working with schools and districts committed to forging stronger school-family partnerships. He has been an educator since 2000, having served as a principal and bilingual teacher. Ari is the author of the new book, On The Same Team: Bringing Educators and Underrepresented Families Together. The Big Dream To embrace an innovative spirit that honors the whole child, incorporates families more into the educational process, and reduces the overwhelm for educators. He envisions more connected school communities that are inclusive, equitable, and where trust is a key lever for change. Ari references Dr. Bettina Love’s words, "We have to actually trust the people we say we want to empower to make structural changes, not just tinker at the edges of injustice." Mindset Shift Required Move from a one-sided family involvement approach to one that truly values parent voices as experts on their children and partners in change. As Ari notes, "We shift the traditional paradigm of family engagement to a more collaborative and empowering model," where trust and psychological safety are paramount. Action Steps While many of the practices in Ari’s book are useful in many family partnership scenarios, he specifically shares ideas for creating and leveraging an FET team. Once you understand what FET teams are and the goals behind them (i.e., strengthen relationships, build trust, and co-create meaningful change) and you as the leader are ready to invest in one… Step 1: Build Your Team There are 5 educators (including the principal) and 5 family members. More are welcome, but the ratio should be even. Educators should not outnumber family members. Step 2: Prepare Ari suggests taking an hour to plan for each 90-minute FET meeting. Logistics to tackle include funding, organizing the meal, securing interpretation (typically meetings are held in the most common home language of families), determining dates/times/location of meetings, and securing child care. Step 3: Facilitate Your Meeting(s) Following a meal and team-building activity, invite families to share their experiences and ideas. There are many specific prompts in the book. It could be: What do you want us to know? After initial trust building, the team will decide on an action project and work towards that goal. Challenges? A significant challenge is the initial trust-building with families who have never experienced such a collaborative space in schools. Creating a comfortable atmosphere where families feel safe to share honest feedback is crucial. Additionally, educators must navigate how to bring family-driven changes back to the staff in a way that encourages co-creation and buy-in from all parties involved. One Step to Get Started For educators looking to make immediate improvements in family engagement, Ari suggests starting with simple yet impactful actions like making positive phone calls to parents to share good news about their children or asking families: How do you prefer we communicate with you? These examples are both energizing and practical, laying the groundwork for deeper connections and future collaborative efforts. Stay Connected You can connect or follow Ari easily on LinkedIn at or reach him at [email protected]. To help you implement FET teams in your school(s), Ari is sharing several reproducibles from his book with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 155 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:
Today on the podcast, we're talking about what I would call like the handbook for Family Partnership. We are talking with Ari Giron Kessler who leads the family Partnerships department for the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado and is an educational consultant working with schools and districts committed to forging stronger school family partnerships. He has been an educator since 2000. Having served as a principal and bilingual teacher. Ari is the author of the new book on the same team, bringing educators and underrepresented families together. This is amazing. Let's get to it. Educational justice coach Lindsay Lyons and here on the time for teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal, assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about co-creator curriculum of students. 00:01:08 I made this show for you. Here we go. Ari, thank you for coming on to the time for a teacher podcast. Welcome. Thanks. It's great to be here, Lindsay. Thanks for having me. I am thrilled to talk about your book today. Like I cannot wait. So I will just say you have a new book and I'm sure there are other things you want to share about what listeners should know as we enter the conversation today. Sometimes people like sharing about themselves. Sometimes it's like this is the thing I've been working on and thinking about lately, feel free to share any, any sort of launching point you would like for today's conversation. Great. Yeah, I'm just eager to talk about how schools and districts can deepen their partnerships with families, um and really create a true space to listen to families and have that kind of be a spark for innovation and deeper relationships. Um So that's on my mind. Um I, you know, I, my first job was at a bookstore. That's the point in my mind when I was 11. So I've always had this deep love of books and, and, um you know, I started teaching a little more than 20 years ago and wrote some articles, but this dream of a book has been, you know, full of ups and downs. 00:02:18 And I just am so thrilled to be at this point where I can share um an offering that I think can be truly meaningful both for teachers at an individual level, but also for a school community because I know there's many books I've loved in education and they inform my thinking, but I don't often get to then go and create something. And so I'm excited about the, the on the same team book because it really gives people a chance to create a new structure for transformative change. Um So, yeah, it's just, it's great to be able to, to share more about it. I'm so excited to dig in and I, and I think my first question is, is kind of big not necessarily directly tied to the book, but I think you, you may have even just answered it a little bit. I like to talk about freedom dreaming and Doctor Patino love talks about it as the dreams grounded in the critique of injustice, which I just love that quote. And so with that, what is your big dream for education in general? Yeah, I love the question. I mean, I my hope is that we can embrace them innovative spirit that really honors the whole child incorporates families more um and reduces the overwhelm for educators while finding ways to regularly kind of renew the fire and passion we have um for the work and that we can create more connected school communities that are both more inclusive and equitable and also where trust um is this key lever for change? 00:03:46 And I know you're, you're a big fan of Bettina, lot of the quote that I often share from her that really speaks to the heart of these families and educator together teams is she says for equity work to work, it must be handed to the community. We have to actually trust the people, we say we want to power to make structural changes, not just tinker at the edges of injustice. Um And that those words and, and, and just some of the kind of experts in the field of family partnerships really inspired me to think about how do we create an ongoing vehicle uh for, for change? Yeah. Some of the people, the research that you ground the work in are just like, yeah, just phenomenal leaders and in the field and it, it is just so the way you set it up like the intro chapter itself, I'm like, did I highlight and underline every word? Like it is just so good and like dense with all of that, like meaty stuff, like quotes like that research like that. That's like, yes, this is the work and it does such a great job of I think making an argument for the, the do you call it fet or fet teams. 00:04:56 OK. So the teams, I think that is just so beautiful that you're like eager to get into chapter one and like just give me the how right? Because you've set it up so beautifully. I especially when you're talking, I was thinking about how you named like this is valuable for many stakeholders. It's not just for families, it's not just for students, it's also valuable for educators. And I love the three column table that you have in there where it's like here's all the benefits for each of these stakeholder groups. It is not just one that benefits. So I love that. Thanks. Yeah, I feel like it's really important. I know time is this major barrier as well as some other ones. I mean, I know um teachers feel passionate often about connecting with families. But what was interesting when I dived into the research, Lindsay to discover that the area that teachers feel least confident is actually engaging with families. And that was really revealing. And so so um to me, one of the powers of this work is especially in that it's bringing together underrepresented, often, often immigrant families with mostly white teachers, school leaders, this space for learning across cultural and linguistic differences. 00:06:02 Um And this space where we shift the traditional paradigm of, you know, typically family engagement is one way and we say, oh, they came to conferences or they didn't or they came to back to school night. And, and I have a lot of regrets for my principal years because even PT A meetings and other things like that, I mostly gave updates and talked a lot and then said, do you have any questions at the end? Whereas what, you know, I've learned through the Fed teams over hundreds if not thousands of meetings is that when we truly center parent voices and treat them as the experts on their Children, as well as experts on. How can we as educators get better at collaborating with them? Um Some pretty powerful shifts happen. And as you were saying, um in some ways, the fed teams are just as meaningful for the educators uh because of what comes out of the relationships they build and just all the insights they get um from listening to family, share their perspectives, ideas. Um So it's, it's really been this unique structure that in the fifth year of doing it finally refined it enough to realize, OK, these are the ingredients, a great gathering. 00:07:05 Here's how we create psychological safety and trust across um all these differences we're bringing together in one room this one night a month. So yeah, it's been a really dynamic experience that I felt almost obligated to capture in writing so that it could be a benefit in other school communities. Yes. Oh my gosh. And there's like 400 directions I want to take it because there's so much good stuff here. I mean, just when you're talking about the research, my my mind went to some of the things I wrote down of just things that I literally wrote like, wow, in the margins because I just didn't know that like, for example, 73% of teachers believed families were not interested in supporting their students education or their child's education. It was just like, wow, that's a very uncomfortably high number. Um And that families actually have higher trust in teachers and educators than educators have in families. It was just like, whoa, like just really shifting that narrative. A lot of times where we and I think you use that word blame at at sometimes is that we have this narrative sometimes of like the blame, the Externalizing like, oh if only the families, you know, cared more, right? 00:08:08 And there's so much underneath that, that we dance around or we yeah, externalize the responsibility for we don't directly confront. And then it's like this is what you're talking about with the Fed teams is like this is how we confront it. Like we literally confront it. But we also do a lot of the foundation work to create the space where we can confront it versus just like naming things without doing all of that groundwork. So I just think there's so much right? And like in what you bring to the table of like here's what's happening and now and now here, here's where we go next. Yeah. Well, and I know some of your other podcasts, you talk about a culture of partnership and I think that's at the heart of this work is shifting from the old family involvement approach. Pretty one sided. The other day, I was reading another book in the field and it talked about you know, we're the host as educators and they're the guests. Uh And there's kind of this critique then of how are they, how are they showing up? And I'll say, I mean, I wanna acknowledge as educators were utterly overwhelmed by such an array of responsibilities um that I believe we should have like two of us in every classroom to make it sustainable. 00:09:17 And, and that said, like it does feel like it is about a mindset shift that when we actually, you know, move from guessing what families want to listen to them and then moving to act like co created action. It's really incredibly rewarding. And I remember one of the other pieces of research was when educators build stronger connections with families, they stay in the profession longer. Um But a lot of those pieces often aren't scared. So families, I know when I was a teacher principal at times, it was like, oh, it'd be nice to do that. Um But I don't have time for it. Whereas actually now knowing what I know my perspective is more like if you carve out efficiently but meaningfully some time to engage in some of these best practices that we learn from families. Um It's, it makes it, you know, a huge difference. And I think about you were talking about how we, we can be quick to judge. I think about one minor shift which for every teacher in August I would recommend is ask families how would you like to be communicated with? 00:10:20 Because one theme we're hearing consistently in set team gatherings is we're overwhelmed by emails, we're not reading them, they're not coming in the language we prefer, please text us. And, and that's been a pretty simple change at a handful of schools that's just been incredibly powerful um as well as just this shift in, let's forge a two way relationship. I mean, I'm thinking about this example of a, a, you know, a teacher who told me a couple of years ago, they were upset when they reached out to a family that they easily could have judged as not caring because they didn't return her call. And when she reached out twice because the, the, the young student was absent. Well, she came to find, after doing a little judgment, the family had traveled across from Colorado to Texas to go to a family member's funeral. And that was the reason she didn't get a call back. So just this piece of like, can we, can we come from a place of uh of trust and curiosity and, and a kind of a spirit of inquiry um and, and make the investment at that time because it just pays off. 00:11:24 Yeah. What a great example. I, I love all the examples in your book too and I love that they are often like, here's what we learned when this happened. Like we learned a huge takeaway from this and then you have like really great lists of like, pure is kind of like all the things we learned in a bullet point list duties. This will be great. Um And I, and I think one of the, one of the things that I wanna do first because there's so much in here and I'm just thinking about the person listening, who's like, talk more about these f teams, like first before we get there. I'd love to just have you give an overview. I know you talk in the book about like who's on the team? What are the goals of the team and that those are really important. Do you mind just like starting there for us? But like, what is this? What does it look like? Absolutely. Yeah. So that teams gather once a month um beginning with dinner. It's usually the aim is at least 500 represented family members and five educators including the school leader at some of our schools. It's more like 30 parents and nine staff members in the principal. Um In some of those gatherings, many of them are held in Spanish, which is of course, incredibly with 20% of our students um in, in our school district being Latino, it's been really valuable for families to have a meeting held in their language just that in itself has shifted a lot. 00:12:39 Um Some other teams and schools hold gatherings in English and we have like three or four or five different interpreters in the room. Um So we're still really letting everyone engage in the language they feel comfortable in. And over the years, we've really refined the structure for the ideal meeting. Um A lot of it's informed by what I learned around social, emotional learning in, in, in the classroom and as a principal. Um and there's time for families to engage in learning because I think one of the big things we've discovered is there's so many gaps we've unintentionally created as schools, especially for families more on the margins, not just the achievement and opportunity gaps, but communication gap, trust gap, access gap. I mean, there's seven or eight of them that, that we kind of explore on the teams. And so we create time for breaking bread together. Um some learning about what's happening at school um making it easier for families to navigate our school system so they can access more opportunities. But then the heart of the Fed meeting is listening to their perspectives and ideas and experiences. 00:13:43 So usually half an hour of the 90 minutes is in small groups or back in whole group really uh posing a couple questions that will give us tremendous insight on how do we create a more collaborative equitable school. Um And so it's really, really structured in a way that um we're fostering relationship building throughout the hour and a half together. Um So that's kind of the essence of it. It's usually led by a few teacher leaders, parent leaders, um who, you know, put a lot of planning. I think just like great teaching. We've learned that about an hour of mapping out an agenda and getting all the logistics ready has really led to success across many school communities um regardless of who's leading it. Just that, that, that fosters a gathering that's truly grounded in, in purpose and, and uh meaning for everybody. Hi everyone. It's Lindsay just popping in here quickly to tell you about today's episode. Freebie. This is from Ari. So we talk a ton about how his book has a ton of reproducible and lists of things, appendices, all the things that you can just grab and use immediately. 00:14:50 He is sharing several of those free reproducible from his book and you can grab those at the blog post for this episode at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 55. Back to the episode. Yeah. It, it's fascinating to look at the 90 minute breakdown too of like how you structure the agenda and how intentional all the pieces are. I mean, even to the point of I looked at one of your sample agendas where it was literally like who's taking on the meals, who's taking on this, the note taking task, who's like it was. So it was so thought out like clearly from the result of like doing this so many times and figuring out what works with, doesn't it? I mean, one of the things and you started with like, there are meals that, which is beautiful. You also have child care for people to be able to, like, bring their kids if that's a barrier. Now it is no longer. And I'm just thinking now as a parent of a toddler, like how lovely it would be to like, just be like, ok, park the kid, get the dinner. All right. Like we're gonna talk now I'm here and it's funny, I'm also a parent of a, a toddler and um and I joked with a couple of f leaders just last week before our break. 00:15:56 I I said, oh, you know, fat could almost, we could almost like portray it as Date Night for, for some families because they're, they're getting a free delicious dinner. Child care is there and they're getting to be together. And also, of course, build community which I think in the wake of the pandemic and the isolation and loneliness. So many of us in this country feel that's yet another benefit of uh of creative space. But yeah, it uh we joked about it actually being date night on top of many other uh other benefits and outcomes. Well, I think that's a really interesting mindset chef, right? Like we often talk about like how to reduce barriers, but like it's also not even just reducing the barrier. It is like a draw, right? Like here is the free food, here is the setup where like not only do you get to go in and talk about, you know, your experiences and like your kids education and everything, but like, you're truly, you're finding friends, you're finding community, you are fed. You don't have to worry about your toddler for 90 minutes. Like that just sounds beautiful. 00:16:59 So cool that you create like this. And you're reminding me of like two, I think powerful examples. One is on the family front that one of the six main purpose of F is to build a network between families to kind of harness their collective agency and build connections. And I was at an elementary school a few weeks back and a mom had just arrived three weeks earlier from crossing the border with a couple of her youngest kids to reunite with her husband. And everything about the school was overwhelming her first time in a US school. And we were in a small group and a, a mom who'd been at that school for four years. Also a Spanish speaking parent um said, basically, hey, call me if you have any questions, well, that reduces the load on the educators and builds this, this wonderful, you know, sense of comadres networking uh and support. Um And then on the, on the, you know, parent educator front, I'm remembering and I think I, I share this father's story in the book where he says, you know, and it hit me hard. 00:18:02 He said as a Latino parent knowing the principal didn't speak Spanish, I often felt like I kind of needed to hide or be invisible when I came in. And now after, you know, a year and a half of seeing the principal every single time we gather once a month in the set meetings, having her listen to us, hearing her try to, you know, speak Spanish as best she can. Um She says, now she says, now I feel comfortable to just go up and have a conversation with her and that opens the door for all kinds of mutual learning support connections. Um So just creating that space and that's where I feel so passionate about the fe teams because many events in our schools today are once or twice a year. And there's rarely this ongoing structure that's focused on the more humanizing part of education, not, not on fundraising, not on other pieces, but really on fostering relationships and mutual learning. Oh, there's so many pieces I wanna, I don't wanna touch on here. So one I know you mentioned this, that Spanish is the language that typically that in your experience, that has been the, the language of the gathering. 00:19:09 And then there is English interpretation. And I love how you, you even get really granular to be like, and we've learned, you know, like to wear headsets so that it's synchronous so that we're, you know, being efficient in time and also being able to like watch and get accuracy for the interpreters to be able to like, just do this. This is how we do it just so many things where a leader might be like, hesitant to do something. And it's like, well, it's valuable and we've worked out like all of the potential challenges and here is like, what we've learned that's just kind of handed to you. I, I just think that's super cool all the way down to like where the budget comes from. So like, you know, it could be at the school level but your district has taken on all interpretation. So like that's there. And then like, from like, you know, here's, here's how much we factor in for like the cost of meals. And like, I think you said $2000 for the whole year has been what you found to be doable logistically. I mean, just some of the things that I think listening to this, you know, a leader might say great. These all are, these are all great like stories and like research based, like we should do it, but it feels so daunting, but you really break down in the book, like all sorts of tips, like ideas literally down to the dollar amounts of like what things cost. 00:20:16 You have a whole appendix of like, here you want to do team building, here's like 30 team building activities and like all sorts of things from like a planning checklist for people who are who are doing this work. So I just want to say like really cool stuff in the book. If, if this sounds overwhelming to any leader, just get the book and you'll be totally fine. And I also, I appreciate you bringing up leadership because I do think often as a former principal, I know there's this feeling or expectation of the principal has to hold a lot of that partnering with families role. Um And I think what principles at the, you know, 24 schools that currently have fet teams have said is not only do I now connect with all of my communities more fully, but I'm distributing the leadership and, and really, as many principals say, I love just getting to show up. And my only real job is just to sit back and listen. Um And yet they also are pivotal in helping us once the the team leaders learn in the meetings from families and from their colleagues, what changes are truly needed. 00:21:21 The principal jump in, you know, for 15 minutes a year, often of a quick check in. Oh, let's let's bring this back and launch this with the staff. Um So it really is, as you're saying, um an easy load on the principal yet it drives not only a lot of great learning for them and, and their colleagues um but they're distributing leadership and cultivating parent leadership that can make such a huge difference in that school community. Yes, yes to the cultivating parent leadership. Also, I love that point. And like, I think you, you may have said this, but I just wanna emphasize for listeners that the the principal, you, you paint a really clear picture that the principal needs to be present at each of the meetings. You, I think you shared a case study where like that wasn't the case and the team just kind of fell apart, right? Yeah, I'm, I'm grateful you mentioned that. And also I'm just thinking back what you said about like how granular and specific I've been in the book. I mean, part of what I should say is that we held hundreds of fe meetings over the first four years at more than 10 schools. And I learned not only from the successes but the the meetings that fell short or the couple teams early on that struggled. 00:22:26 And so it was really in year five, realizing a host of ingredients that were key for an effective team, which I really laid out in the book. Um And one of those pieces really was the school leaders consistent presence because that shows to the teachers who, you know, they're coming at night after a full day, usually in the classroom at school. So it shows, ok, my principal truly cares about this effort enough to be there themselves. Um Not to mention when we want to enact change if they haven't sat there in that space and been moved by the stories and insights of families, they're less likely to feel invested in helping us core that change. So, yeah, that was one of the, the biggest and most profound learnings in the first few years because a couple teams really didn't flourish because the school leader um wasn't deeply invested in it. And to your point about change, I think that's, that's one of the big learnings for me in terms of a fat team versus PT A or something like this. 00:23:28 Like, actually, I saw so many parallels to the arguments that I make around student leadership. Like often I'll be like, oh student council, it's just like planning prom and planning the senior class trip. It's so frustrating, like you're just doing these events, but you're not brought into academic conversations about like, how should be great, what should our policy of A P enrollment be like real things that matter? And that's kind of what it to me sounded like between like PT A is often very like event planning and this is truly you're building relationships and it's culminating in or, or kind of like paired with like action planning, like we are creating change and that's the goal, right? Yeah. Well, and I could share a couple of brief examples because 11 of the things that was really important path of these seven years with fet teams was in year four or five, I realized, wow, we're really building this dynamic community families are loving the space educators are appreciating it, but we're not consistently at every school creating systemic change. We're not able to say in May. 00:24:29 Wow, the staff is doing this differently as a result of fe so these last three years, I've been really intentional and persistent. And luckily, I've built solid relationships with our fe leaders where I actually now in January or February are prompting them with. OK, what questions are you gonna ask at this next meeting so that you can devise concrete action plans for January to March so that the changes are in place. And you know that at one school, for instance, parents told us, hey, conferences aren't very meaningful for us with the teacher. Um And by listening, then it was two really subtle easy changes. One was we added 10 more minutes. So it was half an hour because all the families were using an interpreter and it wasn't equitable for them to have essentially half the time other families had. And then I did a 20 minute PD for staff on how do we create a more relationship centered and culturally uh sustaining approach to um to conferences? And those two pieces alone led families to come back in March and share having a radically different experience. 00:25:33 They also said there's a huge language gap and we literally put in place this wonderful app talking points and that prompted thousands of texts to go back and forth the following year, um, in, in place of that void of communication, relationship building previously. So sometimes it's, it's pretty easy changes because we know teachers can't take on too many more big things. We've got to make them, you know, easy meaningful. But, um, but efficient efforts. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, there's, there's so much that I could, like, talk to you for days about this book. Uh, but one of the things I'm wondering is if a leader is listening and they're like, again, yes, I'm interested and, and I will get the book, but I have like these fears of like it not working or, or something like what's a challenge that you could speak to? That's like, you know what? Yeah, we've seen this as a common challenge to the work and here's like how we've helped people address it. Yeah. Yeah. Great question. And you mentioned the team builders in the appendix and that, that's one of the resources I'm most proud of because I've for a couple decades, been a trainer in SCL and, and those are some of my favorite team builders for students and also for adults. 00:26:43 And, and it's reminding me of one of the challenges. So one of our high schools launching a team and this was before we learned a powerful lesson which I, I should have known already from some of my training that we didn't gather in circles and, and so families came in and teachers had already arrived, they were sitting in a row basically facing the parents and the challenge was, wow, everything is kind of awkward and tense here. There's language barrier here as well. And we did a 2.5 minute team builder um that brought us into, you know, a, a whole group and led to immediate laughter and immediately broke the ice. And, and so that, that is a challenge that for families who've not had this space ever at a school, initially, they might not trust that we're truly there to do most of the listening. They might need to know. Ok, can I truly be honest? I mean, we've had to really be thoughtful about building the space month to month that first year. 00:27:46 Um So I do feel like the book lays out all of kind of the map to do that effectively because it is uh it is difficult to train a lot of us as educators haven't been trained in how to do this deeper work with families across so many differences. So, um that, that's a challenge as well as um I think bringing change ideas back to back to staff and really having a wonderful birth with them that they can go back to the team. Um because it's not just family saying, you know, you gotta make A B and C changes and it's just happening and they truly are co created. Hm Thank you so much for sharing that. I think I'm hopeful that, that like, kind of dispels any sort of like, I'm not sure what this is gonna go like. And I, and I think that that is so comforting to be like you've done this so many times, I think you had like 400 meetings or something. I mean, just like so many times and that you have seen the challenges you've worked through them and therefore, like, you know, consult the book and, and you'll, you'll even see some of those case study challenges like laid out and like, here's, here's what we did. 00:28:50 So I love that, that is a resource for listeners. I'm thinking for the, for the listener listening who maybe feel kind of overwhelmed with like this is a big project and I'm not quite sure where to start what is like step one like they end the podcast and they're like, I just want one tiny step to get started. What would you recommend that be? Yeah. Um I think creating spaces really listen more, take off that kind of teacher expert hat. Um And that could be, you know, a welcome phone call to start a new school year. It can be engaging in, you know, a relationship centered home, visit with a couple of your, your students families. And I think, you know, diving into the book where even if you don't spark the creation of a team right away at your school, I've really infused the book with a ton of everyday practices and ideas um that are really, really straightforward, easy to do. Um, you know, positive phone calls is, is an example. 00:29:53 One of my favorites were literally carving out 10 minutes once a week to call three families and share some sort of good news academically or about character of a student, something kind they did to for another student. Um So I would say there will be morsels in the book right away that um I think are both energizing and very practical. Excellent. Thank you so much. And I think to, to close, I have two questions that I like to ask people. The first one is just for fun. It does not have to relate to your job at all. Although it can, what is something that you personally have been learning about lately? Hm. Um Yeah, I love that question. Um One of the books I'm reading right now um is about Zen and I've been studying Zen now for eight years. My um my wife is uh a monk, uh you know, a, a secular monk. Um And um so I'm reading a wonderful book by this author Charlotte Joko Beck um about Zen. So that's, that's an area of learning. 00:30:57 And I've realized this, this month, having this time off, this last week when I have more time down the road, I wanna learn how to be a better cook, learn how to be a better dancer. Um Those are like 22 areas that I've, I felt recently inspired around deeper. Oh, my gosh, I love those. Thank you for sharing those. I love when people share things that are not related to their job, it just rounds them out as like a full human, which we all are beyond our job. But also, I mean, as, as a, as a father of a 15 month old, like I, you know, grew up volunteering as a middle schooler at a head start. I have a lot of background with like 3 to 5 year olds and then I, I taught and was a principal in elementary schools for 15 years. But I, I'm definitely not an expert on a 15 month old. So been reading a lot about parenting and been excited to see like some of the parallels of what we, you know, what we learn as educators. But also it's been consistently humbling too. Tell me about it. Oh my gosh. Mine is 22 months and it is like, I learn every day. 00:32:02 I know nothing. Exactly. Yeah. Awesome. I, I am so glad that we had this conversation. This has been so wonderful. I think a lot of people are going to be like, let me reach out in addition to grabbing the book. Can they reach out to you at a certain location or are you on social media? Like, where can they maybe follow what you're doing? Yeah. Um The best way would be to connect with me or follow me on linkedin. That's where I'm regularly posting new articles. I'm writing quick practical ideas. Um So that's the best space. And folks are also welcome to just email me directly at A E giron at gmail.com and can also find more about the book at solution tree.com/a. E Amazing Ari Thank you so much for joining the podcast. This is such a pleasure, Lindsay. Thanks for your energy, enthusiasm and just great conversation. Really appreciate it. If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane, Sapir and Jamila Dugan, talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book Street Data. 00:33:09 They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period? I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time, leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast Network. Better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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Whether your teachers are developing their own curricula or adapting “off the shelf” curricula, all teachers need to figure out what it will look like to actually implement a curriculum. In addition to factoring in holidays and field trips and other school events, if you’re supporting teachers to create classroom cultures that prioritize student voices and personalized learning, you’ll want to help teachers consider how to embed flexibility and co-creation with students into their pacing calendars.
Why are realistic pacing guides important? Without considering pacing that creates intentional space for student voice and personalized learning (and all of the places those priorities can take a class), teachers are set up to feel pressured to just “cover” content in a rushed manner because our idealized pacing calendar is too unrealistic. When we strive for fidelity, what we often get is rigidity, which does not serve personalized learning and co-creation. Research on fidelity in “off the shelf curriculum implementation” suggests an optimal approach to curriculum implementation is a scaffolded one, in which teachers first focus on implementing a curriculum with fidelity before adapting it. To ensure adaptations are still effective, teachers should have deep knowledge of the theory(s) behind the curriculum. This is more likely “if the fidelity phase is framed as an opportunity for teachers to learn the program before adapting it, as opposed to being framed as the end goal,” (Quinn, 2016, p. 42). An additional consideration is that curricula may be more likely to be used over time when teachers are able to adapt them to their specific contexts (Dearing, 2008, cited in Quinn, 2016). I acknowledge this research and also recognize many off the shelf curricula could do a better job of embedding space for student voice and personalization within the curriculum and suggested pacing guides. For the purpose of this episode, I’m focusing on how to realistically pace a curriculum (whether your teachers wrote it or you’re implementing an existing curriculum). How to Create a Flexible Pacing Calendar:
Final Tip To account for the unexpected, I suggest building in even more “blank space” days. They can be named “Flex Days” or designated as Workshop Days if the idea is that it's okay to skip them when needed. This way, we’re decreasing the pressure to “cover” everything and concentrating on doing fewer things better while preserving a culture of student voice and co-creation. To help you effectively support your teachers’ curriculum planning, I’m sharing two resources with you for free. If your teachers are internalizing an “off the shelf” curriculum, try my New Curriculum Training Agenda. If your teachers are designing their own curriculum, try the Curriculum Planner I use in my Curriculum Boot Camp programs. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 154 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 Educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons, and here on the time for Teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Welcome to an episode of time for teacher shift. This is episode 154. We are talking about pacing calendars that enable student voice and personalized learning. So whether your teachers are developing their own curriculum, their own units or they're adapting to an off the shelf, so to speak curriculum. Every teacher needs to figure out what it's gonna look like to actually implement the curriculum that's on the paper. 00:01:05 In addition to factoring in holidays, field trips, other school events. If you're supporting teachers to create classroom cultures that actually prioritize student voices and personalized learning, you're gonna wanna help teachers consider how to embed flexibility and co creation with students into their pacing calendars and that can be a hard thing to do. So that's what we're talking about in this episode. In this episode, we're talking about pacing calendars that enable student voice and personalized learning. So first, let's talk about why pacing guides are important and specifically why it is important to develop pacing guides that are realistic. So without considering casing, that it creates really intentional space for student voice and personalized learning and all the places those priorities can take a class, right? There's like 100 different directions that we could go into if we consider all the ways that we enable student voice. And now the student says this thing in a discussion where the classes they want to learn about this thing, right? And now we're going to go in a totally different direction that is a little scary at times, especially if you're new to student voice and personalized learning, we need to make sure that teachers are set up to feel that they're, they're able to cover all the things that they wanna cover and more than cover because cover is a touchy word for me, something, right? 00:02:26 We don't want the idea of like, oh I'm pressured to cover the content in a rushed way because my piece and calendar just isn't realistic and I'm never gonna get it done. So I need to like cut things I need to, you know, all the things that go through a teacher's mind. Right. So, without considering that intentional idea of like, from making space for the student voice for the co operation for the things that go either way we didn't expect or for those unexpected interruptions. Like, hey, we're actually doing a field day this day or something. Right. So we want to make sure that we actually are deeply committed to the un underlying intention and purpose of our curriculum, whether we made it ourselves or we are taking something off the shelf and making it fit our particular class space. So that brings up for me the thought about fidelity. And so when we strive for fidelity, what I often see us do is actually rigidity, right? And that doesn't serve personalized learning or co creation at all. 00:03:30 So while thinking about, yeah, maybe we can, you know, use a curriculum that's already out there. Totally fine. Yes, of course. We want to adapt it to our own context, to our own teaching styles, to what our students want and need. We don't want to lose sight of why we chose the curriculum in the first place, which I'm guessing if we're listening to this podcast was because it did center student voices, it did center meaningful engagement and recognized personalized learning and scaffolding and all the good things that are involved in strong curriculum. If we strive for fidelity, but get rigidity and we sacrifice all those underlying purposes like there was no point right to go very briefly into the research on fidelity in the off the shelf curriculum implementation. What we find is there is an optimal approach to curriculum implementation and that is a scaffolded one. Ideally, teachers first focus on implementing a curriculum with fidelity as written before they actually adapt it and personalize it. I have some thoughts but, but this is what the research has found has been, has been good. So I do think always just a quick note about my thoughts. 00:04:37 Do you think we do wanna be mindful of our students at all times? And if something is just not connecting with them, I think teachers should reserve the right to make those connections a little bit clearer for them. Uh If there is something I was recently working with someone who has um like there is a project at the end where they're selecting artifacts and like creating captions. If you want to do that as an Instagram series of posts, go ahead and do it the spirit of the project of the task itself. You're still assessing the same skills, you're still kind of doing the same thing. If you're putting a spin on it that makes your students excited and motivated to do it like heck yes, do that. Absolutely. But I think what this research is getting at is that fidelity to again those core principles and really making sure that like we do it for the most part, the same. So if you're gonna change a final project, for example, make sure it still assesses the same skills or uh you know, recognizes the same content needs to be brought into it. 00:05:42 The same content understandings are assessed. Ok. With that note, let's do more research. So to ensure adaptations are still effective to any off the shelf curriculum, teachers should have deep knowledge of the theory or theories behind the curriculum. OK. Similar to what we were just saying. And this is more likely if quote, the fidelity phase is framed as an opportunity for teachers to learn the program before adapting it as opposed to being framed as the end goal, end quote. That's from Quinn 2016. And you can link to the full research in the blog post for this episode at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 54. So interesting. So the fidelity phase really should be like here's how you learn it. You just need to internalize it for a year or whatever, then you can adapt it. And that is ultimately our end goal is that it best fits you. So that's a really interesting thing that I don't think we say when we're encouraging folks to adopt curriculum off shop. So an additional curriculum from the research, same researcher is that curricula may be more likely to be used over time when teachers are able to adapt the curricula to their specific context so it actually is going to last longer. 00:07:00 Like teachers are gonna keep using the same units and curriculum if they're able to adapt it. Ok. So we definitely want that. I mean, if you went through the time to choose a curriculum and all of the, you know, conversations that, that entails and all of the research that, that entails, like you chose it for a reason, you wanna keep using it, you want that investment to be like not thrown out the window in two years when they're like, I'm done with this, right? That's also really important. So, and we went off on a little tangent here about fidelity. But I do think if you are taking curriculum off the shelf, fidelity yes, is important. And also we don't want it to turn into rigidity. We want the end goal to be that beautiful adaptation. So when we think about all that beautiful adaptation to me that includes embedding space for student voice and personalization, and we do that best when we have a very clear pacing guide. So for the purpose of this episode, that's where I'm focusing. How do we realistically pace a curriculum, whether you wrote it yourself or you're implementing an existing one. So first thing I would do if I am creating my flexible pacing calendar or I'm coaching a teacher to do so, I'm gonna block my non instructional days first. 00:08:09 So I am going to literally have teachers open paper or a digital calendar, whatever they use. I like using like a Google sheet or I used to use a table of Google Docs before I realized Google sheets are amazing and you can like move things, but that has all the school days written on it. So if you don't have like an agenda that you buy your teachers or something and they plan in, in physical paper, maybe create like a template or something. I think as a leader, this would be a lovely gift to save them the time of entering all the dates in themselves, then get out the school or district calendar. If you haven't done this as a leader already, they can do this themselves and block off any holidays, any field trips or other reason that students would be out of instructional time. These might be grade specific school specific, district specific. So if they are kind of those grade level pieces, of course, you're gonna have the teachers go in and do that. But if you have like the district level stuff or the school level stuff already done for them, that would be really, really nice. And then I think this is a, a nice to have, but I I would do it anyways because again, the goal is a realistic pacing calendar that's not going to result in teachers feeling pressed for time and then rushing to surface level cover content instead of staying true to the purpose. 00:09:19 And like the deep learning I would block each day before a long break. So if you're about to go on like a two day break or something, or you, especially like those week long vacations that are usually like December, February, April, you know, somewhere in there for sure, the day before, like my experience as a teacher, those are not always super meaningful in terms of adherence to or fidelity to a curriculum. Right? Not gonna implement that in the same way as written. So I'm either going to kind of do a deeper dive to wrap up like the day before I might go outside of the planned curriculum to do something fun. I might do like just a team building a circle where we share our feelings about the upcoming brick, whatever it is, but it's probably not going to be one you can count on for like a curriculum implementation fidelity piece, right? So the next thing I would do after that, you've blocked off all of the holidays, events, days before long holidays, then I would block off class culture building days. 00:10:24 Now, some schools and districts have a community wide set of days that are allocated to building relationships and community agreements at the start of the year. So district wide, you may say the first two weeks of school we are doing SCL work, whatever that looks like you can decide, but you're not expected to start your typical curriculum for 10 days, instructional days, whatever. That's an example. Right. But it could be like our school, I worked at a school once that had like, the first two whole days were blocked off for like school wide relationship building activities. And so that was what we did for two days. Like no one had a typical schedule. The schedule is all different, whatever it is. If there are days like that block them off if within your grade or within your department were just within you, right? You want to as an individual teacher have some culture building days. I highly recommend it. I think it's a great idea. Lo those days off next then number three, I would open with a hook day for each unit or content arc so day one of unit one, I would mark in my pacing calendar that we're going to have what I would call a hook lesson. 00:11:36 You can call it whatever you want. And that's gonna be inviting students to consider the essential question of the unit or project question or whatever you call it in relation to their own lives. And you can do this in any way. I love using circle here. Make sure that students leave this class. The whole purpose of this hook day is that they leave the class with an understanding of why the unit or at least the essential question for the unit matters like in their lives. Why is it relevant? They need some sort of personal connection to this. So often I hear teachers who are disillusioned with a curriculum they've written or adopted and they're just like I am sensing that my students just don't care. There's no motivation there. We need to build in the motivation and, you know, your students better than any curriculum writer. Even if you wrote this curriculum, you probably wrote it before you met your students on day one of the next year. Now, as you learn about them, right? You've done your culture building days to lead up into your day one of unit one. Now let's use that relationship building as a launching pad to actually get into. 00:12:44 Well, how do you think about this essential question in your life? And of course, this requires that the essential question is good. So you may have to modify it a little bit if it's just really not getting the students hearts, they really can't connect with it. Ok? Like let's play with it. Maybe students kind of forming a little inquiry lesson here, generate some questions around the essential question or similar to the essential question that they can connect with. But here the whole purpose of this is we are building that motivation. We wanna make sure that it connects in terms of like motivation, research, right? We wanna make sure that it connects to their prior knowledge, their lived realities and experiences, the things they care about, right? All of these pieces um need to kind of be in place. And again, our goal is to build relationships prior to this day so that we can do that well. Right. This is the, the one of the essences of culturally responsive and sustaining teaching. Number four, once you have done the first three steps, you're gonna start filling in the lessons. So literally how many lessons or days we're gonna be in each unit, fill those in on the calendar. 00:13:51 So you might have like a little numerical guide. So you don't have to like write out like the title of each lesson or whatever that might be like you 1.1 or something, right? Unit one day one. Then the fifth step is any time that you have a class that is going to feature a class discussion the next day, make that an opportunity to debrief the discussion. So there's a couple of things that you can do with that day. It can be used to discuss how well the discussion agreements were followed. So more of like a process day like, hey, we co created these discussion agreements. Here's what went well here. What didn't, here's what we wanna do differently as a class next time. Maybe we need to add this discussion agreement. Maybe we need to edit this one, right? Oh This one didn't work well. OK. Well, what, how might that look next time or this is usually when I have found that I needed the day for it can be used to continue the conversation if the conversation was cut short. Like, oh, the bell rang the period over, ah, we're running out the door. 00:14:54 Ok. Conversation is not over bad management of the time on my part usually. But sometimes we just have a really bubbly discussion. That's like, yeah, this is like, why I became a teacher. This stuff is amazing. I want this to continue. Kids are doing great. I'm just sitting here and listening and taking it all in. That is amazing if it's great and there's more discussion to be had. Let's let it bubble over into the next day without feeling that unrealistic pace and calendar push to cut the discussion short and then just follow the as written pasting calendar with zero flexibility, right? That's the kind of stuff that's like, oh, that's hard. Now, another thing that I found to be very useful for like a day to debrief discussion day is to use that second day to interrogate any comments or claims that may not be true. So I would often call this like a fact checkers lesson. So if we are in a discussion class wide and some student throws out like a statistic. That's just like, hm Wow, about that. If I write that sentence down like this is what the student said was a fact with like a question mark or whatever kind of annotation device that I have. 00:16:03 I am going to collect things like that throughout the discussion. And I might have, you know, 3 to 5 by the end of the discussion. And I'm like, oh, we need to interrogate these statements, whether they were statements of presumed fact. And I think they might be inaccurate or they are like, jumping to conclusions that I think are, like, wildly problematic. Right? Or, I mean, if they were wildly problematic I would interrupt immediately. But if there were things that are just like, oh there's a lot of context missing there and we need to do a deeper dive on the research and to dig into that. I wanna make space for the next day to do the digging into. So I might say at the end of lesson one, you know, we had a few things today that I wanna like unpack tomorrow. So tomorrow I'll get ready to put your fact Checker hat on or whatever. And then the next day, you know, I've, I've done, I think a podcast episode about this, but like in short, put those up on the board have groups of students kind of tackle them, interrogate them, do some research around them. And then at the end of the day, you basically come away with like this was true, this was false, this was in between and here's why and what the context is and then talk about like source bias and stuff in terms of where they get that information. 00:17:09 So debrief day following a, a class discussion day. Now, when I think class discussion day, I mean, like a big one. So if you did like, I don't know, like a class discussion of like, what did you like about this reading? And I'm just gonna like popcorn a couple of hands at the end of the day. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about like, student led takes most of the class time. We're talking about a big question, maybe like a Socratic seminar or like a circle discussion or we're really getting into it. And majority of the day is a discussion. Like it's a big discussion on a big topic. You're pulling together and synthesizing lots of different information from different sources that we've learned throughout the unit so far to get. It's a big thing, right? Then we want to have a debrief day for that. If it's like a short, I asked the class a question and like we had a couple people answer like that's not what I'm talking about or even like a circle that was like a check in circle. Like, hey, how are you feeling today or what do you want to go differently in the group work project that you're doing? Like everyone, every single student might answer that in a circle. 00:18:13 So it's like a class discussion, but it's not something that needs to be debriefed afterwards. It's not like really rooted in the content. We're probably not gonna need to have an an extra day for like bubbling over conversation. You can use your own discretion, but that's kind of my thought there. Ok. Then the final step. So to recap, you have blocked your non instructional days. You have blocked your class culture building days. At the start of the year, you have put an opening hook day for each unit. You have filled in your lessons done a debrief day, the day after each discussion. The final step is to determine how often you want to have days where students can work on specific skills. They either need extra practice with or like catch up time with or whatever you call it or where they're just like crushing things and they just need some extensions that are gonna like really stretch their skills. So I would call these usually like workshop days or win days, like whatever I need, um I might call them conference days, what, whatever it is for you to meet with a few students or students to be working on whatever it is that they need. 00:19:22 Personally, I like to do these once a week. So this might be a nice Friday activity, for example, but they can definitely be integrated into each day of a student project week or, or some other sort of thing. So like if you're like, OK, we've done a lot of learning, we're gonna just like press pause on the new learning and we're gonna do a lot of Synthesis Monday through Friday this week. So students are actively working on their projects and I might say like, OK, every single day you determine if you wanna move forward with that project or something is kind of a sticking point for you and you need a little bit of review, you need to meet with me, you need to talk to your group and, and practice like group decision making or you need some reading support. So here's like a strategy or the project is about writing. So here is, you know, some writing tips and a mini writing workshop that you can attend for 10 minutes virtually or like come and sit at my desk, right? Whatever that is, that's the personalized learning coming to life. That's the time where you're like, well, my students really didn't get the last two weeks of instructions. 00:20:25 So I feel like I shouldn't move forward, but I have to move forward because the pacing calendar says to move forward, right? So that's where we want that flexibility embedded where you're not feeling the rush, you're able to pause again regularly, make it once a week, make it so that it's integrated into every day of like a week of, of project days, right? I think as long as you build it in and you encourage your teachers to build it in there is less and less pressure put on moving fast and more and more awareness that we can take the time to invite, allow, encourage students to leave the conversation, leave their learning and to support and scaffold any sort of extension or remediation that students may need in specific target skill areas. Right? That's what good teaching is. That's what good personalized learning is. That's what co creation is, but we need the space for it and we need that space to be written on the pacing calendar, which means that we may have less like quote unquote, you know, curriculum has for days. 00:21:35 So the final tip, I would suggest to account for the unexpected, which always happens. I would build in even more blank space days. Now, you can name them. I used to call them flex days or you could just designate them as more workshop days, right? The idea is these days are I, you know, either skippable or you can use them as placeholders for a particular like, right, that was written and die in this way. Again, the whole goal is we're decreasing the pressure to cover everything, concentrating on doing fewer things better while preserving a culture of student voice and co creation. So to help you effectively support your teacher's curriculum planning. In addition to this episode, with all the tips and you can find the tips written out in the blog post version of this episode located at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 54. I'm also sharing two resources with you for free. So if your teachers are internalizing an off the shelf curriculum. You can check out my new curriculum training agenda for how you would help them do that. Internalization. 00:22:38 Some of the activities are in there, check them out, pick and choose what you'd like if your teachers are designing their own curriculum and they need help writing out what some of those are thinking through the unit arcs. Placing the things on the, on the pacing calendar, right? The days. What is each day gonna be that kind of thing? You're gonna look for my classic curriculum planner. This is the one I use in my curriculum boot camp programs. All of these resources as well as the blog post again are at the blog Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 54. Until next time. If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane, Sapir and Jamila Dugan. Talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period. I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. 00:23:49 Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time, leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better podcast network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where I reveal discussion moves to increase engagement:
3/4/2024 153. Leading Equity Takes Belief, Vision, Systems, and Acknowledgement of Barriers with Dr. Don ParkerRead Now
Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode, Dr. Don Parker talks about the necessity of relationship-building, developing a robust equity-based vision statement, and policy alignment to systematically embed equity in your school.
Dr. Don Parker is a transformational keynote speaker and professional development provider. He specializes in SEL, supporting teachers to build trusting relationships with students, restorative practices, trauma-informed practices, and improving the culture and climate of schools to enhance students’ and teachers’ feeling of belonging. Dr. Parker is a former principal, frequent conference presenter, and the author of Building Bridges: Engaging Students At-Risk Through the Power of Relationships and Be the Driving Force: Leading Your School on the Road to Equity. The Big Dream Equitable schools and classrooms provide high-quality, equitable educational experiences for every student. Dr. Parker elaborates saying, "we can provide each student with a quality education, support their social, emotional learning needs and really truly help them reach their highest potential." Mindset Shifts Required To enact change, school leaders and educators must genuinely believe in the value of equity and the possibility of transformation, as this belief will drive their actions and commitment. Action Steps There are more concrete ideas in the book, but we discussed the following: Step 1: Equity-Focused Vision Statement Develop and adopt an equity-based vision that is robust and reflects actionable outcomes for historically marginalized groups. From there, it’s easier to determine if all school policies and practices are in alignment with the vision. Step 2: Systematize Relationship-Building One example is Dr. Parker’s implementation of dedicated time for student-teacher connections on Monday mornings through the school. There’s a dedicated hour built into the schedule just for this. Step 3: Consistently gather input from students Use surveys and action items to measure and drive improvements in school effectiveness regarding equity. Challenges The biggest challenge, according to Dr. Parker, is overcoming the "acknowledgement gap," where schools fail to recognize systemic inequities. Overcoming this requires a collective commitment to identifying and addressing these issues head-on. One Step to Get Started Engage directly with students, particularly those from marginalized groups, to understand their experiences and needs. This direct interaction lays the groundwork for developing targeted strategies to support student success, so go ask a student how you can better support them! Stay Connected You can find Dr. Parker on his website or send him an e-mail at [email protected] To help you implement equitable change, Dr. Parker is sharing his survey on Leading Equitable Practices with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 153 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 Hi, everyone. Stay on the podcast. I'm talking with Doctor Don Parker who is a transformational keynote speaker and professional development provider. He specializes in SCL supporting teachers to build trusting relationships with students, restorative practices, trauma informed practices, and improving the culture and climate of schools to enhance students and teachers feeling of belonging. Doctor Parker is a former principal and served at Posen School in Posen Illinois where he improved the school climate, staff, collaboration, parent engagement and student achievement. Before that, he was the principal of Lincoln Avenue School A K A school in Dalton, Illinois, where he improved the culture, implemented a resilience program, managed the implementation of restorative justice and increased attendance at student achievement. Doctor Parker has a strong belief in creating a school in which the entire staff strives for excellence to meet the academic and social emotional needs of each student. He is presented throughout the US at distinguished educational conferences including A S CD. Every student succeeds Act conference, the National Principals Conference, Illinois Principals Conference, Oklahoma Secondary and Elementary Conference, the raising a student achievement conference, transforming school culture conference and the innovative school summit. Just to name a few Dr Barger is the author of the book Building Bridges, Engaging students at risk through the power of relationships and his newest be the driving force leading your school on the road to equity, which we'll talk about in just a moment. 00:01:10 Let's get to the episode, educational justice coach Lindsay Lyons. And here on the time for teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Doctor John Parker. Welcome to the Time for Teacher podcast. Thanks for having me, Lindsey. Good morning. Good morning. I am so excited for our conversation. I was just saying before we hit record, your book is excellent. I loved it. So I think there's so many things that you might wanna share your new book being. But I think a lot of times like I, I like to ask the question right off the bat, like what is important for listeners to know either about you or like something that you've been doing or thinking about lately that's gonna ground our conversation today? 00:02:19 Ok, great. All right, thank you. So, um I am, I am very passionate about working with students and working with teachers to help teachers become more trauma informed, that helps students with their social, emotional learning to teach students prosocial behaviors. And so teachers can, you know, touch the heart before they touch the brain. And so that's what my expertise is in. I've had experiences being a high school health teacher. And if you know anything about the health curriculum, it really teaches students how to make healthy choices, teaching them problem solving their skills, critical thinking skills, all those things that students need in order to be successful, not only in school, but also in life. And so that position transitioned me into being a dean of students where I was teaching students prosocial behaviors, doing a lot of authoritative counseling, building relationships with students. And that's what led me to this work now is helping other teachers be successful with those students who may have challenging behaviors. Oh, I love that. And actually, I don't mean to go into your book so soon, but I want to because it was so good. 00:03:23 One of the things that I did not know but makes so much sense having just been in schools was that one of the things that you decided to do was to use Mondays as like an extra relationship building time because often the researchers found that the trauma could spike in the weekends and I was like, yes, this makes so much sense. So let's make space for it. Absolutely. So, um, when I was the principal of my school, I noticed that we had students who had a lot of trauma and teachers were having a lot, a hard time. They said we want to build a relationship, but we don't have time to build relationships and we want to attend the students, social emotional learning, but you know, we don't have the time. So in order to make anything successful, you have to automate it and you have to sys systematize it. And so I just built a system where I worked with the uh president of our teachers union. I say, hey, look, this is what my teachers are asking for. I wanna do this at my school instead of having home room where it's only 15 minutes in the beginning of the day where teachers come in, take attendance and basically transition students to the next class I wanna build in an hour on Monday mornings. 00:04:28 So my teachers can have time to do social emotional learning activities and build relationships with students. So during that time, we did morning meetings, classroom circles and there was a time where teachers didn't have to feel rushed, they could really talk to the students find out what was going on in their lives, find out what kind of social academic support that they needed. And it really just set the tone for the rest of the week because there's a phrase that says you're gonna pay now or pay later. And so if we don't tend to these, our students social emotional learning needs, we're worried about this reference throughout the school day. It's like if we can settle them down at the beginning of the morning, you know, uh, give them what they need in order to be successful, give them the coping strategies that they need. It just helps the smooth day, the uh the school day go a lot smoother. I, yes, I love it. And I love that you use circles as the specific practice within that time. Just so much of what you said, like teachers not feeling rushed. Like so to be able to say like we have the the system or the structure built in a lot of times I hear from teachers that it's like, I don't have that system structure. 00:05:33 So now I have to sacrifice the content that I'm teaching or whatever, just squeeze it in and then I feel rushed and it's not really authentic. And like I just love that this was a school wide initiative to be like we're doing it. We're giving you the time here. It is right. You're right because everything has to be research based, evidence based. And what the research says is that Monday mornings are the most traumatic time for not only students but also teachers like teachers sometimes have a lot of anxiety coming to school on a Monday morning. This does give everyone the opportunity to just breathe, you know, and you know, just getting the right mind frame in order to have a good school day. I love that. And so yeah, like backing up a little bit because I think we just dove right in there with like a concrete thing that people could do as a takeaway for this episode. But I also want to know at kind of a larger scale. I love how Doctor Patina, love talks about freedom dreaming as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. And so I love thinking about schools and educational change and leadership in this way. 00:06:37 I'm wondering, and you've touched on it a bit, I think, but what is that big dream that you hold for education globally? Wow. You know, um it goes to the title of my book. So the title of the book is Be The Driving Force leading Your School on the Road to equity. I would just like equitable schools, equitable uh classrooms and just equitable opportunities for students so that students can get what they need in order to be successful. All right. So we're talking about funding, we're talking about curriculum, we're talking about experiences. All right, every student deserves a high quality education and I know it sounds pie in the sky, but that's really uh what would be my big dream for education and that we can provide each student with a quality education, support their social, emotional learning needs, and really truly help them reach their highest potential, such a simple but powerful and massively effective dream. I love it. So when we think about the path that that takes, I love, I love all of the the the big metaphor of cars that you use in your your latest book. 00:07:45 And so I think about, you know what that path looks like on the road to that dream for, for leaders, for schools, for districts, right? As, as they're kind of making all those changes and you, I mean, we could even just like read through your table of contents because it, it really lays it out right there for each of the sections. But what are the things that you think are, are most important or come first to mind when we think about kind of those stepping stones or those pieces to, to put in that path? Sure. OK. So we're familiar with the phrase that starts at the top and so be the driving force in your school on the road to equity is really a how to book for school leaders on how to promote equity and enhance equity in their schools. And so what I think is the most important is the chapter that I write when I talk about vision. And so, as you know, throughout the book, it's a metaphor that has to do with the car or have to do with driving. Uh and I tie that to a school leadership principle. And so when we talk about vision, when we talk about driving, ok. Um I used to teach driver's ed. I was a driver's ed and pe teacher. 00:08:49 And when we taught students how to drive, we would teach them to look further than just, you know, one or two cars ahead, we teach them to look as far down the road as you can. All right, you have to have vision in order to see far down the road and what we teach them is that it helps you to avoid hazards and it, it keeps you focused on where you're going. And so when it comes down to school leadership, uh school leaders have to have a robust vision and they have to not only have a vision but they have to have their school staff, students and community buy into the vision that they have for the school right now. We know as, as teachers and you know, even like uh student support personnel, how there's a lot of work that needs to be done and we're doing a lot of work. But leaders, yes, you have to do the work. But at the same time, we, we're paying you to think we're paying you to be a visionary. Like my boss used to tell me, Don, you're the CEO of this school. So we have to think about innovation. We have to think about the future. We have to establish the vision and then we have to influence all stakeholders in order to work towards that common vision that we have. 00:09:54 And so just like a driver has to have vision far down the road, a school leader has to have a vision that's far down the road of what you're trying to accomplish and what you want your school to be and then influence everybody to work towards that end. I, I love that and I, I particularly love, I think it's page 83 that there were examples you have like a whole table of like the equity based vision statements. And I love this because I cannot tell you how upset I get when I look at someone's website and they have like this really like ineffective equity statement. And I'm like, yeah, no, you're not, you're not doing that work like, and I just know right. And so it, it is so cool, I think for leaders to actually go in open the book to that table and just be like, hm, does our vision statement that we say is like ra ra equity actually effective. Does it dig in or is it just super surface level? And I, I just loved some of those examples that you shared because I was like, this is it. Thank you. I love it. 00:10:56 You're right because you know, when you have a vision statement that encompasses equity, uh it has to talk about what outcomes, all right are going to be accomplished as a result of that vision statement. So you may have a vision statement that may mention equity in it. However, the outcomes it was really determines equity, what results are we getting? Are we really accomplishing what it is that we're setting out to do and not just saying it absolutely. And I mean, some of them to really like one of them is like, do you mind if I like read the first word? So one of them is ineffective would be we strive to treat everyone equally, right? And so it's just like, oh man, like we're, we're gonna not even say we're going to do something, we're gonna say we're striving to do something. And then, but like also the thing that you're saying is like when it's effective, it's not just like treat everyone equally or even treat everyone equitably, but we're recognizing and addressing systemic inequities. So we're actually identifying the thing and um we're recognizing that they've created disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes for historically marginalized groups. 00:12:06 So you're saying, like, we're not just saying it surface level equity is good. We're saying we recognize and we're going to specifically identify in our community. This stuff is going on behind the scenes and we're committed to consistently digging it up identifying it and making that part of our equitable process, which I just love. Exactly because the, the thing is we can say a vision statement. But in order to really accomplish the vision, you have to do the work. So I have attached the work to what the vision is and telling people what you have to do in order to accomplish this. These are things you have to do. You have to really look at historically marginalized groups. How can we better serve these students? Right, uh inequitable policies, how can we change these policies so that they're not harming, you know, certain groups and then you have to do that work in order to accomplish whatever the vision vision is. So I attach that to the vision statement. So people know exactly what needs to be done in order to promote an advanced equity. I love it because you could just, you can be looking at a policy and say, well, does this do the thing that we say we're doing? 00:13:09 Right. And, and that was one of my favorite chapters is chapter seven where you talk about revising school policies and procedures. There's so much in there that I loved. I mean, just kind of high level, you talk a lot about student voices being central to the process of uncovering and digging into some of those policies and co creating or revising policies. You talk about restorative practices, you talk about A P enrollments, you talk about like what are the structures and mindsets and things that we have to work through to do that better and give everyone access like it was just amazing. And so I don't know if there are pieces that you want to talk more about here to kind of illuminate for listeners. But I, I just loved all of those pieces. Well, here's the thing, Liz. When we talk about equity, people are used to talking about the achievement gap and the opportunity gap. But some people don't even wanna discuss the acknowledgment gap where they don't want to even acknowledge that their inequitable practices or inequitable policies are things taking place that actually harm students. And so we have to look at the barriers, you know, that are in place that need to be removed and dismantled so that students really can't get that quality instruction and have opportunities. 00:14:15 And at first we have to acknowledge and say, you know, what um are we even recognizing, you know, how we are either promoting our students to be successful or how we are hindering their success? And once they acknowledge it, then you can start saying, OK, ask those deep questions of what do we need to do in order to make a more equitable school environment for all students and not just historically marginalized students, not just low income students, not just black and brown students, but all students. It's for everyone. We want to see every single student be successful. Yeah, I love that you included research in there too, right? That like white kids are massively benefiting from having like teachers who are a different race than them, of learning about diverse stories and histories and authors. Like it is beneficial to everyone like the end. Right. Like you're exactly right. 100%. And so I was talking to equity expert and they explained it like this. All right. Um There was some law where we had to make sidewalks accessible for handicapped people who had to use disabled people. 00:15:24 I should not say handicapped for disabled people who needed to be pushed around in wheelchairs or roll themselves in wheelchairs. And so you know how they had the curb, but now they have this ramp. And so they said now this was built for a person in a wheelchair, however, just think about a mom pushing a stroller and they could just easily push that stroller up. So it not only benefits the people who are disabled, but it benefits people on a larger scale. And so that's what equity work does the same. Um, the same, I guess what do you call it the same uh accommodations or modifications and variety of teaching skills that we're using to help students from a different group will also help the majority of students. So we're doing it for everyone. That is such a good example that you shared. And I, I also reminds me, I'm pretty sure, I don't know if this is a base of research, but I heard this from someone that uh texting came about because they were trying to create a support for people who are hearing impaired and couldn't use the phone like auditorily. 00:16:29 And it was like, now look at texting, like people, there are like young people who are like, refuse to call someone on the phone. I only text. That's a great analogy. You're exactly right. That's another perfect example. Lindsey. Look at you. Uh So there are so many different things in this book where you really, you really break it down for people. And I, I love that like, you know, there are surveys in there so people can just grab the book, take the survey, assess where they are and then figure out the next step for them. Is there anything else as people kind of think about going through the the pieces of this book or how to engage with the book that you would recommend for people kind of on a um process level of work through some of this stuff? One 100%. Yes. So, absolutely. Um when you read the book, look at the research that's included in the book, this this book is research rich. However, I understand how people need a more practical breakdown of the research and how can they actually put this research in action for themselves? And so what I do is I talk about what this looks like in the real world and I'll talk about my experience and uh doing these evidence based practices in order to promote equity in my school. 00:17:37 And then, uh, the book gives a survey where it asks you, ok. Well, how effective is your school at, you know, at XY or Z and promoting equity? But then beyond that, there's another section of each chapter that talks about action items where it gives them clear activities, clear actions that they can take to advance equity or to um, accomplish whatever topic there was in the chapter so that they can promote equity and equity practices in their schools. Hi, everyone. It's Lindsay, just popping in here to tell you about today's episode. Freebie, Dr Parker and I talk about all the resources and reproducible in his book. He is sharing one of them with you for free on leading equitable practices. You can grab it at the blog post for today's episode at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/blog/one 53, fact, the episode, whatever you want to call it that you can actually use in action right now today. And, and I love it because it, it spans the whole range of like the person who is research minded. I'm thinking of a leader who's like, you know, kind of leading this team of individuals who have different affinities for like just give me the action right now versus I need to be convinced that this is even worth doing, right? 00:18:52 And I think individual leaders the same, right? Some leaders are gonna want the convincing of give me all the research and tell me why I need to read this chapter and then other people are like, oh, yeah, I'm familiar with the research or I don't need to be convinced. Like, give me the list where you're like writing in bullet points. Give me the reproducible survey and I'm going for it and, and you know what, why that's important is, is because when it comes down to change, whether it's organizational change, whether it's systems change, whether it's change in schools, ok. Uh But I've learned when we talk about managing change in schools, they say the first step, the very first step in promoting change is creating a sense of urgency. And so we have to state the problem and we have to show uh what the problem is and why that problem exists and we have to show if this problem continues, you know, how detrimental it can be to the school or the organization. So if we continue to, you know, go to school every day and you know, do school the way we've done in the past, right? And to sweep the problem under the rug, the problem is just gonna grow and when it comes down to school equity, what the problem is, the students are gonna have uh less sense of feeling of belonging, right? 00:20:01 You're not gonna get a quality of instruction. And if you can, if you just imagine if you forecast about 5, 1020 years. If, if students don't like school, if teachers aren't enjoying teaching the curriculum and, and uh attending to students, social emotional learning needs, then imagine what school will look like 10 or 20 years down the line. OK. We have to have a sense of urgency in order to not convince influence but have teachers to buy in and say this is the right thing that we need to do for our students, staff and community. Absolutely. And I, I often think about like the structures like you were talking about systematizing things and I think if you have those structures and, and it's systematic, like when we, you know, regularly review our policy, we include student and family voices, right? Or like whatever the pieces are. And it's like if this is just the way we do things then like those systems and structures aren't just for this year's policy that we're reviewing or whatever it's for every succeeding policy we review. 00:21:03 And so you're really kind of laying a foundation for doing this work more smoothly, more quickly, more efficiently, later and more equitably, right. You're exactly right because like you said, it's ongoing and becomes part of our process. And it's just, you know, the thing that, that, that we do where that isn't hard anymore because it comes so naturally to us now. Absolutely. And, and so one of the things that I think is there's two kind of questions, I, I wonder if they kind of will have the same answer. I'm not sure, but I'll, I'll pose them both to you and you can choose which one or both if you want to answer them. One thing I'm wondering, especially with equity work is like, is there a mindset shift that you have seen kind of unlock action or um uh the new way of thinking really like moves the path forward more quickly with that sense of urgency or something. So one question is about the mindset shift, is there a mindset shift that you've seen be effective for leaders in this work or two? Is there like a big challenge that you've seen districts face, you faced as a leader, you know, a team has faced and, and you would recommend like a way to like get through or move through that challenge. 00:22:13 So yes, it's absolutely a mindset. So when we talk about the New Year and people setting goals that they want to accomplish, whether it's fitness goals, professional goals, personal goals, all right, whatever it is, you have to make the decision that this is exactly what I'm going to accomplish this year. And it has to be a mindset because uh Oprah has a quote that says you should create the highest vision for yourself because uh what you believe is what you become. Ok. So it all starts with how you think, what you uh think in your head and what you believe in your heart. All right. So a perfect example would be my wife. She loves running marathons. Ok. I hate long distance running. I love weight training. Right. And so my wife one year asked me if I would run a marathon with, but for all my life I never like, really, I never liked doing long distance running. Even when I was a high school pe student, we had to do the mile run. I would always come in last place because I would get tired. It's just, I'm just not good at long distance running. 00:23:18 However, I'm really good and I learned this when I was a pe major when I studied kinesiology is that some people genetically have what you call, um, quick fire muscles. All right. And some people have what they call like long distance muscles where the body is just built where they have slow twitch muscles. All right. So we have fast twitch muscles and slow twitch muscles. And I just imagine that I have fast twitch muscles because when it comes to birth to speed or just like, you know, high power reps, I'm good at that. So I told my wife, you know, what if I had to go to increase my bench press by £50? Like I will, I believe I, I would do that. I would be enthusiastic about it. I'll be energized to do it because I believe I could do it when it comes to long distance running. I don't believe that I could do it because, you know, and then we was, when it's time for us to train, you know, I would have a bad attitude, you know, I wouldn't be enthusiastic about it and I would just pull you down. All right. And so the bottom line is all right, our actions, all our beliefs dictate our actions. 00:24:20 Right. So when it comes to mindset, if we don't believe that we can accomplish something, if we don't believe it's important, we're not gonna work hard towards it. But if we believe that we can accomplish it and we adopt the mindset that this is something that we can do, then we're going to do it. And so think about it, if I said I was gonna do equity work, but I really didn't believe in equity and I really didn't believe that I have to take in order to influence my staff and my community that this is what needs to be done. Then when I step into my school every day, I'm just going through the motions and here's the harm in that Lindsey if I'm a school leader and I step into the building and I'm just going through the motions, then imagine what would my staff community and students do? They would step into the school just going through the motions. However, if I really believe in this, then my actions are going to be dictated by my beliefs. And so I'm gonna work hard towards equity. I'm gonna uh influence my staff that this is what's going need to be done. They will see my actions and then they could follow. And so belief and mindset is so important because your actions are dictated by your beliefs, uh what you think in your mind and what you believe in your heart. 00:25:29 I love that response. And I was, I was smiling because you're literally describing the dynamic between you and your wife. The same conversation happened like a year ago. I'm a marathon runner. My partner is a Kines theist and he is way into weight training and not long distance running. And literally, I don't know what it was about the last year, but he like did some long distance writing and he was like, you know what I'm gonna do it did, it loved it. Now he wants to do a half iron man. And I'm like, this is your future there. It is his mindset switch, right? And that's what has to happen, that mindset switch because people, they're either whether they're aware of it or unaware. What really happens. What the bottom line comes to is that your mindset dictates your act? Absolutely. And I'm wondering, do you think that is the biggest challenge that that people have with this work is just like right off the bat, just not believing in it, believing that they could be effective in doing the work. And so they just don't even kind of get to the second step of the process. But think about it. Yeah, because if you looked at a task and it was so overwhelming, right, then you're gonna procrastinate. 00:26:35 Are you're gonna come up with every excuse as why not to do it? OK? But winners when they look at challenges, they look at it as opportunities for growth and they look at it as these are things that I can do in order to improve. And so they take that challenge on because they know the importance of doing the work and they know what the outcome would be. And so a winner isn't um discouraged by the problem, they're motivated by the result. And so that's what school leaders, teachers, community members, they have to be motivated by the end result as opposed to being defeated by that challenge. I love that so much. And I think about your book and the way that it's laid out and the case studies that you kind of share of just like, here's what my experience was and here's the result that we got. I just sometimes I think that leadership can be so isolating, right? If you're just in your own space and you don't, especially if you're in a like a smaller district, there's not as many people doing the same work as you or something, you might not be in a PLC with like other leaders or principals or whatever it can be really hard to know what is possible unless you pick up a book and see this person did this, this was the context, this is the action subs they took, this is the result. 00:27:44 And then that can even if you've never met the person, right? Just reading about them or listen to a podcast about something like can give you then the picture of what is possible and then allow you to be motivated, I think through that, which is 100% 100%. And what you're describing is called vicarious learning. And so where we may feel like it's not possible for ourselves, but then once we see somebody else have done it now, we can say, hey, you know what he did this or this person accomplished this, I can accomplish this too. It's like the person who first run a marathon, who would you a marathon runner who would think that it's possible that you can run 26.2 miles. And then they found that uh I forgot the person's name who broke the uh what was it? The six minute mile and then the four minute mile. They're like, wow, this is possible to do. And so when we can sometimes do experience vicarious learning, we can say, ok, this is a huge challenge. We know that it would be a huge undertaking yet we can be inspired because we've seen that this has been done. And so it's a process and So, since we're talking about the workout analogy and getting in shape, we know that you can't just go to the gym once and get in shape. 00:28:55 All right, we understand that it's a process. And so what we know about getting in shape that it's comes down to consistency and it's setting that vision of what our goals are. And so it's the same thing with the school, what school leaders need to do is sit down with their staff and community and write out what are three or four important goals. And now we have to think about what is the work that has to be done in order to achieve this goal. And now we're gonna step into our schools and to our school districts and we're going to just consistently work on achieving this goal. And next thing, you know, like I said, it's a process, it's not gonna happen overnight, but a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, we could be proud that we accomplished the goal. Excellent. I think we've talked about so many different things that I'm wondering as a, as kind of like a final call to action or action step. What is the starting point for someone listening to this episode and then saying like, OK, I'm, I'm going to start, I want to do one thing, start building that momentum like that first trip in the gym that usually happens around new Year. 00:29:57 So like that went well. I'm doing another one. What does that first action step look like? Or could it look like for a listener? OK. So it can, it can look like going to talk to a student and then say, OK, that's what empathy is, is putting myself in someone else's shoes and learning uh what their experience is and just asking students who may be from a historically marginalized group, who may be LGBT Q plus, right? Who may be low income or just AAA struggling learner? And just asking them, what are some of the things that we can do to better support you academic? What are some of the things that we can do to better support you socially and emotionally? OK. And ask them what has, what has your experience been in this school? And how could we make it better? OK. And then just, just taking notes, writing down some of the things the student says and they're taking it back to a committee, you, you can establish an equity committee and say this is what we're learning from our students experience. OK. And so what can we do in order to create a more um environment that supports student success and start there and then have your goals drafted because each school is going to be different that each, each um school district has its own unique set of challenges that schools leaders can do in order to uh overcome. 00:31:19 So that's one place I was, I was start. It's simple. It's practical and everyone can do it. Anyone can do. Yeah. As soon as you're done with the episode, walk down the hallway, find a student, right? Or you can find groups of students and survey them through the same questions and then uh take that data and say, OK, what are the themes that we're seeing here? Ok. What are, what are the things that continue to come up? And so these are obvious issues that we know that we need to address and then they can pick up a, a copy of Beta Driving Force and they could find that issue in my book, whether it's policies, whether it's uh you know, something that has to do with uh school vision admission statement, whether it's something that has to do with uh curriculum, whatever it is and they can look for that in the book. And they could say, OK, here's some, some solid action items that we can take in order to achieve our goal. I love that reminder because people aren't just like, you know, getting, collecting the information, learning about the challenges and the experiences of students and not knowing where to go next. There are several ideas of where to go next in your book. So excellent point. 00:32:22 And I think to, to wrap up and you're kind of leading us down that way. I think this is a perfect opportunity for our close two questions. I usually ask people. So, so the first one is something that you've been learning about. So we talk a lot on the show about like, how we're helping people learn on this, in this conversation for people who are listening. What is something that you have been learning about? And it could literally be anything does not have to relate to education? Ok. Well, you know, I am gonna relate to education because it's just so uh poignant for the time that we're in right now. All right. So I started my career in 1997 as a pe a health teacher. And I love that job. I love the school where I got hired in because you could walk from one end of the hall to the next end of the hall and you can hear about six or seven different languages. The school was so diverse and I love that. So I was a pe teacher for like five years before I became a dina students. And when I became a dina students, I worked in an all black school. And then when I became an assistant principal again, I moved to a school where it's an all black school. And my first principal job was in an all black school. 00:33:27 But my second principal job was in a school that was 70% Hispanic and 30% black title, one low income school. And so I had to learn more about the uh Hispanic culture and how I can accommodate them and build equity for them. So they have a sense of belonging. And even now when we talk about, you know, immigration in the United States and how many diverse students that we're getting? Ok. So I'm learning more and more about different cultures about how they learn about uh how they do things. And so what is teaching me is teaching me to be more informed about uh how to better accommodate these students in these student groups so that I can, you know, support their education in a way that they see it as support in a way that helps them that accelerates their learning. I love that answer. Thank you for sharing that. And I think the last question is just where can people get in touch with you? I think people are going to want you to read your book, learn from you, continue the journey with you. So is there social media website anything like that where they can 100%? 00:34:34 So my website is Dr Don parker.com. That's my website and you can email me at Doctor Don Parker at Dr Don parker.com and they can follow me on Twitter at Doctor Don Parker one. And so I keep it simple. So as long as you know me, you can find me as long as you know my name, you can find me beautiful. Thank you so much, Doctor Parker. This is a great conversation. Thanks for coming. On the show. Thank you, Lindsay. I appreciate it. I love your energy. I love your enthusiasm and I love how you want to just uh share great tips and things that your listeners can do to become better educators to create a better experience for teachers and students. Thank you. If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane Sapir and Jamila Dugan, talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book Street Data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period. I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. 00:35:39 How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the teach better podcast network. Better today. Better tomorrow. And the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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In this episode, we’re exploring a mindset shift for when you feel like you can’t move forward because you don’t have all of the answers. If you’re feeling stuck, have a sense of imposter syndrome, or fearful of making a misstep because you (of course) don’t know everything there is to know, this episode will give you an action plan for addressing those challenges.
Why? There is a lot of research on the value and organization of learning communities pursuing a common goal, including the connections to shared leadership, ongoing data collection and analysis, and learning in partnership with one another, both from failures and successes (Harvard). John Hattie’s work has highlighted Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE) as having the largest impact on student learning when compared with 251 other influential factors (visible-learning.org). I propose we treat not just school committees and teacher teams as learning communities (e.g., communities of practice, PLCs), but also majority-student spaces such as classrooms and student groups. How do we create a culture of learning (in pursuit of justice)? Step 1: Recognize you literally can’t do it alone. The answers to adaptive challenges lie in the community, not with you or any one person (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009). Step 2: Form power-sharing structures and processes. At the school level: Bring students and teachers together to lead school committees. Clarify the decision-making processes for each type of decision. For decisions that will be made collaboratively, specify the process. For example: options are created by the leadership team, shared with grade team committees, shared with all students and staff in that grade, grade-level feedback is collected by grade team committees and shared with leadership team, leadership team shares final plan for approval via consensus voting. This episode contains several concrete ideas for shared leadership at the school level. At the class level: Teachers identify regular opportunities to gather feedback from students about what’s working, what’s not, and ideas for change. This data can be specific experiences students have in class. Consider a range of modalities for how students can share this information. At the peer group level: Co-create group working agreements. Determine how decisions will be made (e.g., consensus vs. majority vote). Specify at least one time point to check in with all members about how the group is functioning and how each member is feeling. Step 3: Regularly practice inquiry cycles Ground it in a search for positive deviance (where things are going well) and experiential data, centering people and perspectives that have not been/are not being served by the current way of doing things. Step 4: Systematize experiential data collection Identify who data is collected from, in which formats, how often, and by whom. Consult Dugan and Safir’s book Street Data for some excellent ideas for implementation. This month, I reviewed several of these ideas on my YouTube channel in 5 minute videos. Step 5: Practice building skills of critical discourse. Identify when and for which topics the group avoids talking about or deflects responsibility. Name the type of discourse being discussed (Bridges Patrick & Lyons, 2022)—namely, polarizing, silencing and denying, intellectualizing, or generative mobilizing discourse. The latter is the ideal form of discourse. Final Tip No one can know it all. The best you can do is to surround yourself with brilliant people with diverse experiences who can help you and the community learn and grow. And once you create this culture, it helps address a wide range of challenges! To help you implement a culture of learning in your community, I’m sharing my Leadership Bundle with you for free. It includes my Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges Mini Workbook, a series of culture building agendas you can use for staff meetings, and my Learning Walk protocol. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 152 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 Educational justice coach, Lindsay Lyons, and here on the time for Teacher podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling, and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director, instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nering out about core curriculum of students. I made this show for you. Here we go. Welcome to episode 152 of the time for teacher podcast. Today, we're talking about creating a culture of learning for justice. So in this episode, we're really exploring a mindset shift and this is for when you feel like you just can't move forward because maybe you don't have all the answers. If you are feeling stuck, have a sense of imposter syndrome or you're fearful of making a misstep because you of course, don't know everything there is to know. This episode will give you an action plan. 00:01:06 So not just the mindset shift, but an action plan as well for addressing those challenges. Here we go. All right. So let's talk about creating a culture of learning for justice. So, first of all, there's a lot of research on the value of and the organization of learning communities. So you may call a learning community A PLC or professional learning community. You might talk about communities of practice. You might have these already set up in your school in different ways. There's a lot of legitimacy to them. Uh Typically they pursue a common goal. They include kind of a either distributed quote unquote leadership approach or what I like to call a shared leadership approach, which typically is more inclusive, primarily were inclusive of students ongoing data collection and analysis and also really uh emphasis on learning in partnership with one another, both from your failures and your successes, right? So there's this just culture of learning in these communities kind of inherent in them. Now, John Hattie's work is another piece that I often reference. The number one largest impact on student learning from his research of over 250 influential factors is collective teacher efficacy or CTE for short, we know that this idea of CTE or collective teacher advocacy is highly impactful for a student learning more than anything else. 00:02:26 And so this idea of being able to figure it out as the team, as a collective, as a community, knowing that we will do right by our students, we will achieve our goal because we are a collective who learn from one another and we could do this together. That's what I would like to bring, not just to those staff level committees, but beyond teacher teams. Beyond those school leadership teams, beyond all the things that already have the PLC set up, we also bring them to spaces that are majority student spaces. This could be classrooms, this could be student groups that are working on a project within the classroom. This could be student groups that exist in extracurricular or after school activities, uh sports teams, you know, whatever space that it's primarily students numerically who make up the the group itself. Now, I also want to copy out here that I often talk about shared leadership and the structures of shared leadership, which of course we will touch on in today's episode. Typically those to do right by students to really shift the dynamics towards justice and bring in historically marginalized groups which are typically students, they're not usually at that level of leadership. 00:03:35 We actually do want to have an equal number, if not a slight majority number of students in student adults, mixed groups. Just because if we have a token student or we have fewer students because of that historical imbalance of power, the students are often feeling like they're silenced and they're not speaking up and they don't feel like they um are are truly on equal footing or in true partnership. With the adults. So with that caveat, I will say, let's try to think now about what this looks like, like how do we create this culture of learning in pursuit of justice in our spaces in our communities? So I think the first step is recognizing as the leader that you literally cannot do this alone. So the answers to adaptive challenges, which are the ones we usually struggle with. Right? I've talked a lot about adaptive challenges on the podcast before. Feel free to go listen to a prior episode if this is your first episode. But adaptive challenges, the ones we struggled with the longest we've been trying for years for decades to solve this problem to address this problem. 00:04:40 And we're not getting anywhere right. Then it's probably adaptive. It's connected to the hearts and minds, the beliefs, the long standing values that we hold and are clashing around. Technical challenges are OK. We're going to implement this new curriculum. I, you know, we, here we go, you're gonna study, you're gonna go to three PD days and study this math curriculum. And for the most part you're gonna be good. Now, there may be adaptive challenges in a curriculum implementation. But technical challenges are most likely fixed by like a quick fix. You know, the answer you just have to do it and move forward. Adaptive challenges are often cultural in nature, there is a cultural shift that needs to be made and what adaptive leadership scholars say is that you as one individual person cannot solve it by nature, these adaptive challenges must be solved in community, in partnership with other folks in your space. So you literally can't do it alone, right? If you're listening to something about leading through change or solving a long standing problem, it's the depth of a nature, you can't do it alone. Move on to step two. So what is step two, step two is form, power sharing structures and processes? 00:05:45 I've talked a lot about this at the school level. So I'll review that a little bit. But then I also want to talk about this at the class level. So teachers in partnership with students and then also at the peer group level. Now this could be teacher teams. I think we often have a lot of processes for these. So, so feel free if that's aligned to your role. So tune into that piece if it's not, and you're more thinking about supporting teachers and their instructional spaces at the classroom level, you might be thinking of peer groups like students or perhaps your role or you're in a supportive role for a person who's in a role that supports student groups holistically throughout the school. Then definitely kind of put on that hat. So let's first talk about the school level. We want to bring students and teachers together to lead uh in in the form of school committees. So this might be a literal school leadership team, but it could also be like our curriculum committee, it could be our grading committee. Um your your grade teams which are typically made up of teachers that teach in that grade. What about the students from that grade? Can they be on those committees? Then once you bring them into the literal structure, they are equal members of this committee, clarify the decision making processes for each type of decision that that group will make. 00:06:55 So for decisions that will be made collaboratively, there's not all of your decisions that are gonna be made by the whole group, getting feedback from every student who that group represents. So if grade 10 is going to make a decision that impacts all of grade 10, you know, you may decide, hey, we're gonna get feedback from all of our students before we make a concrete decision, uh we might do a couple feedback loops. So we get their first round of feedback, we put together two proposals, we have them vote on it and we clarify, you know, we're going with the majority vote rules or we're saying, you know, every student has to be able to live with this. This is a massive decision. You know, we're gonna uh do consensus voting. And so anyone who doesn't reach a three out of five, they have not reached consensus and we need to do another round of feedback, right? So you have to get really specific on which decisions go out to everyone for a vote or consensus or however you're making the decision and how that decision is decided. Now, there are some that are gonna be really minor. So for example, it might be, we are taking a field trip and we know that the students want to go. 00:07:56 We've already had the discussions about wanting to go. Now, we just have to like literally hit the date. And so we're gonna look at the school calendar as that grade team level community and we're gonna just choose the date and you know, hope it works for most kids because it can't work for every kid probably right or something like that. That might be actually something that you do throw back to the students. But you want to be specific, which types of decisions are things that are going to be made on the committee and which types of the decisions go to everyone. And what does that feedback loop look like? So that's something that you want to, to think about when you're talking about a school leadership, an example might be um that options for a major overhaul of a school policy are going to be first created by the leadership team, then shared with grade team committees. Then the grade team committees might share with all of the students and staff in that grade, gather a bunch of feedback, share that data back with the leadership team. And then the leadership team does maybe another round of that feedback loop. So they share, here's like a draft final plan. Let's get approval via consensus voting. 00:08:58 If we don't have consensus, then, you know, we're gonna move forward now, um move forward, sorry with the next loop. Now that probably that type of decision that does that level of detail and round the feedback is probably gonna be something that affects every student in a pretty monumental way. So it might be like we're shifting the grading policy or we're shifting some sort of thing that that every single student is going to be affected by. So again, you just wanna lay those out. There are other episodes where I've done a lot of deep dives on what this looks like. Uh The different things to consider the challenges of doing something like this, especially if right now you're very uh a top down organization and also different school and district level kind of examples of what this looks like or could look like at the various tiers like elementary, middle high school district level. So I'll link to that in the blog post for today. Now, at the class level, this could look like teachers just identifying regular opportunities to gather feedback from their students asking really simple things. It does not have to be a very long list of questions you ask and you can ask the questions in a variety of formats. 00:10:05 This could be a a Google form, this could be a whole class discussion that takes up a full class period or, or time. Um ask things like what is working for you as an individual, what is not working and what ideas do you have for me for change, right? It puts you as the teacher in a leadership position um that the students need to acknowledge, right? That, that you are in that leadership position and you ultimately have the final say, but you are willing to learn from them and that they have a role in really co creating what happens next. So if you have a teacher who's really excited to kind of do this work, this is probably going to be an easy lift. Um It's just a matter of like figuring out where this kind of fits in with like all the curriculum. If you have a teacher who's resistant to doing this, we might take some smaller steps uh like it might be at the end of each unit versus at the end of each week or the end of each day, right? Um where the the teacher really has an opportunity and they might want to make some more specific questions. Like I want feedback on this specific part because they maybe they're only open to change in that specific part, right? 00:11:08 Like the mechanism for like which protocol we use for discussion or whatever, but I don't want to change the class content or whatever, right? So So there can be this gradual process where you ask about a specific thing, get feedback and then because the students co created, it likely will go better next time. And then there's an opening kind of an of a willingness to do more co creation and more feedback from students. But a wider range of things I do recommend that this data and this kind of um invitation for feedback is grounded in specific experiences that students have had in class or with your class work. So I think that's something to just be mindful of that. We are grounding it and like you didn't like that. OK. Why? So maybe you felt really stressed out when I made that deadline and I said there's no uh late work accepted, right? And you had this family thing and you were stressed about it. And so you just felt like there was no flexibility and then you just didn't do the assignment because you're overwhelmed, right? Like that's a specific experience a student has, they can share that and then there's context, right? Because if that same student says, well, you should never have deadlines ever. 00:12:11 Like, then it's very um de contextualized and it's harder for the teacher, one to accept that feedback and two to fully for the teacher to fully understand it. And three for the teacher to understand it and then have the student see that understanding and be more likely to share in the future So I think there's all sorts of pieces there. I also just noted quickly the, you know, considering a range of modalities for how students share the information. I do think that's important, it can be written and it can be verbal in a, in a discussion, but it also could be like share with me um you know, photo voices, one of the things in the student voice world for research that's getting really popular or drawing, especially with young Children, right? Draw me a picture of your experience in this class and then then explain it to me maybe in a one on one conference or in a circle where you, you hold it up and you kind of share um ta take pictures if you're not really an artist or like I am not artistic at all. So I would be like, yes, I could take a picture but I don't want to make a drawing that feels like just totally not my jam. So do some photo voice, right? 00:13:13 Take some pictures that are maybe artsy or maybe just like literal that describe to me kind of your experience in this class and you can again walk me through them or add a caption to each picture and submit it via email, whatever. Now at the peer group level, this is uh again teacher, teacher, peer group or student studio, peer group. I'm I'm putting on like a heavy student hat here because I'm thinking you know, we talk a lot about these processes with adults. So what does it look like for students to kind of core this culture themselves with just a little bit of support from, from maybe the teacher, one of the first things I think is to core group working agreements. And so you can see again those parallels to adults, we want to know how to work together. So anytime there's group work on a project, for example, let's talk about how we do that, right? I think you can again do this in different spaces like sports teams or other sort of after school clubs. But like, how do we wanna work with one another? How do we want to disagree with one another? What are the phrases that we wanna use? We don't want to use all that stuff, then determine again how decisions will be made. So, in our group project, when we make a big decision about the project, are we gonna have consensus or is the majority going to win? 00:14:22 Right. And we think about all the interpersonal dynamics that happen in student groups and what often can like derail the project? My vote would often be consensus because we don't want kind of like a, a peer group who's like really good friends with one another, get paired up or grouped up with another student who's not part of that intimate peer group and then that person just gets out voted, right? We want everyone to feel like they have a good sense of voice. Um And then I would also specify at least one time point, particularly with longer projects, even honestly, if it's a group project that lasts like a class period or something, at least one time during that class period or during the course of the project, at least one, you're gonna check in with every member about how the group is functioning. Do you know how they often like assign roles to students and sometimes of arbitrary and like, you know, we have like the timekeeper and the secretary and the presenter and like often those are really helpful rules. Sometimes they are more or less helpful depending on the project or whatever. I really feel that if nothing else, we have a person who does this check in like they could be like the equity checker or something. 00:15:26 I don't know the experienced old person, you better names than I am probably. But I'm thinking about, you know, how do we check in and ask each individual member, how they are feeling and how the group is functioning and how it's best serving them or not serving them, right? And how it might change. Now, step three, once you've done step two and you really have those power sharing structures and processes in place where we have the decision processes, clarified we have equity of voice, then regularly practice inquiry cycles. So again, we wanna ground this in a search for the positive. Where are things going well, we want to ground it in experiential data centering people and perspectives that historically or currently have not been or are not being served by how we do things right now. Right. So at a school level, those students or the family members or even the staff who are not being heard, they're not being served, they're unhappy, they're not being successful. 00:16:31 Um, they don't have the academic achievement, they're not passing classes, whatever it is. Um Their attendance is low, like something is not working, let's hear from them first. And then if there's several groups, for example, uh let's say that in a high school with grades nine through 12 grades, um, you know, 9, 10 and 12 are struggling, but grade 11 is not struggling with a common challenge maybe attendance. So what's happening in grade 11 that is making students attend more than grades 9, 10 and 12, right? Or maybe out of all of the ninth grade classes, one teacher's class is excelling in attendance like really high attendance and others are not. So like what's happening in that class and having kind of an inquiry mindset, a question where we go collect that experiential data of that positive deviant of that teacher or that class or that community where things are going well, what do we learn from them? 00:17:32 And how do we really transfer that learning to the other spaces and communities now step four is kind of an offshoot of step three. When we gather that experiential data, we want to make sure we systematize the data collection and we wanna make sure we have ongoing processes that we can just repeat because we wanna consistently constantly collect that data. We don't want to do it just once in a while around a big project, we want a constant influx of what is happening for students in our educational community. We want that information. So identify who the data is collected from. Again, centering students and individuals in the community that are not being served in which format. So again, are we doing photo voice drawings, a Google form of opportunity for discussion like a focus group. How often we're collecting this and by whom? So who is responsible for gathering that information? If we want student data, can we train and ideally pay students to be trained, pay them in, you know, money or by class credit or something as like a research or independent research study or something course, you know, whatever it is. 00:18:42 But can we have students be the ones interviewing and collecting and gathering data from other students because they will be better received? Like try to figure all those pieces out. I highly recommend you consult Jamila Dugan and Shane Sapper Book Street Data. There are some excellent ideas for implementation. And actually this month, February 2024 I reviewed several of these ideas on my youtube channel in five minute video spurts. So if you want some concrete ideas for like, what might this look like in practice, feel free to check those out, check that book out. It is amazing. And then finally, step five, I really encourage for the sustainability of the project, for the justice centeredness of all of your leadership, all of your, you know, community endeavors. I highly recommend that you all individually and collectively practice building skills of critical discourse. So we have to be able to tackle the tough stuff. So this includes identifying probably first and foremost, identifying when and for which topics, the group and this could be any group, this could be like your leadership committee, this could be a classroom, um avoids talking about or deflects responsibility for, for particular topics. 00:19:54 So when this topic comes up, we say, oh, well, we can't do anything about that because that's so and so is like the families, the right issue or um you know, we, we make a joke when this topic is brought up because we're actually really uncomfortable talking about it or everyone's eyes kind of like look down at their lap when this topic comes up, right? Like we wanna first identify where are we kind of like crumbling and falling apart and not actually digging in. Also, um Juan Eicholtz has this fantastic kind of discourse quadrant which Doctor Sheri Bridges Patrick and I have adapted for uh adaptive leadership chapter, we, we co-authored and, and we talk about these four types of discourse, particularly around racial discourse where we have the polarizing dimension, right? We're on like separate teams and we're kind of entrenched in our positions. Um We have the silencing and denying which is kind of that avoidance, right? We're not going to talk about this. We have the intellectualizing type of discourse where we're just kind of in our heads but not our hearts. And then we have what we ideally want, which is generative mobilizing discourse. And so the this last one is really the ideal form of discourse. 00:21:00 It's very helpful to diagnose. You'll you'll notice there's a lot of diagnosis here, right? We diagnose what we're avoiding talking about. We diagnose the type of discourse being discussed a lot of critical discourse. It is difficult, it's difficult to build that culture of learning and being having that critical discourse as a venue for learning and censoring marginalized perspectives and experiences, right? In all the things that we need. So we first have to diagnose where we're going wrong and then we have to try to build our skills through practice and through redirection. Getting back on track when we try to avoid that or deflect responsibility, right? Recognizing when we're intellectualizing and not using our hearts, those kinds of things to get on the generative mobilizing discourse track. So that is an ongoing process and that's what makes it truly sustainable. Yes, we have these systems of kind of how we share decision making power and leadership. And yes, we regularly practice inquiry and we collect data, but we have to continue the practice every day of building skills of critical discourse because we can do all of those other things. 00:22:06 And when it comes to the actual discussion, if we can't say out loud, our thoughts around making the hard decisions around analyzing the challenging data, around digging into adaptive challenges, long standing problems, right? White supremacy, all of the things that are going to come up and be hard, then we can't actually move the needle forward. We can't actually make change and the change and be a a true culture of learning for justice. So to wrap this up, no one can know it all. And so if you're feeling that burden of like I can't do this thing because like I just don't have all the answers yet where I need to learn more before I act. Yes, I think we do need to learn more but not just as individuals. We need to create the community to learn together collectively, right? The best thing we can do is to surround ourselves with brilliant people with different diverse experiences who can help you as an individual leader and also the community as a collective learn and grow. And then once you've established this culture, you feel it, you foster it, you grow it and that's going to help address a wide range of challenges, like most hard things that you have to tackle are going to be served by this community that you've built. 00:23:19 So, in conclusion, I'm going to help you with uh establishing a little culture of learning in your community. I'm gonna share my leadership bundle with you where I've just kind of bundled my most popular resources around this idea of shared adaptive leadership. So this is going to include my diagnosing adaptive challenges mini workbook, a series of culture building agendas you can use for staff meetings and also my learning walk protocol that ideally involves a mix of stakeholders including students to do this work. You can grab that at today's blog post, Lindsay be lions.com/blog/one 52. If you like this episode, I bet you'll be just as jazz as I am about my coaching program for increasing student led discussions in your school, Shane Sapir and Jamila Dugan. Talk about a pedagogy of student voice in their book Street data. They say students should be talking for 75% of class time. Do students in your school talk for 75% of each class period. I would love for you to walk into any classroom in your community and see this in action. If you're smiling to yourself as you listen right now, grab 20 minutes on my calendar to brainstorm. How I can help you make this big dream a reality. I'll help you build a comprehensive plan from full day trainings and discussion protocols like circle and Socratic seminar to follow up classroom visits where I can plan witness and debrief discussion based lessons with your teachers. 00:24:31 Sign up for a nerdy no strings attached to brainstorm. Call at Lindsay, Beth lions.com/contact. Until next time leaders think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better podcast network better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better.com/podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
August 2024
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