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81: One Teacher Can't Save the World
13 Plays4 years ago
This is a recording of our Teacher Powered Schools Virtual Conference 2020 presentation: Sharing Power with Students: Reframing Systems Toward a Liberatory Pedagogy. This session dives into why reform doesn't work, how teachers can use collective action to change systems, and what really, is the point of us working against inhumane structures if not much is actually changing?
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 81 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:00:07
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
00:00:12
Speaker
This is a recording of our teacher powered schools 2020 virtual conference where Nick Covington and I focused on systems based thinking and reform.
00:00:19
Speaker
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Megan Lambert, Abraham Angel, and Dina Koretsky.
00:00:26
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:28
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Values in Education and Society
00:00:45
Speaker
hoping to make this make the most out of your time here and understanding that we only can arrive at these things through kind of a dialogue.
00:00:54
Speaker
So we thought we would pose some questions for you knowing that we have sort of our take on things, but that we'll share with you as a result of this.
00:01:02
Speaker
But we were wondering if anyone would be willing to maybe share for a second about what it is that we value in education, in society, in life.
00:01:13
Speaker
I feel like I and educators, we value learning and that can look very different, but I value learning.
00:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, I'm the school social worker at my school.
00:01:23
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And so for me, I think I really value relationships and connection with students and family.
00:01:30
Speaker
I've heard some people say frequently in some circles on that education should be more of an objective sort of values neutral endeavor.
00:01:39
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And it's interesting to think about if we believe that education has an impact on the outcomes of society,
00:01:45
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And when we look at societal outcomes, you know, do we see learning, do we see relationships and connecting to the community?
00:01:52
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And a lot of times I think of the outcomes of society sort of in defiance of our values.
00:01:58
Speaker
So this is a hypothetical here.
00:01:59
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What would you have to say if we looked at the outcomes of society today?
00:02:03
Speaker
You might say that we value things like competition.
Aligning Education with Societal Values
00:02:06
Speaker
or inequality, social stratification, racial hierarchies, normalized violence, maybe exploitation of the poor, of workers.
00:02:17
Speaker
You might see a debtor economy in all of this as well.
00:02:20
Speaker
So if we look at those things and we bristle and we say that that doesn't necessarily align with our stated values and maybe some of the unstated ones from our other participants as well,
00:02:30
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We recognize in that tension there is a challenge, right?
00:02:34
Speaker
There's a challenge to the premise that education has an impact on the world.
00:02:38
Speaker
When we look at the world and we see outcomes that don't represent those values, we can either believe that education matters and that we need to change the systems of education in order to align the outcomes with what it is that we believe.
Systemic Issues in Education and Society
00:02:52
Speaker
We have to change to a systems focus
00:02:55
Speaker
and away from individual teachers and look at the bigger picture that we can move forward with here.
00:03:02
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So when we think about school, and I hate to bear it in negative news in the year 2020 with all the things that are going on, but I swear this will have a positive spin towards the end.
00:03:12
Speaker
But this was going on before COVID, right?
00:03:14
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We've had problems in schools long before the pandemic, long before racial injustice has been brought to the forefront.
00:03:22
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of American TV screens, et cetera.
00:03:24
Speaker
And in school, we see historically low mental health.
00:03:27
Speaker
Engagement is incredibly low.
00:03:29
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75% of students in the year 2020 found that they were depressed, anxious, or didn't like school altogether.
00:03:36
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And just motivation, cynicism, and apathy are growing.
00:03:40
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And the survey day that we have about school is not good.
00:03:43
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The majority of students are disengaged, especially by the time they reach high school.
00:03:47
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And I would be willing to bet that when a study comes out surrounding schools during COVID, that things aren't going so hot.
00:03:56
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But as Nick was talking about, there are ways of changing that that we'll get to in a second.
00:04:01
Speaker
One of the things that really, I think, was maybe a distressing prophecy of 2020, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists back in late January of this year, which feels like an eternity ago, but they had actually announced that the atomic clock was moving to 100 seconds to midnight.
00:04:20
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So no longer framing that doomsday clock in the sense of hours or minutes, but really counting down the seconds to global catastrophe.
00:04:29
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And I'll actually read a little bit of a quote from that press release because it said, it's 100 seconds to midnight.
00:04:35
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We are now expressing how close the world is to catastrophe in seconds, not hours or even minutes.
00:04:40
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It's the closest to doomsday we have ever been in the history of the doomsday clock.
00:04:45
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We now face a true emergency, an absolutely unacceptable state of world affairs
00:04:50
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that has eliminated any margin for error or further delay.
00:04:54
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And they're talking pretty broadly there about nuclear proliferation.
00:04:58
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They're talking about climate change.
00:04:59
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They're also talking about disinformation campaigns through social media and the internet.
Critique of Education Reforms
00:05:05
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So the reform movements that we've seen that have tried to address school quality and learning outcomes have actually not necessarily
00:05:17
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surfaced the doomsday clock in any sort of meaningful sense if we keep ticking our way closer and closer to midnight.
00:05:23
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So that traditional accountability framework really relies on individualizing structural problems.
00:05:30
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And it makes it so that way the educational outcomes fall along really predictable and racialized lines.
00:05:36
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it also invades and sort of colonizes our language of school quality and what it means to be a good school, right?
00:05:43
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So when you close your eyes and in your mind's eye visualize a good school, or even if you Google a good school, or if you Google a suburban versus an urban school, you know, you'll see well-funded, majority white, suburban, high socioeconomic status schools,
00:06:00
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but with a robust curricular, with robust extracurricular programs for students to dive into.
00:06:06
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On the other hand, bad schools or urban schools often the framing is, are majority non-white.
00:06:12
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They serve historically disadvantaged backgrounds.
00:06:15
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They suffer from a lack of funding through lower property tax incomes.
00:06:20
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That's the funding formula predominantly in the United States.
00:06:23
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They focus then on a back-to-basics curriculum and weed out things like art and music and extracurricular activities that in a suburban school may provide enrichment opportunities and really are likely to have a police presence and a carceral pedagogy that tries to bring law and order to the classrooms.
00:06:47
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That looks like accountability for students through discipline and behavior policies.
00:06:51
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That looks like for teachers through the use of test scores as a cudgel wielded against them or value added metrics for salary increases or incentive pay.
00:07:01
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And even for schools up until recently, right?
00:07:04
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Schools have been threatened with liquidation if their test scores were not up to par.
00:07:09
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So really wielding accountability as a cudgel against schools, students, and teachers.
00:07:15
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And national reform efforts have been rooted in that law and order message to schools and even reform's biggest proponents for the last two decades.
00:07:24
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So I'm looking at the Fordham Institute here.
00:07:27
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One of their leading minds, Robert Pondicio has said in a couple of different places, he said, quote, if we're clear eyed and candid, we have to concede that nearly three decades of ed reform has been a mixed blessing, lots of disruption in return for less than stellar results.
00:07:43
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And that's a quote from somebody who led the charge on this for two decades.
00:07:46
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So traditional reform has done nothing to try and alleviate any of the systemic, social, political, economic, or environmental ills.
00:07:56
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And it hasn't created any kind of widespread social transformation.
00:08:00
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the outcomes of schools still fall along the same socioeconomic patterns that they have for 40 years, though it certainly has contributed to that sorting as neighborhood schools decline and policies like vouchers and school choice become more and more popular.
00:08:17
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So the question, right, is are teachers to blame for this, Chris?
00:08:21
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I'm sure if we did like a quick survey here, the majority of you don't feel like you're responsible for the plagues of reality that we see across the United States and globally.
00:08:33
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Ultimately, what we have to accept is that no matter how great we are within our own classrooms at teaching our classes, at impacting our students, we of course are making a difference in our students' lives.
00:08:44
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But one great teacher doing great work just within the confines of their own class within this very oppressive system are going to have a very difficult time ensuring that they are unsuccessful with their own students when they're being upheld to, for example, a whitewash standard or to standardized testing.
00:09:01
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But also don't burn out themselves.
00:09:03
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It's exhausting doing this type of work.
00:09:06
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And when you're constantly going up against a system that's trying to hold you back, you see teachers leaving the profession at fairly rapid rates.
00:09:14
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This is the exact same thing as if you have a system where people are fighting back and it just doesn't work on a greater level.
00:09:21
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For example, in environmentalism, you can take shorter showers, but ultimately there are giant corporations who are polluting water and using water at exorbitant rates.
00:09:29
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You'll have police reform metrics, but...
00:09:32
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Just because you have one good cop doesn't mean that the entirety of the police accountability system is going to fall into place in work.
00:09:38
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It's the exact same thing in teaching.
00:09:40
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You can have one great teacher, but ultimately when you look at a school-wide or district-wide level or even across the entire country, you're going to see a breakdown there where people just aren't getting the results that they want.
00:09:54
Speaker
And when I'm talking about systems, we're talking specifically about things like grading and discipline.
00:10:00
Speaker
And all these like little fads that come and go, especially when it comes to quote unquote progressive education, not real progressive education, as I would define it.
00:10:09
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Things like using your LMS gradebook to like analyze some kind of 190-80 and trying to figure out the bell curve.
00:10:17
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Or...
00:10:18
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Identifying people who quote unquote deserve punishment and having them serve in some kind of virtual detention.
00:10:26
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Having your different passion workshops that are ultimately aimed towards putting people into a very specific career instead of identifying the things that they truly love and trying to figure out ways to match that down the road.
00:10:36
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Or my personal favorite, taking the great idea behind mindfulness, something that so many people could benefit from right now, being able to emotionally manage themselves and accept the way that things are in a way that's at least tolerant.
00:10:51
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While it's incorporated in schools, mindfulness is basically just test prep.
00:10:56
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This idea of do some yoga and you'll get through the standardized test as opposed to asking, why are we inventing systems where people are doing yoga to get through something that's expected them at school, which doesn't make any sense in a learning environment.
00:11:10
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And we've attempted to reform these things, right?
00:11:14
Speaker
So we have had these systems, give or take, for decades, if not longer.
00:11:19
Speaker
And people, reformers, have attempted to change these things.
00:11:23
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And what's really interesting is that these attempts at reform probably come from a well-intentioned space, or maybe even a research-informed space, but often get subsumed by the other various systemic factors that remain unchanged.
00:11:39
Speaker
So standards-based grading, for example, started as
00:11:42
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a way to provide more opportunities for students to learn material outside of maybe a rigid pacing guide or the notion that you'd have to learn the material by next Tuesday at 4 p.m.
00:11:54
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and you know there's no retakes and redos.
00:11:57
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However, what ends up happening in the long run is that standards-based grading ignores the detrimental effects of grading on
00:12:05
Speaker
students' self-identity, on students' behavior.
00:12:08
Speaker
And the research actually does say that students who get poor grades, those can be a predictor of poor behaviors later on and not necessarily the other way around, as we would think.
00:12:19
Speaker
And the research around that actually says that that can lead to a negative spiral for kids as poor grades lead to poor behavior, which lead to further poor grades and poor behavior, et cetera.
Rethinking Education Goals
00:12:31
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And that line for students could start with
00:12:34
Speaker
a project that they thought that they were very successful on, that they really put their passion into and spent time on, and then got a C-.
00:12:42
Speaker
All right.
00:12:42
Speaker
And then their mind kind of shutting down the evaluation on their capacity to create and to learn and rejecting the C- and saying, well, maybe my teacher hates me, or maybe I'm not, you know, history is not my thing.
00:12:58
Speaker
Or maybe we all have those moments in our school experience
00:13:02
Speaker
in which grading played a largely negative role, and the research would back that up as well.
00:13:07
Speaker
Moving from standards-based grading, which might be a reform method, to a method of ungrading that actually works to shift the power from teachers and on to students, right?
00:13:19
Speaker
To shift from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation.
00:13:22
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The doing to model of school to the doing with model of school as well.
00:13:27
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So
00:13:27
Speaker
But needless to say, the standards-based grading fails to address the larger sort of sociological and psychological impacts of that, and mostly just serves to replicate bad grading practices in a new way.
00:13:41
Speaker
Alfie Kohn calls this lipstick on a pig.
00:13:43
Speaker
So another one of these reform systems could be tacked on restorative justice.
00:13:47
Speaker
So it's a way to form within the discriminatory structures, but that makes everybody feel better about it in the process, right?
00:13:55
Speaker
Because we can imagine instead of assigning a detention or instead of kicking a student out of class,
00:14:01
Speaker
We'll have a restorative meeting with them sort of in this token manner, but it lacks the relationship building capacity to actually transform student behavior and student identities, to actually identify as members of a learning community.
00:14:17
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We haven't removed that hierarchical structure that says some students are smart and some students are dumb.
00:14:23
Speaker
Some students are capable and some are not.
00:14:25
Speaker
Some can contribute, some can't.
00:14:27
Speaker
And so students shut down, right?
00:14:28
Speaker
They remove themselves from those communities too.
00:14:31
Speaker
Those notions that we try to prepare students to be lifelong learners and then, you know, set them on a bell schedule where they have to learn someone else's content for eight hours a day for half
00:14:42
Speaker
for however many years.
00:14:44
Speaker
And then to Chris's point about mindfulness as well, mindfulness in pursuit of goals like test preparation or to improve GPAs or even like as brain breaks throughout the day, which could be, which can be beneficial things.
00:14:59
Speaker
Don't get me wrong.
00:15:00
Speaker
But what are we needing a brain break from, right?
00:15:02
Speaker
What is so stressful and detrimental about the school experience that you just need some time to step away from that thing?
00:15:11
Speaker
I know that when I'm really engaged in work that's meaningful and purposeful to me, I don't want to take a break.
00:15:16
Speaker
I want to keep going for hours because if not, I'm going to lose that flow.
00:15:19
Speaker
And if you lose the flow, it's hard to find the flow again.
00:15:22
Speaker
So it's paying lip service to reform ideas.
00:15:26
Speaker
ideas maybe to check off some boxes, but without actually having to change the underlying structures that cause us to want to be mindful and passionate and to have to restore justice and to have to do all these other things in the first place.
00:15:43
Speaker
So I wonder if instead of spending time with the latest sort of fad reform, what if we actually looked at shifting the systems to make school a more humane place in the first place?
00:15:57
Speaker
Right.
00:15:57
Speaker
And speaking exactly to that point, we see these reforms across multiple categories of schools, whether it be public schools, private schools, charter schools, etc., where reform always goes in the exact same way.
00:16:10
Speaker
And if you've spoken to pretty much any teacher who's been around for longer than like three or four years, you'll probably know this exact cycle, which is
00:16:18
Speaker
I'll use mindfulness as the example again, SEL, which are both fantastic ideas.
00:16:23
Speaker
You have people post ideas like Carol Dweck with the growth mindset, which in and of itself is a great idea, the idea that you can always grow and get better.
00:16:34
Speaker
But when you add these ideas to a system that assumes that the point of the school district is to increase test scores, to weed out those who don't know what they're doing, quote unquote, to act on often racist classes, sexist norms, it's not any surprise that these systems that are meant to reform are not going to work in the way that they're intended.
00:16:58
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And then as a result, they become short little fads because they don't work.
00:17:02
Speaker
If I try to implement mindfulness in my practice and the practice itself is inhumane and I never question the system, of course, at the end of the day, as a teacher, I'm going to be cynical,
00:17:14
Speaker
apathetic, I'm gonna be burnt out because like, oh, here comes another reform, it's not gonna work.
00:17:19
Speaker
And then we start to question, well, is mindfulness dumb?
00:17:22
Speaker
And then someone's gonna start talking about mindfulness and we're gonna be speaking two different languages about the exact same thing.
00:17:27
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One of us who's burnt out from it and another one of us that has read about what it quote unquote really is, which is really confusing.
00:17:34
Speaker
It's difficult to have a conversation with someone about these ideas when so many of us have been turned off from these ideas because of how they've been implemented within schools.
00:17:43
Speaker
Then we end up returning to the status quo, which is why schools really haven't changed all that much.
00:17:47
Speaker
I know many of you work at schools that have really awesome programs.
00:17:52
Speaker
It's a constant battle to maintain that program because it's so easy to get lost back into that status quo because of what is asked from us by the higher-ups, by someone who is trying to get us to go back there, which is the reason why so many, especially charter schools, fail, or the reason why many public schools, it's just difficult to do these cool, crazy things.
00:18:12
Speaker
Reform also perpetuates the norm, right?
00:18:15
Speaker
It leads to what's called a neoliberal arms race, which is this idea of it's all about making more and more money.
00:18:22
Speaker
If something gets in the way of a student achieving a quote-unquote high grade in order to get to a quote-unquote good school in order to be quote-unquote successful, all framed around making as much money as possible and making the United States competitive against other nations, then, well, we may as well not do it.
00:18:39
Speaker
And that leads to so many different possible issues when we're thinking about what does that mean for our kids?
00:18:45
Speaker
What are they going to think when they graduate?
00:18:47
Speaker
Are they going to think that their skills are important because they're important to them?
00:18:51
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Or are they important because they make themselves money?
00:18:53
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And therefore, does that mean that people that aren't making money aren't as valuable as them?
00:18:57
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It leads to all these really interesting parts of the hidden curriculum, which is based off anything from cogs in the machine to assembly line thinking to what is now referred to as 21st century skills.
00:19:08
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All of them are very, very, very much connected to this idea of building a better workforce and centering education around making money.
00:19:15
Speaker
So then we have to question, what happens or can happen if we change the end goal?
00:19:21
Speaker
What if we rethink schools as opposed to being something that ranks and sorts or something that punishes or demeans, but something that's entirely different, really analyzing the root or zero-based thinking of what could be.
Collective Action for Systemic Change
00:19:35
Speaker
So then as we think about, to Chris's point, if we put all of this burden on individual teachers, then the people who care the most are going to be the people who end up getting burnt out and leaving the system.
00:19:49
Speaker
And that's the worst possible outcome because the people who step into their place are probably going to be more than happy to fit in and play their role rather than push
00:19:59
Speaker
where they can leverage the relative privilege that teachers have.
00:20:03
Speaker
So when we're talking about what makes a bad teacher versus a good teacher, again, I think about this in my own practice, and maybe many of you do as well.
00:20:12
Speaker
I think the things that I do the worst in my job are the things that most people look at and would consider as good teaching.
00:20:21
Speaker
It's grading, it's maintaining grade books, it's the discipline side of things, it's, you know, all of those things that you would normally see when you walk into a classroom are largely like devoid in mine.
00:20:33
Speaker
You'll hear a lot of students, you know, talking about work, working independently.
00:20:38
Speaker
collaborating to the extent that we can when we're wearing masks and socially distant even in even in our online classes so as we talk about that shift from the individual to the system it's not enough for me to be able to do those things because students that leave my room end up going across the hall or they go to the other wing where someone is running a classroom that is built to reinforce hierarchy all right and students in my classrooms talk about grades all the time for the other classes i gotta
00:21:04
Speaker
75 in this, I got an 82 in this, oh I totally bombed this or that other that other assessment and at no point did they actually talk about what they're learning, what they're doing, what it is that they're creating, what it is that we're building together.
00:21:17
Speaker
So it's all just about like that ranking and sorting and that notion that some students are better than others because what, because they got a couple of questions right on a math test or something.
00:21:29
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So
00:21:29
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At this point, I'm just going to be ranting, but as we shift to the system, if my classroom looks like that, all right, and Chris's looks like this, and Kurt's, well, then that starts to actually push us towards a systemic change because the power of collective action actually helps us do more things together than individually.
00:21:51
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When we think about it,
00:21:52
Speaker
The values, the outcomes of the world that we talked about at the beginning communicate, or the outcomes and the values behind it, right?
00:22:00
Speaker
I said, we value things like competition, inequality, stratification, racial hierarchy, normalized violence, exploitation, a debtor economy, right?
00:22:09
Speaker
Those are the things, again, if we believe that education has any impact at all,
00:22:14
Speaker
We have to say that the system is currently built around serving those values.
00:22:20
Speaker
If we are to shift our outcomes, if we want different outcomes, right, if we want to close racial wealth gaps, if we want to improve graduation rates, if we want to actually slow or reverse climate change and deal with police violence, if we want to make any connections to the most powerful social movements that we have in the country,
00:22:43
Speaker
in the world today.
00:22:43
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We have to start with our values.
00:22:45
Speaker
All right.
00:22:46
Speaker
So how do we center to your points, learning and relationships?
00:22:51
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How do we center empathy?
00:22:52
Speaker
Where does empathy show up on the test on Tuesday?
00:22:55
Speaker
Right.
00:22:56
Speaker
What's the assessment that you're going to give to kids to show, to teach them how to be more empathetic thinkers?
00:23:01
Speaker
How are you going to grade that?
00:23:02
Speaker
Where's the rubric for empathy?
00:23:04
Speaker
All right.
00:23:04
Speaker
So it almost seems like the things that we grade and that we spend the most time grading don't actually matter a whole lot in the grand scheme of things.
00:23:11
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Right.
00:23:11
Speaker
In fact, our human brains are designed to forget the things that we don't use and that we don't care about.
00:23:16
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But how many hard fought battles and how many hours do we spend trying to stuff those things into kids heads because it's going to improve test scores maybe by a lot.
00:23:26
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All right.
00:23:26
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Does that matter?
00:23:27
Speaker
Can we build a better world and not even improve test scores?
00:23:31
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You know, I would argue that maybe we could because a shift in our values is not necessarily what we're measuring with our current measurements, right?
00:23:39
Speaker
How do we measure community connection, right?
00:23:42
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Everything about our system today is, especially in 2020, is meant to isolate.
00:23:46
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It's meant to alienate.
00:23:47
Speaker
It's meant to put you in competition with the people around you for work,
00:23:52
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departments, for everything else, how can we, instead of feeling isolated, feel connected, feel like we have some responsibility to each other and to the communities that we serve?
00:24:03
Speaker
So how do we shift from, on the left-hand side over here, valuing test scores, which absolutely are a preparation to have our students be trolled and exploited outside of schools, to real, authentic problem-solving out in the world?
00:24:20
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How can we
00:24:22
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move from thinking about our kids as as yet fully realized human beings and actually get them involved in changing the communities that they serve right now to address the most important issues that we have, to be the strongest voice instead of being cloistered in a
00:24:37
Speaker
in a classroom?
00:24:38
Speaker
How do we shift from a teacher focus on grades and grading, and I'm going to put compliance in there as well, to one in which we're the guide for students as they go throughout the world and explore and problem solve and change.
00:24:53
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And I know so many of you that are with us today are involved in doing that work, which is fantastic.
00:24:58
Speaker
How do we get kids from being consumers?
00:25:00
Speaker
Again, training people to be passive consumers for the rest of their lives to actually being critical creators and maybe even critical consumers, all right, to actually understand where messages and where media is coming from and the means to be able to push back on those things, okay?
00:25:20
Speaker
And then to move from competition to
00:25:23
Speaker
which is going to create winners and losers and internalize those messages for kids to one in which we understand that learning is not a race.
00:25:32
Speaker
It's a collaborative effort.
00:25:33
Speaker
We're only ever gonna get there together.
00:25:35
Speaker
If we look at traditional practice or even reformed practice within these things to what we actually want the system to be, how can we expect outcomes to be any different unless we start with values?
00:25:47
Speaker
One thing I would add, too, that we probably should have thrown on there is just the idea of student voice speaking to like the narrative of the conference.
00:25:54
Speaker
Of course.
00:25:55
Speaker
How do you teach students to be a little revolutionary or rebellious?
00:25:59
Speaker
Not necessarily like encouraging them to overthrow the school, but just the idea of what happens to a student if they talk back or stand up for themselves?
00:26:08
Speaker
Are they shut down instantly or are they heard?
00:26:11
Speaker
And how do we deal with students who maybe don't want to do the things that we want them to do?
00:26:18
Speaker
Is the response to force them to do it or is the response to work with the student and listen to them and hear from them and build a system with our students as opposed to mandating everything from the top down?
00:26:28
Speaker
Because again, that gets back into that reform thing.
00:26:31
Speaker
we can shift to having a creative, cooperative, interesting problem-solving curriculum.
00:26:36
Speaker
But if a student says, no, I don't want to do that, and we just force them to do it, that kind of feeds the entire purpose of what we're talking about here today.
00:26:45
Speaker
So before I show this next part here, I want to preface that there's no silver bullet to solving any of these problems.
00:26:51
Speaker
There is not ever going to be a program or a curriculum or a
00:26:56
Speaker
a speaker who can come in and say, I can make your school into a problem solving school because it's not how education works.
00:27:03
Speaker
It's not a scientific problem.
00:27:05
Speaker
This is a human problem.
00:27:07
Speaker
Every single community and every single group of people and every single student is going to want something slightly different.
00:27:14
Speaker
Therefore, it's organic.
00:27:16
Speaker
It's a creative profession.
00:27:17
Speaker
We have to speak with others and learn from them and think about if these are the values and we can bring some of those values as a group that we're aiming towards,
00:27:25
Speaker
How can we start from square one to ensure that that happens?
Values of the Human Restoration Project
00:27:30
Speaker
So bringing us back to kind of this point, when we're talking about what do we value, we're not referring just to teachers, we're referring to the entire school community.
00:27:40
Speaker
And we have to think about, again, our students being led toward those values.
00:27:45
Speaker
At Human Restoration Project, we see it as 20 different categories.
00:27:49
Speaker
These are really broad.
00:27:51
Speaker
But you can see here, we summarize them into four different value statements.
00:27:54
Speaker
I'll just go through them really quickly.
00:27:56
Speaker
We believe that learning is rooted in purpose-finding and community relevance, that social justice is the cornerstone to educational success, that dehumanizing practices do not belong in schools, and that learners are respectful toward each other's innate human worth.
00:28:08
Speaker
And what's interesting is when you look at each one of these systems, whether it be connecting to the community, whether it be adopting critical pedagogy, a demanding inclusive space of supporting and elevating teachers, whatever it might be, not only do you see change at a student and teacher level, you see it drastically across the entire world through research.
00:28:28
Speaker
When you change the question and research from, okay, I want you to increase your SLO or your test score by 10% by the end of the year,
00:28:37
Speaker
The value of that research drastically changes when you say, hey, are you happy being at school and you survey students?
00:28:44
Speaker
It's absolutely fascinating to note that when you shift the question that you ask, how much these different changes make a difference within your students' lives and also your life, just because it's more fun to do.
00:28:57
Speaker
So Nick and I typed something up that's kind of a summary of these thoughts that relates to other links and other ideas and other things that are going on.
00:29:05
Speaker
That's kind of our whole shtick.
00:29:07
Speaker
The world sucks, but we can make it better by changing the system.
00:29:12
Speaker
We'll take your applause.
00:29:13
Speaker
What's the Jeb Bush line?
00:29:14
Speaker
Please clap.
00:29:17
Speaker
Can we spend some time together here since we have time talking questions and just unpacking stuff?
00:29:22
Speaker
The other big thing about Human Restoration Project is that we wanna model the kind of change that we wanna see, not just in professional development and in the community, but build the network of educators who's doing this work so we're not working in isolation.
00:29:35
Speaker
So we can ask each other ideas and be critical friends of the things that we wanna try and do in our classrooms too.
00:29:41
Speaker
Yeah, I did want to address Danica asked in or put in the chat and Chris responded here too with the pressure for many students of color to get high paying jobs and propel themselves and their families out of multi generational poverty and right if students are working against a system that sorts and ranks right teachers are working against this too, but all those other outside forces in society are
00:30:04
Speaker
working against those communities of color as well.
00:30:07
Speaker
So that way the people who can get out end up being the rare few in a lot of instances.
00:30:14
Speaker
So it's the difference between contributing to stratification and just letting one or two kids and families out
00:30:21
Speaker
out of systemic poverty and structural racist structures to saying, well, let's change those racist structures and address systemic poverty, which, you know, is a broader social change than trying to, you know, uplift one thing in one place at one time that's going to be futile for a lot of people.
Empowering Teachers and Students
00:30:42
Speaker
Thought that was interesting.
00:30:43
Speaker
Assuming that the community is negative, right?
00:30:45
Speaker
Assuming the idea that
00:30:47
Speaker
there's not something to contribute to.
00:30:50
Speaker
Which as someone who teaches a CTE class, so like a career type center, that is the norm.
00:30:57
Speaker
That is the idea that's constantly perpetuated.
00:31:00
Speaker
Train students to get jobs that way they leave.
00:31:03
Speaker
Can either of you say anything about how you've managed to get any part of the system to change?
00:31:09
Speaker
So for me,
00:31:12
Speaker
A lot of this comes down to a combination of two different ideas, which one is creative noncompliance, which is where you intentionally do something that you're not supposed to do, and then apologize if and when you get caught.
00:31:27
Speaker
The other way is through mitigated risk.
00:31:29
Speaker
So understanding that there are some things at the end of the day that we have to report out on, but we can find ways to give students as much control over that as possible.
00:31:40
Speaker
So the one that first comes to mind is my class does not give a grade until the end of the year.
00:31:46
Speaker
and 99.9% of students get an A. Within my class, students over the course of the entire year self-assess everything that they do.
00:31:56
Speaker
I basically take no share in that and that students basically know, hey, at the end of this year, I'm gonna get an A. And what's shocking is if you tell students upfront, hey, you're gonna get an A at the end of the year,
00:32:07
Speaker
They actually work way harder on stuff because that overarching weight has been lifted off their shoulders.
00:32:15
Speaker
And I think that there's a lot of assumptions because of the system that we're in that students are going to use your class as a study hall or that they're going to not care or something like that.
00:32:22
Speaker
And there are honestly students that do that.
00:32:25
Speaker
There are students that treat it that way.
00:32:27
Speaker
But if you compare it to the number of students who had the stress, that had the apathy, that maybe wouldn't have done anything at all to begin with if it was underneath the traditional system, it's not even comparable.
00:32:40
Speaker
So literally just telling kids, hey, you're getting an A.
00:32:44
Speaker
And then pretty much everyone gets an A is one notion.
00:32:48
Speaker
Another thing would be taking discipline as much as humanly possible away from the administrator's office.
00:32:53
Speaker
Pretty much as long as the student isn't doing anything that's a direct threat to anyone, they never leave.
00:32:58
Speaker
Because I know that the second that I send a student to the administrator, that is going to turn into...
00:33:04
Speaker
and administrative discipline protocol.
00:33:06
Speaker
And it's going to be gross.
00:33:07
Speaker
The kid probably won't learn anything.
00:33:08
Speaker
They'll probably get attention and it will just continue the things that we've always done.
00:33:12
Speaker
Instead, that's going to turn into a conversation and it's going to turn into restorative justice that happens within the classroom based off of like restorative justice training, like peacekeeping circles and things like that nature.
00:33:22
Speaker
Or it could be transforming a classroom into a creative hands-on space where students have almost complete freedom and choice in what they do every single day.
00:33:31
Speaker
I found that if you tell students, hey, just so you know upfront, these are the things that we need to cover, but there's a ton of different ways to go about it.
00:33:39
Speaker
And here are some ideas that I have, but feel free to kind of do whatever you want.
00:33:42
Speaker
I'll be around to talk with you about it.
00:33:44
Speaker
they always end up producing way better stuff than if I would have written out a quote unquote like really well planned lesson, which is what I feel like I used to do.
00:33:53
Speaker
But sadly, that's not what students always wanna do.
00:33:57
Speaker
So it's trying to find ways as much as possible to turn power over to students, trying to find ways to think critically about these things.
00:34:02
Speaker
And really for me, the hardest part is rationalizing the assumptions that are there.
00:34:08
Speaker
Rationalizing that students are not going to just turn the classroom into chaos the second that you remove some of these systems.
00:34:16
Speaker
Can I speak a little bit to that too, Chris?
00:34:18
Speaker
I don't know if you had a follow-up to that, Kurt, but the chat has some questions as well that kind of lead it nicely into that.
00:34:23
Speaker
And to speak to Chris's point, one of the things that actually got me in the direction that I am talking to you all today and involved with the Human Restoration Project is actually seeing that in my classroom, the more that I transferred power, and this was a deliberate process,
00:34:39
Speaker
Adam L. The more that I transferred that power the decision making the more that I. Adam L. The more than I stepped back the more that students stepped up so the the more that I gave them meaningful things to do they did better work than than than of any projects and rubrics and anything else that I designed in the past because I learned how to ask them.
00:35:00
Speaker
broader, more impactful questions to say, okay, well, what are you going to do?
00:35:05
Speaker
How are you going to do it?
00:35:06
Speaker
What tools are you going to need to get there?
00:35:08
Speaker
How can I help you?
00:35:09
Speaker
How do you think you did?
00:35:11
Speaker
What are some of the takeaways for you?
00:35:13
Speaker
And those things can certainly be rooted in standards.
00:35:16
Speaker
Obviously, I teach at a public high school.
00:35:18
Speaker
I have standards I have to cover, but I rely on students
00:35:21
Speaker
to cover those things and my planning has to set up some meaningful options and opportunities for students to get there and to plot a non-linear course through that as well.
00:35:36
Speaker
And what's really cool is that I basically have my whole course laid out for students from day one and we kind of just reveal pieces of it as we go throughout the curriculum.
00:35:46
Speaker
And students who want to work ahead and get work done and just have the relief of checking the boxes on my econ units, they just do it.
00:35:55
Speaker
And then they can work on other classes because I'm not up at the front sort of guiding and taking up their time too.
00:36:00
Speaker
So after the first few weeks, say in my economics class in particular,
00:36:04
Speaker
there's almost no direct instruction.
00:36:06
Speaker
We have maps, we have lists.
00:36:08
Speaker
I have activities for students to do.
00:36:10
Speaker
And then it's basically, what are you going to do today?
00:36:12
Speaker
What goals are you going to reach?
00:36:14
Speaker
Here's maybe where you should be by week six or seven or eight.
00:36:18
Speaker
I can check in with students who are there or not.
00:36:21
Speaker
So it's about trust and relationships and those things too.
00:36:24
Speaker
And I see Angela's question is, how do we begin to do that with all the teacher standards in place?
00:36:29
Speaker
I love the idea of upheaval of the whole system.
00:36:32
Speaker
I love the idea of just having the receipts.
00:36:34
Speaker
All right, nothing is better than having people in positions of power over your administrators or whatever ask about the outcome of a lesson or activity and you just turn over piles of student work and student reflections and evidence journals, portfolios that students have built for all those.
00:36:50
Speaker
And that's where I think those things speak to it.
00:36:53
Speaker
So I say I have my list of teacher standards or whatever, or maybe curriculum standards that I have to hit.
00:36:59
Speaker
I view my job less of me having to drag students over the line than as a collective challenge of my classroom to say, hey, guys, here's the list of stuff we got to get done.
00:37:09
Speaker
How are we going to do this?
00:37:10
Speaker
Here's the ways that we can help each other out in this process.
00:37:14
Speaker
I haven't given a grade in any of my classes so far this year.
00:37:17
Speaker
And guess what?
00:37:18
Speaker
Students still show up every day.
00:37:19
Speaker
Students still are excited and engaged and active and motivated.
00:37:23
Speaker
They show up to my Zoom class.
00:37:24
Speaker
They log in and do my online class.
00:37:27
Speaker
And it's not just because I'm a charismatic person who stands in front of the room and talks all day, but it's because I really just set up the structures for them to engage in meaningful, purposeful work.
00:37:38
Speaker
And as far as leverage, I can't do that if I'm a first year teacher, right?
00:37:44
Speaker
I can't do that if I'm in a school where maybe my administrator really has eyeballs on X, Y, and Z metric, right?
00:37:51
Speaker
So I have to leverage a lot of privilege in order to be able to get those things done.
00:37:56
Speaker
But that leveraging actually transfers through my instructional coaches, right?
00:38:00
Speaker
Who use my work as examples and as models for other teachers in the building and in the district.
00:38:06
Speaker
As for administrators who come into my classroom and talk to me about, you know, I heard from X, Y, and Z parent or student about this thing that's happening.
00:38:14
Speaker
Can I come see that?
00:38:15
Speaker
It's leveraging that privilege for everyone else then to get on board.
00:38:20
Speaker
So then the first year teacher can do that experiment, right?
00:38:22
Speaker
And then you can have that reflective conversation about what works or what doesn't.
00:38:27
Speaker
My students are far less interested in their grades than their parents.
00:38:30
Speaker
Now that is the interesting thing.
00:38:31
Speaker
So for example, I have parent-teacher conferences.
00:38:35
Speaker
Well, if I don't have grades and I don't have a grade book set up, so parents go, how's my kid doing?
00:38:40
Speaker
I have to have some sort of meaningful communication with that parent about that.
00:38:43
Speaker
So guess what I do?
00:38:44
Speaker
I turn that over to students.
00:38:45
Speaker
And I give them a digital, a physical document or whatever it is that has some prompts and say, this parent-teacher conference, I need you to be the voice for your own learning in this process.
00:38:56
Speaker
I can corroborate that and give my take, but I'm not inside your head.
00:39:00
Speaker
I don't know how things are going for you.
00:39:02
Speaker
So when a parent asks, how's my kid doing in your class?
00:39:05
Speaker
I turn over evidence.
00:39:06
Speaker
If I don't have the evidence, we can't have the conversation.
00:39:09
Speaker
If I don't have the reflection from the students, I mean, that's like losing the black box for a plane crash, all right?
00:39:16
Speaker
You don't know what's happening.
00:39:17
Speaker
So it's really just about gathering and weighing evidence on these things and seeing how that fits in with the goals that we have.
00:39:23
Speaker
To Chris's point, it doesn't mean that every kid just falls in line and has a great time and everything else, but it lifts the ceiling so that more students can be engaged in that.
00:39:33
Speaker
And then the students who might be turned off by bad grading practices or a boring curriculum or whatever,
00:39:40
Speaker
Right.
00:39:40
Speaker
It alleviates some of those gaps.
00:39:42
Speaker
And then the kids who are doing great and they're like flying through things and they're self-driven and self-motivated.
00:39:47
Speaker
Well, guess what?
00:39:48
Speaker
I don't have to worry about them.
00:39:49
Speaker
Right.
00:39:49
Speaker
That doesn't mean I don't I don't care, but they can do their own thing.
00:39:52
Speaker
And that's cool.
00:39:53
Speaker
So guess what?
00:39:54
Speaker
I'm going to wrap my arms around the kids in my class who need the most adult support and I'm going to work with them.
00:39:59
Speaker
I'm going to spend most of my time with the student in class who needs one-on-one attention the most because I know everyone else in my room can more or less, they can use each other, they can use themselves, they can use resources, et cetera.
Community Engagement and Risk Mitigation
00:40:13
Speaker
Parents are mostly elated that I'm just not talking about a grade book at them at conferences because they say, I already know it's in the grade book.
00:40:20
Speaker
Tell me something I don't know.
00:40:21
Speaker
And I don't have to talk about grades.
00:40:23
Speaker
So I don't have to say, well,
00:40:25
Speaker
You know, your kid could be at a 92, but, you know, they can get a couple more points on this test and then they'll be like at a 95 if they want that A, okay?
00:40:37
Speaker
I actually have to talk about what their kid is like in class and like the things that they're into.
00:40:42
Speaker
how they engage with the people around them and how they contribute, etc.
00:40:46
Speaker
And then we can talk about the work and the places where it's exceeding, the places in which it's lacking, and then the support that I can provide to that student in the process.
00:40:56
Speaker
So there's also like an element of universal design in here as well, right?
00:41:00
Speaker
How can we build
00:41:01
Speaker
an on-ramp for every kid and not like gatekeep and keep the those things away from kids so that way only a select few are allowed to are allowed to proceed yes qualitative information exactly um oh i wanted to talk is i hope it's janice i hope i'm pronouncing that right janice
00:41:21
Speaker
but what are ways your students engage with the community?
00:41:24
Speaker
And I, with my seniors, so again, consider I teach high school, so 10 through 12, but with my seniors in my econ class to do a semester-long project-based learning thing called their economic engagement project.
00:41:38
Speaker
And it's framed like that, but literally they get to ask and answer their own question
00:41:42
Speaker
The only requirement, okay, the only requirement is that it has to have a community connection.
00:41:46
Speaker
So what does that mean?
00:41:47
Speaker
It means if you're going to research and so many of the questions this semester about COVID, what's the impact of COVID on travel is one of the questions that one of the students asked.
00:41:59
Speaker
So it's like, okay,
00:42:00
Speaker
who do we partner with in the community to answer that question?
00:42:03
Speaker
Now, that community might be local, that might be state, that might be a digital community, right?
00:42:08
Speaker
Who can we get in contact with who is knowledgeable about the impact of travel?
00:42:12
Speaker
Is that an economist?
00:42:13
Speaker
Is that one of your parents' friends?
00:42:15
Speaker
Is that whatever?
00:42:16
Speaker
I've had so many people, so many students talk to their parents about what it is that they do in their work and bring, you know, that their parents' work into my classroom
00:42:26
Speaker
either through interviews or through presentations, etc.
00:42:31
Speaker
What's the day in the life like of a nurse in the time of COVID?
00:42:35
Speaker
Oh, my mom's a nurse.
00:42:36
Speaker
I want to talk to her about her experiences.
00:42:38
Speaker
It's ways in which we can build those communities and honor and value student community voices in here as well.
00:42:46
Speaker
If I was more academically inclined, I might call this a culturally relevant pedagogy because I'm bringing in those student voices and adapting the curriculum to them, not to just meet their interests and let them play video games all day or whatever, and that's cool too, but to actually be responsive to the needs that the community has and the interest of the student in wanting to contribute to that thing too.
00:43:13
Speaker
I wanted to get to one final question here, because we only have a couple more minutes.
00:43:17
Speaker
Oh, we do.
00:43:18
Speaker
I wanted to hit Carly's point, which I thought was a really good question, which is, what problems are teachers facing while trying to engage in creative?
00:43:26
Speaker
What's standing in the way outside of job security for people that are trying to do this?
00:43:30
Speaker
And also what advice do we have for teachers surrounding those from working class backgrounds who worry about losing their jobs, because that honestly is end game thing here.
00:43:38
Speaker
And part of it is realizing that there is a cognitive dissonance here, right?
00:43:43
Speaker
We're talking about upholding standards while simultaneously talking about how much can we change the system.
00:43:48
Speaker
So there's a
00:43:49
Speaker
There's this constant back and forth of, well, I'm doing this, I'm doing X, but I want to eliminate Y. And really at the end of the day, it's like, well, how far can I push this possibly before it matters?
00:44:01
Speaker
And I've been shocked every single time that I've done something, how much administration likes it, even very traditional administrators, because they see the products, they don't necessarily see what's going on day to day.
00:44:12
Speaker
And
00:44:13
Speaker
I mean, I've been involved in circumstances where it's just like, you know, the administrator comes in for their observation and the kids know it's different that day.
00:44:22
Speaker
And they kind of get it without really getting it.
00:44:24
Speaker
Jonathan Kozul calls that building the coalition and Hooks talks about it when being observed.
00:44:29
Speaker
Just the idea of like you're forming your own little cohort of learners.
00:44:33
Speaker
who kind of know what they're in on the game, that you're doing something different, and then it can be really cool.
00:44:39
Speaker
And I think it's up to those of us that have more, I guess, political capital at our jobs to push for those who maybe do not.
00:44:47
Speaker
If you're a first-year teacher, you probably don't want to do this.
00:44:50
Speaker
But my job, maybe as a seventh-year teacher, can be going into that first-year teacher's classroom and co-teaching with them and getting these systems built up with them and helping introduce them to these ideas or talking to the administrator about a cool idea I heard about what they were trying to do and trying to push for it.
00:45:06
Speaker
Because I've always been surprised time and time again that students and administrators alike go along with these things once they see them in action.
00:45:16
Speaker
Yeah, bring the receipts.
00:45:17
Speaker
That's what it's about.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:45:18
Speaker
If you can have the receipts, I mean, what's stopping you?
00:45:21
Speaker
Why not?
00:45:22
Speaker
That's that creative noncompliance.
00:45:24
Speaker
That's flexing your privilege a little bit.
00:45:27
Speaker
You got to build the bridge for everyone else so that way they can join you too.
00:45:31
Speaker
So I appreciate everybody for spending the time with us this afternoon.
00:45:35
Speaker
Again, if you're staring at a screen all day long for your work and then you choose to come on here and stare at a screen more to listen to us, that's incredible.
00:45:43
Speaker
So I so appreciate it.
00:45:46
Speaker
any time.
00:45:51
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to the Human Restoration Project podcast.
00:45:54
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:45:58
Speaker
You can learn more about our cause, support us, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.