Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the adaptive edge of education.
Speaker: My name is Miranda Shorty and today we have with us Dr. Bill Preble of New England College.
Speaker: He's a professor of education and learning and he is also the executive director of the Center for School Climate and Learning.
Speaker: He is also the father of two adoptive children.
Speaker: And a former Title IX advocate and hero in the state of Maine, which is where I now teach.
Speaker: And at his heart, truly a seventh grade social studies teacher.
Speaker: So we're super happy to have you on.
Speaker: Thank you so much for coming today.
Speaker: And if you can just talk a little bit about the particular topic that you want to discuss on the podcast and how you see that as an adaptive challenge or your experience with that.
Speaker: Well, thanks so much for doing this.
Speaker: And thanks for inviting me.
Speaker: Yeah, this is a topic that's, um,
Speaker: been kind of percolating around in my life as a teacher and my work as a college professor and educational leadership advocate for a long, long time.
Speaker: So we can come at it from a bunch of different ways.
Speaker: I guess I would say the biggest thing off the bat that I could kind of focus on about pedagogical partnerships was
Speaker: We really, I think, as teachers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how best to meet the needs of our students.
Speaker: I think most teachers generally really aspire to do that.
Speaker: And we know from test scores that, you know, the bell curve shows we we're doing about half of the job that we need to do.
Speaker: We work really well with some kids and we don't work as well with others.
Speaker: And so many teachers spend their entire careers really trying to work on that bottom end of the curve.
Speaker: You know, how do I really reach the kids that I'm not reaching?
Speaker: And I learned at one point as a seventh grade social studies teacher that sometimes the simplest solutions to these problems are the best.
Speaker: And so I often would just...
Speaker: stop whatever I was teaching and ask my students if there was anything that I could be doing that would work better for them.
Speaker: And they would usually tell me quite happily about the things that I wasn't doing as well as I should.
Speaker: And so really just seeking feedback as a young teacher early on.
Speaker: I think just launched me on this kind of pathway to saying, boy, it sure is a lot easier to not try to guess what's needed, but literally like just like ask and and kind of listen respectfully.
Speaker: And a lot of things that, you know, kids would tell me I maybe was not able to do for them.
Speaker: And that's you know, it's OK.
Speaker: It's not a you don't give up control.
Speaker: And that's, I think, what a lot of teachers worry about is when they open that door to partnering with their class, they seem like they might lose control.
Speaker: And I think I always just kind of got through that by saying, I'm still the teacher, so I still get to kind of make decisions, but I can make better decisions if I get input from my students.
Speaker: So that's kind of the common sense approach that I think I started with as a young seventh grade social studies teacher.
Speaker: That's brilliant and shockingly underrepresented in education.
Speaker: Easy, right?
Speaker: It's like, shut up.
Speaker: And it's really, it's like that first tier formative level, like type of work where you're just like getting an informal assessment of how things are going and what people are picking up on what's working, what's not working.
Speaker: that is so heavily promoted from the perspective of like learning content and curriculum, but we don't really employ it that frequently for our own pedagogy.
Speaker: I guess I would just say that I spent the last couple of weeks designing a new course for the Masters of Education program at New England College that I was asked to teach.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I've been teaching in the doctoral program now for 10 years, kind of lost touch with master's level work a little bit.
Speaker: But as I was kind of working on creating this class, I guess I first started by saying, OK, you know, what are the objectives and goals of the course?
Speaker: And, you know, what are the expectations?
Speaker: Where does where does this course fit into the to the sequence of courses in the master's program?
Speaker: But then I started saying, OK, the good news is I'm going to create out of seven weeks, I'm going to create probably four that I feel like I know I need to make sure that this information is part of the course, this non-negotiable stuff there.
Speaker: But how I teach that stuff really is flexible, right?
Speaker: I can teach it in any number of ways.
Speaker: And so then I said, okay, I'm going to start the class off with a draft of my syllabus that have my four pieces.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And I'm going to literally not give the dean a completed syllabus before I start the course and not have a complete Blackboard site all set up before I start the course.
Speaker: I'm going to outline the first two weeks, which is really about kind of seeking and valuing the perspectives and points of view of my master's degree students on this issue of education and society or schools and society,
Speaker: And then I'll finish off my syllabus and round it out.
Speaker: But I'll begin by saying, what do I need to teach?
Speaker: And then I can leave myself open to hear what their interests and needs and questions are.
Speaker: And then I'm sure that I can build in a lot of other important content through the lens of their questions and their interests and their preferences for studying that question of what in the heck do schools have to do with the rest of society?
Speaker: It's pretty wide open.
Speaker: So from the very beginning as a social studies teacher, just starting to listen and seek students' points of view about things.
Speaker: What do you like?
Speaker: What's working well?
Speaker: What's not working?
Speaker: What could I do differently that would make it better, easier, more engaging for you?
Speaker: To literally like co-designing a graduate course with my students as the way to begin a new class.
Speaker: I think that's really incredible.
Speaker: I'm dying to know...
Speaker: what that Dean thought when he saw just two weeks of preparation, he or she saw just two weeks of preparation.
Speaker: I'm wondering, were they comfortable with that?
Speaker: Was that, well, again, the, the, the idea that the idea that this new course was being created, um,
Speaker: I've been teaching the program, so I'm not sure what caused them to come to me for it, but I think I was the last ditch effort or something to get this course.
Speaker: But it just seemed to me like common sense to say, start with the objectives of the course, really think about the issues that are most important to me as an educational leader type person.
Speaker: that I really want to make sure that master's students get to wrestle with and learn about.
Speaker: But then to say there's got to be ways to approach this that are really relevant to folks that are principals, folks that are working teachers, in a way that may be less theoretical or less research-oriented or whatever.
Speaker: And who knows what they'll come up with.
Speaker: But the other thing that I have prepared for probably...
Speaker: 12, 15 weeks is a whole bunch of tools and resources and video clips and readings and all that stuff that I've posted on the website that will trigger some new ideas and thoughts for them that maybe they wouldn't have without that.
Speaker: So I've been planning a whole lot.
Speaker: I'm just not going to dictate what happens for the full seven weeks of the course.
Speaker: I think that's great.
Speaker: When I think of what is the best way...
Speaker: to educate a group of people and account for differentiation and engage students.
Speaker: I can't think of anything more effective than being what I consider being a responsive teacher, which is that I'm not coming in with a canned set of this is what I teach in this course.
Speaker: This is my syllabus.
Speaker: This is how we do it.
Speaker: These are all the assessments.
Speaker: It's already been designed and we're going to move through it.
Speaker: Neither you'll be successful or you won't.
Speaker: I think like being responsive and always being flexible and willing to modify is the best approach.
Speaker: But I'm like sitting here a little envious, honestly, of that notion that you put that forth and like that was okay and accepted and appreciated.
Speaker: Because in education, in public education right now, we're being slammed with requests to make sure that our entire curriculum start to finish is available for everyone's viewing.
Speaker: at the beginning of this school year.
Speaker: And it's impractical.
Speaker: It's, I think, a really poor form of teaching and incredibly inequitable towards students.
Speaker: Because as a teacher, I can imagine what I think a lovely course would be and include all of the content that I think would be really effective and engaging.
Speaker: But if it's not working,
Speaker: and yet I'm forced to move through it in that way because I've published it online for my entire community to see, and now I'm required to stick to it, then I'm really...
Speaker: like held in this vacuum that is not conducive to what students might be asking me for or wanting from me.
Speaker: Yeah, I appreciate the difference between the ivory tower approach to teaching and the real world approach of K-12 education.
Speaker: And I would like to talk about that for a sec.
Speaker: One thing that I did was talk to this Ladeen in the master's program to begin with.
Speaker: And I said, tell me everything I need to know to be able to plan this course well.
Speaker: And the only thing she said I needed to do, which is kind of almost the opposite of what you presented here, it's instructive, is she said, I'm going to tell you what the signature assignment is.
Speaker: We have signature assignments at the end of every course in the master's program.
Speaker: And we gather all that data and we use it to judge the effectiveness of the program itself.
Speaker: So I began with that backwards design model, knowing exactly what the college is looking for out of this, out of this class.
Speaker: Um, and that allowed me to create tons of content, um, that is all posted on the Blackboard site for people to review and look at as we're kind of co-designing those, those weeks of the course at the beginning and the middle.
Speaker: Um, so I, I guess I would say to K-12 teachers, um,
Speaker: If your content and your curriculum is preset, which most online teaching now, you have to create all that stuff before the course begins.
Speaker: I'm taking a little bit of liberty with this one just to make sure that this course the first time gets planned because this course will become the course that's kind of in the can after this.
Speaker: I've chosen to
Speaker: not publish everything perfectly on the first week because I want those voices to be included in the structural design of the course that will be probably taught in a more rote way by other people later on.
Speaker: Does that make sense?
Speaker: Yeah, that definitely makes sense.
Speaker: I think really the reason that this dichotomy between public education and higher ed is most important
Speaker: interesting to me is because the difference that I see foundationally is adultism between where in public education, we have less space to play in
Speaker: that gives students influence or changes or modifies our content or curriculum.
Speaker: We have less, there's less room in the sandbox for that.
Speaker: In higher ed, within pedagogical partnership and developing, you know, student experience, there's more space in the sandbox for that because those people are already adults.
Speaker: And so then there's an inherent trust of their ability to make decisions, to be self-aware, to choose for the self or whatever.
Speaker: And I think that's the huge right now, if you were to like, look at the educational bills that people have been watching intensely in the state of Maine, there are eight bills about giving parents additional rights in education.
Speaker: There's eight of them.
Speaker: And there are zero bills about student rights, none.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: That's, to me, that's really concerning when higher education is moving forward.
Speaker: and not even just in the US, but globally, higher education is working more and more towards pedagogical partnership, moving away from this idea of perennialism or centralism, this idea that we're stuck in here are the people who are older and they've studied this longer.
Speaker: And so they know, and you just sit and you listen to the stage, the sage on the stage, and then you will know all the things that they know.
Speaker: And that's how it goes.
Speaker: And we're moving away from that
Speaker: But in public education, we're still stuck.
Speaker: I think that's really foundationally this mistrust of students' ability to create change effectively, to do so with a strong sense of judgment and self-efficacy.
Speaker: And it's a fear.
Speaker: It's a loss of control fear to give them that level of autonomy and agency as though that means that somehow what we do
Speaker: is less important.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's quite interesting that you talk about adultism here and how the U.S. is actually, especially recently, again, there's lots of different perspectives out there, but from a historical perspective, you mentioned perennialism, you mentioned, you know, the idea of kind of
Speaker: thinking about learning from a delivery of content.
Speaker: This is the list of concepts that are on the test.
Speaker: So we need to make sure that every child learns this specific information and the adults in the room got to make that list.
Speaker: Those are really kind of ancient teaching beliefs.
Speaker: It goes, you know, a thousand years.
Speaker: But if you look forward in terms of sort of more modern perspectives, that the idea of just look at how organizations are run these days in America.
Speaker: It used to be that people sat in the top offices and they made all the decisions and they passed that sort of knowledge and wisdom and rules and you will do's down to the working class people and to the people on the street, on the loading dock.
Speaker: But we had a transition probably 40 years ago, maybe, where...
Speaker: People were controlling quality.
Speaker: Those systems produce really poor quality outcomes.
Speaker: And we know that just like education, when you make those lists, half the kids are going to get the list and half are not.
Speaker: So you start to respect the people who are in the past being on the receiving end of things.
Speaker: And this is kind of the quality management part of the business world where we really start to listen to the worker on the loading dock at Amazon.
Speaker: And we know how do we double production?
Speaker: Well, it's not by sitting in a board meeting.
Speaker: It's by going down to that loading dock and asking the guys in the loading dock,
Speaker: to tell us, what are the things that get in your way every day?
Speaker: What are the things that make it really difficult for you to do your job?
Speaker: How can we make your life better?
Speaker: Those are the same questions I ask my seventh graders in my social studies class.
Speaker: How can we make seventh grade social studies work better for you?
Speaker: So the total quality management folks, it was called Japanese management, total quality management.
Speaker: Now that whole area is a kind of a whole field of leadership called Six Sigma.
Speaker: But it's about participation by people who are engaged in the learning, people who are engaged in the work as experts.
Speaker: So the opposite of adultism is something that my friend Bill Cumming from Maine, who many people might know, he referred to many years ago as this thing called the dignity of expertise.
Speaker: That if you want to know about production on the loading dock, you sit down with the guys that are loading the trucks and you buy them a cup of coffee and a couple donuts or something and you say, tell us how to do this job better.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And you give them time.
Speaker: And instead of elitism, where you have the people at the top telling everybody how to do things, this idea of sort of tapping into the expertise, the voices and lived experiences of people that are actually doing things on the ground, that is a pretty accepted business practice these days.
Speaker: So my question is, why is it that schools find it necessary to go backward when it comes to this notion of soliciting input and feedback from the user?
Speaker: or from the person who's in the learning seat.
Speaker: You mentioned the fact that the US is kind of moving in the wrong direction.
Speaker: We absolutely, I guess, have historically been moving in the wrong direction on this issue of student voice.
Speaker: There was a UN resolution on the rights of the child that was passed by every country except three
Speaker: about 15 years ago, maybe something like that.
Speaker: And then the last couple of years, those two of those other countries went on to pass this resolution that guarantees students, young people, a voice in all kinds of different ways about their education, about their living conditions.
Speaker: It's a way of supporting the training and development of young people to be able to have agency and learn how to use their voices.
Speaker: And you're right.
Speaker: America is still the only country that has not signed that UN resolution because of our concerns about parental control.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I talked about that in a prior episode, that convention on the rights of the child, that was actually over 30 years ago.
Speaker: And we've still, which makes me crazy, but we've still not really...
Speaker: changed, in my opinion, from those four things that the UN Rights of the Child Convention said that we need to give children as their right.
Speaker: They need to have space.
Speaker: They need to have audience.
Speaker: They need to have voice and they need to have influence.
Speaker: That was very clear.
Speaker: And we've still given very few opportunities for those things to improve outside of kind of token
Speaker: examples of that.
Speaker: And when, and I know you and I have talked about heart's ladder, which for the listeners, this ladder of measuring partnership within an organization between children and adults and ladder like rung two is, is,
Speaker: Decoration, which is like, here's an opportunity to be a part of something decoratively.
Speaker: It doesn't mean anything.
Speaker: And then rung three is tokenism.
Speaker: So here you are, you're participating, you're doing all the things that we're doing, but we're not actually taking into consideration what you say.
Speaker: and you have no real opportunity for change making at any serious level.
Speaker: So to me, what that looks like in public education now is here, we've indoctrinated you to National Honor Society, your peers have voted for you for the ability to be the president or vice president or social media person or whatever for your class or your school.
Speaker: And you get to decide on things like
Speaker: where we hold prom and what the theme will be.
Speaker: And you get to decide on things like whether or not we're going to fundraise this way or that way for homecoming or what the spirit week events will be.
Speaker: And while I think those things are important and that's really an important part of the student experience, I'm not sure that's the thing that students really need to
Speaker: universally as a body of kids to feel like their learning experience was valuable and effective and, and built some of these different characteristics in them that make them have efficacy in themselves as adults that are participating in a democratic process.
Speaker: I'm not really sure that that's, I think that's a token example of what that could be.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yeah,
Speaker: that's really frustrating to me because I think we've been sitting on a recommendation for 33 years to do better.
Speaker: And other countries have accepted that.
Speaker: And we see it heavily in the higher ed area, moving in and providing additional points for autonomy and agency and opportunity to be a change agent and give voice.
Speaker: But in public education, we are still just tossing out these really token examples of this.
Speaker: And at,
Speaker: I've recently witnessed a situation in high school where a student not only wasn't able to attend for the
Speaker: campaigns and the speeches for class counsel or student counsel, but it's by class, not only didn't attend, had someone else read their speech and in their speech admitted that as the president the former year, they did a terrible job and they were really sorry about that.
Speaker: And so this year they were only running for vice president because in not doing a great job, there'll be less of a negative impact.
Speaker: That person was still elected.
Speaker: So the popularity contest is one thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's just, yeah, that's what it is.
Speaker: It's, it's who's most popular.
Speaker: Who do we want to represent us and who can get the biggest number of votes because they're liked as a, as a kid, not because they have ideas on ways that can create change because none of the speeches were about that because that's not what the program's about.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: So the, the traditional role was really exactly as you said.
Speaker: So I like to think about the, uh, current, um,
Speaker: you know, structural proposals like in New Hampshire.
Speaker: Last summer, I got a call from a woman who was hired as a consultant to the Department of Education in New Hampshire, and she was putting together a proposal to implement a new program through the State Department of Ed that called for one student to serve on every school board in the state of New Hampshire.
Speaker: We already had a couple of communities that had school board reps that were students, and they were trying to get that as a statewide policy.
Speaker: So her job was to figure out like, okay, how do you get, how do you appoint that representative?
Speaker: What is their role?
Speaker: What are the do's and don'ts of being a student representative on the school board?
Speaker: And so I gave her what you refer to as from heart's ladder.
Speaker: And I just said, well, school board reps are a really good example of heart's ladder.
Speaker: So decoration.
Speaker: So what was the, you know, the idea that you would have students who literally, and I've been to school board meetings where students sit there and they're not, they don't say one word the whole day, the whole meeting.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: that is clearly a decoration.
Speaker: They're there to represent, you know, they're like a flower pot, kind of.
Speaker: Yeah, that falls under, rung one, two, and three all fall under non-participation.
Speaker: Yeah, so tokenism, that's all that stuff.
Speaker: So I shared Hart's ladder with her and I said, so maybe what you could do is think about how to avoid that tokenistic non-participatory role and try to give more responsibility or more space to these representatives of the student body.
Speaker: And so I know you wrote a proposal really challenging
Speaker: the process for collecting students in your school.
Speaker: And you said, well, maybe we should have students who just are interested in the leadership role, not just token representation from the existing student body, student government, I mean,
Speaker: but kids who really would like to advocate for themselves.
Speaker: I would like to share a non-token way.
Speaker: So this would be higher up on the heart's ladder, but this came from the school in New Hampshire that I was working with this last year.
Speaker: So we do this youth participatory action research process, diverse teams of kids, again, like pick one kid from each lunch table in the middle school and the high school who are interested in having their voice heard.
Speaker: I love that idea.
Speaker: Not at all.
Speaker: clarity contest necessarily.
Speaker: So you hear all voices.
Speaker: And the change model is really simple.
Speaker: If you want to improve your school, getting student input, choose one kid from each lunch table who's willing to talk with you.
Speaker: And then hopefully willing to go back to their table and share the kind of stuff that their group is working on.
Speaker: That seems quite simple.
Speaker: So we had that representative team.
Speaker: There were a couple kids who I think they were also members of student council on this middle school team.
Speaker: They were very articulate.
Speaker: They were on the leadership team from sixth grade, seventh grade.
Speaker: Now they're eighth grade.
Speaker: So they've been there for three years doing leadership work.
Speaker: And after meeting, one of the young women came up to me.
Speaker: She said, Bill, I really want to talk with you.
Speaker: I know I got to go to class now, but can we set up a time to meet?
Speaker: I said, absolutely.
Speaker: You've got my cell phone.
Speaker: You've got my email.
Speaker: Just send me a time and I'll come back to the school and we'll connect.
Speaker: So we met and she brought two of her friends, two other students, one other student from the team and a different student that was not on our team.
Speaker: And she went on and on about a program that,
Speaker: that has been in place since COVID in her school called Edmentum.
Speaker: And she said, Bill, I hate Edmentum.
Speaker: We all hate Edmentum.
Speaker: It's the stupidest program in the world.
Speaker: And so- I am shockingly-
Speaker: Very familiar with Edmentum.
Speaker: I'll just explain really quickly.
Speaker: Edmentum is based on the standardized tests that these schools give to all their students, how you do on the standardized test, then goes dumped into the computer and it spits out remedial work or enrichment work, not enrichment, remedial work.
Speaker: to build you up in the areas that you were weak on the standardized test.
Speaker: Using all online stuff, like works with like...
Speaker: edgenuity and online learning programming.
Speaker: So it's not like something you're doing foundationally in class with a teacher or one-on-one with like a tutor or mentor or somebody like that.
Speaker: It's just on the computer.
Speaker: So this school adopted Edmentum during COVID because they were worried about learning loss and they wanted to try to find any means possible to keep kids engaged through this online technology.
Speaker: And so what this young woman told me was she said, Bill, nobody takes the test seriously.
Speaker: So we blow the test off.
Speaker: Then what Admentum does, I'm in eighth grade.
Speaker: It gives me third and fourth grade math problems.
Speaker: And then the teacher says, OK, take out your tablets.
Speaker: It's Admentum time for the next hour.
Speaker: And we sit there for an hour with the teachers like reading the newspaper or prepping or whatever.
Speaker: And we do this third grade, fourth grade work.
Speaker: And what happens is nobody does it.
Speaker: We just close the laptop.
Speaker: We play on the computer.
Speaker: We do.
Speaker: It's a total waste of time.
Speaker: So she said, I want to know how do we get rid of this program?
Speaker: I said, well, I appreciate your eighth grade.
Speaker: You know, let's just blow up the world approach to things.
Speaker: But a girl after my own.
Speaker: I've got an idea for you and you decide if you want to do it.
Speaker: who do we need to talk with to take this to the next level?
Speaker: And she said, I said, you're not going to get any level with me.
Speaker: I can't do anything about it.
Speaker: She said, oh, we'd have to talk to the principal.
Speaker: I said, okay, cool.
Speaker: So let's plan how we're going to talk to the principal.
Speaker: You just told me how stupid the program is and why it doesn't work.
Speaker: Is that the best case you think you could make to your principal?
Speaker: And she said, well, everybody agrees with me.
Speaker: I said, how do we know that?
Speaker: She said, well, these two girls here, and they told me the same stories that she told me.
Speaker: I said, well, that's cool.
Speaker: How many kids are on our leadership team?
Speaker: What about the kids?
Speaker: I said, would you like some time on our next meeting to ask the kids from the leadership team, the 22 kids, to fill out a little questionnaire about their experience with Odementum and just see if people actually do agree with you?
Speaker: Sure, let's do that.
Speaker: So she did that.
Speaker: She collected these open-ended questions.
Speaker: What are some things you like?
Speaker: One or two things you like about Admentum?
Speaker: What are one or two things that you see as problems with Admentum?
Speaker: And what advice would you give to adults who are in charge of Admentum?
Speaker: And so she collected that data from 22 kids.
Speaker: She said, what do I do with all these piles of paper?
Speaker: I said, go home and type them out and then sort of analyze them, figure out what everybody said.
Speaker: And then we'll schedule a meeting with the principal where you can share what not just you and your two friends, but what the student leadership team had to say about Inventum.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: So she did that.
Speaker: We met with the principal.
Speaker: Within two minutes, the principal said, I completely agree with you.
Speaker: I hate this program.
Speaker: I've been trying to get rid of momentum ever since we came back to face-to-face.
Speaker: So she said to those girls, would you be willing to go and have the same conversation you had with the 22 kids on your leadership team with the full faculty at the meeting next Tuesday?
Speaker: She said, absolutely.
Speaker: So she went, collected the same data from all the faculty, took it home, analyzed it, brought it back to the principal,
Speaker: I wasn't even there.
Speaker: She was running on her own after this.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: She said, we have a training with Admentum.
Speaker: The trainer that's going to work with our teachers is coming.
Speaker: Could you take this data and meet with the trainer for Admentum before he does the professional development two weeks from now after school?
Speaker: I can tell that must have gone over well.
Speaker: The Admentum trainer said, they're not implementing the program with fidelity.
Speaker: This is what he said.
Speaker: They're not implementing the program.
Speaker: They're not supposed to just sit there while everybody does the work and do their other stuff.
Speaker: Last thing I'll tell you, she took that data to the assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum instruction and the curriculum director at the central office with her principal.
Speaker: They made a presentation to the full administrative team from the district.
Speaker: And the outcome was they're really seriously looking at the fidelity of implementation issue for Adventum and how much money they're spending on this program and how much time it's taking.
Speaker: way of production.
Speaker: But they also said, this is an example of using students' voice to try to improve our schooling that we've never done in the history of our school district, as far as we know.
Speaker: We have to start doing this more.
Speaker: And I thought, well, that's a pretty fun little way to get kids' voices heard is just by take a salient problem that kids are really
Speaker: fired up about and shepherd them through that institutional hierarchy to try to get their voices heard at these different levels.
Speaker: And everybody really loved it because these kids said, all we want to do is learn and not sit in front of a damn computer and not learn.
Speaker: So who can be against it?
Speaker: Kind of.
Speaker: So I thought it was a fun story.
Speaker: That's brilliant.
Speaker: I, I, I hope that girl transfers to my school.
Speaker: I would love to have her.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I can't possibly agree more.
Speaker: It's a lack of, well, and you're, you're the one that taught me this, that 98% of the time top-down initiatives fail.
Speaker: And that's a top-down initiative.
Speaker: That's someone higher up said, we got to do something in the event of learning gaps caused by COVID.
Speaker: So this is what we're going to do.
Speaker: Yeah, the teachers have rejected Edmentum first because they're not at all with fidelity.
Speaker: They're going through the motion.
Speaker: So of course it's not working because they don't buy it.
Speaker: They were told.
Speaker: And they weren't asked, I'm sure.
Speaker: What would you like to do to avoid the learning gap?
Speaker: What do you think we should do?
Speaker: I'm sure no one asked.
Speaker: And so when they got it, they were like, this is definitely what I wouldn't have done.
Speaker: And so they didn't do it with fidelity because they consider it a waste of time.
Speaker: And so students pick up on that.
Speaker: They're not going to do it with fidelity.
Speaker: And then you've just wasted a whole bunch of money on a program that costs a lot and is ineffective.
Speaker: So yeah,
Speaker: And so it just goes back to the strategy that I used as a seventh grade social studies teacher, which was to ask help.
Speaker: I'm a teacher.
Speaker: I want things to work well.
Speaker: Can you help me do it well?
Speaker: And that's all the superintendent is saying.
Speaker: You principals and stuff, maybe you should be asking your students to give us help as leaders to try to make the school system work better.
Speaker: So it's a pretty simple, respectful strategy.
Speaker: And it flies in the face of those beliefs about adultism that says all the answers to all the world problems come out of the minds of adults.
Speaker: then I think that just, it's just challenging that system to start to respect the voices and ideas without giving away the farm necessarily, but respecting the voices and ideas of others.
Speaker: And I remember a couple of things in one of your classes that I was in that really shifted my mindset about this issue.
Speaker: When I was in, um, I think it was ed reform or a class that I took with you in, um,
Speaker: I was thinking about student participation and I started thinking about why it was on teacher workshop days or professional development days or whatever.
Speaker: We always send kids home.
Speaker: And I was thinking about that because I remember in class you had said, there's no one that's more of an expert on what it's like to be a public education student in 2023 than
Speaker: than public education students in 2023.
Speaker: There's no one that knows more about that than the students who are currently living it.
Speaker: And I'd never heard something I agreed with more in my entire life, just based on being a parent of now my son who's going into his junior year and my daughter who's going into her seventh, her, I'm sorry, eighth grade year.
Speaker: And also working with kids and having them bring challenges to me that they were having
Speaker: frustrations that they were having.
Speaker: And knowing that I really couldn't relate that to my own experience as a public education student, because it's like a different universe.
Speaker: The problems that they face, the issues that they face, the things that are distracting to them at school, the anxiety, the pressures that they feel are sometimes similar, but frequently not at all related to what I went through in high school.
Speaker: And
Speaker: in middle school or whatever.
Speaker: And so I remember thinking, if I can't relate to what they currently need as a student or what they're facing for challenges, why are, why am I and a bunch of other adults who likely also cannot relate sitting in a room together, trying to figure out how to do this thing best for them?
Speaker: It's really fascinating to me and I think super ineffective.
Speaker: And that's when I really started thinking about why aren't we getting kids more involved in this process?
Speaker: Why don't we ask them to take a seat at the table where we're discussing some of these things so that we can have that perspective?
Speaker: Because we do talk about getting the community's perspective.
Speaker: We talk about what the school board might think, what administrators might think, parents and parents.
Speaker: I couldn't remember a time where we really reached out to kids and said, what is working?
Speaker: What isn't working?
Speaker: What can we change?
Speaker: And when I started working in all ed, I came up with that framework of three questions.
Speaker: And I asked my students that in their journals every Friday.
Speaker: And they had like writing journals they had to do every day.
Speaker: And I said, in your writing journal, I want you to ask yourself these three questions.
Speaker: what is working for me?
Speaker: What's not working for me?
Speaker: What can I change?
Speaker: And they would go through and sort of flush that out so that they weren't focused on things that they couldn't actually change.
Speaker: They were focused on, on what they can do, keep doing or stop doing or start doing, um, differently.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: we started working through that process.
Speaker: And I was like, I wonder what would happen if I asked the kids that in my class, but about school.
Speaker: So I came to school the next day and I said to my, a class of juniors that I had, I said, I haven't taught English 11 here.
Speaker: This is my first time teaching English 11 in this school.
Speaker: And I trying to get some idea of what's working, what's not working and what I need to do going forward.
Speaker: So I asked them that I said, um, in,
Speaker: School.
Speaker: And I said school instead of my class.
Speaker: And I don't know why, but I said in school, what's working, what's not working, what can we change?
Speaker: And they started listing out things all over the place, not related to my class at all.
Speaker: And I was like, oh man, I wrote those questions wrong.
Speaker: And then I, we broke for lunch because we had lunch in the middle of class and they all left.
Speaker: And then one student stayed with me who always sat and ate lunch in my room.
Speaker: And he said, I'm so happy you asked us that today because no one ever asks us that.
Speaker: And I've been asking administration for a long time, how can I be involved?
Speaker: How can I bring some of my ideas to people that will listen about things that we could be doing differently here?
Speaker: And he had so many ideas.
Speaker: He had invented a device to detect vaping in the bathroom.
Speaker: He had ideas about what
Speaker: We were teaching for content and curriculum and how to incorporate a more diverse collection of people into our content to learn from.
Speaker: And he had all these things he was tossing out at me.
Speaker: And I was like, those are all really great ideas.
Speaker: Why don't you tell your principal about them?
Speaker: And he said, but I have.
Speaker: But there's nowhere for me to go with it.
Speaker: And, you know, my principal's very busy and doesn't have time to just always be working on my ideas.
Speaker: So I said, well, let's do something about it.
Speaker: And so then we developed the Student Summit Leadership Program.
Speaker: And I was so happy to see how many students really cared about
Speaker: to make change and how many students were motivated to be change agents for their school and their school experience, how many students were interested in constructing their educational experience.
Speaker: It was way more than my administration thought would be, I think.
Speaker: It was way more than my school board was ready for and more than the superintendent was ready for.
Speaker: was so moved by this idea that like this was in them somewhere.
Speaker: They just didn't have an outlet.
Speaker: They didn't have a place to put it to make something happen.
Speaker: Yeah, I love how you're looking at this really from that individual student who said, yeah, thanks for asking.
Speaker: I needed somebody to listen to you switching from asking about yourself.
Speaker: So like when I was a seventh grade social teacher, I said, what can I do, right?
Speaker: But now you're saying, yeah, well, what can we all do?
Speaker: What can the school do?
Speaker: So this notion of student voice going, really elevating from
Speaker: Here's what I have to say and what I feel and care about around my own well-being and my own learning.
Speaker: But here's what I see about, you know, others.
Speaker: Here's what I see about my friends and the way the school works for other people besides me.
Speaker: But I do think that the same idea about adultism
Speaker: where it's really a kind of a, it's normal.
Speaker: So I think, I think adultism is an ideology.
Speaker: It's a, you'd give it the old, is it normal to ask adults about stuff that's important?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Is it natural to reach out to the adults?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: It's like,
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Why not?
Speaker: It's natural.
Speaker: Is it inevitable that we reach out to the adults?
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: We'll always reach out to adults because they have to contribute.
Speaker: So now let's look at that with kids.
Speaker: Is it normal, natural and inevitable to reach out to kids?
Speaker: And the answer is no.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: And so so this idea of challenging an ideology, what we think of as what's real, what's normal,
Speaker: It really throws people when you start saying, let's talk to kids about this.
Speaker: I'll give you one really concrete example.
Speaker: And it goes from my poor daughter has grown up listening to my stories about her for her whole life.
Speaker: But we adopted my daughter from China when she was four months old.
Speaker: She was raised in Hennacher, New Hampshire, which is she was the only Asian girl in her class.
Speaker: She never knew, even though we raised her on Chinese adoption stories and books about China and Chinese traditions and language, she just really didn't want to hear about it.
Speaker: And we didn't know this till she was later in her 20s.
Speaker: She said, I just wanted to be blonde because that's who got respect.
Speaker: That's who people wanted to be with.
Speaker: That's who people wanted to be like.
Speaker: I was always ugly.
Speaker: I was always outside.
Speaker: And it just broke our hearts to hear what she lived and died in terms of racism in her school experiences that she never told anybody about, but wounded her so deeply to be treated as other.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I think that when we were working through the U.S. Department of Justice on these pervasive racial harassment cases down this big one in Tennessee, I was hearing my daughter's voice when we were talking to black kids and Hispanic kids in these schools in Tennessee.
Speaker: They had been lynching.
Speaker: They've been doing mock lynchings of African-American students at these four high schools as a ritual for years and years.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: And no one, if you ask the adults, they said, oh, no, we're not racist.
Speaker: It was great.
Speaker: Until the U.S. Department of Justice got a lawsuit from the parents of many of these kids.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And they lost a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, and our organization was the punishment.
Speaker: We got to go in.
Speaker: Massive trauma.
Speaker: Just a massive trauma.
Speaker: So the Yankees coming from New England to go down to Tennessee to talk about racism.
Speaker: You can imagine how well received that was.
Speaker: But all we did was we started –
Speaker: by, we said, pull together focus groups of kids of color.
Speaker: And no folks from the district could be present.
Speaker: It was just our research team who we had diverse representation in our research team.
Speaker: And we just did what you did.
Speaker: We listened to them.
Speaker: We said, what are the things that are happening here that's helping you learn?
Speaker: And what are the things that are getting away with you learning?
Speaker: And what kind of changes should we make?
Speaker: Same three questions you used for your alternative ed kids.
Speaker: Well, these were the alternative racial kids, right?
Speaker: They were the minority kids.
Speaker: And they had incredible stories to share about the things that had been happening in that school for a long time that the adults kind of conveniently didn't really know about.
Speaker: And so we worked for years using Youth Participatory Action Research to bring about some change in that system and were quite successful.
Speaker: Just because the whole initiative was based on listening to not only the students of color, but to the white students and listening to the teachers and what their experiences were and listening to the principals and administration and what they were experiencing.
Speaker: There must have been such pressure because to me that seems like
Speaker: in that situation, it's so severe, there's need for like really immediate change, an immediate equity building.
Speaker: But what if I've learned one thing over the course of this process of trying to establish an effective youth voice and leadership, a student driven program in my school, what I've learned is
Speaker: people are slow to make change.
Speaker: They are slow to adopt.
Speaker: They're slow to, um, to be willing to access something that is ideologically different than what their, their normative way of thinking is.
Speaker: So civil rights violations aren't just a student voice initiative.
Speaker: That was just part of the puzzle.
Speaker: The other part was U S department of Justin, you know, fines, sanctions, um,
Speaker: mandatory professional development on diversity, equity, and inclusion that they had never experienced before.
Speaker: So it was top-down and bottom-up work, and it was data-driven.
Speaker: So everybody got to see, wow, this is where we are on these issues at the beginning.
Speaker: Remember, those adults said, we don't see it.
Speaker: Well, they got to see it in the data.
Speaker: They got to hear students' words and parents' words in the qualitative data.
Speaker: And they were good people.
Speaker: They didn't want kids to be treated awful.
Speaker: They didn't want kids to be suffering.
Speaker: And so it was kind of a real all-hands-on-deck approach.
Speaker: And the approach lasted for eight years.
Speaker: So you're right.
Speaker: It doesn't just happen overnight.
Speaker: But after three years, a super demming approach to just say, I'm not coming into this with any expectations or agenda of what you're going to tell me.
Speaker: I'm just going to sit here and listen.
Speaker: And use that data as a mirror to really appeal to people's best interests.
Speaker: People are generally good people.
Speaker: There's people that are not.
Speaker: But most of those educators, there was 36 schools that we were working with there.
Speaker: So there was a lot of people.
Speaker: And
Speaker: A lot of them really wanted to do the right thing.
Speaker: A lot of the administration were really good people and wanted the superintendent went out on a limb because he really said, if it weren't for these students telling us of their experiences, we would have kept going in this path forever and ever.
Speaker: And so he said, we may really not want to admit or hear about some of these things happening right before our eyes, but we have to listen.
Speaker: And so that superintendent, again,
Speaker: used his
Speaker: currency, his political clout to stand up.
Speaker: And I'm telling you, that was a brave thing because this was the heart of the Klan.
Speaker: This is where the Klan really was formed in eastern Tennessee.
Speaker: So it was a really tough culture.
Speaker: But humanity prevailed with a stick and some real celebratory stuff.
Speaker: We really focused on positives and what some people really were doing to push back against this kind of stuff and
Speaker: It gained traction to the point where, and this is the last thing about the connection between this notion of going at it from a school climate perspective.
Speaker: You can't, you know, school climate happens one student, one person at a time, right?
Speaker: You know, the school can be safe.
Speaker: But if I'm an African-American kid and I see them doing mock lynchings with the seniors, I'm freaking out as a freshman, right?
Speaker: Then it's not safe for me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So this notion of the effect of these systems on individuals, and then how can you look collectively demographically?
Speaker: So I guess I would just end by saying this notion of looking at my school district in my community through the eyes of my daughter, once she finally told me what she was experiencing when she was older, just completely changed the way that I saw how that school system was working.
Speaker: And when we look at student voice, let's know that all student voices aren't equally expert.
Speaker: You can't tell me about racism if you've never experienced it.
Speaker: You can't tell me about poverty if you've never experienced it.
Speaker: Well, and something else I've been talking to my students about a lot lately in terms of intersectionality is
Speaker: between different vulnerable minority identification markers is I've tried to get them to understand that when they're in my ELA class where they're just analyzing characters' stories, and I teach mostly Bildungsroman or coming-of-age stories,
Speaker: And some of my characters are very young in the stories I teach.
Speaker: Some of them are adults that are just going through late life, coming of age events.
Speaker: And what I have them all do is do these identity marker charts for each of their characters where they have to go through like 20 different possible categories of identifying and determine like where does their character fall on different areas of vulnerability.
Speaker: based on different minority populations they belong to.
Speaker: And then I ask them to consider taking all of those different sections
Speaker: And how does that one narrative of the intersectionality between their different areas of vulnerability differentiate them from another character that maybe only has two of them, but not all of them.
Speaker: So like if you have a story about a character who's a teen girl, who's a girl of color, who also is an immigrant and English is their second language.
Speaker: How is that story different maybe than a teen girl?
Speaker: who is a girl of color from California, who's already found success in like entertainment career and is from a wealthy family.
Speaker: Like how are those two stories different or how did they, how are they interpreting or experiencing their position from within their identity marker differently?
Speaker: And I've told them that's really important to understand because when we consider equity,
Speaker: for students and for all people in relationship to influence and power, we have to understand that like not one person can represent a whole group or be the voice for a whole group.
Speaker: And that it's really critical to go to and expand on triangulate your data, if you will, from a group, get the most data that you can to get, you know, an understanding of a narrative or a story for that group.
Speaker: And that's why when,
Speaker: for student summit when I proposed at my school, the policy memo that I shared with you, where they already have a policy in place to have a student on the student or on the, um, the school board.
Speaker: They've had that policy since 2008.
Speaker: but they haven't used it for several years, maybe even 10 years since they've had a student on the school board.
Speaker: And the policy that preexisted said that the student had to be nominated by a teacher or an administrator.
Speaker: And that one student would represent the entire school body for the whole year.
Speaker: And I was like, guys, does that sound like,
Speaker: like that's a fair representation of the student body?
Speaker: Does that sound to you like that person is likely to represent you and how you feel and what your student experience was?
Speaker: And they said, no, not unless that person was going out and collecting stories from everyone and collecting data from everyone and representing that data.
Speaker: Even if, and then one of my students was wonderful.
Speaker: He had a really fantastic issue campaign this year.
Speaker: He said, no.
Speaker: And even if that student was like another, uh, you know, junior straight white kid that played lacrosse like me, there's a good chance.
Speaker: I still wouldn't agree with them.
Speaker: I was like, well, that's exactly it.
Speaker: It's not, it's not about just having like a couple of the same identity markers.
Speaker: Even if you have those, you're still experiencing, you know,
Speaker: things differently, but, um, getting a whole, whole voice approach or a holistic picture of a constituency is what's important.
Speaker: And so that's why I asked before I sent the policy memo forward, I said, um, what I'm,
Speaker: What I'm thinking is that as a student summit leadership group, we propose that as a group that's fully inclusive, that anyone can participate in at any time, for any length of time, for any reason, we would be that body that would hold that position on the school board by nominating within this program a person that
Speaker: for each meeting to represent the data that's been collected by the group and the research that's been done by the group, not just their perspective.
Speaker: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker: And I was like, I feel like that's really the most equitable way to approach this scenario and give everyone access to space and voice and influence and power.
Speaker: And everyone was very excited about that.
Speaker: and they were fully on board for doing that work.
Speaker: We did not hear back from the school board.
Speaker: So unfortunately, it's likely it's a no-go, which is a little frustrating.
Speaker: I think that's a part of some other even bigger boundaries and barriers that I know you and I have talked about frequently to having a real genuine democratic process experience for students in public education
Speaker: This idea that not all kids currently, even though I would like my program to be 100% inclusive, not all students can access my program.
Speaker: They can't because it's not held during the day.
Speaker: It's not held during school day because it wasn't allowed.
Speaker: So it's after school.
Speaker: And while we do have late buses, and I hold it on a day where late buses run,
Speaker: I still have students that have to go home and care for other siblings that have to work after school, that have responsibilities after school that they can't break.
Speaker: So is it fully inclusive?
Speaker: No, that's definitely a boundary within my program because I wasn't allowed that space to do it during the school day, which would actually make it, I think, more fully inclusive.
Speaker: So you're getting at something that is...
Speaker: really one of the biggest challenges and something that, you know, we work on all the time and we'll always work on, I guess.
Speaker: And that is really, how do you go from, you know, the belief system that, you know, we need to hear from individual students about their experience.
Speaker: We need to look
Speaker: at the aggregate collectively at, you know, what are the universal questions or concerns that our whole system needs to address?
Speaker: So the individual stories have to add up to, you know, where's the, where's the biggest, where's the biggest impact we can have by focusing on something that many people are experiencing, many people care about.
Speaker: And so data collection becomes a really powerful tool for that voice to be, you know, reflected in the data.
Speaker: Even if I can't come after school, even if I have to go home or I don't have the confidence to speak up in a group, there's gotta be a way that we can capture your words or some summary of your thinking through some kind of social science data collection and have a representation of everybody.
Speaker: And we have done, we've tried to navigate that process a little bit to make it more equitable by at the start of every meeting that we have, which the meetings are biweekly, we have this bucket that people place their issues in or things they think could potentially be a student summit leadership program issue that we're tackling.
Speaker: They place those in this bucket anonymously.
Speaker: And they can do that whether they're willing to actually talk about that issue or not, or sign up to be, you know, an issue leader or an issue committee member or whatever.
Speaker: They can even send an issue with another student who's coming if they can't attend and at least have it placed in the bucket.
Speaker: And no one can promise that that issue will get picked up as one that's being worked on and be assigned a leader and a committee member because the students have to have to volunteer for that.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: It's not guaranteed that there will be other students that want to work on that issue, but at least it gets tossed in the ring.
Speaker: We're working hard to try to take the best of what we've been working on in terms of student voice for these years and
Speaker: figure out how to get ourselves out of the mix.
Speaker: So your program was built on your blood, sweat, and love.
Speaker: I know our program, again, built by a few of us that have really been sort of living and dying this work for many, many years.
Speaker: But, but we're all moving on in our, in our lives and our careers probably.
Speaker: So how do we sustain and maintain, you know,
Speaker: The things that we've learned and help other people pick up and carry on and give them a space to join the work.
Speaker: I just had a meeting with this wonderful man who his background is he creates electronic portfolios.
Speaker: He creates badging for specific learning tasks, specific skills where kids can earn badges to demonstrate their expertise or their learning.
Speaker: And what we're trying to do is we're trying to take the student leadership work that you and I are both, you know, championing here and trying to get done.
Speaker: And we're trying to systematize it to a point where if, you know, somebody who was one of your students in your program, you know, got out of college and they became a teacher and they said, oh, man, I'm going to be a teacher.
Speaker: I really want to do that program at my school, they would have an access to at least tools and resources to be able to, you know, jump in at a very high level, taking advantage of some of the, you know, the blood, sweat and tears that we've all put in over the years.
Speaker: So that's our summer project is attempting to create a portal and a set of resources and tools that we can share with all the schools that we're working with,
Speaker: Because you're right, you know, kids come to meetings and you're excited for the half hour, 45 minutes, an hour, two hours that you're at the meeting, but you leave and you go back and the real world gets in the way and it's hard to keep focused on action and following through on action is really hard.
Speaker: So, you know, I'd love to do that, make that make that a little bit more of a consistent and, you know, supportive.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: a brilliant idea to create one place where people can access all of these different styles of programming to build organizations within their organization that create equity and are student driven student voice and leadership.
Speaker: I think that's really cool.
Speaker: I'd love to make a suggestion because as I've been navigating this program with my school, even though
Speaker: they received when I asked to be able to do the program, they received a full breakdown of how that was going to go and what it was going to look like.
Speaker: I think they underestimated the involvement and the level of participation and change that would be created.
Speaker: And so they've attempted a few times to come back to me and ask if I could do my program this way or if I could do
Speaker: integrate my program with student counselors, class counselor, whatever, and modify my program and
Speaker: I was thinking, um, what I ended up doing was creating a list for them of here are the, like the non-negotiables here are the hard boundaries that if I do my program here, I have to be able to do these things in order for me to do my program with fidelity to the intention of the program, which is to give students student driven voice and leadership has to look like this, but here are the places where I could be flexible.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I think it would be really helpful if in creating that portal, people really created some kind of document or tool to access that said, these are, this is what must be done for this program to be like, these are the pillars.
Speaker: This is what has to happen for this to go the way we intended it to go.
Speaker: What might some of the pillars be?
Speaker: So for like, for my program, 100% inclusivity is a critical pillar.
Speaker: You cannot do my program with an election process.
Speaker: It's 100% inclusivity.
Speaker: And there has to, and another pillar of my program, or kind of a sub pillar under that means that there is no academic eligibility.
Speaker: And there is no behavioral eligibility.
Speaker: There is no attendance eligibility.
Speaker: 100% of students that attend that school are eligible, all of them.
Speaker: So that's a critical pillar.
Speaker: And then another pillar of my program would be that it is a hearts ladder rung eight pedagogical partnership in that it is student driven and we are making decisions together with equal weight and value about how to approach different students
Speaker: issues that are brought up by students and adopted by issue leaders and issue committees.
Speaker: So that's a pillar.
Speaker: It has to be that way.
Speaker: And that means giving up, like that really means being more of a facilitator of discussion than being a leader in the program from like a hierarchical perspective.
Speaker: And then another pillar of my program would be that it's given value and merit in some way.
Speaker: So in my school, it has to be something where they're willing to say that I could order, that we have like a place in the yearbook and we have, we're, we can access the morning announcements to make announcements about the program.
Speaker: And we are treated with equal weight to other school non-curricular programs.
Speaker: And I would like to add, although I'm not doing this at my school right now and it is running with, so this is like, this is an area that could be negotiable.
Speaker: We need access to space
Speaker: an audience with all members of the organization.
Speaker: That's a pillar.
Speaker: What that access can look like, whether we actually get a seat at the school board table, whether that's as a non-voting member or voting member or whatever, that can be negotiated, but we have to have access to audience.
Speaker: So it's not enough for us to just be able to meet and talk about things that we think are working well, that aren't working well, that we want to change.
Speaker: We also need to be able to access either administrators to sit in front of the people that are at the top of the hierarchy currently so that we can provide recommendations based on the research that we're doing.
Speaker: So I would say those are the three pillars.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: Yeah, I just sat in on a dissertation from Plymouth State where the woman was presenting her
Speaker: her doctoral research that was built around YPAR and very fascinating to see a completely different approach there.
Speaker: But what she did, which I thought was kind of brilliant in some ways, but has limitations as well, was she connected this idea of YPAR, Youth Participatory Action Research, to, in New Hampshire, we have this thing called ELOs, Experience Learning Opportunities, where kids can get academic credit
Speaker: for the independent study kind of.
Speaker: And I had put that in my policy memo as a recommendation because actually the policy that was written in 2008 gives that student that would represent the school as the student school board member
Speaker: it gives them a half credit.
Speaker: And so I wanted to capitalize on that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's one of the things that got added to our discussion here about this portal.
Speaker: We thought that it would be really cool if we could design both experiential learning opportunities in these roles for kids in schools and
Speaker: and then have the badging system align with the, in most schools in New Hampshire anyway, they all had to develop this thing called portrait of a learner.
Speaker: And so they all have these very vague things like, oh, communication, trust, you know, whatever.
Speaker: But pretty easy to connect anything to most of those outcomes of character and persistence and commitment and those kind of things.
Speaker: So we thought that might be a way, again, to slip into an existing slot where, oh, you say you want kids to develop these skills.
Speaker: Well, here's a great opportunity to develop those skills.
Speaker: And oh, by the way, we'll give you evidence as part of this portal
Speaker: that would allow kids to document what they've done in a way that would make it easy for you.
Speaker: Actually, it would make it hard for you not to give them academic credit.
Speaker: That's the point.
Speaker: So anyway, those were some ideas we had about making it more systemic, tying it into the existing values, beliefs, mission statements of these schools that they say all the right things, but that ideology part, that idea, oh, we didn't mean it that way.
Speaker: You have to lay out the pillars or we're going to shift it back to a traditional model, no matter what you call it.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's a really interesting way to look at it.
Speaker: I love ELOs.
Speaker: And when I was teaching in New Hampshire, I loved them.
Speaker: We don't have as many ELO opportunities in Maine, which is kind of unfortunate.
Speaker: And I would like my program to function as an ELO opportunity.
Speaker: I'd like them to have way more ELOs at my school, actually, to be honest.
Speaker: But I think really...
Speaker: in order to do that, like that doesn't, that wouldn't necessarily have to be a pillar for me.
Speaker: But I know that there are some things that would be non-negotiable because I've been approached this year several times about integrating with other programs or changing my program or modifying it in a certain way that, that to me said it won't function the way it's supposed to.
Speaker: If I do that, it won't be done properly.
Speaker: with fidelity to the intention I have of building this program.
Speaker: And I think that happens a lot when people have access to different resources and programs.
Speaker: And even if they've read it and they know how it should function and what the purpose of it is, there are so many other powers and players that at
Speaker: at bat for every scenario that you end up sometimes being asked to modify and you don't even realize that that's doing something negative with, in terms of like the mission and vision of your, of your program.
Speaker: For instance, I know I've talked to you about, I run the civil rights team for the civil rights team project of Maine at my school.
Speaker: And something that's really foundational to that program is that you have to have entrance lobby display.
Speaker: that says that there's a civil rights team present at that school.
Speaker: And it's like the first thing you're assigned to do.
Speaker: And it's critical and it's important because it shows representation.
Speaker: And we had a huge issue this year when trying to hang, and I'll be honest, we way overshot our goal of building a lobby display.
Speaker: It took us a year to build it because we decided to make it out of clay and do all of these cool designs on it.
Speaker: And we had to cut this massive circular slab of clay into multiple puzzle pieces with the state of main in the middle and keep refiring it because it kept breaking and reglazing it.
Speaker: It was a mess, but it was beautiful once it was done.
Speaker: And the kids were adamant they were going to do it this way.
Speaker: This is the display they wanted.
Speaker: It would last forever.
Speaker: And my dad built this whole wooden frame for it so we could hang it up on the wall.
Speaker: And it probably weighs 200 pounds.
Speaker: And when we finally got it all said and done, the principal was thrilled with it.
Speaker: I brought it down and I went to go hang it in the lobby.
Speaker: And we found one wall that was facing the front door would be perfect for it.
Speaker: And there were already these two really big screws built into that wall that could support the weight of this massive thing.
Speaker: And it just so happens to me there's two big screws there because we hang a giant wreath in that spot.
Speaker: And I was like,
Speaker: we can just take the wreath down and we'll put this up and then this will hang there and we could put the wreath somewhere else.
Speaker: And to me, that seemed fine because the wreath hangs for a month, a year.
Speaker: So who cares?
Speaker: But that changed the entire perspective of the program, like how people were looking at the program that changed everything.
Speaker: You're anti-Christmas.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I'm anti-Christmas with my civil rights team display.
Speaker: And in that moment they said,
Speaker: certain, I'm not going to say who, certain people at the school came crawling out of the woodwork to say, take that down.
Speaker: We can't hang that there.
Speaker: That's where the wreath goes.
Speaker: We need to put it somewhere else.
Speaker: Well, there's literally, it would be very difficult for me to explain why, but there's no other place in the lobby that you could put this thing.
Speaker: That's where it's got to go.
Speaker: In order to like meet the expectations, the pillar of the civil rights team, which is that there needs to be front entrance lobby display of that, of presence of that program.
Speaker: And I'm trying to explain to these people, this is a requirement.
Speaker: It's not like Miranda came along and said, I really want to display this huge thing.
Speaker: Or even that the students came along and said, I really want to display this huge thing.
Speaker: I want to put it right here.
Speaker: It's a requirement that this be displayed somewhere.
Speaker: And this is the most reasonable place for it to be if we do it with fidelity to the intention of having this display here.
Speaker: And I had to go to a meeting about it, of course.
Speaker: So I finally just said, listen, this is a pillar of having this program in the school.
Speaker: This is a requirement.
Speaker: This is a part having representation, making sure everyone has access to the knowledge of representation of this program here via a lobby display so that people feel they are welcomed.
Speaker: all people is a pillar of this program.
Speaker: So either we put it up or we are not doing the program.
Speaker: It's a non-negotiable.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: Like that's how it is.
Speaker: It's that's how it has to be.
Speaker: There aren't that many, there are other things that we can be flexible on, but this thing has to happen.
Speaker: So, and I had to stick to that.
Speaker: And it was hard for me because I don't want to make people mad and I don't want to irritate people or
Speaker: I don't want to make people uncomfortable with the change that I'm presenting, but I think it's really been helpful when entering these different areas of programming and education to know what I'm learning, what I'm willing to die on the sword for, like what I, what is a hard boundary.
Speaker: And I, I wish I had known how important that was like,
Speaker: a lot longer ago.
Speaker: I wish that I had understood what was something that I was willing to go to bat for and what wasn't.
Speaker: And I think when people are trying to adopt other people's programs or use other people's frameworks or methodologies, you
Speaker: if that was a part of their understanding, like what is, what are the critical elements that have to happen?
Speaker: I think there would be more fidelity to the adoption of, of different people's academic programs and education or cultural climate programs or student leadership programs or whatever.
Speaker: When you're pushing back or challenging dominant beliefs and values, you know,
Speaker: you have to sort of say, well, what are the dominant beliefs and values that are going on really sometimes so deeply ingrained?
Speaker: That's what we found in Tennessee.
Speaker: You know, the idea that the Justice Department said, you have been found essentially, you know, in violation of civil rights laws of the United States.
Speaker: We are coming and doing a site visit in six months.
Speaker: These are the areas that we have identified in our investigation that are problematic and they need to be addressed before we come.
Speaker: And if they are not, then we will be proceeding with this consent decree.
Speaker: Some of them were, there's a swatstick on the boys' bathroom stall number three in the south bathroom.
Speaker: It's got to go.
Speaker: There's the N word on the front of a teacher's desk in the industrial arts program.
Speaker: It's written right on the front of his desk that every kid looks at every day.
Speaker: By the time six months came and they went, none of those things had been altered.
Speaker: There literally was cultural blindness to these things that are right before your eyes that they said, we don't have a problem.
Speaker: So when you look at
Speaker: Things like, and I know this is a little example, but it's part of a larger set of belief systems.
Speaker: Look at this notion of, you know, call it white supremacy, call it, you know, Christian dominance in our culture over other religions.
Speaker: You know, look how the right, political right has made case about, you know, you're against Christmas.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it really means you're against us.
Speaker: You're against us.
Speaker: And I would imagine that a civil rights program is probably seen by certain people as being against us.
Speaker: You're for them.
Speaker: And so we get into these such deeply ingrained arguments.
Speaker: So I think your point about standing your ground on certain things that are the fundamentals of your program is exactly right.
Speaker: I have a similar pillar when we go into schools to do school climate and culture work.
Speaker: And that is to me the essence of advocating for students and their voices to be heard in a school.
Speaker: And that is I need to really literally look the principal in the eye and say, are you going to support student voice in this process?
Speaker: Are you going to always say no?
Speaker: Because if you're always going to say no, and there's no kids have told me, you get our hopes up when you come in here and do this work.
Speaker: It's, you know, thank you.
Speaker: The girl that said thanks for asking, you know, or the person that said thanks for asking.
Speaker: They really, really appreciate not only being asked what they believe, they appreciate being chosen to be part of something that's reflective of their values.
Speaker: And the last thing is when you pull the plug on any of those core elements, you're basically lying to the kids.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so I think all of your people, to me, they really say, I don't really want to lie about these things.
Speaker: I really mean them.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: And I will tell you in doing this work and creating the student summit involving so many kids, my biggest fear was that they were going to go for something that they felt so passionate about and they were going to get shut down and it wasn't going to be fair.
Speaker: And because they would have done the work and they would have deserved the voice and recognition, but they didn't get it because they
Speaker: People were too concerned with their age and their lack of authority in life and not really listening to what their research and data and understanding was.
Speaker: And that's the first issue that we brought in front of the school board.
Speaker: I had these kids sit down and I said, you need to make a presentation and it has to be a presentation that ends all presentations.
Speaker: Like you are going to have to commit to making this the best visual presentation thing you've ever made.
Speaker: And it's got to be, it's got to really wow them.
Speaker: It's going to need to put their backs against the wall because,
Speaker: that was really mostly my anxiety saying like, I don't want you to do this and have good work and do good work, but not be given the respect and value that you deserve.
Speaker: And then feel like, I don't want that to negatively impact you.
Speaker: I don't want you to come away from that being like, I failed.
Speaker: I can't make change.
Speaker: I'm not valued.
Speaker: I was so afraid.
Speaker: they luckily they made a brilliant presentation.
Speaker: I, it was probably one of the best things I've ever seen students create.
Speaker: I was shocked and it's very good and it's really well researched and supported.
Speaker: There's so much data.
Speaker: The data is presented in a bunch of different ways to give people a better understanding.
Speaker: It makes big picture.
Speaker: It correlates to big picture ideas.
Speaker: And at the same time, it's very specific to the district and it's just, it's gorgeous.
Speaker: And it really does put the, their backs against the wall because it's like, do you want,
Speaker: better academic performance?
Speaker: Do you want better behavioral data?
Speaker: Do you want better attendance?
Speaker: Well, we can help you with all three of these things through this one change.
Speaker: And so they actually did end up getting the school board to unanimously vote to approve their policy change recommendation.
Speaker: But for 15 years, people have been trying to get this policy to change
Speaker: And every single time it's failed, they haven't even been willing to vote on it.
Speaker: And so I was afraid because I was like, I know that you're capable of doing good work.
Speaker: I know you're passionate about this.
Speaker: I know that this is important to you.
Speaker: And I'm so afraid that you're going to get there and people are not going to listen.
Speaker: I actually really try in some ways almost not to do what you just described.
Speaker: I just want to be honest, because I think of like, I think of the civil rights struggle that's been going on for 400 years and we're not there yet.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so do we say that if we don't get, if we don't get the change that, you know, that's the end of things or that we're so wounded or whatever, I try to prepare them.
Speaker: I try to prepare students for no and say, really, you can't control anything that your principal does.
Speaker: You can't control anything the school board does.
Speaker: The only person that you can change is you.
Speaker: And I've definitely adopted that more relaxed approach now.
Speaker: Well, because then they can say, we made the most unbelievable presentation to a school board that's existed for 15 years and continues to resist.
Speaker: But we did what we could do as activists, as leaders, as advocates.
Speaker: And what I say to them is, the only control you have
Speaker: is your ability to inspire them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You can totally.
Speaker: And so they may, maybe they go from they never voted on the damn thing for 15 years to you got a five to four loss.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You go back.
Speaker: You still made a speech.
Speaker: You inspired them.
Speaker: Four of those folks.
Speaker: And so what you did worked great.
Speaker: It just wasn't enough to change history.
Speaker: Yet.
Speaker: Anyway, I just try to focus on the work.
Speaker: The big mantra is I tell them for leadership.
Speaker: Leadership is I make them repeat after me.
Speaker: I'm a leader.
Speaker: And they usually are really quiet.
Speaker: I'm a leader.
Speaker: I say I'm a leader.
Speaker: I lead with my heart.
Speaker: You could say with your kids, did you lead with your heart?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I lead with my head.
Speaker: Did you lead with your head?
Speaker: Yeah, we put all the data together.
Speaker: We made this.
Speaker: I lead with my feet.
Speaker: Yeah, I got up there and I did it.
Speaker: So the outcome doesn't change the fact that they led in ways that are designed to inspire change.
Speaker: No, it doesn't.
Speaker: It goes last and last, I guess.
Speaker: In looking at my focus group data and the exit tickets that I get from them,
Speaker: and all of the language that they've used to describe their experience, I'm realizing that although the wins that they got, the change that they made were influential and important and they value those, truly their description of their experience is way more about them relating to the work that they're doing and the people they're working with and seeing themselves as a part of a collective action
Speaker: it's way more about that and way less about their individual belief in themselves based off of whether or not their policy was changed or was successful or whatever.
Speaker: Because I also had a bunch of students who did things that did not pan out or come to fruition, at least not yet.
Speaker: And, and they still describe the same change.
Speaker: So yeah,
Speaker: So that becoming part of a something bigger than myself is really the essence, I think, of activism, right?
Speaker: I'm connecting to a cause.
Speaker: I'm connecting to a set of beliefs.
Speaker: In doing so, I connect with others that believe similar things to me.
Speaker: And, you know, there's a sense of connectedness and belonging that happens.
Speaker: I still hear from kids that were in the eighth grade, right?
Speaker: Many, many, many, many years ago, who were Samantha Smith's classmates, who stood up against the U.S. and Soviet governments around nuclear proliferation and
Speaker: And they traveled to the Soviet Union.
Speaker: They advocated for nuclear disarmament.
Speaker: They advocated for world peace in a time of real danger.
Speaker: And those kids still connect with each other.
Speaker: They still connect with me because they were working.
Speaker: And they didn't win, really.
Speaker: But they won a whole lot in terms of their understanding of what they could do as a group of kids.
Speaker: So it's all good work.
Speaker: And it's so, it really, I think also that sense of connectedness and belonging, that's at the heart of democracy.
Speaker: That's at the heart of equity and empathy.
Speaker: And it's all kind of the same thing.
Speaker: This belief in the value of the group and your belonging to the group and seeing yourself as an individual, but also as a part of a whole.
Speaker: And I think that's really what is developing or what's growing in students that are given those four things, space, audience, influence.
Speaker: I think that's it.
Speaker: And voice.
Speaker: Good stuff.
Speaker: We're both preaching wire.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I haven't, I don't know if I've mentioned this yet, but Bill is my, is my chair for my dissertation currently.
Speaker: The, probably the best chair I could have gotten because we have the same sort of ideology and pedagogy regarding student voice and student leadership and,
Speaker: allowing students space and audience.
Speaker: So I know we're both preaching to the choir, but it is still very exciting to talk about and really helpful in building connections to other work and other programs and frameworks that have come before that have been successful and ones that haven't and why they haven't.
Speaker: I do think, I know you picked this to be an adaptive challenge.
Speaker: I do think it's an adaptive challenge, obviously, because it's a huge ideological shift, a huge mindset transition to seeing, to not seeing the world based on a hierarchy with the paradigm of adultism.
Speaker: And so I think it is definitely an adaptive challenge and it's an adaptive challenge in education primarily because that's where kids spend eight hours of their day every day.
Speaker: So it becomes like a major issue in education.
Speaker: And when I consider looking at adaptive challenges in organizations,
Speaker: and in education as an organization as a whole.
Speaker: I think about the Bowman and Deal frames.
Speaker: And the first frame is the structural frame.
Speaker: It's the how we do what we do, what we produce or what service we provide.
Speaker: It's the factory.
Speaker: That's like the symbol for the structural frame.
Speaker: It's the actual logistical production.
Speaker: And then the second frame is the human resources frame.
Speaker: And the symbol for that is the family.
Speaker: It's the interpersonal connections between the people that make up the constituency of an organization and how they communicate with one another.
Speaker: And then there's the political frame, which is, this will come as precisely zero surprise to you, the one that I have the hardest time with.
Speaker: So the political frame.
Speaker: It's the one behind using those two screws in the wall.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's the one behind using the two screws in the wall.
Speaker: Um, and so the political frame is this idea of who has power, who has influence.
Speaker: The symbol for that frame is the jungle.
Speaker: It's like, there's a King of the jungle and then there are predators and there are prey.
Speaker: And where are you in the hierarchical balance of power and influence?
Speaker: Um, and I know that power and influence are not the same thing, but there's a hierarchy for both of those things.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: That's the political lens for looking at organizational structure theory from Bowman and Deal.
Speaker: And then lastly is the symbolic frame.
Speaker: And the symbol for that is the temple.
Speaker: It's the mission and vision.
Speaker: It's the big why.
Speaker: Why are we here?
Speaker: Why are we doing this?
Speaker: Why are the students coming?
Speaker: What's the goal?
Speaker: That kind of idea.
Speaker: And so I definitely see this as an adaptive challenge that can be
Speaker: placed inside of that framework of understanding organizational structure, where do you see it falling under that umbrella?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I actually was looking forward to telling us about the fifth one.
Speaker: Okay, yeah, I'll tell you.
Speaker: Well, I was going to tell you about that one after we talked about the first one, but I'll tell you right now.
Speaker: Lay out the fifth one and I'll answer your questions.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So the fifth frame is a frame that's been proposed by my doctoral cohort and I.
Speaker: Um, so it's, it's not a Bowman and Deal frame.
Speaker: It's an idea that we had when we were sitting around, uh, at a residency talking about the frames of structural, um, of, uh, organizational structure.
Speaker: And we said, and we all kind of coincidentally wrote about the same thing in one of our prompts in response to an assignment online.
Speaker: We kind of said, we think
Speaker: there needs to be a fifth frame.
Speaker: We think that there is a way of looking at an organizational lens through which you view a problem that isn't covered here.
Speaker: And that is what we call the eudaimonia frame.
Speaker: It's the harmony or the synergy in which all of the different frames, aspects, components of an organization are working together effectively to support one another.
Speaker: So it's,
Speaker: the way that we understand or interpret that is when this frame is not, there's a problem within this frame when they, when things are not going well, there's a challenge.
Speaker: It's because there is a lack of everyone sort of tuning together to work at the same frequency, the same pace, the same synergy, the same mood or tone to the work.
Speaker: And that can often come across as people saying, we're not all on the same page.
Speaker: There's like a negative vibe here.
Speaker: Things don't feel great.
Speaker: It doesn't feel like a great place to work.
Speaker: It doesn't feel like a great place to be or to volunteer.
Speaker: It's there's no harmony to it.
Speaker: We're all going different directions.
Speaker: And that we see as the synergy frame and subsequently what we call the eudaimonia frame.
Speaker: It's how well there is harmonic balance between all of the different players and aspects of an organization.
Speaker: And the picture for that one was...
Speaker: The symbol for that is the tuning fork.
Speaker: So everyone tunes to the same, in the same way that you start, you know, an orchestra and you use your, or, you know, a choir and you use your, your pitch key.
Speaker: It's the tuning fork.
Speaker: It's the thing we are all meant to tune to so that we are all working in tandem.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So we have the culminating piece, that fifth one is the tuning fork.
Speaker: And if you go back to the individual strands there, you had the images of the factory, you had the images of the jungle, the images of the temple.
Speaker: What was the relationships one?
Speaker: A family.
Speaker: A family.
Speaker: And how all those work in harmony together to create that vibe.
Speaker: So when I hear this framework, it really speaks loudly to me around our attempts to operationalize for research purposes and just conceptually.
Speaker: What the heck is school climate?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Where does school climate come from?
Speaker: And what are the positive effects of school climate?
Speaker: So if climate is kind of the center, I think climate is the vibe.
Speaker: I think you can walk into a school and feel the climate of the school.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And then I think about, well, what contributes to the creation of that climate?
Speaker: I know Bull Moon Deal, their work is culture work, right?
Speaker: They're like experts on culture.
Speaker: And so when I think of the four domains or the four elements there,
Speaker: I think those four things really are a representation of the culture of a building.
Speaker: What's normal here?
Speaker: What's normal in terms of how leadership works?
Speaker: Is it top down or bottom up?
Speaker: What's normal when it comes to relationships?
Speaker: Are people at each other or a dysfunctional family, or do they love each other?
Speaker: What are the values and beliefs we carry in the temple?
Speaker: Do we come to this place as if we're entering a temple every day, or do we completely...
Speaker: you know, believe certain things outside of school, but we act on different beliefs inside of school.
Speaker: And then the factory is the working conditions, kind of like, do I show up here?
Speaker: And am I, am I treated with dignity and respect as a contributing member of society here or this place?
Speaker: And so our little theory of action is that everything is culture.
Speaker: So we really agree with these guys.
Speaker: But we really agree with you in terms of your fifth piece, is that all of that adds up to a climate.
Speaker: I heard this wonderful quote that says, school climate is like the air we breathe.
Speaker: It often goes unnoticed until it becomes toxic.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's the only time we've talked about climate.
Speaker: We've talked about climate when it came out of the original Columbine school shooting school violence data.
Speaker: They said the climate of that school in Columbine was one of dysfunction, was one of aggressive hate towards certain groups, etc.,
Speaker: And so this idea that the culture of a school contributes to the climate that everyone feels and either thrives within or suffers from, and that all of that is what adds to learning.
Speaker: We did that work for actually just four years of it in Sullivan County, Tennessee, where they were doing all that racial crap.
Speaker: After four years of looking at school climate data,
Speaker: The Justice Department let them off the hook after three years.
Speaker: It was a four-year consent decree we're supposed to be there for.
Speaker: After three years of looking at their improvement in their climate of those schools, 36 schools, they saw they'd made tremendous improvement when they disaggregated by race and gender.
Speaker: Those kids feeling safer, feeling more respected, more connected, more engaged, having more of a voice.
Speaker: And
Speaker: So we basically were out of work after three years.
Speaker: But that's amazing that they were able to create that change.
Speaker: Well, it showed up in the data.
Speaker: And so, you know, they had a nice little trend line.
Speaker: It was trending up in year one a little bit, up a lot in year two, up a lot in year three.
Speaker: The superintendent, being a supporter of the work, he said to the board,
Speaker: let me just put another piece of data on the table.
Speaker: And he did an overlay, you know, slides where it was transparent.
Speaker: He said, here's our climate data for three years.
Speaker: Here's our achievement data for three years.
Speaker: In parallel.
Speaker: So duh, the culture affects the climate, affects the learning.
Speaker: When kids were feeling unsafe, when they're feeling threatened and harassed and all that stuff, the entire system was not performing like it should.
Speaker: There was no harmony.
Speaker: And so when you say, how does Bowman and Deal fit with our work?
Speaker: I think it's the perfect frame for thinking about the relationships between climate, culture and learning.
Speaker: I think you're absolutely right.
Speaker: And I think our issue inside of the eudaimonia frame of education right now, one of our issues, I think there's a few, but one of them is, I think at the heart of this, the culture of adultism and the culture of a hierarchical value structure to the constituency of education as an organization is
Speaker: I think those are major threats within the eudaimonia frame.
Speaker: And I think that they exist within that framework of culture or synergy because there is a lack of structural tools, protocols, policies that support that.
Speaker: There's a lack of interpersonal relationships or human resources type tools.
Speaker: events that support that.
Speaker: And there is a lack of that being a part of the mission and vision of schools.
Speaker: And I think there, and so it falls under this symbolic frame.
Speaker: And I also think
Speaker: that it gravely threatens the political structure.
Speaker: So I think that all of those things are touched by this idea of pedagogical partnership as an adaptive challenge.
Speaker: And I think it's definitely present in the eudaimonia frame because it is an ideological challenge in that we have a cultural ideology of adultism and of hierarchical values.
Speaker: and of popularity over capability.
Speaker: And so none of those things can work in tandem to support the goal of creating equity in student voice and leadership if we aren't all tuned to that fork, and we are not.
Speaker: So Seymour Saracen, the old educational organizational guy, he was the one I shared that data from his book, The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform with.
Speaker: And he was the one whose research discovered that only 2% of all educational initiatives funded by the U.S. Department of Ed for the last 40 years have resulted in real systemic change.
Speaker: So how would we use this frame to understand Saracen's findings?
Speaker: He said that ultimately, while everything matters, the one predictor of the 2%, what was different about the 2% of the schools that were using any kind of reform initiative at all
Speaker: It was that they incorporated a shift in power relations in their work.
Speaker: That's the jungle, right?
Speaker: That's the politics.
Speaker: So he said instead of the superintendent telling everybody what to do, instead of the teachers telling the kids what to do.
Speaker: This idea that we're looking at, you keep using the word hierarchy, and Saracen would agree, those hierarchical dimensions of our school systems, they're in everything.
Speaker: They're in all of it, our belief systems.
Speaker: They're in our factory model.
Speaker: They're in the jungle.
Speaker: They show up every day in the family structures.
Speaker: It's who's on top, who's on the bottom.
Speaker: That ranks everything.
Speaker: And so when you go to that power relationship, we are going to start listening to kids.
Speaker: it cuts to the heart of what Saracen would say will result in educational change and improvement.
Speaker: So I think it's why we love the student voice piece.
Speaker: It's not only because it's more fun than working with kids, but also it's symbolic in terms of representing the kind of shift in power that has to happen at every level.
Speaker: You know, the school secretaries need to be treated differently.
Speaker: The teaching, the TAs or the, you know, the teacher's aides need to be treated differently.
Speaker: The poor kids, the minority kids, the LGBTQ plus kids, that's all about power dynamics and how they fit into that system.
Speaker: And so when we start doing what you and I have been talking about for the last couple hours, which is really finding space to challenge those power relations.
Speaker: And I loved your pillars because those pretty much all relate to shifting power in a system.
Speaker: And if you lose those, you kind of do lose your programs.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And I want to say this last thing because you said I'm your dissertation advisor, et cetera.
Speaker: But I want to thank you because you teach me so much whenever I talk to you about this stuff.
Speaker: And I honestly bring that from my heart when you came and said, geez, why do they send the kids home on professional development day?
Speaker: I'm like, I've been doing this work for 30 years and I never thought of that.
Speaker: It's so brilliant.
Speaker: So I think it's a neutral admiration society here.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Yeah, I can't tell you how appreciative I am to have you as my chair and as a mentor as I'm going through this process and figuring out how to apply what I'm passionate about in education in a productive or effective way.
Speaker: And your help in our discussions have been invaluable in terms of
Speaker: shaping what that looks like for me, um, especially as a person who can very easily go off track, um, and just start, uh, find something shiny to get excited about.
Speaker: So, um, I, I really appreciate it tremendously.
Speaker: And I, I thank you for, um, being patient with me and supporting me through trying to make this work
Speaker: happen and to do it effectively.
Speaker: And I thank you on behalf of the students as well, who will benefit from it greatly.
Speaker: And I talk about you frequently in front of them.
Speaker: So they all know who you are.
Speaker: Some of them who are going to have episodes on this podcast, because of course I would make a podcast that involved interviews with children.
Speaker: So I, I thank you.
Speaker: And, and I really appreciate you being here today.
Speaker: in talking to me about this adaptive challenge in education and hopefully people will take away from this that there is a different way that we can look at educational reform and change that's centered around a partnership between students and staff and faculty.
Speaker: I appreciate it.
Speaker: And the last thing I would say to you is that I have this wonderful feeling here because I never get to really think about my connection to Samantha Smith, my former seventh grade student, who really taught me that, you know, a seventh grade girl from Maine can change the world.
Speaker: Honest to God, she can.
Speaker: And she really did.
Speaker: And so I ended up doing my doctorate because of her and how kids, you know, develop the ability to play in a political arena.
Speaker: and become actors in this world.
Speaker: And the next meeting I want to have right after I hang up with here is one of my other students, Jed Mayo, who I think you might know.
Speaker: I do, yeah.
Speaker: She worked for me as a New England college student, doing the student voice work out in the schools and traveled doing presentations all over the place for ASCD.
Speaker: Well, I'm meeting America.
Speaker: She's going to tell me, how the hell do we keep this going for another 30 years after I'm going to be gone?
Speaker: So it'll be.
Speaker: Well, I'm excited to see what she has to say.
Speaker: I hope you share it with me.
Speaker: I will.
Speaker: I think she's going to help shape the next iteration.
Speaker: So I'm going to certainly have her reach out to you as we keep evolving this thing.
Speaker: So thanks for what you're contributing.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: I will talk to you later.
Speaker: And thank you so much for being on the adaptive edge of education.
Speaker: Thanks so much.
