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Making School Meaningful w/ Lauren Porosoff
352 Plays6 days ago
Whether it was during her nearly two decades as a middle school humanities teacher or as diversity coordinator or grade-level team leader, my guest today kept returning to the same question: why does school so often feel like the opposite of learning?
Lauren Porosoff’s answer isn't a new program or a new curriculum, instead she offers a holistic way of thinking about how systems are connected to outcomes. And Lauren joins me today to talk about compensatory programs: the wellness kits, the diversity posters, the one-off professional development workshops that schools layer one on top of the other to signal that they value belonging, creativity, or student wellbeing, without ever changing the underlying framework for how students and teachers actually spend their time. In this episode, we talk about why schools reach for these fixes, why they backfire, and why they may be especially vulnerable to attack precisely because they're so superficial.
Lauren's website is theteachernerd.com, and her book (one of many!), Teach for Authentic Engagement, is available from ASCD.
The Trouble with Compensatory Programs
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Equity and Belonging in Education
00:00:00
Speaker
they're not just like doing a relationship building activity and then you know sitting and doing their work. They're building relationships with each other in the process of doing important work together.
00:00:10
Speaker
To me, that is what equity and belonging and inclusion are about. They're about giving students a chance to be their full selves as they learn.
Introducing the Podcast and Supporter Acknowledgments
00:00:27
Speaker
hello and Welcome to the Human Restoration Project Podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Dan Carney, Julia Valenti, and Corinne Greenblatt.
00:00:41
Speaker
Thank you so much for your ongoing support. We're proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad-free conversations over the years. So if you haven't yet, consider liking and leaving a review in your podcast app to help us reach more listeners.
00:00:54
Speaker
And of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media.
Lauren Porosoff's Holistic Educational Approach
00:01:05
Speaker
Whether it was during her nearly two decades as a middle school humanities teacher, or as diversity coordinator or grade-level team leader, my guest today kept returning to the same question.
00:01:16
Speaker
Why does school so often feel like the opposite of learning? Lauren Porosoff's answer isn't a new program or a new curriculum. Instead, she offers a holistic way of thinking about how systems are connected to outcomes.
00:01:31
Speaker
And Lauren joins me today to talk about compensatory programs, the wellness kits, diversity posters, the one-off professional development workshops that schools layer one on top of the other to signal that they value belonging, creativity, and student well-being without ever changing the underlying framework for how students and teachers actually spend their time.
Why Compensatory Programs Backfire
00:01:53
Speaker
In this episode, we talk about why schools reach for these fixes, why they backfire, and why they may be especially vulnerable to attack precisely because they're so superficial.
00:02:05
Speaker
Lauren's website is theteachernerd.com, and her book, Teach for Authentic Engagement, is available from ASCD.
Lauren Porosoff's Roles and Educational Focus
00:02:14
Speaker
I was a teacher for 18 years. um My work was in independent schools. So I worked at a Jewish day school in DC and then a secular independent school in DC, then moved to New York and worked at an independent school in New York, mostly in middle school humanities.
00:02:36
Speaker
And I've had a lot of different sort of jobs in independent schools. I was a DEI coordinator for a while. i was sort of like a grade dean. It wasn't called a dean, but like ah like a grade level team leader for a while.
00:02:52
Speaker
And so I've done all of these different jobs, but I see a difference between our jobs in education and our work. And my work in education has really always been about making school a source of meaning and vitality and community in students' lives and in teachers' lives as well.
Designing Meaningful and Inclusive Education
00:03:14
Speaker
And so even though it looks like my books and my articles are about all these different topics, that is what unites them, is making school meaningful and alive and helping students feel a sense of belonging, not by doing a sort of separate set of activities or programs, but by how instruction is designed.
00:03:36
Speaker
That is such an incredibly important point. And that was the through line that I found in the pieces of yours that I was reading to like so much of your work focusing on bridging that disconnect between the values, the way we talk the talk in schools and then our practice in schools. How what are some examples in all of those you know past lives and jobs that you've lived here? how Have you seen that disconnect manifest?
00:04:01
Speaker
I mean, I think, and this has been said, you know, in better, smarter ways by people who are smarter than me, but I i think that so much of what students do in schools is driven by compliance.
The Limitations of Compliance-Driven Education
00:04:12
Speaker
Here's an assignment. Now do the assignment the way I told you to do the assignment. And so students, and I think this is true even in schools that don't give grades, that even when you remove sort of that, you know, letter or number that quantifies compliance, I think students are still driven by a need to please the teacher, you know, check the boxes, stay out of trouble,
00:04:39
Speaker
And so they end up doing work where even even when they do have choices, they make choices based on what would make their work easiest and fastest to complete, as opposed to what would make it meaningful for them, what would make it reflect what matters in their lives, in their communities, you know, and and and reflect the qualities that they want to stand for.
00:05:03
Speaker
And I feel like in so many ways, it's like a self-inflicted um problem in a sense. You had mentioned even in schools that don't give grades or more or less gradeless. What is it about being sort of just trapped in a grammar of...
00:05:20
Speaker
schooling that students play a particular role to follow directions and teacher, you know, teachers teach and students learn in that context, I guess, to flip it on its head. Are there any examples where you've seen it being really successful where schools have really lived those values, either towards student agency or otherwise, and students have been responsive to that?
00:05:43
Speaker
I mean, i think there are some schools that are, you know, very well funded, high tuition, very elite populations where, you know, it's one to one instruction. And so the student can really sort of steer where the learning goes.
00:06:00
Speaker
There's a school in New York City where it's like all place based and, you know, students go out into the community and they work, you know, they go to museums or they work with businesses or like they develop their own businesses as entrepreneurs.
00:06:15
Speaker
And like, that's all really cool. And it's also not scalable, like not in the society that we currently live in. and I'm more interested in what we can do within the constraints that we actually have than kind of burning down the whole system and trying to build a new one because we have a system and that's where most of our students are.
00:06:37
Speaker
So to me, what's more...
Creating Student Agency Beyond Grades
00:06:41
Speaker
Useful is learning ways to design how students learn so that they actually experience a sense of agency.
00:06:50
Speaker
And even if they are getting grades or the teacher is the one giving the assignments, students aren't necessarily thinking about their work that way. Or if they are, that's not what's governing their behavior. Right.
00:07:03
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And you frame it so well in this recent piece from December called the trouble with compensatory programs. It sounds intuitive, um the framing of that. I'm wondering if you could just explain that for listeners and we can start to unpack why schools maybe have an obsession with these compensatory programs and what they could be doing instead.
Critique of Wellness Kits in Schools
00:07:24
Speaker
Yeah. So one of the examples I wrote about in the article is a school that I've worked with, they, you know, sort of jumped on the wellness bandwagon and said, like, what can we do? You know, students are anxious and they're struggling. And, you know, how can we increase student wellness?
00:07:41
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And so they created these wellness kits and they stuck them in every classroom and they had stuff like, you know, Zentangles and little candies and like essential oil and like, you know, stuff that like if you go on Amazon and type in wellness products, like these are the kinds of things you might get.
00:08:00
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i don't know how much students actually use them or how much wellness they actually created for students. My guess is probably not that much. But this is an example of a compensatory practice where schools are actually creating the anxiety.
00:08:17
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And then instead of designing learning environments that make students experience a sense of wellness in the work that they're doing, in the content they're learning and the relationships that they're developing, it's compensating for an absence of wellness.
00:08:33
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So that's what I mean by compensatory practices. It's when a school values something, whether it's wellness or belonging or equity or creativity, and then creates these programs or initiatives that instead of kind of making school a place where those values, you know, get put into action or come true, it sort of compensates for the absence of those values in students' day-to-day experience.
00:09:01
Speaker
I found the same thing you know in every school you know that I've worked with, the schools that my kids attend, yeah schools seem to have this obsession with these compensatory programs or just buying the new hotness off an Amazon wishlist and saying we're doing health and wellness or we're doing diversity, equity and inclusion or something like that. Why why do you think that they're drawn to these things and what do you think they should or could be doing to change that fundamental grammar or that experience instead?
00:09:31
Speaker
I mean, I'll give you my sort of 10 years ago me answer, which I think is an oversimplification. i think 10 years ago me would have said administrators just want to make themselves look good as quickly and as easily as possible.
00:09:47
Speaker
And so you get a program like Wellness Kits. You can take a little cute picture of a wellness kid or a kid doing a Zentangle. You can put that in your school newsletter. And now you look like a really great district leader and everybody's happy and you can move on and go back to, you know, math worksheets and five paragraph essays. And you don't really have to put the effort into changing.
00:10:11
Speaker
Maybe there's some of that. I mean, I'm not saying that like optics is never a concern. But I don't attribute it really to, you know, self-servingness or certainly not laziness. Like this isn't about like teachers not wanting to do the work.
00:10:28
Speaker
I think that instruction is really hard to change. It's really, really hard. I mean, I was a classroom teacher for 18 years. It's really
Challenges in Changing Instructional Practices
00:10:36
Speaker
hard to... learn new ways of teaching.
00:10:40
Speaker
And I think that the way that professional learning is structured, we maybe get a chance to encounter some new instructional strategies, but encounter encountering those new strategies is just the very beginning.
00:10:55
Speaker
We need to you know figure out, like how am I actually going to make this work? Like, okay, now I know how to do a turn and talk. Great. But how do I actually make that work in my classroom when I've got 30 students and I ask them to turn and talk and they don't turn and talk to each other or they talk about the wrong thing, right? So we need a chance to actually learn how the strategies work, adapt them for our environments,
00:11:22
Speaker
you know, practice them, get feedback, the same way students need all of those things in order to learn. And we don't have that. And so if schools are serious about instructional design, teachers need more time in order to do it, to practice it, to learn from each other, to observe each other. And we don't have that kind of time and resource. So we don't do it.
00:11:49
Speaker
So really what we're compensating for is a lack of resources, whether it's time or money or whatever. I think another sort of side effect of this that I've seen, and and maybe you've seen it too, is just that by swooping in and pitching this as social emotional learning or project-based learning or DEI or whatever, and doing a bad job of it.
00:12:13
Speaker
yeah Because they bought a book or they bought a kit or something. And then teachers begin to internalize like an adverse reaction to the underlying practices that are you know inherently good um and sustainable if you provide the resources and supports for that. I'm wondering if you've seen that too, essentially this backfire effect of layering on these compensatory programs and then teachers, maybe rightfully so, don't have an incentive um to change or they feel burned. They get more burned out by layering these on than if we just wipe the slate clean and looked at the the inner workings itself and started fiddling around.
00:12:52
Speaker
Exactly. i i see a lot of that. I mean, I saw it in myself as a new teacher, I got excited to learn new things and new practices, but then it would always be these sort of oversimplified, like, oh, just make sure you learn every student's name and how to pronounce it correctly. And now you're doing, you know, equity work. And it's like,
00:13:14
Speaker
Okay, I can learn every student's name and how to pronounce it correctly, but surely there is more to creating equity in the classroom than that. And so it begins to feel almost like insulting to the work that we do when these these compensatory strategies are presented to us as the answer.
00:13:34
Speaker
So I've definitely seen that I was going to follow up with the DEI portion of that specifically, both to ask, you know, I think there's been a lot to do in different states and in the country. i think maybe New York City is, so I don't know a bastion, sort of ah a bulwark against laws that have been passed sort of against this work. Yeah. I don't know, have you seen schools and systems be resistant or hesitant to continue with diversity, equity, inclusion in response to like the policy or the political environment?
00:14:09
Speaker
um I mean, less in the New York City independent schools that I work with because they're not as affected by that as, you know, most of the country.
00:14:20
Speaker
um But certainly, i mean, i was just out in Utah giving a keynote at a learning conference and the teachers there definitely are affected by, you know, what books they can put on their shelves and what topics they can talk about with their students.
00:14:38
Speaker
And I'm not saying that's not important. I mean, I, you know, just to reveal my own beliefs, like I think students should get to see diverse books and, you know, have their identities represented and see that their way of being is not the way of being, right? Like we we need to be doing this work.
00:14:57
Speaker
And if you're looking at the level of practice, at the level of design, a discussion structure that creates equity in who gets to speak or a um ah project structure that creates a diversity of approaches, those are going to be less prone to attacks because they don't they just look like a different way of having a discussion or a different way of doing a project.
00:15:27
Speaker
They're not going to set off any alarms as far as you know regulators who are saying you can't do DEI. One big example of that, I think, is there's a huge tension in the way that both states and federal governments have responded to DEI and at the same time have to hold up their end of the legal bargain when it comes to like ensuring IDEA and, you know, providing supports and resources enforcing IEPs and 504s and all these other legal documents. So I think
00:16:03
Speaker
their, I don't a hypocrisy or something, but you know, you know, like you wouldn't, I don't think those people would call um giving um a student with a disability, the supports that they need to access, ah you know, coursework ah in a way, in a way that they can as DEI. But that's, I think, I think that's maybe how we should understand that. And you make a great point that perhaps these, the things that you buy might be,
00:16:29
Speaker
eat bad DEI and also be the things that get shut down the fastest when you're trying to do work in diversity, equity, and inclusion. I don't know, my brain's kind of grappling with all of these things. Yeah. And yes, and it it might be bad DEI, like putting up a poster is not DEI. Yeah, yeah. It's the poster that, you know, your administrator is going to walk by and see and a parent is going to point to and right. So the compensatory practices are not going to be especially effective and they're going to trigger the most surveillance. Yeah.
00:17:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's so interesting. I wonder too, maybe there's a flipping things to, i know another area of expertise and experience of yours. And I'm thinking of the just fold in the cheese meme. Maybe we can just fold it fold this into this
Authentic Engagement in Teaching
00:17:18
Speaker
here too, Lauren. But the idea of teaching for authentic engagement. Because I'm kind of seeing, right, the compensatory part seems inauthentic. It's a consumer product, a poster that you put on the wall or a book or a fidget or something like that. And when you write about teaching for authentic engagement, what is it that you that you mean by that?
00:17:39
Speaker
So initially that book had a subtitle, which was too long. And so the publishers took it off, but it was designing instruction. So students connect with the content, their work and each other.
00:17:51
Speaker
And that to me is the kind of work that we're doing when we say we're doing equity and inclusion work. It's making sure that every single student in the room can bring their identity, their values, their interests to the work they're doing.
00:18:10
Speaker
And so they feel like the content resonates with them. They feel like the work is important and it matters. They feel like You know, they're not just like doing a relationship building activity and then, you know, sitting and doing their work. They're building relationships with each other in the process of doing important work together.
00:18:30
Speaker
To me, that is what equity and belonging and inclusion are about. They're about giving students a chance to be their full selves as they learn.
00:18:43
Speaker
So when you work with schools or teachers, ah you know, approach you for for professional development or, you know, you're you're consulting with them, what are some of the biggest shifts or or most frequent shifts um that schools or teachers that you point out that you help them make to get to where they want to be?
Impactful Small Teaching Changes
00:19:01
Speaker
So my focus recently um has been on what I call instructional micro moves, sort of these little changes that we can make to how we teach that profoundly affects the ways that students engage.
00:19:16
Speaker
When I was an English teacher, one of the things that I often did was I had students respond to a prompt in writing, you know, let's say we were reading The House on Mango Street. So I might have them respond to a question about Esperanza, the main character.
00:19:32
Speaker
And then i would have them talk to a partner. and my logic was that if you have three people in a discussion, one person can get excluded. But if you have two people, there is no discussion unless both people contribute.
00:19:46
Speaker
So I would have them you know each write something and then talk to a partner. And so I would you know have them write and then I would say, share what you think with your partner. And what I found was...
00:19:59
Speaker
there would often be one of the two kids would be sort of more outgoing or more more of a risk taker. And that person would immediately start talking first. So, you know, why didn't Esperanza like any of her shoes? Write about it. Okay, tell your partner what you think.
00:20:16
Speaker
And the more sort of outgoing kid would do all the talking. The quieter kid would do mostly listen, and then it would be time to move on. And maybe the quieter kid never got a chance to share.
00:20:28
Speaker
Or maybe like one kid sort of does some talking and then stops and then the other person talks and shares their response and then stops. And then they both kind of look at me like, now what do we do?
00:20:42
Speaker
And I wanted them to have an actual conversation. So at some point, and I don't even know what prompted this. I think it was one of those like happy accidents that I discovered by doing it and then kept doing because I saw what the effect was.
00:20:56
Speaker
But at some point I stopped saying, share what you think with your partner. And I started saying, find out what your partner thinks. And it completely changed the dynamic because the more sort of outgoing, confident kid was still the first person to open their mouth.
00:21:16
Speaker
But what they actually said was, so what do you think? And then the sort of quieter, less outgoing kid was the one who ended up actually sharing their thinking first and so had more of a chance to do it.
00:21:33
Speaker
And because the task wasn't to share what they thought, it was to find out what their partner thinks, they sort of naturally became more curious because now their job was to find out their partner's thinking.
00:21:47
Speaker
And so that that would be an example of what I would call a micro move, right? Like they're still doing all the same stuff. They're still responding to the prompt about the book. They're still having a conversation with their partner.
00:22:00
Speaker
But just by changing the wording of the prompt, it changes the dynamic of that conversation so that both students get more of a chance to talk. They're more open to listening and they have more of a conversation with one another.
00:22:15
Speaker
while the first prompt is an invitation for the loudest person to talk, the second one is more of an invitation for ah inquiry, you know? so that person takes that energy and and puts it into ah getting information from their partner instead of just, you know, ah communicating it immediately, perhaps without even thinking about it. I think that's a much more thoughtful way of framing it. Are there other, I'm thinking,
00:22:42
Speaker
of teachers or people listening to this who will take that example and then revisit their revisit their go-to phrases in the classroom. Are there other powerful micro moves that you're seeing? um These small shifts that lead to bigger changes in classroom culture is really what we're kind of getting at.
00:23:03
Speaker
I mean, it could even be something as simple as labeling the task that you're giving students. So when I put up a slide for reflective writing, it'll have a banner up at the top that'll say reflective writing.
00:23:19
Speaker
And so when the student sees the prompts, they know, oh, this is something I should respond to in writing or you know partner discussion, whole group discussion. And that way, if a student's attention strays for a minute because, you know, maybe they have an attention deficit, maybe they just, you know, are a human being whose attention went somewhere else,
00:23:42
Speaker
This way they can easily re-engage in the task because they see what the task is. So it could be something that simple that, you know, to me, it's nothing to just type the words, you know, partner discussion at the top of a slide.
00:23:58
Speaker
But for a student, it can really help them, you know, be part of be part of the group and share their thinking and, you know, not be lost if they happen to be thinking about something else for a minute.
00:24:12
Speaker
As we're having this conversation, I'm thinking of a universal design for learning, which I've always appreciated as a framework or like a design philosophy for approaching tasks, but have really found it frustrating when you talk to teachers or you try to implement that ah that ideal into practice because...
Universal Design Through Micro Moves
00:24:33
Speaker
there's pretty much infinite ways of of doing a universal design. And so I think for some people it becomes overwhelming or um or frustrating to say, well, I can't do everything. i can't design for every possibility. So I guess I'll just do what I did before. And something like those micro moves in that framing um or giving those examples might help on-ramp teachers into like a universal design approach because what they did in framing this prompt or giving a slide a label, right, is for kids who might need that that prompt or that access, they'll be able to use it. And for kids who don't and can...
00:25:15
Speaker
I don't know regulate or get on the task or respond to it um without that support. They'll just be able to do it too. Do you see it as a similar connection? Exactly. to To me, and I have, you know, protocols that are sort of longer and more involved in some of my other books, there's,
00:25:32
Speaker
The reason I've been focusing on these micro moves is just that it's it's more usable and it's it it is an on-ramp to start to notice like, oh, when I do this, this is what happens. It's what happened to me when i said, find out what your partner thinks and notice that just that little change in language created this effect on students' you know actions and interactions.
00:25:58
Speaker
That's really the goal is to show, is to create that kind of noticing, like, oh, if I make this little change, something different is going to happen. And maybe if I make this other little change, you know, what if I put them in groups of two instead of three? What if i you know, have them write first and not just think first? You know, what what is that going to change? Yeah.
00:26:22
Speaker
And cumulatively, those little micro moves can make a big difference in, you know, belonging, creativity, agency, all the things that we value. We're now designing into how we teach.
00:26:34
Speaker
I love that. Just breaking down that the big goal of say a universal design for learning into something that teachers and students can have small successes with and then build towards, you know, ah build towards that goal and build their toolkit and their repertoire of these things as they go through it.
00:26:54
Speaker
There's another question as we're going through this, Lauren, that I'm thinking of, which is like you've narrowed, um, you know you you seem to have um come across a set of ideas and and that really resonate with you about ah you know the structures and systems and and how we can align these things. And I'm really curious to know, is there something in your experience as a student or as a teacher that really caused you to make that your focus and make it your passion and and your work here now?
Experiences Highlighting School and Learning Disconnect
00:27:27
Speaker
I don't know that there's one thing, but what I can tell you is that as a student, I was pretty successful by sort of traditional measures. Like I, you know, went to school, i got good grades, I, you know, got into a good college, like You could look at my track record and say, okay, this is someone who was successful in school.
00:27:48
Speaker
But there were some classes, some teachers that I really loved and I enjoyed the work that I was doing. And, or, or I found ways to kind of make it enjoyable and meaningful for myself.
00:28:01
Speaker
But for the most part at school, I felt invisible. i felt, if I felt visible, I just felt embarrassed, like in PE class. I felt like there were things that I was being asked to do that I never really learned how to do, like have a class discussion.
00:28:18
Speaker
i've never been diagnosed as autistic, but just sort of based on reading about neurodivergence, I think I probably am neurodivergent. And my sort of ways of understanding the world and understanding other people, just, I never felt, i don't know, I never felt like school was my place.
00:28:38
Speaker
But I loved learning. I loved reading. I used to make these little projects to do for myself at home, and I would do those instead of my homework. like I just felt this disconnect between school and learning. And then when I became a teacher, I wanted learning to be meaningful for students. And so...
00:29:01
Speaker
I never felt like I was going to be able to accomplish that just by designing the right curriculum or giving the right assignments. I always felt like there was more to it than that. And I guess maybe through trial and error, through reading, through observing colleagues, I began to figure out that it's not so much about you know what the curriculum is as it is how we ask students to interact with it.
00:29:30
Speaker
especially that last point there, I wonder if there is just ah one fundamental shift that you look out at the system and say, oh, if we could make this shift, it would make all of the other things that much easier.
00:29:46
Speaker
Can you narrow it down to a single thing at all or, you know, a common picture of what schools are facing? I don't know that I can narrow it down to like do this one thing or think about this one thing differently, except to say we need to be thinking about instructional design sort of in systems terms. We need to be thinking about how the different you know, elements, these different interactions that students are having with books, with ideas, with each other, with the space, how those are evoking particular kinds of behavior, and then asking, are those the behaviors that we want to see?
Teachers as Designers of Interactions
00:30:32
Speaker
they it It's just so interesting as I'm trying to make all of this these different tensions make sense in my head that the you know the roles of teachers very often is not to reconcile the the tensions of the system, but to teach a program that they're given. So it's so hard, I think, um for teachers to to take on their role in in in the system in that way, but it's so important at the same time that they do that.
00:31:02
Speaker
So its yeah it's just it's such a hard kind of, um I guess, circle to square or square to circle, whatever the metaphor would be there. But maybe that is the fundamental shift is shifting from seeing ourselves. And I still say our to refer to teachers, even though I haven't been in the classroom for a few years, I still sort of identify as a teacher um to sort of shift from seeing ourselves as deliverers of curriculum to designers of interactions, because that's really what we're doing. You know, we stand up there. i can do the most traditional teaching in the world, right? Like,
00:31:42
Speaker
stand up at the front of the classroom, tell my students a bunch of things, ask them questions, call on them one at a time as they raise their hands, give them a multiple choice test. Those are all interactions with the content that I designed.
00:31:56
Speaker
And those interactions over time are going to lead to a particular relationship with math or with reading or whatever it is that I teach. So even if I see myself as a deliverer of curriculum, I'm still a designer of interactions and ultimately of relationships with the content and each other.
00:32:17
Speaker
So if I start to see myself that way, if I start to notice that I actually, you know, even within this, you know, completely messed up, awful, you know, problematic educational system that we have, I still have some power to design those relationships that can really change the way that I see myself as a teacher and see my work in teaching.
00:32:43
Speaker
Yeah, that that is so clarifying because we don't teach teachers to think like systems thinkers.
Systems Thinking for Educational Improvement
00:32:50
Speaker
Right. And what I'm trying to grapple with is the fact that maybe the teachers who are the best systems thinkers are the ones who are like most angular to it and and and don't fit in because they're trying to make sense of all these you know different things and up being the the thorn in somebody else's side, but who also push and make real difference for kids.
00:33:12
Speaker
for providing a more authentic, you know, a more inclusive kind of experience than what just checking a box and delivering a curriculum or delivering a lesson that they could do, you know, anybody could do that. But they wanted they wanted to do something different on behalf of the students in front of them. And yeah, that's a cho that's a burden, I think, that that a lot of conscientious teachers have to take on. I think that's right. And I'm not i'm not trying to dismiss that or you know minimize that. I mean, that frustration and that anger, like in my SEL work, I write about the connection between emotions and values. And you know those feelings are signs that our values as educators are being violated, right? Like we're angry because we can imagine something better for our students.
00:34:02
Speaker
And at the same time, i'm always more interested in what I can do than what I can't do. i mean, not that we shouldn't fight for, again, a better system, but I'm always interested in like, okay, so this is where I am right now.
Teachers as Designers within Constraints
00:34:17
Speaker
Like, this is the class that I teach in.
00:34:19
Speaker
This is my budget. These are the desks. These are my students. These are the books. There's a reality right? What am I going to do within that framework? And... To me, i'm I'm more interested in what's possible under the circumstances that we're in I mean, any teacher at any school can stop saying, you know, share what you think with your partner and start saying, find out what your partner thinks and just observe what happens under those circumstances. So to me, that is something anyone can do. And that's why I'm interested in these kinds of shifts is we can all start seeing ourselves as designers of student interactions and observe what happens when we do.
00:35:05
Speaker
I so appreciate that. Yeah, I feel like we have to live in that tension, you know, between real and ideal. And we're doing that as human beings. You know, are we being our best selves, you know, are we living our ideal life today? Or are we somewhere, we're always somewhere in the middle here. And we're always both.
00:35:23
Speaker
pushing ah you know against those constraints to realize that while also being you know in negotiation with that the concrete reality. And I think it's one thing to say that you know there's an easy solution to any of this, which I think there isn't. And to do what you're saying, which is like, here's a starting point.
00:35:44
Speaker
yeah Right on that journey that can just get you going somewhere. Do this one thing that might it might change. Nothing might change everything. You know, you can try this and move on to the next thing. um And I think that's just so much more of a a useful way for teachers to understand themselves as part of a system, too, is exactly changing their practice and being responsive to the kids in front of them.
00:36:09
Speaker
I think it's also more honest. I mean, we can get any book that says like, this is a set of best practices or, you know, this is what you can do and it's going to solve this problem.
00:36:21
Speaker
And maybe it will for some students under some circumstances on some days, but... Learning and humans are just more complex than that. There's no practice that's going to work you know to do the thing you want it to do 100% of the time. And if it does, I'd be super suspicious of exactly what the impact of that would be. So to me, it really is about observing understanding.
00:36:47
Speaker
you know, trying things and seeing what happened, not like throwing spaghetti at the wall, like sure trying practices and seeing how they work and just sort of going back to what we were discussing earlier.
00:36:59
Speaker
i think that's really risky for teachers, because if i know what happens when I ask students to talk in small groups or when i you know, put a math problem on the board and ask students to raise their hand if they know the answer,
00:37:15
Speaker
trying something different, like setting up a different kind of interaction with the content or with each other, i don't know what's gonna happen and that's risky.
00:37:27
Speaker
And at the same time, we have to take that beautiful risk. Yeah. Because maybe, you know, maybe what might be a guaranteed and viable outcome, according to what the curriculum box says, is a lower ceiling than what... That's a kid could be capable of in a different circumstance. And right, being able to willing to go on that journey with them, I think, is a big opportunity to build trust, build um a lot, you know, just build a classroom community together, which I think is sort of the funnel through which all of this can be can be understood as. Absolutely.
00:38:04
Speaker
Who, you know, are your influences? Or who did you read that was influential to you? Or whose ideas play a big role, you know, shaping your thinking? I mean, some of the same folks as, you know, the the folks that get cited and in Human Restoration, you know, people like Dewey and... I'm shocked. Yeah, but but um ah but but also, so my husband and co-author, sometimes co-author, is...
Influence of Contextual Psychology on Education
00:38:30
Speaker
practices ah clinical psychology.
00:38:33
Speaker
And he's trained in something called contextual psychology, which is really all about helping people discover what's important to them and develop the willingness to do what matters even when it's difficult.
00:38:47
Speaker
And so that branch of psychology has also informed my work. Oh, it sounds perfectly aligned. yeah That is yeah really fascinating. It's kind of funny because for the longest time I would talk about my teaching and he would keep telling me, you need to learn about ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy.
00:39:07
Speaker
And the T in ACT is for therapy. And I'm like, not a therapist. I'm not going to read a book about therapy. Like it would be unethical for me to try to do therapy with my students. What are you talking about?
00:39:17
Speaker
And when my son, who you can hear in the background, was 10 months old, there was a contextual psychology conference DC where I had lived for a time and I thought, all right, I'll, you know, I'll take Jason.
00:39:35
Speaker
We'll go with you to the conference. I'll see some of my friends in DC. But as I was sort of hanging out at this conference and like looking at books in the bookstore and talking to people, I was like, this is actually really interesting. So I kind of fell into it by accident, kicking and screaming.
00:39:53
Speaker
And on the way back from that conference, I was like, OK, Jonathan, tell me about values from an ACT perspective and, you know, explain diffusion and explain experiential acceptance. And pretty soon I'm reading all these books about relational frame theory. And that has informed the work that I've done.
00:40:11
Speaker
That was the long version. Well, it's so interesting that we sort of put these artificial walls around what is relevant to like teaching and learning and instruction and education. And i think you're right to say it it would not be appropriate to like do therapy with kids, but having things from contextual psychology inform the way that we think and approach you know, the the relations that we have with other human beings in a classroom context.
00:40:40
Speaker
If we're only better informed, it's only going to lead to better interactions and better communication. um I wish we got more of that cross pollination between these crazy ideas. Have teachers go to ah the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science Conference. Yes. I actually, you know, that'd be so cool.
00:41:00
Speaker
It would be so, I wrote an article but few years, maybe more than a few years ago. might be like a decade ago by now, but it was called jailbreak your PD. So like using the jailbreaking a device metaphor, like when you take a device and make it do things that it wasn't built to do. So like jailbreak your PD by going to a psychology conference or going to you know a conference or reading a book for nurses or you know something that is outside the field of education, but could meaningfully inform our work.
Learning from Other Disciplines to Enhance Education
00:41:33
Speaker
And then learning what you can and applying it to what you do with students. I think that's awesome. I will link all of these things for listeners in the show notes. So awesome so so so and when we hear Lauren saying that, you can go to the show notes and click on click on these articles too. And I'll reference a ah whole bunch about compensatory programs and inclusive instructional design. And I think Lauren, then too, if people wanted to connect with you or find out more about your work, where would they find you?
00:42:03
Speaker
My website is called theteachernerd.com, theteachernerd.com. And it's because I think of myself as really nerdy, but all that means to me is that I pay attention. I think about sort of how all these different little pieces work together and create something larger. So it's my work appeals to people who are nerdy like me, and that's where they can find my I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me, Lauren.
00:42:34
Speaker
I have loved this. kind This felt much more like a conversation than an interview. I really appreciate that. Hey, that's the goal, honestly.
00:42:46
Speaker
Thank you again and for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:43:04
Speaker
Thank you.