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Ari-Gerzon Kessler shares how to engage families in schools
71 Plays6 months ago
Ari Gerzon-Kessler is author of On The Same Team: Bringing Educators & Underrepresented Families Together, which won the Independent Publishers Book Awards 2024 IPPY Gold Medal for outstanding education book. He is a speaker, trainer, and coach working with schools and districts committed to forging stronger school-family partnerships. Ari also leads the Family Partnerships department for the Boulder Valley School District (CO).
Ari has been an educator since 2000, having served as a principal and bilingual teacher. His leadership efforts to strengthen partnerships with underrepresented families and dismantle unjust practices was featured in Education Week in 2015. Ari regularly presents at national and international conferences on Families and Educators Together (FET) teams and other innovative family partnership best practices. He received his bachelor’s in African American Studies from Wesleyan University and a master’s in instruction and curriculum from the University of Colorado.
Link to book, webpage;
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/arigerzon-kessler
Email: arigerzon@gmail.com
Additional resources; school-family partnership resources
Additional episodes on Parent Engagement:
https://podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast/special-episode-crystal-discusses-her-book-when-calling/id1680573123?i=1000640735822;
Music by AudioCoffee: https://www.audiocoffee.net/
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Learner Centered Spaces podcast, where we empower and inspire ownership of learning, sponsored by Mastery Portfolio, hosted by Star Saxton and Crystal Frommer. In each episode, we will bring you engaging conversations with a wide variety of educators, both in and out of the classroom.
00:00:21
Speaker
This podcast is created for educators who want to learn more about how to make the shift toward learner-centered spaces for their students, schools, and districts, or education at large. The learner-centered spaces podcast is now a member of the Teach Better Podcast Network.
Meet Ari Gerzon Kessler
00:00:42
Speaker
We are so excited to have Ari Gerzon Kessler on our show today. He is the author of On the Same Team, Bringing Educators and Underrepresented Families Together. He leads the family partnerships department for the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado, and is an educational consultant working with schools and districts committed to forging stronger school-family partnerships.
00:01:05
Speaker
Ari has been an educator since 2000, having served as a principal and bilingual teacher.
Ari's Background & Interests
00:01:11
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His leadership efforts to strengthen partnerships with underrepresented families and dismantle unjust practices was featured in Education Week in 2015. Ari regularly presents at National International Conferences on Families and Educators Together, FET, and other innovative partnership best practices.
00:01:32
Speaker
He received his bachelor's in African-American studies from Wesleyan University and a master's in instruction and curriculum from the University of Colorado. His passion is helping educators build stronger bridges with families. An interesting fact about Ari, he was a recipient of the Japanese Fulbright Memorial Fund in 2006 and traveled to Japan for three weeks to study the Japanese education system. Relatedly, he has been a student of Zen for seven years.
00:02:01
Speaker
Ari also has an online bookstore. He loves to paddleboard, swim, and spend time with his family. He once arm wrestled Muhammad Ali and spent most of his middle school years meeting authors and historical figures as part of his first job at a bookstore. Please welcome Ari to the show. Hello, Ari. Good morning, Crystal. It's so great to be with you. Thank you for joining us.
Inspiration & Transition to Family Partnerships
00:02:25
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Can you tell us about your journey in education?
00:02:30
Speaker
Yeah, when I was leaving high school, I knew that I had a passion for social justice.
00:02:38
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And when I was an undergrad, my brother was doing Teach for America. And in visiting his classroom, I really felt inspired. And so after a year of working and living in Mexico, where I was a journalist, I had the opportunity to become a bilingual elementary school teacher. And I was really drawn to it because all four of my grandparents were immigrants. And I saw the sacrifices they made to be able
00:03:07
Speaker
to give a better future for our family. And I saw in terms of their sacrifices what education did for both my mother and father to change their life circumstances. So there's a real calling for me to want to
00:03:22
Speaker
be that support as well as to narrow the achievement and opportunity gaps, which were prevalent in the schools I was working in 20 plus years ago. So that really inspired me to become a teacher. I'd also just done an oral history project of a high school nearby and talking to the teachers really inspired me to sense that this was where the most meaning was professionally. So after several years of being a teacher,
00:03:48
Speaker
I was drawn to continued growth and became a school leader and served as a principal and assistant principal for about a decade. And then this opportunity came along to lead a family partnerships department in a district with 56 schools. And I felt really drawn to it because when I looked back, particularly on my principal years, there were a couple of practices that were really transformative to build a stronger sense of school community. And then I also had a number of regrets that I wanted to kind of
00:04:17
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put in to practice the lessons of those. So that's a little bit of my professional and personal journey.
Teaching Approach & Family Engagement Strategies
00:04:26
Speaker
So I'm curious how you've translated your educational background as a teacher into how you now work with families, especially from underrepresented population. What do you carry over? What skills and talents do you carry over from being a teacher into this new role?
00:04:45
Speaker
Yeah, I love your question, Crystal, because there's been a lot of parallels that have been exciting to discover. So as a teacher, in terms of creating a learner-centered space, I was deeply passionate about social and emotional learning and creating a relationship-centered classroom. My mom's life work was really as a pioneer in the field of SEL before most people knew what SEL was.
00:05:09
Speaker
I emphasized practices like joy, cultivating joy for learning, incorporating play in the early parts of a lesson to awaken students brains and whole bodies.
00:05:24
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you know, Monday and Friday morning sharing circles where we were setting intentions and goals, giving compliments to each other. So a lot of these aspects with students in terms of creating high levels of psychological safety so that students could show up authentically has really translated over
00:05:43
Speaker
into my work with families. In the families and educator together teams, we only have an hour and a half together a month. And there's a history of distrust between underrepresented families and our education system. So it's with the same intentionality I brought as a teacher, it's been thinking about how do we create
00:06:02
Speaker
a very safe space where people can boldly share who they are and their perspectives honestly and build bridges across linguistic, cultural and other differences. So yeah, there's been quite a lot of parallels between my approach in the classroom and my approach now in trying to build these connections between educators and underrepresented families. So you and I already have a lot in common.
00:06:28
Speaker
We are both educators and we actually both started teaching in the year 2000. And I don't know if I've told you that. We have that in common. We're both parents and we also have taken our experiences as an educator and as a parent and written a book on a very similar topic. So can you share how you were motivated or inspired to
00:06:54
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take your current role with working with families and turning that into a book so that so many more people can learn about that.
00:07:01
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Yeah, absolutely. I was about five years into my role of leading family partnerships when I really began to notice, as I went out a couple nights a week to coach the leaders of these family and educator together teams, that they were really this consistent vehicle for building stronger partnerships between schools and families. And so I began to pivot and let go of other projects that felt more sporadic or
00:07:29
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practices that weren't having as much of an impact and invested most of my job in developing more of these teams at different schools and just saw the tremendous meaning. So I would often come home at Knight Crystal, you know, 8, 8.30 from these gatherings feeling so uplifted and writing stories, capturing quotes from what parents had said, what educators had said, and
00:07:55
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In that fifth year of having the Families and Educator Together teams, I realized, wow, we've really found kind of a secret sauce here in terms of a structure for an evening as well as
00:08:05
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a vehicle for deeper ongoing work in these school communities. And I began to feel this sense of almost an obligation to write a book about it because it felt to me quite clearly that every school community needs a space like this to be created. And so, as you know well, despite the hundreds of hours it took to
00:08:29
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write and revise the book and that often meant sitting beside my six month old at 5.30 in the morning trying to just knock out a paragraph or two. That really was the
00:08:40
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the inspiration, and her birth was actually too, because I'd been working on other books for years, some I'd published, some I hadn't, and there was this real sense of this is my window to try to land a book contract before she's born so that I can get as much of it done while I have a little more time on my hands. So that was kind of the journey and drawing on those notes and stories I'd been capturing for years.
00:09:07
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Well, we're so glad that you did. And I know it's a lot of hard work to get a book together, especially when you've got a little one around and a full-time job. It's no easy task. So thank you for sharing your experiences and thoughts and ideas with the world. It's very much appreciated.
Communicating Learner-Centered Environments
00:09:25
Speaker
My next question for you, Ari, is I work with international population here in Houston and
00:09:34
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You also have multicultural families representing many different cultures where you are. And we all have we all come to education, you know, as parents, we come to education with different ideas of what it should look like, but based off what we had when we were kids. So my question for you is, how do you
00:09:53
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suggest a teacher or an administrator communicate a learner-centered environment, learner-centered assessments, all that goes into that to families who may not be used to an approach like that.
00:10:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I mean, what comes to mind immediately is creating a space for them as parents to do their own learning. You know, I see it, our families and educators together meetings, we carve out about 15 minutes or more for families to learn about our schools, because what we found is that particularly for international families where the parents went to school in another country, there's radical differences between their schooling experiences and what our schools look like. And so it's vital to give
00:10:37
Speaker
time and space and to make it in digestible pieces so it's not overwhelming. So some of the work I do with our FET team leaders and principals is, you know, coach them around. Let's try to reduce the use of acronyms as we're working with parents and really explain it in straightforward language that makes it easier to understand. Because what we saw in our school system was that many of our underrepresented families
00:11:05
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were not seizing opportunities for their students, whether that was advanced courses or other after-school enrichment opportunities, simply because they didn't know that they existed. And we had just relied on kind of bombarding families over the years and decades with lots of emails. So I think it's creating a space where they can learn about the purpose and meaning
00:11:28
Speaker
And assessment's a good example. The last month at five different schools, we've talked with families about statewide tests, other assessments, and really focused on, here's the purpose of them. Here's how you interpret results. Here's how you can support your child in advance of them taking the assessment. So I think that's one piece. And the other piece that's at the heart of
00:11:53
Speaker
our families and educators together teams and just my whole approach to authentic partnerships with families is give them space for their voices in specific like time for their questions instead of bombarding them with a ton of information about what a learner centered space is more letting them experience it as well as ask questions that drive that learning. So it's just like we want for our students so it's more interactive and engaging.
00:12:23
Speaker
So would that look like more meet the teacher nights or curriculum night when you're saying let them experience it? Cause we don't want families necessarily in the classrooms during the school day, right? For various reasons, but can you describe some ideas you might have for how families could experience a learner centered space in a school that might be outside of the school hours?
00:12:46
Speaker
Yeah. So one example, you know, part of the families and educators together teamwork is to create changes that foster more community and meaning for both educators, families, and students. And so a couple of schools have looked at their back to school night as an opportunity to
00:13:05
Speaker
repurpose it to give families a better sense of the learning experience. So a couple of our schools realized, wow, we're explaining a lot of curriculum that night. We could record that on our own, email that to families. They could take in those recordings on their own time. And we could use a night like back to school night to engage in activities with families that
00:13:30
Speaker
you know, are parallel to what we might do with students and really build more connections between parents during that evening instead of it being more of a sit and get. So really using those precious nights and, you know, another example would be parent-teacher conferences. Instead of sharing a ton of data,
00:13:50
Speaker
asking parents, you know, a simple question in writing or over the phone before conferences of what would make this conference most meaningful to you and letting that guide what the teacher shares. And then using that night to really have it be not just about information, but building relationship and giving that space for families to ask questions about the learning, as well as for the educator to treat the parents like experts on their child.
00:14:17
Speaker
by asking questions, you know, like what's your child passionate about doing at home? What do they love spending time on over the weekend? So that there's this sense that there's greater continuity between the learning spaces of school and home. What advice would you give to a teacher who is maybe not as comfortable looping in the engagement of families?
00:14:46
Speaker
They come in and they do their job and they teach the kids, but the extra mile of just making sure families feel like they're welcomed and that they are part of their child's educational experience, what advice would you have for an educator like that?
Advice for Teachers on Family Engagement
00:15:04
Speaker
This question, Crystal, really inspires my passion because I've got a lot of enthusiasm and clarity around what that conversation might look like with that educator. One thing I'd say is,
00:15:15
Speaker
It's natural to have a little trepidation around engaging families. I know surveys have shown that it's often the area teachers feel least confident. I also would say it's absolutely vital. Research also shows that you want to move from a good to great classroom or good to great school. Stronger family ties is one of the five key levers to do that.
00:15:38
Speaker
So to not see it as some nice extra, nice to do effort, but that it's actually critical to learning. I'd also say that engaging in things that build relationships with families in meaningful ways like home visits or positive calls or back and forth texts.
00:15:56
Speaker
Those happen, as the research shows, happen to be some of the most impactful strategies for also fostering higher levels of learning. I would say that the time is really well spent that's invested. I'm just thinking of a lot of other pieces of research like teachers stay in the profession and find more meaning
00:16:18
Speaker
in their school community if they have stronger ties to families. So there's such a host of benefits. And then I would also say, just keeping it real, that most educators are consistently under so many demands that it's necessary to weave in a lot of these engagement strategies into a day's work. So that would be partnering with their school leader and saying, hey, can you carve out, as we're often saying through our families and together teams,
00:16:47
Speaker
Let's not make this great partnership practice something a teacher has to do on their own time. Let's weave 15 minutes into a staff meeting so that every teacher can get a taste of making three or four positive phone calls. And that can shift a teacher. Many of our teachers, when they're candid, will say, I'm a little reluctant to call a family, especially if that family speaks another language other than English at home.
00:17:13
Speaker
And some of our middle high school teachers just say, it's a little intimidating. We haven't done a lot of them in our career. So for a school leader to weave in that time and for educators to see, wow, that was easy. That was fruitful. That would be one other piece of advice I would share. This is incredibly helpful for educators, administrators, everyone listening. I want you to pause right now and put
00:17:39
Speaker
on the same team in your Amazon cart or anywhere else you buy books.
Ari's Book & Acknowledgments
00:17:45
Speaker
Where else could they get your book if not Amazon? Is there another place? Yeah. Solution Tree, my publisher's website is a great spot and they offer discounts.
00:17:55
Speaker
have a ton of free reproducibles from the book, a school self-assessment inventory to gauge where you are at between traditional involvement and more authentic partnerships and a host of other tools that can support deepening this work. So we will put a link to Solution Tree in the show notes. So please, please pick up a copy for yourself, your colleagues, for the other educators at your school.
00:18:23
Speaker
So lastly, Ari, are there any shout outs you'd like to make for folks that you've met along the way that have influenced your work? Yeah, I mean, I guess I would start by just saying mentors have been so valuable and there's too many to name, but the mentors from my teaching days, principal days, that really took the time for me to feel like my potential was seen
00:18:51
Speaker
and steered me as colleagues and mentors. I think that's why I'm still in the profession, the sense that despite the politics and all the other things that at its best when education's relationship centered, it allows so many of us to feel like we're appreciated and valued for who we are. So that comes first to mind. I also, there's so many
00:19:17
Speaker
books and guides out there. I've grown so much as an educator through reading, you know, dozens of books in the field. So tremendous gratitude for other authors who continue to inform my learning. I think that's a big part of what I love about the work we get to do every day is learn from, you know, the experts and the research, but then apply it
00:19:41
Speaker
on the ground and then continue to refine it. And then I would just say lots of gratitude for all my current colleagues who are, despite the overwhelming demands of their work in schools, are carving out these hours to build stronger bridges with families. And then seeing just how hungry and ready our families are to partner more deeply, just tremendous gratitude for
00:20:08
Speaker
the dozens of parents that give up a precious night at home to come help us build stronger bridges at the school and really help us as educators learn because to me that's one of the biggest shifts I hope to see in the next decade is educators and whole school communities seeing the tremendous value of deepening partnerships and showing that through carving out these bits of time that can be so purposeful and transformative actually. Thank you so much for your time and
00:20:39
Speaker
everyone who's listening out there, get the book. You will definitely find it very helpful in building those bridges and partnerships. Thank you, Ari. Thank you so much, Crystal. Such a pleasure and appreciate all the wonderful questions. Thank you for learning with us today. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. If you'd like any additional information from the show, check out the show notes.
00:21:03
Speaker
Learn more about Mastery Portfolio and how we support schools at masteryportfolio.com. You can follow us on Twitter at masteryforall and on LinkedIn on the Mastery Portfolio page. And we'd love your feedback. Please write a review on your favorite podcasting app.