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Dr. Erin Beard says learning is structure and soul.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
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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.
Shifting Towards Learner-Centered Spaces
00:00:14
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In each episode, we will bring you engaging conversations with a wide variety of educators, both in and out of the classroom.
00:00:22
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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.
Joining the Teach Better Podcast Network
00:00:33
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The learner-centered spaces podcast is now a member of the Teach Better Podcast Network.
Erin Beard's Background and Experience
00:00:40
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Erin Beard was born and raised in southern Oregon. She spent nearly 20 years working in southern Oregon middle and high schools as an ELA, social studies, advisory, art history, and avid teacher, as well as a teacher leader and school improvement specialist.
00:00:56
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She graduated in 2020 from the Educational Methods Policy and Leadership Program at the University of Oregon.
Role at Talent Maker City and Personal Insights
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Her dissertation study explored the intersection of student-centered assessment practices, trauma-informed practices, and equity practices. For nearly two years, she worked for the NWEA as a content design coordinator supporting the creation of responsive teaching and learning professional learning materials and experiences.
00:01:23
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She now works locally, designing, facilitating, and supporting human-centered learning experiences with students and adults at Talent Maker City, as well as off-site locations such as the local Juvenile Justice Facility, Community College, University, local schools, and other nonprofit organizations.
00:01:43
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Meanwhile, she's also the mother of three extraordinary humans who are each in a significant life phase, middle school, high school, and early college. Her best and most favorite educators are her kids. Good morning, Erin. We're so excited to have you with us. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your role, your location, your journey, maybe something interesting?
00:02:09
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Good morning. Thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here. My current role is Programs Director at Tountmaker City. We're located in southern Oregon, just a little bit above the California border, but I consider myself a lifelong learner and educator.
00:02:26
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My journey includes growing up in this region, going away to school to be an educator. I was one of the people who knew what they wanted to be when they grew up from a very young age. Went away to study education in different places and states and even parts of the world. And then eventually I came back to Oregon. I get to be back in my hometown, my home region to raise my own family.
00:02:53
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and also work in education. Interesting fact about myself, my hobbies, it's interesting to me, I'm an expert napper. I love picking naps, recharging, and there's nothing I like more than a really good nap.
00:03:14
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I have to admit that I am a little jealous because I cannot nap.
What are Learner-Centered Spaces?
00:03:19
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I try as I may have many, many years, even on days that I like take red-eye flights through the night, I just cannot sleep when it's light outside. It's the weirdest thing, but I admire those who can.
00:03:37
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Good on you. So what we're really curious about is what does a learner centered space look like, feel like, sound like to you in your setting or in other settings you've been in?
00:03:52
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Yeah, well, I'm still learning and growing. I think this can depend on the humans that we're working with. But I love starting with the word humans when we're working in education. I love how you all phrase learner-centered because what I didn't understand for a long time and I'm still learning and growing in is that the learners include the educators.
00:04:16
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Sometimes we leave them out of the conversation, which can lead to burnout and all other kinds of problems of practice. So in a learner-centered space, it's where all the humans in that space, the students and the educators, all are empowered to learn, to grow, and also to be healthy, happy, and self-determined humans.
00:04:44
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So I've seen this at work in examples of people, educators, and students even, who I consider to be my mentors. And those mentors, what they are able to do is partner with each other.
00:05:00
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I think it's a very first important component in learner-centered spaces where all the humans are set up to thrive. There's a partnership there between the students and the teachers or the educators so that they can all learn, grow, and thrive. They are all welcome in that space and that can look different depending on who the humans are. And their structures to support their growth, their independence, their passion, their joy,
00:05:31
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And there's an attention to both those structures that make that happen as well as the soul. So I like to say there's a good balance of structure and soul that allow all the learners, all the humans in the space to learn, grow, and thrive.
00:05:47
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And there's just this constant adventure of figuring out what is that happy balance of structure and soul for those humans. And people are excited about being curious about what that balance is and continuously work to achieve that balance.
Understanding Self-Determined Learning
00:06:02
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I don't know if any of that made sense or if we need examples.
00:06:06
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Well, I was just going to say, I hear the phrase self-determined learning a lot in a lot of different spaces, and I'm wondering if you could just dig a little deeper into that because I'm not sure our listeners are necessarily aware of that phrase and what you mean by it. Sure. I think part of my journey to understanding what it means for me requires going back to, okay, what's the purpose of 21st century education?
00:06:34
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Is it to manage our learners or to empower them? In my humble opinion, I think it's to empower them. We want them successful in the time that we're working together in educational settings, and we want them successful in all other endeavors outside of school, in their hobbies, careers, their own families beyond.
00:06:57
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So in order to set up for that success in our learning spaces, we have to practice together. What does it mean to be able to make decisions on one's own, not just get managed by someone, not just get managed by a teacher?
00:07:16
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or managed by a parent or other authority, what does it mean to practice? How do I empower? How do I make decisions that are going to help me thrive so I can thrive here in educational settings, but then also thrive beyond? So in my classrooms, it would look like
00:07:35
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Me setting up some structures, for example, like a warm welcome, the first thing people, students experience coming into the learning space was some sort of prompt to get started. But eventually those learners were prompted also, well, how would you like to do the warm welcome? What are your choices and how you'd like to be welcome to this space?
00:07:57
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So and then adding on to each part of our learning journey together, I'd get the party started as an educator, but partner with my students to then have them contribute, take the lead on each part so that eventually they could make their own choices themselves.
00:08:15
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increasing their independence, their self-determination on what structures, supports would help them thrive while we're together, but also so they get the flavor, the practice of how to do that beyond our classroom.
Integrating Assessment into Learning
00:08:32
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That makes complete sense. Thank you for sharing that. I'm a math teacher, as many of our listeners know from maybe previous episodes. And I teach middle schoolers, which is an interesting bunch. And I'm always curious, and I know Star writes a lot about assessment, and I'm always
00:08:51
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trying to balance and I struggle with how to assess fairly with the structure and soul that you're talking about. So how do you advise our listeners who are educators and maybe running a classroom to assess what's the learning that's going on in the classroom?
00:09:09
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Yes, well middle schoolers are indeed a lovely bunch. So my background is secondary. All middle schoolers, all high school for most of my teaching career and then even now they're my favorite. So one thing that's really helped me in my learning journey is to rethink the purpose and power of assessment. You know, I was trained in a
00:09:37
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learner manager factory model of assessment that can look like a lot of things the way i explain it it's like the teach test grade model and then slowly with a lot of practice and a lot of mentorship rethinking wait a second why do we have to silo teaching and learning from assessment
00:10:00
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I learn more and more about not just assessment for learning, assessment as learning, but what's really intriguing and powerful to me is assessment as learning. We don't have to disconnect assessment from any other teaching and learning processes. That's where our students and educators can feel like testing or assessment is interrupting teaching and learning, and it doesn't have to.
00:10:25
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I think if we really want to empower all learners, students and educators, I think one great place to start is to think of assessment as learning.
00:10:36
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and rethinking all the parts of assessment that are naturally occurring and encourage people to validate all those practices that are occurring minute to minute all the time that are assessment. Because digging into those, we can see, oh, we're not interrupting learning.
00:10:58
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assessment is learning. It's part of this. So here's an example. With my middle schoolers, I taught social studies in English. So I'll give you a social studies example. Eighth grade social studies, working on a lot of civics, the U.S. government, early U.S. history.
00:11:20
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eighth graders love games, or a good number of them do. So in our early phases of a learning unit, we play games like Kahoot!
00:11:31
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And what I was doing with the cahoots was not only playing a game with them, but using it for assessment purposes. Not only their answers in that game, but other observations. Sometimes we don't take the time to acknowledge how powerful those observations of students are.
00:11:51
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Are students anxious? Are they avoiding the answers, avoiding the game? Are they peeking over the shoulder of their peers to find the right answer? So I'm triangulating all sorts of information, not only just the answers to the game.
00:12:10
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or the results to the game, there are all those other things to see, okay, what do we, an important word we need to do next together? For some students, Kahoot! and other games was too stressful because it was timed. They felt pressure. So we need to figure out other ways for them to demonstrate their learning.
00:12:31
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And so those students and I would have our chats together and I would set aside time in the week to have those kinds of check-ins either verbally or I would do Google forms to collect more information about what we could do together to assess, gather evidence of learning and check on how they're doing meeting their learning goals.
00:12:53
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but also making sure they were happy, healthy, working on their way to self-determination. And so engaging them and getting that information was one way I did that. Other students, they thought the game was great and their learning evidence demonstrated, yeah, they got the information and from observations, they were thriving. So they were ready to move on to a different way.
00:13:19
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of demonstrating their learning and taking the next steps in
Becoming More Learner-Centered in Traditional Settings
00:13:23
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learning. So that was one quick example of something that we can often just think of a nice game, like who is a nice game, but it can be used in a structure and soul way inside the learning experience. It's not separate from learning to assess how are the students doing, not only in their learning, but their well-being and their self-efficacy.
00:13:47
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I love how you mentioned that the assessment doesn't have to interrupt the learning because I feel that way often I teach it a pretty traditional environment where we have our unit test and we do a review day and we have our unit test and then we go over the unit test and then we're back to learning again. So I love that you could interweave the learning and assessment together.
00:14:12
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So speaking of a traditional environment, many of our listeners are working in schools that are a little bit more traditional. They're not going to be as hands on as talent maker city or a maker space or something like that. What advice do you have for them on how they could become more human centered or learner centered in their environment?
00:14:32
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Yeah, well, most of my career has been in traditional environments. So this opportunity to work at Talent Maker Spaces is new to me and fantastic. And I also know it's an exception. So in my experience in those traditional spaces, for me, what I had to figure out was first,
00:14:54
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how to work on my mindset about the purpose of the time with my students and the relationship. Of course, I always had, you know, friendly relationships, but what's our partnership, the students and my partnership in the learning journey?
00:15:13
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I was trained in very traditional models, you know, the teacher as manager, and eventually, with a lot of practice and still on this journey, okay, well, how do I shift to what I understand is our purpose in 21st century education is making sure every human is learning and growing.
00:15:32
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How do I empower learning with my students so that they are growing and thriving and so am I? Because sometimes what can happen when we take student-centered learning to the extreme is we burn out our teachers. We can't do that either. So how do we find that right balance of structure and soul for our educators and our students?
00:15:56
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And so for me in a traditional setting, in my sphere of control, I had to figure out, okay, for the learning journey, teaching learning journey, especially when it comes to assessment,
00:16:10
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what are the tools and processes that are going to help balance the structure and soul and make sure it's empowering learners and not managing them. So I really had to rethink my unit assessments, for example. Social studies and English language arts can be pretty traditional. I had to think about what evidence is it that I'm trying to get at the end of this unit
00:16:40
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What are the best ways for the humans that I have in front of me right now to demonstrate that evidence? And so that made me dig into getting beyond multiple choice essays. Not that I never used those, but I had to think past them. And then I had to structure my unit tests in a scaffolded way.
00:17:08
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to lead up to to support and to extend past the learning goals.
00:17:13
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So I had to rethink how to structure the test itself to set up for empowerment, and then that would drive my backwards planning. Okay, so that's how I want them to end up at the end of this unit. Here's how I want them to demonstrate and what I want them to demonstrate. Now, how do I unit and lesson plan to set up to empower them to be able to do that?
00:17:41
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An example is we were working eighth graders again, working on understanding Supreme Court cases and the impact on lives of students and educators. So court decisions that impacted schools.
00:17:57
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Well, I wanted them to be able to not only explain a Supreme Court decision, but also put into their own words how they see that decision connecting to current events or their own lives as learners.
00:18:14
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And they could do that in writing or speaking. So then I had to go back and structure the unit and the lessons to build them up to dig into Supreme Court cases. That's some heavy literacy work and to be able to feel comfortable to connect that to carnavents and their own lives.
00:18:34
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So I guess to sum up, I really had to look at my mindset. I really had to look at that end of unit test to really evaluate what and how I wanted students to be able to demonstrate and then structure my unit and lesson plans to scaffold to that success.
Rethinking Assessment and Its Potential
00:18:55
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I think that might be one of the most practical and clear answers to that that I've heard. And I wish you could speak to the teachers at my school. I think every school could benefit from that because what you mentioned about take what you already have is so practical to say you already have this unit test that's written. You already have this essay assignment that's already predetermined.
00:19:21
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And how can you think beyond that? So thank you so much, because I think our listeners and any school out there who's listening, and I think they should reach out to you because you should definitely do PD for sure. So thank you. Feel free to reach out. It's something I have done and continue to get really nerdy and joyous about. I don't know if everyone says they love those kinds of things, but I genuinely do.
00:19:47
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I could super appreciate that, Erin. I too get very nerdy about these things. I think assessment and the way we think about learning is very exciting and helping people recognize where they are on that continuum and helping them to see where they want to be headed is something that's just
Inspirations for Creating Learner-Centered Spaces
00:20:11
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huge.
00:20:11
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Yeah, sometimes we paint ourselves in these corners thinking like how assessment has to be and getting ourselves out of the corner can be scary and hard work but can also just be absolutely liberating, amazing, bring back joy, creativity, a lot of things that we're really thirsty for.
00:20:30
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Exactly. So to that end, can you please shout out for us, people who deserve recognition or people you look to as, you know, for inspiration in these learner centered spaces? Absolutely.
00:20:46
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So, a colleague and friend, I turn to for inspiration all the time. Her name is Jen McKenzie, and she is an edgy rock star, an edgy leader out right now on the Mid-Oregon coast.
00:21:02
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She's a teacher librarian, Fulbright scholar, doctoral student. She's amazing, but she lives and breathes how to be a learner and power because she continuously shows how she's a learner and she's continually showing how she empowers
00:21:19
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others. So she's all over social media, encourage everyone to follow her. Another person who inspires me, her name is Phoenicia Hubbard and she has a book out, just out, fresh off the press, The Equity Expression.
00:21:36
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And in that book, there's another framework for rethinking how we shift from managing learners to empowering them. So if other people out there looking for a framework to guide, I really encourage Phoenicia's book.
00:21:52
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And last but not least, I want to give a shout out to my current organization, Talent Maker City, and all the partners who partner with Talent Maker City. I get to come in and there's been work going on since 2016 and before how to really put human-centered teaching, learning, community work into practice on the daily.
00:22:16
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So it's a joy to work there. So proud of the work that has happened for years. I'm so excited to be part of the work now.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:22:27
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Well, we really appreciate your time. And where could our listeners reach out and find you online? Well, sure. They can find me on LinkedIn. So Erin Beard, D-E-D on LinkedIn. I'm also on Instagram, Dr. Erin Beard. And I'm also on Facebook.
00:22:46
Speaker
Well, this has been great. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. 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. 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.
00:23:15
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and we'd love your feedback. Please write a review on your favorite podcasting app.