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00:00:01
Natalie Vardabasso says learner-centered spaces are healing
82 Plays1 year ago
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Overview
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.
Guest Introduction: Natalie Vardabasso
00:00:42
Speaker
We are so happy to have Natalie on our show today. Natalie Vardabasso has worked as a middle and high school humanities teacher, instructional coach, and assessment lead in Calgary, Canada. Now she works full-time as a speaker and consultant with schools across North America, an author, podcast host, and founder of the Empowerment Ecosystem. Please welcome Natalie to the show today.
00:01:10
Speaker
We are so excited that Natalie is with us this morning. Good morning, Natalie. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey?
00:01:18
Speaker
Absolutely. I am a former high school and middle school humanities teacher, though, because of my background in performing arts, I kind of got all of the courses. At one point I even taught a Michael Jackson elective, which was really interesting. And then I've been an instructional coach. I eventually niche down into an assessment leadership position. And ever since May of 2022, I've been working full time as a speaker and consultant and author.
00:01:49
Speaker
Can I jump in here and ask about this Michael Jackson elective? Oh my gosh. I know. Just a little nugget. I dropped in there. I thought that'd be fun. Hold on. Hold on. Let's pause. Oh my gosh. OK. So this goes all the way back to the fact that I was a huge Michael Jackson fan because I'm of the age where we had the internet right as we were going into middle school. And the first thing I did on the internet was saw a Michael Jackson music video because you could watch videos online and it was such a big deal.
00:02:18
Speaker
I became obsessed. I started impersonating him. I won competitions when I was 16. Like when I go back to my hometown, I still get asked by everybody to moonwalk.
Learner-Centered Spaces: What & Why
00:02:28
Speaker
And so a couple of folks at work knew this and they're like, you need to do this elective. So it was part dance, part history, part like social justice kind of minded understanding of where different trends come from and how they get appropriated. So yeah, that was my Michael Jackson elective. It was called Move Like Michael. Wow.
00:02:48
Speaker
It's actually amazing. Yeah, you know, super cash. So like, I think it's funny thinking about what you just shared, like, that pretty much spells, you know, what is a learner centered space? Bill Jackson being the content there. But yeah, does a learner centered space look like feel like sound like to you? And how do you help teachers now get there?
00:03:17
Speaker
I feel like the answer has changed to this because I've been hosting a podcast called Edgy Crush for the past four and a half years. When I started the podcast, the question I'd ask everyone is, what is the purpose of education? Which kind of gets into what is a learner-centered space. I used to always say to folks, passion and purpose, to help them pursue their passions and
00:03:36
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find their purpose. And as more time's gone on and we've lived through a pandemic and we've lived through kind of a critical consciousness and awakening around a lot of the injustices in our world, I'm changing my answer and I've been saying healing a lot more. When I think about a learner-centered space, I think about healing.
00:03:55
Speaker
And my answer is that because of what I've gone through through the pandemic and a lot of the hardships I faced in rock bottom moments and therapy and all of that, but also the awareness of a lot of the research that's out there that more than two thirds of youth before the age of 16 have had adverse childhood experience. So neglect or household dysfunction or abuse. And if that's true of our youth, it's also true of our adults.
00:04:22
Speaker
And we know that trauma is in a memory. It's a response and people are acting and behaving in ways that are sensitized, stress responses.
Assessment as Empowerment
00:04:30
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And I feel like more than ever before, we need to hold very safe cultures of belonging where everyone can kind of repair those pathways in their brains that have been harmed.
00:04:44
Speaker
So I'm gonna follow up with a question that might be the opposite of healing for some people, which can be high stakes assessments, pencil paper assessments that can be, some would argue could be damaging, right? And so can you talk more about how healing shows up, but also assessing what a student knows?
00:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like there's two pieces of assessment to acknowledge there. The high stakes testing, which has been, I think was implemented with good intentions around the time that we were moving to standards across North America and this higher rigor of learning. But the way it's been implemented, it's become a weapon of accountability to rank and sort.
00:05:33
Speaker
The adults and the children in the space so I don't know if I can say much to defend that but putting that aside if we're talking about the classroom assessment that we call today which is where we have the most impact on the learning. There are so many ways that we can create the conditions for students to become assessors on their own behalf.
00:05:51
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And that sharing of the power is i think where it becomes a healing space because if you can understand the assessment cycle if you know how to set goals if you know how to gather evidence if you know how to reflect on that evidence to determine your next steps you're an empowered learner you have agency.
00:06:07
Speaker
I often say that it's not assessment for learning or of learning or as learning assessment is learning so if we hand it over and share this with the students and teach them how to do it on their own behalf. I think that's an incredibly healing and empowering experience because control is a big part of a trauma informed environment.
00:06:28
Speaker
because often trauma happens when we're in a space where we weren't in control. So to share that with students and empower them is so important. And I have to add on this point, the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a list last year of the top 50 skills most in demand across the globe. And in the top three was education and learning, which was defined as an ability to set goals, monitor progress and reflect. And I was like, that's assessment.
00:06:54
Speaker
So it is critical that we share this with students to help them to heal.
00:07:00
Speaker
Natalie, I appreciate everything that you're saying right now because it totally gets me the heart of the work that I've invested my life's professional work in at this point. And I'm wondering what advice do you have for educators who want to do these things but maybe don't have kids who are as willing participants? Like what's the entry point?
00:07:25
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Because, I mean, kids are disenfranchised. They're not used to being given the power. So how do we introduce them to that? And what I found is not every kid knows what to do with the power when you give it to them or what kind of choices are good choices. What advice do you have to teachers and to younger learners about having control over something that they've not had control over before?
00:07:53
Speaker
Oh, that's a great question because I think like in this space, like in a lot of the more learned centered pedagogies like inquiry and project based learning, there is sometimes a misconception that if you just build it, they will come, you know, the whole field of dreams. If I just give them these opportunities, they're going to be liberated and learning is going to explode, but that doesn't happen. They have been conditioned to be
00:08:16
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passive receivers of education for a very long time and to be coerced by grades. So we have to start in conversation.
Focusing on Learning over Teaching
00:08:23
Speaker
I know it seems like it's maybe not a thing to do, like it's not actionable enough, but just talking to kids about the game of school and how they're playing it is so important. Like talk to them about grades, talk to them about
00:08:36
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how they're cutting corners, how they're just trying to get the grade and avoid any actual learning. Tell your own story about how you did that too and how you're starting to undo that is an incredible first step that I'd recommend to anybody.
00:08:50
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It's so interesting that you brought that up, Natalie, because one of the first things I started doing and what I started counseling other people to do too is on those first few days of classes, instead of talking about rules and regulations and instead of going over contracts about what learning looks like in this room, I would usually open a conversation with what do grades mean to you? What does it mean to be a successful learner?
00:09:18
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And that would be like the conversation I would have with kids to, first of all, understand what those things actually mean to them and what they represent so that we could kind of separate
00:09:33
Speaker
that, that label, that score, that subjective sort of validation or non validation of learning, and really move into more meaningful conversations about what we know and can do and how we could
00:09:50
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build what we know and can do in a direction of our choosing. And it was always baffling to me, since I was mostly working with kids on the higher end of high school, how ill prepared they were to even have those kinds of conversations because nobody had ever asked them. And that's heartbreaking. We just say that that's totally heartbreaking. Like, what are we really doing here if we're not even talking about learning overtly?
00:10:21
Speaker
And I saw a tweet recently that was really poignant to me and I'm sorry I can't remember the author of it, but it was basically we're focusing so much on teaching we have forgotten to talk about learning.
00:10:37
Speaker
Perfect. Exactly. That's the problem. Yes. We talk about what the teacher is doing so much and the assessments the teacher is doing and everything that's happening from the teacher's side, but we're forgetting who are we serving in this and who are the learners and what's their experience.
Shifting to Student-Centered Learning
00:10:57
Speaker
So I thought so much, that one short tweet. So to that end, I'm thinking about the teachers who have never had these types of conversations with kids. They play the game of school because they've always played the game of school, like many of us as educators have, and they just go with that same, we've always done it this way. What advice do you have for a teacher like that who maybe wants to lean more student-centered and wants to have those conversations?
00:11:28
Speaker
to read a book called Hacking Assessment by Star Saksdine. Nice. You're welcome. It goes back to dialogue. One thing I would say is that teacher is probably in a paradigm where they feel very comfortable being in control. So that might be a really scary first step. For some of us, we're more comfortable sharing the space. So for that teacher, I might suggest
00:11:55
Speaker
something that they could control that could kind of frame the conversation is sit down at least with your course, take a look at your curriculum, your standards and come up with a list of six to 10 compelling student friendly goals that encapsulate what your program is really all about and even go a step further to saying this is the purpose of this course. This is why we're here in English or this is why we're here in math and then share that with the students as an entry point to the conversation. But I think sometimes we do
00:12:26
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We forget to just clarify what is the learning that we seek here in a way that is open-ended, that has almost a rationale and the why embedded into it. I think our curriculum documents are, they're good starting points. Our standards are very academic and sound very smart, but they're not likely gonna motivate kids. And so I've seen a lot of folks as they start to put on this path, you know, they copy and paste a lot of standards up onto the board and they're like, here's our target for today. Kids are like, I don't care.
00:12:54
Speaker
So a good first step is, OK, if you want to have some of that control still, sit back and think about what are the overarching goals of your program. And then from there, we need to also unpack those goals into what are the learning progressions, what are the series of steps that range from simple to complex that we would hypothesize a student might take as they're accomplishing this goal, which would allow us to then have some a bit more of an intentional roadmap for formative assessment.
00:13:22
Speaker
Can you give some examples of, because if I'm leading a workshop or a PD with teachers and I asked them, some of them who are brand new to this to write down six to 10 student centered goals, they would ask me immediately, what do you mean? So I'm going to pass that predicted question onto you. Like what, what kind of examples would you guide teachers in this or PD?
00:13:47
Speaker
Well, I'm going to shout out another brilliant female leader in this space, Sarah Zerwin, who wrote a book called Pointless.
00:13:54
Speaker
She has a absolute game changer of a book that explains all of this in depth. And in her book, first of all, she says the overarching purpose of my high school AP English class, which not many people want to unpack, they're like the purpose of AP is to pass the AP exam. Not really compelling. She says the purpose of my program is to help students to read their world so they can write their lives within it.
00:14:17
Speaker
amazing right off the bat. You're like, yes, I want to be a part of this course. And then she gets into goals such as I can read texts that help me to rehearse for life and
00:14:31
Speaker
engage with my passions, something like that. So that's, you could take a goal like that and that's very different than saying, we analyze literature to expand on story elements and their development throughout a text which lead to the resolution of conflict and uncovering of theme, right? Like the way that a standard would be written. It's just a way of reframing it into, okay, these are the standards, but why does it matter?
00:14:56
Speaker
Why do we need to actually learn how to analyze text for literary elements? There's got to be a deeper purpose while there's a rehearsal for life and the opportunity to explore passions. Yeah, I was I was just going to say to Natalie as you were talking and you brought up learning progressions, which I'm always trying to help schools understand.
00:15:17
Speaker
Um, thinking about the why, like not just goals, but like, why is this relevant to student lives? And I think that why question off often, like, I mean, kids ask it all the time. Like, why are we even more? Um, but I don't think teachers often have good answers to that question. And I think we need to be ready with good answers to those questions because
00:15:44
Speaker
traditional education, the way that it's always lived. Although, you know, I'm a learner, I enjoy learning things that don't necessarily have direct
00:15:56
Speaker
use in my life, I'll say like, I mean, I love history and I love to learn about art and I love to learn about a lot of different things. I just like to learn. But if I walked into a space where I wasn't terribly interested in what was going on, I would really rely on that person in front of me to give me a reason to invest my time and interest in learning this new content and
00:16:24
Speaker
I think we have to challenge teachers to always have very grounded answers to that why question that isn't to get you into college, to pass a test, to like all of these compliance sort of measures that just get them to the next spot in their life.
Purpose of School vs. Education
00:16:43
Speaker
It should be something that enriches their life in a meaningful way, whether or not they have intentions
00:16:49
Speaker
of going to college or, you know, if testing is important to them.
00:16:55
Speaker
It's all about negotiating that tension between the purpose of school and the purpose of education. I often say that if we're living in the purpose of school, it's all about you get this to get a credential, to get a job, you go to school to get socialized for, I hate to say it, childcare. There's all these social functions of what schools do, but education is something human. It's lifelong. It exists in the space between people. It exists in our experiences.
00:17:20
Speaker
It's within us. And I feel like what we need more than now more than ever is to cultivate more education in our school spaces. Agreed. In and out. So to that end, if you could shout out people you feel are voices that speak to this message, who would you want to acknowledge now?
00:17:42
Speaker
Oh, man. Well, I've got to acknowledge my two brilliant collaborators, co-authors, co-hosts, Tom Shimmer and Katie White. We are on a bit of our own learning journey because, like you said, education, it's inside and outside of school spaces to create a learner-centered space for adults. So we've created something called the Empowerment Ecosystem Summit. We have a couple coming up this year, one in Calgary, one in Vancouver. But we're trying to take all of this same
00:18:11
Speaker
compassion and love, dare I say, that we're giving to students and give it to those middle leaders in education who have one of the hardest jobs in the world.
Upcoming Events & Closing Remarks
00:18:20
Speaker
If you're going to be in the middle, you know, not quite teacher enough for the teachers or leader enough for the leaders and ask people to change their teaching practice, you're going to hear a lot of resistant comments in return, attacks on you personally, things like that will never work here. That's not the way we do it. So we want to create a learning centered space for them to collaborate, to find community and to find their voice.
00:18:40
Speaker
Those are some great people to follow as well, and your podcast is amazing. Where can our listeners find you online? Probably, I used to say Twitter, the artist formerly known as Twitter, I should say X, but I think I've broken up with it officially, I'm sad to say. We had a long run. It was about five years, but I'm not really on Twitter anymore. The main place I've been creating and finding some joy is LinkedIn.
00:19:08
Speaker
surprisingly enough. I'm on a bit of a new learning pathway myself to help folks, professionals, I should say, who have outgrown their job to unleash their entrepreneurial spirit. So I've been talking a lot about that over there. But I do also have an Instagram that's focused on education. I have a podcast one at Educresh Pod and my personal one at Natabasso. And that's where I jump on often stories and once in a while throw it a reel related to this kind of a conversation.
00:19:36
Speaker
Well, thank you for joining us today. This has been a great conversation. I think that our listeners have so much to learn from the work that you're doing, the work that you're doing with your colleagues, and this whole movement toward student agency, learner-centered spaces. So thank you so much for all that you're doing for us. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
00:19:59
Speaker
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. And we'd love your feedback. Please write a review on your favorite podcasting app.