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Texts to model lenses for students or staff

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Texts to model lenses for students or staff

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Rick Reilly

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Gio's Essay - Three Beginnings, Three Audiences

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Gio's Essay - Three Beginnings, Three Audiences

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Renee Watson

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Listening to Wisdom from a 10-Year-Old Son about his Head Injury

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Listening to Wisdom from a 10-Year-Old Son about his Head Injury

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Introduction: Why do All the Black Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria

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Introduction: Why do All the Black Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria

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Beverly Daniel Tatum

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Beverly Daniel Tatum  Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria

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Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories. - The New York Times

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Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories. (Published 2020)

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We analyzed some of the most popular social studies textbooks used in California and Texas. Here’s how political divides shape what students learn about the nation’s history.

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The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

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Social Action to the Shooting in Atlanta:  A classrooms response and Process

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Social Action to the Shooting in Atlanta:  A classrooms response and Process

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Social Action in Response to the Shootings in Atlanta.pptx

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COMIC: How To Raise Informed, Active Citizens - NPR

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COMIC: How To Raise Informed, Active Citizens — NPR

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From talking about history to volunteering in your community, here’s how to get your kids thinking about what it means to be a good citizen.

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Civics/Election Padlet for Student Research

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Civics/Election Padlet for Student Research

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Christina DiZebba inspired!

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The Civically Engaged Classroom Reading, Writing, and Speaking for Change

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A Study Guide to Teaching During an Election 

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A Study Guide to Teaching During an Election 

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With an historic national election on the horizon, you may be wondering if and how you should address it in your classroom. Here, Mary Ehrenworth, Pablo Wolfe, and Marc Todd, authors of The Civically Engaged Classroom, have created an immensely helpful guide to teaching during an election.

Dear Friends,
If you're looking at this guide, you're likely weighing options for how to address an upcoming election. We know how challenging it can be to teach responsibly in an election year, and we'd like to help. We've taught election units in different time periods and in different places around the world. We've taught with teachers who share our political beliefs and with teachers whose beliefs differ, or whose parent population has vastly different political affiliations than those of the teachers. We've learned that our job is not to teach kids how to vote, or what political party to support. We do want to teach them what political engagement looks like-how people investigate the big issues in play, how they study candidates and parties, how they get involved locally or nationally. We also want to teach kids to explore the history of voting, including who has been enfranchised and disenfranchised, and what work remains to make democracy more just. Our hope is that this guide will give you the tools you need to help your students engage with the electoral process, to help them see their role in how we choose those who serve in our government now and in the future.

Perhaps you're designing a grand election unit every four years, one in which kids track politicians and parties, and trace the big issues and the candidates' positions on those issues; perhaps you'll even have a mock election. Or perhaps you'll want to include a strand in your curriculum that studies breaking news and the electoral process in action. The suggestions in this guide can form the basis of an election unit, or you can use the suggestions as necessary to address particular issues and ideas as they arise. We've included essential questions as well as specific teaching ideas that tailor the core ideas in The Civically Engaged Classroom to the unique challenges of teaching responsibly during an election. As the 2020 presidential election, in particular, unfolds, we'll also be sharing useful resources via Twitter. Follow us at @MaryEhrenworth, @MarcToddNYC, and @PabloWolfe.
All the best,
Marc, Pablo, and Mary

Mary Ehrenworth, Senior Deputy Director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and co-editor for the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Middle School series, works with schools and districts around the globe, and is a frequent keynote speaker at Project events and national and international conferences. Mary's interest in critical literacies, deep interpretation, and reading and writing for social justice all inform the books she has authored or co-authored in the Reading and Writing Units of Study series as well as her many articles and other books on instruction and leadership.

Pablo Wolfe is a Washington DC-based educator who promotes civic education as a means to improve student engagement, celebrate student identity, and embolden the next generation of activists. He's been a public school administrator, a staff developer with the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, a teacher, and a parent, and in all of these roles has sought to make school a training ground for civic life. Whether planning town hall meetings with groups of 7th graders, writing letters to elected officials, or organizing opportunities for service learning, Pablo believes that academic skills are best learned when applied towards addressing social injustices. He is currently working to create a network of civic-minded educators to share stories and best practices that illustrate how civic knowledge, values, and behaviors improve student outcomes and transform schools. A strong believer in the role of teachers as agents of social change, he strives to thread this idea through his writing, staff development and teaching.

Marc Todd teaches Social Studies at IS 289, the Hudson River Middle School in New York, and is a national presenter for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. He collaborates with teachers around the world and leads workshops and institutes on culturally relevant pedagogy and teaching students to be critical readers of history. Marc believes in immersing kids in nonfiction reading and making notebook work inside of content classes both serious and joyful.

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Download This Free Guide to Teaching During an Election

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With an historic national election on the horizon, you may be wondering if and how you should address it in your classroom. Here, Mary Ehrenworth, Pablo Wolfe, and Marc Todd, authors of The Civically Engaged Classroom , have created an immensely helpful guide to teaching during an election.

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Exploring Bias in Ourselves and Texts

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The Freedom Forum's mission is to foster First Amendment freedoms for all.

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Pensacola News Journal Article on Student Walkouts

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Pensacola News Journal Article on Student Walkouts

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Four Pensacola High School students walked out of school Wednesday to protest gun laws in the wake of the February Parkland shooting, despite being warned by school officials they would face disciplinary actions.

Three freshmen and one junior walked out of the school's front doors at 10:17 a.m. and gathered by the flagpole for 17 minutes to honor the 17 victims of the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They held signs that read "Thoughts and prayers don't save lives!" and "Fear has no place in school." Moments before walking out, deans standing at the door gave students little slips of paper that warned them of imminent punishment if they followed through with the walkout.

The slips of paper read: "Malcolm Thomas, Escambia County School District Superintendent, does not support a student walk out. If you leave campus, then there will be discipline consequences for refusing to follow directions at Pensacola High School."

"One of the deans was telling us that we shouldn't have done it here, we should have done it in the park and that this was disrespectful to the memorial," said organizer Gabrielle Vines.
More: More: Pair of Pensacola High seniors to lead March 14 school 'assembly' Escambia County superintendent: No tolerance for walkouts March 14
Students across nearly 3,000 schools marked National Walkout Day on Wednesday, with some classrooms nationwide emptying at 10 a.m. local time in a call to end gun violence.

Coinciding with the walkout on Wednesday was a 17-minute assembly inside the PHS auditorium. Students and administration attending the assembly held a moment of silence, then a select few students took turns speaking about issues like mental health awareness and voting. The intent of the assembly, according to Thomas, was to memorialize the Parkland students killed during the shooting.

The four students who walked out and held a separate event unsanctioned by the school did so to protest U.S. gun laws, which they understood to be a discouraged talking point during the indoor assembly. At the same time, they said they had no intention of protesting the memorial happening inside.

More: Powerful images of students holding hands and hoisting signs: This is what a nationwide walkout looks like

"We're all students at high school, we're all directly affected by the current gun laws," Vines said. "And we don't think that we're safe in school with our current laws and we want to change them, we want to walk out for that change and not be bullied and scared by the school administration into not saying anything."

Thomas said he wasn't aware of the slips of paper with his name and said during a phone interview Wednesday that he believes the four protesters will receive little to no punishment.

"If for example, students gathered by the flagpole holding signs that were not disturbing the school, that's pretty mild," Thomas said. "That's not going to have a big consequence - if any."

Vines said she believes the consequences expressed to the four protesters was a disciplinary referral, which Vines said would go on their permanent records as a disciplinary mark and would require their parents' signatures.

Pensacola High School Principal David Williams did not return an afternoon phone call from the News Journal requesting clarity on the slips of paper or if the school would punish the four students.

Thomas said in an earlier interview on March 7 that students "deciding on their own to stand against the authority of the school and walk out of the school" would become a disciplinary issue. Thomas later met with principals, PHS officials and student leaders multiple times in the past week for ongoing discussions centered around the impending walkout and appears to have changed his stance.

After previously saying that holding signs with political messages on it were not allowed on campus, Thomas said that during a meeting Tuesday between he and school district officials, it was agreed that signs were permitted at indoor assemblies as long as the signs were created "on their own volition."

"What we've said is if a student held up a sign, as long as an adult did not tell them to create that sign, the student has some rights to do that," Thomas said. "An adult can not direct a student (to make a sign)."

Vines, along with fellow protesters Annie Pratt, Caitlin Sarfert and Liam Chau, said they believed the sudden allowance of signs was to dissuade them from walking out and to instead attend the indoor assembly.

Vines said she feels like more students would have joined the four protesters if they weren't intimidated by the deans' presence at the front doors.

"I think the deans being there and personally handing us the slips was them trying to make sure we wouldn't leave and just go to the auditorium, but it didn't work," Vines said.

In the days leading up to the Wednesday protest, Vines said she and her friends nearly had a change of heart as they weighed the possible consequences of their actions.

"I made a last-minute decision last night to do this," added Pratt, who like Vines is an International Baccalaureate student. "My family's supportive and all but it's still scary, it's a scary thought to think, 'What if I get suspended and what if I get kicked out of the IB program. But I don't feel as scared now that I'm actually doing it and there's no going back."

All four protesters said their families supported their walking out.
Jake Newby can be reached at jnewby@pnj.com or 850-435-8538.
Thomas said that he wasn't aware of walkouts at other Escambia County schools on Wednesday. He said every high school in the district held a memorial assembly similar to the one at PHS and though he didn't attend any of them, said he heard they all went well.

"Students all across the district at every high school had an opportunity over the last two weeks to prepare their plan and figure out what they wanted to do as far as showing unity with Parkland and as far as I know, all those plans were implemented. There was no report of disruption and that's a tribute to our students, and we're very proud of them."

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Four PHS students walk out despite written warnings, may not be punished after all

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Four Pensacola High School students walked out of school Wednesday to protest gun laws in the wake of the February Parkland shooting, despite being warned by school officials they would face disciplinary actions. Three freshmen and one junior walked out of the school's front doors at 10:17 a.m.

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New York Times Article on Student Walkouts

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New York Times Article on Student Walkouts

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National School Walkout: Thousands Protest Against Gun Violence Across the U.S. (Published 2018)

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In a coordinated action, students left their classrooms and sometimes marched in the streets a month after 17 people were killed in a Florida high school.

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Identity Work With Students

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Making Space for Your Students' Perspectives

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Making Space for Your Students' Perspectives

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Edutopia

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Making Space for Your Students’ Perspectives

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Designing Learning to Prioritize Student Voices - MindShift

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Excerpted from "Teaching for a Living Democracy: Project-Based Learning in the English and History Classroom" by Joshua Block. Published by Teachers College Press. Prioritizing Student Voices, Decentralizing the Classroom
In our society, it is widely believed that because young people lack experience, they aren't smart, capable, or insightful. These beliefs are often referred to as young people's oppression or adultism. In reality, young people see the world differently and are able to recognize injustice and question dominant paradigms, make intellectual connections, and take action in ways that adults often will not. Paolo Freire explained that learning to read the world and discovering the power of one's own voice are transformative experiences ( Freire, 1983). Designing learning that prioritizes student voices also benefits the teacher, who can leave the position of authority in the front of the room and be side by side with students as they transform themselves through their work.

School matters to students when they are given opportunities to engage with the world around them and ask questions about issues that are often ignored or overlooked. As students engage by reflecting on their experiences, learning about our society, and both envisioning and working for social change, they learn that there is substance to their ideas and that they can inhabit multiple roles in the world. When learning is designed in ways that prioritize student voices and thought, there is a clear pathway for students to invest themselves fully and genuinely in quality work that matters. Another way to think of this is to allow students to make meaning of content on their own terms.

In addition to regularly sharing both rough work and finished products out loud, students can generate questions and facilitate. When I prepare students well and successfully set them up to develop their own ideas, my students facilitate their own discussions by quoting sources, calling on each other, and questioning each other deeply. During these times I remind students to speak to each other and not solely to me. I position myself off to the side or behind other students, in order to make sure students speak to each other and shift away from a model where the teacher is always the center of the action.

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Designing Learning to Prioritize Student Voices - MindShift

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Excerpted from "Teaching for a Living Democracy: Project-Based Learning in the English and History Classroom" by Joshua Block. Published by Teachers College Press. Prioritizing Student Voices, Decentralizing the Classroom In our society, it is widely believed that because young people lack experience, they aren't smart, capable, or insightful.

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The quest to understand something new is a key factor to building the resilience necessary to weather setbacks and navigate life's volatility.

Credit... Monika Aichele

This article is part of a series on resilience in troubled times - what we can learn about it from history and personal experiences.
Eight years ago, while working as an assistant Cuyahoga County prosecutor in Cleveland, Gayle Williams-Byers was in the throes of a serial killer case when she decided to take horseback-riding lessons.

This summer, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Williams-Byers, 46, now a South Euclid Municipal Court judge, started free online classes in American Sign Language offered by Gallaudet University in Washington. She also took a webinar in labor trafficking. In recent years, she has enrolled in a variety of classes and workshops, including one on how to get a commercial driver's license - not something she plans to act on any time soon.

"I don't have a reason to use these things in my professional life, but learning helps me to focus better," Ms. Williams-Byers said. "It's also something that I have some control over. I take classes in subjects I am just wildly interested in learning about it. When I expand my brain, my wingspan is greater. It lets you get a little higher, to get above the headwinds."

Ms. Williams-Byers' quest to understand something new is an example of what many career coaches, authors and experts view as a key factor to building the resilience necessary to weather setbacks and navigate life's volatility.

The theory: To deal effectively with change, it helps to be engaged in changing yourself. "One of the things that makes us resilient is that when we see a challenge, and when we face a struggle, we engage with it, rather than shut down," said Simon Sinek, author of "The Infinite Game" and "Start With Why."

"What I have learned from my career is that something I learned over here helps me over there," he said. "Even if I don't know that is happening, any kind of learning benefits all aspects of life."

Mr. Sinek, for instance, is a dance lover. "My dancer friends kept telling me I should take classes, and it would help me and my love of the medium. I begrudgingly agreed, and I took some basic ballet classes."

Even though it was for personal enrichment, those classes helped his developing work as a public speaker. "My posture is much better," he said. "I move more effortlessly across the stage from my hips, instead of my shoulders."

When you're in the process of learning, your viewpoint changes, and you spot connections that you never noticed before. "Resilience is about being adaptable in a variety of different circumstances," said Dorie Clark, who teaches executive education at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and is the author of "Reinventing You."

"It is a combination of being able to pick yourself up when there are setbacks, but also it is about having the kind of cross-training necessary to be flexible in an uncertain world where we don't know what is around the corner," Ms. Clark said.

This all may require pushing yourself - not the easiest of tasks in times of crisis. "If they are relatively senior professionals, it has been years, or decades, since they have not been good at something, and it can be enormously psychologically stressful to have to face that," Ms. Clark said. "Inevitably, when you are in the early stages of learning something you haven't done before, you are probably going to be bad at it - at least not very good."

Two years ago, Ms. Clark entered a program to train as a musical theater lyricist. "People in this program have master's degrees in musical theater writing," she said. "At first, having to surround myself with people who truly had exponentially more expertise was humiliating on a regular basis, but it was invigorating and inspiring."

Being resilient has a lot to do with perspective. "People who commit themselves to a life of learning show up with curiosity," Mr. Sinek said. "They show up with interest. They show up with a student's mind-set. You don't have to be curious about everything. You have to be curious about some things."

Those who routinely and consciously engage in learning become more confident about their ability to figure things out once a crisis hits, according to Beverly Jones, an executive career coach and author of "Think Like an Entrepreneur, Act Like A CEO." "Each time they hit a bump, they spend less time lamenting and quickly turn to determining what they must learn in order to climb out of the hole," she said.

Moreover, learners develop a more optimistic mind-set, which helps them jump into action, according to Ms. Jones. "In part, this is because each time you become aware of learning something new it feels like a victory," Ms. Jones said. "You maintain the positivity that is a key to resilience."

An important element to remember is that people learn in different ways, Mr. Sinek said. "I can't read a book a week. I learn by having conversations. I like talking to people who know more than me about any particular subject. I love peppering them with questions. And I love trying to say back in my own words what I think they are telling me to see if I understand it."

Right now, with his speaking engagements on hold, Mr. Sinek is studying kintsugi, the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with epoxy and a painted gold solution, which highlights the breaks. The concept: By accepting blemishes and flaws, you can produce an even sturdier, more striking, piece of art. On a deeper level, it functions as a symbol of the human experience.

For one thing, it requires patience. "It turns out the epoxy dries slowly," Mr. Sinek said. "If you do all the pieces at once, it all just falls apart again. I want to be done with my project and move on to the next. I can't. I have to stick one piece and hold it for an uncomfortable amount of time and then let sit for 24 hours."

There are myriad paths to learning from taking part in a free online class to reading a nonfiction book to watching a documentary to a complete immersion in a grade-free educational experience.

Chip Conley, 59, for example, founded the Modern Elder Academy, in Baja, Mexico, a group dedicated to midlife learning.

The academy's core curriculum is based on helping people move from a fixed to a growth mind-set in midlife and beyond, according to Mr. Conley. "Those with a fixed mind-set define success as winning, which becomes problematic when they face difficult circumstances," he said. "Those with a growth mind-set define success as learning. They're not trying to prove themselves, but instead improve themselves, so they get less focused on the results and more focused on the journey."

At the academy, options include collaborative bread baking, improv comedy, learning how to surf or do yoga for the first time and penning a poem to offer to your cohort.

There are also educational opportunities for nontraditional students at some top universities through academic or yearlong programs for executives and other professionals. Students can audit classes, attend lectures, and work on projects with graduate and undergraduate students.

These include the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute, Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative, the University of Notre Dame's Inspired Leadership Initiative, the University of Minnesota's Advanced Careers Initiative, and the University of Texas at Austin, which offers the Tower Fellows Program.

Three years ago, Glenn Lowenstein, 60, was ready for a new challenge. The Houston resident had sold Lionstone Investments, the real estate investment company he founded in 2001, to Ameriprise. "It was a hard decision," he said. "The business had been my dream, and then I lived the reality of it for 20 years, and all of a sudden there was a void. It was scary. When there is nothing in front of you, that's where the resiliency has to come in."

His solution was to return to campus. Two years ago, he was a Towers fellow. "You have to put yourself out there in an environment you have not been in before," he said. "It's a combination of confidence in yourself, enjoyment in exploration and going toward your fear."

As a fellow, Mr. Lowenstein, for example, enrolled in an advanced graduate philosophy seminar. "It was way above my head," he said. "I would try my hardest to follow every single word of the conversation. It was fascinating to me the way the graduate students articulated their arguments. It was super esoteric stuff, but I would walk out and be 'wow, I am learning a new way to communicate here.'"

The best part, though, was his time on campus: "It was so cool to be in an environment where I wasn't the expert," he said. "I wasn't the person relied on to know everything, so I could sit back and enjoy the process of learning, and that's positive energy. My aim is to keep my mind and body and spirit healthy. I don't think you can do that without learning."

For those who can't afford the time or money required for a high-level fellowship or university program, there are myriad paths to learning. Free or reasonably priced online classes are available through sites like Coursera, EdX, The Great Courses, LinkedIn Learning, MasterClass, Skillshare, TED Talks and Udem y.

Other options (online these days) include adult education centers, local libraries, community colleges and universities, and Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes. One Day University, a subscription service ($7.95 a month), offers five livestreaming lectures a week and recorded talks.

For Ms. Williams-Byers, learning is "that extra oomph to turn off the crazy in life and pour yourself into something that is fantastic that you can benefit from," she said.

That explains her decision to take up a new sport during a particularly difficult case. "I had dealt with murder cases before, but this was unsettling," she said. "I could feel myself disconnecting from the case because of the emotional drain. The hourlong lessons refocused my mind, so I could bounce back when I returned to the office."

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To Build Emotional Strength, Expand Your Brain

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The quest to understand something new is a key factor to building the resilience necessary to weather setbacks and navigate life's volatility. This article is part of a series on resilience in troubled times - what we can learn about it from history and personal experiences.

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How to Brainstorm and Collaborate with Students Online - The Art of Education University

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One of the biggest challenges of teaching online is maintaining the collaboration that can easily happen in the classroom. Art students still need the opportunity to share ideas, discuss, and collectively brainstorm. Even if you can't "circle up" like you could in the classroom, there are a number of tools you can use with your students online. Using these tools can create opportunities for interaction and help students refine their own ideas.

Here are four tools that can make brainstorming and collaboration possible with students online:

Each of these tools also offers a level of flexibility with your instruction. By posting or sending the link, students can respond on their own time within a deadline. If you are meeting with students on a video-call, however, you could share your screen and take the lead on entering their responses.

1. AnswerGarden

AnswerGarden is a simple and user-friendly tool that creates a word cloud based on entries. This is your best bet if you're looking for a quick tool with instant results. AnswerGarden allows you to post a question or topic for students to respond to. Repeated responses will continue to grow to create a visual representation of ideas. You can post your project prompt, and have the students collectively gather ideas and build off each other. The word cloud will show students which ideas are more unique and which are heavily repeated.

AnswerGarden is free for educators and does not require an account. The settings allow you to limit characters and select between modes (Brainstorm, Classroom, Moderator, Locked) to best meet your need.

2. Padlet

Padlet is a more comprehensive tool for collaboration that allows users to post a variety of ideas. Students can enter their responses and have the option to include links and attachments. Padlet keeps everything arranged in a clean and organized layout for easy readability. This is a great tool for students to contribute to a collaborative bank. Imagine the possibilities when students are sharing images, artists, ideas, and resources with each other.

Padlet is free for educators. The settings offer a variety of design and layout options, the configuration of comments and reactions, and even censor profanity with a nice emoji.

3. Google Suite

Sometimes the best tool is the one students are already accustomed to using in their classes. Google Docs and Google Slides make collaborating easy, as many students already know how to access and navigate this platform. Google Docs can be used to create a running list of ideas where students type in their submissions. You can load the document with different questions on each page and have the students go in and provide their ideas.

You can also use Google Slides to have each student fill a slide with their own ideas and to create a larger resource for all students to review. Google Jamboard is a lesser-known program and serves as a digital whiteboard for collaboration. Students can work together to add type, images, sticky notes, and manipulate everything with the freedom and flexibility of a whiteboard.

Google programs do require a Google account and are free for use. Settings can be configured for anyone, including non-Google users, to access the files through a browser.

4. Stormboard

Stormboard is one of the most extensive programs and offers several tools and functions to meet a variety of needs. The provided templates can be used to teach your students several problem solving and planning processes, like design thinking. After setting up your board, students can participate by adding their contributions to sticky notes and placing them in the desired spot.

These can then be moved around on the board as needed, which is helpful in the planning process. The layout is organized, and the tools are intuitive. Student entries can also include images, videos, and files. Stormboard is recommended for upper-level students.

Stormboard is currently free for educators through June 30, 2021.

Brainstorming and ideation are best in a collaborative environment where students can build on each other's ideas. These important steps in the artistic process can still happen online with the right tools. Consider your students' ability to navigate technology, the resources available, and your own level of knowledge and comfort, to pick the best tool for you.

As is the case with any new program, it might take a little time on the front-end to learn how to use the tool. But in time, you'll increase your toolbox and help students collaborate together even from a distance.
What other online programs can be used to share ideas? What is the best way to teach students about new programs?

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How to Brainstorm and Collaborate with Students Online - The Art of Education University

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Return to Learn with The Art of Education University One of the biggest challenges of teaching online is maintaining the collaboration that can easily happen in the classroom. Art students still need the opportunity to share ideas, discuss, and collectively brainstorm. Even if you can't "circle up" like you could in the classroom, there are [...]

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Why We Can't Afford Whitewashed Social-Emotional Learning

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'Reality Pedagogy' Is Teaching as a Form of Protest - The Atlantic

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It's about reaching students where they really are.

Editor's Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The "On Teaching" series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers.
In the fall of 2001, armed with an undergraduate science degree and a rushed teaching credential, I stood in front of a sea of Black and brown middle-school students in the Bronx and announced that I was their teacher. On the first day of school, I told them, "This is my class. I am going to be teaching you science and math. You will listen, you will work hard, and you will be respectful." I had practiced these lines in the mirror for weeks. My shoulders were back, my hands were in my pockets, and my teacher scowl had been perfected. Everything I had been told about how to teach-that success was only attained in a quiet, contained classroom, and you had to be tough to maintain it-was contained in those few lines.

A few weeks later, I was walking the aisles of the classroom while my students were working quietly on math problems, when loud sirens began to penetrate the walls. Thinking it was just another police car or ambulance, I yelled at my students to focus. In that moment, ensuring that they were not yielding to distractions was my biggest concern. But the sirens persisted for longer than usual. Students looked up at me with concern; my brows tightened in a scowl that forced their eyes back to their notebooks. I knew that no math was happening, but as long as no eyes were lifted from the page, I felt successful. Then the phone rang.

The voice on the other end informed me that two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center. Parents were storming the school building and wanted to take their children home. I was told to keep the students focused and not tell them that anything was happening. One student in my class, scared by the sirens and the confusion, asked if she could call her mother. I said no.

In the weeks that followed, words like terrorist and bomber became common language. On more than one occasion, I heard those words hurled at the three Muslim students in my classroom, but I just told the students who had wielded them to watch their language and kept on teaching.

I taught through violence against Muslim students and used the permission I tacitly received from the school to justify my inaction. I ignored the chaos of the world beyond the classroom because I believed that it was my job to just keep on teaching. Looking back now, I realize I was not actually teaching at all.

Almost 20 years after September 11, 2001, the coronavirus pandemic has emerged as another siren, tearing through our collective sense of normal. We are responding to this virus and adjusting our methods for remote learning. But institutional racism is also deadly, and it's even more widespread. Derek Chauvin, the police officer who murdered George Floyd, had a symptomatic case of the racism virus. But teachers place metaphorical knees on the necks of young people in classrooms all the time-and their symptoms aren't always as obvious. I know this because I had the virus, too.

The best teachers don't just keep teaching. Instead, they use their pedagogy as protest: They disrupt teaching norms that harm vulnerable students. In my years in the classroom since 2001, I've learned something about how to do this. I call it reality pedagogy, because it's about reaching students where they really are, making sure that their lives and backgrounds are reflected in the curriculum and in classroom conversations.

Reality pedagogy interrupts the notion that teaching is about managing students and their behavior. Instead, I've learned to see them as co-teachers, and I create space for dialogue-in small groups outside of class-about how they experience the classroom and the world beyond it. It's a space for connection, but also for any critiques they have of my teaching. These conversations are generative for everyone involved. Teachers need feedback from their students, who can see what teachers have been trained to ignore in their blind pursuit of a calm, quiet classroom. And students need a sense of agency, which they are often denied.

Co-teaching requires that teachers be humble enough to become students of their students-especially the students who have been most harmed, and will benefit most from a teacher listening to their experiences. In my first years of teaching, I never asked to hear my students' thoughts about having to sit and learn while the world around them was going crazy. I didn't make space for my Muslim students to heal from being targeted. But if I had started that dialogue, I would have learned a lot from them about how I could have been a better teacher.

When students have this kind of agency, a classroom can start to function like a family-or even a small society. I give all of my students a classroom responsibility that counts toward their grades and involves taking care of the physical classroom and each other. And I institute democratic decision making for all actions taken in the classroom: Students help to decide what assignments we work on, how long we spend on activities, and what to discuss. The classroom can serve as an example of what the world should look like- all students with equal power, regardless of their culture or background-rather than a replication of what it is.

Reality pedagogy involves connecting academic content to events happening in the world that affect students. The curriculum can weave in specific references to the neighborhoods where young people are from, inequities that they and their families are hurt by, and protests in the community. But that doesn't mean these lessons are always serious. Students can compete to show their knowledge through art, games, and music. I have created projects like the Science Genius competition, where young people write raps about science content and events happening in their lives and compete to be the best scientist, rapper, and storyteller. The classroom-especially for Black youth-should not feel like a place where they are policed or silenced. Black joy can be a part of daily learning.

All teachers will sometimes fail. But that's why we have to accurately see ourselves in the classroom. I suggest that teachers videotape their teaching for study, so they can self-diagnose for the racism virus they may be suffering from and spreading unintentionally.

In 2001, I thought that good teaching meant delivering content knowledge to students who were behaving "appropriately." In 2020, I know that is not enough. I've learned to see my classroom as a platform for empowering students and transforming society, and to use my pedagogy as a form of protest against norms that silence students. Far from sacrificing content knowledge, engaged students, whose voices are heard, are better able to learn it.

A pedagogy of protest privileges dialogue with students even when the school schedule says there is no time for it. It creates space for youth to teach about their lives even when the curriculum says there is no space for it. It focuses on building community and family even when the school administration tells teachers not to express emotion with students. If teachers want to respond to racism as they've responded to the coronavirus pandemic, they can start here-in their own classrooms.
This article is part of our project "On Teaching," which is supported by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Panta Rhea Foundation.

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It's about reaching students where they really are.

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Interview with Zaretta Hammond

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In reality, cultural responsiveness is more of a process than a strategy. It begins when a teacher recognizes the cultural capital and tools students of color bring to the classroom. She is then able to respond to students' use of these cultural learning tools positively by noticing, naming, and affirming when students use them in the service of learning. The most common cultural tools for processing information utilize the brain's memory systems -- music, repetition, metaphor, recitation, physical manipulation of content, and ritual. The teacher is "responsive" when she is able to mirror these ways of learning in her instruction, using similar strategies to scaffold learning.

For example, a science teacher I mention in the book wasn't having much success with her sixth-grade students learning the science vocabulary. Rather than continue assigning a word list and have kids look words up in the dictionary, we looked at how she could redesign word study using some combination of the cultural tools familiar to her students.

Afterwards, learning weekly vocabulary was more active and game-like. She reported that students were not only re-engaged, but made noticeable progress in using their knowledge of science vocabulary during the lessons.

You'll notice that there's no mention of Africa, Mexico, or race at all. It's a misconception that culturally responsive instruction has to mention race. It's not race that matters in culturally responsive teaching but awareness of implicit bias that gets in the way of healthy student-teacher relationships and narrow interpretations of learning that ignore the cultural tools students bring to class.

Who is the primary audience for your book? Who do you hope will read it?

This is the first year that our public schools have a majority minority student population. That means our classrooms are more racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse than they have ever been, but the majority of our teaching force is still white.

Historically, students of color experience cross-cultural equity issues that contribute to the achievement gap. Closing this gap is where teachers need support. I believe the book will be a resource for instructional coaches as they build their own knowledge and skill around how to help teachers increase their cultural responsiveness.

I hope every teacher gets a copy of the book and reads it with other colleagues. Hopefully it will spark classroom inquiry in identifying what cultural capital students are bringing to school and how to mirror them during instruction.

What are three things that you hope readers will take away from your book?

First I want teachers to get that you don't have to learn 19 different cultures to be effective. Teachers need to simply begin with understanding the cultural dimensions of communalism -- most communities of color have this cultural trait in common, namely a focus on the interdependence of the group. It can be summed up in the African proverb, "I am because we are." This way of being is contrasted with our dominant culture's more individualist, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps worldview.

The second thing is how important it is to build trusting relationships with students who feel marginalized or misunderstood. The neuroscience is clear on the connection between emotions, trust, and learning. Stress hormones from mistrust block cognition. Students respond to a teacher's focus on care by giving her permission to be tough and push them toward higher achievement.

And last, I hope they take from the book new processes and strategies for operationalizing culturally responsive teaching. I see a lot of school districts using the term, but there isn't much guidance to help teachers build the routines, processes, and structures in their classrooms so that it becomes more than a gimmick.

I'm most intrigued by the title of chapter three, "This Is Your Brain on Culture." Can you give a quick synopsis of that chapter?

This is where the neuroscience is so cool in helping us understand the role of culture in learning. It is like software that programs our "hardware" (the brain). Cultural values and learning practices transmitted from our parents and community guide how the brain wires itself to process information and handle relationships. Neural pathways are over-developed around one's cultural ways of learning.

Culturally responsive teachers know this and piggyback on these well-developed neural pathways with similar types of instruction. Tapping into these neural pathways can help students accelerate their own learning.

I have a huge stack of education-related books that I want to read. Can you convince me why I should read your book?

There are so many good books out there we should be reading that provide new strategies and best practices. But this book isn't a collection of so called "best practices" for African American students or English learners. Instead it provides a framework that helps teachers learn about the resources any group of students brings to class.

The added bonus is that sharing the neuroscience behind culturally responsive moves can help teachers really get it.

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Making Connections: Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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In reality, cultural responsiveness is more of a process than a strategy. It begins when a teacher recognizes the cultural capital and tools students of color bring to the classroom. She is then able to respond to students' use of these cultural learning tools positively by noticing, naming, and affirming when students use them in the service of learning.

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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"It Starts with Being Responsive"

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How Ibram X. Kendi's Definition of Antiracism Applies to Schools | KQED

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"In no other capacity is a problem solved by not talking about it," Kendi said. "And yes, it's extremely hard to treat racism. It's extremely painful. Just like it's extremely hard to treat cancer."

He argues that, like his cancer, racism exists in every part of the American system. The country was founded upon racism and its effects can be seen in everything from housing to economic inequality to education. He says the "treatment" for racism is similar to the one he received for cancer. Scan the body to see where the tumors (or racist policies) are, surgically remove them, then flood the whole body with medicine to make sure even the invisible tumors are treated. That systemic treatment prevents a recurrence of the cancer. Then watch the body closely for signs of new tumors and treat quickly if there are signs the cancer is returning.

"Americans want to heal America of racism without pain. That's impossible," Kendi said. He fought his cancer diagnosis despite feeling despair. Now Americans must fight racism by becoming what he terms "antiracists."

His contribution to the current conversation around racism is a deceptively simple one.

"I define an antiracist as someone who is expressing an antiracist idea or supporting an antiracist policy with their actions," Kendi said. "And I define an antiracist idea as any idea that says the racial groups are equal."

In How to Be An Antiracist, Kendi writes:

"To be antiracist is to think nothing is behaviorally wrong or right -- inferior or superior -- with any of the racial groups. Whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or negatively, not representatives of whole races. To be antiracist is to deracialize behavior, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behavior is something humans do, not races do."

In this sense Kendi seems to agree with teachers who prefer to focus on helping the individual students in front of them, no matter who they are. But, he doesn't let people off the hook so easily. Becoming antiracist requires every individual to choose every day to think, act and advocate for equality, which will require changing systems and policies that may have gone unexamined for a long time.

In a Twitter thread, high school English teacher and a founder of the #DisruptTexts Twitter chat and movement Tricia Ebarvia distilled the central argument of How To Be An Antiracist and its application to education. Ebarvia writes:

We usually think that racist ideas lead to racist actions.

But according to Kendi, racist policies came before racist ideas.

Those in power act out of self-interest. Thus, they enact racist policies (slavery, immigration, redlining) to maintain that power...

These policies then result in racial inequities (lack of wealth or education)...

Which lead to the development of racist ideas by others who see these inequities and need a reason to justify why these inequities exist (example: [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] must be "less than').

Educational achievement is a good example of the destructive cycle Kendi describes and that Ebarvia synthesizes so neatly. Kendi reminds readers that the standardized IQ test was a tool developed by eugenicists in the early 20th century. Even the definition of intelligence, and the tests and assumptions based upon that definition, exist within a racialized context.

Kendi lays out how racist ideas and policies are perpetuated in education: Achievement in this country is based on test scores, and since white and Asian students get higher test scores on average than their black and Latinx peers, they are considered to be achieving on a higher level. And then because we connect achievement to intelligence, we think that white and Asian students are intellectually superior to black and Latinx ones. People who think this way then point to the test scores as empirical evidence of their claim.

"We're fundamentally saying that the problem is the test takers, as opposed to the test," Kendi said about that argument. "And we're completely ignoring things like the multibillion-dollar test prep industry that's concentrated in white and Asian neighborhoods. We're completely ignoring the massive amount of disparities between schools in terms of resources. And that's why more and more educational scholars are talking about the opportunity gap instead of the achievement gap."

Tricia Ebarvia sees the interplay between racist policies and the ideas in the curriculum that schools teach. Ebarvia tweets:

How books became "canonized" is directly related to racialized power.

Those in power-predominantly White men who had access to and control of the academy-enacted policies to maintain their power, just as almost any dominant power does.

She goes on to explain that those policies kept women and people of color out of spaces of intellectual and creative power. And because they were not there, racist ideas sprung up to explain their absence.

Women & BIPOC must be "less than": not "literary" or "rigorous" enough.

This racist, sexist thinking is just used to justify the absence of women & BIPOC writers.

This viewpoint is ignorant of the racist, sexist powers and policies that excluded them in the first place.

Fast-forward and teachers and students socialized in this "canon" of work have internalized these racist, sexist ideas about what constitutes "literary value" - and they reproduce it in curricular choices, year after year.

For Ebarvia, Kendi's emphasis on racist policies provides the key to moving forward. She points out curriculum is policy, and it's an easy place for teachers to start acting like antiracists.

HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST

For Kendi, there's no middle ground. Actions, ideas and policies are either racist or not. He points to the fact that racist has a dictionary definition, one that should be applied evenly to anyone, of any race, who expresses racist ideas or who supports racist policies.

He contends that white supremacists have won the rhetorical battle by successfully positioning the term "racist" as a personal attack, that being racist makes you a bad person.

"We should not be saying this is who a person is," Kendi said. "We should be saying this is what a person is doing in the moment. And the reason that's critical is because when you study the history of racist ideas and antiracist ideas, you find the same person saying both racist and antiracist ideas in the same book, in the same speech, in the same article. So then, how would you define that person in a general sense?"

Kendi holds himself to this same standard. He admits that when he was younger he professed racist views. In high school, he gave a speech condemning black youth for not valuing education, for getting pregnant and not making something of themselves.

"I reproduced these ideas and spent my senior year thinking the problem was black people -- as a black person -- as opposed to racism."

He continued to believe that black people were the problem when he got to college, where he saw white police officers and poll workers preventing black people from voting in the 2000 election. That made him think there was something wrong with both black people and white people.

"But eventually, I began to see that the problem wasn't actually a group of people. The problem was racist power and policy," Kendi said.

He'd like to move the conversation about racism away from being perpetrator and intent-focused to being victim and outcome-focused. He's less concerned about who is saying the racist comment than on the fact that the comment is being made at all.

"When we stop being so intent- and perpetrator-focused, and start being more outcome- and victim-centered, then we are able to decenter whiteness," Kendi said. "Then we are able to put the victims of racism at the center of our analysis."

It boils down to this: If one thinks the fundamental racist problem in society is "those bad people," then one can essentially do nothing. But if racism is bad policies, then "you need a collective effort to change those policies."

"Once we get over our denial, and once we admit the ways in which we've consumed racist ideas, then we next try to adopt antiracist ideas," Kendi said. "There's nothing wrong with any racial groups."

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How Ibram X. Kendi's Definition of Antiracism Applies to Schools | KQED

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Ibram X. Kendi urges every American, including teachers, to think about how they can be antiracist in their ideas, actions and advocacy for policies.

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Creating Community in a Socially-Distanced World

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By Liz Prather

Some of us will be separated by houses and streets and neighborhoods. Some of us will be separated by masks and Plexiglass and a social distance of six feet. Creating a sense of community has always been important to teachers, but this year we will have to reach out in ways that go beyond the physical proximity of bodies in a room to generate the kind of shared experience so necessary for student engagement and motivation. Community doesn't just happen; it's invited and built and maintained. Community as "the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared" is built on sharing "the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other" (Berry 2003).

Here are six ways to do that:

See every student:
Often we are forced to look at groups of kids as data sets. This year, by virtue of smaller class size or virtual learning, we have the opportunity to work intentionally with individual students instead of pushing content out in lots of 35. Carve out a distinctive, personal connection with every kid on your roster. Inquire beyond the beginning-of-the-year interest inventory. Get curious about their passions, delights, past times. Curate one or two positive facts about every student on your roster, then capitalize on those. Be genuine in this practice as students know when a teacher fakes concern. Create an inclusive classroom that celebrates each student's gifts, community, heritage. See each student, not as a little cog in the big wheel of your classroom, but as a unique person contributing to other unique people to form a community of learning.

Communicate often and clearly:
Specific and frequent communication reduces anxiety in students and eases parents' minds. It also builds community: students don't feel alone and isolated. They understand how to access information, how to contact you, and how to ask questions and look for help. Create multiple ways for students and parents to contact you; set clear expectations and boundaries around appropriate communication within specific times. Send an email every Sunday night to students and parents about what's going to happen that week in your class. Whatever you design as a road map for learning, make these maps simple and clear, devoid of edu-speak. Name items what they are, a name that makes sense to grandma or the babysitter, not just someone with an education degree. Hand your lesson plan off to someone who is not a teacher and ask: can you understand what I'm asking you to do?

Show up as a real person:
Elementary school teachers seem to do this really well. They share stories of their pets, their families, their own childhood. (Which might explain why, when elementary teachers did drive-by parades this spring to see their students, students lost their minds like Ariana Grande just rolled up into Westgate subdivision.) While middle and high school teachers should be sensitive to the cringe factor elicited by patronizing teens, you should still show up as a real person with an identity that is more than a teacher, someone with obsessions and a history and hobbies and fears. Be vulnerable if you want students to be truth-tellers. Model grace by cutting yourself some slack if you want your students to practice the same.

Create routines:
No matter whether students and parents choose Option A, B, or C, a routine is critical for the smooth operation of both onsite and offsite classrooms. Rituals are important to a sense of belonging. Consider starting and ending your class, in the same way, every time you meet. I open with a writing prompt, spend the bulk of my class on a skill paired with practice, and end with a time to tell stories. The prompt, the skill, the practice, the stories are different every day, but those elements are always the same. These routines can be the same if you are learning face-to-face or virtually. For districts offering two options, your classroom will be effortlessly transferable from virtual to live.

Tell stories:
There's a lot of value in just telling stories, not necessarily as a gateway to another activity or to serve another purpose. Just tell stories, share moments from your lives. In my class, we tell 7-11 stories, where the storyteller has to include seven elements in a story (place, time, character, conflict, emotion, resolution, reflection) and the audience asks eleven questions about it. In-person, storytelling might be freestyle or I might draw a subject out of a hat - pets, family, holidays, the ocean, food - and we all start telling our stories around that subject. Virtually, I might post a subject and students could share a short Flipgrid video with other students piling on the questions. Video meetings, like Zoom and Google Meeting, can help in this area also. The power of telling stories is to create a repository of shared knowledge, while the act of storytelling is a shared experience. Both build community.

Meet in groups:
Activate the four-levels of classroom connection: whole group, small group, teacher-to-student, and student-student. If you're online, meet once a week as a whole group and once a week in small groups. Being snuggled in a smaller sub-set makes kids feel safer in the larger group. In my writing classes, I have mixed grade levels. I assign a junior or senior to serve as a mentor to a freshman or sophomore. These mentor-mentee relationships build community. The underclass students have someone to answer their questions, clarify assignments, help them with organization or work. In my virtual classes, I plan on doing the same: pair two students to serve as writing buddies, pen-pals, check-in mates. They can send an email, text, DM, Marco Polo, whatever to check up on each other.

I want to remember this: my number one goal is to treat each student in my classroom with humanity, with dignity, with respect, no matter how hectic the year becomes. Breaking down the barriers of social distancing--masks, Plexiglass, or whatever technology that stands between us--is daunting, but building a community is necessary for the engagement of your students and the efficacy of your classroom.

* * *

Liz Prather is the author of Story Matters: Teaching Teens to Use the Tools of Narrative to Argue and Inform. Learn more about this book at Heinemann.com.

Liz Prather is a writing teacher at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, a magnet arts program at Lafayette High School in Lexington, Kentucky. A classroom teacher with 21years of experience teaching writing at both the secondary and post-secondary level, Liz is also a professional freelance writer and holds a MFA from the University of Texas-Austin.

Liz is the author of Project-Based Writing: Teaching Writers to Manage Time and Clarify Purpose, and Story Matters: Teaching Teens to Use the Tools of Narrative to Argue and Inform.

Berry, Wendell. "The Loss of the Future." The Long-Legged House. 2003. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press. page 61.

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Creating Community in a Socially-Distanced World

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By Liz Prather Some of us will be separated by houses and streets and neighborhoods. Some of us will be separated by masks and Plexiglass and a social distance of six feet.

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Affirming Black Lives Without Inducing Trauma | Teaching Tolerance

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Affirming Black Lives Without Inducing Trauma

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This week, we were disappointed to see wide circulation of the videos showing Ahmaud Arbery's and Sean Reed's shooting deaths. Educators have a responsibility to engage with students about this violence against Black men-and the white supremacist systems that allow it to continue.

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What If We Radically Reimagined the New School Year?

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What If We Radically Reimagined the New School Year?

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Monday night I sat on my back patio staring up into a rare, starry Chicago night. I squinted and made out each point of The Big Dipper and then turned to see what I decided was Mars, twinkling in the distance. My partner and I sat in city silence, wrapped in a perfect, nearly unrecognizable temperature-and-breeze blanket. For an hour or so we reveled in this brief peace bubble and I gave myself permission to dream:

"What if?" I thought. What if we did something different, on purpose? What if we refused to return to normal? Every week seems to introduce a new biblical plague and unsurprisingly, the nation is turning to schools to band-aid the situation and create a sense of "normalcy"-the same normalcy that has failed BIPOC communities for decades.

In her memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, Patrisse Khan-Cullors states that "our nation [is] one big damn Survivor reality nightmare". It always has been. America's criminal navigation of the COVID-19 pandemic further highlights the ways we devalue the lives of the most vulnerable. We all deserve better than Survivor and I don't want to help sustain this nightmare. I want to be a part of something better.

What If We Designed a School Year for Recovery?

"What if?" I thought. What if Chicago Public Schools (CPS) did something radical with this school year? What if this fastest-improving urban district courageously liberated itself from narrow and rigid quantitative measures of intelligence that have colonized the education space for generations, and instead blazed a trail for reimagining what qualifies as valuable knowledge?

What if we put our money, time and energy into what we say matters most? What if this school year celebrated imagination? In We Got This, Cornelius Minor reminds us that "education should function to change outcomes for whole communities." What if we designed a school year that sought to radically shift how communities imagine, problem solve, heal, and connect?

What if this messy school year prioritized hard truths and accountability? What if social emotional instruction wasn't optional or reduced to one cute poster? What if we focused on district wide capacity-building for, and facilitation of, restorative justice practices?

What if the CPS Office of Social Emotional Learning (OSEL) had more than about 15 restorative practice coaches to serve over 600 schools? What if we let students name conflicts and give them the space, tools, and support to address and resolve them? What if restorative justice was a central part of this year's curricula?

What If We Really Listened?

What if we made space to acknowledge the fear, anxiety, frustration and confusion students, staff, and families are feeling? What if we listened? What if we made space to acknowledge the anger and demands of students? What if our priority was healing? Individual and collective. What if we respected and honored the work of healers and invested in healing justice?

What if our rising 8th-graders and seniors prepared for high school and post-secondary experiences by centering their humanity and the humanity of others? What if healthy, holistic, interconnected citizenship was a learning objective? What if we tracked executive functioning skills and habits of mind? What if for "homework" families had healing conversations?

What If We Made Life the Curriculum?

What if we recognized that life-our day-to-day circumstances and our response to them-is curricula? It's the curricula students need, especially now as our country reckons with its identity. What if we remembered that reading, writing, social studies, mathematics, and science are built into our understanding of and response to events every day?

Here are some examples in the humanities. Reading: comprehension and analysis of the perspectives put forth about the twin pandemics (COVID-19 and, as Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III has come to call it, COVID-1619). Writing: thoughtful and supported arguments for equitable allocation of federal and local resources. Social studies: design and execution of public actions that educate and empower communities.

We can do this in math and science, too. Mathematics: calculation of distribution options for COVID stimulus checks. Science: inquiry about virus transmission and the role of vaccines... the possibilities are endless.

When we structure students learning around their lived experiences and present needs, they not only develop content knowledge and skills but they grow to care about and for one another. They are equipped to collaboratively face the world they are inheriting.

This work is happening in pockets around the city. But this moment invites us to expand the degree to and frequency with which social emotional knowledge and skills, restorative practices, and culturally and socially responsive curricula are implemented.

Let's Stop Policing Our Imaginations

While reading Charlene Carruthers' Unapologetic a few weeks ago, I highlighted the lines: "Anti-Blackness works 24/7 to kill the Black imagination... The destructiveness is ongoing, chronic, but it is manifested acutely. It tells our children to dream of a better future instead of a better now, in the communities where they live."

Lately, I am acutely aware of how intentionally I have to work in order to renew my own lost imagination. How much have we snuffed out the what-if imaginations of our students with policies that police their bodies and minds, inequitably and unimaginatively distribute funding to schools, and tolerate out-of-date, counter-revolutionary curricula?

The removal of police from schools, after all, does not eliminate all forms of policing. What if we didn't police the imaginations of students?

What if enough is enough? No one is coming to the rescue. We can rescue ourselves. We must. As the fifth core assumption/belief of restorative justice states: Everything we need to make positive change is already here. We just have to let our students, families, neighbors, and friends tell us what they need. And we show up. And we learn together.
Photo by Tanesha Peeples. Image is of the mural created by Green Star Movement for Fernwood Elementary School.
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What If We Radically Reimagined the New School Year?

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Monday night I sat on my back patio staring up into a rare, starry Chicago night. I squinted and made out each point of The Big Dipper and then turned to see what I decided was Mars, twinkling in the distance. My partner and I sat in city silence, wrapped in a perfect, nearly unrecognizable temperature-and-breeze blanket.

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Clint Smith:  To Protest and Reckon with America 

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Clint Smith:  To Protest and Reckon with America 

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NPR: Ted Radio Hour Podcast

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subscribe to TED Radio Hour podcast

The killing of George Floyd by a police officer sparked massive protests nationwide. Writer, teacher, and scholar Clint Smith reflects on that moment through conversation, letters, and poetry. A version of this segment was originally heard in the June episode, Clint Smith.
About Clint Smith
Clint Smith is a writer, poet, teacher, and Emerson Fellow at New America. He is the author of the poetry collection, Counting Descent, which was published in 2016. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and his writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, among others. His forthcoming non-fiction book, How The Word Is Passed, explores how different sites across the country reckon with, or fail to reckon with, their relationship to the history of slavery. It will be published next year.

Smith's two TED Talks, "The Danger of Silence" and "How to Raise a Black Son in America," have collectively garnered more than seven million views. The latter was featured on the TED Radio Hour episode, The Consequences of Racism.

Previously, Smith taught high school English in Prince George's County, Maryland. He currently teaches writing and literature in the D.C. Central Detention Facility.

He received his B.A. from Davidson College and his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he studied the sociology of education.

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Clint Smith: To Protest And To Reckon With Racism In America

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subscribe to TED Radio Hour podcast The killing of George Floyd by a police officer sparked massive protests nationwide. Writer, teacher, and scholar Clint Smith reflects on that moment through conversation, letters, and poetry. A version of this segment was originally heard in the June episode, Clint Smith .

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Lesson Plans

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Creating caring classrooms by bringing social and emotional learning together with service-learning.

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By Sarah M. Zerwin
According to my principal, we're starting school with everyone back, in masks, socially distanced, arrows on the floor to direct student traffic. I'll see each class in a 90-minute block every other day. Unless local conditions get worse-in which case we'll be 100% online to launch the school year. And when it's safe for us to be back in-person, it will be with cohorts of 10 students at a time.

I have never had to plan with this kind of uncertainty, and I'm quite anxious about all of it. But whether I'll be teaching in-person, fully online, or in some kind of blended situation, it helps me to think about how six key beliefs developed over my 24 years in the classroom can guide my planning:

I'll use every moment to connect with my students, learn who they are as readers, writers, and humans, invite them to form connections with each other, and help them to feel valued for who they each are.

1. Teaching and learning are about relationships first
If school starts in person, I will treat those days as if they are precious, sacred, and limited since we could shift to remote teaching immediately if conditions change. I'll use every moment to connect with my students, learn who they are as readers, writers, and humans, invite them to form connections with each other, and help them to feel valued for who they each are. That means lots of whole-class and small-group conversation activities (see Liz Prather's books for some that also generate writing ideas) and reading and writing together so I can assess where they are each starting.

If school starts online, I will turn to collaborative digital tools to accomplish the same things. Video conferences with breakout groups. Flipgrid videos. Online annotation tools to see what they're thinking as they're reading a text or to get into their thinking about their writing.

If we start in a blended context, then I have to think about which strategies for building connections with and among my students will work best in person and which ones have the best chance at being successful online. I can imagine reserving in-person time for conversation activities-when we can all share the same physical space and look each other in the eyes over our masks-and asking students to do some initial reading and writing work online. They can annotate in the margins to show me their thinking, and I can use digital tools to talk with them 1:1 about their work.

2. Accessing coursework and resources needs to be simple and straightforward
Even in my fully in-person classroom prior to March 13, 2020, everything my students needed to be successful in my class was easily accessible in one home base. In the early years of my career, this meant unit calendars on paper and notes on the chalkboard. In the last many years, I post everything online: weekly lesson plans, semester calendars, assignments, resources to complete assignments, everything. This online home base is even more important for school year 20-21. If everything is already online, and students know how to find and use it, then we can handle a sudden shift from in-person to remote learning.

One new (for me) thing I'm thinking about is doing all of my direct, whole-class instruction in the form of five-minute videos. Given a possible blended situation, I want to reserve limited in-person time for conversation, interaction, and instruction in small groups or individual conferences. Yes, it's the classic flipped model (Flip Your Writing Workshop by Dana Johansen, Sonja Cherry-Paul is a great resource here). Students can watch and re-watch videos as many times as they need to.

None of this works if even one of my students can't get to it. In the spring, my district provided devices and WIFI hotspots to students who needed them. I expect this work will continue, and if it doesn't, I will speak up.

3. My students must be in charge of their own learning journeys
Traditional approaches to grading emphasize a power dynamic where the teacher controls the students' destinies through the high stakes grade that hovers over everything they do. Students comply with teachers' requests to earn points to cash in for grades. Instead, students can choose their own goals (from the curricular goals for a class) and chart their own path for learning-agency that invites more student engagement. At the end of the semester, they can write a story about what they learned and how they grew so they can see and understand their own journeys clearly. My descriptive notes in the grade book keep my students focused on their learning. Points and scores don't tell me much that helps me teach students so they grow.

This is what I've written about in my book, Point-Less: An English Teacher's Guide to More Meaningful Grading. I've had people ask me how I'll approach it differently for remote or blended learning. What's different is how I might engage students in the conversation about how traditional grading impedes their learning. But the rest of it holds true: students will focus on learning rather than point collecting if we shift our focus, too.

Click to learn more about this title.

4. I can only plan so much before hearing from my students about what they need
In So What Do They Really Know, Cris Tovani reminds us that "unless I start with a little assessing, I'm teaching in a vacuum" (p. 112). I remember the ninth-grade class I met one year who showed me in the first days of school that they could do significantly more than the 9th grade class I had the year before. I re-imagined my plans for them, and I would have saved myself a lot of work had I waited to finish my curricular plans until after I had met my students!
It was my informal, kid-watching assessment that revealed my plans for my class were off the mark. But the remote learning of last spring stripped me of this teacher assessing super power. I couldn't observe my students' responses to the work because we were not in the same physical space. I had to ask them how the class was going for them. And I did. Every single week on a Google Form, using their responses to adjust my plans so the class worked better for them. Their weekly responses were so critical to my planning that I know I need to continue to ask each of them how it's going, even when we are sharing the same physical space. Gholdy Muhammad reminds us in Cultivating Genius that "even teachers with the best intentions and practices are not the best people to speak for any student-the students must speak for themselves" (p. 65). Online or in person, I will seek students' feedback regularly so I'm not making any assumptions about their experiences in my class. In this way, my students and I will co-construct the class together.

Online or in person, I will seek students' feedback regularly so I'm not making any assumptions about their experiences in my class. In this way, my students and I will co-construct the class together.

5. Readers and writers will grow if they read and write a lot.
We show our students what to value based on how we spend time in class. I protect time for reading, writing, and talking with each other about that work. It's the space where I can deliver individualized instruction through one-on-one and small-group conferences, teaching students while they are in the middle of actually reading and writing.
I will use any in-person opportunities for writing and reading time and conferences. These things are just harder to do online. But I have ideas if we're completely remote. I can offer online reading and writing sessions where we all work on our own together. I greet them, we each get to work, and I see them reading or writing in all those little boxes on my screen. I can coach them on the wonders of being able to find a great spot to sit outside to read or write-something they can't do when trapped in a school building all day. I can set up a schedule for conferences via video chat and provide office hours for drop in conversations. It's not ideal, but keeping this belief at the forefront of my planning helps me to find the best online spaces for reading, writing, and talking about it.

6. Be flexible.
Every year I seem to find ways to bring in more choice to my classroom. Swapping out a few whole-class reads for smaller book club experiences, for example. Or moving more toward writer's workshop. But when we went online in the spring, my students helped me access a layer of choice that was next level for me.
When I asked students each week how the class was going for them, a few told me that the work I had planned was overwhelming. Our focus was already narrower than what we were going to do together to finish out the year. But for some students, it was still too much given their life circumstances under the trauma of a pandemic. So a paper we had already been working on became a choose-your-own-adventure affair. Simply giving them the choice-finish the paper or drop it to do something else-engaged them powerfully in the work they each ended up choosing to do. They had control over how they spent their time for my class, they chose work that was most meaningful to them each individually, and they were each able to find success, even under the chaos of the pandemic.

Last spring, my students had control over how they spent their time for my class, they chose work that was most meaningful to them each individually, and they were each able to find success, even under the chaos of the pandemic.

Keeping these beliefs in mind will help me to cut through my anxiety about planning to teach in the context of unprecedented uncertainty. Even if distanced from my students physically, I can still craft a classroom experience that invites my students to do the important work of reading and writing. And maybe I'll even see ways to do things better than I did before the pandemic hit. My hope is that I'll come out on the other side of this experience with a classroom that is kinder and more flexible to welcome each of my students exactly as they are.

Are you a fan of podcasts? List to our conversation with Sarah Zerwin about her book Point-Less: An English Teacher's Guide to More Meaningful Grading.

Sarah M. Zerwin is a high school English teacher at Fairview High School in Boulder, Colorado. In over 20 years in the classroom, she has taught high school in a variety of settings as well as methods courses to college students. A national presenter, Sarah also works with teachers through the Colorado Writing Project. She seeks the best ways to invite her students to read and write for reasons that matter to who they are as human beings.

Johansen, Dana and Sonja Cherry-Paul. 2016. Flip Your Writing Workshop: A Blended Learning Approach. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Muhammad, Gholdy. 2019. Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. New York, NY: Scholastic.

Tovani, Cris. 2011. So What Do They Really Know? Assessment that Informs Teaching and Learning. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Zerwin, Sarah. 2020. Point-Less: An English Teacher's Guide to More Meaningful Grading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

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Sarah Zerwin shares her thinking about returning to school in the Fall. Whether it be in-person, blended, or entirely online, she is leaning on six key beliefs developed over 24 years in the classroom to guide her.

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What Did I Assume About My Student's Summer?

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What Did I Assume About My Student's Summer?

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Edutopia

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Back-to-school is coming soon for many of us, and when that first day arrives, many of us will greet our students with this question: "Did you have a great summer?" We might ask our students to write, draw, or otherwise compare with other students their summer "adventures."
What are we assuming when we ask students about their "great" summers?
When we set up this dichotomy - great or not great - for our students, we're assuming that students are supposed to enjoy the "freedom" of summer. We imply that summer has a certain value: it's supposed to be great. For many of our students, the massive change in routine means many different things. We would do well to check our assumptions about what summer looks like and feels like, instead of what we think it should look like or feel like.

This summer, your students are experiencing a wide variety of things. Some of these may include:

Positive enrichment activities, like camp or classes

Time away from family

Time with family - which may be supportive or may increase stress and conflict

Homelessness or housing instability

Work (for experience, for money to support others, for money for oneself)

Taking care of siblings or children

Positive outdoor activities

Trauma or damaging experiences

Less physical activity

More physical activity

Hunger without the regularity of school meals

Loneliness or depression

Increase substance use

Increased or decreased supervision from guardians

Spending time with friends

Receiving mental health or other support services

A break/disruption from mental health or other support services

Summer school or credit recovery

Learning something new

Boredom

Being more engaged in activities than during school year

Travel

Changes in friendships or relationships since the end of the school year

Connections (or lack thereof) over social media

When we ask students "did you have a great summer?", we project our own feelings about summer onto them. Summer isn't great for everyone, so we can be more neutral by asking students "what's new?", "how are things lately?", or simply telling our students how glad we are to see them.

What else might your students be experiencing this summer? What are your best ways of welcoming your students back to school in ways that support them, no matter what their summer looked or felt like?

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What Did I Assume About My Students' Summers?

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Back-to-school is coming soon for many of us, and when that first day arrives, many of us will greet our students with this question: "Did you have a great summer?" We might ask our students to write, draw, or otherwise compare with other students their summer "adventures."

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Why I won't be asking, "How was your summer?'

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Why I won't be asking, "How was your summer?'

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The first days of school I am so excited to reconnect with students and my 'go to' conversation starter has almost always been a variation of "How was your summer?" But according to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network approximately 25% of American children will experience at least one traumatic event by the age of 16, and there is a very good chance that many of our students had a summer they would like to forget. I realize trying to offer an answer to that question can be incredibly stressful and difficult for these students.

Many will be eager to return to a stable and predictable environment, but they don't always express it with love and gratitude. Many are wounded and traumatized by experiences that make it difficult for them to build relationships, express emotions "normally", or communicate effectively. What we interpret as indifference, opposition, or resistance to being a member of our school community may not reflect how much they are counting on us to invite them into the fold; to make them feel safe, welcome, and loved.

So what can we do instead of asking about their summer? Well, we don't need to pretend it didn't exist. If students openly talk to me about their time away from school I will be glad to listen and converse, I just won't be soliciting that information in a public way.

What I'll focus on is the here and now of this school year. I'll think more carefully about what conversation starters and questions I'll use in a whole group setting, where students may be reluctant to bare their souls to people they are unsure they can trust yet.

For whole group perhaps I could start a conversation with (depending on the grade)...

What are you looking forward to in ____grade/this class?

What are you hoping to learn this year in ____grade?

How do you learn best?

How can the teacher and your classmates challenge and support you this year?

For quickwrites, conversations, or surveys I could ask those same questions or...

What do you want to be remembered for this year in school?

What is a goal I can help you with this year?

What is something you would like me to know about you?

When I see students in the hallways or playgrounds I might say...

I'm so glad to see you. I hope you have a great year!

Welcome back to ____ school. I missed you.

If you heard of or read any good books, let me know. I'm always looking for recommendations.

There's a wonderful article in the Aug 31 2016, New York Times "What Kids Wish Their Teachers Knew" that can give you even more insight and ideas.

My goal will be to reconnect and check in with students, to let them know their teachers care and are ready to support them. I cannot assume that summer was as wonderful for them as it was for me. I can learn about their summer and their lives as we work together. I'm not trying to ignore their experiences, I am trying to honor and respect the reality that not all summer vacations are created equal and I don't want to start the school year accentuating the "haves" and "have nots" or putting students in a position of sharing 'on the spot'. Also, I'm not going to guilt myself or others for asking students in the past. Our intentions are good, we genuinely care. I always remind myself, When I know better, I do better. I am always seeking to know better.

If you have other back to school conversation starters or community building activities that work for you, I'd love to hear them.

What's On My Book Radar?

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Why I Won't Be Asking, "How was your summer?" Anymore

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The first days of school I am so excited to reconnect with students and my 'go to' conversation starter has almost always been a variation of "How was your summer?" But according to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network approximately 25% of American children will experience at least one traumatic event by the age of...

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Nine Ways To Ensure Your Mindfulness Teaching Practice Is Trauma-Informed | KQED

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"If you're unintentionally portraying that it's really important to close your eyes, they can misinterpret that," Himelstein said. In fact, it's common for folks who have been traumatized to misinterpret a neutral direction.
2. Establish a sense of safety
"There are some situations in some school settings where youth are not that safe because there's violence that happens," Himelstein said. "If you're not in a place where kids feel physically safe, then you probably shouldn't be doing any deep practices."

Kids can feel vulnerable when attempting to be present in the moment, so physical safety is key. Establishing that kind of safety may take some extra culture-building in the classroom first.
3. Build relational mindfulness
This set of strategies is about building the type of community where students feel safe practicing mindfulness. Teachers can help make their classroom feel safe to students with clear boundaries that are predictable. Group norms or agreements developed with students are one way to do this.

"For people who have experienced trauma those things tend to not be present, so the more you practice predictability by practicing group agreements, and building authentic relationships between you and the youth, and among the youth, it starts to feel more safe," Himelstein said.

It can be tricky to know if relational trust has been built, but Himelstein said when students are more willing to share openly about themselves or they're relating class material to their own lives, that's one sign they feel safe. Of course it's complicated because of different personality types, some of which may naturally be more reserved. But even with introverted students, teachers can often tell if trust is there through their writing or if they share something out loud even once.

"You can check in with the youth and not just leave it up to your own assessment or guesswork in terms of where they're at in feeling safe and that there's trust in the room," Himelstein said. If there's more work to be done, trust games and icebreakers can help people get more comfortable.
4. Understand intersectionality. Be mindful of implicit bias and culture.
Mindfulness cannot be detached from the other ways teachers interact with students in the classroom. Himelstein said it's important to take note if, for example, girls are being punished more harshly for the same behavior a male student exhibits, but for which he isn't punished.

"It depends on the context, but I've definitely coached some teachers and therapists who work in diverse settings in terms of who they call on the most, who gets the most energy, how their expectations are shifting depending on different folks," Himelstein said.

If students think a teacher is unfair based on race, gender, sexuality or any other identity marker, that will undermine the relational trust needed to facilitate mindfulness and mental health.

"In my work with youth, I never divorce the practice of mindfulness from the greater sphere of building an authentic relationship with that young person," Himelstein said. "I don't divorce intersectionality from the practice of mindfulness."
5. Understand the "window of tolerance" and be on the lookout for it
Imagine two parallel lines. Within those lines is the window of tolerance for physiological arousal. Outside of that is when people may experience tunnel vision, when they can't think straight. Outside the window of tolerance students may be hyperaroused when they're extremely angry or hypervigilant. But students can also be hypo-aroused, when they're disassociated from their surroundings. In both of these states, students won't be able to follow directions.

Himelstein remembers meeting his wife for lunch after a therapeutic session with a client that triggered him. He couldn't physically read the menu because his prefrontal cortex was offline. "My brain was down regulating," he said. "I wasn't quite in fight, flight or freeze, but I was on the way there."

If teachers can recognize those moments with students, they can use other interventions to help students get back into the window of tolerance. Those might include listening to music, playing a rhythm game, dancing -- something that doesn't require the student to process directions.

A teacher might notice a student is getting triggered and naturally take a break from instruction to listen to some music or play a quick game without calling attention to the student who is triggered. This works better if these types of movement or music breaks are already part of the DNA of the classroom. Then it doesn't feel odd or out of place to students when a teacher uses it as a tool to intentionally support a specific student.

"You're hoping in some way the music moves them, not emotionally, but there's something about the music they like," Himelstein said. "Maybe they get that head bob going. That's what you're looking for."

He remembers one young woman he worked with who had been estranged from her father for several years because of his drug addiction. She finally felt ready to reach out to him to try to build a new relationship when she found out he had died of an overdose. Himelstein was with her when she got the news. The young woman was in shock and no mindfulness techniques would have worked at that moment. Instead, Himelstein put on a song he knew his client liked, and they sat and listened until she came out of shock and back into her window of tolerance.
6. The paradox of mental training
The paradox is that paying attention to the present moment -- the heart of a mindfulness practice -- won't always make a person feel calmer. But, at the same time, practicing mindfulness when one isn't upset builds a toolkit that could be useful to stay calm in stressful situations. Himelstein said this is a contradiction teachers have to embrace in this practice.

Deep breathing exercises or a body scan are strategies to practice in a calm state. They can help with stress reduction and emotional management. The goal is to make them part of everything that happens in the classroom so they're second nature, and students can draw on these tools when they need them without thinking.

Himelstein trains youth and guards in juvenile detention centers in these techniques. Recently a young person told him that when a guard called him a name he naturally took a deep breath, providing him the slightest bit of space to consider the consequences of taking action, and preventing him from getting triggered.

"I've heard that in juvenile hall, in education settings, in so many situations," Himelstein said.
7. When teaching mindfulness, prioritize somatic-based exercises.
"The body tends to have the ability to help ground people a little more, or at least not trigger as much," Himelstein said. Especially if students are not used to mindfulness, or don't feel comfortable with it, keeping them out of their heads can be a good thing. Instead focus on how deep breathing feels in the belly and the chest. Do body scans or remind young people to think about the sensations in their bodies.

"When youth don't have a clear sense of what they're supposed to be doing, and it's not as tangible, it's easier for their minds to wander and stumble upon traumatic memories," Himelstein said.
8. Don't over-identify with mindfulness logistics
It can be counterproductive to insist too strenuously that mindfulness look a certain way. Things like keeping eyes closed, holding the hands in a certain way, or having a particular body posture really don't matter, and can lead to power struggles.
9. Think about daily mindfulness interventions.
There are lots of informal ways to bring some of the benefits of focusing on the present into the classroom. It might become routine at the start of the day, or when class begins, to do a mindful check-in: Each student takes a deep breath, and shares how they are feeling at the present moment. Himelstein always encourages youth to use a real emotion like angry/frustrated/happy/sad, as opposed to more generic statements like good/bad. It's also not too much of a stretch to add some element of academic content to these activities.

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Nine Ways To Ensure Your Mindfulness Teaching Practice Is Trauma-Informed | KQED

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"If you're unintentionally portraying that it's really important to close your eyes, they can misinterpret that," Himelstein said. In fact, it's common for folks who have been traumatized to misinterpret a neutral direction. 2. Establish a sense of safety "There are some situations in some school settings where youth are not that safe because there's violence that happens," Himelstein said.

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In today's challenging times, it's critical to make sure our children are equipped with the social and emotional learning (SEL) skills to cope with the world around them. The WE Schools program brings SEL together with service-learning, helping children build key skills such as resilience, empathy, perseverance and problem-solving. With a strong foundation of SEL skills, children will be better able to understand and manage their emotions, feel and show empathy for others, establish positive relationships and make responsible decisions.
Whether you're an educator looking for ways to integrate SEL into your lesson planning, or a parent looking to support your child's learning at home, we have all the resources you need to get started.

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In today's challenging times, it's critical to make sure our children are equipped with the social and emotional learning (SEL) skills to cope with the world around them. The WE Schools program brings SEL together with service-learning, helping children build key skills such as resilience, empathy, perseverance and problem-solving.

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12 SEL Organizations Making a Difference

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12 SEL Organizations Making a Difference

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Around the world, schools, districts and individual educators are embracing broader aims including social emotional learning (SEL) and growth mindsets. The momentum has been building for a variety of reasons - including college and career readiness research, employer input, backlash to standardized testing and interest in positive school climate and equitable discipline practices.

Desired outcomes of SEL and Social Emotional and Academic Development (SEAD) initiatives vary, with a typical focus on productive mindsets and supportive cultures, character development, behavior management, civic education, and career guidance and preparation.

There are numerous organizations and individuals doing great work in this space, including but not limited to research and advocacy organizations, EdTech companies, foundations, and individual classroom teachers.

Here, we feature 12 high impact organizations making a difference through thought leadership, collaboration and research.

Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL)

National Commission Social, Emotional, and Academic Development , Aspen Institute

In partnership with CASEL, the Aspen Institute recently launched the commission to build consensus around a lexicon, metrics, and strategies. Director Shirley Brandman has indicated they intend to advance this new term social, emotional, and academic development (#SEAD) to more fully embrace and support academic goals and not be viewed as separate or optional. The National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development is co-chaired by Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond, Business Roundtable president John Engler and CASEL chair Tim Shriver. @AspenInstitute

PERTS' mission is to improve the equity of learning outcomes by bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and implementation practices. They believe that properly scaling educational research can empower schools to reduce inequity and create better experiences for students and teachers. PERTS works to translate research findings into solutions that can be implemented in schools. PERTS focuses primarily on underserved students and has partnered with entities like ClassDojo, KhanAcademy, Equal Opportunity Schools. Specifically, PERTS Mindset Challenge, a partnership to rapidly prototype mindset interventions that promote better learner outcomes.

Start Empathy , Ashoka Changemakers

The Changemaker Schools Network is a global community of leading elementary, middle and high schools that prioritize empathy, teamwork, leadership, problem-solving and changemaking as student outcomes. Start Empathy Initiative is a collaborative platform for social entrepreneurs, educators, and citizens whose ideas and talents can contribute to the creation of a world where every child masters empathy. Ashoka has a three part strategy which includes accelerating empathy entrepreneurs, partnering with top schools, and changing the conversation to shift societal views of empathy. @changemakers @StartEmpathy

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences , Stanford University

provides resources and training to cultivate a growth mindset school culture, including the Mindset Works Brainology curriculum and other resources for students, teachers and administrators. Their programs are based on research by co-founder Carol Dweck and her colleagues conducted at Stanford and Columbia. Mindset Works' mission is to enable a world in which people seek and are fulfilled by ongoing learning and growth. @mindsetworks

Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching , Carnegie

Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, University of Chicago

CCSSR has established the Becoming Effective Learners survey measures, a research project to develop high-quality measures of noncognitive factors. (supported by Raikes Foundation).

SixSeconds:The Emotional Intelligence Network

The SEL School: Center on Great Teachers and Leaders , Am. Institute for Research

Social, Emotional and Character Development Lab , Rutgers University

The Rutgers Social-Emotional and Character Development (SECD) Lab is dedicated to conducting action-research in public, private, and religious school settings for the purpose of building children's skills for facing the tests of life, and not a life of tests. The SECD Lab focuses on understanding the relationship of academic achievement, social-emotional competencies, and the development of character, and a core set of life principles. The SECD Lab conducts projects that focus on students and their school, family, and community environments.

These organizations - - and individuals making an impact - - will continue to generate momentum and best practices in the space.

The best educational institutions in the world recognize that development of the whole child is critical to ensuring students are able to prosper in the 21st century world. People see the need to develop a "whole child" with a balanced set of cognitive, social and emotional skills so that they can better face the challenges of the 21st century.

What other orgs would you add to the list? Comment below!

For more on SEL and SEAD read:

Mary is a Director is Interim Managing Director of School Success at XQ Institute. You can connect with Mary on Twitter @maryryerse.

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12 SEL Organizations Making a Difference

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Around the world, schools, districts and individual educators are embracing broader aims including social emotional learning (SEL) and growth mindsets. The momentum has been building for a variety of reasons - including college and career readiness research, employer input, backlash to standardized testing and interest in positive school climate and equitable discipline practices.

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All Because I Trusted Them to Use the Chat Box – Kinder Bender

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A week ago I viewed a professional development video that made me cringe. The presenters said that the chat box in our virtual classrooms should only allow students to communicate with the teacher, not one another. "They might be silly if you let them chat," they suggested. I took to Twitter to express my very refined thoughts:

I had to listen to someone leading PD say "they might be silly if you let them chat." Meanwhile teachers are on a back channel text thread sending emoji reactions. Do you know what children are? They are people! Your oppressive policies need to be shut down, not the chat box. pic.twitter.com/p3RJsKdHQM
- antiracist aeriale she/her/we (@arcticisleteach) August 13, 2020

When we shut down schools in March, I had no idea what I was doing. I had never taught a class of elementary school students online and was not even sure it could be done effectively. But I'm the kind of person who does hard things. Always. I mustered together my resources, found other educators facing the same challenges, leaned into the ambiguity and discomfort of the moment, and radically imagined new possibilities.

As I began to navigate this new territory, the thought of closing the chat box never crossed my mind. It wouldn't. It is an instructional practice rooted in adultism and control. I believe in the humanity of children and their freedom. And they never, ever let me down when I maintain those values, even when the world seems to be spiraling out of control.

California is ablaze right now. The Bay Area skies are filled with smoke. When we returned from our lunch break yesterday, the children were filled with questions (and answers) about what is happening. So we skipped my intentions for our writing workshop and spent some time asking our friend, Google, our questions. We watched videos and read an article. As we came to the end of our inquiry, a message appeared in the chat box:

WHAT IS GOING ON WITH 2020?

I gasped.

"I know, friend," I responded verbally. "This year does seem to be very difficult, doesn't it?"

And then, the chat box exploded (correct spelling and punctuation courtesy of me):

I agree with you, (student's name).

I know! First Kobe died.

What else?

BLACK LIVES MATTER!

Sad.

I wish I wasn't born in this time.

I agree.

I agree.

I agree.

Am I going to die?

2020, why? Just why?

I agree.

*Hits 2020 and eats it!

We have COVID-19 and now we have wildfires? Jeez!

This is super scary!

How much more?

*Crying emoji

What's next 2020? Just don't make it bad!

I want to see 2021!

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

What's next in 2020 that's gonna be bad?

Please, 2020, make something lucky, not worse!

I'm going to 2021.

I agree.

Me too.

More like 2022!

No. Wait. Go to 2016. That was the best year!

I am going to 2019.

I hate 2020.

Bye!

Nooooooo!

Bye! I'm going to 2022.

I want to be a baby again.

I'm sick.

Every year except 2020 is the best year. You want to know why? Because there was no virus.

Take me with you!

Virus! Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

Oof!

*Forty crying emojis

My family's still alive.

No, no, no! It's like this. First Kobe Bryant dies. Then alarms go off on our phones. Then quarantine. Then fires! Like jeez! What else could be next?

2019, I miss you.

Me too!

Seriously!

This thread began at 12:39 and ended at 12:50. We engaged in deep dialogue orally as the children processed alongside each other in the chat box. Our conversation led us to make a heart map that posed the initial question: WHAT IS GOING ON WITH 2020? While we listed what was troubling our hearts, we also thought about the joy that the year has brought us as well. Our time was running short, so I offered a teaching point: Writers think about hard things and process their feelings in their writing. We spent three minutes quick writing from our heart maps and decided we would continue this work today.

These pieces are still working drafts, but let me tell you that I was blown away by the power of my third graders' writing as they shared today. I didn't teach any craft moves or require the writing to be done in a specific genre before the quick write yesterday, but appropriate ones for this topic - like poetry and narrative, and repetends and dialogue - surfaced naturally. I cannot wait for them to finish these pieces. Their drafts are already so good!

And now I have to wonder, would any of this have happened if I had limited their chat box use to communicating with me? You already know the answer. . .

Children might not "be silly." Children will be silly. They are children. But they will also be brilliant if we stop trying to control them to accomplish our desired outcomes, which only serve to fuel adult egos.

I have said it a million times, at least. I will say it a million more. Children are the epitome of everything good in this world! It is children who will set us free. I feel more empowered to navigate this harrowing year already having had this incredible experience with them. . .all because I did not stifle their voices and trusted them to use the chat box.

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All Because I Trusted Them to Use the Chat Box

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A week ago I viewed a professional development video that made me cringe. The presenters said that the chat box in our virtual classrooms should only allow students to communicate with the teacher, not one another. "They might be silly if you let them chat," they suggested.

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How to Develop Culturally Responsive Teaching for Distance Learning

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How to Develop Culturally Responsive Teaching for Distance Learning

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KQED

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Hammond distinguishes the differences between culturally responsive education, multicultural education and social justice education. Each is important, but without a focus on building students' brain power, they will experience learning loss.

When it comes to distance learning, applying culturally responsive teaching requires "remixing" education by borrowing from the best practices in how kids learn (Montessori, project-based learning, etc.) in a way that repositions the student as the leader of his own learning. By giving students more agency, the idea is to disrupt old routines around teaching and learning that make the student dependent on the teacher for receiving knowledge.

"It's going to stretch us a little out of our own comfort zones, but it's worth it in the long run if we can get students to continue to do that thinking," said Hammond.

She advises three strategies to help students gain that independence:

1. Deepen background knowledge

Many educators are understandably wondering whether they should teach new content or review familiar material. Hammond encourages educators to do the latter because cognitively dependent learners often have gaps in their background knowledge . "A lot of our students are compliant learners," she said. "They're having a hard time shifting right now [because] they're used to the worksheet, but that doesn't mean they're always processing information."

She advises teachers to help students connect new things they're learning to their brain's existing schema - also known as background knowledge - that comes from home, their community, their interests. Teachers can then give them authentic tasks that help them make meaning and connections. This helps turn new inert information into usable knowledge. "You cannot give another person background knowledge," she explained. "They have to acquire it, but as teachers we can help guide the process." This can be done by building upon student interest.

"Survey your students if you don't know what they like," said Hammond. Ask them what books they enjoy reading or what topics get them super excited. She said It doesn't matter if their interests are broad or narrow; it's important to learn what interests them so that you can use that information to:

Assign non-fiction books that build on student interests.

Create a "Netflix" playlist of documentaries, nature shows, historical events, etc.

Encourage kids and parents to do a walk-about, if that's possible in their community, following social distancing guidelines. Encourage parents and students to seek out community curiosities (landmarks or interesting sights) relevant to students' interest.

With each of these activities, it's important to give the students direction so they know what to look out for. "You have to tell the brain what to pay attention to," Hammond explains. She suggested questions like, "What was your biggest surprise from this book/show?" or thinking routine sentences like "I Used to Think ___. But, now I think ____."

She said to always make sure that students do something with the knowledge as well. She suggested having them share interesting facts they learned either during video conferences or via an audio/video clip. For those students with limited internet access, encourage them to share what they learned with their parents.

2. Cultivate cognitive routines

Growing students' brain power during distance learning starts with building cognitive routines. These routines are essential to processing and hardwiring information in the brain.

"Be the personal trainer of their cognitive development," Hammond said. To do this, she suggested having a routine set of prompts in each packet that become a regular part of the way students think. That way, students begin to think that way even when you're not in the classroom to reinforce that way of thinking.

One example is to ask students to connect the "unknown to the known" or across concepts by asking questions like, " What's the relationship or connection between these things?" or "How does this part fit into the whole? What are the parts of this whole?" These may seem simple, but these questions are critical when it comes to processing information so that students internalize these prompts until they become almost instinctual.

She said students should also be encouraged to sketchnote or doodle to actively process what they're learning as an alternative to note-taking. Sketchnoting can encourage people to make deeper connections to what they're hearing.

3. Build word wealth

Building a student's vocabulary is a key tool in equity strategies for schools. "Kids have different interests in words so find out where their energy is. You can have a differentiated assignment around word collecting, but the idea is to get them actively involved in word consciousness," said Hammond. She said there are many small but high-leverage ways to do this, such as introducing robust word study. A teacher can help students engage in wordplay, word consciousness and word knowledge. This should not happen through a worksheet assignment, but rather begin with building word consciousness of words in their community, home and home language.

Word games like Scrabble, Heads Up, Taboo or even word searches are small familiar but high-leverage activities because they're fun but also require a high cognitive load. You can create your own versions of these games and have students do this in any language. Students can also do word collecting activities like scavenger hunts, or make poetry using magnetic poetry. Students can also do a contrastive analysis, by comparing words they might find in Urban Dictionary to those they might find in a standard dictionary.

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How to Develop Culturally Responsive Teaching for Distance Learning | KQED

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Culturally responsive teaching is a powerful way to help students become independent learners, and it can be especially valuable during distance learning.

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Schools Will Never Return to Business as Usual. Here’s How They Can Make the Most of Our New Reality. | EdSurge News

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Right now schools are making-and, in some cases, already implementing- tough decisions about where learning should take place this fall. Elected officials are making decisions contrary to recommended guidelines that can leave school leaders in an impossible situation of shouldering accountability for health and safety while lacking the control to do so. Yet educators are still doing their best to prioritize students' psychological and developmental needs in this vacuum of resources, guidance and personnel.

All of this effort may get schools to the starting line in the short-term, but schools need to be thinking about the long-term, too. We-two psychologists at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence-spoke to educational leaders and one futurist about what is needed to make this new reality work for educators and students in the long run.

"Schools will never return to business as usual," predicts futurist Andrea Saveri. A futurist analyzes quantitative and qualitative data from current trends in order to predict the alternative scenarios that could play out in conditions of uncertainty, and Saveri's work focuses on education mapping specifically.

"The U.S. education system was designed 100 years ago to support the Industrial Revolution," Saveri explains. "A shock like the pandemic shows just how rigid the institution really is. The future will only be more ' VUCA'-volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous-because of pressures like globalization, greater connectivity and climate change. How schools reorganize now, in response to the pandemic, may only be a dry run for what will be increasingly needed in the future."

Saveri's analysis places emotional, interpersonal and cultural competencies at the center of adapting to a rapidly-changing post-industrial world. Uncertain conditions demand creativity and innovation. People will need to be emotionally intelligent and interpersonally skilled in order to collaborate across diverse perspectives to find solutions, as well as to manage the overwhelming feelings of grief, despair and anxiety that a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world can trigger.

One school that has already adopted this mindset is the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies, a public high school led by principal Brooke Jackson. The Lab School laid groundwork years ago by training staff in RULER, a schoolwide approach to social-emotional learning from our Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence; Courageous Conversations, a model for training and coaching organizations on racial equity; restorative circles for community development and conflict resolution and more.

These approaches teach adults and children how to use their emotions wisely and how to support inclusive, positive relationships to strengthen and grow their communities, which in turn support them. "We can have hard conversations in a way that is caretaking and doesn't create more anxiety, depression and isolation for kids," Jackson says.

In response to COVID-19, the students at the Lab School have been organized into intimate, amphibious squads that can function either in person or at a distance. The squads are autonomous and choose the focus of their interdisciplinary projects together. Courses are taught by two teachers, allowing learning to continue if one develops health issues or leaves. Teachers serve as case managers for students, communicating with families, administrators and guidance counselors. Every morning begins with an in-person or distanced check-in, with mental health the top priority.

Jackson's high school students will have virtual spaces for student-led affinity clubs, and students will have opportunities to be teaching assistants, helping younger students with learning challenges and deepening their own relationships to favorite teachers or subjects. Their school day, also shorter, will end with an enrichment "band" where students can choose a deep dive into topics like the 2020 election or a creative writing project about life under COVID-19-without homework or tests.

Teachers' relationships with one another are also critical, Jackson says. Every Friday, Lab School educators hold a Zoom space for sharing and processing. "I'm going to try to hang on to my teachers," Jackson says. "We might not have a computer lab or new furniture, but I know everyone will chip in to help problem-solve. We are brothers and sisters, and the water's too heavy for any one educator."

Dawn DeCosta, principal of Thurgood Marshall Academy Lower School in Harlem, has always prioritized emotional and social skills but is leading her fall planning with new, developmentally appropriate opportunities.

DeCosta's elementary school students will be able to have question-and-answer sessions with their teachers about living with the new safety guidelines. They'll also spend the first month getting to know each other by creating visual projects on identity, culture and family. The school day, whether in-person or virtual, will be shorter, structured by predictable routines, and interspersed with "brain breaks" for meditation, gratitude practices, checking in with feelings or community kindness projects.

But DeCosta adds, "Our teachers responded to distance learning in inspired ways, but teachers, alone, cannot do everything that's being asked of them. Schools need real help from their communities."

DeCosta's holistic view is consistent with 40 years of research in developmental science, which shows that an individual does not shoulder wellbeing alone. The systems in which an individual is embedded are also responsible. When the people in environments outside of families and schools support children's needs, children do better.

DeCosta details the kinds of support she'd like to see from the wider community, for distance and in-person learning:

Technologists can help families and teachers secure and learn to use the tools in creative ways that advance distance learning, such as Wi-Fi, devices and virtual learning platforms.

Architects and builders can share expertise around creating new spaces or reconfiguring existing for learning, eating and playing to provide greater distances between people while retaining humanity and connection.

Psychological services can support children, parents and educators through unprecedented emotional distress. State psychological organizations can help by linking psychologists, therapists and trauma specialists with local schools, and schools can create nimble Psychological First Aid teams to respond to incidents of critical need.

Community social services can connect with schools to help parents with housing insecurity, unemployment and financial assistance, childcare, and family and medical leave rights.

Pediatricians and nurse practitioners can provide frequent COVID-19 testing, routine vaccinations and screening for other health concerns since people are avoiding hospitals and delaying routine health checkups.

Bodyworkers and somatic therapists can mitigate trauma by teaching adults and children how to settle stress in their bodies, since many children are experiencing more severe bouts of stress and grief now than normal.

Food providers can creatively address food insecurity among families that are facing a loss of income, or who rely on schools to provide up to three meals a day.

Artists and designers can create aesthetic, compassionate solutions to problems like children's fear of masks, their need for a physical hug or touch of reassurance or their sadness over sick or deceased family members.

Philanthropists can underwrite innovative education trials and grantors can continue to step up to supplement educational funds.

The map of each school's needs and resources will be different, but emotional wellbeing and community support must be consistent priorities throughout.

Children do better when environments align to support development. (Adapted from Bronfenbrenner, U. & Morris, P. (2006))

The Lab School and Thurgood Marshall Academy are models for how schools can rise to meet the challenges of these trying times. They also hold the promise of the systemic transformation needed to benefit our children's futures.

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Schools Will Never Return to Business as Usual. Here's How They Can Make the Most of Our New Reality. - EdSurge News

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Right now schools are making-and, in some cases, already implementing- tough decisions about where learning should take place this fall. Elected officials are making decisions contrary to recommended guidelines that can leave school leaders in an impossible situation of shouldering accountability for health and safety while lacking the control to do so.

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Educators Must Offer Alternatives to the White, Hetero Narrative

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Educators Must Offer Alternatives to the White, Hetero Narrative

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Advocate

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A few years ago, we did a "step in, step out" activity in my New York City classroom. Students would step in if they knew the name of the historical figure given, explain who that person was, then step back out. When the name Matthew Shepard was said, students offered blank stares in response. We went on. Ryan White? Tyler Clementi? Edie Windsor? Nothing. Then, we shifted the approach. James Byrd? Trayvon Martin? Tamir Rice? Michael Brown? Eric Garner? Only two students stepped forward. Then we asked about Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan. No one moved.

The experience was unsettling. It happened because the way we currently teach history often excludes the narratives of the vast majority of the population - that is, people who are not white, cisgender males - from the curriculum.

Systems that perpetuate inequality are so often left unquestioned. We are, as a result, in danger of having memories lost, moments forgotten, and powerful stories left untold.

It's time for schools everywhere to actively be part of the solution.

Teachers and administrators urgently need to transform curriculum and implement culturally responsive pedagogy across all subjects and grade levels.

We can no longer be complacent and think that it is not our job, or that it is just too uncomfortable to bring complicated, diverse stories into our classroom. In fact, we are failing our students if we do not.

Beverly Daniel Tatum talks about how students need to see themselves in the books they read. It's our job as educators to seek out and share stories in our curriculum that reflect the students and communities we serve.

So how do we make students and faculty aware of history that challenges their own personal narrative?

It starts with quality professional development. At IS289 in New York City, we had our departments discuss this exact question, and we've worked hand-in-hand with our support staff from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project to magnify the importance of these critical issues on an ongoing basis. For teachers to be successful diversifying their approaches, they need the right support.

Curriculum reviews are also more important than ever. We must pick units with alternate narratives and stories to replace the ones that we have been using for years. Departments do not have to overhaul their entire curriculum top-to-bottom to begin to make change. It can start with one unit and expand from there.

For students, we always ask: How do we become aware of history that challenges our own personal narrative? The fact is those stories and narratives don't have to be sought. They often already exist in my classroom. Educators simply just need to make a safe space for those stories.

And for ourselves, we often ask: How do I encourage students to seek out alternatives to the white heterosexual narrative?

We encourage students to ask themselves "who else?" when they hear a story. When a textbook tells them that Watson and Crick discovered the structure and function of DNA, they must ask "who else?" Rosalind Franklin made critical contributions to this discovery, but her story is less often told. Books and movies about the Apollo 13 mission show white men in the shuttle and control room, but do not show that Katherine Johnson's charts and backup procedures helped bring them safely home.

We must teach students to question commonly held narratives.

And equally important, students and teachers can be allies. For students, we can give them the language and skills they need to advocate for the stories they want to see. We must show our students mentors for activism, from the Stonewall riots, to protests, to the social media campaigns of today.

When we give kids the tools for activism, the social progress they can accomplish knows no bounds.

Our school's Gay Student Alliance (GSA) is now creating a library of books, available to all, that celebrate LGBTQ+ voices. Through well-planned student-led activism, we've brought about change in the school's dress code and in classes that split students along gender lines. Our GSA also invites other students to join the work through lunchtime workshops for students and staff, art in the hallways, and one-on-one conversations.

It's created a better academic environment for all.

Ultimately, allyship is more than putting a "safe space" magnet on your whiteboard. It is encouraging students to consider counter-narratives and bringing the stories of people of color and LGBT+ historical figures into your curriculum.

It shouldn't be a novelty. To engender change, it must be a vital part of the fabric of classroom content. Because now, more than ever, young people need schools and teachers to be bold and do the work to ensure all students are included, challenged and valued in our communities of learning.

Jaclyn Maricle (@jemaricle) teaches Science and Marc Todd (@marctoddnyc) teach teaches Social Studies at IS289 in New York. Both collaborate with teachers around the globe and lead workshops and institutes on culturally relevant pedagogy, immersing kids in nonfiction reading, and teaching students to be critical readers of science and History. Marc is the co-author of Essential Research Skills for Teens and, the forthcoming, The Civically Engaged Classroom: Reading, Writing, and Speaking for Change. Jaclyn is in her second Math for America Master Teacher fellowship and the co-author of a forthcoming book on science literacy. Both have been working with students for six years in the GSA to challenge the heternormative narrative of school and the world around them.

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Educators Must Offer Alternatives to the White, Hetero Narrative

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A few years ago, we did a "step in, step out" activity in my New York City classroom. Students would step in if they knew the name of the historical figure given, explain who that person was, then step back out. When the name Matthew Shepard was said, students offered blank stares in response.

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Decolonizing Your Curriculum After a Summer of Protests and Pandemic - Blog | The Educator Collaborative Community

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Blog | The Educator Collaborative Community

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post by LaMar Timmons-Long, The Educator Collaborative Fellow

As we navigate a new school year, teachers are in a position to do some deep thinking about our classroom practices and how our classroom spaces should be a space that explores the truth and reality of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). However, this new school year brings a ​ like never before; for far too long our English classrooms have centered white stories with a Eurocentric lens and taught with oppressive pedagogies. With the murders of Black folk like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the uprising of protest focused on the racial injustices happening in America, and the advocacy for Black lives, teachers are in a crucial position to make a move towards ​ decolonizing their curriculums ​ .

Educators place a crucial role in the development of a student; we have the power to make decisions about text selection, activities, discussion questions and writing prompts that invite students to think critically about the world around them. However, with this power comes great responsibility to shift our thinking and pedagogical practices to create classrooms and/or spaces where teachers can decolonize their curriculums and begin to center BIPOC stories and ways of knowing. When thinking about how do this successfully, ask yourself:

Whose voices do my units of study, lessons and library center?

Are my units of study inclusive of all racial, ethnic , gender, and sexual identities?

Whose agenda am I pushing in this work?

What do my students want to read and need to read?

Oftentimes, it can be a scary place when you are starting from the beginning or you are forced to use a 'suggested' curriculum. You must ask yourself, "How can I amplify voices of color with a curriculum centered around whiteness?" and "How does the institution's mandated curriculum reinforce harmful ideologies that have led to violence in this society?" Decolonizing your curriculum is not only about ​ you teach. You have to change ​ you teach to anti-racist practices. ​ Teachers have to be mindful of the language being used towards students, stories, and different groups of people, text and materials presented and the overall curriculum. reminds us that the dominant linguistic practices schools force on students have long been used to enact anti-Black racism. ​ Our job is to think of ways to make our pedagogical practices anti-racist while working to decolonize our curriculum. Dr. April Baker-Bell

In doing this work, teachers have to be intentional about how they are decolonizing their curriculums. Furthermore, this work requires you to become and use anti-racist practices daily in your classrooms and throughout your school community. Lorena Germán, the author and creator of ​ The Anti-Racist Teacher: Reading Instruction Workbook (2019) , lays the foundation for how we can use anti-racist reading instructional practices that will amplify and push our students to become better critical thinkers. She states:

When you pause, you want to intentionally build students' consciousness and critical thinking about what they are reading, what is missing, and what they need to draw out. Here are some questions to guide that discussion:

This guide offers the perfect example of the kinds of questions that teachers can ask their students while moving away from the traditional plot development questions and ways of teaching English that reify whiteness. With this guide, students are now able to think about other perspectives and think closely about the author's intentions, thus offering a different route through which to teach literature and decolonize our curriculum.

Understand that the process of taking a real deep look into our curriculum is important and necessary work. Students deserve to have teachers who are willing and able to go against the norm and challenge their thinking. Students deserve to experience a curriculum that is inclusive and centers BIPOC and traditionally marginalized gender identities. Now, as you go off to do this necessary work of decolonizing your curriculums, the reckoning can begin!

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Decolonizing Your Curriculum After a Summer of Protests and Pandemic - Blog | The Educator Collaborative Community

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post by LaMar Timmons-Long, The Educator Collaborative Fellow Decolonizing Your Curriculum After a Summer of Protests and Pandemic As we navigate a new school year, teachers are in a position to do some deep thinking about our classroom practices and how our classroom spaces should be a space that explores the truth and reality of [...]

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Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be

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Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be

While challenging the teacher as hero trope, We Got This shows how authentically listening to kids is the closest thing to a superpower that we have. Cornelius Minor identifies tools, attributes, and strategies that can augment our listening, allowing us to make powerful moves toward equity by broadening access to learning for all children.

"That's the problem with you, Minor" a student huffed. "You want to make everything about reading or math. It's not always about that. At school, you guys do everything except listen to me. Y'all want to use your essays and vocabulary words to save my future, but none of y'all know anything about saving my now. "

In We Got This Cornelius Minor describes how this conversation moved him toward realizing that listening to children is one of the most powerful things a teacher can do. By listening carefully, Cornelius discovered something that kids find themselves having to communicate far too often. That "my lessons were not, at all, linked to that student's reality."

While challenging the teacher as hero trope, We Got This shows how authentically listening to kids is the closest thing to a superpower that we have. What we hear can spark action that allows us to make powerful moves toward equity by broadening access to learning for all children. A lone teacher can't eliminate inequity, but Cornelius demonstrates that a lone teacher can confront the scholastic manifestations of racism, sexism, ableism and classism by showing:

exactly how he plans and revises lessons to ensure access and equity

ways to look anew at explicit and tacit rules that consistently affect groups of students unequally

suggestions for leaning into classroom community when it feels like the kids are against you

ideas for using universal design that make curriculum relevant and accessible

advocacy strategies for making classroom and schoolwide changes that expand access to opportunity to your students

"We cannot guarantee outcomes, but we can guarantee access" Cornelius writes. "We can ensure that everyone gets a shot. In this book we get to do that. Together. Consider this book a manual for how to begin that brilliantly messy work. We got this."

(click any section below to continue reading)

Contents

Foreword, Kwame Alexander

Acknowledgments
Introduction: PART 1 This Ain't Everybody's Hero Story-It's Yours 1. Begin by Listening We All Want Better
How Listening Can Help

How to Listen to What Students Are Really Communicating
2. You Can Disrupt the Status Quo in Your Class
How to Ensure That Your Lessons Speak to What Students Say They Need

Question the Things That Define Your Classroom Culture

Identify Any Groups That Consistently Benefit Less from the Way Things Are
3. Do Your Homework and Then Go for It
Change the Way You Do School So That Kids Have More Opportunities to Succeed

Identify Why Change Needs to Happen

Do a Little Bit of Research

Decide What to Do and Make a Plan

Execute the Plan
PART 2 Taking Your Dreams off Deferment
Find a Productive Way to Say No

4. Show Kids That You Hear Them

Plan for and Hold Regular Class Meetings to Maintain Community

Designate Specific Kids Who Can Give You Feedback
5. Make Curriculum Work for Your Kids
Shift from a Punitive to an Instructive Mind-Set

Use a Universal-Design-for-Learning Framework to Make Learning Accessible

Understand Exactly What You're Being Asked to Do

Understand What Test Prep Is Really Asking You to Do

6. Being a Good Teacher Versus Being a Good Employee

Engage in Imaginative Mind-Set Work

Gather a PR Team as You Make a Plan to Be Better for Kids
Epilogue: The Gravity of Our Work
Bring It Back to the Classroom

Companion Resources

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While challenging the teacher as hero trope, We Got This shows how authentically listening to kids is the closest thing to a superpower that we have. Cornelius

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We Cannot Go Back to the Way Things Were

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We Cannot Go Back to the Way Things Were

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Bettina L. Love

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The impossible is becoming possible. As we all stand in the midst of a world crisis, those of us who can dream must dream. And after we dream, we must demand and act. I want to acknowledge my privilege from the onset of this essay. I am a tenured college professor with access to the internet, university resources, and a reliable income.

But I am not writing about dreaming oblivious to the crisis we are living in. As a Black woman, I am keenly aware of how this virus is disproportionately killing Black people because of environmental racism, medical and housing discrimination, and a racist educational school system that leads to low-wage jobs for Black and Brown Americans, which is why Black people are a large majority of the essential workers in this crisis and those dying on the front lines. In the face of that racism and resistance, it may seem pointless, but this is the perfect time to radically dream.

We must radically dream because before COVID-19 closed our schools and dismantled our way of life, schools were failing not only children of color but all children. High-stakes testing, large class sizes, and the disproportionate expulsion and suspension of Black and Brown students were the norm. Teachers had low expectations of Black and Brown children and high burnout. School shootings were disturbingly common. Schools lacked both adequate funding and inclusive classrooms for students with disabilities. Segregation and corporal punishment persisted. There was a scarcity of educators of color. There were more police in schools than counselors, and racism permeated every inch of our nation's school system.

We all knew it was happening, but it felt too big to take down, too big to rescue. This pitiful existence of the education system has become normalized to the point that many teachers are broken, fighting to just survive, and working to protect children from the very system that is intended to uplift them. This situation is what we have been given, but that does not mean it is what we have to take.

We cannot go back. We now have the opportunity not to just reimagine schooling or try to reform injustice but to start over. Starting over is hard but not impossible; we now have a skeleton of a playbook. It starts with creativity, teacher-student relationships, and teacher autonomy.

When schools reopen, they could be spaces of justice, high expectations, creativity, and processing the collective trauma of COVID-19. Some school leaders are stepping up. In my home state of Georgia, the state's school superintendent issued a letter to teachers and parents calling for "compassion over compliance" as we all try to reach students during a pandemic. In mid-April, Atlanta's superintendent moved the district to a four-day teaching schedule. Teachers are to use Fridays for professional development and to be available to students who are behind. We need that same energy, understanding, and creativity from our school leaders when schools reopen.

As I watch my wife-a 4th grade teacher-teach and my kids-two 4th graders-learn during this crisis, I see the possibilities for an education system now forced to trust teachers, give students autonomy, and rely on the ingenuity of parents. I also see the loss of schools as places of refuge, safety, family services, and invaluable social interactions.

My social-media timeline is filled with stories from teachers around the country finding innovative ways to reach their students. School districts are giving out laptops and books to students-items that were never allowed to leave the building before. Companies are offering free internet to families. Communities are rallying together to support families in need. Schools are relying on different indicators of achievement other than standardized testing to measure improvement, such as parent engagement, teacher-outreach levels, and interactive lessons. Teachers are making the social-emotional learning of their students their top priority. Students are having more time for physical activity and art. And they are researching and learning about things they feel passionate about but never had time to explore before.

The virus has made this new system the expectation of teachers, parents, and school districts. Asking teachers to be creative, react to the needs of students and families with resources backed by the district, and provide instruction driven by a teacher's pedagogy rather than a test is our new norm. However, this new normal will be short-lived if we do not fight to keep it when we return to school.

Educational testing companies stand ready to profit from this crisis. They will introduce tests to measure gaps in learning after school closures. They will market tests to close these gaps, even though those tests have never closed the so-called achievement gap before. Schools will insist on surveilling teachers to make sure they are getting students back on track instead of trusting teachers and their skill sets. Education technology companies will try to convince school districts that moving an entire nation's educational system online was beneficial and can continue in some variation.

Schools will expect parents to go back to homework duty and be less involved. The creativity of teachers and the trusting of students will be replaced with standardized testing, rote learning over critical thinking, and punitive school policies.

Our education system is allergic to change and comfortable with oppression, so if the system is not physically and theoretically pushed to stay in the direction of progress, it will revert back to its obsolete purpose.

We cannot go back. We must return to teaching in schools with a deeper understanding of how racism and capitalism limited our reach in offering all students the resources and instruction they needed and deserved before and after schools closed. This is more important than ever as COVID-19 exacerbates the educational opportunity gap.

The alternative ways educators are learning to exist in our new world cannot be lost when we reopen our society because that world only worked for some and was consumed by racism. What was said to be impossible in education is now here, and we must act for it to stay our reality.

Related Video
In 2016, Bettina L. Love, the author of this essay, spoke to Education Week about African-American girls and discipline. Here's what she had to say:

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Teachers, We Cannot Go Back to the Way Things Were (Opinion)

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The impossible is becoming possible. As we all stand in the midst of a world crisis, those of us who can dream must dream. And after we dream, we must demand and act. I want to acknowledge my privilege from the onset of this essay.

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Thinking Routines Toolbox

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Claiming your Identity by understanding your self-worth.

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Claiming your Identity by understanding your self-worth.

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Claiming your Identity by understanding your self-worth. | Judge Helen Whitener | TEDxPortofSpain

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Crash Course

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Personal Identity: Crash Course Philosophy #19

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Tricia Ebarvia

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Reading a few conversations online recently, I've been thinking a lot about the urgent need for us as teachers to do some hard, internal work of unpacking the identities we bring to the classroom. More and more lately, I've seen teachers get defensive in conversations about curriculum, which I've come to realize are often really conversations about racism, sexism, classism, and other issues in which arguments about books and the canon have become a proxy.

Teaching is an intensely human activity. The best teachers are those who know that teaching-and students-cannot be standardized. Giving two teachers the same curriculum and asking them to follow it "with fidelity" is an impossible task. Not only are the teachers different individuals, but they're also charged with the care of dozens of individual children. We teach who we are. This is what can make our practice so powerful-even transformative-but also potentially dangerous.

We bring all of our identities-and the experiences that informed them-into our teaching. So we have to interrogate the ways in which these experiences have shaped our practices and our relationships with kids. These experiences are those that gave us opportunities to be educated ourselves, which eventually led to our teaching "credentials." It's this professional learning and all our years in the classroom that we draw upon when we make decisions. We draw upon our years of kid-watching and theory-making.
But I would argue that it's often our personal identities and experiences that have the most profound effects on our teaching, and that which most often-and most dangerously-go unexamined.
Some quick examples.

Since launching #DisruptTexts with Lorena German, Julia Torres, and Dr. Kim Parker, there's been some necessary, sometimes difficult, conversation around teaching canonical texts. To be clear, my feeling is not to "get rid of" texts carte blanche. To me, #DisruptTexts means applying a critical, anti-bias, anti-racist pedagogy to all texts-and yes, in many cases, that will mean confronting, directly, the problematic issues inherent in traditionally canonical texts (and in some cases, removing those texts to amplify the voices of others).

That said, a frequent line of reasoning from those who defend the "canon" is that there are certain "literary" works that are rich and rigorous that all kids should have to be "educated," that they're missing out on something critical without [fill in the blank].

But here's the thing: Most teachers, especially secondary English teachers, were educated in a system and in a "canon" of texts that included some voices but excluded many more others. To call into question the validity of the "canon" means that we have to acknowledge our complicity in this exclusion.

I think we need to recognize that when we defend the "canon," we might also be defending our own perceived expertise. And when that expertise is challenged, it feels personal.

I speak from my own experience. As an Asian American, Filipina American woman who has always felt the pressure to "fit in" and "prove" myself in many spaces, I saw my expertise in the "canon" as evidence of my intellect (and perhaps as a path to White adjacency). Knowledge about a specific set of texts was a way to have academic power, but I never stopped to question who made up these rules about power in the first place.

Ironically, when my students and I read Achebe's Things Fall Apart, we discuss how schools were often used as one of the most effective tools of colonizers. Control what people think, I remind them, and you can control what they do-and what they can't. What I didn't recognize was my own complicity in such a system. In the words of anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko, "the most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." This is why we must disrupt texts, disrupt our pedagogy.

Another example of the way my identities have affected my teaching is through my privilege.

I grew up and live in an affluent, predominantly White, somewhat progressive suburb. I live and work in two of the most "high-performing" districts in the state as indicated by many local and national school rankings (for whatever those are worth).

At first glance, my community seems like a great place to live: lots of public parks, low rates of violent crime, access to multiple grocery stores and shops. But one reason for this is because of the racial segregation- carefully and explicitly orchestrated through our legal system -that have shaped many metropolitan areas.

I have to acknowledge that. I can say I live where I live because I want what's best for my kids, because my parents live close by and family is important. This is all true- but it is ALSO true that I'm complicit in an ongoing system of structural racism.

This structural racism has limited the diversity of people around me and my ability to empathize with others ( see Alvin Chang's research to examine the segregation in your own local area). When I reflect on my own racial literacy in recent years, it's been my relationships w/other people of color that have transformed my understanding of racism, especially anti-Black racism.

Why does this matter in my teaching? Because if I don't fully comprehend what impedes my own ability to understand racism as it exists in my own life, how can I teach students about racism with the complexity and knowledge required?

How can I teach To Kill a Mockingbird? Huck Finn? Gatsby? Or really- any American literature? How can I teach students about holidays like "Thanksgiving" or figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. responsibly? How can I offer students #ownvoices narratives in my classroom library?

It's the privilege that my personal experiences afford me that also partially explains my shock at recent events: the racial slurs hurled at POC on buses, police called on Black Americans going to the pool, "family detention centers" erected to imprison refugees. The truth is that none of the injustices we're seeing today are new, just the latest iterations; everything present has its precedent.

And although I am privileged-or perhaps because I am-and went to excellent schools, never in my schooling were the full atrocities of racism ever really explained.

This lack of knowledge limits my ability to teach fully and truthfully. Instead, I might combat racism with platitudes like "be kind" or simply encourage kids to be "colorblind," which only further erases the experiences of people of color. If we refuse to see race, how can we even begin to talk productively about racism?

Where does this leave me? Overwhelmed, angry, impatient, and sometimes, resigned. But that's when I'll try to listen and read, fill in gaps I'm still unpacking. That's when I seek others who will challenge me to grow. That's when I know I need to speak up, push back when I see practices that can be damaging to kids.

Educating ourselves-asking hard, uncomfortable questions that we might not like the answers to- can be the first step towards activism, but this self-reflection itself isn't sufficient, as Melin da Anderson graciously reminded me when I posted my initial thinking online. Here are her words:

The tricky part is that once teachers (namely, white teachers) start to ask themselves those questions, the answers can be upsetting. They come to see how they've marginalized/discriminated based on race/ethnicity. And that can bring feelings of guilt. And what do they do then?

Learning to turn that guilt into action is *activism* and requires more than self questioning. It requires teachers (namely, white teachers) surrounding themselves w/ white ppl who can support them in their personal growth and learning around how to become anti-racist. Not easy!

It can mean losing friends. You're now the person who's called to "speak up, push back" and who wants to be *that person* all. the. time!? It means unlearning and relearning a lifetime of being. It's coming to understand what you know as "just normal" is rly socially constructed!

Self-questioning can eventually lead to activism - or it can lead folks to revert to what's comfortable. Because it's not easy path to walk. And more than anything, to get to activism teachers (namely, white teachers) need support from like-minded white people.

Melinda's comments remind me to push forward. Just being aware of our privilege, of our biases as teachers, isn't enough. It isn't even close to enough. We must act to remedy and repair the damage that these biases have inflicted on our practices and our students. I'm reminded of Cornelius Minor's words last year at a Heinemann Fellows meeting. After an afternoon of leaning into our biases and interrogating racism inherent in our society and educational systems, he told us, "This isn't the work. The work is what we do when we leave here."

We must find ways, small and big, to disrupt the systems around us. It won't be easy. Confronting our own complicity, intentional or not, will be hard work. But what is hard is often necessary, and we should welcome the discomfort, for that is where the most meaningful learning and growth can happen.

NOTE: This blog was originally written as this Twitter thread and revised.

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We Teach Who We Are: Unpacking our Identities

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Reading a few conversations online recently, I've been thinking a lot about the urgent need for us as teachers to do some hard, internal work of unpacking the identities we bring to the classroom. More and more lately, I've seen teachers get defensive in conversations about curriculum, which I've come to realize are often really...

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How the #DisruptTexts Movement Can Help English Teachers Be More Inclusive

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How the #DisruptTexts Movement Can Help English Teachers Be More Inclusive

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Mind Shift

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How the #DisruptTexts Movement Can Help English Teachers Be More Inclusive | KQED

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The dominance of white-authored texts in school curriculum makes it hard for students of color and those in underrepresented groups to connect with the stories. The #DisruptTexts movement seeks to guide educators to develop a more inclusive and relevant canon.

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I believe that teaching and learning are interconnected processes that shape one another and evolve through research, discovery, experimentation, innovation, and reflection.

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Online/Remote Teaching PD Resources

Teaching Remotely in Times of Need ( listen to a podcast about these slides)
Interdisciplinary STEAM Activities at Home (digital choice board) Virtual Community Building for College & Graduate Students Bitmoji Classroom Intro Slides
Digital Choice Boards/Slides

Youth Activists and Change Makers (Google Doc)

Black Lives Matter (Google Doc)

Election 2020 (Google Doc)

Science and Technology in U.S. History (Google Doc)

Current Events Choice Board (Google Doc)

Open Access eBooks

Teaching with Digital Tools & Apps - written and designed by the students in my EDUC 593A Teaching & Learning with Technology course as part of a class project. This free, open access eBook highlights the key steps and considerations for finding, evaluating, and teaching with digital tools and apps.

Web Design Basics for Educators - written and designed by the students in my EDUC 612 Educational Web Design course as part of a class project. The book features five chapters that provide tips, resources, and techniques for effective website design: User Interface and Visual Design, Writing for the Web, Selecting Multimedia, Multimedia Design, and Digital Accessibility.

Building Democracy for All: Interactive Explorations of Government and Civic Life - an open access eBook that provides multimodal, multicultural content, learning activities, and OERs for teaching the new Massachusetts 8th grade civics curriculum.

Open Online Courses

Teaching & Learning with Current & Emerging Technologies - 3 module open online course for educators covering Augmented Reality, 3D Printing, and Virtual Reality. This course was designed by graduate students in EDUC 612 during Spring 2019.

Designing Digital Media for Teaching & Learning - A 4-week open online course designed by graduate students in EDUC 612: Educational Web Design Course (Fall 2015) to help teachers learn how to find, evaluate, design, and use digital media to enhance learning.

PLNs for Educators: From Novice to Expert - A 5-week open online course designed by graduate students in EDUC 612: Educational Web Design (Spring 2017) to help educators expand their professional learning networks.

Other Resources & Projects

Online Tools for Teaching & Learning - A website with detailed information, tutorials, and evaluation criteria for 85 learner-, community-, knowledge-, and assessment-centered digital tools for educators. This site was designed by students in my EDUC 592A (Online Tools for Learning & Instruction) course in fall 2016 and has continued to be updated each semester the course is run. The site has been visited by more than 120,000 people in 196 countries since its launch in 2016.

In Other Words Book Study - Students in EDUC 593A created digital media products to showcase their engagement in a virtual book study.

Leveling Up Online Course Design - A collection of tips, tools, and strategies for enriching online courses.

Annual Tech Tools Showcase - My EDUC 593A (Teaching & Learning with Technology) and EDUC 592A (Online Tools for Learning & Instruction) students host a showcase every year for the College of Education and local community. Students work in teams to facilitate a poster and demo station to bring awareness about current and emerging tools for enriching teaching and learning (e.g., tools for communication/collaboration; accessibility; augmented & virtual reality).

Building a Digital Reputation - An online learning tool that helps students develop a professional online presence.

Interactive Campus Map: UMass Amherst - Students in EDUC 595A: Educational Video Production designed and produced short videos featuring campus resources for undergraduate and graduate students at UMass Amherst.

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Online/Remote Teaching PD Resources Rethinking Teaching 2020 (Google Drawing Version | PDF Version | Google Doc Accessible Version) Using Video to Assess Student Attention in Virtual Class Meetings (full res PDF infographic; accessible version on Google Docs) Evaluating Teacher-Designed Online Materials (Google Drawing Version | PDF Version | Google Doc Accessible Version) Social Learning in...

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Trauma-Informed Teaching in Action: An Expert Interview

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Trauma-Informed Teaching in Action: An Expert Interview

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"This framework is centered on compassion and care, fierce commitment to viewing students as knowledgeable and capable, and viewing the invitation to bring life experiences into school as integral to day-to-day teaching and learning." -Dr. Elizabeth Dutro

In a recent interview, I spoke with Dr. Elizabeth Dutro and Alex Shevrin Venet concerning the need for trauma-informed teaching. Dr. Dutro is a professor and chair of the Literacy Studies program at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education. There, she draws on past classroom experience and her extensive research to design pedagogies that make space for difficult experiences to be honored as knowledge in schools. Her publications include her book The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy. Venet is a Vermont-based, industry-leading trainer, educator, and writer helping educators implement trauma-informed practices across the country. Her first book, Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education, was published in spring 2021.
KS: How would you define trauma-informed teaching and how did this framework emerge?
AV: In some ways, I resist defining and frameworking trauma-informed practice because a core element of trauma-informed practice is embracing complexities and nuance. That being said, definitions are important. Where I landed in writing my book was with this: "Trauma-informed education practices respond to trauma in the whole community, and also prevents future trauma. Equity and social justice are key as we disrupt the things that cause trauma."

Part of how I came to that was in reading a ton of the literature about trauma-informed practices and a lot of the teacher-focused resources really rely on this false dichotomy in which there are some students who experience trauma somewhere else and then bring that trauma into school, and then we as educators have to be responsive. Something that Elizabeth talks about a lot is that there truly is no dichotomy possible between traumatized students and then teachers as saviors or healers, because teachers are people who also experience trauma, and students are healers who can aid in the healing and support of one another and their teachers.

How I came to this definition was looking at that from a really expansive view that, in my mind, it's not just about addressing the trauma that happened somewhere else, although that's a big part, but also recognizing that trauma happens in schools. There are things in schools that cause trauma, like racism, harassment, bullying, sexism, transphobia. All those things exist inside of schools, and schools can directly cause trauma through things like curriculum violence, which is a concept that Stephanie P. Jones talks about where students are directly harmed because of the actual framing of academics that perpetuate harmful narratives or erasure. Trauma-informed education has to be accountable to addressing those conditions.

ED: I think one of the things that is so important is, like Alex said too, resisting definitions because they tend to compartmentalize what trauma is. When you go to many trauma-informed workshops that aren't run by Alex and likeminded people, it's not clear what trauma means, and so it can become this very dangerous term that becomes yet another label for children.

I think with that I'll just then say a little bit about the framework that emerged in my collaborations with teachers and students. Again, teachers and I were in classrooms thinking about what happens if we try to design some pedagogies together that provide rich invitations in a caring, compassionate context for difficult stories from life to matter in school. We came to what we called "pedagogies of testimony and critical witness" and it emphasized teachers recognizing and sharing their own vulnerability in grade-appropriate ways.

Being witnesses to one another in school needs to be reciprocal. It's often framed as teachers being witnesses to students, and that quickly falls into the very dangerous teachers-as-saviors narrative. This framework is centered on compassion and care, a fierce commitment to viewing students as knowledgeable and capable, and viewing the invitation to bring life experiences into school as integral to day-to-day teaching and learning. Children get positioned as witnesses which recognizes their humanity and their agency as learners.
KS: I would love to ‌hear a bit about strategies teachers can use as they try to attend to trauma in this moment.
AV: I'll preface again by saying that I'm allergic to the word strategies. One of the things I always say to teachers when we talk about being trauma-informed is that there's not really such a thing as a trauma-informed strategy because what you do has to be rooted in care, in relationships, in an understanding that includes equity and social justice. As we think about relevant approaches for this moment, the number one thing I would say is always coming back to our shared humanity at the center of things. You can set up all the routines you want for yourself, but at the end of the day, humans going through extraordinarily stressful times need space, and flexibility, and just to be met with care. Finally, using your voice and being an advocate for yourself and your students to attend to those things that cause trauma. If your school is reopening in a way that is going to harm students, don't be silent and go along with it. If your state is refusing to take action, contact your legislators. I think a lot of teachers struggle with thinking of themselves as activists, but if we want to be trauma-informed, we can't just say, "Oh, well I can't do anything about all of the stuff that's causing trauma." Every one of us can do something.

ED: I do think the pandemic, as well as the activism against systemic racism, provides such a unique and important opportunity for educators to think about what's shared when we think about trauma and what's very distinct when we think about trauma. It's very important to tap into both. The pandemic means every single child, family, and teacher has experienced loss of some kind. There's grief of some kind, and then there are such distinctions in the way that children, families, and teachers are experiencing this. Many based in privilege, particularly racial privilege, certainly class privilege. We can think about responding to individual families and students with knowledge of what is happening collectively and individually, and we have to realize that we can't always know all students are experiencing, but we need to assume that there are impacts that then lead to the necessity of embracing those central ideas that Alex shared.

Then on the advocacy front, I think the everyday advocacy we can do as educators is to interrupt in ourselves the larger narrative that's happening around schools. Children are not sliding, they're not slipping; they're also living through this. We have to challenge any narratives that are deficit-based around children sliding, not learning, not learners. Teachers can recognize when they encounter justice-centered approaches to trauma that emphasize shared humanity and children's knowledge. It's important to have critical justice-centered work happening in that arena. That can happen in classrooms by honoring children, and then it can happen with colleagues and in the larger community.

AV: I've been thinking a lot during the pandemic about grief and the depth of understanding that you develop when you go through hard times yourself. I'm hesitant a little bit because you never want to glorify trauma but students might be bringing to their classrooms a sense of how to navigate grief and loss that their peers and teachers could learn a lot from. What would it mean to make space for that deep knowledge of what it means to live through hard times rather than turning to this deficit narrative? Many schools are saying, "Oh, we have to bring those kids back to school because they're experiencing trauma at home" but there's all of this really coded language.

ED: Absolutely. I think it's so important to recognize that life experiences, including trauma, are sources of knowledge. And you're right, children can exhibit a certain depth of relationship and connection that many adults don't have. Teachers get nervous when they haven't had a similar experience and sometimes say to me, "you've experienced much harder things...I don't have those stories to share." Well, what we've learned is that there's no sense of stories having to be equivalent.. It just needs to be something that deeply matters, or a book with a theme that allows connection for the big experiences and losses of life. Children in a justice-centered, nurturing environment feel invited then to use the knowledge they've gained from their lives in the beautiful way you were describing, Alex.
KS: Are there insights or recommendations that you would share with school leaders who want to promote trauma-informed learning in a proactive way?
AV: One of the most important things for school leaders is to recognize that trauma-informed practice requires systems change. It's not something where you can just send your teachers to a PD and then they're going to come back and say, "Okay, we're trauma informed now." For teachers to enact trauma-informed practices, they need to experience a trauma-informed environment for themselves. For school leaders, I think it really requires a lot of reflection and analysis of whether you have policies at the school that are still very trauma insensitive or trauma inducing. Then the last thing would be to have clear expectations and systems about boundaries. In every state, teachers are mandated reporters and that carries legal obligations. I think it can be confusing for teachers who want to engage in this reciprocal witnessing because the expectations may be very unclear about who within the school does what.

ED: I would say that school leaders ought to be sure that they're informed on what it means to be trauma-informed and the range of approaches that exist, think about whether equity is at the center, and watch for the use of certain keywords in those approaches and in their workplace. If words like "damage" or "broken" are foregrounded, it's a time for leaders to push back and say, "No. That is not how we are going to view children in my school. I know there are alternative ways to think about this that are much more humane, that are anti-racist." Find those models and use them.

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Resources Recommended by Dr. Elizabeth Dutro and Alex Shevrin Venet: Books + Guides Articles Organizations + Individuals
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Facing History invites educators to use our Back-to-School Toolkit which offers a location-flexible teaching unit designed to support teaching in the opening days of any course. The unit has been constructed to develop students' social-emotional skills with the goal of helping them co-construct an open and inclusive classroom community in these unprecedented times.

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Trauma-Informed Teaching in Action: An Expert Interview

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Two experts share insights on bringing trauma-informed practices to the classroom in addition to teaching from an equity-centered lens.

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Teaching To Thrive Podcasts

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Easily listen to ATN - Teaching To Thrive in your podcast app of choice

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Quickly and easily listen and subscribe to ATN - Teaching To Thrive for free in your podcast app of choice.

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Today on the podcast we're joined by Carla España and Luz Yardia Herrera, co-authors of En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students. Heinemann colleague Jaclyn Karabinas joined Carla and Luz to talk about choosing texts that speak to and honor the multilingual students in your class. Throughout their conversation, they describe the importance of translanguaging, provide helpful tips for choosing multilingual texts while teaching remotely, and explain how you can teach these texts even if you yourself are monolingual.

Their conversation started with explaining what translanguaging is, and the role it plays in multilingual education.

Below is a transcript of this episode.
Luz: In our book, we define translanguaging in three ways, and we go back to Ofelia Garcia and in the definition from 2014 where they define translanguaging as linguistic practices of bilinguals, a pedagogical approach and as a means for social justice, where students' language practices are honored. So that's really how we navigate this entire book.

And in terms of what it means for bilingual students, it just means that they are seeing their languages, their language practices or community language practices represented in their schooling. They're seeing that there are clear connections between what they experience outside of schools and inside of schools. And we think that's a really powerful thing to have.

Carla: We see translanguaging as being very disruptive of the monolingual curriculum, of the monolingual assessments, of monolingual pedagogy. And this happens in any space. You can be a monolingual teacher teaching in a class that's just an English language arts class, but you might have bilingual and multilingual speakers, and in that space, you can create translanguaging spaces within that. You can employ translanguaging pedagogy. You can create those times where students can engage using their full linguistic repertoire that uses features from different languages, right? And that can happen in your "monolingual", quote unquote, right, classroom, but also it can happen in bilingual settings. And we've also seen how even in classrooms that might be labeled bilingual dual language or transitional bilingual classrooms, even those spaces sometimes tend to be very monolingual, very with the philosophy of assimilation, of trying to push towards this English. And so we're very thankful for all the research, all the practice that goes into this and all the teachers employing translanguaging in all kinds of spaces.

Jaclyn: What unique challenges are multilingual students facing right now and how can we provide support to multilingual students, not just online now, but how can we provide support to them in general?

Luz: Well, I think we have to be very flexible, right, in terms of our ... and I think we're seeing that we must be very flexible in terms of what's happening with remote learning, virtual learning spaces. What it means for bilingual or multilingual students is that while they're probably getting a lot less support than they would in their regular school day, right, often students who are identified as needing additional supports and services do have an extra adult in the classroom or sometimes maybe they get pulled out for special services or different services and so they don't have those kinds of things, like other students who are also missing out on various services, students with disabilities for instance, right?

Carla: I think that's something you mentioned, Luz, that's so important to think about is being flexible with the time that's available with the resources that are available and thinking really carefully about people as resources, as the knowledge base that we have in teachers, right? And so what you mentioned reminded me of one of my grad students who is also a bilingual dual language teacher in the Bronx in New York, and that was one of the first challenges that she faced after the big issue that we talk about with having access to devices.

But once the school made sure that every single student had the devices, the next challenge was how do you meet with students when they've had so much support with support staff at school, right, in person. And so in this case, the teachers, they shared a schedule and then they had all the support staff come in and that was really helpful for them because once that kind of communication happened, the students were able to take part of the whole class meeting where the teacher, who was my grad student, was reading aloud a book and students were able to engage with it live while others were able to watch and engage with it at another time. But there were moments where support staff would come into those meetings or into small groups. And that's super helpful, and that's something that I've been thinking about that challenge a lot because it's coming up in my courses with teachers, but it's also something that I've been very thankful for, the creativity and the flexibility, not only from teachers but also from families and thinking about that.

And I think the other one that we talk a lot with Luz because it's a big part of our book is just the resources that are available. I get updates from New York State, TESOL organization. I get updates, right, New York State Association of Bilingual Ed, [inaudible 00:04:51] website, right? Lee and Low books. And so thinking about all these organizations and resources that have support for this population of students, and I'm just thankful that they're sharing that, but I also know that for the most part, like I mentioned earlier, most curriculum tools are in English, and so how do you navigate that space? Because then it's requiring so much more work on top of what teachers are already dealing with to provide for the support. I'm just thankful for those who are sharing the tech tools that are helping us with translations, that are helping us make education more interactive for this population.

Luz: I wanted to add one more thing that we've been thinking about, and it's just the interaction piece. A lot of our students, a lot of bilingual and multilingual students, they really thrive on this interaction. And I think all children probably also thrive in interaction. They learn and grow with each other through one another and that's definitely is something that they miss. I think that students help each other out, especially in translanguaging spaces, right? They help each other make sense of what they're engaging with, what they're reading, what they're learning, and this is part of translanguaging, being able to use each other, students, each other as a resource. Especially if the teacher is monolingual or doesn't know the student's languages, that's one way that they can facilitate, right? They can pair up students, they can group students to support each other, and of course, that's not going to be very possible in a remote learning space.

Jaclyn: Yeah, I was thinking about that a little bit actually, thinking about the importance sometimes when students have a buddy learner in the classroom as they're beginning to navigate this and thinking about how challenging that would be to schedule online, but it would still be really valuable. Can you talk about the different ways that authors translanguage and how you did this in your book?

Luz: Well, we actually recently wrote about this in an upcoming publication, academic publication, and so we're really excited to share that soon. But we talk about the ways that authors engage with translanguaging in their texts and children's literature, YA, middle grade and children's picture books. And we really like how our colleague, a professor at Brooklyn College, talks about how translanguaging is used. And she argues that translanguaging is often used in Latinx literature for literary effect in order to convey authenticity in the communication between characters in a book, and we see that happening a lot in the texts that we chose, that we amplify in our book for instance. We have an example of Monica Brown, right? Monica Brown writes the Marisol McDonald series, and do you want to talk about that, Carla?

Carla: Yes, and she's also making those readings available on YouTube, so subscribe to Monica Brown's YouTube channel and you're able to view the bilingual readings. And so in some of those examples that we've been looking at, like in Marisol McDonald or Marisol McDonald and the Clash Bash, which is one text that has the English and Spanish within it, right? I'm trying to think. Is that the book? Yes. I was like, "Is it side by side? No, or top to bottom? Yes," because I don't have my books. They're in the office. Can we all have a moment of silence for all the ... We're just missing our books that are not with us.

So in that book, right, Marisol has these beautiful birthday plans and her mother has to break the news to her, right, that Abuelita can't take part in that because her Abuelita is not in the country. And so there's this line that Monica Brown writes that says, "Marisol, it isn't just the money," Mommy explains. "It's hard to get papeles to come to the United States. Abuelita needs a special document called the visa to visit us, but sometimes it takes a long time for the visa to arrive." Speaks to a lot of our realities.

And then later on, there's the birthday, and Abuelita, they communicate through the way we've been communicating a lot these last few weeks, right, through a computer. And Abuelita says, "feliz cumpleaños, Marisol. I'm still waiting for my visa, but I used some of the money you sent me to buy my first computer and get internet connection. "Te quiero mucho," I tell Abuelita. "I love you so much." And I just wanted to share some of those excerpts, because I want you to go read these books and read them with children.

But also thinking about how translanguaging is used to show this way of communicating with family and it shows a family connection. It shows authenticity. It shows relationships, and it's also character development. So it's this really thoughtful craft from thinking about the writer's perspective, and as a reader, I'm also connecting with it and thinking about authenticity. And so for us, it's really key that we search for these texts and also amplify these voices and these stories, especially own voices, own texts. And so we wanted to share that brief example with you.

Luz: And another thing that we want to point out and like to point out, which we do in our book as well, is how the choice that authors often make more recently, more than ever, to not italicize, right? And Yuyi Morales' book, Dreamers, is a really beautiful example of this. In that book, she takes us through her own immigration journey and what the library as a public space meant for her and her son to find her own space, to just regain her confidence. And that's how she eventually found her livelihood, right, as an author and illustrator. But the way that she uses her language just reminds us that as bilinguals, there's not an on or off button, right? There's just language and the way that she writes it is exactly how bilinguals think, how bilinguals speak, and communicate with each other.

So for instance, there's a really short excerpt that we love to highlight from her 2018 book Dreamers, she says, "We are stories, we are two languages, we are lucha, we are resilience, we are hope. We are dreamers, soñadoras of the world." And just in that little excerpt or that little, few phrases, right, she engages her entire linguistic repertoire. And it's just a reminder that there's no boundaries in language. There's no boundaries in the ways that we use language. And so it's an important thing to point out. And in our book we chose to do a similar approach because again, as bilinguals we wanted to present ourselves as authentically as possible.

Jaclyn: And I think you don't want to admit the words that are in their realities and their memories of what they're telling, because I remember... Side story, I'm sorry, I have to. When I was studying abroad, I remember that I studied abroad in Ecuador and there were so many words from the Quechua language that made their way into Spanish there, and they didn't have a direct translation to Spanish, let alone to English. And so I remember coming back thinking, this is that word, but I don't have an English word for that. I don't even have a Spanish word for that. I have a Quechua word for that. And I was just reading your book, just thinking about that, how you have to speak with and write with the words that are of your reality.

Carla: Just thinking about that words from your reality, reminding me of My Papi Has a Motorcycle by Isabel Quintero, illustrated by Zeke Pena because that opening line of, "My Papi Has a Motorcycle. From him I learned words like carburetor and cariño and dedication." I was just like, "You had me Isabel Quintero, in this first part." Right? That word cariño and it's such a key word throughout the books that we think about this relationship between father and child and also this relationship between a family and a community and things that are changing. And yet you go all the way to the end and towards the end it reminds you of this word cariño and things that don't change. So that's another text we love.

Jaclyn: Carla, you begin chapter three with your momento de aprendizaje, your aha moment. You invite students to use translanguaging when telling their own stories. And you modeled doing this yourself, teacher vulnerability, by sharing your own writing, sharing your carburetor. And it really seemed to invite students and give them the permission almost to include the repertoire of language that they have in their writing. And it struck me as a really critical piece to plan for. Can you talk more about this?

Carla: Yeah, that was a really special moment in middle grade classroom, right? And so I was doing a teaching demonstration as I was curriculum planning with some middle grade teachers in a suburb of Chicago. And as always, I never want to ask students to engage in any literacy practice that I haven't tried myself. And so I had my writer's notebook with me, I had some mentor texts and I shared with them a moment from my life and that had words ... it has some dialogue. So I was working through balancing the dialogue and setting description and just emotions that I felt at the moment when I came to this country with my mom from Chile and we spoke Spanish. And so I had the dialogue there in Spanish and I just read it ... I didn't call attention to it. I just read in that moment, and then I asked the students to name what they saw that I did as a writer. And so we created a nice little chart together about what we did.

And when I asked the students to then work on their own writing, that beautiful part of where a child from the back of the room raises her hand and she's sitting with a staff member who was teaching but also was the literacy leader there in that school. And so she calls me over, I walk over and she asked me if it's okay for her to use Spanish. And I thought, "Well of course if this is part of your life and we're using all of our language features that we know and how beautiful it is that you can include that. That's part of your story." And I was like "I can't wait for you to work on this. And let's share it later if you'd like to share it."

But one, I think ... So key things that happened there. One, as a teacher, I was purposeful in making sure I shared my own writing, right? Two, I made sure that I allowed student choice and student participation in that kind of process to look at my piece and also think about what they wanted to write. And three, it was just that creating the space for students to engage in the same. And so when I've shared this with teachers who say, "Well, my writing might not have lines in Spanish because that's not my experience." And I say, "Well, that's why we bring in other authors, right?" So I'm Chilean, I was born in Chile, came to the U.S. when I was little. But I'm always sharing Naomi Shibab Nye's Gate A-4 piece that it has Arabic, and we talk about a different perspective and we talk, and we do and use that as a mentor text because I want to show carburetor in different kinds of texts and show students who are bilingual and multilingual that they too can do this as writers.

Jaclyn: It seems as though for teachers who aren't bilingual or even if teachers are but don't speak the language of the students that they're working with at that time, that it's even more important then to include a variety of bilingual texts, of mentor texts, so that they can read like writers in a variety of ways.

Luz: Right. And I think, well that's one of the things about remote learning that can be challenging, right? Which we talked about before. This interaction piece is going to be missing, who knows for how long, but for now it's going to be missing. And so that chance that teachers can have in the classroom to, again, to interact with the text, with children in small groups and who can then support each other. That's going to be a challenge obviously with remote learning.

But if teachers are not themselves bilingual or multilingual, they can still create spaces within their assignments for children to use their entire linguistic repertoire, whether they're responding to a text of any assignments, a variety of kinds of responses, right? Not only written but also maybe video or through any kind of way that allows them to express themselves and use their entire linguistic repertoire. So those are the kinds of spaces that the teachers can still facilitate, regardless of the learning spaces that they're interacting with.

Carla: I was thinking about that same example from the teacher in the Bronx that does her live readings of books in English and Spanish and she'll have them at different points in the day and it's over second graders and their morning closing meetings, they're very short. But in those moments, students are engaging in a carburetor lesson that the teacher might be reading the texts. Let's say she's reading Sembrando Historias, right? The Pura Belpre book By Anika Aldamuy Denise illustrated by Paola Escobar, and they're talking about Pura Belpre and they're learning about libraries, they're learning about books and the role of books in her life and how she was writing. Great. So they're interacting. She might be reading in Spanish, students might be responding using features of Spanish and English that's live. Wonderful.

Then there are the other 20 out of the 25 students who couldn't be online at that time, which has been the case these past few weeks. And so she posts that video and students respond in different ways. And so they're either commenting through writing or they're doing ... In that class they're using, I believe it's Flipgrid on the Seesaw platform, they're posting it. If it's a Flipgrid video response that they're recording and kids can add emojis, they can add little Post-it Notes on it. So I've been ... I'm meeting with them later. This today is our next session. So I'm excited to hear from the teacher as to how this kind of interaction has been changing and what it looks like, so it gives me a little bit more hope as more students get to engage with them as well.

Luz: One thing that I wanted to just include, we actually wrote about this recently, Carla and I, and it also is coming from Ofelia Garcia's latest work on carburetor and how she points out that just because students are presented with something monolingually doesn't mean that they themselves are not engaging or are not carburetor, right? That they themselves are not engaging with that material bilingually. So students are already doing that naturally as bilinguals, multilinguals. So that's just an important thing. An important reminder I think for all educators that students are already doing this. The key is how can we support and facilitate that whenever possible.

Translanguaging and code switching are different, epistemologically. Translanguaging is in internal perspectives. It's what bilingual people do, their bilingual language practices, language practices of the community that they engage with every day. Whereas code switching is sort of the external perspective, what outsiders feel bilinguals or multilingual people are doing. Code switching brings up the notion that we can just turn on and off our language or we can turn our language on and off. Whereas carburetor is sort of a dynamic fluid languaging practices, which is more reflective of what bilingual people actually are doing.

Jaclyn: In chapter three, you talk a lot about your planning process, so I'm really looking forward to sharing with all of our listeners. What does the planning process look like to achieve all of these things?

Carla: Well, the first thing that we're thinking about in chapter three was starting from what students already teach us, right? And that's why we titled it "Telling Our Stories," and students as bilingual, multilingual, Latinx students, they have experiences, they have different journeys. And so once we already know that from students, we want it to be really purposeful in thinking about which texts can we select to read together? Not so much that I would read out loud and you just listen and I'm going to do all of this reading and writing work, but that we together read and engage with it. And so we thought, what if we really think about what we know about the students, we know we want to pick texts that employ carburetor, right? And so that something about their language in there. We want to select texts that really help us talk about issues of journeys and how journeys are very varied. And so you read it in chapter one of the book, Luz and I may have met in our grad program and we both were teachers in New York city, but before ... our journeys are different.

And so we had different kinds of schooling, our families had different journeys. And I think that's really important that we pick a variety of texts to show that complexity and that's why I'm thankful for those publishers and those organizations like like Latinx in publishing that are amplifying all of these stories because we need more of these stories. You can't just say as a publisher or as an organization, "Wow. Yes, we have this one book about immigration from, I don't know, Mexico. Yes, that's it. We're done." No, actually we have a lot of stories of immigration migration. So for us as step one, we're thinking about really purposeful text selection.

So that's what we share in the beginning of chapter three and give you alternate texts for elementary and middle grades and then really thinking about planning that reading in communities. So I know that on the Heinemann website where the book is featured, we have a sample template that's available for download and that's called a sample plan for reading in community. And what we set that up for that plan is really thinking about steps of setting up for reading in community, thinking about the themes of the book and involving the community. Thinking about your typical book introduction, but in this case also thinking about translanguaging and making a note into the language practices of the authors, of the characters in the book. And then being purposeful about those moments where you will select places where students can actually join you and participate. And so being thoughtful about when we read texts along with students, is it mostly my voice that they're hearing or are they hearing each other's voices? Can they read along with me in some places and having a final discussion on those themes. So that's a little bit of the start, but I'll let Luz talk a little bit about what would follow the reading of the text because we found beautiful resources with the authors that we select. So she could tell you a little bit about lessons two and three.

Luz: So for lessons for lesson two, on chapter three we talk about writing our own stories. This lesson really focuses on giving or creating that space in our classrooms, whether it is in person or virtual for students to write their own stories and thinking about how they can look at the craft moves from these metric texts and employ some of those. So maybe it's through dialogue, maybe it's through thinking about themes that they want to highlight about their own lives and making some connections with the authors and seeing how they go about introducing and navigating these themes.

We also consider the ways that students can develop characters. Maybe it's their own stories, but maybe they want to make several focal characters as part of their central stories. For instance in Alma y cómo obtuvo su nombre or Alma and how she got her name by Juana Martinez Neil, Alma's shares ... it's a father-daughter story. The father shares the story of how Alma got her name and each name is symbolic and means something really special in their family. And so maybe that's one way students can share the history of their names for instance. And it would be a fun way to just share of themselves and also create opportunities for them to not only share these stories in writing but through video perhaps, especially with remote learning. I think it invites those kinds of spaces to occur through video, maybe through art as well and not only through writing.

Carla: So in addition to using that guide to planning a reading in community, experience with students, whether it's synchronous or asynchronous and students are interacting with a text after they've viewed you reading it or an author reading it. We also wanted to call your mention in chapter six of the book. It is our poetry chapter, so if you want to hear a little bit more about poetry, we know that that's going to be our next podcast episode, so we'll talk a little bit more about that. But there is a really helpful planning for shared reading across a week using poetry in chapter six and that's on page 145. We have [inaudible 00:26:38] because ... a concern that we had was that in our school visits ... so Luz and I because we're in teacher education, we do a lot of business throughout different grades.

One of observations that we've had when we were visiting schools was that a lot of the participation by bilingual and multilingual students was happening in the lower grades with shared reading experiences, especially kindergarten and first grade. And the higher grade you went up, the less of that we saw. And so especially now I talk with my students who have been in residency programs with high school they haven't ... they want more of that participation as well. And so we wanted to be purposeful and that guide really thinks about how can we take a text, for example, we can take an excerpt from My Papi Has a Motorcycle. We can take one of the scenes from Monica Brown's book that we were talking about earlier. We can take any extra from a book that we've already engaged with and return to it and really take our time rereading it together every single day.

So you would practice reading it in community together, but also taking each day to focus on maybe one day we think about meaning and we discuss what this means to us. Another day we think about figurative language or author's craft moves and the last day thinking about a response a little bit in response to it. So I just wanted to call attention to that being a different but a purposeful as well tool besides those reading and community plans that would be for an entire text. This one could be just how you can revisit an excerpt of a larger text or ... like in chapter six, we have examples of how we use poetry, so we can't wait for it our next podcast episode where we can talk a little bit more about what that sounds like and how to use poetry across the school year, not just April.

Jaclyn: Our options for literature are somewhat limited now that most teachers and students in the US are doing remote learning. But what are some creative formats you've used or what are some texts you recommend?

Luz: Sure. And I've actually been able to take advantage of a lot of these myself with my son since I'm also home. But a lot of authors that we actually feature in our text have been so generous in sharing of their craft and their time and their art, and their writing. So they've been doing read-alouds, like Michael Lapiña has been doing read-alouds, Jacqueline Woodson has been doing read-alouds. Monica Brown has her own YouTube channel. So there's a lot of these big name authors that are really sharing their books and some of them have given special permissions for teachers to record themselves doing read-alouds of their books to share with their classrooms or their classes for a limited amount of time. And publishers have also come out and supported this practice to an extent. So we have to keep those things in mind. But yeah, seeking out some of these authors and seeing some of the resources that they've uploaded or posted on their social media, their Facebook, YouTube, and things like that would be a really good starting point. Of course, people don't always have access to the kind of technology that you'll need for this or perhaps the social media accounts that you'll need for these kinds of resources, but it's a pretty good starting point.

Carla: A conversation that I keep having with Luz, weave discussed both our gratitude for all of these exciting online opportunities to engage with authors and illustrators, but also holding this tension with that gratitude comes this immense awareness that even though we're thankful for authors, poets, illustrators being generous with their craft, we're also keeping in mind that a lot for a lot of them ... well, for everyone right now, all school visits, talks, conference, presentations, all of those have been impacted. And so yes, we're thankful and along with that, we should try to find ways to support, especially our small publishers and our authors that are new authors and those whose entire livelihoods depend on their school visits and conference and all of that. And so besides seeking out those that are sharing, we've also been recommending visiting bookshop or IndieBound websites to look at ways to support our independent booksellers or smaller publishing houses like Cinco Puntos Press, Arte Publico that are publishing these kinds of books that we're recommending.

And also I know for New York residents we've been using the simply ... the New York public library app. That's been really helpful. So I was on a video conference call with some of my teacher friends and we decided to start a book club because we're all reading these different books and I mentioned a book and immediately once I mentioned it, I put it up to the screen and it was Children of the Land. So I'm reading that memoir by Marcello Hernandez Castillo, I hold it up to the screen and my friend within seconds was like, "Oh, I got it." She puts up her phone on the screen because she got it through the Public Library app. And so we're also recommending people look at their ... try to find texts and supporting those places as well.

Jaclyn: Yeah, that was great because I think both of you sharing those two pieces of it, and it's the and, right? Yes, we're excited about the access and we need to keep in mind that in many ways they're giving away work for free, which is an ideal.

Carla: Yeah. And for some that's quite completely fine because they're in a position where for some they're like ... they're okay financially. But for most authors, that's not the case.

Luz: Some authors have also been doing some book talks and in order to get access to those book talks, you might have to purchase a book through one of these independent bookshops and things like that. So they've been trying a little bit of that. But it's still very much not a widely implemented practice yet. And I think to end, we want to just emphasize the transformative nature or the transformative power of translanguaging and literature. And I want us to think about the waste that we can use texts like the ones that we share in our book and the ones that we shared today to explore and make connections between what students read and students' family journeys, right?

And again, remembering that students have widely different and varied experiences, and we cannot lump all immigration experiences into just one category. We have to think about the varied experiences even within that. And another way that it really is powerful is that it affirms our students' community language and literacy practices. Often students feel that there's a deep disconnect between school and home. And so this is one powerful way that we can really affirm our students' language practices, their community language practices and also just.. Often especially in certain settings, classroom settings, language is very much structured in a way that it's... language is separated. What am I trying to say here? There's a lot of bilingual settings that actually insist on a language separation.

And, often that is very difficult for bilingual children because they don't live as two monolinguals in one, right, as we all know, and they exist as bilinguals. And I think this kind of literature reminds children that their language practices are great, that they're fine, that they're part of their identities and culture and part of, again, their community language practices.

And I'm thinking about.. We shared a piece by Monica Brown and we shared a little piece from Isabel Quintero's book, My Papi Has A Motorcycle. And, one of the things that they do in their books is critique some injustice, sort of social structures, whether it's gentrification or you know, the flawed immigration system. So it provides students the opportunities to engage with these kinds of conversations that might be important for their families, for their communities as well.

Jaclyn: It seems like it would only strengthen the community to make, to consistently bring in texts that represent the languages in the classroom because it's not, I mean, just like you said, don't just do poetry in April. You know, we're not just going to have bilingual texts in Spanish and English in September. You know, it's important year round. It's not just important in one single month. And the message that sends, you know, when you do this regularly, whether you are bilingual or not, the message it sends that you also see it as, you know, an important part of the literature in the classroom.

Carla: So we've also been.. As we're both raising bilingual children and in these times we've also, besides having conversations about lesson planning, we've also been having conversations from the perspective of a parent and also talking with our students in our teacher ed programs who are parents themselves, or who are teaching. And they also engage with families who have school-aged children at home. This is something we also been thinking about is.. You know, our students with their families at home have engaged with multiple literacies before school went online. And so I think we just have to be very cautious about that in the language that we use without making assumptions that like students.. Oh, they're at home, they're not getting that kind of like deficit framework that we hear a lot about, especially in our work with bilingual, multilingual, Latinx children.

And so, like I think about my own childhood at home. My mom was, and continues to be an amazing storyteller. And so, storytelling is one kind of literacy that was very prominent in my childhood. My father is, was always, at the time when I was a child, he was always listening to like, church sermons on cassette tapes. Now, he's like so fancy on these, like, Facebook live groups with these, like, spiritual religious communities that are, you know, doing their Zoom or Facebook live gatherings. And so, music was a big part of my childhood and I would always be singing and dancing. And when I was in Chila, I was in this folklore group and I was engaging with a lot of poetry and song as a child.

And so, even I think about my childhood and I think about the childhood of my grad students, students now in their schools, and how we can think about all those multiple literacy practice that we want to continue encouraging families to highlight with their children, so that the children can also talk to their teachers about that. And teachers reminding teachers that this is, these are, different literacy practices and that we can get to know our students better by incorporating those in our instruction. So really taking a moment to continue getting to know students in their multiple literacy practices at home and bringing that into our instruction.

Luz: And I think just as a reminder, Carla and I are both parents, we're scholars, we're educators as well. So in addition to parenting our own bilingual children at home, we're also working, we're teaching online our own grad students, in-service, pre-service teachers. And so I think it's just an important reminder for working parents or for all parents, whether you're an essential worker, or you're working from home, to just be very, very kind and forgiving of yourselves.

You know, at first I was really, I was okay, I was really kind of buying into the really acute structural, structured schedule for the day, and then realized it was just impossible to maintain with my six year-old. He's in kindergarten. And so we absolutely scaled back. We decided that we were going to pick, you know, four activities per day that we were going to have fun with, whether it was reading, or maybe it's math or science experiments. We just kind of went about it that way and just.. And maybe he's in kindergarten, so that's why we have a lot more flexibility. But I think flexibility is key and just being kind with yourselves is key and just doing the best that you can with what you've got. Jaclyn, thank you again for having us.

Jaclyn: Great to talk to both of you.

Carla: We're also super thankful for Heinemann using this platform really to amplify these stories, these experiences, and especially during these times. I think it's important that we use these platforms to highlight the experiences of communities, especially those that are most marginalized. So we're really appreciative of this.

Jaclyn: Well, it's our pleasure and an honor for sure.
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Carla España is an instructor at the Bank Street College Graduate School of Education. Carla's teaching journey began in a bilingual classroom in Harlem, New York, continued at Teachers College Reading and Writing Project partner schools, and at the bilingual teacher preparation program at Hunter College, City University of New York. Finder Carla on Twitter: @ProfesoraEspana

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On the Podcast: The Transformative Power of Translanguaging in Literature with Carla España and Luz Yadira Herrera

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Today on the podcast we're joined by Carla España and Luz Yardia Herrera, co-authors of En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students. Heinemann colleague Jaclyn Karabinas joined Carla and Luz to talk about choosing texts that speak to and honor the multilingual students in your class.

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Six Practices to Center the Voices and Experiences of Latinx Students in the Classroom

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Six Practices to Center the Voices and Experiences of Latinx Students in the Classroom

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Heinemann Blog

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How can educators create a welcoming, liberating, and transformative environment for Latinx students? We can begin by learning to amplify the stories and identities of Latinx children. Carla España and Luz Yadira Herrera offer six practices that bring Latinx students' perspectives to the center of our classrooms.

Practice #1: Get to know your students' journeys.

Carla and Luz use journeys to describe those experiences that continuously shape and influence our students' realities. It may mean navigating identities that do not fit neatly into boxes that students check off on a form or questioning how others define them versus how they self-identify. Some students have had varied immigration experiences and may be growing up as the first generation in the United States. Perhaps it is a combination of experiences that include the ways their language practices have been interpreted, and other aspects of who they are, all of which impact their lives in various ways. These also reveal how students respond to issues of marginalization. As educators, we have to create meaningful spaces for the sharing and learning of all of our journeys.

Practice #2: Understand our students' language practices.

Carla and Luz use the phrase language practices to highlight how we engage with language and how languaging is a process that is performed differently depending on context. This helps us describe how we use language to communicate, convey emotions, and create or support relationships. Our language practices reflect our linguistic resources, some of which may be nurtured in our schooling or suppressed. A bilingual child, for instance, may have language features categorized as Spanish or English in their repertoire, and thus their language practices often involve the use of all of those features as they seek to communicate, make connections, and negotiate relationships.

Practice #3: Understand our students' (and their families') traditions of literacies.

In this book, Carla and Luz take a broad view of literacy, following the legacies of sociocultural approaches. These approaches consider that literacies happen in context, for example, the various practices that families engage in, such as oral traditions, including storytelling, proverbs, and elder and community wisdom that have been passed down through generations. These also include digital literacies as well as literacies most commonly associated with youth culture: you may have students who can fully explain the use of social media platforms, online gaming communities, music-related literacies (hip-hop, K-pop), and the informational how-to videos they watch repeatedly to learn more about their interests.

Practice #4: Affirm, be in solidarity with, and help create awareness of our students' language practices.

Sonia Nieto, one of the key figures in the field of equity in schooling, has encouraged educators to seek beyond "tolerance" in our work with children, especially languageminoritized students. Affirming our students' language practices means that we must get to know and validate their backgrounds and journeys and, most importantly in our work with Latinx students, learn about the varied experiences. In other words, in both of the following examples from our stories, language is intimately connected to place. Although this has been central to our understanding of ourselves, language practices, and family identities, it is also a privilege that we have had to be able to travel back and forth. We must be thoughtful in learning about different experiences so that we can be in full solidarity with students who may not have the same privileges or opportunities. Also, as thoughtful, critical thinkers, we can and should consider the reasons why we may have had opportunities our students have not.

Practice #5: See the connections between school and government policies and their direct effect on our students' lives.

Educators have to be aware of the policies, political climate, and national narratives that impact our students. The chart below identifies some policies that have negatively impacted Latinx students' lives.

Practice #6: Understand that our students live in the intersections of many cultural practices and identities.

Carla's and Luz's understanding of their students' identities and systems of oppression are informed by the foundational work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor at UCLA and Columbia Law School. Crenshaw uses the term intersectionality to "denote the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black women's employment experiences" (Crenshaw 1991, 1244). Consider the intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, language practices, and documented status-among other ways of self-identifying-as you learn about the marginalization of Latinx students in both bilingual/multilingual and monolingual classrooms.
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Carla España is an instructor at the Bank Street College Graduate School of Education. Carla's teaching journey began in a bilingual classroom in Harlem, New York, continued at Teachers College Reading and Writing Project partner schools, and at the bilingual teacher preparation program at Hunter College, City University of New York. Finder Carla on Twitter: @ProfesoraEspana

Luz Yadira Herrera is an Assistant Professor at the Kremen School of Education and Human Development at California State University, Fresno. As a former teacher in NYC public schools and researcher at CUNY-NYSIEB, her teaching and research centers culturally and linguistically sustaining approaches to teaching emergent bilinguals, translanguaging pedagogy, and bilingual education policy. Find Luz on Twitter: @Dra_LuzYadira

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Six Practices to Center the Voices and Experiences of Latinx Students in the Classroom

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How can educators create a welcoming, liberating, and transformative environment for Latinx students? We can begin by learning to amplify the stories and identities of Latinx children. Carla España and Luz Yadira Herrera offer six practices that bring Latinx students' perspectives to the center of our classrooms. Carla and Luz use journeys to describe those experiences that continuously shape and influence our students' realities.

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Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students

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"Here's our book, at last! España and Herrera's engaging narrative, and the voices of teachers and students, remind us that we are en comunidad when we express our care, love, and understanding for emergent bilingual learners of Spanish, English, and all world languages. En Comunidad confirms that students possess intellect, creativity, and imagination across their language assets and repertoires. We educators were waiting for España and Herrera as our colleagues, guides, and seers, and they're here at last. Thank you for guiding us further in our journeys toward literacy, libertad, and equity through your humane work, vision, and practices."-R. Joseph Rodríguez, author of Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites

"It shouldn't be a mystery or a chore to educate secondary Latinx bilingual learners. To this end, teachers need to learn how to center their students' voices and experiences in their classrooms, and in so doing, to make education meaningful to them. Kudos to Carla España and Luz Yadira Herrera for this conceptually rich, beautifully written, and highly accessible text that indeed charts a new way forward."-Angela Valenzuela, College of Education, University of Texas at Austin

"Somehow this book manages to be at once deeply personal and profoundly practical all at the same time. Carla and Luz weave their own stories as Latinx educators and students with concrete, transformative suggestions for making all students feel welcome, honored, and supported in our schools. Each year there is one book that comes out that makes me wish I could go back to my first year teaching and do it all over again - to do it better. This is the book for me this year. How I wish I had had Carla and Luz in my ear, and how glad I am they are here for you now." -Kate Roberts, author of A Novel Approach

"This book centers around how to empower minoritized Latinx students as learners by helping them value their own language, their own history, their own community and themselves in a system that has marginalized them for centuries. En Communidad is not just for Latinx students or teachers who teach Latinx students, but for all American students and teachers who desire to bring real democracy to this country and make this world justice for all people. This is indeed a wonderful book."- Danling Fu, Professor of Language and Literature in the College of Education, University of Florida

"In this incredible book, Carla and Luz remind us that, like in all good teaching, the most effective classrooms place students at the center of teaching and learning. In a mix of critical pedagogy and inspirational practice, they demonstrate ways to build curriculum around students' lives, to avoid the trap of monolithic thinking, and to trust-truly trust-students to fill in knowledge gaps (including our own) through shared discussion and inquiry. Carla and Luz guide us to consider: when classrooms are shared spaces, when children teach as much as they learn, we, as a community, can thrive."-Chris Lehman, coauthor of Falling in Love with Close Reading

"Dr. Espana and Dr. Herrera hit a home-run. Together they beautifully bridge the gaps between theory, policy, practice, and personal experience. Their work evokes untold Latinx histories, and offers culturally sustaining pedagogical approaches to classroom practice. It's clear this work is not only about sustaining Latinx raciolinguistic ways being, rather it's also about sustaining researchers and classroom practitioners as well. This work reminds us that we are here and we belong."- Steven Arenas, English Teacher and Recipient of the NCTE 2016 Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award

"In this book, grounded in research and lifted by story, Carla and Luz provide compelling rationales and practical ideas for valuing students' and colleagues' linguistic repertoires and identities. As a monolingual teacher, this book exponentially expanded my growing understanding of best practices for teaching all children and for building inclusive and appreciative learning communities in which everyone is seen, heard, and valued."-Kathy Collins, coauthor of I Am Reading

"This book is a radical departure from every other professional development book I've read about teaching about emergent bilinguals. Carla and Luz's embrace of each student they work with and their staunch belief that every child brings an abundance of value to our classrooms, not in spite of, but because of their linguistic heritage, feels revolutionary in this day and age. Then they went one step further and made those ideals tangible by providing engaging, practical lessons about language, identity and literacy. Every educator who reads this book will be changed by it. And perhaps most importantly, so will our students."-Colleen Cruz, author of The Unstoppable Writing Teacher

"As a scholar who seeks to challenge racial and linguistic hierarchies in the education of Latinx children, the most common question that I receive from teachers and administrators is how they can work to dismantle these hierarchies in their day-to-day practice. Now the answer has become more simple: En Comunidad. In this book, España and Herrera treat seriously the idea that the cultural and linguistic practices of Latinx children are legitimate and should be made central to their educational experiences. It is a must read for all educators who work with Latinx students."-Nelson Flores, Ph.D., Penn Graduate School of Education

"En Comunidad pushes beyond the common notions of learning language, using language, or having language. Authors España and Herrera send the invitation to live language. When we are safe to live our languages inside classroom spaces, we can live a more represented, connected and liberated life. And I can't imagine a greater gift to give students. Thank you, Carla and Luz, for writing a book that not only offers an insightful course on language, but helps us take the power off the page and into the classroom with a series of researched, dynamic lessons."-Maggie Beatty Roberts, coauthor of DIY Literacy

"Have you ever wondered what bilingual education would look like if it were intentionally designed to sustain the rich practices and identities of Latinx children, families, and communities? If so, you will definitely want to read En Comunidad. In this engaging book, you will be introduced to a critical bilingual literacies approach to curriculum and teaching. Intentionally centering bilingual Latinx voices, values, practices, and experiences, this approach invites us to consider robust pathways for engaging in teaching that honors bilingual Latinx students' full identities. En Comunidad offers us powerful lessons for transforming the education of bilingual Latinx students in the pursuit of justice."-Mariana Souto-Manning, Teachers College, Columbia University

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En Comunidad brings bilingual Latinx students' perspectives to the center of our classrooms, and offers classroom-ready lessons that amplify the varied

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NYTimes

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Memes can provide an opening for parents to talk to adolescents about serious issues like coronavirus or the possibility of war.

Credit... Stuart Bradford

How do you prepare for the coronavirus?

By cutting up a few limes.

That's the message conveyed by a popular internet meme that shows a pair of hands slicing limes. The image and caption - "Me, preparing for the coronavirus" - are a bit subversive: While public health officials worldwide are scrambling to determine how to best treat and contain the virus that has killed hundreds, the meme plays on the name of the beer brand Corona, and suggests there's no real need to worry.

Internet memes use images to celebrate, mock or satirize current events and popular culture, and they have become a defining part of how teenagers communicate in the digital world. The recent rise of memes seeming to make light of the Wuhan virus or international tensions offer a glimpse into how teenagers learn about and process world events. Today's tweens and teens get their news via memes on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, while parents, teachers and grandparents still largely rely on news reports and Facebook and Twitter posts.

As a result, there's a generational gap between how I learn about and perceive the news, and how my teenage sons learn about and react to the same events. When I learned (on Facebook) that an American drone attack killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the powerful Iranian commander, my stomach dropped. Having been married to a Marine deployed in the gulf war in the 1990s, I know that war is no joke.

Our sons came home from school that day laughing at World War III memes claiming their generation is ready for war because they've been "training" in the video games Fortnite and Call of Duty.

My first impulse was to lecture my sons about the seriousness of war. But lectures almost never change teenagers' behavior, so I dug deep into meme culture instead. What I found: Kids use memes to express and channel all kinds of emotions, including fear.

Many are harmless but some coronavirus memes risk spreading both misinformation and racist attitudes.

Here are some ways parents can use memes to connect with teenagers and provide essential context.

Shortly after the drone strike in the Middle East, "my 14-year-old jokingly said that Iran should just blow up the U.S.A. and get it over with already," said Tanya Brown, who lives in Ontario, Canada. "His comment caught me so off guard that it made me cry right then and there in front of him."

She added: "We've raised our boys to be kind and empathetic to others, so when my son made such a hurtful comment, it really made me sad and angry."

Making light of a deadly virus or the prospect of war may seem crass or thoughtless, but humor is often a way of coping with something we cannot control, whether it is a comedian joking about having cancer or the "Saturday Night Live" cast lampooning the Trump administration.

"Ask open-ended questions," said Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist in Sonoma County, Calif. Ask where they first saw the meme, what they think about it and what their friends are saying. Offer to fill in facts on the virus or other current events.

Remember that most adolescents do not have personal experience with life-or-death experiences. "Even as adults, we can get something cognitively, but not really understand it until we experience it," Dr. Manly said.

My four boys, ages 14, 16, 19 and 22, were born years after their father left the Marines and don't know what it's like to have a loved one deployed. They don't know what it's like to live through a pandemic.

According to Dr. Manly, sharing personal stories may be one way to help children understand the impact of international conflict and emerging health threats on individuals and families.

Today's teens are definitely more tech-savvy than previous generations, but they need adults to help them develop a personal code of ethics to guide their actions both on- and offline. Memes present an opportunity to discuss your family's definition of healthy and unhealthy behavior. You can look at images together and point out exactly which ones you think go too far and why.

"Talk about your thoughts, feelings and values, and use that as a springboard to let the kids talk about their thoughts and feelings," said Jo Langford, a Portland-based therapist who teaches parents and teens about technology. "You also want to give kids really clear boundaries" - outlining for your kids what is and is not O.K. according to your family values - "so they can make appropriate judgment calls when they're out in the world."

Parents should also remind their children that "memes could be made by anyone, including foreign governments and those who want to spread rumors and dissension in society," said Andrew Selepak, a media professor at the University of Florida. It's also a chance to point out that fraudulent information may be spread in other forms, as happened with text messages that appeared to be sent by the Army telling the recipients they were being drafted. The Army said those were fake. Similarly, memes can spread false information about the coronavirus, often with anti-Asian racist messages - an opportunity to remind teenagers about the harm in using slurs.

Boys, especially, feel a lot of societal pressure to appear strong, stoic and unconcerned. In her new book "Boys & Sex," Peggy Orenstein writes that boys often use the word "hilarious" as "a safe haven; a default position when something is inappropriate, confusing, upsetting, depressing, unnerving, or horrifying ... 'hilarious' offers distance, allowing them to subvert a more compassionate response that could be read as weak, overly sensitive, or otherwise unmasculine."

A response like Ms. Brown's tearful outburst after her son's insensitive comments can be a way to "break through that mask of bravado," Dr. Manly said. In fact, Ms. Brown said that she and her son then talked at length about war and why some people might find his comments hurtful.

Of course, children should never feel responsible for an adult's behavior. As a parent, it's important that you take time to process your feelings of grief, confusion, anger and being overwhelmed, so that you're not "oozing unprocessed, undigested personal material out to your children," Dr. Manly said.

But don't be scared to express emotion, even (or maybe especially) if your child seems stone-faced. Dr. Manly frequently works with veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder; some have suffered traumatic brain injury. At first, many convey horrific stories with a flat affect because absolute control of emotions is essential for survival on the battlefield.

"There are times they're not able to cry, and I feel my eyes watering," Dr. Manly said. "I'll say something like, 'Excuse me, that's really hard to hear. Wow. Let me grab a tissue.' By modeling, I teach them. They see an appropriate emotional response without being preached at." Eventually that may help them begin to express their suppressed emotions.

If your teenager says something like, "Maybe we should just get it over with now, before we develop even deadlier weapons" or "I want to get the coronavirus" - both things my 16-year-old has said to me - try saying something like, "That is really scary for me. Can I give you a hug?" Dr. Manly said. Verbalizing your fear gives kids permission to do the same.
Jennifer L.W. Fink is the creator of BuildingBoys.net and co-host of the podcast "On Boys: Real Talk About Parenting, Teaching and Reaching Tomorrow's Men."

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Memes can provide an opening for parents to talk to adolescents about serious issues like coronavirus or the possibility of war. How do you prepare for the coronavirus? By cutting up a few limes. That's the message conveyed by a popular internet meme that shows a pair of hands slicing limes.

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The Talk: Conversations about Race, Love & Truth

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The Talk: Conversations about Race, Love & Truth

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Bookshop: Buy books online. Support local bookstores.

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Sorry, the page you’re looking for doesn’t seem to exist. If you’re looking for a specific book, you may find it by searching by title or author below:

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Usable Knowledge

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Helpful tips on creating an inclusive classroom community - virtually.

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Why Identity and Emotion are Central To Motivating the Teen Brain

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Why Identity and Emotion are Central To Motivating the Teen Brain

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KQED

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In the past decade, neuroscientists have been able to identify what makes the adolescent brain so geared for the kind of inquiry that can pay dividends in the classroom. As children enter adolescence, some developing neural systems have already stabilized, Dahl said. But puberty creates a whole new set of elastic neural systems that, when interacting with the already stabilized systems, offers unique windows of opportunity for engagement and experiencing the world around them in multiple ways.

"Adolescence is a perfect storm of opportunities to align these changes in positive ways," Dahl said. "Learning, exploration, acquiring skills and habits, intrinsic motivations, attitudes, setting goals and priorities: There's compelling need for transdisciplinary research to understand unique opportunities for social and emotional learning. But few people do it in fear of these challenges."

These new scientific insights have large implications for how schools teach adolescents, which have traditionally viewed this age group as troublesome.

'One way to think about puberty is to think of it as a learning spurt for heartfelt goals.It's a particularly opportune time to fall in love with learning itself.'

The feelings of acceptance, rejection, admiration, among others, are all the story of adolescence. Children in this age group also seek physical sensations and thrills. There's heightened awareness of social status, especially as they realize that acts of courage can earn them higher social status among peers. Their wildly swinging neurological systems also mean that adolescents can readjust quickly - making those years critical for educators to engage students in "the right ways," when the brain is learning to calibrate complex social and emotional value systems that use feelings as fast signals, Dahl said.

Contrary to common belief, children in this age range don't actually have "broken brains." Rather, these children are undergoing a profound update to how they process the world around them. Adolescents are often considered bad decision-makers who are thrill-seekers. These myths, however, stem from young people's desire to display courage, which is valued across cultures - and adolescents constantly seek the emotional satisfaction of being admired. In fact, Dahl said that adolescents take risks to overcome their fears, not seek them out.

"[Adolescents] are learning about the complex social world they must navigate, including the hierarchies, social rules for gaining acceptance and status, and the mystifying discovery of a sexual self," Dahl said. "This is a flexible period for goal engagement, and the main part of what's underneath what we think about setting goals in conscious ways - the bottom-up-based pull to feel motivated toward things."

Adding to the confusion over how best to respond to adolescents is a wave of research showing children around the world are entering puberty at younger ages. One report found that in the 1860s, puberty for girls began at age 16. In the 1950s, it occurred at 13. Today it's closer to eight years old. The transition for boys is similar, according to the report. The earlier onset of these pronounced biological changes puts pressure on educators and parents to update their expectations for what it means to be young, and how youth plays into adulthood.

"This is an interesting potential opportunity, with the longer time to learn activated motivational systems, longer time to increase skills and develop patterns of developing knowledge," Dahl said. "If kids grow up in opportune settings, they can take advantage of the scaffolding and freedom to go on to take adult roles. But the risks are probably more amplified than opportunities for kids in disadvantaged settings."

It's still unclear how the earlier development happening in children might create other sets of challenges, Dahl noted, but it's evident that it's a key development window of motivational learning, a time when the brain more intensely senses motivational feelings, strengthening the patterns of connections to heartfelt goals, and creates potential for deep, sustained learning.

This period of learning is exemplified by even the forbidden love of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The young couple is brought together by a single brief encounter, after which all mental processes of planning, goals, motivations, longing, and desire are transformed. They begin to obsess over reuniting, and would sacrifice anything - including comfort, safety, family, and friends - to be together again.

Without the context that adolescents' motives can explode entirely by the spark of a single passion, Romeo and Juliet's story would be one of utter insanity, Dahl said. But adolescents' abilities to rapidly reshape motivations and goals both supports their emotional volatility as well as presents a key period to find love - not necessarily romantically for others, but for academic activities and goals.

"With the feelings that pull you to persevere, maybe [adolescence is] a particularly opportune time to fall in love with learning itself, to love that feeling of exploring," Dahl said. "There's a new window to create that 'Yes!' feeling."

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Why Identity and Emotion are Central To Motivating the Teen Brain | KQED

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In the past decade, neuroscientists have been able to identify what makes the adolescent brain so geared for the kind of inquiry that can pay dividends in the classroom. As children enter adolescence, some developing neural systems have already stabilized, Dahl said.

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What Anti-racist Teachers Do Differently

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What Anti-racist Teachers Do Differently

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The Atlantic

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They view the success of black students as central to the success of their own teaching.

Editor's Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The "On Teaching" series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers.
Ask black students who their favorite teacher is, and they will joyfully tell you. Ask them what it is about their favorite teacher, and most will say some version of this: They know how to work with me. So much is in that statement. It means that these students want to work, that they see their teachers as partners in the learning process, and that they know the teacher-student relationship is one in which they both have power. In other words, black students know that they bring intellect to the classroom, and they know when they are seen-and not seen.

As the principal of San Francisco's Mission High School and an anti-racist educator for more than 30 years, I have witnessed countless black students thrive in classrooms where teachers see them accurately and show that they are happy to have them there. In these classes, students choose to sit in the front of the class, take careful notes, shoot their hands up in discussions, and ask unexpected questions that cause the teacher and other classmates to stop and think. Given the chance, they email, text, and call the teachers who believe in them. In short, these students are everything their families and community members have raised and supported them to be.

I have seen some of these very same students walk into another teacher's classroom, go to the last row of desks, and put their head down. I have seen them sit frozen in their seat, staring at an assignment-when earlier I had heard them make jokes, talk excitedly about the content of their history class, celebrate solving a vexing algebra equation, or shake a test tube with authority, waiting for a result. Their report cards often reveal this disparity in classroom experiences: A's and B's in classes where they feel valued and C's, D's, or even F's in classes where they don't.

When black students' academic strengths are overlooked, black students are marginalized. They are kept out of advanced courses, given bad grades, and sent to the dean's office. Over the years, the power that they initially bring to school is siphoned off by educators at every level of the educational system who do not respect, and in some cases do not wish to respect, the intellectual contributions of black students.

Anti-racist teachers take black students seriously. They create a curriculum with black students in mind, and they carefully read students' work to understand what they are expressing. This might sound fairly standard, but making black students feel valued goes beyond general "good teaching." It requires educators to view the success of black students as central to the success of their own teaching. This is a paradigm shift: Instead of only asking black students who are not doing well in class to start identifying with school, we also ask teachers whose black students are not doing well in their classes to start identifying with those students.

I spent the majority of my career in the classroom, and I loved it because-to do it well-it required that I call on all aspects of my humanity. Standing in front of my black students, I knew that it was my responsibility to invite them into the classroom and then to see, push, and protect them once they were there. Over the years, collaborating with other anti-racist educators, I co-developed an approach that was successful-and it showed in the students' attendance, grades, and quality of work.

We read articles and books, and we attend workshops centered around black pedagogy. That helps us examine cultural differences in discourse styles, so we can better understand black students' analytical approaches in essays. We learn how to integrate oral language into our curriculum, such as adding a debate unit or a poetry-recitation assignment, and to provide ample opportunities for students to work together. And we learn that nothing goes without saying and that praise and direction should be plentiful. In essence, we do what works for black students, which also works for all students.

Educators who are committed to black students use evidence in their own classrooms to find ways to improve. They analyze the assignments handed in, identifying ways in which their teaching reached-and didn't reach-all of their students. They recognize the brilliance of a black student's contribution to a class discussion and seize on it. They disaggregate data such as grades and attendance by ethnicity, look for patterns, and problematize their own practice-rather than assume that their students weren't motivated or sufficiently prepared to engage with challenging material. They ask themselves: Why did Taylor get a C on the final when he earned an A or a B on all of his other assignments, many of them equally demanding? Why is Vince silent in his group? What inspired Hile to write multiple drafts of her essay, each time asking for more detailed feedback? They seek support from colleagues who are effective teachers for all of their students, including black students, because they know that the changes they make to their teaching practice will have an impact on their students' achievement. All of this makes them better educators.

Teachers who do not value black students will shift the discussion away from their own practice when they see that black students are not succeeding in their classes. They will create bonds that eventually turn into factions with fellow educators who are also unwilling to change their approach.

To fight against systemic racism means to buck norms. Educators at every level must be willing to be uncomfortable in their struggle for black students, recognizing students' power and feeding it by honoring their many contributions to our schools. Teachers need to insist on using their own power to consistently reveal and examine their practice, and seek input from black stakeholders; they must invite black parents to the table, listen to their concerns and ideas, and act on them. Principals must clearly and consistently communicate the anti-racist vision for their school, create professional-development opportunities for staff, recognize teachers who successfully teach all of their students, and intervene when they see problems. District-level administrators must more firmly root their anti-racist messaging in black students' school experiences, making expectations for educators clear. And school-board members need to listen to educators who have shown efficacy in educating black students. They must enact policies that hold us all accountable to our black families. We must make demands of ourselves and work together in our communities.

The only measure of our anti-racist teaching will be the academic success of all of our students, including our black students.
This article is part of our project "On Teaching," which is supported by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Panta Rhea Foundation.

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What Anti-racist Teachers Do Differently

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They view the success of black students as central to the success of their own teaching. Editor's Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The "On Teaching" series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers.

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James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil

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James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil

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The New Yorker

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"Let's begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time." So opens "A Talk to Teachers," which James Baldwin delivered to a group of educators in October, 1963. (He published it in the Saturday Review the following December.) That year, Medgar Evers, a leading civil-rights figure and N.A.A.C.P. state field director, was murdered in his driveway by a white supremacist in Jackson, Mississippi. That year, four young girls-Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley-were killed when Klansmen bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama. That year, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in his motorcade through downtown Dallas.

I make a point of revisiting this essay at the beginning of each school year, and while Baldwin's words have always felt relevant, this year they feel particularly so. Students have returned to school after a summer of political and social tumult. In August, white supremacists and neo-Nazis brazenly marched across the campus of the University of Virginia; one shot at a counter-protester, and another mowed down a crowd with a car, killing a woman who had showed up to oppose their hate. A few weeks later, the White House announced that it would be rescinding the protections set in place by President Barack Obama's DACA program-a move that left eight hundred thousand undocumented immigrants uncertain about their futures. Many teachers are wondering how to address these events in their classrooms. Should they incorporate potentially contentious issues into their lessons? Should lessons be pushed aside to tackle the urgent matters of the day?

Recently, I was chatting with a friend who teaches at an elementary school in Washington, D.C., where I live, and he shared with me how confused and disillusioned his students were by what they had seen on television. He sat them in a circle and gave them space to ask questions. "Why was somebody so angry that they wanted to drive a car through people who were asking for their rights?" one student wondered. My friend shared with me another story from a community meeting that he had just attended. A mother stood up and said, "I'm tired of having to teach my two-year-old how to duck; I'm tired of having to teach my two-year-old that certain nights when we get home from school we have to sit on the floor."

"Yet we send them to school and we're not allowing them to be a part of an opportunity to address that," my friend said, hurt and perplexed. The next evening, he brought his students to a local candlelight vigil, where hundreds of people showed up to honor Heather Heyer-the demonstrator who had been killed in Charlottesville-and to protest the hateful actions that led to her death. Throughout the evening, people talked about what had transpired. Some of the students chimed in, too. Later, my friend recalled, the kids told him that doing so made them feel important. "People wanted to listen to me," one student said.

Baldwin's talk offers a way to think about this. I first read it when I was a high-school English teacher, in the winter of 2012. I was sitting at my desk one day, after the bell had rung, staring at a clouded chalkboard, leaning back in my chair, its beige foam crawling out from beneath red cloth. I had just struggled through a lesson on the different types of sentence structure-not the most riveting topic for most fifteen-year-olds, I realize-and I had seen my students stare blankly past me, disengaged. I wondered how preoccupied they might be by what was happening outside school walls. A string of senseless murders had taken the lives of some of their friends. In Florida, a boy named Trayvon Martin had just been killed, too, and his killer had yet to face charges. But that day, like most days, I stuck to the book, keeping politics on the periphery.

My decision was based, in part, on Maryland's educational standards. The state had recently adopted Common Core and PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) assessments; there was little incentive to teach beyond the bounds of the new curriculum. This wasn't why I had signed up to be a teacher, but job security and paychecks were directly linked to student test scores. I found myself becoming a part of a system of incentive-based learning that I opposed. That day, a friend, who had been a teacher for many years, gave me a copy of "A Talk to Teachers." The essay might quell some of my frustration, she said.

Baldwin delivered the talk on the heels of the March on Washington, where he was famously pulled from the list of speakers because organizers-who knew the writer's habit for speaking extemporaneously-were unsure if he would stay on message. "A Talk to Teachers" is emblematic of Baldwin's proclivity for candor over political appeasement, and, like much of his work, focusses on history and the American consciousness. "It is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history," he writes. Young people are constantly absorbing-through media, textbooks, and policy-the myths of American exceptionalism; for black children, this means that what they are taught in class does not match the world that they navigate daily. "On the one hand he is born in the shadow of the Stars and Stripes and he is assured it represents a nation which has never lost a war," Baldwin continues. "But on the other hand he is also assured by his country and his countrymen that he has never contributed anything to civilization-that his past is nothing more than a record of humiliations gladly endured."

A more honest reckoning with history is necessary, Baldwin insists. Of slavery, he says, "it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn't understand. It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble."

It's this focus on history that rearranged my thinking. In Baldwin's view, it is the only thing that can help disabuse black children of the stereotypes that have been projected onto their community-and it is necessary for white children, too, who oftentimes serve as the purveyors of these myths, and who do not know the truth about their history, either.

Baldwin understands that learning this history can leave students in a state of cognitive dissonance and frustration. Imagining his own hypothetical students, he writes, "I would try to teach them-I would try to make them know, that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal." Here, Baldwin, with literary sleight of hand, adopts the terminology used to pathologize black people and applies it to the system in which they operate. What follows is a medley of lessons that is disquieting in its contemporary applicability. "I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger-and that it belongs to him," he writes, adding, "I would teach him that he doesn't have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality, that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything."

After reading "A Talk to Teachers," I altered my approach, placing less emphasis on the standardized tests and using literature to help my students examine their world. I realized that rigorous lessons were not mutually exclusive from culturally and politically relevant ones. Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" did not have to be sacrificed in order to make room for a discussion on community violence. Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" did not have to be abandoned in order to tackle immigration. "A Talk to Teachers" showed me that a teacher's work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical, and, instead, confront the problems that shape our students' lives.

The most quoted line from "A Talk to Teachers" may be this one: "The paradox of education is precisely this-that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated." A teacher, Baldwin believed, should push students to understand that the world was molded by people who came before, and that it can be remolded into something new.

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James Baldwin's Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil

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Clint Smith on James Baldwin's "A Talk to Teachers" and the relevant lessons it offers teachers in our current political climate.

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12 Ways Teachers Can Build Resilience So They Can Make Systemic Change

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12 Ways Teachers Can Build Resilience So They Can Make Systemic Change

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Mind Shift

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When things are hard in the classroom, it's tempting to blame the kids, their parents, or the communities they come from, but those are not things an individual teacher can control. Building personal resilience is about responding to adversity, to setbacks, to getting knocked down. The resilience comes from learning something in those moments.

"Resilience is about thriving and not just surviving," Aguilar said. "Because I think there are places where people use the term and they're just talking about survival. But resilience is when you experience a challenge or a setback and you come out stronger than you were before, having learned something new."

After decades of teaching and coaching, Aguilar has written a book that joins her years of experience in classrooms around the country with the research about resilience. Called Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators, the book offers practical ways educators can build their resilience mapped to months of the year, and the ebbs and flows of energy that dictate school life.

But this isn't the average self-help book. Aguilar, like many educators, sees real issues in the systems and structures of education. But she also knows teachers are too overwhelmed and tired to pick their eyes up and see the bigger issues. Aguilar believes that building personal resilience leads to action. In Onward she writes:

"Here is my theory of action: If we boost our individual resilience, then we will have more energy to address organizational and systemic conditions -- to elect officials who will fund public education, organize against policies that dehumanize educators, and push back on punitive assessment policies and scripted curriculum that turn teachers into robots and students into depositories to be filled. With more energy and more resilience, we can build and strengthen the kinds of communities in which we can thrive, where we can engage in professional development that allows us to reflect on our own biases, and where we can observe and learn from each other."

As a coach, Aguilar is action oriented. She wanted to give educators things they can do, habits they can form to boost their resilience. The current research isn't framed that way; it describes dispositions, which are more like attitudes or ways of being. Resilient people tend towards optimism, for example, and they're curious and courageous.

Aguilar has taken that research and developed a sequence of reflections and activities that teachers can do throughout the year to build habits that cultivate a resilient disposition. She thinks they will be most powerful if educators do them together.
1. Know Yourself
"You'd need to do this in the summer when you have a bit of a break," Aguilar said. She recommends June, when school has ended and teachers have had a little time to recover. In June many educators are reflecting on the end of the year anyway, so why not go a bit deeper to think through the values, socio-political identity, strengths and personality traits that define each of us?

In Onward, Aguilar writes: "Self-knowledge helps us to be more confident about our actions and clear on our decisions. It's what enables us to show up in a way we want to show up."

This is foundational work. Everything else depends on self-knowledge because so much of how one reacts to a situation is rooted in experience, context, identity and perception.
2. Emotions
There's been an increased focus on social and emotional learning for kids in classrooms, but much less attention is paid to helping teachers manage the array of emotions that come up over the course of a school day. Just because teachers are adults doesn't mean they've had practice recognizing, naming and reckoning with their emotions.

"Embedded within emotional resilience is emotional intelligence," Aguilar said. "And I find so many adults have never had an opportunity to really learn about emotions."

In the workbook that accompanies Onward, Aguilar offers activities that walk educators through a process of thinking through what an emotion is, how to understand their own, and offers language to talk about emotion. This is reflective work, perfect for July when teachers have a little distance from the classroom.
3. Tell Empowering Stories
"It really might be the most important habit, but you can't practice it well without understanding your emotions, so they all connect," Aguilar said.

The stories educators tell dictate the experience they'll have, she said. The story could be about kids and parents that don't value education. Or, it could be that teaching in a particular context is hard because the political and economic systems aren't set up to support this community. "You can tell really different stories about the same thing," Aguilar said.

She has found that educators often get excited about this habit: "When they realize they have the power to reframe a situation, it's actually very empowering. It can be a big relief to people."

It can also open up avenues of creativity. Sometimes teachers can feel so overwhelmed that it's difficult to see a situation in any other way than the one they're already locked into. Aguilar has seen this time and again when coaching. She often asks teachers and leaders probing questions to shift the way they see the constraints and structures within which they are working.

"I think it's really critical because so many educators almost can't imagine how things could be better," she said.
4. Build Community
Aguilar imagines this habit tied to September when school is back in session and people have energy and hope for the year ahead. "One of the visions I had when I wrote this book was that teachers would read this book together," she said. "They'd talk about it together, and they'd do the workbook activities together."

And in doing so, they'd deepen relationships with one another. Those relationships can be a crucial source of resilience when setbacks occur.
5. Be Here Now
This section draws from mindfulness practices and their power to ground educators in the present moment. Mindfulness in schools has exploded over the past few years, especially on the West Coast where Aguilar lives. So she was surprised when readers from elsewhere in the country had never heard of it.

"The ability to be present in the moment allows you to be clear on what story you're telling," Aguilar said. "It's really hard to tell powerful stories if you're not able to recognize when you're telling a story."

She equates this set of strategies with October because towards the end of this month things can start to get hard for educators. It's a time for deep breaths, creating some metacognitive space before reacting to students, and taking care of oneself.
6. Take Care of Yourself
November is often a hard month for teachers. The excitement from the beginning of the year has worn off, the days are getting shorter and darker, and exhaustion becomes a factor. Most educators have probably heard they should take care of themselves and yet many still don't. Aguilar uses this section to help educators interrogate why this might be.

"Teaching is so dominated by women and there's so much messaging to women about self care, but they also get messages about giving to everyone else," Aguilar said. Sometimes deep values come up about who deserves rest and what it means to prove one's worth.

"It's intended to help people untangle what's going on," Aguilar said.

7. Focus on the Bright Spots

"This is an opportunity to focus on strengths and assets and skills and shine a light on what's working," Aguilar said. Again, in the heart of winter it can be easy to let a natural negativity bias take over. It requires active work to push back against those thoughts and create structures to notice the progress students have made and the many beautiful things happening in schools and classrooms.

"Resilience has a lot to do with how often we experience what is thought about as positive emotions. That is in part how we get to the thriving part of the definition, and not just the surviving," Aguilar said.

It's easy to dwell on the negative, the lesson plan gone awry, the one kid who won't engage. But Aguilar says that unless educators actively work to refill the reserves of satisfaction, meaning and connection it's hard to keep going.
8. Cultivate Compassion
In January it might seem like teachers would return from a vacation and feel rested, ready to jump back into the classroom with energy. That's partly true, but Aguilar has also found that the time off can decrease people's tolerance for stuff they have to deal with in the classroom. They've felt like a normal human for a few weeks and they don't want to go back. That's why she suggests cultivating compassion for oneself, colleagues and students during this time.

"Recognize that if you're cultivating compassion you can have greater understanding with a student who lost their temper and did whatever they did, and you can respond differently in that moment."
9. Be A Learner
Learning is something resilient people do. They take away a lesson from hardships they experience.

"One of the most useful prompts for someone when they're in a challenging situation is to ask, is there any possibility I could learn something from this experience?" They don't even have to know what they're learning yet, but just asking if there's something that will reveal itself later can make it feel possible to get through.

Aguilar used the example of her mother's battle with cancer and ultimate death. In the moment, she felt horrible and couldn't see her way out of the pain and grief she was experiencing.

"When I think back to that time, now I can see there were things that I learned," Aguilar said. "But it's definitely not a situation in which I would say that was a great gift because I learned this or that. Without question I would rather have my mother back."

In those difficult moments, it helps to acknowledge and value the emotions someone is feeling. Without that acknowledgement people don't feel heard and they can get stuck in the negative emotions.
10. Play and Create
There's a lot of research showing that play is fundamental to learning and to human nature. Yet it's often stripped from schools. Play also helps people to be creative, deal with stress and solve problems, all qualities connected to a common disposition of resilient people -- courage.

11. Ride the Wave of Change

"Springtime is when things start changing in schools," Aguilar said. "Spring time can be really unsettling and difficult." New initiatives are launched, hiring happens, teaching assignments change, it can be hard for teachers and deplete their energy.

Aguilar recommends that teachers engage with change, but think carefully about whether the change is within their sphere of influence. Making that distinction can help an educator decide where to spend their energy.

"We all have a finite amount of energy and we can make decisions about how and where we use it. Change gives us an opportunity to reflect on that."
12 Celebrate and Appreciate
"We need to end the year on a note of celebration," Aguilar said. Taking time to recognize growth and show gratitude offers a different perspective on what can be a tiring time of year. Many schools have end of year rituals to celebrate the achievements of the year, but personal rituals, as well as class rituals can also be powerful.

Aguilar has no illusions that teachers will pick up this book, do a few exercises, and magically become more resilient. She knows these qualities require cultivation and time, but from personal experience she also knows they work. She now has a daily gratitude practice, and she finds herself repeating over and over again the activities that help her deconstruct her thoughts and beliefs to gain a deeper understanding of her values.

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12 Ways Teachers Can Build Resilience So They Can Make Systemic Change | KQED

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When things are hard in the classroom, it's tempting to blame the kids, their parents, or the communities they come from, but those are not things an individual teacher can control. Building personal resilience is about responding to adversity, to setbacks, to getting knocked down. The resilience comes from learning something in those moments.

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Rethinking Literacy for Empathy and Action in a Digital Age

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Our society is flooded with technology. It enables people to connect, it amplifies voices, and it has the power to enrich lives. Yet our society can be so distracted by the possibilities of technology that we can forget it is our humanity-and the stories we share-that make it meaningful. As educators, it is up to us to ensure that students know how to use all the resources available to them to think critically and compassionately about the world.

In Read the World, Kristin Ziemke and Katie Muhtaris draw from their own rich pedagogical background and classroom experience to provide teaching strategies and flexible lessons that support students in acquiring the skills they need to thrive-academically, socially, and emotionally-in today's digital world. Kristin and Katie layer research-based instructional strategies, a student-centered approach, and strategic use of technology to outline a path that:

builds upon what students already know about reading and interacting with print and provides new strategies for comprehending digital mediums like images, web content, eText, and more

provides practical suggestions for centering curricula around empathy

supports student agency and engages learners to employ the skills they've learned to take action on issues to benefit the lives of others, as well as their own

offers resources, guidelines, and suggestions for teachers to help ensure that students are accessing print and digital stories which reflect their own experiences and a wide array of experiences that differ from their own.

Each chapter offers lessons with target outcomes to help you assess students' growth and invites you to reflect on the work as it unfolds in your classroom.

Our students have been raised in a digital culture; now we need to guide them to use technology to tell their stories, hear the stories of others, and take action. With modeling, explicit instruction, and time for practice, we can-and must-teach students to build bridges, eliminate barriers, and thrive in this world. Start where it makes sense for your school and community and provide students the tools, teaching, and opportunity to rethink literacy and read the world.

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Our society is flooded with technology. It enables people to connect, it amplifies voices, and it has the power to enrich lives. Yet our society can be so distracted by the possibilities of technology that we can forget it is our humanity-and the stories we share-that make it meaningful.

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The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning

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The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning

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Advancing Social and Emotional Learning - CASEL

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CASEL is helping make evidence-based social and emotional learning an integral part of education, preschool through high school.

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Social and Emotional Learning Roadmap for Reopening School

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Reunite, Renew, and Thrive: Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Roadmap for Reopening School - CASEL

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As educators across the country prepared to welcome students and adults back to school in Fall 2020, they faced the layered impact of school closures, the COVID-19 pandemic, and racial inequities exacerbated by the pandemic and amplified by the nationwide mobilization for racial justice.

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Created by a super talented team of Boston Public Schools teachers led by Jess Madden-Fuoco. If you use these, please credit her :)

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Restorative Justice Circle Plans, 2018-2019 Boston Green Academy

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Restorative Justice's Promise by Fania Davis

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Restorative Justice's Promise by Fania Davis

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Fania Davis - Restorative Justice's Promise | Bioneers

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Easily create beautiful interactive video lessons for your students you can integrate right into your LMS. Track students' progress with hassle-free analytics as you flip your classroom!

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School Suspensions Are An Adult Behavior by Fania Davis 

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School Suspensions Are An Adult Behavior by Fania Davis 

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School suspensions are an adult behavior | Rosemarie Allen | TEDxMileHigh

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A conversation about using Restorative Justice practices

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A conversation about using Restorative Justice practices

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A few colleagues in Boston Public Schools discuss what it's like to use Circles in their teaching.

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Listen to Boston Circle Corner on Spotify. There's a lot of talk about restorative justice around the Boston public schools but what is it? How does it even work?

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Understanding how school discipline policies can contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline is essential for educators and families. Harsh punishments, automatic out-of-class time and police involvement for discipline can push young people out of classrooms and into the criminal legal system. But educators, parents and caregivers can help to change this harmful system by advocating for and implementing practices that prioritize mental health and well-being.

We offer this new resource page that highlights LFJ articles and content to open dialogue, shift practices and foster change to benefit all young people.

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Learning for Justice | Education Resources

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Learning for Justice provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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Lessons from crisis: trauma-responsive teaching tools for the work ahead

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Lessons from crisis: trauma-responsive teaching tools for the work ahead

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A guide for Social Emotional Learning

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by Marshal rosenberg

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NonViolent Communication by Marshal Rosenberg : Animated Book Summary

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Identity Resource and Activities

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An online companion to the book The Children of Willesden Lane. This powerful true story of Lisa Jura, one of 10,000 young refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Vienna on the Kindertransport as a child before World War II.

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An online companion to the book The Children of Willesden Lane. This powerful true story of Lisa Jura, one of 10,000 young refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Vienna on the Kindertransport as a child before World War II.

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"I believe in the power of Facing History."

-Durias D., Facing History Alum

"I went to a Facing History workshop and it opened my eyes."

-Tareeq R., Educator

Facing History & Ourselves
uses lessons of history
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Facing History & Ourselves is more than our name. It is an active and continuous process that calls on each of us to connect the choices of the past to those we face today. To build a more just and equitable future, we must face our history in all its complexity, Are you ready to face history with us?

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Facing History has thousands of research-based resources and professional learning events to support Social Studies and English Language Arts education.

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And hopefully, they will always remember what happened to us and make sure that it won't happen again.

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Facing History & Ourselves uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate.

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Institute for Racial Equity in Literacy  

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Institute for Racial Equity in Literacy  

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Heinemann Podcast

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Listen in or watch as Dr. Sonja Cherry Paul and Tricia Ebarvia talk about two upcoming virtual #IREL20 institutes focused on centering racial equity in our literacy practices. ⁠

Click the image below to download the #IREL20 brochure! VIRTUAL #IREL20 INSTITUTE 1: JULY 13-17, 2020
Understanding Systemic Racism: Society, Schools, and Classrooms ⁠

⁠ VIRTUAL #IREL20 INSTITUTE 2: JULY 27-31, 2020
Interrogating Internalized Racism in Ourselves and in Our Practice ⁠

These institutes were developed in collaboration with Heinemann PD Services. Each #IREL20 multi-day institute is a full week of interactive, self-paced multi-media engagement and content, punctuated with a central day of synchronous live online sessions. All activities will be hosted within the event's dedicated online PD platform.

***

The following links are to articles and resources that Sonja and Tricia mention during the talk. They are listed in order of mention:

***

View the recording of the June 15, 2020 Facebook LIVE session with Dr. Sonja Cherry Paul and Tricia Ebarvia.

Teaching Interpretation. Sonja Cherry-Paul, Ed.D., has taught middle school English for twenty years. Sonja's research and work stem from an unyielding commitment to anti-bias and anti-racist pedagogy and practices. Sonja developed curriculum that centered the work of racial literacy in K-12 schools. She co-founded the Race Matters Committee in the school district in order to spotlight and center issues related to race and racism and provide faculty and staff with the language and tools to facilitate conversations with students about race.

Sonja is the co-founder and co-facilitator of the Institute for Racial Equity in Literacy. She is an author, consultant, and senior research associate at TCRWP. Sonja is the co-facilitator of the Heinemann Fellows. She is the coauthor, with Dana Johansen, of the titles Breathing New Life into Book Clubs, Flip Your Writing Workshop, and

To learn more visit sonjacherrypaul.com or follow Sonja or on Twitter @SonjaCherryPaul

Tricia Ebarvia has spent the last 19 years as a classroom educator with a student-driven approach to teaching reading and writing. Through her career, Tricia has applied the philosophy of the teacher-as-researcher while applying best practices to "cultivate independent learners" through independent reading and student choice. "For better or worse, "well enough" doesn't satisfy me. I approach each school year, each course, each unit with fresh eyes." Tricia is an english teacher and department chair at Conestoga High School in Berwyn, PA. Tricia is a Heinemann Fellow from the 2016-2018 cohort.

To learn more visit triciaebarvia.org or follow Tricia on Twitter @triciaebarvia

Tricia is working on a new book that will be published by Heinemann in Spring 2021.

Below is a full transcript of the podcast. This transcript has been machine generated.

Sonja: Hi, everyone. Hello, hello. I'm Sonja Cherry-Paul. I am an activist, an educator and an author from New York. I've been teaching middle school ... I was a middle school teacher for about 20 years. And I'm here today with the full force of all of my blackness, and the history, and the richness of my racialized identity, and I'm bringing that here today to talk to you about this moment in our nation, IREL 20, and liberation.

Tricia: Hi, everyone. My name is Tricia Ebarvia, and I have been a high school English teacher since 2001. I teach in a public school just outside of Philadelphia. I am so excited to be here tonight with Sonja to talk about liberation and how we can get there, and especially how our literacy practices can take us there. Since this is a conversation that centers race and racism, I also want to say that I am a second generation Filipino American. My parents immigrated here in the 1970s. My racial autobiography informs a lot of my instruction in some ways. I've been unpacking that over the years, and I will share that throughout this conversation.

Tricia: But Sonja and I ... I don't remember exactly when Sonja and I met, I just feel like we've just known each other forever. We founded last year together the Institute for Racial Equity in Literacy. We had found that there were a lot of conversations around equity, and there were a lot of conversations around literacy, but the intersections of those were something that we found weren't really happening in a lot of conversations. And so we decided to come together, and we had an opportunity to do a summer institute last year, and we are very excited to be able to bring that Institute to you this summer. Not in person as we had hoped because, of course, of our global pandemic, but at least online. This webinar, we hope is a way to kick off that conversation. So whether you are able to sign up for our institute or not, we hope that this conversation over the next few minutes or so is going to provoke some thinking and some conversation for ... within yourself and with your colleagues. So keep it going.

Sonja: Right. So, Tricia, I just want to say a few words, maybe a little more than a few words, about the fierce urgency of now, and us evoking the words of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Which we know these ... Hopefully we know these words come from his "I Have a Dream" speech. And Tricia knows one of my great sources of frustration is the way in which Dr. King's life and legacy has been whitewashed and reduced to these canned narratives. So I think it's extremely relevant that we both frame this discussion with these words, as well as talk about the ways that his work, the work, has been co-opted, particularly now as the country is finally beginning to discuss the racial data around COVID-19, respond to it by opening up the country, almost as fast as we can, now that we understand who it's killing. And as we see continued police brutality, and are beginning to discuss re-imagining what school will look like when we go back in the fall.

Sonja: It was 1963 when Dr. King gave this speech, and within the first two pages, he's calling attention to the political, the economic and social conditions, plaguing black Americans. And these same conditions are plaguing black Americans today, right now. We must call out the way Dr. King, during that time in America, was fiercely hated by white America. His life was threatened. His family was threatened. The government wiretapped his house. His house was set on fire. He was assassinated. Because his activism was not simply about demonstrating peacefully. It was about equality and it was about change. There's a legacy in this country of violence against black people who dare to speak up and claim their humanity.

Sonja: So our country often cherry picks the words and actions of Dr. King. They cherry pick the parts that they feel most comfortable with, foregoing the others. And so as we frame this conversation right from the start about the fierce urgency of now, we need to be centering the lives of an experience as a black man and brown people in our thinking around what you're hearing. Now is the time for audacious demands for justice, and for those who are serious about advancing the work of equity to make those demands unabashedly. So as we're having this conversation with protests and unrest happening around not only the nation, but the world, about the death of George Floyd, and all of the black men and women that have come before him, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, yet another black man, Rayshard Brooks, was murdered by police in Atlanta, Georgia this weekend.

Sonja: So as we frame this discussion with the fierce urgency of now, refusing to center white comfort and wishes to return to normal, it's important that we think about his other words, too, in that speech, which are often up scored. In particular, I'm thinking about, "We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness, like a mighty stream." So, Trisha, when you think about what has this moment revealed for you, what's coming to mind for you?

Tricia: Well, I think exactly what you said in many ways. As I've been watching the protest being covered by the media, and being covered by social media, including people on various social media networks, I've seen a lot of memes. Dr. King linking arms, like this is what peaceful demonstration looks like, as a way to criticize the uprisings that are happening right now. And again, it's this very selective memory that I think white America mostly has around Dr. King and his legacy. I worry about the ways in which this moment will again be co-opted. When you were speaking, Sonja, I was thinking ... The word that came to mind was gentrification of civil rights, and what civil rights actually means, and what protest actually means. What does that look like, and what does direct action mean? It is about creating discomfort. That's how you bring people to the table.

Tricia: So this moment is revealing to me a lot of the narrative around this moment. How is this being narrated? How is it being covered? What is the media saying versus what are people on the ground saying? Whose voices are being heard? Whose voices are being excluded? Who are the people in positions of power who are going to make decisions? All of these things come to mind. And then I think, too, again, about how this is affecting our kids. Because the way that this is going to get narrated for posterity is also the way that our children, your grandchildren, my grandchildren, they're going to learn about this in school, and what will they learn is the question. Fifty years from now, what is going to be the legacy of this moment?

Tricia: Is it going to be the way we look at Dr. King today? And I would be severely ... I would be disappointed if that's what our textbooks told us about this moment. So I have that urgency right now to think about how can we ... How can we face this moment honestly? I've used the word and heard the word a lot around my colleagues, this idea of the word reckoning, that there needs to be a reckoning. It's past time that there's a reckoning. And part of a reckoning means really looking in the mirror, and you're not going to like what you see. I think this pandemic has revealed what systemic inequities have always existed. And so yeah, I think that it's going to be hard, but it's work that must be done. Otherwise you're going to be caught in a loop. We're just going to be continuing to do this forever. What about you, Sonja? Anything else about this moment right now for you?
Sonja: Yeah, no, everything that you just said. The selective memory of this country, this willful amnesia that has just been perpetuated over and over again. When we look and we see the folks that are in the streets and they are just refusing to die down, they are not there to placate. They are there to disturb you, to jumpstart the collective consciousness of this country in order to create change. So, yeah. Yeah.
Tricia: I think, too, what heartened ... what I feel a little bit hopeful about, it's a lot of youth, just like it was in the 1960s and 70s. Youth. The youth will lead us if we're willing to listen to them.

Sonja: That's right. That's right. Yeah.

Tricia: So I think when we think again about this moment right now, and Dr. King said the fierce urgency of now in 1963, when will now be ... When will we actually pay attention to now? What will it take to disturb us enough to actually make a difference? And so when we look at what's happening right now, I think that our pandemic, I think the uprisings, the civil rights uprisings that are happening today ... I always think about, again, another one of those memes on social media, if you ever wondered what you would have done during civil rights, you can just look at what you're doing right now.

Sonja: Yes.

Tricia: You don't need to wonder. You can just ask yourself, well, what am I doing right now? And understanding, of course, we are in a global pandemic, and there are restrictions in place for the collective good, understandably. But there are things that we can do. And one of those is to reckon with our role in how our system has played out, especially our role as educators. So yeah, thinking about right now, systems, inequities in our healthcare system. Sonja mentioned who is getting sick, who are ... who's considered essential? Sometimes I can't help but hear when I hear the word essential, sometimes I hear the word disposable.

Sonja: Yes.

Tricia: The racial health disparities, economic injustices. And of course, schools. Schools is a system. I think these last three months teaching through a distance learning model has been very revealing as far as what our kids need and don't need. When we think about what is essential learning, it's interesting how so many state tests, of course, have been canceled. That's interesting that state tests have been canceled. Suddenly those aren't necessary. It makes me wonder, well, have they ever been? Yeah. So all these things right now are ... The current pandemic and our crises right now are really revealing.
Sonja: Yes. And I love that you said what's revealing is who is considered disposable. It is a hard word to reckon with, but it is the word. Who is considered disposable? And I feel like what has been revealed in these months is a collision. All of the institutes, healthcare, education, economic, policing, colliding together in ways that are finally visible to some who have willfully or unintentionally not seen what has been happening in this nation, and the consequences of this emerging from the wreckage and flames. Time and time again are black and brown bodies treated as disposable.
Tricia: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep. And in our schooling, too. When I think about the disparities that are going to come out as far as the learning-

Sonja: Yes.

Tricia: We need to be ready when we see that. And we shouldn't be surprised by that data, either.

Sonja: We should not. And we should be prepared to start seeing a flurry of the usage of the gap word again, the academic gap, which is a racist term, and folks are ready to just pull that right out of their back pockets to justify the kinds of solutions they're going to come up with for how we educate kids in the post COVID-19 ... era of post COVID. So we all should be prepared for this.

Tricia: Yeah. Without recognizing that any quote, unquote, gap that we're seeing is really by design.

Sonja: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tricia: Right? That there is not anything inherently wrong or deficient about children, but everything in our systems.

Sonja: That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

Tricia: So again, crises reveal character. So we have to think about ... I think in moments of crises, we tend to fall back to our biases. That's what research has shown over and over again. It's almost a survival instinct, and we can't get rid of our biases. They're baked into us. That's how we've been socialized. And so the question becomes, when we think about the purpose and function of schools ... and our audience right now is a lot of teachers. Think about the last few months. To what extent did you spend time really thinking about the purpose and function of schools, and then your role in it? And in thinking about the actions ... And again, I understand that this is an emergency remote learning situation. This is not something that any of us signed up for. This is just how things ... These are the cards that we were dealt. But how many decisions were made, and who was centered in these decisions? When we're thinking about falling back on what we know is good for kids, or what was comfortable for us.

Sonja: Yeah.

Tricia: That's the question.

Sonja: And I think what you're saying is so true, this willingness to just really think that through and interrogate it, because certainly in times of uncertainty, as you said, and also times of stress, we revert to this default ... these default ways of knowing and being in the world. We can see that in the history of healthcare. Doctors who don't interrogate their biases and assumptions, continuing to ignore black pain, to treat black and brown people as if they have higher thresholds for pain and trauma. Left unchecked, this becomes the default. There's a history of medical institutions using African-Americans unwillingly for their research that extends beyond Tuskegee, beyond Henrietta Lacks, that absolutely shaped the way that doctors right now are treating black and brown people today.

Sonja: I say all this to say, when we think about schooling, another institution, and folks say they're so anxious to return, what is the normal that they are so anxious to return to? Because that normal is grounded in whiteness and committing educational violence against black and brown students. This has been happening since the beginning. To evoke Dr. Ibram Kendi's words, it's been stamped into schooling from the moment black and brown children stepped foot through the doors. So yeah. Where do we go from here?
Tricia: Yeah. It's interesting to think about when people are ... I understand it, but that phrase. I just want to get back to normal. I want everything to reopen. I want ... That urge to go back to what was comfortable. And I think a lot of people are looking around, myself included, I think ours included, that what ... I don't want to go back to normal. And I'll be very honest speaking from my own experience. This is not ideal. This is not an ideal learning environment in my house, and it's not an ideal teaching environment. And I have three children, and I'm not sure how much academic learning that they've done. They've done some. I'm fortunate that they tend to do school well according to those measures. But I also know that I've ... This time has also been a gift in other ways. I think about the ways in which they've been able to bond.

Tricia: Right. I think about the ways in which they've been able to bond. I think about the ways in which they have learned other lessons about what it means to be a human being, how they have been not under the grind of competitiveness that they see and feel in schools, going from one class period to the next, to the next, to the next. The flexibility that they've been able to experience right now. So, there are lots of things about right now, as terrible as it is in most ways, that I think we can learn from. So that we don't just go back to the grind that was wearing us all down, and that has been designed to systematically have a negative impact on black and brown children.
Tricia: So, thinking about how have our schools been normed? They've been normed according to the people who have had power, which in this country, have traditionally been white men. Right? And so, we have to think about those, unearth and unpack those values that are really the underpinning of our public school system.

Sonja: I agree with you. I think that unearthing an unpacking of the underpinnings of school is exactly where we must go immediately, because schools are the most critical site for change for me in our institutions, among our institutions, because it's here where kids are indoctrinated in these kind of belief statements that have brought us to where we are right now in this moment. And oftentimes I'll hear from folks, educators will say about kids, "Oh, well, they must have learned that at home." And what we need to do is shift the conversation to, they must have learned that at school. They learned it through silences around race and racism, and this unyielding devotion to whiteness, from what kids are asked to read, to how they are asked to write, they are swimming in whiteness.

Sonja: And for black and brown kids in particular, they're drowning in it. They're drowning in it because our educational system again, and again, tells them that something about them is fundamentally wrong. I think about your boys being home with you Tricia, and how under these unfortunate circumstances, how that bubble you've created for them... Just, it's so nurturing and powerful for them to not have to face that message constantly when they walk through school, that who they are and what their beliefs are, there's something inherently wrong with that. So, we have to be willing to, in terms of where we go from here, we have to be willing to recognize the steady spirit killing intentions of our curriculum and instruction on black and brown children, and then dramatically, not gradually, make substantive changes.

Tricia: Yeah. And I think again, if schools are a mirror of society, ask yourself, well, what does society look like right now? Right? And so when we think about what's going on right now, and what our children, all of our children are seeing in the news, they might see this, right? They might see people who in April were out protesting. And these protests were of course all about individual freedom, right? Freedom to open up businesses. And I do want to say, I'm very empathetic towards people who want businesses to open because their livelihoods depend on it. Right? That is a real issue. I get that. At the same time, I can't help but wonder, what if our society was one that there was a safety net for crises, like a global pandemic, so that people wouldn't have to choose between putting food on the table and their health, and the collective health of people in their community.

Tricia: Maybe we need to imagine a little bit beyond that. And so Dr.Kendi here, he wrote this essay for The Atlantic. And I just love the way that he frames this, that some Americans are, right now, want to live in a society that frees them as individuals by subjugating the community. That was the psyche of the slave holder who believed he was free, only if the community was enslaved. And I think about that idea of individualism and how much individualism is so baked into our school systems. Kids are measured, they are their success. Quote, unquote, success is quantified. They are ranked, they are tested. They are... Think about the level of competition, right?

Tricia: I remember when this pandemic began, there were discussions among many teachers in my school and other schools and other teachers I've talked to, teachers were like, "Well, how are we going to grade? We can't really... How do we do these?" And these are good conversations. And some people expressed this nervousness that kids weren't going to do the work that we assigned or provided, if they weren't getting grades for it. That tells you a lot.

Sonja: Yes.

Tricia: If kids are only doing things because there's a number attached to it, then that's feedback for us. They don't see that there's something there. I think about the way that individualism is part of that grind that I was talking about.
Sonja: Yeah. I think you're so right, Tricia. America loves to tout its individual freedoms and to take great pride in them. And lest I be accused of being unpatriotic, I'm not. But I also need to point to this ideology, because it has absolutely everything to do, in terms of leading us to where we are, to this moment right now. This idea that we don't need to care about anyone but ourselves and we can stand at the sidelines and watch the terror inflicted on communities, as a result of that stance. This rush to open the country is absolutely a form of racial terror. It's the nation, again, saying loudly and proudly exactly who is, I'm going to come back to that word that you used, disposable.

Sonja: And folks expressing gratitude for being able to get a haircut, and dining in restaurants. And we've got armed men storming the State Capitol. White men, I should say, storming the State Capitol. The story, we know, would absolutely be differently if these were hundreds of black men storming a State Capitol armed, to demand their freedoms in response to these stay at home orders.

Sonja: So, we're going to have to get to the point where we talk about morals and our core values, and we have to name this. And we have to face it in order for things to truly change. We have to recognize that these citizens are the students in the seats of our classrooms, have been shaped and encouraged to think this way, throughout our educational practices, as a result of our educational practices.

Tricia: Yeah. I think about... I mean, it's not on the slide here, but I go back to Charlottesville. And I go back to Charlottesville in 2017. And I think about those young men with their torches, polos and khaki pants, and I could not help but think to myself that these are kids in our classrooms.

Sonja: Yes.

Tricia: And it horrified me. I remember that moment thinking... I mean, I understand. I hear what people are thinking right now. Well, it comes from their parents, all those things. Yes, you're right. Parents are... And community members and family, they are a powerful socializing force in our young children, as they should be. Schools also play a role. And to be very honest, schools for some kids are a place where they can be exposed to ideas that are also outside of their family, so they can test and tease. This is not about indoctrination, it is about getting the full sense of what our, I think our... A collective society could be and could look like. And yeah, I just can't help but think about the role that teachers and schools play here.

Sonja: And I'm glad you brought up Charlottesville, because I remember that August, Tricia. And I remember walking back into school and it was superintendent's conference day, and all the faculty had come together for the first time since we're getting ready to launch the school year. And I remember not one person talked about it. It was the same year as the... What was the ice bucket challenge? Do you remember that?

Tricia: Yep.

Sonja: I can't remember what it was, but it was the ice bucket challenge and everyone was posting their ice bucket pourings on each other and having fun. And it was coming up on the slides in the auditorium of my school, as it was being shown to all of us to sort of welcome us back in. At no point did Charlottesville come up.
Sonja: So, we can continue to talk about kids learning stuff at home. But as I said, we have to talk about, no, they are absolutely learning this in school. They're learning this in school. And yeah, when we think about our collective freedoms, we can be thinking about how do we move toward a focus on community and the collective? How can we understand that such a focus does not take away from the individual? And I think as an African American woman, what has been a core value in my upbringing, is to think about the collective. I was taught that my actions mattered not simply on my own, but as a part of the whole, and to have a sense of humility, right?

Sonja: Too often, this is not what we see valued in schools. As you said, you're taught to compete against your peer. Your focus is on yourself and not on others. We have to acknowledge that that has been what's driven schooling, this idea of who is the best, and determining that by quantitative data.

Tricia: Yeah. I think about the ways in which we look at test scores and we think about, what does high performing mean? And high achieving? And rankings and ratings and all these things. And I think we have to ask ourselves, what is the metric? And I think if we change the metric for what is a good person? What is a responsible citizen? Like, if we had a report card on those kinds of things. If we had, let's say for example, the teaching tolerance, social justice standards. If those were our standards, I think a lot of places that are considered high performing would not be so high performing. Maybe even failing, according to those different metrics. And so, I want us to think about, again, this idea of collective freedom. And Dr. Kendi here, "I want to live in a society that frees me as an individual, by freeing my community. That was the psyche of the enslaved knew she was enslaved, only because her community was enslaved."

Tricia: This idea, what is freedom? Right? Freedom is one of those words that's tossed around. And we can't really talk about freedom if we don't talk about individual versus collective, or really, not just individual versus collective, but individual and collective, individual and community. I think right now, when you look at these pictures here, you can see there is a moment of a kind of reckoning, or a kind of moment of truth here. What is going to be more important? And I think that the pandemic, as far as our collective health... I can say, "Well, I'm just going to do my own thing, and Sonja's going to do her own thing." Except that we can't, we've agreed to a social contract, where we live with one another.
Tricia: And what I do, whether I choose to wear my mask or not, whether I choose to teach this book or not, it does affect Sonja. And it does reflect how her children are going to move in the world. Right? And we have to think in the ways that we are all part of the larger tapestry, right? And similar to Sonja, I think black and brown communities, many black and brown communities and indigenous communities, there's an ethos of community, collectivism, of cooperation, that is not just about the individual. Growing up, my parents, it was very clear to me that I, when I stepped out into the world, I wasn't just me. But I was also representing my family, I was representing my community. Not so much that I was a spokesperson, but that... Not that I spoke for, but I was a reflection of, right? And so that I moved in the world thinking about that, and then thinking about how then I could always be in community with other people. Right? That was constantly the way that I was thinking about things.

Tricia: And I think that there's a wisdom there, right? Like Dr. Kim Parker and I, some of you might know, we organized a 31 days IBPoC, which is 31 days of writing from indigenous black and educators of color, in the month of May. And one of the central messages or takeaways from that, is the collective wisdom and excellence. This is a time where we're looking for solutions, where people are looking around thinking, what are we going to do? Right? In any crisis, people look around and say, "What are we going to do?" Whether it's a crisis like climate change, whether it's a crisis like gun violence, whether it's a crisis like right now with the pandemic, what are we going to do?

Tricia: And I think we have answers. There are answers. And those answers have largely been ignored. And those answers oftentimes are in the wisdom and excellence of brown and black communities, if we're willing to hear. It's time to hear.

Sonja: And that ethos of care and collective good, that are part of the wisdom of indigenous black people of color that you and Dr. Kim Parker were thinking about, in 31 days, it is that ethos that is violated when our kids go to school, right? It's another example of educational violence, by essentially schools working to break that, to force indigenous black people of color and our students to succumb to these white ways of being and knowing in the world.

Sonja: And I think about everything that you're saying, like the solutions, the solutions and how the message is heard. And yes, indigenous people in particular have been telling us and telling us and telling us and telling us forever and ever, and we can't hear the message about, for example, the environment until Leonardo DiCaprio says it? I mean, I don't understand. It's just this dismissing of collective knowledge and care that is, again, it's a violence. In my community, you're a part of the village. You've heard it, right? You're a part of the village. And yes, you matter individually, but it is collectively that we work together, and the village is here for you and you work for the village. So, I do think that dipping into that richness, into that well of collective good, is essential in terms of where we go from here.

Tricia: Yeah. So again, thinking again, we started this thinking about what are your beliefs about the purpose and function of schools in our society? Do you think that schools are simply a mirror of our society, or do you believe as I do, that they can be transformative? That schools don't have to be a place where kids are inflicted with the kind of social, emotional, intellectual violence, right? That schools can be a place for liberation. That we can actually be free. I think about the ways in which, growing up... And I did go to predominantly white schools. I think about the ways in which parts of my own identity, I knew I had to cut them off when I walked through the school door.

Tricia: I mean, to some extent that is true for every child, right? Because you show one part of you in one context and another. So, I don't want to like, all students this. But I will say that there is a specific kind of contortion that brown and black children have to learn when they go to school, because they learn very quickly that the parts that nurtured them, and held them tight, and really developed core sense of who they were at home, that those things have to be tucked away in a box the minute they go into school. And that message is received over and over again, by not just the ways of being that they have to be in school, but also when we think about how they are represented in curriculum, or really not represented in curriculum, right?

Tricia: ... or are really not represented in curriculum, right? So again, if you're a teacher who's thinking... Recently there's been a lot of teachers, they've acknowledged that racism has existed, but I think recent events have really clarified for them. I think the extent to which it continues to damage kids, especially with the pandemic, I think also, has really shone a light on these inequities. But I think if you're surprised and disturbed, that's a moment to reflect on yourself and ask, "Why am I disturbed?" Because the system is working exactly as designed.

Sonja: That's right.

Tricia: All the inequities that we have seen that have come out because of school closures and distance learning, every system that we see where there are racial inequities, that's how they were designed. They are the logical consequence of practices, policies, or lack of policies that have led to our moment right now.

Tricia: If you've really been paying attention. And so if you haven't been and were surprised and disturbed, and I'm sometimes surprised that I'm still surprised. I constantly think about "I can't believe this". And I think, "Well, why didn't I believe this?" And I have to unpack my own privilege and my own like sense of "Why didn't I know that?" And then I have to ask myself "How come I wasn't taught this", too. So again, it's like a kind of reckoning with understanding systemically how all this has been working and also my role in it. And then my role moving forward.

Sonja: That's right. Racism in education, it's not coincidental. As you said, it's designed this way. It's functioning efficiently so it's not coincidental. It's not isolated, it is endemic. It is stamped into the foundation of schooling. And when I think about the beliefs and purposes and function of schools in our society, this draws me back to really learning and implementing anti-racist critical race theory, culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies, not as a list of practices that we can just check off occasionally and throughout the year, but as part of the blueprint that we design and the foundation that we build.
Sonja: So anti-racism education is not about repairing cracks in the foundations. It's about our realization, reckoning if we will, evoke that word again, that we need to tear down the foundation and rebuild it in ways that does not silence everything that we've been talking about. And to see this work as not exclusive from the curriculum, it is the curriculum. It's the bedrock upon which we build so that students understand the larger social and historical context of racism. If we are to really have this transformative approach to education that we're looking for.

Tricia: Yep. And again, I think as we're looking for what, where, how are we going to get back to normal? And you know, this is a piece by Kelly Wickham Hurst that Sonja and I both love so much that she posted when school closures started and this idea that, what if quarantine homeschooling is bad for black children, right? What if, like when I shared with you, I kind of knew, and maybe this is what you accept as a person of color when you walk into school is that there are parts of you that you just have to like cut off when you go into the door, you'd have to cross those parts of your identity off, imagine the excellence that we could all achieve and benefit from, if kids could come to school whole.

Sonja: Yes.

Tricia: You know, and I think about, there was a line in this piece where she wrote, and it's not only just black children, but I mean, thinking about the racism around COVID-19 against Asian people, the spike in racism, against Asian people, there are kids right now who because they've been forced to stay home and Asian children, they have not had to go to school and to contend with the microaggressions and really outright aggressions that they might be facing otherwise. And so we have to think about again, like where, and in what ways, were our schools like being in the actual building, being damaging for some of our kids and how do we, when we go back, how do we make sure that, that's not part of the normal that we go back to and that whole transforming model that Sonja was talking about?

Sonja: Yeah. Yeah.

Tricia: Sonja, did you want to talk, you had such a great piece here. I just wanted to give you a chance to talk a little bit about this.

Sonja: Yeah. So yeah, for 31 days, indigenous black people of color and this amazing movement that you and Dr. Kim Parker have started. I wrote this piece Becoming the Architect of School, Architects of School Building for Liberation, to just sort of very quickly without being too dense, trace the legacy of racism across the history of this country. So that we can see again, that there are no accidents. It's not coincidental what we're seeing in our practices and in our curriculum. This has always been the plan. And so, as we are beginning to reimagine school, I want us to think about all the times that folks have reimagined school, what has been steady is to oppress black and brown children, to commit acts of educational violence against them. And so, as we move into this moment of reimagining school, in the wake of COVID-19, it's going to take the collective of us who are anti-racist educators coming together and demanding change and creating a new blueprint so that we can achieve liberation.

Tricia: And as you were speaking, Sonia, I was just thinking about people who might be sitting here thinking, or maybe not people sitting here tuning into this, but maybe your colleagues who aren't here, maybe thinking like, "Why can't we just go back to normal?" "I don't understand why do we have to change everything?" Why throw the baby out with the bath water kind of thing, like things were working. And I think if you're still in that place, I think that's an invitation to reflect on why you're in that place, right? Like why don't you see, what are you not seeing because black and brown people have been saying this forever, right? And I think that we know the system hasn't been working, right? We know that we have data to prove it. And so like, this is an opportunity if we're going to build something new to build something that takes into account the damage that has been done from the past.

Sonja: Yes.
Tricia: Yeah.
Sonja: Yes

Tricia: So one thing that has been encouraging is been... Dr. Kendi actually posted on social media about how never in his lifetime, has he ever seen so many books about anti-racism or racism in general, on the New York times bestseller list. I believe White Fragility is sold out his book, "How to be an Anti-racist, is sold out. And I think that's... And I have to say, I am heartened by that. And I have to say that, that education, and it's what I have done myself, right? I have had to unlearn and relearn our own history, our real history. I have had to do a lot of self-work as far as critical race theory and so on and so forth. And that all has a place, all of that is good, right? I have been in book clubs where we just like look and study and all of that is important. But I think one of the things that these two articles just recently brought attention to is this idea that what's going to happen after the book club?

Sonja: Yes. Trisha when Trey Johnson wrote, When Black People are in Pain, White People Just Join Book Clubs. I was sitting in my backyard, minding my own black business and this came up and I started reading and my closest friends know that I'm a humming woman. And I just left up out of my seat and just started to hum because listen, years ago I was part of a book club meeting with mostly white educators to discuss one of the most popular books out there that white people in particular have flocked to that you mentioned before. In order to understand and search for answers, or I don't know, about racism and I may or may not have had a cocktail or two at the cocktail hour before entering into this book club. Just want to put that out there.

Sonja: But one of the things that I was really asserting for during that gathering don't know how eloquent it was, was one of the things I was really asserting was that this gathering seems to be a demonstration of performative allyship, which is when the book itself becomes the performance. Because if you're unable to name how the book is going to translate into action and to substantive changes in your practices and in your ways of being in the world and then demonstrate those actions, it's a performance. And so when Trey Johnson wrote this article last week and talked about being caught in this perpetual loop of media cycle, display of racism, folks running to like gather and book club a book, and then nothing. And then media cycle of this loop, this perpetual loop, it just really struck a chord for me.

Tricia: And I think related to that, it's also a lot of the equity PD from people who've never been interested in equity before. I think we're also seeing some of that. And again, I think, the book can't be the means and ends like, it can't because then that's like what you said, then it becomes a performance. It's what you do afterwards, right? Because I read this and I was like, "Okay, well those are all the things that I did." I've done, you know me, I do all the reading but it's what we do with that reading. Do we allow it to change us? Do we connect it to our practices? Do we sit and think, "Okay, well I'm now I'm reading about this theory. How does that look in my everyday life?" How does that look in my classroom? How does that look in the decisions I'm making about curriculum? I have to really think about those things. How does that affect my relationship with kids and what actions can I then take?

Sonja: Yeah.

Tricia: Yeah, and I think, again, I think for some teachers too, with this other meme that I've seen circulating, since removing racist statues, we are removing racist statues, which books are we taking out of our curriculum? And of course this is referring to the removal of Confederate statues. Probably the long overdue removal of some, not probably, definitely the long overdue removal.

Tricia: And I think about years ago, a few years ago, I listened to this podcast with Aisha Taylor on Slate and she was talking about the... It was some anniversary I'm not even really sure, but it was a conversation in which she was discussing the removal and comparing the removal of Confederate statues, like Robert E. Lee to Gone with the Wind, the movie and the book and how... Oh, I know what it was, there was some anniversary in Gone with the Wind is usually playing at a theater. And like in the moment with Charlottesville, I think it was right after Charlottesville. It seems strange to play Gone with the Wind at this movie theater. Imagine, right? And so this idea that like, what is a Confederate like, it's this nostalgia for the past, it's, I guess an honoring of bravery courage, it's all white centered, right?

Tricia: It's definitely from a perspective that is, meant to build sympathy, right, for Robert Lee. And she was comparing it to, Gone with the Wind, that Gone with the Wind in many ways it's the stereotypes and the perspectives there. And I was thinking how many of our books, like I immediately went to how many of our books are also like that? How many do we see them as these kinds of fixed statues that we cannot remove? And I could not help but make that connection then to the number one book that PBS All-American reads lists, which was To Kill a Mockingbird. And can't help but wonder like, what is the connection here?

Sonja: Right.

Tricia: Because there's always one, as you know, in my work with disrupt texts with that is one that is almost always defended in the same way with the same fervor that these statues are sometimes defended.

Sonja: Yes. And so with the removal of these flags and statues, I'm wondering what will be the transfer to schools and our curriculum. Will we start to remove these relics of the curriculum that are doing exactly what you're saying? They're steeped in whiteness, they're glorifying whiteness and are another form of educational violence against black and brown students.

Tricia: Yep.

Sonja: And not only that, but we need to be changing the names of schools who are named after folks who committed terror against black and brown people. And now kids are being forced to go to a school every day named after this person, again, educational violence. I'm going to keep using that phrase because when we say violence, people again, want to think about physical harm and isolated acts. And these are continuous acts of terror that are committed against black and brown children. So yes, we will see if these relics of the curriculum are removed.

Tricia: Yeah. A couple of things here again, I am heartened by the fact that people are... I've seen, I'm on social media, a lot in Facebook groups and Twitter and Instagram. And I can't tell you how many of the requests for quote, unquote, diverse texts there have been, like this moment has awakened people's... And again, I think that's good. I think it's good that this moment is asking us to reflect and realize, you know what? I really don't have any voices from black people in my curriculum. I need to think about that. And now I need to seek recommendations. But as you were seeking those recommendations, I would ask you to think about like, why didn't you already have those in your back pocket? Why didn't you already have those lists? What reading were you not already doing that required you to go ask others about these books and these texts? Right?

Tricia: So this always brings to me, I think, Chad Everett has said that there is no diverse book. Because when you think about diversity and what a diverse book is, who is centered in that, whose perspective, right, is that from right? It's a white centered perspective, right? That white is normal and everything that is not white is diverse.

Sonja: That's right.

Tricia: If I were to look at it from the perspective of like black and brown people, like diversity is different, right? And so thinking about that and then thinking again about adding a book by a person of color, it does not constitute an anti-racist curriculum and definitely not anti-racist instruction. You can teach a book like The Hate You Give, in a way that is damaging. If you do not also understand the historical underpinnings, the context of that text, all the nuance that Angie Thomas is doing in that book, around code switching. If you don't have that kind of facility of knowledge and nuance, then you will potentially do damage to kids, not just the kids of color in the room, but also white children who are in the room who are looking to you as the person to lead them through these conversations.

Tricia: And that's the other thing that I want to point out too, which is that I think that there's a whole breadth and depth of black and brown excellence and talent and literacy and discourses that have not been taught in schools, that even myself as a teacher have not necessarily been taught. And so I have to recognize that that is a deficiency in me that I need to fix. That when I look at for example, I know that there is art that I have not...

Tricia: ... I look at, for example, I know that there is art that I don't have training to understand by black and brown people that I need to learn how to read. And that just because I don't know, I don't have access to those discourses doesn't mean that I can't, but I have to do the work to do it. And I simply can't dismiss those texts as not rigorous. Because, again, that word rigorous thrown around a lot. But when you do a critical reading of many texts, there are ways of unpacking that again, I don't think that many teachers are versed or practiced in doing yeah.

Sonja: Well, about 84% of teachers in the nation are white teachers. And certainly schooling in this country means that we haven't been taught to do that. To understand how to center the lives of anyone else other than white people. And to then learn about other ways of knowing and to recognize the brilliance of black and brown people. We have not been taught to do that. And I worry now that this effort to rush to books, to rush to diverse books, just sprinkling them in in our curriculum becomes the answer for some teachers. If I just get this book and put it in my curriculum, then I've done something. I'm not going to change, the curriculum isn't even going to change, and the instruction isn't going to change, but I'm just going to add in this book. And it absolutely, as you said, Trisha can cause more harm.

Sonja: And, and for all the reasons that you said, not understanding the nuance, not being able to recognize and teach the nuances of a book like the Hate You Give. And also, because there can be this, I don't know, this sort of like, "Let me just grab, brown folks on the cover and put them in." Not thinking about whether or not we are as Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas says, providing racialized mirrors and windows for kids. And not not thinking about the wide range of stories, the fullness of the humanity of black and brown people. And making sure that's represented in the literature that's brought into the classroom. So if you don't have a consciousness around that, then you absolutely can be harming kids in a multitude of ways.

Tricia: Yeah. And I know that seems overwhelming. You hear that, you're like, "Oh, well, I just can't do anything now." And that's not our message, our message is, this work is hard. You have to be willing to invest in doing that hard work. If you, if you're here feeling defensive and you're thinking, "Oh, well, I guess I just won't do anything. Or I guess now I can't do anything right." Part of the work is making mistakes. And you know what? Educators love to talk about resilience and grit. This is a time for teachers to build up their grit or resilience when it comes to anti-racist education. This is a time that where you're going to make mistakes and where I've made mistakes. And I think, "You know what, I screwed that up. I'm going to repair now." And that's part of the work. That's how we get better. That's what we'd expect of our kids.

Sonja: Yes.

Tricia: So when Sonja and I were talking and we kind of came to this conclusion, this whole conversation I think has been like the why. And I hope that in this conversation, you're thinking maybe, this is why we need to do this work. This moment, the history that has led up to this moment is why we need anti-racist instruction and racial equity and literacy. But thinking about it from the teacher's perspective, as a teacher, I have lots of tools. I have a tool in my 20 years now, almost of teaching. I have a tool for when a student is looking out the window and I know they're not paying attention to me, so I walk over them to kind of gently invite them back into the conversation.

Tricia: I have a tool for when a student is struggling with voice, knowing exactly the [inaudible 00:58:17] I need to give them, I have a tool for when kids they're struggling with their sentences. Sentence study is the tool. I have many tools. And so I guess the question is that what struck me is in all these requests for diverse texts and such. Is that it's clear that then when this moment happens and now all of a sudden, not all of a sudden, but with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Ahmed Arbery and these events in the news. And then you're feeling perhaps as an educator needing to talk about these things. Because silence is not really an option here, it's just not. It's a form of gaslighting actually, when you just don't talk about what's happening in the world.

Tricia: Because it's coming into the classroom. And you think to yourself, "Okay, well, I want to do this stuff." And then you look in your toolbox and what strategies and tools do you have for this moment? And that's a question that each individual teacher is going to have to ask themselves. What is in my toolbox? If it feels uncomfortable to talk about race, that's a question, that means that you don't have tools in your toolbox. It means that the tools that you have for X, Y, or Z, the things that I mentioned about mentor texts and all of these things. Those are insufficient in this moment right now. And again, it was a moment and an opportunity for us to reflect on why that is and how then we can change this.
Sonja: Yeah. I mean, what I want educators to reckon with is this, when you, as you said, open the toolbox to advance the work of equity, particularly racial justice in this case, and you find the toolbox empty. You must be willing to ask yourself, where are my tools? Why don't I have them? What stopped me from developing any tools? And as you said, what's causing me to reach for them now? Because after the news cycle dies and we've seen this time and time again. Is the tendency to return to business as usual. So what will you do, educators, when this urge hits you? How will you resist and fight against this? Because what we're seeing right now in the world is not some sort of seismic shift in how the country operates in terms of race, not at all.

Sonja: We can't simply remove some Confederate monuments and flags and call ourselves done. We're not done until power systems shift and institutions change. And that won't happen, it won't happen in a whisper, and it won't happen with insufficient tools. So for example, the narrative around the protests right now, and all the rioting and the property and the da, da, da. What tools do you have? It could be the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, "A riot is the language of the unheard." It could be the tool of Tony Morrison who talked about after the Los Angeles riots. How, what surprised her was how patient folks were, they waited and waited for justice and it didn't come. That's a tool, the tool of Ibram Kennedy's words about what a riot is and what a protest is. So your tools need to be sufficient. And if we don't fill our toolbox with them and make large sweeping, loud thunderous noises with those tools now, then we're not changing.

Tricia: If not now, then when? Which is a question that Dr. King asked in 1963.

Sonja: Yep.

Tricia: And so with that said, we want to invite you to participate this summer in the two institutes that Dr. Sonja Cherry-Paul and I are offering humbly. We have [inaudible 01:02:58] July 13th and all verbal, we tend to do some changing around. So if you were interested in these before, when we were meeting in person back when we released this information in March, and you've been waiting patiently, thank you for your patience. But these two institutes will really be about those tools. And so the first theme is going to be about understanding systemic racism society, schools, and classrooms. And this is really going to be a systems approach. Looking, touching on some of the things that we talked about today. How have schools been really systems of racism in our country? And then looking then closely at our classrooms as systems and how we can start to disrupt and build our toolbox. We're disrupting the systemic racism that may be perpetuated in our ways of being in our classroom, or just for us to unpack some of those things. And Sonja, do you want to talk about session two?

Sonja: Yeah. Session two, we're going to be interrogating internalized racism in ourselves and in our practice. Just really being steeped in the knowledge that no one is unaffected by racists. As Dr. Kindie says, there is no such thing as not racist. And as Angela Davis says, "What we need now is not this idea of not racist. We need anti-racist practices." So by identifying our own personal relationship with race and racism, we are then better able to disrupt and dismantle the ways that our literacy practices may harm students and work towards this liberatory stance. And I think Tricia and I strongly believe that literacy instruction is a powerful tool for change, for racial justice. Just imagine how indigenous, black, and brown children and white children would show up right now in their lives and in their futures, having access to these tools that we hope to build with you at, at IREL 20, so that we can fill our toolboxes and get to work.
Tricia: Yeah. So we invite you to come if you can, if you are able. These two sessions are complementary in the sense that they complement one another. So not one is not required before you take the other. So you can just do one, you can just do the other, you can do both. But we invite you and hope that this conversation was a start. If you aren't able to come, we will be putting out things on Twitter and things like that. But registration, if it's not already open, it will be open. I believe it's open today. So you'll be able to go to the Heinemann website to register for that. You will also see that we have several wonderful facilitator presenters who are going to be with us during that week, because this is a partnership between Sonja and I, but honestly, we could not do this again, community and collaboration.

Sonja: Collective. That's right.

Tricia: So we haven't facilitators. We also have some guest speakers. We will have people from BARWE, which is the Building Anti-Racist White Educator Group. We have Randy Ribeye, who is going to speak also at one of the institutes. So we have these things lined up and we hope that you'll be able to join us in these conversations. Again, we just want to reiterate, beliefs matter and actions speak. What are our beliefs and what are the actions that we're going to take? So our two institutes will really be focused around these claims. That our current state of schooling is unacceptable in literacy, racial literacy, especially. The level of racial literacy that's developed in kids right now is unacceptable, which will require a fundamental re-imagining. And that the personal and professional are not separate. They are inseparable. Who you are as a person comes with you into the classroom.
Tricia: You cannot compartmentalize who you are. You just can't. And I think we can see that even, because I think when you see these social media posts of people who are saying obviously racist things, and you find out later that person's a teacher and you're like horrified. And then you're thinking, "Well, how has that been showing up?" I'm telling you that person has not been able to hide that in their classroom, it comes across. But that together teachers, students, and communities can come to be together as architects of this new system. And that again, if you think about the way our two institutes are working, we're thinking about what's the connection between the individual and the internal work and the community and systems work that we need to do? Because they inform each other. And so we need to unpack how that happens.

Tricia: And since we're out of time, we'll put a link to this video. Some of you may have already seen it. This is a wonderful video here. I don't want to spoil it for you, but I will tell you the one quote at the end that will come from this "When you know your why your what becomes more impactful because you're walking towards or in your purpose." And so when we think about our why, when it comes to anti racist work, anti-racist pedagogy, do we have the what's, the tools, the how's that we are going to be able to enact a new way of learning, thinking, and being in the world?

Sonja: Absolutely.

Tricia: So thank you. Thanks Sonja, for being here.

Sonja: Always great to chat with you. Looking forward to seeing everyone soon. Rolling up our sleeves together and engaging in this work.

Tricia: We will promise it'll be a week of hard thinking. And I think if you're not feeling uncomfortable, you're not working hard enough. So we'll leave you with that thought and hope to see you at the institutes. And if not at the institutes in any other way as we are both available on social media and our work is in many other places. So thanks everyone for joining us tonight.

Sonja: Thank you.

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On The Podcast: Dr. Sonja Cherry-Paul and Tricia Ebarvia on the Institute for Racial Equity in Literacy

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Listen in or watch as Dr. Sonja Cherry Paul and Tricia Ebarvia talk about two upcoming virtual #IREL20 institutes focused on centering racial equity in our literacy practices. ⁠ Click the image below to download the #IREL20 brochure!

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Lessons and Strategies to Teach Social Comprehension

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Foreword by Terrence J. Roberts, PhD.

A Letter to Readers

Acknowledgments

An Introduction to Social Comprehension and Strategies to Prepare You for the Work Ahead
Chapter 1: Exploring Our Identities
Lesson: Affirming Our Identities: Identity Webs
We introduce the elements of our own identities (such as sister, athlete, bilingual, reader) and look for connections to or wonders about the identities of others.

Lesson: Placing Ourselves in the World: Stories of Our Names
Using a mentor text, we write the stories of how we got our names, how our names make us feel, and our experiences with our names.

Lesson: Journeying into Our Family Histories: "Where I'm From" Poems
We use the structure of a "Where I'm From" poem to share our family histories, storied objects, and moments.

Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 2: Listening with Love
Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 3: Being Candid
Lesson: Seeing Our Own Bias: Drawing Activity
We learn about how bias works, and we use an activity to help us see some of our own bias and brainstorm how we can confront it.

Lesson: Understanding Microaggressions: Poem Analysis
We analyze examples of microaggressions to understand what they are and how they affect people, and we look for microaggressions in our own lives.

Lesson: Refusing to Let Others' Biases Define Us: Identity Statements
We assert who we are with confidence. We recall labels others have tried to put on us, reject those labels, and choose how we define who we are.

Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 4: Becoming Better Informed
Lesson: Understanding How Our Identity Affects Us: Our News
We identify what is happening in our world-personal events, news stories, media-and consider how our identity shapes what we give our attention to.

Lesson: Moving Beyond Our Initial Thinking: Mini-Inquiries
We use a mini-inquiry to learn more about a topic and examine how new information changes our perspective.

Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 5: Finding Humanity in Ourselves and in Others
Lesson: Broadening Our Ideas About Who We Are Responsible To and For: Our Universe of Obligation
We consider who we feel responsibility to and why. We also consider how that responsibility can change in certain situations.

Lesson: Understanding Others' Perspectives: Intent Versus Impact
We work to understand two sides of a divisive issue by listening to both perspectives.
Chapter 6: Facing Crisis Together
Suggested Resource Stacks

References and Inspiration

This book is based on the idea that we can develop skills and habits to help us comprehend social issues and participate in relevant, transparent conversations. Social comprehension, like academic comprehension, is how we make meaning from and mediate our relationship with the world. We understand that the meaning making, or socialization, is learned, not inherited. Each chapter in this book includes lessons and/or practical help for students to learn and engage in a targeted social comprehension concept. Our thinking will change often as we practice being more socially literate citizens of the world, so we allow for and model the same for our students as we construct comprehension and cultivate our empathy together. The "At First I Thought . . . Now I Think" journal page in this introduction gives you and your students a tool to reflect on how the experiences in the lessons are affecting your outlook. In the work of social comprehension, we want to be as transparent as possible and make our thinking visible.

The final chapter of the book addresses how we, as educators, can continually refine our own approach to this work. If we are going to be on the front lines of helping children make sense of the news they bring to school and the curriculum the world keeps handing them, we must have a strong foundation of social comprehension in place. If we can commit to approaching this work as the lead learner, teaching with curiosity and modeling vulnerability rather than rigid certainty, we can build habitats of trust where kids (and adults) participate in a learning discussion, and where expression, identity, and social literacy matter.

- Introduction

A sense of urgency for pedagogy rooted in empathy and humanity is palpable in communities around the world. But how can teachers actualize such instruction and make it accessible to students? Where is the professional development teachers yearn for to facilitate important, and at times, challenging conversations? Being the Change is the resource every educator needs right now! Against a socio-politically charged backdrop where tensions run high, Sara is a beacon of light who offers practical, compassionate guidance that makes it possible to do the work of social comprehension. The journey to accomplishing this isn't linear; it is messy, tangled, circuitous. But Sara provides a pathway for teachers and our students. She offers a sustained, clear voice that reminds us of why this work is necessary and how it can look in our classrooms. Being the Change is invaluable to all educators as we work to empower our students as change-makers who positively influence the world.

- Sonja Cherry-Paul

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Sara Ahmed is the ultimate upstander; she cares enough to confront. Her gentle and wise voice is a model for how to be in this tumultuous age. She shares text sets that ask big questions and resist simplistic answers. She invites teachers and students to address tensions in today's classrooms and examine bias in their thinking. Being the Change offers practical tools for building a classroom community that is inclusive, candid, and caring. This book is a treasure.

- Penny Kittle

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What an incredibly powerful, practical, beautiful book. As I read I could not help but think how this book has the potential to radically change conversations in classrooms (and larger communities) around compassion, listening, empathy, and knowing. It is books like these that heal. It is hope and possibility and humanity within these covers.

Perhaps the greatest compliment I could give is that as I read, the teacher in me itched to get out of this room and into the presence of kids- to experience these lessons in real time, to hear children's stories, to dig into this work because for the first time I feel capable. This book is a roadmap with an entry point all of us can access and guidance through the most challenging places we could go. I don't feel afraid of what could happen, I feel energized about what Sara has taught me I can help happen.

I could not help but think of the million and one ways I could use Sara's thinking and teaching, to engage in this work whole heartedly from the moment children step through the doors.

- Kristi Mraz

****

In her book, Being the Change, Sara K. Ahmed offers us not only the roadmap of how to create and maintain components of meaningful social change within our instruction but also the necessary tools for us to navigate the hard conversations we invite in and those we have not had the courage to have...yet. By centering her book on developing the identity of the very children we teach, she gives us invaluable tools to navigate the hard topics that are constantly surrounding our learning community. While she writes in her book that there is no magical formula for making the world a better place, within the pages of this book and in her willingness to help us grow not just as educators but as human beings with her impactful lesson ideas, she has given us something near magic. A resource to be used in every school, this book will leave a trail of change for a better world in its wake if we let it.

- Pernille Ripp

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Being the Change is based on the idea that people can develop skills and habits to serve them in the comprehension of social issues. Sara K. Ahmed identifies