Zach Diamond  00:08
Welcome to catalyzing classroom change, a podcast from the modern classrooms project.

Kareem Farah  00:22
All right, let's do this. Hey, everybody, thanks for jumping on. I know some more folks are gonna be coming in throughout this session. My name is Kareem Farah. I'm the co founder and CEO, the modern classrooms project. And this is our second sort of webinars session on what we call catalyzing classroom change. And really, the whole point of this webinar is to talk about the different creative ways that we should be thinking about creating real change in classrooms. I think a lot of times we feel like there's a lot of things we talk about wanting to change when it comes to teaching and learning in classrooms. But there actually change what we see when we go visit classrooms where we hear from students when we work with teachers. So this is a session all about that. The first one was about catalyzing bottom up innovation. This one's about redefining the role of teacher leaders. I think when we think about the future of teaching and learning, when we think about changing the game for classroom instruction, nothing is more important than figuring out a way to amplify the voice of our teacher leaders lean on our teacher leaders, but also create the space for them to live sustainable lives because they're so critical to our K 12 education system. So I have two incredible guests that that sit in very different spots in education system for a reason. But both have a deep impact on teacher leadership and understand what teacher leadership means that you folks, I have a Brian Hassel, the CO president of public impact. And I also have created Scott who is a founding educator, and a modern classrooms expert mentor, and all around awesome educator. They're both here to have a discussion with me today about what it means to redefine the role of teacher leadership. The way this works. By the way, if you're expecting some fancy slides, and some wild data and some animations, you've come to the wrong place, you can always just click leave. But this is supposed to feel like you're just in a session with us having a conversation. So please drop things in the chat asked questions. This is supposed to be a very more organic discussion, almost like a podcast, where we have the opportunity to really dig into some interesting questions related to teacher leadership today and hopefully inspire some interesting thoughts. So without further ado, I want my two fabulous guests introduce themselves. Crazy. I'm gonna start with you. Can you just share a little bit more about your work what you do in K 12? Education? Don't be like, say it all, you know, let everyone know who you are, what you do and where you're coming from.

Khadejah Scott  02:34
Okay, good. Good evening, everybody. Except for it into evening. So I am today Khadejah Scott, I am originally from Georgia. I currently teach in Washington, DC. I've been here for the past nine years. This is my ninth year. I've taught middle school the entire time. So I'm one of those crazy people who loves middle school. Middle schoolers are weird. They're great. I love them. And I've taught mostly reading intervention for the entire time that I have taught, in addition to English, and just well, some social studies. We founded Ida B. Wells Middle School in 2019. So I don't know, as a founding teacher then and I've been there since. And at Wells, I also lead the technology innovation committee. And I do some other things that while leadership and DCPS. So I represent the district, and we do test development events. So for things like Park, and then I also design facilitate professional development. So we have micro credential courses that we work on. And I create those. And I also make sure that the educators get their credentialing from those micro credential courses. And I'm also an expert mentor. So I mentor educators, all different grade levels, all different places around the US around the world, in the modern classrooms model.

Kareem Farah  03:48
So you're busy is the shot from that for sure. And you're doing outstanding work. And I have heard from many teachers who have been mentored by you how incredible the work that you do is, Brian, tell us who you are. What is it that you do? How did you get an education? And what's the work that you lead now?

Bryan Hassel  04:08
Yeah, great. Well, thanks for Thanks for doing this. Excited to be here. And Bryan Hassel, co-President public impact the other co presidents Emily asked you hassle. And we found a public impact about 25 years ago to try to achieve dramatic learning gains for students, especially students of color and low income students in US schools. And a lot of that time was Think Tank. I came from a policy background. Emily was a management consultant. We were thinking about what sort of research we could do papers we could write ideas we could put forward about this. And Emily wrote a paper in 22,009 called 3x. Four all about expanding the impact of the nation's best teachers. And that paper has really become the basis of most of our work now, which is in the opportunity culture initiative. We as an organization are working with schools and districts around the country about 55 District

Unknown Speaker  05:00
takes about 600 schools, to redesign schools around teacher leadership, multi classroom leaders, then we get into this more in the future, but to change schools so that every teacher has great career opportunities, and every student has access to excellent teaching. That's what we're all about these days.

Kareem Farah  05:18
Fabulous Well, listeners out there, if you haven't figured it out, we have some serious expertise on this call. And just a little bit of background, by the way on the modern classrooms project, and a little bit of our work with teacher leadership, as Canadian mentioned, she's a modern classroom expert mentor, one of the things we do with the modern classrooms project is we take our best implementers, we credential them, we first give them the distinguished modern classroom educator credential, we have well over 400, distinguished modern classroom educators across the country. And then of course, those distinguished modern classroom educators become expert mentors, and they're the ones that train all the teachers that we support across the country. So that's why teacher leadership is also so important to modern classrooms project. So diving into the actual discussion now, the first question I have for you all, and I'll take this one to you, Brian, to start. What does teacher leadership normally look like in K 12? Education? You know, when we think of teacher leadership, when we think about the roles that most educators have, that are tagged as teacher leadership in most public schools across the country, what does that look like? What does that feel like? You know, how would you describe it? And would you describe it as effective?

Bryan Hassel  06:21
Yeah, it's great question, I bet most of the teachers on the line would have their own list. Hopefully, it lines up somewhat with this. But some of the things I would say are, it's often unpaid, or low pay, it's often it's paid, it's often paid with a temporary grant, hey, we've got this special project, we can pay some teacher leaders to do this thing. It's often piled on to teachers existing workload, which are already very large. So it's, Hey, keep teaching like you are and do this other thing and the leadership that's beyond what you're already doing. It's often unrecognized as a kind of official thing in the school. And, you know, frankly, it's often not tied to a specific responsibility for something like the third grade achieving the standards that we've set for them. So that often, therefore it's unsatisfactory to teachers, and it's not getting the impact that it could if we really thought it through differently.

Kareem Farah  07:18
What are your thoughts on that? Like? How would you describe it? You know, would you do you have a similar articulation of what it feels like, at the moment? And do you think it's effective in the way that it's currently designed? Yeah,

Khadejah Scott  07:30
so similar to what Brian said, a lot of times, they are the unpaid roles where you're asked to kind of step in and, and lead an initiative or a leader project or something like that. But the other way there, there are actually two other ways I've seen it. One is the traditional in my district, there are team leads and department leads. And that's really the only formal teacher leadership positions that I see they do come with, with with stipends. But typically, those don't really have the impact that I really think they could. A lot of times, it seems like they just kind of become a popularity contest, and they just become whoever applies for it just gets it done. There's not really even though there's a slight bit associated with it, there's not really specific expectations, or goals associated with the, with the positions. And the other way, and kind of what Brian alluded to is when there's just tremendous talent in a building that's just not really being noticed or utilized. So I have an example. So I taught for my first year with two veteran teachers, they've been teaching for 30 years, like 60 plus years between them. And they were both retiring the next year. But actually, it turns out that they had been at the school for a while, but they had all this knowledge that they had shared with me and with the other person who was a resident teacher, but no one had asked them to share any of that with anyone else. So as soon as they retired, that knowledge was just gone. And neither of them was in a formal leadership role.

Kareem Farah  08:57
Well, actually, I think you bring up something really important that I some themes I just pulled from what both you all said, and both from my experience as well. You know, I think a lot of teacher leadership and K 12 education isn't about amplifying what the teacher leaders do. Well, it's about a set of tasks that someone needs to do in the school or district that are given to the teacher leader and perhaps come with an associated stipend, right, I think about grade level chair, for example, you would think that a grade level chair is primarily about scaling the expertise of what is best practice at that grade level. But I think if you ask most grade level chairs, they tell you it's a lot about disseminating information between leadership and the teaching group within that grade level, right? That's not utilizing your best instructional experts in the way that we want to right instead of saying teacher leadership is about taking the best educators and spotlighting why they're so good at what they do. It's a lot more about just adding more activities on their plate and tasks on their plate and it's usually because the best educators are also a Some of the educators who we can trust to be able to go do those things. So it ends up feeling like wait a minute, I just added another component of my job. I'm not actually necessarily using the things that I do amazing and then scaling it out. And then to your point, Asia, it doesn't actually have that lasting effect, right. It's like, if you're doing something amazing in your classroom, we should be figuring out a way to multiply that and scale it across the system. And I don't think we do that really well. So I think that's the I just noticed those themes that I think are critical about what you both just identified. I want to talk a little bit about why this is so important. Because I mean, I think we've identified look, teacher leadership in its current form, by the way, I'll just add another form of teacher leadership, I call it the hidden form of teacher leadership is just leaving the classroom and becoming a school leader or a district leader. Right. And I think that's a tug and pull we can't run away from right, which is that the teacher leadership roles that you normally see aren't that financially lucrative. And if you do want to grow within the profession, you feel like, either I'm staying in the classroom or on leaving the classroom. So there is this almost natural incentive structure, to take teachers that are amazing at the craft, in my opinion, arguably, the hardest job in a district is to be the teacher. And we're taking people out of the most challenging job and pulling them into school leadership and district leadership. And don't get me wrong, school leadership, and distributorship is challenging. But I don't think we should be taking, you know, star players and putting them in that role. I would almost be like in sports, if we just said, Oh, you're amazing at basketball, let's take you out of the basketball game. And let's put you in the front office. It's like, I don't know what that's the last thing we want to do. Like you're the all star we need you in the classroom executing. So let's talk about why teacher leadership is so incredibly important, particularly in this moment. Khadija, why don't you start with that, like, Why do you think right now, and the system is in such a stressed spot? Where obviously, you know, in the process of working through a very challenging time, like, Why do you think teacher leadership has a key role in this?

Unknown Speaker  12:00
Well, just thinking about my experience with teachers that I've lived up to that have been my official mentor, or unofficial mentor, I think that really engaging in good to teacher leadership prevents us from from over analyzing the problems that we've already solved. So there are a lot of things that I learned from other teachers, that could have been problems for me, but they weren't because I had spoken to someone about or I had specific training, where they were telling me about how to solve a problem that I wouldn't even know it'd be a problem. And I think a lot of times, like you're saying those people who are great in the classroom, they're great at their craft, they do leave the classroom, either to be leaders somewhere else, or to just leave the classroom. And then, of course, they take that with them. And then we end up solving the same problems again, or not really solving, because we don't really have the support of someone who has already already dealt with it. And then also thinking about since the pandemic, I really applaud anyone who is going to be a teacher right now. And I really tried to give them all of my support. I know a lot of other teachers do as well. Because there are a lot of people who are really trying to go into education right now. And so I think for anything new that you're trying to do, mentorship is really important, especially for teaching so that people can see that it can be done, even though it's hard, especially if they're coming in right now, because it's extra hard right now.

Kareem Farah  13:23
You're not spot on, Brian, what are your thoughts on this? Like why why now? Why is this a uniquely important time and why teacher leadership in general, there's so many other ways we can make an impact on the K 12 education system, what's so special about teacher leadership?

Unknown Speaker  13:35
Yeah, that would really amplify what you both said. And then you can add to your point about the support teachers need when they're trying to do something new. And of course, everyone's trying to do something new. Right now we're in this moment where students need more than they've ever needed. And educators need more than they ever needed to be successful. And, and teacher leadership really could be part of both of those, you know, to the teacher, one is the obvious one, it's currently teachers don't get the support they need in the classrooms and be effective when they're getting started as a rookie Teacher. Teacher leadership can provide that if it's structured well, they don't have the chance to advance in their career like you were talking about Korean unless they also want to leave the classroom. Teacher Leader shift can provide that a way to earn more gain a promotion, as it were, or a way to have a bigger impact without leaving the classroom without leaving, while you know while continuing to teach. So that's huge for teachers. At the same time students is also a key part of this currently, every year we assign students to different classrooms. Some of them have brand new teachers that have never done it before. Others have great teachers that have many years of experience, everything in between. And what teacher leadership does is say, hey, we want to make sure educators that have shown they can achieve high growth with students reach all the kids in the grade are all the kids in the subject Department not just the 25 kids that happen to be assigned to them this year. It's a way to take those grades Teachers and make sure they can support every student directly in some ways, but also by lifting the skills of other teachers. And by getting other adults involved. In the opportunity culture model where the team is led by a great teacher like this, we see student learning results go up by about a half year of extra learning per year, because of that support for the teachers and the support that teacher leaders giving to every student who's in that in that reach.

Kareem Farah  15:27
You know, there's something interesting about teacher leadership, because I think one of the things I often talk about that that sort of breaks my heart is the degree with which the teaching profession feels like it's siloed. Like, you walk into a school building, and I can speak for when I was teaching, and I can speak for when we go visit classrooms all the time, like, you may have never seen another person teach in your life, or you haven't seen them teach in the last couple of years, even though you're in a building, and there's 75 classrooms in this building, and there's someone teaching literally next door to you and across the hall from you, you got no clue what's actually going down in those classrooms. Which means the profession is really siloed, which is kind of a shame, right? Because if you think about it, I love the idea of like communities raising, you know, young people, that community is contributing to the growth of an individual. And schools are a perfect example of that, you know, you drop a bunch of kids off at school. And in that building, there's a whole bunch of adults, and somehow they leave after eight, nine hours, and there have grown academically and socially, emotionally. But there's such an opportunity to make that a community effort. But sometimes I feel like it's a fragmented effort. And I think in many ways, teacher leadership is the glue, right? Teacher leadership, those are the folks that have the capacity to glue this together. But we need to create the framework to pull that off. So I think that's so so important. Now, let's talk about the types of teacher leadership that actually have worked for you all, Brian, you run an organization that's all about accelerating teacher leadership in a very specific way. Kinesia, you've participated in some pretty awesome teacher leadership roles, I'm bias your modern classrooms, extra mentor, I think our role is pretty cool. But there's other roles you've also played in this work. So I want to hear about what this journey looks like and your respective of work. And please be very forthright about what it is that you do, right, we want to the listeners, including myself, I want to hear about what this actually looks and feels like. Because now that we've talked about why it doesn't work, we have the opportunity to really dig into the things that can work and why we should be optimistic for what there is in the future. Brian, why don't you start on this one, like, talk to us a little bit more about what this opportunity culture initiative is? How do you all think about teacher leadership? How do you scale it? And what does it literally look like in the communities that you serve?

Unknown Speaker  17:42
Yeah, can I can do that. And I also take a look at our website, where they're not right now, because you're gonna have to hear the scintillating comments that we're going to make. But take a look at the website where you can hear some educators talking about these roles, see some video of them in action, I think that brings to life as well. But the cornerstone here in this opportunity culture is a multi classroom leader. So that's the teacher leader who has prior high growth success with students who leaves a small team of other teachers and I said small because it's three to eight other teachers. It's not the instructional coach for the whole school or spanning four schools, but a grade level team or two grade levels, if it's a smaller school, or a subject department in a high school, or half of a subject department if it's a big high school. So it's three day teachers, and that lets that teacher leader, truly get to know every single teacher on the team and support them really effectively. And so the teacher leaders role is a full team leadership opportunity. It's includes leading the planning of the team, what are they going to do in classrooms, leading the data analysis, what are we learning about student learning, as we go along, preparing for adjusting based on that data, let's get ready for next week based on what happened this week. So lots of time together, planning, thinking, analyzing, and then in addition to that, getting out into the teen teachers classrooms, co teaching with them, teaching small groups of students in their classrooms to get to know their students, modeling for them, stepping back and observing and then later meeting with them and giving them feedback on what you saw on that action step they were trying to work on with you in the roof. So it's that full team leadership role from common planning to in the classroom with their peers, and lets them lead the whole team towards excellent outcomes for kids.

Kareem Farah  19:37
It's a great start, but tell me a little bit more about some of the I mean, there's components about this from a time standpoint, like what's different about their school day versus you know, a teacher that doesn't play that role? There's also a compensation component if I didn't make that up. Can you add a little bit of color on that? Just around what what is different about their days as well?

Unknown Speaker  19:57
I can tell on the on the schedule, there's too big things one, we work with the schools to create a big block of common planning time that the teacher leader has even more of, and they're able to then use that time to be with the team, but also do a lot of their own planning to get ready to support their teams. So that might be even a couple of hours a day, not just a little sliver here and there. So that's one big thing. And the other big thing is release time for them to go into the other teachers classrooms. And if it's an elementary school, that might mean another adult is coming to their class for for discrete periods of time, releasing them to go down the hall. In a secondary school that might be setting up just the rotation of classes so that there are several periods during the week when they are free, and can go support other teachers on the team. Those are the two big ones on in terms of time, compensation, we each school works with its own budget, and reallocates in order to pay multi classroom leaders and other teachers on the team more. The average MCL as we abbreviate it earns about 12,000 per year as a stipend on top of their salary. It goes up as high as 20,000, in some districts for leading teams of seven or eight teachers. And these models, also, if you organize them, in a certain way, allow every teacher to earn more on the team. So every teacher can earn 5% or more as part of a team that's led by a multi classroom leader. And that's done within existing budgets, which means it can keep going over time, there's not a foundation providing a grant or something that's gonna go away. It's built in, and so you can count on it.

Kareem Farah  21:39
I mean, if you're listening, you're probably like, whoa, that's cool. I've always appreciated the way that you all think about my multi classroom leaders because of two things. I mean, if you're gonna empower future leaders, you need to think differently about how you compensate them. And you need to think differently about when they do the work. But if you're not going to do that, then a lot of its talk, right? A lot of it is, hey, you're already one of the busiest people in the world. Let me add a little bit more work to you. And let me not necessarily compensate you. And you're going to do this out of goodwill. And it's not, that's just not a sustainable way to create change. So I think you've really addressed two fundamental components of the challenge here, which is how in a fixed timeframe, can we create a space for teacher leaders to be able to impact more classrooms and also get appropriately compensated for that? So shout out to you all for the work that you're doing that way. Khadija, can you tell us a little bit about your work? And you know, I know you're gonna talk a little bit about being a mountain classroom expert mentor, but also share about any other components of teacher leadership that you've dug into what has worked? What do you do? What is it like, and like, get specific with it?

Unknown Speaker  22:44
Sure. So actually, I'll start, I won't start with talking about being a mentor, I will start by talking about something that I'm seeing in the chat with interpretations and observations. That is one of the more effective forms of teacher leadership that I've seen. My school was started really leaning into doing that a lot this year. So we actually have opportunities to visit other classrooms, give those teachers feedback. And then that will count for us for our part of our impact for our CSC, which is how DCPS measures your commitment to the school community. So it's kind of a win win, the teacher gets feedback, you choose which teacher you observe, you go into their classrooms, or for a few minutes, give them feedback, and then they're able to implement that feedback, you can ask them questions. And it's really something you don't get the chance to do, unless time is actually dedicated to that. So I really appreciate that our school has dedicated time to that, so that you're actually able to do it. Because the only time when I've actually been able to do that was when I was looking for a new job. So I went to other schools, I was in a kindergarten classroom, I was in like a fifth grade autism classroom, high school classroom, looking for where I was going to be next. And that was one of the more impactful days of my career, I'd say, actually was two days, I spent two days just visiting different schools in DCPS. And I got to see not only the the way that the school cultures work, but the way that those individual teachers ran their classrooms, things that they were doing that were similar to what I was doing a different I got ideas from everywhere, whether it was the the elementary autism classroom or the high school English classroom. And so because teachers become teachers, because we like to teach we like to share information, that that is very impactful. Anything that allows teachers to do that organically, I've found is really helpful. The other one that I've seen, really started up this year for us is called Thinking Thursdays. I will preface by saying thinking Thursday used to just be a Thursday morning meeting. So that was just what Thursday morning meetings were called was thinking Thursday, but you weren't actually doing any thinking you were just meeting on Thursday. But this year what Wells has done is had had teachers leave those different thinking Thursday sessions So coaches identified teachers that were really great at specific things that align with the school's priorities, and had teachers lead those sessions. So we've had, and I could find the list and have it sent out to you all of what our sessions have been. But they've been everything from the first one that I did was on behavior management. So incentives for kids, someone has also done small groups responding to disengagement, all sorts of things that we deal with every single day, those are thinking Thursday sessions that we can go to, you don't have to go to but you can if you want to. And it really becomes a nice self selecting group of educators who are really interested in furthering their practice of whatever the topic is for that day. And aside from that, so the as far as mentorship, I love, like I said, beginning I've mentored teachers all over the world. And I was really surprised at the beginning, because I had a teacher who taught home economics. And so I was looking at her lessons on sewing, and I was learning how to sew, and it was looking at all of her mastery checks. And it was it was pretty cool. And that was something I never would have had the opportunity to see if I wasn't in that role. So that's, that's a lot of what I really liked about mentoring is that I do get to interact with teachers who are everywhere, who are doing all sorts of different things. A lot of my mentees have taught for a lot longer than I have. But my role is introducing them to this brand new model. So I'm bringing that they're bringing all their expertise, all the great things they've already done. And we're meshing it. And it's always really fulfilling just to see teachers figure out how things they've already done can work well with something that's brand new.

Kareem Farah  26:38
And Kinesia, can you tell us a little bit kind of similar to the question I asked Brian, like, what is the structure of your life as it relates to the mentorship program and the modern classroom project? So like, you know, you wake up in the morning? When do you get mentees who tells you and how many do you have? Like, how do you get compensated just like some of the ways that that works? Because I actually think that's like the secret sauce of what we do with the modern bathrooms project. But the operative word, there's a secret like I don't actually think people know what's going on other than the mentors themselves, can you just share just a little bit of some of that structure and like how you how your day to day life interacts with that?

Unknown Speaker  27:15
Yeah, totally. It's very flexible. It's the most flexible, teaching related job I've had. So I really appreciate that. And as far as getting mentees so we fill out a capacity survey at the beginning of every mentor session. So for the summer, there's usually two or three sessions that lasts for about six weeks long. And at the beginning of each of those sessions, we'll fill out a survey saying what our capacity is, so how many mentees we feel like we can mentor and then we send that often then we get matched with mentee. So the way the matching works, I think there's some sort of like very secret algorithm.

Zach Diamond  27:48
But there's a

Unknown Speaker  27:50
mentor as a mentee. And then when you get your, your list of mentees, you reach out to them you meet with them. And then through their session, if it's six weeks, or if it's a school year, they're a course that's actually already fully built out for them online. They're going through it at their cell face going through it. And what I do is I look at their submissions, so their mastery checks, which are like assessments, their videos, and I give them feedback. So there's not really any, any formal like teaching that I'm having to do, because the course is already there. It's created. It's more of just supporting people with like I was saying earlier, meshing what they've already done with something that's brand new, and just being a thought partner for that.

Kareem Farah  28:38
Perfect and you know, one of the things I want to there's a couple of things, I want to note that I've seen across both these structures of leadership that I think I we're certainly proud of at the modern classroom project. And if you're not proud of a public impact in the opportunity culture, then you should be because it's awesome. I think there's a couple of things first, I think there's compensation involved, right? Kinesia. You know, this, like every hour you work, you fill out a form, and you get compensated for that. And it is a appropriate hourly rate, right? It's not a low hourly rate. And Brian and your case is like a prerequisite to building this out within schools and systems is allocating funding to that. I just think that's a really important thing to note. And I don't think anyone should be hiding from it. You know, the monitor classroom project, it's actually funded by us, but it's funded through, but it's essentially the district funding oftentimes, because when districts fund teachers or go to the program, part of the price of that is to be able to compensate our mentors. The other thing I want to name is the teacher leaders were describing you could Asia and the MCL is are leveraging their expertise. When you are you said something I think is really interesting today, you may be mentoring someone who has more experience in the in the classroom, but you're mentoring them on something you're an expert on, which is our model, right. And that's super important. In my opinion. When you think about scaling, teacher leadership, they should be scaling what they're experts at and I think that's so important. The third They don't want to name it across the board. It's learning for the leader, not just the teachers that are getting supported. Like, I think the idea that like, you can either watch videos and mastery checks, you're giving feedback, which also like, Oh, that's pretty cool. And then the MCL is are going and visiting the classrooms of their colleagues on these teams, we all know that they're probably seeing amazing things from other teachers. And they're going, Oh, we got to tell the team about that. Which I just think is so so important, Canadian when you said that the only real time you ever seen other teachers, teachers, when you were thinking about leaving, like that's, that's a reality, we got to fix in K 12. Education, right? If the only time you see other teachers, teachers, when you're thinking about leaving, you know, that's like a sad reality, we just got to address so I can't stress enough how important is the modern classroom project scaled almost exclusively, because people started watching other people teach. My co founder, Rob was like, Hey, you look really sad in this math team meeting. And it's because you can't meet new students needs particularly well, do you want to come to my room and see what I'm doing? And I was like, wow, this is a very different experience than what I would have thought. So I just want to name those commonalities, I think are real. And I think they can be scaled in creative ways. I think we have a version of this. The opportunity called her in public impact has a version of this. But there are other ways to do it. Right. But we have to be honest about addressing some core challenges that I don't think we take seriously enough. My next question is just like, as we think about the combination of both innovation and teacher sustainability, these are two concepts that are on my mind a lot, because I think we are we are at a point K 12 education that's really interesting. On one hand, it is the most important time for us to be innovating as a collective right, we need to be thinking differently about classroom instruction, we need to be thinking differently about the way schools are organized. On the other hand, burnout is an all time high. And generally, innovation and burnout don't necessarily go great together, at least initially. Although a lot of times, the way you break out of burnout is by innovating. But that's a hard thing to kind of digest. So I want to talk a little bit about this idea of why teacher leadership can play a critical role in paving a path forward for us in K 12. Education. Brian, why don't you start? Like how do you all think about the role teacher leadership plays not just in, you know, day to day life of teaching, but how it can actually impact the changes we need to see in K 12 education and the retention of educators over time?

Unknown Speaker  32:27
Yeah, that's a tall order. But I think it's so important to everything that you're you're naming and the burnout, at the same time as the need for innovation is such a compelling challenge. We need new structures that make teachers want to become teachers. We're losing enrollment in in education programs across the country. We haven't seen giant turnover or great resignation. Exactly. But there's, there's a fear that that's, that's coming. And you can see why the demands are higher than ever. And so I think the challenge is you can, you can see over the hill, if you had teams with teacher leaders and schools were organized that way, then every new teacher had a team leader that was going to help them every day get better and better. And every veteran teacher had a chance to, to learn as well and could advance, you could see how to get if you're over that hill, it would be a much, much more retentive environment, a much more attractive environment. But how do you get over that hill in a time when everyone is, is working so hard already. And I think, to put it in a kind of joint plug for our two organizations here. You know, part of what you can do is take a starting point as an existing model and work work from that. So that doesn't mean cookie cutter. Because I think you've probably seen modern classrooms all across the country that look really different from each other. And you see opportunity culture schools, designed differently, because there's a different context everywhere. But if you think of the task as being well, we have to come up with a completely new way of organizing our school or our classrooms from scratch and do that that does seem overwhelming anytime, especially in a time of burnout. But if it's more like okay, there's some existing ideas out there that we can build on and make our own version of an art place that becomes a much more doable idea. And teachers can be leaders in that by initiating it, you know, going to your principals and saying, Hey, I've heard about this, these things that are going on, and we should try something like that here in our in our place, and they can be leaders of the change once it happens in our I'll stop talking here in a second greement in our in our work with schools. Every one of them forms a school design team that is made up mostly of teachers and they're the ones that figure this out on the ground, figure out the schedules, figure out the funding, figure out how to organize it and go forward over time and so it's teacher leadership even before the teacher leadership roles have been created.

Kareem Farah  34:53
I love that. Someone tells me conditioners a little bit about what it's like on that building. It's given you a founding teacher, and I know that Journey is fascinating. You know, I think there's something really powerful about not everyone is necessarily supposed to be leading innovation. But there are people in every building that should be leading innovation. And it's not a binary decision. It's not all 75 teachers in this building are supposed to be leading innovation. But then if not all, 75 aren't ready. It doesn't mean zero people are leading innovation. And I think a lot of times we operate in that way. I don't think that's appropriate. And it doesn't respect educators enough and respect the idea that there's a diversity of readiness. And there's a diversity of ability levels in our students. And there's a diversity of readiness and ability levels and our educators and we need to respect that connection. Can you talk a little bit about your end? Like, how have you seen in your own experience, how teacher leadership roles for you have helped accelerate innovation. And then also, like, you can make this personal or impersonal, but like, to what degree have the teacher leadership roles that you have, you know, increased the likelihood that you want to stay in the classroom, and you feel connected to the profession?

Unknown Speaker  36:02
Yeah, so one of the things that you were just saying, actually connected to something I was thinking about, was about how not everyone is going to necessarily lead in the same way. But that it's still important to acknowledge the different ways that people can lead. So just as an example, when we were founding wells, we were coming up with the core values of the school. So there was, we already had the first two it was love and grow. And then there was a vote on what the third one should be, either was going to be love grows, serve, or love, grow lead. So I voted for love, grow serve. And my reasoning back then, was I thought that everyone isn't necessarily going to lead but everyone can serve. And I think I think that's really important to thinking about teacher leadership, teacher sustainability, especially sustainability. Because the most effective leaders are the ones that are serving the ones that are doing what teachers do every day. And that's especially powerful if you are actually a teacher. So if you're doing what your colleagues are doing every day, you can share things that you've been doing with them that will automatically improve their sustainability. Because you're, you're not like I said, having to solve the same problems over and over and over again, someone else has already had the problem you've had, you talk to them about it, they lead you through it, maybe you visit their classroom, and then you're able to solve that problem, you're able to actually innovate, and make things better for your students, because you were able to see if someone else has done it. So I think just thinking about my experience, like I was saying the most effective leadership is part of the people who are serving doing the same thing. So if I think about at my school, thinking about administrators, I know if I'm out, there's a 80% chance that the principle or the system principle is going to be in my class, I'm actually gonna see my students and see the work they're doing, and actually be able to know what's going on. So they can actually support with whatever issue that I have. And then I think I lost, I lost my train of thought a bit. I think also in terms of improving sustainability, I'm seeing something in the chat about on conferences and teacher led conferences. I think one of the experiences that I've had that I've really appreciated that leads to sustainability is Ed camps. I know if anyone here has ever been to an ED camp, but they are unconferences. For teachers, I used to be mildly obsessed with them, I would go to one like every month. But what it is, is instead of it being a conference, like a regular conference where you go and you have breakfast, so you have these corporate sponsors that are selling you things, they start and they have everybody put on a sticky note, what is something you want to learn or what is something that you do really well. And then all those sticky notes go up on a board, whoever is organizing it, organizes them into categories, and then those become the sessions for the day. And that doesn't take planning really, except for the place letting people know about it. But a lot of the really great ideas that I've had have come from unconferences, things like that, things that I can do every day that that do make it so that I'll stay in the classroom, because there's not a problem I have to solve by myself.

Kareem Farah  39:06
I love that. And I do here at a campaign. I'm super popular. I want to name one thing that just comes to mind for me with regards to innovation and sustainability. I mean, from a sustainability perspective, you know, I think it's just really important to create variability and a gret in a in a fantastic educators day. Right? I think they have the capacity to make a difference. It's very motivating to be able to scale your impact and support others. And to be able to introduce that into a teaching teachers profession is a beautiful thing. You know, teachers leave the classroom and become administrators sometimes because they just want to leave the classroom but other times it's because they have the ambition to scale their impact. And, you know, they choose that because that's the only way they can see a pathway to pull that off. By the way, if you have questions we're about to pivot to questions in the chat if there are any, anything close things out. Um, the other thing I want to name is, you know, when we think about innovation, I think it's really important to remember that innovation is really, really hard. And that you need people to pilot stuff. And that not every single person at one point in time is going to be able to dive into that innovation. And then most importantly, the folks that are on the fence about it are most likely to convince by their colleagues. Right. So you know, when an MCL goes to their team and goes, folks, I'm serious. If we do this, I think it's going to change the game for our students, that's going to work a lot better than if the principal goes to a faculty meeting and goes, I'm serious, this is the way to change the game, right? Because educators naturally have seen a lot of top down initiatives that haven't worked or have seen a lot of top down initiatives that feel like they were fleeting. The people that they trust the most are their peers, because their peers spend the day living the lives that they do working with students. And it's messy, and it's hard, it's difficult. So a lot of times, I see teacher leaders as this critical filter, of like, you have to teach your leaders the things to buy it, they go test it, they'll tell you, good, bad needs to change. There are some of the best educators. So they're also the right people to be testing it. But then if they're inspired by something, they will go to bat for it. So other folks who maybe aren't quite convinced or ready are one and are skeptical of that change. So I think we oftentimes throw innovation on the shoulders of shoulders of leaders. And there's two problems with that leaders are spread thin, they got a lot to do. But the second problem is they're not the best people to be vocalizing why that should change in classrooms, the teacher leaders are. And I think that's super, super critical. If anyone has any questions, drop them in the chat. There's been a long thread in this chat, which I love. I think there's like awesome discussions going on. I saw one quick question about modern classrooms being introduced in college education programs, a tiny bit not enough. So if you have a way we can get in there, please call me. Because I'd love to. Because that's critical. So I see one question in the chat, Jasmine wrote, I'm curious about everyone's thoughts on when it comes to teacher leaders can best support emerging bilingual educators and special education teachers, national homogenized, the two groups, but I recognize that they face a few extra challenges. This is a really interesting question around like, you know, what, oh, teacher leaders roles play? Does it need to be a teacher leader that is specific to that, you know, teaching group, or, for example, can an MCL be able to support, you know, emerging bilingual educators and special education teachers? And I Khadija, I know you have unique expertise on this. Do you want to take this question first, and then see if there's any additional thoughts we want to add?

Unknown Speaker  42:29
Sure. So this is actually really exciting question, because I got the opportunity to do this for the first time this year, in terms of supporting a special education teacher in a self contained classroom. And so what I'm doing is going in, and naturally, I'm supporting the students, so pull them out, or I'll push them and then support them with reading. And what I really noticed about that is that she's doing a lot of the same things that I'm doing. But of course, it's, it's still, a lot of times, we're discussing some of the same topics. So what I can do is, share with her some resources that I use, she shares resources I use, and then I ended up being able to use some of those with my students, even though my students have learning disabilities and not intellectual disabilities. So for example, a lot of the really cool symbols that special education teachers have access to those are things I didn't really have access to and in a inclusion setting, but she did so I was able to share my resources with her and she can share hers with my, as far as should it be someone specific to emerge, it necessarily has to be, I think, if you go in thinking about a specific problem or specific goal, that doesn't necessarily have to be a teacher who's taught bilingual students or a speller students special needs. Because there are a lot of things that are just common among teaching students, they're like things that are common to an age group, there might not necessarily have to be specific to those two high needs groups. But it is it is helpful if it's a teacher who does have a lot of experience with that, because they like I said, they have a lot of resources they can share, and things can open up for teachers that they support.

Kareem Farah  44:10
Well, that thanks for sharing that. And, you know, in general, I think my thinking on that too, is there are aspects that need to come from teacher leaders unique to that expertise, but there's other aspects of the profession that aren't unique to that person's expertise, but matter for the student population anyways, and can be shared, you know, across the board. Brian, you have any pretty good thoughts on how this works particularly in opportunity culture and public in fact?

Unknown Speaker  44:37
Yeah, I can I can chat a link to with some specific models, especially within the special education context, and I think there's some overlap here with the immersion bilingual lingual, but there's different ways schools organize special education and they can match up with different ways of organizing teacher leadership. So a couple of the models that you'll see in this link that I said, you know, one is One is you've got, basically general education oriented, multi classroom leaders supporting teams. But then there's also special ed, multi classroom leaders focusing on special educators who are part of those teams. So there's integration between general and special in a way that hopefully is really productive, those leaders can work together, the teachers can work together, and they're all serving the same students. If it's if you're working in a model where there's more self contained, as Khadija alluded to, in one case, you might have special ed MCL, supporting multiple self contained special ed classrooms. And he could do exactly the kinds of things that today's describe her experience having. There's a couple of other variants of this, but it's a little little trickier in some ways than just a straight up third grade multi classroom leader setup. But it's, it's really worth thinking about if the leverage of both the teams have the potential to help everyone, including general educators learn how to meet the needs of all students, and that should be a priority.

Kareem Farah  46:04
I think that's fascinating. And you know, in general, I think the question is really important, because I have seen examples where things are scaled. And then supporting emerging bilingual students or special education teachers feels like Oh, it'll just happen naturally, as a result, as opposed to an intentional effort to think about how to address it. And that's obviously a huge mistake in any community. And we also know that in a lot of the communities that we support it that is not a small percentage of students we're supporting and they cannot be treated as an afterthought. That's terrible. So I think it's a really important question. I'm not seeing any other questions in the chat. And it's we didn't nice 45 minutes. And as I always say, in the same way, in modern classrooms, time should not be the primary constraint and nor should that be in a webinar. So I just want to thank you both, for just the incredible work that you do. Khadija, every single day when you are working in your classrooms, but also as a teacher leader, supporting our work at the monitor classroom project, and the way that your teacher leadership across the board. And then, Brian, when you all are doing public impact, and the opportunity culture initiative is incredible. So I thank you all for every single thing that you do every single day. And I thank you for jumping on this webinar, and I look forward to continuing the discussion. And thanks to our listeners for joining by folks. Thanks

Unknown Speaker  47:20
for including us, everyone. Thanks for everything you're doing.

Zach Diamond  47:29
Thank you so much for listening. Be sure to check out this episode's show notes in your podcast player or on the web. For more information about the speakers in today's show. You can learn more about the modern classrooms project at WWW dot modern classrooms.org. And you can learn the essentials of our model for free at Learn dot modern classrooms.org. You can follow us on social media at modern class proj. That's p r o j and that'll do it for us. So be sure to tune in next time for another episode of catalyzing classroom change.


Transcribed by https://otter.ai