Essay: One Teacher Can't Save the World

Chris McNutt: Hello, and welcome to episode 81 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project. My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio. This is a recording of our Teacher Powered Schools 2020 virtual conference where Nick Covington and I focused on systems-based thinking and reform. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Megan Lambert, Abraham Angel, and Diana Koretsky. Thank you for your ongoing support. You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. 

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Nick Covington: …We have sort of our take on things, but that we'll share with you as a result of this, but we were wondering if anyone would be willing to maybe share for a second about what it is that we value in education, in society, in life. 

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I feel like I, as educators, we value learning, and that can look very different, but I value learning. 

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Yeah, I'm the school social worker at my school, and so for me, I think I really value relationships and connection with students and family. 

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NC: I've heard some people say frequently in some circles on that education should be more of an objective, sort of values-neutral endeavor, and it's interesting to think about if we believe that education has an impact on the outcomes of society, and when we look at societal outcomes, do we see learning, do we see relationships and connecting to the community, and a lot of times I think of the outcomes of society sort of in defiance of our values. So this is a hypothetical here. What would you have to say if we looked at the outcomes of society today? You might say that we value things like competition or inequality, social stratification, racial hierarchies, normalized violence, maybe exploitation of the poor, of workers. You might see a debtor economy in all of this as well. So if we look at those things and we bristle and we say that that doesn't necessarily align with our stated values and maybe some of the unstated ones from our other participants as well, we recognize in that tension there is a challenge, right? There's a challenge to the premise that education has an impact on the world, and when we look at the world and we see outcomes that don't represent those values, we can either believe that education matters and that we need to change the systems of education in order to align the outcomes with what it is that we believe. We have to change to a systems focus and away from individual teachers and look at the bigger picture that we can move forward with here. 

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CM: So when we think about school, and I hate to bear it, negative news in the year 2020 with all the things that are going on, but I swear this will have a positive spin towards the end. But this was going on before COVID, right? We've had problems in schools long before the pandemic, long before racial injustice has been brought to the forefront of American TV screens, et cetera. And in school, we see historically low mental health, engagement is incredibly low. 75% of students in the year 2020 found that they were depressed, anxious, or didn't like school altogether, and just motivation, cynicism, and apathy are growing. And the survey day that we have about school is not good. The majority of students are disengaged, especially by the time they reach high school. And I would be willing to bet that when a study comes out surrounding schools during COVID that things aren't going so hot. But as Nick was talking about, there are ways of changing that that we'll get to in a second. 

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NC: One of the things that really, I think, was maybe a distressing prophecy of 2020, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists back in late January of this year, which feels like an eternity ago, but they had actually announced that the atomic clock was moving to 100 seconds to midnight. So no longer framing that doomsday clock in the sense of hours or minutes, but really counting down the seconds to global catastrophe. And I'll actually read a little bit of a quote from that press release, because they said, it's 100 seconds to midnight. We are now expressing how close the world is to catastrophe in seconds, not hours or even minutes. It's the closest to doomsday we have ever been in the history of the doomsday clock. We now face a true emergency, an absolutely unacceptable state of world affairs that has eliminated any margin for error or further delay. And they're talking pretty broadly there about nuclear proliferation. They're talking about climate change. They're also talking about disinformation campaigns through social media and the internet. So the reform movements that we've seen that have tried to address school quality and learning outcomes have actually not necessarily surfaced the doomsday clock in any sort of meaningful sense if we keep ticking our way closer and closer to midnight. So that traditional accountability framework really relies on individualizing structural problems. So that way the educational outcomes fall along really predictable and racialized lines. It also invades and sort of colonizes our language of school quality and what it means to be a good school. So when you close your eyes and in your mind's eye visualize a good school, or even if you Google a good school, or if you Google a suburban versus an urban school, you'll see well-funded, majority white, suburban, high socioeconomic status schools, but with robust extracurricular programs for students to dive into. On the other hand, bad schools or urban schools, often the framing is, are majority non-white. They serve historically disadvantaged backgrounds. They suffer from a lack of funding through lower property tax incomes. That's the funding formula predominantly in the United States. They focus then on a back to basics curriculum and weed out things like art and music and extracurricular activities that in a suburban school may provide enrichment opportunities, and really are likely to have a police presence and a carceral pedagogy that tries to bring law and order to the classroom. That looks like accountability for students through discipline and behavior policies. That looks like for teachers through the use of test scores as a cudgel wielded against them or value-added metrics for salary increases or incentive pay, and even for schools up until recently, right? Schools have been threatened with liquidation if their test scores were not up to par. So really wielding accountability as a cudgel against schools, students, and teachers, and National Reform efforts have been rooted in that law and order message to schools and even Reform's biggest proponents for the last two decades. So I'm looking at the Fordham Institute here. One of their leading minds, Robert Pondicio, has said in a couple of different places, he said, quote, if we're clear-eyed and candid, we have to concede that nearly three decades of Ed reform has been a mixed blessing, lots of disruption in return for less than stellar results. And that's a quote from somebody who led the charge on this for two decades. So traditional reform has done nothing to try and alleviate any of the systemic social, political, economic, or environmental ills. And it hasn't created any kind of widespread social transformation. The outcomes of schools still fall along the same socioeconomic patterns that they have for 40 years, though it certainly has contributed to that sorting as neighborhood schools decline and policies like vouchers and school choice become more and more popular. So the question, right, is are teachers to blame for this, Chris? 

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CM: I'm sure if we did like a quick survey here, the majority of you don't feel like you're responsible for the plagues of reality that we see across the United States and globally. Ultimately, what we have to accept is that no matter how great we are within our own classrooms at teaching our classes, at impacting our students, we of course are making a difference in our students' lives. But one great teacher doing great work just within the confines of their own class within these very oppressive systems are going to have a very difficult time ensuring that they are unsuccessful with their own students when they're being upheld to, for example, a whitewash standard or to standardized testing. But also don't burn out themselves. It's exhausting doing this type of work. And when you're constantly going up against a system that's trying to hold you back, you see teachers leaving the profession at fairly rapid rates. This is the exact same thing as if you have a system where people are fighting back and it just doesn't work on a greater level, for example, in environmentalism. You can take shorter showers, but ultimately there are giant corporations who are polluting water and using water at exorbitant rates. You'll have police reform metrics, but just because you have one good cop doesn't mean that the entirety of the police accountability system is going to fall into place and work. It's the exact same thing in teaching. You can have one great teacher, but ultimately when you look at a school-wide or district-wide level or even across the entire country, you're going to see a breakdown there where people just aren't getting the results that they want. And when I'm talking about systems, we're talking specifically about things like grading and discipline and all these little fads that come and go, especially when it comes to quote unquote progressive education, not real progressive education as I would define it. Things like using your LMS grade book to analyze some kind of 190, 80 and trying to figure out the bell curve or identifying people who quote unquote deserve punishment and having them serve in some kind of virtual detention. Having your different passion workshops that are ultimately aimed towards putting people into a very specific career instead of identifying the things that they truly love and trying to figure out ways to match that down the road. Or my personal favorite, taking the great idea behind mindfulness, something that so many people could benefit from right now, being able to emotionally manage themselves and accept the way that things are in a way that's at least tolerant. While it's incorporated in schools, mindfulness is basically just test prep. This idea of do some yoga and you'll get through the standardized tests as opposed to asking, why are we inventing systems where people are doing yoga to get through something that's expected them out of school, which doesn't make any sense in a learning environment. And we've attempted to reform these things, right? So we have had these systems give or take for decades, if not longer and people reformers have attempted to change these things. 

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NC: And what's really interesting is that these attempts at reform probably come from a well-intentioned space or maybe even a research-informed space, but often get subsumed by the other various systemic factors that remain unchanged. So standards-based grading, for example, started as a way to provide more opportunities for students to learn material outside of maybe a rigid pacing guide or the notion that you'd have to learn the material by next Tuesday at 4 p.m. And there's no retakes and redos. However, what ends up happening in the long run is that standards-based grading ignores the detrimental effects of grading on students' self-identity, on students' behavior, and the research actually does say that students who get poor grades, those can be a predictor of poor behaviors later on and not necessarily the other way around, as we would think. And the research around that actually says that that can lead to a negative spiral for kids as poor grades lead to poor behavior, which lead to further poor grades and poor behavior, et cetera. And that line for students could start with a project that they thought that they were very successful on, that they really put their passion into and spent time on, and then got a C-. All right? And then their mind kind of shutting down the evaluation on their capacity to create and to learn and rejecting the C- and saying, well, maybe, right, my teacher hates me. Or maybe I'm not, you know, history is not my thing. Or maybe we all have those moments in our school experience in which grading played a largely negative role, and the research would back that up as well. Moving from standards-based grading, which might be a reform method, to a method of ungrading that actually works to shift the power from teachers and on to students, right, to shift from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, the doing to model of school to the doing with model of school as well. So but needless to say, the standards-based grading fails to address the larger sort of sociological and psychological impacts of that, and mostly just serves to replicate bad grading practices in a new way. Alfie Kohn calls this lipstick on a pig. So another one of these reform systems could be tacked on restorative justice. So it's a way to form within the discriminatory structures, but that makes everybody feel better about it in the process, right? Because we can imagine instead of assigning a detention or instead of kicking a student out of class, you know, we'll have a restorative meeting with them sort of in this token manner, but it lacks the relationship-building capacity to actually transform student behavior and student identities, right, to actually identify as members of a learning community. We haven't removed that hierarchical structure that says some students are smart and some students are dumb, some students are capable and some are not. Some can contribute, some can't, and so students shut down, right? They remove themselves from those communities too. Those notions that we try to prepare students to be lifelong learners and then, you know, set them on a bell schedule where they have to learn someone else's content for eight hours a day for however many years. And then to Chris's point about mindfulness as well, mindfulness in pursuit of goals like test preparation or to improve GPAs or even like as brain breaks throughout the day, which could be, which can be beneficial things, don't get me wrong, but what are we needing a brain break from, right? What is so stressful and detrimental about the school experience that you just need some time to step away from that thing? I know that when I'm really engaged in work that's meaningful and purposeful to me, I don't want to take a break. I want to keep going for hours because if not, I'm going to lose that flow. And if you lose the flow, it's hard to find the flow again. So it's paying lip service to reform ideas, maybe to check off some boxes, but without actually having to change the underlying structures that cause us to want to be mindful and passionate and to have to restore justice and to have to do all these other things in the first place. So I wonder if instead of spending time with the latest sort of fad reform, what if we actually looked at shifting the systems to make school a more humane place in the first place? 

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CM: Right, and speaking exactly to that point, we see these reforms across multiple categories of the schools, whether it be public schools, private schools, charter schools, et cetera, where reform always goes in the exact same way. And if you've spoken to pretty much any teacher who's been around for longer, like three or four years, you'll probably know this exact cycle, which is I'll use mindfulness as the example again, SEL, which are both fantastic ideas. You have people post ideas like Carol Dweck with the growth mindset, which in and of itself is a great idea, the idea that you can always grow and get better. But when you add these ideas to a system that assumes that the point of the school district is to increase test scores, to weed out those who don't know what they're doing, quote unquote, to act on often racist, classist, sexist norms, it's not any surprise that these systems that are meant to reform are not going to work in the way that they're intended. And then as a result, they become short little fads because they don't work. If I try to implement mindfulness in my practice and the practice itself is inhumane, I never question the system, of course, at the end of the day, as a teacher, I'm going to be cynical, apathetic. I'm going to burn out because like, oh, here comes another reform. It's not going to work. And then we start to question, well, is mindfulness dumb? And then someone's going to start talking about mindfulness and we're going to be speaking two different languages about the exact same thing. One of us who's burned out from it and another one of us that has read about what it quote unquote really is, which is really confusing. It's difficult to have a conversation with someone about these ideas when so many of us have been turned off from these ideas because of how they've been implemented within schools. Then we end up returning to the status quo, which is why schools really haven't changed all that much. I know many of you work at schools that have really awesome programs. It's a constant battle to maintain that program because it's so easy to get lost back into that status quo because of what is asked from us by the higher ups, by someone who is trying to get us to go back there, which is the reason why so many, especially like charter schools fail or the reason why many public schools are, it's just difficult to do these cool, crazy things. Reform also perpetuates the norm, right? It leads to what's called a neoliberal arms race, which is this idea of it's all about making more and more money. If something gets in the way of a student achieving a quote unquote high grade in order to get to a quote unquote good school in order to be quote unquote successful, all framed around making as much money as possible and making the United States competitive against other nations, then well, we may as well not do it. That leads to so many different possible issues when we're thinking about what does that mean for our kids? What are they going to think when they graduate? Are they going to think that their skills are important because they're important to them, or are they important because they make themselves money? Therefore, does that mean that people that aren't making money aren't as valuable as them? It leads to all these really interesting parts of the hidden curriculum, which is based off anything from cogs in the machine to assembly line thinking to what is now referred to as 21st century skills. All of them are very, very, very much connected to this idea of building a better workforce and centering education around making money. So then we have the question, what happens or can happen if we change the end goal? What if we rethink schools as opposed to being something that ranks in sorts or something that punishes or demeans, but something that's entirely different? Really analyzing the root or zero-based thinking of what could be. 

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NC: So then as we think about, to Chris's point, if we put all of this burden on individual teachers, then the people who care the most are going to be the people who end up getting burnt out and leaving the system. And that's the worst possible outcome because the people who step into their place are probably going to be more than happy to fit in and play their role rather than push where they can and leverage the relative privilege that teachers have. So when we're talking about what makes a bad teacher versus a good teacher, again, I think about this in my own practice and maybe many of you do as well. I think the things that I do the worst in my job are the things that most people look at and would consider as good teaching. It's grading, it's maintaining grade books, it's the discipline side of things. All of those things that you would normally see when you walk into a classroom are largely like devoid in mine. You'll hear a lot of students talking about work, working independently, collaborating to the extent that we can when we're wearing masks and socially distant, even in our online classes. So as we talk about that shift from the individual to the system, it's not enough for me to be able to do those things because students that leave my room end up going across the hall or they go to the other wing where someone is running a classroom that is built to reinforce hierarchy. And students in my classrooms talk about grades all the time for the other classes. I got a 75 in this, I got an 82 in this. Oh, I totally bombed this or that other assessment and at no point did they actually talk about what they're learning, what they're doing, what it is that they're creating, what it is that we're building together. So it's all just about like that ranking and sort of thing and that notion that some students are better than others because what? Because they got a couple of questions right on a math test or something. So at this point, I'm just going to be ranting. But as we shift to the system, if my classroom looks like that, all right, and Chris's looks like this and Kurt's, well then that starts to actually push us towards a systemic change because the power of collective action actually helps us do more things together than individually. When we think about the values, the outcomes of the world that we talked about at the beginning communicate or the outcomes and the values behind it, right? I said we value things like competition, inequality, stratification, racial hierarchy, normalized violence, exploitation, a debtor economy, all right? Those are the things, again, if we believe that education has any impact at all, we have to say that the system is currently built around serving those values. If we are to shift our outcomes, if we want different outcomes, right? If we want to close racial wealth gaps, if we want to improve graduation rates, if we want to actually slow or reverse climate change and deal with police violence, if we want to make any connections to the most powerful social movements that we have in the country and the world today, we have to start with our values, all right? How do we center, to your points, learning and relationships? How do we center empathy? Where does empathy show up on the test on Tuesday, right? What's the assessment that you're going to give to kids to show, to teach them how to be more empathetic thinkers? How are you going to grade that? Where's the rubric for empathy, all right? So it almost seems like the things that we grade and that we spend the most time grading don't actually matter a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, right? In fact, our human brains are designed to forget the things that we don't use and that we don't care about. But how many hard fought battles and how many hours do we spend trying to stuff those things into kids' heads because it's going to improve test scores, maybe by a lot, all right? Does that matter? Can we build a better world and not even improve test scores? I would argue that maybe we could because a shift in our values is not necessarily what we're measuring with our current measurements, right? How do we measure community connection, all right? Everything about our system today is, especially in 2020, is meant to isolate. It's meant to alienate. It's meant to put you in competition with the people around you for work, apartments, for everything else. How can we, instead of feeling isolated, feel connected, feel like we have some responsibility to each other and to the communities that we serve? So how do we shift from, on the left-hand side over here, valuing test scores, which absolutely are a preparation to have our students be trolled and exploited outside of schools to real authentic problem solving out in the world? How can we move from thinking about our kids as yet fully realized human beings and actually get them involved in changing the communities that they serve right now to address the most important issues that we have, to be the strongest voice instead of being cloistered in a classroom? How do we shift from a teacher focus on grades and grading, and I'm going to put compliance in there as well, to one in which we're the guide for students as they go throughout the world and explore and problem solve and change. I know so many of you that are with us today are involved in doing that work, which is fantastic. How do we get kids from being consumers? Again, training people to be passive consumers for the rest of their lives to actually being critical creators and maybe even critical consumers to actually understand where messages and where media is coming from and the means to be able to push back on those things. And then to move from competition, which is going to create winners and losers and internalize those messages for kids to one in which we understand that learning is not a race. It's a collaborative effort. We're only ever going to get there together. If we look at traditional practice or even reformed practice within these things to what we actually want the system to be, how can we expect outcomes to be any different unless we start with values? 

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CM: One thing I would add, too, that we probably should have thrown on there is just the idea of student voice, speaking to the narrative of the conference. How do you teach students to be a little revolutionary or rebellious? Not necessarily encouraging them to overthrow the school, but just the idea of what happens to a student if they talk back or stand up for themselves. Are they shut down instantly or are they heard? And how do we deal with students who maybe don't want to do the things that we want them to do? Is the response to force them to do it, or is the response to work with the student and listen to them and hear from them and build a system with our students as opposed to mandating everything from the top down? Because again, that gets back into that reform thing. We can shift to having a creative, cooperative, interesting problem-solving curriculum, but if a student says, nah, I don't want to do that, and we just force them to do it, that kind of defeats the entire purpose of what we're talking about here today. So before I show this next part here, I want to preface that there's no silver bullet to solving any of these problems. There is not ever going to be a program or a curriculum or a speaker who can come in and say, I can make your school into a problem-solving school, because it's not how education works. It's not a scientific problem. This is a human problem, and every single community and every single group of people and every single student is going to want something slightly different. So therefore, it's organic. It's a creative profession. We have to speak with others and learn from them and think about if these are the values, and we can brainstorm those values as a group that we're aiming towards, how can we start from square one to ensure that that happens? So bringing us back to kind of this point, when we're talking about what do we value, we're not referring just to teachers. We're referring to the entire school community, and we have to think about, again, are students being led toward those values? At Human Restoration Project, we see it as 20 different categories. These are really broad, but you can see here, we summarize them into four different value statements. I'll just go through them really quickly. We believe that learning is rooted in purpose-finding and community relevance, that social justice is the cornerstone to educational success, that dehumanizing practices do not belong in schools, and that learners are respectful toward each other's innate human worth. And what's interesting is when you look at each one of these systems, whether it be connecting to the community, whether it be adopting critical pedagogy, demanding inclusive spaces, supporting and elevating teachers, whatever it might be, not only do you see change at a student and teacher level, you see it drastically across the entire world through research. When you change the question in research from, okay, I want you to increase your SLO or your test score by 10% by the end of the year, the value of that research drastically changes when you say, hey, are you happy being at school and you survey students? It's absolutely fascinating to note that when you shift the question that you ask, how much these different changes make a difference within your students' lives and also your life just because it's more fun to do. So Nick and I typed something up that's kind of a summary of these thoughts that relates to other links and other ideas and other things that are going on. That's kind of our whole shtick. The world sucks, but we can make it better by changing the system. 

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NC: We'll take your applause. What else you got? What's the Jeb Bush line? Please clap. Can we spend some time together here since we have time talking questions and just unpacking stuff? The other big thing about Human Restoration Project is that we want to model the kind of change that we want to see, not just in professional development and in the community, but build the network of educators who's doing this work so we're not working in isolation. So we can ask each other ideas and be critical friends of the things that we want to try and do in our classrooms too. Yeah, I did want to address, Danica asked or put in the chat, and then Chris responded here too, with the pressure for many students of color to get high paying jobs and propel themselves and their families out of multigenerational poverty. If students are working against a system that sorts and ranks, teachers are working against this too, but all those other outside forces in society are working against those communities of color as well. So that way the people who can get out end up being the rare few in a lot of instances. So it's the difference between contributing to stratification and just letting one or two kids and families out of systemic poverty and structural racist structures to say, well, let's change those racist structures and address systemic poverty, which is a broader social change than trying to uplift one thing in one place at one time that's going to be futile for a lot of people. 

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CM: Thought that was interesting. Assuming that the community is negative, right? Assuming the idea that there's not something to contribute to, which as someone who teaches a CTE class, so like a career type center, that is the norm. That is the idea that is constantly perpetuated, train students to get jobs that way they leave. 

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Can either of you say anything about how you've managed to get any part of the system to change? 

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CM: So for me, a lot of this comes down to a combination of two different ideas, which one is creative noncompliance, which is where you intentionally do something that you're not supposed to do and then apologize if and when you get caught. The other way is through mitigated risks. So understanding that there are some things at the end of the day that we have to report out on, but we can find ways to give students as much control over that as possible. So the one that first comes to mind is my class does not give a grade until the end of the year, and 99.9% of students get an A. Within my class, students over the course of the entire year self-assess everything that they do. I basically take no share in that, and that students basically know, hey, at the end of this year, I'm going to get an A. And what's shocking is if you tell students up front, hey, you're going to get an A at the end of the year, they actually work way harder on stuff because that overarching weight has been lifted off their shoulders. And I think that there's a lot of assumptions because of the system that we're in that students are going to use your class as a study hall or that they're going to not care or something like that. And there are honestly students that do that. There are students that treat it that way, but if you compare it to the number of students who had the stress, that had the apathy, that maybe wouldn't have done anything at all to begin with if it was underneath the traditional system, it's not even comparable. So literally just telling kids, hey, you're getting an A, and then pretty much everyone gets an A is one notion. Other thing would be taking discipline as much as humanly possible away from the administrator's office. Pretty much as long as the student isn't doing anything that's a direct threat to anyone, they never leave because I know that the second that I send a student to the administrator, that is going to turn into an administrative discipline protocol and it's going to be gross. The kid probably won't learn anything, they'll probably get attention and it will just continue the things that we've always done instead that's going to turn into a conversation and it's going to turn into restorative justice that happened within the classroom based off of like restorative justice training, like peacekeeping circles and things like that nature. Or it could be transforming a classroom into a creative hands-on space where students have almost complete freedom and choice in what they do every single day. I found that if you tell students, hey, just so you know up front, these are the things that we need to cover, but there's a ton of different ways to go about it. And here's some ideas that I have, but feel free to kind of do whatever you want. I'll be around to talk with you about it. They always end up producing way better stuff than if I would have written out like quote unquote like really well-planned lesson, which is what I feel like I used to do. But sadly, that's not what students always want to do. So it's trying to find ways as much as possible to turn power over to students, trying to find ways to think critically about these things. And really, for me, the hardest part is rationalizing the assumptions that are there, rationalizing that students are not going to just turn the classroom into chaos the second that you remove some of these systems. 

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NC: Can I speak a little bit to that, too, Chris? I don't know if you had a follow up to that, Kurt, but the chat has some questions as well that kind of lead nicely into that. And and to speak to Chris's point, one of the things that actually got me in the direction that I am talking to you all today and involved with the Human Restoration Project is actually seeing that in my classroom, the more that I transferred power and this was a deliberate act on my part, the more that I transferred that power, the decision making, the more that I stepped back, the more that students stepped up. So the more that I gave them meaningful things to do, they did better work than than of any projects and rubrics and anything else that I designed in the past because I learned how to ask them broader, more impactful questions to say, OK, well, what are you going to do? How are you going to do it? What tools are you going to need to get there? How can I help you? How do you think you did? What are some of the takeaways for you? And those things can certainly be rooted in standards. Obviously, I teach in a public high school. I have standards I have to cover, but I rely on students to cover those things. And my planning has to has to set up some some meaningful options and opportunities for students to to get there and to plot a nonlinear course through that as well. And what's really cool is that I basically have my whole course laid out for students from from day one. And we kind of just reveal pieces of it as we go throughout the the curriculum and students who want to work ahead and get work done and just have the relief of checking the boxes on my econ units. They just do it and then they can work on other classes because I'm not up at the front sort of guiding and taking up their time, too. So after the first few weeks, say in my in my economics class in particular, there's almost no direct instruction. We have maps, we have lists. I have activities for students to do. And then it's basically what are you going to do today? What goals are you going to reach? Here's maybe where you should be by week six or seven or eight. I can check in with students who are there or not. So it's about trust and relationships and those things, too. And I see Angela's question is, how do we begin to do that with all the teacher's standards in place? I love the idea of upheaval of the whole system. I love the idea of just having the receipts. All right. Nothing is better than than having people in positions of power over administrators or whatever, ask about the outcome of a lesson or activity. And you just turn over piles of student work and student reflections and evidence, journals, portfolios that students have built for all those. And and that's where I think those things speak to it. So so I say I have my list of teacher standards or whatever, or maybe curriculum standards that I have to hit. I view my job less of of me having to drag students over the line than as a collective challenge of my classroom to say, hey, guys, here's the list of stuff we got to get done. How are we going to do this? Here's the here's the ways that we can help each other out in this process. I haven't given a grade in any of my classes so far this year. And guess what? Students still show up every day. Students still are excited and engaged and active and motivated. They show up to my Zoom class. They log in and do my online class. And it's not just because I'm a charismatic person who stands in front of the room and talks all day, but it's because I really just set up the structures for them to engage in meaningful, purposeful work. And as far as leverage, I could I can't do that if I'm a first year teacher. Right. I can't do that if I'm in a school where maybe my administrator really has eyeballs on X, Y and Z metric. Right. So I have to leverage a lot of privilege in order to be able to get those things done. But that leveraging actually transfers through my instructional coaches who use my work as examples and as models for other teachers in the building and in the district, as for administrators who come into my classroom and talk to me about, you know, I heard from X, Y and Z parent or student about this thing that's happening. Can I come see that? It's leveraging that privilege for everyone else then to get on board. So then the first year teacher can do that experiment. Right. And then you can have that reflective conversation about what works or what doesn't. My students are far less interested in their grades than their parents. Now, that that is the interesting thing. So so, for example, I have I have parent teacher conferences. Well, if I don't have grades and I don't have a grade book set up. So parents go, how's my kid doing? I have to have some sort of meaningful communication with that parent about that. So that's what I do. I turn that over to students and I give them a digital, a physical document or whatever it is that has some prompts and say and say, this this parent teacher conference, I need I need you to be the voice for your own learning in this process. I can corroborate that and give my take, but I'm not inside your head. I don't know how things are going for you. So when a parent asks, how's my kid doing in your class? I turn over evidence. If I don't have the evidence, we don't we can't have the conversation. If I don't have the reflection from the students. I mean, that's that's like losing the black box for a plane crash. All right. You don't know what's happening. So it's really just about gathering and weighing evidence on these things and seeing how that fits in with the goals that we have to Chris's point. It doesn't mean that every kid just falls in line and has a great time and everything else, but it lifts the ceiling so that more students can be engaged in that. And then the students who might be turned off by bad grading practices or a boring curriculum or whatever. Right. It alleviates some of those gaps. And then the kids who are doing great and they're like flying through things and they're self-driven and self-motivated. Well, guess what? I don't have to worry about them. Right. That doesn't mean I don't I don't care, but they can do their own thing and that's cool. So guess what? I'm going to wrap my arms around the kids in my class who need the most adult support and I'm going to work with them. Right. I'm going to spend most of my time with the student in class who needs one on one attention the most because I know everyone else in my room can more or less they can use each other, they can use themselves, they can use resources, et cetera. All right. Parents are mostly elated that I'm just not talking about a grade book at them at conferences because they say, I already know it's in the grade book. All right. Tell me something I don't know. And I don't have to talk about grades. So I don't have to say, well, you know, your kid could be at a 92, but, you know, they could just they can get a couple more points on this test and and then they'll be like at a at a 95 if they want that. OK, I actually have to talk about what their what their kid is like in class and like the things that they're into and how they engage with the people around them and how they contribute, et cetera. And then we can talk about the work and the places where it's it's exceeding the voices in which it's lacking and then the support that I can provide to that student in the process. So there's also like an element of of universal design in here as well. Right. How can we build an on ramp for every kid and not like gate keep and keep the those things away from kids so that way only a select few are allowed to are allowed to proceed? Yes. Qualitative information. Exactly. Oh, I wanted to talk is I hope it's Janice. I hope I'm pronouncing that right, Janice. But what are ways your students engage with the community? And I with my seniors. So again, consider I teach high school, so 10 through 12. But with my seniors in my econ class to do a semester long project based learning thing called their Economic Engagement Project, and it's framed like that, but literally they get to ask and answer their own question. The only requirement, OK, the only requirement is that it has to have a community connection. So what does that mean? It means if you're going to research and so many of the questions this semester about covid, what's the impact of covid on on travel is one of the questions that one of the students asked. So it's like, OK, who do we partner with in the community to answer that question? Now, that community might be local. That might be state. That might be a digital community. Right. Who can we get in contact with? Who is knowledgeable about the impact of travel? Is that an economist? Is that one of your parents friends? Is that whatever? I've had so many people, so many students talk to their parents about what it is that they do in their work and bring, you know, that their parents work into my classroom, either through interviews or through presentations, et cetera. You know, what's the day in the life like of of a nurse in the time of covid? Oh, well, my mom's a nurse, right? I want to talk to her about her experiences. It's ways in which we can build those communities and honor and value student community voices in here as well. So, you know, if I was more academically inclined, I might call this a culturally relevant pedagogy because I'm bringing in those student voices and adapting the curriculum to to them, not to just, you know, meet their interests and let them play video games all day or whatever. And that's cool, too. But but to actually be responsive to the needs that the that the community has and the interest of the student in wanting to contribute to that thing, too. 

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CM: I wanted to get to one final question here because we only have a couple more minutes. Oh, we do. I wanted to hit Carly's point, which I thought was a really good question, which is what problems are teachers facing while trying to engage in creative? Not what's standing in the way outside of job security for people that are trying to do this? And also, what advice do we have for teachers surrounding those from working class backgrounds who worry about losing their jobs? Because that honestly is end game thing here. And part of it is realizing that there is a there is a cognitive dissonance here. Right. We're talking about upholding standards while simultaneously talking about how much can we change the system? So there's a there's this constant back and forth of, well, I'm doing this, I'm doing X, but I want to eliminate Y. And really, at the end of the day, it's like, well, how far can I push this possibly before it matters? And I've been shocked every single time that I've done something, how much administration likes it, even very traditional administrators, because they see the products, they don't necessarily see what is going on day to day. And I mean, I've been involved in circumstances where it's just like, you know, the administrator comes in for their observation and the kids know it's different that day and they kind of get it without really getting it. Jonathan Kozol calls that building the coalition and Hooks talks about it when being observed, just the idea of like you're forming your own little cohort of learners who kind of know what they're in on the game, that you're doing something different and then it can be really cool. And I think it's up to those of us that have more, I guess, political capital at our jobs to push for those who maybe do not. If you're a first year teacher, you probably don't want to do this. But my job, maybe as a seventh year teacher, can be going into that first year teacher's classroom and co-teaching with them and getting these systems built up with them and helping introduce them to these ideas or, you know, talking to the administrator about a cool idea I heard about what they were trying to do and trying to push for it, because I've always been surprised time and time again that students and administrators alike go along with these things once they see them in action. 

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NC: Yeah, bring the receipts. That's what it's about. If you can have the receipts, I mean, what's what's stopping you? Why not? You know, that's that creative noncompliance. That's, you know, flexing your privilege a little bit. You got to build the bridge for everyone else so that way they can they can join you, too. So I appreciate everybody for spending the time with us this afternoon. Again, it's if you're staring at a screen all day long for your work and then and then you choose to come on here and stare at a screen more to listen to us like that's incredible. So I so appreciate any any time. 

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CM: Thank you again for listening to the Human Restoration Project podcast. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education. You can learn more about our cause, support us and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at Human Restoration Project.org.

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