← Catalyzing Classroom Change
Catalyzing Classroom Change
Episode 2: Redefining the Role of Teacher Leaders
00:48:12
Kareem Farah, CEO and co-founder of the Modern Classrooms Project, hosts a conversation with Bryan Hassel, Co-Director of Public Impact, and Khadejah Scott, DCPS Teacher and Expert Modern Classroom Mentor to explore how we can redefine the role of teacher leaders in K-12 education.
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- [00:08]
Podcast Host
Welcome to Catalyzing Classroom Change, a podcast from the Modern Classrooms Project.
- [00:22]
Kareem Farah
All right, let's do this. Hey everybody, thanks for jumping on. I know some more folks are going to be coming in throughout this session. My name is Kareem Farah. I'm the co founder and CEO of the Modern Classrooms Project. And this is our second sort of webinar 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 they don't actually change what we see when we go visit classrooms or 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 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 K12 education system. So I have two incredible guests today that sit in very different spots in the education system for a reason, but both have a deep impact on teacher leadership and understand what teacher leadership means. The two folks I have are Brian Hassell, the co president of Public Impact, and I also have Kadesha 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 the session with us having a conversation. So please drop things in the chat, ask questions. This is supposed to be a very 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 to introduce themselves. Kadesha, I'm going to start with you. Can you just share a little bit more about your work? What you do in K12 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.
- [02:34]
Brian Hassell
Okay, good.
- [02:35]
Kadesha Scott
Good evening everybody. It's afternoon and to evening. So I am Kadesha Scott. I am originally from Georgia. I currently teach in Washington D.C. 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 as well as some social studies. We founded Ida B. Wells Middle School in 2019. So I joined 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 involve leadership in DCPs. So I represent the district and we do test development events. So for things like PARC and then I also design and 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.
- [03:49]
Kareem Farah
So you're busy is the upshot from that for sure. And you're doing outstanding work and I have heard from many teachers who've 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 into education and what's the work that you lead now?
- [04:09]
Brian Hassell
Yeah, great. Well, thanks for, thanks for doing this. Excited to be here. And I'm Brian Hassell, co president of Public Impact. The other co president is Emily Askew Hassell. And we founded 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 are some research we could do, papers we could write, ideas we could put forward about this. And Emily wrote a paper in 202009 called 3X for 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 districts about 600 schools to redesign schools around teacher leadership, multi classroom leaders. Then we'll 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.
- [05:18]
Kareem Farah
Fabulous. Well, the 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 Khadija mentioned, she's a modern classroom expert mentor. One of the things we do at the Modern Classrooms Project is we take our best implementers, we credential them, we first give them a distinguished modern classroom educator credential. We have well over 400 distinguished modern classroom educators across the country. And then a portion of 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, so important to Modern Classrooms Project. So diving into the actual discussion now, the first question I have for you all, and I'll kick this one to you, Brian. To start, what does teacher leadership normally look like in K12 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, and would you describe it as effective?
- [06:22]
Brian Hassell
Yeah, it's a great question. I bet a lot 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 paid. It's often, if 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, to do this thing. It's often piled on to teachers existing workloads 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 I think often therefore it's unsatisfactory to teachers and it's not getting the impact that it could if we really thought it through differently.
- [07:18]
Kareem Farah
Kinesia, 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?
- [07:30]
Kadesha Scott
Yeah. 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 lead initiative or lead a project or something like that. But the other way. 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 that 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 or they just become. Whoever applies for it just gets it. And there's not really, even though there's a stipend associated with it, there's not really specific expectations or goals associated with the, with the positions. And the other way, 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, so like 60 plus years between them and they were both retiring the next year. But it actually, it turns out that they had been at the school for a while but. And 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.
- [08:57]
Kareem Farah
Well, I actually think you bring up something really important that 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 in K12 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 an 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 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, Kadesia, 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. 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. And 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.
- [10:49]
Brian Hassell
Right.
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Kareem Farah
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 I'm 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 district leadership is challenging, but I don't think we should be taking, you know, star players and putting them in that role. It 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. 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. Kadesha, why don't you start with that? Why do you think right now, when the system is in such a stressed spot, we're obviously in the process of working through a very challenging time. Why do you think teacher leadership has a key role in this?
- [12:00]
Kadesha Scott
Well, just thinking about my experience with teachers that I've looked up to that have been my official mentor, unofficial mentor. I think that really engaging in good teacher leadership prevents us from. From overanalyzing 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'd spoken to someone about it or I had specific training where they were telling me about how to solve a problem that I wouldn't even know would 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 them, because we don't really have the support of someone who has 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 try to give them all of my support. I know a lot of other teachers do as well because there are not 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.
- [13:23]
Kareem Farah
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 K12 education system. What's so special about teacher leadership?
- [13:35]
Brian Hassell
Yeah, and that would really amplify what you both said. And Kadesha, 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 teacher leadership really could be part of both of those. The teacher one is the obvious one. It's currently, teachers don't get the support they need in the classroom to 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, Kareem, unless they want to leave the classroom. Teacher leadership can provide that. A way to earn more, gain a promotion, as it were, or a way to, 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 are 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 or 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 great 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 the teacher leader is giving to every student who's in that, in that reach.
- [15:29]
Kareem Farah
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, 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 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's 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. The 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 they're 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. Kadesha, you've participated in some pretty awesome teacher leadership roles. I'm biased. You're modern classrooms expert 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 respective 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 it 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?
- [17:43]
Brian Hassell
I can do that. And I also take a look at our website where they're not right now because you're going to 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 it to life as well. But the cornerstone here in this Opportunity Culture is the multi classroom leader. So that's the teacher leader who has prior high growth success with students, who leads 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 to eight 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, it includes leading the planning of the 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 team teachers classrooms, co teaching with them, teaching small groups of students in their classrooms 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 the action step they were trying to work on with you in the room. 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 Start.
- [19:37]
Kareem Farah
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?
- [19:57]
Brian Hassell
I can. So on the schedule there's two 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. 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 discrete periods of time releasing them to go down the hall. In a secondary school it 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 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 abbreviated 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 going to go away. It's built in and so you can count on it.
- [21:39]
Kareem Farah
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 multi classroom leaders because of two things. I mean, if you're gonna empower teacher leaders, you need to think differently about how you compensate them and you need to think differently about when they do the work. If you're not going to do that, then a lot of it's 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 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 time frame, 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 do in that way. Kadesha, can you tell a little bit about your work? And I know you're going to talk a little bit about being a modern 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.
- [22:45]
Kadesha Scott
Sure. So actually I'll start, I won't start by talking about being a mentor. I will start by talking about something that I'm seeing in the chat with inter visitations and observations. That is one of the more effective forms of teacher leadership that I've seen. My school has 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 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. Career, I would say. Actually it was two days. I spent two days just visiting different schools in dcps. And I got to see not only 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 or different. I got ideas from everywhere, whether it was the elementary autism classroom or the high school English classroom, 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 found is really helpful. The other one that I've seen really start 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, 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 teachers lead 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 a 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 or whatever the topic is for that day. And aside from that. So the as far as mentorship, I love, like I said at the 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 I 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. And so that's, that's a lot of what I really like 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.
- [26:38]
Kareem Farah
And Kadesha, can you tell 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 at the Modern Classrooms 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 Classrooms project. But the operative word there is 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?
- [27:15]
Kadesha Scott
Yeah, totally. Is very flexible. It's the most flexible teaching related job I've had. So I really appreciate that 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 last 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, we send that off and then we get matched with mentees. So the way the matching works, I think there's some sort of like very secret algorithm, but there's a mentors and mentees 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 self paced 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 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.
- [28:38]
Kareem Farah
Perfect. And you know, one of the things I want, there's a couple things I want to note that I've seen across both these structures of leadership that I think we're certainly proud of at the Modern Classroom project. And if you're not proud of a public impact and the opportunity culture, then you should be because it's awesome. I think there's a couple things. First, I think there's compensation involved, right? Kadeja, 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, in your case, like a prerequisite to building this out within schools and systems is allocating funding. 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 Modern 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 who 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, Kadesha, and the MCLs are leveraging their expertise. When you are. You said something I think is really interesting, Kadesha. You may be mentoring someone who has more experience than you 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 thing I want to name 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, Kadesha, watch videos and mastery checks, you're Giving feedback, but you're also like, oh, that's pretty cool. And then the MCLs 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 to, oh, we got to tell the team about that. Which I just think is so, so important. Kadesha, when you said that the only real time you've ever seen other teachers teach is when you were thinking about leaving, like that's, that's a reality we got to fix in K12 education, right? If the only time you see other teachers teach is 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 it is the Modern Classrooms project scaled almost exclusively because people started watching other people teach. My co founder Rob was like, like hey, you look really sad in this math team meeting. I think it's because you can't meet 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 Culture and 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 in 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 at a point K12 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 K12 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 K12 education and the retention of educators over time.
- [32:28]
Brian Hassell
Yeah, that's a tall order. But I think it's so important. Everything that you're. You're naming and the. 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 education programs across the country. We haven't seen giant turnover or great resignation. Exactly. But there's a fear that's coming, and you can see why the demands are higher than ever. And so I think the challenge is you can see over the hill. If you had teams with teacher leaders and schools were organized that way, and 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 learn as well and could advance, you could see how, if you were 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 working so hard already? And so I think to put in a kind of joint plug for our two organizations here. But, 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 probably see 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, wow, 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 in our 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, Karim. 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.
- [34:53]
Kareem Farah
I love that. Something tells me Kadesha knows a little bit about what it's like on that building phase, given you were 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 0 people are leading innovation. 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 in our educators, and we need to respect that. Kadesha, 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?
- [36:03]
Kadesha Scott
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 growing. And then there's a vote on what the third one should be. Either it was going to be Love, Grow, 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 of that. I think that's really important 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 actively 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 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 how someone else has done it. So I think just thinking about my experience, like I was saying, the most effective leadership is, are 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 an 80% chance that the principal or the assistant principal is going to be in my class and they're actually going to see my students and see the work they're doing. And they'll actually be able to. They'll know what's going on so they can actually support with whatever issue that I have. And then I think I lost my train of thought a bit. But I think also in terms of improving sustainability, I'm seeing something in the chat about unconferences and teacher led conferences. I think one of the experiences that I've had that I've really appreciated that leads to sustainability is EdCamps. I don't 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 and 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 it's not a problem I have to solve by myself.
- [39:07]
Kareem Farah
I love that. And I do hear edcamps are 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 in a grass, in a, in a Fantastic Educator's 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 teacher's 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 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, and then close things out. 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 and it's difficult. So a lot of times I see teacher leaders as this critical filter of like you give the teacher leaders the things to pilot, they go test it, they'll tell you good, bad, needs to change. They're 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 to other folks who maybe aren't quite convinced or ready or want it and are skeptical of that change. So I think we oftentimes throw innovation on the shoulders of leaders. And there's two problems with that. Leaders are spread, then 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 introducing 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. Not to homogenize the two groups, but I recognize that they face a few extra challenges. This is a really interesting question around like, you know, what do teacher leaders roles play? Does it need to be a teacher leader that is specific to that, 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 Kadesha, 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 you want to add?
- [42:29]
Brian Hassell
Sure.
- [42:30]
Kadesha Scott
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 actually I'm supporting the students. So I'll 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 different. A lot of times we're discussing some of the same topics. So what I can do is share with her some of the resources that I use. She shares resources I use and then I end up being able to use some of those with my students, even though my students have learned 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 that I didn't really have access to in a inclusion setting, but she did. So I was able to share my resources with her and she could share hers with mine. As far as should it be someone specific to emergent necessarily has to be. I think if you go in thinking about a specific problem or a specific goal, that doesn't necessarily have to be a teacher who's taught bilingual students or students with special needs. Because there are a lot of things that are just common among teaching students. There are things that are common to an age group that might not necessarily have to be specific to those two high needs groups. But 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.
- [44:11]
Kareem Farah
Love 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, that person's expertise, but matter for the student population anyways and can be shared, you know, across the board. Brian, do you have any particular thoughts on how this works, particularly in opportunity culture and public?
- [44:38]
Brian Hassell
Yeah, and I can chat a link too 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 send, you know, one is, one is you've got basically general education oriented school 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 some 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 Kadesha alluded to in one case, you might have have special ed MCL supporting multiple self contained special ed classrooms and we can do exactly the kinds of things that Kadesha described 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 set up. But it's, it's really worth thinking about to get the leverage of both 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.
- [46:04]
Kareem Farah
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, that is not a small percentage of the 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 did a 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, Kadesha, every single day when you are working in your classrooms, but also as a teacher leader supporting our work at the Modern Classrooms Project and the way that you're teacher leadership across the board. And then Brian, what you all are doing in 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 all the listeners for joining. Bye folks.
- [47:20]
Brian Hassell
Thanks for including us, everyone. Thanks for everything you're doing.
- [47:29]
Podcast Host
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.modernclassrooms.org and you can learn the essentials of our model for free at learn.modernclassrooms.com you can follow us on social media ModernClassProj. 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.