Nati Rodriguez [01:40] 
Thank you so much for being a part of this conversation, and we are really excited to learn about your work. Would you mind telling us about why you were selected for a Teacher of the Year this year?  

Michelle Stradford [01:50] 
Oh, gosh. I was actually nominated by a wonderful person at our district office, our Assistant Superintendent, Mr. Dustin Seemann. He had emailed me to let me know that he was nominating me for this whole process. It was actually a process I was super unfamiliar with. I didn’t even know about the Teacher of the Year and so I did a little research myself.  

Why I was selected – that’s been an interesting thing to reflect on. You hear this nomination it makes you reflect on your entire career and the things that you have done. I went back and thought through, and Dustin gave me some help. I think the best I can answer is that I hope I was nominated because I’ve done a lot. I’ve been with my district for a very long time and done a lot of roles, kind of over and above just my teaching job, which I think helped. I like to be a problem solver. I think that’s a natural teacher tendency to do. I’ve worked in a variety of roles with my district office, and so I think that for him, I was someone that he could always count on and turn to and get the answers he needed for curriculum or things going on at our schools. I think, in reflection, I hope that’s why he selected me to be a part of this process this year.  

Nati Rodriguez [03:08] 
Can you speak to some of those other roles that you’ve taken on aside from classroom instruction?  

Michelle Stradford [03:13] 
Sure. One of the biggest roles that I’ve taken on, and it’s titled something different in every district; in Beverly Hills, we call it grade-level specialist. You are the person who’s in charge of your grade level, you act as a liaison between the district office and your school site. I’ve actually done that job for about twelve years now. I started it very early in my career, and it’s just something that I enjoyed because I went to my team and got answers, and took it back. We had a small cohort of grade-level specialists that worked with the district to solve those problems that you need a smaller, tight-knit group to work through instead of working with hundreds of teachers. So, I did that. I’m still in that position, actually.  

I have worked on several committees. I’ve done textbook committee adoptions and school site council at our school. We have something at our school called Instructional Leadership Team, which is site-based, and it’s our small group of teachers who get together and talk about problems that need solving at the school, curriculum issues – what do we need? what do the kids need? what do the adults need?  

I also have been our PTA Rep for a number of years that I’ve been here to work with the parent side of our school site. And then on the teacher side, I have always been a part of our teachers’ union, but I also stepped up about six years ago to start taking on an actual role in our union. I’ve done K-5 Director, so I’ve been in charge of the issues hitting our K-5 staff, and then I was the Secretary of our union for the last several years as well. So, learning that whole side of the job, which is an entirely different side to teaching than just being in the classroom.  

Nati Rodriguez [04:55] 
That’s great. That’s fantastic. It just reminds me of, with more time in the field, the expansion that teachers can experience in their learning and their own careers, that’s not just about the classroom, but really informs that instruction. I’m curious how those roles, if at all, how those changed during distance learning and COVID? How did that impact your experience? 

Michelle Stradford [05:18] 
Like everything it impacted it severely. I think that we were thrown into the situation. I know the same words get reused and are redundant, but it was something none of us ever thought we’d experience, and didn’t know what to do. We were all day-by-day trying to figure it out. As a grade-level specialist, it was transitioning to meeting with my team on Zoom and then going to the district office staff on Zoom and just finding that time. In our district, we taught full days during the pandemic, so we’re not on shortened days necessarily. We were teaching full days. It was a lot of after-hours work, which, in the past, we would get a sub day and talk about things. It was more commitment during the pandemic. The union, of course, made everything harder because we were again, dealing with – how do we make this successful while keeping teachers safe and kids safe? What decisions do we need to make, and compromises do we need to come to with our district? But really keeping our staff and their health and safety and what their wants and needs were, kind of high priority.  

That was something that, while that’s always our intention as a union, now we had this whole other virus that is something that we had no idea what to do. It was a lot of, I mean, we made some hard decisions, and not everyone was happy with us. That was also a really hard situation to deal with, and everyone has different views on what was the right thing to do, and we just did the best we could during something that was so unprecedented. So, it was hard. All about teaching was hard. Those other roles that I had to do outside of my teaching job, it was a learning experience for sure and something that I will take. Hopefully, if we ever have another virus, we do things a lot better this time around, but it was difficult for sure.  

Michelle Stradford [07:28] 
Yeah, I think we have a foundation to build on, whereas we had nothing when this happened. Nobody knew what they were doing. We were all just, I mean, it was an hour-by-hour at some points during the year. I think if this were to happen again, I hope it doesn’t, but I think that we now have past experience to build on. Hopefully we will not make some of the mistakes that we made, because mistakes were made, because we didn’t know. Now that, you can call it a blueprint, if you will, if this were to happen again, we at least have some starting off points and we know what worked virtual learning and what certainly didn’t work virtual learning on the kids’ side. We know for the adults – what do we need to do and come together. I said this word again, I’ll probably use it a lot. What do we need to compromise on to make sure that everyone is being heard and decisions that were being made were benefiting everyone involved as much as possible. 

Nati Rodriguez [08:20] 
Thank you for sharing that. Maybe this leads to my next question. What keeps you in the profession? What excites you about your work?  

Michelle Stradford [08:28] 
The kids. I have been asked a lot of these questions lately going through the Teacher of the Year process. Again, it’s going back, that’s why teachers do this job in the first place. Sometimes people forget that we are here for the kids – that is our number one thing. People ask me why I still do this job. It is them and it is a hard job. I will never, ever use another word to describe it. This job is hard every single day, but you have these little beings who you never know what’s going to come out of their mouth, and you never know what they’re going to say or do. That is what makes the days fun, exciting, and sometimes weird. That’s okay because they are who they are. When I think of my career path, when people ask me if I ever want to go into administration, my answer is always a quick no, because that takes me away from the thing I love best about this job, which is the kids. Although you’re still dealing with kids as an administrator, it’s an entirely different situation. For me, the kids are what keep me here.

Nati Rodriguez [09:35] 
Thank you for sharing. I’ve heard that what’s tricky about education and being a classroom teacher is that often the better you are, the more veteran, and the more experienced, you tend to go towards an administrative path, but that might not actually be what is best for the individual or even for the students being served. I’m curious, have you given some thought to what could change so that teachers stay in the classroom, who are meant to be teaching, and then the administrator is a different path?  

Michelle Stradford [10:08] 
No, I think I understand you. I think that I read something on Twitter recently, and one of the things that this person was talking about is that in teaching, there is a really big energy imbalance. Teachers give so much energy to the kids because that is our job, and that is what it is. But we have so many others asking for the energy that we have left, and there’s more energy being asked of us than there is that we have. Keeping teachers in teaching is I mean, there’s got to be a shift in what is expected of us in the hours that we’re expected to dedicate to this job. It’s not a new story to tell that we work outside of our hours. I always tell people I teach from eight to three, and then I work after three o’clock because you don’t have that time during the day to do those things.  

Again, I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I do think there’s so much being asked of educators, and there’s not actually enough time being given to them to actually accomplish a lot of those tasks. I’m 18 years with my district, 16 years full time. I wouldn’t say it’s getting easier, and I think that at some point when you’re a veteran, things should get easier, but it’s not, because I feel like every time, there’s just more and more being asked of teachers. People go into administration, I don’t envy that job either. I think that that is an incredibly difficult job. I think that there’s even more being asked of you, weekend events, and nighttime events, and all these councils that you have to sit on, and it is difficult. I think that there’s a lot of people who don’t want to move into administration because, as I said before, you’re taking out that funny, cute little kid part that you get to do all day long, and deal with more of the paperwork and bureaucracy. So, it’s hard, very hard.  

Nati Rodriguez [12:39] 
We watched your TOY video and you mentioned “not needing to fill every minute with instruction.” Could you just tell us about what other things you incorporate in your classroom that bring joy into that experience?  

Michelle Stradford [12:54] 
Yes, that was the funny thing. No one knew which clip they were going to show, so I had no idea what they were going to show. I’m actually really glad they chose that one because, obviously we’re here to learn. Instruction is what schools is about, but I think, and I will include myself in this, I think sometimes we forget that we’re working with kids. They are children. They are little. They are, in our case, we have transitional kindergarten (TK) on our campus; they are four years old. My kids, at max, have been about twelve years old and so they need breaks. So, yes, obviously I teach most of the day, but even if it’s just take five minutes and walk around and talk to your friend, stretch your body, do a little yoga in the corner. I’ve got these boys this year who love to dance, and so they’ll just go to a corner and dance, because for them, that’s their energy release, and that’s their way to reset themselves.  

Socialization is also really important in school. It’s not about independent learning all of the time. It’s not about working alone. Letting them just have 15 minutes to talk to one another. We play a lot of games. Blooket is a big one in our schools, and so it’s just a fun game that they get to play. I’m not always great at it, but it is deeply part of my daily thing to give them time to just be kids. Sometimes that’s watching a funny video that’s letting them – I had a kid write a rap the other day about nothing, but he wanted to share it with the class – of course, you can because, although I have standards to teach, and I have assessments to give and state testing to give, they are children, and that actually should be priority number one.  

Nati Rodriguez [14:27] 
That’s great. The students that are in your classroom must be very lucky.  

Michelle Stradford [14:30] 
I hope so. I think so.  

Michelle Stradford [14:38] 
That’s like the million-dollar question. I have been asked that again a lot recently, and I will tell you, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. It’s all I ever knew. If you talk to my parents, they’ll tell you that I came home in kindergarten and I wanted to be a teacher, and I had a fantastic kindergarten teacher, Ms. Laughlin. I can still even tell you her name, I can remember her classroom, and that was it. That was my path. I did not stray from that path. My entire K-12 education, I was in an ROP program in high school where I got to teach elementary school for two periods a day. I had a great high school that allowed me to do that. I went to a fantastic teaching program at Long Beach State, and I went knowing what my major was. I was in a special program to get me in and out in four years, and I was done. 

I worked for Beverly Hills; I got hired three months after I graduated from college. I just wanted to be – I don’t know – one of the running jokes is I think I really wanted to write on an overhead projector when I was a little kid. Which then, of course, the funniest part about that is we don’t have them anymore. I became a teacher, and they were obsolete, and so I don’t know. I always loved school. I loved my teachers. I enjoyed being at school. I think there’s an inherent creativity to education, which I think that I also really liked as that aspect. I don’t know, I was on that path and found myself here.  

Nati Rodriguez [16:00] 
If we wanted to – I’m thinking about you having this kindergarten teacher and what kind of teacher you are now for your students – how do we get kids more excited to be teachers?  

Michelle Stradford [16:13] 
I am the teacher I am because of the teachers I had. That’s 100%; I can name you my favorite teachers from every school. I’m still in contact with some of my teachers that I had growing up, whether it just be social media acquaintances, or I actually see one when I’m in my hometown. I try to see her every time that I’m there. I think that, and it’s funny because I think everyone has this idea that the best teachers are the fun ones and the ones that play games all the time.  

While that may be true, some of my favorite teachers were the hardest teachers that I had because they pushed me. I think finding that balance of good management with your teaching, having that strictness, but doing it in a way that is not detrimental to who kids are, it’s a really fine line to walk that you want, of course, a structured room, you want kids that are following rules and that’s part of life but finding that balance of also having fun and it’s okay to laugh, and it’s okay to be – I’m a fairly sarcastic person and my kids learn that sarcasm really quick – but it’s okay to joke around. I hope kids that I’ve had go into teaching, and not just because of having me, but because of having some of the fantastic teachers that I also work with, because that is the reason that I am in this profession, because of who I was surrounded with growing up.  

Nati Rodriguez [17:58] 
Thank you. What advice would you give a new teacher?  

Michelle Stradford [18:01] 
Day-by-day. Again, reflecting, going through this Teacher of the Year process, I went back to my first year. I would not have survived without my colleagues, not only on my team, but I had a fantastic administration team at that time, and I had fantastic colleagues. I leaned on them so much – that is what you have to do. To be a new teacher you want to surround yourself with the people that you work with, that you can ask questions to, get answers, ask for help, and it’s okay to ask for that help. 

 I didn’t know what I was doing my first year. It was survival mode. I was up late looking at standards, learning how to teach all this material. When I needed something, I had such great people to turn to on my team who helped me with that. Mine would be to lean on your coworkers, lean on your colleagues, that’s what we’re here for. I mean, you work with kids all day, so you’ve got to find yourself in a room with the adults and ask them for what you need.  

Nati Rodriguez [19:02] 
Thank you. Looking now towards the future, where do you see yourself in the next three to five years?  

Michelle Stradford [19:08] 
I think still teaching fifth grade. Everyone, they’ll always tell you, especially this is advice for new teachers, you’ll find where you fit. I had always said I was going to be a third-grade teacher; that was my thing. When I started working as a substitute and I started working in other classrooms, I realized that there was other loves that I had, and so I started teaching fifth and fifth is my place, and so I love the curriculum. I get to teach American History, which I think, the foundations of this country and democracy, and to me, that is a personal love of mine. Teaching fifth grade is where I would like to remain. I’ve been very fortunate. I know how often teachers get moved in their jobs and moved in grade levels. I have been incredibly lucky to stay in fifth grade by choice. I think in three to five years, you’ll still find me in my little fifth-grade bubble, and happily so.  

Nati Rodriguez [19:59] 
Awesome. Thank you. I have heard of a lot of teacher movement, and I didn’t realize that it’s not in the teacher’s hands often.  

Michelle Stradford [20:08] 
No. Teaching is seniority-based for the most part, of course, not everywhere, but the longer you’ve been in a position, the little bit more seniority you hold. Generally, if there’s a closing of a class, if you have five fifth grades and we’re going to four, the lowest person with the lowest seniority will be moved to two different grade levels. Unfortunately, it happens a lot. I have a coworker at my school who’s been moved to four different grade levels in four years. It’s an unfortunate side to that seniority part of teaching, but everywhere does it different. I know there are some schools that don’t kind of follow that. That’s just a precedent where I work. It’s hard, I think it would be hard to teach a different grade level every year. I do deeply feel for those teachers that get moved when they don’t want to be or involuntarily.  

Nati Rodriguez [20:57] 
Got it. You’re teaching fifth grade, and do you have them all day or is there any co-teaching involved? Do you teach every subject?  

Michelle Stradford [21:04] 
I teach every core subject – Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies. We are very fortunate. Again, I do realize the privilege that comes with working where I work. My kids also attend multiple specials throughout the week that I do not attend. They have a standalone music teacher; they have a standalone art teacher. They go to Makerspace, which is about engineering design. Also, we have a science lab class that I actually go with them to. It is co-taught in a sense, a science lab with them. They have standalone PE teachers as well.  

We also have a fantastic program that we started a few years ago. Our kids are getting social-emotional learning every other week. They are also getting digital citizenship every other week taught by standalone teachers. Particularly after the pandemic hit, the social-emotional issues that we’re struggling with, and because they’ve been online, making sure that they’re learning how to be productive online citizens, which has become a really important thing. Yes, they are with me all day, but they are elsewhere with other staff for a variety of things.  

Nati Rodriguez [22:08] 
That’s great. It’s great to hear that they have these additional experiences. Are the SEL and the digital citizenship – do you foresee that being permanent because of what’s happened?  

Michelle Stradford [22:19] 
I hope so. Our counselor is the one that teaches our SEL lessons. She is a counseling professional, so she can do things that I’m not necessarily trained to do in that area. I think you deal with social emotional issues as a teacher all day long, but it’s nice to have a structured lesson about a specific topic. For fifth grade, she does a lot of work on their transition to middle school next year. How is that going to make you feel and what stresses you out about that? She’s really good about hitting on topics that are really specific to the age of kids she’s working with. Our digital citizenship teacher is one of our tech specialists, and she does again, how much time is too much time online? What do we do if you run into a situation that’s unsafe online? To me, they’re good life lessons in both. I deeply hope that that stays as something that we keep as a part of their day.  

Nati Rodriguez [23:31] 
Just going to shift gears here. What are you reading, watching, or listening to lately?  

Michelle Stradford [23:36] 
Oh, gosh. I am a huge reader, but I have found myself in the middle of a very long fantasy fiction series, which has taken me many weeks, called Zodiac Academy. It was recommended by my best friend. It’s fantastic, it’s a young adult thing. I read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo recently, which I really loved. I love an author named Frieda McFadden, so I’ve been eating up her book. She’s a mystery thriller author, and I jumped on the bandwagon of the Colleen Hoover books as well, so I’ve been reading a lot of hers recently.  

Watching – I was a big House of the Dragon fan, so I just finished that. I am patiently waiting for another season of Ted Lasso, which I hope comes sooner rather than later. I’m a baking nerd, so I love Great British Baking Show and watching that. I love Yellowstone, that’s coming back on very soon.  

Listening to – I do a lot of podcasts. I love the true crime genre, so I do a lot of that. I love – for teaching, for kids there are two podcasts that I really love that I’ll listen to sometimes with my class called But Why and Brains On which are two really fantastic kid-based podcasts. They answer kid submitted questions in a really humorous way, so we’ll listen to that sometimes in class.  

Nati Rodriguez [25:03] 
I love it. We’ll have to check those out. Is there anything else you would like to share with the Learner audience?  

Michelle Stradford [25:13] 
Oh, gosh. Say thank you to teachers. Be kind to teachers. You know I think that it’s been a hard two years for everyone, and it’s been flipping this job on its head. over and over and over again. We have all been working very hard, and our deep love is for the kids that we teach and everything that we’ve done. I even try to tell the kids in my class, a simple thank you goes a really long way. If you are in another teacher’s class, just a quick thank you. We do this job because we love the kids. So be kind to your teaching staff.  

Nati Rodriguez [25:45] 
Well, thank you. I think that’s a good way to end. Thank you, Michelle, thank you for your commitment and your leadership at your school and school district. We’re really happy to have you and look forward to continuing to see you grow in your profession.  

Beverly Hills Unified School District 

Blooket 

Brains On 

But Why 

California State University, Long Beach 

California Teacher of the Year 

Colleen Hoover 

Frieda McFadden 

The Great British Bake Off 

Horace Mann Elementary School 

House of the Dragon 

Los Angeles County Teachers of the Year 

Makerspace 

Mr. Dustin Seemann 

Ms. Michelle Stradford 

ROP program 

Teachers of the Year program 

Ted Lasso 

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo 

Yellowstone 

Zodiac Academy 

Transitional kindergarten (TK) 

Nati Rodriguez [02:48] 
Well, thank you so much. It’s an honor to have you on our podcast today, and we’re excited to learn more about your work and all of your accomplishments. Can you tell us about your work and why you were selected as a Teacher of the Year?  

William Morejón [02:59] 
Sure. I feel like describing my work could be very simple or very complicated. As you mentioned in the bio, I currently work at my own high school, where I graduated from in 2007. So, we’re about 15 years out. To people who know education or people who are familiar with education, I also see myself as an inspirer, a mentor, and a colleague; there’s so many roles that I play on our campus.   

First and foremost, I’m a teacher in the classroom, spending about three-quarters of my day working with students. Specifically, my content area is math. I’m taking students, I actually have all grade levels this year, and just getting them to understand math and its beauty. I know the students have a love-hate relationship sometimes with mathematics. So, we try to make it fun and engaging and get them to think critically and overcome the fear that they had in middle school, “It’s hard”, and get them to believe in themselves.   

You also mentioned one of the other hats is being the department chair. I’m the liaison between my teachers, all the math teachers at my site, and the district leadership. If we want to adopt a new curriculum, we coordinate meetings for that. If we want to adopt a new textbook, we do pilots. I’m also the advisor of two clubs on our campus, so I advise Key Club, which is sponsored through Kiwanis – it’s a very popular community service group in society. We do a lot of community service outreach in the local area. I’m also the adviser for a club called Academic Decathlon, which is a scholastic competition every year.  

To answer your question about why I was selected as Teacher of the Year, I feel I work with so many passionate, hardworking educators. I’m still like, “Me, really? Like, I was chosen.”  

I really think that kudos to my colleagues and the students. You mentioned that it starts at the school site, and our principal threw out an email just saying, “Hey, anybody that you want to nominate?” I guess my colleagues nominated me and then we went from there. I guess they saw value in all the work that I do on my campus. I’m very appreciative of them being able to recognize us. 

Nati Rodriguez [05:19] 
You mentioned your philosophy of teaching. Can you speak to that?  

William Morejón [05:20] 
When a teacher comes into the classroom, we have this elementary idea of what it’s going to be, right?    

“I come in, I walk in, kids walk in. I write some stuff on the board, whatever, right?” 

As you become a seasoned veteran teacher, you also develop this, 

 “Why do I do this every day?” 

“What is my long-term goal?” 

“Why am I investing in these students?” 

“Where are they headed in 5, 10, 15 years, right?” 

This actually goes back to my first few years teaching. I was working with a group of kids, which we called it at the time, it doesn’t exist anymore, but we called it Cougar Academy. It was specifically students that were in need of high intervention, meaning they were probably failing multiple classes, they had behavior issues. School wasn’t their thing. They had other priorities. They work, whatever it may be. We identified a good group of at-risk students, and then we identified teachers that were like, “We’re going to sit here, we’re going to form a group, we’re going to work together, and we’re going to do every intervention possible to try to make sure these kids experience success.” 

At that time, I was like, “You know what, I have to be more than just my content.” I’m a math teacher, but I have to realize that these students are more than just paper and pencils, and tests and quizzes. Through that experience, I realized that a lot of my students have a lot going on outside of school. I think at that time my pedagogy evolved from, “Hey, I’m a math teacher, but I’m also like a mentor and sometimes a counselor, a coach.” You know, all those roles that young students need in their lives especially if you know, they’re lacking a lot of that oversight and guidance outside of the classroom.  

I would describe my teaching pedagogy as twofold. Obviously, as I mentioned earlier, I want to acknowledge and be very honest with the students. I know students go into middle school, and that’s where they start developing this, “Math isn’t as fun as I wanted it to be,” or “Math isn’t the most exciting subject anymore.” 

In high school, I’m trying to reinvigorate that passion, that love, that excitement, but I also try to explain to the students that mathematics is an exercise in training your brain as well. I often tell them that a lot of times, the reason why they fear math is because it’s the one that they are exercising their brain the most at, right? It’s the heaviest weight at the gym. It’s the one that’s hardest to lift. You’re always like, “Why do I ever need this? Why do I really need this?” 

I tell them, this is the subject that later on, you’re going to wish you had these analytical skills, especially know when everything is numbers and charts, and graphs and figures, and stocks and rising and falling. There’s so much data around us that I want the students to be savvy consumers of that data. There’s also the humanizing component, right? Whether you’re an A+ student or you’re failing the class, I don’t judge you based on what your grade is. I don’t judge you based off your performance. We can have a positive working relationship aside from what might be influencing your academic performance in the classroom.  

Nati Rodriguez [08:21] 
I love the analogy. What a gift it is to have a teacher like you in math because you’re right. A lot of students are very disillusioned by the time they get to high school. We read that this is the high school that you graduated from. How has that impacted your experience with students and even with your colleagues?  

 William Morejón [8:40] 
It’s definitely been interesting, I’ll say that. Obviously when I decided to come into education, there were a lot of options, especially now. I’m sure everyone knows there’s teacher shortages and schools are dying to get teachers. I definitely had options in terms of where I could have applied or where I could have worked. Honestly, when I was deciding to go into education, it was a no brainer. I was a product of this school. 

I understood that it was a school that was in need. I knew that I didn’t want to work in a school where there were a lot of resources already. I really wanted to target groups that needed assistance, needed somebody to really focus on, and needed somebody to care. I knew, coming from this community, that that was my school. I remember after undergrad, I reached out to the principal at the time, and I just told him, “Hey, just putting my name out there. I’m an alumni. I’m looking to come into education, specifically math. I graduated here, I got my engineering degree,” and he was like, “Yeah, we need math teachers. Come on, please. That’s the one area that we’re always losing teachers. We need them.”  

That’s when I enrolled in my Master’s program to get my credential and my Masters, and it was just an easy transition. I did my student teaching here. It is interesting because my first few years, I did work with a lot of my former teachers. It was interesting because I spent four or five years calling them Mr. So and so, or Ms. So and so and I still can’t break that habit. They get annoyed because they’re like, “We’re colleagues now. You can call me by my first name.” 

I’m like, “No, but you’ve always been Ms. So and so or Mr. So and so.”  

That’s interesting, but I also think that it gives me a very interesting respect with the kids because oftentimes they look at me and they’re like, “Why are you here? You’re accomplished. You have a quality, high education. You have a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree.” 

They don’t really equate with, why would somebody with that much education come back into high school and work with me, right? I do often have to justify my decisions to the kids, and I do often have to say, “I’m here because well so, would you rather you have somebody that doesn’t care about their subject? Somebody that doesn’t want to be here? Somebody that’s less qualified?” 

They’re like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. I definitely want somebody that’s invested and cares and wants to be here.” 

It’s interesting to see how the dynamics of a school change so drastically, even in just a short period. This is my 10th year in the classroom, and it’s just flown. It’s so different than what it was 10-15 years ago. So, yeah, that’s about what it’s like working at the school that I graduated from.  

Nati Rodriguez [11:22]  
Thank you. It makes me wonder how we could get more teachers to return to their schools, right. What would that look like if leadership and principals were really actively trying to recruit their own graduates? I’m sure you’re getting students excited about math in a way that they aren’t typically excited about being a classroom teacher.  

Nati Rodriguez [12:16] 
I’m curious about Integrated Math. I don’t believe it’s very common across the country, and I’m curious what that is and why Integrated Math?  

William Morejón [12:24] 
Sure. This is actually something that I had to learn over the course of the last ten years or so. I started teaching around 2012 – 2013, and the word integrated was on nobody’s radar. To summarize Integrated [Math] in a nutshell, essentially the logic behind it is, what people noticed is that students were taking a year of algebra, and then they were taking geometry, and then following it with another year of algebra and so there were gaps. 

People were noticing, hey, students are forgetting their algebra from 9th grade year because their geometry classes focused more on shapes, and area, and volume, and circle. Students were struggling when they got to their third year of math because they didn’t always remember or see how the two were linked. There was definitely a need for that. 

The third thing that people noticed was, yeah, calculus is cool. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some calculus. I teach it, I love it, but that’s not everybody’s pathway. Some people are going to go more on a statistical path, or more on a data-driven path, or computer science path. Pretty much about six or seven years ago, I can’t really speak to who it was, I don’t know their name, but a group of people who develop curriculum said, what if we integrate the pathways?  

What if we take the elementary parts of algebra one, the elementary parts of geometry, and the elementary parts of statistics and merge them into one class, and we call that Integrated Math One.  

We take the intermediate parts of algebra, the intermediate parts of geometry, and the intermediate parts of statistics and probability, and we merge that into one class and call it Integrated Math Two.  

We take the advanced topics in algebra, the advanced topics in geometry, and the advanced topics in statistics and probability, and we merge that into a class called Integrated Math Three. 

It’s not different in terms of the standards that are taught. It’s just different in terms of the order that they’re taught. The other reason it’s called integrated is because we want the algebra, geometry, and statistics to work together so that the students don’t see them as isolated curriculum, but unified, joined curriculum. Our district over the past six or seven years has really championed this adoption, I guess, of these Integrated Math curriculum standards.  

You mentioned earlier we do a lot of summer PD around this. We get all of our teachers to meet in the summer to reflect on what’s going well in these courses, and what could be improved in these courses. We make curricular changes all the time. We call the algebra two path; we call it traditional. This new path is integrated, right? Integrated only goes up to Integrated Three. I will also say, too, that because of our adoption of Integrated Math we have also been able to offer some cool courses to our students. For example, we offer a class in Advanced Algebra with Financial Applications. We also have a class that focuses on Sports Statistics. We also have a class called Introduction to Data Science. 

I feel like the adoption to integrated has opened people’s eyes to, “Hey, there’s more pathways for math than just what has been algebra one, algebra two, pre-cal. Everyone was on this one-track path. Now it’s linear for a bit, and then it diverges, and it becomes different things. I like that because we can offer a lot of variety to our students.  

Nati Rodriguez [15:32] 
Yeah, I love this menu of options. I want to take these classes.  

Nati Rodriguez [15:56] 
I’m curious, how is math done internationally? I know you have some experience teaching abroad. Was it in math? How does that compare to the US. traditional math?  

William Morejón [16:06] 
Good question. You’re correct. I did have a good chunk of teaching experience abroad in undergrad. It was just one of those things where there was an office looking for people to travel, and I was like, I have nothing better to do. Sure, I’ll go and a couple of experiences that come to mind – I remember the first place I went to was mainland China, a southern part near Hong Kong, a city called Shenzhen. The reason I went there is because they wanted teachers to teach leadership. What they realized is that a lot of the students were really good at the textbook, but they didn’t have the social skills, or the idea of serving their community, or interpersonal skills, or group dynamics. 

That was the first experience that I had abroad, and then that grew more the following summer. I got invited to go to Rwanda. For that, we went to do a computer science summer coding workshop that was based on entrepreneurship. We wanted the students to learn this coding language and then find a need in the community and merge those. They had to code something like an app, for example, before apps were super popular. So, they were supposed to code an app that would serve some need in the community. There it was even something as simple as an app to make an appointment with their doctor, or an app to see if there were homes available for rent or purchase. There was a very high need for that when I was in undergrad. I feel like a lot of those experiences really motivated me to pursue and maintain my interest in education after I graduated as well. 

Nati Rodriguez [17:38] 
Yes. That brings me to my next question about Stanford Hollyhock Fellowship. What is your work with the fellowship and what will be the outcome of this experience?  

William Morejón [17:51] 
Yeah, so the Hollyhock Fellowship was actually something that came under my radar because of a colleague of mine. The whole purpose of the fellowship is to take, not necessarily early career teachers, although you can be anywhere between year one and year eight, and they want to create this network. The whole purpose is to take a step back and reflect on your identity as a teacher, your pedagogy in the classroom, and create this network where a teacher might be in Chicago or Florida or anywhere else in the US, that we can also get a window into their classroom as well. 

The structure of the fellowship was we had some summer professional development, and it was perfect timing because we got accepted in February or early March 2020, and then all of a sudden – COVID. I felt like I got thrown into the trenches because I had no idea what teaching online was going to be like. I had no idea. All the strategies and things that I had developed in my first six, seven years teaching were going down the drain. It was perfect timing, I feel like even a blessing because, going into that, I was like,  

“What are teachers doing?” 

“How are teachers functioning online?” 

“What are best practices?” 

We throw around these words, like “best practices”. There were no best practices for online teaching, right?  

When we joined the fellowship, it was perfect because they modeled a lot of the strategies that really carried me throughout online instruction. Essentially it was a two-year fellowship, so we did a summer, and then they have online coaching throughout the school year. We have a designated staff member from the fellowship, and they are our coaches. So, we would share these artifacts of our teaching. Last year especially, I did record a good chunk of my lessons and then I would share them with these teachers, and it was cool because we would watch each other’s videos and give just genuine, honest feedback. It was non-threatening.  

It was like, “Hey, we’re both being vulnerable right now. All three of us are being vulnerable right now,” and “How can we make our pedagogy better?” 

I feel like it gave me that fuel to fill the next, say, five, six years of my teaching, the next decade of my teaching, because I’m okay, now I’m not burned out. I know that other teachers are experiencing the same trauma that I am. I know that they’re struggling too to get their kids to participate and be invested in lessons. It was a really cool experience and it culminated this past summer.  

We had all been doing this virtually and we got the opportunity to go as a full cohort. I want to say 30, 40, maybe even 50 teachers that went to Stanford University this past summer. We did all these workshops around our pedagogy, reflecting on our identities as educators, bonding with each other. I felt like I came into this year super motivated, the tank was full, and I knew exactly why I was doing this.  

One tip I would give to any young educators that are listening is look into that fellowship and give it a shot. Because if you are lost, in terms of your professional identity, that’s a really good program that helps you realign yourself and figure out who you are. 

Nati Rodriguez [20:50] 
Thank you. There’s a lot of great information you’ve shared for our listeners who range in their experience as educators. I’m curious, where do you see yourself in five years?  

William Morejón [21:00] 
I feel like I’m riding a high on my professionalism right now, especially with all the recognition with Teacher of the Year and everybody’s like, “Congrats! Congrats!”  

Everybody’s like, “You’re it right now.” I think that that definitely is a large source of my motivation this year and for the coming years. One goal for myself is, I want to branch out beyond my school and district walls. What I mean by that is I’m really big on creating teacher networks and support. There are also opportunities, for example, to present at certain conferences and get the word out to more districts and more teachers. 

I’d like to sit down and identify certain aspects of my pedagogy that I feel might strengthen other teachers’ pedagogy. Maybe if there’s certain lessons that I feel are worth presenting at conferences or sharing with other teachers so that can infiltrate their rooms and influence their students as well. I do have experience with that. You mentioned that I did co-present with another colleague of mine at a UCLA conference, and that was really fun because you take a bird’s eye view and you’re like, “This is who I was. I was this teacher learning how to be a teacher and doing these cute little activities and having this ‘aha’ moment of I could use this in the classroom. I feel like that’s my next calling, is like, “Okay, how can I strengthen other teachers and build them up, so that they’ll be able to become better teachers in the classrooms themselves.

Nati Rodriguez [22:41]
We’d love to hear about what you’re reading, watching or listening to?  

William Morejón [22:47] 
Fun fact, I really love learning languages and studying languages. I think that also started from all the traveling that I was talking about earlier. I was supposed to go to Japan. I’m still hoping to make that a reality soon. I still read a lot of language books, Japanese, and I took actually a few courses at the community college. I’m trying not to lose it because you know how they say, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.” 

When I just have pleasure reading, I do a lot of sci-fi, like when the Dune movie came out a few months ago, I was like, “I don’t want to just watch the movie. I want to read it.” In terms of watching, this is one way that I bond with students a lot. I just get their anime recommendations. Kids are super into anime right now, like some have a cartoon or figure on their shirt. When I see one that I’ve never watched before, I’ll ask a kid, “Is that worth watching? Give me out 10, am I going to enjoy that one?” 

It’s an instant bond with the kids because they’ve invested so much time watching it. If I do, and I know the story, we have automatic conversation, just an instant connection.  

Nati Rodriguez [23:46] 
Is there anything else that you would like to share with our Learner audience?  

William Morejón [23:50] 
Yeah, first of all, thanks for listening. I think I especially want to speak to people who are on the fence about going into education, especially with the shortage and everything. I will admit that this profession is demanding, I’m not going to lie to you. I also find a lot of rewarding aspects of the profession as well. I think if people are out there and they really are passionate about working with students, young minds and at any level, it could be kindergarten, first grade, third grade, fifth grade, 12th grade, or even college. 

I just want the general population to continue to acknowledge teachers for how hard they’re working. It’s really demanding. I know as a society we’re finding more ways to value teachers, but you mentioned this earlier, we don’t do it enough. I do highly appreciate being recognized as Teacher of the Year, but I also look around at my colleagues every day, and I’m like, so many more of them deserve the same recognition. For those teachers, especially if people are listening and they know other teachers that are working hard and maybe they weren’t, they’re not getting a lot of recognition, definitely reach out to them and just validate the work that they’re doing. I know they will appreciate it. Sometimes I get messages from former students, and it just makes my day. It’ll just – instant full tank. I’m like, okay, I matter, what I do matters, what I say matters. Yeah, just thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.  

Nati Rodriguez [25:09] 
Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time, and congratulations to you.  

Advanced Placement 

Dune (2021) 

Hawthorne High School 

Integrated mathematics 

International Baccalaureate 

Key Club – Kiwanis 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Stanford University 

Stanford Hollyhock Fellowship Program 

Los Angeles County Teachers of the Year 

UCLA 

UCLA Curtis Center of Mathematics and Teaching Virtual Conference 

University of Southern California 

William Morejón 

Mind, Brain, and Education [01:35] 

Paul B. Yellin: I’m an associate professor of pediatrics at NYU School of Medicine, and I direct a center called the Yellin Center for Mind, Brain and Education. 

Narrator: Mind, Brain and Education (MBE) integrates the work of clinicians, neuroscientists, and educators.  

Paul B. Yellin: What we were hoping for is creating language, vocabulary, shared conversations where we can help each other move forward in helping children. We are understanding through research about brain development that there is a wide range of normal variation in different children’s brains, that there is something called neuroplasticity, which means people’s brains are changing all the time; even over the course of a classroom lesson, it seems, we’re making new brain cells. That, therefore, how people’s brains work and how different brains work differently affects how people learn. We make educators feel inadequate if kids aren’t getting good grades or kids are not passing all the end-of-your examinations, instead of really looking at what the statistics show, which we know that something like nationally, 38% of high school graduates are reading at a twelfth-grade level, that as much as 20% of normal children are going to have difficulty learning, no matter how you teach them. And so that, I think helping teachers understand that when children are not successful, it doesn’t mean that they’re doing a bad job, and that there’s information out there that can help them understand the children in the classroom and help them really be more successful. A common question that we do get is, “Is this the latest fad?” 

You know, last year it was whole language and now this year it’s brains. Well, I guess the argument that we would have to make is that it’s hard to imagine brains not being part of education in the future. And, you know, as I speak to young educators, what I hear from them is that they’re hungry for understanding about how learning happens, and that a lot of their education is really focused on, sort of, curriculum and the details of math and how it’s taught; but understanding how children learn is something that is going to empower them, and that isn’t just a new fad.  

Narrator: Many educators feel they are unequal partners in a vertical collaboration. MBE is a horizontal collaboration of equal partners.  

Paul B. Yellin: There is a natural perception when a clinician or a scientist walks in the room that there’s this hierarchy, or that the expert or the academician is telling you how to do my job. And I think that we need to move past that; I think the notion of Mind, Brain, and Education is to be equal partners. The important issues that affect how children learn don’t live in any one discipline. And that traditionally, we’ve all been out here alone as pediatricians, or as educators, or as mental health professionals, or as researchers, and Mind, Brain, and Education addresses, or attempts to address, the fact that really there needs to be a conversation across disciplines, and that as that conversation happens, first of all, we all have a lot to learn from each other, and, more importantly, we can all be more effective in how we do our jobs.  

Emotion and Cognition: A Neuroscientist’s Perspective [05:28] 

Narrator: In Atherton, California, teachers from Sacred Heart Preparatory and neighboring schools attended a presentation by Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang about the connection between emotion and cognition and how it affects education.  

Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: In fact, I don’t even like to think of emotion and cognition as separate things. They’re really – there’s thinking and thinking has an emotional aspect and it has a cognitive aspect. And you can analyze one aspect or the other and kind of ignore one for now, but real thinking is never divorced from emotion, it’s always got the two things together.  

Narrator: Mary Helen invited the teachers to participate in a dialogue about the relevance of research on emotion and cognition to teaching practices.  

Teacher: So, students, adolescents, they’re very emotional when it comes to everything. Do you think that’s a hindrance or help when it comes to us trying to teach them using their emotions? Is that a help or a hindrance? 

Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: How could you make emotions a help? They need to be encouraged to be able to marshal their mind into an emotional space that’s relevant to the current context. That’s where the best emotional thinking happens. And so, the fact that they have strong emotions is helpful because once you get there, they can get so enthusiastic or so engaged, and so connected to the material, if that’s facilitated for them, if they get into it. But if they don’t, they can be, by the same token, extraordinarily distracted, extraordinarily frustrated, and extraordinarily unwilling to mentally move into that space. It’s a double-edged sword. Yeah, it’s a double-edged sword.  

Narrator: After the talk, teachers met in small groups to discuss specific challenges within the classroom.  

Teacher: Are you saying that the emotions that we see adolescents going through about the zits on their faces, etc, that we consider irrelevant, aren’t necessarily irrelevant?  

Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: Oh, no! They’re very relevant!  

Narrator: Mary Hellen suggested possible solutions based on the neurological link between emotion and learning.  

Teacher: One of the things we all face on a daily, weekly basis is the emphasis on the high-stakes testing. And we have to teach to the test with the pacing guide, etc., sometimes not in a way that facilitates learning for our students or creates joy in our lives. And there’s also a horrendous amount of tension, both from the students and the teachers as this comes up. Can you give us some suggestions to find positive ways to deal with this? Because we can’t ignore it.  

Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: No, you cannot; it’s a big problem. So, at the highest level, which isn’t the immediate answer, but we have to think about ways to make tests better. But that’s not the answer you’re looking for; you need to know what to do. And so, here’s what I would suggest, it’s kind of mutiny from the bottom up, you know, so to speak, let’s just color it from a little bit at a time. And that is that, we should think about the tests as testing not what a kid knows in general, but what a kid knows in a particular context. And so, we need to understand tests, not as obstacles, but as giving us information about one aspect of children’s learning, and that is, what can they do with this kind of material in a testing situation. But then how do you teach so that you can actually have the kids do well on the test, because you need to, otherwise you’re accountable, right? I still think that if you do something where you’re actually, it might take longer at the beginning, upfront, but rather than telling them it, let them learn it, let them discover it, let them extract it from a cleverly orchestrated context that allows them to discover it themselves, or to measure it themselves, then once you’ve got that, you can use that and extract out from that the sort of the concrete, discrete things that they’re going to need for a test later. The bottom line is, you have to have faith in yourself and in your students that if they understand the material deeply, they’ll be able to transfer that knowledge into a test-taking situation, and then you also have to save a little bit of time to actually let them practice doing that. Because transferring the knowledge into the test-taking situation is a piece of test-taking skill, and that’s where you need to actually practice taking a test, because otherwise if you’ve not seen one before, then you’re figuring out, not just your knowledge but how to take a test at the same time.  

Teacher: I know that in our western culture the emotions tend to get a, philosophically, a pretty low-grade status. And the goal of the philosophical meditation is to become more rational. 

Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: That’s right, which means take away your emotion.  

Teacher: Right, and so, this is more of a comment, but it’s fascinating that what we’re suggesting is somewhat the opposite – that we need to bring thought to bear on emotion and to feel the right things at the right time. And so, the goal is maybe to get them more emotional in proper ways.  

Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: More personally connected to the meaning of it, exactly. So, it’s not an accident that the first book on the neurobiology of emotion by Antonio Damasio, who is one of my mentors, was called Descarte’s Error, exactly for that reason. And now just to add a little more evidence to what you noticed, exactly right. We now have very good evidence from patients with brain damage, just happen to have brain damage, in regions of the brain that are involved in basically feeling the physiology of an emotion and connecting that to your high-level thinking and planning into the future. And what happens with these people is that they are still very smart, but they make terrible decisions, and they become psychopathic. They’re actually amoral people, who can’t live on their own, and it’s not only that their decision-making is – their decision making is supremely rational. They weigh the consequences and the risks, in a kind of a rational way, and then they pick the one that’s best. But they’re insensitive to the kind of emotional implications of particular choices that the rest of us are very sensitive to. They don’t get that kind of queasiness saying, “this might be a little…” you know, this has got very high stakes, and it could lead to very good outcomes, so you might want to pick it, but you might also want to consider the bad thing that could happen. And what happens is they end up burning themselves out in all ways, not just in emotional and social ways but in terms of rational decisions; they make bad business decisions, they lose all their money, they gamble, they cheat on their wives, they do all these kinds of things that ruin their lives because they are insensitive to the long-term emotional implications of a bad decision now. That just teaches you, teaches us, about the role of, sort of, praise and punishment and social acceptance and social evaluation and group membership and culture in the development of moral and social thinking, which is absolutely emotional as well as cognitive, and rationality divorced from emotion is very bad for us. It ruins our lives in all sorts of ways. Exactly. The original Kantian philosophers had it wrong in that sense.  

Teacher: I teach in the middle school, and the one thing that is pervasive with middle school are emotions and I teach science, and in the 8th grade it’s chemistry. And right now, it’s so frustrating because they don’t understand, and to try and get these points across to them sometimes it’s very difficult. So, I try and break it down into very simple terms, but then you have these kids who their frustration actually shuts them off – how do you get them without doing the one-on-one, touchy-feely, you know, just – unfortunately don’t have time in a day to really get into that with them, how do you get around that? How do you start, because I can understand, I can go through the empathy process with them, I totally understand their frustration, but it’s almost like, how do we get them past that? What do we have to do in order to make them move through that?  

Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: That’s a great question. So, what you’re basically describing is the emotion of frustration – the cognitive aspects of the emotion of frustration are to shut down alternative avenues of thought, right? You just want to end and get out of there. That is the cognitive aspect of that emotion. So, it’s a piece of the frustration emotion that you’re seeing. In order to get around that, what you need to do, and I can’t tell you how to do this, you know your kids, your curriculum, but what you need to do, I think, is find a way that you can design an experience for those kids, a context for those kids to learn something where they are engaging it from the bottom up, and they discover what it is you need them to know. Rather than you telling them from the top, which is leading them to frustration, because they’re coming from such a different place that they can’t get to where you’re coming from, and then they’re missing you, and then because they’re adolescents and they don’t regulate their emotion well and reflect on it, especially in that moment, then the piece of the emotion, that’s cognitive, which is the shutting off, starts to happen, and then you’re really done. If you can find a way to engage them from the bottom up so that they actually are facilitated, unbeknownst to them, if they engage with this experiment in the way that it’s meant, and they’re really thinking about it, they can’t help but to discover what it is you wanted them to understand anyway. It can help hugely to get them around it, and then you can come back and teach it the other way, too, but now they’ve got something to hook it to. And that can help a lot.  

Peer Mentoring [15:12] 

Hallie Cohen: One, two, let’s try it, go.  

Narrator: After taking a workshop on neuroscience and education, music teacher Hallie Cohen recognized that she needed to find a way to make playing instruments more emotionally relevant for her students. She also understood that learning does not happen in a vacuum, but in a social context.  

Hallie Cohen: The thing that’s really important is building a community of learners. It was reinforced that kids really will learn more from each other in some ways then actually from the instructor and I said, “okay, how do I use this?” 

Melissa, work with Scheherazade; Phoebe, you’re going to work with Nathan.  

Narrator: Hallie began providing lots of opportunities for her students to make music socially. She created structured time for peer mentoring, where older students helped teach her younger students.  

Student: One, two, ready, go. You’re playing one extra note, so it’s just, “Give me a break today, yo, I need a break.” Yeah, it’s good, it’s just the same thing.  

Narrator: Peer mentoring helps the students become emotionally engaged. The older mentors get validation and appreciation for their work, and the younger students, since they look up to the older ones, become more focused.  

Hallie Cohen: They’re more confident. They got this support by more experienced players, and it’s always been my experience that when there is an older peer mentor working with the younger students that they get it a lot faster than if I was just, like you know, hounding them. For some reason, even as the peer mentor is doing the same thing that I would do, they get it a lot quicker in that situation.  

Student: The last note, the ‘E’, it’s a fourteenth-note. But, so, we’re rushing it a little bit though. You know that train-track thing, that means you stop all sound and then you begin.  

Hallie Cohen: Kids like to know that they’re going to be heard and that what they are saying is important and valuable. That is fundamental to all this. Yay, good!  

Dynamic Skill Development [18:02] 

Narrator: Piaget’s classic conservation experiment illustrates how young pre-operational learners can’t distinguish the same amount of liquid put in two differently sized containers. 

Dr. Kurt Fischer: If it’s taller and that’s what they’re focusing on, then they say the taller one is more. If it’s more flat out, wide, you know, it looks like a big pancake, and that looks like more, then they’ll say, “The low one is more.” 

Whatever they happen to focus on is what they choose as more.  

Narrator: But as learners experience and engage with the world, they reach a certain developmental moment when they start to recognize the amounts of liquid as equivalent. These moments when learners make large leaps in understanding is what interests Dr. Kurt Fisher, the director of the Mind, Brain and Education program at Harvard University.  

Dr. Kurt Fischer: We could see these times when a child was creating new knowledge, a new way of thinking. For example, a child would say, “Oh, there’s more in the tall one.” And then he would say, “Oh! Wait a minute, Hmm…boy that’s hard. I got to think about that. I think maybe they’re the same, but I’m not sure.”  

So, you see, the child is getting an insight and starting to work on it, but they still have to get it consolidated. That’s the beginning of a new way of thinking about amount.  

Narrator: Dr. Fisher has been studying the emergence of new skills, or jumps in learning with a combination of re-examining 100 years of cognitive developmental research, his own novel interview research, and EEG studies. He found rapid jumps in performance at certain ages when students were performing under optimal conditions.  

Dr. Kurt Fischer: We got the idea that, “Well, we can look for rapid changes in kind of thinking.”  

So, we then went through a bunch of data, and we created some new studies where we would actually look for the sudden surge in a new kind of thinking. We found that we could actually measure that numerically.  

Narrator: Researching thousands of students in numerous subjects led Kurt to develop Dynamic Skill Theory. One of the key components of this model is universal developmental levels. This scale, which starts at three to six months and goes well into adulthood, can be used to measure where student’s thinking lies developmentally on almost any concept.  

Dr. Kurt Fischer: We’ve collected a bunch of evidence now that shows that the same scale works in every domain we’ve looked at. We have documented that in many different ways. One of the most important ones is to look for times of reorganization of knowledge, evidence that people are reorganizing their minds, are thinking in a different way, are building a new kind of knowledge. Those times of reconstruction co-occur at common ages and at common points in learning sequences.  

Narrator: The scale starts in infancy with motor actions, then builds to more complex representations, and finally to advanced abstractions.  

Dr. Kurt Fischer: Infants are focusing on actions and perceptions and how they work together. We call that sensorimotor action. So, how do I look at something? How do I grasp something? Those actions then get put together to create what we call representations. Toddlers can create a representation of a mother, a representation of a self, a representation of a ball, and they build that representation out of their action systems. Once they’ve got representations, they create more and more complicated representations, moving from single representations to connections between representations, to complicated connections between representations. That leads them to build another new entity for understanding, which we call an abstraction. They move from understanding the President, for example, as the boss of everybody, which is a concrete representation, to understanding the President as a role in the government. The President is the chief executive. That’s an abstraction. Each level is a reorganization of what’s gone on before, moving on to a more sophisticated kind of thinking and problem-solving than we were able to do earlier.  

Narrator: In these cognitive developmental jumps, Kurt came up with a remarkable surprise. He discovered a close connection between the growth cycles in his scale and EEG results that were measuring neural activity in the cortex of the brain.  

Dr. Kurt Fischer: So, as a child is developing in infancy and childhood, on into adolescence, for each of the levels that we see in skill, there’s a growth pattern in the brain that we see, where the growth of networks moves around the brain systematically. The most extensive evidence involves EEG, or the electroencephalogram electrical waves in the brain. We see correlations between waveforms in different brain regions that show that there’s a surge in connections. It seems to start with growth being maximal from front to back, and then it moves over into the right hemisphere, then more into the left hemisphere, and then starts over again. So that cycle of brain growth correlates with cognitive growth, with the emergence of a new level in the child’s or adolescent’s development.  

This is one of the places that neuroscience and education come together just beautifully. Neuroscience has shown us that in order to reshape the brain, experience can reshape the brain, but it only does it when we are actively doing things. In a world in which we’re manipulating objects in a certain way, that changes the way our brain works. Neuroscience has shown us that this active experience will reshape the brain. Passive experience where animal is just exposed to something, does not reshape the brain. The brain is only reshaped when we actively work on the objects that we’re experiencing anew. Students frequently memorize what they need to learn and don’t really understand it. One of my friends has a daughter who went off to college and called him crying after her first physics exam, saying, “Dad, I don’t understand physics.” 

His response was, “But, what do you mean? You got an A in high school physics.” 

She said, “But I didn’t understand it. I still don’t understand it. How do these things relate to each other? How do I do an explanation in physics?”  

So, a whole lot of times people memorize in order to get by, and they have a little bit of an understanding here and a little bit of an understanding there, but they don’t really get how it all works together. So, in a classroom we as teachers are constantly trying to help our students to figure out where they need to go in their own learning. One of the major roles for a teacher is to help students to figure out how to direct their own learning. For each level that a child goes through, they need to be engaged in mastering particular skills, particular tasks in particular contexts, and actively manipulating concepts, the representations, the abstractions, in order to reorganize their own mind, to reorganize their own brain so that they can move to a higher level of understanding.  

Emotional Connections in Math and Science [27:20] 

Gary Scott: My name is Gary Scott. I’m with the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. My research is on the emotional connections that I think have to be developed to math and science content knowledge in order to sustain interest in the joy of learning in mathematics and science. I think it’s time that we make a strong case from the neuroscience perspective, how important that is to students’ persistence and enjoyment in learning mathematics and science.  

Do I have to pay more money here with this representation or this representation?  

Student: They’re the same.  

Gary Scott: Why?  

I immediately tried to come into classrooms and work with kids at a very early age to find out ways that we could provide evidence that we think that that’s the case, and creative ways that they could implement what we think are the kinds of approaches that will actually foster that emotional connection. We also are going to try to measure that using some neuroscience methods to establish a case of a difference in the brain functioning as a result of tapping into kids’ inherent creativity. Neuroscience is going to provide us hard, scientific evidence that many of us have suspected and only just hoped we were right about it. Without that kind of hard scientific evidence, a lot of education becomes “he said, she said” and trends and fads and whatnot. When we have hard evidence from the world of neuroscience about how learning occurs and what affects learning, we can be very confident in the kinds of approaches that foster those deep neural connections that we have long suspected to be the case.  

Students Think for Themselves [29:12] 

LaNelle Harvey: My name is LaNelle Harvey. We’re at 93rd Street School in South Central Los Angeles. I really believe in trying to help the kids to be thinkers. Why are you choosing answers you’re choosing? Why are you choosing strategies that you’re choosing? Not thinking about the right or the wrong answer, but thinking about why and what leads me to that answer. So, someone who thinks he thinks it’s wrong; what is your evidence?  

Student: He let Kunta Kinte free because he knew that slavery was bad and he should have freedom.  

LaNelle Harvey: Okay, anybody else agree with that? Disagree with that? I’m trying to wean them off of me, challenge each other. I say, “Oh, you all agree with that answer.” 

Everybody’s quiet. “No, no.” Say something. So, it’s trying to engage them in discussion, which is actually, it’s the learning style of African Americans and Latinos. Anyway, having to discuss, we discuss, we discuss, we come to a conclusion.  

“How many agree with number eleven? Raise your hands if you agree with number eleven.” 

Now I’m doing Socratic seminar in math, where the kids have to get into a small circle and share their answers and start challenging each other and coming up with mathematical, logical thinking for their answers. It’s not just one and one is two; sometimes I’ll say, “What if I say it’s three? Prove to me it’s two; how do you know it’s two?” 

In the process of defending their answers, either they’re going to decide, “Oh, maybe it’s not two; maybe it’s something else,” or it’s going to strengthen their thinking. So, it’s questioning techniques. Remember, and this ties over into your reading passages, why you choose the answers you choose. I had the kids read Jack and the Beanstalk and I said, “The question we’re going to discuss the next day, “Is Jack a good guy or a bad guy?” Because traditionally, we have learned, “Oh, he’s a good guy; this kid went and killed the giant and da-di-da-di-da.”  

So, the kids just discuss it and I was shocked by how deep the kids got into Jack and the Beanstalk. They were arguing he’s a bad guy, he killed this giant. The giant didn’t come down to their land, he went up to the giant’s land and he killed this giant. He was stealing from him. Some kids say, “Well, he’s trying to help his mother to survive.”  

They really got into a lot of discussion and what ended up, we started writing a play; they wanted to put Jack and the giant’s wife on trial for conspiracy to commit murder. And we started writing the play.  

Any test they throw at you is going to seem “easy” if you are prepared, and the way you prepare is by coming to school, paying attention, asking questions, discussing things, doing your homework. The way I’m to prepare you is by providing the environment in which you can do this. I think the dropout rate here is because these kids, they experience bad experiences in school; the dropout rate in high school in this area is 70%. We need to change that. I did a study here at the school with two groups of students; one using problem-based learning and one using rote learning. My students did better in all the academic areas of school; they outdid the other fifth graders at that time. I’m just convinced just through experiences, reading – I’m just convinced that it is the best way to go.  

Nati Rodriguez [02:11] 
Thank you. The recent news is that Adam recently received a Principle of the Year award. Congratulations! We’re really honored to have you here today.  

Adam Lane [02:23] 
Yeah, thank you. It just happened over the summer in June and on the NASSP, which is the National Association of Secondary School Principals. I’m the State of Florida Principal nomination. There’s one for each state, and then in October, during Principal Week, they’ll pick the National Principal of the Year. I’m excited to be in the running.  

Nati Rodriguez [02:43] 
Awesome. That’s great. What an honor it is for us to have you and would love to hear about the work that you’ve been doing. Can you please share about why you’ve been recognized as Principal of the Year for Florida?  

Adam Lane [02:55] 
Yeah, I think one of the reasons is I started out as a member of the Florida Association of School Administrators, which is our state organization, and we have some great committees. We have a diversity committee, membership committee, conference planning committee, and a legislative committee. One of them, our legislative committee, it’s really powerful. It’s a group of principals that advocate for education. We go to Tallahassee; we meet with senators and representatives from our districts. We even go to Washington, DC; we meet with representatives for our states. 

Every year is a little different. This last year our main three priorities, that I’m sure you can relate to, was the first one was the educator shortage and building that principal pipeline. How do we make the education profession shine and promote it to attract people? It used to be such a prestigious place to be. 

Have we slipped from there and how do we get it back? How do we build that pipeline from substitutes to teachers to assistant principals to principals? What’s that going to take?  

What do we need from our legislatives and our senators and our representatives to build that back?  

Our second main concern this year, whether we’re in Tallahassee or Washington, is our school mental health resources and safety, and it was always a concern. After two years of e-learning and you don’t have that day-to-day connection with a lot of our students, we need more social workers, we need more counselors, we need more psychologists.  

The third one is the conditions of our buildings. How do we make sure we have new buildings for the development in certain areas, so we’re not overcrowding schools, especially old schools. Even our old schools, how do we upgrade them with new HVAC systems and everything we need for just a safe environment?  

That’s just touching base on one of the committees and how busy we can be working with legislators, representatives, senators and really making the education profession the number one thing people should want to go into after school. 

Nati Rodriguez [05:31] 
Agree. Thank you. That’s one of the initiatives that Learner really is trying to support is how do we get more teachers in the classroom. What does that pipeline look like? How do we get people excited and retain them? I’m curious what the outcomes of some of this work has been, or is it still in the process? What does that look like?  

Adam Lane [05:48] 
It’s still in the process, but I can tell you, depending on what state and what policies have come about, I can say in Florida, I believe it’s gotten much better. There are a lot of incentives for new teachers. Our starting pay was just raised to $47,500. People coming out of college need to also realize that’s a ten-month contract; there are still two months that you can either go lay on the beach and relax and get your lesson plans ready, or you can get another job. And the benefits of our health packages have increased with better coverage. The amount of personal days and sick days have increased. There are even incentives now for moving expenses to go to certain districts that they’ll cover the cost to get you there. The mental health piece, there has been more funds issued, where I can say at my school, I’m up to 13 guidance counselors, and I have a full-time psychologist and a full-time social worker, which I always had to share one before with other schools, but now they’re right there on campus every day, which is amazing.  

Nati Rodriguez [07:08] 
That’s great. Do you know anything about credentialing – is that changing in Florida or at the national level? Are teachers starting to get paid sooner, making it easier for them to get through the credentialing system so that they can get in the classroom faster?  

Adam Lane [07:22] 
Yeah, absolutely. There are a lot of fantastic people that are just so good for kids, but maybe they were not an education major, maybe they were a major in another field. Let’s say you have a four-year degree in marketing, but I have a science opening. You might be a fantastic person that knows science, but you’re not certified in education. You’re not certified in science. I can hire you for one calendar year, and we can work on courses, and we can work on passing the state exam in science to get you certified to be a science teacher the next year. That’s just a one-year entrance to pull in great people that just maybe missed the boat on the education profession but realize “I love the salary; I love summers off, and I love being around kids. I’m just a good relationship maker”, and that’s what that policy was made for.  

Nati Rodriguez [08:21] 
That’s great. I’m glad to hear that those are changing to make it easier. In your new role as Florida Association of School Administrators President – congratulations on that – what goals do you have for this upcoming year?  

Adam Lane [08:35] 
As president of the Florida Association of Secondary School Principals, what I’m really looking for is I want to increase membership in FASA. I want more principals to join our state organization, but you got to have a purpose. They have to feel a purpose to join. I’m looking to build our networking. That is something that joining FASA and becoming a NASSP member has done for me, is the networking opportunities to call a principal in Colorado and say, “Hey, are you having homecoming this year?  

Especially during the COVID times – “How are you handling homecoming?”  

Or you calling Rhode Island, “Are you going to blended learning? “Are you doing e-learning?”  

That networking piece that you’re not alone and you can call other districts in other states and have cell phones in your back pocket, is amazing. I really want to increase the membership to show them the purpose of the networking that can be involved. When you have that, you’re going to get more involvement and more numbers in things like the legislative committee that I mentioned, or the conference planning committee, or it goes on and on. I really want to focus on that membership, and that networking, and the involvement of great principles from around the state.  

Nati Rodriguez [10:02] 
Yeah, it sounds like it’s a really great opportunity for them to continue their learning as well. Sometimes when I think of teachers in the classroom, it can be very isolating and networking doesn’t come to mind when I think of education. It’s wonderful that it’s making its way to this organization. What has your own educational experience been like, and what drives you to do this work?  

Adam Lane [10:26] 
I grew up in northeastern Ohio – a very rural area, small school, sports, Future Farmers of America, very community-based. The school and the functions of the school were just the highlight of every night and every weekend for everybody, whether you had kids at school or not. I loved that, and I had such amazing teachers, and I still stay in contact with them. That’s what made me want to go into the education profession and be a teacher, which led me to want to be a principal and help teachers become better teachers. 

You know what leads me is relationship building, decision making, creating unforgettable moments. I think any of my staff will tell you we really focus on making good decisions. How do we become better decision makers? What leads us to make a decision and do we get better day to day through trial and error because we’re all at different levels.  

The main thing is we’re going to go through things, and we need to make sure we’re better tomorrow than we were today, and we’re better at graduation time than we were at freshman orientation. 

You mentioned as a teacher, you never thought of networking. Well, you need a principal that’s going to bring teachers together and make that number one on their priorities. I’m going to create moments to bring people together to communicate and to share. We’re going to make it unforgettable, so they want to come back to work every day, and the teachers keep coming back, and the students want to come back and learn. 

As a principal, you better create unforgettable moments that they don’t want to be anywhere else but at your school.  

Nati Rodriguez [12:21] 
Well, that brings me to my next question, which you’ve touched on a little bit. I’d love for you to share what it feels like to walk into Haines City Senior High School. What does one see, hear, feel? Can you paint a picture for us?  

Adam Lane [12:33] 
First of all, I wish you could come down, I’d walk you through the halls and take you on a tour. My second year there, we got a group of students, parents, community members, teachers together, and we re-wrote our whole vision and mission to match exactly what you said.  

How do you feel when you walk the halls?  

What do you see?  

What do you hear?  

Does your heart beat?  

Do you get tears in your eyes? 

Because  what was on paper didn’t match what we were doing. We wanted to write a vision and mission to match what we’re doing. Our focus is that we’re a PBIS school – Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports. We’re one of 19 high schools in the state of Florida, but we’re relationship based. Everything has to start with a relationship before curriculum; a relationship before testing; a relationship before the pacing guide. So we don’t rush to the curriculum. We rush to build a foundation of relationships. We start out – we want our students to serve as productive, responsible citizens. When you come in as a freshman, I’m not concerned where you’re going to go to college in four years. I’m not concerned right then where you’re going to go to work. I’m concerned about your behavior. Are you a productive, responsible citizen? And do you know what that means? If I can make sure that’s in place, colleges are going to want you, the workforce is going to want you, the military is going to want you.

Once we know you’re a productive, responsible citizen, and you have that respect for your classmates and your teachers, then we prepare you for one of three things.   

1. We’re going to make sure you are ready to go to the workforce and make some good money.  
2. We’re going to make sure every college and university is beating down your door because they want you for your post-secondary education. 
3. Or we have a very strong JROTC program, and a lot of our students have careers in the military.  

I could go on and on about all of it. We created a place called Hornet Nation – we’re the Haines City Hornets. The kids and everyone came up with Hornet Nation. Really, it’s a membership club that we’re all part of. We feel safe there. We feel a sense of pride. We feel confidence. We have common ground. It’s just like a connection that explodes and makes your energy go crazy.  

Nati Rodriguez [15:09] 
I love it. I think it’s very telling that it took awhile for us to even talk about curriculum and testing because sometimes I feel like schools are so driven by that. So, it’s refreshing to hear relationship first.  

Adam Lane [15:22] 
Yeah. Curriculum and testing will not make you excited to come back to school every day. Relationship building and loving your teachers, and you can’t wait to have lunch with your classmates, that stuff will keep you coming back. You’re ready to dive into the curriculum and testing with your teachers and your classmates because you feel supported, like you’re not going to let each other down. You have such a level of respect for each other.  

Nati Rodriguez [16:27] 
We may have already answered the next question, but you were able to decrease discipline referrals by 31% and increase graduation rates by 20% in the last years. What do you attribute this to?  

Adam Lane [16:40] 
Well, there’s a direct data correlation that we realized five years after we started it. I’ll start with the end in mind. We found out, as our discipline referrals went down – and I’m talking in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension – overall discipline referrals went down. Our grad rate consistently went up as our discipline referrals went down, but there was a middle section missing and then we realized what it was. It was, as discipline referrals went down, teacher retention went up because teachers wanted to be at Haines City High School because it wasn’t all about arguing. It wasn’t all about writing discipline referrals. It wasn’t all about kicking kids out of the class. It was about building relationships and feeling good and having a nice climate and culture. 

As discipline went down, teacher retention went up. That automatically drove graduation rates to go up. To drive the graduation rate up was never one of our goals we even discussed. In the beginning, it was just how do we get kids to come to school and not be suspended? How do we even get them to school because they only show up about once every 10-15 days? I think the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports system was one of the major factors because we had students, and staff, and parents and community members, create expectations on – how do we expect you to behave in the classroom? How do we expect you to behave when you use a restroom? What’s the expectation when I go into the cafeteria? When I’m in the hallway, what are the expectations?  

When you have 3,000 kids on one tiny little piece of real estate, they better understand every specific detail of what the expectation is for you to behave. And then we created the Hornet Buck. Not only did you have the expectation, but when you met it, we rewarded you with what we call the Hornet Buck, which is money that you can go to the school store and spend. Our school store is like a Super Walmart. It has everything you can imagine from shirts, pens, pencils, lanyards, hats, and it’s all plastered with Hornet Nation and Haines City High School. If you set the expectation, you have a reward system, and then you have the means to cash in your reward. Who doesn’t want to be recognized? Who doesn’t want positive feedback? Who doesn’t want that in front of their classmates? Even if you’re bad, you’re going to become good because you want attention too, and misbehaving isn’t going to get it for you on our campus.  

Nati Rodriguez [20:12] 
Thank you for sharing how this also helped with teacher retention. One of the ways we actually found you, Adam, was through a profile, I believe it was on EdWeek, about how you were able to avoid staffing shortages. So, can you talk about that? What’s the secret sauce?  

Adam Lane [20:30] 
That article came out as we have not had any staff shortages in six years. And that was prior to COVID. Even through the COVID tough times when there were a lot of vacancies, we just didn’t have it. It’s because of our alumni. We have been graduating people that love their teachers, love the culture, love the experience of high school, had all those unforgettable moments in their mind, and when they graduated, they would come back as substitutes, daily substitutes, long term substitutes. We would work on them as they’re working on their four-year degree in education. Maybe they would sub for me and work for me Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and take their college courses Tuesday, Thursday, or maybe they’d go to college in the morning for half a day and come in and help me in the afternoon and sub for me at the end of the day.  

Once they had their degree, we’d put them right into a teaching position. I have alumni that are subs, teachers, secretaries, assistant principals, custodians, you go on and on. You know how it goes. Once you become a staff member and you graduated with 17 of your friends, and then you start talking and before you know it, four more of your friends are now teachers in your hallway. It just becomes a real family-oriented type place. I think a lot of that is you got to have a good product. There are high schools students graduate from, they get their diplomas, and they run, and they will never come back. For the rest of their life, they will never bring their family or kids back. Then there are those high schools where they graduate, and they want to hang out. They want to bring their husband or wife and kids to football games and hang out.  

You really got to build that product, but then you got to make sure your seniors are invited and encouraged to come back and work with you to make the school an even better place. The article you read, that’s what that was all about, is we couldn’t rely on anybody. As a principal, even my first three years, I was like, “I’m going to graduate these kids, get them ready for the real world and say goodbye.” Well, they’re awesome. Why am I not recruiting them after they graduate to come back and fill my vacancies? You really got to have that mind shift to get the pipeline going.  

Nati Rodriguez [23:08] 
Yes. I love how you talk, and I have a little bit of business background, but hearing you talk about it as a product and building this culture reminds me of business. If you’re wanting people to come back and have the best [talent], that’s definitely a great approach. Just wondering why more people aren’t doing it.  

Adam Lane [23:29] 
It is a business. It’s not just sipping milk and sitting on a carpet square. It’s a business. There is grades, diplomas, people are demoted, promoted, fired. I mean, it goes on and on. We need to treat education like a business on the surface, but it’s very fun and loving, and mushy on the inside. Who better to hire than an alumni student that knows your mission, your vision, has walked your halls, knows your expectations, knows exactly as a teacher what those kids need, because you know what, you were just that kid four years ago. You know exactly what that kid needs.  

Nati Rodriguez [24:13] 
Yeah, that’s great. Given your experience and your success in recruiting and retaining talent, what advice do you have for other leaders? If they wanted to start somewhere, where could they start?  

Adam Lane [24:25] 
Well, I can tell you where I started, and I was never a principal before Haines City. I just opened up my 8th year. I love it. A lot of principals will come in, and they feel they got to change everything; they have the final piece of decision-making out of everybody. Yes, that’s true, but you’re only one person. I got a staff of 247 now. I’m up to six assistant principals now. Our enrollment keeps going up, but I got to realize, really, my job is to create a platform for people to express their self and feel empowered.  

So, an example, when I got there, we were on a seven-period day, 48 minutes, seven periods. When COVID came about, we switched to a block schedule. We met every other day for 90 minutes just to reduce seating charts, reduce movement, and try to make it a safer environment. Last year, my teachers came to me, my department heads, and said, “Hey, can we vote and see if the staff and students want to go back to a seven out of seven?” 

The block schedule, a lot of people just felt it was tough, like a 90 minutes class and you meet every other day. That connection of meeting, I need to meet you every day. I don’t care how long it is, we need to check and connect. We had multiple discussions with faculty and students. Students shared their opinions to the faculty; faculty shared their opinions to the students. We took it to a vote. They voted they wanted to go back to a straight seven out of seven, but we do that with everything. We do that with dress code.  

Do we allow rips and tears in the jeans? 

Do we allow crocs?  

Are we going to allow hats outside?  

Do we take them off inside?  

What I’m trying to say, I could just sit there and say, “We’re doing this, we’re doing this, but no one’s going to listen to me.” 

If I create a platform and have discussions and forums and set up a voting system, everyone has buy-in to everything from the dress code to the bell schedule. I think my main advice to principles, outside of relationships first, is to create a platform for discussion, forums, and voting, and let your people decide what they want and go with it. 

Nati Rodriguez [26:54] 
Did you say that the students also have a voice in this?  

Adam Lane [26:58] 
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely they do. Our teachers like listening to the students, like packing your backpack. A teacher doesn’t think what goes into a teenager’s mind at home when they pack their backpack. They shared how confusing it was not knowing if it was a green or white day and which classes they had. They always brought everything, and it hurt their back. It was tough to carry it. Where if they have a straight seven, they felt like teachers gave them less books, gave them less work, because they see them every day. In the end, it wasn’t that they did less work or had less books, but it felt like it, and they knew exactly where they were going. Instead of, you miss one block day, you might not see your teacher the whole week. It’s just creating those environments where you learn from each other.  

Nati Rodriguez [27:49] 
That’s fantastic. I think what I remember hearing from students is the sense of not really having a voice in decision making. Being able to be a part of that, at such a young age – it’s wonderful that there is a space for that, and then also for teachers to learn about the student experience, because the further out you are, the more you forget.  

Adam Lane [28:12] 
Yeah. One of my favorite events is we do lunch with the principal on the last Friday of every month. Like I said with the Hornet bucks, they use ten of them for a chance ticket. I usually have about 100 or 200 kids and then I pick ten of them, and our local Pizza Hut or different restaurants to bring in food. Well, that’s what it’s all about. We sit together and they tell me what they like, what they want to change; the restrooms need more paint, or we really like the new senior parking lot. I don’t know that stuff unless I sit down and have pizza and some soda with them and really hang out to hear what their concerns are or what to continue and what not to do anymore.  

Nati Rodriguez [28:57] 
Thank you for sharing that. It makes me want to visit. Can you tell us about the importance of the academies and the IB program at your school?  

Adam Lane [29:07] 
We have 3,000 kids, and you can get lost. We all know smaller learning communities produce more, not only mental benefits, but academic benefits. We have an IB program, JROTC program, and career academies, such as the Academy of Children’s Educational Studies. We have an Academy of Media Production. A lot of those kids will go on to work at Universal Studios and Disneyland and Island Adventure. Some of them want to be in front of the camera, some of them want to be behind the camera and learn sound and lighting. 

Our other big academy is the Environmental, Agriculture, and Technology Academy. Those kids are like in my day, the Future Farmers of America, but it’s so much more developed now. They have their own livestock; they have their own citrus field. We try to create as many cool academies and programs such as IB and JROTC.  

We make sure every student on our campus falls into at least one of those just to have a smaller learning community. They hang out together, they go to sports together, they have study hall together. It brings the parents of those kids together. I just think without that academy piece, kids are going to get lost and possibly lose an interest in school.  

Nati Rodriguez [30:50] 
I’m just going to switch gears here. What are you reading, watching, or listening to? 

Adam Lane [30:55] 
I’m not too big on watching or listening. I like listening to music. I’m an 80s rock hair band guy, so everything from Guns and Roses to Def Leopard, Bon Jovi. I really like my music. I play a little guitar on the side. I’m trying to get better every day and learn songs from my students and staff. I’m taking their requests, but I do like to read.  

Two of the books I’ve been reading most recently – and I kind of read them before, but you go back and revisit the great ones – is Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point. I think that is a great book for anybody, especially principals and teachers, because when you look at the tipping point, it’s all about that magic moment when an idea, or a trend, or a social behavior crosses that threshold, tips and spreads like wildfire. We talk about as a principal building a culture. Well, it’s like you watch the needle. You’re not there, you’re not there, and boom, everyone wants to work there, and that’s that tipping point you work for. Or as a teacher, your kids just aren’t getting it. You keep retesting them and assessing, and all you want is for it to connect so they can somehow show you. I remember, as a teacher, the tipping point when you finally figured out how to make that connection to get that information into them so you know it. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is one of my most recent rereads, and that’s going to be my recommendation for the day.  

Nati Rodriguez [32:33] 
Thank you so much, Adam. It’s definitely a pleasure to witness someone so visionary and who’s instilled such a culture of leadership and empowerment for your staff and your students. We’re really excited to hear what happens in October and thank you.  

Haines City Senior High School 

Adam Lane 

International Baccalaureate program 

Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps 

Environmental, Agricultural, and Technology Academy 

Academy of Media Production 

Academy of Children’s Educational Studies 

Digital Arts Pathway  

Performing Arts Pathway 

NASSP 

National Principal of the Year 

Future Farmers of America 

PBIS – Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports 

Guns and Roses  

Def Leopard 

Bon Jovi 

Malcolm Gladwell – The Tipping Point 

Nati Rodriguez [02:20] 
I’m also excited to announce that the Learner series The Habitable Planet is now available on LabXchange. The Habitable Planet is a video course for high school teachers and undergraduate students in environmental science, and additional series will be added in the coming months, so stay tuned by subscribing to this podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right Marty, can you tell us about what LabXchange is and who it’s for? 

Marty Samuels [02:46] 
LabXchange is for everyone. I think that’s the most important thing to speak to. Our mission is to provide materials that allow people to be inspired by science, be empowered by science, fall in love with science, and start thinking about how science is fun, doable, and something that they might want to pursue a career in. We’re primarily designing interactive science content aimed at secondary school or high school student classes. In that vein, we are thinking about what are the kinds of lab techniques or science concepts that a student might need to know before they walk into their first lab in high school or before they walk into their first lab in college. What kind of lab skills might they want to practice or think about before they look up a scientist at a research university or at an institute, and think about reaching out to them to do research with them and ask them if they’d like to join their lab. So really our mission is to support high school teachers, high school students, and lifelong learners who are interested or passionate about science and science education. 

Nati Rodriguez [04:00] 
Thank you. It sounds like a really good experience. When I think of labs, I think of a physical space so I’m curious if you could walk me through a user’s experience. I know you mentioned a high school student. How do they get started, and how does LabXchange fit into different teaching models? 

Marty Samuels [04:21] 
Let me start at the beginning with where a high school student might begin on LabXchange. LabXchange is free and we are dedicated to being a free resource that’s available for everyone. We are based at Harvard University, and our mission is to make some of the beautiful cutting-edge, interactive science educational materials that we’ve developed at Harvard, accessible and available to everyone so everyone can engage with them and benefit from them, and give us feedback and know how we can improve them. We’re in this mission with everyone together. 

If you first come to LabXchange.org, our home page, one way to engage with it is that we are like a library of content, and so that is similar to YouTube or Spotify or any other platform where you can search through a library and find what you’re interested in. One place to start is by searching for whatever topic you might be interested in. Do you want to learn more about breast cancer? Do you want to learn more about the coronavirus or something like that?  

Another way to walk into LabXchange, is by engaging with some contextualized clusters or learning experiences that we’ve designed. LabXchange can offer the ability for anyone to build any learning experience they want, and that’s really designed primarily for mentors and educators to be able to design learning opportunities for their students. We also build a lot of contextualized learning opportunities that we call pathways or clusters. We built a lot of them already for people – one, so that they can hit the ground running with a pathway or a cluster that we built, but two, so that they can edit or modify any of our pathways or clusters and use them for their own ends.   

One of the first clusters that we built and one of the clusters that we are most proud of is the Foundations of Biotechnology; this was an adaptation of an Amgen Biotechnology Experience curriculum that introduces high school students to foundational techniques and biotechnology. That involves how to cut pieces of DNA, stick them together, and to insert them into a bacterium, so that bacterium starts making a particular protein that you’re interested in and then how you can purify that protein and potentially use that protein as a therapeutic or drug – like what we do for insulin or like what we do for some recombinant antibodies that could be used as treatments for the coronavirus or something like that. What we’ve built is a lot of virtual lab experiences in that cluster; that cluster includes something like ten plus virtual lab experiences in which someone can virtually pick up a pipette and start doing all these experiments in a virtual lab simulation, right off the bat.   

The intent is not that it is designed to replace doing any lab work, but instead, it is to motivate or inspire people to feel like they can do lab work, to show that lab work is easy, that you can make mistakes in a low-stakes environment. It’s just a video game on LabXchange. If you ever want to hit the reset button, hit the reset button. If you ever want to repeat a different experiment or try a different variable, try a different variable. Time is infinite and materials are infinite in virtual spaces.    

In that vein, for hybrid use, our virtual lab simulations allow for both warm-ups and extensions from what you might do in a physical classroom. Of course, during the pandemic, a lot of people have ended up using our virtual lab simulations instead of lab opportunities. They don’t have the opportunity to do the lab in real life. While we didn’t really plan on that being the role of these labs, I think initially when we first developed them, I think it worked really well. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from people being able to conduct their senior thesis research projects while they were using LabXchange or publish a paper using LabXchange. We’re really excited about the opportunity that we were able to make it a little bit easier for people who were trying to do science remotely while they didn’t have access to a lab or didn’t have access to their school resources or something like that.   

Of course, we’re still thrilled to provide those opportunities for people and want to continue to figure out how we can expand and continue to bolster those resources so we can continue to inspire and push those boundaries about what people can do as a scientist in their own living room.    

Nati Rodriguez [08:57] 
Yes, well, that’s exciting. Now I’m curious what the virtual simulations look like. A couple of questions about the pathways and the clusters. If a student is working through this in a classroom setting, assigned by a teacher, or even independently, is there a way for them to get recognized for the work? Like, do they get credit? Is there a certification? The other is, given the pandemic and the possibility of using virtual spaces more for this lab experience, have you seen any changes in the requirement about physically going to a lab? You mentioned that most of them you have to go in for three hours – is that changing in any way?  

Marty Samuels [09:40] 
The latter question, I don’t know that I have a lot of purvey into. I’ll say this – for the handful of senior theses that I was reading for undergraduates at Harvard, a lot of the research recently has been what you’d call, in silico research, as opposed to in vitro or in vivo. Rather than studying an organism or studying cells in a petri dish, people have been doing experiments on their computer using bioinformatics tools, by doing things like sequence alignments, or protein alignments, or the kinds of discoveries that you can make given all of the tremendous resources that currently exist online based on like the bioinformatics explosion. That’s something that we want to get more into at LabXchange – to prepare people, not just for how to do the wet lab work that scientists do now, but also for what is it that scientists are doing when they’re just sitting at their bench looking at a computer? What kind of databases are they looking through? How are they asking hypotheses using a database like BLAST or the NCBI sequence servers or things like that?   

I’ve noticed that many people have been doing amazing research because they’ve been driven to, from a bioinformatics perspective, the last couple of years because they haven’t had access to their lab spaces as they traditionally would. I should say another thing that we offer, we have virtual simulations for, are not just virtual simulations that allow you to manipulate pipettes and pieces of experimental equipment to kind of perform a lab, with a step-by-step protocol telling you what you should be doing along the way, but we also have virtual activities that allow students to put together their own lab so that if we give you the starting point, like imagine that you have the genome sequence for the coronavirus, and your mission was to create a protein that can act as a potential vaccine for the coronavirus. How would you do that? What experimental steps would you want to go through? Not just which ones would you want to go through, but how would you sequence them in the appropriate order to create that potential vaccine by the end? We’ve developed a couple of simulations where a student can actually build their own experiment, like what kind of protocol steps do they want to do as opposed to just executing a protocol step that someone delivers to them, and that we’re super excited about because that’s really what you only get to do when you become like a professor or like a faculty member.   

You asked another question a long time ago that I totally rambled off on. 

Nati Rodriguez [12:12] 
It was about certification, but all these questions came up as I’m hearing you. One is like, I feel like it expands what we thought of as a scientist, at least for me, and I haven’t done a lot of that science or lab since maybe college. I also thought about access. How many people have access to a lab to begin with, let alone during the coronavirus? And that is amazing. I’m curious, what are your thoughts on the field of science and what this opens up? Is there more validity to one or the other? Are we always going to need to go into a lab otherwise, you’re not really a scientist? 

Marty Samuels [12:58] 
These are great questions and profound and deep questions, and let me not pretend I am an authority on answering them. In fact, my favorite thing about science is that science is a toolbox for investigation. It is the ultimate democratizing force. The best arguments that are supported by the best data win, that’s it. That’s all science is. We know that we’re often wrong, and that some smart person is going to come up with a clever experiment that’s going to provide more data five to ten years from now. We’re all going to have updated ideas in five to ten years from now based on that new data. Science is an ever-evolving field because we’re always accumulating a better understanding of how the natural world works. That allows us to update our understanding and our theories about how nature operates and how we can make use of it.   

The truly empowering thing about science is not just that it allows us to understand something about how nature works, but by understanding how nature works, we can design things to alleviate human suffering, to make our lives better. For example, we can develop clean energies, or we can develop therapies for diseases. Once you understand how a cell grows in a normal way, and you understand what parts of a cell are broken when it’s cancerous and the cell starts dividing too rapidly, then you can actually start rationally designing drugs to say, “Okay, well, how do I repair those broken parts of a cell so the cell returns to its normal state of health?” 

Or that the immune system can clear out all of those bad cells that are cancerous, and the person can go on living a happy, productive life. The truly beautiful thing about science is that it’s just a toolkit to tinker around and try to understand questions that may seem small but often by answering them, you understand deep and profound things that will affect the way that we think about the world forever.   

Most recently, a group of discoveries in biology called CRISPR-Cas9 – these were enzymes or genes that were discovered in the 80s – and for a long time, people didn’t realize how powerful or brilliant these tools were. Very recently, people began to understand that there’s incredible power in these tools to do specific gene editing that seems to motivate a lot of potential future therapies and certainly recent Nobel Prizes, about how, if we can identify genetic causes of disease, how we could begin to alleviate some of those.   

When you ask, where does science go in the future? Really, I think where science and science education are going in the future is to empower users to think about questions they are interested in asking, and help empower people to think about ways they can ask those questions. Often thinking about a question in a subtle way of asking that question is the hardest thing about science. How am I going to ask this question in a way that when I get the data from it, I’ll be able to figure out what the answer is because that’s not always super easy. As a student, you are often told that having questions means you’re not smart enough like a smart kid knows all the answers or something. That is just so far from the truth. Smart people are the people who have billions of questions. Science is all about having questions. The pursuit of trying to answer those questions and trying to understand something about our natural world allows us to develop tools to make more nutritious food to treat malnutrition or any other maladies that you can see in our world today. Some of those scientific discoveries are going to happen in a wet lab, with someone doing experiments or someone in the field, someone discovering something in a cave, in the savannah, or any other biological space. Some of those discoveries are going to be done by people looking up databases and really clever ways of trying to analyze the data that other people have collected and put on the Internet.   

There’s no valid or invalid way of doing this, really. There’s no valid or invalid way of being a scientist. It’s just being curious and having questions and wanting to find out more. There’s no right or wrong place to do that. 

Nati Rodriguez [17:56] 
Is there collaboration around labs? Again, thinking about a physical lab, when I went in there, I was working with somebody, either a partner, or four of us – Is there a way to do that on LabXchange, and is it done across the world? What does that look like? Do you have any data on how many of those collaborations are taking place?   

Marty Samuels [18:17] 
That is a brilliant question because the best learning and the best science is collaborative. There’s no way around that. Right now, we don’t have a great way to understand how people are using LabXchange collaboratively versus independently. I mean, what’s hard is that we’re so young in a way. We launched in the beginning of 2020. We have something like 20 million unique viewers at this point. A lot of them are happening in the context of school, and so what our anecdotal understanding of a lot of that learning journey is, similar to how they would have buddies and do a lab in groups of two or three students, is that they’d be doing the virtual lab together or activities like that in class together. If someone gets stuck in a protocol step or someone doesn’t know how to answer a question, they have a lab mate to help them through that. That is often how we would recommend how to use this, to do it collaboratively. We don’t know yet to the extent that people are doing it collaboratively versus people are doing it at home independently by themselves. 

Nati Rodriguez [19:28] 
Thank you for sharing about that and then just switching gears. Given your deep knowledge and experience in the sciences and in teaching, what is your vision for science education in K-12 and at the college level? 

Marty Samuels [19:42] 
Okay. Maybe if I take a step back and I acknowledge a concept called Bloom’s Taxonomy, in which the first couple of levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy are like knowing facts, and the next couple of levels in the middle of Blooms Taxonomy are applying those facts to new situations. The top of Bloom’s Taxonomy, the highest “cognitive levels,” are being able to evaluate or vet facts, or create experiments, or create arguments given data. Where I see education going, it doesn’t take a genius to see this, is that there’s so much I mean, we live in the information age now. The human genome was again just successfully sequenced. We just had the 20-year rerelease of the now complete human genome. Of course, if you look up almost anything on Google, it’s going to give you an answer, or on Wikipedia.  

My little niche of biology is called structural biology, which means that for DNA made out of little subparts called nucleotides, I care about where all of those atoms are positioned in the nucleotide. An A-T-A-G or C. Proteins are made out of components, subunits called amino acids. I care a lot about what the 20 amino acids look like and where exactly the atoms are in each of those 20 amino acids. When I was a kid, I had to memorize those in tests. I had to take a test, and we had to draw the structure of the 20 amino acids or draw the structure of the four DNA bases or things like that. Now, it’s hard for me. I just give students cheat sheets in every single class they could draw whatever structure they want when they come to class to take a test. Why would anyone ever have to memorize any of this information ever again because literally, it will be in front of them. 

The question is not so much memorizing information or memorizing facts, right? There was a time before the Gutenberg Bible when no one had any of the information in front of them. You had to memorize everything. Now, we all have that book. It’s in our phone, it’s in our pocket. We can look up any information all the time. The question is how to use it. The question is not just knowing those foundational Blooms level facts, but how do you apply them to new phenomenon? How do you interpret data in light of those facts? How do you evaluate facts? How do you evaluate papers or claims in a research paper or try to understand them?  

Given the information age and given the amount of data that’s at our fingertips all the time, where education is going is not necessarily requiring students to memorize or learn facts, but it’s really in helping students to evaluate or vet facts. If you read a news article, how do know it’s true? When you look up a Google search, you are lucky if you only get one result back.  That means that you only have one thing to look up. Normally, you get 100,000 results back. Which one do you click on? Which one do you trust? How do you learn how to evaluate or vet knowledge, or figure out what is the knowledge that’s trustworthy that I know I can believe in?  

As scientists, we believe a lot in having a claim that’s supported by reasoning, supported by evidence. So that’s always what we’re looking for. It’s not about the big name who’s saying something. It doesn’t matter who says something. It doesn’t matter what the accreditation is. All that matters is whether or not you can prove it or not, and that’s what science is.  

This is a long way of saying that I see science education as going in the direction of training people how to critique arguments, how to make arguments, how to use data to support claims, and how to critique other people’s claims. If you read a paper, you can say, “Wow, half of this paper was brilliant, and the other half of the paper, I don’t know if I buy it.”  

If we can go in that direction, I think that we all have done a huge service for the next generation. 

Nati Rodriguez [24:00] 
I’m curious what your own K-12 educational journey was like? 

Marty Samuels [24:04] 
I was a humongous nerd, and I loved my science classes, but I also loved my humanities classes. I loved English and Literature, and I did okay in drawing and did terrible at music, but I was super lucky. I grew up in Maryland, and I grew up just outside Washington, DC. I grew up next to the National Institute of Health (NIH), a laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland, because of that, I got super lucky and had amazing people who were there to support me. I got an opportunity to work in labs at NIH as a high school student.   

My first one was with this amazing mentor, Dr. Frederick K at the National Cancer Institute. My grandfather, I had never met him. He passed away when my mom was five of leukemia. There was always a mission and never spoken out loud really, but, I mean, a burning inner flame to figure out how to cure cancer. That was just always a deep-seated thing that I still feel to this day. That’s just such a central motivation for me. It was a central motivation for me going to grad school and everything else. My mom, of course, wanted me to become a real doctor, like a medical doctor. We watched ER together all the time, and she was always wanting me to become one of these people. Well, I don’t know that I can stick my hand into someone’s abdomen, but I do like the science. I got to do some very basic research, make a ton of mistakes, and had really incredible mentors who were just there to support me all the time. I actually had a couple of amazing opportunities to work at labs while I was a high school student.  

These are stories I would share with my undergrads at Harvard. I had a ridiculously privileged opportunity to work in a bunch of science labs in high school. I went to college, and I joined another lab in college, and they fired me almost immediately. I just couldn’t get an experiment to work, and it wasn’t clicking. In hindsight, I was young, and I was stupid, and I wasn’t probably mature enough, and going to my mentors and asking them for advice and thinking about different ways I could try it, but it was demoralizing. I took a year out of lab or something like that. It took me a while to build up the gumption to go email another professor and ask if I could work in the lab. After a while, I did and I felt completely at home again.   

I think it’s just important to know that adversity is a thing. No one makes it through scot-free. Everyone’s going to struggle, and the most important thing you can do is believe in yourself and know that you can do anything you want to do. Don’t let setbacks derail you. If you want to try something, try again. Get back up, dust yourself off. It’s having a growth mindset or perspective that having one or two failures, or three or four or five or six failures, is nothing to deter you from trying things that you’re really passionate about or continue to try things you’re really passionate about. Learn from mistakes, learn from setbacks and try again. Rely on your support network, rely on your friends, and rely on your loved ones. They’re going to help you through all of this. 

I think that those were the most important things that I got out of high school and college, which were – one, amazing opportunities, but two, amazing opportunities to fail and to grow from it in safe spaces and where people were there to protect and support me.   

Nati Rodriguez [27:37] 
Thanks for sharing that. Just looking at all of your incredible awards for teaching, advising, and acknowledgments, I just think that it was shaped by all of these rich experiences that you had. I hope that more people do not get derailed when they have a passion.    

Marty Samuels [28:01] 
Well, that’s kind of you to say. Honestly, I think everything in education is just trying to empower the next generation to be amazing and to be future leaders. Not just be able to do the things that we’re thinking about today, but to be prepared to think about questions or challenges that we haven’t even thought about that are going to appear 20 years from now, and they’re going to be responsible for solving. As I’m sure every educator you speak to says, watching a student fall in love with the topic or realize that they are capable of confidence and they feel empowered by any discipline or way of asking questions, it’s the biggest possible reward you could ever have as a teacher. 

Nati Rodriguez [28:43] 
I know that you’re Head of Content at LabXchange. Are you still teaching?  

Marty Samuels [28:48] 
Not at the moment, no. I have to say I miss it. I haven’t been in a classroom, I’ve guest lectured here and there. In all honesty, I haven’t been in a classroom for a few years now, and I miss it. I’m sure very few students appreciate that comment, but I kind of miss it, I do. 

Nati Rodriguez [29:10] 
The reason I ask is because I can feel your enthusiasm around helping the next generation of learners, just curious if you were still practicing. 

Marty Samuels [29:20] 
We do our best to try to pour it into the online stuff — one thing that we try to do, which is hard. If you imagine the most rewarding educational experiences, it’s usually a one-to-one experience with someone, where you are asking them questions, and they’re responding to you. It feels like that should be doable in online spaces, that we should be able to create systems that give you very meaningful and personalized and detailed feedback, that coaches you along the way, that says, “Oh, I see what you did there. That’s tricky, don’t worry about it. Why don’t you think about it from this perspective and try it again?” 

Trying to think about ways in which we can build more coaching and positive feedback and inspiration and motivation into the online spaces, is something we’re thinking about all the time.  

Nati Rodriguez [30:08] 
Would that be through AI or would there be a person actually evaluating and coaching?  

Marty Samuels [30:15] 
I would say somewhere in between, probably because I don’t think I really know what the word AI means. I have no idea what that means other than Will Smith movies. Can we imagine a lot of possible incorrect answers? I think this is a lot of data we want to collect in the future. What are the misconceptions that people have about a particular topic? If we can figure out what are the top ten most common misconceptions someone has about a particular topic, then we can come up with nested feedback for each of those misconceptions. Maybe that might not be perfect, but maybe if that relates to the next question that they also get, that feedback can be combined in an iterative way that can become individualized for the user, and maybe that does become AI machine learning at some point. I just don’t know what those words mean.  

Nati Rodriguez [31:02] 
As a teacher and teachers that have been in the field for years, they’re very familiar with all the hiccups students experience on particular concepts or in a problem. They see it over and over again and they know how to respond and they get really good at guiding. Yeah, I can imagine that with enough data you can do that in an online space.  

Marty Samuels [31:22] 
I should say that, frankly, we are so reliant on experienced teachers as we build this content. There’s so much expertise that we are so privileged to get to apply and make use of, but we’re always looking for more. Let me just say that. We are young and our website is young. All the things we’re making are prototypes. If we’re going to be around for 20 years from now, the things we’ve made in the first couple of years will be just the first examples of things we can make. We want all of our things to get better. We’re excited to hear from people about how we can make things better for their students, for themselves as teachers, and for people as lifelong learners. We are thrilled to get any and all feedback from anyone at any point along the way or any guidance from people. We are in the space with a great deal of humility. We know what amazing teachers are out there who have taught this content to many amazing students before, and we are also in a position of wanting to learn from them, as well.   

Nati Rodriguez [32:24] 
Great. That’s a great point that you made. Our Learner audience is several thousand, not quite 20 million, but they’re veteran educators who’ve been in the field and are experts in their content areas. I think they would appreciate trying LabXchange and providing any feedback if they have some insight into the sciences and education in general, which they do. Is there anything else that you would like to add or share with our audience?  

Marty Samuels [32:52] 
I don’t know that I do, other than just to share my appreciation to you for this amazing podcast and also for the amazing content and the classroom resources that are already up on your website. We’re so excited for LabXchange to have a collaboration with you. There are just so many directions, just thinking about the STEAM projects and the writing and the science from different disciplines and lenses perspectives, so much of this is just so exciting.  We can’t wait. Honestly, we feel like, in so many things, we feel like this collaboration is just the beginning as well and we’re really pumped about everything. 

Nati Rodriguez [33:59] 
What are you reading, watching or listening to these days?  

Marty Samuels [34:04] 
Okay, that’s probably the most important thing. I originally grew up in Maryland, so I’m hooked on The Wire if anyone watched that. HBO had another rerelease of the show, We Own the City, which I could probably just keep re-watching 24 hours a day and be happy with my life. Now I get to interrupt that with Ms. Marvel, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the other shows on Disney Plus.   

In terms of what I’ve been reading recently, one amazing project that LabXchange has had the honor to work on, is an anti-racism and science education project, another project funded generously through the Amgen Foundation. Over the next year, we plan on releasing a lot of content about how health inequities in the US don’t have any biological basis, teaching about the genetics and the biology of human variation, and also how to be a teacher who’s more inclusive and antiracist teacher, someone who can support all the students to succeed.   

There’s a book that I’ve been reading, Racism, Not Race, by Professor Joseph Graves and Dr. Allen Goodman and that’s a completely stunning book. I was also reading another chapter by Dr. Robert Palmer on persistence frameworks and how to support all students to succeed. He’s a professor at Howard University. It’s just been an amazing project to get to surround myself with such amazing scholars and scholarship.   

Nati Rodriguez [35:35] 
Marty, it was a pleasure to speak with you today, and we look forward to continuing to work with LabXchange. 

A-T-A-G or C 

Amgen Biotechnology Experience 

BLAST 

Bloom’s Taxonomy 

CRISPR-Cas9 

Disney Plus (streaming platform) 

Dr. Frederick K 

Dr. Robert Palmer 

ER (series) 

Foundations of Biotechnology 

Gutenberg Bible 

Harvard University 

Harvard University – Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning 

Harvard University – Molecular and Cellular Biology and Chemical and Physical Biology  

Howard University 

In-silico research 

LabXchange 

Martin “Marty” Samuels 

Ms. Marvel (series) 

NCBI sequence servers 

National Cancer Institute 

National Institute of Health (NIH) 

Obi-Wan Kenobi (series) 

Racism, Not Race, by Professor Joseph Graves and Dr. Allen Goodman 

The Habitable Planet 

The Wire (series) 

University of Chicago 

We Own the City (series) 

Nati Rodriguez [01:43] 
Can you share with us what being a DEN Star is like for you and what it is exactly?  

Matthew Woods [01:50] 
Being a DEN Star with Discovery [Education] has been a great experience. You always hear the term time flies when you’re having fun. I believe it’s been about two and a half years now that I’ve been DEN Star. It’s just been great because one, it provides an opportunity to connect with other amazing educators across the country and a lot of them who are using Discovery Ed products and using in that format, but also, just collaboration, right and being able to have thought partners out there to think about different strategies, to talk about different topics, and just know that you’re not alone, right. A lot of times we can all get stuck in our own silos. It’s good to have that type of support. Also, additionally, it’s a great opportunity because I love how Discovery Education, you talk about, for example, or you hear companies or products say, “Hey, we’re making this for education, for students, we’re making this for this.”  They actually take the opportunity to provide spaces where not only we can collaborate, but we can give them constructive criticism and honest feedback. We’ll get exposed to different things that they’re getting ready to come out with and they’ll say: 

“Hey, from your perspective, how does this look?” 

“Does this make sense?” 

“How would you adapt it to your day-to-day roles and positions?” 

“What are the things that don’t work about it?” 

“What are the things you don’t like about it?” 

“Please be transparent with us.” 

I love that honesty and that openness to get that kind of feedback. Those are the two biggies that really come to mind. It’s helped me because it makes me think about when we have different initiatives going on or we’re doing different things, how are we structuring it in a way to get feedback and get that constructive criticism and then use it in a way to grow, develop and build.  

Nati Rodriguez [03:48] 
Great. Thank you. I recently read something about how ed tech companies, often at the foundation, aren’t using research-based practices, or sometimes even involving teachers in reviewing product before it gets released. It’s great to hear that Discovery Education does that and that you’ve been involved in this process. You mentioned they create spaces for collaboration and feedback. What does that look like? Is that happening virtually or in person? Did that change in the last 2-3 years because of the pandemic? 

Matthew Woods [04:18] 
A lot of it has been virtually, and when I became a DEN Star it was right here in the middle of COVID. A lot of it just started off the get-go being virtual. Now as different provisions and different safety measures are being put in place all across the country, opportunities are starting to open up for folks to connect to different conferences and so forth. Even just the way they structure it virtually. I think a lot of times folks automatically have the stigma, “We’re hoping on the Zoom call. We’re hopping on Google Meet, right?”  

You can do it in a fashion that is very engaging, and I have to tip my hat to [Discovery Ed] because they are masterminds. They do it in such a way, it’s extremely valuable. The flexibility doing it that way allows to have all the different educators, like I said, across the country who are in different time zones, who are in different places and spaces in their lives.  

Nati Rodriguez [05:21] 
Another thing that you pointed out was the ability to collaborate and meet people across the country. When I think of teaching, that’s not what comes to mind, right? I think of a person in a classroom that doesn’t really interact too much, maybe with their department or grade level teams. How valuable is that for you in your roles, either at the school level or in the other work that you do?  

Matthew Woods [05:42] 
It’s extremely valuable because it’s hard when you tell people to think outside the box, but they’re trapped in the box. It’s hard to tell somebody, “Hey, you could do this differently?” If you have no frame of reference. It becomes easier when you can say, “Hey, we might not do it this way, or it might take some work to get it this way.” 

“Look, you can’t tell me it’s not possible because I’ve seen it and I’m talking to someone who’s doing it right here.” Or we can use it to measure how far we’ve come on something compared to someone who’s starting on it. It gives you a good starting, middle, and end point, per se. It’s interesting a lot of times when we all in education have some of the same issues that we’re going through, which is hearing the different perspective, but then get dig into the root cause. So why is that perspective different for that person?  It’s because they’re at this place. It’s because maybe they’re in a rural, not an urban area. It’s because maybe they have these additional resources that we don’t have or vice versa. You can start to really unpack, how can we all make that positive growth and that change to accomplish whatever the goal or the objective is that we’re trying to do. 

Nati Rodriguez [07:15] 
Yes. Thank you. Context! I think you get a sense of what their context is. That takes me to my next question, how have you seen Discovery Education used in the classroom and school buildings, either at your sites or across the country? 

Matthew Woods [07:29] 
I got a good in-depth view of it, per se, when I was principal. Our school at the time was working with Discovery Ed and when I say see it firsthand because I was interacting with it, my staff was interacting with it, and my students were interacting with it. One of the things that I tell folks this story all the time that really stuck out to me was when they did their initial pitch. They show up, got the really nice slides, they give you the cool pins, all the freebies, right? I’m sitting there, and I’m just reading the body language of my staff, and I could tell, “Hey, this isn’t clicking,” because, in the back of our minds, we were focused on literacy. We needed to improve literacy. I was like, “Hey, this is great, but I don’t see the connection, and I can tell my staff don’t see the connection.” 

I remember being very transparent, and they were very transparent, that’s what was beautiful.  “Hey, I don’t think this was connecting with folks.” 

I said, “Well, now that you say that, let’s open the floodgates.” We had an amazing conversation where it was extremely authentic. 

I said, “Hey listen, I love what you’re doing. I’m a firm believer in organized chaos. I’m a firm believer in seeing students move around and modeling and being active and hands-on. Everything you’re saying, I’m right there with you. The problem is, everybody knows that literacy is at the forefront right now.”  

I said, “The fact that people don’t see that alignment is where you’re going to get heartburn and where it’s going to be a struggle.” I remember they were like, “Well, Mr. Woods, this does align with literacy. Believe it or not, here are the things and how its cross curricular activities and so forth.” 

We came back to the table, and they spoke to the staff, and then it was like a light bulb went off.  

You would see what they were doing in their class and how they were modeling things. It was great seeing, not only just how their resources were helping to improve instruction, but most importantly, how it improved engagement and collaboration. I thought that it was just powerful, just seeing it firsthand how these resources have really helped prove and elevate instruction.  

Nati Rodriguez [10:54] 
A couple of questions. What grade level school site were you the principal at, and which subjects in Discovery Education is used at your site?  

Matthew Woods [11:02] 
Yeah, it was middle school, so grade 6-8 and I was seeing it everywhere. We all know kids, some kids are at different levels and how they want to do something, same thing with teachers, right. Some teachers had a natural affinity for it and they started like, “Oh, I can embed this here, or I can do this.” Others were apprehensive about it. The apprehension that I started realizing was just how to properly make it accessible. I need to feel comfortable with it before I start modeling it, right. 

In turn, there became a lot of investment in that professional development. I like to use the term – I’m going to understand it like I know the back of my hand, making sure that it becomes so automatic to me that when I’m talking to somebody, or in this case, I’m teaching students right and modeling it, I’m not reading a script. I don’t need to say, okay, where do I go on the website to do that? What resources do I need to pull? I already have it rocking and rolling, and it just becomes just another tool in my toolbox.   

Nati Rodriguez [12:10] 
I love that we’re talking about this – professional development – because I think you recently released a course on it. Can you share about that and your viewpoint on how to best train folks in the field?  

Matthew Woods [12:23] 
The course is in collaboration with School Rubric. We called it Leading Off The Woods based on a lot of the work that I do. Its emphasis is on building relationships and building relationships in a way that is not tangible. When you say building relationships, are you including everybody? It’s easy for me to build relationships with people I have a natural affinity to. So, it’s easy for me to say, I play basketball, so I walk into a room, “Okay, you play basketball?” Okay right there, we strike up a conversation. It’s different if you come into the room and say, “No, I don’t play basketball, Mr. Woods. I play hockey.” Okay. 

I don’t really know much about hockey. Right there, what is happening where we’re not building up those silos, right?   

If we’re all being transparent, we see that in education all the time. You see students have a natural affinity for teachers that they feel some type of connection to. You see teachers and educators develop relationships really easy with kids they have a natural affinity for. So, what about the ones where the barriers are there? What about the ones where the relationships are sour? What about the ones where data, historical data shows us we do not do a good job of building those relationships. We have data that supports these groups of students historically, through our schools anywhere, usually feel more marginalized, usually feel like they don’t have a connection. And what do we know, without that foundation of a relationship, the chances of them being successful in schools start to dip. Okay, so what happens when that starts to dip? Then their achievement score starts to dip. Their level of engagement starts to dip. Their behaviors start to increase because they don’t want to be there with us. The likelihood of or the increase of them dropping out of school starts to increase. The data is always there supporting that. At the end of the day, it all comes back to relationships, right? 

Even though this isn’t the actual module, I’ll tell you just a small clip for all the listeners out there, I want you to think about who your favorite educator was that you had, either elementary, middle, high school, some folks, college, whatever it is, your favorite educator, whomever you came in contact with. Just think about that for a second, have that image pop into your mind. Once you have that person, then think about what made that person or those folks, the ones that stood out to you. What made that one or two people stick out? I say to folks, okay, so tell me, and folks will start sharing. I tell people all the time it always starts with relationships. Usually, it starts with something that had nothing to do with the class. It was like, “Hey, the way this person greeted me, no teacher had ever greeted me like that.” 

Like I said, that’s in a nutshell, what the module talks about. It’s about how we build those relationships, but doing it in a very logical and operational way. We have built-in resources where we have you look at your data, but we have you examine your data from a relationship lens. For these kids who you’re like, these are behavior issues, who has relationships with them? So, nobody has a relationship with them. Maybe this is something we should reflect on and kickstart.  

Nati Rodriguez [16:21] 
Yeah, I mean, that’s the kind of foundation that would support whenever we encounter things like a pandemic and students feel connected to an adult. The strength of that relationship, I think, could probably be mapped to, and how they feel and how they feel about belonging. They say that one of the number one thing for kids to feel connected and to learn is to feel like they belong. 

Matthew Woods [16:41] 
Yeah. I think we all see the news and everything going on in the world. For a lot of folks who aren’t traditional educators, that’s hard to understand. No, kids just need to learn about English and Math and History and Science. When you even ask those folks, “Okay, tell me about the teachers who are so impactful to you? What made you care?” 

Now, some folks will say, “Oh, my parents, they made sure I had that foundation. I couldn’t get in trouble at school.” True, okay not going to argue that a solid foundation at home does help. I think any educator will admit to that, but when I say what made those educators stand out, even the folks who harp on that, they’ll start talking about relationships. I think everybody gets it, per se, but I think sometimes with all the demands and everything that’s going on, it gets lost in the background. That’s why I’m excited about the module, and I’m excited about that professional development because folks are really connecting with it and vibing. It gives you resources, you get that professional development, you get a certificate at the end of it that you can turn in for in-service credit to your principal, or your district. So, it’s just been a great experience.  

Nati Rodriguez [18:02] 
Thank you for sharing it. It sounds like something we definitely need now more than ever. It’s a good point that you raised that we naturally are going to connect to some people. But for everything else, having something to fall back on to figure out how to do that is helpful. I mean, I’m a student at heart, and that would help me. Did you implement some of these strategies with your site when you were a principal?  

Matthew Woods [18:29] 
A lot of it just has come through the course of my career, you know trial by fire, right. You do it on the fly, you don’t really think about it, and then I’m a firm believer I learn more from my mistakes. I’m very transparent about that. Thinking about what could I have done differently? How could I have made this connection or done this? One thing that we focus on the PD too when we talk about building relationships, if I care about you, I’m going to figure out the best way to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. Telling somebody what they need to hear, sometimes that might be a difficult conversation because if I actually care about you, I’m not going to lie to you. Especially in education, sometimes we talk about relationships you hear people say it, “Well if you really cared about me, you would have been honest with me.” 

Now, you don’t do it in a way to demean people, but you provide it in a space where push comes to shove, no one can say, “Hey, they had me walking out here looking foolish. No one addressed that with me.” I think that’s the key that we’ve all got to continue to strive for, but do it in a way where we’re always respectful with not only our colleagues but then also our students.  
 
Nati Rodriguez [20:23] 
So, shifting gears a little bit, you’re also an author. Can you talk about the I Wanna Be series and how that came about?  

Matthew Woods [24:21] 
The I Wanna Be series is actually based off of my son. My son is biracial, I’m black and my wife is white. I tell people all the time when you become a parent, things change. You start looking at things real differently. My son was born, and he just recently turned three, a little three-year-old. Obviously, I’m an educator, my wife is a social worker. Education and a strong foundation is very important to us. We want to read to Hilton and practice things at home with him to help give him that foundation. What I started noticing was, we would go out to stores to look for books. I could just feel myself getting so frustrated because I couldn’t find books that I felt identified with our family dynamic.  

It brought me back to places and spaces that I was when I was a kid, questioning different things. I’m a huge comic book nerd, so I always question I’ve never seen any comic book characters that really look like me. I remember as a kid saying that. Another random fun fact for your listeners – I can remember as a kid if I found a Black action figure, I would buy it. So, like, John Stewart was Green Lantern, Black Panther, and this is before the movies. 
Finding things like that, I just had a natural affinity for, right. All these things are going through my head and my wife bought me for Father’s Day a couple of years ago, bought me one of those books. I don’t know if you’ve seen it before. It’s supposed to be like you. You send in a picture, and it’s supposed to be you and your kids. I’m looking at the book, and the first thing I said was like, “That dude looks pretty good. He don’t look none thing like me. He ain’t got these wrinkles. He don’t look tired like me, got black eyes.”  

 I’m sitting here thinking like, “Well, baby, I appreciate the gesture, but I don’t feel a connection to this.” 

She was like, “If you can do better, why don’t you go write your own book?” 

 I was like, “Sure, I’m going to go in the kitchen right now and write my own book.” 

I tell folks that was honest to God, how it all started. I remember sitting down at the kitchen table and the ideas just started flooding. I want to be, what do I want to be, well, I might want to be a lawyer, I might want to be a CEO, I might want to be a veterinarian. I remember as the ideas started running through my head, the occupations come from the fact that you don’t see many people of color, specifically males in those roles. I often tell folks when they say, what made you write this book? Okay, without thinking hard, name five Black lawyers. If you don’t actually know their names, name five experiences where you’ve seen five Black male lawyers. Tell me five Black male vets. Tell me five Black CEOs. It’s funny when I do that to folks how their faces get red and it’s not a matter of trying to be confrontational. It’s getting them to kind of see things and I think sometimes we don’t look at different perspectives.  

In the books, we are very intentional about the vocabulary that we use, making sure that people understand what an internship is. How many kids know what an internship is, let alone families? When you talk about becoming a lawyer, how many people know that, no it’s not just going to college, getting a Bachelor’s. No, it’s additional graduate school. Some of these occupations require licensure and getting different licenses to practice these fields or to do these things.  

It sparks curiosity, which is a beautiful thing. And the other piece, when you see the books, you’ll see pictures of my son, so he’s the main character, so the books actually grow with him. When you see the first couple of books, it’s a picture of him when he was one, and then you notice that the artwork changes as he’s become two and three, and as long as the ideas keep flushing in there, the artwork will grow with him just to continue inspiring him. Hopefully when he gets older and he can reflect on it, it will always just keep encouraging him. 

Nati Rodriguez [25:01] 
What a gift that you’ve given him to track him with books and then share them with the world. I’m curious, you mentioned that the images change as he grows. Does the content change to follow children as they start to read or improve their own vocabulary? What is the age group targeted?  

Matthew Woods [26:34] 
The age group targeted is pretty much from a toddler all the way up through elementary level. The artwork is geared towards the younger levels, and it’s done because you know as an educator too, the earlier that I spark your curiosity and keep your curiosity, the more as you grow and develop, you’re naturally going to want to seek out answers. You’re naturally going to want to figure it out. As you could tell, as a former history teacher, I used to tell kids, “Hey, I don’t really get into politics.”  

Listen, I just teach you the facts. I present it in a way where you come to understand, and I have enough faith that when you just understand the facts and you ask questions, you’re going to go exactly where you need to go. That’s how we structure the books. Like I said, it‘s been amazing to see people across the country reach out to me and connect about the books. There was a school in Chicago that had reached out to me, and I was like, “You’re reading these in Chicago?” Okay, cool because it takes me back to that feeling of being frustrated that night, I was sitting at home at the kitchen table, drafting it out until now, just seeing how I took a negative emotion and turned it into a positive, it’s just been amazing.  

Nati Rodriguez [26:40] 
I look forward to the day when we can find books like that easily. I look forward to hearing about the big news related to your books. Can you talk about your own educational journey? What was that like, your K-12 experience, and what motivated you to be a teacher?  

Matthew Woods [26:56] 
So, my K-12 journey is interesting. Growing up, I did not want to be an educator. I tell people I wanted to run for the hills. I say that because I have a lot of educators in my family. My mom was a biology teacher, a high school principal, and an administrator. Both my grandparents were teachers. I’ve got education just all around. I would tell people, not only do I know what it’s like to be an educator in front of people, I know what it’s like behind the scenes. I know what it’s like seeing someone stay up late grading. I just remember as a kid, like, “no, don’t want no parts of it.” I think I was maybe 16-17, I’m getting ready to graduate high school. We were at a store, my mom and I, and this lady walked up and did double take look at it, and she’s like, “Oh my God, it’s Ms. Woods.” 

For you, to say to her, Ms. Woods, it’s like, “Oh, you’re taking it way back when she taught you, right?” 

My mom had said, “Oh my God. It’s great seeing you, honey,” and that was code word for my mom forgot your name. She said, “Oh, my God, honey, it’s great seeing you.” 

I think I’m standing behind her chuckling. I remember I want to say I’m reaching for some cereal or something while she’s talking to this lady. This lady just giving her all these compliments, “Oh, my God, you changed my life. You were the best teacher I’ve ever had.”  

I remember leaning back to see this lady, because my mom was to my side, and the lady was looking in my direction, but at my mom. I tell people, the way she looked at my mom, I’ve never seen that before. She was looking at my mom, like my mom was a celebrity. This lady had this type of impact. I remember that image was just burnt in my head because you were in her biology class, but she was just so sweet and so complimentary of my mom.  

In my head, I’m sitting here trying to fathom, and I remember that was the spark that really was like, maybe I’ll try this education thing out.  

Nati Rodriguez [29:34] 
Well, thank you. You sort of have answered this, but I’ll ask you anyway. What is your vision for public education?  

Matthew Woods [29:41] 
The vision is that everybody has at least one positive experience. I’m a firm believer life is not about everything being peaches and cream. Everything is not going to go your way. You will hit adversity, but every student, every person should be able to say, “Hey, there was that one person in school, for whatever reason, we click.” Even with all the other bad things, that at least kept me afloat to finish, that sparked me into the career I’m in, that helped me stop from making some of these other bad decisions. That to me is the vision that I have for public education, that everybody can at least at some point, say they had that connection somewhere, because that lays the foundation for so many other things.  

Nati Rodriguez [30:41]  
Thank you for sharing that. We’ve covered a lot of ground. You’re involved in a whole bunch of different things, including being a DEN Star, a writer, professional development, and the podcast. Can you talk a little bit about the podcast and then also just what’s next for you?  

Matthew Woods [30:55] 
Sure. The podcast is Leading Out The Woods. The podcast really started from, I guess those negative emotions before that I had going through grad school. For a lot of us who go to grad school, grad school is very traditional, a lot of writing, there’s a very straight structure that you follow. I remember having conversations with friends of mine saying, I feel like my voice is getting lost in the shuffle. I’m fitting into a box just to finish, just to get the degree to do it. What it turned into a couple of years later was me being approached by a couple of folks to write a blog about my experiences and different things. I was like, “I don’t really have time to do a blog, even though I feel like I got time to do everything else.” They were like, “Why don’t you do a podcast?” 

So, I started the podcast. It really started just reflections that I had in my experiences. I had folks approach me and say, “Hey, would you think about having guest speakers?” Sure. Guest speakers can help me reflect on something I’m going through and reflect on a topic they have. Then came a really big deal. I say that with all humbleness because some of the folks that we’ve had on the podcast; Dr. Luvelle Brown, Dr. Michael Hynes, Dr. Todd Whitaker, Darrion Cockrell, who’s just Missouri Teacher of the Year, Anthony Swann, who was just Virginia Teacher of the Year. 

It’s been amazing because we’ve made a space where anybody can just log on to the podcast and listen. It gives me goosebumps having been able to talk to them and fills my toolbox up with different strategies. The podcast has been great. I think it’s amazing to think it’s already been two years doing the podcast, 60 plus episodes already, and I think we’re booked for the next four or five months. Shout out to all the listeners who are now sharing the podcast, but most importantly saying, “Hey Matt, here’s somebody that would love to be on the podcast or we’ve made this connection for you.” You make my job so much easier. So, I love you all. Thank you so much.  

Nati Rodriguez [33:12] 
Thank you and where can people find the podcast? What’s the best way to subscribe?  

Matthew Woods [33:16] 
You can find it anywhere. We’re on Apple, iHeart Radio, Google, Spotify, Amazon – you just type in Leading Out The Woods or you go to my website, www.leadingouthewoods.com.  

Nati Rodriguez [33:30] 
Great. Thank you. What are you reading, watching or listening to that you’d like to share?  

Matthew Woods [33:36] 
What do I listen to and read right now? Oh, my goodness, I read so many different things. I love to go back and re-read some classics because I think with a fresh set of eyes and perspectives. I’m looking at again, Dale Carnegie, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. It’s interesting, his perspective on things. Every time I’ve read that book, I think it’s already been like 10 or 12 times, I always pick up something new and something to think about. That’s the one off the top of my head. As part of my role, I have to look at education law and policies a lot. I love that stuff, but I know for the average person they don’t think it’s that cool. So, I’m actually looking at Dr. Dayton’s Education Law book, reading through just making sure I’m staying up to date on the different laws and policies that continue to get revamped and looked at all across the country, so I can stay as sharp as possible. Those right now are the two biggies that are in front of me that I’ve been flipping through.  

Nati Rodriguez [34:35] 
Got it. Thank you. Is there anything else that you would like to share with the Learner audience today?  

Matthew Woods [34:51] 
No, I would just say thank you again for having me on here. It’s been a great experience. For all the educators listening out there as always, I don’t think you all hear it enough, but I definitely appreciate you. I see you. I just want to thank all the listeners on here. You’re doing amazing work, it’s much needed and we appreciate you. 

Anthony Swann 

Black Panther 

Darrion Cockrell 

Discovery Education 

Dr. Luvelle Brown 

Dr. Michael Hynes 

Dr. Todd Whitaker 

Education Law: Principles, Policies and Practice – Dr. John Dayton 

Green Lantern 

How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie 

I Wanna Be series – Matthew Woods  

John Stewart 

Leading Out The Woods 

Leading Out The Woods podcast 

School Rubric 

Nati Rodriguez [00:42]
I’m very excited to learn more about this topic and trends around teaching statistics, as we all know, data is everywhere. The ability to understand and use data is an essential skill for understanding the world around us. I’m very excited to learn more about this topic and trends around teaching statistics, as we all know, data’s everywhere, and the ability to understand and use data is an essential skill for understanding the world around us. Welcome, Jessica and Victoria.  

Nati Rodriguez [02:16] 
Well, I’d love to start with, why statistics? 

Jessica Palmer [02:20] 
If you really think about it, statistics and data are all around us. We can check the weather or even statistics for our favorite sports team at the touch of a button. We try to show teachers that for all grade levels and subjects, there is cool data out there. Not to mention the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that statistics-related jobs are on the rise and the job outlook is 33%, which is much faster than average. Our goal is to help prepare students for a data-driven world.  

Victoria Glasier [02:49] 
One of our goals is just to show teachers and everyone that statistics is a scary word and a mouthful, but it’s not just high school math. I’d like to give an example of my son that he probably hates, but math was such a struggle for him, he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it every year. We would just struggle through that class. He’d be the first one to come to me every Sunday to give me stats for his favorite football team. 

Lately, he likes to talk about how Top Gun versus the Marvel movie is doing. I tell him, “You are doing Math.”  

There’s so many places and that it’s not a scary thing. There are cool ways to incorporate it to help our students build those data literacy skills.  

Nati Rodriguez [03:35] 
That’s a great point. When I think of statistics, I think of high school and college. I’m curious Vicki, how early can, or do students start getting exposure that would be useful long term?  

Victoria Glasier [03:47] 
That’s one of our missions too. We’ll talk more about it. From kindergarten on, we can do cool things. We can show how many other kindergarteners are in your state or we can lead you through a simple survey in your class, just from simple bar charts to things that kids can relate to, and further up through the years, as they’re learning different things in all kinds of subjects. There’s something statistical that can support it. I wish we had a different word than statistics.

Nati Rodriguez [04:19] 
That’s a great point. It does sound a little intimidating and your idea of just surveying – kids love to hear what their peers think. That seems like a very easy entry point for K-12 to get into statistics. I’m curious about your website, who uses it, and what kind of materials are available to those that access it? 

Jessica Palmer [04:41] 
We have a lot of great resources on our website for educators from K-12. We have fun facts activities, which are based off of our Census Bureau Facts for Features, which is more of a higher-level thing that’s easy for students to understand. These are mainly centered around holidays, special observances, and heritage months. Just to highlight a few of our most popular activities, we have an elementary school activity that teachers love called, “Where’s Gina the Geographer.” It gives students a bunch of clues and they use one of our data tools called State Facts for Students and they help solve a mystery of where Gina is in the United States.

[5:21] US Census Fact 1: Did you know? States with the oldest populations include Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. States with the youngest populations include Alaska, Utah and Texas. 

Nati Rodriguez [05:32] 
How do educators find out about SIS? It seems like a great resource! 

Jessica Palmer [05:37] 
We have a couple of different avenues. We have an ambassador program, which is a collaborative effort between educators, librarians, and the U.S. Census Bureau to get the word out about the program and get it to other colleagues as well. We also do have a monthly newsletter and emails that we send out each month with resources available.  

Victoria Glasier [05:56] 
I was just going to add that we recently partnered with Kahoot and that’s been a lot of fun for us because that definitely has put the focus on, how can we pull out the interesting data. We just recently put up a game called Fireworks and Road Trips: Slide into Summer with Census Data. We’re going to have future games on Hispanic Heritage month and STEM careers. We went live with that this year and we’ve had over 110,000 players in the United States, and Canada, and the United Kingdom. It’s a fun way to get your 12-question quiz to learn about facts in the United States.  

Nati Rodriguez [06:42] 
That sounds great. I love Kahoot. The song is catchy.  

[06:44] Did you know? There were a total of 63 zoos and botanical gardens in California in 2020. 

Nati Rodriguez [6:52] 
What are your thoughts on the debate around statistics versus calculus as a path towards college?

Jessica Palmer [07:00] 
To be completely honest, I don’t actually know much about that debate, the statistics versus calculus. I can speak to statistics being that we are the U.S. Census Bureau and why they are important. As Vicki mentioned previously, it is imperative to work with children at a young age, not just high school and beyond, to get them familiarized with charts and numbers to help strengthen their statistical literacy. This is why we have our program. It’s so beneficial to get students involved at a young age and using real-life relevant data, not just the made-up data from textbooks.  

Nati Rodriguez [07:40] 
Yeah, that’s really important. I’m also curious how comfortable teachers are that may not have the background, either in accessing these resources or teaching it in their classrooms? When I think about elementary school, a teacher is responsible for teaching all subjects, right? Sometimes these areas can be intimidating for an educator, let alone for students. What support is available for the educator to feel more comfortable leading their classroom on these topics?  

Victoria Glasier [08:06] 
For each activity and for our fun facts, we do everything we can to provide teaching guides and topics taught, and skills taught. We try very much to target what they’re doing in the classroom to just supplement what they already have going on. There shouldn’t have to be a whole lot of stress going into it. For example, Jessica mentioned the State Facts. We target 3rd to 5th graders because we know they’re learning about their state and it’s a very easy interface. We’ve got six activities that support it. Kids can learn fun things about dentists’ office or candy makers. They can look at the number of kids, their age in their state. They can go to other states and compare it. They can learn historical information about what it looked like ten years ago.  Again, back to that statistics being a scary word; we’ve given tips and tricks and worked with teachers to create this program. In doing that, we’ve tried to make it as easy as possible.

[9:03] Did you know? Texas had the most amusement parks in the country in 2020 with 71. 

Nati Rodriguez [09:09]
You shared the exploring 1950 Census Fun Facts – that sounded really interesting. Can you talk about that?  

Victora Glasier [09:16] 
The Census Bureau recently released data from the 1950 Census. Census records are confidential for 72 years. After 72 years they’re released. There was a lot of fanfare. There’s people that can look up their family name and then find out things about grandparents or whoever. I know Bob Ross, the artist, certain famous people that anybody can go and see what they’re doing.  

We know jobs are changing, but just to really see that. We started back then collecting job data when someone was 14. Just the age, right now we’re late twenties for marriage, but then it was, late teens, early twenties. I am [not] a statistician, but that kind of thing is just about our society and our country and how things have changed. It’s just fascinating. 

Nati Rodriguez [10:13] 
Yeah. I’m still stuck on the 72 years. Why 72?  

Victoria Glasier [10:18] 
For my length of time at the Census Bureau, that’s always been one of those things. A lot of people think it’s lifetime, right? Like you won’t be around after 72 years, but that’s not actually it. I actually don’t know that we know for sure where those 72 years came from, but it’s very cool. You should go in and check it out. It’s very easy. The more the data has been out there, the more other companies make it easier. There are teams of people that go through and try to make it easier for people to search. One of the things I’m actually going to miss, because it was still handwritten up until this census, where it was online, so you can still see the handwriting of either the person in your family or the census taker.  

Nati Rodriguez [11:06] 
You mentioned that some of these are handwritten. As a user, if I go on the site, I can look through old records that are handwritten, how does that work?  

Victoria Glasier [11:15] 
You definitely can. Once the census is done, we hand over our records to National Archives. That is where you would go to find the information you’re looking for and it’s pretty prevalent on their site. You can go in and you can type in last name or anything you know, a state, or a residence to try drill down to finding who you’re looking for.  

[11:39] Did You Know? There were 427 ice cream and frozen dessert in the United States in 2020.  

Nati Rodriguez [11:48] 
Wow. That’s really fascinating. You mentioned they can look up their family or their ancestry? 

Victoria Glasier [11:54] 
Yes. I was looking up my family, and just to be able to see my parents and their relatives, before they were my parents, before they met each other. It is very interesting. Sometimes people find surprises or things they weren’t expecting. A lot of people also use the U.S. Census Records to verify that they were born and to get a passport. A lot of people don’t think these were official records to document where people lived and what their house would look like. 

Nati Rodriguez [12:27]
It reminds me when sometime in elementary, maybe middle school, we would do the family tree activity, but it would have been a much more enriching experience to have the data, right? 

Victoria Glasier [12:37] 
With the Fun Facts, we created a couple versions of a family tree activity just for that. That’s what we hope to do. You’re doing something in the classroom, but we can add to it with the data and make it that much more enriching.  

Nati Rodriguez [12:51] 
I’m curious, are there new activities coming down the pipeline that haven’t been released similar to that, supplements to what’s happening in the classroom? 

Victoria Glasier [12:59]
We’re always creating new things, especially this year and moving forward. All of the data from the big 2020 census is coming out. We will be updating what we have and we’ll be creating new ones based on different stories that are going on, whether that’s in history or math. One of the activities that I find really interesting and this is for an elementary set. We talk about what names mean, and we do a narrative about reading books and just talking about people’s last names. Then, you look at the 1990 census, the 2000, the 2010, and then we will update it for 2020, but you really see in a very cool way because it’s in a name tag. You see how much things have changed from what the last names were, the top 20 last names in 1990, compared to 2010 and what they will be for 2020. So, everything we have we will be updating with the latest data. 

Jessica Palmer [13:57] 
Just to add to that really quick, coming up within the next few months, we’ll be updating our Back-to-School Fun Facts, Hispanic Heritage month Fun Facts and we’ll also have lots of cool Constitution Day resources for September.  

Nati Rodriguez [14:10] 
Thank you. Who is behind creating all of this great content besides you?  

Victoria Glasier [14:14] 
In creating this, we have teachers and we have the Census Bureau subject matter experts. We definitely wanted teachers on board, so we knew what we were doing would be relevant and useful in the classroom, and we have the Census Bureau. We had talked to some teachers before we started the program just to learn how they got information or what they did, but we were told the Census Bureau is gold and they knew. They didn’t always know what they were saying in the classroom in terms of using Google, but they knew if it came from the Census Bureau that it was pretty reliable. Just having the teachers along with our statisticians, we’ve been able to create some great things.  

Nati Rodriguez [14:54] 
That’s great. I know educators always love material that’s been created by their peers. So that’s awesome, that makes it relevant for the classroom.  

[15:03] Did you know? About 7 out of 10 (70%) of people 14 and over were married in 1950. Today that is about half (50%) of people 14 and over. 

Nati Rodriguez [15:13] 
I’m curious how the pandemic and distance learning changed or impacted SIS in terms of the access to materials? On a separate note, if you could speak to just the experience of collecting the census during in 2020?

Victoria Glasier [15:29] 
I know during the pandemic, we had to regroup because were doing some in-class lessons and things. We put together a teaching kit for caregivers and people at home. We also got really creative with Kahoot. We started thinking about things we could do virtually. Two other things that came from that that we’re still refining, but we’ve had some practice with, is virtual field trips where we’ll bring in the kids virtually and try to be really interactive with taking them through either their state. We have a couple of different things depending on the grade level and just showing them the kid-friendly data we have.  

Another thing we’ve actually gotten a lot of requests for virtual experts, like Zoom an expert. We’ve had geographers come into the classroom or after-school clubs and answer activities. We’ve had people talk about the Census and how it’s done. We have something called the American Community Survey. Just a range of topics, everything from diversity and what our country looks like, to some more of the subject-specific things. We’ve been able to bridge that connection while we’ve been at home.  

Nati Rodriguez [16:39] 
Yeah, the virtual field trips I think, have really taken off in the last two years. Do you anticipate that will continue, now that most students are back in person?  

Victoria Glasier [16:50] 
I think absolutely. I mean, like you said, it’s taken off. I enjoy a museum or the zoo or the aquarium, like watching that. I think that’s something definitely we’re going to be building out in the years to come.  

[17:03] Did you know? In 1950 – 6 percent of the population completed 4 years of college or more; in 2020 that percentage was 38%. 

Nati Rodriguez [17:13] 
One thing that I’ve seen in talking to organizations that have transitioned during distance learning, is the access to experts. All of a sudden. we can plug into these folks that can sit in for a class for 15-30 minutes, and students get exposure without having to leave the classroom. That’s a really great experience. 

Victoria Glasier [17:32] 
It is. It’s hard to talk about the positives from all of this, but that’s been something that’s been a change that I think has been successful. Just that, finding ways to interact with each other more than just getting on a plane and flying to a meeting. 

Nati Rodriguez [17:50]
You mentioned the ambassador program. If a teacher and/or school site is interested in bringing the SIS program and materials to their school, what should they do? 

Jessica Palmer [18:00]
So, they can reach out to us directly. We have more information about the ambassador program on our website, and it’s actually under our ‘About Section’ and ‘Partner with SIS’, they can reach out to our inbox and we can provide more information from there. As I mentioned previously as well, we send out quarterly newsletters to our ambassadors. In addition to that, we have monthly newsletters that are sent out to subscribers.  

Nati Rodriguez [18:24] 
Last question, I’m curious what you’re reading, watching, or listening to these days? 

Jessica Palmer [18:29] 
I know I’m probably late to the game, but I actually just finished reading Where the Crawdads Sing because the movie just came out. I’m hoping to get to theaters to see that soon. As far as shows, I am, as with I’m sure many other people, hooked on Stranger Things.  

Victoria Glasier [18:49] 
I am late to the party too. I just finished up Bridgerton and then I went over to Gilded Age. Those are both similar period pieces, which is fascinating. I love the costuming. With the Statistics in Schools staff, everybody’s telling me I need to do the Stranger Things, but it’s on my maybe list. Have you guys seen that?  

Nati Rodriguez [19:12] 
I have not seen Stranger Things, but I have read Where the Crawdads Sing and Bridgerton. I’ve watched. Season one at least, I haven’t seen the second one.  

Thank you for your time today and for the work that you do. I’m sure our listeners and our educators will be excited to find out about what’s available on Statistics In Schools. 

About the 1950 Census, we can peek into the lives of some of the famous Americans born during this time and who first appeared in census records in 1950. Some of these include: Jimi Hendrix, Annette Funicello, John Belushi, Muhammed Ali, Bob Ross, Arthur Ash, Janis Joplin. 

American Community Survey 

Bob Ross 

Bridgerton 

Census Bureau Facts for Features 

Fireworks and Road Trips: Slide into Summer with Census Data 

Jessica Palmer 

Kahoot 

Marvel 

National Archives 

Statistics in Schools (SIS) 

Stranger Things 

The Gilded Age 

Top Gun 

U.S. Census Bureau 

U.S. Census Records 

US Census Ambassador program 

Victoria Glasier 

Where the Crawdads Sing  

Where’s Gina the Geographer? 

1950 Census Fun Facts 

1950 Census 

Nati Rodriguez [02:02] 
I’d love to start with what was your own educational experience growing up and what motivates you to do this work?  

Adeola Whitney [02:19] 
I am a first-generation Nigerian. I was born here in the States, but both of my parents were born in Nigeria and education has always been something that’s been really critically important to both of them. They’re not educators – my father was a journalist and my mom worked in retail. When I was very young and in elementary school, I went to a public school. It was an okay public school. When my family purchased a home right around the time that I was about to go to middle school, we moved into the city and I went to a public school. Unfortunately, the resources weren’t as great as the school that I had gone to before. The school looked a lot different and felt a lot different from my elementary experience. It was an inner-city part of Columbus, Ohio. I remember having extraordinary teachers who looked a lot like me. That was not the case at all in throughout school, both in elementary and middle school and even high school, just people who believed in me and in my potential and would tell me that regularly, not just my parents. My parents, anytime we were home, would buy us books and talk about the importance of reading. I was an avid reader as a kid. I think that also helped my experience in learning by the time I was in high school and even in college. 

Nati Rodriguez [03:44] 
What set you on the path to do this work in education, specifically as an adult?  

Adeola Whitney [03:49] 
Yeah, so there was actually an experience I had when I was just starting sixth grade. I went back to school shopping with my parents and I witnessed this harassment that was racially charged. I saw my father basically place himself in harm’s way to support another human who he had never met. Long story short, we were coming out of the mall and as we were walking to our car we could hear a woman screaming, a Black woman, very visibly pregnant and was thrown to the ground by two white mall security officers. They later called the police. My father went to make sure that they would stop throwing her and being so physically harmful to her, given that she’s expecting a child, but even just because she’s a human and there’s no reason to be so violent with someone. He went back towards the wall and told us to go to the car and they called the police and they were filling all these racial epithets his way and her way. I think they were claiming she had stolen something. She hadn’t stolen anything. They let her up and also let my father go. He immediately started taking pictures of what was going on. The next day on the front page of the only black newspaper in Columbus, Ohio, was the scene of what happened in an article written by my father. He was the city editor of this newspaper at the time. After that, the Ohio chapter of the NAACP boycotted all of the JCPenny’s in our state that year.  

So how does that connect to education? How does it connect to social justice?  
That was clearly a move of social justice before I even knew what social justice was and it was a move of activism before I even knew what that was. My father saw this woman, did not know her, but saw injustice underway and wanted to do something about it, and so he did. I think that just taught me – you always speak up for people, you always pay things forward, you never know when you’re going to be in a compromising situation, And you want someone to advocate or speak on your behalf. That led me to doing a bunch of different volunteer opportunities and being part of various youth development nonprofits. 

When I went to college, I majored in English and African-American Studies and just did more volunteering. It wasn’t until later in college that I really learned what social justice was and realized the crossroads between social justice and education in this country – that so much that has happened in the space of public education in this country has put people that look like us in jeopardy. For young people, especially in economically-disadvantaged communities, the resources just aren’t necessarily as great as in more affluent areas, and therefore that impacts their education.  

More than anything, I learned a lot from my father and I just always knew that I wanted to do something in education. I think it was somewhat shaped by that experience and volunteer experiences that I had. I think of the work that we do at Reading Partners, and it is also at the crossroads. Yes, we are a literacy organization, but to not talk about educational inequities that exist in this country, is almost like denying folks from really understanding why we exist anyway – why an organization like ours and Jumpstart, Literacy Lab, Reading Corps and so many other great organizations, why we all need to exist.  

Nati Rodriguez [07:40]
Thank you for sharing that and for connecting that to Reading Partners and this organization that’s powered by volunteers. I assume a strong sense of social justice is why volunteers are part of Reading Partners. Why reading specifically, and not math or something else? 

Adeola Whitney [07:37] 
When we first existed, the founders at the time, were doing some volunteer work in Silicon Valley, specifically in some inner-city schools. They were volunteering to help read, they weren’t volunteering to do math or anything else. In conversations with principals, they saw how many students were struggling to read and they focused on reading. From my perspective, in order to learn anything, in order to learn more about social studies, in order to focus on STEM or STEAM, which I also think are really important, in order to do word problems, in order to do really any type of math or any other subject, you have to know how to read. We start in the first few years where kids are learning to read, but once about 3rd grade comes their reading to learn and everything that they do and every way that they’re learning in school is based on their ability to read – even the connection to social and emotional learning and their confidence, instilling belief in themselves and showering them with positive reinforcement, helping them believe that they could do anything. There’s also that tie in of social and emotional learning to learning. You can’t just teach a child how to read just for the sake of teach them how to read, it is a combination when someone can’t do something, it’s a lack of skill, will, or both. That’s why at Reading Partners, social-emotional learning is so critical. 

To answer your question from my vantage point, there are incredible math organizations out there, and I think they need to exist. Reading Partners and other literacy organizations absolutely need to exist because in this country right now, there are millions upon millions of elementary age children, who are not reading at grade level, by the time that they’re in 3rd or 4th grade. Those factors and that data are used to determine so many other things, so many other outcomes for them within their public education. That’s part of the reason why literacy and the pandemic has only exacerbated the challenges. For students, for example, who have been struggling to read at grade level pre-pandemic, are only struggling more and students who are doing better or above grade level in something like reading are only doing better. The gap is also widening, which is just more of the reason why we must do something.  

Nati Rodriguez [10:04] 
Thank you. For our Learner audience who isn’t familiar with Reading Partners can you describe the organization and talk about the model? 

Adeola Whitney [10:11] 
We are a national nonprofit; we operate in 12 cities across the country and we’ve been around for about 22 years. What we do is empower and support young people to learn to read, as young as kindergarten and up to about 4th grade and we do that by mobilizing community volunteers. My alma mater, Oberlin College, used to have this model that says, “Do you think one person can change the world? We do.” We do at Reading Partners, too. 

We think it’s through volunteers, that one-on-one connection. We train our volunteers and coach them on how to best support young readers, and again, I’m defining that as kindergartners through 4th grade. We partner mainly with elementary schools where the majority of the students receive free and reduced lunch. In our case, about 95% of the students we serve, as I said earlier, are Black and Brown students. [For] many of them English is not their first language so also helping and supporting them to both learn, to read in English as well as all of the other challenges that come along with that, given that many of them can read very well in their own native language. We recognized we could no longer go in school. Our program was in-person, it’s still in-person in some places now, but during the height of the pandemic, we were unable to be in-person like so many other organizations and so many other folks that do work to support young people. We had to have a virtual offering and that’s called Reading Partners Connects. Reading Partners Connects is our online curriculum. Essentially, we took everything we did in-person in a school building and just put it online. We still do trainings that way, but that has allowed for volunteers in one city, [and] tutors in another city. There are actually districts where we’re able to still support kids, even virtually in that way.  

Nati Rodriguez [12:06] 
Has going virtual expanded the reach? 

Adeola Whitney [12:11] 
I think like many organizations, nonprofits, youth development focused groups, during the pandemic, our enrollment has actually decreased. Much of that is related to absenteeism in schools. Also, schools had never gone through any of this before. This pandemic, this is not what principals got their certification and their degrees to become principals on. No one learned how to run a school during a pandemic. Teachers certainly did not learn how to teach a kindergartener virtually. Given their own challenges that they were dealing with in schools, sometimes our programs would start and operate later – that was also a factor. meaning we wouldn’t necessarily be able to start right at the beginning of the school year. We had to wait a couple of weeks or months just given other challenges that the school was dealing with.  

As we move forward, and as we climb out of this pandemic, while a lot of the academic outcomes and the challenges that students faced during the pandemic are going to still be with us and our communities for years to come, we recognize that being able to be in-person gives us more leverage to use either our virtual program or our in-person based on what the school wants. What we also noticed over the pandemic is that we now are at a place where there are many communities who recognize the challenges that many young people are facing right now with literacy. They want to do something about it, whether that is an after-school neighborhood community-based program, where they don’t teach kids how to read, but maybe they do homework help.  

They say, “Hey, we really need help with helping them learn to read, but we don’t have a curriculum.” Reading Partners has a curriculum. “How can we partner with you?” 

That is happening simultaneously, as we’re also trying to build back up our pre-pandemic enrollment numbers. Both are true at the same time. While the last two years perhaps served less students than we typically would in an average year, that is definitely going back up. In a year we’ll be serving close to 8 or 9,000 students at minimum.  

Nati Rodriguez [14:21] 
That’s great to hear. Yes, I think a lot of organizations are still in this transition period, especially when you’re partnering with school districts with fluctuating attendance. 

Nati Rodriguez [15:12] 
In terms of effectiveness, do you find in-person or virtual or some combination being more or less effective in terms of academic outcomes for the child?  

Adeola Whitney [15:22] 
It’s early on for us. We won a US Department of Education Innovation and Research grant for $8.8 million. That is to do a five-year study, randomized control trial that MDRC will be helping to lead from the research side on the effectiveness of Reading Partners Connects. It’s like we have this one curriculum that we’ve only been using for actually less than two years. We have our other in-person curriculum, which we’ve been using for 22 years where we’ve had a number of randomized controlled trials, including one done by MDRC, which shows its effectiveness. Is Reading Partners Connects, our virtual one, effective? It is. We do mid-year and end-of-year evaluations, and in the first year of our program, the 2020-2021 school year, what we saw in the results was that kids were making a very similar progress to the type of progress they were making in our program in-person. I think the hardest piece of it is the social-emotional learning.  

It’s really awesome when you get to give somebody a high five.  I’ve given virtual high-fives and it’s just a little harder to do. We’ve just been much more thoughtful about talking to a number of experts, like some of our program advisors who are folks in the field in higher ed that study literacy, but talking to many people, many supporters of ours on how to best support students’ social-emotional learning in a virtual way. We’ve developed these social-emotional learning lessons where we still read with the student at the beginning of the lesson, but the focus is much more on self-esteem or about different emotions that you experience as opposed to, this is the letter “A”, let’s say the sound that the letter “A” makes, now make a small word. It’s much different than that.  

So that has been helpful. I think in-person will always exist in-person, and I think we’ll also always exist virtually. I think that it’s a different offering. We have some schools that have said, “We want you Reading Partners back in the building.” You’ll be able to pull the kids from class during their session, but tutors will not be allowed back in the building. We’re in-person, but we’re still using Reading Partners Connects. In other places they’re like, “Students need the connection.” They need the in-person connection so as much as possible we want to be in-person.  

What our virtual program allows us to do though, is in places that we may never be able to go through direct service – that’s where we set up an office, we hire an executive director, they hire an entire team of people who are responsible for program, fundraising, recruitment of volunteers, recruitment of AmeriCorps members, and training of tutors and operations – what we’ve said is there are already some really great nonprofits that exist in some communities that we’re not in. If they want to partner with us and bring our training and technical assistance and specifically our curriculum to students, we can do it that way. I think that’s how we think about exponentially serving more kids. It’s not just what we do through direct service, it’s how we can partner with others. 

There are both some challenges to virtual, but there are also a lot of benefits. That’s why we’re continuing to pursue it because we see it as an opportunity to reach students that we would never be able to reach before, or in communities where they can’t afford to bring Reading Partners there, or there’s not a big foundation or corporation there that can provide seed funding for us to be sustainable. Even at our height, we reached 11,300 kids. That is a small drop in the bucket when you talk about the millions of children in this country who are struggling to read. We’re going to continue to do some of the work through direct service in the communities we’re in. We also want to partner with other people who believe in this mission and believe that young people learning to read is one of the biggest, most important education priorities that we have as a country.  

Nati Rodriguez [19:30] 
Switching gears to the volunteers, who are the volunteers and what is their experience [with] Reading Partners?  

Adeola Whitney [19:39] 
Our volunteers are high school students who are trying to get community service hours, high school students who grew up in very similar communities to the very communities we serve, college students, where we have partnerships with various institutions of higher ed and their work-study programs where they volunteer but then the school may pay them as part of a work-study type of internship. We have retirees, people who had kids 20 or 30 years ago, or more, and have retired from whatever they were doing professionally and are looking for something to do in their spare time. We have stay-at-home moms and corporations. We’re partnered with corporations such as Five Below who understand our mission and believe that some of their staff can be volunteering with us. It’s really widespread. There is a background check process for any and all of our volunteers. What’s really great is you can be as young as a teenager to volunteer with us, or as old as one can be in terms of how high it goes. It’s just anyone who knows how to read, believes in our mission, and really enjoys working with kids.  

Nati Rodriguez [20:54] 
There was big news recently with Reading Partners receiving 20 million from MacKenzie Scott. Can you talk about the impact that this funding will have and what it will be deployed for?  

Adeola Whitney [21:05] 
Absolutely. First of all, I’m sure I speak for every nonprofit leader out there, this is what executive directors, CEOs, folks running organizations wish for – a gift like this because it’s transformational. We’re approximately a $30 million organization so to receive a $20 million gift is just more amazing than I can put into words. Such a big part of our strategic plan is really thinking about how we exponentially serve more kids and how we make our technology better to be able to do that but also, how we make our in-person Reading Partners program better to deepen our reach in the communities that we’re already in.  

What’s been really important for us is that this gift is going to be used to really further our strategic plan, to be able to serve more and more students. If anything, what it allows is for us to accelerate so much of what we were planning to do, and that’s how we’re thinking about using it. First and foremost, to serve students. The last two years have also been really difficult for educators. I just read an article over the weekend about the toll that this time period has had on frontline folks like nurses, but also frontline folks like educators. People who are in schools, working with our students and who have experienced the pandemic in such a nuanced way that only an educator can describe. I bring that up because it’s tied to how we’re thinking about our future. Our program managers, our AmeriCorps members, all of our people at Reading Partners, our community engagement managers, all of the people who are on the frontline, either as AmeriCorps volunteers or AmeriCorps members – they’re the face of our program in the majority of our schools – or the people who manage them, program managers who support our programs across many different schools and manage our AmeriCorps members just to ensure that we’re delivering our program with efficacy and that our students are making progress.  

When I think about those stakeholders, I think their experience is probably very similar to a lot of teachers. It’s been tough. If we cannot serve more and more students and exponentially grow, if the very people who are on the frontline doing the work to coach tutors, to recruit tutors, to support them, to run our reading centers, if they’re not feeling great about the work or if they’re worn out – some of the investment is also going to what we can do to best invest in the people who are doing the work so that we can then support more students.  

We’re thinking a lot about just our infrastructure operationally; what do we need to do to make sure as a nonprofit we’re not putting ourselves at risk? What do we need to do to plan for the future? How are we thinking about our overall financial sustainability, but also just our operational efficacy and sustainability? What are the structures that we need to put in place now that will ultimately ensure that we can be here for a long time if there are clearly students to serve. If we somehow fix this literacy crisis in this country in the next decade, and we’ve put ourselves out of business, that’s a good thing. If that is not the case, we want to be able to exist for a long time to really be able to give the nuance support that we provide.  

Those are all of the things that we’re considering. Now, if you were to ask like what, like, no, tell me like the line item, like how much it’s going to what, I will tell you that what I have learned this year, after getting this gift, is it’s so exciting to celebrate a $20 million gift. It’s so much harder to figure out exactly the dollar for dollar, where this money will go. What we did was we came up with some guiding principles and I kind of described some of them to you that are also tied to our strategic plan. We came up with those principles and we’re ensuring that the funding is helping to support that. What we don’t want to do is look back, I don’t know, 5-10 years from now and say, “we got this huge, transformational gift what did it go to?”  and then we don’t have anything to show for it. So that’s how we’re thinking about it.  

Nati Rodriguez [25:26] 
You touched on this about supporting your frontline teams that are very much similar to teachers and given just your deep experience in education, both in the for-profit and nonprofit space – what are your thoughts on how we can best support and elevate the teaching profession to meet the needs of our students?  

Adeola Whitney [25:45] 
I think coaching, training, professional development are always important. Creating opportunities for anyone, whether they’re an educator or not, but to continue to learn and grow in their work is really critical, to allow for inclusivity and what is happening and how decisions are made, especially about the students that teachers and educators and program managers and AmeriCorps members are at the front line of serving, is really important. I would say in addition to that – how people are compensated, what are the benefits they receive – that’s important and just what’s their quality of life and their experience like working.  

I’ve heard about the teacher shortage in different communities across this country, and oftentimes who suffers most, in addition to the students, are the other educators. We’ve seen that same thing around AmeriCorps recruitment. That has been even harder than we’ve seen in previous years. If there are less AmeriCorps members that means the people who are on the ground are now doing more. What are we doing to ensure the staffing structure of the school, or a nonprofit, is done in a way that is sustainable.

Nati Rodriguez [27:16] 
At Learner, we’re thinking about how we get young adults excited about teaching. How do we increase the pipeline and how do we get more teachers of color in the classroom serving those students? Any thoughts there on how we just get kids excited? 

Adeola Whitney [27:28] 
Yeah. I think a couple things are true. I think it’s exposure. Let’s say, the goal is to get more black and brown men to become teachers. If the goal is to get more minority men, they have to see other minority men as teachers. Otherwise, they’re never going to think that they can be teachers. You’re right, it is exposure. It’s what you see and I think it’s your experience having great teachers. I think that’s really important and understanding what’s at stake in our country right now and the importance of education and the importance of our teachers. The more that we can create opportunities for young people to experience tutoring, or volunteering, or working with young people, or helping them understand the educational inequity gap that currently exists in this country, the more we inform and educate, I think that helps organizations and institutions that are focused on recruiting more teachers of color and that they’re given some type of incentive.  

I hear sometimes people talk about their struggle with recruiting folks from diverse backgrounds. I say, “If you keep going to the same place and you’re expecting a different result, do something different.” 

“How are you marketing to this community?” 

“How are you connecting to people who are already really tied into the community?” 

“How are you using faith-based institutions or clubs and Greek life?” 

“How are you utilizing all of that to recruit?” 

 I think those are just some of the things that I think about.  

Nati Rodriguez [29:03] 
What is your vision for public education?  

Adeola Whitney [29:07] 
I think my vision is probably similar to that which is my vision for Reading Partners – I believe we cannot go at this alone. I think far too often national nonprofits that are somewhat established, come into communities as if they are changing the face of the community in doing the work to the community, or for the community, not with the community. I think the same thing with the public education system. We have to do this work with our community. Family engagement is really important, understanding the community, and being able to actually recruit some leaders, instructional leaders, teachers, other volunteers who are from the community. What I would say is my vision is that we once and for all are able to close this gap.  

What is centered in public education are students, and that our tax dollars ultimately help kids reach their full potential and that everyone who’s in the school building believes that. People go into this work with an asset-based way of thinking; we’re not thinking about what our young people do not have, but rather all that they have. We’re not thinking about simply how hard the pandemic was. It was, but my goodness, how much resilience have children learned right during this pandemic?  

You’re actually not going to see anybody in-person. 

You’re not going to do play dates. 

You’re not going to play any sports. 

You’re not going to go to after-school activities. 

You’re going to just learn in front of this machine. Nope.  

You actually won’t be able to give your teacher a hug or a high five, and won’t be able to see your friends, but we expect you to learn how to read and do math and be on time.”  

That is tough. I’m just using that as an example of thinking about things from an asset-based way. I just think recognizing their brilliance and their potential and banding together with other nonprofits, teachers, school districts, community leaders – who believe in a child’s potential, who believe that a child’s outcomes in life should not be based on the community they grew up in, on their families’ educational attainment. It shouldn’t be based on any of that. It should be based on how much money their parents make or lack thereof. It should be based on them. It should be based on what they want to be, on their potential.  

My vision is that more schools and communities band together for that realization and that’s what public education ultimately becomes, and educators are paid well to do the work and they are supported, and they have the balance that they need to do the work, and that there’s a lot of self-care, that self-care is promoted, especially when things are difficult. That’s some of what I would say. I just think teachers and educators are some of our biggest assets, and I just want us to treat them as such. I think there’s still a lot for us to do as a country and just communities. 

Nati Rodriguez [32:33] 
What are you reading, watching, or listening to these days?  

Adeola Whitney [32:37] 
Yeah, so I’m looking over at my bookshelf right now. I have a ton of books that I like to swap out the books on my bookshelf for the things that I’m reading. I am reading Killers of the Flower Moon, which is about tribal nations by David Grann. I am reading The Measure of Our Lives, it’s Toni Morrison’s work, but it’s a compilation of a lot of her work all put together. It’s beautiful. I’m also reading Professional Troublemaker by Luvvie Ajayi Jones. I’m reading a lot of different things. In terms of what I’m watching, I’m not watching a lot of television right now, which is kind of unlike me. It’s really difficult to watch the news given just all that is happening right now in the world. I choose to read that instead of watching it on television. 

Nati Rodriguez [33:30] 
Is there anything else that you would like to share with the Learner audience?  

Adeola Whitney [33:34] 
The last two years have been hard on everybody for a variety of different reasons. We just talked about that experience for educators and for young people, but also for parents and caretakers of children. It’s been hard, we’ve all kind of been indoctrinated into becoming educators at home when some of us would not have chosen that as a profession. I would say I’m speaking to people who have kids, people who do not have children, but people who care about our country, and about its future and about making sure that we can instill in young people that anything is possible, that they can be whatever they want to be, who believe that every child should have an opportunity to dream and to be whatever they want to be and to reach their full potential, that there are organizations such as Reading Partners, where you can volunteer.  

If tutoring is not your thing, I’m sure there are other organizations. The plug that I would put in here is that if you just have an hour of your time, you have an hour once a week, and you’re interested in volunteering, we are in communities across this country and now have some opportunities to even be virtual for folks who are not in one of the 12 regions that we serve. My plug is volunteer. There are communities who need you and give an hour of your day or hour of your week. Reading Partners is an option, but there are so many other great options, too.  

Adeola “Ola” Whitney 

AmeriCorps 

Department of Education Innovation and Research 

Five Below 

IMentor 

JC Penny’s 

Jumpstart 

Kaplan  

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann 

Literacy Lab 

MacKenzie Scott 

McGraw-Hill 

MDRC 

NAACP 

Oberlin College 

Professional Troublemaker by Luvvie Ajayi Jones 

Reading Corps 

Reading Partners 

Reading Partners Connects 

The Measure of Our Lives by Toni Morrison 

[playing The Best Part of Science]

Nati Rodriguez [04:45] 
Wow, what a treat. That was fantastic, Tim.  

Tim Griffin [04:51] 
What we do is, we write songs, mostly me so far, but I’m gathering more and more songs into the library by other people. The idea here is to have songs that teach specific grade-level standards. You remember watching Schoolhouse Rock on Saturday morning TV, and you may have seen it on YouTube. More recently, we’ve seen on the Animaniacs, they have those wonderful geography songs. And of course, all of the old stories that we have – the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Iliad, Odyssey – these were all songs for a long time before they were ever written down. The reason is because even back then we knew that if you learned something through a song, if it’s got a rhyme and it’s got a beat, it will stick in here better.  

By the way, we have solid data at GriffinEd. We did a study with 170 kids in kindergarten through 5th grade, we were able to show that kids who hear one of our songs 5x or more are going to test higher when you give them a test on the topic of the song. It just sticks in the head better.  

Nati Rodriguez [05:57] 
What age group or grade level is it for, and then how is it presented in the classroom?  

Tim Griffin [06:04] 
This one is really aimed at the primary grades, kindergarten – 2nd, but it’s one that I’ve found is pretty popular with the upper elementary and middle school and even with grownups. One of the privileges of my job is I get to talk with a lot of professional academics – real-life scientists and real-life historians and archeologists – to find out more about what they do and how they do it. In fact, I’m doing a songwriting residency for NASA in May. They’re going to fly me to Atlanta for their international conference on astrobiology. I’ll be doing a couple of shows while I’m there to entertain them. Mostly I’m going to be sitting down with people and asking lots of dumb questions and trying to put it into plain English. Every song that we share has one big idea that we want to stick in here and then a few supporting ideas and some vocabulary that we try to use in context. The one big idea for this song is that science is based on observation. What you can see out in the real world. You try to figure out what’s going on. You start making predictions based on what you think is going on. If your predictions work, then you’re onto something. If your predictions don’t work, then you need to rethink your idea.  

Nati Rodriguez [07:24] 
That just reminds me of the importance of science and math in school, particularly in the elementary grades. I know that elementary school teachers often don’t have a background in those fields and it’s not until middle school when they really get into the discipline. I’m curious is most of your experience with music, with elementary or middle school or even upper-level grades, what does that look like?  

Tim Griffin [07:48] 
Yeah, mostly elementary. That’s where my professional training and experience was. I taught for 18 years with LAUSD as a multi-subject teacher, eventually specializing in STEM and inclusion teaching, which is where you work with the kids who have mild special needs. They don’t need a special day program, but they may need some accommodations for different learning styles. That’s where I got into bringing more and more of the arts into the classroom. We did drama for math. On Friday afternoons we would do Matherpiece Theater where the kids would write and perform short plays about whatever we had been working on for math that week. We would write songs, sometimes by myself, about a lesson, or sometimes with the kids where they would have to figure out what are the main ideas of the lesson, and then look up some rhyming words online, and then start drafting lyrics. I would help them with the meter and we would fit it to a tune that they already know.   

If we can integrate movement and visual arts and music, we can bring the whole brain to the task of learning, which means not only do we learn it faster, but we remember it longer, we understand it better. We’ve even seen elderly people, who are starting to suffer degeneration of the brain, may not remember their grandchildren’s names. They may not know what day of the week it is, but they can remember the pop songs they learned when they were teenagers. I go to a nearby senior home with my piano teacher and I’ll put on a suit, with a little flower in it, and I’ll sing jazz standards for them. These people who have been sitting there, staring off at nothing, all of a sudden, they’re sitting up in their wheelchairs making eye contact. Some of them are starting to sing along, Fly Me to the Moon, because it’s wired into their brains so hard that even when the day of the week is gone, the music is still there. It seems to me crazy that we don’t use this all the time in the classroom, which brings me to what makes my nonprofit different than just one more teacher with a ukulele or a guitar. There is no one place where a teacher, or a parent, or a kid, can go to find a song. I need something for 7th grade math or I’m in 5th grade, we’re studying American History, what can we find out about that? The main purpose of my nonprofit, which is Griffin Education, is we make all my music and music by other people with permission. We make it available. We organize it by grade level and subject, in alignment with the standards of the state of California, and some other states, along with the Common Core and the Next Generation Science Standards, which means that if we can find or write a good song for 4th grade earth science, for the kids in Los Angeles, it’s also going to work for the kids in Boston or Miami or Seattle, or, any state that’s using the same standards.  

Nati Rodriguez [10:54] 
Do you find that there are school sites or districts that are more open to this kind of supplement to their curriculum? Why isn’t this everywhere? If we know and the data and the research show that music and even writing lyrics can really help with retention.  

Tim Griffin [11:10] 
What I find is when I’m at a school doing staff training, or a live show for the kids, or a residency in one of the classrooms, people are always excited about it. They’re like, we got to do this every day. The big dilemma for teachers is every day they come into that classroom and they’ve got about 10 pounds of potatoes to fit into a 5 pound bag, as far as their scheduling goes. They’re starting off the day knowing full well that there is no way they can fit everything in. There’s so much content out there and the teachers are so over-scheduled. I’m in a program with the Children’s Media Association where we’re looking to find a collaborator who can take our music and get it on TV, either as animated videos in between episodes of shows, or as a recurring feature on someone else’s show, like the Animaniacs. They would have their cartoons and then they would have the song about geography, because we’ve got data that shows that this really works. We’ve had lots of good feedback from teachers and parents and kids, but we know that they need to hear a song at least a few times before it’s going to really make a difference in their head. For the people who don’t know about what we do, it’s not doing any good at all for them.  

The good news for us is, because we can deliver it all online, there is no scaling problem, which is why I don’t do drama, for example with my nonprofit, because that kind of requires that somebody be there to help the kids put together a play. With over a thousand schools, just in LAUSD, I can’t get to all of them. But if I can make a good recording and a good video and, and make sure that the professional academics, the college level, people say, yes, this is correct, you’re using the vocabulary the right way. The teachers say, yes, this is exactly what my kids are going to be tested on this year. If we can make that available for free online and make it easy to find, by grade level and subject, then we can help millions of kids. And that’s the goal.  

Nati Rodriguez [13:29] 
Did you see any changes in your audience, either the demographic or growth during the pandemic? From what I understand, districts were looking for things online that were educational.  

Tim Griffin [13:41]
We got a grant from the Lewis and Harold Price Foundation to reinvent the songwriting residency program as an online activity. The way it works now is instead of me going to a school and going into a classroom, now I meet with small groups of kids from a classroom and help each group write a song about a topic chosen by the teacher. It’s directly related to what they’re studying right now. I guide the kids through a process of researching the topic, drafting lyrics about it, and then I help them set their lyrics to a tune that they can sing. That way, when I’m not there to play for them, they can still use it as a practice tool. What the teachers find is that, not only do the kids become stone-cold experts on the topic, I mean like 100% experts on the topic, because they’re having to study it, not just to satisfy some writing requirement for the teacher, they know they’re going to be performing this for their peers and they really want it to be correct. They want it to be funny. Not only do they become experts on the topic, but their writing skills improve, according to the teachers.  

Now it’s hard to objectively measure their writing skills, but what the teachers say is the structure of songwriting – where you’ve got verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus – that art, that structure that’s imposed on you requires you to think about, okay, where is this idea in my head going to go in here? If it’s the big idea, it goes in the chorus. If it’s a supporting idea, it goes in one of the verses, and this is true for pretty much any pop song. What’s the big idea? Maybe it’s, “wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care”, right? Everything else in the song needs to feed into that idea. The kids become better at expressing themselves in writing generally. May I give you an example of a song that was written by kids in one of the residencies?  

Here’s a song written by a group of middle school kids and all the content and vocabulary came from them. The only thing I did was I helped them edit it to fit a tune. They’re studying ancient Egypt, because this is seventh grade, right? Ancient civilization. I was asking them what are you going to write about ancient Egypt? How about their irrigation and advances in engineering? No, no. What about the politics or you know how the Pharaoh’s work? No, no. We want to know how mommies are made. So that’s what we researched. And here’s what they wrote.  

[playing Organs in a Jar]

Nati Rodiguez [19:13] 
Something that you said about the students performing for each other – I’m a big believer in those stakes, right? When someone has to get up and do something and show what they’ve done, they just really show up, especially kids.  

Tim Griffin [19:27] 
Oh yeah. They really bring it. If I asked seventh graders, they got to do something to meet my expectations, they’ll figure out, okay, if they need to go do this much, if I’m asking for this much, they’ll see how, maybe they’ll come close. But if it’s for each other, they are going to bring it a 100% every time.  

Nati Rodriguez [19:47] 
Can you share another story of what has been surprising for you or the teachers or the school, in the environment that they’re in?  

Tim Griffin [19:55] 
Well, I think the big surprise is when they find the kids singing the songs to each other at recess. That’s one of the pleasant surprises for me is that it’s one of those things that sticks with the kids after the lesson is over. They actually create their own follow through for it. I actually had a grownup come up to me. I was at the supermarket about 2 years ago and a guy looks at me over this rack of bananas. He leans over and puts a big finger right on my chest. He starts singing a song at me about the water cycle, where it’s got the names of all the different types of clouds and the altitude and the precipitation. And I said, “who are you?” 

He says, “I’m Ihram! I was in your class 20 years ago.” 

He had written that song with me, and with some other students, when he was in 3rd grade in my class, and it was still stuck in his head, the whole thing, he sang it. No problem.  

Nati Rodriguez [21:00] 
That’s great. That reminds me of when I worked with schools, I remember talking to an administrator who said the best sign of engagement, whether this platform was working, is if students were talking about it outside of the classroom. How can they not be? These songs are fantastic.  

Tim Griffin [21:15] 
Well, thank you so much. I’ve had a lot of help. In the early stages, it was basically the Tim Griffin Show where it was just the songs from my albums. My goal is that at least half the songs should be by other people because the point of, cause if it was just about me, I could make a CD. I could have a website and a YouTube channel and, fine, that’s easy. Lots of people do that. The real work is going through the standards for kindergarten all the way up to eighth grade, for every subject, and hunting through the internet and through the folk song groups. There’s a Dr. Demento fan club; it was a program that was quite popular in the 1980s for goofy songs about all kinds of things, and finding the songs, tracking down the creators of them, paying them some royalties, for which we raise money from donations and grant funding, and collecting it into the library so that we can have all that stuff readily available with a couple of clicks of a mouse.  

This is critical because most of the teachers that I’ve worked with over the years, when I was a teacher and at the schools I visit now as a visiting artist, they agree that the music helps the kids, but most of them will tell me, well, I don’t have time to learn to play ukulele. I don’t have the talent to write a song or whatever, and I would argue it’s not as hard as you think, but it’s also true that nobody’s going to be an expert at everything. One of the most important things we can do as professional educators is find a way to identify our strengths and look for ways to share those with other teachers so that their students can benefit too. The one thing I found that I did better than pretty much anyone at my school was I could take a complicated concept or lesson and make silly lyrics about it and then revise them and turn it into something that would be fun and informative. If I can do that and if we can prove that it works and we got the data, we know this works, and if we can do that and if it costs nothing to share it online, then it would be crazy not to.  

Nati Rodriguez [23:27] 
I just think in this environment – where we’re talking a lot about social-emotional learning and finding creative ways to help them with unfinished learning and to really get them up to speed and accelerate learning – this seems like a great delivery and a great way for students to showcase all of themselves in song, and writing, and lyrics. I love what you said about the main idea and supporting argument, never thought about a song that way. There’s just so much to take away from this process.  

Tim Griffin [24:02] 
That’s one reason why you talk about poetry. There are a lot of loosely organized poems that I love. I wish I could remember the name of the young lady that recited at the inauguration of President Biden. I mean, boy, that was really her show and also a guy became president. That’s how good she was, but as far as using memory and organizing ideas, I do believe that the rigor of taking your ideas and revising it, so that it fits into the boundaries of a sonnet, or a limerick, or a haiku, or any other organized structure, it forces you to really think hard about what you want to say and what you can leave out. Which is of course, a vital skill for writing or speaking in any situation. 

Nati Rodriguez [25:26] 
Were you a musician before you were a teacher, or how did you get into music and songwriting?  

Tim Griffin [25:31] 
When I was a teenager, I was a physics geek and my only real hobbies besides math and science were, I played Dungeons and Dragons and played video games. I had a very lucky break. I went to a boarding school that was quite small, and there was a very high-energy music teacher there who insisted on doing a voice test for everybody. He checked my voice and found that I had a good pitch. I had a good baritone range, which is rare for people in early high school, I had a nice deep voice. He dragged me into this new chorus that he was putting together. Furthermore, told the drama teacher, “you need to audition Tim!”  

To my horror, I was given one of the lead roles in a show called The Fantasticks, and there I was singing lead.  

I was literally vomiting with fear before each performance because this was so completely outside my comfort zone. Yet I found that I was getting approval of a completely different kind than I’d ever had before. I’d always gotten approval for my grades, but I never had that kind of approval where people are actually watching me and applauding. I found that not only was I getting approval, I was getting approval from girls, which for a teenage boy who just starts to sweat, even at the thought of speaking to girls, that was a huge incentive to keep up with it.  

By the time I was in college, I was singing in a couple of different acapella groups and a couple of jazz bands and made pretty good money, enough to pay for most of my college and graduate school. What I really wanted to do was teach elementary school. When I got into the classroom, it just felt natural to bring my guitar in with me and start doing those old Schoolhouse Rock songs with my kids. When we’re studying a map of the United States, we did Route 66 for the highway, and Proud Mary for the Mississippi River, just to help the kids get some context for all this stuff. I figured, well, I wrote some songs for these bands in college, I can write lyrics about the weather. It slowly grew over a period of 18 years to a point where I had two full-time jobs.  

Nati Rodriguez [28:01] 
That’s beautiful. What happened to this teacher? Does he or she know what you’re up to now? 

Tim Griffin [28:09] 
I followed up with him a bunch of years later. I sent him a letter and a couple of albums that I’d made and he just sent back a postcard with a huge happy face on it.  

Nati Rodriguez [28:20] 
Yeah. Those stories, there gold, right? It reminds us why teachers teach and the transformation that can happen with one adult.  

Tim Griffin [28:30] 
Yeah. If you’re lucky you get a few teachers in your life who just completely change your world. And he was one of those.  

Nati Rodriguez [28:40] 
I’m sure you are one of them.  

Tim Griffin [28:43] 
For some of the kids, I sure hope so. What I tell the kids when they worry about, oh, well, I don’t know if I’m good enough to be doing music and stuff. When I was teaching first grade, I would take them every two weeks on Friday for lunch, we would go to a nearby retirement community and do a lunchtime show for these elderly people. The kids would be like, well, I don’t know if I’m any good at singing.  Look at these people in the audience, they are literally weeping with joy to see you here. Do they care if you mess up on the lyrics? Do they care if you cannot carry a tune in a bucket? It does not matter. There’s this crazy idea, particularly in Los Angeles, where if you’re not doing the arts at a professional level, then you have no business doing them, you should not be painting unless people are paying money for it. You shouldn’t be making music unless you’re getting paid to do it. We’ve become consumers of the arts, which is a fine thing to be, but I think we also should be artists, and if you don’t get paid for it, that’s okay. You do it for fun. You do it for your friends.  

Nati Rodriguez [29:44] 
I hadn’t thought about the fact of living in LA puts this pressure on kids.  

Tim Griffin [29:52]  
Well, yeah, because we’re surrounded by professionals in the arts. There are actors and there are musicians and it’s intimidating.  

Nati Rodriguez [29:58] 
That’s a good takeaway for me. I guess I’m not from LA, so I hadn’t considered that, but yeah, it’s a blessing and can also be pretty harsh for kids that just want to have fun.  

Tim Griffin [30:10] 
Oh yeah and by the time they get to middle school, now you’re starting to really think about how your peers see you? Which is one reason I found for the songwriting residency, doing it online actually works better than going in person. It’s a lot less intimidating. They’re a lot less filtered in their ideas. I get more participation; I get more energy out of the kids. I get more writing out of the kids, this way, than if I walk into the classroom and tell them, “okay, everybody we’re going to write.”  

Nati Rodriguez [30:55] 
How do they write in a session that’s online? Are they submitting like in the chat or they’re emailing what they write? How does that work?  

Tim Griffin [31:02] 
What we do is, each of them will have a window like we do now, but I will have two windows. One is on me. The other is I have a little camera on my desk pointing at a blank piece of paper. That’s where I’m taking notes on the conversation. The idea is we do what some people call a circle map or a word web. There are a lot of different names for it, but the idea is – a blank piece of paper, the main idea goes in the middle, and around that we have three or four supporting ideas. For each of those, we have some key details or vocabulary words we want to use. Once we’ve got all that down, we look up some rhyming words. For each detail, we’ll write two lines of text about that. I tell them, don’t worry if it rhymes, don’t worry if it’s got a steady beat; just say what you want to say and whatever vocabulary you’re using, make sure you’re using it in context, correctly. We’ll write for a couple of minutes and then we’ll pause and I’ll say, okay, who wants to share? And I never make the kids share. I always invite them to share, but I don’t insist because, if you insist on making them share, then they’re going to clam up, right? They’re going to freeze because that can be scary. Once they see that the other kids are reading out loud and that I’m being super positive about it and finding something positive to say about everything they share, then they open up. I try to steer them towards older songs that are not under copyright, but if they really want a Katy Perry tune, then that’s what we’ll do.  

Nati Rodriguez [32:55] 
That’s so great. I mean, just your description of this process – it’s a really great way for kids to learn how to write, to think about context, vocabulary, and then the actual content of it, whatever it is, their learning could be science or math. 

Tim Griffin [33:06] 
Exactly. The standards we’re addressing, that’s totally up to the teacher. I’ve been in classrooms where they wanted songs about conserving water. I was in Phoenix, Arizona, and they wanted a song to help the kids remember the 5 C’s for Arizona – I have to sing the song to remember what they are – copper, cattle, cotton, climate, and citrus. Those are the 5 C’s, the 5 pillars of Arizona’s economy. The 4th graders, they do Arizona, just like California kids do California in 4th grade. So I worked with those kids; we wrote a very silly song about the 5 C’s and the kids were just, they can’t sing it without giggling and they all remember it now. By the way, for any educators or parents who wind up watching this, it’s free, all you have to do is contact me, let me know. I’ve never had any teacher or parent who was not glad that we did it.  

Nati Rodriguez [34:13] 
Okay, Tim. I know we’re coming up on time. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with our Learner audience?  

Tim Griffin [34:20] 
I would urge everyone to have a look at the GriffinEd website. It is GriffinEd.org. We have a library of fun, rigorously researched songs, mostly educational, not a hundred percent of them. Some of them are there just for fun, but mostly it is a growing library of songs organized by grade level and subject. You can find something for 2nd grade math or 5th grade earth science, kindergarten through middle school. We do have a few songs suitable for high school and even college, but really, it’s a lot of fun.  

Nati Rodriguez [34:52] 
Thank you, Tim. Do you want to close us out with another song?  

Tim Griffin [34:55] 
Sure. One thing you asked about me was – what is your most popular song. May I finish with that one? This is one that’s for California history. It’s a true story about something that happened in 1928, a little ways north of Los Angeles. Now a lot of people know where Mulholland Drive is, but most people don’t really know anything about William Mulholland and why he was such a huge deal. This is a song about something that happened at the end of his career.  

[playing Lucy on the Line]

Animaniacs 

Beowulf 

Children’s Media Association 

Common Core 

Dr. Demento 

Dungeons and Dragons 

Fly Me to the Moon 

Griffin Education (or GriffinEd) 

Iliad 

Katy Perry 

Lewis and Harold Price Foundation 

Mulholland Drive 

NASA 

Next Generation Science Standards 

Odyssey 

President Joseph Biden 

Schoolhouse Rock 

The Bhagavad Gita 

The Epic of Gilgamesh 

The Fantasticks 

The Torah 

William Mulholland 

Nati Rodriguez [01:20] 
First, I’d like to just pick your brain around what’s happening now and what is preventing us from creating a public education system that works for all students?   

Bruce Fuller [01:30] 
Well, a lot of my team’s work, really over the last 15 years has been in LA. I’ll respond through that local lens. In Los Angeles, there’ve been two or three big barriers to improvement. Although we’ll get to the mystery that motivated my book, which is why achievement went up in LA for so many years. One is the current distribution of funding for schools in Los Angeles. Like other big metro areas, you have a pretty significant middle-class and even upper-middle-class in parts of LA – on the westside or northwest LA. And then you have pockets of very severe poverty. Civic activists and pro-equity groups now for 25 years have pushed for more progressively funded schools and they’ve had some real success in that regard. I think the other big issue, which I really learned about from these same activists in Los Angeles, is that for a long time you had racially organized expectations in the heads and hearts of teachers. You had teachers who really felt that only certain kids had the ability or the capacity to go to college. You had pretty sharp tracking in LA elementary schools, high schools. Over the last quarter-century, there’s pretty good evidence that those teacher expectations have changed. The teaching force is beginning to look more like the demographics of the kids being served and that has a very positive effect on raising expectations. In the guts of the beast, these expectations are super important to enrich and equalize, and then equalizing school funding is another big remedy for which there’s been great progress.  

Nati Rodriguez [03:15] 
Touching on the funding piece, right now districts are inundated with more funds than they’ve ever had. I’m just wondering, how are LAUSD or California districts – how are they making sure that there is an equal distribution of funding? Are they using existing models or creating new ones because of the influx of funding? Can you speak to that? 

Bruce Fuller [03:36] 
Yeah, that’s a great question Nati. LA Unified, as one big district, the nation’s second-largest district, has about a 40% bump in its annual budget from federal stimulus dollars, and California Governor Newsom provided additional funding. There’s a lot of cash slushing around in the system, but a lot of that will go away in 2024 when the federal stimulus dollars expire. A lot of districts are in this very awkward situation, where they have a lot of funding now, but tomorrow they’re not going to have a lot of new funding. We see interventions like tutoring have received a lot of attention in recent months. Districts can quickly hire private firms to provide supplemental tutoring for kids. There’s some evidence that tutoring does pay off if it’s done by high-quality teachers and tutors, but that’s a temporary fix. That’s a band-aid, that’s not looking at the long-term quality of the core teaching force. It’s not looking at; can we sustain some of the innovations that popped up during COVID? It’s not looking at; can we lower class size over time? So, we’re in this very strange era that’s going to go for another couple of years now, where there’s a lot of money, but that funding may not actually be targeted on building more innovative and engaging schools.

Nati Rodriguez [05:04] 
Shifting gears, back to the book, can you describe who the new pluralists were as you described them in the book? Also, what new coalitions and tactics you’re observing now during the pandemic? 

Bruce Fuller [05:19] 
My research team, with colleagues at other universities and my students, began to hang out in LA for months at a time. This began about in 2007. I grew up outside of Pasadena. I am an Angeleno by birth so I was happy to get back to my hometown. What motivated our inquiry was we began to discover that test scores kept inching up and up and up in Los Angeles from 2002 forward. In a town that had become increasingly working class, increasingly populated by families who are struggling to make ends meet – despite that challenge, test scores were going up, and after about 18 or 19 years until the eve of the pandemic, on average kids were now about one grade level higher than they were in 2001-2002. That was a very tantalizing mystery for an academic researcher – like why in the heck did you see such progress in a district that oftentimes looks pretty chaotic?  

To your question, what we discovered was this complicated group, which we call the new pluralist in the book. The book is called When Schools Work; it’s trying to explain that mystery. One answer to this is that in the late 1990s, you had a new politics of education emerging in LA. Without droning on about this, it was basically a third sector, a third group of activists that were not aligned to the old, mainly white corporate moderates in downtown LA, who pulled a lot of strings oftentimes to fund or to limit funding for LA schools. These third sector groups were not aligned with organized labor. In fact, some of the Latino groups had no history in organized labor because labor unions in LA had not accepted Latino members until the late 1950s. This was a third sector of activists from the political left and what we consider the political right. That is part of the new pluralists were advocates for charter schools, which were being funded by right of center groups, like the Walton family and Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, who is a left-of-center Democrat, but he’s very hot on charter schools.  

You had a set of new pluralists that introduced charter schools. And then on the left, you had pro-equity advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Advancement Project, a group started by left-of-center attorneys in Los Angeles, InnerCity Struggle, started by Maria Brenes, who’s now a school board candidate in LA, and Karen Bass who started the Community Coalition in South LA and is now running for mayor of LA. You had this new generation of activists who weren’t satisfied with the corporate remedies nor the labor remedies for schools, and that generated a whole bunch of school reforms that we might want to talk about. The point is these new pluralists, this more pluralistic politics in LA, generated a fresh set of energy that has really lasted through the pandemic over the last quarter-century. These folks now are rising up in positions of power after challenging the status quo. That was the driving spark behind these reforms that resulted in almost 20 years of growth and student achievement. 

Nati Rodriguez [08:56] 
Got it. Can you speak to what that might look like going forward? I can imagine just there being a lot of discontent around parents and families, where there’s been a lot of issues that they faced, including unfinished learning, unclear communication from schools about returning or not returning. Where do you see this heading now, in terms of the groups that are working for or against, or within the district to make change?  

Bruce Fuller [09:25] 
Well, I think going back to these immediate band-aids like tutoring. I think the pro-equity wing of the new pluralist are pushing to make sure that these new interventions, these new support systems, are focused on schools that are most challenged by poverty. The theory of action here is quite simple, it’s a little bit like healthcare. We don’t equally distribute public support for healthcare because healthy people don’t cost as much as people that suffer from illness or disease. Like healthcare, these groups are saying that to move kids in poor communities over the proficiency bar, to help them reach proficiency in reading math, [and] social studies, those communities do need extra support, and it’s this progressive form of school finance that’s being pushed on. The report out two weeks ago from LA Unified on the tutoring showed that tutoring is only reaching about one-sixth of all the kids in the district. That’s the kind of thing that upsets these equity groups. 

LA Unified has an extra $3-3.5 billion per year now, and they’re not getting the tutoring support to the kids who would most benefit. In the short run, post-COVID, there’s going to be this ongoing press to distribute resources more equally. At the same time, try to make sure that we’re upgrading the teaching force across all schools, rich and poor. Superintendent Carvalho has talked about renovating school facilities to make sure all kids, rich and poor, go to first-class facilities. This is going to be a universal strategy with some strong focus on progressive finance to make sure the kids that were hit hardest by learning loss get the most supplemental aid. Some of the themes originating with the new pluralists back in the late 1990s, those themes and those policy priorities, I think are maturing and growing even stronger post-pandemic.

Nati Rodriguez [11:37] 
This reminds me of something that I read in your book about the equity index. Is that related to how funding was pushed to the schools that were most in need, or the communities most in need? What is that exactly?  

Bruce Fuller [11:48] 
Going back about 10 years ago, United Way of Greater Los Angeles led a coalition called The Class Coalition. Some of our students did analytic work for the Coalition, which showed that as new funding was coming into LA- former Governor Brown increased funding dramatically from 2013 forward – [as] that new money came in, this Coalition was trying to push to make sure that the most challenged schools received their fair share, and the way to distribute money was organized around a new equity formula. This has become known as the SENI index, the Student Equity Needs Index. The Advancement Project in Los Angeles, the Community Coalition under Karen Bass’ leadership, these are the core groups that have put in place this allocation formula which will regularize a more progressive way to finance schools. As new funding comes into LA Unified from the state capital, rather than spreading that funding evenly, the SENI index makes sure that the most highly challenged schools, often times in the poorest parts of South LA [or] East LA, that those heavily challenged schools receive some extra support, just like we do in healthcare finance, to make sure that those kids can reach the state proficiency bar. The SENI index is a really pivotal case of how the new pluralist have worked at this for 12-14 years now. They didn’t just settle for a rhetorical resolution passed by the school board. They’ve really dug in and implemented this index. It now moves about $1.5 billion of the district budget each year progressively.   

Nati Rodriguez [14:14] 
There was an interesting map in your book about the degree of competition between charter, pilot, [or] private, as it relates to traditional district schools. It showed that if there was a school within a 2 mile radius, and this was captured in 2016, that the schools actually decreased in achievement. What might that map look like today, given all the numbers of students that have left the district?

Bruce Fuller [14:40] 
To back up one step, part of the new pluralist agenda was to move towards, what we call in the book, organizational pluralism – that is letting a thousand flowers blossom, creating a more diverse set of schools in the district. Again, the new pluralist made huge progress on this agenda. On the right, there were the charter advocates, which has proven very controversial, but charter schools now enroll a fifth of all the kids in LA Unified. Maybe more in the center politically and left-of-center, you had the growth of pilot schools. Pilot schools are like charters, but teachers remain in the union. Teachers remain in the pension and benefit plan system for the District. There are now 51 pilot schools, many are small high schools. In Boyle Heights, the Esteban Torres Complex, there are five small pilot high schools, human-scale high schools, [and] you have dual language immersion programs.  

The district has about 70,000 youngsters in magnet schools that move from a focus on theater arts, to pre-nursing studies, to STEM and math science. You had all these flowers blossoming and an enormous amount of diversity. Parents were no longer tied to attendance zones. You have a very liberal parental choice system in LA Unified, and kids are traveling across town, outside their neighborhoods to this wild kaleidoscope of different kinds of schools. This proved to be a double-edged sword. This comes to the maps. Now, if you put a pin on a map in any regular public school in LA Unified, there may be 5-7 alternative schools within a 2 mile radius. This competition unfolds, which on the positive side has proven very popular among parents because now parents feel that they can search out the best school that fits their child’s interests, attributes, personality.  

It’s the positive side of competition. On the other hand, to your question, we also found that regular public schools that face the most competitive pressure, tend to lose their most effective teachers. If you put one of these pins on a map in East LA, if that school is surrounded by twelve alternative schools, rather than two alternatives, that first school is going to lose more of its most effective teachers. By effective, we mean teachers that boost kids’ learning curves most steeply over a year or a school year. That proved to be the negative side of competition. These alternative schools, for whatever reason might provide more small-working environments, they might be more social justice-oriented, they might be more specialized, but the most effective teachers in regular schools tend to migrate out to the alternative schools, and that’s the downside of competition.  

Nati Rodriguez [17:28] 
I’m curious, and maybe this isn’t part of your research, but what could those schools do? Assuming that’s the lever that needs to be adjusted; how do they make it competitive among teachers so they stay at their respective campuses?  

Bruce Fuller [17:42] 
Yeah, that’s a great question Nati, and one that I hope Superintendent Carvalho addresses. I think charter school advocates, or proponents of dual language immersion, would say that they’re creating more innovative models, which should be mimicked by regular public schools. They’re saying that we’re just not like Burger King, we’re ramping up hamburgers, or we’re providing a more quality product, and that pressure should lead to innovation in those regular public schools. That’s a hopeful argument and ideally, that plays out. The problem though, is that the regular public school in that community may not have the capacity to innovate, or it may have an aging teaching staff, or it may have a deadhead school principal. This is the problem with market arguments – it is that markets create sparks of innovation, but they also drag down organizations that don’t have much capacity to innovate. The other thing we found, which is troubling, and which we think the district should be monitoring more closely, is that some of these schools like charters are more effective in boosting kids’ achievement, but they’re also recruiting kids from better-educated households. They’re accepting kids who are already achieving at higher levels, in the first, second grade. The new forms of schooling are exciting, they’re proving to be popular, but they’re also leading to new forms of stratification among kids, even in a town that’s heavily working class and lower middle class. This is not stratifying wealthy Westwood kids from poor Boyle Heights kids. This is now a new form of stratification just among middle to lower-income families.

Nati Rodriguez [19:20] 
Thank you for clarifying. That leads me to my next question about the segregation around schools. I think historically, it’s talked about in terms of separate but equal doctrine, what does that look like now? What are some of the policies or activism around trying to integrate schools?  

Bruce Fuller [19:43] 
There’s still severe racial segregation in LA. The other complication in Southern California, or if you think about LA County, which is a bigger geographical unit than the school district – we have districts like Santa Monica on the westside, which is much Whiter than LA Unified, Glendale Unified, which borders on LA Unified. Glendale is super interesting, it’s Latino, White, and Armenian. So, just the diversity of the county is really unbelievable and quite remarkable. What’s happened in the last quarter-century in LA Unified, is that with upward mobility, especially among young Latino families and young Black families, they tend to move out of LA Unified, not far from LA downtown, but into neighboring districts like Glendale, Burbank, Culver City, is a much more integrated district. Culver City is an island inside LA Unified, for listeners who aren’t familiar with LA. The good news is we’ve had upper mobility, especially since the 2008 recession. That’s led to a lot of migration of middle-class Latinos and Blacks, and even Asian heritage families, out of the district into neighboring districts where they think they’re finding higher-quality schools or safer neighborhoods, but that leaves behind a much more segregated population within LA Unified. As I mentioned before, within LA Unified, with a diverse range of schools, the parents who have time or wherewithal or chutzpah to shop around schools and to drive in LA traffic to find different schools, those kids tend to sort into stronger schools and alternative schools. That leaves behind kids who may be in foster care homes or whose parents work graveyard and swing shifts who don’t have time to shop this market. The marketization of the L.A. school system is leading to these new forms of stratification.  

 
Nati Rodriguez [21:52] 
I read about San Antonio where they’re trying to integrate students from different zip codes and they actually allocate a certain amount of seats for students so that it is a more diverse population. In San Antonio, it’s not racially diverse, but it’s income diversity. Is there anything like that in LA County?  

Bruce Fuller [22:13] 
It’s a great point. There is talk of this inside the district. Kelly Gonez is a school board member from the San Fernando Valley, she formed a commission to look at whether there could be greater integration across social class lines. I know the policy and strategy office under Superintendent Carvalho is looking into this. Whether the board will take action remains to be seen, but at least there’s some serious thinking about this. One center of the conversation is around magnet schools because magnet programs in LA Unified have become really very popular. There are about three-parent applications for every one seat that opens up each year. [There’s a] long waiting list for magnet programs. There are many magnet programs that resegregate kids. You might have the resegregation of Asian heritage kids in certain kinds of magnets, or Black families are turned on by one magnet in one part of the district. There is real interest in trying to make sure that the magnet system is racially and integrated across social class lines.  

Nati Rodriguez [23:24] 
I’m curious since we’re talking about magnet schools and also just the smaller school movement in general did those fare better in terms of enrollment in the last three years, I’m thinking magnets, dual language, those mission-driven theme schools? We keep hearing about enrollment being significantly down across the district.

Bruce Fuller [24:49] 
I have not seen solid data on that out of LA Unified. We do know that attendance was lower. We did find that pilot schools, at least over the last 10 years, are more effective than regular public schools in LA in terms of reducing dropout rates at the high school level. Pilot schools have more holding power. Kids transfer out of pilots at a much lower rate. It may be these smaller human-scale high schools, like in San Antonio – Superintendent Carvalho did this very well in Miami before he came to LA – it could be these human-scale, small schools have much greater holding power and kids feel more loyalty and feel more respect and acceptance in those school settings. Hopefully, they’ll be maintained and funded at a higher level.  

Nati Rodriguez [24:31] 
Yes. When we think about achievement, it starts with getting the students there and I feel like we’ve taken so many steps back during this pandemic. I think we’re going back to let’s just get them in the classroom and learning again.  

Bruce Fuller [24:45] 
Yeah, and making them feel like they’re members of a school community. They’re not just out there in electronicsland, not connected to their friends and to their teachers.  

Nati Rodriguez [25:16] 
There’s a graph that summarizes your findings in When Schools Work about which policies benefited students the most between that period of the early 2000s to 2020. Can you talk about what the key takeaways were?  

Bruce Fuller [25:29] 
We found a few things that worked really well. Some of these new diverse forms of schooling, like autonomous pilot schools, as I mentioned, were lowering dropout rates and that tends to increase achievement over time. We found that going back to Roy Romer’s superintendency, starting in the year 2000, he really focused teachers on early literacy skills and really tried to herd all teachers to get behind a shared set of basic proficiencies, tied to early literacy, reading, reading comprehension, writing. This was not without controversy because he did buy a fairly regimented curriculum called Open Court. He sent in monitors to keep track of teachers – were teachers teaching the curriculum with great fidelity and allegiance. This regulation was controversial, but that’s when achievement first started to go up. As that cohort went into middle school with stronger literacy levels, ideally a greater love for reading, stronger math skills, that cohort then drove future achievement trends that kept climbing and climbing until right before the pandemic. Focusing on a fewer set of key proficiencies, I think is something that really worked. We also found that investing in facilities made a big difference, especially in the South cities, in East LA, places where kids were going to schools where the bathrooms were closed because the toilets didn’t work, roofs were falling in, the place hadn’t been painted in 30-40 years. Sometimes facilities are seen as a cosmetic fix, but we actually track kids as they went from old decrepit schools into newer renovated schools, and that raised achievement.  

We talked to one kid; I’ll never forget. A first-year high school student in a brand-new school said, “I’m no longer going to a ghetto school. I realized that the grownups actually care about [me].” 

It was just the vivid symbolism of being in a freshly painted school. He realized that there was this civic investment in his future. Facilities investments also paid off in spades.

Nati Rodriguez [27:40] 
Based on those findings, if it were me, I’d go to the district and say these two things created a huge improvement in achievement, more than all these others that are being explored. Would that be a fair argument to make? I can see backlash on the first one, the curriculum, but the second one?  

Bruce Fuller [28:02] 
It wouldn’t be that controversial. No, that’s a good point. My colleague Pedro Noguera and I did an op-ed a couple of weeks ago, doing what you’re suggesting Nati. We read the book together and then distilled our best agenda for the new superintendent. Part of the problem though, is conditions have changed. So, LA Unified is going to have to be closing at least a few schools as enrollments decline. Ideally, we’d like to know, of these kaleidoscope of diverse schools, post-COVID, which schools are more effective or least effective. I think Superintendent Carvalho – he’s kind of a data nerd – I think he will try to look at the comparative efficacy of different kinds of schools. We’d want to know more before we move on that. Certainly, we know changing teacher expectations, as I mentioned upfront, has been very effective.  

Maria Brenes, at InnerCity Struggle, really pushed to ensure that every high school kid in LA can enter an Advanced Placement class, every kid in LA can take a college prep class to qualify them for the University of California. Maria Brenes, Karen Bass, these new pluralists from the 90s, they did concrete things to try to raise and enrich the expectations teachers have for their students. We have a long way to go on that too. There are certainly reforms discussed in the book that are kind of halfway implemented, and we just have to keep the momentum going.  

Nati Rodriguez [29:29] 
One of the understandings that I took away from the book was that LAUSD was a highly centralized district and it had slowly moved to be very decentralized, giving a lot of power around budgeting and hiring to school site leaders. I’m curious, do you see that continuing to happen? Do you see it moving back a little? How does that help us, or not, address all of the many issues that are facing the district, including unfinished learning, families with food insecurity, illness, job loss, and attendance in the last three years?  

Bruce Fuller [30:01] 
Yeah. That’s a really pivotal issue and Superintendent Carvalho – I’ve heard him speak a couple of times and met with his staff – he’s leaning towards centralization. So, this is going to be interesting. Also, I would say that if you add up this kaleidoscope and this rainbow of alternative schools, charters, pilots, dual language immersion, magnets, it’s still probably about a third of all the schools in LA. Two-thirds of the schools really still operate as conventional, regular public schools under the centralized reign of the district. The district is one-third decentralized, two-thirds still pretty centralized. That’s going to be something to deal with. That’s a tough governance situation for the board and for the Superintendent. The other point here is when the district hands out decentralized chunks of funding, under the SENI index we talked about earlier, that gives more discretionary funding to school principals, even in regular public schools.  

When that happens, principals are not always the most strategic planners. They might say, well, we’ve got to reopen two bathrooms, or I have a Spanish teacher who has a bad bulletin board. I want to replace the bulletin board or the English department needs new textbooks. That is, when you decentralize funding it’s not always a silver bullet because principals may be patching holes in the walls. They may not actually be rethinking the nature of schooling, or creating more alternative internship programs, or getting rid of lousy teachers. Right? Principals are political actors too, on a small canvas, and they may just be engaged in incremental improvement. Decentralization is not always a silver bullet because that discretion may not lead to bold improvements at the school level.

Nati Rodriguez [32:00] 
I wonder if there is a world in which you have both, where the money is going to those local leaders, but something attached to it so there is system-level change at the local level? 

Bruce Fuller [32:13] 
There’ve been a couple of models. The Bill Clinton [and] Barack Obama model was that centrally we should set the learning objectives, right so we have learning proficiencies set by the state government or perhaps the school district. Essentially, that is what are we working towards? Everybody should work towards the same learning objectives, but then you decentralize as to how schools get there. That’s one model which has had some success in some communities. The second model, which Carvallo really pioneered in Miami, he looked at student growth school by school, and if a school over three or four years kept showing student growth, he just decentralized management. He just said we’re not going to come and see you guys very often anymore. You’re doing fine. He rewarded high performance. It also allowed him to not worry so much about upper-middle-class families complaining all the time in Miami; he could focus his attention and resources on schools and communities that needed more capacity building and greater assistance. That’s a second model to reward schools that turn around and show growth over time. There are different strategies, but I think one message from our book is that decentralization buys you variety in the types of schools and programs that are created, but decentralization doesn’t necessarily reduce inequality and narrow achievement gaps. It’s a double-edged sword.  

Nati Rodriguez [33:39] Yes. I read that although student achievement went up, the gap persists.  

Bruce Fuller [33:43]
Exactly and this miffs a lot of us in the academic world. I think activists are frustrated by this. We’ve seen this in other cities and suburban school districts, that if over 25 years, you have concerted policy reforms, you can raise achievement levels. In Miami, where Carvalho is from, kids are two grade levels above where LA kids are performing. Carvalho went through the same experience, where he could raise achievement levels on average, but reforms that actually narrow disparities, that’s a harder nut to crack. We’ve not been able to do that yet in LA.  

Nati Rodriguez [34:20] 

Do you see that working or having been done elsewhere?  

Bruce Fuller [34:25]
Well, Carvallo did it in certain schools in Miami. He had very low-performing schools serving quite low-income communities and he did turnaround a fair number of schools. We haven’t seen that happen so much in Los Angeles, although pilot schools give us a hint as to how to do this. The Esteban Torres Complex in East LA – a lot of those kids used to go to Garfield High School, which was an overcrowded, dismal place to be in for a couple of decades but those kids are doing much better in pilot schools. I think we have hints as to how to close achievement gaps, but we haven’t yet done it very well on a system-wide basis. 

Nati Rodriguez [35:42]
Do you see some innovative practices, or practices that look promising, that could be shared across the system in LA? What else is being done there that’s unique? 

Bruce Fuller [35:53] 
Well, pilots, I think it is small scale. These are schools with 400-500 kids as opposed to 3,000-4,000 so it is human scale. Pilot schools recruit teachers. Just like magnets, teachers are recruited who get behind the program. There are pilots that are very social justice-oriented and kids do internships in the community. Kids learn all about serving the community. Racial injustice and class inequality are topics that are dealt with head-on. Talking about problems kids face in walking to school or walking by liquor stores, just the day-to-day challenges kids face, are put on the table and talked about. Yeah, we need to make sure kids know civics and know long division, but we also want to respect and engage the daily issues they face. That new relevance is super important and then some of the new pluralists, the nonprofit groups like the Community Coalition, they form student clubs that are organizing tutoring sessions. Kids come in for lunch sessions, the Community Coalition, the CoCo clubs, and they talk about community problems. They talk about how do we get our school painted. How do we try to set aside lousy teachers? How do we make sure that discipline isn’t criminalized and cops aren’t on campus? Some of the new pluralists have really innovative ways of engaging kids and really nurturing their ability to take control of their lives and their communities. We have a chapter in the book just on this very topic, following these CoCo school lunch hours. It’s a fascinating innovation because now kids feel control and feel like we’re being respected as agents of improving our neighborhoods.  

Nati Rodriguez [37:40] 
I remember reading about these organizations that are applying pressure at the top, but they’re also getting youth exposed to leadership and becoming change agents in their community so they can then do the work.  

Bruce Fuller [37:52] 
If you look at Maria Brenes, school board candidate, and Karen Bass, mayoral candidate, these are people who when they were young, went through these organizing sessions and they became very connected and very respected members of their neighborhoods. This is a way to rethink relevance and really engage in what kids are struggling with day-to-day and what they’re mulling over, not just what the Sacramento set curriculum objectives look like.  

Nati Rodriguez [38:19]  
Bruce, is there anything else you would like to share with our Learner audience, about your research or your book When Schools Work or anything that’s coming?  

Bruce Fuller [38:28] 
The other big takeaway from the book – I was at USC the other day, and I gave a book talk and a person in the audience came up afterward – she made this great point that most of the characters that I trace in the book, no one’s ever heard of. Even like LA political hacks, may not have heard of Yolie Flores or Elmer Roldan, these characters that I came to love in tracking them over 10-12 years. The point is that these reforms that proved so effective came out of this cauldron of new thinking, new politics, new pluralism, but they were authored and crafted by a lot of individual actors that just had this commitment and faith that they can improve the schools. So, it wasn’t Barack Obama, it wasn’t Jerry Brown, it was lesser-known civic activists that made it all happen. I think that’s a hopeful story. That’s an uplifting reality [for] how schools can improve over time, driven by the commitment of a lot of different people.

Advancement Project 

American Civil Liberties Union 

Barack Obama 

Bill Clinton 

California Governor Newsom 

Community Coalition 

Elmer Roldan 

Esteban Torres Complex 

Governor Jerry Brown 

InnerCity Struggle 

Karen Bass 

Kelly Gonez 

Maria Brenes 

Netflix 

Open Court Reading 

Pedro Noguera 

Reed Hastings 

Student Equity Need Index (SENI) 

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho 

The Class Coalition 

United Way of Greater Los Angeles 

Walton family 

When Schools Work 

Yolie Flores 

Nati Rodriguez [02:19] 
The collaboration between the Annenberg Foundation, Best Buy and the Greater LA Fund created this unique opportunity to build out a Best Buy Teen Tech Center at the Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corporation (VSEDC). Can you share with the learner audience what the Best Buy Teen Tech Centers are, who they serve, and what the experience is like for members? 

 
Chheav Em [02:40] 
Teen Tech Centers are afterschool spaces. They’re equipped with cutting-edge technology and are staffed by development professionals who provide these safe and supportive learning environments for teens. Teen Tech Centers provide access to professional-grade tech, like 3D printers and music studios. Those are things you’ll see a lot of times in all of our Teen Tech Centers. They inspire young people through supportive mentors and peer-to-peer collaboration, and they provide opportunities through technical training and college and career guidance. It’s a Teen Tech Center, so they’re built for teens specifically. No young person is ever going to be turned away from a Teen Tech Center, but strategically Teen Tech Centers are a place in disinvested communities. Our hope at Best Buy is to provide access and resources to communities who don’t generally have them. The experiences in a Teen Tech Center are going to look a little different depending on the teens themselves. I think that’s the beauty of a Teen Tech Center. A student would be able to explore coding one day or beat making another day. You can get into this really specific maybe more math-oriented activity. The next day you also tap into the more creative side of yourself and make music, films and things like that. With access to so many things, our hope is that young people would continuously explore and create in the Teen Tech Centers. Of course, there are opportunities for them to have more structured project-based learning, but at the core young people have the freedom to follow their interests. That self-guided learning is one of the elements of a Teen Tech Center. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [04:09] 
Got it. That sounds really fantastic that they have all this equipment available to them. How is the location of a Center decided? 

 
Chheav Em [04:18] 
There are a couple of layers in that we have a committee or a group of partners that we work with, Annenberg Foundation being one of them and the Greater Los Angeles Education Foundation being another. Together, we take a look at these priority communities, the Internal Services Department has helped create this really cool map of where some of the biggest needs are. They assess things like poverty levels and access to the internet and technology. Unfortunately, when you look throughout LA County, the map is very red and it just gets redder and redder in certain communities. So that’s one layer of it – where is there an actual need? Another layer is the fact that we are using some American Relief Funds for this. We got every supervisorial district to approve funding to go into these Teen Tech Centers. We will put one in every district so that’s another component. Diving deeper into that, when we launch a request for proposal (RFP), we do a lot of groundwork in talking to members of the community and different community-based organizations. We have a team that assesses all of the proposals that come through to us. We are looking for mission-aligned organizations who are already serving teens. At the forefront, that’s what we’re looking for. We just go through this process of reviewing and doing site visits and having continuous conversations until we land on one organization that we feel would be the best fit. Sometimes it’s an easy decision to make, other times it’s a little harder. There are a lot of great organizations out there doing great work, we’re lucky to be working with some solid people. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [05:59] 
Got it. You’re describing the LA model. Can you talk about what a Community Impact Hub is and how it’s different from other locations that have Teen Tech Centers? My understanding is they’re all across the country, is that right? 

Chheav Em [06:14] 
Yes, there are. Best Buy has been investing in Teen Tech Centers for awhile now. The first Teen Tech Center opened nationwide in 2012. There are 50 currently open with the plan to hit 100 by the end of 2025. 12 of those 100 will be in LA County and that is the Community Impact Hub. Those 12 Teen Tech Centers are going to be a network of Teen Tech Centers that will provide the same types of access, programming, mentorship, and support that all the other Teen Tech Centers provide, but with this added focus on building a career pipeline into the creative economy. LA’s got one of the largest economies in the world and one of the most diverse regions in the world, yet somehow, with a 94% increase in tech jobs in the region and almost 75% of people here identifying as a person of color, representation and diversity in those jobs has remained stagnant since 2007. So that’s the crazy thing, right? We’re looking at like the fact that there are structural and systemic barriers that keep people of color out of these creative jobs. The Community Impact Hub is trying to change those conditions and systems that keep people of color out of the creative economy. We’re doing that by developing these pathways into these jobs. So, we’re identifying the gaps between the learning that happens in the Teen Tech Center and being job-ready by the time a young person ages out of the program. We’re building partnerships with foundations and companies to fill these gaps and to provide mentors who support young people on their journeys. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [07:46] 
It’s amazing to hear that Best Buy has dedicated so much of these resources and locations to LA specifically. I think we can see why. 

Nati Rodriguez [08:03] 
You mentioned about creating a pathway to jobs, and I assume that some of those will be jobs with Best Buy. What other companies are participating in this work that are committed to creating these pathways for students and teens? 

 
Chheav Em [08:18] 
Yes, some of these jobs will be with Best Buy. I think that’s a great entry point and there’s a lot of room for growth once someone joins the company. We’re still really early in the process. We have a few Teen Tech Centers open, we have a few more that will be open in another nine months, but we’re really early in the Community Impact Hub. The need to have a very specific commitment from a company right now is not quite there. What we do need to do is start having conversations with companies. We are meeting with the guilds, we are working with the EIF, which is the Entertainment Industry Foundation, to start having conversations with the different guilds to see like where can we start building out the programs and the pipelines to get into those jobs. We are still putting in the groundwork of identifying, starting really early conversations, and then working with foundations to start filling some of those gaps in the tech programming component of things. We are in a place where we’re thinking, can we work with UNAVOC Foundation to start offering programs in our existing Teen Tech Centers so that we can start building out the learning pieces and strengthening those things, while we start exploring the job piece of things? 

Nati Rodriguez [09:40] 
Yes, it makes sense. Just to clarify again for our audience, one of those centers is opening in a week, so it’s very early in this work. We will definitely track and update this information as it develops. Going back to what teens are learning in these centers, can you talk about the learning model and the kind of skills they will come out with after, some touch points in the Teen Tech Center? 

 
Chheav Em [10:03] 
There is a learning model and there are specific skills. Our learning model is to learn by design, follow your interests, build community, and foster respect and trust. It’s a model that we’ve adopted from our national implementation partner, The Clubhouse Network. That learning framework is important to us because we believe that when you’re actively engaged, you’re going to learn more, when you care about what you’re working on, you’re willing to work longer and harder, which again, leads to learning more. When you collaborate with individuals from different ages, cultures, and genders, you gain new perspectives for understanding the world. When different ideas and opinions are respected, there’s a sense of safety and trust in the environment, and again, allowing young people to take risks and innovate. These are things that are true for teens and adults. I know I learn more when I am allowed the grace to make mistakes. 

 
That’s the environment that we want to create in our Teen Tech Centers- very specific skills that young people can learn coming out of a Teen Tech Center – if they’re in a workforce development program, they’re going to learn some workforce development skills, those soft skills that unfortunately aren’t taught to young people in our communities by parents or even in schools. I know I didn’t learn about resume writing, how to conduct myself in an interview, and how to even look for a job. I didn’t learn those things at home or in school. I learned it at an organization. Those are some of the soft skills training that we’re going to teach young people, [and] very specific tech skills. You can take a coding class if you’re interested. A lot of the Teen Tech Centers offer robotics and coding. They might offer photography. How do you work a DSLR camera? How do you edit the camera? All Teen Tech Centers are equipped with the Adobe Creative Suite software on their computers. They have access to that. They can do the editing that they need to do in their pictures, in their films, and things like that. How do you take a picture with just a green screen and how do you change the backdrops so it looks like you’re somewhere else, not in a Teen Tech Center? These are the things we’ve seen in a Teen Tech Center, where kids have done these amazing things that I wish I had access to when I was younger. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [12:15] 
Can you talk about some of the projects that you’ve seen come out of the Centers that they’ve created there? 

 
Chheav Em [12:21] 
A standout project for me right now is one that took place at the Legacy LA Teen Tech Center. In partnership with Legacy LA’s Youth Leadership program, these teens conducted research on how many cars produce pollutants into the community by testing the air quality around the Ramona Gardens Development Complex. After researching the air quality, the teens discovered that the pollutants that they found cause illnesses that are often found amongst the residents who live in the housing development. The teens collaborated with one another and they interviewed community members and worked with community leaders. What they actually ended up doing after all of this, they created this documentary about the natural park that was built to be a green buffer to filter the pollutants in the hope that it brings awareness to the need for more natural parks in their community. I’m not really a science-oriented person, but when I hear about projects like that, I think it’s so cool to see how young people are not just engaging with science, but they’re gaining other tech skills and learning how to collaborate and work with other people.  These are all things that they can use in the future, regardless of what career they go into. I think the best thing about it is that they use tech to highlight an issue that they saw in their community. They want to use that to enforce some sort of change. That’s the type of empowerment we want to see in all the Teen Tech Centers. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [13:44] 
They discover their own agency and are learning in a way that’s authentic to them. That sounds amazing. 

Chheav Em [13:54] 
When young people create in the Teen Tech Center and they’re empowered and they’re allowed to make mistakes and just really dream, they come up with some crazy things. I think I couldn’t do that at 15 or 13, they’re so talented. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [14:11] 
And to have the space and time to do that freely. When I think about the school environment, in a traditional school, it’s very structured and it’s not interdisciplinary. If you’re in math, you’re doing math. If you’re in English, you’re doing English and this type of project seems like everything gets pulled to the table. 

 
Chheav Em [14:32] 
To your point about how things are structured in the schools, Teen Tech Centers – the layout is going to differ with every location because of building, room size, and design interests – some of the pieces that are very important to us is to make sure you don’t have a classroom setting. We want to see these clusters. We want to see tables in pods and computers in pods because of that free, collaborative experience we want young people to have. As we start building out the designs of Teen Tech Centers, in partnership with hosting community-based organization, we articulate that early on. We don’t want this to feel like a classroom. That environment is really something we want to make sure we instill in all the Teen Tech Centers. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [15:19] 
Yeah. Environment makes a big difference to how you experience the world and learning and interacting with others.

Nati Rodriguez [16:08] 
Given your experience, building out the college access retention programs in your previous work, how much exposure do students get to college access versus paths towards vocation or trade school when they go through a Teen Tech Center?  

Chheav Em [16:22] 
It is definitely a part of the conversation. Unfortunately, our Teen Tech Center Coordinators can’t be experts in tech, youth development, college, career. It’s a lot to ask one person to be an expert in all of those things. I’m sure there are people out there, but it’s not easy to come across. I think the important thing that we want to highlight is that the coordinator should be meeting a young person where they are at. If college is what the student wants to explore, that’s the conversation that should be had. If a trade school is what the student wants to explore, that’s the conversation that should be had. If neither one of those options is what the young person wants, then it’s exploring – how do we ensure that we have this pathway into a job, and what does it look like to get there? 

 
I think that’s the piece that we’re trying to build out more with the Community Impact Hub. It’s understanding that no two teens are going to be the same and it’s meeting that young person where they are, and then having continuous conversations with them so that they’re informed in the decisions that they make for their future. That safety and that freedom to explore all options is important. I think an important thing is to recognize, where is this young person at? What is it that they want to do? How do we have these conversations so that they can make the most informed decision about their own future? So, it’s not this clear-cut dosage. I will say though, the most ideal situation for a Teen Tech Center is to have this built out college access program; to have someone who is an expert in that; it’s to have this separate career pathways program and it’s to have an expert in that. And to all work collectively. I think wraparound services are an important thing in Teen Tech Centers. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [18:29] 
Do Teen Tech Centers provide wraparound services? 

 
Chheav Em [18:32] 
Teen Tech Centers in themselves don’t, but oftentimes when you can find an organization that has the additional support, maybe not specifically in the Teen Tech Center, but it might be an organization that has a college program already. If there’s already a built-out college program and you add this piece like a Teen Tech Center, how do those coordinators work together to make sure that a young person has access to both? If you have a work development program already, and sometimes it’s just social services – what emergency assistance can take place? If you can find an organization that can meet some of those other needs and a Teen Tech Center gets layered into that, that means the organization as a whole, the teens that they’re already serving now get this amazing piece of access to technology and these cool programs. It also means the teens that come through that program now have access to the other established teen programs that exist and, in that way, you can explore all the different avenues. One thing that you’ll keep hearing about is collaboration. We want young people to collaborate with each other. We want foundations to collaborate so that we’re building out a Hub. We want the staff to collaborate so the young person is served and supported in the best way possible. I’m sure you’ve heard the term “it takes a village”, and it takes a village and so many things to help young people grow. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [20:03] 
Yes, and I see, because Teen Tech Centers are not just built from nothing. They’re built-in existing organizations that already have some of these assets and resources for families. 

 
Chheav Em [20:17] 
Yes. I have tried to explore the thought of building a Teen Tech Center out of nothing. I now understand why that is not a good idea. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [20:30] 
Yes. I think a lot of the research has shown you have to connect with community partners and trusted partners that are there and not just try to come in. 

Chheav Em [20:41] 
It’s essential to the success of the program.  

 
Nati Rodriguez [20:43] 
Yes. On that note, can you talk about your own experience with this work and your time at Bresee and how that’s connected to the Best Buy Teen Tech Centers? 

Chheav Em [20:53] 
Yeah. I actually grew up at Bresee when I was in high school. My job training skills – how to conduct myself in an interview, things like that, I learned that at Bresee. I got a scholarship to go to college from Bresee. I fully understand what it means to just grow up in an afterschool environment and having a lot of my learning pieces come from that avenue. Two years after college, I worked somewhere else in between, but I eventually found myself back at Bresee running the high school program. We had a great program, a bare-bones program, but it was good. When Best Buy opened its first RFP in LA, I was in the need for a lot of space. I can’t run multiple programs in this tiny little room on four very old, outdated IMACs. Not like the flat screen IMACs, like those boxy ones that are all colored and things like that, we’re talking back in the day. We had this opportunity to apply for a Teen Tech Center and I was just like, “Yes, let’s do it!”  

Anything is an improvement; I have zero resources. We were doing homework help, SAT classes, and internship programs all from that. It was chaos. Essentially, we got granted the funding for a Teen Tech Center and we were able to convert an underutilized rec room into what is now the Best Buy Teen Tech Center, and moved all of our programs there. It was great to be able to have the space to allow kids to explore tech, but to also have enough room and computers where young people can apply for college, or do their FAFSA forms, or have workshops. It was amazing, but we did spend a lot of time upping our college access programs. To the point we talked about before, that wasn’t the only avenue that kids wanted to go into, but it was such a huge part of the conversation at the time. When I think about what my experiences were like in high school, we didn’t talk a lot about going to college. I went to college because growing up in an Asian-American family, that was my expectation. It was just what happened after high school; making an informed decision about college and what that meant, wasn’t a thing. By the time I graduated from college, it was a huge part of the conversation. How do we strengthen these college programs, not so much STEAM. Fast forward a few years later, STEAM is becoming a huge part of the conversation. 

 
I was lucky enough to be able, with that trajectory, [to] spend so much time strengthening the college access component. What I did see was so many young kids saying, “Well, I don’t want to go to college.” 

We would just say, “Well, that’s what’s going to help you. That’s what’s going to help your family.” 

The more we did that year after year, it was like, no. It’s not a guarantee; that degree isn’t a guarantee. It helps, in most cases, but it’s not a guarantee that a cycle of poverty will be broken because someone went to college; nor is it fair to tell a young person that is the only choice that they have for their future. What I love about this opportunity is Best Buy then came in with all of these resources. It start[ed] to open my eyes to this other world, the other world of STEAM, and playing that, I didn’t really pay attention to or value. I was just like wow, there’s this other opportunity. If a young girl comes to me and says, “I want to go into film.” and I say, “Okay, go study film at Cal State LA.” Is that the only way into the film industry? – to go to school, to have to take your pre-recs, to have to do all of these other things? Or can we build out a way to say, how do we get you into the film industry without saying go pick a university that has a film program?  The film program can work, but there’s got to be another alternative. I think that’s the beautiful thing about the Community Impact Hub. What is that alternative and can we then build both of those things out? And say okay, well, what would you prefer? What makes more sense for you – to have to go the university route or can we nudge you in a different direction that seems to fit you more? Cause what happens if a student doesn’t do well in the classroom? [Is that] the only choice you have? I think that’s an unfortunate thing. The beautiful thing is that I’ve been able to see Bresee getting the first Teen Tech Center here and that being the envy of all the other organizations right, and I still hear it. People are like when Bresee got that Teen Tech Center back in 2016, I was like, I want that. Now we have one at Legacy LA and we will have one at VSEDC. We will have three others in Watts, Boyle Heights, and Antelope Valley. 

 
This thing that seemed to be such a dream to people – like wow, what would happen if we had that? – now is a reality for so many organizations, specifically 12, and it’s such a great thing to see happen out here. I think the cooler thing is that, if we can do this right, if we succeed in this, can we replicate this somewhere else? Can we do it in another city? I think that vision of what’s possible, I didn’t see that before and I see it now. 

Nati Rodriguez [27:02] 
That’s great. A couple of things, one is how do you measure the impact? Two, is there a city [or] another location in mind to create a Community Impact Hub?   

Chheav Em [27:13] 
I’ll answer the second one without fully answering it. I know Best Buy is exploring doing another Community Impact Hub. I don’t know where yet. We’ve eliminated a couple of options. We’re exploring a couple of others. That is as much as I will say on that, but we’re testing it out in LA because we are the trendsetters, right? If we can make it happen in LA, then we can make it happen anywhere else.  

The other one is measuring impact. The kids tell us. Impact is measured in a few different ways. From an organization standpoint, the assessment and planning reports that CBOs have to do. They do it mid-year and they do it at the end of year. It’s designed to support site hosts in a reflection process. What are we doing well? What are we not doing well? What do we want to change? It’s a tool for improving quality and setting future goals for programs. That’s structured in a way for the individual organization, right? Do some self-reflecting on what you’ve done and where you want to go and like certain components. Do we grade these organizations? No. We really just want to guide and support in that conversation of where do you see yourself and where do you want to improve? The bigger tool that we use to measure impact really comes from our youth impact surveys. Those are conducted in all the Teen Tech Centers. Youth at every Clubhouse are invited to participate in a survey that assesses their feelings towards school, their interest in STEM, their interest in their communities, tech, and social skills that they’ve learned, the environment, the relationships with mentors, and caring adults, things like that. Some of the things that we’ve been able to see and learn from the reports of the youth impact surveys are that 91% of the teens feel that the Teen Tech Centers are a safe space for them, a safe space with trusted adults, and 93% of them are confident that they’ll achieve their career goals. That’s the biggest way we measure success, is to really hear it from the young people. I’ll say the last thing – we are working with a third-party company, Informing Change, to conduct a more longitudinal study about the effectiveness of our career pathways program. We are still really early in that process. But that is another avenue that we’re looking at for measuring impact. 

Nati Rodriguez [30:02] 
How long have you been with Best Buy’s Social Impact team? 

 
Chheav Em [30:06] 
Seven months. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [30:08] 
Awesome. Congratulations, that’s a big accomplishment. I’m sure all of your experiences are coming to the forefront in building out this Community Impact Hub here. 

 
Chheav Em [30:22] 
I hope so. I’ve definitely learned a lot from all my colleagues. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [30:28] 
What are you reading, watching, or listening to these days? 

 
Chheav Em [30:32] 
I’m always listening to Taylor Swift. I might take a couple of days off and then I’ll just be right back at it. I don’t know if you’re a Taylor Swift fan. She has an album or a song for every mood. Are you wanting happy fairies? Listen to one of the earlier albums. If you’re wanting revenge, listen to one of the newer ones. She’s got a mood for everything. It’s great.  

 
Nati Rodriguez [30:52] 
I just had a visual of the feelings wheel, the thing for kids, I wonder if there’s a feelings wheel that points to Taylor Swift songs. If not, we should make one. 

 
Chheav Em [31:08] 
I think you’re onto something and that’s probably something that I will Google afterwards. That would be amazing. Oh my goodness. I can’t stop thinking about that now. What am I watching? I just started watching The Staircase and it’s really sad because then I also have caught up to The Staircase on HBO Max. To be fair, there’s only, I think six episodes of The Staircase. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [31:32] 
I don’t know what it is. I’m going to Google it after this. 

Chheav Em [31:35] 
I have feelings about it. I’m just like the protagonist, he’s not a likable person, but I’m hooked. I’m reading a book that my best friend gave me about enneagram sixes. I’m an enneagram 6. It’s all a lot of reflecting on myself. I did just start a book called, The Body Keeps the Score, that one’s all about trauma. If I have downtime during the workday, which sadly not a whole lot of these days, I’m reading the Field Guide to Human-Centered Design, which sounds like such a nerdy thing, but it’s actually really interesting. It really just shapes the way we think about programs and implementation as we look at all of our work, whether it’s Community Impact Hub or something else on the innovation team. If you haven’t read it, I mean, I haven’t finished it, but as I read it, I’m just like, “Oh, that’s very interesting.” 

 
Nati Rodriguez [32:28] 
Is there anything else that you would like to share with the Learner audience? 

 
Chheav Em [32:31] 
I would just say that learning isn’t black and white. The traditional model of learning in the classroom is great. I did well enough in school, but that just wasn’t my way. I didn’t love school. The traditional model is great, but it doesn’t work for a lot of people. It does for a lot, but it’s not everyone. I want to point out there are different ways to learn and we need to acknowledge that; we need to value it and we need to strengthen those learning models. Also, that learning shouldn’t ever stop, myself included. I should embrace learning a lot more and I feel we should all embrace learning a lot more and we should constantly challenge what we think and what we believe, and invite dialogue with people from different perspectives. Because I think if we modeled this for our young people more, we just all would be in a better place. 

 
Nati Rodriguez [32:18] 
Yes. I agree. Well, thank you, Chheav. I really appreciate you taking this time and I’m excited to follow this build out of the Community Impact Hub and your leadership in creating this. 

American Relief Funds 

Annenberg Foundation 

Best Buy 

Best Buy Los Angeles Community Impact Hub 

Bresee Foundation 

Cal State LA 

Enneagram 

Greater LA Fund 

Informing Change 

Legacy LA Teen Tech Center 

Legacy LAYouth Leadership program 

Northwest Nazarene University 

Ramona Gardens Development Complex 

Request For Proposal (RFP) 

Taylor Swift 

The Body Keeps the Score 

The Clubhouse Network 

The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design 

The Staircase 

Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corporation (VSEDC) 

Nati Rodriguez [02:50] 
I would love to learn about your role at the California State Board of Education. According to the website, “The 11-member State Board of Education is California’s K-12 policy-making body for academic standards, curriculum, instructional materials, assessments, and accountability. That sounds like a lot. Can you give us a sense of what this work is actually like?  

Haydee Rodriguez [03:14] 
Absolutely. First of all, I want to extend my acknowledgment to Governor Newsom for having appointed a classroom teacher.  

I’ve been told by a few people that even though a lot of the people on the Board are former educators, or maybe administrators, but in recent history and maybe in the State Board’s history, I may be the only classroom teacher. It’s very important because as teachers, we’re the ones who are putting a lot of these policies that the State Board [puts] into practice. The Board members that I haven’t met in person because we’ve all been in zoom since I was appointed, are so thoughtful in their comments. They’re incredible, well-prepared people. I’ve learned a lot from being in the meetings and we all bring our perspective in which a beautiful way to make decisions. It’s not one person making decisions. We all have our different input and my lens is the teacher lens. Additionally, while I don’t represent the student voice, because of my proximity to students, I feel that I have a pretty good pulse on what my students need, who live in a historically marginalized community on the border and with a huge Latino population. I learn a lot. I learn a lot from going through this process – it’s a lot of work. We meet every other month and in order to make decisions and vote on decisions, it’s essential to prepare, to read the agenda items, to listen to our community partners when they call with concerns about a particular agenda item. Going through the decision-making process that I know will impact all of our students and families in California and teachers – I take this responsibility very seriously.  

I also serve as the liaison to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which I was on for six years. I’m able to sit in the meetings and give reports to the State Board about the things that connect, especially with the teacher shortage, teacher preparation, all of those matters that concern the Board. I’m also the liaison for ELD. I’m able to go back and report to the Board so that the different Board members have different assignments that way one Board member can’t be on top of everything that’s happening. When it comes to, whether it’s the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) or the Instructional Quality Commission (IQC), etc., that way during the liaison reports we are all kept abreast of everything that’s going on.  

Nati Rodriguez [06:31] 
Interesting that you brought up the teacher shortage. I also read about the sub shortage. In your opinion, your research, and experience, how can we get more people interested in teaching and through that pipeline. Could you talk about what the credentialing process looks like now, and what, if anything, would need to change to meet the need in California? 

Haydee Rodriguez [06:52] 
This is an issue that we’ve grappled with since I was on the Commission on Teacher Credentialing. We want to diversify the teacher workforce and we want to make sure that we create interest in younger people, or maybe even career changers, like myself, to go into the teaching profession. It’s a problem and I believe that some of the teacher shortage has been just a response to a lot of the changes that are happening in our society. In a lot of places, teachers are severely underpaid. Oftentimes, when something happens teachers bear the brunt of problems that occur in society. We’re blamed, “it’s the teachers” and this and that, when we’re actually part of a system. As that system is changing, whether it’s for the better, in a direction that may be very stressful, teachers will be pulled in all of these directions.  

One of the things that I think happens as a teacher, I’m just complaining all the time. I may be excellent at executing a lesson plan, but if I don’t look happy, if I’m complaining about everything, a student looking at me isn’t going to want my job. I want to make sure that I’m projecting. I’m so excited about some of my former students who are teachers. In the recent past – Itzel Perez who was just a marvelous student and has now joined the teaching profession, Christina Hernandez, who was one of my AP Spanish Language students, is just this marvelous teacher here in our community, amongst many others. That excites me because I know that they will be a model for their generations. As teachers, we have to remember that we were models for the young people that are sitting there and be mindful that as teachers we want to recruit talented young people into the profession.   

Whether we know it or not, they’re looking at us. Students are always looking at us. Second, I’m a career changer. I didn’t start out as a teacher. I didn’t have a favorable experience in high school. I’m actually a high school dropout. I didn’t feel that the school responded to my needs, whether it was my social-emotional needs, especially my cultural needs, acknowledging my heritage and making me feel like it was a place where I belonged; that memory is very much alive with me. I remember my teachers being all stressed out and they didn’t seem happy to be there. The last thing I wanted to be was a teacher because that was the image that I had in mind. I didn’t want to be somebody who pushed people down the way I felt that I was being pushed down or silenced, and I didn’t want to be somebody that looked unhappy. I joined the corporate world and I was a corporate recruiter. What I knew how to do was interview. When I became a teacher, it was on my way to law school, and it’s important to mention as a Mexican woman, because I felt like I didn’t have any respect, societally, I thought I’m going to become an attorney; I’m going to become a labor lawyer and people will respect me because I’m a lawyer and I’ll have power. So that’s what I thought, and in a very roundabout way, I was asked to substitute a class while I was on my way to law school, which happened to be at the continuation high school, which was students who had dropped out of high school like me. I was reluctant, but I did it. Day one, I fell in love. I looked at students who were me, looking back at me. One of my friends, who was just a marvelous teacher and mentor for me, I asked him the day before, I said, “Jimmy, I don’t know how to teach.”  

He was a band teacher and the epitome of greatness. Jimmy said to me, “Every child has something beautiful inside of them. A good teacher can see it and a great teacher can show it to them,” and he said, “Be a great teacher.”  

That guides me every single day that I’m in the classroom – to be that mirror that I didn’t have.  

I went in and what I knew how to do was interview people. So that’s what I did, I interviewed all of my students. That way I could tailor what it was that they needed for their learning. I thought, what can I do so that nobody has to go through the pain that I went through when I dropped out of high school and the pain that my students are going through. I found out that Stanford School of Education had the best adolescent development program, and I looked into it and that is how I changed my career path. I don’t regret a single day because I was looking for power and I found it. I found it because I know that power is something that we have inside. It’s not a title. It’s something that just makes your soul richer. I know that when, at the end, the experiences that I’ve had with my students, being the mirror for them, will always be there. That’s what I hope, that young people who want to make a difference, who want to academically enrich people’s lives, but also culturally and social-emotionally, that they want to be a teacher, and not just that, but make the profession stronger and be the voices, whether it’s on state boards or other policy-making bodies, but be that voice, so that we have a system that embraces teacher voice and helps students grow.  

Nati Rodriguez [13:21] 
That’s so inspiring. I got chills listening to you share about helping students see what’s good in them. We would see a lot of joy in the classroom. 

Nati Rodriguez [14:21] 
I understand that the pandemic has significantly impacted not only student lives, but teacher lives. Earlier you made the point that teachers often carry the brunt of what’s happening outside the classroom. How did the pandemic change your work in the classroom and what is here to stay? What were some of the lessons learned for you?

Haydee Rodriguez [14:40] 
There were so many lessons. One of the things that became very clear to me, as soon as our schools closed down, was there are certain roles that teachers have which come across as naggy to students. I don’t want to say monitoring because I monitor my students’ learning, rather than being an academic authority or an authority on student learning and student growth, authoritarian monitoring every moment that the student is doing. I noticed that my students would rely on that outside monitor. When schools closed down, they didn’t have an internal monitor to say, you have to do this or you have to do this. That’s one of the things that my students really struggled with, that independent learning and not doing something just to check it off a list, but actually for the joy in learning. It occurred to me that we really need to work harder to have students become that internal voice that motivates them to really build those independent skills. Something that really excites me is how much of my students became comfortable emailing. Prior to that, if I sent an email, nobody would read it. With the pandemic, they got really comfortable emailing and then little things, like me telling them, “pro-tip – fill in the subject line.” That started helping the students develop, being able to boil something down to the essentials of what they’re writing. Giving them feedback on that and helping that skill grow, I’ve noticed students that email me now, even though they’re not in my class, they got that lesson. Those are the soft skills that we talked about, but also the technology. Having students understand that it’s not just about being tech natives, but how can we harness that so they’re actually using tools to learn and not just using tools to get something done.  

Another thing that really broke my heart was the whole digital divide and realizing that some students don’t have the economic resources to get their needs met. Again, [I am very] grateful that I live in a state that responded to that immediately and made sure that our students had the tools to do the work that they needed to do. Another lesson is how much I just love being back in person and hearing their laughter. Because when we were online, everybody was on mute. If I said something funny, which I usually did, I had a little laugh box, so I’d have to push the button so that I could hear laughter, and then they would crack up. But if something funny happens for us to be able to laugh collectively because there’s a lot of healing in that.  

For me personally, one of the lessons is we know our students undergo serious mental health issues. I’ve taken psychology classes, but I don’t have the skills for working with depression or serious mental health issues. I can provide a safe space for them to process, [or] refer them to people who can help them if they have something bigger that they need to get through. My students are incredibly grateful to be back in person. Sometimes it feels like when I go to a store, that, wow, did we learn the lessons of the pandemic? I think that my students did. At least the students that I have are so grateful to be back, whether it’s their mask-wearing or whatever they have to do to keep each other safe. It makes my heart overflow with joy because they want to be there and they want to take care of each other.  

Nati Rodriguez [19:08] 
It sounds like you’ve created a really beautiful space for them to learn and grow. Can you share about your students and the community you serve?  

Haydee Rodriguez [19:22] 
Imperial County is on the border with Mexicali. Mexicali’s population is about 2 million. We’re a border community. When I was growing up, I lived in Calexico and we would cross every single day. It was very different back then. Especially after 9/11, sometimes the lines are very long, but my students, a lot of them, they call Mexicali, Mex. When I ask them what they’re going to be doing over the break or over the weekend – [they say], “I’m going to go to Mex,” because their grandparents live there, their families are there. My students are transnational. They’re back forth all the time and they have tremendous resources. For example, exchanging money in their head; I’ll hear them converting pesos to dollars, but they’re failing their math classes. So how is that? I tell them, how is it? “Oh, I’m not a math person,” and I see them like doing this boom, boom, boom, quicker than I can.  

I tell them, I think you are a math person – maybe it’s different when you have some kind of a block when you go into your classroom. One time I had a student who was really struggling with equations and, although I’m not a math teacher, we were in Avid class and I sat down with her and I said, “So what’s going on?” I said, “Look, why don’t you just not think about math right now? I’m having a party this weekend, and this is my budget, and this is how much stuff is going to cost. Can you help me with it?” 

She’s like, “yeah, of course!” It was all equations. Oh, but if I only have this much money for tables and she’s like, “why don’t we take away from this? Do you really need to have this?”  

When were done, I said, “you just did equations.” And she’s like, “what do you mean?” 

I said, “I’m really not having a party.” 

It was actually something very spontaneous because I know that she’s really good at organizing things and parties. I thought, how can I use something that she’s really good at, so she can see how equations work and she got it. And she laughed. There are some skills, innate skills and some skills that they’ve developed. They don’t yet see how those can transfer into academics. That’s our job as teachers to be able to show them that. About 87% of our population is Latino, Mexican, and there’s diversity within my students. They may all fall under the Mexican umbrella, but there’s a lot of diversity within that.  

Nati Rodriguez [22:17] 

The story that you shared about them, budgeting for a party, reminds me how beautiful it is to have a teacher, or someone really know you that can take this little bit of information that they have about you and help you make that connection. Especially in edtech, we think technology is going to solve a lot of things. When I hear something like this, it reminds me how much the human element, and really understanding a student, and where they’re coming from, helps with the learning process. 

Haydee Rodriguez [22:40] 
Absolutely. That’s the crux of National Board Certification, right? Know your students – that is the golden rule – know your students. When we know our students, we know when something’s going on with them, we know what they like, who they are. Like you said, we’re able to connect with them on that level and find something that interests them. Right now, I have some students who are in my world history class, and they’re very much into astrology. I mean like deeply into astrology, but they know they have all of this knowledge about astrology. We’ll be studying Napoleon and they’ll google him. He was a Leo and stuff that he does, they’ll say, “That is so Leo.” 

So, I mean, like Robespierre in the French revolution, they found his astrological sign and that’s how they embrace what we’re looking at. Rather than saying, “oh, astrology, it’s a pseudo-science.” I’m not going to belittle anyone or put anybody down; I’ll use what they know and have them connect to what we’re studying. I actually set aside a little project for them, so that they can use some of the historical characters and tie that into astrology, and they’re very excited about it.  

Nati Rodriguez [24:16] 
I love that. That sounds like a great project.  

Haydee Rodriguez [24:18] 
Yes. Yeah. I’ll keep you posted on it.  

Nati Rodriguez [24:22] 
Thinking back on your first years of teaching, what advice would you give yourself?  

Haydee Rodriguez [24:30] 
Well, my first years of teaching, I wanted to do so much. Again, because I came from the private sector where I would work 12 to 15 hours a day, sometimes. I had a lot of energy and just wanted to do so much. I think that what I would tell myself is, well, I was going to say don’t do so much. When I look back, I’m happy [that I did]. There was one year when I was coaching mock trial and also coaching academic decathlon (AcaDec). I was going nuts with that, but I wouldn’t change that. I would tell myself to find my strengths and use them to bring out the strengths in my students and help them develop a path and to not expect that they’re going to be like me. My own experiences helped me to see that we don’t come in as empty sacks. We have a lot of experiences. Maybe to rest a little bit, that’s what I would tell myself. It’s okay to rest.  

Nati Rodriguez [25:42] 
How do you rest now? What revitalizes you? 

Haydee Rodriguez [25:47] 
Drawing, and not very well. You’re not talking to a Van Gogh here, by the way, or a Miró, or a Tamayo. I consider myself very creative, not necessarily artistic. My classrooms are like little incubators, where a lot of the expression that happens in there is creative expression. I draw, I doodle and I belong to this group where every day, we produce something, it’s called 50 Days of Making and we share it on Instagram. I’ve put my doodles and my art out there. So, people have seen it and it’s really nice because I don’t care if people don’t like it. That’s what I want my students to feel comfortable with. It’s really funny because last year, actually, when we came back for a short period in April, a few students came back to school with very strong conditions. They had to have temperature checks.  

What I did with my students was we made a book and I taught them how to make a book. I learned this from the National Writing Project in 1998, my first-year teaching. I bought all of the materials, I bought watercolors, and I told them, I said, this is what we’re going to do – you’re going to make a book and you’re going to chronicle. This will be a primary source of what you’re going through during the pandemic and that’s what we did. During that time, I played music that they liked. I asked them to give me songs for a playlist and I played music and we all just painted and drew and wrote. This year, I don’t know what the vibe my classroom is given off, but I have students coming by and dropping off their artwork for me to hang up on my wall. I’m not an art teacher. Again, I’m not an artist, but it’s using creativity in art for them to express themselves. It’s very cool. So that’s what I do and garden. I love working out in the garden and hanging out with the bees, taking care of nature for my enjoyment and for posterity.  

Nati Rodriguez [28:10] 
Wonderful. We’ll definitely need to get your Instagram handle so we can share it. I’m curious also about your other teachers, how do you continue to share best practices or learn from others? What does that look like for you?  

Haydee Rodriguez [28:24] 
One of the hard things also about the pandemic is as that teachers, we just came back and haven’t really had a chance to sit down and talk to each other. Some colleagues that I’m very close to – Renee, Alejandra and Robin – we share things that we’re doing and things that are working well. It’s wonderful. We share common students so we always look for ways to support them. We all taught Avid together, actually, Alejandra, Renee and I still do. We supported each other during the pandemic, we support each other in supporting students. When we know that a student needs something, we reach out to each other with the best practices. With new teachers, I always make myself available to see if there’s any way that I can support them, especially as they’re going through their induction process.  

But they’re so busy that I think they just go into their classrooms and try to get through the day. They have somebody that’s assigned to them to support them through that process. One of the things that’s happened this year is I am on the social-emotional learning team at school. There are four of us who have gotten together during advisory time to plan activities for our students. That has been such a blessing, because two of the teachers there, our paths probably would’ve never crossed on campus. During this time, which is a very short period of time, but we’re connecting with each other, we’re supporting each other. I can’t stress enough how important it is for schools to really make time for teachers to sit down and share common practices and share about their students, how they can support them and have some type of rubric for conversations.  

When I was at East Palo Alto High School, we had time to sit down and say, “I’ve noticed this in my advisory class that this student hasn’t been talking much to others lately. What are you seeing?”  

We can refer them to the counselor and then somebody else might know, “I coach him in soccer and one of the students told me that his mother’s sick.”  

When we can communicate and as teachers be diagnosticians, like doctors are, rather than look at our students as problems, look at them as, how can we find out what’s going on so that we can support them? That is very powerful. I’m in a traditional, comprehensive high school now, and I would like to see, this is my wish list, for us to be able to have time to do that break up a certain number of students and just have teachers responsible for them, for lack of a better word. And not that many so that it’s overwhelming and impossible, but a few that we can come together and talk about and support.  

Nati Rodriguez [32:07] 
Yes. I love that model. It also gives the students somebody that they feel that’s on their side, their champion, that covers their whole person, and it’s not just subject specific.  

Haydee Rodriguez [32:20]
Right. We’ve done similar things like getting to know one student at least really well. We’ve done that at our school. But if we’re using those ideas in a comprehensive, traditional model, it becomes very hard to really execute the idea. We really need to see the time, to make sure that teachers have enough time to do that, and to be able to schedule that into the day so that it does happen and there is good follow-through because the students and the teachers all benefit.

Nati Rodriguez [33:01] 
I have a dream of redesigning the school day completely, but that’s another conversation.  

Haydee Rodriguez [33:07] 
Yes, it is. One of the things that I’m very excited about is at our last State Board meeting, we had a conversation about community schools and the whole wraparound model – creating places that respond to the communities. That is something that’s coming down the pike in California and that is very exciting because within that, there are opportunities for redesign to meet adolescent students’ needs.  

Nati Rodriguez [33:41] 
That’s great to hear, and I love to see where we end up. It’s been so hard to make change in education, but I think because of what has happened in the last two years, although unfortunate, we’re really thinking hard about our public education system. 

Nati Rodriguez [33:39] 
Where do you see yourself in five years?  

Haydee Rodriguez [33:39] 
I love being in the classroom. If there comes a time before retirement, when I feel like I’m not serving my students, then it’s time to do something different. However, there is something that I have been thinking about now for a year and a half, and that is a program in a New Mexico university and it’s a master’s in Art Therapy. I could be a counselor, there’s a counseling degree in art therapy. I would love to do that and take the time. I can’t this year, but I’m seriously thinking of applying next year, because I can use a lot of those skills with my students and perhaps move into school counseling as I’m getting ready to retire. Within that there would be a lot of opportunities and with a master’s in art therapy, I would be able to work with little children as well. That’s something that I’d love to do in the future. Something that I’m doing right now this year I was selected to be the United States Institute of Peace Teacher for California.  

 It’s very exciting because I do believe conflict exists and it should remain as non-violent conflict. Once violence happens, we all lose. I am definitely a person who advocates for peace at all levels. So, it’s very exciting. I have always wanted to participate in something with the United States Institute of Peace and this opportunity opened up. They’ve never had a teacher from California so I’m the first and my students are peace builders. My ninth graders are actually the ones that are learning about using diplomatic tools for conflict resolution. They’re going to create children’s books and we’re going to share those books. They’re going to take peace-building tools and pick a conflict that they’ve witnessed or that they know about within their own school setting. Then they’ll write a book about it and the resolution, and we’ll share it with the younger students here in El Centro.  

Nati Rodriguez [37:15] 
That’s lovely. Wow.  

Haydee Rodriguez [37:18] 
I’m so excited about it. It really is. It was a dream come true to have been selected. I’m so happy about it.  

Nati Rodriguez [37:25] 
Thank you for sharing that. That’s such a big accomplishment and also the work that the students will do will be incredible. Haydee, is there anything else that you would like to share with us?  

Haydee Rodriguez [37:34] 
Thank you so much for the invitation. I really appreciate it. I do hope that we can find creative ways to recruit teachers of color and to recruit new teachers into what I consider the most beautiful profession in the world. We have the privilege of accessing young hearts and young minds, and it’s not a privilege to take lightly. It’s exciting to be part of the Annenberg [Learner] Podcast because when we started the school in East Palo Alto and I was a student teacher, my classroom was featured in the culturally responsive pedagogy. It was a lesson that a group of teachers and myself designed and it had to do with colonization. We read Bartolomé de las Casas, and looked at some of the changes in culture and colonization. It was the Annenberg project, so it’s nice to reconnect this way.

Nati Rodriguez [38:49] 
Yes, yes, definitely. We have beautiful series that a lot of our educators around the world access. It’s great to be interviewing you and coming full circle after so many years and watching your journey.  

Haydee Rodriguez [39:04] 
Thank you and the series is wonderful. I receive the emails and I often go in there for my own professional development. It’s something that I can do here at home. I can, sit in my comfy chair on my iPad and watch some of these lessons and they’re masterful so great curation.

Academic Decathlon (AcaDec) 

Bartolomé de las Casas 

California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) 

Christina Hernandez 

Continuation high school 

East Palo Alto High School 

El Centro 

Governor Newsom 

Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) 

Itzel Perez 

Joan Miró 

Mock Trial 

National Writing Project 

New Mexico University – Master’s in Art Therapy 

Maximilien Robespierre 

San Diego State University 

Stanford School of Education 

Stanford University 

Rufino Tamayo 

United States Institute of Peace Teacher for California 

Van Gogh 

50 Days of Making