Episode Transcript
Speaker 2 00:15 Hi, I'm John Moscow and I'm Amy helper. Welcome to ethical schools where we discuss strategies for creating inclusive equitable schools and youth programs that helps students to develop a mittment and capacity to build ethical institutions. Our guest today is dr Harriet faint professor
Speaker 3 00:36 Lehman college school of education in the department of counseling, leadership literacy and special education. Dr Fein who goes by, Nicki was the inaugural Dean of the school of education at Lehman. She spent two years as interim provost of the college after which she returned to teaching as a faculty member. Welcome Nikki.
Speaker 4 00:55 I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 3 00:58 Maybe Lehman college was just awarded a federal grant to establish a teacher residency program. How will that work and why is it so important?
Speaker 4 01:08 So this is the second teacher residency program that the U S department of education has sponsored at Lehman college. So we are over the moon excited about having another opportunity to prepare teacher residents in high needs schools in the Bronx. What's really important about this program is that it provides us with a unique opportunity to both look at ourselves critically and look at our schools critically and figure out a way forward to do simultaneous reform of teacher preparation and the work that goes on in schools. So this is in a sense a real partnership and like all partnerships, it requires a lot of interaction and communication and what the us department of education dollars do provide us with resources in order to make this really work. Um, at the core there is a basic <inaudible> you're lying assumption, which is the best way to prepare people to be teachers and have them ready to teach day one when they essentially our certificated is to provide them with a year long clinical experience.
Speaker 4 02:29 Traditionally students do a one semester student teaching experience. And I think there is, there was consensus that a one semester is simply insufficient to provide students with all the opportunities they need to really understand the culture of a school and to really spread their wings and try out new approaches, um, and meet all of the requirements are just part of getting certificated or licensed in a state. So having the luxury of a year to be able to really get intensive training with cooperating teachers, mentor teachers who are really prepared to host them well is just a marvelous opportunity for our candidates and a great opportunity for us to really forge even deeper partnerships with some of our Bronx schools.
Speaker 3 03:31 And I understand that part of the grant is also going to include the opportunity to work with second stage teachers who have achieved tenure but may have say three to five years in the classroom. And a lot of these teachers are being tapped for teacher leader roles and that many want to stay in the classroom and not become administrators. So can you talk a little bit about what you do with them? And how you can help them do achieve their goals.
Speaker 4 03:59 So there was a really wonderful opportunity provided by the last grant cycle for us to get a three year extension on our first teacher quality partnership grant. The money for those three years was specifically earmarked to follow up on our residents once they had become teachers of record. Many of them, particularly the ones who started early in the project were now teachers of record in years three, four, and five. And we spend time observing their teaching and meeting with them informally in their school settings as well as hosting come back to Lehman symposia and other kinds of group experiences. What we discovered is that many of them had already been tapped to be teacher leaders. Some of them were already out of the classroom full time, some were out of the classroom part-time. Um, some were simply taking other kinds of teacher leadership positions that allowed them to stay full time in the classroom.
Speaker 4 05:08 But it was pretty clear that our residents, because they were deemed to be very talented, already demonstrating some really exemplary teaching skills, were being tapped by principals to play leadership roles in their building. So we plan to follow up with this second iteration by being quite deliberate as we look at second stage teachers. And while most of these grant projects, our design to make sure that you follow up on your resident, um, for the first two years of teaching, we're committed to following up with our residents. You're three, four or five and in perpetuity. Um, so we realize that shift in identity moves you from being a teacher who looks at your own practice in your own classroom in a systematic and reflective way. That's certainly what we hope we do during the first several years of teaching with good feedback from your mentors, informal and formal within your building and hopefully supported by Lehman faculty as well.
Speaker 4 06:22 But during the second stage, we're going to focus on pivoting from looking just at your classroom, but looking at your leadership skills. Could you explore a little bit? What is a teacher leader and what does it entail? So teacher leaders play a number of different roles. One that's very dear to our hearts as people in a teacher preparation program is teacher leaders train the next generation of teachers by serving as cooperating teachers or mentor teachers and hosting a student teacher or an intern in their own classroom. So that's one very important role. And very often we assign people to classrooms and picked out mentor teachers who are well prepared to demonstrate their excellence but have never been trained or educated or provided opportunities to learn how to mentor or how to coach. So we realized that that was a missing link that we needed to really focus in on a second kind of teacher leadership role that we see lots of our students being offered in Bronx schools is some kind of coaching position.
Speaker 4 07:35 So you become a literacy coach or a mathematics coach at the elementary level for example. And you're expected to push into class. This room's model. Great practice, observed colleagues and tried to provide them with some assistance in how to move the needle from where they are to where they should be in order to impact positively on the learning of children in their classroom. They may also, there's a third kind of teacher leader tapped to do inservice or professional development, not necessarily in classrooms, but perhaps organize the professional development in a building across the year as part of a committee task force or working directly with the building principal. A fourth type of teacher leadership opportunity is someone who really wants to dig into the data that exists within a school building and try to make sense out of all of the data and figure out how to make that data actionable and then turn that data into actionable data, which then really gets used by teachers in the building to improve the quality of instruction. So I've named I think four different kinds of teacher leadership roles. Different people have different talents, different interests and may elect one or another or across the career continuum may find themselves in one role for some period of time. And then in another one of these roles for another period of time.
Speaker 3 09:16 All the roles that you've mentioned seem to involve a shift from working directly with students or at least consistently in a classroom to working with the adults, the other adults in the school. Are there ways that teacher leaders can continue to have their own classes if they really want to be spending a good deal of their time working directly with, with one group of students?
Speaker 4 09:39 Yes. I think the clearest place that teachers who don't want to give up that wonderful experience of working directly with the children would be serving as a cooperating teacher or mentor teacher because then you are hosting someone in your classroom and you are developing the next generation in consultation and cooperation with you know, with college or university. Um, you are essentially making a huge impact on the teachers of tomorrow and in fact all the research evidence indicates that there are two people in teacher prep programs, whether they be traditional or a year long residency program that really make the critical difference in who I become as a teacher. One is your cooperating or host teacher. And the second one is your university or college supervisor. Having a wonderful student teaching team or internship team is really important. And any teacher leader who wants to stay in their classroom full time really has a great opportunity to make a huge impact on teachers of tomorrow.
Speaker 4 10:47 The other roles tend to take you away from students, at least part of the day. And that's why I almost can see a a career pathway. You come in and out of teacher leadership roles, but you mentioned quite appropriately that the skills that you need to be a teacher leader outside of your classroom and even inside your classroom as a mentor teacher means that you need to know how to teach adults, not just how to teach children and <inaudible> in some ways teaching adults has its own unique challenges and requires, as you pointed out, a different orientation in a different kind of training. So I've seen many, many successful teachers who could fall on their face if they were asked to teach adults because you have to in some ways address problems in different ways. Right. Um, so I think it's important that we provide the kind of training. If we believe someone is exemplary and someone who can really be a wonderful model, we have to help them understand how to be explicit about what they do, how to think aloud in a way that other people can understand how to present material in a way appropriate for adults and not essentially alienate people because they feel it's what they're getting is developmentally inappropriate and well. The notion of listening is really important when you talk about teaching kids, it's even more important when you're talking about teaching adults
Speaker 5 12:25 <inaudible>. Thank you. They're disproportionately fewer teachers of color in elementary and secondary schools and they also have higher attrition rates in their first few years of teaching. How can these situations be improved?
Speaker 4 12:41 I'm, I'm someone who believes strongly that a residency model was specifically designed, number one, to attract individuals of color to the profession because it provides training, stipends that incentivize your participation. That helps because many of the students who we are trying to attract into teacher education come from backgrounds, neighborhoods and families much like the students that they're going to be serving, which means they've got a significant economic challenges. So that's number one. I think a year long paid residency program has a unique opportunity to attract. Second of all because we're embedding our candidates in school cultures, high need school cultures which are not necessarily um, challenge free. We're helping them get a realistic foothold into a world which essentially is the world we want them to stick with once they graduate. There's no point in training people in an ideal setting only to throw them into their first couple years of teaching into a setting that doesn't resemble that ideal setting.
Speaker 4 14:00 That's a formula for disaster. So how do we attract more teachers who look like the kids is the phrase I tend to use one the year long residencies help particularly because of training stipends to providing school settings which are like the settings they are going to essentially enter once they become teachers of record. Three I really believe strongly and try very hard to promote a notion of cluster hires in buildings because I believe that if you prepare people to be teachers, um, and they share a conceptualization of teaching and learning and they feel that they can support one another, they're more likely to stay the course. So rather than hire one wonderful in one building and another one in another, if we can find ways to do cluster hiring, I think it promotes retention and growth. So, um, the other thing I think we have to be very deliberate about when we think about students of color is the same thing we're thinking about when we think about graduation rates at the college level.
Speaker 4 15:14 When we worry about who graduates and who doesn't. So I'm thinking we need to be very intrusive in our advising when we deal with individuals who we believe are likely to fall out of the pipeline. So how do we keep people in the pipeline? Number one, I've dropped about ways that I think we can keep people in the pipeline. Um, the teacher pipeline up til they get certified. Now, how do you keep them in the pipeline once they actually are teachers of record? The notion of cluster hiring helps. The notion of being very intentional about the way you advise and mentor helps. So you need to be proactive and not assume that people are at risk, but rather assume that there may be unique needs that we need to address and you have to root out any unconscious bias or unconscious racism or classism and name it and address. Once you do that, I believe that you've created a friendlier climate, a more inclusive climate, one that teachers who come from underrepresented groups are more likely to feel like they have a voice. In
Speaker 3 16:35 talking about the cluster hiring, can you expand on that a little bit? What does that actually look like from the elementary or secondary schools point of view and from the teacher's point of view and why is that so important? You've sort of addressed some of that, but if you could talk a little more about it.
Speaker 4 16:52 So I've found that sometimes, I mean it can happen by, it can happen just by serendipity or it can happen by design, is that individuals from the same program and up getting hired in the same building and it may not always be in the same year because job openings obviously fluctuate year by year, but when you can identify a cluster of individuals who have all participated in a program and are attached, let's say to a college or university, they have a shared identity and that shared identity becomes a way to mutually support one another. I think that it's very, very easy when you're in the early stages of a teaching career to lose track of some of the good ideas and key principles that you knew once upon a time, but that you put in a desk drawer by having a group of people who shared a common experience with you, you can serve each other as reminders of why you got into the business to begin with, what you had as a mission way back when and how you can keep that mission going. Also by clustering, it gives university faculty and college faculty a destination because if we know that there is a group of schools, a network of schools that we can find many of our graduates employed by, we're more likely to be a presence in those buildings to again serve as an informal support service. <inaudible>
Speaker 4 18:36 diversity is also an issue at teacher's college. How do you address this at Lehman? So we've been, we've been very fortunate in in many ways, um, to be able to really chip away at this particular problem. And the way we've approached it is not all of that clever to telling the truth very generally. What happens when you're going to hire for a faculty position, you put together a search committee and the search committee then looks through, you know, creates job descriptions and post those and then applicants apply for these positions. It's not any secret that when a search committee looks at a group of CVS and cover letters, you tend to pick people unconsciously who are just like you. They graduated from the same kind of institution or they worked in places that you're familiar with. And so there's a tendency to replicate yourself. All that I did as an administrator was to say, when I saw a pool of candidates coming in front of me and I saw that they weren't as diverse as I might have liked them to be.
Speaker 4 19:54 Um, you have three slots to bring people to campus. I'm going to give you one more. If you go back into your pool and identify a more diverse candidate than the three that you've put forward. I'm not asking you to pick out anyone who is not qualified, but I am asking you to look and see if you could diversify the pool. And the way I'll do it is by giving you the incentive to bring four and not three people to campus as finalists. It was amazing how well that work. Instead of saying, no, I don't like who you picked and therefore I'm going to abort this search or do something, you know, really high handed. All I did was give them yet another incentive to look back at their pool and it has yielded really good results. A second thing we've done is create these informal support systems.
Speaker 4 20:49 We've connected with a national center for professional development that really is very specifically geared to marginalized individuals in the Academy and what that's done on our campus, largely it's an online service, but what it's done on our campus is to create meetups and like minded individuals tend to find themselves working together to improve their own tenure and promotion opportunities. And guess what many of these are our faculty of color who across the college come together in these informal meetups to support each other and to ask the tough questions of each other that they don't feel comfortable asking of the people who are supervising them. So I think number one, incentivizing increasing the pool of diversity and then to creating informal structures that build relationships across boundaries seems to work. That's great. Susan, about relationships. I know Lehman offers courses in ethical leadership, which we usually think about as being all about relationships.
Speaker 4 22:07 Yes. What do you address in these courses? So we have two courses that I'm very familiar with that actually have ethics in the title. So one is, um, of course that we offer in the brand new masters in organizational leadership, which really has attracted some folks from the education sector who are not interested in becoming building leaders or district leaders but rather work in education in some of the non-instructional areas. But we've also attracted a lot of individuals from the nonprofit world and from healthcare facilities. And um, so it's a really interesting kind of mix. During the first semester you're in that master's program, you take a course on ethical leadership and in that we talk about virtues, you know, leadership virtues and we talk about moral development and the construct of moral development in relationship to behavior. Um, but more importantly we talk about some of the kinds of leadership styles that are at their base, very relational.
Speaker 4 23:20 So the kinds of constructs that we use help people understand notions like servant leadership and understand collective or collaborative leadership styles. What is servant leadership? So servant leadership is actually a set of traits that have been identified by the individuals who have of promoted this particular kind of approach to leadership. And they involve at the base. While there are certain definite traits, most of them boil down to a notion of being true to yourself, being a good listener and having the interests of people that you work with as more important Britain, then your own self interest. So there's a lot of emphasis on really, really making everyone within the organization the best that they can be. In collective leadership there is a model to say don't wait for the hero, don't wait for the white Knight who's going to come riding on a horse and save you.
Speaker 4 24:34 Collective leadership is about looking for leadership characteristics across all individuals and coming together in teams to try to solve what really are thorny problems, often thorny social problems. So in addition we look at issues like gender and we look at issues like how notions of leadership are exhibited in different kinds of cultures. And so we try to globalize some of the notions of leadership. And I think one of the most stunning characteristics of this course and the course in the ed leadership sequence is that we linked this to clinical field hours. So students constantly look back at what they're reading about, what they're seeing in video clips or listening to a podcast and connecting it to what they're seeing in their workplace or in their community and trying to figure out how to apply what they're learning. So that's the course in the master's in organizational leadership in the ed leadership program, which is really primarily designed to prepare people to be certified as building leaders.
Speaker 4 25:51 We have a course in ethics in school leadership specific course. I think that may be somewhat unusual that a program actually use curriculum real estate specifically for one course. This course happens to be offered in the second year of a two year program. And again it's that field hours attached to it. Um, so students who are largely in teaching positions, although some of them may already have moved into administrative positions, are grappling with ethical issues and ethical dilemmas and thinking about their reasoning and thinking about their choices as part and parcel of being part of a graduate cohort. So I think that's the, the link between theory and practice is really important at Lehman in our school of education. And, um, I think we believe that we have a conceptual framework that requires us to think about ethics front and center. Okay. So if all we are doing is training people to be good managers and technocrats, then we would take a very different approach. Our approach really is asking people to think about the bigger picture, about justice, about equity, about making sure that everybody has access to high quality services. All of that is just so much part of what Lehman's school of education is about, that it's front and center. In both of these programs, preparing people to be leaders.
Speaker 3 27:35 Could you give a couple of examples of what might be some specifics of of things you'd be asking some of your students who, who are in these situations to grapple with?
Speaker 4 27:46 I'll give you a very concrete example from a, an assignment, a key assignment that I ask students to do. They are expected to do what I'll call a dilemma analysis. So they pick out a dilemma that they're experiencing in their own workplace. Okay. They see injustice, they see questionable practices, people you know, sort of not necessarily doing the honest and the right thing and they see a supervisor or a colleague who essentially is demonstrating the worst possible kinds of behavior as far as they're concerned. They have to ask the question. Then the dilemma is, I see this, what do I do about it? What did I do about it in the past? You know, has this been going on for a very long period of time? And as someone who is perhaps in a follower position rather than a leadership position, what is my responsibility and how can I affect change in this workplace to make it a more ethical environment?
Speaker 4 29:05 So that's one kind of example. And you know, people have talked about supervisors who clearly favor one type of individual over another or who damp and morale because they're such poor listeners that no one feels they have a voice. Um, they talk about colleagues who take advantage of other colleagues and are free loaders. Um, so many of the very, some of the very common things that you see that irritates you on a day to day basis in your work life. However, we're, I'm asking them to put an ethical lens and zaniness it's not enough to no longer are you allowed to just say, Oh, this is above my pay grade. Okay. Or I'm just going to keep quiet because I'm going to get in trouble if I point this out, I'll be a whistleblower and something terrible will occur. Now I'm asking them to move beyond the very simplistic solution to trying to make an ethical decision.
Speaker 4 30:08 And then they come back and they journal about their successes, their lack of success in some cases. But we keep this dialogue going. So we build a relationship across the semester, which hopefully gives people the confidence they need to become the ethical person. They want to be. Just an amazing course. My ed leadership cohort too. I mean, they are young in my eyes, young and enthusiastic, early career teachers actually, they're second stage teachers, most of them. Um, who, when we talk about inequity, when we talk about racism and classism and all the unfairness that they witnessed, both in the communities in the schools, they are ready to take this on. And so in their field experiences, they so much work within their context to figure out a way to move their schools in a positive direction. So they're careful because we all know life is, it's a Duco puzzle in New York city, department of education schools, you've got union regs, you've got a New York city, DOE, reds, you've got state, you've got federal. There are so many ways that you can essentially jump into the deep end of the pool and drought. So I think what we try to do as a cohort and as a faculty working with these students is to make sure that they don't jump into the pool and drown, but rather we help them be the change agents. They want to be in a way that essentially allows them to continue to stay the course.
Speaker 5 32:00 Wow. So school systems are starting to focus more on equity issues and institutionalized racism, perhaps in a deeper way than in the past. We had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with Jesse Hagopian about black lives matters in school.
Speaker 4 32:20 <inaudible>.
Speaker 5 32:20 What are some other ways that you think fundamental change can happen in school?
Speaker 4 32:26 I think there's no question that first, you really have to have a critical mass of teachers who it comes from backgrounds that are different from, you know, those who have typically come a background of white privilege. So there's no question that partially you've got to have, this is not an academic discussion. You know, it's easy to have those discussions to talk about being more inclusive when there are, you're not talking about it with people who don't look like you, who don't think like you. You can be very noble. Um, I think it's, uh, essentially something which means that you really have to dig in. Um, the school district, New York has talked a great deal now about having, having these conversations, having these tough conversations and learning how to do that. They've sent out the advanced message that they're going to, but many of my students say it hasn't really happened yet.
Speaker 4 33:25 Okay. So I think the courageous conversation model, difficult conversations about race and class need to be orchestrated. They're so much better when there really is heterogeneity Janae and the group of individuals who are discussing essentially these principles. And then you've got to have some, you know, you have to have decent ground rules, otherwise people go away feeling silenced and sort of digging down into their own respective holes and not coming out for any future discussions in an authentic way. So the, the key here is how do you orchestrate this in a way that people continue to grow, don't feel so threatened that they just hunker down and stop participating in any meaningful way. And how do you create the heterogeneity in a group that would foster real conversation and not just platitudes?
Speaker 3 34:28 And you've, you've talked about the importance of talking about issues in a way that doesn't make people feel overly defensive. Right. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? I mean, that seems to be a core question of how to do it.
Speaker 4 34:45 I really like it when a small, I, I think you start with small groups of people. So you know, so you don't try to do this with an entire building, but rather you try to organize groups of four, six, eight people want to come together. And I think you start with a very concrete situation. So I think case studies, whether they be generated within your own building or whether you start with case studies that are, you know, sort of written for this purpose, um, where everybody tries to come up with a solution for a problem that very clearly has at its root. Some elements of institutional racism or classism. So for example, I always think about the example of the male elementary teacher who happens to be, you know, African gets assigned as a fourth grade teacher and finds himself always being asked to lead discipline efforts in the building.
Speaker 4 35:46 Number one because he's male and one number two because he's black. And when other kinds of calls for assistance come out of the principal's office, like who wants to sit on a task force about curriculum innovation or infusion of technology? This young man never gets the nod, right? Because he's been typecast as the school disciplinarian. That's a pretty lonely position to be in. That's a great case study to talk about in a group of males and females, people from different ethnicities, people who represent different amounts of experience within the building. And again, I like, I believe all politics are local. I believe all problem solving starts with a very concrete situation and you try to keep things finite so that you can build off a real concrete experience, which might then be something you can solve. And once you solve one, then other problems sort of emerge and people believe you can solve them.
Speaker 4 36:56 When you try to take on, you know, all of the issues of an achievement gap in your building or the entire problem in math, um, that exists, let's say in a middle school or all of the bigger issues that seem so intractable. I think you make it much harder if you start with the task, Oh, let's see, we got a problem at this door between the beginning of school and first period. Let's try to analyze what that problem is, what causes it, and as a group, can we figure out how to solve that? Okay. Often that problem relates to certain kids who happened to be from certain kinds of families who essentially don't feel like they are terribly welcomed within that high school. So what do we do differently to sort of diffuse what's become a discipline problem and lead to negative consequences for kids?
Speaker 4 38:05 And honestly, frustration for teachers and administrators as well. Okay. So I think when I say concrete, I think there are a number of kinds of concrete problems. And when small groups of people who are heterogeneous, who come at them from different perspectives, learn to solve them together. You begin to have an ability to talk across boundaries. Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't spoken about? I'm really excited about the fact that the notion of culturally responsive and sustaining practice, it has the kind of energy behind it and now gravitas behind it that I see coming out of New York state and New York city. I think some of it is incredibly, some of the languages, amazingly brave. The language that I believe is particularly brave is allowing students to have a voice. Um, and I think that's going to be a major, major shift that taking leave for middle and high school teachers and administrators.
Speaker 4 39:16 I think that's a place where building staff can come together and try to figure out how to create positive energy among students to give them voices in the curriculum in the way the school is run. That will essentially unite the school personnel in ways that other issues might not. But again, that's a real brave moves to give students voices because you know what, you never know what they're gonna say. And um, that I think is a really interesting challenge. I also really love the strong emphasis on the fact that schools are embedded in communities, and it's not just about parent outreach. It's really about trying to figure out how to make communities work better.
Speaker 6 40:11 <inaudible>
Speaker 2 40:13 thank you so much, dr Harriet sane. You are very welcome. Thank you for listening and second you listeners for joining us. We'd like to hear how you've incorporated ideas. You've heard our podcast or read on the ethical school's blog. Please email us at posts at <inaudible> dot org that's posts at ethical school. Stadler checkout prior episodes and articles are on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. All right. Editor and social media manager is Amanda man, until next week.
Speaker 6 41:19 <inaudible>.
