Terri

Windows and Mirrors

One of my first years of teaching, I had a student make a comment that has really stuck with me.  My fourth grade students were in book clubs to talk about books they were reading.  James was resistant.  Why, he wanted to know, did we need to talk about the books when the most important thing was how he would think about the book in the future.  He said something to the effect of, “next year something will happen, and I will remember the book and how it helps me understand this thing.”  Out of the mouths of babes. 

I have been thinking about his comment a lot recently for two reasons.

The first reason is personal. For about two months this spring, I traveled in Asia.  Part of my regular travel plan is always to read about the places I am visiting. I read non-fiction books about the places I visit and fiction that is written by authors from those places. I read books for adults and children. These books provide me with a window into the worlds of others. I gain a more nuanced understanding of the experiences of people around the world and build empathy for their lived experiences.  In all the books I read during this journey, a repeated theme was the impact of history on the current lives of people today. As I wandered through markets and streets and rode subways and trains, I wondered how they experienced the tumultuous times through which they have lived. From the 90 year old woman selling sweets in her market stall in Ho Chi Minh City (The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen) to the people my age I saw on the streets and subways of Seoul who lived through the uprisings in Korea against the dictatorship in the early 1980s (Human Acts by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith) and the history of 20th century Korea through Mirinae Lee’s 8 Lives of a Century old Trickster.  These books opened me to thinking about the world in different ways. I keep going back to scenes from them as I go about my daily life.  Reading these books has made my life richer. As James suggested, the power of these reading experiences is that I keep thinking about them in my daily life.

The other reason is how reading and literacy are taught in schools. NYC schools are switching to a mandated literacy curriculum for K-5 students.  The teachers and schools I know in NYC make deliberate efforts to provide varied reading materials that allow students to build knowledge of the world and themselves.  This windows and mirrors approach to literacy teaching is aligned with current research on reading – it builds content knowledge, it allows readers to build empathy and understanding of others, and it helps them develop a self-identity as a learner and valued member of the community. The mandated curriculum will take away the teachers’ ability to help children find books that are meaningful to them, and it will limit the independent reading choices students have.  I worry about the children losing the chance to build meaningful reading lives – lives that are enriched by self-awareness and a strong sense of their own identities and respect for and knowledge of the wider world.

This past winter, I was delivering a donation of books to a school in a high poverty neighborhood. The books featured diverse characters by authors from diverse backgrounds. A group of fifth grade girls was helping me unbox the books and display them. The children’s eyes lit up. On the cover of one book was an illustration of a girl in a head scarf. One girl grabbed this book. I asked if she was Muslim and she nodded. I identified two other books that featured Muslim characters and handed them to her. Her response was a highlight of my year! She beamed, held the books close to her chest and said that she was so excited to read them. Kids (dare I say we all?) need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. They need to have choice and they need to have the time (and instructional support) to sit with these books and read them. Highly scripted curricula restricts the space teachers and children have for this critical work. The conversations I am having with professional colleagues is how to navigate the mandates with respect while also finding space to build mirrors and windows into the classrooms they serve.

Terri

Radical Inclusion

In my reading recently, I came across a reference to the concept of “radical inclusion.” I had an idea of what inclusion referenced but I was really curious about what makes it radical. I was rereading Street Data by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan (2021). Radical inclusion happens when we have a mindset where “we commit to identify and include the voices of those who may have never had a seat at the decision-making table but whose experiences and perspectives matter (p. 77).”

I was intrigued and went on a paper equivalent of clicking through an article to learn more about this idea of radical inclusivity. The first text I found was Radical Inclusion by Dr. David Moinina Sengeh. The Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education of Sierra Leone, Dr. Sengeh tells the story of how he used radical inclusion to more deeply understand an exclusionary policy and then to guide the larger community to a more inclusive educational system. He lists seven principles of radical inclusion: identify the exclusion, listen to understand and learn, define your role and purpose, build a coalition, develop and enact a plan of advocacy and action, adapt to the new normal, and then relaunch the cycle with a new issue.

Change is never easy. It often means that we have to reflect on our own values, think about how those values align with our current actions and opinions and experiences, and understand that the change is unlikely to impact just us — others will have ideas on the proposed change that might differ from ours. If we really believe in the importance of the proposed change, then it behooves us to engage in self-reflection and to seek out the thoughts of others who may agree with us and those who don’t agree with us. More importantly, in order to be radically inclusive, we have to solicit the opinions of those whose voices are often inaudible in the planning and discussion of policy and continue to attend to those voices throughout the change process.

There are lots of exclusionary policies in schools. Even though people might not want to think about it, schools are very political places. What books are selected as texts, what topics to include or not include, enrollment policies and zoning, assessment systems, and mandates from retention policies to school food are all decisions made by policy makers and elected officials. Educators know that schools tend to be impacted by the political election cycle. This results in lots of change — radically inclusive or not. Every time there is a new administration, educators need to prepare for a new set of initiatives. If the elected officials have a big agenda, it may mean that we encounter a lot of change initiatives in a short amount of time. It is my experience that the first 3 or 4 of Sengeh’s actions happen fairly regularly in the schools I know. Because of the number of initiatives, we often don’t have time to move to principle 5 where we implement a solid plan of action nor do we have time to “adapt to the new normal” before another election cycle brings new initiatives.

It takes imaginative leadership to purse the goal of radical inclusivity in our schools. It takes imagination to create a vision of more equitable schooling. It takes imagination to have empathy with others. It takes imagination to generate solution pathways to our goal of greater inclusivity and equity.

Sengeh writes, “Equity is a state, and inclusion is a process to get you toward that state in which everyone enjoys the same opportunity to be present, to participate, to be seen, and to be oneself. Radical inclusion is using all means to ensure constant progress toward that state of equity for all those excluded. Equity is the goal; inclusion is a crucial first step in getting there” (p. 180). As I read Sengeh’s book, I reflected on how change does not happen as a clean cycle — it is iterative. We need to observe and listen with an open mind, heart, and ear to how it is working and then couple those insights with imaginative, creative solutions as we work to achieve our goal of greater equity.

Terri

Snow!

New York City recently had a two year stretch where we had no measurable snow. This is unusual. Thankfully, recent snowfalls have given us all a chance to get outside and play. There wasn’t much snow, but children (and their grown ups) don’t need much to have fun. When I was running in the park, I saw villages of snow people, broken sleds, snowball fights, and sledding. Some sledding was happening on snowy hills (the NYC Parks Department puts hay bales by trees to protect trees and sledders from collision). Some sledding was happening on muddy hills that used to be snowy. There was a lot of laughter and joy. I loved it!

Awesome snow person!
Sledding in Central Park
Snow person village

A snowy day is a reminder of the importance of play.

When our school opened in the 2009-2010 school year, we were in the throes of the No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top policy initiatives. We had 50 kindergarteners that first year and a commitment to developmentally appropriate practice. For the first staff book club, we read Vivian Paley’s book, A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play (2005). As a school leader, I quickly realized that it would be hard work to hold on to the idea of play in kindergarten in this particular era. My metaphor of choice was that we were on a sailboat headed towards the island of developmentally appropriate practice but we kept getting blown off course towards the island of “academic rigor” in kindergarten. It took continuous effort to keep our boat on course!

Every year, when I spoke to prospective parents about our school and our program, I emphasized the importance of play. I frequently referenced Dr. Stuart Brown’s book, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (2010). I felt like I needed to convince the parents that play in school is a good thing. Heck, if the Google engineers get a Lego room to play in and the Jet Propulsion Lab recognizes the importance of rich play lives and histories for their teams, why don’t we want our kids to engage with it? Play builds social skills, problem solving, and out of the box thinking. It lets us tap into our strengths and gives us joy supporting our mental health. Play invigorates our lives and helps us be better humans.

I chanced upon a book last spring, Cultivating Imagination in Leadership, by Gillian Judson and Meaghan Dougherty (2023). They begin the introduction by clarifying that engaging in imagination is not solely the work of childhood fantasy play. We have to be able to “imagine a future that is different – just and equitable – before we create it.” And they “invite readers to think about imagination as like fertile soil out of which leadership practices grow” as a tool we use to create and articulate our vision for the work and with which we navigate the needs of our communities and the structures and road blocks we encounter as we strive to provide programs and create a culture that will improve the lives of our families and communities. Play, as children and as adults, feeds our ability to imagine.

Terri

Nurturing a “quiet eye”

This year, I have transitioned from my (more than) full time position as a school leader of a public preK to 8 school. That hasn’t meant that I have given up my connections to schools. I still believe that education — particularly public education — is the single most important tool we have to achieve a more just, kind and equitable world. I volunteer weekly at the school where I used to work. I lead a sewing lunch club on Mondays and Fridays where I work with second to eighth graders in the FabLab. I also am a good listener to help out my former colleagues when they face challenges. 

That said, I am grateful to have time and the mental space necessary to nurture my attention. Being a school leader is intense work. Being a school leader during a pandemic and the aftermath, is extra intense. By the time this past September rolled around, my brain was tired. Four months later, I am recuperated and still interested in my life’s work of learning. 

Recently, I have been reading Maryanne Wolf’s book Reader, Come Home. There is a lot to unpack in this book. The first lesson I am taking away is the importance of attention in reading deeply. Maryanne Wolf uses the poetic phrase “a quiet eye” to describe the antidote to the constant movement of our eyes and attention as we navigate a highly distracting world (p 69-70). 

These past few years, my reading has been fairly shallow given all the demands on my time and emotions. Now that I am rested, Dr. Wolf has “prescribed” that I work on reading more thoughtfully and deeply — that I come home to the place of getting lost in a book’s story and ideas and the connections I make and insights I gain from reading the ideas of others. That is hard work. I am doing it on paper with a pen or pencil in hand and a pack of sticky notes at my side. 

The posts from 2023 and earlier on this blog are from my time as a school leader. From this point on, I am going to be using this space to ponder the books I am reading. Hopefully, the reading and writing I do will help me gain important insights into challenges faced by schools and learners and deeper empathy for the experiences of others.

Terri

Reflections on sustainability

The book I wrote about in my last post, Braiding Sweetgrass, is a call to ecological and sustainable awareness and practices.  12 years ago, when we first opened our school, I was learning about the Cloud Institute Sustainability Standards for Education.  These standards are rooted in helping students develop a sense of place, history, and connection to their neighborhoods, communities, and environment.   As we develop this awareness, we can nurture a sense of responsibility to the community and the earth. One chapter in Braiding Sweetgrass that I am reading over and over again is the chapter on what it means to be indigenous to a place.  For Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author, being indigenous to a place requires one to have a sense of history and a “soul-deep fusion with the land.”  As a nation of immigrants steeped in an economic philosophy of consuming, we have some serious work to do if we want to really belong to the place we call home.  Our teachers are constantly thinking about and learning how to better foster a sense of belonging to our communities, neighborhood, and environments in order to nurture the wonder and gratitude needed to care for our earth.

 I often neglect to attend to the fact that we are in a “green” school building despite our dismal “grade” of D on electricity usage. (We are working on it!)  One of the green features that I do appreciate daily is the natural light we have in our rooms and the views of the harbor.  This connection to the earth that I see each day is one way that I hold on to my own sense of wonder and gratitude for our environment and the history and legacy of our community. Working with children is another way that I connect to our world and hold on to my values of sustainability. I feel an obligation to leave the world slightly better for them than it is today — cleaner, kinder, and more just for all.

Terri

Gifts

I have been reveling in a new book.  Braiding Sweetgrass is a combination of memoir, meditation on ecology, and exploration of the contrast between a western scientific world view and an indigenous world view.  (The author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a professor of botany and ecology at a SUNY school upstate, a poet, and an award-winning nonfiction writer.) This book is going to take me a while to get through.  I have to frequently stop to reread and savor her writing and ideas. 

Generosity and the reciprocal nature of healthy relationships between humans and between humans and the natural world are a theme woven throughout the book. She writes that gifts are ways “to honor, to say thank you, to heal and to strengthen.” But she is not focusing on gifts as commodities.  This book, was to me, a gift in that the new friend who recommended it to me attended to who I am and shared her own love of the book with me.  The gift was in the connection and honoring of our relationship, not in the presentation of the book wrapped in paper and given to me. 

The idea that gifts need to be physical presents is a story that many of us have grown up with. “The stories we choose to shape our behavior have consequences,” Kimmerer writes.  We can choose to focus on a market economy story where presents need to be purchased, or we can choose to focus on a story in which we “bestow our own gifts in kind, to celebrate our kinship with the world.”  

I see lots of benefits for this worldview — environmental and economic sustainability, a framework for caring for others, a reminder to be in “amazement at the richness and generosity of the world.” 

What gifts have you received or recognized lately? 

Terri

Thinking about Asian Bias

One of the things that has helped me through the stress of this past year is striving to continue my learning about the history and forms of racism in US history and, particularly, how we can better incorporate anti-racism and anti-bias work in our teaching. I am reading books on culturally responsive leadership, participating in webinars and watching recorded talks about anti-racist teaching, participating in the IDC work (special thanks to Audra, Melanie, and Mary for launching this work with Inshirah Duwors and Ashley London Taylor and to the other staff and parents who are joining these meetings) and reading fiction and non-fiction that broadens my perspectives. 

Racism shows up in many areas of life.  Students continue to use memes that have racist histories because they have not tuned in to the racist history behind these memes.  I catch myself using language that has become totally normalized in our society but that is rooted in a history of bias and is offensive to different minoritized groups. It also shows up when we are uninformed or not clued into the bias and racism experienced by members of our community. 

Last Saturday evening, I participated in a Bollywood Cooking Lesson through the Geffen Playhouse in LA.  My original intention was to watch some Bollywood movie clips and learn to cook some Indian food.  Sri Rao, the author of Bollywood Kitchen, led the Zoom session, interspersing cooking with family stories. As an American of Indian heritage (his parents immigrated in the early 60s), he spoke about his life growing up as the only brown boy growing up in white middle America.  He spoke about the racism he encountered as a child and that his parents encountered as immigrants in a not always welcoming America. 

Racism faced by Asian Americans is too often unnamed.  Yet, our colleagues and families from Asia undoubtedly are assumed to be from “somewhere else” and not the US even though many of them have been born in the US.  There are expectations of meeting a certain standard of behavior and academic achievement.  And we don’t often teach the histories and contributions of their ancestors or the challenges faced by their ancestors as they arrived in the US.  Nor do we acknowledge the stress they feel as they walk down the street or ride the subway due to the increase in hate crimes targeted at Americans of Asian ancestry.

My challenge to our community is to be more aware of these experiences and to offer care to those in our community who may be encountering this stress. As we move forward as a community, it is important that we are mindful of the experiences of others and that we model this mindfulness and empathy for our children. I encourage families to stop by our monthly IDC parent workshops as well as we engage in conversations with others about our blindspots and unconscious biases and how by naming these we can guide our children to be a part of the society we wish to see.

Terri

A response to vandals and sedition

Once again, I am writing a blog post about our school’s response to a national tragedy. I learned this evening that this tragedy has been compounded by a local hate crime. A vandal tied a Confederate flag to the door of the Museum of Jewish Heritage across the street from our school. This was done in sight of the train car that carried innocent people to Auschwitz to be brutally treated and killed.

I am sickened. I am grief stricken. I am angry.

At the same time, our kids and teachers give me hope.

On Thursday, all of our students began to process this news in developmentally appropriate ways. For example, our kindergarteners listened to Dave Eggers’ book, What Can A Citizen Do? and talked about ways that community members work towards peace and safety through kind actions. Our fourth graders started their conversations by reflecting on the norms they have for being part of a community. Our eighth graders started by reflecting on their beliefs:

Each of these approaches is grounded in listening to children and reflecting on the values that they are developing. We made sure to listen to the information that they have, correcting misconceptions and answering questions, and giving them choices of ways to participate (or not) in these conversations.

These initial conversations are just part of the work that we all need to do as we live through this historic time. As educators, it is our professional obligation to help young people process information, engage as citizens, and critically evaluate news and information.

Over the coming weeks, we will continue this work as part of our commitment to teaching Civics and the democratic ideals of justice and equity. And we know that giving people the opportunity to engage in some form of action is empowering and alleviates anxiety. We will be offering all community members the opportunity to participate in a COVID safe and winterized version of Sidewalk Chalk for Peace over the next week. More information will be sent home next week.

I worry for our nation and our society. We live in very challenging times. But, as Mary noted at a meeting on Thursday, the values our students express and their commitment to making the world a better place are evidence that my hope is not misplaced.

Terri

Thank you, staff

One of my many new year’s goals is to communicate more about what is happening at school and in life. Here is my start to that goal. Each week, I send an email to staff with updates and reminders. These emails always begin with a short framing of and reflections on our work as educators. This is from an email I shared with teachers before break…

On and off, I pretend that I am fluent in Twitter.  I don’t often remember to check it and when I do, the disorganization overwhelms me.  However, this thread showed up in my feed that is inspirational. My riff on it is…

I have learned in the face of this pandemic that 276 staff have the ability to…

  • make me laugh each day with their sense of humor and joy in children;
  • create a sense of community through a screen, and building virtual and in-person traditions; 
  • remind me of the power of collaboration and teamwork as you help out on Fridays, plan together, support each other with technology, etc.; 
  • teach me what it is like to be an educator who cares deeply about children and justice and equity during multiple pandemics;
  • give me grace and forgiveness for momentary panic attacks, poorly phrased “wokeness,” and awkward efforts to invite people in to difficult conversations;
  • provide me with a sense of community and connectedness through these lonely months of isolation and responding to the larger bureaucracy in which we work
  • offer me opportunities to learn about the world through their interests in travel, reading, politics, art, creating, music, and athletics;
  • And allow me to learn to be a better me. 

I appreciate each and every one of our staff members and want to publicly thank them for everything they do for our community every day. 

Terri

Preparing for this week’s news

As a school community, we know that 2020 has capped a number of years of increased tension and strife around social, racial, public health, economic, and political issues. This year’s national elections and the COVID-19 pandemic have amplified these tensions. While we await election results this week, our students will have lots of questions and our teachers will guide conversations based in fact while also helping students to process their feelings.

As I shared at the last PTA meeting and in the email I sent out as a follow up to that meeting, we know that students learn best when they feel safe and recognized.  We do this by helping them develop social-emotional learning skills. CASEL, a highly regarded organization dedicated to social-emotional learning (SEL), organizes these key skills into 5 categories. 

We know that dialogue and an informed citizenry are critical to our democracy. We are so fortunate to live in the United States where we can challenge and question policies and elected officials, to have a range of media to learn from, and to have access to a public education that encourages students to ask questions and learn from each other. 

  1. Self-awareness: How am I personally feeling?
  2. Social-awareness: How are others feeling?
  3. Self-management: How will I behave now that I know how I am feeling and how others might be feeling?
  4. Relationship-building: How will I interact with others based upon what I know about their feelings?
  5. Responsible decision-making: What actions will I take to appropriately express my feelings in a way that is also respectful of how others might be feeling?

As we process the news over the next several weeks, the answers to these questions will help our students feel safe in tumultuous times.  Our school mission statement affirms we recognize the importance of diversity, equity, and student voice as we prepare students to become responsible members of our society.  At 276, each family brings unique cultural insights, political perspectives, and experiences to our community. Despite all this diversity, we all share the value of care and respect for others. 

With appreciation for your partnership, 

Terri