Read the full transcript of Episode 69 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features host Morva McDonald speaking with Elham Kazemi and Jessica Calabrese, co-authors of Learning Together: Organizing Schools for Teacher and Student Learning. They share how they worked together to create an embedded professional development lab program that built community, improved student outcomes, and changed how both teachers and learners thought about their work.
Morva McDonald: Welcome back to New View EDU. I’m really excited about the conversation we’re going to have today, with Elham Kazemi, a close friend and colleague of mine, and Jessica Calabrese, who’s a person who has spent a long lifetime of work in schools and public schooling.
I first met Elham when I went to the University of Washington as a professor, and she’s an expert person in the field of mathematics. We were hanging out, we had young kids at the time, and she said to me, “You know, Math is everywhere.” And I was highly influenced, both as an educator but also as an adult, to look around the world at all of the things that suddenly were Math, right, what was Mathematics. And then I had this incredible opportunity when she and Jessica were doing work at Lakeridge Elementary School in Renton, in Washington State, where I went and visited with them while they were doing work together with teacher educators.
And they were helping new teachers actually learn how to teach. It was just an amazing thing to watch them open up, actually, the practice of teaching and learning with adults. Which, you know, sometimes we think of the process of teaching as really personal and somewhat private. And the way they worked together, the context that they constructed in a school setting live, with children, with real adults, was just an amazing moment for me as an educator to think about how do we help adults learn the work, not just of the art of teaching, or the craft of teaching, but the science of teaching, the expertise of teaching that it takes. So I’m super excited to talk with them today. I hope you’re going to enjoy this conversation. There’s a lot to learn from them.
Elham Kazemi is a professor of mathematics education at the University of Washington. Her work focuses on how teachers strengthen mathematics teaching and learning by eliciting and building on their students’ ideas and experiences. She and Jessica Calabrese co-authored the book Learning Together: Organizing Schools for Teacher and Student Learning. Jessica was the Chief of School Improvement in the Renton School District and the principal at Lakeridge Elementary, the school at which the research-practice partnership described in the book originated.
We’re going to have a great conversation today. Let’s get started.
Hi Jessica, hi Elham, it's great to see you. I'd love to start off actually just a little bit with trying to understand, like, who you are and how you came to work together. Tell us that story, basically.
Jessica Calabrese: Oh boy. So in 2011, that was the era of splashy headlines and “schools are failing,” and it was on the front page of the local newspaper, and the federal government was offering grants that really weren't grants. They were, you know, like “you will do.” They were “thou shalt.” And in the school district where I worked, an elementary school was designated a persistently low performing school, which means it was in the bottom fifth percentile of all of the schools in the state.
And at that point, I was in the district right next door at the middle school as an assistant principal, and I decided to apply and I got that job, became the principal. That school, as a result of this grant, had to replace the principal, lengthen the school day, lengthen the school year, and about 50% of the staff had to turn over, and then we had to choose a research-based strategy.
So as I was making my way into that new position, I was trying to figure out like, what's a research-based strategy? Some of the things they listed were ridiculous. And a mutual acquaintance introduced me to Elham. And from that point, I had a math coach, right? Like that was a sure thing we were going to have. She and I met and what I understood was they were doing something called labs that were about teacher learning. The one piece of credit I can take because believe me, this is about brilliance that came from all different places to coalesce around the school. But I knew from being an instructional coach that change really happens when teachers work together to meet kids where they are.
It has to happen in what we would call a PLC, a professional learning community, a grade level team, whatever it is, people who teach the same thing. That had to be what we worked on. That was the one thing I was pretty sure of. So enter Elham and her work in labs, and the fact that we had coaches in the building. We had people who were designated just to work with teachers. We started off doing these labs.
Elham, tell us about labs.
Elham Kazemi: Yeah, I think at the time we met with you, I had been working with two of my colleagues at the University of Washington and then some colleagues at other universities, at UCLA and Michigan, to figure out how to work with teachers authentically, but with students, not apart from students.
And so we had tried to create some new professional learning designs that allowed teachers to collaborate together, like Jessica said, but alongside their students, because you can't get better at your work kind of apart from being with students. You can think about your work, but those decisions that you make in the moment, you also need practice together and thinking time together. So what I was surprised by is how much time she said they had for teachers to work together. So along with Alison Hintz and Adrian Kennard and some other colleagues at UW, we thought we could really support the school to use that time well that would really meet teachers' real needs for how to grow their craft.
Morva McDonald: Talk to me a little bit, because it might be confusing for people, or just to get inside of it a little bit. When you say, with students, what do you mean? And why exactly is that so important? Because it's not explicitly clear to me, as why does that matter so much? Why can't I learn something somewhere else and then do it in real time? Help us understand that a little bit more.
Elham Kazemi: In my experience, I do a lot of work in teacher education at the university and in math education in particular. Since the 80s, there's been a lot of artifacts of practice that have been created to help people learn about good teaching. So lots of cases of what teachers do in the classroom with kids, lots and lots of examples of the brilliance of children's mathematical thinking that you can study what kids might do, what's a good response to what kids would do. And at least with beginning teachers, early career teachers, they get really excited and inspired by what's different from their own educational experiences. But often what they would say to me when they went to try things out by themselves is they would come back and they would say things like, well, that didn't work, or my kids don't talk, or I didn't really know.
And so it's hard to know how to help someone apart from their kids, right? And the same thing for practicing teachers. They can have really rich discussions of those cases, look at video together, look at student work together. But then when they try to recreate or try to apply those ideas by themselves in their classrooms, they sometimes get stuck, or you need help thinking about what you're hearing and how to interpret what you're hearing and then what to do next. That happened myself, like the first time I was like, I want to lead these great math discussions. And I asked the initial question, but I didn't really know what to do next.
And I think when I say with kids, that means groups of teachers planning together. And that's what the labs that Jessica's referring to. We do plan together. We think about what it is that we want to try with students, but then all of us go into the classroom together. Instead of going separately into our own individual spaces, we collaboratively go into one space where we know the kids, where we're invested in their learning, and try to learn with them. So we'll pose the tasks. We'll think with the kids. We'll tell the kids that we're there to try something out and learn from the children themselves. And we pause when we need to make sense of what to do next or something that we see that we didn't anticipate, that now we can take advantage of because our real children are there with us.
And then we get to, of course, step back and also reflect on what happened. And that's what I mean about being with children. And that kind of professional learning is rare. I mean, I don't think it really, it doesn't happen on a routine basis in schools.
Jessica Calabrese: So from the principal perspective, right, like your role is, something needs to change, right? Like it, this is not working.
What I thought was amazing from literally the first day was all of the teachers were immediately operationalizing something that they were thinking about, looking at together, learning together. And I could see that path between, We all learned something today with and from kids and each other. And now tomorrow, I could hold that thread into, OK, what are we all doing tomorrow? I could say, like, OK, let's do this tomorrow. I will come, I will see it. The coaches will be there. Like, I could pull that thread right back to the classroom. And so much of what we lead, and we think it's great PD, but so much of what we lead doesn't then translate right back to kids.
So I was like, Oh, I can see how this is going to change teacher practice and therefore kid experiences.
Morva McDonald: It was clear. It was like, really clear immediately to you.
Jessica Calabrese: And the next day, we were still talking about it. How often does that happen in schools? Like usually it's like, OK, we did the PD, now I have to go plan my lesson. This was the plan for tomorrow. Oh, wow, I'm going to go try this.
Morva McDonald: So let's step back for a second, because having been a leader in a school myself, I think, this must have been a particular kind of place, or this must have been a very special group of teachers, or you're like, you must be an amazing leader of some kind, right? Probably a skill I don't have. But I don't think that's what you would say. I think you're going to tell us something different.
So how did you get, right, from what we normally understand about teaching, which tends to be really privatized, people sit in classrooms, they do their own thing. They maybe talk about their work, they kind of share maybe a problem they're having with a kid, but they don't really engage deeply in it. How did you get to a space where the thing that you're describing became possible?
Jessica Calabrese: I do think the labs are a shift in how teachers orient to learning. Like teacher learning is not an ethereal thing. It's just something that makes you think about what you're doing and how you might do it differently or better to meet kids where they are. And if we just make that the ongoing conversation, which is somehow what labs sparked for us, it carried through to what we talked about next. It carried through into what we would talk about during PLC meetings where we met as a group about their content that week.
They were amazing teachers. I don't, I mean, I can never, ever deny or understate how amazing they took up this challenge. And everybody just wanted to do something different. Like if this isn't working, let's figure out what to do. But I think the magic is in, this is creating an ongoing conversation. We are still talking about this over time.
And so often we talk about our practice, and then I go in as the principal or the evaluator, that role, and I see you doing very different things. I don't see the same, you know, like we're all doing X. No, we're not. We're doing it very differently. But when we're all in this conversation and there's a coach and a team working on something, we all are actually talking about the same thing, and it is changing what we do for kids.
Elham Kazemi: I think there is an interesting balance between fumbling and innovating. And it's not that it wasn't hard or frustrating at times for people. It certainly was. But I don't think it was just a copy me sort of, I'm going to demonstrate how to teach in a particular way. It was really no, let's figure out what is happening with our students, how they're approaching – I think this is the beauty of what happens in math education, is if you can shift away from kids learn math by you showing them what to do and then they practice it, to you pose problems to them and see how they're making sense of it, and then you figure out what to do with the diversity of ideas in the room to move the whole class forward. The craft, the intellectual work and the joy of that can create frustration, but it can also create innovation.
And we were there not to try to be perfect, but to keep seeking, to keep trying and figuring it out. And I think that that's the approach that we took, as the university partners. It wasn't like I've got it all figured out. I knew some things and I could sort of open the door, but the teachers also had to innovate and they had to puzzle. And what was really important about Jessica as the principal and the coaches that she worked with is they also had that same attitude. Like, OK, it's not that we hold all the knowledge and we're just like waiting to give it to you. It's that we'll create that knowledge together from our starting point.
Morva McDonald: I think it would be helpful to hear a little bit just on the, because I think it's, to your point, Elham, I think this is, this is a thing that's unusual in schools, where you don't see a lot of this kind of professional development in schools. So it's hard to imagine what you're talking about exactly.
Jessica Calabrese: I think it's really important when you think about this, like we're calling it a type of PD, but it is one experience in that it nestles into a whole system that is designed to continue the conversation. So a lab is a full day experience that is designed specifically for a team.
It's about them as sense makers. It's about their kids as sense makers. What are the challenges happening in their classroom right now? What is the content that's coming up that teachers may need to deepen their understanding of? So it's an in real time opportunity to learn together, and to do it in the context of what is happening in your classroom. That's one space, but that space alone isn't enough to really support teachers over time.
Every week, so that might happen every six weeks, every week we're meeting together as a team, and a coach is really integral to this, because the coach has the space and the content knowledge and the expertise to come alongside the teachers and be in their classrooms so that when she is designing that lab experience, it really is what the teachers and kids are struggling with and puzzling about right now.
And then in the PLCs, which I also participated in because– we can talk about that in a minute, but it is really important to have that other aspect of leadership. Coaching leadership is like constant support on the ground. She knows the lesson level of what teachers are doing. As principal, I'm there also every week and all day during the labs. But I know the, the unit level, but also the context level of what else is happening and how to pace and structure the pressure and the support and the, you know, when to pull back, when to push in, when to say, no, we all really are going to try this.
So the lab is part of a larger system that we craft to constantly support teachers as growing decision-makers. Teachers make a million impromptu decisions a day. And if we can help them with content knowledge or strategies to engage all learners or conversation to deepen their thinking about what's happening in their learning environment, in their classrooms, then we are providing instructional leadership that supports their continuous growth.
Morva McDonald: So let me get this right. The structure was like, we have a day of some kind in which a group of teachers with the coaches and you, Jessica, and you, Elham, and your team from UW come together and you make some kind of plan about some kind of lesson you're going to teach. Everybody's going to teach in their classroom.
Elham Kazemi: Well, the lab day, you're not planning a lesson that everyone's going to teach in their own classroom. You're planning a lesson that you're going to teach that day in the, during the time of the lab, and one of the teachers’ classrooms and maybe two actually, you might revise it and go into a second one based on what you learned in the first one.
Morva McDonald: Got it. So you're all going, you're planning a lesson together, you're all going into a classroom together, somebody's running the lesson or maybe a group of teachers are running the lesson, everybody's observing and talking about it.
Elham Kazemi: Yes. Everyone's sitting with the kids trying to make sense of it. You usually are highlighting some big content idea and or community idea, something about how you want to craft discussions in the classroom. So there might be a strategy that's, that's a little bit more general, but it's always like really grounded and in particular disciplinary subject matter content that is an important idea that is, that matters for the rest of the unit that you're teaching in some particular way.
So that's the day to raise all those issues and kind of see what the work is that's going to be picked up in weekly work thereafter, between now and the next lab.
Jessica Calabrese: It might be important to clarify that the lesson, or whatever it is we go and teach that day, that isn't the third point. The third point is really what are teachers thinking about right now? What have we been talking about? What's the new content we're about, you know, that's coming up in the new unit? And what do kids already know about that?
Like, it's always a question we're exploring together. And then whatever we go and teach is to elicit the student thinking, so that we can all think together about their thinking. That's the third point we're all trying to come together and puzzle about, so that it can inform what they do when they go back to the classroom. So that lesson isn't the point of the lab. It's the vehicle to elicit the student thinking so that, because teachers, like students, they're learning something. We're all learners. So how we make sense together of things drives what we do next. So it's like, OK, let's pull this out and unearth it and examine it together and then puzzle through it together. That's what drives the ongoing conversation.
Morva McDonald: That's really helpful. I think from my perspective, the central element in here that I like, pull out and highlight is this notion of the role of sense making in the space, right? It's not, I know something and I'm telling you how to do it, then you're trying it, then I'm saying, that's good or bad, or I'm evaluating that, right? But it's like, we're posing a problem basically to a group of kids. We're trying to see what they do with the problem and then we're trying to make sense of what they do, how do they do it, how do they think about it?
So for me, as a takeaway, it's like, oh, it's sense-making that I'm helping everybody come to terms with and what we have to understand about teachers and classrooms is they're constantly being asked to do that, right? That is the central element of their work. Rather than making discrete decisions, they're actually always engaged and making sense of what kids are thinking and wondering about actually in their classrooms. I think that's a really key element.
Jessica Calabrese: So what you said is a perfect segue, because trying to elicit how kids are making sense of things so that we can all like come alongside each other, puzzle together about it, think about what might work next, think about what we might need to revise together, commit to like, all right, let's all try this and then regroup at PLC on Wednesday and see what did kids do about that? What are we going to do next?
Positioning the kids as sense makers and constantly fostering that orientation to student thinking is something that as leaders, we also have a space to think about. Because just as much as we want those kids constantly being positioned as sense makers, right? It's their knowledge that we want to develop, not deposit.
So at the same exact time, we have to constantly, as coaches and principals, be thinking about how are we positioning the teachers as sense makers? They set the whole context for that classroom. So how are we positioning them to continually be sense makers, to continually grow a community of learners that gives access to all kids?
So we have a space where we do the design of the teacher learning and collaboration spaces.
So we have two teacher learning and collaboration spaces. We have the labs and the weekly PLCs. Then together every week, principals and coaches meet, APs if you have one, and we think about our teacher learners and how are things going? What's coming up? What are the dynamics like? What's happening in the context of the school that might be, you know, providing some barriers for people?
And then what's the learning that we could do to nudge them from where they are? Like meet them where they are and nudge. So that is called the instructional leadership team meeting. It's a weekly check-in, what's happening, what are you seeing, who needs support,. It's the on the ground, puzzle it together.
Morva McDonald: The architecture, right? There's an architecture there that's multilayered across the system. It's helpful to get a sense of that.
You're talking to an audience that is an independent school audience. It's different. It's different than leaders in public schools have different kinds of opportunities, different kinds of challenges.
All things being said, generally independent schools have a lot of autonomy, right? I ran an independent school, I had a lot of autonomy as a leader to think about with my teachers and my staff and everybody else in my school. Like, how do we want it to be? I don't have any of the constraints. I don't have any of the other things also in a district that allow me to do certain kinds of things, but I don’t have any of the constraints of that.
So I'm interested as you both step back and think about that, like, what kind of advice do you think about giving somebody in an independent school, that has all this autonomy, like, how could they start? Where should they start?
Elham Kazemi: There's certain things that are perennial challenges for teachers. But I think what you have to do is not assume that teachers can go to some outside event, get that information, figure out what to do on their own.
And I think independent schools, like public schools, have that issue. Teachers may be very collegial with one another as they are in public schools and want to collaborate, but the school day and the school week doesn't really give them a lot of in-depth opportunity to work with each other on their craft with their students. I think the “with their students” thing that we keep going back to is what's missing in most schools.
The teacher's own individual planning time obviously is their planning time. Their grade level team meetings is separate from their kids. And so they're not having the time to process new ideas with one another alongside their students. So, you know, even if you report to each other what's happening in your classroom, you're all interpreting that in your own view. And if you've, you know, as school leaders, I'm sure you know, when you go from one teacher's classroom to the next, you see different decision-making, and it's great for you. I mean, I think that's the position of privilege, is the person who gets to go into all these classrooms. But because we're so isolated from one another, teachers don't get to see each other's instructional decision-making with their students. And so we don't grow as a, as a group together.
And that also means, I think, for students, they may have really different experiences in different teachers' classrooms as a result. And I don't think we necessarily want that.
Jessica Calabrese: I mean, that question, I have no experience with this. But if I hear someone say I have fewer barriers and more flexibility, I'm like, yay, let's do this. Right. Like if there is less resistance to starting that ongoing conversation about what is really happening, the decisions you're really making in classrooms, if you can create the spaces where you do that frequently, more easily than in public schools, create those spaces and do it more frequently.
Like it takes on momentum, I think pretty quickly, right? Teachers are so isolated. Like Elham said, even when you're meeting weekly and you're sharing and you're sharing, you're not doing it in your classrooms. It's not directly impacting the decisions that you make.
So any space you can create as an independent school leader with that additional flexibility to have that ongoing conversation with teachers so that when I walk in as the leader, I already kind of know what you're puzzling with and I can be like, hey, did you hear what she said? She just said the thing that we were wondering if they'd say. Like, how do we get her to repeat that and have the group talk about it? Like anything you can do to create that ongoing conversation, I think, would be really powerful.
Morva McDonald: I think the structural problems are similar, right? There's always the like, there's not enough time. There's just never enough time, right? So part of the finesse in a leadership position is like how to move away from time as the constraint, right? And that exists everywhere. And so to think about that demand.
This is a huge investment, I can imagine. And to some extent, a tremendous risk for you, Jessica, at the school, thinking about what's happening for kids. So I could hear this, like, wow, this is a great experiment. How nice that these people got to do this, and they did this lab thing, and they worked with kids, and they learned a little bit about their teaching.
And when the kind of rubber hits the road, like, talk to us a little bit, in your view, like, both the impact of this experience for teachers and on teacher learning, right? The culture of teacher learning in the context of your school, but also the culture of student learning, right? Both broadly conceived, but also just really honestly like direct outcomes, like did it change the path that kids were on, related to learning, and what does that sound and look like from your perspective?
Jessica Calabrese: We haven't talked a lot about it yet in this conversation, but I think coaching is a critical element. That person who can come alongside you either in the moment, or over the course of a few days, or in the process of planning and then teaching and then reflecting, like so many ways a coach can do something a principal can't do. They just have more capacity.
I think the role of coaching is yes, an investment, but also just a huge lever in helping teachers have those ongoing conversations that elevate everything they do from the planning to the intentionality of creating groups in their classrooms. Having another pair of eyes and ears in your classroom is, I can't underscore the importance of that.
Like, Hey, you know what I noticed today? I noticed on this side of the room, they aren't even able to hear what's happening on that side of the room, like just the things that a coach can initiate and support and nurture over time. And then bring all of that super timely knowledge into what happens in the PLC with everybody. Like what's the intersection of what's happening in these four classrooms that really all of us need to talk about? And it really will impact all of us.
Like finding those points of intersection, those really, really rich, everybody's ready to access this next step. The role of coaching is really important.
Elham Kazemi: Morva, you were asking a little bit about what did we see change for students.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, I am interested in that because I think there's lots of PD that goes on in schools, right? And to your point, it doesn't often have a great impact actually on what happens for kids in classrooms. And so I'm wondering if in reality, like, was this different?
Elham Kazemi: Yes, I would say it was dramatically different. I mean, we have all kinds of video records that we have shared for people to see what the level of engagement was like in classroom discussions. But I think that one of the problems we have in schools is that we very early on, you know, assess kids, decide who's capable and who's not, and start to talk about kids in those terms, right? We have our high kids and our low kids and the kids that got it and kids that don't got it. And if somebody didn't get it, then you try to reteach, right? And this is like, or you try to break things down further or whatever.
And the sense-making that we keep talking about and the paying attention to student thinking is really challenging that way of looking at kids. And instead of sorting kids into categories, what you start to do is pay attention to what they're understanding and why they're doing what they're doing and what's the logic. So even when they make errors, how are they interpreting the problem? How are they attacking a certain text? You know, what is it that's happening? So that your instructional decision-making is specific to what you're seeing. And you don't look at the diversity in your class as a problem, right? You don't think, Oh, I have such a range of kids. You actually realize that part of what helps everybody grow is the way they compare and connect their ideas.
That's one thing that is, that makes the student experience start to change is because teachers aren't treating, they're not relying on a certain group of kids to carry the conversation, for example. So what they're trying to do is invite everyone into the space. And this also in turn has the effect of helping students believe that their ideas are valued, instead of hiding, or not saying anything and not raising their hand, they realize that it's OK to say something, hear something else, and then just say, I want to change my thinking. I want to revise my ideas. And so you have lots and lots of examples of students doing that from kindergarten all the way into fifth grade and not being intimidated by their peers or not feeling like their peers are judging them or shaming them or that the teacher is doing that.
So the level of engagement and deep content that the teachers were paying attention to really elevated everybody's experience and withdrew the need so much to kind of group kids by ability or to push in a bunch of intervention, which I think was the problem at the beginning, is the people just thinking, I have a whole bunch of, you know, really low kids, which is a terrible way of thinking about kids’ capabilities.
Jessica Calabrese: One thing we haven't really talked about is how a vision of what we want children to experience has to develop. Because to do what Elham was just describing and really trust that keeping all of your kids in the classroom and over time pulling everybody into the thinking and the like, this is your understanding. Are you listening to each other? Can you compare your idea to her idea?
The vision of how that happens in a classroom is super important and central to this work. And one of my favorite experiences ever, ever, ever was when it shifted from, I would walk in and the teacher would say, I wish you were here a minute ago while I was teaching to, I'm so glad you're here. Sit down and listen to like, go listen to that pair for me. I can't get to everybody.
When teachers shift from, I'm teaching when I'm talking to, let's, how do we work together? Let's create a community where the kids are talking and we're responding, like our instruction is actually just responding to their thinking and how do we nudge it along, meeting them where they are? That shift is super critical to think about together and to keep saying like, this is our goal guys, we're doing the work, we're like, we're right in the heart of what we want to be doing.
These are the classrooms we want, where kids are eager to share their ideas. Where they have a second idea because they listen to you and now they're changing their thinking. And that is teaching. And the teacher identity that we're fostering in this is that we're just positioning kids to grapple with ideas. We are, of course, providing content and curriculum and problems and topics that push them to do that, but our role isn't to be the talker and the depositor. Our role is to create that environment that invites all children into that community of learning.
So having that vision of this is what we're here to do is part of the shift, that having an ongoing conversation across all these spaces that we so intentionally designed for teachers, but having that ongoing conversation that's really centered on this is our vision. This is our vision of what's happening in classrooms. So everything we do is to foster that, so that you can make those in the moment impromptu pivots to best engage kids in deeper learning.
Morva McDonald: I imagine in your experience, that maybe there was a moment or a set of moments. Because I imagine that in the beginning, there was an understanding that I think echoes something that you're saying, which is we tend to frame kids in particular ways. And we categorize them and we say, this is a low group of kids and they haven't learned this. And maybe we think that's an innate problem or maybe we think that's because of exposure, but we definitely talk about them in those ways. And these kids are the high kids. And maybe we think of them as inherently gifted, but we also know that they have learned a lot in some other place.
So I imagine at some place that was true, right? In this space, that was a belief that people held deeply onto. They held onto it. And I'm interested in your perspective. What is it? What are the things, right, that allowed that to actually become something different? Because it's actually very hard to change people's beliefs about children. This is a fundamental challenge we have. We think of them in particular ways, whether that's about our experience with them or based on their race or their gender or their identity in a lot of ways. So I'm interested in how do you see that? How do you explain that? How do you think? Can you think about that with us a little bit?
Elham Kazemi: It is probably the central work of changing the authority that teachers feel, or actually the diligence that we feel, that we really want to help children learn. So it's our job to explain things to them. And if they don't understand, we'll find other ways of explaining and that shift away from patience and listening and trying to make sense of the child. And perhaps seeing that, yes, that third grader isn't reading at the level we would expect them to, or they're not doing mathematics at the level we want them to. But just cramming more stuff at them isn't going to help them grow. So you have to see an alternative.
I mean, you have to experience an alternative. And often what happens at the beginning is that, and this is maybe where our experience as teacher educators also come in, and what we've learned through our growth is that you start with tasks that will be more open-ended and often will surprise teachers. I think that's actually the first thing that you'll hear is like, wow, that's so interesting that that child or that student said this or this. I don't typically see that in the classroom. And that's true, right? They might not see a particular kind. So one of the things you have to do is try something different that allows, allows teachers to see something new in their students that challenges their perceptions.
So often surprise is the first thing that we hear. It's like, I didn't think that would happen. Or that's something I have so hard– When I say my kids don't talk, it's like I try something and there’s silence. So what happened here that got more kids talking? And how can I build on that? So that's like... the kernel of how, the seed of where things start.
Morva McDonald: It's also really important, I think, in here that it's like, it's with your actual children.
Elham Kazemi: Yes, with your own students, yes.
Morva McDonald: Your students, right? Because otherwise you kind of say, well, that's a different, that's a different group of kids, right? That's not really possible to see it with a group of kids that you haven't seen before come up with ideas or thinking or voice a certain kind of understanding that you haven't experienced is, I think is actually central to the surprise.
It's not somebody else's children, it's not somebody else's students, it's my students who I know and love and care about and suddenly they're saying things I never expected them to be able to say.
Jessica Calabrese: I would add on to that. It's such a good question, Morva, because I think there's a real role that only the leaders can play in helping teachers believe that we are truly committed to sense making. And it takes a lot of drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. Like I'm being consistent. I'm not, we're not going to pivot to test prep because that's coming up. We really, really mean it.
We have to re, like, redefine our identity as teachers, that my job isn't to get kids to do things. I can get you to do things, but you are not left with something new in your understanding when I walk away.
So if I'm truly teaching you to be a learner, like we talk a lot about teach the reader, not the book. Teach the mathematician, not the math. And it takes a lot of reassurance from leaders for teachers to believe it's OK to do that, that I am not being judged by what I can get kids to do things in a moment or on a day of a test. And I find myself saying that a lot of like, we're growing children, not test scores.
So I think it just bears a lot, a lot, a lot of repeating. And when you keep positioning the adults as sense makers and not expect them to miraculously get it one day, they slowly stop doing that to children.
Morva McDonald: That seems central to me in the work that you're talking about. And it's both belief and experience, right? It's the combination of I believe something and understand something, and now I have an experience of something that is different or new.
Jessica, when you started, I think as your own introduction of the school and where you are, of course you noted, right? Like I'm in a public school, I've been...It's been deemed as needing to be reconstituted, essentially, as part of the reconstitution era, right, in schooling. And kids were in the bottom quartile of whatever, however we frame that.
And the practical side of me, the part that is strategic, wants to say like, OK, well, where did it end up? Like, did it actually move? Did it actually change on the things that whether we believe in them or not, we value in a system, right, that says that this is in fact better, that kids are doing better, they're learning more, they're learning differently. And I'm interested about that part of the story.
Jessica Calabrese: Yeah, it really did. There's data, right? Like the state came in and recognized that data. At that time, it was very much about desegregating your data. And all of those things did move. But here's my favorite part of that.
There was a day we were in a lab. And when I'm in a lab all day, right, I'm not on email. I'm not getting the sticky notes people are leaving on my door. I'm not getting the phone calls. So I had just gotten back to my office. And you know, it's just like this tidal wave of all the things I didn't do for seven hours. And this substitute walks right into my door and right around the corner and up to me and she says, you are never going to believe what happened today. And the principal part of me went, “Oh God, what?”
And she said, and it was, she was teaching second grade and she said, I finished leading the discussion and this child said to me, now you're supposed to ask us what we think. And how surprised that substitute was, that she came and told the principal at the end of the day, to me, that answers your question of did it really change? Because an adult they didn't know came in, tried to engage them in a conversation, didn't do it the way they thought she should do it, and told her. That's developing agency, that's saying this is our community, this is our knowledge, you're supposed to ask us what we think.
That's how I knew things were really, really changing. And yeah, the test scores followed, but I'm serious about it. We're building children, we're growing children, we are not growing test scores. These are other people's children. So I felt committed to that, and I truly believed the test scores would follow. I was lucky I'd had some experience leading before and I'd seen that test scores do follow, when engagement changes.
So I was like, OK, we're going to trust it, but we're not going to worry about it. And honestly, they changed faster than we thought they would. The initial data that, Elham will remember this, the initial data that we got at Lakeridge, especially in math, was really disheartening. It was really hard. I remember the conversation where she brought it back because she had brought a whole bunch of doc students in and we are watching individual students do individual problems and notating them. And she came back and she was like, I know we said we were going to share this with them, but wow.
And within a couple of years, kids were really, really engaged. And I think that's the best. That's the measure that I care about.
Elham Kazemi: I mean, I would say also with respect to test scores, we really didn't do test prep. We really focused on helping kids grow their strategies. We did monitor and did pay attention to how kids were solving math problems and whether they were getting the answers right or wrong. The test is only going to measure if you get the answer right or wrong. We were also paying attention to how did they get their answer?
So are they using strategies that appropriate for what we would expect at the grade level? And then when they're making errors, why is the error happening? And that actually, all that specificity, we talked to every single kid in the school at the beginning and the end of the year with just a couple of problems in math, for example. In the same way that teachers listen to their children read, it's like you have to watch children solve problems to see what's happening.
So we were able to see, you know, and a lot of our work is buttressed by a lot of deep engagement with content and children, right? And children's engagement with that content and their understanding of that content. But in public schools, test scores are sort of a hard thing as a track of like, is quality learning happening? Partly because you have to pay attention to kid mobility. You have to think about who's there, how long have they been at that school, how consistent is instruction across the classrooms?
And I think what was happening differently in these schools is the whole school effort to not do the same thing in every classroom. We're not trying to create teachers who just do the same thing. You want to, it's not scripted, it was really about paying attention to kids. But I think what was important is to have your own ways of monitoring student quality and student quality of work, student quality of engagement, and to be able to see that. And sometimes the test scores will also match. Sometimes they won't, and that has a lot to do with your student population. It can't be the only thing that you rely on to understand if you…of what kind of education children are experiencing.
Morva McDonald: It's helpful. I ask it because I know that as leaders in schools, right, whether you're in a public school or independent school, there are all kinds of pressures that make it feel very high stakes and make the decision making about where you invest time and energy and whatever kind of a high stakes decision. And so it's helpful to have that understanding around those kinds of outcomes in order to also build the capacity, right, to take the risk, to say it's worth the risk.
And I appreciate Jessica's, her, your kind of conversation about, it's about student engagement. And we actually know that increased student engagement generally changes learning. It changes what kids learn and what they know, and that there's a tight link in that space.
Elham and Jessica, I just want to thank you. I think there's just an unbelievable wealth of knowledge and experience and information in this conversation I hope that people will grab onto. If there's any last moment or thing that you would want to say, you should shout it out. But otherwise, we're going to conclude. And as an educator to other educators, I just deeply appreciate the work that you've done and continue to do. So thank you.
Jessica Calabrese: Thank you. It's just always a great opportunity to continue this conversation with other educators. We love sharing the work.
Elham Kazemi: Thank you. I think investing in teacher learning and learning from our students is central and so important to our work to grow as educators.
Morva McDonald: Perfect. Thank you guys.