Learning from One Another Lessons in Educational Excellence

[Applause]

my entrances usually aren’t this

dramatic i promise

so it’s 5 a.m on the thursday of finals

week here at csulb

and it’s one of those mornings where you

wake up

exhausted already thinking about all the

things you didn’t get done the day

before

and that you still have to do that day

instinctively i reach over for my cell

phone

to start scrolling through my email

until i see this message that makes me

pause

dear professor shea i’m sorry for the

late notice but i will be unable to

complete the assignment by the due date

if you could please accept it i would

greatly appreciate it

thank you for your understanding student

x

i have a heavy sigh and put my phone

down

i am so tired

and the weight of all the exhaustion

i’ve been carrying around

all semester suddenly hits me as i read

student x’s message

and my immediate response is thank you

for your understanding

what understanding do you understand

that i am trying to balance grading for

your class

studying for the class i’m taking

supporting my two adult children

parenting my teenager and my preschooler

training for a half marathon

coordinating a church ministry

um wait did i forget something else oh

yeah writing under a deadline

and sometimes i forget to eat and take a

shower

so i don’t have time

for understanding and i don’t have time

for late papers because i’m just

trying to crawl to the finish line

and i can feel that end of semester

frenzy

as it’s barreling towards me and i’m

about to jump into the rabbit hole

when i pause and i realize that

perhaps in their own way my student is

in exactly the same place

when we think about a rigorous education

and educational excellence often

we think about academic success as

measured

by a series of tests

we think of excellence as comparing

scores

and we ask all students to fulfill the

literally impossible task of being above

the norm

without considering what the norm

actually represents

and who these individual students are

the unique contributions they bring into

classrooms

and what it means that we’re asking them

all to conform to one

narrow standard of greatness

we order rank and evaluate our students

and it starts in schools by well-meaning

educators who say

if you just work a little bit harder

you’ll reach

academic success which will lead you to

career success which will lead you to

happiness

don’t you want to be happy we all want

to be happy

and on the other hand if you’re testing

far below basic you just have so far to

go

before you can actually be happy

so what are the costs and consequences

of this definition of academic

excellence well in schools and

universities across the u.s and around

the world we’ve seen a narrowing of

curriculum

and a focus on standardized test prep

that leaves us thinking

inside of boxes instead of engaging with

the world

creatively in addition to the

institutional costs there are individual

costs no matter where you

fall in the academic hierarchy those

students who are pushed out of the

system

or stuck in intervention or remediation

classes

are told to think inside of a box inside

of a bubble

and not engage creatively and for those

of us towards the top of the academic

hierarchy those of us who have been

successful in traditional education

we often feel like we’re in

a hamster wheel where we have to keep

running faster and faster

producing more and better results

constantly running and running

but we’re actually not going anywhere

and as i said it doesn’t matter where

you are on the academic hierarchy

because this definition of excellence

causes us all to wonder

what we’re actually worth

i am somebody who has been fortunate to

be pretty successful

in terms of academic excellence in my

life right that’s how you get a phd and

come to teach teachers right you have

academic excellence

and yet what most people don’t see is

how often i question my own worth

whether it’s not getting a concept as

quickly as i think i should

forgetting exactly what i’m supposed to

say next in this talk

forgetting something on my shopping list

whether it’s because my four-year-old

won’t listen to a simple direction that

i give her

i constantly find myself asking why are

you such a failure

and even on those days where i managed

to get all the things done on my to-do

list

that i have to do i wonder is this

excellence

and if it is is it worth it given how

exhausted i feel at the end of the day

and it’s not just me recently i was at

my son’s

academic magnet school this is a school

that promotes

students with excellence right they have

to test to get in and not only are they

academically excellent but they’re

students who are contributing to their

school and local community yet when they

were asked

what is it you wish your parents knew

these were some of their heartbreaking

responses

i wish my parents knew how hard i’m

trying

or sorry that i’m trying my hardest i

wish they knew

how much i worry about my academic

performance in order to satisfy them

i wish my parents knew that the

expectations and pressure

they put on my grades continually

crushed me every day

and that they appreciated how hard i

work rather than dismissing my lack of a

through a punishment taking away

everything that makes me

happy

and i wish i could say it was just me

or the peers at my son’s school actually

i don’t wish i could say that because i

don’t want it to be anybody but

it’s more than them too i also hear this

from my very own students

my students many of whom are the first

in their families to go to college

and who have so much to give to future

students in their own classrooms

they are students who bring things from

their own educational experiences

they’re learning in the credential

program to design innovative and

relevant

lessons that engage students and they’ve

often spent years working in and outside

of school

with youth yet so many of them are kept

out of classrooms by standardized tests

one narrow measure of their content

knowledge

so what if we had a different view

of educational excellence and excellence

in general

what if excellence was more than just an

exhaustive list of

individual accomplishments and more of a

collective

empowering process

well this idea may seem radical it’s not

totally

original more than 50 years ago

brazilian educational philosopher paolo

frey

envisioned a system of education

designed on liberation

transformation and humanization

and he defined humanization as the

process

of becoming creative and transformative

persons

who engage in and with their world

can you imagine with me for a moment

how our world would be different if

every

student if every person in this room

if every person outside these doors

was working on becoming a transformative

and creative

individual who was engaging in and with

their world

it sounds pretty great right

but if we’re going to reimagine

excellence in this way we need

ways to get there right because the ways

that we’re going right now

not going to lead us there so

one of the ways that we can get there at

least in the classroom

is through something called humanizing

pedagogies

right which is a complicated educational

jargony way

of saying that we can learn to listen to

one another

that we can learn through engaging with

perspectives

that each person brings into a learning

situation

as long as we’re clear and acknowledged

that there are differences in power in

any situation

so here’s what i mean simply right

it’s that we think of education as a

teacher

teaching students one person teaching

many students

right but what if teachers and students

entered into relationship

together deep relationships where each

person knew what the other brought

into a situation what if we engaged in

reciprocal relationships where i could

teach you

in one moment and you could teach me in

the next

how would learning be different in that

way if we could listen to

and learn from one another

now that’s a great idea right and we can

all support that

yes everybody’s opinions are valid and

important but here’s the thing education

doesn’t happen in a vacuum

it happens in societies and in societies

different people have more or less power

i’ll give you an example i am

the same person pretty much all the time

right

but in some situations i’m given

more respect and authority because i

have a phd

and a title and in other situations

i the exact same person and given less

respect because i’m a woman of color

and a mother

right so our powers shift in different

situations and when we have power we

have responsibility

we have responsibility to make space

for the voices of those who are less

often heard

and it’s not just about the idea of

making space

it’s about aligning our actions with our

beliefs so that if we

say we want to hear the voices of others

that we actually

listen to and engage with them in

powerful ways

so here’s an example from my classroom

my classroom is clearly a space in which

i have power i’m the professor and so i

was inspired recently by my son’s

uh by the activity at my son’s school

to ask my students so what is it you

wish i knew

right and i got a lot of really great

responses and they were very validating

and they said how great i am and i felt

really good and i was like yay i’m doing

everything right

and then i read this response i wish dr

shane knew that twitter and photographs

make me uncomfortable

and i have some students in the audience

today and they are laughing and they’re

laughing because

they know that twitter is a regular part

of the way i run my classroom right

so i believe in sharing on social media

the things that we do in our classroom

because i believe it makes our learning

more public

that others can learn from our space and

what we’re learning

so i do this regularly and my first

reaction

in response to this response was okay

um well if i just explain better

why i’m doing what i’m doing then my

student will be like oh yeah you know

that that’s okay

you just keep doing you right

and maybe that would have been true

except that i had already explained

why it was that i shared twitter and

photographs from the classroom

so then i knew i was giving this talk

and i was like wait a second are you

really

practicing humanizing pedagogies and so

i started to think

what was the humanity behind this

response like what was the very human

request that was here what was it that

my student really wanted me to know

and what i had to sit with was that

something that i was very

comfortable with and something that i

really believed in

was making my student uncomfortable and

so then i had to think

if my goal is to make our learning

public

is it necessary for me to put

photographs

when i tweet about our class

and when i thought about it i realized

you know it really isn’t

i can still make our learning public

without

doing this part that is making my

student uncomfortable

and so the very next class i came in and

i said

you know i read this response and

whoever wrote it i don’t know who wrote

it

i just want you to know i’m not going to

tweet any more photographs from this

class

and that day in the anonymous exit

ticket out the door

post-it that i was reading somebody said

i feel relieved

so in doing that small change to the way

that

i handle my classes i was actually

opening the door to greater educational

excellence

both for my student who now can sit and

learn in a place where they are not only

more comfortable

but also feel seen heard and

acknowledged

but i was also opening the space of

excellence for myself

i had to think more deeply about what my

educational goals

were and whether those practices really

aligned

with what i was doing and so that

opened the space of educational

excellence for our entire community

as i modeled what it was to be

a better educator by and for students

so this is all nice right in the

educational realm i’m an educator there

are educators i know in the audience

but what about those of you who aren’t

educators

what’s the point of humanizing practices

in your own lives

well humanizing practices aren’t just

for the classroom

in fact they can help us bring

excellence to all areas of our life

particularly in our relationships with

others

and with ourselves

so one example and you guys will think

that i live on social media which is

more or less true

um because my next example is also about

social media but

you know we’re in an election year and

election years

cause a lot of controversy on social

media so you may recently have seen

a post by someone you love who’s dear to

you a close friend or a family member

on a social media platform and you see

it and you’re like

i cannot believe they posted that thing

that is so ignorant did they even fact

check

what is wrong with them and if you’re

anything like me you begin typing

furiously

on your keyboard or getting your thumbs

ready on your phone

and you’re like see i have the argument

for this and i can’t believe and what

and you’re just about to hit send but i

would encourage you

to pause for a moment before you hit

send

and re-read that message and see if you

were the recipient of that message

no matter how justified it is

how that would impact your relationship

with the sender

see i think disagreement is necessary

sometimes right we’re not going to

always agree with other people’s

perspectives

but by speaking in and through the

relationships we have with people

by accessing points of mutual care and

concern

we can confront perspectives in ways

that still honor

people’s humanity and that in and of

itself

is transformative

but it’s not just on social media it’s

actually in life too i know some of you

out there

are parents and i want to tell you that

the greatest teacher for me

in humanizing practices is my

four-year-old

and i want to say that it’s never too

early to start learning from the

children around you

so here’s what my four-year-old has

taught me about excellence

she has taught me that excellence really

isn’t about all the things you do

it’s actually about those moments where

i’m most present with her it’s about

making

time for play she’s taught me that

excellent storytelling isn’t about

having your b’s and d’s face the right

direction

it’s about bringing yourself to the

story

and my 14 year old he’s not a bad

teacher too

in fact he taught me that i should try

again and audition for this tedx talk

but he also teaches me

that i don’t have to take every single

leadership opportunity

that’s presented to me or participate in

every single activity

to be excellent in fact it’s better

to do less but do what you’re really

passionate about

he and i are both working on caring less

about what other people

think about us and more about what our

internal compass tells us

is truly excellent

now again as someone who’s done well

who has by external measures

seemed excellent to most people in the

world i’ve had a lot of trouble

disentangling my accomplishments from my

sense of excellence and my sense of

worth

but reclaiming my excellence has been

worth it

i know now that my excellence cannot be

measured

by the number of degrees i have how many

things i get done

in a day or how many right or wrong

answers i have on a test

and truly your excellence cannot be

measured by these things

either if we must

measure excellence perhaps we can begin

to measure it in moments

moments spent on the car ride to and

from school with my son

listening to k-pop or taking him to his

first concert

moments spent reading the tweets of my

former students

when they share about the excellent

things that their students are doing

moments spent learning and growing

writing

and rewriting preparing and practicing

this talk

i’d like to invite you all on this

journey towards this

new form of excellence one that asks us

to change our perspectives

but may allow us to be more present to

the moments in life

that make us human and that make

life beautiful

we can of course continue to sharpen our

number two pencils

and run on our hamster wheels or

we can begin working together and

walking on this journey

towards excellence creating a world

where we can all

engage in and with one another

the choice is ours together

thank you