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