A humanizing February post card

Sometimes, as I get sucked into the daily-ness of a school schedule, I get a little (or more than a little) disilussioned with myself and my (in)ability to live up to my humanizing educational committments on a daily basis. How/Am I being critical, making change, transforming systems, or empowering voices that need to be heard in school? Some days it doesn’t feel like I’m doing much of anything.

So this post is just a nugget, a postcard to remind myself that planting seeds and starting conversations and moments of challenge are important too. Here are two anecdotes from a day in February when I was tossing about for a couple of moments in my day that show my efforts toward pursuing education that disrupts, empowers, and challenges.

A bridge between teacher’s strengths and students’ needs

During an online training back about strength-based feedback for instructional coaches, I was asked to reflect on what my strengths are as a coach. I shared that I try to use my skills as a quick diagnostician to affirm a teacher’s strengths and look for ways to use that strength as a bridge to address their goals. In conversation with another coach, I shared my observations about one teacher who has a vivacious, engaging voice and who excels at storytelling, elaboration, and illustration to help students understand concepts. I’m planning to talk with her about how she can use her strength as a communicator to help students develop their own elaboration skills so that their voices can take center stage in the classroom—which relates to her goal of increasing student engagement.

If I enter a teacher’s room with a deficit lens (e.g., “This teacher talks too much and doesn’t give her students a chance to speak”), I’m missing the change to help the teacher see how she can use her strong voice to empower her students’ voices. Taking the strengths-based approach humanizes the teacher so that she can see how her strengths can help her reach her goal of helping students take ownership and express themselves more clearly and fully.

Listening and critical restraint

On this same February day, I was chatting with a lovely and energetic teacher about her classroom library. She shared a goal of labeling her classroom library with Lexile levels, and she showed off how she’s using data from an online reading program to track her students’ reading progress. My librarian and critical literacy gut clenched and wanted to jump in and say, “No! Don’t limit a student’s reading to a narrow Lexile band! That’s so dehumanizing!”

But I paused, let her talk more, and she went on to share that she had thought a book she was reading with her multilingual learners was a 720 Lexile, but actually was at a 920 level—but that she was pleasantly surprised to they were doing fine with it! Letting her tell more of her story gave me the chance to respond with praise for her willingness to let her read beyond their Lexiles, and we continued on to talk about how other factors like a student’s interests in the book or collaborating with peers can help students access higher levels.

It may seem like small beans that I listened and let her talk rather than jumping straight to critical questions and the preachy-didactic route of the more prescriptive critical literacy pronouncement that was brewing in my gut. But remember, I’m still detoxing from academia, the land where critical pronouncements and questions are sometimes valued for their performative rather than transformative qualities. How ironic that it’s so tempting to use criticality as a dehumanizing weapon in academia. Inadvertantly, perhaps, but still.

In future conversations with teachers about Lexiles and student reading, I can focus on asking questions that respect both the teacher’s growing understanding of diverse criteria for text selection (beyond Lexiles) and students’ need for privacy, diversity, and autonomy in text selection. I’m thinking forward to how to raise questions about alternate placements of reading level labels as a way of respecting a students’ privacy, intellectual freedom, and autonomy as a reader.

Signing off…

Every postcard needs a signature, and my two anecdotes here are small but meaningful memories in my own journey toward humanizing listening, questioning, and relationship-building with other teachers!

~Kate