Episode 260 Transcript

The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 260

Jennifer Gonzalez, Host

GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 260 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’ll explore seven teaching practices that nurture student voice. 

In our efforts to improve school, especially in the United States, student voice has really gotten lost. We focus on test scores, top-down curriculum, and measures of success that never quite get to the humanity of our students. Not only have these efforts not succeeded in raising test scores, they haven’t given us much satisfaction in other ways, either: In a recent survey, nearly half of educators reported that student behavior was worse than before the pandemic, and that number had grown since teachers were surveyed just two years earlier. 

Although there are most certainly individual schools where great things are happening, too many schools are still missing the mark. Too many schools keep trying to address these problems without hearing from the very people who are impacted most: the students. 

But there is another way. Four years ago, I started talking a lot about a new book I’d read called Street Data. The book offered an approach to school improvement that was different from anything I’d seen before. It focused on having slow, thoughtful listening sessions with students at the margins, those whose voices were rarely heard and whose needs weren’t being consistently met at school. From those sessions, new solutions could be developed, piloted, and then iterated and improved on, followed by more listening sessions to guide further change. 

Unlike so many other programs and approaches I’d seen for making schools better — many of which are quite expensive to implement — the model outlined by this single book seemed like it could actually work. I really wanted teachers and school leaders to try it. 

So I started by having the authors, Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan, on episode 178 of the podcast. Not long after, I offered to produce a mini-documentary of Shane and Jamila guiding two schools through the Street Data process, so that teachers could get an up-close look at how the approach worked. A year later, I published an eight-episode video series and had a few of the participants join me on the podcast to talk about the project; you can hear that conversation on episode 203. 

As the Street Data methodology made its way into more schools, one question that came up often was what does it look like when teachers center student voice and student agency in their pedagogy? If a school is invested in the Street Data process and in shifting their practices, what kinds of practices might they actually use in the classroom?

To answer that question, Shane Safir teamed up with three educators: Marlo Bagsik, Sawsan Jaber, and Crystal Watson. Together, they wrote the new book Pedagogies of Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency.

Rather than prescribing a single rigid approach, the book functions as a “seed store” of practices, a rich collection of small, replicable moves that educators can use to center student voice, nurture agency, and create space for meaningful learning. 

This book is especially important now, in a time when marginalized voices, which had just begun to gain long-overdue recognition, are being aggressively pushed back into the margins. Across the country, books are being banned, teachers are being censored, and democracy is being threatened daily. For educators wondering where to put their energy in these frustrating and scary times, Pedagogies of Voice offers a powerful answer: Teach in a way that amplifies student voice. Create spaces where students can reflect, speak, and act, where democratic practices like listening, challenging different opinions, and collaborating can thrive. Help them grow into the kind of people who will reshape the world for the better.

In this episode, I talk with the book’s four authors. Each one shares one or two of their favorite classroom practices from the book — specific, actionable moves you can try right away. As you listen, you’ll get a taste of the broader collection that fills the pages of Pedagogies of Voice, and hopefully you’ll walk away with some new seeds to plant in your own classroom.

Before we get started, I’d like to thank Solution Tree for sponsoring this episode. If you follow the show, you know the value in learning from other educators. That’s the basis of Solution Tree’s work. They match schools with experts who help them implement professional development for teachers and administrators and bring out the very best in students. What makes Solution Tree different is that their experts are real educators who have been in your shoes and have faced the same types of challenges your school may face. From building professional learning communities to improving student intervention strategies, Solution Tree has helped schools nationwide see real, sustained results in student achievement, teacher satisfaction, and overall school culture. See the kind of results they can help a school or district like yours achieve at solutiontree.com/cultofpedagogy.

Support also comes from Listenwise, providing short, high-quality, age-appropriate podcasts for grades 2-12. Save time with pre-made lessons and build students’ background knowledge and academic vocabulary. Keep students on grade-level with scaffolding and differentiation. Listenwise now offers the Writing Assessor, a new tool that provides instant, actionable feedback to help students become more confident and capable communicators. The Writing Assessor generates English Language Proficiency levels and identifies strengths and growth areas, saving teachers time and giving every student the valuable feedback they need to improve. Start a free trial today at listenwise.com.

And again, before I play the interview, I’m afraid that for the second episode in a row, my own voice was recorded in sub-par quality. I don’t know what is going on with my settings or why I can’t seem to notice in time that something is off, but there it is: You can hear me fine, but I don’t sound great. Hopefully I’ll get my act together and this will be the last time. 

With that said, here’s my interview with Shane Safir, Marlo Bagsik, Sawsan Jaber, and Crystal Watson.

GONZALEZ: So we are, this is sort of a long overdue interview about your book that you all wrote together, Pedagogies of Voice. And so we sort of have a planned structure for how we’re going to talk about this because there’s so much in the book. There’s so much background that we could probably talk for several hours about it, but what we want to do is just give listeners an idea of what this project is, what they can get out of the book, and then share a couple of practices that they can use. So Shane, we’re going to talk to you first, and this is now, I believe, your third time on the podcast.

SAFIR: Right.

GONZALEZ: Because we talked all about street data, and so this is a follow-up book to “Street Data.” So tell us about, what is “Pedagogies of Voice,” how did it come to be, and what is this book?

SAFIR: Thanks for that, Jenn. I’m sitting next to both of these books and I’m thinking about how a book is like this flat object, but it’s also this story reservoir, right? There’s so much inside of that. I always think about Ruth Ozeki’s beautiful novel “The Book of Form and Emptiness” and how books are alive. And when I look at the faces of my three co-authors, I think about how much story and connection and healing went into the birth, the development and the birth of this book. And, you know, it really is like a beautiful sequel to “Street Data,” but so much more than that. So for listeners who’ve read “Street Data,” you’ll know that Chapter 5 of this book laid out a student agency model that was meant to really embody an expansion of what we think about sort of school transformation efforts from satellite data and metrics and numbers to this much bigger mark or this kind of North Star of student agency. And as “Street Data” sort of gained some traction in the field, there was a lot of interest and a lot of curiosity in that chapter and that model and in this idea that equity work is first and foremost pedagogical.

GONZALEZ: Mhmm.

SAFIR: So from that authentic inquiry that kept coming up in the field, that contained the seeds of this book, “Pedagogies of Voice.” And the four of us came together in this really organic way and we used the equity transformation cycle, which I know you’re super familiar with Jenn from Chapter 4 of “Street Data,” to actually just talk to educators across North America. We did five focus groups and we just asked people, what are you wanting to read right now? What are you wrestling with in your practice? What do you feel needs to be said about student voice and agency in the moment that we’re in right now? And those focus groups provided so much rich street data that shaped the book that is now “Pedagogies of Voice” and really helped us hone not just a proposal, but like a why, a purpose for this book that was deeply rooted in the voices of educators. So I’ll just close by saying that we took the agency framework in “Street Data,” kind of metamorphosed it, if that’s a verb, into its own new iteration, which instead of mastery as the third domain includes inquiry as the third domain.

GONZALEZ: Mhmm.

SAFIR: So the four domains are identity, belonging, inquiry, and efficacy. And then each of those domains has two pedagogical approaches that sit within them. And Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 really unpack very practically, very concretely, what does it look like to awaken student identity, belonging, inquiry, and efficacy through specific practices and approaches? And we represent different content areas and have worked at different grade levels. So we were able to just weave in just everybody’s voices and stories and experiences, as well as lots of the folks in the focus groups became contributors who also offered us tools and ideas and templates. So it’s just like a real quilt of different people’s voices.

GONZALEZ: I like that. That’s a really nice metaphor. It’s a quilt and that’s how it feels. I mean, literally almost in the way of the design of the book, because you can look at almost any page and there are sort of, like, patches. They’re kind of like thrown on of, like, here’s another idea, and here’s something else you can add if you like.

SAFIR: Cool. 

GONZALEZ: Okay, thank you so much for that introduction. And so I, you know, didn’t mention this earlier, but now when I think about you pulling this group together, I think it would probably make more sense rather than having me introduce your collaborators, you have a much better idea of what got you to pull them into this project. And so what we decided would be a good way of introducing this — because there is so much in the book — would be to just have each person, each of the four of you, share one impactful practice so that people listening can right away take something into their classrooms and give it a try. And then if they like what’s happening, they can go ahead and read the rest of the book. So, what you decided, I think, is that we were going to be starting with Sawsan. Yes. So why don’t you, and this is also Sawsan’s, I think, third time, maybe fourth time on, on the podcast. So she’s also a repeat guest. So tell us about Sawsan and why she is a part of this project, why you wanted her to be with you on this.

SAFIR: Oh, this is so fun. My favorite thing is to get to glow about you all. So Sawsan is, for anyone who follows her, knows that she is brilliant and that she is deeply rooted in the classroom and pedagogy and has been enacting many of the practices in this book throughout her 25-year career. So I was fangirling her in social media before we connected. We connected, and she told me she was really using “Street Data” and doing some workshops with her teachers around it. And just the more I got to know her, the more it seemed like such an obvious privilege to get to bring her voice and her genius into this book. And wow, I mean, the level of stories and practices and student artifacts that she brought into this book, I can’t even, there aren’t even words. It’s really, it’s really incredible. So I’ll turn it back to you.

GONZALEZ: Sawsan, you’re going to be talking about something within the identity domain. So the book has four, four domains and this first one is identity. So what are you going to share with us?

JABER: So before I share, I just have to say, Shane fangirling me is like, I still feel like saying Shane is my coauthor and my friend is such a flex. Because “Street Data” literally transformed my profession, me as a professional in so many different ways. So working on this book was such an honor, with this team and with Shane. I’m going to talk about storientation, which is one of the pedagogies, but I’m going to give two specific practices within storientation. And the reason that I feel like this is probably one of the, well, the whole book just meets this moment in so many different ways, but stories, they pierce people’s hearts and change their minds, and they humanize in a world that’s working so hard to dehumanize. And so storientation is one that I feel like really builds community. And so one of the ways that we talk about storientation in the book is through the identity mandalas. And I have done the identity mandalas with high school students and with, now, my college students. And in both cases, found it to be such a transformative experience, because it forces people to kind of delve a little bit deep into unpacking and interrogating parts of who they are and how they show up in spaces. And so with my pre-service teachers that I work with now, and I found this book to be a godsend in this moment, in the pre-service classroom, it helps us to really kind of get down into our positionality as human beings and how we show up in front of students based on our lived experiences, our values, our ancestors, and the people who have really molded us and the experiences that have molded us to be the humans that we are, and how we can really model that and do that with our students. And for my high school students, when I did it with them, the feedback from the students was, we didn’t even think about these things before and how they really impacted us. And so for teachers that are looking for below-the-iceberg, get-to-know-you activities with students, this is definitely one that combines both art and words and like deep interrogation and meaningful private — but could be public ways as well — all together at the same time. And it helps to really, we keep talking about mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors for a really long time. And I think one of the flaws in that and the way that came about, like the way it became actionable in classrooms, was that teachers were deciding what the mirrors were for students. And with the identity mandala, it’s students creating mirrors for themselves, about themselves, that become windows for other students. And so instead of me being the gatekeeper of what is an accurate mirror of the students in front of me, they use this tool and other tools like them to create something that represents who they are that then we can use as a tool to get to know each other very deeply and build that deep community that’s based on knowing and understanding each other versus the surface level things that many teachers do when they go back to school. So that’s one. And then the other one is one that I think is genius because I always struggled as a student with math, always, all the way through my doctorate. It’s like, I call it the M-word. And I think that if this strategy was used by my math teachers, my experience would have looked very, very, very, very different. And so it’s the math autobiographies and just having students talk about their identity as math learners and their experiences and their histories as math learners and giving teachers that insight to really understand students beyond the standardized test score, but to really, again, humanize, right? Like, that’s what happens with these stories and all the different ways that we tell them. And when you say storientation and stories, people often lean towards “this lives in the humanities, the social science, and the English.” But in “Pedagogies of Voice,” we have tied all of these pedagogies across content, across, across grade level, because they fit everywhere. And even in math, we can tell stories to help our teachers and help ourselves understand ourselves, right, better in order for us to grow as learners and as people and as humans and as communities. And so, storientation, it’s on in all its forms. And what’s beautiful about every chapter in this book is that there isn’t one way, but there’s an abundance of ideas and strategies and teacher voices and student voices that teachers can go in there. And I always say, like, my favorite thing is when Shane describes it as a seed store. So you can go in there and pick the seeds that you want to grow your garden. And what fits for you and for your students. There are so many ideas in the book, and storientation of different ways to implement the storytelling aspect of really getting to the core of who your students are.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Let me ask you to, so we’ve got two things right now. We’ve got identity mandalas. Did I say it correctly? 

JABER: Mhmm. 

GONZALEZ: And then math autobiographies. Can you, can we take a moment with the identity mandalas and just explain, what does that actually look like in practice? Is this a picture that someone is creating?

JABER: So, I mean, the physical form of it is a circle that has four quarters. And in the four quarters, there’s like the roots of a person, the goals and the dreams of a person. So you kind of are digging into, like, the different parts of yourself, like, what roots, what roots do you really think about and attribute to who you are today? And it could look like anything. So the way we did it with both sets of students and the way it’s presented in the book is that it’s a combination of art and words, but we’ve done it together as a team several times, and we’ve seen, some of us have done only art and some of us have done only words. And so it really can be whatever you want it to be. I don’t, I can’t think off the top of my head what the four quarters of it are. There are roots, I don’t know if anybody knows off the top of their head or has it in front of them.

SAFIR: Roots, relationships, maybe events, and hopes and dreams or something like that.

JABER: Yeah. Mhmm. 

SAFIR: That sound right?

GONZALEZ: Okay.

JABER: Yeah.

GONZALEZ: Okay. Is events like past history, some things that have happened in your history that are significant?

JABER: It really can be whatever you want it to be, right? 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

JABER: Because it’s your interpretation of the events that you think are the things that shaped you in your life.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

JABER: And so like your roots can be your ancestors, it could be where you come from, the places where you come. It can be experiences that you’ve had that are, like, really deeply rooted in who you are today or who you, who you, who you’ve become. And your hopes and dreams are, those are the things that kind of we, we looked at those as professionals from a professional standpoint with my pre-service students. Some students, some people looked at it as future ancestors and what footprints they wanted to leave behind. So really, I think the choice and freedom and agency that’s built into the, a task itself gives people the opportunity to really, really also build themselves and weave themselves into it in ways that it’s meaningful for them. There is no right answer or wrong answer.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

JABER: It’s who you are and how you see yourself, and it’s about really holding a close mirror to yourself in order for you to do a deep dive and ask yourself questions that I don’t know that in education we often ask our students to ask themselves, right? 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

JABER: And it’s that part of, like, I care enough about you to want to know these things about you. But also, I ask sometimes my students questions about their own ancestry, and oftentimes, in some spaces, there’s such a deep need to assimilate that they don’t know the answers to some of those questions. And so with, with tasks like this one or, like, not, I don’t wanna call it a project, but like these tools, I think that there sometimes is a push to get students to really do that deep dive, and especially for teachers. One of the things that I think we talk about with “Pedagogies of Voice” is that every single practice in the book is something that can be applied with leadership to teachers as well. You can’t do an identity mandala with students if you haven’t asked yourself those questions first. And so with the pre-service teachers, if you have a really strong, deep-rooted understanding of who you are, it’s going to help you understand how you show up in front of students who don’t look like you and students who look like you, right?

GONZALEZ: Right. 

JABER: Because of our kind of complexity and our nuances and in the identities that we, that we bring to the surface, especially as teachers.

GONZALEZ: If a, if a teacher is doing this with students, then it sort of sounds logical that a teacher would present their own mandala to the class first as an introduction to the project, and then — and you had said earlier, I think, publicly or privately. So these would be shared either directly with the teacher or maybe not at all or, or shared with the class in some way or not?

JABER: Yeah, I think that choice always has to be there because if you’re asking, one of the ways of being that we talk about in Chapter 4 is vulnerability. And I think that’s a really important part of, like, it’s a foundation to doing a lot of this work. Teachers need — students need to see that teachers are willing to do the same things and kind of model the thinking and the behaviors and the vulnerability behind some of these things so that they’re also, it makes it acceptable for them to do all of, because historically in education, we don’t. We are not vulnerable and we don’t ask students to bring those pieces of themselves into the classroom either. And so all of a sudden they have a teacher, out of many teachers, who’s saying, hey, I am welcoming you to bring your language, to bring your identity, to bring your ancestors, and I’m validating your ways of knowing and who you are in this space. A lot of times, they don’t know what to do with that. And so by modeling it, that helps to make it more acceptable and more tangible for many kids who haven’t had that experience prior. And sharing, I think, I personally always give students the opportunity to not share if they feel like it’s too personal or they’re not ready to share, but always talk to them about how important it is for us to build community and encourage them to share and feel more comfortable as time progresses.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

JABER: But if you’re doing this very early in the year, chances are you haven’t built enough community to share them publicly yet.

GONZALEZ: Mhmm, mhmm. And then the math autobiography, I’m guessing that could be like a written thing. It could be a piece of art also. And this is, and this would also be maybe something that the teacher would model first.

JABER: A hundred percent. And I have done, I’ve been doing a lot of vlogging in my classroom too, because I feel like putting faces to names, and it could be anything as like open up your iPhone and press record in the camera —

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

JABER: — but, like, have a conversation so that it feels more human than reading a blog post or submitting a paper or whatever. And that also gives them the opportunity to integrate their mother tongue and their languages and the body language that you often miss when you are reading a paper is included in a vlog. So I feel like that’s something too that can be translated into many modes depending on the students that are in front of you and the preferences in which they choose to communicate.

GONZALEZ: Nice. Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing that. So we’re going to move now to the next domain, which is the domain of belonging. And so Shane, I’m going to ask you to introduce Crystal, who is going to be sharing practices from that domain.

SAFIR: So it is my honor to introduce Dr. Crystal M. Watson, who just received her dissertation doctorate a couple weeks ago. And it’s a little funny to me that I connected with both these brilliant women and thought leaders through Twitter because of the current state of Twitter, but that is the truth. That is the real, real story. And when I think about social media, I feel like social media is often just such a performative space, right? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SAFIR: And people are putting out these versions of themselves, whether personally or professionally. And one thing I could say early on in following and fangirling Crystal is I could tell that Crystal was the real deal. Like, I could sense even in her social media presence that she was a really authentic, grounded person. And it just came through in, like, her relationality, the way she connected so graciously with other educators and other scholars. And I think I just reached out to her. I slipped into her DMs, as they say, and was like, wow, I love the way you move in the world and the work. I’m just so touched by it. We kind of struck up a conversation that way. And then eventually, as I got to know the depth of her STEM knowledge and her math pedagogy expertise, and she really occupies this very unique space at the intersection of student voice and math that I think folks desperately need to see and to feel like they can bring those things together, right? And math pedagogy doesn’t have to be rote and drill and kill. And I was just so touched by the way she moved in that space and her innovation and her, and her groundedness that I invited her to be a part of this. And the rest is history. Now she is my other sister in this circle.

GONZALEZ: Welcome, Crystal. So tell us a little bit about the belonging domain and what practice you want to share within that.

WATSON: So it’s funny because I think about belonging, and I’ve thought about it way before it became this educational buzzword, right? When, I am a career changer. And when I came into knowing that I wanted to be an educator, I was interviewing and the interviewer asked me — Emily Campbell, she asked me — what do you want to teach? And I said, anything but math. And she said, well, why? And I said, I was a terrible math student. And she asked me some questions and got to the root of the fact that I just didn’t have a good math experience. And my trajectory in my math identity could have been changed with an experience or more, right?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

WATSON: And so I was like, okay, well, I’m going to trust you. And she promised me she wouldn’t let me fail. She would make sure that I had coaching and etc., etc. And so when I got into the classroom, I knew that I was going to not be status quo. I knew that I was not going to have kids in rows. I knew that I wasn’t going to teach my seventh and eighth graders just rote memorization and algorithms, even though you know, once you get to the middle school, it is more abstract math. You don’t have those concrete examples like you do earlier.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

WATSON: But I knew that I was going to make it relevant. I wanted every kid to have an anchor for why we were doing what we were doing in the community that they were in, right? So whether it be, be us talking about transformations, we rooted that in gentrification. You can read more about that in the book, because it doesn’t make sense when I say it like that. But it does when you see what happened with that. Or maybe it was talking about discounts and percents and thinking about, like, housing insecurity and, and racism and things like that, or gentrification and erasure of whole communities. 

GONZALEZ: Mhmm. 

WATSON: So I really, really took this belonging piece really seriously. I wanted my kids to see themselves in the classroom. And then also it was kind of some heart work and me work, right? Because I wanted to see myself in the, in the math classroom. And I didn’t see myself in the math classroom until I became a math teacher. So for me, the practice in belonging, that, that really sticks and is, is really dear to me and close to me is circling up. So it seems so, so simple just to put kids in a circle, but the meaning of the circle and why we do it really resonates with me. And, and I still do it with my staff as a principal now, we circle up, even with 70 staff members. I just love the fact that when you circle up, you’re all equidistant from the center, right? And that is the definition of a circle. So at any given time, an identity, an idea, a person can be centered, right? So we’re not centering one or, or two identities or thoughts or ideals. We can center them all at any given time in our time together. Specifically in math, I feel like, you know, math is a very polarizing place. People are either, like, oh, I love math. I was good at math. And they’re like, oh, my gosh, I hate math, which I get most, right?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

WATSON: And so when folks are like, I hate math, and I’m like, well, why? And they’re like, because, you know, you just sit there and do problems. And I said, that’s the problem. 

GONZALEZ: Right.

WATSON: You know, it should be more conversational. It should be, argumentation should be a part of the math classroom. And when you circle up, you can actually see each other. You can see each other’s body language. Somebody’s not speaking from the back of the room and you all have to turn around. You’re all in a circle and you’re speaking about whatever math concept you’re talking about. My friend Nolan Fossum, he is a contributor in the book as well. He actually taught math in Orange County, and he did a lot of circles with math and the kids would have their math books, notebooks in a circle, no desks in his room. And they would just, like, debate and talk about and grapple with math concepts and how they showed up in the real world. You know, those types of things and how they were meaningful to kids. So for me, it’s more about the students that I’ve come to have the privilege to teach, right? Because I tell all my parents this, parents have choices. Even when you think that parents don’t have choices because you’re their neighborhood school, they have choices. They could homeschool. They could do, they could go to charters. So we should all see it as a privilege that, that parents are sending their kids to us. They’re sending their best to us. They’re not keeping the kids that they want to keep to themselves at home. Like, everybody is coming to you, right? And they’re sending their best to you. And they expect that we’re caring for them the same way that we would our own children. And the kids that I’ve talked to have really talked about how math has been a place that is very constricting for them. They’re not able to be creative in the space. They’re not able to, like, have an opinion because there’s nothing to have an opinion about because it’s either right or wrong. And so circling up and just a lot of the strategies within all of the domains, but belonging in, in, in particular, allows students to bring their lived experiences into the math classroom, which is creative enough, right? And it doesn’t separate math from what they do after school, how they interact with their peers. It doesn’t separate their home life from their school. It integrates all of it. And we show that, that creativity does have a place in the math classroom. And stories, like Sawsan said, stories are what bring us together and mold us, right? So stories also have a place in, in the math classroom.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Okay. So, and so really it is very simple. Just the physical placement can sort of confer a sense of belonging to everyone in the room.

WATSON: Yes.

GONZALEZ: And that sounds like for a lot of people, math is a place where we don’t see that happening often. It’s where it’s needed really badly. All right. We’re going to move to the third domain, which is inquiry. We’ve done identity, belonging, and now this is three out of four, which is inquiry, which, Shane, you’ve decided to take that one. And then we’re going to move to Marlo for the last one. So tell us a little bit about this domain and then what practice you want to share.

SAFIR: Okay, so yeah, I get to talk about Chapter 7, which is called “Pedagogies that Awaken Inquiry.” And every chapter has a credo. I don’t know if we mentioned that earlier, but the credo here is “your ideas matter here.” This is what we want students to feel when they come into the classroom. And I have a lot of passion for this chapter and just this whole concept of inquiry-centered classrooms. I’m just going to read like one little passage from page 169 of the book. It says, “Inquiry-centered classrooms tend to revolve around open-ended questions that have no right or wrong answers, but rather invite thoughtful responses, dialogue, and sometimes controversy. In such classrooms, students’ viewpoints, ideas, and opinions are central to every dimension of the learning process.” And when I think about why this pedagogy in this chapter really speaks to me, I can’t help but think about the state of our democracy, the sort of fragility, the life support that democracy seems to be on, not just in our country but in others as well.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SAFIR: And to feel that part of the reason we are in the place we are is because inquiry has been stripped from the learning environments, so many places. The ability for young people to wrestle with big questions about the world —

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

SAFIR: — to be curious, to stay curious, to develop not just literacy, but critical literacy about text, about media, about the world.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

SAFIR: And that’s really like what this chapter is about. And like all of the pedagogy chapters, it’s rooted in concrete practices. So we talk about questions over answers, and feedback over grades, both of which showed up in Chapter 5 of “Street Data,” but are really unpacked here. And if it’s helpful, I can give you like a couple of quick examples of what that looks like. So like a really low-hanging fruit example from questions over answers is a wonder wall. So the idea of having students generate inquiry questions. What are they genuinely wondering about the world or the communities they inhabit? We draw from actually one of my son’s middle school teachers, Gwen Hornig, who adapted a question from Shanna Peeples’ work. What question would you ask the wisest person in the world? And then they don’t just say it on a Post-it or on a, you know, to a partner. They create a visual wall of their questions. And even in the focus groups that informed the revision of the book, I got to ask that question with a teacher, one of our contributors, Alessa Ibanez, with her third graders. And the kids came up with the most brilliant questions. And in that conversation, that short listening session focus group, the teacher got really lit up about, wow, what if I did pursue some of these things that kids are really interested in? So that’s like one example that’s pretty easy to do.

GONZALEZ: Mhmm. 

SAFIR: And then there’s more complex ones. And one of my favorites is the sort, sorting, which a lot of folks I think know about. And this is something I first was exposed to at Urban Academy, a public high school in New York City that uses a lot of sorts. So it’s the idea of basically framing a question and giving students lots of little strips of paper that have an array of answers. At an elementary school classroom, it might be like, 10, 15, or 20 little strips. In high school, it might be 75 to 80, and then individually and then in small groups, having kids sort the responses to activate their critical inquiry around what they think. So, for example, at an elementary school classroom, it might be, what is good for kids? And you give them lots of examples like allowance, not having a uniform, doing chores, a stay-at-home parent, music lessons, and they’re debating, discussing, and sorting. At the high school level, a more sophisticated one, who are the 10 most and 10 least important figures in US history? And you give kids 70 examples, right? And so through that pedagogy, which can be adopted at every grade level and every content area, right? You can do it with art, you can do it with ecology, you can do it with all these things.

GONZALEZ: Right.

SAFIR: Students are driving the learning, they’re carrying the cognitive load, they’re thinking about what’s important, and they’re having to learn to articulate and defend their responses. So I just love that, that strategy, because it’s so cross-applicable and hopefully that’s helpful to listeners.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. I love it too. That’s great. Really good stuff so far, and we’re ready to move into the last domain, which is efficacy. And so Marlo is going to take that. So introduce us to Marlo.

SAFIR: Now I get to glow about Marlo. This is so fun. Okay. So Marlo and I, in our group, we’re the only two who got to know each other in person first in real life because we live near each other. We live like a mile from each other in Oakland, California. But we actually became colleagues in San Mateo Unified High School District where Marlo is now the, oh my gosh, director of professional learning? What, what’s your title again? The —

BAGSIK: Learning coordinator.

SAFIR: — professional, professional learning coordinator. At the time, he was situated in a really amazing continuation high school in this large, very diverse public high school. He was a teacher leader there and an English teacher. And I got to watch and witness and sense what a force of nature he was and is and how much Marlo moves from this like very deep moral imperative, but not in this kind of pie in the sky, like woo-woo way, but a moral imperative that’s rooted in practice, that’s rooted in pedagogy, right? That actually activates these very specific moves that serve and accelerate the learning of the most marginalized kids in the system. So when people read this book, Chapter 2 features his relationship with a particular student, a multilingual learner from Guatemala named, who we call Andy in the book. And it’s a beautiful story. He generously shared it and unpacked it. And it’s connected to the street data levels of data model, but also to Marlo’s practice at the time and how he transformed as an English teacher by, like, walking alongside and sitting alongside this student who was in a very, very vulnerable place, having immigrated as an unaccompanied minor and just been through so many different things. So I’ll just say that you will hear from him in a minute, but his voice is true and clear and compelling. And I just feel so privileged that he’s been a part of this.

GONZALEZ: I was watching Marlo’s face as you described him as a force of nature. It’s just like, that’s something to be described that way. Marlo, welcome. Please tell us about the domain of efficacy.

BAGSIK: Absolutely. I’m so honored to be here. And I want to transition and use that force of nature because I think I’ve been twice now, I’ve gotten the feedback that I’m a quiet storm. So I receive that, all of that, because I don’t, I really move in the world with this ethos of you don’t have to be the loudest in the room to get heard. And it really drives my own pedagogy and my own inquiry around students. And efficacy is one of my favorite ones because of what it’s taught me and how to build it and how to prompt students to start to believe in their own self-efficacy. So the credo for this is you can make a difference around the things that matter to you. And that, just hearing that, and then reflecting on my own practice over 10 years in the classroom, I’ve always been speaking of Andy, who is featured in Chapter 2. I was always really attracted to not the loudest voice in the room, because I know that our system silences and oppresses those so deeply that they just try to pass by, because of the way that they’ve been disenfranchised. And to me, those are my highest concerns because that is even more marginalized. The students with behaviors are coming up and they are communicating, that’s data. So once I got right with that and had to attend to those needs, it was really digging deeper, digging deeper into the classroom, into these quiet corners to try to interrogate how do I excavate and try to blossom the self-efficacy that I know is possible within all my students. And so there’s two pedagogies in efficacy, but I’m really going to focus on reflection and revision, which I look back, and I’m so proud to just even offer this to the world because it’s been iterated on. And while it is situated in two inquiries, like, it’s just after 10 years of teaching, this small micro move that you make, just make it more impactful. So the first move in advocacy is Monday intentions. And I would take, I was like, in my mind, a big inquiry was, how do I get students to think about themselves? Just, and how many times in their day as a teenager do they get to stop and pause and think about everything, not just my English course, not just the content. So at first it started that way. And then I realized, no, I need to expand this question. So one of the, so the question is, or I’m sorry, I quote first, I say, “When we set good intentions for ourselves, we become our biggest cheerleaders,” always to remind themselves that they need to be their biggest cheerleader. And then I asked students in three sentences, think about the week ahead of our classes, at your home, at your school, or anywhere else in your life, what actions, tasks, and/or things do you want to see happen that you have the control over? And that last bit of “what you have control over” was really, it added because at first it didn’t have that, but I started to see that micro shift of because students come to schools with trauma. So they’re so situated in big, huge things that they can’t control. And I was like, hmm that, how do I take that? But then kind of guide them to their own sphere of influence. Take that really big thing, but let’s reflect on that big thing you may not fix, but what can you do for yourself so that you’re better and you’re making better choices? And this was remarkable because it’s low stakes, it’s five minutes to seven minutes of just private time for yourself. As a practitioner in the classroom, I would read these. I would now get patterns of what’s coming up in my classes. And in high impact weeks, for instance, like in moments where things were happening globally, I noticed my Monday intentions, the things that came up, were really, really triggering for them. So I was like, okay. It helps me pivot. I use that street data to then guide the rest of my classroom. Now, on the flip end, that’s the beginning. It’s really big. It opens up to their humanity, right? At the end of the week, it’s paired with a Friday, a reflection Friday. And the quote on top says, “Reflection is the exercise that strengthens the mind’s retention.” And this is really tapping into that metacognition, right? Really thinking about learning. How are you learning? So the prompt here is: reflect on all your assignments, readings, notes, your discussions, your interactions and conversations with me or your, or your, your students or your peers. What moments do you remember and why? That was the transfer. And I would even give them the brain science and say, doing this is taking what you learned this week from your short-term memory to your long-term memory.

GONZALEZ: Mhmm.

BAGSIK: And they were like, whoa. And so they started to look forward to these things. They were low impact. They didn’t really get grades for it, but they were so engaged in it and to the point with, when they graduated from their class, from my class, they would come back to me, “You know, I still do Monday intentions and Friday reflections.” It’s a life skill, right? It’s like this thing that they’ve, they were never given permission to do or maybe never had an idea to do it. But alongside, I started to see, oh, that’s building self-efficacy. They are becoming their cheerleaders. And I saw these micro transformations happen all throughout the year, and then by the end, I would see their journals because I would have them hand write it. But in COVID obviously they had to do it digitally, so there’s many ways to do this. And you could do it with littles, you could do it with high schoolers. It’s really just having them sit with themselves of what they believe that they could do, and then think about how they did, giving themselves their own rating on how they did, and that, I think, can apply to any single classroom.

GONZALEZ: Oh, I love that. Thank you for sharing that. That’s a, that’s a, a nice one. And I agree, it could be used in, with all ages and in any classroom. And it’s just a good practice for kids to take outside of school anyway. The way that I wanted to close, but before I do, I should just check and see, is there anything else that, you know, before we do sort of the closing thoughts, that anybody wanted to sort of add in that came up while we were talking.

WATSON: I just wanted to bring up the fact that I know that throughout all of our explanations, we talked about students, students, students. But there’s, a lot of these practices can be transformed in a way that would translate into adult learning as well. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

WATSON: So as a principal, I’ve used many of the things that are in there. So I just wanted to reiterate that this is not just for teachers that are in service of students, but it’s also for leaders in service of teachers who are in service of students as well.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. It’s so desperately needed too. 

WATSON: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Teachers get overlooked so much in all of these conversations. 

WATSON: Yes, they do.

GONZALEZ: And, and the work that we do to nurture teachers’ spirits, that carries over into every classroom. So it ends up being good for the kids also.

WATSON: Absolutely. I tell my teachers all the time, happy teachers make happy students.

GONZALEZ: Mhmm.

WATSON: If y’all aren’t good, how do I expect you to have, you know, do good for students?

GONZALEZ: Yeah. And you know, if school is supposed to be a place where we’re growing as human beings, why shouldn’t the teachers continue to be people that are growing also? I mean, it’s supposed to be this rich soil to grow these little learners. Like, we should be also there growing right alongside them. 

WATSON: Absolutely.

GONZALEZ: So I’m glad you reminded us of that, because it did come up earlier, but I think it’s worth repeating for sure. So I wanted to ask you, and we’ve, we’ve sort of referenced this a few times about how we are at a particularly challenging, really rough period in history right now for so many reasons. So I just wanted to kind of go around and give you all an opportunity to just share a final thought about why this book and these practices are so important at this moment in history. 

WATSON: I can start.

GONZALEZ: Okay.

WATSON: I had to take a moment just to breathe through that question, because I could, this could be the whole podcast about why the book and why right now.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

WATSON: But I will start by saying that teachers are not poured into enough in the right ways and in ways that help them be more efficient in their jobs, more impactful in their jobs, but also, like, being able to heal some of the trauma that they’ve had from being teachers, from being a part of the educational system, right?

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

WATSON: And this book literally is, and this is, I’m quoting folks that have read the book, right? So I’m quoting Phonisha Hawkins. I’m quoting Shelby, Shelby Cole. They both said, this is like a love letter to teachers. I’m reading the book, and it’s like teachers are feeling, teachers need to feel seen. You are not the enemy. You are doing all the great things and you are exactly what we need right now. And this book is for you. It’s for educators. It’s for anyone that is in service of children. Anywhere, anyone from, you know, our kitchen staff, janitors, in-class teachers, paraprofessionals, all the way up to our administrators. And why right now is because we need it. There’s just so much in the world right now and in society that is, is begging to suck all of the life out of us and all of our ability to see the humanity in each other and in ourselves, that this book is a breath of fresh air to say, these are things that are being done now by people that do what you do. So it’s not us up on our high horse that are, you know, admin or whatever, that aren’t in classrooms telling you what to do or folks that have never taught before telling you what to do. This is like folks that really, really do this work and are doing the work that you do that are giving you their heart. They’re, they’re giving you parts of their spirit in this book. And our hope for the book was always that everyone could see a part of themselves, whether they read one chapter or all the chapters, you know, cover to cover, they would be able to see a part of themselves and a part of their students in order to continue this work with, with the fervor that we know it, it needs, right? So that’s why our book right now, y’all. Right now.

JABER: I’m going to piggyback off of Crystal’s and say that this book was also written in solidarity and to exemplify solidarity and to model solidarity and to make solidarity actionable in classrooms for teachers. Like, this is what solidarity looks like in our classroom to all of our students today, the, the ones at the margins, right? Like, particularly our students at the margins. And it is something that, I always call it hard work. Like, education is hard work. We heal through our practices, and we craft the futures of tomorrow in our classrooms every single day. And we can be those that are using our curriculum as a tool or as a weapon, right? That is solely the teacher as a gatekeeper in a classroom. And so I think that we throw around words like “differentiation” and we throw on words like “equity” and we throw around words like “social emotional learning” and “meeting students needs.” And where, we have really reduced many of our students in school spaces to numbers and statistics on standardized testing. And this book forces us to pause and, and humanize and really bring that back into the classroom as actionable ways so that success is redefined in the classroom. But that’s really rooted in first getting to know each other and in making students feel whole again, right? The holism, the concept of holism that was introduced in “Street Data” and really kind of fleshed out and mapped out in this book. It’s all of those things that we are meeting students’ social emotional needs when we are elevating voice and agency. We are, we are being equitable teachers. We are differentiating. We are, there are student-centered classrooms. This book is not the philosophy like many equity books where it’s left to teachers to really sit down and say, okay, but what does this look like in my classroom? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

JABER: It really does give, it’s, it’s written for practitioners across the board, and it’s written for people to walk into this concept of education from a lens of community and solidarity and bringing in the entire village, everybody involved, right? We have voices of psychologists. We have everybody involved in what does it look like to heal our world in, in a larger landscape, to shift and build global citizens and not just students who are good at doing school. So I feel like all of those answers, and that’s what made “Street Data” transform, like, transformative for me is because it wasn’t just giving these like big scholarly words that I had to then go back and figure out how to make that actionable in my classroom, but it really did provide me with, like, frameworks and ideas and examples and all of these other things. And I think this book does that. And it does weave in student voices and other things that make it a lot more actionable as something that is friendly to people who really want to do this work and really want to make every student feel like they have a space in the world, not just in our classrooms, because our work in schools has to be bigger than just what happens in our classroom space. It has to be bigger than that. And I think that is the very big undertone of solidarity that’s modeled within the four authors of this book in every possible way in the writing of the book by us bringing ourselves and weaving it into the book, but also with really defining what does it look like for teachers to be in solidarity with their students today.

GONZALEZ: Thank you. Thank you. That was beautiful. I feel like we should turn to Marlo now.

BAGSIK: Yeah, I was going to, like, jump in and say Crystal and Sawsan’s words and the way they breathe life into this reverberate it. It’s just, I feel it in my body, and I want folks to also feel that as they read the book. But listen, I want to just be really concise and say that when we center the voices of our learners, especially those at the margins, everything changes, their hearts, their minds, their sense of what’s possible. And right now, possibility is what we need to be focused on, centered on. We need to be able to dream about it and live it in every breath that we take. This conversation needs to be about oriented in possibility, because there’s too much happening in the world. And we know that. There’s so much weight, there’s heaviness, right? I’m already feeling lighter just orienting around the word “possibility” because of the socio-political conditions that we’re being divided by in the world, because of climate change, because of all the things that are coming down at us at a rapid pace. But what I will say is that this book, and I think you said it, Jenn, in the foreword, right? It’s the book that we needed for like, how, what, what can I do tomorrow? And I think we just shared like four low-hanging fruits. If you want to see what’s possible tomorrow, try one of these things out.

GONZALEZ: Yeah.

BAGSIK: Or go into the different eight pedagogies and kind of pick. I’m a plant person, and so this seed metaphor works. Just plant the seed, but don’t expect it to flower tomorrow. Nurture it. Nourish it. Continue to believe in what’s possible, and then you start to see the possibility emerge into a reality. And if we, if we situate ourselves and reorient ourselves as educators back to this headspace of what brought us to education to begin with, because I will go as far as saying that every single educator went into the profession to want to make a difference. 

GONZALEZ: Yep. 

BAGSIK: And we’re showing you how to make the difference and also kind of guiding you in a healing way, saying it’s not your fault that we’re situated in this problem. It’s not. We’ve inherited the problem, and we continue to produce outcomes because the system is making us do the things it was designed to do. Possibility is getting us out of that. And actually to Sawsan’s point, reminding us that we have to be in solidarity with this work. All of us do, and that’s, that’s the umbrella that we wanna capture here. And so we invite anyone to try these things on, to be in dialogue with us, to even fail forward, because we want to see our students fail forward. We want to see our students and education systems build critical learners, thinking about the world that they’re going to be building themselves and for us too. So that’s what I offer.

GONZALEZ: Thank you. Shane, you want to wrap this up?

SAFIR: That was such a mic drop. 

GONZALEZ: Right?

SAFIR: I’m still absorbing all those words. I love that you brought back the seeds. So about a year ago, my colleagues know that one of my, my main personal, excuse me, personal goal a year ago was I wanted to learn how to grow and nurture plants, because I had basically killed every plant that I ever had. And if you went downstairs right now into my living room and dining room, you would see that I have these thriving plants. And I have Marlo in part to thank for that because he’s an amazing plant cultivator. But also I think this metaphor of what happens when we slow ourselves down, and we learn how to tune in and be in relationship with all the living beings around us, which in my home includes these plants. And I think that’s a beautiful metaphor for this book and just the level of care that went into crafting it and the invitation to readers across the globe to slow down and be in relationship with your students and with your colleagues differently, to know and trust that the answers will emerge when we shift our ways of being, when we disrupt the 10 toxins that we write about in Chapter 3. And so the last thing I’ll say is, you know, I think they, I’ve heard it said that you write the book that you wish you had. And when I think about myself in the Stanford teacher education program in 1996, ’97, many moons ago, getting my credential and my master’s, Paulo Freire’s work was the book that blew my mind and made me think, oh, like, this is the purpose of education. This is what I want to be doing. It’s, it’s about liberation. It’s about critical consciousness, all these things. But it did leave me with a lot of how-to questions. And so when I think of what this offers, and my colleagues talked about it so beautifully, I want to say with a lot of humility that it’s in the tradition of Freire’s work. We talk about him in Chapter 1, but it’s a pedagogical guidebook. It’s a roadmap. It’s an actionable, concrete way to take those theories into your daily practice every day. And I hope that that offering speaks to people. And I hope that it really equips people with the next-generation skills and capacities they need to transform their practice.

GONZALEZ: Well, thank you all. First of all, thank you for the work that you did on this book. I mean, and this is, this is just a slice of what’s in that book, but I, I just feel super honored to be invited in to write the foreword, and then also to just be able to, to talk with you all and hopefully get more educators reading, and then really applying the, the practices in the book. It’s a beautiful piece of work. I hope it’s around for a really long time. And thank you all for pouring into it. I know how long you’ve been working on it too. So thank you so much for, for all of that.

WATSON: Thank you for having us and thank you for saying yes to writing. It’s not like you have a lot of extra time on your —

GONZALEZ: I told Shane, I say “no” 90 percent of the time. So yeah.

SAFIR: I don’t know what it was that made you say yes, but we are very grateful.

GONZALEZ: It’s, well, it’s you. So, well, I, I was such a fan of “Street Data,” and I kind of felt like years ago when I read that, and I was just like, “this is the greatest thing ever,” that I was probably going to say “yes” to almost anything else. 

WATSON: She sounds like us, Shane.

SAFIR: Be careful what you put out there, Jenn.

GONZALEZ: I know. I might edit that out.

JABER: But that’s why we all said yes. I feel like that’s why we all said yes.

GONZALEZ: Right, right. I mean, when you see something that is really hitting a note in a different way than, because there’s a lot of stuff out there. There’s so many books out there on education. You know, everyone’s trying to, like, solve this problem. And the way that you and Jamila originally sort of attacked the issue was just so different and so, like, yes, that, duh, that’s been sitting there this whole time, you know? So anyway, I just, I want to do whatever I can to support that and whatever grows out of it. And now I’ve met these other, I’m pointing at this corner of the screen where Marlo and Crystal are, because I did not know them before this project. And so now it’s just keeping expanding. And so, yes.

To read a full transcript of this interview and get links to purchase Pedagogies of Voice, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 260. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses, products, and speaking services, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.