The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 265

Jennifer Gonzalez, Host

GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 265 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’re going to learn a framework for discussing hard topics called growth discourse.

We’re living in a time when having a difference of opinion about anything other than pizza toppings is a potential minefield of hurt feelings, emotional outbursts, and severed relationships. This is a problem that has occupied my thoughts quite a bit over the past ten years, and I’ve found very few solutions.

So when I learned about the growth discourse framework used at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership (or SEGL), I wanted to know more. SEGL is a semester-long residential program for high school juniors from across the U.S. The curriculum emphasizes ethical thinking skills, leadership development, and international affairs, and their mission is for students to graduate ready to create positive change in our world. A foundational piece of their programming is growth discourse, an approach to discussion that equips students to have productive conversations about topics many of us would be hesitant to bring up in a group setting. 

Looking at SEGL’s growth discourse guidelines, I liked what I saw. Their approach acknowledges and makes room for the heavy role our emotions and vulnerability play in these kinds of conversations, while also prioritizing courage and honesty in moving those conversations forward. And because it’s pretty simple and straightforward, I believe it’s a framework that could be replicated by any teacher who wanted to have better discussions in their own classrooms, so I’m sharing it in this episode.

Joining me is Noah Bopp, who founded the School for Ethics and Global Leadership in 2009 and currently serves as the Head of School. In our conversation, he shares the story of why he founded SEGL, then walks us through their growth discourse model, including a classroom example, so teachers can understand how to apply it with their own students.

I had a couple of big takeaways in this conversation, and I want to highlight them ahead of time: 

Before I play the interview, I’d like to thank foundry10 for sponsoring this episode. Teens want to learn more social media literacy in school. But too often, what they get sounds like an outdated PSA: “Don’t share personal info. Avoid strangers.” So how can educators make the lessons more relevant? foundry10 is an education research organization that blends research and practice to make a real difference for real youth today—while deepening understanding about effective teaching strategies. Through applied research, they are studying everything from social media literacy instruction, to soft skills in career-connected learning, to supporting number knowledge with dramatic play. They generate insights from impactful practices, expand ideas about learning, and create immediate value for youth, educators, schools, and community-based organizations. If you’re looking for fresh, research-backed ideas you can apply in your classroom, visit www.foundry10.org/cultofpedagogy.

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Now here’s my conversation with Noah Bopp about growth discourse.

GONZALEZ: Hey, Noah. 

BOPP: Hey. Really excited to be here. 

GONZALEZ: I’m glad you’re here. So we’re going to be talking a lot about how to have healthy discourse about challenging topics. Before we get into that, let’s just get a little bit of background on you. I’ve read a little bit from your website, the School for Ethics and Global Leadership, which it looks like you founded in 2009. So if you could just tell me sort of what were you doing before you founded that, where did that come from, and then what’s happened since then? 

BOPP: Sure. Well, the first thing to say is that every founding story is linear. But, in fact, in reality, every founding story has lots of curves and jagged edges. So let me give you the linear piece, and if you want to ask me about the curves and the jagged edges, I’m happy to get into it. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: The founding story of the School for Ethics and Global Leadership is that I was a teacher on September 11th, 2001, and the next day I had to stand in front of my students. And on that day, as I’m sure you can imagine, my students were scared and angry and confused and making all kinds of assumptions about what had happened and what we needed to do next as a result. And I realized, as I’m sure you did and many of your listeners did, the world had fundamentally changed on that day. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yep. 

BOPP: And so for me, the question was, as an educator, how should I respond? I had always felt particularly called to the students who regardless of background were going to be the leaders. And so the founding insight of the School for Ethics and Global Leadership is that in a post-9/11 world, America needs leaders who are ethically strong and internationally aware. So as a result of that moment, I started a summer program for Duke University to pilot the curriculum. I took a job at the Mountain School, which is the oldest of the semester programs because I thought that that model was compelling. I got a degree in private school leadership from Teachers College at Columbia so people would think I knew what I was talking about. And then I moved down to D.C. In 2006, lived in an apartment about the size of this office that I’m in right now. It was where the chauffeur lived back in the day. And it took about three years to raise the money and build the board and find the locations, and renovate the locations. And we’re now in our 17th year of operation. 

GONZALEZ: That is fantastic. And it’s just a school for high school juniors, correct? 

BOPP: Right. So, our curriculum works well for high school juniors and also seniors. Every once in a while there’s a sophomore that creeps in. But we’ve found that the sweet spot is 11th graders, and they come from all different schools around the country: Public, private, parochial, home schools. They’re all students who in some way have made the most of their education. It doesn’t mean that they have to get straight A’s, but they’ve made the most of their education. They want to be there. And they’ve also demonstrated what we call and what researchers call non-cognitive variables, indicators that they are going to be leaders, that they can delay gratification, they can long-range plan, they can be persistent in the face of adversity, they work well with students who are different than they are. And so they come for their 11th grade fall or spring, we have a summer program too, or their 12th grade fall or spring. We give them all of their regular courses at an honors or AP level: English, history, math, science, foreign language. And then they get this ethics and leadership class, which is case study based, and puts them in touch with all of these cool leaders on one of our three campuses. So students can choose Washington, D.C., where I am right now. They can choose Johannesburg, South Africa. That campus opened in the spring of 2020. Great time to start something new. Or they can choose London, United Kingdom. That campus opened in the fall of 2023. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. And so, one, and this is what we’re going to be talking about today, one of your core practices is what you call growth discourse. Am I?

BOPP: That’s right.. 

GONZALEZ: I saw it called something else too. It was another word too. Growth dialogue maybe? 

BOPP: You can call it either one, but officially we call it growth discourse. And growth discourse, you probably haven’t heard of that term. You may be more familiar with the term civil discourse. We call it growth discourse in part because we do discourse in a particular way, but also because the motivation for doing it is built into the title, right? So a lot of people are talking about civil discourse these days, but some people are asking, well why do I need to be civil in a time like this? Well, we believe that discourse that helps you grow is essential to our meaningful lives and is also central to a functioning civic ensemble. Calling it growth discourse also shifts mindset, right? So for students, oh, I am about to engage in discourse that may or may not be civil. The point is it’s discourse that’s growing to help me grow, and then also for faculty, for teachers, the goal here of the discourse is not just keeping everybody be nice to each other, right? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: Stopping kids from yelling at each other. The Goal here is what can I do to make sure that this dialogue, that this discussion, that this conversation helps students grow. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. I, I want to make sure that I remember to ask this later, and so I may, this might be a too early of a time to ask this — 

BOPP: I can go out of order. 

GONZALEZ: — and this was not in our planned question, yeah. But it might come up more later on, but one of the things that has weighed on me for years now. This is the only blog post that I ever published and then unpublished because it got so much pushback, and it was on this topic. It was a guest post written by a high school history teacher, and it was about how to have conversations in class about controversial topics. And he was using the Virginia protests, this is years ago now, this was about 2019, as his topic, and this was right around the same time that Trump was saying “good people on both sides.” 

BOPP: Right. 

GONZALEZ: And so the whole concept of both sides having validity was a very, I got a lot of pushback because it was, it was being interpreted, and I could see where they were coming from, that he was saying both sides have validity. 

BOPP: Right. 

GONZALEZ: And they were saying, that is not always the case. We should not give air time and validity to bad people. And so I’ve been really hung up on where the line is in that and how you navigate that, and it also brings to mind this question of, do you actually have, does your program attract people that actually have polar viewpoints? Or do they tend to all kind of be on the same side of issues? 

BOPP: Right. So this is such a great question. And let me dig into it in a few different ways, and also, acknowledge that I don’t have all of the answers here. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: I’m sharing this, and when I give presentations to teachers, I’ll take our growth discourse model, and I’ll print it out and after we explain it, I will say, now I want you in small groups to edit our growth discourse statement. What do you think works at your school? What do you like, what do you not like? And I often learn quite a lot from their understanding. So the first thing I would do is give you a bit of an analogy. I don’t know if you’re a bowler, or if you’ve ever gone bowling. 

GONZALEZ: I have bowled, yes. 

BOPP: Okay. So when I bowl, I’m not very good. 

GONZALEZ: Same. 

BOPP: And so if I’m going to try and knock the most pins down, I try to aim my ball right down the center. I just want to go right down the center. It has the least chance of ending up in the gutter. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: But I don’t bowl a whole lot of strikes. If you look at an experienced bowler, what do they do to knock all of those pins down? They got to curve it. They put some spin on it, and that ball gets dangerously close to the gutter, but it actually has the best chance of knocking all those pins down. So think of those pins as truth, right? We’re all trying to aim at truth. If we stay right in the middle, we have less of a chance of knocking all those pins down. But if we try to curve it, yeah, we might get closer to truth. Are there some risks? Absolutely. So that’s one answer to the question. The other answer to the question is to try and help people see a distinction between being nonpartisan, and SEGL is nonpartisan, and being neutral. SEGL is not a neutral institution, right? We don’t say, “The Holocaust: Good or Bad? You decide.” Right? 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: We don’t say in our science classrooms, “Climate change. Is that real or is it not real?” In our, what we do say is when there is a topic where reasonable people, powerful people, educated people, well-known people are disagreeing, we as a teacher, as teachers, remain nonpartisan, okay? So just as an example, let’s imagine that we’re talking about Trump’s immigration policy. A lot of people have very, very strong feelings about that. That is a policy that although you and I may have some disagreements, out in the world, outside my window, I’m sitting here just a few blocks from the, from the White House, there is real disagreement. And so on those issues, what we choose to do is give our students critical thinking skills so that they can evaluate arguments and then bring in people who represent the best possible arguments on those different sides and say, where do you stand? And ultimately you’ve heard this before, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to teach students how to think and not what to think. If we air on the side of teaching students what to think, which is so easy to do and it’s so understandable, but what we do is we shortcut the critical thinking process and we make that kid susceptible to the next demagogue who comes along. And in case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of demagogues in this world right now. So for me, here’s another thing that I often say. The most socially just thing you can do is to help a child think for herself. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: So anyway, those are a few answers to that question. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: There are some other answers that will come when we get into the growth discourse model. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: So if I can just move to that. 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

BOPP: Very first piece of growth discourse is to begin with belonging, to make sure that every student knows and believes she, he, they belong here at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership. Some of that is asserting it. But some of that is the work that we are doing to bring a variety of voices to the table in terms of our student body. And also have those voices represented, experience-wise, in our faculty. If we have a really homogenous group of students, it’s very hard for us to address a difficult topic like Trump’s immigration policy, right? 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

BOPP: Because we’re going to get similar views. And some students are going to feel excluded, and you’re going to get responses to blog posts like the responses that you, that you got. But if I can set up an environment where I have students who represent many different backgrounds and many different points of view, right —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: — and I show those students that they all belong here, and I can give you some examples of how we show students that they all belong. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: Then I can create an environment where those students are not on edge when we’re having these conversations. So I can just give you an example —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: I told you I’d give you more than, than maybe you need. But the very first thing that we do is we take them to the Phillips Collection, which is two blocks from where I’m sitting right now, one of the most famous private art collections in the world, to experience Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. And The Migration Series is one of the great works of art in all of American history, and it depicts the migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the time period that culminates, essentially, in the Harlem Renaissance. And we do this critical thinking model with the students: See, think, act, reflect. I know we’re going, going out of order here, but we teach them to see fully before they decide what they believe. Then we bring in Helen Zughaib who’s an Arab American artist and has developed a Syrian migration series, which is just what it sounds. It’s inspired by Jacob Lawrence, and it depicts the migration of Syrians out of Syria in the wake of the Syrian civil war. She comes in, she speaks about her art. The students realize that migration is something that we all have in our background. Then we give students a wooden board and the same kind of paint that Zughaib and Jacob Lawrence used and say, each of you now gets to paint one panel from your own personal migration series. Maybe it’s something personal in your life, maybe it’s something about your family’s life, your community’s life, your culture’s life, but you get to pick one piece of your identity, one piece of your migration to SEGL, and then they paint that, and we put all of those panels up on the wall of our residential common room. And that is a, and then they share the stories with each other. What does your panel depict? They do another round of critical thinking. And the point there is to demonstrate your story is up on the wall, right. You remember in “Do the Right Thing” the Spike Lee movie where —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: Buggin’ Out comes and says to Danny Aiello, like, “How come there aren’t any pictures of brothers up on the wall?” And he’s like, it’s only Italians. It’s an Italian pizzeria. There is a picture of every student up on the wall at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership. So we, the other way that we like to say it is the only student who doesn’t belong at SEGL is the student who says, “You don’t belong here, you and your kind.” That is probably a student who doesn’t belong at SEGL. So the first part of the growth discourse model is to begin with belonging. The second piece is to balance intent and impact. So when I first started teaching and people did what was then called diversity education, one of the core tenets was to assume positive intent. And if I did a spectrum activity, which is something we do often at SEGL, and I said, which is more important when you’re discussing difficult issues of difference, the majority of the students, regardless of their background, would be over on the intent side of that spectrum. 2020 comes along, and we have COVID, and we have George Floyd, and we have January 6, and we have all of those things, and all of a sudden, nearly all of the students were pushed over on the only thing that matters is the impact that your words have. And what we are trying to say to students is both of those things matter. If I use, “Oh, I’m so sorry, that wasn’t my intent” as if it’s a get out of jail free card, right —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: — I probably need to do some reflection on the impact I’m having on others. On the other end of the scale, for me to assign a motive to another human being solely based on what that person made me feel, I am at least being unreflective and incurious. So both matter. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: Balancing intent and impact together. It’s two truths. The third piece of growth discourse is to avoid echo chambers. So one of the most formative works that I read as a young teacher, you’ve probably heard of this book, is “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” by Beverly Tatum. And the answer is, they’re debriefing their day in a world that is different and foreign and maybe even pretty negative for, for those students. I get that it makes sense that sometimes you need to go to people with whom you share some things. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: Some ideas, some identity, right. But at SEGL, we go to those conversations not to disengage but to figure out how do we re-engage. And then the last part of the growth discourse model is we say, follow the STAR, and the STAR is our critical thinking model: See, think, act, and reflect. And my guess is that you’re going to ask me to break that down a little bit next. 

GONZALEZ: That is our next question, yes. So that is the, that is the critical thinking model that you all use. 

BOPP: That’s right. 

GONZALEZ: I guess my first question before we break it down is did you all come up with it or did you get it from someplace else? 

BOPP: Right. So I want to give some credit to Harvard’s Project Zero, which some of your listeners may be familiar with. I love to keep my ears open, and am fairly intuitive as a teacher and a learner. I had a friend who taught at the National Gallery of Art, and she used some of the Project Zero Artful Thinking routines to educate kids from lots of different backgrounds in the galleries. I was really transfixed by that method and adapted it to SEGL. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: So I want to give some credit to Harvard’s Project Zero, and we have adapted that for our purposes at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership in some important ways. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. So what is the STAR model? You sort of said what the four letters stand for, but let’s kind of work our way through it a little more slowly now. 

BOPP: Right. So the most important part of the STAR model is to make sure you are seeing something as fully as you can before you decide what to think about it, before you make a judgment. And that could be one panel in Jacob Lawrence’s migration series, and that could be another human being. I’m going to anticipate a challenge that a lot of folks have to that, which is I live in a world where if a police officer comes up to my car, I don’t have time to see that police officer fully before I make a judgment. I get that. I understand, right? 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

BOPP: But remember that the founding principle at SEGL is to begin with belonging. We are not police officers come to take you, take you away, threaten your well-being. We’re a welcoming environment where you can take those defensive fists that people have built up over the last few years in particular and you can bring them, you can bring them down, take time, take a deep breath, to see whatever we’re putting in front of you to see the people that you’re experiencing this semester with as fully as you can. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: So that’s the first piece. And there are different questions that make for a good “see.” So there’s the essential questions, what can I see, what can I understand before I judge? Another question is what do the experts say? There are a lot of kids these days who if they’re trying to figure out, do I go to the restaurant, they’ll crowdsource it, they’ll go to Yelp and they’ll figure out, what do thousands of people with a little bit of bias toward people who had a bad experience think about this particular restaurant? You and I might go to the Washington Post restaurant critic and figure out what, what he thinks. One of those responses is not necessarily better than the other. But asking, what do people who have devoted their life to this topic have to say about this, we think is an important part of the “see.” Another part of the “see” is what voices are missing from this conversation? So we might be talking about, again, Trump’s immigration policy. Have we heard from an undocumented student or an undocumented voice? Have we heard from somebody who is negatively affected by an influx of immigration in hospitals or in schools? Do we have all of the voices at the table? What’s missing? How can we find those, those voices before we decide what we think? So the, the thinking can be difficult. That’s the next stage. A lot of students want to stay in analysis mode, and they’re a little bit afraid of reaching a conclusion. But ultimately, and particularly as a leader, you do have to decide, what do I think about this situation? Is it good, is it bad, is it right, is it wrong, is it black, is it white, do I like chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream or strawberry ice cream? Once you decide what you think, and this is a major addition that we made to the Project Zero curriculum, as leaders, we have to decide what to do, how to act, and I can give you some examples of that, if you would like. But we have to decide, do we vote for or do we vote against? Do we cheat on the test? Do we not cheat on the test? Do we lie to protect our friend, or do we tell the truth? We have to act in the world. The act is usually the quickest piece of this. This is what I’m going to do as the leader. That leads to the last piece, which is the reflective piece. We want to reflect on what we just did. Did we like it? Did we not like it? What was the response that we got? What might we do next time? The beauty of this model is that the “R” in the STAR becomes part of the next “S,” it becomes part of the next “see” the next time that we face a similar situation. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: The best learning happens when we are engaged in reflective, deliberate practice, and that “R” ensures that students are continually iterating not only their critical thinking, but the actions that flow from their critical thinking. 

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GONZALEZ: Okay. So see, think, act, and reflect. That’s the STAR model. 

BOPP: You got it. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. So this is what you have agreed to do with me is you all had sent me kind of a sample lesson plan — 

BOPP: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: — on the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., which I spent a lot of time on Google Maps looking at it. Because I lived in D.C. for four years, and I was like, how come I don’t know where this is? 

BOPP: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: So now I, I know what the neighborhood is and everything, and so I got it now. So what we were going to do is kind of walk through this lesson, which follows the STAR model, yes? 

BOPP: Right, yes. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. So I’m going to actually just click on it right now and open it up so that, so if, if you could, just give us a quick overview, what is the Emancipation Memorial, so people have sort of an image in their mind? If anybody’s listening, they want to Google it, it’s in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., and then you’ll see it, but tell us what that is.

BOPP: Yes. So let me start by why we go there, and then I’ll tell you what it is. 

GONZALEZ: Yes, okay. 

BOPP: And then happy to talk about the lessons. But I think that this is worth noting that several years ago, I had a student who was a conspiracy theorist. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: And most of our listeners would probably dispute some of the conspiracies that he asserted. And I used to meet with him once a week at lunch to ask him Socratic questions, to watch some of the videos that he would say to hear some of the arguments that he would make. And over the course of those lunches, great kid, doing amazing things in the world, but over the course of those lunches, I realized that we did not have a common understanding of how to evaluate something. And so this child actually doesn’t know this, but the child was responsible for altering all of SEGL’s curriculum, and in fact, our first week of the semester, we now postpone classes and do something called critical thinking week to help students get a common foundation of critical thinking. Again, we’re not telling them what to think, but to help them understand how to think, how to approach these difficult topics.

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: So that’s a bit of the why or the STAR method or critical thinking week and for this exercise. Now what is the Emancipation Memorial? So the Emancipation Memorial is a statue that sits in the middle of Lincoln Park about 12 blocks east of the U.S. Capitol in this beautiful bucolic setting. There are parents pushing kids in strollers. There are people throwing frisbees to their dogs. These days there are National Guards people who are picking up trash. It’s a very bucolic and also D.C. setting. And the Emancipation Memorial dedicated in 1876, so we’re about to come up on the 150th anniversary. At the dedication, a number of dignitaries whose names you would recognize, none greater than Frederick Douglass, who is the one who dedicated this memorial. If you were to look at this memorial, you would see that it’s, it’s made of bronze. It’s up on a pedestal. Maybe if you jump up you could touch the bottom of it. But there are two figures in this Emancipation Memorial. One appears to be on a knee and looking up and is clearly an enslaved or formerly enslaved person. And the second is Abraham Lincoln who, he is standing fully erect with his arm straight out in front of him over the head of the first figure that I mentioned. This is a statue that in the spring of 2020 was almost torn down by protesters. We had been going there since 2018 or 2019, and it is still standing. But the fact that in 2020 it was front page news in the Washington Post heightens the interest for our students. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. So I’m, I’m assuming that the conversation about it, if you’ve been doing this sort of lesson with it since pre-2020, I’m assuming the conversation got richer and more complex — 

BOPP: Indeed. 

GONZALEZ: — over the years?

BOPP: Richer and more complex. So the exercise has remained the same, and one way that you know as a teacher that you got something good is if it withstands the, the winds of change. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: And sometimes we adjust the sails a little bit, but this is a lesson that has become a signature for us. So it begins by walking the students the 12 blocks from our dormitory, which is right across the street from the Supreme Court and the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. And if it’s in the fall, it’s a beautiful fall day, the leaves are starting to turn. The students walk into this park, and they see all the folks that I just mentioned to you. And then they see off in the distance that there is some sort of a sculpture, some sort of a statue. And we stop on the backside, and there’s usually a sense of anticipation and mystery that the students have. We don’t tell them what they are going to do other than, “Follow me. We’re going to go for a walk.” We don’t say, “This is going to be a conversation about race,” or “This is going to be a way to improve your critical thinking.” We just do the thing so that they can experience it and reach their own conclusions and learnings in, in real-time. So the first thing that we do is we give them an initial “see.” We just have them give some initial impressions. And usually, especially in the last few years, their initial impressions are negative. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: What they see or think that they see is a white man very, in a patronizing way, standing over a kneeling, enslaved person, and all of these images from the last few years come into their mind. They might depict the statue as bigoted on one hand, old fashioned on, on the other, somewhere in between that spectrum. Okay great. So one of the things that I love as a teacher is to discombobulate students, to take them out of the thought pattern that they have been in and bring them to the edge of that comfort zone. So we said, okay, all right. There’s your initial impression. And it’s true that according to studies, the average amount of time that somebody stands in front of a work of art in a museum or presumably in a public park is about 20 seconds. They make a judgment, and they move on. So the students have those 20 seconds. They generally judge that it’s unsavory in some way. And then we say, okay. What we want you to do now is take more time — they have what we call academic reflection journals in their, in their hand — and silently walk around the sculpture. Get far away from it, get up close, look from top to bottom, from bottom to top, across diagonals. And we want you to make a list of 10 things that you see. Now again, these are not judgments. These are not, “I see an unhappy slave,” right, or “I see a racist former president.” They’re, they’re looking for a little bits of data that they can interpret later, but right now they’re looking for, “I see Lincoln,” right? 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

BOPP: Pretty easy that it’s Lincoln. He has a beard. The statue seems to be made of metal. There is another person who appears to be a man. He has his eyes looking upward. These little bits of data that are without judgment. One of the things that they see is that at the base of the statue there is a plaque, and the plaque says that the funds contributed were contributed, and I’m quoting now, “solely by emancipated citizens of the United States declared free by (Lincoln’s) proclamation,” the Emancipation Proclamation. “The first contribution of five dollars was made by Charlotte Scott a freed woman of Virginia being her first earnings in freedom and consecrated by her suggestion and request on the day she heard of President Lincoln’s death to build a monument to his memory.” And the students go, “Oh. Oh. So there was a formerly enslaved person who had this idea, donated the first $5. The only people who raised money for this statue were freed men and freed women. Oh, this makes it a little bit more complex.” Right? And so there’s not, like, the goal is not to get them to realize that the statue should be up. 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

BOPP: The goal is to bring them to that moment where they say, oh, this is complex. This is more detailed. There’s more detail here. There’s more nuance than I thought at first. And you can see it on their faces. By now, we can sort of hide a little bit and watch when the students come around to the plaque, and they get up next to it, and they’re looking closely, and they’re trying to write down what it says. And then you can see the look on their face. Like, oh, oh, this is more, and sometimes they’ll turn to a friend and say, “Hey, did you, did you read this?” 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: So then we say, this is the next part of the scene. Okay. You got your list of 10. A lot of kids who just really quickly will dash off 10 things. “I’m done with the assignment. Now I’m just bored.” Okay, what we say is we want you to go back into the statue, back into the memorial, make a list of 10 more things that you see. And the idea there is it’s another opportunity to move beyond a first impression. It’s called looking ten times two. And so now they have a list of 20 things. And once, they share those things with each other. What do you have? What do I have? What’s missing? In small groups. And only then do we, do we ask them, now what do you think about this? And some of them say, you know what, I still don’t like it. I think that those people who were formerly enslaved, this was probably not what they were expecting and maybe in their time this was the right thing to do, but if they were living today, I don’t think that they would like this at all. And some students say, this is a triumphant monument to an important part of U.S. history, and clearly this slave, or enslaved person, or freed person is not kneeling, but I see him as rising up. This is the moment where he is assuming the full dignity of the American experiment. Or some students say, well, I, I don’t like it, but it’s a part of history —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: — and we need to be able to understand history and all of its fullness. So now they’re telling us what they think. Great. Interesting conversation. We often will give them supplementary material at this time. Remember I said that part of the “see” is “what do experts think?” 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: So one of the most amazing pieces of critical thinking in all of American history, and I stand by this, I’ll fight for this, is the dedication speech that Frederick Douglass made. It is an extraordinary piece of critical thinking, and one of my favorite lines from that speech is, it’s just so great, “It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model.” So amazing, right? Such bravery. There are 10,000 people who are listening to this. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: There is a group of freed people who erected this. There’s a bunch of white dignitaries and politicians. And he’s saying this dude right here behind me, not our man, not our model. But later on in the speech, he then says, “Despite the mist and haze that surrounded him; despite the tumult, the hurry and confusion of the hour, we were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position.” I’m actually getting teared up as I say this, right? What he’s, what he’s saying is, it was really hard, and he did the best he could. 

GONZALEZ: Wow. Yeah. 

BOPP: It is such an amazing piece of critical thinking. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: And so we’ll give them that speech. This is what Frederick Douglass thought of it. There are other speeches that we can give, including one that a Harvard student made in the spring of 2020 saying, “This thing needs to come down right now. It’s one of the most racist things in Washington, D.C.” So these are what some folks have thought about this memorial. They, there’s a copy of the statue in Boston, an exact copy, I think minus the plaque, that was taken down a couple of years ago. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: So we give them that bit of information. And then we move to the act, and we say, in groups, you have to discuss what you want to do about this statue. And later on today, our faculty are going to play a set of community stakeholders, and you are going to present your act, your decision about what to do, given what you have seen and given what you think right now. They’re going to ask you some questions as a community stakeholder might do. Later on in this semester, there are other exercises where we’re really presenting at the White House or at the Pentagon or the State Department, but this is the first week of the semester, so it’s just faculty who are playing characters, community stakeholders. What do you think ought to happen? So then the discourse begins. They are beginning with belonging. They are balancing intent and impact. They are avoiding echo chambers and most importantly, they are following the STAR. And they all, in those small groups of four, they come up with their own ideas for what should happen. Some students say the statue should stay as is, and that’s it, and here is our reasoning for why. Some students say the statue should stay, but we need to put an explanatory plaque next to it that explains it for people to understand, in part, why it’s worthy of being in the, in the park. Some students say, we need to raise another statue, and in fact, there is another statue too, a famous African American educator at the other end of the park. But students will say there needs to be another statue. Sometimes the students will say, tear it down, this is bad. But then what do you do with it? Do you put it in a museum? Or do you melt it and use it —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: — for the better statue that’s going to come, that is going to come next? So they have time to discuss what is their action, and then they have to present and defend their ideas in front of community stakeholders who become their own aid to the further scene of the students, if that makes sense. Because those community stakeholders have different points of view and arguments —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: — that the students might not have considered at the beginning. 

GONZALEZ: Yes. 

BOPP: I’m getting super excited. I’m ready to go out there right now to do it. But that’s, that’s the essence of it. Now at the end, if we want a little coup de grâce at the end, I don’t like telling students, well, this is the right answer. Never like to tell the students the right answer. But in the summer of 2020, there were a group of historians that did some research, and they found a letter to the editor that Frederick Douglass wrote a few days after he dedicated the memorial where he answered the question for himself. And he says, in this, it’s a short letter, he says, this statue should stay. I understand why it’s important to history. And it does not tell the full story of the African American in our country, and so I would suggest that we put another statue up that depicts the full richness of the African American experience and shows a man fully erect, fully standing in his, in his freedom and his own self determination. By the way, that brings up a whole separate thing because there’s a female African American sculptor who went to my alma mater Oberlin who has the sculpture that I think, if we’re going to do that, it’s called “Forever Free,” and that brings up its own issue because it’s a man standing, and there’s a woman who’s kneeling at his feet. And part of the interpretation you can have of that statue is men got their freedom, but women were still unfree regardless of their, of their skin color. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: So anyway, that might be a tag on at the end that you can cut, but I get super excited and geeked out about this exercise. Let me stop here and see where you want to point me. 

GONZALEZ: No, you’re totally good. Yeah, I say we keep going. It feels like we’re sort of between A and R right now, between “act” and “reflect.” 

BOPP: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: On the, yeah. 

BOPP: So that’s right. So the last piece of this, and we do reflections in different ways, right. The students have English journals, and they write in those journals every week. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: But often after an experience we bring the students together. Sometimes we give them a couple of minutes to write in their journals, particularly at the beginning of the semester because some kids are talkers and some kids are observers, and if you write in your journal for a few minutes, then you’re prepared to say something, regardless of which group you fall into. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: But we just asked the students what, give us some reflections on this. Almost always when we do reflections, it is entirely up to the students to decide where they want to take those reflections. We don’t really give them reflection questions.

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: Because we think that what is the best is for them to decide what is the most important, for them to decide what they are still wondering about, for them to engage with each other. So sometimes there are some general prompts that we might give. Sometimes there are reflections that we give as teachers at the end, but generally those conversations are very student centered. We don’t, as teachers, even call on the students. They figure out their own way of calling on each other, which is its own part of the SEGL curriculum that I’m happy to get into. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. If it doesn’t take too long. There’s like a protocol basically for sort of turn taking and sharing space with each other? 

BOPP: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: So early in the semester, one of the things, this is actually the day before we go to the Emancipation Memorial, but in this building where I am in, we do some low ropes course activities. And before we do those low ropes course team-building activities, we ask them, what makes a good leader, and what makes a good follower? It’s up to them. It’s not up to, and they put lists together. This makes a good leader, this makes a good follower. We want them to be specific, not “a good leader is brave,” but what does being brave look like? How do you know that somebody is being brave? “A good follower listens.” Okay, well, how do you know that somebody is listening? And then we put them through these low ropes course activities, and they get to experience these leadership challenges. Then they come back and we have them reflect on, well, you just earlier said this is what makes a good leader and this is what makes a good follower. Do you want to revise that in any way? What are your reflections on what you said before given these activities that you just went through? One of the things we want them to wrestle with is this. Sometimes, I’ll give you an example, sometimes, interrupting is really bad for a group. Some people, they really take it personally. They like to have space in between the different sections of what they’re saying. Sometimes it’s really not good for a group to interrupt. Other times, interrupting is great. You’re building on each other’s ideas. I know what the second half of your sentence is going to be and you know what the second half of my sentence is going to be, and we’re just going and going “and then we can do, and then we can do, and then we can do, oh my gosh, this is great.” 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: And it works for us. Often as teachers, we decide for students what the rules of engagement ought to be. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, okay. 

BOPP: And we will say, you loud students need to be quiet so that the quiet students can speak. And I would suggest, I understand the reasoning behind that, and this may end up being the most controversial part of the podcast. But for me, if we step in and provide a crutch for those students, then those students never learn to gather their own voice and share it. And the students who are loud, decide, well, I’ll just continue to be loud until the teacher tells me to stop. Rather than self-facilitate. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: It is, it’s a long process. This is not just something where we just send them to the wolves. But if you come to an SEGL classroom by this point in the semester, what you will see is teachers are looking down at their notebooks, diagramming a conversation. They’ve started the conversation by saying, “Who would like to speak?” But we’re not even looking at the kids, and the kids are talking to each other, maybe they’re calling on each other or maybe they’ve developed a system where they just know each other well enough that they know when somebody is about to speak. They’re deciding what is the most important bit of the prompt or they’re deciding what reflections are most important. And so they are fully in control, and so that, we think not only helps their critical thinking, but it gives them these soft skills of how to run a discussion. I can go and go and go on this. When we have guest speakers, we never, as teachers, ask the guest speaker questions. So earlier this semester, we had Linda McMahon in the room below where I am right now. The U.S. Secretary of Education came for 45 minutes, and you can bet your bottom dollar that I have many questions that I would like to ask Linda McMahon. But it’s more important to me to give our students things to see about Linda McMahon, to give them critical thinking skills so they can evaluate the arguments that she’s made, to give them some preliminary soft skills for how to behave in situation like that or choices about how to behave, and then to make sure that they believe and know, this is your conversation. If we all stare in silence at each other for 45 minutes, that’s going to be the conversation. If you finish the conversation and you say, ah, I wish I had asked that question, great. So what are you going to ask next time? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: But they realize that they are the ones who are guiding. They are the ones who are in control of the learning experience, and for us at SEGL, at least, the result has, has been a successful one. 

GONZALEZ: I think where we go next is I think we’re ready for the second to last question, basically, which is what advice do you have for teachers who would like to try using this framework for the first time? 

BOPP: So I thought about this question, and what really came to my mind is actually gratitude. I think it’s really hard to be a teacher these days. I think it’s actually a heroic act to be teaching in the classroom. I’m not saying this about me or my teachers. We have certain advantages that other teachers don’t have. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: But the stakes are so stacked against teachers these days, and so really before I give any advice or pretend to have advice, the most important thing that I want to say is just like, thank you. This is so hard, and it is the most meaningful work that you could possibly be doing in this world. Please stay strong, and if there’s anything in what I have said that might be useful to you, please reach out. Even if the benefit I can provide you is being a place for you to vent and say, Noah, I totally disagree with everything that you said in this, in this podcast. That’s totally fine. That is a way that I can express my gratitude is hearing your disagreement — 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: — living out the values of the school. So that’s the most important thing I think is gratitude. The second piece of advice that I would give is I think it’s very important before you have difficult conversations about difficult things to make sure that the leadership in the institution has your back. There are so many teachers that I have met with who say, I want to be able to have these conversations about Gaza. 

GONZALEZ: Oof. 

BOPP: But my principal does not have my back. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: I mean, at SEGL —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: — right, we bring in the spokesperson for the Israeli embassy, we bring in a leading Palestinian negotiator. We bring in an adviser to six different U.S. Secretaries of State. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: We talk about whether “from the river to the sea” is anti-semitic or about liberation, right? 

GONZALEZ: Right. 

BOPP: We have all those difficult conversations, and our students are like, oh, thank you. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: I’m so glad that we can have these conversations —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: — because in our schools, the teachers either tell us what to think, right?

GONZALEZ: Right, right. 

BOPP: Take a particular point of view. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: And other points of view we know are not welcome, we know are not going to give us A’s. 

GONZALEZ: Yep. 

BOPP: Or just as frequently if not more, we’re told, “We’re not having this conversation.”

GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. 

BOPP: There’s all kinds of examples of parents getting mad, donors getting mad, school board members getting mad. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: Right? So, but if you know that your head of school, that your principal has your back in having these difficult conversations —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: — you can do almost anything. So that’s a key piece of advice. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: And in terms of how to have that conversation with your department chair or with your head of school, I do think that indicating that you’ve thought this through, I think indicating that you’ve had some resources. I think trying to figure out what are some of the key questions that they might ask. So for some, it’s just a worry that there’s going to be parents who perceive a bias in the classroom. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: And if you can address that from, from the beginning to say that you’re using a method that not only comes from the School for Ethics and Global Leadership but comes from everybody from Harvard to Socrates, right? 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: That might be, that might be helpful. So that’s the, that’s a key piece of advice. I think that giving yourself grace for making mistakes. You’re going to make mistakes in, in the classroom. I would say that when the moment gets the most tense, unless you’re afraid that there’s going to be some sort of physical violence, which we just are not afraid of at, at SEGL. But unless you are really, really afraid, sometimes the best response as a teacher in those difficult moments is just to remain silent. I am here with you. I am engaged. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: And to just say something supportive like, “These are hard conversations.” You can ask the question of the kids, would you rather not have this conversation? Almost always kids would say, “No, no, no, no, no. We would rather have it.”

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: “We just don’t like the way that we’re having it.” 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: Okay, great. So let’s figure out how we can have this conversation so that we’re all growing. I think that another piece of advice is, I say this often, is that we want to make sure that we spread the uncomfortableness equally in the classroom. So sometimes what happens is when you’re having these difficult conversations that certain kids from certain demographics get burdened more often than others. And I think that it’s very, very important to set things up in your classroom where you, it’s equal opportunity discomfort. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: If you can’t do that, if you’re, if you’re consistently burdening certain kids, then I would suggest that you, that you take a step back. By the way, that’s it’s own podcast that we could have right there. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: And the last bit of advice is there are people who are doing this, and I’m happy to give my email out, set up a Zoom conversation — 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: — give a talk. And there are other faculty member here at SEGL. We really think that this is a productive, civic-minded, meaningful, positive mental health oriented way of addressing topics that are on kids’ minds. And we are happy to not only give you some advice but hear your own advice to improve our own practice. 

GONZALEZ: Fantastic. So if people do want to reach out to you, where would be the best place for them to go online? 

BOPP: Yeah. So I mean my email address is just noah.bopp@schoolforethics.org. The school’s website is schoolforethics.org and watch rerun of MSNBC’s Morning Joe in May, and you can see what I look like there. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: Just realize that my jacket was a $40 jacket that I bought on Etsy and my glasses, which I’m holding right now are just $30 drugstore glasses. We’re not anything special here. And if you forget my email address, the contact page, most of those emails, you say the topic that you’re interested in, most of those come to my inbox anyway. The other thing I would say is that a lot of teachers hear about SEGL and they say, “I’ve got a student. I’ve got, this student needs to come.” And so you’re welcome to nominate a student for our, for our program. We’re always looking to become a more diverse community. And so getting your listeners’ feedback on who the best possible kids are —

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: — just know that that’s something that I’m happy to respond to as well. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. I’ve got one last question that was unplanned, but I, I feel like I am weighed down with this question so, just constantly now. I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve unplugged from the news, I’ve unplugged from social media because the level of discourse is so nasty that it’s making me lose faith in humanity. So this is one of the reasons why this topic was so interesting to me. So I guess my question is do you feel optimistic that we as a species can pull ourselves out of this time? 

BOPP: Yes. 

GONZALEZ: Okay. 

BOPP: I’m optimistic. So when people say, how do you teach ethics? I go to Book 7 of Plato’s “Republic” at the end of the allegory of the cave where Plato has Socrates talk about the purpose of education, and Socrates says, education is not about putting sight into blind eyes. The effective educator assumes that the power to learn is already present in the soul of the learner. And that means that the goal of the educator is to give the learner places to look and questions to ask. I have enormous faith that if we can give students places to look, the current challenges that face our world, questions to ask, which are the classic ethical questions that cross culture and time and age and language, that the goodness that is already present in the learner will be uncovered.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: Socrates also likes to say that we’re like midwives giving, helping students give birth to their own ideas. So for me, I have a fundamental belief in the goodness of every human being. Maybe that’s naive, but it sure helps me as a teacher, and it sure helps me these days.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. 

BOPP: We have a guest speaker who is the only American to stay behind in the Rwandan genocide. His name is Carl Wilkens. He’s extraordinary, right, but if there’s anybody who can feel cynical about human nature, it’s Carl. And the first thing is he has this famous thing that he says, which is, inside “each one of us there’s such a potential for good, and there’s such a potential for evil.” And as teachers, we have the ability to cultivate the potential for good. I’ll also say that Carl is one of the happiest people that I’ve ever met in my entire life. And if he’s found a way through, I can find a way through. So my faith is in the, the fundamental goodness of human beings. And I will also say that we can’t really uncover that fundamental goodness if we don’t have good teachers in, in the world. And that’s why, as we get to the end of this podcast, just my gratitude for the teachers who are in the trenches doing jobs that are far more difficult than the job that I have right now, that gratitude is just overwhelming and full of awe. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Thank you so much for spending this hour with me, for the work you’re doing, and for sharing it so that other people can try to replicate it. 

BOPP: You got it. Well, it’s an honor to be on the, on the podcast, and just thank you for the work that you’re doing in this time that a lot of teachers feel is pretty dark. You are lighting candles wherever you go. So I’m, I’m, hopefully I’ve lit a candle, but it’s part of this big arrangement that you already have out there. So anyway, just thank you so much. 

GONZALEZ: Thank you. 

To read a full transcript of this conversation and find links to SEGL, their growth discourse guidelines, and the sample lesson plan we talked about here, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 265. 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.