Writing Curriculum Together with Lindsay Lyons, Ep. 163 Instructional Coaching with Ms. B

Writing Curriculum Together with Linsday Lyons, Ep. 163 Buzzing with Ms. B: The Coaching Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

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Chrissy Beltran  00:55

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Chrissy Beltran  01:32

You’re listening to Buzzing with Miss B, the coaching podcast where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach, and every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an instructional coach, resource creator and coffee enthusiast, and I’m your host. Stay tuned for practical tips and honest coaching talk that will help you coach with confidence.

Chrissy Beltran  01:56

Hey, coach, and welcome to episode 163 writing curriculum together with Lindsay Lyons, this month is PLC month on the podcast, we’re digging into ways that you can use your PLCs better. And one of my favorite ways is to write curriculum together. Now true collaborative planning isn’t for the faint of heart by any means. I myself struggled with it significantly during my first year as a coach. Over time, things got so much better. But it took real work, thought and having a purpose for everything we did to make this time work to help you grow your own structures for curriculum writing. I’ve invited Lindsay Lyons to the podcast. So welcome, Lindsay. I’m so glad you’re here today.

Linsday Lyons  02:37

Thank you so much, Christy. I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Chrissy Beltran  02:41

I’m so glad you could join us. Before we get started and talking about writing curriculum together with your teams. I’d love it if you could introduce yourself to my listeners a little bit talk about you know who you are, how you ended up here and what kind of work you focus on right now.

Linsday Lyons  02:54

Yeah, definitely. So my name is Lindsay and I really I call myself an educational justice coach, people always asked me what this means I totally made this up. But I think because everything that I do, whether it’s around curriculum, whether it’s around policy, it always centers justice and intersectional justice for our students at the center. And so how I came to education, my parents were both educators and I was always staunchly in the camp of I am not going to be an educator, because I see you know, all the grading that comes home and all the things but my undergrad was very much geared in gender, Women’s Studies, Sociology and justice type of things. And I was like, I really want to get to the heart of, you know, preventing the injustices before they happen, rather than helping people through them as they’re adults. You know, if I can work with youth, that would be great. And so that’s how I ended up as an educator. I’ve been really what I’m doing now is I’m hyper focused on developing feminist anti racist curricula with teams, specifically with departments, typically, that social studies ELA, but I’ve gotten into social studies, or science and math more, and that’s super fascinating. We recently did a Trek episode. So there’s all sorts of ways to bring justice to the core of, you know, whatever content area you’re teaching. Yeah, I

Chrissy Beltran  04:04

totally can see that science. I mean, like farming, there’s so many issues that are connected to social justice, you know, having access to food, and you know, the way that we use our materials. And that’s I’m sure, there’s a lot of really interesting stuff that went into that planning.

Linsday Lyons  04:20

Yeah, definitely so many cool things. So today,

Chrissy Beltran  04:23

we’re looking at curriculum writing. And this is like your areas of forte. And so we want to talk a little bit about how we can leverage a PLC to create new units, because PLCs can do a lot of things together. And this is one of the things that they can do together. And I have found it really, I mean, it’s a it’s an amazing process. It’s so interesting, and it helps people bring like their best of themselves to the table over time. But I would love to hear from you about a little bit about what this process looks like whenever you write new units with a team.

Linsday Lyons  04:52

Yeah, definitely. And there, it’s so unique to talk to a whole team versus one individual teacher. So I think, excellent framing there. So I think one of the things is, you know, are we working with a team who’s writing a bunch of different units? Like they’re not teaching the exact same curriculum? Or are we writing one where all the lessons, all the texts are going to be shared by the whole team. And so it will look a little bit different for both. But I think generally, I tried to really make sure that the process is one of co creation. So as a coach, you know, thinking about where do I provide those sparks? Where do I provide those questions that kind of direct us down this path? Or help us think a little bit more broadly or about our purpose? So usually, I’ll think about, okay, where do we find a spark? And so I love Dr. Goldie, Muhammad’s work in so many, so many ways. And one of the things that she talks about her most recent book is like this idea of being able to become like fluent and curriculum writing. So being able to take a spark of anything, I’m walking down the road, and I see this really interesting tree. And now I’m curious about how the tree got to be that color, and you know, whatever. And so just taking any spark in our daily lives, or our students daily lives and kind of going from there. So I think the first step is really like, what’s a spark that will be interesting to students might be a hook lesson, it might turn into something like a driving question. And then from there thinking about her her five pursuits she talks about, but really, I like the three that are I think, most undervalued, which is identity, criticality and joy. So how do we bring those three things in to the unit that we’re developing? And, and I think often criticality is the piece that I feel most comfortable with. And also that is furthest from sometimes our minds when we’re in more of a traditional mindset of teaching and planning for teaching. And so that’s usually the one that brings me back. So what’s that critical piece, which leads into the driving question that usually has some element of criticality in it, and ultimately, a summative assessment project, which I used to call an activist project. It’s like, how do students take action in a true authentic way to use what they learned to help their communities in whatever way you define community, it could be their school, it could be their classroom, it could be their city, the states, the nation, you know, globally. And I think that’s really it. And then from there, we’ll build out a unit arc. So I usually have people create a unit arc, that’s the same regardless of content, you can use it over and over. But it’s like, I usually build the hook. And then I build the base of the foundational knowledge, maybe we have a core text we revisit for three or four days. And then I pull in case studies. And so here’s the lessons or types of lessons that I do are on a case study, and maybe students are choosing the content of those. But I know that I usually do a gallery walk, or I usually do a circle protocol to discuss or a Socratic seminar. And so I think once you have that you can kind of plug and play the different texts and specific types of things for each unit.

Chrissy Beltran  07:33

Makes it more manageable over time once you’ve got people set up with that structure.

Linsday Lyons  07:37

Yep, exactly. Exactly.

Chrissy Beltran  07:38

And so how do you go about introducing those elements to teachers who are very unfamiliar with that process?

Linsday Lyons  07:45

Yeah, I think one of the things is just asking them what is possible first, because I think if you have the excitement and the energy around, well, this is something that I’ve always wanted to do, or I can connect to, you know, where I was, as a student, I think often, one of the largest hurdles is like, it seems insurmountable. So I just don’t want to go there. And I don’t even want to go there to the point where I’m just gonna say, you know, what I’ll have is good enough, or I could just slightly tweak it. And I often I’m thinking, we want to start from scratch or truly center justice and not add it in as kind of this like checkbox thing, you know. And so that can be overwhelming and daunting. And so people kind of shy away. So usually, it’s, well, what do you want students to feel to experience? What do you want to feel when you’re teaching it? And really to get at those feelings are kind of like lived experience of this. Going to that kind of dream space where like, we’ll figure out the how later can sometimes be very freeing to be able to kind of get people interested, and then the process could come later.

Chrissy Beltran  08:42

Okay, so then you do you bridge, like things that have to be taught inherently at school standards that teachers have? Do you find ways to bridge that into the Justice areas that you’re focusing on?

Linsday Lyons  08:54

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that’s, that’s critical. Otherwise, if you don’t have those standards, you know, if we do have some sort of state tests, like, your students might not do well on it. And we, you know, we have to do that. So I think, yeah, it is a bridge. I also think that most of the standards that we have, if we are kind of willing to explore or be aware of like a lot of social justice happenings, and like different connections, like it is actually a much easier tie than I think I initially thought when I started this work. And so I think sometimes it is just being able to have the conversations with experts in the field of social justice. And then you being the content expert of you know, your class and the standards of your specific state, like bridging those together, just that conversation alone can be really generative.

Chrissy Beltran  09:38

Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think that we get really stuck. Teachers tend to get really stuck because they’re so worried about like, the tests, like you mentioned, are about checking things off. That has to be taught to a certain level that they get really focused on. Well, this is the way we always do it. This is how we have to teach this thing. But what you’re saying is we can look at these units through a different lens and say what connections do they have to the world. And we know that relevance is a huge part of the way kids are engaged in school, if something is relevant, it’s more meaningful, and they’re more likely to be interested in doing that thing. And so if we can paint them a picture of this is how it affects the world that we live in, and affects different people in different ways, then they are more likely to be engaged and find meaning in that thing that we’re teaching, even if that thing is fractions or whatever, you know, area and perimeter, you know, if it’s some sort of discrete knowledge that they might not really understand. Why does it matter? Well, there is relationship between this and the world and how it functions.

Linsday Lyons  10:40

Absolutely. I was just talking to a science teacher who we went through this whole, like, probably 40 minute conversation, and we got to this thing, it was kind of like, oh, okay, like, I feel like I’m just kind of still adding justice in. And then he phrased it better than I could, right. Because like teachers, just like students always do it better than me. And he was like, oh, okay, so we’re using the science as a way to advance justice. So we’re not just saying like, here’s this extra add on, we’re like, No, we’re learning about the science so that the science can be the way we reduce climate change impact on racialized communities or something, you know, like,

Chrissy Beltran  11:11

Yeah, interesting. So then what are some of the hurdles, and you’ve kind of hinted at a couple of them already, but some of the hurdles that we have to plan for as coaches as facilitators, when we’re starting to help teams plan collaboratively and write units together? Like you said, it’s very different than working one on one with a teacher.

Linsday Lyons  11:29

Absolutely. I think one of the biggest things is identifying the places you need consensus and making space for it and having, I think, even a protocol for it. So I like something as basic as like fist to five, three and above, we can live with it, you know, to and below, we can talk about it. And I think that just gives some sort of structure to this kind of a morphus. Like, well, what do we need to agree on? Do we all use the same rubric? Even if we’re teaching different lessons, or even different projects to get to that rubric? Like, are we still assessing on the same standards? And how much do we like nitpick the language of the rubric? Right? Can there be personalization to each teacher? Or should we really be like, this exact wording stays the same? And if the exact wording stays the same? Does it need to happen in the coaching call with me? Or is this something that is independent work that you can do later on? And kind of bring back to the table? Right? And I think that’s like, how do we leverage our time together, where we’re all sitting together in the chair, because I’ve literally been in coaching calls with a PLC, where we have gone so far down the road of specific language of like one sentence for 30 minutes. And it’s like, we’re totally lost for the day. Right. So that’s one piece, I would say. And I think another piece I’ve drawn a lot on adaptive leadership. And I think resistance is loss is a big thing that they talk about. So this idea of resistance often is like, if we’re doing something totally new, sometimes it’s a loss of identity is like I was a good teacher, or looking back, it’s like, does that mean the unit I just did was terrible. And I’m like, destroyed my students. For the last 20 years, I’ve taught this or whatever. And I think one of the other pieces of that. So one, just acknowledging that loss. And then the other piece that right now in the climate of especially teaching for justice, and thinking about all the state laws that are being passed in the book bans, and you know, the legislation, there is often this fear, even in states like Massachusetts, where I live, where there’s not legislation like that on the books right now, but teachers are still kind of self censoring, or districts are like, preemptively, or for whatever reason, censoring themselves and their teachers. And so I think one of the things adaptive leadership coaches us to do is think about the underlying beliefs, habits and loyalties. And I love that wording, because it’s like, oh, who was my loyalty to is it the comfort of the rich white parent who I think might say something, and actually, I’m not even sure if they will. But that’s who’s in my mind versus all of the parents who might actually love this direction that my curriculum is going. But that’s not the voice in my head, it’s a really interesting, like, deep inner work that we have to do sometimes with that,

Chrissy Beltran  13:56

I’m sure some of that comes from, I’m worried, like, I can do some small things. But if I push too far, that’s going to be the thing that trips up the system, and then we’re not gonna be able to do anything. So it’s like, you’re kind of pushing at the edges of things. But you’re afraid that if you push that too far, then you’re there. The pushback will be so extreme, that now you can’t even read books about people who look different than you get. Like, it’s like the degree of retaliation, you know, is a scary thing.

Linsday Lyons  14:27

Yeah, and a lot of that fear is very large. And I mean, people are like, right, have in many states is like losing their jobs over things like for sure. And I think one of the things that that I think is also interesting from a leadership level, is like being able to work with the department sometimes in my role, where I’m not in a school, it’s actually coming into a school. So getting the leaders to be excited about this work and be interested because sometimes the teachers are but the leaders might not be. And so I think there’s also that piece to navigate that can sometimes present a challenge as well.

Chrissy Beltran  14:57

That makes sense getting everybody kind of on board with the idea Yeah, because whatever you produce is going into classrooms, and admin has to be ready to say yes, this is what we believe in this is these are the lessons we’ve created, and we believe they are for the betterment of our students. Yep. Yeah, exactly. So what are the logistics of your planning sessions? What does it look like? I get a lot of questions about how can we make PLC work with them the realities of the school day, and you know, a planning session within our teams? So what’s your logistics look like?

Linsday Lyons  15:27

Yeah, such a good question. So my dream and how I’ve luckily been able to do this with a lot of departments now that I’m fully on my own and not working within the confines of some traditional instructional coaching spaces, is two days completely separated out from like teaching. So we’re not like going back to our classes, we have full time subs, or we’re doing this on a non instructional day, we have a PD day dedicated to this, where we just have the space to be able to create, as a teacher, myself, this is what my principal did for me, when I was teaching. And our department literally just went two floors below where we taught. And we were just like, in a room for two full days. And we and I was like, This is it, this is where my brain just gets to be free to create, I get to collaborate in a really meaningful way. And I’m not looking at the clock to say, Oh, I gotta be, you know, printing these copies or whatever, for the next class period. So I think being able to have that space is ideal. And if you can’t, I think being able to give as much creation time as possible in like the one hours, I’ve also done kind of like the one hour PLC time, that is part of the school day where you got to get back. And I think for me thinking about how often I coach teachers to think about 75% of the class time is student work time or student talk time. And so I tried to do the same as a facilitator of a conversation. So we’re co creating, so I’m not going to talk and give you process guidance are examples for more than maybe 10 minutes of that hour. And then creation time is really 25, maybe 30 minutes, and then we’re kind of sharing out, maybe getting some feedback and committing to a next step. And I think that’s the last five minutes is always next step and like what is the evidence of implementation or feedback. And when we think about kind of that measurement piece, sometimes, you know, we can bristle at accountability, and that can feel scary. And it has been used in scary ways. But like we’re accountable to students, so what are the students saying, what are the students able to do? And you know, what’s that data we can look at next time. I love that you

Chrissy Beltran  17:18

include that accountability piece at the end, because something that I also hear from coaches is, well, this idea of like leading from the middle where you are supposed to hold teachers accountable, but you are not an administrator, there is no, you can’t really say, you know, anything like, Well, you didn’t do this. So this is you know, the cause, or I am requiring you to do this. That’s not really the role that we have. But you can create accountability to your team by saying, What is this piece that you’re going to bring back the next time that we talk the next time we work on this? What are you going to bring with you to show how it went? It’s not about a gotcha, that word is so irritating to me. It’s not about that it’s about how are How did it go? How did it go in your classroom with your actual kids when you tried this, and let’s bring that artifact back. Or let’s bring that you know, whatever it is those responses back and talk with our team about how it went so that we can make adjustments for the next time that we plan. But you don’t know what adjustments you need, if you don’t try it. So try it, try something and then bring something back to share about how it wins.

Linsday Lyons  18:24

Yeah, exactly. And I love that idea. bring something back to because it’s like, I could just kind of reflect but then my reflection might be off. I mean, I’ve had so many times where I taught something. And I was like I taught it last week. And I think it went well. Like I don’t really remember what the students said. So it’s like, can you literally record in the moment or ask students to write down on an exit ticket or like some level of student voice that is concrete and is like decentering, you as the teacher granted, not experienced as the teacher is important, like how did it feel like it went to you is is important. But it’s also like, you know, the students voice,

Chrissy Beltran  18:54

even a little video, you know, if provided everybody has the ability, you know, legally to do that. A little video that you can share in your team, and everybody just sits there and watches your, you know, two minute video of kids working in teams on something that is is evidence of learning and engagement and of how things are going in your classroom in relation to the lessons that you’ve planned together?

Linsday Lyons  19:17

Absolutely. And I think even when we’re thinking big, like curriculum sometimes seems very big. And yeah, you want to, you know, like, plan out some things. But I also think there’s so much that you can kind of CO create, so you could be in the middle of a unit and still kind of building the unit because you’re co creating it with students, not necessarily because you didn’t think to plan but but because we have kind of a frame. And then we’re like, Okay, well the students came back last week, and they told me they’re interested in these three ideas. So now next week’s case studies or whatever we’re going to call them those lessons are gonna be focused on these three ideas. So like let’s brainstorm resources or something. There’s so much we could do within the context of a PLC to kind of build the plane as we fly it in service of student voice and co creation. So how

Chrissy Beltran  19:56

does that look whenever you’re thinking about okay, these are the three They have to learn by the end of this unit. These are the three things are interested in are the things that came back from my students. It’s kind of like an inquiry sort of model. So then how are you bridging that with teachers when you’re looking at resources in the next lesson planning?

Linsday Lyons  20:14

Oh, my gosh, that is a phenomenal question and one that I’ve been grappling with like, right, yeah. So I think to me right now, in this moment, and even by the time this airs, I may have added something. But I think right now it looks like building out that unit arc that we talked about before, where we have kind of a general idea with the specific protocols and activities like this is what it’s going to look like, the discussion is going to take this form, but the content kind of comes through conversation with students. So you might plan out typically what I will have teachers playing out is like the hook lesson. So like, what’s, what’s the thing we’re going to do to get people excited? And maybe that includes some question generation and some inquiry kind of style activities. What’s the foundation so that might be, you know, a week’s worth of content, that is what I usually call build the base. So what are the absolute essentials? And this takes a lot of paring down, usually from what we typically teach. But it’s like, if they learn nothing else, I have three things that they need to learn or one concept that they need to learn in, like a few different areas of application, what is that one thing, and then if we could get clear on that, then we could say, Okay, so we’re going to actually just keep revisiting like in history, for example, we might be doing, you know, you don’t know the Constitution or something. So we’re gonna keep revisiting this segment of the Constitution again, and again, man, because it’s like the most important part. And then we’re going to look at how that constitution is played out. In our case studies coming up, I might choose one in advance, but then I might ask students or look at those questions they generated, and then find resources, they might even bring in resources of how is that playing out in current events? Like, what’s a news article, we could bring in, or a video clip or, you know, a letter to an editor and a recent paper, and then that’s how we would co create moving forward, but the very initial stages, the first week or two of the unit, I might already have planned out.

Chrissy Beltran  21:57

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I was thinking about like, in science, when I taught fourth grade, and we were learning about, like, the effects of natural events in an ecosystem, you know, like, if there’s a fire in the forest or something, there’s a lot of different kinds of events that you can learn about, in that within that one standard. And some of those events, they are natural, but maybe our actions as humans perpetuated those events, like fracking or something. So, you know, we can learn about the thing in lots of different ways, because one standard doesn’t have, it’s not always clear, like literally what that standard means, especially in science and social studies. There’s like one standard one statement, and maybe it has such as you know, you have to include those things. But beyond that, you can really kind of dig into different kinds of examples, and, and make connections to, you know, like you said, you know, the way that we see it playing out in the real world current events and, and, you know, looking at looking at it with that lens of justice, so that we’re making sure that everything we’re looking at, we’re understanding how is actually affecting the kids that we’re working with, or other populations and the kids that we’re working with that maybe they should know a little bit more about.

Linsday Lyons  23:05

Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely think that’s right.

Chrissy Beltran  23:08

So what role does the coach serve during these sessions, because I can see bike over time, that role would probably change. If you work with one team over time, I’m going to think that the coach might have to take a little more of a leadership role at the beginning, and then overtime, be able to be more like a team member. But what does like what does that look like? And are there different roles? Because I would imagine, like you mentioned before, you know, certain questions or like setting up the framework, and those things have to be done. So what does that look like?

Linsday Lyons  23:36

Yeah, I forgive me. I can’t remember who the guests on your podcast was a few episodes back, but they talked about Coach versus consultants. Yeah, I’m familiar. My friend Arthur.

Chrissy Beltran  23:44

Arthur Aguirre. Yeah, the life coach, and he was talking about coaching conversations.

Linsday Lyons  23:50

Yes. So I think I was fascinating listening to that episode for me was I was like, Oh, I think I actually take on the role of a consultant occasionally, even though I do really situate myself as a coach most often. But I think sometimes, especially if the process is really unfamiliar, like, What do you mean, Lindsey, take a spark and then create from it, like, what a step up, no one’s asked me to do that. And so that’s like, sometimes we have to be a consultant in the Okay, this is an example of what this might look like, or here’s like 30 Sparks, I want you to like sift through them and see what what’s resonating with you? And how do you know what’s resonating? Oh, that feeling in your gut or that, you know, like that you thought immediately of that student and that thing that they said or, you know, whatever. Sometimes that takes a little bit more maybe prompting or offering some examples, I think, then, like you said later on, even you know, even the second part of the first day of something like this, you can take a much more backseat approach. But I think early on, to just even get the understanding of what it is that we’re trying to do and the process that we’re trying to go through. I think there’s usually a lot of hesitancy and confusion, and I’ve literally gotten feedback from participants before saying, you know, I as a teacher who only knows my car I’m textin only does, you know has taught in this one way in this one department, I just needed you to step in and say, you know, here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to just try this out for the next 15 minutes, let’s try to game out this scenario or this approach. And that way, sometimes that will actually bring people together where they might have said, you know, we want to teach history thematically, and we want to teach it chronologically. That’s huge social studies debate, but like, you know, what if we gave out this approach, and just see if we like, you know, let’s take the next 10 minutes. That, to me, is like, sometimes a little bit more consulting, than coaching. But I do think like, asking the right questions is something I’m trying to still work on. And I think I will hopefully refine some of those really effective questions over time, at different stages of this process that will really push people forward without me having to take as much of a consultant role.

Chrissy Beltran  25:48

I’m really glad you brought that up. Because yeah, you’re right, we don’t want to do so much like directive, you know, this is what we should do. And, but we also are, it’s needed that we do that sometimes, because like, especially at the beginning, but sometimes just whenever we just hit a wall, and that is normal. And the truth is, if people could do it without you, they might already just be doing it. So you might need to just tell them something, you know, instead of everybody sitting there feeling really frustrated, because if the process is wishy washy, teachers are very uncomfortable. And that was my as a new coach, I was I was trying to plan with these people that I didn’t know, didn’t know me. And we all came from different places. And the way that I had planned with teams that I knew that I as a teacher that I was one of the teachers on the team, and we knew each other and we would you know, we had a sec, a shorthand language, because we just knew each other, and I came into coaching, thinking that you could plan with, oh, we’ll have kind of like a broad structure. And then we can just share some ideas about this. And what are some things that we could do to engage kids and teachers looked at me like, they were like, what does that mean? What is a learning experience? What are you talking about? What is this format, I don’t know what this is, it was like a very stressful experience. And so I learned from that more structure is needed to get started. And then you can open it up and do all kinds of cool stuff. But if you don’t have the structure to start, people feel like I don’t know what I’m walking away with. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing in this moment.

Linsday Lyons  27:20

Yes. And one of the one of the areas that I think because I put a lot of emphasis on the driving question of a unit, because I think we can use it even as the exit ticket every single day, like every single lesson is like, how do I think differently about this big question. And it’s so hard to come up with a good one. And honestly, it could be years before you could come up with a perfect one. I mean, is there any such thing as perfect, but what I have decided to do is start using some sentence starters of common driving question frames. And that has just elevated the conversation. It’s reduced the brainstorming time. And it’s like, okay, I don’t really care if every department I work with has the same frame. It’s an amazing question. And it’s an amazing unit. And at first, I was so hesitant to restrict the conversation. But I think once you get it, like you said, you can then expand the you can then throughout the frames and go from there. Yeah, the

Chrissy Beltran  28:09

scaffolds are there for a reason. And if you like you say you feel like oh, I don’t want to limit it. I don’t want to take away, you know, their independence or their like their free thinking. They don’t even know where to start. So let’s get started. And then we can do all the amazing, you know, we can really open it up once they have a handle on Oh, this is what I’m trying to do here. I totally agree. You You mentioned something a minute ago about like teaching history somatically versus chronologically, how do you really support teachers of different philosophies you talked about? Like, let’s just like a fun experiment. Let’s just try it out and see what we think. But what do you do in that? Like? Is that the main way that you support them? Or what are some of the things that you do to support teachers who come from really different backgrounds?

Linsday Lyons  28:50

Yeah, this is this is hard. I think, honestly, one is too big time for it make time for the struggle. So initially, I was thinking I could do some of this work so much faster, because like you were saying, my familiarity with teams that I had worked with is like, Oh, we can do it this fast. Well, that’s because we’re already on the same page about so many foundational things. And so if you’re brand new to working with a team, I think give it give it a little bit more time than you anticipate one. And then two, I like to really ground everything just like I did in teaching with a class just like I would do in like a PLC that I was part of as a teacher, ground and shared values and shared vision. And so if you can just name and be able to name the values that are important to you in this project, or in this unit creation, or whatever it is. I think that’s huge. I also like to share some like commitments or agreements that I usually use as part of community building. I think we do this a lot, you know, teachers in the classroom or staff who are leading like their first meeting for the year. You know, a coach who’s working with our first team for the year. We do this then but I think at the beginning of each project just to ground us in that one of the biggest ones for me is to uphold the dignity of all people. And so when you’re talking specifically about justice like just to name that whatever we’re doing, it’s in the best interest of advancing justice and dignity for all people. And so if we can just kind of land on that, and then any other supporting vision or values, it can really bring us back like another pieces to bring us back to the kids. We’re here for the kids. So any sort of like disagreement or something we have, we can just ask ourselves the question, or the coach can ask the question, like, what would this look like when it’s impacting kids? What’s the impact that it could have? And so we can kind of like game out different scenarios or decisions from that perspective, because I think that’s the unifying piece for us. And sometimes in our general national political discourse, even, it’s very polarizing. And we just get into this is the side that I’m on. And this is what I believe, I don’t want to hear anyone else. While I think like dignity is an important piece to uphold, like, I think that that grounds us, so as long as we have that, disagreement is fine. And we can kind of move forward with what’s the impact on kids making any decision kind of with that in mind makes it so much easier to just be like, Okay, right. So that’s the clear next step, or we could go in either of these directions, and it will still be beneficial for kids. Mm hmm.

Chrissy Beltran  31:11

Have you ever had people get like, outright heated or very agitated? Or? Yeah, what what did that experience then? Yeah, I

Linsday Lyons  31:19

think we and I think, for the most part, people are generally very much there for the kids and able to like kind of ran themselves in in terms of whatever they might have wanted to say, in a, maybe a private meeting without me as the coach speaker, for example. But I do think that there have been moments where things have gotten heated, and we just need to take five, so we literally will just take a break. And I will have usually, like on the screen, or if there’s a projector or you know, whatever, just kind of a moment of like, so why are we here, like, let’s grind again in the vision. Or maybe we write down and we’ll do an activity like I would with students, you know, as a teacher or something like, you know, here’s the emotion I’m feeling in this moment. One of the the things that I use, and this is a, I like acronyms, so I had to find an acronym that I can remember easy. So I just kind of made one up, I think it’s an adaptation of glasses, five basic needs. And so its base. And so these are like the often unmet needs that we have in a conversation. So belonging, autonomy, survival and enjoyment. And so if I’m not having one of those things, if I can name in a conversation, you know, oh, I’m, I’m feeling like a little bit of lack of joy, right now, a little bit of lack of autonomy, then I can like, ground it in that versus thank you for being blah, blah, blah. It’s more about like my experience at the situation. So a little bit of kind of like conflict resolution skill building in there. But I do think that that that often grounds us in why we are here and moves us forward. But it is absolutely challenging, because I think, especially if teachers are expected to teach the exact same lessons with the same, like texts and everything. Yes, it’s like this is a very hard ask. So if I were ever an administrator, I would not ask people to do that most likely. And why I grounded also in, we’re developing almost like a, it’s not a template, really. But it is kind of like a template in the sense that we are building the foundation we’re building the first few weeks, we know kind of the arc of where we’re going. But so much is going to be co constructed with students that just inherently in the way that we design, we don’t have to agree on everything, because we’re centering the student voices and not our teacher voices. So that can be helpful as a way around it too.

Chrissy Beltran  33:29

Mm hmm. Yeah, it’s a very good point, alignment is a prickly place to be. I as a coach, as a teacher, we were not aligned, and nobody cared. And that was not great for kids, in a lot of cases. And as a coach, alignment was expected, and it had not been in the past. And so I was the one responsible for getting that going. And that was rough, because I was like, like it was alignment was not an issue as a classroom teacher, because I didn’t see all the other classrooms, but then I had kids coming up with tremendous gaps, and people who could have benefited from support from their colleagues, but there’s a degree of alignment that is reasonable. And then there’s a degree of alignment that can be a little bit much, you know, and whenever we all have to be doing the exact same thing at the exact same time, that can be a problem. But it also can be certain pieces of it can be very supportive of teachers who need the support, but it also can rein in those teachers who could do truly awesome stuff. So it’s a really, I don’t know the answer. It’s a really tricky place to be and having people move into that when they have never done it before. Like if this is their first experience planning collaboratively with you. And that’s probably like, well, that’s exciting. Like, I’m sure you get a lot of like, you can probably feel the energy in the room at times is is is just very uncomfortable.

Linsday Lyons  34:51

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I’ve worked with teams who they’re like, we actually don’t want to redo curriculum at all like we are completely fine with exactly what we have We don’t know why we’re here. And then it’s like, ready, go?

Chrissy Beltran  35:03

Yeah, well guess what we’re doing today? The opposite of what you just said.

Linsday Lyons  35:09

And I found in those moments, I mean, I still am looking for, you know, coaching tips on how to how to deal with that situation. Because that is so difficult, as you’re saying, like so many challenging situations that we as coaches are put in from leading from the middle, and it’s just like, Okay, we’re gonna make the best of it. But I do think that grounding and like, what do you wish school would be for your students? Like, what do you think would be the best possible so? And then we can kind of go in with like, Okay, well, you might love your curriculum, you might, you know, you might keep pieces of it even. But let’s do a thought experiment here. What could this potentially look like? And that sometimes can, again, that dreaming space sometimes can be more freeing than the reality? Yeah,

Chrissy Beltran  35:45

exactly. You know what, I’m not here to make sure that you’re doing every single lesson every day, I am here to help you plan a really awesome unit. So let’s plan a really awesome unit and see what happens. And maybe you’ll actually like it. I mean, you know, can we just like try it and see what happens? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that’s probably a reasonable approach. In many cases, whenever you have the ability to do that I act. So actually was the person going into class was going to follow up as well and see how things were going. But again, you tried to say, Hey, how is it going? How is what we planned working? What can we do to adjust it and make it better? And it’s, it takes time, but it’s just, we just have to be responsive? And say, Yeah, okay, you’re having an issue with this. Okay, we’ll come back. And we’ll talk about that. And we’ll try to problem solve that together. During our next session. You know, that’s, I feel like that’s the best we can do with the realities of coaching sometimes. So, having teachers plan together, oftentimes is new in many, I mean, there may times they haven’t to do it, having teachers having to be aligned isn’t new. But what kinds of methods have you used to have teachers implement something new, like new content or new strategies? Or? I mean, I’m sure just, you know, approaching it from that focus of social justice is new in itself? How are you getting teachers to try these new things in their units?

Linsday Lyons  37:02

Yeah, I was just gonna say the idea of justice is often so new, at least the degree to which Oh, you want to center it, it needs to be in the question and the project, you know, there’s an activist project, like what? So I do think that inherent in the expectations and the framing and the process, it is just New, and then it’s, you know, how, to what degree Am I kind of meeting that are able to do that? And so I think that’s kind of the thing, that’s often the thing that’s hard, right is like, Okay, well, that’s so new. And so like, what does that even look like? And so again, that dreaming space? It’s like, okay, well, you’re you’re nervous about fitting in all of the standards, and you don’t have the time and you’re kind of thinking, How do I sprinkle it in? But you’re asking me not to sprinkle it in, like, you know, what does that look like? So again, it’s kind of, let’s put all of that worry aside of how we get there. And let’s kind of just dream, getting to the how later kind of thing. But I do think so some of it, especially like the unit arc piece, we can test that before we’re even in the the unit itself, and in the planning stages. So it’s just thinking of like a PLC, before you get to the actual curriculum planning, you’re kind of doing like the pre planning maybe, where you’re thinking about what protocols or activities might be part of a unit arc, I might test a new protocol. As a team, maybe we say, okay, we want some better discussion protocol. So you know, these two teachers are going to volunteer to do circle protocol. And these two are going to do Socratic seminar, and these two are going to do a ride around or whatever, you know, and then we’re going to come back, and we’re going to think about that. And then maybe based on the student feedback, we agree as a team that our unit arc is going to include one Socratic seminar per unit, and you know, that kind of thing. And so I think that is a kind of a, I don’t know if it’s safer, but like a way that sometimes feels a little bit less scary. If you’re like, as a team, we’re investigating, and we’re testing, you know, some protocols. So it’s not even like we’re testing content, we’re testing something that we’re going to do a lesson every day anyways, there was going to be discussion anyways. And now we’re just kind of tinkering with what that could look like. And we’re doing it collectively. And so sometimes that’s like an easier entry into like, Okay, now we start, maybe your curriculum conversation with the full unit are already planned out with all the protocols we already love. And that’s an anchoring and like, what we feel confident in what we know our students like. And now we’re feeling a little bit more exploratory and willing to flex on some of the content that may have initially felt scary because we have half of it done in terms of the pedagogy.

Chrissy Beltran  39:23

I love that idea. I love that idea of saying, let’s look, these are our different choices. And let’s divide it up in like, which one do you want to try, you get to choose which one you want to try and then go try it out and let us know how it went. I love that. Because it’s like a personalized, it’s a personal choice. They can decide which one they think might work for their kids. And then they get to try it out. And then they can come back and they become the expert in that thing, but because they actually use it with real children. And I think that is such a it’s almost fun. It’s like a fun way. You know, like, I do love planning and so I get a kick out of planning lessons and I heard my teachers were like, That is so weird. That is not normal. I’d be like, Yeah, we’re gonna plan a year. On adaptations, and they were like, That’s all right, you know, but I just, it’s just fun starting something new, it’s fun and figuring out how it’s gonna go. It’s fun. But if we can involve the teachers in some of that joy, right, share the joy and let them have the opportunity to try stuff out and experiment. I just think that’s a great method.

Linsday Lyons  40:16

Yeah, it’s so fun to be able to tinker and learn together. And when you have that learning orientation of like, we’re testing, we’re just testing. Yeah, it’s so much. It’s like, Oh, if my coach comes in, and it’s totally flopping, this lesson is awful. It’s like, Well, we did it we tested that’s like a good thing we were willing to try.

Chrissy Beltran  40:32

Yeah, I love it. Well, thank you so much for all of the content that you’ve shared today about how we can plan you know, in new and exciting ways with our teachers. Because I think it’s it’s a big challenge coaches have as a new coach, I struggled with planning PLCs. It was like, the bane of my existence until I figured it out. And then it just kept me I keep changing all the time, like you said, you know, so thank you for giving us some new ideas that we can implement.

Linsday Lyons  40:59

Of course, thank you so much. I just learned so much in conversation about some of these strategies, and just hearing like, what feels interesting to other people, or what other people’s kind of take on things. Like, I just loved this conversation. So thank you.

Chrissy Beltran  41:10

Oh, yeah, I did, too. I love to talk shop. So and I love to talk shop with people who are excited to talk shop, right? That’s the best. Before you go, I do want to ask you, it’s a fun question that I ask all of my guests. And it is what is your favorite thing right now. And it can be anything. It can be an activity, a product, a podcast, a book, anything you’re loving right now,

Linsday Lyons  41:32

this is such a hard question, because I feel like lots of things. But I guess in the education realm, specifically, I’m thinking of st data pod, because in we’re also in the podcasting realm. So I think this is like one of my favorite podcasts at the moment. The book street data was amazing by Shane Sapir, and Jamila Dugan, and then LC Mumbi came in with shades of beer. And now they do have a podcast. They have amazing guests, they are always talking about justice centered education, and they just ask really good questions. And so it is one of those ones where I’m like, Oh, it came out five minutes ago, like I’m listening right now pausing everything else.

Chrissy Beltran  42:03

Awesome. That’s a great recommendation of the check it out. I’m a huge podcast person, I always have, like a wait list of things that I’m listening to. And for all different reasons, you know, all different purposes, mostly entertainment. Because whenever I do information, I tend to do an audio book, but I do love to listen to it just, it’s just such a great way. There’s information that’s out there, you know, and, and people are saying smart and funny things all the time.

Linsday Lyons  42:30

Absolutely. It’s usually how I motivate myself to go for a longer run is I’m like, Oh, I will listen to a podcast.

Chrissy Beltran  42:35

Here we go. Yeah, yeah, I’ve been saving this one. That’s what they say you’re supposed to, to for tasks you don’t enjoy. You’re supposed to set yourself up with either like an audio book or a podcast, you’re excited to listen to, that you’re only allowed to listen to when you’re doing the thing you don’t want to do. So where can people find you online? Or in the real world, if they want to talk to you about you know, ask you questions, or if they want to enlist your services and you know, supporting their planning, where can they find you?

Linsday Lyons  43:02

Yeah, I’m getting better about social media. So I am on it, usually Lindsey Beth Lyons, but Lindsey Beth lyons.com is my website. So everything’s there. There’s a bunch of free resources on there. My podcast time for teacher ship is on there. So it’s a nice central hub.

Chrissy Beltran  43:14

All right, awesome. Thank you so much for being here today, Lindsey, and sharing all of your

Linsday Lyons  43:18

ideas. Oh, my gosh, thank you so much for having me. This is so fun.

Chrissy Beltran  43:22

All right, coaches, that was fantastic. I love people when they come on here, and they have tons of energy. And you can just hear the energy that Lindsey has for planning collaboratively and involving social justice. And I just think that’s fantastic. So I know, I got some really great ideas. If I were going to do some planning. I love that idea I sincerely do about having teachers try out different things before you plan it together for everybody. That is such a cool idea. So yeah, definitely try that one out. If you’re working with teams of teachers, I also have a resource for you that you can use to plan with your teachers if they are stuck, like if you talk to them, and they don’t say anything. And if you’re working with your PLCs, and they are just like I hate to say they’re duds, but sometimes they’re duds. And so if you had to buy things, Miss b.com/episode 163 and scroll down, you can grab the PLC discussion dice, I’ve got a free one for you there have the resource in my store on teacherspayteachers. But you can grab a free one there on my site. So that is has like each side you roll the dice and each side has a prompt for teachers to share about so if you’re having trouble getting people to talk, there you go use a dice get everybody almost like a game. It’s a little bit more engaging than just posing maybe a question so you can check it out. If you are interested in learning more about how to use your PLCs effectively, you want to listen to my episode next week we are talking to a coach in the field about PLCs and we’re going to do some troubleshooting and some problem solving together because there are PLCs were initiated once and they were not initiated well. And I know that you have seen that happen before right? Whenever PLCs get off to a really that start. So we’re going to talk a little bit about how this coach can support their faculty and get those PLCs moving again, and also what role they’re going to serve during that time, how they get people to do all the preparation stuff that needs to happen. Tons of great stuff we’re going to talk about in the next episode, and that is going to be episode 164. So I cannot wait to talk to you next week about PLCs and until then, happy coaching!

Chrissy Beltran  45:33

Thank you for listening to buzzing with Miss B the coaching podcast. What more coaching ideas, check me out at buzzing with Ms. b.com. and on Instagram at buzzing with Miss B. If you love the show, share it with a coach who would love it too. Or leave me a review on iTunes. It’s free and it helps others find this show. Happy coaching!