Gholdy Muhammad
To the classroom podcast: Episode 15
May 28, 2023
Jennifer Serravallo:
Welcome Dr. Muhammad.
Gholdy Muhammad:
Thank you, Jennifer. It's so wonderful to be here with you. I know our names are always talked about in conversation together in school, so it's nice to finally collaborate a bit.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Likewise. It's such an honor. I can't believe it's been all these years of reading your work and being connected on social media and we haven't met. So this is really a privilege and an honor. So thanks for being here.
Gholdy Muhammad:
Yes, thank you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So your first book is called Cultivating Genius, and I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say genius.
Gholdy Muhammad:
Well, the word genius is an interesting one. Growing up and working in schools for over 20 years, genius just felt like a word that's been reserved for a selected few. And those who did really well on one standardized test were considered geniuses. Right? And we also, when we think of genius, many of us would think of inventions and Albert Einstein and sometimes we didn't see ourselves. Everyone did not see themselves in that word. So when I started studying the ancestors, Black ancestors, Black communities, and what they did and what they were able to accomplish and build during the time of enslavement and hardship and turmoil and violence, it felt like the word genius came to mind. And I define it as brilliance. The unique gifts that we carry, that we offer to the world. Anything that you have that's special that helps to build and advance humanity in some kind of way is genius. So it can be the creativity, the knowledge you carry, the things you are able to do that is special. All of that can be considered genius. It doesn't have to just be how you score on one exam. If you braid hair, that's genius. I read the link of braiding hair to a surgery and the precision that's needed to semiotics to geography. If you double Dutch, if you can read image and draw, if you're musically inclined. All these things sometimes that we don't count as genius or we don't recognize as genius in classrooms of our children who carry these unique gifts. I count it as that because if the ancestors did, then why can't we think about things very differently today? So all those things are examples of how I'm looking at genius today.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I love that. I love so many things about that, especially the asset-based framework that that calls up. That we're looking for and we're expecting these brilliances in children and that that's the starting place. That's just beautiful.
Gholdy Muhammad:
And we all have something we can do, something that we are good at and something that is special to us. It just needs to be cultivated, watered, and grown. It's already within every child and every educator.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'd love to hear about the research you did into the Black Literary societies of the 1800s and how it inspired this framework. I think we're in a period of time where people are talking a lot about quantitative research or experimental design research, and I think that the research that you've done is so important. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that.
Gholdy Muhammad:
Sure. So when I was a graduate student getting my PhD studying language literacy, and culture, before that I had, just so you know, I was a reading specialist and I taught English language arts and social studies. I was also a literacy coach. So one of my first classes I took my professor was on the National Reading Panel, which concluded how we need to teach reading and literacy, but particularly reading. And one thing I noticed from their synthesis of literature, which they only pull quantitative studies, is that it was largely absent of culture of scholars of color who were doing rigorous, valid qualitative work. And when you are absent of pulling in qualitative work, you're not fully understanding people of color because the numbers do not tell it all. Another class I took was where we had to historize our topics and go into the archives to study. Now taking on historical methodologies, I had already in grad school started the research. I started looking at coding methods for looking at historical documents, but I started to look at research about the history of teaching reading, literature, all these things. And in all of my classes they left out Black folks. Children's literature was all about the Europeans and white people, never about Black children's literature. It's almost like we did not exist.
So I started my research by studying people like Dorothy Porter and librarians during the 19th century, Elizabeth McHenry who wrote the book, Forgotten Readers, Maisha Wynn, who did historical research on Black independent institutions and so many other scholars. And I went in depth into what does the research say about how literacy is defined among Black communities. What kinds of literature did they read, what kinds of literacy practices did they engaged in? How did they teach phonics and how to teach children how to read.
And I would do formal research studies to see how do children today respond when their reading development, writing development, literacy, math, science is intentionally framed around these pursuits of identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy. And that's my own research built upon reviews of literature, archival histories, and building upon the research I've been previously doing.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So let's get into what that looks like in the classroom. So you talked about these four pursuits, identity, skill, intellectual development, criticality, and then you added joy with your new book, which we'll get to as well. Can you explain what each is and give an example?
Gholdy Muhammad:
Sure. So when I started doing the research, I said, how did Black communities in Black schools define literacy historically? Because in almost every training I've had it' skills. It's phonics. It's reading development. It's almost not even writing literacy was like skills and you can be literate or illiterate, but for communities of color, literacy was not about you have it or you don't. Everybody has it. It is more about this differentiation of the multiple types of literacy one could embody, not "have" or "not have." They never use words around capitalism and money like assets, ownership, investments. I also noticed that to be a very different something. So they define literacy in these four major ways, literacy as identity development. There was not a time historically reading about Black literacies that they were not also making sense of their lives as they were developing reading and writing and thinking and communication, they were making sense of who they are: identity. They were also learning those proficiencies needed. Perhaps those proficiencies originally gathered on the reading, National Reading Panel report. They were also becoming smarter about something.
So many reading specialists I work with, they focus on decoding and phonics and reading comprehension so much, which is not a bad thing. But their child did not leave the tutoring session learning anything new about the world. No people, places, things. And what did they become smarter about? Fluency. Okay, when they were practicing fluency, what did they read and learn about? It was like these isolated skills that I would see today. But the ancestors had contextualized literacy instruction and then criticality became now that you develop intellect and knowledge, how do you critique it, understand it in order to problem solve and disrupt hurt, pain and harm in the world. That was the criticality piece. You don't see the Science of Reading folks talking about criticality. It's just like it's almost non-existent. People have said we have to teach this or that, we don't really see it together. So that's how they actually define literacy. Their literacy was criticality, their literacy was identity, intellect and joy. And so those five practices became their pursuits. They also did not call their goals "standards" because a standard comes from someone else. A standard means there's a stopping point or a ceiling. A pursuit means that the ultimate goal for literacy instruction is self determination, it is not to pass a test. So they were about reading the word and reading the world.
Sojourner Truth has a very famous quote that says "I cannot read little things like letters. I read big things like men, I read the people." So she was very literate in terms of writing and her communication and making sense of the print, but she was also literate in terms of reading the world around her and how to navigate using different forms of language. So that became sort of this model taking exactly from the ancestors and what I would do in the research. To go back to your other question, I would read archival like hundreds of archival data and I said, "Okay, this is identity. This feels more like intellect." And I would sort of code it. My coding process ended up with those sort of four to five codes if you will. And that's how I came to those five things.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'm thinking too about the moment we're in right now where there seems to be this big move toward adopting a new reading program. There are short lists of programs that are approved in some places.
And many of the programs that I'm seeing show up on these lists again and again and again have been criticized. I'm looking at the NYU Steinhardt reviews that you've probably seen of some of these programs for their lack of cultural responsiveness and relevance. And I'm wondering how you would advise teachers to navigate this. I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask this question. How do you incorporate your brilliant framework if you're forced to teach a program that has so many problems and so many flaws? What do you do?
Gholdy Muhammad:
Well, the people who are making these decisions need to do better.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yes they do.
Gholdy Muhammad:
Because it's not a teacher's problem. I mean it is a teacher's problem because that's the curriculum they get. But a teacher should never have to say, what do I do? They should be given excellence to start with.
These companies are well funded. The people who are doing good curriculum work, they don't get that kind of backing and funding sometimes or it's a little harder for them. They're trying to still navigate so much. I always say people of color and Black women, if I could speak on behalf of Black women being a Black woman, the things we have to navigate on a day, day to day basis, we cannot even focus on the dream of developing a curriculum because it's all the foolishness that comes up. So we need to stop saying, present your bid and we will pick one. School districts need to say, this is what we're looking for in the curriculum, now write to this. What we're doing, Jennifer is saying, I want to dress and just show me the dress. What don't matter what size it is, I'll just pick one of the dresses and hope I can fit it. Instead of saying these are my measurements, these are my interests, this is the kind of fabric I want. This is the kind of fabric my students look good in. And then I want you to design based on my vision as a leader. We don't do that in schools. We just allow these publishing companies to give us whatever.
So for a teacher who's then given this, my best recourse for teachers are for teachers to adapt it because you have two options. Or maybe a few options. You can teach it as is, which is not responsive, culturally responsive, and you know that it's going to have some shortcomings and we're not going to have any change in our achievement data, which is what we've seen over since the nineties. You can throw it out and write your own, but teachers don't have the time or energy to do that all the time. And then the third option is let's, if it has any kind of goodness in it and a lot of unit plans have something good about it, we can adapt it. And so that's what I'm in that middle space with teachers. I take the dress out of the closet that's been given to them.
Jennifer Serravallo:
You're the tailor. You do alterations.
Gholdy Muhammad:
Where it is somewhere, it's not like a whole revision, but it's like you're just making it better. But it's a lot of time, it's a lot of energy when they could have just presented a stronger curriculum to teachers in the first place. The hard part. And so what I'm doing, I am on that curriculum side where I'm trying to write curriculum, but folks are sometimes afraid to have, they think a curriculum with my model is too radical or something I said, is radical a bad word? I've always thought of radical to be a radical departure of harm. You want to be radical, you don't want to be basic and stagnant.
You know, have to choose humanity over money. You can have both perhaps, but you have to have what is good for our babies and not just good for some, but good for all.
Jennifer Serravallo:
In my dreams, we take the capitalism and the market forces completely out of curriculum development and we have some grant funding, some brilliant folks like you at the table and create curriculum that doesn't have to be sold, that doesn't have to meet a certain sales target that is good and right and can be tailored according to the group of students that you're working with. That's always my other concern is how do you write something that gets sold in the Mississippi Delta and the South Bronx and in Los Angeles and in Wichita, Kansas. And it's right for everybody. That's...
Gholdy Muhammad:
It's not even general enough to be right for everybody. Yeah, and you know what you just said just seems so simple. I mean is it's a loving kind of comment. It should be available for everybody. It seems so simple. Love all things loving can feel so simple. We have a US Secretary of Education, we have a US Department of Education. It's 20, it's almost 2024. And we have still not provided a free curriculum for our US children and teachers. That is baffling to me because of two things. We have the genius, we have the genius in this country, you get a few people together for a month and we will solve everything curricular wise. We have the genius in this country and we have the resources. Those are the two things that to me, we got those and anything is possible.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. The other thing that I think I see seeing a lot of lately is this is not about curriculum, but there's a lot of use of deficit language, right? Learning loss, kids at risk, kids are unmotivated. How do you push back against that deficit language?
Gholdy Muhammad:
I push back in kindness and love. That's the only way I was taught to push back. You know, a brother, a Black man asked me last week, he says, "Are you saying you have never met a unmotivated child? There's just no such thing." He was really like, come on, Goldie, there are some. This is the message I heard in between. He did not say this, but I heard there are some unmotivated child children. I said, I haven't met them. I said, listen, this is my point. Nothing is ever sort of this or that, black and white. I said to put that label on a child means that we are using one sort of criteria.
But people who have some inclination for doing right by children in humanity. I talk with them in kindness and love and I just listen and I say, what are you against? Are you against a child teaching, like teaching and learning to know themselves and teaching identity? Yes or no? Do you think that's a good thing to know yourself? I say, are you against the teaching of standards? Are you against phonics and decoding and comprehension? They say no. I say, are you against teaching a child intellectualism? And to have knowledge and to stand in any room and be able to know knowledge to talk about the world around them. Okay, are you against criticality? I mean I go through it like that. Are you against helping children to apply what they learn to make the world a better place? Now see, that's the part, Jennifer, that gets a little tricky. Yeah, see some people are against, you can teach environmental justice and pollution, but don't teach about the inhumanity of people. You can teach about girl power, but don't teach about Black power. You can teach about Black power but don't teach anti homophobia.
There's pushback on joy, believe it or not, because people are like, we're not here to have joy. We are here to teach the standards. But here's the thing, when you look at mental health issues in this country, the mass shootings, if we don't focus on wellness...See, I define joy as peace and safety and wellness and having justice and aesthetics and art. If we don't teach more of a balance in our curriculum, I am afraid of what we will continue to become as a nation. Our children need to know that they are enough. They need to know how to have joy in their lives. They need to know how to know themselves and love themselves.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, let's talk about schools, teachers, districts that have really embraced your framework and the positive impact it's had on them as a school community or as individual learners. Can you share some just moments of celebration, some examples of schools where you're like, they're really crushing it, they're really doing a great job.
Gholdy Muhammad:
There are teachers who email me who say, Goldie, they feel a closeness to me. And I love that because that's what I want to feel to each other. And they say, I've been teaching for over 30 years and this is the first time that I feel felt invigorated during that time of my career where I felt like my genius was celebrated. I had to tap on my creativity as a teacher. My intellectualism my genius because all of these programs are stifling for our creativity where they get to create something. Teachers are like artists in that way. They create beautiful works of art through their lesson plans. I just love it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, I love that this framework supports student learning, but that it encourages creativity and the bringing of up of the genius of the teachers. Because I think that's so critical. And I agree with you that one of the greatest joys of in teaching is the ability to create and see the response in your students.
Last question I have for you is about assessing and tracking progress within the context of your framework, how do teachers, how are they creating assessments that align to these different pursuits and how do they measure how students are growing?
Gholdy Muhammad:
Yeah, so it depends on the discipline, right? A reading course would look very different than high school math class. So the way I talk about my model and within Unearthing Joy, I say anything you teach, you should assess. That does not mean you grade everything you assess. We would probably have no time ever as teachers. You don't have to assign points to everything you assess. To assess means, to gather information to see how students are experiencing the learning.
Assessments should be differentiated, multimodal, creative. You should not have a quiz every time, but maybe project-based assessment, performative based assessment. Assessments tap into their multiple genius and brilliance. So I say the same thing, you don't have to relearn a whole new assessment criteria. You have to use everything you've learned about what makes assessments so good and great.
The only thing I recommend is not to have, every unit plan, one assessment for all five of these.
They need all five, I teach all five and I help to cultivate a sense of development across each of them.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Beautiful. We'll stop there for today. Everybody has to check out your two books, Cultivating Genius and Unearthing Joy. I'll link to them in the show notes. And I just want to thank you so much for your time and for sharing all of your ideas and genius with us today. Thank you so much.
Gholdy Muhammad:
Thank you. And thank you for your work and all that you do too.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome my colleagues, Lea, Angie, Jerry, and Emily for a conversation about what we're excited to bring to the classroom. Who'd like to get us started?
Lea Mercantini - Leibowitz:
I love her positive approach with everything she spoke about love the way that she described genius as she was talking about finding the genius in any kid I couldn't help but think about the importance of complimenting kids in our classrooms and making sure that we find anything that is positive that they're doing, whether it be smaller than the thing that they need to work on, knowing how important it is to bring to their attention that you are a genius.
Emily Strang-Campbell:
Leah, thank you so much for bringing up the power of the Compliment conference as a way especially not only to start the year, but even as a way to start units as a launching pad into units. Gholdy, Dr. Muhammad, when she brings up the importance of bringing identity first, starting with student identity feels so important to me. And that gets me thinking about the importance of our goal setting conferences, which sometimes can get lost in middle school. And hearing her speak and reading her books over the past couple of months is just reminding me about the power of the goal setting conferences as a way to not only get to know the students academically, but as a person, their identity first.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And Emily, your goal setting conferences are just the most beautiful things ever. You can see kids like growing three inches taller with pride. You make them feel so amazing. Anyone that ever has a chance to watch you in action, it's just like you get tears in your eyes. It's gorgeous, but you do, you have a way of just making every student feel so heard and honored and valued. And I think that is absolutely at the core of what we need to be doing for every child. Yeah, absolutely. Jerry, what's on your mind?
Jerry Maraia:
Yeah, I wanted to pick up on this idea of literacy as identity, meaning making that Emily is talking about, which feels so incredibly important. Jen, it reminds me so much in your engagement chapter around finding your topic territories.
This idea of really thinking about what are the books that are significant in your lives and really thinking about identifying what those books are that are significant in your life and maybe not so significant as well, opening it up to being larger than just print text, right? Thinking about movies and TV and songs and blogs and YouTube videos, whatever is sort of inspiring you in terms of thinking about your history, thinking about your past, and then looking for those trends and themes across what it is that you're seeing coming up over and over, whether it be around theme or character plots or genres. And then helping students identify text to choose to really raise engagement that lives off of their lineage, that lives off of the things that they care deeply about. And that to me feels like something we can't lose as we are helping kids build a sense of identity as a reader. And the same thing happens for writing as well. We could do similar types of things in writing.
Angela Forero:
I'll just piggyback off that idea, Jerry, because I think it's so important, those compliment conferences where we're noting what students are doing and being able to name that back for kids, and that's part of recognizing their brilliance. So in the beginning, Jen, you have that wonderful list, that survey that students can take in writing to think about things that they're not yet doing, sometimes doing, so that they get a sense of themselves. Also teachers could add questions that Gholdy had mentioned around identity in her book. That is another form coupled with that, where kids can be asked about their family and what do friends say about you and what do you read and think about in your home and community. And so all of that together can present the whole child to support teachers in planning their curriculum.
Jennifer Serravallo:
What do you all think about, thank you, Angie. What do you all think about the pushback around criticality. I could see where that might be the thing, especially in certain states with certain legislation where people are kind of afraid to go there. And yet it's so critical. It came up in the interview with Dr. Debbie Reese as well, right? The importance of critically evaluating the texts we read, the books we read, but then also non-traditional texts and how we approach our world. How have you been able to do some of this work in some of the schools that you're working in?
Angela Forero:
I mean one thing that's jumping out at me is that term criticality. I, I don't think people understand what it actually means. And if they did understand, they would realize how important it is to develop kids criticality, their ability to understand texts and the world, to read texts, not just print sources, but multimodal texts, social contexts, and to understand power, privilege, and oppression. We would want all of our kids to walk out of school, being able to do that when they don't have teachers to be able to support them in processing difficulties, conflicts, things that feel uncomfortable when they don't have teachers to do that with them and in groups in class, how are they going to manage in the world? So I think there is just not an understanding, and that's the problem. One of the problems.
Jennifer Serravallo:
At it's core, it's really, to me means you're teaching kids to think, right? It's really about are we teaching kids to think, not just to do the skills, but to have ideas and to evaluate the information that they're presented with. Jerry, what are you thinking?
Jerry Maraia:
Yeah, I mean, I've been thinking a lot about this notion of criticality and how it plays out in schools. And specifically to Angie's point, I think there is some really immense value in folks doing this work, the adults doing this work before we're doing this with our kids.
We can't do that work unless the adults in the space are doing the work First. And I think part of the teaching needs to be from the place of calling it out. Let's start with calling it out. Who has the power here? Who doesn't? Whose perspective is the story being told from whose voice is missing?
I think read aloud is also a really beautiful place to begin infusing some of our think alouds, our stop and jots our turn and talks with our kids around these very, very clear specific prompts or ways to get them thinking about the text differently. That we're modeling what that looks like. And then that transfers into the work in which they're doing independently.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And don't you find that even very young children, they have a sense of justice? That's not fair. Even as two years old, that's not fair. He took my this, that's not fair. She has that and I don't, right? So they have, they're naturally hardwired. All of us are parents here, they're naturally hardwired. We hear that from the beginning days of their lives to recognize these sorts of things in their family, in their friend groups, in their school, and I think eventually in their world.
Lea Mercantini - Leibowitz:
When you had mentioned the idea that this being critical is to ask the questions, it reminded me of the work that you have laid out in the conversation goal chapter of Strategies 2.0 and the strategies that teach kids in conversations to make a conversation go deep. It is a lot about challenging. Challenge, the idea, that strategy, "Think well on the other hand..." so even if we're all agreeing with what's someone's saying, let's just stop for a minute and think, well, what is the other side of this? What's the other perspective to broaden what it is that we're thinking? So that, like Jerry had said, you know, do it in read aloud and we can model it for kids, but getting kids to do this on their own so that it happens in the classroom, a safe place so that when they're in the cafeteria, somebody brings something up that is in context of a social setting, not because it's in a book. They have strategies to use to speak up from themselves or another group of people or an idea with confidence.
Emily Strang-Campbell:
Dr. Muhammad talks so much about reading to make the world a better place. Those questions can start in our read alouds, in our book club conversations. Where do we see some of the social issues that these characters are facing in our own lives, in our own school community, in our own neighborhoods? How does this apply? Would we have acted similarly? Would we have been an upstander or a bystander? Like Sara Ahmed often asks and in her work. So it's that idea of not being afraid to take the stories. We spend so much time cultivating the stories for our classroom and putting so much beautiful thought into that. And where is that next step into asking how these stories can help us lead better to be better in the world? How can we learn from the characters as a way to live differently in our communities?
Jennifer Serravallo:
And to develop knowledge. There's so much talk about knowledge, and I think a lot of people talk about the knowledge that we need for reading, and they think about science and social studies, which is of course also important. But there's knowledge about people and how we are in the world and knowledge about issues and the kinds of issues that we're dealing with that are relevant to kids. And all of that's knowledge building. And so the teaching of strategies and skills devoid of content or devoid of these deeper ideas is much less powerful. Absolutely. Jerry, what are you thinking?
Jerry Maraia:
I think so much of what we're talking about here in reading connects beautifully to writing in the ways in which we get our kids to be imagining the topics, the territories, the ideas that they're passionate about writing about, where they can see themselves as change agents. They can see themselves in a place of using their pen to make a real difference in the world. And I think that there's real beauty in bringing that out in classrooms where kids can be given strategies to unlock that a bit. This idea of look around in your community and find the things that you care about and think about the people who have the power to change it, and based on the people who have the power to change it, what might be a genre that you could write inside of that can really help maybe make that change happen? I think there's some real importance there around not forgetting that we don't just write argumentative essay or persuasive essay to tick the box of compliance that we've hit the standard because again, whose standard is it? But that we really think about the fact that writing has such an immense, beautiful ability to transform lives and to not lose sight of our identities inside of the transformation of our lives.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I was just watching your video where you were teaching that lesson to a group of kids, eighth graders I think, right in the South Bronx. And man, they were so engaged. They were on fire, they had lists of things that they wanted to change, things that they wanted to do, they had a purpose and a passion, and it was relevant and it was such a simple lesson yet so powerful. And I could just imagine the incredible writing that came from that.
Angela Forero:
Can I just jump in? I like you, I saw that video, it was amazing to Jerry and Jen and Jerry like you, I believe that the importance of bringing in beauty into the work we do. And similar what you said, Jen, when you were kind of surprised about the pushback on joy. I mean, the research does show that. I mean, kids come into kindergarten in some of the primary grades with lots of questions, and by the first, second, third grade, they stop asking questions. We've tamped down their curiosity and we're teaching in a way that does not foster curiosity, joy, and wanting to know just for the sheer purpose and joy of knowing. So I thought that, I can't wait to read that book like you, Emily, but there's some beautiful strategies around having conversations and having joyful conversations in the 2.0 book, like using a conversation play board. I love that idea. I've done, I did that in my own classroom, and kids forget that they're learning by having fun with it and pushing themselves to think these deeper ideas in a joyful way. So we really need to bring that back to the classroom.
Emily Strang-Campbell:
Can I brag about Angie? Angie, can I brag about you for a minute? Angie does this work so often when I would see her and both her and Jerry teach as middle school teachers, they, they brought so much joy, which is part of why I'm so grateful to work with both of them.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Going back to the curriculum thing and considering that many teachers are being asked to follow a program that was created by people who don't know their own kids, making revisions that bring in some of Dr. Muhammad's framework or bringing in some strategies that will help kids to learn about their world, tap into their own identity, make thoughtful choices when it comes to the books that they're reading or the topics that they're writing about.
I'm wondering if you all have any ideas around how you would support teachers with that work of doing the revision. If you look at a lesson it says to teach with this text, it says that this is the lesson, these are the questions that the kids have to answer at the end. This is the assignment. What do you do with that?
Angela Forero:
Dr. Mohammed talks about the importance of layering texts. So in one way to start would be to think about, okay, what texts do I have here and what other texts could I add to this curriculum? And also based off what I know about my students that they can connect with. If we go to think about Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop's work around mirrors, windows, sliding glass doors, and the importance of making sure that kids can see themselves in the texts that they or they're reading in school. So that could be one way to get started. I'm sure you all have other ideas.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So you have this initial inventory of your students' interests. The things that they're working on is for goals, the things that they want support with. You learn things about them. You have these initial conversations with them one-on-one to get to know them as people. Then you look at your curriculum and you say, okay, that's the book. All right. And then you say, how can I layer on, kind of meet in between, this book that I have to teach with and what I know about my students? And kind of make that bridge. I like that idea, Angie, thank you.
Jerry Maraia:
Just to quickly build off of this idea of layering text, it also gets me thinking a lot about multi literacies, right? And this idea that literacy is nuanced, it's complex, it's layered, and that we need to be thinking in more multimodal kinds of ways as we're thinking about our curriculum. So we kind of crack open the notion of text, what does text really mean? Our kids come to us incredibly literate, maybe not from the decoding and fluency perspective, but they might come to us incredibly literate when it comes to sociocultural reading, right? Reading people and read reading the world. So I think about how we can help teachers look at curriculum and really look at how text is defined. And part of layering texts is to think more broadly.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And that also has us thinking from an asset perspective, what are kids bringing? What can they already do, and how can I find their way to the curriculum from what they can already do?
Jerry Maraia:
I would just add one more. I love the idea of teachers, and maybe this could happen over the summer or right before the school year begins when we're all refreshed and we're coming back in September, but really asking this question that she proposes to us in Unearthing Joy. It's this question of how does my curriculum and instruction enable amplify and spread joy?
Emily Strang-Campbell:
Building off of what everyone is saying, this idea of enabling and amplifying and spreading joy no matter what curriculum you're given as a teacher and all the flaws inside of it, I love Dr. Muhammad's suggestion of kind of finding somewhere in the middle, but also finding as many places inside the lesson where student voice lives. So are we allowing for rich partner talks and turn and talks or turn and teaches? Are we allowing places during our lesson in the middle of independent reading or whatever the middle of the lesson might look like for partner shares or quick spotlight of student voices? Are we closing? Whose voice is the last voice that's heard in our 45 minute session? Are we making sure that kids' voices are also a part of that ending stamp on our lesson?
Jennifer Serravallo:
I just want to thank you all so much for your time today and for joining me for this conversation.