INTRO Aviva Levin: [00:00:07] Welcome to Lesson: Impossible, an exploration of educational innovation. I'm your host Aviva Levin. As always, I'm chatting with educators of all types who are on the forefront of pedagogy or making effective changes to old practices. Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to put students’ own values at the center of their learning in order to make school meaningful beyond academic skills.  The special agent assigned to help you with this task is Lauren Porosoff of Scarsdale, New York.

INTRO Aviva Levin: [00:00:49] First of all, thank you to all the listeners who rate and review the podcast on iTunes!  Hearing that you are learning new things to apply to your own practices is what keeps me doing this, and it allows new listeners to discover the amazing things the Lesson: Impossible special agents are doing! I spoke to this episode’s special agent, Lauren Porosoff, in late April. She very generously took time out of her work schedule, caring for her family, and recovering from COVID-19 to answer my questions over zencastr.

Aviva Levin: [00:01:24] Would you mind just giving a small summary of who you are and what your role is?

Lauren Porosoff: [00:01:28] Sure. So I'm Lauren Porosoff. I taught in independent schools for 18 years. And during that time I started to do some workshops and then some writing and consulting and finally decided to strike out and write and consult full time. So I've written some different books on empowering students and teachers to make school meaningful. And that's been important to me for my entire career. And it's something that I'm really focusing on now.

Aviva Levin: [00:02:05] I think that's something that is becoming more and more to the forefront of a lot of educators, hopefully even before Covid. But just before we got on this call, I was looking at Twitter like I normally do. And I was reading a tweet of a woman who was saying that she and her daughter sat down and looked at all of the different assignments that she was getting that were like overwhelming to her. And with her daughter decided, OK, which one of these assignments do you think are meaningful to you and where you want to go? And choose a few of those. And then everything else I'm just going to email your teacher and tell them I'm sorry, my kid's not going to do it.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:02:47] I think that's so healthy. We don't we don't do that. We don't teach students we don't actively teach students how to prioritize their work, how to think about what's most important to me. You know what don't I need to do or what? We send sometimes we send the message that students need to do their best on everything, but do they really need to do their best on everything? Like I know right now I'm as I said, I'm recovering from Covid. Like, do I need to cook the best meal of my life tonight? No, I just need to feed my family. So it's important work to do with students and it's work that can happen in school. It doesn't just have to be in a time of crisis that parents are doing this with their kids.

Aviva Levin: [00:03:34] And so how do you define a meaningful lesson or unit?

Lauren Porosoff: [00:03:39] So in in one of my books, Two-for-One Teaching. I talk about three kinds of relevance: personal, practical and cultural. So personal relevance means that the lesson or the unit or the book or resource connects to sources of meaning in the student's life. Sometimes we hear teachers or educators and educators, education writers talk about passion projects or student interests, and those are important. But sometimes a topic can be of passing interest. It can be just fun or comfortable in the moment, but not necessarily connected to deeper sources of meaning in the student's life. So personal relevance to me means that there's something about it that invokes the student's values, that helps them tell their own story that they that they connect to on this deeper level. Practical relevance: it has utility not just in that class and not just to get them straight A's, but in other classes beyond that classroom, beyond school and in their future. And then cultural relevance. That's not my work. There is a whole body of work on cultural relevance. But the way that I think of it is their work affirms their identity. It honors diversity within groups. So there's it's not about tokenism. It's about noticing that diversity within groups and helps students challenge injustice. So that it's a lot personal, practical and cultural relevance. But that's how I think of meaningful work.

Aviva Levin: [00:05:20] Do you have some examples of some of your favorite meaningful units or lessons that either you created or helped facilitate the creation of? I know that I was in preparation for this interview I was reading about your Shakespearean gender identity class. So you were you were creating a link between, I think was A Midsummer Night's Dream and the gender spectrum. And that one, like, really hit me where I was like, wow, that's such a cool lens to take. But do you have any favorites for yourself?

Lauren Porosoff: [00:05:55] Yeah. That one was one of my personal favorites, too. Just because we think of A Midsummer Night's Dream as this canonical text written by a dead white man 400 years ago. And it was exciting to use that text as a way and to think about the gender spectrum. Or the gender spectra, I should say. But one of my favorite units was a unit that I taught, a unit that I taught for seventh grade English on spoken word poetry. And we watched different videos of spoken word poems. And one of them was actually by Elizabeth Acevedo, who's the author of The Poet X. And With The Fire, I'm High. And she's sort of very popular in the white world now. And I used her spoken word poem before those books got popular. So it's kind of the English teacher version of I listened to that band before anyone knew them. So. So we watched all these different videos. And what was cool was we we analyzed them to think about the poet's techniques, their poetic devices, their delivery, their hand motions. But we also use them to think about how do we know that this is a topic that's important to this poet? And what are some topics that are important to me? And instead of just giving the students, you know, a class period or two to make a list of important topics and then, OK, pick a topic and write a poem. We really dug deep into that work so that they thought about their histories, their identities, their neighborhoods, their families, issues that they cared about. And I gave them all kinds of different prompts to get them to to unpack that. And then they formed groups and within their groups, they looked at the different topics that they had identified and found connections and then wrote poems together. Most most of the students worked either in twos or threes. There are a couple that were solo and they had that option. But it was cool to see how they not only found a topic that was important to them personally, but they were able to connect with each other through these topics that were important to them in different ways, for different reasons, and create a piece of poetry out of that.

Aviva Levin: [00:08:23] In prep for for talking to you I. So first of all, your thesis of work and topics needing to be meaningful, I was like, yeah, who could possibly disagree with that? And then I went and saw that there are people that are that are critical of that. And I was wondering if I could talk to you of kind of the big criticisms that I was seeing and and your response to them, if that's OK.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:08:50] Yeah, it’d be great.

Aviva Levin: [00:08:52] So the first one is... I feel bad, even saying some of these to you. But the first one is, well, kids need to learn that not everything is about them.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:09:02] Yeah. I mean, that's true. Kids do need to learn that not everything is about them. And I think in particular, having worked at schools where students have extraordinary privilege, where I spent most of my 18 years teaching was at an independent school in New York, where there is just extraordinary wealth within that community. Not everyone, but a lot of privilege. And yes, students do need to learn the whole world is not about me, I am not at the center of the universe. But I don't think that personally relevant work means that that's the message students are getting. It's that it's more like there's a conversation of ideas that's out there in the world and they have something meaningful to contribute to that conversation. So, for example, in the spoken word unit that I was just talking about, there was a group of three girls. They decided to write a spoken word piece together about sexist micro aggressions that they'd experienced. And each of them experienced sexism in different ways. But they were able to not only share their own experience, but notice the connections between their experiences and between the three of their experiences and those of other women and non binary identifying folks out there in the world. So, yes, it was about them, but it was also about connecting to this larger set of experiences and issues out there in the world.

Aviva Levin: [00:10:39] And then the next one, which actually enraged me a little bit, I'm not going to lie. I'm clearly not an unbiased interviewer here.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:10:47] I'm not unbiased either. So go for it.

Aviva Levin: [00:10:51] Well, if you're going to have to do meaningful lessons for students, that means you have to take the time to get to know them all individually. And that's there's no place for that in my curriculum.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:11:02] Yeah. That's a travesty. Definitely don't get to know your students. Yeah. I mean, I get it. I get why teachers say that. I think teachers are crunched for time and feel like they've been given this impossible task of delivering a ton of content in a very short amount of time. And they think, OK, you know, my job is not to get to know these students, it's to teach English or math or Spanish or whatever it is that they're teaching. So I get the sentiment. I just feel like, first of all, how can you possibly... Learning is all about connection. So how can you possibly teach effectively and how can students learn if there isn't a relationship between the teacher and the student? And second, it's possible to get to know students in the process of doing meaningful work together. So it doesn't have to be either or. It's not like, oh, we have to carve out this separate time to get to know students. We can get to know them through having meaningful discussions together.

Aviva Levin: [00:12:09] And then the last one to lob at you is: students don't know at their developmental stage what possibly could be meaningful to them. It is our job as teachers to show them what is meaningful in life.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:12:29] I mean, I get that too, because, I mean, I'm I'm forty-four. I'm not afraid to say my age on a podcast. I'm 44 years old and I'm not fully formed yet either. So what is the. What does it even mean to be at an age where we're where we know what, what's meaningful to us? That's always evolving. And as teachers, it's really exciting to expose students to new ideas. But that doesn't mean that we can't that there isn't space to help students tap into what's important to them already. And to help them discover for themselves who they want to be. And then the other thing about about values work, which is that's what Two-for-One Teaching and Empower Your Students are about. It's about helping students tap into their values. It doesn't necessarily mean that the student has this, you know, fully formed set of values that they are now bringing to school. And we need to draw them out. It means sometimes it's about having them try on certain values. So we have a protocol called rubric response where students look at an assignment rubric and we ask them: OK. So looking at this assignment, how would you respond to it as your most grateful self? How would you respond to it as your most kind self? How would you respond to it as your most responsible self? Your most curious self. So curiosity, gratitude, kindness. These are values that students are exploring and kind of trying on the way that they might try on a new outfit to see how it fits. And then they get to choose how am I going to approach this assignment and how does it feel.

Aviva Levin: [00:14:14] If a teacher that's been teaching for a while comes to you and says, I've examined my curriculum and I don't feel like I'm able to make lessons or assignments that are that are truly very meaningful to my students. How would you guide this teacher towards making a more meaningful curriculum?

Lauren Porosoff: [00:14:35] Well, I might ask them questions about what is it that you're trying to get your students to achieve and they might answer questions related to standards or, you know, I want them to learn how to use the quadratic formula or I want them to learn how to conjugate verbs. Well, why? What's important about that? So I might sort of keep asking that question of what's important to you about that or where does that come from? I might ask them questions like if you could imagine your students twenty-five years from now, looking back on what they're doing in your class. What do you want them to remember to kind of get them away from this more immediate need to master content or skills and think about what the long term meaning is? And then the other thing is, it's not necessarily about the the curriculum. It's not necessarily about the content. It could also be about how that teacher approaches learning. So I might describe to them some of the protocols like rubric response or like collaborative conversations, which is a way to help students really listen to each other and use the context of an academic discussion as a way to practice the kinds of listening skills that they want to bring to their relationships. I might describe some of those and say, you know, and ask them, is this something you might be willing to try? Or maybe I'd come and observe their class and look for little, little ways, little tweaks that they might try out that would make the class more personally and culturally relevant for students.

Aviva Levin: [00:16:15] Do you think that, in your experience, that that mindset of teaching is authority and lessons that I am pouring into the empty vessel that is my student? Do you see that changing more or do we even have new teachers coming in with that same mentality?

Lauren Porosoff: [00:16:34] It's a good question. Do I see it changing? I hope it changes. Right now I spend a lot of time like you on Twitter. And so I hear from teachers who are taking their free time to learn and connect with one another. And so it's a biased view. Like it makes it look like every teacher in the world is trying to promote inquiry and project based learning and social emotional learning and culturally sustaining pedagogy and trauma informed practices. But, you know, Twitter is not the world. And I don't know. I can't really answer that.

Aviva Levin: [00:17:15] Something that that does strike me is it I have the privilege of interviewing a lot of very innovative teachers for the podcast and a lot of them talk about how alone they feel sometimes. Which I think is just the nature of teaching: you're either siloed into your subject matter or you're in your classroom. And if you don't have colleagues and admin that reach out to you or you have a barrier to reaching out, it can be very lonely to be affecting change by yourself.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:17:44] Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking in preparing for this interview about some of the struggles that I've had and that loneliness was definitely one of them. And I did have colleagues who were interested in my work. I was interested in their work. We had lots of conversations about individual students and about curriculum. And sometimes I still felt like there were all these changes that I wanted to see. And I saw all of this potential and what school could be, but didn't feel like I had much power or voice. And if I feel that way, as someone who writes about this stuff and, you know, there are books out there with my name on it. Like, if I feel like I don't have a voice, you know who does? You know what I mean? Like, you know. Right. So. So what is it even. What does it mean? And at the end of Empower Your Students, we address this a little bit. We talk about how teachers aren't necessarily themselves empowered to empower students, how there might be changes they want to make but can't. And that starting to even think about these changes means that when the time comes or when they meet someone else that might be interested in that work, too they've thought about it. They're ready to have that conversation. You know, maybe it takes a new administrator coming in. Maybe it takes a consultant coming in and saying, you know, this needs to change. Maybe it takes a global pandemic. And I hate that. I hate the fact that all these folks out there are sort of opportunistically capitalizing on this moment. But sometimes it does take a disruption of this magnitude to get people to really think, you know, what matters. Which worksheets can I skip? You know, what do I want my class to be like? What kinds of conversations do we need to be having? And then what can I let go? So, yes, it's definitely lonely for innovative teachers who have been having these conversations forever. But I think it's still important to have them so that when the time comes, we can build a bigger movement.

Aviva Levin: [00:19:55] And so who do you look to for inspiration when you're either feeling lonely or you want to expand your own learning? Do you have some people or organizations that you look to?

Lauren Porosoff: [00:20:09] Beyond my my own teachers, my mentors and some of the folks out there who are offering up their wisdom through webinars and books and all of that I belong to a community. It's called the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, ACBS. And I discovered it because my writing partner slash husband, in the opposite order of importance, he is a clinical psychologist. And when I used to talk to him about, you know, my curriculum, share anecdotes about students and the things that I was trying to accomplish in the classroom to make learning more meaningful he kept telling me over and over: You have to learn about ACT. ACT stands for acceptance and commitment therapy. And I was very put off by the word therapy. I was like, I'm not a I'm not a therapist. I'm a teacher. I'm not interested. It's for psychologists. Leave me alone. So one year it was when my son when my son was 10 months old. The conference for ACBS was in D.C., which, you know, isn't too far from New York. So Jonathan wanted to go. And we all went and Jonathan went into sessions and Jason was just learning how to crawl. So I had him crawling around in the conference area. And eventually I got bored and wandered into the conference bookstore and started to look at these books that were for therapists. But they're books and I love books so I was taking a look. And I started to discover that acceptance and commitment therapy was all about helping people clarify the values that they wanted to live by and accept the pain and struggle that comes along with doing anything meaningful. And as I started to look at that, I thought this is exactly what teachers need to be doing in the classroom, helping students discover what's important to them, connect to their work, to those values, and then accept whatever pain and struggle is there as part of living a meaningful life, doing meaningful work, learning meaningful material, building meaningful relationships. Like this was this was what I was looking for. And it was kind of embarrassing because Jonathan had been telling me all along that I needed to check this out. But as I started to learn first from him and then from other members of the ACBS community by reading about ACT and other related therapies, I saw more and more what the applications could be for the classroom.

Aviva Levin: [00:22:45] When you bring forward these things, like we've we've talked about some of the criticisms, but when you talk about bringing something from a different discipline into education, is there a lot of resistance to that? Or once people get over the word therapy or are they like, oh, yeah, no, this makes sense.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:23:03] It's it's hard to get people in the door. Like, it's it's it's hard to describe what it even is because, like, I've kind of hooked onto the SEL movement because people are talking about social emotional learning. But this isn't really about like let's create a calm down corner or let's set aside five minutes for mindfulness at the beginning of class, or let's dedicate an hour a week to talk about our feelings. It's more about using what students are already doing, their assignments, their projects, their class discussions as a context for them to discover what's important to them. And teachers don't know that they're looking for that, you know, if they're happily teaching math. Then why do they need to be doing values work? That's for advisory. That's for counselors. Right. That belong somewhere else.

Aviva Levin: [00:23:59] Or English teachers.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:24:00] Exactly. Or it's for English teachers. And I get that resistance to like, you know. Oh, but you taught English. Like, of course, you can have students think about their values when they're writing a spoken word poem. But, you know, some of us need to teach photosynthesis. Right.And how can we do values, work with photosynthesis? And the short answer is, you can you actually can do it. But instead of thinking of values work or social emotional learning as something that happens, you know, in in in in a siloed area or in a set aside part of the class period that we don't have time for. Instead, it's using the study of photosynthesis, I'm using this example, as a context for discovering how do I want to how do I want to approach by learning. How do I want to approach this assignment? Who do I want to be in this group of people that's doing a photosynthesis project? Since students spend so much of their time in academic classes, it's actually an ideal context for them to discover how they feel, what they value, who they want to be. But there is some resistance because because, again, teachers don't necessarily know or think that that's part of their job or they're not interested in it. So they don't they don't explore it necessarily. Just like I didn't explore ACT for a long time.

Aviva Levin: [00:25:25] I'm going to switch gears just a little bit, because I I read an article that you wrote about Sherman Alexie.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:25:32] Oh, yeah.

Aviva Levin: [00:25:33] And your decision not to use his resources anymore because of his as part of the #MeToo movement, several indigenous women have made accusations against him. And your grappling with this idea of the source material has been so meaningful for my students and I've gotten so many amazing conversations out of it, but that ultimately you can't support him and his work. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:26:03] I have to say that you asked me earlier about some of my favorite units. That unit was it's not even that it was one of my favorite units. It drew out some of my students best writing. So I had a student that came out as bisexual in writing her essay about her intersecting identities. There were students that talked about how it felt to be called the N-word or how it felt to just how they were perceived in their families. They they they went really deep with those essays and they went deep because the book inspires that kind of thinking. It's a character. The character in that book has a voice that they weren't used to hearing.

Aviva Levin: [00:26:47] And just. So this is the Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:26:51] Correct. Yeah. So it was it was a huge loss. But I also felt like if my curriculum was going to be about affirming identity and affirming experiences and challenging injustice, I couldn't keep having my students read work by someone who stood accused by all of these indigenous women, as you as you said. So that year that year was actually my last year in the classroom. So I can't speak to changes because that was that was it for for me, at least for the time being. I hope to go back at some point. But we had conversations about it in class. And instead of kind of, you know, just ending the unit and then hoping it would all go away we we confronted it. We talked about, you know, how do we feel about this? And students asked, is it OK that I still like this book? Students asked about the decision to drop it from the curriculum. We talked about other books that we could use. So we used it as a teaching, as a teaching moment for sure.

Aviva Levin: [00:28:02] So, yeah, thank you very much for sharing your experience today. It was it definitely sparks a lot of stuff for me, and I appreciate it.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:28:09] Thank you so much for not only for having me, but for asking such thought provoking questions.

Aviva Levin: [00:28:15] Thank you! If people are interested in following up with you and your work, where can they find that?

Lauren Porosoff: [00:28:22] So my Web site is Empower Forwards dot com. I'm also on Twitter. It's just @laurenporosoff as my handle and my books are wherever education books are sold.

Aviva Levin: [00:28:38] And I'll have links in the show notes as well.

Lauren Porosoff: [00:28:40] Oh perfect.

OUTRO Aviva Levin: [00:28:48] So there you have it. Lauren Porosoff with helping students find relevance in their learning, why it's important to do values work within your own practice, and why sometimes your spouse is actually right. If you want to find out more about what innovative educators are doing around the world, go to Lesson: Impossible dot com. And if you like the podcast, please consider forwarding it to your colleagues and rating and reviewing it on iTunes. This has been Lesson: Impossible and I was your host Aviva Levin.