Creating Necessary Conditions for Teachers to Thrive

Although most people working in education agree that teachers should spend time developing their foundational understandings of brain‐based learning, culturally responsive pedagogy, literacy and numeracy, a lot of their actions say otherwise. Those who are making decisions about how teachers spend their time across the school day inhibit teachers' ability to grow their pedagogy in ways that most directly impact their students. For example, in the United States, many elementary school teachers are contracted to work 38 hours a week, with 32 hours dedicated to instructional time. Secondary school teachers, on average, spend 30 of 38 hours instructing students over the course of the week (NCES 2012).

Since COVID‐19, schools have been impacted in myriad ways. Particularly, being short of staff has had one of the greatest impacts on teacher well‐being. The time teachers spend covering their colleagues' classes or even classes with teacher vacancies adds up. In short, teachers are overworked. This leaves them little time to reflect, rest, think, collaborate, download new information, and/or give input to the ever‐evolving shifts in post‐pandemic schooling, let alone enough time for creating authentic and rich curriculum. This constant grind contributes to the lack of teacher agency in determining instruction and what kinds of learning experiences are most appropriate for students in schools.

While it is absolutely important to create necessary conditions for teachers to thrive, I am not suggesting this labor should be centered on any one group of people in a school. School leaders are often blamed for teaching time constraints. However, there are many factors that are beyond school leaders' control that can be acknowledged in the pursuit of creating more nourishing teacher spaces that foster teacher agency. In fact, creating conditions for teachers to exercise their agency is most impactful when the whole community pours into creating that kind of environment (more on that later!).

First, let's complicate the school leader's role in providing space and time for teachers. In recent years, especially since the COVID pandemic, I've witnessed school leaders stretched in ways that were beyond their control, mostly due to the aforementioned staff shortages and policy bombs.³ In many cases, school leaders and those making scheduling decisions have a deep desire to create space and time for teacher nourishment, but are working in systems that disable their ability to provide for their people in ways they hope for. This ethical dilemma school leaders experience is best described by Meira Levinson's (2015) term moral injury.

Dr. Lakisha Howell introduced Levinson's concept of moral injury to me one afternoon as we developed ideas on how to support teachers across various school landscapes. I named my shift in thinking regarding the role of school leaders and the inner turmoil I was witnessing as their budgets, staff, and student bodies continued to get smaller. Kisha told me that what I was witnessing was a form of moral injury, wherein people who are trying to run schools ethically are forced to work within systems that are not aligned with their ethics (Levinson 2015, p. 1). The term moral injury resonated with me, and I explored it further.

Levinson (2015) describes moral injury more specifically as “the trauma of perpetrating significant moral wrong against others despite one's wholehearted desire and responsibility to do otherwise” (p. 1). While the wrongs that are perpetuated in schools are sometimes located in big events, more commonly they are parsed out in bite‐sized pieces, accumulating over time. The experiences that attribute to educators' (namely school leaders) moral injury over time include delivering frequent coverages to teachers' already packed teaching schedules, mandating disconnected professional learning experiences that stem from top‐down officials' directives, hiring unqualified teachers for students because they are the only people available for the job, following racist school disciplinary codes,⁴ the inability to protect teachers from inappropriate demands given by parents and caregivers, and not being able to provide adequate supplies, materials, and texts, amongst other things.

I remember sitting (on Zoom) with a group of principals Cornelius and I had been working with for a few years before the pandemic. Like many other people working in schools during the earlier part of the pandemic, we shifted quickly, meeting virtually every month and flexibly working toward school leaders' needs. I remember Cornelius and I leading a conversation we called “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Exploring Tensions, Considering Relief” during a learning series that had originally been designed to build equitable feedback and assessment structures. Shortly after we began one of our first workshops in Fall 2020, we were in breakout rooms discussing intellectual versus emotional labor leaders experienced while trying to keep their schools running. The principals and assistant principals, in smaller groups, were more visibly weary, and also more revelatory in sharing what was really happening in their schools. One principal's statement pierced me. It went something like this:

It's hard to engage. I'm dealing with a lot right now. This morning, a teacher called me to tell me she couldn't come in because her dad was in the ICU with COVID. Four more teachers were already out in quarantine. We still haven't been able to reach a number of families who are on our remote learning roster. One AP is also in quarantine. There are no subs available. The last thing I did before I left school yesterday was attend a citywide health and safety meeting, where every school leader has a story similar to mine. This is just one day, but it is like this almost every day. I'm so busy trying to keep people alive that finding any space to consider curriculum, instructional methodology, or simple, everyday learning needs feels extraordinary.

I'm not sure how many people understood the levels of management, emotional labor, and completely new skill sets that were required to keep people safe during the pre‐vaccination part of the pandemic. I remember that my and Cornelius's goal during that workshop was to hold space for naming tensions and to provide strategies for relief. However, the weariness and pain I witnessed from those school leaders drew a new well of empathy I'd not yet been equipped with. We held space for school leaders to name tensions, but at that point in time, relief felt unreachable.

Although this anecdote is from Fall 2020, the residual impact of COVID‐19, amongst other national epidemics like inflation, school shootings, racism, anti‐Gay legislation, book banning, and centuries‐old racism, has led many school leaders to continue to experience the moral injury of not being able to provide for their people because they have not been given the tools, resources, or blueprints to do so. I had known that teachers were in a state of deep exhaustion, but a new layer of frustration was unveiled to me when I learned that school leaders' daily responsibilities impaired their ability to adequately care and provide for their people.

“Community Up”: Communal Responsibility for Cultivating Teacher Agency

Earlier, I mentioned how important it is to distribute equitable responsibility within the community to nourish teachers with time and space for planning, thinking, reflecting, and collaborating (yes, this is a thought sanctuary!). When this labor is centered on one entity, like “school leadership” or “grade team leaders” or even one person like “the principal,” the likelihood that an authentic and intentional thought sanctuary for teachers will come into fruition is minimal. One way to think about this movement is through the concept of “Community Up,” meaning that community growth is connective, lateral, and moves upward, together.

The Cylindrical Model (Kills First 2021) shown in Figure 5.2 is an example of a community up model, and supports organizing within a school community. Like Circles (First Nations Pedagogy n.d.), it is based on Indigenous wisdom. Many educators are familiar with Circles, where classroom communities meet together in a circle formation to initiate, build, and/or restore community. While Circles are usually referred to in the restorative context, Circles also are used as an instructional methodology wherein communities learn together, cocreating knowledge. Importantly, the community of people participating sit within a circle shape so all members are able to see each other, and no one person is centered. All people within the circle are equally visible. Usually, an item referred to as an “object of power” (First Nations Pedagogy n.d.) is held to indicate a person is the speaker, and is passed around for turn‐taking.

The Cylindrical Model builds on Circle ideology; it is used to symbolize a flattened hierarchy, where no one person in the community is more important or more capable than another. As the circle of people in the community contribute and learn together, the circle grows upward, transforming into a cylinder, showing equitable growth for all (Kills First 2021).

To the right of the Cylindrical Model in Figure 5.2, notice the Triangle.⁵ The triangle is a more typical representation of how power and agency flows through a school.

• At the top, school leaders are positioned with ultimate decision‐making power. Their vision, guidance, and leadership (or lack thereof) significantly impacts how all people experience school.
• On the right bottom angle of the triangle, you will find teachers. The yellow arrows shown between teachers and school leaders demonstrate how connected they are as well as their relational power dynamic. This is significant: school leaders are almost always positioned above teachers.
• Kids are placed on the bottom side of the triangle, representing their lack of power within the school, as well as the people with whom they are connected to: their parents and/or caregivers and their teachers. They also serve as a conduit for how teachers and parents and/or caregivers communicate with one another. That is, what kids say happens during their school day is interpreted by parents/caregivers in ways that shape their perspective on their child's teacher. This can either hinder or strengthen teacher agency.
• Finally, you'll see the left side of the triangle connecting parents/caregivers to school leaders. This connection varies across school, but this body of voices has the power to heavily influence the ways in which school leaders strategize and make decisions.

The Cylindrical, or “community‐up,” Model allows the entire school community to contribute to the needs of school communities, enabling more space and time for teachers to plan, collaborate, and be thoughtful when developing curriculum and making instructional decisions based on the needs of their students. Potentiality for community contributions is vast, and, again, looks very different depending on school demographics, resources, and perspectives.

Below are a few examples of distributed community contributions.

• One community I worked in solicited parent volunteers to serve as substitute teachers so their teachers on staff could participate in professional development together with me. Many parents and caregivers volunteered; however, this community was affluent, mostly white and East Asian, and many volunteers had jobs with flexibility that allowed them to contribute their time during the school day.
• Another time, a principal I worked with liaised with a community sports group to spend time with children in the gym so teachers could curate their classroom libraries more thoughtfully together, rather than covering each other's classrooms and doing the work in isolation. In that case, the community was predominantly immigrant and BIPOC, disadvantaged economically, but advantaged in that they had a long‐term commitment to building cross‐community relationships.
• I've also seen students contribute to nourishing teachers' agency. One school I worked in regularly invited students to attend curriculum‐making sessions with teachers, acting as thought partners with their teachers to ensure their learning was relevant to their experience. These experiences were built across their advisory program, so when curriculum meetings happened, students were prepared to contribute in meaningful ways. This particular school served economically disadvantaged students and was racially and economically diverse. Significantly, they were led by a visionary school leader with a strong, diverse school equity team who were equipped to actionize various learning structures they learned through workshops centering students, equity, and racial dynamics as part of their school experience.

The Teacher's Role in Developing Teacher Agency

This is really hard work. Remember in the introduction of this book, where I introduced the idea that spreading joy and justice requires us to face multiple truths regarding the role of teachers in school? How teachers are amongst the most overworked, exhausted, and underpaid group of professionals in the country, yet hold the most potential power to create a substantial transformation in the ways students experience schools? Well, that power only works if teachers' agency is strong, hovering near Levels 4 and 5 on that Likert Scale (Figure 5.1).

If we are to build that structured generator of hope that was unpacked in Chapter 1, one of the most important ingredients is teachers' conviction in their ability to make decisions that enact justice and enable joy within their communities for their students, and with them. One of the ways teachers can do that work is by honing their craft, delving into learning processes, developing a student‐centered curriculum, and cultivating community, all through the lenses of sound research, joy, and justice.

Assessing Teacher Agency and Instructional Delivery

First, let's assess the landscape of instructional delivery and how teacher agency is connected to one's ability to realize joy and justice within schools.

Here are important notes as we engage in this work:

• Curriculum is what we teach.
• Instructional delivery is how we teach.
• Your pedagogy includes all the components in your teaching and learning practice (your choices, your curriculum, your style of community building, etc. (We unpacked this a lot in Chapter 1.)

While curriculum is a large component of teaching and learning in the classroom, it is an individual's pedagogy that shapes how curriculum is implemented. Moreover, pedagogy is formed by the level of agency teachers feel and enact. How much or how little teachers are involved in curriculum development impacts the kinds of decisions made and options available for the instructional delivery that students experience.

There are infinite ways to teach children, but some types of instructional delivery are more prevalent than others based on educational policy, parent/caregiver involvement, and the ways in which teachers prepare for the profession. Based on my experiences with hundreds of teachers in classroom spaces, there are four types of instructional delivery that are most frequently demonstrated by teachers given their current realities: prescriptive, adaptive, universal, and homegrown. Which one of those instructional delivery methods shows up in a school community, or a teacher's classroom, varies.

In Figure 5.3, you will see a continuum that shows the relationship between teacher agency and common instructional delivery models. These levels correspond to the teacher agency Likert scale shown in Figure 5.1. That said, if you identified your teacher agency on the lower side with a score of 1 or 2, that means your instructional delivery methods are most likely scripted or adapted, and often are not developed to accommodate the unique needs of your current students. Conversely, if you identified higher levels of teacher agency, Levels 3, 4, or 5, that means you are most likely adapting curriculum according to your expertise, your students' needs, and may even be writing your own curriculum with colleagues based on learning standards connected to your community, location, students, and world events.

The Impact of School Reform on Teacher Agency and Instructional Delivery

As stated in earlier chapters of this book, a key component of the human learning process is to build upon existing schema. For engagement to occur within a group of learners, something about the information within the curriculum must be connected to their lived experiences. In curriculum‐writing practices, this is often referred to as the anticipatory set, the motivation, or the connection.

Teachers who feel empowered to recreate lessons and activities that have been pre‐created by others who do not know their students work to develop relevant motivators to whet students' appetites for learning, and increase increasing their interest in the lesson's objective. Teachers who feel less empowered may feel pressure from meeting benchmarks tied to government funding. For example, in 2009, a nationwide school reform program was announced by the Obama Administration called Race to the Top (RTT). Areas this federal program sought to improve in the United States' public school system included:

• Development of rigorous standards and better assessments.
• Adoption of better data systems to provide schools, teachers, and parents with information about student progress.
• Support for teachers and school leaders to become more effective.
• Increased emphasis and resources for the rigorous interventions needed to turn around the lowest‐performing schools (White House Archives n.d.).

A point system was attached to each area of improvement. States that were able to design programming inspiring growth in connection to each area of improvement were awarded points according to their program designs. The number of points states received corresponded to how much RTT grant money they were awarded. RTT, like so many other school reformation programs, was well‐intentioned. However, it is attributed to very intense accountability systems centered in quantitative data. Schools now had to report all kinds of empirical data that circled back to their states' learning design to show they were informed about all the players' progress in school, including teachers, students, and administrators.

For a teacher working in underserved schools where many students are not from the dominant culture, where many families experience low‐income, eroding neighborhood infrastructure, and barriers to healthcare and fresh foods, this heavy reliance on rigid data for the exchange of school funding restricts her agency, and damages the kinds of learning experiences her students have in school. Surveillance of her teaching, her students' attendance, her lesson plans, and, especially, her students' test scores infringe upon the choices she is able to make within the domain of her classroom. Her teacher agency diminishes. She is subjected to restrictive school policies that mandate lessons be taught exactly as they are written at the same time as other teachers on their grade level.

Building Your Curricular Inquiry: The Nuts and Bolts of Curriculum‐Making Is Important in Social Justice Conversations

Sometimes, the nuts and bolts of curricular and instructional planning are left out of the conversation in educator social justice circles. I remember attending a workshop that was created for teachers who were working toward social justice during my last few years of teaching. By then, I had learned a thing or two about teaching literacy, and I thought about how different my former high schoolers' lives would have been if I had known more about the foundations of reading instruction when I taught them. The teachers who attended the workshop were going to try out some recently developed curriculum created by teachers who actively work toward social justice and often publish their curriculum and their experiences in relation to teaching it.

After spending time getting to know one another, the curriculum was introduced to us, and we were going to act as students while the workshop facilitators were the teachers. The lesson was robust: its objective was to teach students about social movements through the Black Panther Party's Ten‐Point Program. After a brief overview of the Black Panthers and their Ten‐Point Program, we then received specific roles, and were instructed that we were going to participate in the “tea party” protocol, where students adopt the role and characteristics of the person's profile they have been assigned and engage in a discussion with other students who adopted different roles. In this case, we were assigned various members of the Black Panther Party.

First, I was alarmed at being a white person asked to play a role of a Black person. Second, when I looked at the document I was handed describing the role I was to play, it was a full page, full of second and third tier vocabulary words, and, if I had to guess, was written at a college‐reading level. I thought about my former eleventh and twelfth graders who would have most certainly appreciated the content within this lesson; the Black Panther's Ten‐Point Program tethers seminal moments toward the Black freedom struggle in our nation's history. I couldn't help but wonder about Lexile levels, ableism, and, worse, pending educational neglect.

I knew this particular experience, being expected to navigate a complex text about a period of time many students are unfamiliar with, and then adopt characteristics in a role play experience they've just learned about with their peers, would not have landed in the high school classes I taught without serious adaptations. Attentive listening and interest probably would have transpired during the overview and introduction, but as soon as this dense print went to students who were still learning to parse out words at fourth and fifth grade levels, the lesson would have combusted.

Thankfully, we teachers were guinea pigs in this particular workshop experience, and it was noted that the print and Lexile level would be a major barrier for students, and a larger conversation for curricular accessibility opened. Many teachers had a lot to say about white people being assigned Black roles. (Note: reenactment of history in most cases is riddled with potential human harm—I do not recommend it, and when a Black role was assigned to me, I did not participate.)

Content, of course, is important. The way we teach is, of course, also important. But how we organize the trajectory of learning and pathways to access the learning is also important. To that end, it is essential we familiarize ourselves with research‐based frameworks and other instructional strategies to accommodate and care for our student's learning needs so they may experience an education that is relevant to their human experience, and that is content‐, standards‐, and skills‐based.

Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Pedagogy

Gloria Ladson‐Billings is one of the foremothers of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP)⁷ that, importantly, has grown into Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Pedagogy (CR‐SP). Ladson‐Billings first documented CRP as a framework educators could use for curricular guidance and teaching in her seminal text, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children, in 1994. According to Ladson‐Billings, culturally relevant teaching is a “pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (p. 20). She underscores the importance of cultural relevance by noting how the use of student culture in one's teaching has the ability to transcend the negative and harmful impact of dominant culture, that is, the erasure of students' history, culture, or background within everyday school life as well as in curriculum (Ladson‐Billings 1994, p. 19).

What might this look like in a classroom? Well, CRP is vast. It looks different depending on who your students are. When I first started teaching CRP to groups of teachers, I designed an experience to develop felt knowledge: when teaching is culturally relevant, it is both explicit and subtle. For example, my last few years of teaching were spent teaching grades four and five in a huge elementary school in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It was in the mid‐2010s, when the “cups”⁸ game was really popular among Brooklyn adolescents. Whenever I picked students up from the cafeteria or there was down time after school, students everywhere could be heard skillfully performing the cups rhythm with one another, in groups as large as 8 or 10 kids!

Before reading or lecturing about the CRP framework with teachers, I invited them to learn how to play the cups game in teams. I equipped them with cups and a YouTube tutorial. Two or three people learned the cups game, while the other person in their group was instructed to take observational notes on their learning processes, including the ways in which they communicated, were able to perform, and their affect (the feeling demonstrated in the group—both said and/or unsaid). At the end of a 15‐minute period, groups were invited to perform the cups rhythm. After a mixture of laughter, frustration, and even a little entertainment, we worked together to unpack how this experience was connected to the CRP framework we would be exploring as we worked on curriculum‐making.

Teachers had a lot to say and share. When asked what skills were exercised when learning the cups rhythm together, they listed the following:

• Persistence: It took practice and multiple attempts to learn the rhythm, even when they felt like giving up.
• Communication—oral language and body language: To perform a rhythm in unison, group members had to discuss how they were going to stop, start, etc. When they learned how they were going to start and stop, they began to rely on body cues to maintain the same motions and rhythm.
• Motor skills and dexterity: A level of coordination is required to flip the cup, tap the cup on the table, and repeat the motion in a specific pattern multiple times.
• Concentration and attention to detail: During the activity, there was a lot of loud learning, cups banging, people laughing, and talking. The game requires specific movement and patterns, and it took increased concentration to learn each detail.
• Cooperation and collaboration: Not only did people need to work together to tap and flip the cups in unison, but they also had to work together to learn the rhythm and movement patterns.

After we unpacked the skills required to learn the objective of the cups game performance, the teachers and I came to a big understanding that reflects Ladson‐Billings's “cultural referents” youth learn from: skills required to learn the cups game objective and skills required to learn academic curricular objectives are not mutually exclusive. While it is clear that youth culture is not synonymous with Black culture or Latinx culture or Queer culture, it is often a starting point for people's initial understanding into why it is so integral for educators to consider the ways in which students communicate and the interests in which they surface, in addition to their racial and cultural backgrounds—all of those things are intertwined.

As educators everywhere witnessed elementary school students and other adolescents perform the cups game with delight, high energy, and extreme skill, we witnessed a group of learning mechanisms in which students are equipped with to tap into other types of content within the curriculums we adapt and design. Consider students whose families come from collectivist, storytelling cultures. Many students outside dominant culture do. So how might we build upon their oral communication and group collaboration when learning about historical events, solving investigations in math and science, and/or analyzing a body of literature? How do we recognize that learning feels more comfortable when it is done in louder environments for students who are accustomed to musical environments, or who simply feel comforted with the sound of the TV on in the background? What motor skills matter in the types of writing, building, or exploring we do in our classroom spaces, and how are they recognized differently amongst individuals in your classroom spaces?

The application of cultural relevance expands possibilities for how we connect, teach, and learn with our students. CRP is both vast⁹ and distinct, and knowing how to incorporate it within your pedagogy can feel somewhat nebulous if you are not accustomed to adapting or designing your curriculum. For clarity, I return to Gloria Ladson‐Billings. In a later iteration of her original CRP framework where the word “sustaining” was added, Ladson‐Billings readdresses the power of its application, saying culturally relevant teaching “allows for a fluid understanding of culture, and a teaching practice that explicitly engages questions of equity and justice.” (2014, p. 74). The Educational Alliance at Brown University offers clarity in consideration of the application of the Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Pedagogical framework in one's teaching life at school. According to the Educational Alliance, characteristics of the CR‐SP framework include:

• Positive perspectives on parents and families.
• Communication of high expectations.
• Learning within the context of culture.
• Student‐centered instruction.
• Culturally mediated instruction.
• Reshaping the curriculum.
• Teacher as facilitator.

Many teachers and I have found it helpful to focus on these tenets when creating and or adapting curriculum that is culturally relevant and sustaining. Earlier, I referred to the nuts and bolts of social justice teaching. Part of the nuts and bolts is familiarizing yourself with pedagogical frameworks that are created through the lens of justice. Among the many other parts working toward socially just schools is the development and practice of authentically knowing and understanding the students you teach so that you may do the work of reshaping curriculum in ways that speak to the classroom community: teaching through cultural referents, centering students, and facilitating knowledge. Families of the students you teach must understand you are their partner, not a person above or below them who tells them all the things wrong with their child, or even all the things their child needs to do “to get back on track.”

Finally, we are not diluting the work of teaching and learning by using cultural relevance as foundational equipment; rather, we are expanding the mechanisms we use to create access for all students, especially those who have been most historically marginalized, to achieve high outcomes.

Understanding by Design

This part is going to be short and sweet, because there are abundant tools in books that Wiggins and McTighe have already created that are better suited for more immersive learning experiences regarding the Understanding by Design (UbD) framework. However, I feel compelled to name UbD and offer the CliffsNotes version because backward planning is essential for developing a strong roadmap for you and your students' learning regarding their needs and wonderings in relation to curricular standards. According to Wiggins and McTighe:

The Understanding by Design^® framework (UbD™ framework) offers a planning process and structure to guide curriculum, assessment, and instruction. Its two key ideas are contained in the title: (1) focus on teaching and assessing for understanding and learning transfer, and (2) design curriculum “backward” from those ends (2011, p. 1).

They also identify three stages within UbD, including Stage 1, where you identify “desired results.” Essentially, these are your learning objectives that derive from state standards, where essential questions that drive your curriculum blossom. Grant and Wiggins ask: What do you want your students to know? What do you want them to be able to do? Stage 2 is based on assessment evidence. This is where assessment is a game changer for students learning and your teaching. The UbD framework is centered in this realm: How will you know that students were able to meet your learning objectives? What kinds of evidence do we agree upon that show their knowing and their learning growth? Finally, Stage 3, my favorite part, includes all the different types of learning experiences you plan for students to reach the learning objectives you named in Stage 1.

Roadmap feels a little cliche to describe UbD, but without it, we educators are literally lost, even if we haven't yet discovered that we aren't moving toward the place we thought we were going. Many curriculum units that have been prewritten and delivered to us are like the Google GPS on your phone: Google does its best to find us the fastest route, it knows the layout of the streets and highways. But what Google hasn't been able to do for us is anticipate the street closures, traffic jams, roadkill, and weather patterns that find their way into our local neighborhoods. In places that are familiar to us, we are able to renegotiate the route, changing directions. If you live in a place with other forms of transportation, like me, you might choose to park your car and take the subway for the remainder of the route. And sometimes, we find ourselves in spaces with no GPS signal at all, and we have to rely on the knowledge we hold as an individuals and communities to figure out where we are going.

This is where UbD comes in. Before we even leave for the trip, we first decide on where we are going. If we were taking a road trip with our colleagues, we would brainstorm places of interest for us. Fiji might be unreachable due to distance and fiscal constraints, but Puerto Rico might be more realistic. From there, we determine the kinds of experiences we want to have to honor the desired result of our collegial community: How do we know our relationships have been strengthened? That we have learned from the spaces we chose to visit? Maybe we decide on a mid‐trip check‐in, or appoint a few group leaders who will collect travel journals from the group. The group determines that pages from those journals will reflect relational learning, including shared dinners, or collaborative adventures like partner kayaking. Everybody who goes on the trip will participate in an exit interview. Finally, the group creates an itinerary that lists a variety of learning experiences and destinations that will promote community building.

This UbD road trip is quite different than journeys that are preplanned for you, and created by people outside your community. Sometimes, it's easy to just get on the plane and enjoy what you can, even if your unique needs haven't been taken into consideration. However, the types of learning we catalyze through a cocreated plan for the people we teach and learn with is absolutely unmatched.

While descriptions of these frameworks are brief in summary, the combination of CR‐SP and UbD make up the good bones of a curriculum, and combined with strong teacher agency in practice, a powerful DNA that is specific to you and the learners in your community is evoked. Working in relationship together, this manifestation has the ability to enable the kinds of joy and justice we hope for in school communities: experiences that move away from dominant culture (see Figure 1.1 Structured Generator of Hope) and toward future goodness.

I encourage you and your colleagues to consider how CR‐SP and UbD live within your curriculum‐making already and/or the possibilities they might have in your future curricular planning in relation to your instructional stance and level of teacher agency.

Collecting Information About Your Learners in Authentic Ways Informs Your Planning

This hyperfocus on empirical data is nothing new. It's been around since the Industrial Revolution, rooted in Taylorism, or “scientific management” (Lynn 2017, p. 145). This is the idea that purports complex problems can be solved through an objective approach, and that attention to nuance isn't as important as paying attention to production increased through the use of specific methods (think about how test prep is used to “remedy” low standardized test scores). While it is frustrating that the story of human growth is often incomplete and undertold due to how enmeshed data growth and funding are, it is still essential for us to embed the use of data collection in our everyday school lives so we may understand our children better to teach them well.

Importantly, there is a difference between quantitative and qualitative data, and both are of equal value when used in conjunction with one another. Table 5.3 describes characteristics of both types of data.

Although the overemphasis on quantitative data is problematic, standalone data in either category is also problematic. Isolated data, qualitative or quantitative, should always beg the question: What else do I need to know about this student to teach them better? The following work along is designed to stretch your thinking regarding the ways in which data is used and discussed in your community.