Owning It: Proven Strategies to Ace and Embrace Teaching

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Alex Pate. Alex is the president and CEO of Innocent Technologies and the creator of the Innocent Classroom, a program for K-12 educators that aims to transform U.S. public education and end disparities by closing the relationship gap between educators and students of color. Mr. Pate is a noted writer and the author of five novels, including the New York Times bestseller Amistad.

[00:42]

And he's the author of the new book from ASCD, The Innocent Classroom, Dismantling Racial Bias to Support Students of Color.

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And now, our feature presentation.

[00:53] SPEAKER_01:

Mr. Pate, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you, Justin. I'm happy to be here with you today. So let's start with that concept of innocence. What is innocence and why is it so important, particularly when it comes to relationships between educators and students of color?

[01:08] SPEAKER_00:

You know, as I came to this idea, theoretical framework by which, I mean, I didn't start off actually to create a professional development program for educators. It has just evolved into that in a very strong way. I think talking about innocence is really critical, but before we do, I think I have to say a bit about the guilt that exists in the consciousness and in the bodies of a lot of children of color in the education system in general. So what I'm saying about guilt is guilt is the outcome of the cumulative experience. impact of negative stereotypes. So I'm saying many of our children, by the time they go to school at kindergarten, but certainly by their early, early grades, have been infused with a kind of idea about who they are that is developed from iconography and negative stereotypes and negative narratives about who they are before they even reach school.

[02:10]

And so they bring this burden in with them, not actual evidence or information about their lives in fact, but rather constructed stories about them, you know, that they're angry or that they are hard to educate or whatever those stereotypes are. And there are legions of them, many of them. And we talk about that with educators all the time is what does America tell you about the children of color you teach? Not what you believe, but what does the society around you tell you through TV and popular iconography, popular media, et cetera. What does it tell you about children of color? And I'm saying what it tells you about and what they tell us about what the media tells them about children of color is not very positive.

[03:02]

And then I'm saying those children know that that's being said about them. And in some ways, those children may even think that you think that you believe what the world says about them. And so there is a gap right from the beginning that makes it much more difficult for those children to trust our educators and teachers in a school environment. So that is the guilt. And so how do we free our children from carrying all of that around? Particularly, how do we free them from bringing that into a particular classroom?

[03:35]

And so... And by freeing them, I mean rendering them, allowing them, helping them, encouraging them to show up innocent in your classroom. And innocent, the innocent classroom is a classroom where children are curious, energetic, want to be learners in the best possible way and want to follow the leadership and the guide of the teacher who is at the front of the room to help them get through school.

[04:03] SPEAKER_01:

It's so fascinating to hear that described as guilt. You know, I don't think I've ever heard that before. You know, we've heard about implicit bias and stereotypes and internalized stereotypes that affect students and stereotype threat, you know, familiar with those concepts, but framing it as guilt. is so powerful to think about what we might do about it and to kind of restore that innocence and allow students to see themselves, you know, as, you know, as their teachers want to see them as, you know, as we want students to see themselves. It's not enough to simply reject stereotypes. You're saying there's almost like a, like an absolution that needs to take place for students to

[04:44] SPEAKER_00:

Yes, yes, that's a really good way, a really good way. There is, I mean, if you think about the impact, what we know now about stereotypes is they sink into the consciousness, the subconscious minds of its victims, so to speak, and it replaces a sort of uh learning context with a script so if i'm supposed to be this if i'm supposed to be angry if everybody keeps telling me that's what my challenge is you know if i am going to be a problem in this classroom and that preceded my actual presence in that classroom I'm suggesting that we actually create the environment in which children don't actually know how to perform and behave and interact with educators in the proper way, but that that guilt is carried with our children into the room.

[05:40]

And, you know, this came to me, the framing of this as guilt and innocence came to me as a personal reflection. At some point, I'm an African-American man. At some point in my life, I realized I wasn't always authentic. It wasn't always an organic response that I was giving to a particular situation. Sometimes I was responding the way I thought I was supposed to respond, given the way the culture had framed my existence in this culture. And I just got to the point where I found that unacceptable.

[06:19]

So I began a personal meditation to try to free myself of the impact of negative stereotypes. And in the process of that, I began having conversations with educators and administrators who were curious about that as it related to public school students. And I was lucky enough to get some support to begin working with a group of educators in Omaha, Nebraska, and slowly develop this theoretical framework and programmatic response by which we could help teachers help children disconnect from that list of negative stereotypes and open themselves up to being the kind of, like I said, curious, energetic learners that we know them to be.

[07:08] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I want to make sure we get into the details of that research and that project and how that worked and what you discovered working with educators early on. what some of the major components of that framework and program are today. I have to say, one of the things I was very excited about when I first saw your book, Alex, was two things that went together. One, you used a word that I typically do not like, the word dismantling, but then you backed it up with the thing that's usually missing and the reason I usually don't like that word, which is something that can actually be done. And I remember back to some of my best writing classes in college where we learned not to use weasel words. And I feel like in so much of our discourse today, dismantle or dismantling is used as a weasel word when we don't really know what we want to happen.

[08:03]

We just don't like what we have. We don't know what to do. We don't know what we're asking for. We just want something to be different. So we just kind of throw dismantle this thing that I don't like. in rhetorically, and nobody really knows what to do with that.

[08:16]

But you actually back that word, dismantling, in terms of racial bias, with a pretty specific action plan, with very specific things that educators can do. So take us into that a little bit more in terms of what you did with teachers in Omaha.

[08:31] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. What's important about that, your word is dismantling, my word is relationships. There's a certain way in which we talk about problems that arise from bad relationships in professional life, in our work life, in our personal life. But nobody ever, at least for me, had ever presented a process of responding to problems with relationships. How do you create a relationship? How do you make a relationship authentic and true?

[09:02]

So in the same way that you're talking about dismantling, I started thinking about that as it relates to relationships. In the work these days, as it relates to disparity, there is a lot of work in diversity training, a lot of work in cultural proficiency and cultural competency and all of that. And I'm not here to speak negatively about that. I think it has its place. It does its job. People need to be up to speed on the world and as it relates to the many cultures and ways of living that we have going on in our culture.

[09:39]

But it doesn't solve the problem of the child in the classroom who is struggling. And it doesn't solve the problem of the teacher in the classroom who was trying to get that child to stop struggling. So I looked at innocent, and I felt like if I couldn't come up with a solution to this challenge, or maybe the solution hit me upside the head one day, but I realized that I want an innocent classroom to be solutional. And I started talking about it that way. The circle, you know, in school education these days, we talk about disparity and We talk about it as a problem, and then we elucidate the problem. We talk more about the problem, and we end up back at the beginning again talking about the problem.

[10:22]

I wanted to intervene in that cycle. So the intervention is, if there is a gap, I'm saying that disparities are the outcome of this relationship gap between educators and students. And reason why that gap exists is because of the guilt that our children are carrying and the negative perceptions their teachers have of them as they walk in the door. So how do we go from that reality to one in which children are engaged and in functional, effective relationships with their teachers? So, all right, take a step back. We have guilt on one end, innocence on the other end.

[11:09]

And again, innocence, you asked the first question, what is innocence? Innocence is the minimization, the elimination, or the neutralization of negative stereotypes in the child's life while they're in your class. So that that child unburdens themself as they walk through the door and see you as an ally, as a guide, as someone who can lead them into the next phase of their, whether it's from kindergarten to first grade or first grade to second grade. So that's innocence. So how do we go from guilt, this heavy weight that our children have to bear that they don't create, that isn't necessarily from anything they've done, but it has to do with history and race and racism and all of that. How do we get them to unburden themselves for four hours so that they can appear innocent in a classroom?

[12:02] SPEAKER_01:

Well, and let me ask there, you're saying it's environment specific or classroom specific? It's classroom specific.

[12:11] SPEAKER_00:

It has no power outside of the classroom unless the relationship between the teacher and student is super strong. So it's this place focus. I mean, we are not out to solve the problems of the world. We will eventually evolve as a people and deal with race as it needs to be dealt with. And I see us moving now in that direction. But in the classroom, I just want you to learn how to understand, see, and maybe even love my child well enough to teach them effectively, well enough to get them excited about their educational career.

[12:47]

And understand that this is about the relationship between They teach teacher A and student A. And so the power of that relationship will recede immediately as that child leaves the classroom. And I'm asking educators not to care so much about how that child interacts in the hallway, not to care so much about how that child is in the cafeteria. That's a whole nother area. We're working with administrators to deal with cafeteria. We'll work with the teacher next door where that child is gonna go to in the next year, well, that teacher needs to have the same training you do so that they pick up where you left off.

[13:27]

But this is about the personal interaction between a student and a teacher multiplied by 30 in a classroom. And the action that takes place So how do we go from guilt to innocence is, I mean, as you know, I mean, I'm a creative writer. I've spent a lot of time focused on the development of character and all of that led me to Aristotle. And in Aristotelian philosophy, Aristotle defines good as the thing for which all other things are done. I mean, there are many ways to have gone about this, but I landed on Aristotle. and in arist and in this way this aristotelian definition of good not good versus evil or good versus bad or you know purity or versus being uh uh not pure his definition of good is the source of the action the source of the beginning of the way people respond so

[14:28]

All I ask teachers to do is to discover the reason why the child is responding to you in the way they respond. If their heads are down on the desk, if they're late in their work, if they're always tardy, if they're argumentative, if they're bullying, no matter what the issue is, what the negative stereotype is, no matter what the guilt is, find the reason for the manifestation of that behavior. The discovery, so now I'm actually getting into the construction of the relationship, right? So if you can find the reason why that child always has their head down on the desk when you're talking, and there is always a reason, and then you can begin to engage, and we call that a good, right? So some children need to feel connected.

[15:21]

Some children need to feel respected. Some children need to feel safe. Some children need to feel like you will see them or hear them. Nobody ever sees or I guess I should be talking about this almost in a negative. So the goods, when I said safe, some children never feel safe. And only if you do certain things in that classroom for them every day will they start to feel safe in that space with you.

[15:51]

And so they can only rely on you to do that. And you, in turn, can ask them, because you know that they need to feel safe and because you have been doing things to help them feel safe, you can ask them to do their homework. And they will look at you and respond differently than they would have if they didn't know you cared enough to try to help them feel safe. So the elements of building this relationship are really kind of complex and yet simple to do. One of the things we know about Aristotelian good is if you engage another person's goodness, if you know what it is that is driving them and you start to respond to that, the first thing A byproduct of that engagement is empathy. And empathy takes us to the next step.

[16:40]

It's so simple and commonsensical. It's what we do without talking when we form relationships with people. But talking about it is not as easy to do as we do it instinctively. So helping a teacher, A, understand that the child's behavior is not necessarily a reflection of who they are. that there is a good underneath all of it that you need to find, that once you find it, you can develop a strategy to respond to it, that once you start strategizing and responding to engaging that good, that the child will change. Because the child, in some cases, some children have never had anybody see through their behavior.

[17:24]

never understood that this child's family is going through trauma, or there's a sick relative, or they feel isolated and alone, or whatever it is, the teacher comes to that, develops a strategy in a classroom, the student responds to that teacher in a particular way, and voila. Sometimes it's literally like suddenly the child will drop all barriers. And then the teacher has an opportunity to lead. So, you know, people are talking about anti-racist work and all of that. You know, to me, it's all encompassed in this in this relationship. Right.

[18:06]

There is this is molecular, like building a relationship teacher to student, student by student, good by good. and suddenly things have a possibility of changing.

[18:17] SPEAKER_01:

Well, it makes so much intuitive sense when I think back to my experience many years ago as a middle school teacher, where you'd see students in different environments, whether it's a classroom, maybe you go visit another teacher's classroom and you say, are these even the same kids? Things are so different. And sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Or you'd have a meeting with a counselor and all the teachers would be there, maybe talking about how the student's doing before the The student and parent show up. And yeah, often we wonder, like, are we even talking about the same student? Because that relationship with the teacher can be such a huge variable that is a little bit difficult to pin down.

[18:59]

And I know for school leaders... You know, we have a choice of different explanations for why a teacher may not currently be reaching a particular student. And usually we can rule out things like, you know, this teacher is just racist and doesn't like the student. Sometimes, most of the time, hopefully.

[19:19]

But that doesn't get us all the way there to that solution of really having a relationship that allows the student to thrive and to do well.

[19:31] SPEAKER_00:

When we train whole schools and we have every teacher in the room, suddenly our impact grows dramatically because just as you talked about, the whole school now, all of the educators in that school, counselors included, will know what the good of Johnny is. And when everybody knows that Johnny, you need to be respectful to Johnny because Johnny feels like he's lived his whole life with people looking down at him and he's never had anybody uplift him. And he's struggling with that. Third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, 10th grade, doesn't matter. If everybody then begins to say, you come up with a strategy, how do we show Johnny respect all day long, every day?

[20:24]

And suddenly Johnny realizes his head pops up a little bit stronger. He's a little bit more alert in school. And then individual teachers begin to open that relationship up and identify the qualities that he has and begins to respect. So in other words- individual teacher, individual student, but in a group reality where we work with whole schools, you have this amazing kind of critical mass energy that flows around each student because the teachers come to know each student in an entirely different way.

[21:02] SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And that opportunity to share what has worked to build that relationship among teachers, I think, is so powerful, especially at the secondary level where it's difficult to know each individual student well enough, quickly enough.

[21:16] SPEAKER_00:

Well, that's when you talked about the process that's outlined in the book. It's difficult, but it's not impossible. Right. That's the point. It's like that's what the book Innocent Classroom does. Is it everything that I've said?

[21:31]

I mean, we have data to prove it. And so what we do is we help educators dive into this issue with Katie. This particular child seems obscure and difficult to understand. What is her good? That's our challenge. Find her good.

[21:47]

Once you find her good, develop the strategy and step back and see if it has an impact. If it doesn't have the proper. If she doesn't respond to you, even though you're doing things that you think you need to be doing, then you picked the wrong good and step back, refocus, gather new information and come back and provide a new strategy to respond to her.

[22:10] SPEAKER_01:

Well, tell us a little bit more about the work you do with school teams. So if a whole school staff wants to get this kind of training and take on this challenge as a school community, what can they do?

[22:23] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I mean, there are a couple of different formats and ways in which we approach this. And now we're almost, yeah, we are 100% online training. We used to do this, obviously, before the pandemic as a live training. But we've moved everything online, and it's been extremely, extremely effective. What we do is during training times, et cetera, schools will bring their teachers together. So it's usually four or five two-hour sessions in which we lead – educators through the process of understanding the problems that they're seeing and beginning to identify the stereotypes that are operating in the children that they're teaching.

[23:12]

And then we spend time debunk, you know, sort of helping a teacher because the first step, the teacher has to let go of those stereotypes herself. And so then we get through that process and we introduce the idea of goodness and how, you know, what Aristotle, how he defined it and what our list of goods are to combat the list of negatives that have already been presented. And then we send them out to gather information about their students. It's a very kind of, you know, convoluted process. We usually ask educators to identify three children to start with just to practice. It's like a muscle you have to build.

[23:52]

Once the muscles have developed in terms of seeing through behavior to find the good, to develop the strategy, to engage the child, it becomes second nature. It's not as laborious as it may seem at the outset. And most teachers will say the investment of that time, I mean, the innocent classroom teachers will say the investment of that time pays off royally, right? towards the middle and end of the semester where discipline issues go down. I mean, one of the things that happens, Justin, is referrals outside of class drop almost by 50% when an innocent classroom is engaged. And there are all kinds of data.

[24:34]

I won't go into all the But academic mindset, quality of life for a lot of educators as they go through this program, they're like, it changed the way I thought about this is what I thought teaching was supposed to be. And so it changes the dynamics of in-class engagement in a way. And when whole schools are engaged in that, schools change. I had a conversation yesterday. Day before yesterday evening, with an assistant principal at a school, we started working with that at the very beginning. They adopted Innocent Classroom.

[25:10]

They are now proudly an Innocent Classroom school, and there are a few of those popping up here and there as we grow, and as the concept becomes more popular, I would say. And her commitment to her teachers in an innocent classroom school mirrors her demand for her teacher's commitment to her students. It was just really powerful. So when schools go through that process of becoming an innocent classroom school, it's pretty gratifying. It's pretty powerful to see the impact that they have on teachers, and on students, and as this principal was, assistant principal was saying to me, and parents, because parents now come to her and say, I want my child to go to another innocent classroom next year, because they can see the difference.

[26:08] SPEAKER_01:

And are we talking secondary, elementary? What grade levels are currently using it?

[26:12] SPEAKER_00:

I started thinking this was a K-5 type program, But because we were in a localized reality in Omaha, Nebraska, as a start, I mean, we're in a lot of different places right now. But when I started, it was literally piloted in Omaha, Nebraska. And we would meet periodically with teachers. And as we piloted this up to the point where we introduced it in 2012, And there were too many middle school and high school teachers who wanted to be in. So we now have slight adjustments and we help high school teachers adjust to this in a different way. But we go K-12 and we do bus drivers, cafeteria workers, nurses.

[27:00]

counselors, discipline folks. I mean, all of those people are involved in the way a school shows itself to children in a way that children don't expect it to. I mean, if there's a bottom line to this, is children have a way of thinking about teachers in school. We have to disrupt that. And the only way to disrupt that is to change the way we think about them.

[27:25] SPEAKER_01:

I think there is so much overlooked potential in working with the other staff that you mentioned. We think first of teachers, but we have to remember that even before a student interacts with their teachers for the day, they've already interacted with, as you said, the bus driver, the cafeteria workers, security, yeah, all these different people who really shape the student's experience of the school environment. Yeah.

[27:49] SPEAKER_00:

Some of the best conversations I've had have been with bus drivers, because they do. They see children way before teachers do, and they watch children come home. And they know how, you know, exhausted some kids are. I mean, their knowledge base is deep. And helping them identify good in a child and begin to do some of that work before the child gets to school, it just makes it better.

[28:17] SPEAKER_01:

So the book is The Innocent Classroom, Dismantling Racial Bias to Support Students of Color. And Alex Pate, if people want to learn more about The Innocent Classroom or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to go online? Innocentclassroom.com. Well, Alex, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[28:35] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. I'm happy to have been here. It's great.

[28:38] Announcer:

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