Youth-Adult Partnerships:
My Professional Journey
As a teacher, my driving force has always been relationships. I am invested and passionate about every single one of these young people’s lives. Thinking about their potential, their personalities, and their development gets me giddy. On most days, I truly love my job.
After transitioning to emergency remote teaching in the spring, I felt lost. The challenges that educators faced during that transition felt insurmountable. “But at least I have relationships with my students,” I thought. Because of these relationships, I believed that students would still participate in our class, attempt assignments, and show up to the optional Zooms (where my focus was purely on their social-emotional wellbeing: playing games, writing together, sharing stories, and feeling connected).
And they did.
Students showed up to hang out with me and their classmates. They partook in the assignments. Not all of them, but enough that I was reaffirmed in my beliefs: relationships matter and are key to learning.
Fast forward to summer. In truth, at the start of this summer, I was the most rested I had been since college. My daily commute had been eliminated and the structure and demands of my work day had become (dare I say) manageable. Because of these changes, I was able to maintain a regular sleep schedule in the spring. As a result, I didn’t have to spend the first two weeks of summer decompressing from the school year. With this cache of energy, I created professional goals for myself and set out to achieve them. I’ve always been a reflective practitioner, but I had a renewed focus in my personal, professional development as I went into summer. The time was now.
Goal #1: Read Flash Feedback by Matthew Johnson and facilitate a book group around it.
Goal #2: Finish reading Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman.
Goal #3: Commit to the Greater Madison Writing Project’s yearlong institute, What We Can Become.
And here’s where I’m at as a result:
As a teacher with high expectations for myself, my goals this summer helped me raise the bar even higher. “I am going to do all this,” I’ve thought, “and I’m going to find ways to do it virtually.” Having met all three of my summer goals, the information and practices have been churning together in my brain. As a result, I am prepared to provide my best yet… (level of teaching.)
Here’s what I learned:
The yearlong What We Can Become (WWCB) institute kicked off with a week of in-person learning and collaboration. The premise was simple: the pandemic forced us to shake up education, let’s keep that movement going and try to truly reform it. What were the good things that resulted from this tragedy? How can we continue to build on them? As someone who was truly benefiting from the gained hours of sleep, again, I found myself intrigued. As a cohort we developed a series of principles that we’re calling Culturally Sustaining Youth Partnerships (or what I’ve come to refer to in my head as “the epitome of education”). The primary focus of these principles is engaging students as partners in their learning. YES, I thought.
Flash Feedback built on this. This book promised me my sanity through steps to make grading and giving feedback on student work feasible. Giving feedback is the most time consuming part of my job, and it’s often the piece that can be most easily shortchanged. How about asking students to set personal writing goals and then having them routinely revisit their goals? How about including a space for those goals on the rubric for the piece? How about including students in the generation of the rubric? How about conferencing with students about their goals and projects? Is this all connected to Culturally Sustaining Youth Partnerships? YES, I thought.
Grading for Equity took it further and added a new level of meaning to Culturally Sustaining Youth Partnerships. My principal had chosen this book for our second semester book study, and my book group and I had been slowly making our way through it since the end of March. Feldman promised exactly what he stated in the title: equitable grading practices, and a true shake-up of what has come before. Grading is a very nuanced and personal practice with roots dating back to the industrial revolution. Could a complete overhaul of longstanding practices actually lead to increased equity? What if students’ grades were for them (and not just at them)? What if the grading floor for a failing grade was equal to those of the passing grades? What if students were invited to be active participants in the learning through the process of retakes and revisions? What if grading became about them and not about me? YES, I thought yet again.
With these new pedagogies and tangible practices up my sleeve, I have set-out to face the task of building partnerships with students virtually. Young people need their teachers more than ever, it seems, and I’ve got my boots laced and my lunch packed; ready and willing to embark on this journey with them. Relationships still matter, and I’m here to build them, but my focus this year is on partnerships. In so many ways, this just isn’t about me. It’s about them, their learning, and my specific role may not require the same form of relationships I’ve previously been accustomed to.
