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Professor Karen Colbert provides her insights and advice on effective professional development for math educators. She brings her years of experience as an BIPOC STEM student, scholar, and educator.
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Professor Karen Colbert provides her insights and advice on effective professional development for math educators. She brings her years of experience as an BIPOC STEM student, scholar, and educator.
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Professor Karen Colbert provides her insights and advice on effective professional development for math educators. She brings her years of experience as an BIPOC STEM student, scholar, and educator.
Listen to Episode 1 - Karen Colbert by As the Little Crow Flies MP3 song. Episode 1 - Karen Colbert song from As the Little Crow Flies is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 48:05. This high-quality MP3 track has 82.795 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 9 Jan 2023. Stream and download Episode 1 - Karen Colbert by As the Little Crow Flies for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
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Karen Colbert, a math educator at Keweenaw Bay Ojibwe Community College in Michigan, shares her journey in STEM education. She discusses the importance of addressing the barriers that prevent indigenous students from excelling in math, such as the need to change their identity to fit the traditional academic mold. Karen emphasizes the value of recognizing adult learners and fostering a reciprocal relationship in the classroom. She also talks about her experience with the Carnegie Math Pathways curriculum, which focuses on facilitating student learning rather than traditional teaching methods. Overall, Karen highlights the significance of seeing students as adults and listening to their perspectives in order to create a successful learning environment. As the Little Crow Flies, straight talk from indigenous communities. Our discussion today is with Karen Colbert. Welcome, Karen. Good to have you on this episode. Would you be willing to share with us what your journey has been as a math educator, your educational background, your community background, and what kind of context you are currently working in and how you identify yourself as a math educator? Of course. Boozhoo Gatina. Karen Indigeneca. Desho Geechee Goomy. Karen Colbert. I work at the Keweenaw Bay Ojibwe Community College on the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in Michigan, Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And my journey actually started... I was a stay-at-home mom and with an electrical engineering degree, living my best life. And a friend of mine, a very dear friend of mine from the Choctaw Nation was working here on the reservation, and she said, Karen, we need some support here. We have a STEM outreach program. And so reluctantly, I said, I'll help out a little, but only if I can bring my kids with me. So that's kind of how I was introduced to the work on the reservation. I've always been a member of the STEM program. So even as a young person from the Black and Indigenous people of color communities, there's always been these initiatives to increase women in engineering, to increase people of color in engineering and the sciences. And so I've always been a part of those kinds of pilot programs. And so when they said they were starting one on the reservation, it was like, well, of course, of course, because I'm a product of that. So from being a part of the outreach program, what we found was that it wasn't that our students were not interested in STEM, but the barrier was that they weren't able to pass their math courses. And so we had to figure that out, right? We have these great programs, you know, we have archery, we were teaching students about velocity, we had titanium arrows, we had traditional arrows, we were doing longbows versus, you know, we were doing all these things to introduce STEM and to show that math is everywhere. But the students were not able to translate that into what was happening in the classroom. And so that was where my work began. And they said, OK, so Karen, you can figure that out. And a part of me wanted to, because I identified as a student who didn't believe that I was a math person. I didn't feel like the person that I was was, you know, what math was. And so even in my upbringing, I remember thinking like, OK, if I'm going to be good at engineering, I need to do it this way. I need to change how I talk, I need to change how I interact with people, because this is what educated people look like, or this is what educated people sound like. If I'm going to be successful in these spaces, I need to change who I am. And that was really difficult. And so I remember thinking that's the problem, right? It's not that our students don't know who they are. It's that in higher education, there's this narrative that we have to change who we are to be something that's ambiguous, kind of generic. This is what a math person looks like, or this is what a smart person looks like. And it's not defined, but it is, if that makes any sense. Like, we can't say, oh, there's a picture of a red square. That's what you need to be. Or there's a picture of a yellow circle. So it's not clearly defined, but at the same time, it is because it's like, it's anything not me. And that was where that dissonance was, right? So we had these students that were excited about STEM, but they did not identify as students who flourish or believed that they were excellent or could excel and be scholars in math. So that's kind of where my work started. Very interesting. And then along with that, I had sort of a different story that I was sort of fully assimilated because I lived in the cities and my father was Saxon and my great-grandfather had come over from England in the turn of the century. So I had gone the opposite way of trying to become unassimilated. And so when I looked at these things, I said, no, you have to be successful. I've got to re-assimilate. And so there was that dissonance. So that's this idea of identity, either trying to grab onto an identity that's not us so that we can be successful or seeing that the successful identity is one that we don't want to be in anymore because it means that we're giving up part of who we are. Right. If not all of who we are. So interesting. I assume initially your task was to revise the curriculum for those types of courses. So right. I think that's interesting because we didn't necessarily define what it would be, but it was like, Karen, you help them pass math. Solve for everything else. So at first, it just looked like putting me in the classroom with the textbooks that they were using. And so the students were in the classroom with everyone else. And then they said, no, we want any of our students who are in the STEM program to have their own math class. You teach them using the same textbook and make sure that they pass math. Right. So that's how it started. And then working with a smaller cohort, I started to learn a lot about what does learning look like? What does teaching look like from both perspectives? Because at that time, I had probably been out of school maybe six or seven years. I mean, I was teaching my children, but teaching adults, that's a completely other realm. And so I started to learn a lot about what does learning look like? How to take what we now call andragogy and using that to the benefit of the students, because they do have a lot to bring. I think higher education and maybe just in the academic setting, you know, this traditional K-12 academic setting, we're kind of taught that we come in and we're this empty vessel and the teacher is going to, like, pour into us. And so we just kind of have to wait to receive it. But adult learners actually bring quite a bit into the classroom that is to their benefit. But if they believe that they're this empty vessel, that they have nothing to offer, that they're waiting for the instructor to give them everything, then you have that dissonance because they're trying to change their brain to think like you. And that was where we'd have a lot of disconnect, because remember, I mean, I learned some of these things the first time, maybe 15, 20 years prior, and the whole world has changed. And I'm trying to communicate with the students in the classroom that are adults that have had an entirely different life than I have and bring these old ways and hoping that these are ways that are going to connect with them in the world that they're living in. So there was a lot for me to learn about how to teach adults, but how to teach it in a way that they understand that I'm not pouring into them as an empty vessel, right, that it's a reciprocal relationship. So that evolution kind of happened over time. And that was when I was introduced to some of the online teaching epistemologies. And then eventually when they said, well, now we need a full-time math instructor and we want to change the curriculum. Are you willing to learn this new way of teaching? And I said, well, sure. I mean, some of the things we're doing now aren't working, so what do I have to lose? So that was when we were introduced to the Carnegie Math Pathways. Okay, wonderful. What I want to highlight here is your perspective from the very beginning, though. You saw your students as adult learners. And at the university I teach, I so often hear my colleagues referring to, well, the kids do this. And I go, they're not kids. They are adults. Yes, they may have just got out of high school, but they're 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds. And don't forget about those 40- and 50-year-olds that we do have in our classes as well. These are adult learners. But when I talk to Indigenous educators, that seems to be where they start. Even they see their high schoolers and their middle schoolers as more being an adult than a child of how you would treat a child. So that puts you on a journey that gets you success, really, from the start, because that's where I think it is. How do we see our students? How do we see our role with those students? And then we can have these trainings and use these other curriculums and stuff. If we don't have that proper relationality with our students of how we see our students, maybe we don't listen to them as well because, oh, they're just kids, right? We're the adults. Well, if we see we're all adults, we got to listen. And so maybe just along that line of how did your students help you along that journey as you were looking at new curriculums? What input did they have into your product that you ended up getting? Yeah. So I think the way that Carnegie was introduced is more of a, so there's a dichotomy of like a stage on the stage where I'm going to stand up. I'm going to say some things. You're going to write it down. And then in a couple of weeks, I'm going to ask you to say it back to me. And their teaching is more of trying to get the instructor to be more of a facilitator. OK. So that's kind of the overarching. Your role as the instructor should be the facilitator of the class. Well, that's kind of hard because we have deadlines. We have, you know, your class is limited in time. Your calendar is limited in time. You're required to assess students so often. So you're like, I have to get through all this material. But you're asking me to let the students speak and guide. And so trying to figure out how that ebb and flow would work. So at the beginning, I was very bad at it. I'll be honest. I'm trying to be the facilitator. And I'm trying to listen to the students. And I'm like, OK, but the answer is, I'm still trying to really push them because I feel I'm feeling that pressure that at the end of 50 minutes, we have to have a finished product. At the end of 50 minutes, they have to have the light bulb have to go off for all of them. And so when students would try to have those deep conversations, especially about the contextualization of the classroom material, I wasn't able to hold space for that in the beginning because I didn't understand that there was such great value in that. So my first year, I mean, my poor students. I love you all if you're listening to this podcast. Oh, I'm so grateful that they were so patient with me. But I learned so much about how to be intentional about contextualization. Because again, we have adult learners. And so they don't need fractions out of context. They're spending money and trying to save money and trying to split a dollar into 10 different ways all the time. And being creative about what do assets look like? What do liabilities look like? What does problem solving look like? And how many different ways there are to really solve a problem. I need this to happen at the end of the day. But I also have these time constraints. I have these physical constraints. I have these financial constraints. And they figure out how to solve for x with all those different variables moving at the same time. So they're already doing those things. They don't need me to come up with some kind of a random carnival problem that's completely out of context. So my students are teaching me, hey, these are some problems that I'm having in my day to day. How would I use this to figure that out? And I'm still stuck in the, wait a minute. Now the learning objective is that we have to, OK, so as the denominator gets bigger, stick with me now, stick with me now. So a lot of those open-ended conversations helped me as the instructor to kind of relax into, you know what? My students are whole. And they really do know what they need. And I am really here to just hold space and support them. And a lot of those open-ended conversations, I was able to kind of bottle those up into, wow, OK, well, we are talking about statistics. And this is something that has impacted us as Black and Indigenous people of color. And this is something that's important to us. So let's talk about that. And all the other things started to fall into place. They were meeting all the learning outcomes. They were doing the problem solving. They were doing the quantitative literacy and the reasoning and the information literacy where they were having to go and seek out more data and clean it and talk about the sovereignty of the data. Whose data was this? Why was it clean? So all those things started to happen anyway when I allowed my students to just be who they were. And those conversations, they were really deep. And they were rich. And they were also really empowering to the entire class. Very interesting. So as a matter almost, I guess we could say of faith, having faith that they know where they need to go. I just open up the opportunities, put this out there, but let them go. And that faith that if you followed them, you'd get to the right place. And again, circling back because you had that experience as a student yourself looking, I have to be somebody else to be successful. What would it look like if people were their selves and they found their success on their own? So that elusive thing, that journey you had most definitely probably tried, but it takes time. It takes time to find those. Yeah, it does. I think that was at the point where I really remember thinking like, hey, I'm getting really good at this. When I stopped trying to control what was gonna happen in 50 minutes, because that's how I felt. I knew I was gonna have to take the ACTs. You get 35 minutes for this section. You get 50 minutes for this section. You have to make sure that if you don't know this, you skip to this, you come back to this. It was very linear. It had to happen in a certain order. And you had to skip things if you didn't know them. You would guess and skip and just keep moving. It had to happen in a certain order. It had to progress in a certain order. And so I was holding on to that. And I think those first couple of semesters trying to hold onto those old ways and still figure out how to be a facilitator and then giving students like this ambiguous, I'm giving you space, but I'm really not. Like you can spin around in a circle, but don't take a step away. I started to realize that, wow, I am getting better as an instructor because I'm giving my students that space. I'm not telling them that I'm going to tell you once. And after I tell you one time, you have to know it forever. Like that's it, right? There's no room for you to internalize it. There's no room for you to digest it. There's no room for you to make it your own. There's no room for you to translate it into something that's tangible to you. You have to like it just like this. And that's how you're going to take it to the test. And you're going to regurgitate it just like this. When I let go of that belief that there was only one way for it to happen for everybody in the classroom, that was when I started to believe that like, wow, I think this is getting, not only is it fun, but I can see my students growing because we, especially as a tribal colleges, we have this mission. We don't want our students to just have this experience that you could have anywhere else. But the experiences that you have in our classroom should translate into making your community better. You should be able to envision what you can offer not only to your family, but to your community. And those don't just happen by teaching people how to find the common denominator and greatest common factor and all of those other things. You have to teach it in a way that people can see that these lessons are going to translate into the way that I interact with my family, the way that I interact with my employer, the way that I seek out opportunities for myself. And how do I add value to my community? Whether I'm in a math classroom or I'm going to work or I'm thinking of something else that I can do to help my community. Yes, and I just had this light went on for me. We so often in Indigenous education, we talk about how we're helping our students to live in two worlds, a community they've grown up in, they're part of and the dominant culture. Until I heard your experience, I never thought we are also doing a journey through two worlds. And I guess I look back, I can now see that that's what I've been trying to do to try to make it relevant to my students. But I'd never seen myself necessarily because I thought, well, I survived, I got my degree. So I learned how to live in two worlds, but I'm still learning how to live in the two worlds or maybe three worlds or whatever, however many different worlds we end up living in. But your words are giving me that, yes, we also are continuing on that journey. We haven't finished the journey and then now we're giving help. We are still ourselves as educators on that journey. At least if we put ourselves on that journey, that's where we find success in reaching our students. Thank you so much for that. That's awesome. So in bringing in this new curriculum that was new to you as well as to the students, the way of doing things, could you speak a little bit about what were the sort of support you received from your community, your college, the elders, the students, your colleagues in that process? Yeah, so I was a graduate student in math. So I have my electrical engineering degree and then I went to graduate school for math. And in that program, I had a class on how to teach math in college. It was like one semester, we would stand up, we would do like a lesson. It was like a script. So every lesson had a learning objective and then there was like a script and then you were supposed to put a problem on the board and then you let your students kind of shout out answers and then you kind of guide the, you know, so there was like a script to follow. So in higher education, I was just kind of like, okay, well, I had a class on how to teach math in college and so I was, well, we'll just kind of do that. And then when I was introduced to the new curriculum, there was no room for that script. Like it didn't work because you would never get anything done. You only get 50 minutes. Sometimes my classes are 90 minutes and you have to get the students, there's not enough time to get all that stuff done and it doesn't follow the script because you're waiting for students to work in groups and then they have to do this productive persistence and this productive struggle. And I'm like, how do you give people time? You have 30 seconds to struggle, okay? You get 30, you get 10 seconds to struggle and then we need to move on. We had a cohort of other tribal colleges that all of us were trying to use this new curriculum and what we were allowed to do was we were allowed to meet quarterly and talk about what we're trying in the classroom, what's working, what's not working. We would practice on each other and then within that cohort, each of us had a mentor that we would meet with monthly and do the same thing, kind of like talk about, okay, I tried this, this did not work, I'm not sure what's happening or I'm trying this, it's going really well, I'm so glad we changed it. So having that constant feedback and just talking about what's happening was really helpful. And then as far as my institution, I'll be honest, I could have been doing all kinds of stuff in that classroom. They were just like, Karen, we trust you. Go do your best. And so a part of it was scary to me, but at the same time, it was like, wow, they trust me to figure this out. So I felt like I had all the space that I needed to try some things. Because like I said, if it didn't work, I could always just go back to what we were trying and that wasn't really working for us, but that was what everybody was doing. You open the textbook, you talk about the first two sections, you assign 10 problems, ask anybody if they have questions, nobody has questions because you don't want to be the only one with questions. You move on, you give a test or a quiz every couple of days. We had already tried that model. And if the facilitating model, the group collaborative model didn't work for us, I could just go back to doing it the other way anyway. And so I felt like there was no way to fail to me. My institution gave me enough support that they were like, she's not going to fail. No matter what she does, she's not going to fail. And they gave me the space that I needed when I said that I needed more equipment, when I said I wanted to try some different software, they were like, go ahead, feel free to do whatever you need to do. So that was really helpful because we're using this curriculum, there are people that felt the curriculum, they have thoughts about how they want it developed, but then they also want feedback because in the tribal college community, we have a mission statement that no other minority serving institution has. And our mission statement is centered on revitalizing language, rebuilding culture in an indigenous way. No other minority serving institution has that mission embedded in the identity of who they are. And so we were having to explain to them as instructors at tribal colleges that we are following your curriculum, but we have to do it in a way that serves our community. And Carnegie Math Pathways was amazing. They were like, you have different needs, let's talk about it. Let's get you all together and let's support it. And so they were able to support our needs in an even smaller cohort where we developed curriculum together. We would test and pilot each other's lessons and classrooms. We would meet together and do book clubs. I mean, it was a really comprehensive group where we were constantly involved and engaged with each other and knowing that each of us is working at tribal colleges. Some of us were large colleges, some were small. Some of us have more constraints within administration than others. Mine is very free flowing. If I said I needed something, they supported it. Others had a lot more management where they had to go to their key stakeholders and explain, this is why I want to make this change in the classroom. I'm using Carnegie, but I need to do this with it as well. But we were able as a faculty group to support each other as a cohort because say, okay, here's how you can present it to your administration so that they understand why you need to do it this way. And here's how you can develop some data or here's how you can visualize this for people who aren't in the classroom so that they can understand what's happening. And out of that, I personally started to do what I call indigenous data storytelling where I'm learning to take the data, whether it's physical data, data that is numerical or qualitative that had to make quantitative and create a story that people can understand. Right. Wow. I had the great privilege of joining your group there for a little bit last summer and hearing some of the great work you all had done. And one of the things I'd like to then talk about as well is you all even got into talking about what the success for our students look like down to the level of grading and ungrading. And you had many different things that you had tried. How did that either change your perspectives on things? How did it take a test? You get this percentage, you got this grade. How did looking at what success actually looks like change or complement what you were doing? That was a huge complement to the decolonization of the teaching practices. So that particular cohort, we were in a reading group called Grading for Equity. It is amazing. So that's my plug, like not getting any money from it, but look, if you can read it, if you can go to the class, if you can go to seminar, it is, and I'll say, we don't all agree on some of the things that were in the text of the Grading for Equity, but it definitely made you think about, am I really being intentional about what I'm reading? Or am I just grading the way that I've been graded? And most of us as educators, that's what we do. We aren't taught how to teach. We're just experts in our field. And then we go into the classroom and we're like, okay, I'm an expert. And what we've actually learned is that the experts, because you're so far removed from what it was like the first time you learned it, actually we ended up being like the worst teachers. Because it's so hard to remember what was it like the first time you did it? What would those struggles look like? How much space do you need? And how do you grade academic success without penalizing the learning process? And so that was what the Grading for Equity kind of opened up for all of us. It's that I have these learning outcomes on my syllabus that say, once you take my class, a successful student should be able to do XYZ. But are your grading practices in alignment with by the end of this class, if a student is struggling, and then by the mid semester, they are actually getting better and improving, are you actually grading the learning process and you're penalizing them for struggling at the beginning? And because of the way that the point system works for you, there's no way to recover, even though by the end of the semester, they can check off all of those learning objectives because they finished that journey. And yes, they can demonstrate that they can critical thinking, the problem solving, whatever those learning outcomes are for that particular course. But the grade that they get is more indicative of the struggle that they have. And so thinking about how do I want to assess my class so that I'm not penalizing the learning process. And for a lot of people, that looks really different. I mean, we've had conversations about what does extra credit look like? What are the point systems? Push back on different types of rubrics. It was really an opportunity for us to think about how do I want to be intentional so that I can say, what is the difference between a student who is an 87 and an 88? And if you can't describe that student, maybe you don't need 100 different designations, right? If there's no difference between the student who's an 87 and an 88, you need to just describe what that student learned, what has that student mastered and grade that. For us, it really kind of opened up that door of, okay, am I only grading because I feel like I need to put numbers here? Why am I grading? What am I grading? And are the things I'm grading really in alignment with what I'm saying are being learned in my syllabus? Very good. Because I've always thought of that is at the end, when someone looks at a transcript and they see a letter on there, what they think of is that's how well this student knows this topic. And yet the way we grade, it's not really what that letter represents. It represents whether they were on time with their assignments and whether they did this, this, or this. And they might've been missing some unimportant part, some busy work part stuff. Because I've had many students who they don't learn by doing the homework. Maybe they look at, somehow they do it. They do very well on the test, but if they never do the homework, then that's going to take them down. I'm actually a D student or a C minus student, right? And saying that a C minus student is a student who has subpar understanding of material, but that's not what that letter says, right? So we kind of push back, like we're not saying change it. We're just saying, why is your reason? We're saying be intentional about what that grade actually reflects. That grade is not a reflection of a student who knows 70% of the material. You need to change your learning outcomes to reflect what it is you are measuring. Yes, excellent. So again, grading for- Grading for equity. Grading for equity. Definitely, I'm going to join the program. Yes. Awesome, awesome. What about systematic mechanisms do you see? Now, you've been able to come over many of them because of the support you had at your institution. Maybe looking in the wider institutions of higher education across the country, what are some of the systematic mechanisms in there that prevent many of these opportunities that maybe don't need to be there? So from the student perspective or from the teaching perspective? For both. For both, yeah. Yeah, so right now I'm really centered on equity for educators, solely focused on that. Because I feel like for us, and I'll say this to anybody, I think that at Keweenaw Bay, we put our students first. Our students are everything. We will move mountains to make sure that if there is a need that is a barrier to them learning, we have figured that out from the student services perspective. As far as child care, financial burdens that may hinder students from being able to show up in class. I think for students, maybe this may not have been true prior to COVID. I know that when COVID first started, there was this disconnect between people who were like, I didn't sign up for an online class. And there's a lot of resistance to that. And just prior to COVID, there was still kind of like that joke, like, oh, you got your degree from online. You know, like it wasn't as credible if it was online or if it was remote. And then COVID happened, and it was like this necessity to provide 24-7 access or unlimited access to these resources so that students could have all the time that they needed to learn the material, to digest it, multiple modalities of how to submit material, right? So now you've got, I need to be able to do a presentation with my video on. I need audio equipment. I need to be able to interact with an interactive screen. I need tools to do that and to be able to demonstrate mastery so that I can get the grades that I need to. You've got different types of assessment, right? So for students, they needed access to multiple types of ways to demonstrate mastery because some of us were in communities where internet broadband was not good. And so if every single one of your lectures is video and audio, I mean, you're setting that particular group up for failure. Vice versa, you've got people who really need to have access to the notes in written form well in advance so that they can have time to actually read it before they come to your Zoom session or to your conference call or to interact in your Zoom group. And so for students, I think even though we're moving back into being in person and to being in these structured spaces, for students, we still have to provide all of those amenities that were like kind of extra before. Now they're neat. You know, COVID isn't over. The world that we live in now isn't changing back to the 2019 world. And so students still need access to all of those provisions that we provided before. They need multiple modalities to be able to interact with their instructor, to interact with their peers. We need to figure out how to make it in an interactive, engaging way because we are kind of like a Netflix and chill kind of community, right? I mean, a lot of people like to put their class on while they're doing their dishes and they're cooking and they're multitasking and there's lots of things going on so that they can be present in class, but they're not actually engaged in class. But if you don't have other tools to help to bring engagement, the only time I may have is when I'm cooking dinner. That is my two hours of time that I have to focus on this. And so making sure that as a class that I have access to those materials. So we're moving barriers like that where students don't have access to the tools that they need in order to learn the way that they need to learn. Then you have other dichotomies, right? You have the instructors. And I will say personally that during COVID when we were kind of told the next day, you will become an online instructor. I mean, some of us weren't even using our online portal other than to just enter in grades at the end of the semester. So, I mean, we have students that didn't even know where to go to find the information, let alone instructors who knew how to upload multiple modalities of audio, visual, go find YouTube tutorials, go find podcasts, go find these interactive PowerPoints where you can doodle where you and I are both drawing on the same screen and things like that. We as instructors, we just didn't, there wasn't enough time to learn all the things, let alone embed them into your teaching practices in two or three weeks and do it in a way that you were going to be happy with. Because I think when you make your syllabus, you have this, oh my goodness, we're going to like go on this journey together and it's going to be this beautiful and then the flowers are, you know, the rain is going to come and then the flowers are going to sprout, you know, because you've got to plant the seeds, you've got the dirt, and then the rain's going to come and we're going to struggle a bit and the flowers are going to come and then at the end of the semester, we're all going to be like, oh my goodness, we learned so much, we've grown so much. You don't have time to figure out how do I make these tools create that same end result. So, the support system for instructors looks a lot different because now we have YouTube. You can learn an entire degree program on YouTube, but it's not sorted that way. So, you have to find all of those resources and then you have to vet those resources and then you have to, for us, decolonize those resources in a way that you can use that's going to be meaningful, that's going to be in alignment with your value, as an instructor and your mission statement as a tribal college and community. Because, right, in higher education, it's like we want to grade it. How do you grade an experience? How do you grade how you made somebody feel? How do you grade how you improved someone's self-esteem and removed barriers to the learning? How do you grade that as an instructor? How do you figure out how to reduce anxiety and how do you grade that? Like, the reason why they were so successful is because they didn't have that anxiety. I didn't add more knowledge to their brain, but I removed that wall of, I don't know. And the only way to know is to ask the Googles. Or to ask the YouTube or to wait for Karen to tell me because she's the only one with the answer. How do you embed those into a high-flex, hybrid, online environment that, prior to 2019, was like a joke, right? Nobody would have taken an online certification seriously. Whereas now, it's like, no, that's how you do it. You go online, you get what you need, and then the practical, you go into the hospitals and do your online, your hands-on practical, or you go into the court system or whatever it is. This is how you do it. And having to, like, separate those mindsets that one type of learning environment is more valuable than the other. Right. And so, as you're speaking, I start seeing this sort of dichotomy that I'm always facing. There's a certain part, we're teaching a class that has content, and so we're looking for that content to be known. And yet, at the same time, we're working with people. And a large part of our goal, especially in Indigenous education, is human development, to help this person develop as a person, a moral person, a person in their community. And so I sometimes say, well, hopefully they pick up the content along the way. But my focus is, if they can become a good person, if they can get to where they want, that's really the success I'm looking for. But then we go back and forth. We want them to do both. We want them to get that content. But sometimes we focus, like you've been saying, too much on the content part. We lose the opportunity for human development. Maybe if we focus too much on the human development, we could lose sight of the content development. So we've got this struggling that we're doing. How do you see that fitting in your personal practice? Right. So in my personal practice, what it looks like is intentional grading practices, which for me has come full circle. I really thought, put these things in my syllabus and my students are going to totally shut down and we're going to resist it. And it's actually the opposite. I think that students appreciate knowing that when they have circumstances that they need to come to, that it's OK to have circumstances. And I personally had a circumstance. My son was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, which is a bone cancer in March of 2022. And my students saw me show up. They saw me teaching class from the hospital. They saw me on Zoom. They saw me driving 30 miles one way to do my lecture and answer their questions and then pack up and go back home so that I could be with my family. And that was a huge testimony to not only my commitment to them, but to the opportunities. They saw me show up. They saw me show up. They saw me put my family first and then they saw me show up. And then they watched me tell them, this is what I can do. We can do this and we can do this. Which would you like to choose? Would you like to meet on Zoom on Thursday or would you like to meet shortly after class? I showed up for them. And that in and of itself showed them that like, you're allowed to be human. You're allowed to be human. You're allowed to make mistakes. You're allowed to have circumstances, but you can still show up. You can still show up. And I'll be honest, I will tell anybody, I don't think that I was like the greatest teacher that I could have been. There was a lot of times when I was like, Lord, I want to focus more on this or I want to be better at this or I want to do better at this. But at the end of the day, I feel like everybody that was a part of that community, whether you were in my classroom or whether we were in professional development, they saw me show up. They saw me give. They saw me not over commit what I could do, but I always over delivered. I always over delivered. And it's possible. And that's all I ever wanted to be is just an example of what's possible. This is possible that you can do this. You can be a full time parent, full time caregiver. You can work full time, still get your degree. You can still show up and be the person that you want to be and still add value to your community. You can show up. And I think if anything, that's been like that kind of overarching. When I look back and like, I don't even know how I did it. You know, like my son and my husband and I were taking turns driving downstate in the hospital that my husband would have to fly to California for work. So then I'm having to find a family member to fly to the UP so that I can go downstate to be in the children's hospital. We're doing chemo and we're going back and forth. I mean, I just, but we showed up. We showed up and everybody had the space that they needed to get what they needed to get done. Wonderful. And just how is your son doing now? He's doing great. So osteosarcoma, you have to have the bone removed. So it was in his upper thigh. So we had one doctor's opinion that thought that the best option was to amputate his left leg. And he's 11, or, you know, he's 12 now, but I mean, that was devastating. And so we found a second opinion and they were able to save his leg. So he has a prosthetic in his thigh, but he has his full foot and his knee is his own. And we're hoping that this year he'll learn to walk again. So it's just, it's good. Thank you for asking. Sure. And so even you use problem solving, we don't take the first option. We look for a better option. And so that's the modeling you show to your students, is that whatever circumstances we have, we do the best. We don't make excuses, but we work within our circumstances and we do the best we can from within those circumstances. Awesome. So yes, I'm happy for your son's recovery. That's always good to hear that, the modeling. So with all of this, it's been a rich conversation we've had. And what kind of advice do you have to other educators, maybe like yourselves, who are working in a smaller community, maybe somewhat isolated, or to others who may be in larger communities? What would your advice be to educators who want to really help their students experience the success of learning and making their dreams come true? I think right now my mind is kind of leaning to pick the one thing. So we have seven grandfather teachings, we have the four directions, you know, we have growth mindset work. We also have like other kinds of teaching practices, but I would say you need to pick one thing. So when I first started, it was the four directions and that's the journey, right? And everything that I did was filtered through this journey. So in the four directions, you have, you can have the seasons. A lot of people like to use the seasons because there are seasons, but the seasons always come around and every season is necessary. You can't have the spring and then the summer, right? You have to have that dying season and then you have to have that growth and that rebirth and that reflourish. And even when you think about plants that grow on apple trees, the first year is like kind of puny and you don't want those apples, but the season still must change around that growth in order for it to flourish into something strong. And so if you wanted to use that as a framework, you stick with the four seasons and the four directions. And how does that framework demonstrate to my students that this is our season to struggle and that is normal, that we want you to struggle. We don't want you to be perfect and that when you start learning something, you're gonna be really bad at it and expect to be bad at it and be human about it. Like I want my students to know I'm gonna be really bad at this because this is the first time I've taught it and we're gonna laugh and we're gonna look back 10 years from now, we're gonna cringe, right? But make it part of that normalcy that you can struggle as an instructor, but that's part of that season and that your students, when you're embedding, you know, whatever this teaching practice is, whether you're teaching math or you might be teaching philosophy or you might be teaching problem solving or computer class or computation, embed that practice into a framework and everything goes through that same framework. And the ones you get really good at putting things through the framework of seasons, like, okay, this is our season to struggle. This is our season to flourish. This is our season to reflect, right? However you wanna make it, you know, have it go through that framework, then you can add other things. Like, you know, now I have seven grandfather teachings that I, you know, I talk about when I'm teaching something new and my students will say, I don't know. And I'll say, well, you know what? Did you realize that the words I don't know actually block wisdom? So what if you did know? Where would you go? Where do you go to find out? Because a lot of the things that we have today did not exist. They were an idea in somebody's mind. It didn't exist. And so if the only way that we could get internet and satellite and electricity is because of something that we already had in the past, we wouldn't have a lot of things that we have now. So don't say you don't know. You're figuring it out. And let's pretend like you did know. What would you do if you did know? And it's interesting when I use language like that, and that's from seven grandfather teachings. Students are like, well, I mean, I could try this. OK, let's try that. Well, I mean, well, let's see. I tried that. OK, well, I could try this. And all of a sudden, the world has opened up to all these possibilities. And that's what happens, right? You start with one framework. You filter everything through that framework. And then once you've exhausted that, then you try another one. And all of those frameworks and like I said, the things that I'm teaching, you don't have to teach in the math classroom. You could teach them anywhere, in any setting where a student or somebody that's learning is going to struggle and hit a block and go, I don't know. I have no idea. OK, but what if you did know? What would you do? What if failure wasn't there was no penalty for failure? What would you try? What would you go do if it didn't matter? If failing wasn't the most, you know, the most terrible thing in the world, what would you try? What would you go do? Just tell me. If you had all the money in the world and resources, what would you go get? What would you need? And from there, you start to get lots of ideas so that we can kind of get out of that unstuck mode. And so that would be my advice is come through one framework and exhaust everything you have through that framework and then add another. And then add another. Wonderful. Now I understand how your students have reduced their anxiety so much because you just reduced so much anxiety for me. I remember meeting with your cohort last summer and that was the end of a five-year grant, I think it was, that you all were in. And so you all had done such amazing work and I was feeling like, what am I going to start? There's so many things you guys have accomplished that I had never seen. And I'm thinking, I got to do this. And now you just reduced my anxiety because you said, just do one thing, start. And I can do that. And I see some areas. I think I'm going to start with that grading for equity and make that one of the things. And so, perfect. It's all those listening to hear, we all just need to try one thing. And I love those questions you ask. What if you did know? What if there was no, you know, let's open up these opportunities instead of blocking them down with this, oh, I can't do that. Because, you know. There's only one way and I don't know how to get there. And Karen's got the key and she's only going to get the key like two students because only two students can get A's. I mean, you would just, you would be enamored with a lot of the thoughts that people come into the classroom with. And they're borrowed thoughts. You know, I mean, it's borrowed thoughts because it is something that we're kind of taught that, you know, some of us are going to fail and some of us are going to do well. And Karen gets to pick, right? She's already, she's already predetermined who they are. And so I'm just going to sit and decide, you know, who am I going to be for her when really they get to decide. Right. Choice, choice. Very good. Well, I thank you so much, Karen. It's been a wonderful almost hour together with this great conversation. I look forward to the next time we serendipitously will meet somewhere. And hopefully I'd love to come visit up north there. Yeah. Wonderful. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.
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