Create Consistent Spaces for Reflection: Schedule Time with Colleagues That You Look Forward to (Like Lunch!)

There were, and still are, quite a few reflection rituals that make a tremendous difference in my teaching and learning life. Some of the deepest connections I've made with other humans happened during shared lunches with other teachers on my grade team.

When I was teaching elementary school in my later years of classroom life, I came to know this space as the most authentic one for my development—both personally and professionally. Every Thursday, a teacher who had been teaching for 20‐plus years hosted lunch in the classroom she shared with her co‐teacher, a newer teacher who brought great energy, curiosity, and humor to our shared table.

In this space, members of our fourth grade team would rotate in and out each week of the open invitation, always with at least four to five people present. Here, in conjunction with sharing interesting snacks and trading recipes, we asked each other questions we didn't necessarily feel comfortable surfacing in front of the entire teaching staff (we were in a group of approximately 100 teachers serving nearly 1,000 students!). Together, we learned skills and strategies that were more emergent and directly connected to our student community.

For example, I remember working through a new math curriculum with lots of “rich tasks” that were new to many of us. For some of us, the lessons would go terribly. We reported to our colleagues about students rolling around on the rug, or the students who would show expressions that mirrored our confused teaching.

I remember telling my colleagues how the new lessons “went” in terms of what I thought students left understanding (not a whole lot … was it possible that they left the math lesson at a deeper state of confusion than in which they started??). I'd ask how their students responded to similar work, or how they worked through the same problem set or task.

My colleagues' feedback was candid because after meeting every week for months (and, for some of us, years as we had been at the same school and grade team for quite some time), we trusted one another. This honesty came from the alchemy of teachers' genuine yearning to be better at their craft mixed with authentic sharing from people who worked toward similar goals.

We all wanted the student community to have better, more joyful, and more impactful learning experiences. We were all deeply interested in creating stronger pedagogy where students became more proficient in their foundational math, literacy, and critical thinking skills while staying true to their identities along the way.

Establish Routines and Rituals with Colleagues: Purposefully Work Toward Shared Vision and Illuminate Individual Strengths

Another powerful component of reflective practice I developed throughout my teacherhood was the ability to develop a shared vision with my co‐teachers. This manifested through a series of ritualistic daily check‐ins, weekly planning sessions, and even frequently attended happy hours! Throughout my teaching career, the relationships I've developed in the many classroom spaces is one of the most important markers of my pedagogy. The camaraderie and fellowship that my fellow teachers and I cultivated had a profound impact on the families and students we served. It also changed our ability to sustain and grow the kinds of goals we had for our teaching and learning lives.

This work does not happen automatically, and it is different than a teaching friendship. Cultivated camaraderie and shared vision grows from intentional and meaningful planning from teachers who share a school community. It doesn't happen overnight, nor does it just happen when teachers share a hallway together or sit next to each other at staff meetings.

This is where rituals and routines come in: they are a key element for developing a collaborative reflective practice. For example, in the teacher groups I have worked in, we used a variety of protocols to surface our personal needs, cultural orientation, and values. As we got to know each other and our students, we spent time cocreating shared visions for our classroom communities, including individual strengths and students' interests. Additionally, we took great interest in developing our place‐based pedagogy and how the world was positioned around us.

Our vision for our classroom was cocreated with our students and their families as well.

The rituals and routines we established allowed for us to not only work toward shared understanding, but also to name what wasn't going well, concerning practices, and/or parts of a lesson that triggered pain points for individuals or groups of people. Below are suggested steps that support building a more collaborative reflective practice and establishing routines and rituals.

• Determine in which context you'll be collaborating. This could be within a grade team, a subject‐area department team, or perhaps in a smaller context such as a partnership within a co‐teaching environment. Maybe it's just a friend who you enjoy working with who shares the same students, or students who are similar to those in your class/es. Whomever you choose to collaborate with, they should be a person or people who you are working with in a similar school or the same school community. You should also be able to schedule meetings with them regularly (preferably baked into your teaching schedule already!).
• Agree to document some reflective experiences beforehand. For example, before you begin spending any kind of significant time together, spend time doing inner work by developing an identity map and/or zooming in on a few moments within your personal school history timeline (see Historical Underpinnings section online). While it will not be necessary to share your reflective artifacts fully during your first few meetings, it will be important to have the foundational mindset of who you are in place. The inner work of identity mapping and timeline pedagogy in the context of personal history of school allows you to consider your identity markers and how they matter in your teaching and learning life.
• Schedule a first meeting during which you state your beliefs and values for the work you do. See the lesson plan in Chapter 3 for surfacing needs and values, which is the perfect protocol to do this work.

Another example of this work is featured below: documenting a team's Values‐Practice Connection by sharing anecdotes that demonstrate their foundational values. There, you will find examples of story snippets that match the values of a team during one of their initial collaborative reflective sessions.

The Values‐Practice Connection

This team began with the short, poignant question that defines an educator's everything in terms of how they operate in school communities: “What are your values?”. This team surfaced their values through story, strengthening their core collective belief system within their community. The Center for Nonviolent Communication has an excellent resource to support people in naming their values available on their website, called the “Needs Inventory”.

Later, each individual worked to clarify their values in alignment to their practice (as a verb!), especially when working toward the shared goals of the team's community. In Table 4.1, find the shared value set created during this period of time. We call this the Values‐Practice Connection.

Move Away from Static Meeting Agendas: Complicating What We Mean When We Say “The Work”

Embracing multiliteracies like talk story is an important component of teaching and learning methodology, especially through the lens of engagement. In many classrooms, administrative meetings, and other professional learning experiences, the idea of “chit‐chatting” or passing along stories orally is seen as separate from “the real work,” the Work with a capital “W.” As I've grown my own pedagogy in partnership with many students, teachers, and families over the years, I've had lots of opportunities to witness how both low stakes (e.g., a description of what one ate for breakfast) and high stakes (e.g., a description of a conflict one personally experienced in school) oral storytelling takes a powerful role in shaping learners' growth.

As a teacher who has grappled with, explored, and taught through multiple forms of literacy experiences, I'd heard of and practiced oral history projects with students. We learned about folktales and griots. Even as a kid, when I sat around the campfire (literally) and listened to my family tell ghost stories, I walked away a changed person.

To this day, with each community of learners I have worked with as a classroom teacher, whether they were in my elementary school classroom, high school advisory, or graduate class sitting with me at Teachers College, we built community circle time together to share parts of our stories.

Sometimes, the sharing would be something basic, like what students were looking forward to in the week. Other times, it would be something more emotive, like an appreciation about a specific peer. There were also times when the sharing was more restorative, like when members of the class experienced a problem or crisis together.

It wasn't until I started working with two different groups in a professional context that I learned just how powerful and important talk story is to a group's ability to grow and learn from one another. First, my partner, Cornelius, and I have worked with a wide network of teachers in Kapolei, Hawai'i, to support them in building their literacy practices. Second, I worked with a group called Breaths Together for Change (mentioned in Chapter 1) with the goal of ending racism through white racial reckoning.

While I could go on for a very long time about the potency of my learning in each context, my goal here is to underscore what those two groups had in common that lent themselves to not necessarily just my own personal growth, but, more importantly, the connectivity within the group and a stronger version of collective purpose.

To talk story, or mo'olelo in Hawai'i, is to pass wisdom through the spoken word. It is a pidgin phrase that comes from the ‘Ōlelo language, a tradition that comes from an Indigenous knowledge‐base, and, to this day, is part of the daily life in Hawai'i and other Pacific Islands.

Rosa Say, author of Managing with Aloha, describes the concept of talk story:

Our Hawaiian ancestors did not pen a written history of our islands. Information was passed generation to generation orally, with the ‘Ōlelo (the language and spoken word) and in storytelling. Today there is much effort in our Hawaiian renaissance to record what we know about our past history before the kūpuna (our elders) forget and can no longer tell it to us. Still today, for us to communicate and dialogue is to “talk story.” There is so very much I personally have learned from the ‘Ōlelo form of teaching, perhaps most of all that anyone who speaks has the potential to be my teacher. I only need listen as well as I can, quieting the voices in my own head (Say and Fiske 2019).

My favorite part of Rosa Say's description of talk story is the part when she says that anyone who speaks has the potential to be her teacher, so long as she is able to listen. Talk story offers us an important frame to situate ourselves when we sit down to learn in the educational spaces we work within.

In Breaths Together for Change, each meeting was centered around participants' personal stories in connection to meditations we listened to. In the Hawai'i educator group Cornelius and I facilitated in partnership with educators from the community, we adopted a similar approach that was heavily influenced by mo‘olelo, or talk story, as modeled by our Hawai'i education partners.

In any group I have led or been a part of, the creation of space for the telling of stories served as impetus for not just change, but also for the hope of creating something better. Creating space for the telling of our stories is a proclamation of joy, and while storytelling might feel like a subversive thing to do in a professional learning experience (and maybe in some places or institutions it is), it as an important step toward learning that impacts communities on both personal and professional levels.

The Six‐Word Story

Not everybody will feel comfortable with sharing their stories. Some might even think it inappropriate in the workspace. If you aren't sure how storytelling will be received in the space you're creating for teaching and learning, the six‐word story is a great place to start.

The first time I experienced six‐word stories was with fifth grade students during a memoir‐writing unit. I had been gifted a small book of six‐word memoirs, which inspired an internal excavation of other six‐word story websites and generators. I shared several six‐word stories with the fifth graders, and then challenged the students to write a story about themselves using only six words. At first, they were delighted, especially the students who typically groaned after writing their third sentence. However, soon after the activity started, they grew pleasantly weary … encompassing yourself in so few words is hard!

That's the beauty of the six‐word story. Rather than bucketing energy in grammar, long sentences, and expressive language, the locus of energy is instead put on finding just a few words to describe an experience, event, or even oneself.

I smiled at that memory when I experienced six‐word stories in the Breaths Together for Change adult learning space. At the end of every single session, after we spent almost the entire time talking story, we were asked to document our learning experiences from the session through a photo, captioned with a six‐word story in an online archive.

Throughout the year, we met each month. During our last meeting, we had the opportunity to view the trajectory of our growth, as well as others in the group, by reading through a year's worth of six‐word stories matched with photos in the online archive we created. Some people captioned their photos to further illuminate the connectivity in their stories to their experience.

Typically, when learning is deep and emotional, human capacity for downloading new information decreases. Capturing the essence of learning in fewer words matched with visuals is a more practical and precise way to synthesize individual and group experiences as opposed to reading lengthy testimonials. It is also more practical from a time constraint and/or scheduling point of view.

To use the six‐word story as a storytelling device that promotes learning and growth individually and collectively, consider the following moments and goals to implement this practice:

1. Opening up a meeting with students or other colleagues: Use a six‐word story to describe your morning/how you are feeling today/what you are looking forward to today/what's not going well today.
2. Assessing a learning experience: Use a six‐word story to describe your learning today. Optional: use a photo that connects to or represents your six‐word story. For groups meeting consistently over time, consider including a six‐word story with a photo after each meeting. Some people may wish to expand their story, captioning their photo with a descriptive connection.
3. Envisioning a more just and joyous space: Use a six‐word story to describe what a more just and joyful space would be like for you. Optional: include an image that represents your story. Also, consider weaving the six‐word stories together to create an amalgamation of stories that reflect a collective vision. Post this work somewhere public and visible to hold one another accountable for maintaining and building that shared vision throughout time.

Below, see six‐word story examples from educators in Kapolei, Hawai'i, that exemplify a year's worth of their learning in literacy professional development with my organization, The Minor Collective. This group was accustomed to talking story, and my partner, Cornelius, and I actually learned how to refine this teaching and learning craft from the participants in this group.

On our last meeting date of the year, we (Cornelius and I) first invited them to talk story in small groups. We used the prompts in Figure 4.2 to catalyze their story telling.

After the group of educators engaged in talking story in small groups using the prompts from Figure 4.2, we then invited them to document their stories using the six‐word story device with a representative photo and connective descriptions (option 2 from the earlier goals). In addition to the photo, we also asked them to write a small connective paragraph between their photo and their story to further expand on their thinking. We gave them approximately 15 minutes to work independently. Following are some of their six‐word stories. Find a template to create six‐word stories with your community at https://www.kassandcorn.com/teachingfiercely/.

This relates to the conversation I had in breakout groups. Working with incoming Freshmen this year, students have missed out on that growth period within the middle school environment due to being out of school for nearly two years. So students have had to go from an elementary mindset to a high school mindset so quickly. My six‐word story relates to us teachers and students keeping up the fight. To keep going and persevere in such crazy times.

—Teacher, Sophia Carba, Hawai'i

Earlier this year, an elementary librarian sent me a book that she felt was inappropriate for an elementary library. The book Heartstopper Volume 2 is a YA graphic novel featuring queer characters that is being turned into a Netflix series. All 35 of my students in my Gender Sexuality Alliance Club borrowed and read that 1 book in only 2 weeks.

They all shared that our library doesn't have any books about LGBTQ+ folks, and they can't even check out books. Our community library isn't supportive of students spending time there either. Seeing how much the students loved the book, I wrote a DonorsChoose grant to get the full series, books 1–4 and they arrived yesterday. The kids were instantly in love and instead of a GSA meeting, they just wanted to read and share the books together.

I'm not an ELA teacher anymore, so to have kids all over my room sharing books, like they might have in pre‐COVID times, felt special. For an inclusive future that's better for everyone, kids need to see themselves in literacy. When they can't see themselves in books, it's our job as teachers to help them find access to diverse reading material.

I'm also acknowledging that these books are NOT welcome everywhere in our nation, so it's critical that kids know an inclusive future is possible. I've been scared for the mental health of my LGBTQ+ students, and I need them to know a better world is coming, because teachers like us will help build it.

—Sarah “Mili” Milianta‐Laffin, Teacher, Ilima Middle School, Kapolei, Hawai'i

Cocreating a Shared Vision

Sometimes when we collaborate, we are only working with one other person. They might be a “teacher bestie.” Or maybe they are the person you've been matched up with by your school administration, and you are teaching in the same classroom with the same group of kids every day. No matter if you are best friends or complete strangers, these shared reflective practices are important. The students you teach will be able to read your connection or lack thereof. Whether or not you are on the same page is very clear to the children you teach, and when there is dissonance between the grown‐ups they rely on for safety and community, they will absorb that dissonance, resulting in confusion, chaos, or worse.

The Shared Vision exercise shown in Figure 4.3 is one way to initiate powerful collaboration, surfacing not just fundamental teaching philosophy beliefs, but also, what you imagine and hope to practice in your instruction, and in developing your classroom community.

Whether or not you are self‐initiating this collaborative reflection for your own teaching or facilitating it with others, it's a powerful exercise to frame an integrated source of strength that can evolve throughout the year, serving as a point of reference for who you are, what you believe in, and what you are working towards.

In Figures 4.4 and 4.5, see examples of similar work that was facilitated during a co‐teaching institute by myself and my former colleague, Dr. Katie Ledwell, with the Teachers College Inclusive Classrooms Project.

• Determine a weekly time you will meet. This is really important. At the beginning of the school year, a lot of excitement is generated with fresh starts and new people, but as the year moves on, people tend to disconnect and meet less frequently. Choosing a weekly time that you and your partner/s will commit to is integral for a routine to become ritualized, that is, marks of your collaboration that you and your partner/s begin to embody.
• Mark the times on your calendars during the meeting. I personally love a shared Google calendar because it allows all people involved to see the event, share attachments and links easily, and also notify meeting participants of any changes in meeting time, place, or structure.
• Hot tip: Google has an excellent “Workspace Learning Center!” Whenever I can't figure out how to do something on Google, I go to support.google.com, and explore the very user‐friendly interface. In Google calendaring, they have helpful tutorials like “What can you do with Calendar?” and “Share your calendar with someone.”
• Other popular web calendars like Apple's Ical are also great, but they tend to be less accessible, especially for those who aren't using an Apple device. Google calendar is available and free on all devices.
• Establish a planning routine. When I wasn't able to stay at school past 3:30 p.m. due to grad school classes in the evening or having to pick up my kids from daycare by 4:00 p.m., my planning routines with my colleagues got really real. If I didn't use my time wisely during the school day, it meant I would be staying up after hours, way past my bedtime, to finish planning and/or preparing for the next day. After one too many late nights, I began to get a lot more intentional about how I spent my teacher prep periods.
• These habits have been long‐lasting, even as my discretionary time evolves.
• At the beginning of each meeting with my collaboration partners, I began to ask what we wanted to accomplish during our time together. After we named those components, we then prioritized what was most important to work on together, and what could be done individually if we ran out of time.
• After that, we did the important work of discussing parts of our shared vision; we weren't just pontificating about our hopes and dreams or hashing out our frustrations because we could talk a good game, or because venting felt pleasant.
• Rather, our conversations were rooted in the daily lived experience of classroom life, including noticings and wonderings we had based on kids' contributions within class, or their worrisome silence. We'd surface current events in light of the curricular themes we had planned on building, and change course if we needed to. We'd take stock of various strategies we were trying, and determine what was working and what wasn't by looking at artifacts and evidence like student work, or family and caregiver's feedback.
• In Figure 4.6, find an example of a co‐planning routine I developed that helped me and my teaching partners organize our thinking, prioritize tasks, and build ideas intentionally while considering the needs of our classroom community. I created this routine when I was working in several co‐teaching relationships, that is, every day I taught with these teachers at the same time in the same classroom.