The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Director of the Educator Community Sari Laberis.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Humanizing Data: Strategies for Inclusive Classrooms with Brooklin Trover
Ever wondered how you can humanize data to better understand and support your students? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Brooklin Trover, Senior National Director of Content and Implementation at Curriculum Associates, as she shares innovative strategies to transform raw data into meaningful insights. Brooklin delves into the importance of discussing data openly with students to normalize the conversation and shift the focus towards their growth areas. She challenges the traditional practice of labeling students with colors and offers practical tips to ensure that educators see their students as individuals, not just data points.
In the second half, we tackle the critical issue of access in education. Brooklin shares insights from her colleague, Naneka Brathwaite, on how to provide all students with equitable access to grade-level instruction, regardless of their starting point. We discuss effective scaffolding techniques that ensure no student is left behind and emphasize the importance of inclusivity when analyzing data at the beginning of the academic year.
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Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!
Welcome back to Season 5 of the Extraordinary Educators podcast. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you had a restful and relaxing summer and you are ready to dive in. Whether you started the year or you start soon, we are wishing you much success as you welcome a new class of students this fall. So for today, I spoke with Brooklyn Trover, one of our incredible national directors. She is the Senior National Director of Content and Implementation at Curriculum Associates and she just dives right into humanizing data, as you are getting a lot of data back from this beginning of your time, you know, with different assessments and surveys and preferences from your students, really thinking about your mindset around that data, how you're categorizing kids in your classroom and really remembering that at the end of the day, they are people just like us. So I'm really excited for you to hear my conversation with Brooklyn here it is. Welcome Brooklyn. It is so great to have you back on the podcast. Thank you, sari.
Speaker 1:Good to be here, awesome. Well, we are kicking off this season with all things back to school, so it is the beginning of the school year. It is well underway for some folks and you know educators are administering their assessments, they're getting data. What are some things that are on your mind as we head back into this back to school season?
Speaker 2:Well, besides, like school drop-off duty, because that's a nightmare. Yeah, all things getting going. It just reminds me so much of how we get to know our students and you know there's those favorites little sheets they fill out and it's the surveys from their families, families and it's the assessment data that you're getting to and just that reminder that the students are a whole package that continues to evolve. And you know thinking about how you continue to get to know your students over time, at the details.
Speaker 1:Right, it's in the details yes, absolutely, and as teachers are getting all of that data whether it's their preferences, what students like to do in their free time, what their favorite color is, you know, as well as their academic data. What are some helpful strategies or tips that you're thinking about as teachers wrap their head around all of this information about all of their students?
Speaker 2:I would definitely say to add time in as much as you can, because a little more now will help you in the long run to talk with your students about it.
Speaker 2:You know some people think, oh, you have to have data chats of any kind in one-on-one format, and it's just not true. You can, you certainly can, but you can also do small group and you can also do whole class talks about data conversations and have students talk to each other. You know, putting up prompts on the screen after diagnostic results, you know, and everyone has their own scores in front of them, thinking like for an upper grade class and giving questions to the kids or what they want to work on this year and why. Then you have a whole room full of kids talking about their own data with each other and really brings down, you know, the I'm not good at this area and turns it into what am I working on next, you know, and it's those kinds of moves that really place the emphasis on what we're about to learn, what we're ready to learn next, and for teachers, for the instruction, instead of just putting kids into groups and colors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and I think, too, it's a nice way to normalize just talking about data and you know, everyone's great at something and we're all working towards something and kind of reiterate the point of the assessment to begin with, right, which is to understand what you know, what you need to know, and you just mentioned colors. So I want to, I want to dive a little bit more into that. We know that when and you know, both of us have been former educators when you get the data back, it's almost like a traffic light. You see the green, the yellow and the red, and as you're in classrooms and talking with educators, you know and especially focused on COVID recovery still, you're hearing and seeing some things that you would like to shift a bit. So, if you don't mind, just kind of adding a little more color.
Speaker 2:It is, hands down, my mission to continue to talk to educators at all levels administrators, superintendents, teachers, you know aides to think about our students as the people that they are, and those data points which are color coded for ease of use to push us quickly into what's next. And what's next is instruction. And so when we hear the labeling of people with colors, like my red group or something like that, you know, I just challenge everybody to reframe that and say you know, my students who are getting instruction in this area, or my students who are getting needing the below level supports? Okay, they're students first and, yes, they need those tier three interventions or below level supports, or scaffold integrate level or extra regroup lesson. The red, the yellow, the green that's instruction and not this human.
Speaker 1:Right, right. So what do you say? I'm a teacher and I'm in the teacher work room, you know, grabbing my morning coffee or whatnot, and I hear someone who's definitely not, you know, doesn't have ill intentions, but they say something like oh, I'm going to pull my red students today to work on addition while the rest of the class is doing multiplication. Do you have any worksheets for that? Or something you know. You get that kind of pit feeling in your stomach and then what? How do, how does a teacher help shift that narrative in their building?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a good mission for all of us, and I think there's a couple different approaches For me. I'm a humor person, so I would joke and be like red students what, everybody's wearing red shirts in there today, right. Like, lighten it up, it's awareness, right. And then, second, just lead with example when you respond. Just say it the way that humanizes the kids. Be like, oh for my tier three instruction or my red instruction.
Speaker 2:I usually use this with my students and just put the word students in there as much as you can. There's no reason especially for ill-intentioned people, you know, to call it out, but it might be something to bring up. If you have the comfort at your PLC, you know just that mission to always put the humans first, and it really does change things. It changes perspective, it changes motivation. It's that subliminal push to be better. One more layer, siri, that I just can't stop thinking about is when people label the green students, and that's really weird, because tier one instruction is for everybody. Everyone needs access to tier one instruction, and so in a sense, everybody would be a green student and some would also be yellow and some would also be red, because that's the way RTI works. So it's just you know. Another layer of even separating on-level students does them a disservice because they need extensions and other pieces them a disservice because they need extensions and other pieces, so Right.
Speaker 1:And you don't want to exclude the kids who aren't there yet, because they also need exposure to grade level content, right. So I thought we could do a little game here where I say something talking about you know the, the way in which you don't want to hear educators kind of labeling their students and then you can provide a different way to say that same phrase. Great idea, let's see how I do. Perfect. So I am a teacher who does small group intervention and I say I'm not seeing my red students as much as I should.
Speaker 2:So I'm the regular teacher, right? So I'm gonna be like, oh, thank you, I'm so glad that you're you're motivated to see those students more. Which group are you talking about? Right, just flipped it away. I didn't even say the color, yep.
Speaker 1:All right, I am either a grade level chair or leading a PLC and I say we have to move those yellow kids to green.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm with you. I want to give less, you know, have less kids in that tier two support. What do you think we should be focusing on for our instruction? All instruction and kids, right, no colors.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep, all right, one more here.
Speaker 2:All right, I'm giving it my best shot.
Speaker 1:So we're at a grade level meeting and you hear a teacher say let's group all of the red students for our small group instruction.
Speaker 2:Which kids are red? Come on, they're kids. Let's take a look at our. Let's take a look at our reports. I'm sure we can have a good time in our day to get these kids some intense instruction.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you so much for that, brooklyn. That's really helpful, and if you are listening and you do this, share with us. Let us know how it goes in your school community. So, before we close out, brooklyn, I want to touch upon something else that you talked about in your recent blog, and we'll link the blog in the show notes here.
Speaker 2:But you know, color coding aside, this is also an equity issue, right, and so if you can just, you know, provide a little more detail there and talk about what that means to you, yeah, I continue to learn from all my colleagues, but one that has truly helped me a lot in this area is my colleague who's the other author on this blog, and it's the layer of really thinking about access.
Speaker 2:You know, what we're seeing with the COVID recovery is that gains, although they're being made, are still not up to where we were historically, and in marginalized communities it's even more, in different groups it's even more, and so that light bulb going off on you know, if you're starting at a further place back than others, you have further to go, and although we know this in our head, we often don't visualize it, and so I think about it like a starting line.
Speaker 2:You want kids to get access to grade level instruction. That's every third grade teacher's dream out there right, when some kids are already at grade level instruction and some kids aren't, what are you going to do? That's different for those kids. That's the equity that we don't think about. Not everyone's starting on the same starting line, and I've really tried to absorb some of the pieces that Nandika talks about of just considering what you can do to scaffold in so that you're not denying grade level instruction, that instead you are providing access to it, and that's a mission we can all think about as we're looking at data at the start of the year.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and we are just going to end it on that note, Brooklyn, because I don't think we can say anything else that's more powerful than that. So thank you so much as always for being here, and we really appreciate hearing from you. Thanks so much, sir. Get inspired by following us on social media and please tag us in your posts on X at Curriculum Asoce and on Instagram at my Eye Ready. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest or if you want to be a guest, email extraordinaryeducators at cainccom. Please subscribe where you listen to podcasts and if you'd like to help more educators, just like you, join the conversation and please leave a review. Remember, be you be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educators Podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates, editing by Shane Lowe, social media by Atsiti Hannan, guest booking by Sari LaBeris and production by Haley Browning. This podcast is copyrighted. Materials and intellectual property of Curriculum Associates.