Transforming School Culture, with Dr. Anthony Muhammad

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [0:00]
Every system has a culture, and it's a set of agreements they make on how to operate. The culture is how you do things around here, and it's either productive and making things better, or it's counterproductive and keeping you stagnant or making you regress. And of all change, changing the culture is the most challenging.

Rena Clark [0:23]
The topic for today's podcast is transforming school culture with Dr. Anthony Muhammad.

Unpacking Education is brought to you by AVID. AVID believes in seeing the potential of every student. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark [0:41]
Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education.

Rena Clark [0:52]
I'm Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann [0:54]
I'm Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin [0:56]
And I'm Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann [0:59]
And we're here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music with Rena's Children [1:04]
Education is our passport to the future.

Opening Quote and Discussion

Rena Clark [1:08]
So our quote today is from Dr. Anthony Muhammad, and it is from a podcast conversation that he was having with Aaron Keith Hawkins. Dr. Muhammad says, "A school shifts from stagnation or regression to progress when it becomes student-centered as opposed to adult-centered."

All right, Winston, Paul, what do we think?

Winston Benjamin [1:37]
I agree, but without saying that I agree, I think the important part about it is that the goal is to prepare students for their future. If we prepare somebody for the future, and I already live my life—I got my degrees, I got my bills, I'm already in adult space—that's not really preparing me for that opportunity again.

I just think it's important to get out of the way of the future. And I think this is a really great way to really put people in the place of: whose future are we really thinking about, and how do we really engage those individuals with their future? So I love that quote.

Paul Beckermann [2:16]
Yeah, being student-centered is the key to everything, right? I mean, school's about the kids. It's why we're there. It's our mission. Rena, you always talk about keeping our eye on the North Star. There's no greater North Star in the school than the students themselves.

When we keep our eyes on them, we can see what works. We can see what helps them grow. We can see when we have to change course. Being student-centered—that's the key for me. I love that.

Rena Clark [2:43]
Yeah, see, now you got me thinking they're the sun and we need to revolve around them.

Paul Beckermann [2:46]
Oh, there you go! The sun is a star, so it's okay.

Rena Clark [2:51]
Yes, that works. That works. I like it.

Guest Introduction

Well, I am really excited today because we have Dr. Anthony Muhammad with us on the podcast. Dr. Muhammad is an educational consultant who I was privileged to be able to see at a conference and reached out to. I was excited that he would join us. He's a best-selling author. He served as a teacher, assistant principal, and principal, and he is recognized as one of the leading experts in the areas of school culture and Professional Learning Communities at Work. So we know that in many educational areas as PLC.

So welcome, Dr. Muhammad!

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [3:32]
Thank you. Thank you. It's an honor to be here. I appreciate you all inviting me as a guest on the podcast, and I want to thank your listeners for tuning in. Hopefully we can share some things today that will add some value to their lives and to their professional practice.

Rena Clark [3:49]
Yes! And so we always like to ground ourselves in just taking a moment to know a little bit more about our guest that's here with us. So if you can just tell us a little bit more about yourself to go beyond that little intro I did.

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [4:03]
Absolutely. Well, I grew up in the Midwest. I'm a native of Flint, Michigan, and started my teaching career in 1990. One of the things I pride myself on is that I've continued my original mission of using education as an outlet for my activism.

Growing up in Flint and watching deindustrialization—a city going from nearly 100,000 manufacturing jobs to under 8,000 in a matter of 10 years—you rip 90% of any economic sector out of any community, and it's going to crumble. And then to have that coupled with mass incarceration and the influx of crack cocaine, education seemed like the perfect way to save the youth of today from what my friends experienced, because they weren't prepared for that tsunami of deindustrialization that hit the Midwest and made many towns like my hometown a ghost town.

So I spent eight years as a teacher, and I spent nine years as a school administrator—two as an assistant and seven as a principal. As a principal, I ran into and was exposed to Professional Learning Communities at a conference, just like you, and I really found a pathway or structure to execute my activism. I always wanted to, as an institution, have deep, predictable, positive impact on children. But what I discovered was desire wasn't enough. You needed methodology. You needed a structure. You needed a system.

And PLC was just a perfect marriage for my ideology, my ambition, and I had a staff that was willing to take that walk with me. We evolved—this is in metro Detroit—we moved from being considered a dropout factory to a National Blue Ribbon School.

In 2007, my late mentor, the late Dr. Rick DuFour, asked me to join him because we were one of the early adopters to help other schools and districts duplicate the same type of transformation. And this is where I got introduced to the concept of culture, because what I realized was I was sharing success stories and tools with people who didn't have the same core values or the same ambition.

So, as I mentioned, PLC was the structure for an intrinsic desire. What I figured out was some people are allies in that, and others need some support in moving towards that ambition. Because I look at a structure or a practice as a tool, but the artisan or the technician is as important as the tool, and you need both if you're going to get progress.

So I've had an interesting journey. It's all developed organically because I just got tired of seeing kids like me get the short end of the stick because they weren't prepared for a world that was ever-changing and evolving.

Winston Benjamin [7:25]
Thank you for your work and your continued work. I think sometimes, as we get in education—especially with me—there are times when I feel I'm working for the dark side, right? To your point about the school-to-prison pipeline, having to walk students out to officers sometimes makes me feel that I am part of that monster. And I appreciate that there's a level of action that you spoke about.

But one of the things that I wanted to try to see if we can gather around and try to put boundaries around this conversation: through your experience, what are some of the biggest problems or challenges you see that schools are facing today? And as a part of that, how do we begin to address these challenges and initiate change? You saw something in the '90s, you made action. What is some of the advice you can give us about taking action?

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [8:31]
Great question. Well, schools are really just a microcosm of the environment in which they operate. So what I saw in the school system in Flint was just symptomatic of what's going on in the community at large. I don't know how a person would expect that if you're in a dysfunctional environment, that the schools would somehow be shielded from that.

I like to lean on research and evidence because I can give my opinion, but Merrimack College every year does what's called the State of the Teaching Profession Report. This is just from the professional standpoint. And as of last year, only 18% of American teachers reported being satisfied with their jobs.

The four top reasons for the dissatisfaction:

Number one was the politicization of the profession. There used to be a very clear mandate: we accept all, we educate all. But we've had an influx of activist boards of education, small groups of provocateurs in the community who push for a certain agenda or certain ideology. Teachers don't want to be treated like political footballs.

Number two is the mental health of their students. It started before COVID, but COVID was an inflection point. So not only do I have to watch what I say and walk on eggshells, but my students are traumatized from the environment in which they operate.

We can add to that social media and smartphones. There have been several studies that saw the rapid decline of student mental health starting around 2014 with the mass production and distribution of smartphones. Then you add to that continuous access to social media, which is a rabbit hole. There's a study just released last week about how social media impacts human cognition. So not only are they getting these unrealistic social expectations from social media, the incessant scrolling and the brain rot makes it difficult for them to deeply engage with their learning.

And another statistic: as of last year, truancy has tripled since COVID, and number two reason is depression, and number four reason is anxiety. So two of the top four reasons that kids are missing school are mental health issues. Before COVID, they weren't in the top 25.

Number three reason was student behavioral concerns, which should be natural. If my mental health isn't secure, I'm going to misbehave.

And then number four was low wages—rapid inflation, mass increases in rent and affordability and groceries.

So you take a group of people who feel as if they're disrespected and unimportant, and political agendas are more important, with kids who are more traumatized and needier than ever, which isn't their fault, but we need to be equipped to respond, and then you pay people very low wages. I just don't know if that's a good cocktail for improvement.

Paul Beckermann [11:53]
Well, and all of that feels like a culture shift, really—almost a societal culture shift—but even in our schools. And I know you've written a lot about culture. In fact, you write about the four subcultures of a school. You talk about Believers, Tweeners, Survivors, and Fundamentalists. Do you want to talk about that and maybe what that is and what impact that has on school culture?

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [12:18]
Sure. Well, to get some context for it: as a consultant with what had been affirmed by most legitimate researchers as a very legitimate reform initiative—Professional Learning Communities—and dealing with some schools where you just couldn't get to first base, I theorized that something must be wrong with their culture.

So I did a study that became Transforming School Culture. But in my literature review, I ran into the work of Willard Waller. Willard Waller was a sociologist from the early 20th century, and he wrote a book in 1932 called The Sociology of Teaching. He was the first one to really describe the culture of a school and its impact on its productivity.

He described school culture as a war of ideology. And he said there were two critical combatants in this war: a group that he called the Traditionalists—people who coveted the system exactly the way that it was—and they were at war with what he called the Innovators. Innovators were those who were futuristic. They saw the system could evolve, that change was not the enemy. Change was the gateway to improvement.

When I studied these 34 schools, I witnessed the same tug-of-war, but I also witnessed two additional subcultures. So in my framework, I didn't call them Traditionalists and Innovators. I call them Believers and Fundamentalists. But I also found two other subcultures that Waller did not identify in his work that were more minor contributors, but very dependent on the health or the toxicity of the culture. Those two subcultures are called the Tweeners and the Survivors.

Now, the Tweeners are those who are new to our system. I'm going to go back to Roland Barth and his work on culture. Roland Barth says an organization's culture he describes as "how we do things around here." So every system has a culture, and it's a set of agreements they make on how to operate.

Let me give an example. Let's say I work—we work in the same school, and we have an agreement within the school that I have total autonomy on curricular outcomes or curricular standards. That's an agreement. I'm the teacher. I'm the authority. So then what happens when somebody introduces power standards or guaranteed viable curriculum? "Around here, how we do things is that when a student misbehaves, we send them to the office for punishment." Well, then what's the reaction when you're introduced to PBIS or AVID or restorative practices?

So every culture develops a set of norms, values, and traditions. The Traditionalists—whom I call the Fundamentalists—benefit from that. And the Believers believe that they should always be reflected upon and challenged, because if the system or habit is counterproductive, it needs to be changed for the benefit of the student.

A Tweener is someone who's new to your system who doesn't understand how things go around here. They become easy prey of Fundamentalists because of their level of innocence and naivety. They're open to the type of educator we'd like to be, but they can be influenced by those who see them as a potential ally. What I found was Fundamentalists tend to be much more active socially with their influence, where Believers tended to choose flight often over fight.

And the Survivors were whom we refer to in the literature as burned out. These are people who have been overwhelmed and have become almost casualties of how we do things around here. They've experienced initiative fatigue. They don't know how to respond to students' needs, and they just withdraw.

Well, obviously, if your culture is healthy, you'll prevent the development of Survivors, and you can socialize your Tweeners into being productive members of your culture. So Waller, in his analysis, didn't see those two subcultures emerge where I did, but we're in alignment with where the real action is: between those who are advocates of improvement—and you can't decouple improvement from change. They're connected, but change is always inconvenient and it's disruptive.

Well, if I'm an advocate of that, and you've always taught all the AP classes in isolation, but we need you to be part of a team to share your expertise, to collaborate on the needs of kids, what happens when what you covet clashes with what's best for the institution? And this is when Fundamentalists start to become active. And I found the Believers typically tend to retreat.

Well, the greatest disruptors of that bad song and dance is effective leadership and courageous allyship of Believers. There's a way out, but it takes courage and it takes resolve to really forge the kind of school you want to become, to be explicit about it, to courageously confront behaviors that are contradictory to it. I call them in my book "the elephants in the room."

Are there bad policies we need to address? Are there stereotypes we need to confront? Are there bad systems that need to be redrawn? This is what every productive organization does. But part of my analysis is schools have often gotten the pass on deep self-reflection because of society's perspective—and it's true that teaching is hard—so we tend to get a pass on things that other organizations don't.

And if we're a real profession and we want to be effective, no hospital would be happy with losing 50% of their patients. But we say all the time, "They're doing the best they can." No, we could do better if we would be self-reflective, if we would fail strategies and not students, and work together to move forward.

So the culture is how you do things around here, and it's either productive and making things better, or it's counterproductive and keeping you stagnant or making you regress. And of all change, changing the culture is the most challenging.

Rena Clark [19:33]
Fail strategies, not students.

Winston Benjamin [19:35]
Yo, stuck on that.

Winston Benjamin [19:36]
That's a T-shirt moment right there.

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [19:37]
We fail students so easily, and we do it in such a cavalier fashion. Really, what we're saying is they're acceptable casualties. That's a life. And you're making it more important that you don't give retakes, you don't accept late work, or he was chewing gum—those are the things you want to die on the hill for? That child could learn a lesson, be changed forever, and you would be the reason that child's life is better.

But we're so committed to traditions that validate whatever, and not realizing the impact it has on kids. I'm very uncomfortable—I was as a teacher—looking at a class list and seeing kids who failed and not asking, "What could I have done differently? What do I need to do differently?"

That's not weakness. That's not not backing teachers—it's helping teachers get better at their craft. Because success is when students are more successful, when they learn more, when they grow more. And I think often we forget, and a culture can go awry when that happens.

Rena Clark [21:02]
So I'm trying to think from the perspective: if I'm a listener and I'm thinking, "Yeah, I'm not maybe in the best culture, but maybe I want to shift," and I might be a leader, or I might—maybe I'm thinking I'm a Believer. I'm just curious, because it's a big process to shift culture. So maybe thinking from that Believer level, what is something I could do as a Believer that could help?

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [21:29]
Okay, great question. I have associate consultants that work under my scholarship, and they wrote two anthologies. One anthology is called Culture Champions, which is about how can teachers be better critical friends to other teachers and other colleagues in improving culture.

And one of the things is to be tactfully courageous. If Fundamentalists feel validated, and we've all been in situations when they say some cold, callous, inhumane, unprofessional things about their colleagues, about parents, about students, about administration, then why shouldn't I be emboldened to be ethical and say something as simple as:

• "Wait a minute, I disagree."
• "Wait a minute, I see it a little differently."
• "Wait a minute, isn't that a little unprofessional?"
• "Can we have lunch and not defame our colleagues? I want to eat without that over my food."

It's our lack of courage. And I say all the time: a lot of schools work with students on anti-bullying, and we talk about the role of the bystander. They say the bystander should become an upstander. And I ask people all the time, "Are we asking 11-year-olds to have courage we don't expect of a 40-year-old?"

Why would we tell a kid who's 11 to stand up to a bully, but we're afraid of Mrs. Johnson? What's she going to do? Not give you a Secret Santa gift? Freeze you out? Give you a cold stare? That's the kind of nonsense that makes people hesitate. That's a child!

Are you really serious that Mr. Jones is going to—so what if he gives you a cold look? But you spoke your conscience, and you did it respectfully, you did it professionally. And that level of hesitation really challenges whether we are the child advocates that often we claim to be.

And I always ask people: if that person's behavior was affecting your own child or a child you love—like a niece, a nephew, a brother or sister—would you be silent? And my colleague Mike Mattos said it's unethical to want for your children what you don't want for other people's children.

And when leaders model that cowardice, it trickles down to teachers. I see leaders all the time acting like they don't see unprofessional behavior or insulting comments—comments often laced with bigotry or unethical professional behavior—and they wink at it, or they act like they don't see it, or they make a joke. And whenever they do that, they're giving their Believers permission to stand on the sideline. If you don't have courage, don't expect them to have courage.

Winston Benjamin [24:48]
Oh! Modeling for our students how we want to behave as good people. That is a wild take, but not really the wildest. I appreciate the comment. People weren't able to see my face, but the reason why I was reacting the way I was is we're right now in our building doing an anti-bullying conversation, so that analogy really hits home for me in terms of: how do they know how to do it if they're not watching us do it? To be those people, to be that good individual that they can support.

Earlier, I'm trying to jump back into this because I think what you've done is you framed it from the admin perspective, teacher perspective, for the goal of our students. I'm going to try to take the conversation and now flip it on the way out—student out.

Many people would agree that the "why" is important. But there's a conversation of: what is important about being student-focused? Why is it important? What is important about being student-focused when addressing school culture? Because you're talking about school culture, but I think the goal is to deal with people who are dealing negatively with children, right? So you're shifting that.

So why is it important for us to take a look at it, and what does that look like to actually address that from the student-focused perspective?

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [26:31]
Great question. One is to not lose our core purpose. Schools exist to educate and prepare the youth of every community to carry on society and advance it. That was the vision of Horace Mann with the Common School Movement in 1830. America introduced the world to public schooling. It has a very specific, egalitarian purpose. And over time, certain institutions can forget that or drift away from it. So it's important to re-establish that.

But also to address it from a professional perspective: serving children is your professional obligation. It's not charity. When it's charity, you're doing it out of the goodness of your heart. When it's your obligation, it's what your life's craft is. It's what you do as a person who's been educated and prepared to enter this research-based profession.

So from a professional standpoint, my validation is based upon my impact on the children that I've been educated to serve. When I don't do that well, I can't alibi away all the reasons that I was ineffective. I have to grow. You know a good reading teacher because kids read better. You know a good math teacher because kids are more numerate—they are better at mathematics.

So it's not charity. It's just our professional obligation. If the core purpose of a school is to educate its community's children, and if we're effective at it, let's keep getting better. If we're ineffective, let's figure out how to get more effective. It's really just our obligation as professionals and as citizens and as human beings. And to make it any more or less than that, I think, is to convolute the discussion and to really divert it from the cause at hand.

And most people don't have a hard time understanding that fully until you have a child that struggles in the system. Then you start to see all the blemishes of the system. We know how impactful those 13 years are on the rest of our lives. And if I make it about me, then it's going to impact how I serve our children, which are our core purpose.

And I try to demystify it just quickly. I'm the proud father of six children. Would people consider me a good parent if I made it about me? It's just natural that a good parent pours their energy, their time, their resources, their sacrifice into the development of their children. Schools are partners in that endeavor.

So if I left my kids at home because I need some "me time"—and you just don't understand, I'm going to leave a three- and a five-year-old because I want to go to the nightclub—Child Protective Services would be over before I get back, because that's neglectful. That's adult-centered. But a responsible parent says, "No, I have obligations. I have to sacrifice going to the nightclub and mingling because I have this obligation that I have to commit to."

And nobody throws you a ticker-tape parade. You don't get pats on the back. It's just a part of being a mature adult that's responsible. So I challenge anybody that disagrees to show me an adult-centered school that's highly successful at developing children.

Winston Benjamin [30:40]
It's a simple question, but bro, that's not that simple.

Rena Clark [30:44]
Show me one where people do what they want, when they want, they manipulate the schedule, all the rules, and the heck with the kids. Show me where a school like that is successful.

Rena Clark [31:12]
Well, you've had the opportunity to see a lot of different schools and even in other countries and see how some different schools operate. So I know I'd be interested in—what are some insights you've gained from those opportunities or those contexts that maybe we could hear about or take away from?

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [31:21]
Great question. A lot of the problems we have here exist internationally. There's a few outliers that I think are worth examining. Those outliers would be Finland and Singapore, because their school improvement efforts were more holistic and centered around the community valuing the school system and investing collectively in a community goal.

In Finland, their school reform initiative was around a national initiative on wellness and healthcare, employment, transportation, and obviously schooling. So they saw schooling as a part of living a good life, and the government framed its support around that.

In Finland, they don't have local school boards and local control. All the schools are under the Ministry of Education, so they're centrally led. They sent fact-finders as they were creating this national reform movement into schools to get an assessment of what they needed—not to give one school an A, another school a C, another school an F, call one school exemplary, one failing. They created this core list of needs, and they strategically made investments based upon those needs.

So if in your school literacy was a big issue, they sent the best literacy teachers in the country to that school. If vocabulary or numeracy was an issue, if crime and behavior—so they centered their reform around the needs of the school. It was wraparound.

They also changed their teacher preparation requirements. You need a master's degree and a year under the tutelage of a master teacher, but their starting salary is equivalent to a high school principal or a superintendent of a small district. They have their priorities where education is worth investing in, and we need to wrap around.

And in Singapore, their teachers led a revolution or movement in the '90s for improvement, and what was unique about that: it was an organically led movement for the teachers to say, "We could do better. We want a better system." And they chose the Learning Community model.

Teachers in Singapore teach about half the number of hours that U.S. teachers teach, but they spend the rest of that time in lesson design, visiting other teachers to watch their pedagogy, data analysis, professional development, looking at evidence from their students' learning, sharing student work.

So in Singapore, they believe that the preparation of the educator and their support and proficiency was the gateway to a better system. So they invested in the professional as the gateway for students. There is no country in the world where teachers have more instructional hours than the United States, except Chile.

We have the old industrial model of efficiency as opposed to effectiveness. Singapore has an effectiveness model. We have an efficiency model. Our model is good for building Model Ts or cars, but it's not a good system for meeting the diverse needs of 51 million public school students.

Many other systems emulate the American system, and they have a lot of the same problems: teacher shortage, burned out, high turnover. But those two countries stick out as outliers. Australia was doing much better, but for some reason, they felt the American and the UK model was a good thing to follow, and now they're falling off the cliff. And I warned them about it 10, 12 years ago. I said, "Don't do it. Don't do it."

They were going to national tasks to rank schools. In Singapore, they don't publish student test scores. They give them to the parents, the schools, and the students for self-reflection and improvement. They don't treat their schools like NCAA college football, where they rank them and some make the playoffs and some don't. Their goal is for every school to be successful.

Could you imagine if we did that to police departments or fire departments? Who wants to move in a community with an "F" fire department or failing police department? It's done for schools, and I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but it's really just a redistribution of real estate wealth to create a stratified society of haves and have-nots.

There is no evidence that standardized test scores represent the best way to measure school progress, and you definitely don't publish them in a newspaper and give schools scarlet letters or badges of honor. So some think they're perfect, and some think they're hopeless, and all of them need to improve. But it guides population, housing prices, equity in homes, wealth in community. No Child Left Behind had absolutely nothing to do with student learning. It was a slick redistribution of real estate.

Winston Benjamin [38:48]
Well, see, now you're getting into my zone of interests. But as we're getting closer to the end of our conversation, there are things that you've said that I'm still mulling over. The last time this happened to me was when I was talking to one of my college professors, and she would just break my brain, and I would think about it for multiple days later, which was one of the best learning experiences I've had in my life. So thank you for this.

But I'm going to ask you a question: a lot of times our guests are engaging with some deep thinking. What's been on your mind? What are you pondering? What's something that you're thinking about?

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [38:49]
Great question. Brené Brown just did something in the UK around some corporate trends of absenteeism and mental health breaks and days. And psychologists are saying that this level of social uncertainty is contrary to how the brain operates. And so people—that choice of fight or flight—we're deep into that.

There are so many dynamic things happening around institutions we've depended on for years that I believe people have their heads buried in the sand on things, not because they're aloof, but because they're just fighting for mental stability.

What's been on my mind is a couple of books I'll recommend. One is called The Death of the American School System by Cara Fitzpatrick, and the other one is The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan.

Bryan Caplan is arguing—and he's gotten a lot of traction in certain circles—that the system that Horace Mann set up, which is very expensive (education is the second biggest government expenditure nationally), his argument is we educate too many people, it's too expensive, and we're not getting the bang for our buck.

And Cara Fitzpatrick has argued that the movement to decentralize schooling has been in motion for at least 40, 45 years. Betsy DeVos and the Mackinac Project in Michigan, which was the start of the charter school movement, privatization, homeschooling, vouchers—what's been on my mind is I believe if we're not careful, we'll wake up and the system that we've known for years will look nothing like it has.

Cara Fitzpatrick's book is really, really good because she said the assumption we've had since Horace Mann was: schools are publicly funded, the accountability is to the community, all kids have access, and it's free from political and religious indoctrination. That's the system we've known. You live in this community, go to that school, you pay taxes, everybody can—in fact, you have to go. Your parents are going to jail for negligence.

That system as we know it is on the verge of a major shift, where many states are proposing just giving parents a stipend and letting them keep the kids at home, take them to a private school, start little schools in their living room, make certain shifts. And I think that people aren't tuned in, not because they don't care. I think they're so overwhelmed.

The U.S. Department of Education closing is a domino or it's throttling—pushing special ed back to the states. Well, that's one of the reasons that the Department of Ed started to begin with. They didn't think they were implementing IDEA or Title I or Title IX the way that they were supposed to be, and so federal oversight—that's the first step. Then you start pushing more and more.

I'm just afraid that the sinister intentions have become so politically savvy that we'll wake up one day and what you thought was the system you knew will look totally different, and it'll happen so quickly that you won't know how it happened.

That's what's been on my mind. And I think there's so many people in survival mode that they don't have the energy because they're dealing with mentally and emotionally disturbed kids who have COVID achievement gaps, and you're covering this person's class because you don't have enough subs or certified teachers. As Brené said, the brain's not wired for all of this instability.

So I didn't mean to add more to—

Winston Benjamin [41:56]
No, no, no!

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [41:58]
Yeah, that's what's been on my mind.

Winston Benjamin [42:00]
First of all, thanks for calling it out, because again, there are times when it feels like—I said I'm working for the dark side, right? I am part of it. But feeling that there is something pushing, and as a Believer, right, having to know that there's a part, a role that I play in the progress of that culture.

But you dropped two books in, and you jumped the gun a little bit, and I don't mind it because I'm going to steal those books. But I'm probably going to ask you for some more tools. So it's time for the question: What's in Your Toolkit?

Music [43:32]
Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What's in the toolkit? Check it out.

What's in Your Toolkit?

Winston Benjamin [43:41]
Today's toolkit—it could be an idea. What's going on, Paul? What are you thinking? What are you dropping in the toolkit?

Paul Beckermann [43:49]
All right, I give a shout-out to our guest, Dr. Anthony Muhammad, and say start a book study and pick one of his books. I think they're awesome. Transforming School Culture—that's an awesome one. The Way Forward: The PLC at Work—he's got some other ones out there too. Do a book study, get together with some of your colleagues, and have some good, rich discussions about some of these topics.

Rena Clark [44:11]
I like to visualize. I like the idea. And for me, I need those reminders to be a Believer, to call things out. So even that idea of maybe vision boarding at your school—you could do it individually, but even as a team—create visuals, stories, images, quotes, whatever it is.

And, kind of like in our engineering design process, it's like keep coming back to that student, student-centered piece, and it's like: how are we meeting this, or how do we need to adjust this? Because it's constantly a model that we're going to adjust and change based on the needs of our students.

So that's how I'm envisioning this. And you could do it in a lot of ways to make it, but I like the idea of it being very visual and out there. You could do it electronically, not electronically, but just having it be very visual.

Winston Benjamin [45:02]
I like that, Rena. That visual. Because my whole thing—I was stuck on a question that caused the visual, but I think it's a question you should always ask yourself as you're doing progress:

"Show me a school that is adult-centered where students are successful."

Asking yourself that question when you're making decisions: How does this benefit students? How does this support students? And do we want to be that place that fails the future? I think those are some really good questions to ask as we make decisions.

Anthony, I've got to ask you. I'm sorry, I can't just call you Dr. Muhammad. I think you've been dropping stuff in my brain where I just feel like I've got to make you a personal friend.

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [45:50]
I was Anthony long before I was Dr. Muhammad.

Winston Benjamin [45:54]
My G. That's fine. Thank you so much for being willing to be my personal friend so you can help me think. Is there anything else—a tool, an idea, a mindset—that you would like to throw in our toolkit to help support our listeners in engaging either with school change, culture change, or just in general, engaging with education?

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [46:17]
I'd like to drop a couple, if that's okay.

One is a tool that is very affordable and the value is way more than the cost. My publisher, Solution Tree, has a tool called Global PD Teams. And Global PD Teams really is a curated set of videos and book studies on the best thought leadership in education. I have several on there—Bob Marzano, the late Rick DuFour, Mike Mattos, Luis Cruz, Dylan Wiliam—any subject you can think of. It's like YouTube for educational thought leadership.

So if you're having a hard time explaining to your staff the importance of culture, there may be a four- or five-minute clip of me delivering from a keynote, making it clear. A team is struggling with how to organize their data—you can put it in there, and you might bring up a team wrestling with data, or one of our experts giving a clip from a speech they gave. So it's just a one-stop shop for answers to questions of practice and theory that come up all the time.

And the other one—it's free, but you can upgrade it to a paid version—it's my favorite go-to for educational research, and it's Academia.edu. It is invaluable. And one of the problems with other sites like ERIC or Google Scholar is that often there are paywalls associated with it.

So let's say we want to take a look at: how do you respond to aggressive adolescent boys struggling with self-esteem? You can put that in Academia.edu. It'll bring up all the studies and case studies on that particular topic. The problem with Google Scholar and other tools is that you'll find that you click it—if it's ASCD, they'll make you put in your username and password and join. But once it's on Academia.edu, it's public domain and it's in PDF form.

And if you want to take it one step further, you can use an AI tool called NotebookLM, and you can drop that PDF into NotebookLM. It'll summarize it for you in writing, or it'll put it in a podcast form where they'll discuss it.

So those are just some tools. I believe that the really modern professional educator could benefit in advancing your professional knowledge and professional practice.

One Thing: Final Takeaways

Paul Beckermann [49:03]
Those are fantastic, and they're great jumping points into our One Thing.

Music [49:08]
It's time for that one thing.

Paul Beckermann [49:18]
All right, One Thing time. Time for our final takeaway today. What are your final thoughts? Winston, Rena, I'll let you start.

Rena Clark [49:29]
I have so many bullet lists. I just—I love this. When you said "be emboldened to be ethical," so I know personally, for me today, that is what I'm going to walk away with, that being my big One Thing. And do it in a professional, ethical way, but be emboldened to be ethical.

Paul Beckermann [49:52]
That's awesome. Winston, what about you? What are you thinking about?

Winston Benjamin [49:56]
Yeah, it was said so early, and I said my brain was broken from the beginning, so I was trying to really push myself to see how I'm either a Fundamentalist and what I'm resisting change from.

So the part that stuck with me is: you can't separate innovation and change, because there's a lot of people who want innovation, but are still in the punish old school, right? So it's like trying to make sure that I keep those two things true as I move forward.

Paul Beckermann [50:38]
I'm kind of pondering some things that Anthony said that kind of revolve around that quote that we started with. He said at one point, "We need to fail strategies, not students." That's so wise, because if a strategy is not working, then let's get rid of it. We can't get rid of the students. That's what we're there for. That's everything. So we need to really examine that.

And then it kind of ties into the other piece he was talking about with our school system and our model of education: that we're valuing efficiency over effectiveness. And I've thought that for years. We're not evolving within our system the way that we need to to serve every student that we have in an effective way. And I guess we need more Believers, so let's bring them on.

Anthony, you get a chance—this is your final, final thought for our listeners today. What do you got?

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [51:34]
I think from the beginning, everything goes back to what I started with: I came into this profession as an outlet for my life's work and activism. So this wasn't a job. This is an outlet for passion and a core value.

I just encourage the listeners to embrace your inner purpose and your inner activism. You get a chance to shape the future every single day, and don't forget that. And the minute you forget that, and grades become more important, or position or power within school, or fighting for the best schedule—when those things start to take precedent over your core purpose, then you're drifting out of your own effectiveness and your own power.

It's something I've had since I was a child, and I don't want to sound morbid, but I've never really, even as a kid, feared death. I learned—my grandmother took me to a funeral when I was really young, and I saw somebody in the casket. I said, "Am I going to be there one day?" She said, "Yeah, baby, we all will." I said, "Okay." And I said it, and I thought, "I've got to make this time worth it, because when I'm gone, I'm gone."

And sometimes people call me an "edu-celebrity" or whatever. I don't really embrace that, because I know how meaningless I am in the grand scheme of things, and that I'm going to die one day. So I don't care about book sales or fame or applause or accolades.

I'm encouraging people to just be a good person and leave the world better than which we found it. And you can go to that place that I saw that person in that casket when I was four years old, with a smile on your face knowing you made the world better. And the only thing to fear is fear itself.

You know, I don't fear cancer. You can cancel me tomorrow. I've lived a great life. I'm going to tell the truth as I know it and I believe it, and I can prove it, and it pleases who it pleases, and it ruffles the feathers of those—I don't want to sound cavalier about it. I just—the things that make people hesitate from doing the right thing really is just a figment of their imagination.

If you're self-actualized, and you know you're doing the right thing for the right reasons, that just has to be enough. So that's my final thought.

Closing

Rena Clark [54:31]
That's a big one. And quite frankly, I don't think I need to do much of an outro here, because that was pretty good. But I do want to thank you so much for joining us today. I know all of us very much appreciated it, and I hope that you're able to join us again sometime. So thank you, Anthony.

Dr. Anthony Muhammad [54:49]
Thank you for what you do.

Rena Clark [54:50]
Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin [54:53]
We invite you to visit us at AVIDOpenAccess.org, where you can discover resources to support student agency and academic tenacity to create classrooms for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann [55:07]
We'll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark [55:12]
And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin [55:15]
Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann [55:18]
You make a difference.