In this episode, Dr. Christopher Dignam, a former K-12 educator and current university professor, discusses his journey in integrating art and science in teaching methodologies. He emphasizes the importance of portraiture, a framework that blends ethnography, phenomenology, and narration, to create a holistic learning experience. Dr. Dignam shares his experiences as a high school principal, where he implemented interdisciplinary courses and parental involvement to enhance student engagement and reduce stress. He highlights the success of his AP colloquium, which increased AP test administrations from 200 to over 5,000. Dr. Dignam stresses the need for professional development focused on thematic units and parental involvement to foster a love of learning.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

distributed leadership, teaching methodologies, differentiation, curriculum design, portraiture, art and science, research impact, student engagement, parental involvement, interdisciplinary teaching, innovative curriculum, social change, professional development, AP colloquium, holistic mindset

SPEAKERS

Amy Vujaklija, Joi Patterson, Chris Dignam

It was grounded in distributed leadership. It was about looking at the portrait of a learner. So had to be, you know, first, foremost, involve all, all learners.

This episode was originally released under the podcast titled teaching and learning theory versus practice. This rebooted episode has been migrated to teaching and leading with Dr Amy and Dr Joi I am Dr Amy Vujaklija, Director of educator preparation,

and I am Dr Joi Patterson, Chief Diversity Officer. Our podcast addresses issues through the lens of diversity, equity and inclusion, along with solutions for us to grow as educators.

So join us on our journey to become better teachers and leaders. So let's get into it.

Good morning. Dr, Amy,

good morning. Dr, Joi, how are you today?

I'm wonderful, and we're going to talk about one of my favorite subjects today, which is teaching methodology. And it's strange, I really like different teaching methodologies, because I think that all students learn differently, right? And when I think back to when I went to school, I went to parochial school, so I went to Catholic school. Growing up, I'm sure there were not any differentiation and methodologies at all, and you had to pretty much conform to the teacher, right? And I mean, there's some benefits in that too, because it makes you the learner, flexible, and you do whatever the teacher wants you to do. And you know, but I think it lends itself to greater outcomes for the students. When we use different methodologies, what do you think?

Well, and I think also that our teaching methodologies are really informed by how we research. So we're also going to talk about the lens through which we look at curriculum, how it's designed and put together. But one thing I had not heard of before was portraiture. Yes, that's new for me, too, and as I'm looking further into it, I want to hear more from our guest today is how portraiture brings that art and science together so you it really informs your methodology of research, but then that research helps change your view of what teaching looks like in the classroom. So it's multi layered approach here that we're going to be talking about today. I want our listeners to know that we can do research in our classrooms on a small scale, and it can really inform our practices and the guests we have today did do that in small scale, but then he went on to principal and superintendent to really make change in schools based on the methodology He was using in his research, he saw connections that we might not have seen had we not, you know, when we don't do research, let me introduce Dr Christopher Dignam, who served as a K 12 educator for 25 years as a teacher, principal and superintendent. He began his career as a high school biology instructor and taught a variety of high school science content areas, including chemistry, physics, anatomy, physiology, advanced placement, biology. These are what we call the hard sciences, right. Dr Dignam also served as a district area science instructional coach and provided supports to a portfolio of 24 diverse schools. He also has served as a university professor for graduate and adult studies for over 15 years, for educators who are pursuing their master's degree and licensure as principals and doctoral degree diplomas and licensure as superintendents. Dr Dignam joined Governor State University in January of 2022 and instructs and supervises future leaders in our principal leadership program, and current leaders in the interdisciplinary leadership program. But I also want to mention that he is an accomplished guitarist and writes and records music in his home studio. Welcome to our show. We're going to talk about. About that mixture that blend art and science today. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation,

right? And it's all wrapped up in Dr, Chris, right? Because we were talking about teaching is art and science, and we can certainly see that in your description. And Chris, when I look at you and think about you. You remind me of my husband so much, who grew up in the projects, and you can imagine all the things going on around him. He had two brothers, unlike him, that's all we're going to say. Unlike him, and he drowned himself into visual arts and sports. And that took him to the NFL, and that took him to becoming he just retired 42 years as an art teacher. So he really drowned himself. He took a different route, and he drowned himself into his passions, into the arts of expressing himself. So you have so much similarity before we get started and talking about portraiture, tell us about yourself. I want to know a little bit about your childhood, your family and your journey to becoming a professional educator.

Oh sure. Well, first of all, thank you Amy, and thank you, Joi, for having me here today. And I really appreciate being here and be able to discuss portraiture and learning in general. So as you kind of alluded to, Joi, I'm happy, and I actually feel a little relieved that maybe there's some commonalities here that we all have. Because sometimes when I when I meet other educators, my pathway feels very different. And I've read about the imposter kind of syndrome or effect that people kind of feel when you walk in places and around people. So you know, with with with my with my journey. And that's right, I refer to it as it's it's about taking in every day and and learning from what it is that is around you and what we can learn from other people. And you know, my my journey has been a beautiful journey, that one I'm very proud of, and where I've come from, and those people that I've loved, and the people that I hope to get to know and be friends with and love in the future. And my family were is an immigrant family where my mom and dad immigrated here from Ireland, and my dad had me. He was almost 50 years old, so I was very late in life. And so there are things that we could all go on about, challenges we've had or but it's really about, you know, how you find, I believe, how you find solutions to those things. So yeah, it was we when we grew up, when I grew up as a child, we grew up by the lakefront in Chicago and Lakeview when it wasn't nice, and it was challenging, because my my brothers, unfortunately, they had a different pathway than me and and it was one that creates long term pathways in life for others and gang involvement those things. And so for me, learning was refuge, and especially music. And so being in a family of, you know, five siblings, and having parents that are not from this country, and when you go to school and you pull out your food, and you got this big, Lumpy, funny smelling food that doesn't look like anyone else's with homemade bread, and everyone else has Wonder Bread, you kind of stick out. And so I always found myself surrounding myself with other kids that were like me, maybe with that experience of being immigrant students or first generation. So the ways that I got into education were really through learning from people I've never met, writers of books that maybe have passed away, musicians that were inspirations for me to learn to play guitar, things with science that I would hear about on television, PBS, and want to go to library and look up books, and so those are my those are my first teachers. But music was, that was my passion. It still is. It's that's what my heart that was my first love, was music. So guitar playing was a way for me to just shut out all of those other things are going on around me that I did not want to take part of.

It's so important that we hear about people's passions and how that can help you stay focused on a pathway. Talking about your pathway, you have a strong science background, teaching biology, chemistry and physics. You've also been an instructional coach for science, yes, yet your doctoral research was arts based, and you've talked about the passion for music. It might help us understand a little bit more about this passion for portraiture, if we heard more like, how did you get drawn into music or explore arts as that passion, that pathway,

sure, when I was young in the 1970s i There were guitarists that I just I heard, and I mean, it started out. Was seven years old, and I think music was different than and important to people than it is now. And I'm not diminishing the music that young people listen to, but it meant something different. And there were vinyl LPs, and it was, it was a very cool time, and there are guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Jimi page and Jeff Beck, and I wanted to learn what it was they were doing in it, and it and it resonated with me. And so I could not always afford. I couldn't afford to have a guitar for several years, but I would borrow or be able to use instruments, and my mom was able to sign. We found out there were free guitar lessons with the Chicago Park District. And so it was a great place for me to go, because at that time in the neighborhood we lived in, we had, you know, we had Latin eagles, we had the deuces, we had the Simon City Royals. It was very split up, so you had to be careful which way you would walk, because my brothers were not just involved in the games, but they were leaders. And I stuck out because I was their younger brother. But, you know, I grew pretty tall pretty quick, so I would stick out of my community and with music, what helped me was having a guitar at home, and I could not always go to lessons, so I would listen, and I discovered I had relative perfect pitch. And I didn't know that, because I would listen to songs, and I would be able to play along with them and went to music lesson one day, and it teaches, well, how did, how did you do that? Now, I was about, I was about 10 years old at the time, so I was just listening to this over and over. It was Led Zeppelin song, and he's played a couple. He had a couple records in the room, and so try and find the chords. What are we doing? I could find them. And so he said, you know, your relative perfect pitch, you know, you're kind of born with that. And so that made listening to music very different. And when I would close my eyes, I would, when I would play, I could, you see things, you know, I would see colors, or it's like watching Disney's Fantasia. And so that that was, that was solace for me, and I would be able to shut out those other things around me. And around that same time, there was a PBS series cosmos that came out, and Carl Sagan was had this program, and that was the first time I ever got really interested in science, and it was about astronomy. But I was very interested in biology and astronomy, and here was this man talking about these really cool things. So I did things I probably shouldn't have. I ride my bike down to the Museum of Science and Industry and ride back, and it was a very long ride, but I would just want to look at those things. And there were days you could go there for free. And so I started, you know, going to a library that we my mom, he was a very small library look like now, would be a corner store do you pick up your groceries at? But that love of music connected me, in many ways, to science, because, you know, as I start learning these things, and we didn't have science classes, and I was a kid in elementary school, and I don't know if that was unusual or not, but this was before there were computer classes as well. But I would learn about things, about sound waves, and I wanted to understand frequencies and things that I was not being taught. And so I was learning those things on my own. And I was by no means a bookworm, but it was, it was it was self discovery and and the reason why I mentioned a reason why it's important is as an educator, I I've noticed that there's a sense of discovery learning that occurs, I think, and that's when it's deeper. And when I thought about how I was learning, even as a young person in later middle school or high school, things become very compartmentalized, and that bothered me. And it seemed like the older I was getting, the more compartmentalized it became. And that beauty of, you know, the esthetics of the art of science, or, you know, when you read a book and you're thinking about history and the time places people are in, and maybe the music or foods that address that they have, those were starting to be taken away. And, you know, you go to your history class and you go to your class and math class, and I did not like that. So sometimes wonderful teachers are the worst students. And before I was a teacher, in many ways, I may have not been the best student, because I kind of rebelled against that. So I would just want to learn things on my own, but but having some place to go as a child, and circling back to the music piece, my sister passed when she was 19 years old, and it was, it was devastating for her family, because all of our, I mean, 90% of our family, 95% is all in Ireland. And how do you deal with that? And and, you know, my my brothers, then they it became, and I want to stay. I'm not judging anyone, because we have our paths and things we do. Sometimes it's survival, and sometimes it's because we've not learned the best ways. But, you know, I'm dealing with incarceration and in dealing with visiting Cook County Prison or going down and, you know, in Menards, you know these, these are not for small crimes. You. And it was not a pathway I wanted to go to, so I closed my self into books and into music. One of my brothers was very protective of me, and the other was not, and they're, you know, last night, I would say socially, there's a temptation to follow that path when you're 1011, 1214, years old, and it was not something that felt natural to me, but my my love of learning, whether it was science or mathematics or music, that's what helped me grounded as a young person. I reflected on that and eventually, when you know, wanting to go to school, teaching was something that I was drawn to naturally, because in many ways, I was teaching things to myself as a young person, and so,

Chris, I love how reflective you are and just reflecting on becoming you as Dr Chris, big no, I really love that. So thank you for sharing that. Tell us about your pathway to doctoral research using portraiture. So let's get into portraiture. Sure.

Yeah, so if it had not been for portraiture, I'm not sure what I would have done for my doctoral study, or if I would have continued with it, because I was torn and so I was fortunate that I'd met a professor, and her name was Mary Lou Dantonio, and she had written a book on collegial coaching. And it was kind of cool, because at the time, I was in science instructional coaching, and I was based in the Inglewood community in Chicago, and so I was I knew she had this book, and I was talking to her about it, and talking about my pathway towards my doctorate, and she was asking, you know, what things are you interested in? What do you know? And, you know, I was talking about storytelling, which I love, and sometimes I talk too much, and so, you know, I said, these are things that I that's what I'm passionate about, and ethnography. And I was, I was thinking about my study might be phenomenological. It certainly was not going to be quantitative, because I I'm interested in understanding what's happening around people. And I said, you know, I'm kind of torn, because I I want to understand what is important for young people to learn. And I wanted to ground my work in parental involvement, because it was very near and dear to me. Because had, I had, had my parents had a different type of understanding of the educational system in America, I think would have helped my brothers immensely, and even my sister who passed. And so I wanted to do something to honor that. But as a teacher at a high school level, and I was a science teacher, there was no professional development on parental involvement at the high school level, and so I was sharing this, and I found out about this book, The Art and Science of portraiture. And I was like, What is this? And as it turns out, I found out I had actually read, you know, a text by the same author years earlier called the good high school, and I had not connected. It was, it was the same author. And what portraiture does is that is a type of a type of framework, a type of tradition that bridges and blurs ethnography and, you know, phenomenon and narration together, so you have a picture of the experience of individuals that you're studying. And that was it, it's it totally clicked with me. And so I picked up this book by Lawrence Lightfoot and Hoffman Davis, and I couldn't believe. I thought, my God, this is her background. Was about the arts and it was about the science of teaching and learning. And I felt selfishly like I thought, Well, this was kind of written for me, so I don't know if it was Synchronicity or whatever it may have been, but that's how I was drawn to portraiture, because that spoke to me, because that's the way I like to learn. And sometimes in education, we have to kind of go with the way that the education is set up, the education system set up. So that's how I got into portraiture. I know it's a little bit of a long winded answer, but it was an interesting journey, because it brought all of those elements together that I love.

Let's talk about more about what your research has done for you as it informed your practice as a teacher, a principal, an administrator. What have you taken away from the research that you've done?

That's a wonderful question. So I think that's, that's the most important piece, and that's something that when I, when I as a professor, when I when, when I teach students, especially those around pathways that become principals. You know, if you're going to earn these degrees, you should do something with them. And so, you know, what does that look like in practice? And so what the beauty of this was, and it was, it honestly, it was. There were very few times in my life where I can reflect on things that were life altering. That was one of them, because it made me look at its systems and structures very differently. And being, you know, a developing high school administrator, again, it's very compartmental. Realized. And so what I wanted to do was, in any ways possible, draw learners into the educational experience. And how can you be involved? How can you own that, and what does it look and feel like? And so when as as an administrator, when I moved on from being a science instructional coach, and, you know, working with two dozen schools, and some of the challenging, most challenging, not some of in the most challenging areas of Chicago. I became an assistant principal, and I was still working on my doctoral research. Completed it when I became principal at Lane Tech in Chicago. I wanted to put that into practice, and so we had lots of spaces in the building where we had 11 enormous spaces that used to be shop rooms. And the shops are taken out of the schools in the early 2000s 1999 2000 and so years later, they were abandoned full of junk and not used, and sometimes used as an office. And you got this 7000 square foot office. So what I want to do is put teams together and and how do we look at the courses we need? And so I would have conditions that were required for a class that new courses we could run. You know, they had to be, had to have a 10 year window, meaning that the class would be relevant for four years of high school, four years of college and maybe two years practice past that, it has to be inclusive of all learners. Our students of color are students with special needs, our immigrant students, our first generation, et cetera. So our females in science, and so those teams would come together and look at curriculum, but it had to be blended curriculum. It had to be curriculum as interdisciplinary. And so we were looking at things like, okay, for example, you have chemistry and you have ceramics, there's a lot of chemistry happening in ceramics, and there's some really cool stuff with ceramics that kids could do in a chemistry classroom as projects. And so it was taking that approach with teachers and saying, I'm not just going to open up an anatomy class. It should be a class that is blending science mathematics, and don't forget English and history and world languages as well. Let's incorporate those so that it is true interdisciplinary teaching and learning. So that was my approach for constructing innovative teaching and learning courses and new programs that didn't exist before and that stemmed itself into regulars and honors classes and then eventually into Advanced Placement, at least the philosophy into Advanced Placement

of truth. As a former administer principal, I love doing thematic units. And I was an administrator at a middle school for a while, and so thematic units and this integrated practice was kind of our approach and a good way for teachers to work together. And as you know, if they're going to work together, then you have to schedule, like planning, common planning time. So you have to have all these processes and practices in place in order for that to happen. So I want you to talk a little bit, maybe, about what that structure looks like in order for you to achieve this. And also, I want you to talk about your parent how did you get your parents involved, because, I mean, they're an essential component of this, and how do you create a community of practice that's active and getting your parents involved?

Great. Thank you for asking that there's something I probably should have mentioned earlier. When I became my first job as principal, I was put in a very unique position that turned out to be a blessing. It was a ton of work, but it turned out to be a blessing. I'm principal of a high school 4500 kids, and we had petitioned for three years while I was AP, and then became and then, just before it became principal, to open up a middle school inside the high school was called an academic center. Well, the caveat is that your principal both, and so it was quite a bit of work. But the blessing there was that articulation piece, which I had only experienced as an instructional coach, because I'm providing services for high schools, and I have to articulate what's going on with the elementary schools. And so that was that was phenomenal, because what I was able to do was pull teams together. So we had our middle school teams and we had our high school teams of teachers and a parent involvement piece was, again, that was my background. So it was much more natural to pull our middle school kids in. And so there are things that we did at the high school level, and I had a programmer, and his his name was John Nishimura, and I have to honor John, because I know I drove him nuts. I said, Hey, John, I want to create a system for our high school. I had been working on it as an assistant principal for that point, almost six years, where we can put kids in pods of 28 but they go to high school together, and they have their science, math. An English class together for all four years, but everything else is mixed. And those kids, then, if they are interested in the sciences or the arts or research, that is a great pathway for them to move forward. So we did that at the high school level, and that is extremely complicated, as anyone can imagine, for programming 4500 kids, but then started out as only 56 kids. We call it alpha stem. Well, you know, years later we had about 500 600 kids in this program, and to take their it ended up being a four year strand. So what we did it in terms of programming, that was really cool, because we did then between the reason I we had math, science and English was it was cross disciplinary teaching and learning. So we had teachers doing common lessons and teaching between classes. So you would have an English teacher coming into the science class to do an instruction for, you know, such amount of time with our middle school, we created a system where they could have some classes with our high school kids. And I was in a position where I had an experience. Extremely large number of kids from across the city, every ethnic background, every social background. And so we increased our world's languages to just go from the typical Spanish, Italian, French, I think we had German, you know, I wrote a grant, and we had Mandarin Chinese. We started Arabic. We started in Japanese class. And so we would have guests come in to speak. So we had parents come in. We had calligraphy and things that you could involve with World Languages. But the one thing I did school wide was we had a school store, and we had issues with the school store before I became principal and and if you're ever a principal of a big high school, or any high school and you have a school store, it's a lot to manage. So I met with our parent groups and said, Look, you know, how about if this is the parents store, you can purchase the materials. We can use it for fundraising. We can it's run. I can have volunteers during the day. Will my administration work with you? And so our parents, then they ran our school store, so they're in our building all the time. And it was a lot of volunteerism. And so I applied a lot of what I was reading about with Joi substan, and she was like the leader in that parental involvement piece on the volunteerism, you know, the home school dynamics. And so that's a whole other piece. Then involving parents in the homework and we and so we were doing that as well. And so I, you know, that's another piece I could probably go into a little bit deeper as well. I

want to return to the considerations that you have when designing courses and pathways and curriculum. Sure, what is the portrait of a learner.

So there are a couple of things probably with any teams that I've worked on at schools, and they would get tired of me hearing and they get tired of hearing me say, one is, you know, never come to me and say we got a problem. Come to me and say we have a solution to find. The second one is, I was not. I was never interested in saying this portrait of a graduate. It always, it always bothered me, because by the time they've graduated, it's too late. So what does a portrait of a learner look like? And that would be something I would say. So that's a wonderful coincidence of thought that we have here. And so I would say, you know, there are certain things we have to have in place, and they're called our guiding principles. And it was, it was grounded in distributive leadership. It was about looking at the portrait of a learner. So it had to be, you know, first, foremost, involve all, all learners. You know, special needs students. If we're going to have a robotics class, we can also, we should also be able to have a section for special learner, special learners, or inclusion of that. So we did, like we started the only robotics program in the city, instead of it being a club, it was an actual class. But then we did adaptive robotics. And so our teachers, I would say, Well, part of our, you know, one is inclusion of special needs. Students have been involved in everything. Two, what's the social change mandate going to be for the class, you know, designing, recruiting, implementing, I want to ensure females and students of color, you know, are there for equity and access. So that was a second piece for any new classes. The third was always an innovative, creative course. Commitment has to include cycling. And what that means is curriculum cycling. I had worked in many schools as a coach and as a teacher, and you get this curriculum has not changed forever, and we did not have active curriculum cycles. So I had to be part of we're going to have a new class. I want to plan what does your curriculum cycle look like? Because this is a living, breathing thing. It needs to be fed and nourished. And so that was part of it. The other piece was, if we're going to have new courses, what's the commitment for innovative, innovative learning space? Review, because it's also the portraiture piece. I would say, look at every classroom as like the painter's palette, and what does that look like around the classroom? And if you. Look at things like that, I think it becomes kind of beautiful whether you're in your back garden or you're in your living room. What does that look like? Because the painters palette, you have all these hues and things on the palette, and think of our kids in those ways. Think of the curriculum in those ways. Think of equity and access in those ways. It gets embedded in your practice. And so what I would say is that I don't care what the classroom looks like, how run down it is, how small it is, how large it is. What can we do to make it better, rather than dwelling on that negative piece, because our kids in the inner city deserve to have beautiful classroom spaces. What can we do to beautify that to in, you know, support the teaching and learning? And then the other piece was because I had the middle school program in particular make sure in our classes we're going to involve our middle school kids in the high school classes and vice versa. And so that was important so that there's a social dynamic happening, and the act of collaboration among interdisciplinary planning teams is very important. And And lastly, whenever possible, have those home communication pieces or even parts of the homework with parents, and that was done through dialog journaling, and that, that was actually for my doctoral research that was groundbreaking for me at the high school level, because, and I would say this to my teams, look, you can look up any parental involvement. You'd like 80% of it, 90% of it's going to be for elementary or middle school, but our high school parents can be involved. And so if we have all of these requirements for new, innovative teaching and learning programs, the parent piece as much as possible, whether it's reflective, journaling, communications, home, having them help complete the assignments those those were I could show through my research, those are extremely important in taking ownership of the learning. So those are ways that I would over trial and error, very easy to sum it up in five minutes, over trial and error of many years, what makes an innovation innovative teaching and learning program sustainable. So those are things that we would have in place with our with my teams.

As I'm listening to you, I was thinking, are we talking about teaching? Are we talking about art? And we're talking about both. And I just want to thank you, Chris for just painting a picture for us, and we're talking to Dr Chris Dignam, and we're talking about his journey through his education, and we're talking about his passion and how we use portraiture as a teaching methodology, which is really new for me and is something that I'm now going to Subscribe to. I've always been a fan of implementing experiential learning and project based learning, but this feels, it feels very organic, and so I love how you describe it. And something I want to go back to is about learning being fun, and something that you said, and somehow you get to a certain grade, right? Chris and learning isn't fun anymore. Amy and I, we talk a lot about the teacher shortage and how difficult it is to attract people to the to become teachers, and that's because of the model that they see. What is teaching now, if you ask a lot of five year olds, because I went to my granddaughter's five year old kindergarten ceremony, and all of them wanted to be a teacher. Most of them wanted to be a teacher at five years old. One kid wanted to be a car. I don't know what that was about, but the rest of them wanted to be a teacher, and that's because learning was much like what you just described for a five year old, and then we get to middle school and high school, and it's not that and this allows you to bring some of that back to them that love of learning. So, So, Chris, how do we remove the silos that exist in high school? How do we create more cross disciplinary approaches? So even talk about what you did with your AP course and that curriculum and that integration?

Well, yes, certainly. Thank you for bringing it up and and when you mentioned and something to I would whether now with, you know, teaching as a professor, but and serving as a principal things to two things I would say is, look, you have an experiential mindset, but I want to have that innovative spirit and the most wonderful music and the most important science is done with both of those. And there are mistakes that happen. But when as a musician, you play and you you make a mistake, well it might sound kind of cool if you do it this way or that way, and sometimes you repeat this mistake enough, and next thing, you have a really cool scale or something. So I would, I would come across with our teams like that, saying it's. Okay to do those things, but, but I want you to approach it in that manner. And so when, when we look at that, that portraiture piece, and at the high school level, I've talked about this ad nauseam, I can remember, and we can all remember being children and learning and and even as adults, like I said, if I were to, if I were to read a book on Frankenstein's monster, I'm going to picture that time period, and there are many things that are happening as I'm reading that passage. So I'm not just reading a fiction book, or I'm not just reading a historical semi fiction account. There's science involved in that period of time, and there's music and those things that are occurring. And for whatever reason, that discovery learning piece becomes more and more categorized. And I think part of the issue is, is necessary. It's a necessary issue that kind of opened my eyes with a parent involvement piece that's also a necessary issue. And what I mean by that is you need to become a little bit more specific for your lessons when you're starting to move towards, you know, someone who wants to learn about electricity, well, they're, you know, of course, you're going to have a very, very formal type of learning that occurs in that very much categorized course. But school does not have to be like that for everything. And that's the piece that bothers me at the high school level. And with, with the training for high school teachers, and even with our principals to be challenged to say, you you can remove those silos and what. And it's not just a speech. I've done it, and I didn't do it on my own. I did it with great teachers who maybe didn't have the opportunity to do that before. So I think at the high school level, we have to have instructional leaders with that vision, and it really has to be genuine. You have to believe it, and maybe you've lived it. But if there's training and professional learning that occurs, I think that's where the important pieces, and what does that look like, and sharing these stories like what we're talking about today, because any of us who are learning a certain subject or other things we love besides those things, and I think the other piece that happens with parents as our students get older is that there's two things. One, I think as they get older, they're becoming less confident, as I remember doing when my children were a little younger than going through elementary and high school, they maybe have not had geometry in a very long time, so it's kind of hard to help your kid with geometry or even with fractions or other things you might be doing, so you start to give kids a little bit more independence, and then it becomes a lot more independence at the high school level. And so that's another challenge for school leaders. When our kids are moving from middle school to high school, how do you still keep that Joi of discovery learning, but understand we need to, you know, you might need to focus a little bit more heavily on strictly biology, on strictly geometry, English language. I understand that piece, but having it's almost like doing things the right way rather than doing the right thing. And so we can approach it in that way. And I think curriculum at the high school level is just, it's become a practice. If we look at what happens in our bachelor's programs with the training, it's very much like what I described. It does not, in my opinion, does not start to be until you get to your master's, and it's certainly your doctoral program where you start to get back to that inquiry driven learning. I mean, you can you create your own dissertation. You know, we should do those things at the high school level. I think would have help our bachelor's programs immensely. But I think it comes down to teacher training, and especially the instructional leadership training, because they they don't need to look like that, and that's not how we enjoy learning and teaching should be just as fun as it should be for the five year old walking around the zoo for the first time.

So what would you say to a student who has loaded their schedule a sophomore, junior and senior year with all these AP courses, and you're looking at the their plan, how would you adjust their plan? They've got AP Chem, AP Statistics, they've then the next year, they have AP Psychology, and AP something else. And then what would you suggest? Let's, let's get specific here.

I would suggest something that was genuine, that I had lived, and that is, I was fortunate in many ways, to have a school the size I did as principal, with enormous student body, with an AP program that did not look very different from when I was a kid, and that was sad when I was when I was young, and I was able to pull the data at that Time, I pulled our data from 20 years earlier, and I looked and I said, what it was through that was very weird. I had the exact same number of kids from that year I graduated an AP Bio as there were in the bio class that I taught when I was an AP teacher. And here I am now as an administrator, and the classes still look very much the same, listen, same types of kids. In the classes I didn't even know we had AP when I was in high school, it was it was COVID, it was for specific kids, they were asked to join AP. Now that philosophy changed, we actively seek out kids to join AP. My concern is talking about feeling happy, there are parents sometimes that push us a little bit too much, because they maybe not understand the social implications of taking on too many advanced placement courses and what classes you're taking. And so what I did for that is I created something there was no other program like this, and it would be interesting sometime to even speak with folks from the College Board, because they would be able to delve a little bit deeper into this. What, what I did at Lane Tech is I created something called the AP colloquium, and it was that philosophy of portraiture, education and blended learning I would I would find year after year, and I'm the AP coordinator, and I'm trying to make this program bigger and bigger and get moving from hundreds of kids to 1000s of tests per year, which eventually I was able to do. But the reason we're able to do that was by working with our teachers, listening to what teachers are saying, working with the counseling staff who are not advanced placing teachers, our kids are stressed out, and why is that? And looking at our kids who are mostly stressed out with advanced placement, it was the courses they were enrolling in, and I was dealing with about 70 hospitalizations per year. And this, think about that. You know, school 4500 kids, about setting hospitalizations per year. Almost all of us anxiety based. Some of it is, it's not thinking through what it the classes you're taking are pressure at home. And so we would have AP fares. Would have AP night for parents, but the AP colloquium, what that was, was I looked at what our curriculum was. And at this time, when I was going back a little further, when I was an instructional coach, I was fortunate to be able to serve as an AP audit trainer, and that was for a city, the entire city of Chicago, and providing professional development and how you write your syllabus for the event, for advanced placement, to give you permission to even teach a class, because you need that you're not allowed to teach unless they approve your syllabus. So I was very familiar with like, for example, what is in statistics and what's in psychology. My My kids were most stressed out were kids that were taking too many math classes, their science classes, and they were, they were not enjoying the beauty of the Advanced Placement Program. So the colloquium was saying, Look, if you're for counseling staff and for teachers, if your kids are interested in statistics, please do not unless they're just math whizzes, let's, let's dissuade them from taking, you know, AP Calc The same year, or AP physics the same year. Maybe statistics, you could take psychology, and maybe our psychology teacher could work with our statistics teacher, and we could switch classes once in a while, because there are, there's a lot of stats in psychology. There's some cool things that are happening with our kids that are taking, for example, one cool one that we did was we were looking at classes in twos and threes that we could pair up and advise kids maybe take these. Our kids in world language for French, take a world history class. It's an advanced placement class. Take biology. And if you're taking for taking those, and we're doing our training with our teachers as an instructional leader running the school, when you're looking at the Renaissance, there's some really cool stuff happening with discoveries in biology that you could talk about in your in your French class, but you have the teacher switch, and the same thing in world, your world history class. So it was, it was that approach to advanced placement. And despite all of those challenges, there's a lot of programming, which, you know Joi had mentioned earlier. How do you handle it at the high school level? It's complicated, but it's about getting teachers enthused. And I worked with some of the most gifted teachers, and I was, I was extremely proud to work with them. And again, it was not them working for me. It was working with them, listening to what they're saying and how we can better support the social emotional needs of those learners. Because I can't, you know, having kids hospitalized because they're stressed out about coursework, that that's wrong. And so those are our approaches to doing that. And what I would end by saying is that we would, when I had the program in 2006 to seven, we had a 46% pass rate, and there were only a couple. There were only about 200 kids in the program taking advanced placement classes by 2015, to 16 school year, we had we were administering over 5000 exams, and we had created a largest Advanced Placement Program in the in the United States. And it was that approach. It's a smart approach to doing that and still supporting kids socially, emotionally.

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that, because all rolled into outcomes. You know, what are the outcomes for social, emotional learning? What are the outcomes for academic performance? What have you learned about the outcomes of using portraiture as a methodology?

So what I've what I've learned from using portraiture as a methodology, and those out. Comes that you can achieve when, when you blend in and include your parents and your students and your teachers and in the approaches that you are taking for providing teaching and learning, you create partnerships. Okay, and that's huge. You know, especially at the high school level. You're you you walk into high school, you don't see big, colorful bulletin boards. What do you do when you walk around elementary schools and everyone's a little more serious about things, and you know, because I'm, you know, the AP, calc teacher, so you know, I'm the biology teacher, and you're not, you're teaching kids. You're, you're every student's teacher, and even when you're walking down the hall, you're still role modeling. So that piece that I was able to take away was looking at the outcomes of having your parents involved. Your parents feel that it's inclusive, and they know it's inclusive because they feel it. Your students are developing skills, or they're taking ownership of the learning and the things that they are involved in there, we would, we would do best practice fairs with our staff on providing the types of teaching and learning that you're including your class and how you're involved in your parents, and improving the interchange of ideas and and communications and reflection with parents. And it was, you know, it was ownership of learning improve efficacy. It was that holistic mindset and students that can do attitude, being supported. And the big takeaway for me, and the big piece, and I've used this whenever I've spoken with other administrators or my own students in as a college professor, university professor, is that when you holistic mindset develops between that partnership of home parents, you know, with the with the teachers, and the home parents, with the students and with the teachers, that holistic mindset develops. What that means is that when you feel good about learning, and it kind of goes back to things you probably heard about in teacher college, you feel good about learning, you then want to learn. And when you want to learn, you feel good about learning. And so it becomes this cycle that occurs, and I think that becomes as natural as creating your lesson plans. And so that's I just it's a beautiful thing to see and process. And so that was a big takeaway for me, is it's ownership of the learning about a community that's a community that's a community of practice. So

as we close today, I have one more question I want to Could you talk a little bit about what some actionable strategies teachers and administrators can consider as they close out this school year, and then, as we know it, end of April, May, that's the planning for next year. There's scheduling happening. And in addition to what you talked about with your AP course, the pairings, what might be some strategies that people can consider right now.

So the strategies for our administrators would be to move away from professional development and its professional learning in what and what I mean by that is this is always the time of year I would start planning, okay, what is it we're going to do in summer? And during summer, we send out what our theme is for the year. And if you look at his thematic units of professional learning, that moves away from teachers just showing up and they walk in, they go in for an hour, and they have an in service on how to use Elmos, and they go to their classrooms, but half the teachers don't have Elmos in their classrooms. Okay? So that was mean. That was meaningless professional development. It was just a meeting. That's all it was. And so for our administrators, what are the themes, what are the takeaways you want for the upcoming school year? And so for for I would imagine, for administrators across the nation, it's going to be getting parents back into the buildings and involved in the safest way we can with hopefully diminishing issues of COVID 19. And how do we get that volunteerism back in the schools? Because that's a challenge. And there's, there's, there's a social adjustment that's going to have to take place, because we've had things that have been upended and those norms have been disrupted. And so that would be my, my big advice for anyone who's a principal right now or a superintendent, have themes for the year, and each time you have your institute days or your non attendance days for Kids, come back to those themes. It's a theme of professional development or professional learning, moving away from professional development. It could be your parental involvement. It could be your discipline practices for the school and how we embed our equity and access and all of our practices, which means that, you know, it's for our clubs, our activities, it's for our mathematics electives that are, you know, our high performing classes, so that you don't walk by a room. And you can particularly tell what that's an honors class or AP by looking at the kids faces. That's professional learning every time. You have those Institute days, you keep coming back to that. As teachers, if your administration is does not have an organized set for you, for your common planning time, are those other things that you would need with your department or your grade level colleagues, do what I did, take it upon yourself and seek out those people that are like minded and make those plans for yourself. You. I would hope that any instructional leader is allowing a great deal of freedom for academic planning and instruction, and if not, do that on your own and apologize later. Take that if we are teaching children, they only get fifth grade, once they only get eighth grade, once they they are only going to have one experience as a senior student. And take that and if you love education, if it's good enough for someone that you love, or your own child, then then it's good enough what you're doing in your classroom. So philosophically, I would have that approach, as for our teachers coming up for the new school year, we're going to have challenges still with COVID and those things going on again. That's the problem. What's the solution? So we have a solution to find

and speaking of professional growth, one thing that you said earlier about, if you learn something, you should use it. I just did some research on our graduates from the principal prep program, the Educational Administration program here at Governor State University. And it was shocking to me, because when I go into the program, when they're starting off, I said, say a show of hand. You know, I take a poll show of hand, how many of you want to be a principal, and maybe a quarter of them or less raise their hand, because really they're there for oh, I want a master's degree. I want to get a pay increase. They're never thinking that I want to be an administrator. And so I was shocked to learn that four years later, and that's the average time it really takes, you know, from the time you graduate to land a principal position, that 50% of them were actually administrators, so great for governor, state university. So they went into it with the mindset that I'm just going to get a master's degree and not use it. How about that, Chris, and not use it. And 50% of them are actually using it. And that's a really good number. That

is a good number. And that's, and that's something that I was astonished with myself when I was a student, because I remember many, you know, 20. Gosh, it was 20 years ago, you know, earning, earning, my type 75 and you would have people in class that they were, they were taking that for their, you know, lane or step adjustment, you know, going to the master's level now. And they, they did not intend on using it. And so I've said it repeatedly to students. I have saying, Listen, I cannot tell you. I can only share with you my experiences being an administrator. You're you're working with a another level of influence you can have on your learning community. And if you don't see that as a beautiful thing, then then maybe this is not the right program for you, because I'd rather you do not continue on this program and just do this to do nothing with it, then be here, and you should be highly involved in I think that is, that is a very good number, because statistically, and that's why back, I think it was around 2012 or so, State of Illinois started changing their type 25 program because of this exact phenomenon. I think it was, I think it was at that time, it may have been the greatest master's program, graduate type of work that that educators are seeking, but they weren't using the license

Correct. Yeah, that's a present great and not only did I find is 50% of them are administrators, they're all performing at the excellent and proficient level. So we're doing something great here at Governor State University, and just thank you so much for being such an influencer. Dr, Chris,

thank you. Thank you so much for having me today, and I'm very excited to work with all of you here at Governor state

Yes, I'm glad you're on our team. Thank you so much for being with us today, too.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for listening to teaching and leading with Dr Amy and Dr Joi. Visit our website at G, O, v, s, t.edu/teaching, and leading podcast to see the show notes from this episode,

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