[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.

[00:00:16] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Our guest today is Dr. Anthony Johnston. Dr. Johnston is an associate professor of education at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford, Connecticut. His most recent book is “Introduction to Secondary Teaching: Blending Wisdom, Research, and Social Justice.” This is Anthony’s third visit to the show. Welcome back, Anthony.

[00:00:40] Anthony J: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here. It’s great to see you both.

[00:00:44] Jon M: The subtitle of your book is Blending Wisdom, Research, and Social Justice. Can you tell us why you chose this subtitle and what it tells us about the book?

[00:00:53] Anthony J: Absolutely. I really found that there is a lot of scholarship out there in the realm of social justice pedagogy.

We can certainly look at resources that talk about evidence-based practices, adolescent brain research. There’s a lot of really amazing things that have come out, especially since 2014, around that particular area. And then of course, teachers’ wisdom of practice, the wisdom that we gain from teachers, which is something that absolutely needs to be valued. And part of the conversation, and I find myself going through all of those spaces in my role as a teacher educator, working with secondary teachers and pulling works from people I really admire and respect. And I was thinking about the ways in which these different, I call them strands, scholarship strands in education, talk to each other, and I wanted to think about a way to bring them all to, I think of it as like sitting all around the dinner table and discussing the work of teaching and having different perspectives and different foundations and different theories and different values, and really having them sit in the messiness of it and look for some shared ideas and some ways in which they connect, but also explore the contradictions and so forth. So I argue that teaching is a very complex activity, and in order for us to really engage in a thoughtful discussion on how to teach, I would argue we need to enter into that space of dissonance around these questions, of wisdom of practice, social justice pedagogy, the evidence-based practices work, and the adolescent brain research. And that’s why I brought all four of those together to try to produce a book on teaching that could hopefully speak to people in different ways, but also complicate some things that maybe we take for granted a little bit.

[00:02:40] Amy H-L: The Trump administration has recently declared that teachers are not professionals. This can affect funding sources for professional education. Does demoting teacher status and autonomy represent a broader sociopolitical change?

[00:02:59] Anthony J: It does, it’s not out of step. Certainly with this current administration, across in numerous fields , and anything that has to deal with anti-intellectualism and so forth, it seems to be a big part of their charge, and that’s seen at the K through 12 level, but certainly also in higher education. But I would argue that sometimes we have to, you know, hit rock bottom. And I feel like in some ways we are pretty close to that, if not there, in some ways, when it comes to how we treat and view the teaching profession. Even before they made that decision to deprofessionalize the work of teachers. And I argue in my book that this is actually a time for teachers. We have the research now that really indicates that teaching is the most effective resource for effective student learning. And so we really want our students to learn and to grow and to engage and to have agency, and to have possibility and see themselves as learners. Then we really need to empower teachers more than ever. And we’ve seen that the technology that we’ve tried to be the, you know, make that the silver bullet. Or the new app or whatever it might be, is nothing compared to the power of a highly qualified teacher in the classroom. So if we can embrace that, and that’s what this book does, it talks a lot about that as well as what that should mean and the high expectations we should have for teachers and so forth. Then I hope that we can start to rebuild the sense of professionalization that teachers enjoy and that our larger society values and appreciates.. So it’s a pendulum swing and we’re at one end of a pendulum right now and I’m hoping that my book and many others that do a lot of really great work can help to go the other direction and we begin to value teachers for the work that they do.

I’ll just say quickly, we’re at a place right now where so many people argue that anybody can be a teacher. And I often talk about this with my students. Some politicians tend to think that way because they themselves were students, right. And so they have all those years, just like all of us, all those years of having gone through school. And we think that we know what it is that teachers do. But what teachers do in front of the classroom is really only about 25% of their jobs. And the other thing is just because you’ve been a student in a class doesn’t mean you know how to teach.

I had to get a lot of work done on my teeth when I was a kid. I had a good 10 years of sitting in the orthodontist chair, but I can promise you, you don’t want my hands in your mouth fixing your teeth. So to me, it’s the same thing with politicians and other people who say, oh, anybody can be a teacher because they went to school. And I think that’s the rhetoric that really disrespects teaching and really shines a light on the lack of value we put on schooling in this country.

We have moved to a space in which we have de-skilled teachers, and part of that is the result of standardized testing and the emphasis on handing them scripted curriculum and taking a lot of the teachers’ work out of their hands. But I also feel like we’ve reached a point where we see how that’s problematic, and I’m hoping that we can rebuild the skills of teachers, and that’s something that I talk about in the book, to being the professionals and effective teachers that our students need.

[00:06:18] Jon M: You begin your book talking about three essential elements of teaching not generally covered in teacher education programs, for which you use an acronym, tips, T-I-P-P-S – teacher identity, teacher presence, teacher passion, and teacher stance. Could you talk a little bit about these?

[00:06:35] Anthony J: Absolutely. So these are four, to me, they’re their foundation, right. So I think of teacher identity, teacher presence, teacher passion, teacher stance. And I’m going to talk about them together first, and then I’ll talk about them individually. They are like, and I talk about it in the book this way, they’re like the base of, of a dish, like when you’re cooking and you want a good, you need to make a good roux first, right. If you’re baking, you know, Southern New Orleans style food, you want to have that good base, that good foundation, and chefs know how to do this. Good cooks know how to do this.

And to me, the TIPPS is the root of all the teaching practices that happen in the classroom. And if you’ve got that foundation down, and sometimes you develop it as a new teacher, but I think teacher education programs need to start to develop it, at least in teachers. They’ll be more effective sooner and they’ll be less likely to leave the classroom within the first three years when there’s a high percentage of teachers who do.

I always say it takes five years to become a good teacher. Too many teachers leave before they have the chance to find out that they’re actually great teachers. And I think part of that is on us as teacher educators, is to provide them a better foundation to get through those first few years. So TIPPS works together in this way.

Teacher identity is the sense of what we think a teacher is, and that’s informed by our own experiences as a student, but also media representations informed by all the books we read in our teacher education program, our idea of what a model teacher might be, and who we are as a teacher. We have a take a reflective stance and think about our own practice and what do we need to do to get to that model idea of the teacher we want to be. So a lot of that is teacher identity. I know for myself, for example, this is giving my age away a bit. I love the, like a lot of people, the Dead Poets Society and the Robin Williams portrayal. And I thought that was the teacher I wanted to be. And I came to realize that good teaching is not when you blow students’ minds. Good teaching is when you give students the power to blow their own minds. And I think that to me, the shift I made in part of my own teacher identity.

Teacher presence is one of the more complicated ones that don’t really get talked about at all in teacher education programs. I equate it to actor presence in the sense of when somebody’s involved in acting, and my background’s in theater, when they’re on totally immersed in a scene and they’re fully committed to the objective of the scene and they’re totally connected with their scene partner, and they’re listening and they’re reacting, they lose any sense of the fact that they’re acting in that moment. And they’re so fully engaged, they’re like jazz musicians, to use another analogy, all working together collectively. And I think that teacher presence is when a teacher is so fully invested in the act of teaching, right. In psychology, we talk about it as flow, where you raise all the standards and expectation in all, and your own ability arises to meet the moment. And so that means they’re connected to what’s going on for each student. They’re making a thoughtful and compassionate best next step in terms of their choices as a teacher. They’re able to hold the whole class in their hand as well as see them as individuals and think about what’s going on for each student .So that teacher presence is a powerful thing and when we can experience it, and I think a lot of teachers have experienced it, maybe not using that word. But it’s one of the very rewarding aspects of teaching.

Teacher passion is really the why of teaching, right. And this comes out of Robert Fried’s work, this idea of I’m going into teaching, especially in secondary, because I’m passionate about students, passionate about adolescents, either as a group or who they are just as individuals. Sometimes my passion is rooted in my content area, my love for social studies or for science or math, and sometimes that passion comes from larger social justice. Maybe issues happening in the world, concerns about the planet, things like that. That motivates me to be a science teacher, to help young people understand. So those passions, and I would add a fourth one to his model and say there’s also people who just have a passion for the action, for the everyday mundane tasks of teaching. There can be great passion that comes with… maybe it’s how they greet their students at the door and how they organize their room and things like that. I know a lot of teachers who really love that part of it and that passion can change over the years. And there’s times when our focus may be more on one than the other, but holding onto that passion is really key to sustaining this work.

And the last one is teacher stance. And this has some parallels with the passion piece, but for me, teacher stance is about what you see as your charge. What do you see as your job, and how do you mentally prepare yourself to carry out that charge when you walk into a classroom? And then paired with that is how do you see your students? What do you see them as being capable of? And that stance is really important. Because when we have high expectations for ourselves and we have high expectations for our students, it fuels our teacher passion. It helps add to our teacher presence over time. It shapes our identity as teachers. So I see all these things as interwoven and connected.

And sometimes they contradict, right. There are certain times when our stance is, oh my God, I can’t. This class I’m teaching today has been driving me crazy. And when you have that, you need to be a reflective practitioner in that moment and say, whoa, like, my stance right now is not really in a good place to best serve my students. So that whole notion of TIPPS is something that I think we can teach more and help prepare new teachers to be effective in the classroom on Day One.

[00:12:26] Amy H-L: Anthony, you’ve had quite a bit of experience in more progressive Coalition schools, but you’ve also discussed some positive developments in more traditional district schools. Could you discuss this and maybe provide some examples?

[00:12:46] Anthony J: Absolutely. I think about my own background. I had the pleasure of teaching as part of the Coalition of Essential Schools. First, in the South Bronx in my student teaching year at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, before I went on to teach in the Bay Area at Leadership High School for [inaudible], and both of those were great experiences and truly changed what I thought education looked like based on my own experience going through the public school system in San Francisco when I was a kid. And it made me very excited to be a teacher. A big part of what I loved about it was how collaborative all the adults were in the space. It was this, maybe it tapped into my joy of having done theater and working with others to put a show up on its feet. But we all were just coming in every day and trying to figure out how are we were going to best serve our students and teach our content and work together to have school be a space where students felt like they had a home away from home and were held to high expectations and so forth. And that energy, that space, that work that we did, I thought was really, really powerful and shaped me in many ways.

But I also think there were certain fundamentals to teaching assessment and supporting students beyond just making them feel great, which is really important, but some fundamental skills that we didn’t always follow up on. And I really value what I see sometimes in more traditional schools where there is more structure and there is more support, some clarity around what they’re asking of students. And so how I talk about blending the wisdom of practice and social justice and evidence-based research, I think there is so much that we can take from different schools and look at, okay, this might not be the school I would want to attend personally, but what can I draw for? I might not want to teach in this particular school, but what can we learn from this school and what can we learn from this other type of school and bring these together to talk about how we best support students. For too long in education in general, whether it’s because of some of the traditions or the school choice movement that has caused a lot of this to happen, we are just talking in our own silos and there’s a lot to be gained, I think, in different types of ways of teaching students. I mean, schools that are teaching students outdoors and students that are having students work jobs part of the day, there are so many different models that exist out there, but they don’t really work. To me, they’re not really in conversation with each other enough in ways that could best support students.

[00:15:21] Jon M: Dr. Elizabeth Moje, the Dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan, was a guest on the show last April. Dr. Moje distinguishes between teaching with social justice and teaching for social justice. What does this distinction mean to you?

[00:15:39] Anthony J: I love her work and I’m going to have to go back and listen to that podcast now. Teaching with social justice and teaching for social justice in the context of this book, especially as I think about working with people who are going into teaching, I really want teachers who are fired up to teach for social justice reasons, to have a path forward, and I think it can be hard to have that in this current political climate that we’re in.

I know that folks in some parts of the country are surrounded by folks who are working hard to teach for social justice, right. Places like New York and Chicago and the Bay Area and places like that. But I also know that there are a lot of places where teachers may have that desire and may not be in a place that’s conducive to it, based on the politics of that district or that school or that state. And so that’s where I feel teaching with social justice really comes in. I think a teacher has to focus on what would it mean to help our young people have agency, engage in critical thinking, engage in creative work, engage in inquiry, all in ways that, to me, speak to social justice.

When you have students who have historically been marginalized by education and they’ve been just handed worksheet after worksheet, and they’ve been passive recipients to their educational experiences, well, anything that it moves beyond that is teaching with social justice, right, because we’re trying to help these folks develop that sense of agency in their lives so that, as I said earlier, they can do the work to save themselves. And teaching for social justice often looks like being more explicit about here’s what we’re saying is happening in the world, and these are these issues that we need to address and we’re going to address them and talk about them in this classroom. And whether it’s the things that are happening in Minnesota or whether it’s things that are happening with the environment or so forth, those are spaces where teachers have the power to step forward and, and say, we’re going to talk about this and tackle this and look at it from all different angles, and look at all the data and look at, what the research says and come up with creative and critical thinking solutions to these issues. That, to me, is teaching for social justice.

[00:18:00] Jon M: How can teachers make sure that they’re not penalizing students for views that they find offensive?

[00:18:08] Anthony J: Well, they should absolutely not be penalizing students for views that they might find offensive. At first I thought you were saying it the other way around because I think it tends to be more the case that’s when people talk about politics in the classroom, they’re thinking we don’t want teachers to bring their own views into the classroom, that they should be penalized for that if that happens, which I totally disagree with. But with regards to students’ perspectives, teachers know where those views are coming from, right. And often they’re coming sometimes from parents, but often, sometimes also just from the social media that they’re engaging in and the talk shows they’re listening to and the podcasts and so on and so forth. So the job of the teacher is not to tell the students you should be penalized for having that perspective, but to help them think about it more critically and to consider alternative viewpoints and weigh the data and really help them to step back and really think about where their stance is on that particular topic.

[00:19:10] Amy H-L: If teachers share their own core beliefs with their students, how can they make sure students aren’t afraid to disagree with them?

[00:19:20] Anthony J: When you say core beliefs, you’re talking about their values and.

[00:19:23] Amy H-L: Their values, yes.

[00:19:24] Anthony J: Okay. Exactly. So one thing I ask my students in an early class in our education program at USJ is I ask them, should teachers bring their politics into the classroom?

And 99% of them will say, no. And the reason I think for that is that when we hear that statement, we have a tendency to think it means they’re going to come in and they’re going to say, I voted for so and so, and if you didn’t vote for this person, then there’s something wrong with you, you know. And then there’s a whole power dynamic at play and so on and so forth, which is really problematic. But I try to point out to my students that politics is always in the classroom. Politics is always present in the classroom. Every single curriculum that you’re going to look at was vetted through all sorts of political parties along the way. Boards of Ed. The books that you are assigning to your students went through a whole political process to be chosen to be on that bookshelf for you to be able to provide to your students. Anything with regards to, heck, all the way up to school lunches. There, there’s not really an aspect of schools that doesn’t involve political choices.

To me, a big one is the fact that, you know, we have a lot of really new teachers who are being given very difficult classes in their first year or so, rather than having really strong teachers take on those more difficult classes. And that, to me, is another example of politics. So politics is always present in the classroom. If we start with that, we can then say, and I also want a teacher who is trained to work with adolescents, who understands adolescent brain development, who understands what young people are going through, who is trained to be able to help people see multiple sides of an issue, who is able to hold space, to have hard conversations sometimes that require being empathetic and compassionate listeners and engaging in constructivist listening and so forth. Teachers are all trained to do that, and I want, that’s the adult that I would want my students having conversations with around these tricky topics that maybe people have different, you know, values around and different core beliefs about. So that seems to me a no-brainer. That’s what teachers should be able to do, and we should be sure that we are preparing them to do that.

In other spaces in their lives, they’re not likely to come across that level of thoughtfulness and consciousness of their audience in so many other spaces that might be trying to sell you something or that might be trying to just encourage listeners and things like that, that don’t necessarily want to embrace all the different sides of an issue. That seems to me, the classroom seems to me the best space to have those kinds of hard conversations around core values

[00:22:28] Amy H-L: Given the differences in cultural capital with which students come into the classroom, how do we grade?

[00:22:39] Anthony J: Well, I generally think that we should think about grading with regard to who that student is and where that student is, and meet them there. I don’t tend to like the idea of a classroom where there’s a certain amount of As to give out and some people are going to get them and some people are not. If you’re using a mastery-based approach and you are helping students to move forward along a continuum in terms of their growth in that particular area, then their assessment should be based on their own effort, their own work they put in, their own growth. And while they may not necessarily meet the standard totally, that you’re trying to help them get to, they should be recognized and rewarded for the work that they do. And then they may need additional support going forward to actually reach that particular standard. But I think it needs to be individualized. It needs to not be a situation in which students are competing for grades or anything like that, but should be an atmosphere.

I always promoted an atmosphere in my classroom that we’re all the goal in this class is for everyone to get an A, but you’re going to all not only work really hard, but also support each other to get to that point. And so that’s where the social responsibility piece comes in, is we’re all in this together and we have to move towards the system, I think. And, and I think the Coalition of Essential Schools was really good about this, having this sense of, this isn’t just about me, it’s about us as a community. And when students go to school and they experience that in their classrooms, hopefully they carry that mentality and that sense of something larger than themselves once they go out and participate in a democracy. And as you know, Dewey talks about being engaged, in active citizens who are participants and who think about the larger community and not just themselves. That can happen if we move away from this competitive view of how we should do grades and classes.

[00:24:37] Amy H-L: Grades do serve a purpose of helping colleges to sort out students, right. So I’m wondering what that looks like when you’re giving essentially an E for effort.

[00:24:53] Anthony J: No, I’m not saying to give an E for effort. I’m saying that we need to have high expectations for all of our students. But we also know that all of our students aren’t starting at the same place. And so I’ve been in plenty of classrooms where I see students who are really strong and who come in having read a certain amount of books, things like that. So their ability to read the book that’s assigned is pretty much a breeze for them. They go through the whole class, they get an A, and they haven’t worked hard at all, and they haven’t learned very much at all. So that’s a concern as well, right.

But with regard to your question about the colleges, this is a really tough space we find ourselves in. My own daughter is currently hearing from colleges right now about whether or not she’s been accepted into schools. And we had a time period that we’re still in with these test-optional choice for colleges in terms of whether or not students should submit their SAT scores.

And there was some research recently done that suggests that grades are not a good evaluator of whether or not students are going to do well in college. Part of the problem for that is because there are so many schools where students are getting grades they maybe they should not be getting. I can tell you, being around districts where there’s privilege, there’s a whole lot more pressure by parents on teachers for children to get certain grades, you know, coming in and saying, well, I know you gave my child an A minus, but I need them to get this A, because I’m trying to get into this school, and so on and so forth.

When I was teaching high school, I never once had a conversation like that ,in my entire 10 years, in part because I don’t think the parents of the students that I was teaching, felt like they had the right to come into a teacher and tell them you need to give my child this particular grade. So it’s a really messy, complicated system that we have right now with regards to grades.

It leaves colleges in a difficult spot in terms of how well they can assess a student’s application. They put a lot of emphasis on the personal essay, which I think is good. But then, of course, with AI and things like that, there’s all kinds of questions with regard to that. So we’re in a tricky spot in terms of college acceptances and how students should be evaluated.

And I think the more holistic approach they’re taking in terms of ways that students can be involved in different activities and jobs and so forth is really good. Interviewing students I think is a great idea and really getting a sense, and I think teachers’ letters of recommendation can be helpful. So there’s a wide range of things that colleges look at, and both grades and test scores have been put under scrutiny quite a bit.

[00:27:32] Jon M: You mentioned Robert Fried, and in the book, you quote from ” The Passionate Teacher,” asking if a school board decreed that the final exam had to be given a year after the course was completed, would that change how you teach? What are some of the ways you think that would affect teaching?

[00:27:49] Anthony J: I love that quote, and I used his book for years as a teacher. I think that speaks to what Amy was asking about as well, is just how do we reimagine what assessment might look like, and how can we do it in a way that allows us to have a more thoughtful and complete and complex view of each individual student beyond just a mark on a paper. Grading has historically been, assessment in general, has historically been a very tricky topic for teachers. We struggle to even know what we’re talking about when we talk about grades and we talk about assessment. I would argue an assessment can be how somebody does on a quiz, but an assessment can also be, how I read that student when they walk into the classroom and look at how they have their head down and they’re dragging their feet. I’m going to assess them in that moment, and I’m going to engage in assessment and figure out what’s going on for them. So assessment, just as a term itself, has different meanings depending on the context.

I think that one of the problems that I’ve always had with assessment as it relates to grades is that it’s often based on different point scale systems, right. The zero to a hundred scale, and, you know, anything less than, I think a 62, is an F . And that whole, the mathematics behind that, many people have demonstrated, and I talk about it in the book, that that model penalizes students in ways that are really problematic. There’s a formula that I share where if a student has a series of Bs and maybe a couple of Cs, and then they get one F that brings their overall score down. Their overall points average down to such a low place that it would take like eight more A’s and B’s in a row to get just back up to like a C. To me, it’s always just been very weird and arbitrary,

And I’m being honest, and I’m speaking for myself, I have had years where I was teaching, and this is before everything was based on computer systems and so forth. But even there, how do you rig that system? So I would have a year where I taught a class and I realized a student got a B minus, that if I had used the, the grading system I had used the year before, that same student may have gotten a C plus. And that just feels weird to me, like if they had done the exact same performance and, and that arbitrariness can be seen across schools and across districts, even within schools. One teacher might have a special policy for participation points. Another one may have something where they have a late policy that’s their own. So all of these things are so random, and it really calls into question the authenticity of these grades and these assessments. And then that doesn’t even take into consideration what you raised in the beginning around the different capital that students have access to. And so students may go home to a household in which they have a lot of support to complete their homework assignments and so forth. Other students may not. Some students may have experiences and backgrounds and cultural experiences that might allow them to complete work that might be completely unusual and different and foreign to some students. So those things that we’ve always known are present also play a role. And so my personal view is that we have to think about some of them more. There are some really great new ways of thinking about grading, such as using the one through four scale, is one system that some schools have moved to, that I think is a more mathematically effective way of thinking about it. Some teachers will drop the lowest score, for example. And I think one of the things that we did at the Coalition school was if a student had made an effort, but still failed, but we saw that they at least tried, we gave them what was called a “not to standard,” and then they would have six weeks to complete work that would allow them to then eventually get a C in the class so they could still get credit for the work they did, but they had to show and demonstrate to us that they had learned the material. So there are ways and systems that can be used.

[00:31:49] Jon M: And just for listeners who may not be familiar with it: What is the one through four system?

[00:31:54] Anthony J: It’s basically rooted in the mastery-based grading program that some schools have moved to, which really looks at standards and says you have to meet this standard before you can move forward. And their performance is based on that. And you’re like, okay, so you’re at a two, which means let’s get you at least to a three. And they’ll continue to work with them till they get to that three before they move on to the next step in that curriculum. So when students have assessments that are beyond obviously standardized testing, but even just giving them a test at the end of a unit based on all the material that was taught or the book that they read, that rarely is the thing that they come and tell you after their senior year of high school, that you gave them when they were freshmen, the thing that they were going to carry with them for the rest of their lives. But if you are a teacher who engages students in project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, presentations that involve an authentic audience, things like that, those are the sorts of experiences and assessments that they will remember a year from now and maybe even further into their lives about what they learned from doing that experience, both the content and the skills that were involved to be able to successfully complete it.

[00:33:09] Amy H-L: Thank you, Anthony Johnston, author, “Introduction to Secondary Teaching: Blending Wisdom, Research, and Social Justice.”

[00:33:18] Anthony J: Thank you.

[00:33:19] Amy H-L: And thank you, listeners. If you’ve found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with friends and colleagues. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show. Check out our website for more episodes and videos, and to subscribe to our monthly emails. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes. Contact us at hosts@ethicalschools.org. We’re on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Until next time.

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