Crosstown Students on Co-authoring Learning Experiences

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Learn more at GettingSmart.com slash SmartSprints or at the link in the show notes. Alright, let’s jump in. You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Deion Jordan, and today I am joined by a few very special guests from Crosstown High. And we are actually based in Memphis, Tennessee, and our guests are Ava, Dallas, and Vera.

They’re all seniors at Crosstown High School. I’ll give them each about 30 seconds to do an introduction. Let’s start with Vera. I’m Vera. I’m 17, and I’m a senior at Crosstown High School.

I’m Ava. I’m Ava, and I’m 17, and I’m also senior at Crosstown High School. Hi, my name is Dallas. I’m 17, and I am a senior here at Crosstown as well. Very nice.

Thanks for joining the Getting Smart podcast today. For the past four years, the three of you have held various leadership positions and contributed really greatly to the imagining and the envisioning of what is Crosstown High School today. So we’ll spend some time together discussing again called authorship at Crosstown.

But before we get into that conversation, I just want to provide kind of a definition for our audience so that they can understand what exactly we mean when we say co-authorship. A recent Superintendent’s Association report entitled An American Imperative, A New Vision of Public Schools, posits a definition of co-authorship as the following. Learners are co-authors of their learning journey.

Their empowered agents continually invited and habituated to voice their whole learner needs and preferences in their interests and passions so that educators can adapt and instruct to them. Blanket instruction that stops sort of incorporating the individual, social, emotional, and cognitive growth needs of learners is insufficient to prepare them for lifelong success and well-being.

So let’s start with Ava, and I’ll actually incorporate Vera here as well. But Ava, tell us about your role in the development of Crosstown. I think you’ve been involved in this process since you’ve been in sixth grade or since the sixth grade. Can you talk us through that?

Yeah, definitely. So I have been involved pretty much since sixth grade, and I’ve had a pretty unique experience just being involved with that young and kind of seeing the process of the school and how they have involved student voice since day one. And we as in me and Vera, we would be involved and our parents would be involved in these

type of meetings before even we knew what the school was going to look like, what the kind of curriculum was that we were going to have. Were we going to be project-based? Were we going to include competencies? What was going to be our overarching goal?

What do we want diversity? And so from that very young age, I guess for me personally, being able to see how things have changed or things have stayed the same and just grown throughout these four years of the school has been a really amazing experience. And just I think me as a person and the Holstown body has grown from having so much student

voice and having so much ideation go into the school from the beginning. Yeah, thanks for that. Vera, what do you have to add to that? I mean, you’re actually around your involvement in the process and what were your wants? What were your needs as a student involved in this process?

Traditional versus non-traditional or more again, more innovative learning environments? Yeah, definitely. So similar to Ava, I was kind of roped into the process of trying to think about what our school was going to be and kind of like the culture of it all in the sixth grade. And at the time I was homeschooled actually.

So I myself had a lot of expectations of like what a classroom should look like in my opinion because I hadn’t been in a normal classroom in so many years. And so through the process, like through my middle school years, like watching the school grow and going to the different like design thinking and ideation meetings of like what the school is going to look like, what kind of teachers do we want?

What kind of students do we want? Like moving from homeschooling to traditional school to our school now. For me personally, it was a lot of like, it kind of opened my eyes to like the different ways education can impact a person because I went through three different things consecutively. And so getting to be a part of that and getting to witness that and like have my voice be

heard and getting to see the insight and behind the scenes of that has been so formative of my ability to like perceive different situations and kind of. You know, since we’re on this topic of student voice and choice, Dallas, what is, what, when you hear those words, I feel like sometimes, you know, student voice and choice has the ability to kind of lose its thrust because we say it so much, right?

What does that mean to you? And what does that look like in an actual school? So I can talk from a advocacy standpoint. That’s like the leadership role that I’ve obtained here at Crosstown. So student voice and student choice, of course, go hand in hand, but it’s essentially providing

feedback to improve your learning and to help you build this foundation for your future. An example of student voice and student choice would be all of the clubs we have here, all of our sports, anything that has been implemented within the past four years has been heavily student influence, I feel like. So I think that we all have been creators and trailblazers for our own learning styles.

And that’s what student voice and choice is here at Crosstown. Can I, I’m going to follow up because I think you really brought something very interesting and relevant to this conversation and also to the creation of authentic co-authored learning experiences within schools, this idea of providing feedback for your learning. I think that that’s really important as we think about this idea of habituating voice

right through this whole learner objective. What does that actually mean? Right. Or can you talk, can you give us an example of when you’ve provided feedback to either administrators or teachers that shaped kind of your learning journey or the learning or the learning experience of your peers more generally?

I think that overall, I think I’ve provided a lot of feedback. But the thing or experience that speaks to me the most is projects and working on teams and collaborating on teams. So having those check-ins with your teacher to let them know what’s going on and like communicating with your peers to make sure that everyone’s on the same page and having

those open discussions over conversations, surveys, emails, etc. I feel like all have contributed to me being able to advocate for myself and my learning experiences. Thank you. Thank you for that. Switching over to Ava.

Ava, can you provide an example of a co-authored learning experience or a co-authored leadership experience that you’ve been involved in? And then talk about what that means to you and then what that means to the success of your peers. Yeah, for sure.

I think that one of the most important things about co-authorship is that a lot of different students have the opportunity to kind of pick their passions and explore what they’re interested in. And so in that co-authorship, it’s more geared towards what you’re interested in and how you want to co-author your experience.

So the way that I lead my learning and co-author my own experience is going to be different from peers. It’s going to be different from Dallas because we have different passions and interests. So a really good example was over the summer, I did an internship with the school working in project curriculum development and kind of analyzing what projects were going to be

implemented for the new classes next year. And so being really interested in project-based learning and wanting to pursue that when I get older, I had the opportunity to do that with some admin here. And so during professional development week, we had some conversations about a specific project called Capstone, which is basically an individual learning opportunity for the

seniors. That’s a year long project. And so I was able to be in those meetings and provide feedback and get the hands on experience that I wanted to in using co-authorship to advocate for my own experience, but also using co-authorship to drive my passion and interest towards wanting to learn more about

project-based learning. Yeah, thanks, Ava. Something I want to shift to Vera, based on something that you said around picking passions and identifying interests and then those things showing up in your learning experience. Vera, can you talk about a time when you did not know what to do or you probably were

unaware of your interest or you had to do a little soul searching and digging, right? What do you do when you don’t know what to do? What’s your approach to that situation and how do you kind of respond? Yeah, so I guess I can just talk about my capstone. So for my capstone this school year, I’m going to be producing our school’s first musical

we’re going to be doing a production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. This has been in the works for a really long time and I never really knew that it could be like an academic thing that I could kind of bring to my education. And so over the summer, like in the later weeks of July, when we were starting school and we were talking about capstone and kind of trying to decide like what you wanted to bring to this

your senior year, I had to have a lot of talks with a lot of different teachers. So I talked to like Mr. Pryor and Miss Maggie Dennellen and Miss Stockwell and Ginger even just trying to figure out like what I could do that brings my passion for musical theater to my education since musical theater is what I want to pursue like out of in post-secondary education. And so it took a lot of planning and it took a lot of ideation to try to figure out the

different ways that you can incorporate like the performance arts into the different levels of education, like not just the academic stuff, but also like the social aspect and the soft skills that are developed through projects such as mine. And so it’s really just a process of finding what you like and then finding the academics that you can rope into that.

Dallas, what does equity look like in the creation of core learning experiences from your perspective? Right? How? How do how do how do teachers?

Right? How do practitioners? Right? Create a space that truly includes everyone’s voice and choice and then allows for them to again really take control of that journey in a way where they feel like they have the

resources to do so and the support either from their peers or from from their teachers. I would say the best way to create an equitable learning environment is solely to just listen from a place of open mindedness and empathy. And I think we drive these two characteristics a lot across town. And honestly, if you are listening to your scholar, if you’re listening to your educator and you

guys both have mutual respect for each other, where you guys are like constantly communicating and being on the same page, equity is kind of like already in the mix. Like it’s not a thing that you have to like be so conscious of, whereas you just have to come from a place of being open minded and understanding that everyone knows what’s best for them and everyone learns differently.

So having that individualized learning setting where you are giving students like a thing that they need to do, but also recognizing that everyone is going to do it in their own way. I feel like it’s the best way to have an equitable learning space where you’re also being a co-author of your learning. Thank you.

Eva, can you give us an example of co-authorship within your your learning journey? Yes, for sure. I’ve had many over the four years and they’ve all looked a lot different. They’ve all been with obviously different groups of people and different teachers. And I feel like each time I have had a co-author learning experience, I’ve developed different skills.

And so my personal favorite experience was actually freshman year. It was the very first project that I had. And so we had a lot about refugees and immigration for a quarter. And we were tasked, we were recently tasked with trying to replicate their experience and just trying to advocate for like what happens when refugees immigrate.

And so there is a restaurant on the first floor of Crosstown called Global Cafe. And so me and two of my friends decided to go down there because at this cafe, they have three different cuisines. And at each of these cuisines, each of the chefs are actually refugees. And so they’re brought from anywhere in the community that are in there looking for a job and the manager

gets them and they come and work for Global Cafe. And so we went down there during the school hours because like we can do that. And we went down there and we interviewed each of the chefs and we just asked them about their story. And in just talking to them, asking them about their experiences, you have it takes so much engagement with your community and empatheticness and just like able to understand the other like

other lived realities of individuals. And I personally learned a lot of skills from just that. But then we also asked them like their favorite recipe from home. And then we took their stories and their recipes and we put it into a cookbook. And then we put our own stories and our own favorite recipes and put them into the cookbook as well to

just kind of show that America is melting pot. And so being able to have the opportunity to go out into the community and to explore other perspectives and to get really hands on experience and just get an experiential learning. It’s just been so valuable. And especially during that, that’s when I think that I realized that Crosstown was able to give me

opportunities that other schools wouldn’t be able to give me and exploring not only other people and their backgrounds, but also exploring my own and how I can communicate with other people more effectively and more empathetically. Thank you. Dallas, I know you spoke a bit about some of the some you’ve spoken a bit in the recently about

your co-authorship or your co-author learning experiences or actually leadership experiences around kind of our project feedback cycles. Can you talk a bit more about that process? Of course. So I’ll use my example of my capstone project from this year.

And it’s focusing heavily on one of my biggest passions, which is advocacy, as I previously stated. And it has been in the works for a very, very, very long time. And I have went through many ideation cycles with admin, with students, with teachers, with community partners, and a lot of different people from the community.

And it’s just been like an overall helpful experience. So an example would be my advisor for the project is Mr. Ryan Pryor. And we’ve had at least five feedback sections within the last two, three months. And all of them have just been like a casual conversation, really, of

like, what are your next steps? What have your takebacks been? Like, how do you plan to move forward? And it really provides like this sense of comfort. Like, I might not be where I want to be, but I’m getting there and I have people who are

there to support me, but I’m also in control of the situation. And so I think my overall experience with the feedback cycles has been that it’s OK to make mistakes and it’s OK to have setbacks, but it’s how you react to them that really makes the difference. Thank you.

I’ll start with Vera here. What does it mean or look like to be empowered? Right? In addition and or right? The incorporation of the individual social, emotional and cognitive growth needs that

you have so that you feel empowered within within your school. I feel like a big part of feeling empowered as a student within our school is a communication from students to administration, students to teachers, students to students, like having an open communication and an environment that fosters a type of positivity that allows students to feel comfortable to have that kind of open conversation can open the door

to having so many students feeling empowered. Like I myself was a part of an Ava as well, a part of some student led teacher interviews that have been held every single year over the summer before the school year starts. And basically we are a part of the interview process and finding new educators. And I think that’s such an important aspect of our school specifically.

It’s why we have such good teachers who love what they do and who work so well with students because they get to teach a mock lesson to students who are experienced and know about PBL and know about the transition from traditional to PBL. And I feel like that, including students on different decisions such as who will be teaching at the school and what kind of events are happening and just overall school culture

can make students feel so empowered. And it also helps students to feel more comfortable just to have their voice heard and say things even if they feel like it’s going to be the wrong thing. Right, same question to you Ava. I obviously I agree with everything that Vera said and I agree that like us being able

to have open communication is a huge thing that makes us feel empowered. I think the next step to that would be that because of the open communication and because of the opportunities that the school offers us, it then empowers us to go into our community outside of the school and to discover those opportunities as well. And so me and Vera are actually on the XQ Student Advocacy Council.

And we found out about and are involved with XQ through the school. However, we took our love for the school and our passion for project based learning and advocacy to that student council. And so I think that was able to happen because of the communication and the opportunities that we were given inside of the school.

It just showed us that we are individuals and we are able to take our own passions and learning experiences outside of the classroom. And so I think that’s one of the most beneficial things is that because of the hands on communication and opportunities that are able to happen in the school. It just shows not only me, Vera and Dallas, but it just shows every student in the school

that they’re able to take advantage of those opportunities and seek out those opportunities outside of school and for the rest of our lives. Thank you. That a lot of what you said makes me think about proactivity and being a proactive agent. I’m interested Dallas.

What does it mean to be a proactive agent? I think sometimes students, educators alike can be very reactive and responsive to situations and not really think about how, how could I have prevented X from happening? Right. If I thought about in an example that we use within the Cross Town Leadership Group, we

think about it as a pre-mortem. Sometimes they do a post-mortem autopsy. The pre-mortem is like, how do we like think about all these things that come before? So what does it mean to be a proactive agent or a proactive learner? And how might that benefit a student, again, to be co-authors of that, of their learning journey?

I think it’s about analyzing truly what’s happening, like coming to terms with your reality and evaluating all your possibilities before you act. And I think that a lot of Cross Town students do a really good job at that. But I think it just comes down to planning, like simply planning. And we have plenty of audition processes for you to get there.

So I think that the biggest thing about being a proactive learner and like having these quote unquote pre-mortem like scenarios all comes down to like being an analytical person and truly like reflecting on everything that’s occurring and taking other experiences and bringing them to your own. And I think from there, you’re in your ideation process and from there you can,

you know, reflect and go from there. But I think like the overarching thing is like, I’m going to sit down, I’m going to reflect, I’m going to be open-minded and like take it all in. And like, I think that really contributes to everyone’s experience because we are reflecting different ways.

Exactly. So, you know, ideally foundationally, to be a proactive agent, it kind of necessitates some aspects of self-reflection that you need to have, like being reflective of yourself and then internalizing, internalize those reflections or whatever comes out of those reflections to then figure out what steps you need to take to make positive forward

steps. Right. I really like that. I’m interested from the three of you in just like a 30 seconds to a minute, what advice do you have schools seeking to create co-authored learning experience?

And again, that’s experiences that empower learners, that invite learners to really express their interests and their passions and their needs so that the school or educators can again adapt instruction, adapt culture, adapt the learning environment to meet those needs. Yeah, I can start off.

I think that the most important thing a school community in and can do and that can be with the students, but mostly the teachers and the administration just because they’re the ones that are really able to make things happen is each school is going to be different depending on the culture and the community that they’re immersed in. And so you really, you can’t ask for student voice if you’re not willing to listen yourself.

And so for teachers and admin to have an open mind, an empathetic mind and just the willingness to listen is what’s going to make a student’s school culture and just experience very transformative for them. And so I think if you were to put Cross on High somewhere that wasn’t Memphis, Tennessee and Midtown Memphis, I think that it would look different genuinely because the students

that we have here are from this community. And so we’ve shaped the school based on where our immediate environment is. And so I think it would be difficult for other schools to try and exactly replicate Cross on High because that’s just not the reality. I think you can obviously replicate curriculum and stuff like that, but the curriculum is

nowhere without students and the curriculum is nowhere without student voice and each of the students’ experiences that they bring to add to the culture. And so teachers and admin having the willingness to listen, to be open minded and to genuinely care about what students have to say, I think is the first step to everything. I would honestly say like exactly what Eva said, but I would love to add that equity

is so important. Like trying to create an equitable space is so important. And sometimes it can be so frustrating because I myself have even found at times like in our school that I think things are going too slow or things are going too quickly. But having the flexibility to have everyone go at their own pace and to the no student

left behind equitable mindset has helped shape our school culture so much. It has given us such an open and inviting and close knit community like within our school. Like, yes, we are students and we are each other’s peers, but like our relationships expand outside of the classroom because of that kind of equity. I think that once you’ve like set this foundation like Eva has talked about and you’ve

implemented equity, it’s all about pursuing your personal passion and understanding your identity as a person and like who you want to be. And so having these like, whether it’s an ideation session or we’re having an open conversation, like keeping your interests at heart is the best way to co-author your own learning.

Not under like understanding your experiences and how they contribute to your identity can be so vital and so important and so helpful to like understanding what you want to do and like understanding what ideas you want to pursue. So I think that once you set this foundation and you’ve taken into consideration that no student is the same understanding that you as a student need to pursue your passions

to help your learning experience is so important. Eva, Dallas, Vera, I want to thank y’all so very much for joining us today. I’m Deon Jordan. Keep learning and keep innovating for equity. Thanks for tuning into the Getting Smart podcast today.

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