Isaiah R. Walker on Recruiting and Retaining Black, Indigenous, Educators of Color

Alright folks, you’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast and I am Deon Jordan. Today I am joined by an extremely exceptional guest, Isaiah Walker, and we’re going to spend our time talking about recruiting and retaining Black, Indigenous, educators of color. But I want to get into a bit about Isaiah Walker. He’s currently a principal at KIP Philadelphia Prep Academy where he manages and mentors

multiple principals and residents. Folks, here’s a bit more about him. He started his teaching career at St. Charles, Bournemayne, School in Harlem, teaching middle school silence, then transitioned to Newark to teach middle school English and which arts and creative charter school.

Later, Isaiah spent five years working with KIP focusing on building teacher coaching and leadership development with KIP New York City and KIP school leadership programs. And as a leader in his building, in the KIP network more generally, Isaiah developed multiple at-risk intervention programs to address social and emotional issues for students that are being used throughout the organization and across the country.

Isaiah holds a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University, has studied and received certifications for Cornell University and Harvard University and is currently studying at the University of Pennsylvania. Wow, that is amazing and a mouthful. Again, I’m very excited to have you here.

Let’s just start off with something casual. What’s your favorite book and why? My favorite book. That’s a hard question. As a child, I grew up reading Walter Dean Myers, but I would say in the late a year,

James Baldwin, my Dungeonship, yeah, The Fire Next Time, yeah, collection of writings from James Baldwin for sure. Yeah. You can never go wrong with anything by Baldwin in my opinion. So I kudos that.

Let’s just get right in. I’m interested in getting started because you’ve been in education for quite some time and I love that you were a science teacher and an English teacher, so you were like both sides of discipline, right? Which is, for me, I think it’s kind of unheard of.

And so why did you become an educator? Full transparency. I grew up dyslexic ADHD with a comprehension reading disorder and my mom just drilled school into me and I used to be at school, I want to say from like 6.30 in the morning to 8 o’clock at night involved in every program before school, after school, Saturday school.

My mom was a single parent. She did a really good job with me, but I was in institution. So I went to church. I went to school as a part of programs, after school programs and so what I know is school and school for me was always a safe haven.

And so it kind of was a no brainer. I was a little bit of a hot mess in school. Same. We had the moments. We had the moments.

It was a no brainer for me to kind of go into education. I would say when I realized I wanted to become a teacher, I met my junior high school and high school principal, Dr. Sandy Johnson. And she kind of just held my feet to the fire. She lived two blocks away from me.

I used to hang out with her in the weekends. Later I want to say in like high school, I used to spend weekends at her house. She would mentor me, but she just would put me in a place where failure wasn’t an option and I wanted to replicate that. I wanted to be a part of that and I was excited to be a part of that.

So for me, school was just great. School was a safe haven and I wanted to be able to contribute and give back to that. And so that’s pretty much why I went into education. Very nice. I feel like you’ve already kind of answered this question, but I am slightly interested

if there’s a different perspective that you can yield around what continues to drive your passion to remain in education. I think I’m asking that question because post pandemic, we’re seeing the great resignation. Right. So many teachers are leaving. So many leaders are leaving.

Right. What is inspiring you to continue working in education? You know, it’s so interesting because, yes, there are a lot of people who are leaving the profession. When I think about education, I think about education in a way like we think about lawyers and doctors.

We diagnose, we prescribe, we collect data, we respond to data. And so, you know, from my lens, it looks different. And particularly in my school, we don’t have folks resigning like that. Folks are invested in it. And so I’m kind of in my bubble.

And what makes me happy in this bubble is the opportunities that we create. And so when I think about the 20 something BIPOC male educators, I have my Black and Brown women in leadership. I think about those things, right? The opportunities that we create for them and in turn create opportunities for our kids

because they see people who look like them and increase this visual image of success. And so for me, I think it’s the opportunity that we create that keeps me going. I really love that. I’m interested in your transition from, you know, classroom teacher to leader, right? Like, what did you have?

Did you have was it a learning curve? And you talked about kind of being thrown into fire, right? Like, what was that? What’s that? What does what does it mean to be thrown into fire as you transition to school leadership? Right.

Let me tell you, this is a whole story. So I was at Great Oaks in Newark, New Jersey, and every I was it was like a residency program. There was about 40 folks. I was number 41. I did not.

They like gave us an apartment, luxury rental rent paid. I was like, I got to get in this program. I just came back from the yard doing some work abroad. And I did not get an apartment. And so they were like, hey, we like you.

We want you to be in the program and we want you to teach here in Jersey. But, you know, we can’t offer you housing. And so I had to commute every day. And one of my childhood best friends lived in Jersey and she drove me to the bus. I want to say five o’clock in the morning every day until somebody dropped out the program.

And then I moved into the to the luxury rental. A few months down the line, we were all interviewing for other jobs, other opportunities. And someone from Harlem, a recruiter from KIPP that I knew from like through like Posse and other people like Posse plus programs reached out to me and said, hey, we got this position. We don’t know what it is, but we know that the work that you did at Columbia, we know what you’re about.

Would you be interested in this? And at the time they were calling it like a peer counselor or a student advisor, but they knew that they wanted to create programs for black and brown boys. And they were calling it at risk and invention programs at the time I didn’t like the term. But I knew what they wanted to do.

They wanted to combat negative social outcomes. They wanted to like mitigate suspensions. They wanted to like really slow down. This idea of like black and brown young males having negative self-concept. And so the opportunity was there.

I was a student advisor. There was no details for the role, no real JD. And they said there were about like five boys. When I got there, there were like 25 boys. And so I said, you know what?

I’m actually just going to like be their case worker, create programs around these kids and flip the narrative to try to get, you know, people to invest in these kids and as well as make something that everybody wants to be a part of. So it becomes inclusive and not students are not ostracized. And so while doing that, the dean at the time,

she went away because her mother-in-law was very, very sick. And so I stepped into her role and by January, the principal had to step out for some personal reasons. And she asked me to step into her role and it just all kind of became by January. Yeah. By January, I was running an upper school.

And, you know, I just kind of stepped into the role from there. I just kind of, that was leadership for me. And so I moved into administration very quickly. It all happened really fast, but I think it was a need that needed to happen. Yes. No, I love that.

I love that story. I’m interested in transition. I know you spoke a bit about, you know, you’re at your school in particular, not experiencing these resignations, right? And having high retention rates. And obviously, I think that a part of that is school culture

and the investments in professional development. I was just recently presenting at South by and Latinos for Education. I was at one of their sessions and they said, if we do not properly address the pipeline shortage of male educators of color by 2030, we may not have men of color in schools.

I’m interested in what you think about when you are look when you are recruiting, right? And what your recruitment practices are and then what your hiring practices are. And those may be one of the same, but if you could talk a bit about, you know, because I know there’s definitely a difficulty, there’s a shortage, right?

Of men of education that we’re at less than 2%, right? And so I’m interested in your thoughts around what practices you employ during the hiring process and the recruitment process. Well, yeah, well, first, I want to say that there is a shortage and people are leaving the classroom.

I have had four people leave this year. No black men. I would also say that the majority of people that have left, I think are people that could leave. And we can possibly dig into that at some point in this conversation.

And there’s that opportunity piece there again. As far as me jumping into recruitment, I really look for worth mindset. People that want to be coached, want to be developed and actually really have a love for learning and a love for kids. I’m not looking for someone who’s perfect.

I’m looking for someone who’s coachable, right? Who’s a team player who’s selfless because this is a serving role. Who knows how to receive feedback and knows that it’s not punitive. This is feedback just to make you grow. And so I’m constantly looking for that.

I think we’ve been fortunate to have such a good reputation at this point where folks are telling like their cousin or their uncle or their friend from college to apply. Folks are hitting me up on LinkedIn. Our recruiters are saying, you know what, based on people’s interview,

I know that you would be good for KPPA. And so we’ve been experiencing this influx of folks who just want to be a part of our community. It definitely is the Mecca. It feels like the Mecca when you walk through the building. And I think people feel comfortable and feel safe.

I want to dig into that a bit more. And I have a follow up question also from something else that you said, but I do want to get into the feeling comfortable and feeling safe. What’s the culture that you as a leader are establishing? How does that show up in your vision?

How does that show up in your mission? And then how does that then trickle down into your professional development and your coaching practices? Yeah, I mean, I try to be my authentic self. I, you know, I own my identity and I want everybody in our space to be comfortable

in their identity, in their narrative, in their footsteps. And so across the building, we have COVID signage, obviously, but that is one safety measure that people think of. We have Black Lives Matter stickers. I mean, we just have signage across the school for everything.

And I employ that. I definitely want to foster a place where people are successful. And so the first, you know, thing we do in professional development in the summertime is talk about identity and feeling comfortable in this space. And people need to feel comfortable where they work at.

And I work in a middle school. And so kids are in a space where they are trying to, you know, learn who they are and try different things. And yeah, understand themselves. And so we have to be able to model that in a very genuine and authentic way

and have empathy for that process for children and adults. And I think when I talk about safety, people feel comfortable being safe and being themselves. You know, the same was ugly sometimes. But I think that we definitely have a culture here where people want to come to work, love each other, laugh and joke.

Some folks hang out. I’m like, why do you guys still hang out after work? You hang out all day. But you know, people feel good. People feel good.

I love that. You know, and I want to shift back because I think you talked about growth mindset and you talked about the four folks who laughed. And perhaps that was what was best, right, to be Frank. You know, I’m interested in like, how do you as a leader, like,

let’s say you have someone come in and they’re growth minded and then, you know, they don’t fully embed themselves in the culture or they revert back to this fixed mindset. Or it also sounds like you have a culture that is asset based, right, that understands the social historical context of the learners, that understand their experiences and how they’re showing up each day.

And then that’s reflected, I think sometimes educators have difficulty with modeling metacognitive awareness, right? Because they don’t want to be open and transparent. It’s like, how do you as a leader, right? How do you coach that?

Yeah, I mean, I think you coach up and you coach out, right? So you have to have to have these difficult conversations. It’s, you cannot not have those conversations. And I think I pride myself on pushing the needle on really addressing, you know, we talk about like, say it ugly or say, you know, what’s hard with love.

I name it for folks because it needs to be named because those folks are in front of my kids. And so some of those issues have to be addressed. And I think that we spend a lot of time and I say we like in the world of education kind of tiptoeing around, let’s do some more development around this. But at some point, somebody has a fixed mindset and how do you navigate that?

And sometimes you just got to coach up or you got to coach out and that that’s part of the process. That is not personal. It’s really about, you know, our kids. Can you for the folks that are listening and I know that a lot of schools are, you know, are obviously looking to diversify. But and with that, and it’s always difficult for me to say these terms are very politicized and polarized diversity, equity, inclusion,

justice and anti-racist. I’m just interested though, like, are there some best practices or tips and tricks that you have for having those tough conversations? Are you all reading, you know, are you doing common readings, you know, rather than with Eberrex Kennedy on how to be an anti-racist, whether you’re reading works by someone like Bell Hooks, like, you know, what are you all reading or what are you doing to kind of build that culture to have these tough conversations? Yeah, so we have, there’s a number of things.

So every Friday or Sunday, I send out a Kim Marshall reading this like a weekly podcast as extended leadership teams or teacher leaders. Bettina Love’s book, Abolition is Teaching. We’re talking about the difference between being okay and wellness and what does that look like for black educators. We have a trauma consultant, Dr. Jackson comes in and bridges the gap between addressing the trauma within ourself and in the black community and within our black community in northern Philadelphia. We also have some empathy trainings that we do and some empathy interviews that we do from the regional office.

I also have an outside consultant that coaches me to coach my leaders around equitable approaches and just thinking kind of like outside the box when it comes to folks who are new to the craft and, you know, need to develop and what does that look like. We also have our social work team that has built a curriculum that is like social justice space but social emotional learning that we internalize we do like a pre internalization process before we put it in front of kids. And it is on, you know, what’s happening in the current day and in the past. What else, there’s a number of things. Also, you know, when the pandemic first hit, we were having con, you know, when George Floyd, everything started happening that was already kind of happening.

We just had the conversations. We sat down on zoom and had the conversations. And we created the space and that was our professional development. That was the baseline of the work we did, because we knew that we had to address the trauma that we were feeling in that moment before we actually moved forward as a community. And that created some tension but it also created some awareness for our staff and I think it brought a lot of us closer. I met you where I first encountered you at the Black Men Education Conference hosted by the Center for Black Educator Development, which was great.

One, it was my first time intending and two, I got to meet you, who I’m deeply inspired by in your work and your leadership. I’ve said that a billion times, but I enjoyed your session and I’m interested because, you know, I think that you spoke to the culture and the positive culture and the honest and intentional culture that you have at your school. I’m interested in the other side around, and you spoke about this, like how, like, how you’re holding teachers to being rigorous in their curricular development in their classrooms. Can you speak to that? So first, I want to shout out BMAC.

They gave me the platform and opportunity to, you know, just spread some knowledge. You know, a lot of times I think that, you know, there’s conferences and I think BMAC does a really good job at trying to create rigor. But there’s moments where we talk about, you know, Black educators and we come together and we celebrate and it definitely feels liberating and energetic and I just feel charged. What I wanted to do in that space was provide a skill and a tool for people to take back with them from my session. And I wanted them to say, hey, I went to Isaiah Walker session and I knew how to task plan or I learned how to implement X, Y and Z.

And so I’m really about, you know, what is the skill that you walk away with? And so I think they gave me the opportunity and the platform to showcase a skill that is transferable that I could coach, whether it’s 10, 20, 100 people on the call, and then walk away with the skill and be able to have that and take it back to their campus. And so I was excited to do that. Part of my, I think the bedrock of some of the work I’m doing now and it has shifted is really around professional development, whether it’s hybrid practice, internalization of attacks, creating systems for not just intellectual prep,

but how do you internalize content on a deeper level? Yeah. And so at our campus, we do, there’s like a cycle and I can share the cycle with you at some point, but it is very leverage leadership. Well, yeah, that’s like task planning 80, 90, 100. So everybody’s 100 in the world is our 80.

And your 80 can get a lot better with more detail. And so that 80, 90, 100 protocol is actually from an organization called Jounce, which is a great coaching organization I used to work for. I mean, we have a number of things that we do, you know, we do hybrid practice of a skill. That’s like an engagement instruction based skill. We do pre internalization and internalization of attacks or a math, math concept.

And we do not necessarily deliberate practice, but we do, we’ll actually look at the text, we’ll look at the curriculum. After we internalize it, then we’ll fuse it together and say, how are we going to teach this thing? Let’s practice this thing for 15 minutes, everybody in the whole school, and we’ll all be in an auditorium for some of the sensory like sensory folks, they might step out into the hallway. But for the most part, we do this every week. And it’s a culture that we’ve built here. I think initially when I started folks were like, what get up and practice that doesn’t make sense.

And I was like, yeah, get up. Let’s get up right now. Or if I walk into a coaching meeting, I think what it will look like is 25 minutes, but 15 out of the 25 minutes you’re practicing. And so we built that culture of not just being good and not just being great, but trying to be really authentic and automatic where practice. And we do that through multiple reps of a skill, right? And so like that 80, 90, 100, the idea is that you’re never at your 100. You can always increase and always get better and get more detailed.

And as learners, even as the head learner, I can never stop learning. I can never stop getting more detailed. You can get better and better and better and the better you get, students will grow. I just want to pause and just reflect on that because that lifelong learning aspect just speaks to me, right? It’s the continuous edification process. We’re always going through it. I want to take a quick step back to recruitment and retention.

What are the outwardly facing policies or the outwardly facing mission or vision statements that speak to the diverse culture that you’re looking to create within your school? I guess my question is because I’ve had conversations with school leaders who are like, I can’t find black men. I can’t find them. And I’m like, where are you looking? Are you looking in the right places? Are you doing the right things? So what are you doing? How are you finding and attracting folks? But also, are there publicly facing things that if I’m as a black educator where I’m like, oh, I’m on your school’s website, I’m like, yes, I’m coming here because you have publicly promulgated an anti-racist pedagogical approach. What should schools be doing? Where should they be looking?

Is it as difficult as folks are making it seem? I would say it’s yes and it is difficult. I would say it’s all about coaching and managing. And so one, we have a very clear vision. We create a place where black and brown people and all people win. And that is something that I’m constantly saying. And so there’s a level of comfort and safety that people feel that they are echoing. And if I say it a million times, then my staff will say it to other people. And families will say it, right? Like, we just got a staff member this year, her son graduated from our school last year.

And we just end up having a conversation. She talked to an AP and now she’s on board, but she knows what we’re about. And so she jumped on. I think the other piece of going back to coaching and managing, I am very close with our recruitment and talent team. And I’m constantly in a space where we’re sparring and giving each other feedback. And so I’m very clear about my EVP and what I am looking for. And so, you know, my recruitment officer, when Nodge goes out or formerly Malcolm, when he went out, they knew what to say. And they were saying everything I was saying. And so I’m constantly coaching that. And if someone comes and we have an interview process, let’s have an interview process.

After the interview process, we debrief and I give feedback, coach or manage that situation based on what came in front of me. For example, I did like there was there, there have been moments where someone had a phenomenal resume and came with no lesson plan. And so I shut the door shut the door me down. And I was like, listen, you got a nice resume, you’re warm and welcoming. You know, I don’t interview folks who are unprepared. And so I’m going to give you an opportunity to do this again at another time.

It’s a bar here. It’s a bar that, you know, I want to be able to have. Yeah. And so it really is about being like working closely with certain groups. And so I work closely with relay work closely with Lincoln. We know some folks at Temple. I’ve got my editor ground in the community. I walk from Northern Philadelphia, three miles to center city to my home, because I want to be in the neighborhood in the community. I’m out on Saturdays at community events because we need partnerships. And so part of the work is not looking at a resume. It is actually being on the ground.

Managing those relationships. And so, I mean, maybe I need to write it all down what I’m doing, but I’m just out here. I’m just out here doing the good work. As we would say, the worst work in some spaces.

And I want to be transparent. Like when people feel good and people feel fed and developed and not even just paid, right? When people feel like, dang, that was a good lesson. Oh, wow, I just nailed this skill. Oh, my kid just got it. They feel good and they feel fed and empowered and developed. And that person goes and tells the next person. And that’s what has happened here. I have one, two, three, four, five former division one football players. And like, they have told each other.

Like crazy. We’re not on camera, but I’m a gas. I’m like, yeah. It’s like, hey, I got this friend that wants to come. I’m like, we don’t have this, but we can talk about it here.

You know, and then I think the other part is, you know, being really intentional about your bench. And so we have, we have our leaders, we have our teacher leaders, our teacher coaches, our gender, our special education, but then we also have a program called instructional assistants. So every year there’s four or five instructional assistants who have either graduated from college or in like their last semester, who are aspiring teachers at one point in time, 100% of them were black men. I think right now we have one black female in that program, but 100% of them have transitioned into full time roles in the past. And so we train those folks to, to step up into the classroom. And so the other part about retention is if you have someone that needs to be coached out or needs to lead, you have the bench to do so.

And so it’s about creating that what if plan or if then plan, so to speak, making sure your bench is really strong. So learning doesn’t stop because this is a train we can go local so people can get off, but we’re going to keep moving. I love that analogy. I really do. And I think you spoke to this but just more explicitly in the form of a question, you know, what suggestions do you have for schools that are looking to diversify their faculty and leadership teams. Yeah, they have to go out.

They have to go out and so last night I was at the BAI black achievers industry dinner in New York and really tired. I just got back, but I needed to go to the dinner one because I was a cheever years ago, but I also wanted to see who the college grads on stage receiving awards and what did they want to do. And so three of them want to be teachers. And three of them are going to interview at my school. And so I’m hitting the ground. Right. Yeah, this is a girl from Spellman, one from Harvard, another one from Columbia, and they got to speak to me directly.

I’m going to temple. I’m going to Lincoln. I’m my, you know, some of my teachers are in school at Lincoln, and I’m going to send the back of their class. Because the power is the professor. You actually want to know what my teachers learning. I want to meet some other people. Go into Howard. My recruiter and I are going to Atlanta to go to Spellman and go to Morehouse because I’m going to go actually do the work.

I can’t just rely on one person. I got to, I got to go do it. You talked a bit about, as you put it, your bench and also the folks that you just mentioned. At the conference. You know, I’m interested in what does upward mobility look like at your school? You know, if I want to go from teacher to teacher leader or from teacher leader to coach or from coach to, you know, AP, like what’s that process for you? And how are you developing folks internally to be prepared to transition upward?

Yeah, for sure. If I’m thinking about, if I’m thinking about instructional assistant to teacher, they’re involved in internalization, they’re involved in higher practice. At some point in time, I will push them into teacher concept like SEL, a social emotional learning block, just to get their feet wet. The goal, though, for the program is that in a year, they should be in a full-time position. By January, I should be considering them and trying to figure out what are they going to teach as it’s self-contained, lower school. Is it within a specific department or domain? Do they have a specific skills that may be in the sciences? I think for teachers to become teacher leaders is the application process, but I’m specifically looking for folks who can build capacity, the capacity of others, and can coach.

For teacher coaches, I’m looking for folks who have expertise, who can do exactly what I can do when it comes to teaching. I trust that whatever you say is whatever I’m going to say. Right now, we have Peter Regerio and Sheila Ames and Morgan Dysonger who are teacher coaches, and they are really good. So I think when I think about those folks and the development, those folks were hungry and they were not, they didn’t just want to be okay or good. They wanted to be automatic and authentic and they wanted to continue to learn. Even now, they call me a lot, which is okay. I think they want continued growth. So when I think about leadership, folks who are okay shooting in the gym over and over and over.

So yeah, I think a look at those things. My final question, and this is a question for like where and how, where or how, can our listeners find out more about your approaches? Your approach to curriculum design, your approach to recruitment, your approach to resume? How that, like, where can we find more information that folks can, can put put into practice some of these things that you’re doing that are clearly working? You know, Dan, I think that’s a project that you and I can work on. Because that’s something I need to start doing. Folks are asking and I’m just working. And I need to actually put that package together. So let’s start the project.

Absolutely. No, I think you’re right. And obviously, I would 100% love that be inspired by that. Isaiah, I really cannot thank you enough for our conversation today. I think it’s it just was deeply provocative. And I think that folks ought to walk away with a lot. If they if not, they should. And so I don’t know if you have a final word or a final thought that you’d like or parting thought for the audience for our listeners. Well, one, thank you for having me on the podcast. Thank you for providing this space. I really appreciate it. Yeah, so James Baldwin. I think we spoke about this last time, or I might have put it in that presentation. But in my Dungeons chef, the letter to his nephew, he says you were born into a society which is spelled out with little clarity in as many ways as possible. And he was considered to be a worthless human being. And he’s talking to his nephew, he says, you’re not expected to aspire to excellence. You expect it to make peace with mediocrity.

I think the word or the phrase or like the sentence I want to leave folks with it’s not okay to be okay. It’s not okay to be like basic. We’ve got to aspire to excellence and our kids deserve that right. We need to do what we have to do in order to be prepared for the future. And that is being prepared. That is internalizing that is giving all we have. So our kids and our future can grow. And so you guys those are my words I want to be folks with. We definitely appreciate that. Thank you again, Isaiah. I’m Dion Jordan. This is the Getting Smart podcast. Keep learning and keep innovating for equity. Thanks for tuning into the Getting Smart podcast today. We want this podcast to be actionable and insightful and a great way to learn about what’s next in learning.

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