Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to education perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education. Our guest today is Dr. Carmen Coleman. Dr. Carmen Coleman is the Ohio Valley Educational Cooperative's chief of transformational Learning and leading this role includes leading Ovac's Deeper Learning Initiative and other strategies to impact the more than 9500 educators who serve the OVAC region. Coleman has served as the chief academic officer for jefferson county public schools. In this role, she developed and led the implementation of a district wide competency based initiative known as the Backpack of Success Skills in 2019. Google for designated this initiative as a signature project. Prior to her time at JCPS, coleman served on the faculty of the University of Kentucky's College of Education, specifically in the educational leadership and principal preparation programs. Her 28 years in education have also included the roles of superintendent at Danville Independent Schools, director of elementary schools at Fayette County Public Schools, and principal resource teacher and classroom teacher in Scott County Schools. Welcome, Carmen Coleman to Education Perspectives. We're so delighted to have you here.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:01:42]:
Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Talk about what I love.
Liza Holland [00:01:48]:
Absolutely. It's a love fest for education here.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:01:52]:
Yes.
Liza Holland [00:01:53]:
I always start out with the same question, which is, if you take it on a 30,000 foot view, why do you think we as a society invest in education?
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:02:05]:
I think because it really impacts all of us, whether or not you have children. We live in communities, we coexist in society, and we want our world to continue to advance. Science is really important to my family. I have two brothers who are researchers, and my husband is an oncologist. Science is important, and I think education is where all of that starts. I have a really good friend that I used to work with in another district, and he was from Columbia, and he would say people who think we don't need to worry about achievement gaps, education for everyone. He said they should come home with me and feel what it feels like to be where you don't feel safe all the time and you don't feel just every aspect of life in some places there. And that always really stuck with me.
Liza Holland [00:03:19]:
That's really powerful, and it really does tell us that we have to foster our democracy and those freedoms that we have. Great answer. So what drew you to education in the first place?
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:03:32]:
I think I'm like so many who said, I'm never going to do that. My mom was a teacher, my aunt was a teacher. I grew up in school getting ready for carnivals and field days and staying for faculty meetings. But I sort of dabbled in different things. When I got to college and I finally gave in and took an education class just as kind of an intro course. And I felt at home and then I took another class and getting to get into schools, I just felt like, gosh, this is fulfilling work and there's also a lot to be done. And I've seen even early on, I thought, gosh as fond of a memory and a place that schools have in my heart. We also have to be realistic and know that we're pretty outdated in many ways and even obsolete almost in some ways when you consider the world and the way that it's evolved. And I feel very inspired and challenged by the opportunity to help bring along what is phase two of what school looks like in our country.
Liza Holland [00:04:59]:
Well, you have been an incredible pioneer in this type of work. Can you tell us a little bit about your time in Danville and starting out with UK next gen and how that all kind of came?
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:05:11]:
To be sure. So right before I was hired as superintendent in Danville, something happened that really made me think about the way we were approaching school. I was prior to that, as a principal and teacher, I was very motivated by those test scores because I saw that number as one representation of how our kids compared and how they would compete. And I still, to some degree, yeah, that's one number one aspect of a much bigger picture. But I was in Fayette County at the time, and the board, my superintendent then, who you probably know, liza Stu Silberman, my mentor, and really like a dad to me in so many ways. He always challenged us to think about what is it that kids who are higher socioeconomic levels, what do parents with means families who can do for their kids, give their kids? What experiences do those kids have and how can we get those kinds of experiences to all kids? And so, for example, something really important to him was music and providing different kinds of lessons for kids, making those things possible for all kids. He did a lot with that in his prior district in Fayette. One of the wonderful things that he and the board did was to make it possible to have a world language teacher in every elementary school. And at the time, my two brothers were in graduate school in Boston and they would talk about how the kids, young adults that they were with all could speak multiple languages and they felt at such a disadvantage because they couldn't. And so when that opportunity came, I was so excited and I went to my principals and said, listen, we have a great opportunity. And they were not overjoyed. And they said to me exactly what I probably would have said as a principal. That's a wonderful opportunity. When are we going to do that? It's not tested. How are we going to make time for that. And that was the beginning of a real turning point for me. Danville was looking for a forward thinking superintendent that board at that time recognized. We need to give ourselves a signature. We need to really know how do we need to best equip our students for successful futures even then, I mean, it was 2009 then, but we thought we'd be all riding around in hovercraft right in the 2000s. What do we need to do? I got there, and one of my board members had visited high Tech High School in San Diego. He had been at the National School Board Conference that spring, and it happened to be there. And so he had read about that school in Tony Wagner's book, the Global Achievement Gap. So he really was a leader for me in as much as I felt like school had to change. And I started to see that we were taking opportunities from our kids because we were so afraid of test scores and what impact making changes might have, that we were very short sighted. But what I didn't know that I learned during that time in Danville, when that board really gave us permission to explore and to think big. And I visited some places. Like high Tech High School, like the I School in New York City. And even though those places contextually were different, the kind of work that kids were doing was very similar in that it was meaningful, authentic work. It wasn't pretend school stuff. It was solving community problems. It was the group that really made the biggest impact for me was in New York City, and there was a class of sophomores, and they were working with the Ground Zero museum board to make recommendations for the artifacts that that museum should collect and house. And so, needless to say, these students were charged with a heavy challenge and task. And I was reading one of the kids proposals, kind of reading over his shoulder as he worked on it. And this was an African American young man, and he looked so much like a student of mine in Danville at that time who is still near and dear to my heart. He's just one of those kids that was a standout when I got there. In fact, he asked me I'll never forget, he asked me he was a junior then. He said, now, did we have a superintendent before you? And I said, we have had a lot of superintendents before me. And he said, well, I never knew him. I never knew him. And I said, well, you might not, because there's a whole lot involved with this role. I love being in the schools. That is where I find my joy. That is where I find my purpose. And so that's where I stay very closely, if not in the schools every day. And so anyway, that young man in New York City was writing such a beautiful proposal for an artifact. And all I could think about was my student that he reminded me of so much. He wasn't doing work anywhere close to what that kid was doing, and it wasn't that he couldn't. That young man named Max was very bright and so talented. Oh my gosh. But we weren't giving him the chance. The best I had to offer were AP classes. And unfortunately, most kids that looked like Max in my district weren't in those classes, to be very honest. And that is when for me, that was a stake in the ground. I thought, you know what, we have got to make some drastic changes. And it was also the realization that the kids can do anything that we support them in doing. And so that limited vision for what school is, is on us. And I decided then, never again will I be the reason, and adults be the reason, that kids under my watch aren't getting the most amazing experiences possible to equip them for the future. So that really began the journey in Danville, and it continued. We explored, we tried new things, just having the permission really to go see what are schools doing, who are thinking bigger, and what does that look like? And so we started trying public presentations of learning and project based learning. And our students, I believe even now, if you talk to them who were there during that time, it was a joyful time for students and adults, just making it free to try. I remember one Saturday, high school kids were in the front yard at Danville High School working on their catapults and trebuchets for a class. And that was on a Saturday. They didn't have to be there, but they wanted to work on it. And so the teacher said he would go. And those kinds of things happened all over the district. UK got interested in the work that we were doing. In fact, lots of people got interested, which was always sort of a real interesting phenomenon to me. Because Danville is a district of 2000 kids, we certainly weren't trying to get any attention. We were trying to just do the best we could do every day. And I'll never forget one day I got a call from a person named Kat McGrath, who was with PBS NewsHour, and she said John Merrow wanted to come and feature the work that we were doing. And you can find that clip, it's still out there. That was, I think, 2011 twelve, something like that. And it was just surreal. They wrote about some of the work we were doing, like in the Harvard letter. It was featured in Getting Smart. Tom Vanderart came multiple times. And what just was really interesting is that we really were much farther ahead in our thoughts than in our implementation at that point. But it was enough different that it was really started getting attention. And we explored, we worked together to answer. What does our diploma mean? That became our North Star. We defined that. We called it the Danville Diploma and that became the North Star that we aspired to across the district. And not only did we aspire to it, but we wanted to see evidence along the way that showed that every child was getting the kinds of experiences that we knew they needed to be equipped for success. And so then the adults have to provide those experiences. So that was a wonderful time. A wonderful time. UK Next Gen became very interested in what we were doing. Actually, Next Gen was just getting started at that point. This was sort of all at the same time. Ultimately, I joined that team after five years in Danville because I felt so compelled by the work that we had done and by what I had seen and the difference that it made. I thought the opportunity to spread this in Kentucky and help others know how to go about making change is one that I just couldn't pass up. And so that's kind of the beginning of the journey and it has certainly been an interesting one and it continues.
Liza Holland [00:17:41]:
Absolutely. It amazes me how the roots of what you started with giving yourselves the courage and the permission to play and explore and all that kind of thing has really it's created a movement and a headwind in this state.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:17:57]:
It really has. We were just down there in Damble. I didn't know there was someone out writing about something called a graduate profile. I had no idea that that was getting started, too. All I knew was that we were trying to figure out what does school need to look like? And we read The Global Achievement Gap, tony Wagner profiled some of those schools in that book and then going to see it and just realizing the power of thinking bigger about what's possible. And yeah, I think it has really helped to be part of an awesome movement toward change.
Liza Holland [00:18:43]:
It is so powerful and it is so needed because that's really where I came to as well, is looking at because I wound up in a bunch of meetings with employers, talking to educators and realizing that they're saying, what you guys are giving us is not what we need. And that portrait of a learner, portrait of a graduate is really starting to bridge that gap.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:19:12]:
It really is.
Liza Holland [00:19:13]:
Yeah. Tony Wagner, you brought up several times and it's always struck me when I saw him and he said, you know, people content, it's in your pocket.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:19:24]:
Right.
Liza Holland [00:19:25]:
The importance of learning content has really not got the same power that it once did. It's all about learning how to think and how to use that content.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:19:36]:
That's right.
Liza Holland [00:19:37]:
It's very inspiring.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:19:39]:
It is. And it's so exciting when you get together with community leaders and workers, you get together with families, you sit down with students, teachers, farmers, it doesn't matter the group and you ask them, what are the most important skills for success? What do you think? How do you think kids need to be equipped so that they thrive as adults in our communities, everybody gives the same answers. Everybody perseverance, communication, problem solving. We know all the words, all the words. Critical thinking in the next question. So where do kids get those experiences? If we say, that's most important. And there's always a pause, and then we start to realize, oh, yeah, there are some places, but they're all around the edges of school. Or they're with one special teacher who does these awesome units where the kids are solving problems in the community or building a community garden, but it's not something for all kids. And we have a tremendous opportunity gap.
Liza Holland [00:21:03]:
It's a little points of light, but not systemic, which is an amazing segue to your backpack program in Jefferson schools. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I think this is one of the most powerful integrations that I've seen that really seems to be sticky. That's one of the problems with change, is people get going, and it's all these wonderful leaders, and as soon as the leader leaves, it's like, okay, I guess we'll just slide back into what used to be right. But this really seems sticky over there. Can you tell us about the backpack program?
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:21:40]:
It seems like it. So I was so convinced by the theory of action that we had really unknowingly applied in Danville, but I recognized after the power of what do we want for our kids? And then what does that learning look like to lead to that? And how will we know if it's happening? What will we do? If that's what we want? Shouldn't we have some checkpoints along the way? So I was with next gen when I was introduced to Marty Polio, who was principal at Dos High School at that time. We were introduced by a mutual friend, Tim Godby, who works for the Department of Education, and he was working in Jefferson County, and he had met Marty. And it's funny, Tim was principal at Lincoln County High School when I was in Danville. We did not know each other, and that's what he said when he called me. I know we don't know each other, but I watched the work you did in Danville, and I have a principal that I'm working with in Jefferson County. I think he needs to hear that story. I think he has the ideas, and he just needs to think about where do they go from here? And he said, I realized that I don't know. But I said, I don't know, but I know who can help you. He said, I think he's on to some great work. So I went down there and we met and we talked about Dos High School, and we made what he had done. They were all doing Project based learning training. And his thing was engagement. And I want kids to be engaged. I'm tired of that teenage days. Look, I want them to be excited. But he said, what's the end game? Like, okay, we do project based learning training and we do that. So to what end? And I talked to him about the Danville diploma and answering that question, what does your diploma mean? And really articulating it and making that the living vision. And then in a few weeks, he called, we made big plans. And then he called and said, listen, I've got another project. And he had been asked to be interim superintendent. And he asked me to come. There was not a chief academic officer, and he asked me if I would come and work with him there. I was like, oh, my goodness. And I said, I tell you what, I believe that district needs to be the lighthouse for our state. It is one of the 30th, usually 27th, 29th largest in the country. And it's like another planet. Like, to people like me at that time, I didn't know anything. And I've been in Fayette for a while at one point, but Jefferson was like a whole nother planet, really. And I said, I will come, but here's what I believe, and this is the only way that I will approach this work. Now, I will not chase test scores. I believe it's important and I will not ignore it, but I will give it the attention that it warrants and not anything more. And I showed him what we did in Danville, and he let me run. He and I went we met with every group of people and faculty that we could get to. I mean, we drove the wheels off our cars that year and really every year, but to meet with groups. And we ask them three questions, how do you want us to equip your children, your students, for success, your future employees? And we would let them make lists here's the skills they need. And I always say, Liza, we are schools and school districts. Academics are not negotiable. We are not trying to say this is what we need to be doing. Instead, what we're saying is the skills that everyone says are most important are teachable and learnable, just like a math skill. And we have to teach kids to apply those skills with academic content to solve new problems, to new learning. And so we asked that, what do you want? The second question was, like I mentioned before, what kinds of learning leads to that? What does that look like? And I always like to give a scenario. If I gave you 30 students for a week and said, your only challenge and the way I'm going to hold you accountable is by asking these kids at the end of this week to show me evidence that they have applied academic knowledge and equally not the skills that you've just said were most important. I need to see that they've grown in those ways. And so what would you do? So I love to give them, and I only give groups two minutes to talk about that. Listen, in two minutes, no matter what kind of group I'm talking to, they know what to do. They come up with, oh, I would have them we would plan a trip and they would have to do all of the planning, the budgeting, the travel arrangements, the packing. We would go they would have to navigate, learn to navigate the city or wherever we went. We know what to do. They would say we would look for issues in our community to tackle, and we would tackle those or even as simple as we would design one of those breakout games for people. Awesome, right? And I always say, now, look, every one of us knows how those skills are developed. We know what kinds of experiences kids need. And they always talk about, well, sports and music, hobbies, band. That's where they get all those skills. But that's what leads to the third question, which is, where in your school today is that happening? Who's getting these skills? And I always like to say, so everybody, right? Because you said these were the most important. So where are these being taught and learned? And the answer, like we talked about before, is always this gut punch that we have an equity problem. And the quote from Deming, I think that's something like every system is perfectly designed to lead to the outcomes that it does. That is such an illustration, right? I mean, we say these are the most important skills, but the kids who are getting those experiences are kids whose parents can pick them up from robotics after school, parents who can afford for them to be in band and play sports. And that's far from all students. And so what we have to do is make that kind of learning school that is school. And so we collected those lists from all those groups. We put them together literally in a wordle, so that we could show people this is how many times perseverance came up in these conversations. This is how many times critical thinking came up. It was powerful. We, with a group within the district, created what are called the Five Success Skills based on those lists of words. We had demonstrators under those words, just simple bulleted list. Here's what we mean when we say critical thinking or productive collaborator or whatever. We just swung big, right? And we're not going to pilot because this is really about the day to day experience for every child. And so if we pilot, who are we going to leave out? And every child is going to have a digital way of collecting evidence every year of both academic content and success skills. And also we want them to do formal what we'll call defenses of learning at transition points. Fifth grade, 8th grade, and 12th grade. And just like in Danville, because that's the same. We did that same thing in Danville. And I knew the power. I knew the power of it. They would ask, do you really think that a fifth grader is going to get up and do a presentation that you're describing, like a doctoral defense? I mean, like, really? And I would say, you know what? I do not know if they can or not. I don't know yet, although I did know then. But what I know is that if we don't make this opportunity possible for them, they won't. And I know if they do, what an advantage that gives them that they can stand and talk about their learning and reflect on their progress and their growth. And the other part of that was the theory of action, right? If we know how we want our kids to be equipped, and we establish a system for collecting evidence or looking at evidence of that along their journey, then we as educators have to create the kinds of experiences that will lead to that evidence. And we jumped in. I mean, I got there in 20, 17, 18. We worked on this over that year. We got the success skills going even that spring of 2018. We were saying by then in one of those conversations with an elementary staff, one of those conversations where we answered those three questions, a teacher said, so it's kind of like a backpack. If you think about when kids come to us, what skills and knowledge do we want to put in their backpacks that they'll carry with them and carry into life? So it became the backpack. And we promised every kid on the first day of 2018 will have a digital backpack and they will begin collecting evidence. But we made it fun. It was a celebration. We tried to make it safe to try.
Liza Holland [00:33:36]:
So critically important it is.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:33:38]:
I mean, teachers are leaving and they're not coming in. We've got to help people find again their why and find joy, right? And this is the best work you ever do. The joy that it brings in designing awesome learning and then seeing what kids can do, there's nothing better than that.
Liza Holland [00:34:04]:
And it's joy on both sides. It's joy for the kids, it's joy for the teachers. It is student agency being able to take a bit of control over their lives. I was very inspired by Sir Ken Robinson who talked about seeing kids in elementary school, and they're so curious and they're full of life, and by the time we get to high school, we beat it out of them. So I think that there's definitely more joy that needs to be put in there.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:34:34]:
Oh, my goodness. And what would happen? So we would get to the defenses, just like in Danville. Let's get to the defenses. And then teachers on panels come together, and they see what the kids can do, and it is just they can't believe it. So it does. I mean, I remember when Marty went to his first elementary, fifth grade defense, and he came back and said, Carmen, people cried. He was like, I almost cried. That was good. We saw kids who had just been in the country a matter of months who could fluently talk to you about their learning, and there's nothing more inspiring. And not only is it inspiring, it's also it makes all the learning transparent. So kids, when they start to show evidence, the other benefit is that you start to see where we need to strengthen what we're doing. So lots of implications about how we need to learn and grow as the adults as well.
Liza Holland [00:35:54]:
Absolutely. Gosh, it's just so powerful. How much has been accomplished in a fairly short amount of time. It's pretty cool, but obviously, we've got a long way to go. Tell me a little bit about some of the obstacles that you faced along the way, and then I'd also love to get your take on you get what you measure. You're talking about systems being set up to do what they're supposed to do, about what type of changes we may be needing to make in our accountability systems to be able to accommodate this type of powerful learning that will actually give kids the tools that they need.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:36:30]:
That's right. The accountability system the high stakes have created for the last 30 plus years we've been in this era, the achievement gaps have widened. People sort of had their hair on fire about learning loss and COVID, and I would show people that the results aren't very different. What we were doing wasn't working, but that is the elephant in the room. That is the barrier. In Jefferson County, I sat in a room with principals after KDE had come in and done an audit who were told that they weren't found to have the capacity to leave, and they lost their jobs. So that's no joke, and people were scared. What ends up happening is that the kids in the schools who really need this, a different approach, a different kind of learning, most desperately are exactly the ones whose leaders are so afraid to make change because they feel so locked in by that system. And even if you try to talk to people and say, okay, what is it that you're doing that you think is working toward that goal of keeping the test scores what they need to be? We're not suggesting that you change what's working, but is it working? I was on a panel last week with a group called Fair Test and NEA in Washington for policymakers, and that is the challenge across the country. Right. We have this federal this is tied into the federal accountability, and I believe we need to be accountable 100%. Absolutely, 100%. But what we have, to be honest. About is whatever that accountability tool is, whatever the measure is, is going to be what school looks like. So if that measure is a multiple choice short answer test, then your kids are going to spend a lot of time doing that. When you think about I always like to talk to people about think about the permit test versus the driver's test. Nobody argues that the permit test is important, but we would not dream of letting a 16 1720 year old anybody out on the road without having shown demonstrated that they can actually operate a vehicle safely.
Liza Holland [00:39:35]:
That is a great analogy, isn't it?
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:39:38]:
But yet we give diplomas based on 13 years of permit tests and send them off to life. And diplomas should be tickets. They should be tickets to their next step. Tickets worth a lot and they're not in so many cases. So I think we've got to think about how do we again broaden our definition of student success and broaden the ways in which we measure student success. It doesn't have to be a multiple choice short answer test for everything.
Liza Holland [00:40:25]:
In fact, it can't be because that's not what we need in our society today, kind of coming back around to why we do this in the first place.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:40:33]:
That's right. It cannot be. But that has become our Super Bowl. And as long as that's the Super Bowl and people lose jobs and schools are labeled based on that, it is not impossible to change. It's not. But you will never fully realize the benefit until we can get above that turbulence.
Liza Holland [00:41:03]:
And that answers so well, my usual last question, which is what would you like decision makers to know? And that right there is a wonderful piece because in order, this is a big boat to turn. It really is. I keep going back to that huge barge that got stuck in the canal while we were in the middle of the pandemic. And I thought it's a great analogy to education. And all of the normal things that they did to get boats unstuck didn't work. So over six days they had to innovate and try lots of little tiny things and whatnot to be able to get it to free up the supply chain.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:41:44]:
Right.
Liza Holland [00:41:45]:
And so we need to free up our boat.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:41:48]:
We do free up the boats. And I think it's really important, too, in those conversations that we did with all those groups. I always have them take out a picture of a child that matters to them before they answer those questions about what's most important. And I would encourage our lawmakers to do the same. Think about your child. How do you want them to be equipped for success? And is this really what you want? Is it enough? And it's not that's it not suggesting that we throw everything out and start I'm suggesting it's not enough. I mean, we've got to think differently.
Liza Holland [00:42:40]:
Yes, and absolutely. Well, Carmen, it has been such an incredible delight to have you on Education Perspectives today. Thank you so much for taking your valuable time and sharing these amazing stories.
Dr. Carmen Coleman [00:42:53]:
Well, thank you so much. And thanks for inviting me.
Liza Holland [00:42:57]:
Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Education Perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Facebook page. Let us know which Education Perspectives you would like to hear or share. Please subscribe and share with your friends.