EdFix Episode 4: "He looks like me!" How a Book Club for Boys Inspired a Culture of Reading at a D.C. School

TRANSCRIPT

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
They read that book. It had two little black kids, 11 year old and 14 year old, Genie and Ernie and the boys are like, “I love that book. I felt like I was a part of it.” But it was just a coming of age story.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Welcome back to EdFix. I'm Michael Feuer, your host for our podcast, which is a source for insights about the practice and promise of education. We are in for an amazingly interesting conversation with two wonderful colleagues, friends of ours here at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development and even more importantly friends of the community of the District of Columbia. Mary Ann Stinson is the principal at the Truesdell Education Campus, a DC Public School for students pre-K through grade eight in ward four.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Michael Redmond is the assistant principal. Truesdell has won already, the standing ovation, DC Excellence in School Innovation Award for 2017. Both Mary Ann and Michael are doctoral students here at GW. Just some introductions, so I'm going to defer to our principal.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Yes. First, good morning and thank you Dean Feuer for having us this morning. I've been at Truesdell for eight years now. I came to DC Public Schools for the position at Truesdell and was very excited to be the principal of an education campus serving children pre-K three through middle grades, up through eighth grade. I'm a product of the Catholic school system and went to a similar school with those kinds of grades and I really believe in the value of having students for 10 years and being able to really shape and mold and give them every opportunity that they need to go on to the next phase of their life.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Which would be to, in our case, make sure our boys and girls are ready for the highly selective high schools here in the district, that they have that opportunity just the same as any other student in the district. So we focus on that from the minute that a three year old enters our doors and continue that joyful, rigorous work so that they are prepared to go onto high school and then of course to college. Prior to coming to the district, I was an administrator in Richmond Public Schools.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Just through serendipity, met somebody at a conference that worked for the district. We were in a data working lunch meeting and that person said to me, “Wow, you know a lot about data. We need you in the district.” That started the conversation and recruitment process to come to the district. That time Michelle Rhee was the chancellor. I really wanted to be at the forefront of the reform effort. I have very high expectations and belief in children and through my teaching experience and administrative experience in an urban school, in urban schools in Richmond.

MARY ANN STINSON:
I really saw what could happen when you have teachers that believe in kids. It's never the kids that don't make it, it's not an achievement gap, I think sometimes it's a teacher gap. So I was very excited to come and be part of a reform movement and over the eight years we've seen substantial change at Truesdell in a positive way. We've seen student growth. We have gone from 20% of our students reading on grade level in 2010 to over 87% of our students now read on grade level or above and significant portion of our students read well above grade level.

MARY ANN STINSON:
So we're very excited to give that gift to our boys and girls and to prepare them for whatever their wildest dreams may be. We know that our job right now is to prepare them for a world that we don't even know exists. We don't know what they're going to be facing, we don't know what type of job opportunities there will be, so we are preparing our students for those opportunities that will come to them.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mr. Michael Redmond, say a little bit about yourself and how long you've been at Truesdell and then you know, I'm going to ask you something very specific about one of your projects there, but go ahead, tell us what you can.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Good morning and thank you so much for having me. I've been at Truesdell for three years, but actually I cross paths with Ms. Stinson as an access fellow at GW and it's such an awesome opportunity to come to a job that is your purpose and your passion and for your leader to have faith in you to do the work and trust you. That has been the greatest experience of these four years learning from her and her trusting me to do this work.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
I am where I am because I have the opportunity to stand on your shoulders like you… She is tremendous in the district in this work, in education and the breadth of knowledge that she brings to reforming schools in places that other people don't believe could have the results that she's had. Every day we're pushing for more and more kids. We want all of our kids and when we use the phrase like all means all, we really mean that.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
We're not satisfied with having the great turnaround until every single one of our babies is able to read and able to, like Ms. Stinson said, be equipped with the skills and the knowledge that they need to be able to go out and fulfill their wildest dreams. Not my wildest dreams for them or society's wildest dreams, but whatever they decide is what they want for themselves.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
We are involved in educator preparation here, among other things, are we creating a foundation of skills and knowledge that are sufficient for our graduates to work even in places where they don't have the kind of leadership, the atmosphere that you've described at Truesdell? What could we be doing more?

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
For schools of education, I think that it's important that, yes, we train teachers and we give them a lot of the theory and a lot of the background, but they have to get more experience and more practicums. You're talking about cognitive development, you're talking about all these things. What does that look like when you have a kid that hasn't eaten or whose mom is dealing with substance abuse or who has a brother who was just murdered and they have six, seven, eight, nine, 10 adverse childhood experiences, what does that really look like?

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
There's no textbook that can really prepare you for that. So making sure that we continue to link these awesome theories with doing the work every day. There's nothing that replaces doing the work. I think that the field of medicine does a really good job of that. We just don't send doctors out there because they've studied a book and they've followed around other doctors for a couple of hours, we say like, “No. You're going to go through a very intense residency program and you're going to follow and work and train with other doctors for years.” I don't think that we operate with that same urgency and that same mindset around how life or death teaching is.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mary Ann, you did mention that you come from a Catholic school background. Is your current philosophy of leadership somehow related to what you experienced?

MARY ANN STINSON:
Being raised by the nuns is not necessarily the most loving experience because they have high expectations and there's a lot of structure. Catholic schooling is very structured, it's very routine, it's very consistent and I think there's a lot of value in that and we bring that consistency and that structure to our students and to our staff. There is that expectation that learning is going to be happening every day at a high quality every single day.

MARY ANN STINSON:
But I think what is very different and a lot of this was really developed through the work here at GW and I could talk about a few very significant experiences that both Michael and I had here at GW that transformed the work that we do. In 2010 and over the next few years we were very focused on academics. Our mission statement was reading on grade level and people would tell me over and over again, “That's not a mission statement, that's a goal.” I said, “You could call it a mission, a vision, a goal, a priority, but I'm telling you right now, every kid in this school is going to learn how to read and we're not doing anything.”

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
This was at Truesdell or...

MARY ANN STINSON:
This is at Truesdell in 2010.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
That was in 2010.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Yap. But I was hired August 5th, 2010 to open school August 21st. The principal was gone, the assistant principal was gone, the instructional sup was gone and the school was under total renovation and this is not an exaggeration, this was the reality. I worked in the first day, they gave me a hard hat and my first job was to hire an assistant principal, which I did. Clinton Turner, who was an amazing for us as well.

MARY ANN STINSON:
But as I looked at the data and the outrage that students in eighth grade were reading on a kindergarten level, that they were going to graduate a school that they may have been at for 10 years and still didn't know how to read. I just could not put my head down on my pillow at night. So it was a very simple vision that we were going to figure this out and kids are going to learn how to read and that's what we set out to do.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Through the hard work of a lot of people, Mr. Aupperle, who's another assistant principal, was a coach at the time. He was promoted from within as an assistant principal now. He and I both had the same vision for what literacy needed to look like. To be quite honest, those structures were not in place within the district or within the school. Michelle Rhee was doing a lot of reform work that was needed. The school went under the control of the mayor, so we had a lot of latitude.

MARY ANN STINSON:
I think because the district had so much work to do, we were sort of left alone at the school to design what we needed to design. However, fast forward five years into 2015-2016 where we saw the fruits of that labor for reading, kids knew how to read. Kids could technically read, they knew their phonics, they understood comprehension skills, they were able to do that, but we weren't seeing the true love of reading or the joy of a rigorous experience in the school and we knew that that was our next step.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Meeting Mr. Redmond, we both have the same sense of what the purpose is and our passion is around young people. We went to Policy Institute with Doctor [inaudible 00:10:39] and at that Policy Institute, that summer, it was all around adverse childhood experiences and developing trauma sensitive environments. I had not had the language for that before. I knew what we did. I knew how we love kids.

MARY ANN STINSON:
I knew that when kids came in and drag themselves down the wall of the school or would fight and I don’t want to go into a classroom, but the only way to combat that was through love and conversations, but I didn't really have the why behind it. That institute galvanize that for me and that's the work that we have now brought back to the school and we say that every classroom has to be just as much therapeutic as it is academic. Our teachers are the first responders to kids who are showing up every day coming from traumatic situations that they faced, but maintaining high expectations for them.

MARY ANN STINSON:
We know that all the love in the world is not going to get them into a high performing high school, so it needs to be both. It has to be the academics, it has to be therapeutic. I've always affirmed kids believed in kids, but when Mr. Redmond showed up at Truesdell and truly showed us how you affirm a young black boy, it was life changing for me. All the work that I thought I was doing, all the affirmation I thought I was giving, I realized was so small and so little compared to what was really needed.

MARY ANN STINSON:
I think we have this conversation a lot. I think representation matters. I think any work that I do, it's not authentic. I don't have the experience in life to truly understand through the eyes of our boys and girls. I don't look like the kids at my school and I needed to see it through somebody that did have that experience. Mr. Redmond brought that to our school and he's taught all of us so much about how you truly love children and that solves so much.

MARY ANN STINSON:
So the nuns were the rulers. I've left that behind. Not that I ever had a ruler towards a child anyway, but old school would be, you keep your foot in the back of kids until December. Don't even say hello to them. That is so wrong and it's so opposite of what really works. But if you only give a little dose of affirmation or little dose of love, that's not enough. It has to be so overwhelming that kids can't fight it and they come around because they're coming in with so much hurt and pain.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I would say that there are at least two components, two ingredients of the recipe that you are suggesting. One is total commitment and dedication on the part of the teachers, the administrators, the aides. The second part of the recipe is the leadership.

MARY ANN STINSON:
What we see in schools, and this is my third school of reform and it's happened in all three schools, so it's not happenstance and it's not by chance and I was not the leader in the other two schools. So I am just bringing forward what I've been shown and taught by other fantastic school leaders. When you build a structure and you build the team and you're relentless on what your expectation is for children, it will happen. You have to believe in the kids and it has to be a whole team effort for high expectations.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Believe me in 2010, 11, 2012, even today, there's a lot of people that do not like Mary Ann Stinson that do not believe in the work that has to be done. I'm okay with that and I tell people, this is not for everybody. Working in an urban school is not for everybody and I don't know why it is for some of us that we have it, but there's some reason why that it is the drive and we've been fortunate enough over eight years now to build a very powerful team that go far beyond what anyone would expect somebody to do for their work, but they love the work.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Mr. Redmond and I talk a lot about and some of our research that we hope to do is around scholar identity and high quality literacy programs within schools. Separately, either one of them is not going to make it just to give kids reading skills, without the correct mindset or without the right belief in themselves, that's going to fall short. To give them the scholar identity, to think that I'm scholarly yet I can't back that up with anything, that fall short too.

MARY ANN STINSON:
We've seen people that are sort of loud and wrong, that's not going to get you far either. So it's the combination. Mr. Redmond was working on the scholar identity work and programs that contribute to that. My work has been on the side of literacy and being able to set up systems within schools that work. I think far too long we hear about how brown and black boys can't read.

MARY ANN STINSON:
That's unbelievable to me because I'm telling you, you send any black boy to Truesdell, they will learn how to read. Now we not only have them learning how to read, but they are absolutely loving reading. When Mr. Redmond shares the number of books, the volume within those books and the texts that our boys are reading far above their grade level, we now see the fruition of this and it's not just a thought that we had that maybe this would happen. It is happening.

MARY ANN STINSON:
I'd like to also say like a program that we've set up, it impacts our parents. Our parents are reading the books, our parents are seeing what their kids can do, sometimes stuff that they were never able to do themselves that they wished that they could have, but it's a second chance for all of them. I do think in time it could also impact the community in a very powerful way.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Interestingly, you mentioned that you started at Truesdell eight years ago, which is approximately a year and a half into our experiment with mayoral control in Washington, D.C. and probably two years into the tenure of the then chancellor Michelle Rhee. Both of those phrases mayoral reform and Michelle Rhee, I would venture to say are not the most popular metaphors on the lips of Washingtonians today.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Yes.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
What's the plus minus so far on this experiment?

MARY ANN STINSON:
Could add a third leg to that stool?

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Yes, please.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Teacher evaluation systems.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
I was about to ask.

MARY ANN STINSON:
And principle evaluation systems as well and testing.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Testing, so go for it.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Yes. I'm not opposed to assessments. I think there’s some confusion over assessments, so statewide assessments is not necessarily assessing what individual students can do, but it gives us a little bit of a benchmark about where schools are performing. Being able to see what type of resources might need to go into a school or what kind of a change needs to happen and you have to triangulate that data. It can't just be that one point of reference is a lot that needs to be looked at.

MARY ANN STINSON:
There's three things that we could look at when a student or a class is not doing well. The amount of time. Are students receiving enough time on instruction to bring them up to where they need to be? If they're getting adequate time, then what's the content that's being taught? Are they getting the content? Is it at the right rigor? Are they looking at real world math problems that they need to think through and analyze? Then lastly, who's delivering it?

MARY ANN STINSON:
Because if you've got the time and you've got the content but the kids still aren't getting it, I'm telling you, it is not the student, it is something else and that third leg might be the person that's delivering it and we have to take a look at that.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Now this is your moment. Tell us about the book club, because that's not the first thing that would come to mind when you think about an accountability oriented movement

MARY ANN STINSON:
But the book club was actually born out of data. The true story behind the book club… I'll start it. I will kick it over to you.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Yes.

MARY ANN STINSON:
I was in my office cleaning my desk and someone had put our reading data on my desk. I started looking through and two or three of our boys’ names came up and instead of being in green and blue where they were previously showing that they were reading above grade level, they were in yellow and I couldn't believe it. I said, “What is going on here?”.

MARY ANN STINSON:
It was our fifth grade boys and we had been struggling a little bit without fifth grade class. So I got up, I went into the cafeteria and I said, “Where's Damon? Where is Devon? Where's the third student? I want to see them, I want to talk to them.” Before I left my office, I picked up three books. I took them with me and I said, “You all need to start reading. What is going on with your test scores? I want you to be reading.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Damon is crying saying, “The test is broken, the test is broken.” So Ms. Stinson is like, “His middle of the year data has come back on his reading assessment and he's yellow.” So she's been dramatic and I'm already super dramatic. So I'm like, “What?” Damon is full tears. Ms. Stinson says, “Okay, prove to me that it's not broken. Here's a book.” So he starts reading and she's like, “Okay, good. You can read, sit down, keep reading.” She calls the next student, he does the same thing. “I'm confused. We have to take these tests seriously. I know that you could read on grade level, but all people have is this printout. All people will see of you is this number. So you have to make sure that when you're testing, you're giving it all that you have every single time. We never want to put out into the world anything less than what we truly are capable of doing.” So I have that little side conversation, Damon stops crying. One of my favorite kids in the whole world, Devon, he walks by and I'm like, “Hey, come here. I want you to start reading this book.”

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
He was like, “I'm not yellow.” I was like, “Read the book.” Then he's like, “Okay Mr. Redmond.” I was like, “I'm going to read it too. So you three boys and me, the four of us will read this book.” It was Walter Dean Myers, Bad Boy. I purposely got Devon because he's going through a lot and he's this kid that I've chosen, for the rest of your life, I will be in your life to make sure that whatever you want to do, I can help you and support you to get there. About an hour later, I'm in Ms. Stinson’s office and we get a knock on the door.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
It's a little kid. “I was wondering, can I get a copy of Bad Boy.” Ms. Stinson says, “Cool, great. Yes.” So she gives him the copy of the book. 10 minutes later, knock on the door. “Hey, I was wondering if I can get a copy of the book, Bad Boy.” Ms. Stinson says, “I already gave you a copy.” It's not for me. It's for my friend who wants the copy of the book, but he doesn't want to come down and ask for it. So she's like, “Sure.” 3:30 our librarian into the door like, “Hey Ms, how's it going? Can y'all tell me what's going on? I'm getting all of these calls, all of these requests for this book, Bad Boy and I don't have any in the library. All these fifth grade boys are coming to ask for this book.”

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
“Okay, we'll order some for some kids. We'll keep some in our office and then we'll order you some for the library.” So the 10 boys, it was 10 boys that ended up getting the book that day and I was like, “Fantastic. We are going to just start a book club. So I'll see you tomorrow morning at 8:15 and we're going to talk about the first couple of chapters.” We did that for Walter Dean Myers, Bad Boy. Within a couple of days I had girls that were coming to ask me, “Mr. Redmond, can I be a part of this. Can I get the book? Can I get the book?”

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
The boys had created this feeling and it was almost like, “I don't know if you should be a part of this, but I'm super excited that you're excited about reading.” So I went to Dr. Fields, who's our instructional coach, one of our instructional coach really, I said, “Can you start a book club for girls?” “Yep. Got the book.” So she had a Jacqueline Woodson book selected for the girls. So she started reading with the fifth grade girls. A week later, the boys finished the book. They were super excited.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
The conversations that they would have, the language that they would use to talk about it, just the energy in the room. We would get people who would just come and be like, “Are y'all having book club meetings today?” I’m like, “Yeah, we're meeting.” People just say, “I just want to sit in the room.” From that moment we've read Walter Dean Myers, Bad Boy.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Monster.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Then we read monster.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Handbook for Boys.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Handbook for Boys.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Crossover.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Crossover. Then Black Panther release and that's like a huge moment for black people everywhere. So we had a big huge discussion about that and one of the little kids in the club, he was like, “This is such a great moment for my friends. They're able to see a superhero that looks like them. Who's not the sidekick, who's a lead character from this place, Wakanda where they're super smart and they have resources and it's not this poor Africa that people like to talk about. I'm super excited, that rock and have a hero and Devon can have a superhero that looks like them the same way that little girls can have a superhero with wonder woman. I'm just sad that there's not a superhero like me. So rock is Latino.”

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Immediately I'm like, “We need to read a Jason Reynolds, Morales Spider-Man.” It's Latino Spider-Man. We've got to read this, the next book. I was like, “What's the next book? What's the next book?” “We're reading Morales, Jason Reynolds’ Miles Morales, Spider-Man.” Romeo whips out the book from his backpack. He's like, “I just picked it up from the library.” It was such a great moment. Now all the people in this book club are reading this book with them and they were so excited. They're like, “My gosh, Latino Spider-Man.”

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
So excited and to see his face, to see how he was so proud for Black Panther, for the boys in the book club, the little black boys in the book club, like for them to be super excited to then read that book and them to all be reading it together, they were super excited. But it has taken off. We have parents that are reading the books. They just finished reading Jason Reynolds, As Brave As You, talking about what does it mean to be brave? What does brave look alike?

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
This is so funny. That book is 410 pages, they had a week to read it. We announced their follow-up book, Kwame Alexander, The Crossover, the next day. We had a snow day on Wednesday, the boys came back to school. “We're done.” Ms. Stinson is talking to them like, “You read the book, you read the book.” That was only 200 pages. That was nothing.”

MARY ANN STINSON:
Yeah. They said that book was way too easy. I saw them in the cafeteria yesterday morning and I said, “You got the new book Crossover.” They're like, “Done, finished. I need another one. We need to get onto the next book now.”

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Going to the next book.

MARY ANN STINSON:
They were like, “Our last book was 400 pages.” But they actually, they loved the longer book as we all do. They're at that stage now where they're getting so invested into their reading and it means so much to them. Their conversations have changed, their analytical skills, the way they approach reading is so much different and that come… Daniel Willingham’s talks about that. Like stop teaching so much about the comprehension skills and start reading and you need a little bit of that, but get the volume of reading.

MARY ANN STINSON:
That was our goal and we had been working towards that at the school. We knew we did a good job getting everybody to technically learn how to read. I said, “But they need the next launch.” The super level is when kids are going to go home and start reading on their own. The other thing that we had been thinking about and working towards and the reason why I had the stack of books in my office was to make sure that our literature represented our boys and girls.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Jason Reynolds, As Brave As You, they read that book. It had two little black kids, 11 year old and 14 year old Genie and Ernie and the boys are like, “I love that book. I felt like I was a part of it.” But it was just a coming of age story

MARY ANN STINSON:
Schools need to be responsive to that. That's very, very important and I don't see that in a lot of schools in the research that we've done and the readings that we've done, but we were very intentional about that and honestly like we're just starting. Like this school year, making sure that our library is going to represent the type of literature and the reading that our kids will be really interested in and feel connected to. Then having teachers with a lot of energy that can relate to our boys and girls is very, very important.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Mary Ann Stinson, Michael Redmond. Thank you ever so much.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Thanks.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Thank you and my pleasure.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
You're showing me at least that my congenital optimism about public education is not entirely misplaced and we're going to make a go of it.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Thank you.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
Thank you again, both of you. We're very grateful that you took some time to be with us on this show. While you've been sitting here with us, I'm quite confident that at Truesdell things are okay, but I know you want to get back and so we're going to let you go.

MARY ANN STINSON:
Thank you so much.

MICHAEL REDMOND II:
Thanks.

MICHAEL J. FEUER:
To our listeners, if you enjoyed today's conversation and I can't imagine why you wouldn't have, you can subscribe to the EdFix podcast on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Stitcher and SoundCloud. For more information about this podcast, about our guests and about other episodes, you can see our website go.gwu.edu/edfix.

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