In this episode of #vted Reads, we talk about Troublemakers, a book by Carla Shalaby. We touch on what we're really doing when we ask our students to code-switch, Black Lives Matter, and the trouble with classroom norms, and we pose the question: 'How do school systems bestow unearned privilege on some, and un-earned hardship, on others?' Oh, and we talk about Harry Potter. Naturally.

Anyway. Welcome back to #vted Reads!

Let's chat.

Jeanie: Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Mike: Sure. My name is Michael Martin. I work as a Senior Associate for the Rowland Foundation which is a Vermont based non-profit. I'm also the Director of Learning for South Burlington School District.

Jeanie: Excellent. Well we go way back and so I've been really looking forward to having this conversation about this book because I know we both loved it. Introduce us to the structure of Shalaby’s book. How she uses student stories to frame her thinking.

Mike:   Well the thing that I love about this book is the thick description as they say that’s provided through the methodology of portraiture that Shalaby is using. It obviously just immediately draws the reader in. There are just so many passages where you're incredibly moved. There are a few that I remember that were really painful, where there is sort of peer exclusion of some of the students in the story.

I had flashbacks to playgrounds, some of the playgrounds of my youth. Thinking of specific students who were kind of the black sheep and were ostracized by their peers. Feeling like a visceral reaction and blushing and just thinking back and wondering why was it okay for this person to be treated so poorly.

It’s a really powerful book. Everyone that I know has been really moved by it. At the same time, it’s really touching, it’s definitely an appeal to empathy. It really brings out compassion, I think.

When we’re thinking of these individual students as people again instead of as numbers. There's this incredible human dimension and at the same time, there's a systems lens that’s applied to the book. The challenge that Shalaby poses to us is to think of troublemakers as our greatest assets in schools and that’s not how we treat them. https://twitter.com/msmBTV/status/1086654686487343104

Jeanie: To be clear for those of you who haven’t read the book, Carla Shalaby takes four troublemakers, kids who are identified as troublemakers by their teachers, in really high performing schools with really high-quality teachers and she follows them for I think a year. She's in their classrooms observing and taking notes, sort of like an anthropologist. And she gets to know their families. She talks to their parents, she goes and visits their homes and she gets to know them in their full lives.

Mike:   I love that you drew attention to that because one thing that jumped out at me is how we don’t tend to think of students as having public and private personae. But that comes through here. Anybody who’s ever coached a sport or been a co-curricular advisor knows that students, that the way students act in the classroom is obviously very different. And it just makes you realize what a thin slice of human potential of individuals we’re actually encountering on a daily basis in the strict structures of school. So that really comes through.  I really appreciated that her talent as a qualitative researcher to go deep and to actually find out this family dimension that shed so much light on these individual students.

Jeanie: I think the other interesting thing is that they’re all in first or second grade. They're really young, and yet this book is entirely relevant to middle and high school situations. Having been a K to Six librarian for a number of years, you talked a little bit about how this book made you – reading these accounts made you uncomfortable thinking of yourself on the playground or in school. And I definitely felt that.