Janet Hanshaw:
I went from a non-vocal little math teacher in my classroom trying just to improve my own little space to being a voice for others. Maybe I didn’t know that that voice was there, or maybe we are so accustomed to not getting to have a voice, not even getting a seat at the table. So maybe my voice has always been there, it’s just no one’s ever asked me the questions before.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Janet Hanshaw. Janet teaches math at Chapmanville Regional High School in West Virginia. In this episode, you’ll also hear from Joanna Burt-Kinderman, an instructional coach in the Pocahontas County School District, also in West Virginia. Janet and Joanna spoke to Stacey Caillier, director of the Center for Research on Equity and Innovation at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, about a project they’re both a part of Mountaineer Mathematics Master Teachers or M3T. It’s a network of math teachers in West Virginia who are working together to improve their teaching and they’re doing it in really exciting ways.
Last April, Janet and Joanna ran a workshop at the Carnegie Summit on Improvement in Education in San Diego. Apparently just about everyone who was in that room told Stacey that she had to find out more about what they’re doing, so she set up this interview.
I love this conversation so much for a whole bunch of reasons, but the biggest one is that everyone is just so real and honest about what it’s like to try to change your teaching. I’m so excited for you to hear it. So let’s get into it.

Stacey Caillier:
So I’m so excited about this conversation. Today we get to learn about the Mountaineer Mathematics Master Teacher Network in West Virginia, or M3T for short, because that’s a mouthful, so we’ll refer to it as M3T from here on out, and how they’re using improvement science to empower math teachers and math students to collaborate and creatively solve problems.
I first heard of this network a few months ago at the Carnegie Summit where the two women were going to talk with today, Janet and Joanna, were leading a workshop. Afterward, multiple people came up to me blown away by what’s happening in this network and across the state. As a result of this teacher-led work, students are engaged in daily math talk, middle and high school math test scores in the district have risen, and districts that have struggled to retain math teachers in the past are seeing teachers energized, feeling a sense of pride and ownership, and leading the work. If you have ever wondered how we can use improvement to shift instruction and do it in a way that doesn’t just prescribe solutions but engages educators as problem solvers, this conversation is for you.
So let me introduce you to Janet and Joanna. Janet Hanshaw has been teaching math for over 30 years, and for the last 12 years has been at Chapmanville Regional High School in Logan County. She’s a third year fellow in the M3T Network. Joanna Burt-Kinderman is a co-lead of the M3T Network and an instructional coach for Pocahontas County Schools. Thank you both for being here.

Janet Hanshaw:
It’s great to be here.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
Thank you for having us.

Stacey Caillier:
I want to start by just giving you both a chance to introduce yourselves and share any identity markers that shape how you show up in the world or in this work.
Janet, would you like to go first?

Janet Hanshaw:
Sure. Let’s see. I’ve grown up in West Virginia, educated, grade school, high school. I did go into Kentucky to a very small rural school for college to get my teaching degree. Let’s see. I’m married, been married to my husband for 28 years. Bless his heart, he’s been married to a teacher for 28 years, and only people married to teachers or who are teachers understands what that really entails. I have two boys who are, I guess, adult children. They’re 23 and 20. That’s Austin and Kevin. As you noted earlier, I’ve been teaching 30 years. I just closed out my classroom today. For 30 years, 4,500 students approximately have been through my classroom doors.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
That’s just remarkable. What an honor to be here with Janet and supporting her on behalf of all of our fellows to share this story.
I’m Joanna. I grew up in West Virginia, left at 17 sure that I would never come back here to live. I’m so grateful that I found my way back here to raise my own family. I have two teenage girls. I’m an instructional coach in Pocahontas County schools in the nine to five, along with running this network, and after hours I play upright bass every chance I get. So those are the pieces of my life. Also married to a very patient man. Grateful for him for his support of all of these things too.

Stacey Caillier:
All right. So Joanna, I want to start with you because you helped launch M3T and I’d love to just have you start with what was the problem that you were trying to solve when you launched this network?

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
So I think from maybe my second year teaching, I started teaching when I was 21, it became so strange to me that no amount of teacher learning looked like any piece of best practice of learning in a classroom with students. So this idea has been in a Petri dish in my head and heart for a long time. I had about a 10-year journey here as an instructional coach in Pocahontas County with a lot of support, a lot of freedom to curate a learning community of teachers in a different way and during that time intersected with folks who noted that what we were doing here looked a lot like improvement science. Those weren’t words that I had ever heard, but together really felt that this was an approach really successful in one district and deserved sharing across more spaces than just our district is the most rural east of the Mississippi so we’re an incredibly rural space and incredibly isolated from other places even in West Virginia.
Met a research friend who I really dig, which is a rare friend to find if you’re me. A researcher who really honors practice and practice-based knowledge. I certainly could have gone to get a PhD. It was a choice I did not want to make, I want to stay right where I am, and it was really cool to find someone who felt that the academic community should learn from the grassroots efforts of how to make schools better. So in that partnership, he and I together hatched a plan to scale the basic approach that was happening here in Pocahontas County School District across more spaces.
We were very fortunate to find partnership in the National Science Foundation. Our Department of Ed and all 29 districts at this point are also supporting this work. So really feel very lucky to have opportunity to try out a pretty different idea about how to get better teaching and learning happening across more spaces together with some really wonderful partners. Certainly first and foremost, Janet, and the rest of the fellows in our network.

Stacey Caillier:
So I’m going to link the EdWeek article that you were featured in so that people can learn more about the work and about history of it.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
The one time I had my hair professionally done. Yes, it was exciting.

Stacey Caillier:
It does look so good in that picture.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
It was such good hair, yes. I have to admit that I saved the big… You go to one of those events and they make big posters of you, I saved it, and if my husband or children are ever brats, I unroll it.

Stacey Caillier:
There’s a six-foot picture of your face.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
There’s a six-foot face.

Stacey Caillier:
Well, in that article I really appreciated that one of the things that you had talked about was also how you started this work with also a goal of addressing this pipeline issue where you’re having folks who are in the profession but they’re not staying in the profession. Can you just say a little bit more about how that informed the network and how you decided to structure it or who should be in it?

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
Absolutely. So it occurred to me as well as starting with myself. I mean, I taught in middle and high school classrooms, community college, and in all of those spaces felt like I was solving micro puzzles that I wanted to know if they could be solved in the same way with someone else’s hands and someone else’s setting. So the natural progression is to have someone say, “Well, go get a master’s degree in admin. Become an administrator. That’s how you do this kind of stuff.” So you take a young teacher who is a pretty promising young math teacher and you remove them from the thing that they’re good at.
I did do one of those programs and they’re terrible. One thing I would never want to be as a principal of a school, God bless people who want to do that. But I do feel that some of our most promising leaders don’t have a natural home in the classroom and one of those reasons is that you continue to want to solve the next puzzle. So if you could find a way in which people can influence more than their own 20 to 100 kids that they’re dealing with right now, then they’re able to solve the next puzzle. I’ve never met a teacher who was motivated by the schedule or the workload or the payment plan. People are here to solve puzzles and I really believe that any approach at professional development needs to include that, which means you have to offer the agency to people to define those puzzles that they want to solve in the first place.
In the very infancy of this work, we really were coming together as a department of middle and high school math teachers and saying, “What bugs you? What are the things that aren’t going the way your dream classroom should go?” Then together, digging into the ones that we had in common, the bugs that kind of bugged us all, to try to better understand the nature of those things, and then collectively try to test some different ideas to make them better and really keep our conversation focused on this humble space in which we had that shared bug.
We have anecdotal stories, they’re no kind of sterile research, of folks saying, “I would’ve left the classroom if I wasn’t part of this community here in this district.” That was one of the big stories that trickled up and we do see that across the work of the network right now. Not to say that people haven’t left teaching, they have. Fellows have left teaching. Teaching is a tough thing to keep doing for sure and we have lost a few folks to administration. But we also have lots of folks who are saying, “This is giving me new life. This is giving me new energy. It’s giving me new puzzles to solve.”

Stacey Caillier:
I remember in our last conversation you made this beautiful point too about so often folks leave the profession or they leave teaching or they retire and that knowledge is all lost.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
Well, that’s the Janet. You might not be able to zoom in well enough to see my glasses fog when she says 4,500 students. We’re not linking to Facebook here, but I actually just saw it earlier today and the gaggle of past students who are, “You were my favorite. I tell everyone, you were my favorite. I learned to love math because of you.” If we allow, I mean, does Janet deserve to retire at some point in the future? For sure.

Stacey Caillier:
Yes.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
30 years. 30 years of doing this. But if she goes with the treasure chest of what she knows how to do to make generations, no offense, Janet, but generations of people say, “You were the best math teacher I’ve ever had,” what a loss. So I do think it’s important that our network is providing structure, not just to help share what you know with the person that you know, but to help share what you know across contexts that otherwise couldn’t be bridged.
Absolutely, I really appreciate you bringing that up. We are unique in a [inaudible] project I think that we do have a really diverse set of teachers in this work. We don’t just have young teachers. We don’t just have teachers who their counties have selected to be representatives. We have a real mix of teachers. We have teachers who are hungry to solve problems and in diversity comes strength.

Stacey Caillier:
What a great transition to my next question for Janet. Janet, I want to hear your story of how did you come to be part of M3T and why have you stayed with it, because I know there’s been ups and downs?

Janet Hanshaw:
Actually, there was an up and then a down and then we’ve been trending upward ever since. So there hasn’t been another downward turn after that first initial one that almost made me want to quit. Actually, this really all started the very first attempt at getting my National Board certification because I was a very traditional teacher because I came from a very traditional teacher who was the greatest person that, I mean, she walked on water. I thought she was everything because whatever she told me, I learned. I didn’t realize at the time that not everybody else in the classroom may have been learning as well as me at that time and I didn’t know that either in my first 10 years of teaching.
I didn’t understand that concept. So when I attempted National Board certification and I had to video and then I had to relate my video and my thinking and how did I know and all those very thought-provoking questions that came along with that, I realized that I didn’t know really what I was doing or how to really teach and how to really pull knowledge from my students. I didn’t understand that. So that led me on a journey to attempting professional developments, going to conferences, and then coming back into my own classroom after those being, oh wow, I’m really going to do this, but then I realized that I was trying to revamp my entire classroom and my entire structure and my entire methods for teaching and I would be overwhelmed with no one to turn to with no feedback, with no support system, and I would go back to my old ways because it was familiar, it was comfortable, and I knew there was content that I had to cover and I was able to do that in my old style.
So then we were starting in 2020, this is right after COVID had shut us down, found an email about this M3T project, and I thought, okay, I’ll give this a try. I just knew I wanted to be better, I just didn’t know how and I didn’t know how to sustain that, the improvement. When I would have a setback or a failure, I didn’t understand that that was also part of the learning process, so I didn’t understand all of that.
I did the application. I had a phone interview with Joanna. She didn’t know me from Adam and I really don’t know what she or Matt saw at that time when they chose me, but they chose me on that first go around. Like I said, when we started the very first year, it was all about improving in my own classroom. It was meeting with the other fellows, being paired up or grouped up with other fellows that were having the same bugs or problems or issues in their classroom. So we would get put together, we would be able to talk, come up with a plan of attack, implement that plan into our classroom, and then we would come back, which was something I had never had before.
I would implement in my classroom, but I wasn’t able to come back with others and say, this worked really well, this did not, this crashed and burned. Then not only would my small little group, but then we would also meet and we would tell our stories to another group and we would get their perspective, and then we would meet with another group and say, “This is what we did. This is what happened,” and then we would get their perspective. Then being able to put all of that together and to have a sounding board and to say this really went well, try this next time that you’re doing whatever it is in your classroom. This did not go well, so maybe you have an idea for me to improve.
But everything I was trying was in my own little classroom island. Does that make sense? Previously, before M3T, and then now whatever I try, I have 40 other fellows. Or what do we have, Joanna? I can’t remember. I’m sorry. 42?

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
42 and 150 LIT team participants now.

Janet Hanshaw:
Yes. So I have all of that support system now. When something does really well, we all celebrate. When something crashes and burns, we all celebrate and we dig in. Because one thing that we have learned, and I want anyone that’s listening to this, when you fail at trying something new in your classroom, you are still learning.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
Hallelujah.

Janet Hanshaw:
Yes. You take that and you come back and you start again and it’s okay. That is something that I have learned because I’m not really good with that part. It’s that perfectionism in mathematics. We like everything perfect. We like everything structured. We like all the way down to the perfect right answer. I’ve realized that this teaching thing and transitioning and doing new stuff in my once traditional classroom is messy. I’m excited and nervous and fearful all at the same time.

Stacey Caillier:
That’s a great combination of emotions, I think.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
That’s what change feels like.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah, exactly.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
That’s what growth feels like.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. So Janet, you referenced here two highs and a low, but you didn’t tell these folks about the low.

Janet Hanshaw:
Okay. So the second year is when we came in and we needed to get someone to become a part of our LIT team, and I had to get someone to join me and have them collaborate in this work with me and I did not want to at all ever. I’m in the middle of focusing on transitioning my own teaching, I did not feel qualified to do that and have somebody else work with me. I didn’t feel that I had the knowledge to be a leader in that aspect.
People were getting their LIT teams and other districts, they were getting people to join them, and Joanna and Matt started telling us this in September, October, November, and December. I think everyone by that time had had at least one person to join their team and I had not even asked anyone because I just did not feel that I had it in me to be a leader.
I’m so focused on improving myself that I didn’t feel that I could lead others. Joanna told me that that was part of what I signed up for. Apparently I glossed over the leadership part of the application. I guess it did say teacher leader, but I don’t know, maybe I thought I could just wing it. I really don’t know what I thought. But Joanna said that I had to, that was part of my agreement, and I didn’t want to. So I was in January trying to make a decision whether I was going to continue on with this work or if I was going to find somebody that would join this work with me that was in the building.
So that’s what happened. I think I measured it, 150 steps down the hallway to ask a fellow colleague named Don Taylor if he would be so kind and join this team and work with me. We would work on anything that he wanted to work on. It didn’t have to be my bug in my classroom. Whatever he wanted to work on this year, I would work on. We would work on it, we would find a solution together, we would do the PDSA cycles on whatever he wanted to do. Bless his heart, he said he would.
So then I messaged Joanna. I’m like, “I’ve got one. Got one person. One person is willing to work with me.” So there we go and then it has been a whirlwind ever since. It has been a upward straight up almost. It’s been amazing actually.

Stacey Caillier:
Can you tell us about the evolution? First Don, then?

Janet Hanshaw:
First, Don. We crashed and burned on our first PDSA cycle. I’m going to own this one. Our bug in our classroom was students’ mathematical vocabulary, and especially across the board as far as, for an example, some mathematical problems would say slope, some would say rate of change, some may have said a change in Y over change in X, and our students not recognizing all three variations of that same term meant the exact same thing. So we set up a cycle to work on the vocabulary as far as taking a math problem and rewriting it using other vocabulary. But then do you see this conundrum? We were asking them to use different mathematical vocabulary, but that was the problem we were trying to address. So how could they rewrite a problem using different math vocabulary if that was the problem from the beginning?
So it was a fiasco. It didn’t work. There was no improvement. It was really sad. But here’s the point, that crash and burn failure led to us going back to the drawing board, realizing that maybe if we visually show students the different ways that math problems can be represented then maybe we can start to recognize the change in the vocabulary. Then that was just, I mean, eye-opening. But if it had not been for that failure, we would not have went back and addressed it again and we would not have ended up where we are now, which was, at that time, a meeting with the superintendent and the secondary director of education, who then in turn provided me with five days of professional development for all the 8-12 math teachers in my county.
They gave me a budget. They gave me supplies. They gave me autonomy to do with the professional development as I saw fit with no oversight from anyone else. It was just me and the other 8-12 teachers in the county. Which has led from that to going to this amazing summit in San Diego and speaking in front of people, to where I’ve never spoken in front of people before, with that presentation to meeting with my newest superintendent and him asking me to start this same type of improvement in our county with all of the 9-12 teachers next year, including the middle school teachers with us the year after that.
So I have went from a non-vocal little math teacher in my classroom trying just to improve my own little space to being a voice for others. Maybe I didn’t know that that voice was there or maybe we are so accustomed to not getting to have a voice, not even getting a seat at the table. So maybe my voice has always been there, it’s just no one’s ever asked me the questions before.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
I can’t keep dry eyes around Janet.

Stacey Caillier:
I know. Me neither.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
I can’t. I think that there’s the implication for policy, for funding is profound because Janet is one in a million and of many 30-year veterans with thousands of students saying, “That’s my favorite person. That person helped me be able to learn math.” No platform, not even a platform, no invitation to challenge the notion it can’t be me. I can’t even walk down the hall because I don’t have that expertise and what I know isn’t enough for this space. We need collectively every single Janet to look left and look right and have invitation to say, if not me, then who?
No matter how wonderful, I mean I do believe that the leadership Janet has is wonderful and needs to be uplifted, that right now Logan County Schools recognizes that there’s a person in a classroom with a lower pay grade and a lower title who knows more than they know about how to get better math teaching and learning in that district and that they might actually get a ton more from really relying on her and trusting her than they will from contracting with a PD provider from somewhere else and paying that person worlds more than they would ever dream of paying someone like Janet.
It’s super progressive and super important to uplift those leaders who are willing to do that. I just could not be more, I always think people use the word humbled wrong, because I’m proud of it, but I’m also in awe of Janet and her journey and alike of the rest of the fellows who are walking their own path in the same direction.
Anyhow, not to overstep, but I have huge dreams for this work and always have since I was a baby teacher. But folks like Janet, these fellows together, this entity together is bigger than what I could dream in terms of the paradigm of possible shifting.

Stacey Caillier:
Yeah. I mean, there were so many things that really struck me, Janet, in hearing your story a second time. One is just the humility of when you were sharing like, oh man, this realization of how you had taught for the first 10 years and the teacher that you wanted to be. I think about that all the time. I don’t know that there’s a teacher who exists who isn’t constantly singing that Cher song of, “If I could turn back time.” So I just love the humility of you using that moment as a chance to just dig in and totally seek out a community that you could learn and reflect and grow with.
I think why your story is so important to me is it highlights your tenacity and reflectiveness as a person and the power in teachers, and it also just the trust of the system and leaders in the system to be like, “Hey, you’re doing great work. Here’s a budget. Design what you think we need so that other folks can have this kind of experience and teach in this same way.” I just think that it’s like, yes, you’re an amazing person and there are things in the system that are supporting you to emerge as this leader. Like you said, you probably always had this voice, but you didn’t have the invitation. So I just love. I wish more folks would get this invitation.

Janet Hanshaw:
Absolutely. It’s been a journey, but I have been three years working with my fellow M3T teachers, and the first couple years I was known as the quiet one. I was like, we would have our Zoom meetings and everyone would have stuff to say and everybody would be talking and I’m just taking in all the information. Then one day somebody said, “Janet, you don’t speak a lot, but when you speak we all need to listen.” I think that was one of the first moments that I thought, wow, maybe I do have 30-years worth of knowledge that’s locked in here that does need to be shared instead of just always keeping it to myself or just trying to do my thing in my classroom.
I have realized that I’m doing a disservice to the other young teachers in my building and in my district and across the network that if I don’t speak up and share what I believe and what I think and what I know works or what I know to be true, I need to do better in that aspect as well. I never realized that until I got put in this M3T program. I didn’t realize that and I didn’t realize how people like Joanna and Matt could see what was inside of me even though I couldn’t see it.
So when they’re like, “We want you to go to San Diego to the Carnegie Summit and to tell your story,” and they’re like, “People need to hear your story,” and at first I’m like, what story? But it’s been a very eye-opening journey for me professionally and boldly and leadership wise. It’s been an amazing transformation for myself for the past three years and to not be afraid to speak up and to say that there is a better way and I know there’s a better way.
When the superintendent asked me a few weeks ago, he said, “Can you do this?” I said, “Yes, I can.” Three years ago, I would’ve never said that. So the journey I’ve had for three years, and I want the people that’s listening to this to realize that I understand that I’m a veteran teacher 30 years in and I know that people tend to think that teachers with 30 years in have their foot out the door and they’re just biding their time and they’re just trying to get out, not all of us are like that. Some of us are still students, we’re still learning, and we still have things to give.
So it’s not always the newbies and the fresh ones coming in, and that’s not an offense to any of that either, but sometimes your veteran teachers, especially that are as old as I am, have grown up in a system where it’s all top mandated down and maybe they have a voice, but they’ve never been asked the question. So I believe some of these districts need to go out and find some of those too, in my opinion.

Stacey Caillier:
I love that advice. When I think about this work at its best, it’s transformational and I feel like you just described something that’s transformational. You described this shift in feeling like your locus of control was your classroom and I’m going to stay quiet and I’m going to do my best for my kids to this big shift of seeing your locus of responsibility and influence to so much bigger and broader than that. I just think that’s beautiful.
We could keep on like this and I’m dotting my eyes and my eye makeup is all messed up, and thanks so much Janet for that.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
Same.

Stacey Caillier:
But I want to dig into bugs, because this was one of the things that I kept hearing over and over again. People were like, “They’re talking about bugs. I love that language of bugs, that makes so much sense.” So Joanna, I want to just invite you in and tell us about bugs. Why did you guys decide to focus on bugs rather than a driver diagram or whatever it might be?

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
Well, and that’s where this work doesn’t start with improvement science. This work starts before I knew about improvement science and then the realization of how powerful the marriage could be. So I think what we’re up to, and with full blessing, I mean it’s been cool to get to know some of the top Carnegie brass and they all say this is exactly what we intended. Not that there’s a Bible or a script that how things should go, but instead that this is a way of doing business I think at its root, I would agree with you, is transformational and does really depend on a deep and consistent roots cause analysis of what it is you’re trying to be up to a measurement system to help you know whether you’re doing anything and in what direction those things are happening and then some protocols to hold yourself accountable for your own learning more than your own outcomes.
So those are the things that feel really attractive to me and some of them were pieces that I didn’t hold already. But I do think that what bugs you language definitely predates my understanding of that. In fact, I was preparing for this and looking back at some things that I’d written because I was feeling a little bit uninspired doing a lot of stuff and my very first blog post of a blog that didn’t live very long, because I just couldn’t keep paying attention to it, was what’s bugging you?
I do believe from the minute I had one grade administrator a long time ago who gave me a sense of how important it was to define what I wanted him to look for when he was coming into my classroom and that was so empowering to me to say, okay, the value of this other person is to be a mirror for the things that I care about, shifted my thinking. When I first asked the man who is now retiring, a superintendent, or leaving as superintendent here, but was director of federal programs 11 years ago when I started this work here in the district, and when I had to pitch to him, I said, “I just want to work with teachers to open their doors together and to share boldly what’s going well and what’s bugging you.”
What’s going well is a thing that is ready to share. We’re ready to help each other understand that we’re ready to invite each other in to watch our practice to see this thing that’s going well, and what’s bugging you has to be as well. It has to be an open door because it’s around that we can create community.
I really was thinking about the best version of a teacher’s lounge. The worst version of a teacher’s lounge is you all get in together and everybody talks over one another about why their idea is the best idea, whether it be how I assign homework or what my sign out policy is for the bathroom. It doesn’t make anybody feel good. It doesn’t make anybody friends, it doesn’t solve any problems. But if you can be in a teacher’s lounge in a moment where somebody says, “Hey, I wonder about this thing,” or, “Man, I can’t make this work.” “No, I can’t either. Wonder why that is?” Those are engaging lunch conversations. That’s when you’re late to get back and unlock your door and the kids are all through the hallway.
So I think it’s rooted in that basic understanding of what makes a day of teaching feel good and what makes it feel frustrating or bad? What makes you feel good about your colleagues and able to learn from them and what makes you feel bad? I think what’s bugging you is the central piece of that. I also really believe that it’s a fundamental invitation to change work, which is hard.
It’s a parallel to what we say about kids all the time. We want the question formulation techniques. Those are the center of engagement for students to learn. Can they ask a question? So it really is inviting teachers to ask a question together, and when you bring that notion, if you ascribe to that, which really did work here in one case, very small district, but worked to hold teachers engaged, everybody kept coming back, and we actually invented some language protocols over the course of a few years rooted in thinking about the problem. Why is it actually a problem? Why can’t kids talk about math? Why are they uncomfortable? Right? Each of those whys has all these tentacles of things that you can operate on if you go deep enough.
So I loved the visual of a fishbone diagram. I loved the idea that a person should revisit such a thing. So in our network, our fishbone is really the operational piece. A driver diagram is holding, it’s almost our filing system for what are we changing and what are we learning so that somebody else can look it up, but how we start each new group of friends that comes together. So LIT stands for local improvement team, and those folks come together to learn together around a shared problem of practice.
But we’re not bringing that to them. Matt and I aren’t looking at, oh, statewide, it appears that, dot-dot-dot, so everybody should do, dot-dot-dot. But I do think what I’ve learned my way into is that if we’re really talking about a transfer of agency and on the sky level, that’s what’s really attractive to me about network improvement communities. It’s sort of saying, no, we don’t want to find a solution and force everybody to mangle themselves with tons of extra funding and support to make that solution work with fidelity in the same way in the same classrooms. Almost everyone knows that doesn’t work.
We’ve done tons of research and anyone who’s in this family of people interested in improvement science has heard this talk a bazillion times, but the needle’s not really moving on this intractable problem of kids learning more. We can talk about it on any scale, but certainly we can talk about it in math. So it calls for a different paradigm. But I think we’re missing something because if you charter a network improvement community with a small group of thought leaders and those folks are the ones who define the problem, then you’re just making a larger figurehead to the same ship.
So what we’re doing is a little bit messy. It’s not true that all of our folks are trying the same protocols, right? Because they’re not all interested in the same part of the problem. It’s not true that we have a super clean measurement system because different subsets of folks are working on different arms of the problem. But it is true that we have a super engaged group of people really interested in what students are saying about learning conditions in their class and learning new ways to interact with all kinds of data. Certainly including benchmarking and outcome data on standardized tests, but also including student-driven data marking different moments in class to look for different moments of engagement, some of the things that really are leading indicators for driving better outcomes for teaching and learning.
I feel like I have gone off into outer space because I get really fired up about this, and gotten pretty far away from the question that you asked me in the first place. But if I had any advice to another group who wanted to work in this way, something that’s so transferable, whether or not you’re trying to do something as large scale as we’re doing, is to check yourself early and often about where the agency lies. When decisions are being made, is the agency closest to the doer? If it’s not, what changes can you make?
I have to ask myself that often. I wrangle with that because it is the enemy of clarity and clean systems. Putting agency closer to the doers makes things more tangled, it makes things more complicated, and it makes things more diverse. It requires that we have an interactive relationship with both our driver diagram and our fishbone and our whole measurement system. But I do believe we’re starting to learn in year three that we can start to watch where is interest coalescing? So over all of these 200 odd classrooms right now, where are these teachers’ eyes drawn? We do have a big collective map of what are the reasons more students aren’t doing more math, and we’re starting to color code that to match our driver diagram to house these change ideas and watch where those things are happening.
In the coming year, a preview of our summer institute, Janet, we’re going to be deciding where we’re focusing much more on which measures we really believe best associate themselves with those outcomes and thinking about what are the low hanging fruit things that we could be watching, inclusive of some of the practical measures that we’re using at a student level.
But that’s the thing that gets people to come back, right? It’s a variation on notice wonder, right? It is. It’s really leaving it up to you and your brain to say, what is interesting to me here? What compels me? What drives me? Because it’s not true that there’s a dearth of really great ideas to make math classrooms better. They’re everywhere. What’s true is that we don’t have the attention span and the fuel to learn our way into making them work for us in our context, and I think leading with a bug is a huge piece of the solution to that.

Stacey Caillier:
What I’m really appreciating in what you said too is just this invitation to get really clear on where does the agency lie in the development of the work, in the work as it is enacted? What’s really striking to me is you mentioned before that we’re all unpacking the same problem, why aren’t more students doing more math in our classrooms? But that problem came from us, it came from teachers, and the bugs are coming from us, and the solutions are going to come from us digging into those bugs. So there’s just this beautiful, it’s all coming from us.
I mean, there’s a parallel there that I’m not articulating well to, Janet, what you shared of maybe I had a voice all along, just like maybe we have the ideas all along, but this is the path that we needed to get to the learning to enact it in our context. So thank you.
I would love to hear a little bit more about just what are some of the bugs that are up for you and how do you support folks in coming up with change ideas? Because I’m guessing it’s not just, well, this is your bug, so you should do this. So what do you guys do?

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
Messy. Janet, do you want to do a personal answer first or would you like me to do the wide lens of what everybody’s up to?

Janet Hanshaw:
I’ll do a personal one first. This year, like last year I only had one person on my LIT team, but then after the professional development and everything this past summer, my entire math department, which were five of us, all joined in and we all worked together this year. So I went from one to five and felt a lot more comfortable in the role of I guess leadership. But really it was all of us collectively working together. I just guided the way a little bit.
But our big concern was students discourse. Not enough students talking about mathematics beyond what did you get for problem number five? What was the answer? All five of us, we all decided that we needed to improve the discourse in our classroom.
I have two long-term subs, a newbie teacher, I think it’s his second year, and then you have Mr. Taylor and myself with 30 years. So this is what we have. So I suggested several different things and then we settled on incorporating Robert Kaplinsky’s Open Middle Math Problems to where there’s multiple ways to get to the problem.
We started with non-curricular problems first. For example, there was a problem that we worked on, it was an order of operation problem and you had all of the blocks that you had to fill in with the numbers from one through nine and you had to get the largest possible number and then we would revert it back and do the smallest possible number. Some of us did vertical whiteboards to where we had the students all up and about in the classroom working on those. Some of us had them at our tables because I believe just about every one of us now have those wonderful dry erase marker tables, which are amazing. It’s amazing how a student will write with a marker as opposed to a pencil.
We started with non-curricular because, one, I was instructing the teachers on how to use this concept of open middle, two, it’s easier to teach your students how to do open middle problems when they were non-curricular, and then we did just a simple tally of how many students did you see actively engaged? As a teacher, you can walk around the room and know whether they’re talking about the latest video game that night that they set up till 2:00 AM to play or if they’re talking mathematical. So we did that. We saw well over 80%, 90% of active participation with the students of actually talking math. So that was a bug of ours, and that was something that was really small, simple.
That’s another thing. Not some big huge overhaul, it’s just something small. A small little change, take a measurement, a simple measurement to see what’s happening, look at that data, decide if we needed to improve or change or what adaptations we were going to have to it, and then try it again. So simple little changes.
That was something that came about, we all loved it, we’ve all adopted it. The district bought us all the Open Middle math book so that we could have that as a reference guide. That was the one thing that my LIT team and I, that’s what we worked on this year, was just to improve a little bit of discourse, having students talking about mathematics beyond just the rote steps and learning and what did you get for number five?

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
I just want to call out that it’s incredibly distinct what Janet’s team did. Janet’s team defined a bug, talked amongst themselves about why that bug exists, and I do think that that kind of excavating the why is where sometimes people are inventing new structures or they’re just better understanding what their hunch is as to why that particular thing is happening.
Janet provided an example before of thinking that we wanted to connect different terms that mean the same thing, but her excavation of that included the failure of her initial change idea. She’s better able to understand what the root cause of that problem was. In this case, it’s better understanding the root cause that led her to, and Janet, I might be mistaken, but part of our protocols are that you have a meeting structure that’s pretty similar across everybody who’s having a LIT team meeting to define their bug and ask themselves those five whys. It’s a counseling protocol, but we’ve co-opted it into teaching land.
Then you come to a whole network meeting with all 29 districts and their own LIT teams represented, and we randomize which groups talk to whom, but they go into breakout rooms and they say, “This was our bug, give us all your ideas.” So they’re getting outside their own context in a real structure and being able to hear from other people and other people can say, “Hey, have you considered this? Have you considered this? Read this thing. What about that book? I heard this.” Then they go back and have another meeting and say, “Hey, what do we have appetite here for? What seems doable to us? What’s low enough leverage that we could actually give it a go?”
That makes a really different level of buy-in, not just for Janet’s team, but across everybody, because it started with your problem. You got advice on your problem, you came back together to decide what are we all willing to do, and that’s not necessarily going to be us agreeing to do the thing that was most interesting to each person. Those people can keep doing those things if they want to, it’s just that we’re all going to talk about this piece of it, the piece that we’re all ready for.
So I just wanted to call it that I think that’s pretty different and build on what Janet said, network-wide, and this is now over the course of three years of this particular funding, we had private funding for a year and had a development year to figure out what the appetite was for doing work in this way and whether or not districts would allow us to, because we’re not internal to the Department of Education. We’re not internal and it really is giving teachers a lot of agency that usually is held by curricular specialists or directors. So we had a year for that as well.
So now looking at really five years of working on this gigantic fishbone diagram, and they really do categorize into three boxes, the bugs that really wake people up and say, “I want to work on these things.” We acknowledge far more bugs in the landscape of why more students aren’t doing more math, including lack of breakfast, really all the way down to that grain size. But three really have bubbled up, and one of them is improving math discourse. I don’t think we’re alone in this, but I definitely think it is a big deal in an Appalachian culture in particular where we do relate by talking. We are talkers, our traditions are oral traditions, and to expect that the frontier of education is going to be students alone with their bots on their computers, that’s not how we’re going to learn. It’s not how we interact. It’s not cultural responsive at all.
So there are a lot of reasons why talk is important to everybody, but I think it’s particularly important to us also in a place where the way in which we communicate with each other is pretty far from academic discourse, and as righteous. We don’t want to walk away from that. We want to be able to talk the way we talk with the words that we use in our own context and be able to solve really tough math problems, but we don’t want to have a divide from a world that might use some different language sometimes. So we found that across all of these districts that’s really important.
The next ones that people have coalesced around are student mindset about mathematics, their own agency. So really thinking about who is doing the doing in the classroom. If we want all students doing math, who’s the doer? Is it the teacher doing the doer? Where’s the heavy lifting? If it’s students, which students is it? Is it just a few of them carrying the rest of them on their back? And certainly thinking about productive struggle in that bucket of things.
The last bucket of things is if all students are doing math, what in the heck do we mean by math? So we really do have a whole set of bugs that are related to what are we assessing, what are we offering, what do tasks look like, what does practice look like? What if we messed with some of that some? Where are we treating those things distinctly, where are the connections? And importantly in COVID for everyone, but in West Virginia in particular, we definitely have a lot of students that aren’t grade level ready. So how do we dance with the absolute need to teach grade level content to a class of kids for whom 75% of them might not be grade level ready? So a lot of the work that we did actually in year two, people got really fired up about. How do I make just in time prerequisite content dance with the current thing I need to be teaching and how do I make that as fluid as possible without pausing grade level teaching and learning?
So those are the three big buckets across the five years and all the teachers. We’re happy to share all of that too, by the way, if anyone would like to look at what does our driver look like. That’s our filing cabinet, again, for what those buckets are and how we define them, and also our great big fishbone, we’d be happy to share those.

Stacey Caillier:
We’ll link that to the show notes. That would be great. I just have to say, as we’ve led a math network for the past five years now as well, and everything that you’re saying totally resonates with what we have found also, and especially just this idea of our tagline of our first math network was abolishing the phrase, I’m not a math person. That was our goal just to abolish that phrase. So much of that came down to redefining how we even thought about what math was and redefining that with students so that they could see themselves as smart and mathematical in ways that they hadn’t seen before. All of that just makes so much sense to me. I love that y’all are working on those bugs. I share those bugs. I’m excited to see what comes out of them, for sure.
I wanted to, Janet, just dig into a little bit more. You’ve described yourself as someone who used to be 100% traditional math teacher, and now those percentages are all sorts of different for you. Can you just paint a picture for us of how does math teaching look different for you now? What has shifted in terms of what it looks like for you as a teacher and how your students experience your classroom?

Janet Hanshaw:
Oh, absolutely. I used to be the, I’ll do it, we do it, and then you do it. So that was just about how every day ran. We would come in and I would do some examples, they would do some examples with me, they would practice a couple, and then they would get 10 or 15 problems, this is what you do. So now I still truly believe in direct instruction. However, instead of 100% of that, I’m going to say I am around 60/40 now.
So for example, I did a lesson on scatterplot. So instead of just coming in and here’s the vocabulary, copy this vocabulary down, here’s a scatterplot, this is what we do with the scatterplot, this is how we do the line of best fit, I actually started the class with the which one doesn’t belong? It’s like I put up four scatterplots and then I just said, “Which one doesn’t belong?” I know that just sounds so simple, but it is magnified in the classroom when we spend five minutes of just letting them look at the four different scatterplots and seeing which one doesn’t belong and they have to justify that within their group, maybe share out to the entire class.
Not that I don’t eventually do a little bit of direct instruction from there, but just that shift of five minutes or 10 minutes, whatever the conversation lends itself to, I mean, I didn’t realize what I was taking away from my students by not allowing them a chance to talk and to share. I didn’t realize how much I was keeping them from learning from others by not giving other kids in the classroom a chance to talk and to share.
I don’t have to always be the dispenser of all knowledge, and that has been a shift for me. I’ve had to give up a little bit of control. I’ve had to learn how to handle controlled chaos, I guess I should say. I know people think maybe that that’s a simple thing, but it’s not always so simple to allow the students to get into a conversation and to bring them back.

Stacey Caillier:
Anybody who’s teaching knows that, yes.

Janet Hanshaw:
But people outside of that, I don’t think they realize how difficult it is to allow students to take part in their own learning and their own conversations and to share their knowledge, but then to be able to bring them all back to get to another point that you’re wanting to address and to bring them back.
So just simple, which one doesn’t belong, and notice wonder. Oh my gosh, I taught geometry last year, and notice wonder was getting ready to do parallel lines cut with a transversal. Put up a parking lot, what do you notice? Put up a street map, what do you notice? And how that lent itself to going into the lesson and how much more engaged they were instead of here’s parallel lines and a transversal. Oh, these angles are alternate interior angles. They are the same.
Here’s what’s baffling. You would think after 28 years, by this time that I would realize that I would know, but I didn’t know. I didn’t realize.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
Because don’t you think because of those constructs, they pull at each other, right? It does complicate things to transfer more agency. I don’t know, I’m having a little bit of light bulb. Y’all can watch me do my work right now because about to change something I’m going to do next week. But I do think where you’re putting more agency for what is learning even in the first place? So if learning is not just a transfer, but instead is a growth almost that you’re letting that be closer to kids and in so doing you’re creating more chaos for yourself.
I would just like to call out right now that if you talk to a bunch of people involved with improvement science around math education, they would all be like, “Oh yeah. Well, we all know that.” But then I would want to say to them, “Well, what about you? So are you allowing in the same way that notice wonder of your teachers to shape your whole ship and can you hold your breath through the chaos that will ensue because it will break your measurement system that was really simple in your bogus four week chartering phase?”
That doesn’t work like that. I’m just being a little pest right now in saying, first of all, I do like to rabble rouse. But true West Virginian style here, we’ll give you a little history lesson that a redneck, the word redneck, we’re reclaiming it because it came really from the very first union organizers before those unions were even called unions with their red handkerchiefs around their neck. So we are pot stirrers from way back, neither North, nor South. I think our network embodies that, creating this new space that didn’t exist before.
When I was listening to Janet right now, I was thinking, huh, I wonder if we could make little dials on these change ideas because it’s important to know impact. Often, that’s the only thing we talk about, right? So Janet started using a notice wonder protocol in all kinds of places before she started really doing her direct instruction, which she’s not going to step totally away from.
By the way, Janet, totally agree with you. I am not a Kool-Aid drinker that thinks we should all shift away from really well done direct instruction. That would be so silly to think that every child’s going to develop their way through thousands of years of mathematics on their own in 13 years under our tutelage is goofy.
But I think impact we need to marry with ease and spillover. So these are the two things that I thought was actually really interesting about what you just said. You were calling out that there was complexity so it made your system of your classroom harder to deal with, less easy for you to turn a notice wonder right in the beginning of class when you wanted to then bring them back and move right onto something. But if that ease is balanced with a spillover factor, in other words, if we’re going to do non-curricular related task, if we’re going to do an order of operations thing, which is a fifth grade thing, right? If we’re going to do that in a 10th grade classroom, then we would only really want to do that or tell someone else that maybe they should do that if we’re going to see some actual spillover into those discussions getting easier, more comfortable, more relevant to the course content itself. So it does seem like it would be really interesting to think about our huge inventory of all these change ideas with three meters on them, ease, impact, and spillover.
Anyhow, I thought I would just share that aloud instead of just writing it down right now in terms of a next move for us internal to our network.

Stacey Caillier:
Well that’s one of our favorite tools that we come back to all the time. I guess it’s called the pick chart in medicine, but the whole ease and impact matrix and where do things land?

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
But I think it’s the third piece, the spillover piece, that’s what just fired me up right now.

Stacey Caillier:
I also appreciate just this acknowledgement that teaching in this way isn’t necessarily easier. It can be more challenging, more complicated, more uncertain, more awesome.

Janet Hanshaw:
Yes.

Stacey Caillier:
Jump in, Janet. I see you going like, “Yeah.”

Janet Hanshaw:
Yes. Actually, it’s really messed with my pacing of covering content. I know that we’re covering it deeper and that there’s more understanding, so I’m still trying to figure out how to do that pace, cover all the contents that I need to cover, and maintain and not want to slip back into the ease and the comfort of just direct traditional instruction.
So it has been kind of messy and I have really felt, this year particularly, I have not felt the flow that I normally feel or the ease that I normally feel in my classroom. I believe that’s a good thing. It’s just been a hard thing to adapt and to handle and to be okay, at the end of the day still kind of feel that, I don’t know if all that went well, but still being okay with I think I like it and make notes and I can do that better next year mentality.
That’s where I am right now. I’m trying, learning, failing, going back, succeeding, going back, and trying to keep notes of everything that I’ve done differently this year. All of these little bits and pieces have been incorporated into my classroom, yet I don’t feel like I flowed well and I still feel very discombobulated from the whole experience. I guess growth comes from being uncomfortable and I have to get out of my comfort zone. But it’s been okay. We all survived. I believe we made it.

Stacey Caillier:
Well, and one of the things that I’m struck by too is as teachers we try things all the time.

Janet Hanshaw:
Yes.

Stacey Caillier:
But I think what’s powerful about the stories that you shared is that because you were noticing how students were responding, noticing whether they were engaged, even when those things feel harder, there’s more of a investment in but I’m going to keep on keeping on because I see how this is making a difference for my students. I can see it in their work and in their discussion and how they’re relating to each other. So I just think that gathering of the evidence and reflecting on it is so powerful.

Janet Hanshaw:
Well, a big portion of it is that it was my problem collectively with other fellows from this group, it was a solution that we developed and we incorporated, and then I have my fellows to go back to say, “This is what happened.” Then we meet with other fellows and say, “This is what happened.” We get feedback. “This is how it happened in my classroom. Try this or try that.” So I’m not in my classroom all by myself anymore and it’s not just my problem, it’s a problem that everybody within this community, our fellows, and our LIT teams, we all have these, but it’s ours. It’s not somebody that doesn’t even know us, that doesn’t even know West Virginia is actually a state that’s coming in here and pushing it down our throats. I mean, it’s really, we have come together.
So it wasn’t something that I learned in a conference and I’m brought back to my classroom and thought I’d try it. It was a solution to a problem that I was having that came from this collective work and therefore I had much more ownership and much more desire to succeed in my classroom and to see the effect that it’s going to have on my students as opposed to it coming from somebody else.
So being able to find the good parts along with the bad parts and to be accepting of all of it collectively is what really has transformed me this year. It’s been a tough one. It’s been hard. I’m not saying that it’s been easy. But along this path and this journey, I’ve learned that I can do hard and I can do it pretty well. I didn’t realize that I could, but I can do hard and I can stick with it because it was mine and it was my agency in my classroom with support from everyone else throughout the state that’s in this program.

Stacey Caillier:
I love that. So in improvement, a lot of attention has gone to things that are not instruction. These are the stories that are most readily available to us in a lot of cases. Things like making sure students are on track to graduate, making sure they have access to college, reducing suspensions, reducing chronic absenteeism. These are all super important problems. There’s amazing work happening across the country also focused on literacy, math, science. Those stories are often a lot more complicated to tell, so we don’t hear them as much, and it seems like as a result maybe of our lack of storytelling or inadequate storytelling, I think some folks are skeptical that improvement can actually improve teaching and learning. I’m curious, what would you all say to this?

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
My answer is twofold. One is that those treating systemic issues and personal growth as one in the same problem spaces is just a mistake to start out with. So if there are a version of the tools of improvement that work really well to improve problems like whether or not a student walks in the door, while there are a lot of complex root causes to something like that, the locus of control of the school is pretty similar school to school, and that’s not anywhere near as complex a problem as teaching and learning math.
What you’re treating in the case of absenteeism, college access I feel like gets a little closer, but I feel like the problem that you’re treating is looking for a better way for a system to do business, not an individual to do business. So because of that, a system doesn’t have a personality. It has a culture, and you can affect that culture over time, but you don’t need to pay as much attention to the system as a sentient being, if that makes any sense. Whereas I really believe that the variation that we’re up to here, getting better teaching and learning to happen where there do exist a lot of great ideas for that to happen, and the bigger issue is whether or not attention can be paid to fitting those ideas to the right place with the right nuance and a learning frame.
That requires this bug piece to be central. This is really my philosophy, right? I think that’s the distinction. I would say that we are a case to watch carefully. I think that we have some early indicators that something really good is going on across veteran teachers, brand new teachers, and everywhere in the middle. But we don’t have that outcome data as yet, and if we do have it, if we do grow it, we expect it to last.
I do think it’s interesting that the way we’re doing business is grown from a 10-year experiment in one district. I think that’s important. This isn’t an idea coming from, hey, we just think this is going to work, so let’s get a lot of money and a lot of people invested in this thing that happened in an ivory tower. That’s not at all what’s happening. What was built initially was built in teachers’ hands through teacher learning and I think that’s got to be the distinction in those spaces.
Much earlier in this podcast you talked about that this is transformational work, and it has to be in the world of teaching and learning if it’s going to have impact. So this can’t just be an additional form to fill out when you are implementing the new district level PD initiative. If it’s that, it’s not this. So to run a system where transformation is possible means you have to up your tolerance for chaos, just like Janet does in her system of her classroom.
I think it requires some folks to come together. I am sad I didn’t meet you in San Diego, but some of the folks that I did meet who are doing similar work really do agree there’s a need for those of us that are trying to do this at scale and with brutal honesty to come together and really learn from one another what are those hunches and what’s the evidence to support them? And also what are those hunches and what data supports those hunches in the cases where this work does not seem to be working? I think that’s going to be a necessary next step.

Janet Hanshaw:
Stacey, their very first year when we got introduced to this thing called the fishbone diagram and we were brainstorming all of the reasons that students were not doing mathematics in the classroom, so we brainstormed and some of it was the content standards, the curriculum, the kids not coming to school, and a whole host of those type of issues, and then the very next thing was what ones do we as the fellows, as the teachers, what ones do we have control over? What ones can we move the scale?
So if you’ll see that fishbone hanging beside Joanna there, those bones that’s on the side that you can see are primarily the ones that we really don’t have a lot of say or control over. It’s all the stuff that’s over on the other side. I can improve the discourse in my classroom by improving the type of task I give to my students. I can work on by the time I get kids in the ninth grade that they’ve decided that they hate math. Where they got that from, I don’t know, but by the time they get into the ninth grade, it’s so embedded, but I can work on that. I can work on questioning skills. I can work on teaching students how to critique others works. These are the things that we were taught to focus on, the things that we had control over, the things that we could actually improve in our own classroom, and if we improve that, we are improving.
Now, I have no say over the absenteeism in my classroom. I’m not calling mom and dad and I can’t get them up and the grandparents and aunts and uncles or whoever it is that’s raising this kid at this time, and whatever other issues, but when they get in my classroom, that’s when I can control things. So from the very beginning we were taught and discussed find the things that we have control over, what we can improve in our classroom.
We can’t deal with those other ones right now. That’s out of our realm. But what we can improve is what we do in our classroom and what we do with the other teachers in our building and our other network, our LIT teams. Then if we just start there, how many students are we impacting now, Joanna? What was our number with all of our fellows and our LIT?

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
I think we had 10,000 survey responses this year.

Stacey Caillier:
Wow.

Janet Hanshaw:
So there you go. I mean, I understand on track and that’s a huge thing that we have to hear every year about our freshmen, because Algebra I is one of the most failed classes in the building.

Stacey Caillier:
In the country.

Janet Hanshaw:
And that right there is getting them off track. So how do we get them on track? So we get that all the time, and we get the absenteeism all the time. We get the graduation rate. That is another measuring stick on our school. But once we were told and then to focus on what can we control and what can we improve in our own classroom, I’m sitting here talking to you, living proof of a transformation of what can happen. You cannot, no one can tell me that my kids are not getting an improvement because I’m improved. Does that make sense? The ones that I have in my classroom, it has to be an improvement just because I myself have improved.

Stacey Caillier:
Dang. I was going to ask if there’s any final words, but I feel like that was a mic drop moment. But I’ll also still ask is there anything else, anything that’s on your minds or hearts that you want to get out before we say goodbye to folks?

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
I’m honored to be here representing our entire network. We are two of 50 folks doing this work with our staff and our fellows. Not quite 50, but close. We’re a thin bowed group of folks. But any one of them could have been on here. I am glad to be here myself, I’m glad to be with Janet, but just want to uplift the entire group and all of our districts and our Department of Ed for really taking a chance. This was taking a chance. This is not something that’s happened before that’s sort of coming here with a lot of data to back it and it’s really exciting to be doing that.
I just want to double down that it’s hard to get in and out of West Virginia physically and also with professional contacts. Our mountains are real in both senses and it just absolutely means the world to the folks, whoever they were, who referenced to you that we should talk, and also that you took time to get to know us. I say this often, and I definitely have a soapbox for it, but one in five students in this country are in rural schools and context matters. The solutions that are going to help urban schools get better are not the same solutions, there might be spillover, but they’re not the same solutions in rural spaces oftentimes.
We have much less teacher turnover. So if we could get a little bit more attention thrown on promising practice in rural spaces where there are by and large far fewer funders, far fewer universities, far fewer folks actually noticing what’s happening. So I just really want to uplift you for thinking that the world needs to hear a little bit about what we’re up to here and really invite and encourage other folks to connect. So big thanks for your time and also for the thoughtful way in which you engaged us in really thinking about what we’re up to here. I look forward to knowing you further. I just want to say a big thanks.

Stacey Caillier:
I feel like you guys are both brilliant and I want you to be my two new best friends. I’m working on getting you to San Diego.

Joanna Burt-Kinderman:
We’re in. We’re in. We’re in.

Janet Hanshaw:
Oh my gosh, I loved the city. It was beautiful to visit. I’d never been there and I just loved it. But again, and just like Joanna said, I’m just one story representing. Everybody has their story of their improvement and their journey and I’m honored to be the one that’s representing us, even though it was, I guess I should say, something that I didn’t aspire to do, but that I have learned to grow, to speak, and to use my voice. So it’s an honor and a privilege to be representative of West Virginia, of Logan County, of the M3T Network.
Joanna, Matt, Stacey, you’ve been lovely, I’m telling you. Just like I had said about Joanna, how she makes everyone in the room feel great and wonderful, you’ve done the same for me. Both times that we’ve met and talked I felt better when I left, so thank you very much for that as well.

Stacey Caillier:
Well, I’m a big believer that those who are clamoring the least for the mic are the ones who deserve it the most. Oh my gosh. Okay, I’m going to stop recording.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Janet Hanshaw, Joanna Burt-Kinderman, and Stacey Caillier for this conversation. We’ve included a link to the EdWeek article about M3T in our show notes, as well as links to the M3T website and the Center for Research on Equity and Innovation.
Thanks for listening.