Brendon Jobs Interview: How to be an Unofficial Teacher Leader

Last week in my Leadership in Educational Institutions course, we discussed teacher leaders and the roles they play in schools.  We looked at teacher leaders in the appointed sense, where a principal may assign a teacher to be in charge of training the other teachers in certain skills due to his or her expertise.  We learned that the implementation of the teacher leader concept is one that at times faces challenges due to the lack of clarity of the role.  This could lead to various levels of success or failure.  But what happens when someone assumes the responsibility of a teacher leader, without being appointed to a teacher leader position?  Can it be successful?  Are there challenges?

Enter Brendon Jobs, a Penn GSE Alum ('11), who teaches at the Philadelphia High School for Girls.  Assuming the teacher leader role without being officially assigned to the position, Jobs gave me a first-hand account of his success and challenges as he tries to "unofficially" lead his colleagues.


MTW: How did you become a teacher leader? 

BJ: You can either be selected or self-appointed.  I’m one of the self-appointed teacher leaders.  We came up with this organization called Revamp Girls High School, and it ended up being a voluntary [teacher-led] school improvement group.  We would kind of map out the vision of what a Girls High School girl is and should be, and also think about different functions within the school.  There were points where people could come to share ideas about what they wanted and expected from the school.  The environment we constructed through Revamp Girls High School made me feel like a teacher leader. 


Brendon goes on to describe some of his success in this unofficial teacher leader role:

BJ: I had a great administrator.  She let us publicize and get [Revamp] together. And slowly but surely I feel like people [at Girls High] were more open and candid in conversations.  I think Revamp made it so that there was a better sense of relational trust between the administration and the faculty, and the students as well. 

I also started giving periodical professional development sessions, and that’s not something that faculty members generally step up to do.  Teacher leaders operate within the school building.  You have to think of yourself as a member of the faculty, not just a teacher in a classroom.   

I try to bring some of the professional development stuff I've done in Philadelphia back to my department.   [For example], we don’t get professional development on issues of gender.  I was able to share the studies I did at Penn on that topic.  I don’t know how to measure whether or not it’s doing anything.  That can be something that’s difficult about teacher leadership.  But I think it definitely contributed to the school environment. 

MTW: What are some of the challenges you've encountered as a teacher leader?

BJ: The union fought [Revamp] really hard.  I feel like a lot of people, more of the senior faculty, were suspicious of the group.  There was a lot of push back and apathy.

There’s always going to be that resistance to change, unless that change is mandated from above.  I don’t think superintendents and school reform commissions really run what we do.  I feel like as an educator, as a professional, I have a say of how I conduct my classroom environment and school environment.  


MTW: Are there any interpersonal strategies you developed to overcome these challenges? 

BJ: In general when you’re respectful and thoughtful and engaging with faculty or children, they respond to that.  I was told by a friend of mine on the staff that sometimes I seem unapproachable.  I think I’m unapproachable to the right people.  If you’re going to come over here and complain, I’m not the one to talk to.  But if you want to develop yourself, or talk about awesome things that are happening with our girls, or in your class, then I love talking about that.   


MTW: What advice do you have for current education students who may want to be a teacher leader one day? 

Wherever you are, wherever you end up, get out of your classroom and use your summers to develop yourself and to greet people outside of your school building and district.  There are teachers all over the country that do amazing things.  Every summer I come back energized because I interact with people who are energizing and have amazing ideas.  Make sure you don’t stay in your box.  Try your best to not operate from a "place of protection." Your new and young, so experiment and have fun.

Brendon Jobs' official website: https://sites.google.com/site/brendonjobs/

CAMRA Interview: What will Define Success for the Screening Scholarship Media Festival?

This is the final part of the interview with four Penn Doctoral students who contribute to the Media Pedagogy Lab, CAMRA.  They are preparing for the First Annual Screening Scholarship Series Festival this Sunday, an event that CAMRA is co-sponsoring.  

Part 1 of the interview is here.

Part 2 of the interview is here.


MTW: The upcoming Screening Scholarship Media Festival is the inaugural
event of its kind at Penn.  In what ways, if any, do you measure the
success and effectiveness of the festival?

Matthew Tarditi (Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education): For me, the sheer nature of the process is a measure of success for me.  Truly collaborative, creative, supportive and facilitated by technology, the organization of the festival modeled the guiding principles of CAMRA and the essential elements for building partnership and community among our members and affiliates.  

Even so, it would be dishonest of me to say that I am not concerned with attendance and basic efficiency and smoothness of operations as two main measures of success/effectiveness; however, the quality of the experience and not the quantity of the attendees is my main concern.  That being said, we want SSMF to be a forum for sharing, collaborating, questioning and exploring, and based on the characteristics of the participants and attendees, as well as my own penchant for community building, I am confident that the festival will leave me satisfied with the experience yet hungry for more of its kind.  

Leya Matthew (Education): That’s a good question.  On a personal level, as a researcher, it will be on the basis of questions and discussions that bear directly on the issues I struggle with as I use video/audio as a research method.  In that sense it is a way to plug into a larger community that is invested in the questions I struggle with. 

At an institutional level it is one step in legitimization; at recognizing non-textual works as scholarship, which is why it is a hybrid between a Media Festival and a conference. That is a very conscious and strategic space we are trying to define, where a peer-reviewed screening will be treated with the same seriousness as a conference presentation or an academic paper. 

Sofia Chaparro (Educational Linguistics): The fact that we've been able to organize the festival at all, that we've received institutional support from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Graduate School of Education, as well as student organizations such as GAPSA, and most importantly the excitement of those who hear about it, to me already makes it a successful endeavor. 

The goal really is to bring together a community of students, scholars and media-makers who are concerned with innovating the way we do research in the academy through the use of diverse media and technologies, and thinking about the implications that such innovations bring for the process of knowledge production itself and the wider impact of our work.

Arjun Shankar (Anthropology and Education): I think the success of the festival will be measured by the types of dialogue that go on in each of the sessions.  If audience members and presenters are able to collectively and openly think about ethical and theoretical issues, then I think we would have met the festivals goals.  

What I am most afraid of is outright dismissal of particular products or points of view because of a dogmatic stance regarding what research should be, etc.  That is precisely what we aren't about.  I am hoping that the first assumptions of everyone present is that there are valuable leanings to be had, and to really spend the time to understand how to incorporate these leanings into their own practice within and outside of the academy.

Interview with CAMRA, Part 2 of a 3 Part series

This is part 2 of the interview with four Penn Doctoral students who contribute to the Media Pedagogy Lab, CAMRA.  They are preparing for the First Annual Screening Scholarship Series Festival this Sunday, an event that CAMRA is co-sponsoring.  

For part 1 of the interview, click here.


MTW: One of the results of creating new ways to present research is that you can establish new ways to set the tone of the learning environment.  As visual and digital research representation becomes more prevalent, what aspects of the learning environment - and the students and scholars in those environments - must researchers be aware of?

Matthew Tarditi (Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education): Pedagogy is at the heart of CAMRA and most of us in the organization who are educators and/or educational scholars are keenly aware of the relation between research, knowledge production and issues of representation on one hand and teaching and learning on the other.  

Audio-visual and digital technologies pervade all facets of our lives, not only as learners and teachers, but also as social beings acting and interacting with one another through these media.  Therefore, researchers must continue to be aware of the ways technology mediates and influences the complex array of individuals, knowledges, relationships, contexts and learning environments, among other variables, in order to explore, account for and ultimately incorporate these media (existing and new) into pedagogical approaches.  

Lastly, for researchers, the issues of ethics and participation are important themes warranting thoughtful consideration and awareness as we continue to experiment with multimedia technologies in educational environments.  


Sofia Chaparro (Educational Linguistics): First, we must address the media literacies we come with as audiences for digital/visual/auditory representations of research. How do we interpret what we see and hear? What literacies are already in place that frame what we see in particular ways?

Secondly, we must address the issue of legitimization of this type of genre in the academy. How do evaluate such work? Is there a way to “peer review” and “publish” digital/visual/aural works? What criteria do we use? Part of the project of CAMRA is engaging the academic community in this discussion so that we may begin to articulate frameworks that will allow this work to “count” just as much as written papers and publications do.

Finally, as Matt mentioned above, issues of ethics and representation come to the forefront whenever you use visual media as a methodology in social scientific research, particularly ethnography. To me, it means that fostering critical literacies in students is paramount as a goal of education at all levels. 

Arjun Shankar (Anthropology and Education): This is a great question and one I have been thinking about a lot.  The first is that technologies (film, multimedia) are not some magic bullet.  We have all been in classrooms already in which professors put on films expecting that the film will somehow do all the teaching for them.  In reality, these forms of media have to be thought of with a pedagogical lens in mind.  What types of power differentials and inequalities might the film be propagating?  What are the major questions which a professor needs to be ready to address and critique when students integrate these new forms into their learning environments?  These are really important ethical questions which cannot be swept away.  

The second part of this is that we cannot expect students to be able to utilize these tools in self-conscious ways just because they are immersed in digitality in their everyday life.  To use these tools effectively, professors have to begin allowing students to experiment with production, and help students see how their own biases come out in what and how they produce these digital products.

Interview with Students from CAMRA, a 3-part series

This Sunday, CAMRA (a Media Pedagogy Lab at Penn) GSE, and the Annenberg School for Communication will co-sponsor the First Annual Screening Scholarship Media Festival at Penn.  The festival will run for most of the day, and will allow attendees to explore how, as the website says, "diverse and creative uses of multimedia are changing knowledge production and the research imagination."

I had a chance to catch up with a few of the Penn student contributors of  CAMRA to find out a little more about the lab and the upcoming festival.  

The four students I interviewed are all in Ph.D programs: Matthew Tarditi (Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education), Leya Matthew (Education), Sofia Chaparro (Educational Linguistics) and Arjun Shanker (Anthropology and Education).

This is Part 1 of 3.  Part 2 will be posted Wednesday, and Part 3 will be posted Thursday.


MTW: CAMRA has an ambitious mission.  What does this mission and the goals of the group mean to you personally?


Matt: There are many aspects of CAMRA's mission that speak to me.  The creative, artistic and rigorous incorporation of multimedia technologies, specifically film for me, in all stages of the research process and the overall academic project are both exciting and necessary as the world becomes increasingly digital and audio-visual.  Multimedia not only speaks to a larger audience, but more importantly, it affords researchers like myself boundless possibilities for representing research, producing knowledge, and collaborating with partners, communities and research participants.  Relatedly, there are exciting pedagogical openings and opportunities enriched by technology broadly, and multimedia technology more specifically.  

It is because of these rich opportunities associated by multimedia technologies that I am drawn to CAMRA.  Most personally of these are the artistic/creative and collaborative affordances.  In sum, informed and guided by a strong collaborative orientation, the mission of CAMRA is also my personal mission as a practitioner, researcher and being in the world.  

Leya: I think CAMRA is on one level an acknowledgment of the growing diversity of the academic population.  As people from other knowledge traditions like filmmaking bring diverse ways of knowing the world into the academy, epistemological and ontological disorientations are bound to creep up. It becomes necessary that positions taken for granted be taken up for scrutiny yet again, be it who has claims for knowledge production or even what scholarship looks like.  In one way, I find it astounding that knowledge claims have succeeded, for so long, to retain the supremacy of one specific medium - text. At the same time, I also see a tendency to translate textual scholarship into film, maybe too literally. Nevertheless, it is exciting to build this community here at Penn, to re-imagine scholarship in ways that make research exciting, and anxious in some ways. I say anxious because new techniques also raise up questions of ethics in urgent ways. This is not new, anthropologists have been struggling with these questions for a very long time, which is probably why we trace our intellectual debts to anthropology in many ways.

Sofia:  I was initially very drawn to the use of film and visual media in research for its potential in reaching wider audiences, something particularly important for me as a former teacher and educational researcher.  At the same time, using film in my field site last year made me realize that it impacts every step of the process, not just the dissemination stage. So that film becomes as much a product as a process that will impact the research relationships I develop with my participants, the interpretations and analysis that I gather from my data, and the ethical questions I must address in the process of representation.

Arjun: For me, CAMRA represents a changing way of thinking about knowledge production in the university.  Firstly, and this is really important, it means including voices in the conversation which have previously been marginalized or excluded completely.  I have been thinking a lot about participatory methods, which necessarily mean deciding who has access to and can disseminate research - whether it's filmmakers, teachers, students, etc.  An academy which takes these voices seriously will not only be a more ethical place, but also a much more lively intellectual community.  For me, it also means a new way to think creatively about research; what technology has done is force me to critique textual practice itself.  For example, if we can begin exploring fictional methods in film then why not in text as well?  What artistic openings are we afforded?   


Part 2 will be posted Wednesday.

Finish that Application!

The deadline for Penn GSE's Higher Education Master's program is March 1st.  I am wondering how many people out there are considering applying but have not completed their profile for fear that grad school may not be the right choice.  We have more news articles every day that tell us how graduates are struggling to get jobs in this (slowly improving) economy, even those with Master's and PhD's.  The threat of being burdened with further student loan debt may make Grad school look like it's not worth it anymore to a potential applicant.

But if you're thinking about applying, and you're checking out Penn GSE's website, and you're looking at the Admissions Blog, and you stumbled on to this blog (thanks for visiting!), I have to ask... why not apply?

We never know what's in store for us unless we take that good ol' leap of faith, if you will.  If you have begun an application (for any of the programs at GSE whose deadline has not passed or is based on rolling admission), you should go ahead and finish and give yourself a chance to be accepted at this great institution.  All of the worries of the world, and whether Grad School is worth it nowadays, doesn't really matter.  What matters is taking a chance and giving yourself as many possibilities and opportunities as possible.  The worse that can happen is you get rejected.  Getting rejected should not be looked at as a definitive reflection of self, I feel that it's more of a sign that the circumstance you want to put yourself in does not quite align with the timing you try to put yourself in it.

The best that can happen is you get accepted.  Then you can weigh the pros and cons of whether grad school would be worth it to you.  But at least give yourself that chance first.

So go ahead, finish that application.  You'll feel better once you do.

Interview with Brendesha Tynes, Part 2

This is Part 2 of the interview with Brendesha Tynes, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the USC Rossier School of Education.  She will present a lecture at Penn as part of the Visiting Faculty Scholars of Color program on Feb. 5th.  Part 1 of the interview is here.

Part 2:

MTW: What experiences have you had or what have you seen that influenced you to take the research path you chose?

BT: I’ve had a number of experiences but I’ll mention the first.

I wanted to be a biomedical engineer when I was a sophomore and junior in high school.  The University of Michigan had a program where they brought aspiring engineers to the campus.  At some point during the program,  I was walking down the street, and a car full of white guys drove by and they said, “Go home ‘N-word’” [They said the actual word].  I lost my desire to go to Michigan and to be an engineer shortly afterwards.

Fast forward to undergrad and graduate school and many of my research questions have centered around African American self-perceptions, dealing with discrimination and how it affects their development.  My life could have been very different. I could be creating prosthetic devices, but my experience at Michigan changed that.  I want to do my part to figure out the impact these experiences have on others.


MTW: Where do you see your research, and the field, in 10-15 years?
BT: This is the absolute best time to study race online.  This historical moment is the absolute best time to do this research.  You have people thinking about race in really sophisticated ways. At the same time you have a retreat to pre-Civil Rights era race relations.

In the future you’re going to see more research on intergroup relations and intergroup learning online. Researchers will also try to better understand how the internet can be used as a tool to promote more positive race relations.


MTW: What advice do you give to the aspiring scholar who wants to do similar research?

BT: My work covers at least three disciplines: Developmental Psychology, New Media Studies, and Black Studies.  When you want to do interdisciplinary work it takes a lot more time.  For each discipline, it will take a year and a half of reading and coursework.  I  would also suggest connecting with faculty who are doing similar work.

Part 1 of this interview

Interview with Visiting Faculty Scholar of Color, Brendesha Tynes

On Tuesday February 5th, GSE’s Visiting Faculty Scholars of Color program will present Brendesha Tynes, the Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the USC Rossier School of Education.  Professor Tynes will present a talk titled, Online Racial Discrimination and Mental Health Outcomes among a Diverse, School-based Sample of Adolescents.  I had a chance to talk to Professor Tynes about her research in this emerging field, her inspiration, and advice she has for scholars who want to do similar research.

This is Part 1 of the interview.  Part 2 will be posted on Monday.

MTW: Please tell us a little about your upcoming talk at Penn and what you hope to accomplish with it.

BT: I’m going to be presenting the results from an NICHD-funded, longitudinal study of the risk and protective factors associated with online victimization.  My research team is beginning to analyze data from Wave 1 of the project. I will be presenting these results, focusing on online racial discrimination and how it relates to mental health outcomes.  Also, we’re looking at group differences in those outcomes.

There’s been a rise in online hate activity since the 2008 election of President Obama.  While we hear a ton about cyberbullying, we don’t hear about the race-related experiences that our teens are having.  I’d like to change that a bit.  I also want to show how these experiences relate to our teens’ everyday schooling experiences.

MTW: Can you tell us about some of the ways that racial discrimination online affects an adolescent differently than racial discrimination in a classroom?

BT: We are trying to figure that out.  Thus far we know that discrimination online has a unique impact on mental health, including depressive symptoms and anxiety over and above discrimination offline.  We also believe that the duration of victimization online may have a unique impact on development. The discriminatory text or image  online becomes a permanent reminder and victims may repeatedly experience an incident... on Facebook, for example where offensive language is not removed from a person’s wall. Individuals also know that a particular hate site with extreme language exists once they have either stumbled upon or deliberately viewed the site. Its permanence and the fact that it is legitimated or viewed by a wide audience may have a particularly detrimental impact on adolescent adjustment.

MTW: Who has the greatest opportunity to protect adolescents from the negative repercussions of online discrimination? Parents? Teachers? Other adolescents?

We’re beginning to see that everyone can play a role.  For example, peers and family can be buffers in the association between online victimization and depressive symptoms. [The adolescents] have fewer depressive symptoms when they have peer and family support.  When they have teacher support they have fewer rule-breaking and aggressive behaviors.


MTW: In a blended learning environment, how should an educator balance the attention they pay to the impact of virtual elements and the impact of real-life elements on the development of the students?

BT: This is the interesting thing…the line between the virtual and reality is really blurring. The virtual is real. A lot of what happens in school gets extended into online worlds.  Our teens see each other all day and then connect on sites like Facebook in the evening. 

I plan to talk about the focus of my next study, a blended learning environment where they manage to do a good job of balancing the two. 

*Part 2 of the Interview will be Posted Monday.*