Falling Out and Back in Love with Education
By Dr. Manouchka Pierre
Principal/Educator
Founder, DifferentiatEd Consulting
From the Lens of An Educator
My lens would be through the vantage point of an educator, specifically - an educator who understands how important learning can play a role in your life. I say that because if you looked at me 25 years ago, I was the epitome of all things statistics when you’re talking about the African-American community: a high school dropout, teenage mom, and living on welfare with two kids by the age of 20. Education is what changed the trajectory of my life, but it also gave me purpose. Becoming a mother allowed me to see what I wanted for my own children and what I wanted for the children in the community I lived in.
My story begins there in terms of my journey, but truly, it wasn’t until I was working on my doctorate that I fell out of love and then back in love with being an educator. During that journey of achieving my doctorate, I was working within the school system and had become disillusioned with what education had become. I saw that children were treated more like a number and become collateral damage in terms of testing not necessarily meeting their needs but being used as a method to separate the grain from the chaff. That was clear both in the classroom and as I moved up the “ladder” of becoming an educator. As I looked at the curriculum, I saw how children of color were not represented in any capacity, not the standards, the books, or the tests, but they also weren’t seeing themselves represented in the educators or the leadership of their schools. There was no true cultural representation and the inherent racism of the culture of low expectations was robbing them of their chances at true success and becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Pipeline
As I was writing and coming up with ideas for what my dissertation would be, the first idea I came up with was immigrant kids and gifted education. I missed the opportunity to be staffed as gifted, and my daughter, though intelligent enough for the gifted program, was not recommended because she was not “mature enough” in the 1st grade. One of my cohort members chose to speak on Latino representation in gifted education, and I didn’t want to piggyback off of that. So, I thought, “What can I talk about that is not being discussed but is clear to everyone?” I decided on the discipline gap and how African-American students, specifically, are experiencing exclusionary discipline at a higher rate. I wanted to go beyond the impacts to solely them as an individual and discuss how that affects them in terms of their ability to give back to their community, ability to participate in and be active members in their community, thus limiting the ability for that community to grow and thrive, which are the most harmful consequences of the schoolhouse to jailhouse pipeline.
If you kick kids out of class more often, then they have this antagonistic relationship with education and don’t see the importance of it. When those kids eventually have kids, they may pass that relationship on. More importantly, when you take those kids out of the classroom, they lose days, weeks, and months of learning, which makes them disinterested in the process and more apt to find other things to do out in the streets. Even by putting police officers in the school building, taking the disciplinary role away from the administrator, and putting it in the hands of police, in which you go from zero to 100 and bypass the [disciplinary] process sends them from juvenile justice to juvenile justice; it’s almost a straight shot to jail. The flip-side of exclusionary discipline is the achievement gap. When we talk about how African-American students are not achieving or they’re not meeting the standard, we’re not looking at the fact that a lot of that happens because of them being removed from the classroom. So, when I chose that topic, I didn’t realize that it would coincide with me also becoming disillusioned with the education process, so it was difficult to look at this data and not become angry.
Finding Purpose Halfway Across the World
I ended up taking a year off and needed to find a way to fall in love with education again, and it ended up happening 7,000 miles away from all things familiar. I was educating students that didn’t look like me and that had not experienced education the way that I’d experienced it, but seeing how hungry they were for any bit of what Western education looked like really opened my mind to the potential of what it is that I had to offer to them as an educator both to children and other educators. I could help educators see the connections that they could make, both with the content and the students. I was helping them to see that they, too, needed to learn and grow to help students, and just finding a way to then make that a reality, which is how I ended up starting DifferentiatEd Consulting. It’s always been something that I’ve done, but I just never could find a way to monetize it because I love it so much. I love being able to have conversations with other educators and help them see their capacity. I love seeing that lightbulb go off in an educator’s head just as much as I love seeing it happen for students. More importantly, I’m not just working with educators; I’m working with grad students who are in the education process and helping them to see those light-bulb moments and helping them find their “why”, and helping them make those connections.
Currently, I have a client who’s in the military, but I go through the same process that I would go through with a teacher and ask the questions of, “What is the goal that you’re trying to achieve?”, “Who are the people you are trying to touch?”, and “At the end of the day, what is the change that you are trying to be in the community, that you are a part of?” Helping her from there has been a great journey for her and it has been enlightening for me that my expertise and my “why” is not limited to the education sphere. While I’m an educator at heart, what I am doing could help or push anybody. It could affect any industry. It’s just about helping people find their “why” and the change that they want to see happen and moving forward with that.
Change versus Growth
The reason why I look through the lens of an educator is that I feel like there’s always an opportunity for growth. That growth mindset in any industry is just so important. For this school year, our motto that I picked for this year is, “Change is inevitable, but growth is optional,” and I think that could be used in any way. Every day when we see changes - when you see the situation now with the way that COVID-19 is happening, we have to change. We have to figure out how we’re going to teach children online and how we’re going to meet their educational needs because they aren’t in the classroom anymore. That change is something that we have no control over, but the growth we’ve been able to achieve as educators in trying to keep kids engaged, and the growth that I see my students make in terms of how we’re assessing them (we’ve had the highest Reading MAP scores in the years I’ve worked at this school, but used a reflective portfolio method for our midterm grades) has been profound. We no longer can do a paper and pencil test, but instead, we must ask students to truly think critically using these 21st Century skills that we’ve been trying to embed in them for the longest time. It’s just been really amazing to see.
I’ve watched my team of teachers, and especially my Heads of Department, grow exponentially even while it’s been stressful. I think that things that they thought they weren’t capable of or things that they thought they didn’t know were possible are now possible because of that growth mindset. Teachers have added so many things to their “bag of tricks”; skills have been honed, imagination and activity have come together, and the extra mile they are willing to travel is even longer.
When it comes to my capacity for growth and change, the impact that I want to make not just as an educator in my field but in all of the industries that I touch, is that growth is always the mindset that we move with and learning is always the scope that we work within.