Ken Futernick brings together people who deeply disagree about the issues that most divide school communities these days, such as teaching about gender and sexual identity or the history of racism in the United States.
And record the conversations.
You might think that arguments would involve shouting matches or verbal fireworks. But Futernick, a longtime educator who has served as an elementary school teacher, teacher educator and leader of a national school turnaround center, seeks to keep the dialogues as civil and productive as possible. To do this, he uses depolarizing strategies, such as “looping,” or having each person repeat the other's argument in his or her own words and asking if he or she is hearing the other side accurately. The goal is to highlight areas of agreement rather than discord.
Futernick shares these recorded discussions on his podcast: “Courageous conversations about our schools.”
The dialogues unfold slowly, but many are fascinating. As an episode about supporting LGBTQ students. One of the guests was Willie Carver Jr., Kentucky's 2022 Teacher of the Year, who is gay and who left the profession out of fear amid growing hostility toward LGBTQ educators and students at his school. The other guest was Dov Fischer, a law professor, Orthodox Jewish rabbi and conservative politician who wrote an op-ed in 2022 against school policies that allow students to designate their gender identities.
Over the course of more than an hour of conversation, “they began to realize that they didn't really disagree that much,” Futernick says. “Fischer said, 'You know, really, I'm starting to realize that as a Jew I grew up in New York, and I was sometimes made fun of and bullied for being Jewish, and I never felt fully American as an American, and I did. that I am'. What I hear you say is that really, as a gay man, you have felt like the other, and so much so that you had to quit your job.' So, at the end of the conversation, each of them called each other a friend.”
We connected with Futernick for this week's EdSurge podcast, to hear what he learned from the 20+ episodes of his podcast and his advice on how to calm the toxic and often heated debates that have erupted in schools in recent years.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Cloudy, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript, edited for clarity, below.
EdSurge: I understand that your interest in this topic arose from the work you did advising low-performing schools.
Ken Futernick: It is more normal for relationships between administrators and teachers, and even between teachers and professors, to deteriorate and trust is lost.
Not only is there no collaboration, but sometimes teachers simply stop talking to each other. And that is never a good thing and ultimately causes some teachers to leave the profession.
Why don't they talk to each other?
Sometimes they can't even remember it.
You can usually trace it back to an incident. Some issue arose where there was disagreement about some school policy and people lined up on one side or the other of an issue and it was never resolved. And they weren't able to say, 'Let's just agree to disagree.' And then this simply becomes a matter of division.
Or there is an administrator who has some philosophical approach that some teachers agree with and others don't. And so they line up on one side or the other and remain divided.
So it seems like you started this work because you felt this was the issue that needed the most attention: this challenge of talking to each other about problems?
Good. I became distressed by the so-called “culture wars” that were breaking out everywhere. It was initially about critical race theory and then expanded to other concerns. The idea was that somehow teachers are talking to young children about things they shouldn't. Many times it didn't go well. People will show up at school board meetings, stand in line, have their three minutes, and accuse teachers of doing things that in many cases weren't actually true. But there is no other place that most school districts have created to have civil, productive conversations. So the podcast I created is a place to do that.
How would you describe how these culture wars have become more prominent in schools in recent years?
Of course, there have long been concerns about things like what books children have access to. But thanks to social media, what's different today is that there are now people who fall into the category of what Amanda Ripley calls 'businessmen in conflict.'These are people who promote conflict for conflict's sake because there is some political or financial benefit to doing so.
And all you have to do is convince parents that teachers are doing something wrong and create fear. And if you haven't been to school recently or aren't a parent of some kind… you think, “that doesn't sound right.” So your hair stands on end and then there's no easy way for people to find out if that's really true. Then you hear it enough times and you start to believe it. And then a lot of people are motivated to come forward and say, 'I don't want that and I'm going to vote for laws that prevent it.'
But there's never a real, honest conversation with educators to say, 'Wow! I have heard this. Is it true that you are indoctrinating?
And I think teachers would say, 'I would really invite you to come into my classroom and observe.' That's usually how these things are resolved, if there are stronger relationships between parents and educators, through courageous conversations and a bit of empathy and a sense of curiosity, rather than entering those conversations with suspicion and a feeling of contempt for them. people so-called leftist educators.
For schools, teachers, and school leaders, is there anything you've found that can change the tone once debates become toxic?
I mentioned earlier that I had worked with some of the lowest performing schools in the country. And what we found is that in those schools people had become polarized. They were on one side or the other. People simply stopped talking to show that there is very little trust. And so before we can start to focus on teaching and learning and curriculum to change these schools and have to try to see better outcomes for their students, we had to try to repair the relationships between people in the school.
There is an elementary school in Stockton, California. And when we asked all the teachers at a particular elementary school in a survey how much they felt there was trust between the staff and the administration, between all the people at the school, it was very low. We asked them how much they liked coming to work. Not many people enjoyed it.
So we got everyone to agree to meet voluntarily at an after-school meeting and we said, 'What if we could define a different future for all of us and not go back and try to change the past, because that's what happens?' impossible? But if we could list the type of values we would like to live by as a school community.'
And they listed, you know, integrity, honesty, trust; that kind of things. And I said, 'What does that really look like in terms of what you will do and what you won't do?' And they say, you know, when we cross paths, we always have to recognize each other. Say hello, say hello and don't ignore each other. This is a simple thing, but they came up with a list.
And pretty much everyone says, “I'm willing to commit to it.” And then, you know, a month later, we come back.
And I can guarantee you that it will go off the rails, or it will seem like it did at one point or another, (so) we have to go back and talk about how to have a conversation when that happens.
We did this for several months and did that survey about how much confidence they felt. A year later, 90 percent of people said, “I enjoy coming to work.” And what was really interesting was the 50 Stockton Unified schools, academically. And we hadn't even started to focus on teaching and learning, it was just about repairing relationships.
Listen to the full conversation on the EdSurge podcast.
