Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Insightful Questions, the podcast where we dive deep into the big ideas shaping Eastside Prep's community and beyond. I'm your host, Sam Uswak, and in this series, we're exploring the theme that's at the heart of our school year, leading compassionately empathetic dialogue.
Each episode, I'll be sitting down with different members of our EPS community to unpack what this theme means in their world, whether it's in the classroom, on the field, in performance spaces, or even behind the seeds.
Together, we'll uncover how empathetic dialogue isn't just a concept, but a practice that informs leadership, strengthens relationships, and creates meaningful connections. So join us as we ask the insightful questions that help us lead with compassion and listen with intention. Let's get started.
Today I'm excited to welcome two amazing guests, Diana Gonzalez Castillo and Dan Yezbek, both part of our social science team.
Diana just wrapped up our resident teacher program last year and now she's here full time teaching upper school social science and one middle school literary thinking class.
Dan's been with us since 2015, almost 10 years, and has taught history and English classes in the upper and middle school and everything in between. Diana and Dan, welcome. How's your day been going? What you been up to?
[00:01:30] Speaker B: My day's been going great.
I taught one class today. It was literary thinking with the seventh grade. It was super did side by side conferences.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Got to give a lot of one on one feedback about writing, which is something I care a lot about. I know it's a lot for the students to be one on one with their teacher, but I think they got a lot out of it.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Wonderful. How about you, Diana?
[00:01:50] Speaker C: Pretty good. Since I'm still early in my teaching career, every class still gives me a little bit of anxiety. Like some days, some weeks are more relaxed. Last week the kids just worked on and presented a project, so I hadn't been in front of them in a while. Every class I'm kind of just like, am I going to get through this? And then I do. And today in class we talked about women in the Han dynasty.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Ah, yes. So our theme this year of empathetic dialogue. You know, the catalyst for that was certainly the fact that we have a presidential election this year. And rather than just sort of pretend it's not happening as a way for the school to engage in this, I think we decided to do the exact opposite, which was to take that head on. But I think what's important to note about civil discourse and civic engagement is that these Are not something. These are not skills you simply spin up for an election year, a presidential election year. I think these are incredibly important skills. Right. That persist and just need to be part of the fabric of the school. What do you think?
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. I think especially coming out of the middle school, I'm not seeing a lot of conversations about the election, but I really think that our role at the middle school is a really important one, which is to provide the foundation. And I keep thinking of that phrase. You can't just spin it up. It's something that has to be part of the culture, and culture gets built. You know, every day. Every day we show up. So at the. Up at the. In the middle school, not the upper school. In the middle school, for me, that looks like having it be part of the classroom experience so that they learn those habits of mind and that skill set.
So. Because when they're starting out at 10 years old, you know, it's just a very different kettle of fish than when they're gonna vote at 18. I mean, it's.
It's really a broad spectrum of ages and developmental phases we're looking at. And so it's important to tune what we do in the classroom and around things like the election so that it's age appropriate and meets them where they're at.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: I think that's one of the most interesting and challenging things about working in a 512 school. We have folks who are going to vote their very first time. So that brings with it a certain set of experiences and perhaps a certain, you know, some nervousness or whatever. But then we have students who don't even know how an election works, how this is all put together. And, you know, and then everyone's familiarity with the actual issues that are being discussed right now varies so greatly. How do you see that play out in an upper school class?
[00:04:42] Speaker C: Diana, in the ninth grade, I think one of the most exciting things about teaching is getting to foster a community within a classroom. The biggest exercises in trust and care in community is discussing the election with someone. How do you voice your opinion and do so respectfully when you fear that assumptions will be made about you? And the best conversations I've had about politics are with people that I've come to trust the most. And some of the best experiences that I've had as a student are when everyone in the classroom sees each other, respects each other, and is able to participate in this exchange of ideas that school is all about.
And so with the ninth grade, half of the class, a little over half of the class were EPS students in eighth grade. So they're coming in from the middle school. The other kind of 30 or so students are coming from multiple different middle schools. And community has just been at the front of my mind. How do we kind of get these groups of people to see each other as not just whether or not they're my friend or not, which is where developmentally they are at? Who's my friend? Who's going to. Who might be my friend? Who do I not talk to? How do we get them to see each other as colleagues? And the election?
Well, I don't expect them to be talking about politics in a fully fledged out way or kind of getting into the nitty gritty of issues. Maybe this is an opportunity for them to kind of build trust amongst each other. And I think that's what excites me about the election as an opportunity to do that.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: So it sounds like there are a number of preconditions that you need in order to have the kind of conversations you'd like to have. And you've just identified one of those as trust. So you have to build trust. I'd be curious, first of all, what are some other preconditions for what we're trying to do with students? And how do you fit it all in? How do you teach trust in a classroom? How do you establish that? So what are some preconditions for the kind of conversations we're hoping for? And how do you as social science teachers work with the kids on that?
[00:06:58] Speaker B: For me, listening. And the phrase active listening gets thrown around a lot, and I think that that's important. But what kind of listening am I talking about? I think about my eighth grade class, which is a lot about world religions. And so the setup where you can think about and you can. You can sort of tune into a belief system that is not your own. That's sort of part of the fabric of the class, the expectation. And so what does it look like to ask questions as an outsider? You're not seeking consensus. You're looking for actually listening to understand. And so I really love our 8th grade class for that very reason, because by virtue of the fact that we study the world's major religions, it's just understood that we're not seeking consensus or agreement by any shape, in any way, shape or form. Instead, we're learning how to ask good questions and how to find out about something we don't know about and is not familiar. I really feel good about that program. And we lead into that by having the Students do a simulation where they adopt a culture that's not their own in a reduced form, and they don't even have a shared language between the two groups. And then they send explorers or sort of anthropologists from each group to the other group to sort of try to figure out what's going on with these other people. So the setup is really fun. And the year takes off from there. I think that's a great foundation for other topics where you're sort of on an exploration. You're not trying to find the truth with a capital T.
You're trying to find out what people who don't think like you, what is their rationale, what are they thinking, what's their life like?
[00:08:44] Speaker A: So so far, we have to establish trust, and we have to emphasize and teach students to truly listen, which I think, as you said, comes in the form of asking the kind of questions that signal both that. And go deeper into the topic. What other preconditions do we need to.
[00:09:05] Speaker C: Warm myself up to? Another precondition?
[00:09:07] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:09:08] Speaker C: I just wanted to echo what you said about listening. So today is Inside Out Day. Faculty are meant to dress up as Joy or as a character from the movie. And I attempted to dress up as ennui. And ennui is just this character that's, like, always looking down at their phone. I think listening is so underrated, and I think it affects.
As an adult, I struggle with listening. And part of it is, how do we. I don't know, how do I get my students to kind of lead into moments that are uncomfortable? I don't know how to synthesize that into a single word. But part of it is as a discipline.
My colleague Jeff and I want our students to begin to see themselves as scholars, see themselves as kind of engaged with kind of modes of research that historians use.
Listening is also part of that mode of what do I do when my classmate is telling me about this primary source document? And I'm not required to pay attention or I'm not going to be graded on this information, but I just want to learn about it. And so as a teacher, I think my role right now is to hype up my students so much, though, that you're like, this is something worth paying attention to. Look at each other when it's uncomfortable. We want to look at our phones. I don't allow phones in my classroom, but we want to look at our laptops. And because we use. I think a challenge that as a faculty at eps, we have is because our materials are on our laptops. We want them to use their materials responsibly. The lapsteps are so helpful in the classroom because as history teachers, they just have access to a wealth of information and can easily access that. And how do we then get into the mode of just looking up, turning away? So it's such a. I don't know. I think listening is so underrated.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: I think that's one of the amazing things about teaching at our school, is at the very same time we're having a conversation about these incredibly important skills for our country and for learning, we're also doing a spirit week. Right. So I failed miserably. You know, it's radio, so you can't see that I don't even look like Joy at all, even though Joy's like my favorite character in Inside Out. So we're in the midst of all that this week. So one of the things I learned this summer while thinking about civil discourse is just there's a whole number of different modes of conversation, and each mode has sort of a different purpose.
I think one of the things I would love for students to understand is that you can have a conversation in which you're not always trying to convince someone of that your position is the correct one.
Is that something you focus on or do some work with your students?
[00:12:08] Speaker C: As a new teacher, I think about how there are so many modes of debate that our students see online. So so many types of content in which an influencer, a political influencer, is just sitting at a desk at a university and just kind of knocking down young college students that are trying to maybe convince the influencer of something else. Whether it's like the premise is toxic on both sides. It's a premise in which there's no attempt at discourse. It's, we're trying to win. We are trying to kind of knock each other down a peg. Whether it's a college student coming up to an influencer and trying to just prove something or kind of thinking of just debating. There's various content that is centered around debate that is not actually discourse. And so with that being in our popular culture all the time, I'm trying to think of other examples.
But with so many toxic forms of discourse being upheld online, I'm afraid that our students are seeing that and think that is the goal of discourse. To prove each other wrong. To win.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Right? Exactly.
[00:13:24] Speaker C: And it's such a natural thing, like, you want to win when your point is not being like, our students play sports. They're competitive. That is a kind of a Primal instinct.
I don't know. That's something that's on my mind. Yeah.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: I just have to say I love debate. I mean, I'm the middle school debate coach, so I can't like, you know, I just have to put in a plug. I think debate is a wonderful format. It should not be the only format that goes. Yeah, of course not. But I think it's a great way for people to figure out what they think. I mean, obviously it puts us into two teams.
Middle school debate. In most debate you're assigned a side and you've got to argue that side and it gets you to really think through both sides of an equation or both sides of a stance or a policy or a point. And that's all for the good. And then you have to anticipate counter arguments as well. So debate definitely gets a bad name at times. And I just want to, just want to put a quick plug that. It also helps you think through the arguments on both sides. There's no doubt about that. It's obviously very divisive for communities as well. When you're just thinking, you know, my team this and your team that. And I saw recently that even if you, if you say the word Republican and Democrat, you will get worse results than if you say like supporters of policy A and detractors of policy of A or whatever. If you just refer to the policy and say supporters or opponents, you get much better results. And I think it's because when you do get into the teams thing, the thought stops, you know, and it certainly doesn't, it doesn't help in our community. I think even in the middle school, the kids are basically well mannered enough to know that you're not going to bring that up because there's no that you can't find community there or commonality. And so it's just sort of a.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: Thing to me, it's the art of knowing when to employ dialogue versus conversation versus debate versus, you know, a whole bunch of different forms. I mean, if your goal is to truly explore the complexities of something and go into the conversation without your mind made up, maybe debate's not the right format. But if it is an issue in which, you know, you have some expertise and you're trying to move the needle forward on a particular view, then maybe a debate is the appropriate form. Right. So it's just when, when the thing's employed and I sometimes wonder if, you know, if what we really need to do is think about what's our goal in this conversation, you know, what Are we trying to achieve? We might just be wanting to learn and not. I think we can be, you know, and I certainly think about this often with students. You know, are we always pushing them to solution or forming, you know, a stance before we've had enough time to kind of sit in the complexity of any topic that we're talking about?
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Yeah. We can't ask them to take a stand when they're not ready. I think about the religions course, you know, eighth grade, we don't ask students to, you know, to represent the particular background of their family. If they bring that and they want to bring that, well, that's great. They're ready. If they're like, no, it's not for me, absolutely. That's also fine. But it has to come from a place of.
That's something they feel good about or they would like to share. But I think, like drawing lines and saying, okay, well, then I think about. We also have, like a four corners activity that's pretty common in middle school as well. And that can be a way of helping them practice not agreeing with each other and seeing different points of view. You can just put people in, you know, there'll be four corners in the room, and it'll. And it'll be like, which of these four activities would you prefer to do? For example, that would be a softball. And so we start them there. And I think it's really important to practice those skills as well. Practice the skill of not agreeing with everybody. Because certainly I think of the seventh graders in particular.
They want to see what everybody else is thinking, and not agreeing can feel dangerous.
[00:17:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think it's important to practice.
[00:17:47] Speaker C: Yeah. As teachers, I think something that makes our positions a little bit difficult is that our students are looking to us, whether it's history or math or science, for the truth. So we're teaching them what happened. Like, what happened, what is true, how does this work? And politics is different than that. Think about the power we have to deliver or facilitate their understanding of the world. And that is one role we play. And when we get into.
Facilitate them developing an opinion. So we want to teach them something, but we also want them. We want to facilitate their opinions, or a better way to put this would be to.
Yeah, we want to encourage them to cultivate their own opinions and think critically. And sometimes those come into tension when those intentions are misread or get muddled.
[00:18:42] Speaker A: I think that's one of the things that makes this set of skills, in particular some of the most difficult to teach.
We talk about Often that the job of a school, the job of educators, is to teach students how to think. Not necessarily what to think, but it's so much more complex than that. I'll give you an example, Dan. You referenced how there's no requirement to share about one's religious identity, but it's encouraged. And if students want to do that, wonderful. So now this adds another layer of complexity to setting up authentic conversations, which is one's identity. Because what we're not going to do at Eastside Prep is debate the existence of identity. That's an issue of humanity.
Some of the issues out there right now that our students are grappling with are, have been around a long time, come with them intense feelings. Some of those feelings are feelings of fear. Some of them are lived, experienced, lived experiences of harm due to who they were. And so, you know, teaching students that, sure, we can talk about these issues, but we have to remember time and place. We have to remember what we're bringing to the conversation. We have to remember and understand what others are bringing to the conversation and not be cavalier about it.
Do you see this play out in any way?
[00:20:23] Speaker B: Absolutely. My fifth graders are working on early hominins and the development of us as a species.
[00:20:31] Speaker A: Whoa.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: And it's really fun because the thought that I had that speaks directly to what you were just saying is we were wrong for many years. Right. It's like the sort of what the actual story comes out over time, and it's a series of corrections on what now seem like bad ideas that, like, where did people come from originally? And they're sure that they came from Asia and Europe. And then we were talking with the fifth graders about the discovery of Lucy, you know, or these early hominin ancestors. And it's like, wow, we've got evidence here. So now we've got to change the story. But talking about those changes of perspective when faced with new evidence sort of makes history a story of sort of constant refining and improvement and basically collectively changing our minds about what we think happened there. So I find that really exciting. And I definitely inject that spirit of, well, we were wrong, and now we're getting closer to what probably is the real story, which I think is, you know, being able to admit that you're wrong is so crucial. And I think that it's part of human history and it's part of the reason that we improve.
So for 10 year olds, that really speaks to me there, that discussion of how we found out about our early human origins. It's a process of Discovery. And so for them as well, it's a process of discovery.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: How about you, Diana?
[00:22:02] Speaker C: So last week students designed a private independent school based on an assigned in my ninth grade class, we're just finishing up a module in ancient China.
And the students were tasked with designing a private independent school based on one of three Chinese philosophies. Confucianism, Taoism, legalism. It was really fun. They had to think of campus layout, extracurriculars, policies, educational philosophy, a teaching model. And I hope they were able to reflect a lot about what school does and how even things like a school uniform promotes a certain type of value. But they have.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: I told you we're implementing those.
[00:22:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I think.
I know. I didn't get the memo.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: Just kidding. Just kidding. I joke.
[00:22:57] Speaker C: So last week students were just kind of arguing for the best ruling philosophy out there.
But today we learned about the end of the Han dynasty and what caused the Han dynasty, which kind of used a combination of legalism, Confucianism, Daoism. What caused the Han dynasty to fall apart were a series of natural disasters, a series of succession crises, taxation, a loss of income, other factors that were non political outside threats. So getting students to understand that multiple factors that make or break a society, societies don't hinge upon one ruler or one single person or one ideology. In fact, history is a lot more complicated than that.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Complexity.
[00:23:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: My goodness.
Well, listen, first of all, I wish I'd had y'all for history teachers. It took me a while to.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: You'd make a fun student.
[00:24:01] Speaker A: What do you mean by that?
[00:24:03] Speaker B: Let's see. Trying to picture classroom management with USWAC in the room.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: It's a fine art. It's its own pod. Listen, I really want to thank you for taking the time today. I know in our day to day time is such a valuable, such a precious thing and I'm really thankful that you were able to share your thinking, some really great stories about the work you with students and just all the work you're doing so that we can go after this thing together, this idea that we can be the school that is teaching students this challenging set of skills, but also just ways of being habits of mind and putting them all together to create an experience that they grow from. So thank you.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Thanks for having us.
[00:24:50] Speaker C: Thanks for having us.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: For more insights, check out our weekly news every Friday.
