Inclusion Today Minisode One MASTER.mp3
2025-07-10
Transcript
0:00:00 Jessi Brunken: And so we are tired of waiting for later, later, later. We think today is the day and today is the only day. We were saying today is the only day. And so with the support of EALA, we, our collective organizations are going to be running a national campaign. The goal of our campaign is that one year from now, when we are sitting here or drinking margaritas or chatting in the hotel lobby late 1,000, at least 1 million, million at least students will be learning in schools whose system leaders have made a public commitment to improving and adopting truly inclusive practices across their system.
0:00:45 Jessi Brunken: Our campaign is going to, we’re going to go into the details in a second, but what I really want you to take away…
0:00:48 Tim Villegas: This is think Inclusive. I’m Tim Villegas. In today’s bonus episode, we tell the story of inclusion today. A cross organizational collaboration made possible by the Educating All Learners alliance.
0:01:04 Brooke Allen: Our Campaign will take place across phases throughout all of next year. We’re going to plan out internally within our teams, each contributing a part of the work plan, research and synthesize, connecting with inclusion experts to develop a set of core competencies of inclusive system leadership, develop and launch a campaign using multiple communication tactics and then elicit a system leader commitment that they will sign and access follow up tools, resources and networks in order to implement these practices.
0:01:39 Tim Villegas: After a short break, you’ll hear from each member of the Inclusion Today team and what our experience was like at the Educating All Learners alliance community of Action in December of 2023.
0:01:55 Cindy Camp: I’m Cindy Camp. I’m the marketing and communication specialist with the Describe and Captioned Media program.
0:02:03 Justine Katzenbach: Hi there.
0:02:03 Justine Katzenbach: My name is Justine Katzenbach and I’m the director of organizational strategy at the Diverse Learners Cooperative.
0:02:09 Sergio Jara Arroyos: Hey, my name is Sergio Jara Arroyos. I’m the senior director of marketing communications at Blue Engine.
0:02:16 Brooke Allen: Hi, I’m Brooke Allen. I’m the executive director of the Diverse Learners Cooperative.
0:02:20 Brittni Sammons: Hi, I’m Brittani Sammons. I work for MCIE. I’m a professional learning lead coordinator.
0:02:26 Tim Villegas: Okay, so let’s think way, way back. What were your expectations going in to the community of action?
0:02:33 Sergio Jara Arroyos: I remember filling out the form to attend and in that form I recall one question, something to the effect of what’s the primary reason that you want to attend? And I remember my response being less about the program itself and more about connecting with people. I was in an organization at Blue Engine where I was in a role that was doing very important work. And at times it felt like I was doing important work on my own.
0:03:02 Sergio Jara Arroyos: So it was important to me that I was meeting and connecting with like minded individuals at other organizations and just begin to build my network this ecosystem a little bit more. So that was my expectation. Meeting new people that I hadn’t met before and willing to talk to strangers.
0:03:19 Tim Villegas: Yeah, we were pretty much all strangers at that point.
0:03:23 Cindy Camp: So I wasn’t really sure what to expect in my current position. I network a lot with teachers and people that I’m trying to help, but I don’t get to network a lot with peers. So that’s what I was looking for. People who are kind of doing the same thing that I’m doing and seeing what struggles they’re having, how do they reach out, how are they working in the community and in the school system. And that’s what I was hoping for.
0:04:04 Cindy Camp: But it was all kind of new and unexpected and we got information but not a lot before we got there. And so I think we all kind of showed up not really knowing what to expect.
0:04:25 Justine Katzenbach: I would say my focus was also on just like building my professional community and learning from people in similar roles and experiences and learning from people in different roles and experiences. But I also, I don’t think I fully grasped the idea of a participatory grant funding experience. I read that and thought, interesting, but I’m not sure I really had any actual idea what that would look like in practice.
0:04:58 Tim Villegas: I read the description and I said to myself, and I said to Brittany, how is this going to work? I think I even called Aurora and I was like, okay, really, just tell me how this is going to work. Because this sounds like it could be really messy. But she assured me that, that there’s a process and that it’s, it, it was, it had been successful and I just have to trust the process. So. And we did, we did. But I will tell you, Brittany and I got there on the first day and I’m like, Brittany, like we need to, we need to like plan out what we’re going to do. Like we need to sit down and we write out some notes here. Because I do not want to go into this thing completely like with nothing.
0:05:44 Tim Villegas: And we did, but it did, like that didn’t help. And it’s much better to go in with nothing. But I know that now. I didn’t know that then, but now I do know that now.
0:05:54 Brooke Allen: I think that when I signed up to attend, I had attended one of these prior. And so I had a framework to go on and knew from my prior experience at a community of action that the most difficult part was finding the nexus of organization, mission, but also personal interest. Area so that you could bring your expertise, but also your organization’s expertise together to develop something in the education realm. Like, it’s very broad.
0:06:35 Brooke Allen: And so having to, like, get specific, but then also stay broad enough to connect with other people was a unique experience and one that I think if we were to do it a third time or do it a fourth time, we would approach differently in the future, too. Just because every time that there’s a different group of people, you’re going to find different intersections of your own little Venn diagrams.
0:07:01 Brittni Sammons: Yeah. I had not attended a community of action before and love the experience. I remember thinking at one point, where are our people? Trying to figure out where we fit in. And I feel like the outcome of how we all connected and the visions of our organizations couldn’t have been better matched. Like, that was just a really unique, amazing opportunity that we all ended up together. Never mind that our project was selected.
0:07:33 Cindy Camp: Right.
0:07:33 Brittni Sammons: That was a wonderful surprise and shock. So I, too, can relate, Brooke, to, like, the process being really amazing in figuring out how you come up with these problems and solutions and how you get grouped being a really awesome experience that we had that year.
0:07:52 Justine Katzenbach: I just. What you said about the idea of going in with, you know, not having this whole pitch already prepared being really important. And I think, like, the night before, Brooke and I did the same thing. We were like, what do we need to do to prepare for this? This is our focus. This is aligned with X, Y and Z that we’re already working on. In retrospect, that is nowhere near where we ended up going. In the process of actually engaging in the community of practice, I think I learned a lot about expectations. I expected needing to have an idea already. And in actuality, it’s better to go in with an open mind.
0:08:25 Sergio Jara Arroyos: It’s funny because that was definitely not what I did. After a long day of travel, I was just focused on the dinner. I saw the email come in. I was like, I’ll deal with that tomorrow in the morning during breakfast, and I’ll do the best that I can. For right now, all I want is to go eat. And I was just trying to figure out where to go and hopefully find a group of people that was going to walk over together like that.
0:08:51 Cindy Camp: We had the virtual meeting before we met in person. It was nice to be able to get to the hotel and. And at least recognize a few faces because I went on my own getting to the hotel and going, oh, I remember you. I saw you on Zoom. I really wish we could have had two or Three virtual meetings ahead of time. I think it would have made things a little bit easier to get to know people. I felt like that first day was somewhat chaotic, a whirlwind for a lot of us who are very a personalities.
0:09:32 Cindy Camp: And we like things very planned. And you talked about Tim and just planning ahead of time and trying to have a plan. It would be nice to feel a little more comfortable. But the process did work, surprisingly. And that chaos, even though it was very uncomfortable for a lot of us, it did all come together in the end. It was just a little more unstructured than what some of us would maybe feel comfortable with.
0:10:08 Cindy Camp: There was a structure there, just not what we thought it ought to be.
0:10:26 Tim Villegas: I’m realizing now that I’m looking at these questions that I. I kind of missed a big part of the process part. So let me set this up and then if you want to comment or. Or take this any further. But I think it was the first day and there were butcher paper posted on different parts of the room. You were supposed to go to a section that had a topic or a problem that your organization. Like, it was a problem of practice, I think.
0:10:59 Tim Villegas: And so, you know, we’re wandering around and trying to figure out, well, you know, is it teacher education? Is it professional learning? Is it family engagement? Is it something else? Brittany and I went to one, and I think it was the professional learning one. Everyone’s talking and you’re supposed to find your people. You’re supposed to find the people that you’re going to be working with. Like, for the next couple days.
0:11:23 Tim Villegas: We looked at each other and we’re like, I don’t know, this is really hard. What if you pick the wrong people? What if you start going down a road on some sort of problem and you’re like, that’s not the problem that I feel any connection to. And so we actually stepped back from the whole process and we sat down together and we’re like, I don’t know, what are we going to do? Should we just kind of phone this in?
0:11:48 Tim Villegas: Should we say we’re just going to step back and take the fly on the wall approach and whatever happens, happens? And then it was one of the coaches, Toni Barton. There’s a number of different coaches that are walking around and helping facilitate conversation and trying to get people to meet each other. And Toni was like, okay, so tell me, what are you thinking about? And we had said one of the biggest problems we have is focused on leaders and mindset.
0:12:20 Tim Villegas: When engaging with a school district, how do we give Them the tools to move the work forward. And Toni’s like, oh, my gosh, wait right here. Let me bring over some people. And so she brought over Justine and Brooke, and she brought over Sergio and Jesse. And then I’m not sure if she brought you over Cindy or if you just hopped on, but I’m so glad that it all happened that way. It was one of the most organic things I’ve ever experienced. It’s like, all of a sudden we’re sitting at this table, and we’re like, wait a minute, you want this and you want this?
0:12:58 Tim Villegas: And I think once we found each other, you know, and thankful that Toni was part of that, facilitating that, then we really dove in and bought into the whole process. So what was that experience like for y’? All?
0:13:13 Sergio Jara Arroyos: I will say that this was one of the parts where it felt most uncomfortable. And I say this because all of a sudden, we’d gathered a combination of so many individuals that lead in that space, and jargon left and right just got intimidated by how people were seeking to solve these complex issues. In my head, I understand that mindset of leaders is a complex thing, but also in my mind, I was like, it’s such a simple thing that can have a tiered effect on so many different things.
0:13:51 Sergio Jara Arroyos: And it was tough to navigate that space When I would hear the range of jargon left and right. And like, we care about this policy, this approach, and. And this framework. And all I could think is, I might be in the wrong room. These individuals may know a lot more than I do, and I don’t know where to go from here. Once Toni did a great job at identifying individuals and bringing people together. And so y’ all are trying to solve very similar things and getting to engage with each one of you.
0:14:25 Sergio Jara Arroyos: What became clear is that we were less focused around the framework. We were less focused about our individual work. We really coalesced around mindsets, Unpacking that we understood that we had different definitions and took a while. I remember even in our first several rounds of collaborating, we were one of the groups that was, quote, unquote, the slowest. That is true. And a lot of that time was spent aligning on definitions.
0:14:53 Sergio Jara Arroyos: Like, hey, what do we mean when we say systems leader? What system are we talking about? The entry point to that conversation lived at different altitudes depending on our day to day work, was being able to talk through such a complex problem and approachable is what really made me look around and think, okay, I think I’m with the people that I need to be.
0:15:17 Justine Katzenbach: I would say that once we all got together and started talking, it started to get really fun. So it went from feeling really overwhelmed and I really wasn’t sure where to insert myself or like what value I brought to what conversation to then thinking, okay, this is a topic, this relates to me in this specific way and this is how I can insert myself into this conversation. And one of the things that I really valued was that all of our organizations are doing different things, right? There’s parallels between all of our organizations, but we all have different missions, different focus areas within supporting students with disabilities.
0:15:55 Justine Katzenbach: One of the things that I found really interesting was figuring out what is a thing that we all feel aligned about that’s a focus area that would really benefit and the work that we’re doing and really add to our body of work as our individual orgs. And then also what were the specific talents of the individual sitting at this table. And so for me it was just also like a real celebration of people’s skills and talents in a way that I didn’t anticipate going into the.
0:16:25 Justine Katzenbach: Into this.
0:16:26 Cindy Camp: I think another thing that we all learned from this was when we were starting out and everybody was writing on the post its and putting them up on the boards around the room, we were all thinking of these huge problems and we’re thinking of big scale. And then when we sat down and we started working on it and it really hit home. We have basically 10 to 11 months to take something from inception to completion and we have that’s something that’s added onto our day to day work.
0:17:11 Cindy Camp: So we really had to scale back and thinking we can still do something very meaningful. But it has to be something that’s going to fit into our day to day work and it’s not going to be building this huge thing and that’s okay. It still can be very, very meaningful and successful. It’s just going to be a little bit smaller in scale than what we initially thought. And that’s something that I think going into it we had to just change our mindset.
0:18:07 Tim Villegas: Been reflecting on the aspect of teamwork and the collaborative part of it and wondering why it felt so good. I have, I have a couple of reflections. I’m just going to throw them out there and let’s see how you’d like to respond. One thing that really struck me as we were going through the process is that I felt like everyone developed trust the participants very quickly. I don’t know why that happened.
0:18:40 Tim Villegas: I’m wondering if, if you felt that way as well and if you have any insights about that?
0:18:46 Brooke Allen: I think that there was something to the magic in these specific organizations. I don’t know how many organizations were there, but let’s just say it was 15. It might have been more. But all of these organizations serving specifically students with learning differences somewhere in the country. It’s like when you go to a school as a special educator and you find your other special educator friends and you’re like, we get it. We speak the same language.
0:19:16 Brooke Allen: We’re going to sit together at pd, right? Like, that’s your people. You put those people into a room together. You’re never really in a room with that many people focused on students with disabilities or very rarely outside of a large conference space or a small school team space. So I think that’s like 20ish people in a room where there might. There probably was more. I don’t know, I’m estimating.
0:19:42 Brooke Allen: But you put those people into a room and there is this base level of trust that we’re here for students, we’re here for our communities. We do different pieces of this work. We work with families, we work directly with students, we work with schools, we work with policy organizations. But ultimately we have a very similar goal. And that felt very apparent to start with. Getting to know some people without doing the work is really helpful. I don’t think I met anybody that ultimately landed on our Inclusion Today team the night before.
0:20:22 Brooke Allen: I met you all on the morning of the work. And so I do think that there is something to everybody representing an org that does serve similarly to yours that starts that trust building process right away.
0:20:37 Brittni Sammons: I also think that through the process, because there were coaches moving around the room and listening to the conversations, we were fortunate for our coach to say, you all need each other. I feel like that’s how it started when she brought us together. We were all listening very closely to what each person had to contribute to make sense of where people stood on particular ideas and topics. Very surface level of the intent of your organization and your mission and vision. But I do think that element helped bring us together.
0:21:13 Brittni Sammons: I also felt supported by our coach to really get at what it is that we wanted to solve and the solution that we thought we could conjure up in order to serve our students or learn differently and our diverse populations of students better because they deserve it.
0:21:30 Brooke Allen: Something I would add too is by the end of that day, we had all found a specific role within that team to step up, and this happened inadvertently. But every one of our roles within our organizations is really different. Tim, having you as communications and Sergio as marketing. We put those two into the project. The project wouldn’t have been what it was without that specific perspective. Justine and I were good at the project management part, and we stepped into, like, okay, let’s record all these information.
0:22:09 Brooke Allen: Let’s get it into the slide deck. Brittany, your expertise on programmatic pieces and, like, what do schools really need and at what level do they need it? And you work with so many people at different levels of school organizations. I think that all those things came together as, like, actually building the project that reflected the team’s expertise, and that wasn’t on purpose. Like, we didn’t find. I didn’t go like, tim, you’re a comms guy. Let’s do this. But it actually shaped what we ultimately did.
0:22:58 Tim Villegas: Yeah, yeah. Before. Before I ask about, do you think we accomplished what we set out to do? I wanted to bring up this idea about collaboration because I thought I knew what collaboration was. But the intensity of the collaboration that happened during the community of action, like, it was. I’ve never experienced anything like that before. And it was so to your point, Justine, like, trusting the process, but also, like, experiencing each other in and saying, okay, I think that, you know, Sergio, Justine, and Cindy bring these strengths and ideas and experiences to this process, and I’m going to trust that everyone’s bringing their best self and then also trust the product that comes out of it.
0:23:55 Tim Villegas: And what was really nice is I felt like we did that. Like, I didn’t feel like there was ego. Like, I felt like we were really trying to have this open experience, and it was, like, super fulfilling. And so I have yet to have that experience again, like, in that way, but I’m always reminded of that. And so I think that something that I learned about collaboration is that no matter who you are working with, that level is possible.
0:24:33 Tim Villegas: You just have to, like, really be open and trust the other people in the group. Well, whoever you’re collaborating with. But I think it is possible.
0:24:42 Sergio Jara Arroyos: I definitely appreciate slowing down on the collaboration component, primarily because I took a moment at one point and also had to reflect on some of this. And what caught my attention was it was a combination of trust and vulnerability. I think something that I noticed across the individuals in our group was that we’re willing to acknowledge and accept that we didn’t have the solution to it. Right.
0:25:10 Sergio Jara Arroyos: We were willing to acknowledge where we fell short. And instead of viewing that as a deficit, we were able to lean into what other organizations were doing well. And before we could get there, I’ll Speak for myself, I think the room felt a little bit more competitive. And it went from competitive to collaboration. I don’t know if every group was able to move beyond competitive. And we were able to make that shift due to that willingness to accept that we didn’t have it figured out, that we didn’t have the perfect framework, that we didn’t have the solution that was going to meet all the needs.
0:25:57 Sergio Jara Arroyos: And also, just speak on the point, Cindy, that you made, it wasn’t only around like scaling back. It was about refining. Right. That limitation of that timeline pushed us to be a little bit more realistic and refine what we were going after. And sometimes when I think of collaboration, it can feel like, what is that big cross organizational collaboration that is massive, that is going to turn heads and all of a sudden it’s going to go viral.
0:26:31 Sergio Jara Arroyos: And I think sometimes that is what we aspire it to be versus some of this collaboration that happens in the background with organizations that are really good at what they do and are managing through implementation on how to make that happen.
0:26:46 Justine Katzenbach: I was just going to add, I think that one of the things that stood out to me during this experience was this idea around looking at all the people we were working with, all this collaboration, and just being asset based in how we were thinking about each other. You know, a lot of times there’s everybody who came to this brought some real talent, bringing everyone together who, you know, maybe people who wouldn’t normally even if they, if we all worked in the same organization, may not have a lot of opportunities for collaboration based on our specific roles.
0:27:20 Justine Katzenbach: But just like, what. How do we interweave all these talents to really come up with something that’s a good product that speaks to all of our strengths? And that was a really exciting challenge for me, but it was. It’s also really changed the way I look at collaboration in general. And just this idea to what you were saying, Tim, of like, if we focus on the assets that people bring to a project or a problem, right. What do they bring and what knowledge do they have and how do we play into those strengths and how do we use those strengths to really, like bring up the overall quality of a project as a whole?
0:27:59 Justine Katzenbach: It’s really inspiring for me. And I think it’s definitely translated into a lot of other projects that I’ve worked on as a result. And so like, that energy that I felt around, like honing in on people’s talents was. And being like, okay, this is a strength you have. This is not a strength I have. How can we? But you can do this part, and I can do this part.
0:28:19 Brooke Allen: Right.
0:28:20 Justine Katzenbach: And just thinking about things from that perspective is really helpful.
0:28:24 Cindy Camp: I think our project ended up being very successful because we were all so enthusiastic about the project itself. We were so invested in the outcome, and it wasn’t about any individual personality. Nobody wanted to be in the spotlight. And so, Sergio, you were saying it wasn’t. I need to get the credit for this. We were all so focused on the outcome, and that’s how we made it successful, and that’s how we were able to refine this really good final product.
0:29:05 Brittni Sammons: I keep going back to your question. The trust element of it. I think it’s what we’ve just described. There wasn’t pressure based on a person’s title. It came through focusing on. I think the process itself really lent us to make sense of what it is that we believed was our problem of practice, and then, in turn, what potential solutions were going through. That process drew out people’s strengths, gifts, and talents.
0:29:32 Brittni Sammons: No one was like, what’s your role? What’s your skill set you’re going to be doing? Which is what Brooke was mentioning a few moments ago. There was no pressure around it, which allowed people to make sense of those things more organically. And maybe that’s what cultivated the trust.
0:29:47 Tim Villegas: Yeah.
0:29:47 Brittni Sammons: While the structure for the community of action had great intent, purpose, and, like, routine in order to help, like, filter things out and get people to come together. I do believe that it’s the way that we interacted and worked through a common goal, which is to support our students. Right. Ultimately, that really led to everyone feeling comfortable with what we ended up doing. Right. Like, we all ended up in roles that really allowed for us each to contribute our strengths and gifts.
0:30:22 Tim Villegas: Yeah.
0:30:23 Brooke Allen: And we were really stuck until three quarters of the way you are.
0:30:27 Brittni Sammons: Right.
0:30:28 Brooke Allen: Really stuck. We were like. We had drafted multiple ideas that we were like, this is not going to work. All the practicality in this group stopped a lot of ideas from being the project because we were like, that’s not going to work. Nope. Nobody’s going to listen to that. Nope. We were really stuck. And I remember Aaron came over and gave us another idea, and we’re like, maybe. Nope. Keep going.
0:30:49 Brittni Sammons: Yeah. There was a lot of safety among our group. And so, to me, I think that’s what really allowed for the freedom. I know that brainstorming is supposed to be. You can throw out anything. Nothing is wrong, but you have to trust the people that you’re with to actually safely brainstorm in that Way. And to your point earlier, Brooke, while we did have an opportunity to have brief introductions or reunite with someone you might already know, there really was not a whole lot of time for our group to really make sense of who we are and generate that safety. We had to trust that it was safe.
0:31:28 Brittni Sammons: And I think it was the way in which we all came to the table wanting to learn to know each other. Right. We wanted to make sense of who each other were, but it was all through this common effort. And I think that common effort is what created a safe space for us. Down to the wire, making decisions, running out of time. Never once did I ever feel flabbergasted, except for maybe being interrupted 900 times because we’re on a train of thought. That was frustrating, but that was nothing to do with our group. I feel like the safety that was culminated for us to take risks in our thinking and throwing out ideas really helped us come together as a team as well.
0:32:31 Tim Villegas: Does anyone want to take a step, stab or a try at explaining what we did, like the final product? I didn’t prepare anyone for this. I mean, I could try, but I was just thinking all of us worked on it. If somebody was like, oh, yeah, so you got this grant, so what’d you do? What was the thing? Don’t worry, you’re being recorded. It’s fine.
0:32:51 Justine Katzenbach: Okay, I can take a stab at it.
0:32:53 Tim Villegas: All right.
0:32:54 Justine Katzenbach: So our idea was that we created a public awareness campaign to try to encourage leaders, so district or system level leaders at adopting inclusive practices in their schools and districts. And so as a result of that, we created a starter kit that was essentially like a way for leaders to identify areas that they could implement inclusive practices and how to go about doing that.
0:33:29 Tim Villegas: Awesome. How do you feel about that? Good.
0:33:31 Brooke Allen: I feel okay.
0:33:32 Justine Katzenbach: I’m open to somebody else trying too, though.
0:33:34 Sergio Jara Arroyos: I think that’s a great.
0:33:35 Justine Katzenbach: After I said that, maybe that way and say it more succinctly now.
0:33:38 Sergio Jara Arroyos: No, I think that’s. That’s definitely a great way of explaining what we did, but also to unpack this word of inclusion and inclusive. Right. What we were hoping to do with that is to making sure that students had access to grade level content regardless of learning differences. We know that teaching to the average, at times we get stuck with this idea that there is an average, but in reality, there’s so much range to how individuals engage with learning material, and that is something that we were aiming to do.
0:34:15 Sergio Jara Arroyos: So when we’re talking about inclusion practice and inclusive practices, it was more to the idea of how do we make grade level content accessible for all learners in the classroom, regardless of what their starting point is? And how is it that they engage with materials in a way that they’re creating meaning for themselves and had an impact in their academic outcomes?
0:34:41 Cindy Camp: One of the issues we had seen is that students with disabilities, even in today’s society, tend to be segregated and put into specialized classrooms, not so much because they need individualized or specialized attention and learning, but because it’s easier for the school to separate them out. And we wanted to make sure that whenever possible, those students have access to the generalized classroom with their peers and that they had the same educational opportunities.
0:35:27 Cindy Camp: And so our campaign was designed to help the leaders make sure that they are including all students in the generalized classroom and that the learning opportunities are equal for everyone.
0:35:48 Brittni Sammons: So our product was really grounded in how do we provide perspective, generate some schema like using questioning in order to support thinking around supporting students, as well as like culminating and not dumping resources in order to support removing barriers in order to more meaningfully including students with disabilities and who are diverse learners. And so that was what we ended up with and what we were hoping for.
0:36:22 Brittni Sammons: I feel like we were constantly coming back to, is this concrete enough? Can someone take our product and bring people together, have a problem that they want to tackle, and do they have the questioning structure and access to resources to make action steps based on where they are within their system, their school, their position, collaborating with the other organizations because of everybody else’s experiences, whether it’s because it’s based on a region in which they work or their own personal experiences in the structures of school.
0:36:58 Brittni Sammons: I think that part was really beneficial to have everybody’s lens and reactions as we were building out our product to try and make sure that, number one, universally, no matter who you are in the educational field, you have access to, to make sense of the work as well as be able to glean something from it.
0:37:17 Brooke Allen: I think that the product ultimately put us all around a table, metaphorically, to think about different perspectives that could be influenced by something that we would do. At the Community of Action, there was a lot of discussion around who’s the audience for this? And how do we name that audience? Through the collaboration that ensued, we kind of kept returning to that idea of like, who is this for?
0:37:45 Brooke Allen: Who would this be most practical to actually shift some sort of practice. We weren’t in the game of putting something out that would just sound good. It was continually a conversation about what we could say that would make somebody think differently about this Even the sound bite of inclusion today, what does that mean? That it’s urgent, that it’s now, and you need these things in order to accomplish it or to make greater gain toward it, I think was super grounding through the collaboration of just like, who is this for?
0:38:25 Brooke Allen: And we were each able to bring different perspectives, but ultimately land in a place that the product is useful, a certain level of leader within school districts that has a high level of influence on student experience across the country. As we were getting the signups for the pledge, I was watching those come in and sending out maps of, like, where is that? Where all these people coming from? And just to experience the reach of something like that, after thoughtful consideration about who should be signing that pledge and why felt like a positive outcome of months of collaboration. The maps made me really happy.
0:39:11 Brittni Sammons: Made me happy.
0:39:12 Brooke Allen: I don’t know if that was obvious in our Slack channel, but I was like, here we’ve got 47 states, so don’t forget Ireland.
0:39:21 Brittni Sammons: They were everywhere. I was like, oh, my gosh.
0:39:23 Tim Villegas: Yeah, great. I think everyone’s explanation really just sums up what we did. And the only thing I would add is that along with the awareness campaign, we created a landing page where people could go and download the toolkit. And it’s been downloaded hundreds of times by leaders all across the United States and the world. And so, you know, I think we had big dreams of maybe measuring impact, and that’s really difficult, especially with the budget that we had and the time that we had.
0:40:01 Justine Katzenbach: I will say I’m really excited about this tool. Keep continues to be something that surfaces in my life as really practical and helpful in so many partnerships and with so many schools that we work with. And so even just in my own practice, it’s definitely been something that lives on, and I see it living on in our community. Like, even when we went to the community of practice this year, we were sharing about it, and people in the audience were like, I printed this out and shared it with my school leader. And I, you know, I forwarded this to the superintendent. And so there were lots of ways that I just saw, like, the ripple effect of what we created.
0:40:43 Tim Villegas: I believe that this tool really is one of, like, the most evergreen things that we’ve made. Like, it’s going to last for a very, very long time. And so I feel very, very proud to be a part of creating this with all of you. And it’s just something that I think is a great example of how four organizations can come together, do something collaboratively, and no one is like saying, yeah, we did most of this, or, you know, this is really ours, or whatever.
0:41:25 Tim Villegas: It’s such a collaborative effort. That’s all the time we have for this bonus episode of Think Inclusive. The next episode in your feed is another bonus episode of the Educating All Learners Alliance Community of Action. In December of 2024, EALA invited the inclusion Today team to not only share about what we did over the last year, but also to participate in another round of collaborative grant funding.
0:42:02 Tim Villegas: So you’ll hear a little bit from our team, but also the team that won the funding in 2024. No spoilers though. Now let’s roll the credits. Think Inclusive is brought to you by me, Tim Villegas. I handle the writing, editing, design, mixing and mastering. This podcast is a proud production of the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education. All our music in this episode was provided by Melod.ie. Thanks again to the Educating All Learners alliance for their work in supporting Inclusion Today and these bonus episodes.
0:42:39 Tim Villegas: We truly appreciate each and every one of you who tunes in. We’d love to hear how you’re using these episodes. Are they part of your teaching toolkit? Are you sharing them with your school administrators? Drop me a line tvillegas@mcie.org and let me know. Thanks for your time and attention. And remember, inclusion always works. From MCIE.