Ep 88: Let's Inspire, Inform, Instruct and Include Students

Join Julie and Ginger as they speak with Anashay Wright, a national award-winning educator, speaker, consultant, and ​​founder of Authentic Disruption and Disruptive Partners, a community-based leadership development program. https://www.anashaywright.com/ Anashay describes her journey by telling a story of inclusive school leaders who surrounded her family with community resources when they were in need. She says that school and district leaders prioritized people over policy, which led to Anashay falling in love with helping children, and she is now paying it forward. Here are some great takeaways from Anashay: The curriculum can’t save you. Brainwash them into greatness. Use the community as a connector. Use tech and AI to educate. Kids don’t need Saviorism; they need servant leaders. Kids can read! They read what they want. You can drive solutions with what kids CAN do. If they argue, teach them to argue like an attorney. Beware of the cycle of impoverished thinking. Give them the power to express themselves, and then listen to them. Beware of deficit thinking that shames people. What are the gifts and talents that you bring into the space? Let them dream. Lead with what’s possible. It starts with the adult dreaming. Make their vision your mission. Lead with radical, disruptive love. The question isn’t how we protect kids from trauma; it’s how we help them respond to it when they encounter it. Our favorite quote from Anashay: When we start to lead with what’s possible and the promise, shift our thinking, and actually believe in ourselves and then in our children, we will disrupt the system. Disruptive Innovation means building something better and ignoring what we currently have. In a classroom, that means if all the other teachers are writing kids up, I’m not going to write kids up. I’m simply gonna ask kids, “What’s wrong, what’s the solution, and how are you feeling?” The big and small moves you make every day when nobody is looking disrupt the system.