Five Questions with Innovative Leaders

A Series by Dr. Yoon S. Choi, CEO

Featuring Shareefah Mason, Director of Teacher Experience, City Teaching Alliance -DFW

One of the best parts of leading a national non-profit is getting to collaborate with brilliant leaders. To share their insights and experience, today I’m excited to launch a new Q&A series on LinkedIn: Five Questions With Innovative Leaders. My goal is to shine a spotlight on impactful and innovative leaders who are improving educational outcomes, breaking down barriers, and supporting students and families. Over the next few months, I’ll be introducing a range of voices who come from different backgrounds and have unique perspectives. Please reach out if you have ideas on leaders who you think would be great to include in this series.

For the first Q&A, I’m thrilled to welcome Shareefah Mason, the Director of Teacher Engagement at City Teaching Alliance, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, Former State of Texas Master Teacher, and a Former member of the Texas State Board for Educator Certification.

Yoon: What is something in particular from your past that draws you to education?

Shareefah: I grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, one of the country’s most disenfranchised cities. Along with the poverty we endured, we were also known for having an extremely dysfunctional public school system. For the last four decades, education in the state has ranked between 48^th-50^th. When you come from a marginalized community with a poor education system it is almost synonymous with being unsuccessful, destitute and worthless. My dad dropped out in 11^th grade and my mom earned a high school diploma. As a waiter and homemaker, respectively, they understood that education was super important and they ensured we had every opportunity to pursue it. The vision of experiencing a life that surpassed the obstinate holds of poverty made me unwavering in my pursuit of education at the highest level possible.

Even though they weren’t exactly aware of the best routes to postsecondary education, they ensured that I was placed in spaces with people who could assist me in making the most informed academic decisions. I attended Edna Karr Magnet School and was able to learn from diverse teachers, interact with diverse students and learn how to engage with educational opportunities that would tremendously enhance my knowledge and skills and provide connections to the scholarships I needed to fund my collegiate aspirations.

Yoon: Tell me about a life-changing moment you experienced as a teacher.

Shareefah: The moment that changed my life is when I was working at Zumwalt Middle School in the Dallas Independent School District. I was an 8^th grade social studies teacher who was working as a member of the district’s unprecedented initiative, Accelerating Campus Excellence. The goal was to bring the district’s most distinguished teachers to its struggling schools in an effort to increase student achievement and transform the campus culture. When I first arrived to the campus in 2015, only 18% of the students had passed the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR). By the end of the year, I had increased the scores from 18% to an astronomical 60% passing. It was the first time many of my students had passed a STAAR test since they began taking the assessments in 3^rd grade.

To work at a school nestled in one of Dallas’s most impoverished areas and empower students, who had been labeled as struggling learners, to rebuild their academic confidence, was the most humbling feeling ever! When I received my scores and realized that my students, who had one year before had only had 18% passing had more than tripled their scores, I was in complete awe. They had been covered by the news for vandalizing the school, fighting, etc., and now they had tapped into their inner academic confidence and learned how to reframe the narrative. This was my greatest accomplishment. When you empower and amplify the least of us…everyone wins!

Yoon: If a genie granted you one wish that you could use to enact a change to education policy, what would it be?

Shareefah: I would create a system of strategies and techniques to support the literacy skills of African-American students. There is a misconception that English is the native tongue of African-Americans, which is very untrue. African-American students are descendants of enslaved Africans. For centuries, their ancestors were denied access to education, and more significantly, access to literacy and writing, which deprived African-American children the opportunity to learn the foundational skills of reading and writing the English language. This inaccessibility greatly led to the development of different English dialects used in African-American communities that do not align with the standard English language and continue to cause severe challenges for African-American students in effectively comprehending in reading and communicating in English classes.

In the last 50 years, since the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that began the process of African-American students integrating white schools, the idea was to reverse the inequities in the concept of ‘separate but equal.’ However this decision caused more harm to African-American students. They were bussed far from the familiarity of their communities and sent to schools with teachers who did not look like them and were totally uninterested in learning how to connect culturally, which continued the disconnect between African-American students and the organic comfortability and utilization of the English language.

This intentional exclusion has cultivated the consistently ascending achievement gap between African-American students and their white counterparts. Passing educational policies that equip teachers with research-based strategies and techniques to assist in building the phonetic and linguistic skills of African-American students would leverage the educational playing field, tremendously.

Yoon: What is something you’d tell aspiring education teachers or leaders you wish someone had told you?

Shareefah: In my role as the Director of Teacher Engagement at City Teaching Alliance, a national non-profit, educator preparation program, I tell aspiring educators three things I wish I had known my first year:

It is important to be your authentic self from day one. Children are the hardest people to impress. Once you show them that you are inauthentic, you become untrustworthy to them and children do not learn from people they don’t trust.

Understand that education is ‘heart’ work. People always talk about how hard it is to teach but they rarely share the importance of operating from a spirit of love when one is a teacher. Without this understanding, there are millions of teachers who enter classrooms fully prepared for the routine tasks associated with teaching, such as: taking attendance, writing the objectives on the board, analyzing data, meeting with parents, etc…but they don’t take the time to develop a firm understanding of the social emotional needs of their students. So, they spend the time perfecting their ability to educate and are far removed from their ability to emote. This disconnect leads to students are academically intelligent, but emotionally impaired.

Always be okay with making mistakes and correcting yourself publicly. It is imperative that teachers model for children how to engage in restorative behaviors. Teachers should know that children deserve respect at all times. When teachers get something wrong, they should prioritize sharing with their students what they did wrong and how they are going to correct it going forward. Often times, adults are upset because children don’t apologize when they are wrong, but we don’t provide healthy examples of apologizing and restoration for them to follow. So, it is incumbent upon teachers to create a safe space for themselves and their students to be okay with mistakes and correcting them in a mature and respectful way.

Yoon: What makes you optimistic about the future of education?

Shareefah: I am extremely optimistic about the funding that allows educators to create their own schools. Only people who have taught in schools truly understand what it takes to develop a successful school system that provides an exceptional education experience and is affirming and safe for students and teachers, alike. It is time that teachers have access to opportunities that allow them to have the autonomy and freedom to design academic and social emotional curriculum, as well as the global concept of what learning should look like in the spaces in which they teach.

With that said, I am excited to see how districts continue to create systems to empower teachers and administrators to design schools that meet the collective needs of their students. Dallas Independent School District is one of the school systems that has developed an Office of School Transformation which supports teachers and principals in proposing innovative school ideas to ensure the district is offering an array of varied academic possibilities for its diverse student groups.

If I could engage in that system, I would develop a system of middle schools, in marginalized communities, dedicated to underrepresented careers like aviation, cybersecurity, and health care. The goal would be to introduce students to the foundational skills of some of the most lucrative careers that will allow them to earn certificates – before they enter high school. This would create a pipeline of students who can engage in employability and entrepreneurship spaces that will provide opportunities for them to create generational wealth for their families.