Dr. Megan Taylor:

I had an experience working in a school many years ago where we were asked by an administrator to share a really fully powerful and important memory with a teacher, like a moment with a teacher that really changed our lives for the good. We thought about those stories, wrote about them, and then shared about them. Then we took time to do the opposite. We were asked to find in our memories a moment with a teacher that was really dehumanizing or really destructive for us, or where we experienced some kind of really awful thing that also had a big impact on us. We wrote about those things and shared about those things. What we noticed as a staff—this was the entire staff at the school doing this exercise—is that across the board, the vast majority of teachers in both groups were math and science teachers.

My name is Dr. Megan Taylor. The pronouns I use are she, her, hers. I am currently the director of the Teacher Institute at the Exploratorium here in San Francisco, and I am the founder and former Executive Director of Trellis Education. Trellis really started from the perspective of saying, “What would we do if we had no limitations if we just said, ‘Let’s use all the things we know, all the best practices to create a thriving representative workforce and do it?'” And that was really the starting place. So I think one of the things is to break down teaching practice into core practices to say, not to incrementalize it, but to say, “There’s a lot of things happening when a really accomplished teacher is fully serving students. Let’s break those things down. Let’s practice them as components, and they’ll let you build them back up again into your repertoire.”

I think the second piece of that is that you do not learn that one day. You do not learn that in a few weeks, in one course, or in one year. You learn that as any professional learns their craft over many, many years. You learn that in deliberate practice, which means that you have mentoring and you are getting feedback that’s very specific to how you’re enacting a certain practice and getting better at that. A lot of people used to ask me, “Why did Trellis focus on math and science? Was it a STEM organization? You want everybody to become a math and science teacher?” And I would always say, “Absolutely not. But as long as math and science are gatekeeper courses for all sorts of other things, including graduating from high school, certainly going to college, and possibly having all kinds of other professional opportunities, we better be taking seriously students’ access to math and science.”

I remember as a math teacher at the time, that was so striking to me because I do think there’s a particular power to math and science teaching to either lift up or to dehumanize young people to make them feel powerful and worthy or to do the opposite. Especially in a system that’s fundamentally racist and designed to do very particular sorting and oppression work, we better, as math and science teachers especially, be working to dismantle that and push on that. I think we can do that not just in our classrooms, but we can do it in our departments, our schools, and with each other. I think Trellis built communities of folks who were fundamentally committed to that kind of work and who were doing it at all of those levels together.