Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:00:00]:
Welcome, advocates, to another episode of the Leading Equity Podcast, a podcast that focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their school. Today's special guest is doctor Kelly Davenport. So without further ado, Kelly, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:00:18]:
Thank you. It is such a pleasure to be here, Sheldon.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:00:20]:
Pleasure is all mine. I'm excited for today's conversation. We got some stuff, folks, that's gonna really help you out when we're thinking about an asset based approach to education. So before we get into the topic, Kelly, I'd love for you to share a little bit about yourself and what you currently do.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:00:36]:
Well, I loved Sheldon an episode you had just recently with doctor Shamari Reed. He introduced himself as human. So I wanna say I'm a human first. I'm a white woman. I have been a career educator. And for the last 24 years, I've had the privilege of founding cofounding the first school and then founding 3 other schools in Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware that serve kids that self identify predominantly as kids of color and kids who qualify for free and reduced lunch and who lived in predominantly underserved neighborhoods. So those kids are really who I am. That is me other than my own 2 kids that I have at home.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:01:12]:
Alright. Well, let's get into it because your your the name of your school is Freire and Freire Schools, and I I always try to pronounce his last name as best as possible. I sometimes butcher it. But I, you know, when I when I got excited because I knew we're gonna be talking, I I went ahead and grabbed my copy, pedagogy of the oppressed. And as I spoke to you earlier before we even started recording, that is my favorite education book beside my own book. That is my favorite education book of all time. So tell us what are some of the philosophies that were pulled from his work and how that relates to what we're doing at your school.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:01:48]:
Pronouncing his name is really hard. You're right. The first day of our 1st year, our kids came to our board meeting and helped us decide how we were gonna pronounce the name of the school. So we pronounce it Friere. That's not how you pronounce it in Portuguese, but, the kids really decided how to pronounce that. And before that, they were saying ferry and Ferrari and all kinds of crazy things. So it's it's Friere schools. And the basic principles that we pulled from the book, which is also one of my favorite books, is that, you know, Paulo Freire says that true education begins when we reconcile the power imbalance between teacher and student relationship.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:02:24]:
So that is inherently sort of flawed. And as we go through this podcast, I'll sort of point out some of the places where I see that. But our vision, and Freire also says this, is that kids can learn as much from teachers as teachers can learn from Eakins. And it's that one to one experience in true form where real learning happens. Now I'm not trying to say that teachers need to give up authority or the responsibility to build lesson plans or to do what's right for kids by any Eakins. But in the classroom, Paula Freire said that the power imbalance is such that a teacher pours tries to pour knowledge into a child's head like they're an empty vessel or his vernacular is to bank knowledge into a child's head. And I submit to you in my educational experience that that doesn't work. Our kids come as full human beings.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:03:19]:
They have past presence. They have experiences and hopes and dreams and emotions, and you can't just open up their head and pour anything into that. You have to motivate them, connect with them, join them. And that is what I believe Freire means by reconciling the power imbalance between teacher and student. So at our schools, we're really trying to work on building a culture where teachers learn from kids, kids learn from teachers. There's still plenty of authority and discipline going on. But when kids need help, they have voice. They can reach out and say, hey.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:03:54]:
I need help with that. Can I do that again? So we call it the culture of asking for and receiving help. Freire also talks about just reading that students need to learn how to read the word and the world together. And I think that's where we marry this idea of the power structure. Why do we think that kids don't understand that teachers have more power than students or try to be sort of coy about that rather than being honest about what the power structures are and how kids use their own power to advocate for themselves to get in there and get what they need as learners. So that's really what we're trying to do at the Free Area Schools.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:04:33]:
You know, there's a lot that I could pull from that response. And and I think at the end of the day, I think we can all agree that we can learn just as much from our students as we learn as we teach them. The challenge that I hear a lot of teachers say is, well, I'm a math teacher. My students don't know the math that I'm teaching them. How can I learn from them if I'm supposed to teach them this math equations and all these things? What kind of response do you give if you get those Eakins of that kind of pushback, Kelly? Well, I

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:05:05]:
was a Spanish teacher by trade for 9 years. I think similar to math or any subject, what you can learn from your kids is who they are, how they learn, where they struggle, whatever misconceptions they had about math prior to coming into your classroom, and then how to really connect the math to each individual's experiences, needs, visions, self identity, those Eakins of things. I'm not suggesting that we interrupt math. I'm suggesting that there is a dance that needs to go on between the teacher and the student that's authentic and it's human. And inside of that, math gets taught. And I would say that that's how actually math gets taught to all students at a faster rate.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:05:46]:
So it's not necessarily that we're expecting our students to teach us, you know, to put it as as basic okay. Spanish, for example, for us us to learn from our students how to communicate, but we are learning what they're interested in, what their background is. So we have to look at it from that sense as opposed to just thinking, oh, our students are actually teaching us the concepts or or the context of the content, but we're actually learning from them as far as the human being side of things.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:06:17]:
Yes. The arrow can't just go one way. It can't just be that teacher is impounding knowledge into a student's head. It just doesn't work like that. There's a relationship that has to occur. And I think that's really what we're talking about is that relationship.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:06:31]:
Yeah. I liked it. Okay. So you you mentioned the part of students have voice, and we're providing a space for our students to express themselves. For example, maybe they they took a test, and they didn't do as as good as they could have done the first time they took it. And often in our traditional school settings, we we grade it, and then, you know, we move on to the next concept, and whatever grade they got, that's what grade they got. But you and I were Eakins talking before we started recording about there's something a little bit different approach that you take when it comes to maybe assessments for for our students. Could you share?

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:07:09]:
Our idea is that in a standards based education system, which our nation adopted in the early 2000, The idea is that every student needs to meet a certain standard. And I will say that not every student is gonna meet that standard at the same time. In other words, unit 3 algebra test. Let's say that's on polynomials. Well, the test is on March 14th. That doesn't mean that every student is going to do well on that test or understand or meet that standard by March 14th. In the power of yet, students take the test on March 14th, and let's say they don't do so L, that then they can advocate for and ask for a redo on that test down the road. The idea being that every student can meet the standard over time and that some need a little bit more time.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:07:57]:
And students say, well, I just haven't met it yet. I haven't met that standard yet, but I'm getting there. And our job as educators is to provide those opportunities. Now we have found practically you can't do that with every single assignment. So mastery assignments are the assignments where students can ask to retake a test. And just the other week, I was asking students about the power of yet, and they love that opportunity for L, so do parents. And what students have said to me are things like, you know what? I took the test the first time and I didn't understand the directions. Or one girl said to me, my mother was in the hospital and dying, and I had to take a math test, and I wasn't ready.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:08:36]:
Another student said, I needed to sit down with my teacher and really go over the material again because I thought I understood it and I didn't. And Sheldon, when we think about the world we're preparing our kids for, which is what school is about, it's about knowing where your resources are so that when you don't do something right the first time or you mess it up, or you just still don't get it, you can go and figure it out. It's that skill of advocacy and resilience that I think is just as important as the math that we're trying to build inside of our students.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:09:07]:
So are they taking the exact same assessment?

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:09:11]:
Most times, no. It will be the same standard in some other form. And I think that's really important to say because I appreciate you asking that. We're asking our teachers to do more

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:09:21]:
here Mhmm.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:09:22]:
In a way. I wanna just name that to be true, and I think our teachers are incredible already for the work they do, and there's more here for them. And our schools of education don't prepare our teachers for this mindset of that kids being able to do it again. Just like traditional L, elementary school, traditional school does not prepare our students for this kind of mindset either. And so it like, we're asking something different ironically that will actually help our kids in the real world outside of school than what the present system is. And bottom line, when we allow a student to fail a test and we don't address it, what are we saying to kids that we don't think they can do it or that they're sort of almost learners? They're almost getting there, but they're not there yet? And so I think this opens up a dialogue too about performance, expectations, supports, self advocacy that I find really helpful in the classroom.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:10:22]:
You know, at the end of the day, I think the question for me, the question should always be, is this grade, does it provide an accurate representation of what a student has mastered or not? Right? Because like you said, there's we're human beings first. Kids are humans. They deal with stuff at school. They could do all these different things, and sometimes they're they're distracted sometimes those things. Or they they just didn't understand it the first time it was explained to them. You know? That happens. Right? Sometimes you explain it to them multiple different ways, and it's that third way that you explained it. Oh, boom.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:10:53]:
I get it. Oh, shoot. I should you should have started with that, you know. So those kind of things happen, but when we give them a grade and, again, the child, for whatever reason, didn't do their best, that doesn't necessarily mean that they have an accurate representation of that grade that they have. So it makes sense to me if a child 2 weeks later says, you know what? I wanna try this again or, you know, I've done some tutoring or whatever it is. These you know, my life situation is better. I wanna take this opportunity to try again. To me, that makes more sense.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:11:24]:
Why do you think that's not a concept that a lot of us are doing? Like, why is that not a thing, I guess, in most schools?

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:11:32]:
I think it comes down to the factory model of how our schools were built. And when you think about just the number of kids that a teacher has in his or her classroom and the amount of work it takes every day, I founded these schools. I am the CEO of these schools, but I will tell you being a teacher for 9 years was harder than that. It's the hardest job I've ever done. And so I think the grammar or rigid sort of traditional structure of school is easier to go through because nobody has time to question it or to change it while we are still educating kids.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:12:07]:
Mhmm.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:12:07]:
And that's sad to me, which is the opportunity that I had to open new schools and to start again and to rethink some of how the structure of that needs to be. Like, that's been a privilege of of mine, not everybody gets. And this one concept I think is so incredibly important to that self image of student. And I, again, teacher has to be willing to do that. So I give teachers a lot of credit, especially our teachers for being willing.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:12:35]:
Shout out to the educators that are able to give children another chance. You know, that's that's at the end of the day. Shout out to those who are able to do that. I know some teachers will do extra credit assignments, and I I I know I had a guest on not too long ago where he talks about where extra credits can often be was this Camp? Cam was my guest not too long ago, and he talked about how extra credit sometimes can be inequitable because maybe one teacher gives extra credit, the other teacher does not. Same class, but one has an one class set of roster has, you know, extra chances, while the other class does not have those extra chances just because the teacher isn't willing to do the same type of extra credit, which kinda leads me to my next question. Is this a, like, your model, is it school wide? Meaning, like, if you have multiple English teachers, are they all providing those opportunities for students to take that retake a test or, you know, get that extra support? Is that something that's pretty standard to profess throughout the school?

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:13:35]:
Yes. We have middle school and high school. So our middle schoolers call it the power of yet.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:13:40]:
Mhmm.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:13:40]:
And they have a little bit of a different structure than our high schoolers who call it multiple opportunities for mastery or mom, they call it. And so but it's the same thing. Kids have to put in a request or an appeal to be able to take something again, be able to articulate what's gonna be different this time time and why, then they're given an opportunity to take that test again. It has to be a mastery assignment. And then if they do better, their grade improves. And I I also wanna say, like, in Singapore, for example, who's beating the pants off of us academically. In Singapore, we take our strongest and best teachers and place them with the kids who need more time and support to learn something. We don't say, oh, well, you who didn't master it at the time that I had preordained, you cannot learn that.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:14:25]:
We give up on you. We're moving on to the next thing. We rather we reallocate resources to those who need it the most and make sure those are the best resources. And while I can't do that every day in our schools and hope that all of our teachers are really strong, what I can do is make sure that kids have adequate amount of supports and time to prove themselves in a particular subject area. I set our schools up on a x y axis. High expectations, rigorous curriculum, and high level of supports to help any and every student through that rigorous curriculum. I had a student once, maybe 10 years ago, tell me that, oh, miss Kelly, I understand exactly what you're saying about high expectations. It's like my grandmother says.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:15:08]:
Says we, all of us, you, me, we are all like fleas in a jar, he said, which I had no idea what that meant. And he said, my grandmother says that if you put actual fleas in a jar, that they will only jump high enough once to hit their head. So if they jump and they hit their head on top of the lid, that they will recalibrate. And from that day forward, they will never jump any higher because they do not wanna hit their head on the top of that lid. And what the student was telling me was that, oh, your high expectations are because we are all fleas in a jar and we have to keep the expectations high or we will start to recalibrate and lower our own expectations. I think in science that's called entropy. And support. So while your expectations are high, your supports are there too.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:15:52]:
So the power of yet is one of those supports. Another one that we offer in our school system is that we provide 1 on 1 individual therapy from emotional therapists who do family therapy, 1 on 1 therapy to our kids every day at all of our campuses. And what happens is about 28% of our kids on any given day are getting 1 on 1 individualized therapy support. So that's another way that we are working to build a culture of asking for and receiving help where kids who need extra L. I mean, look. On a random survey every year, our kids take this test where it assesses what sort of childhood adverse childhood experiences our kids have been through. And since COVID, Sheldon, that number has skyrocketed. Yeah.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:16:38]:
So 30% of our incoming 9th graders on this anonymous survey have experienced 4 or more adverse childhood experiences. That could be incarceration, drug overdose, sexual abuse, violence, any of those things. Our kids experiencing them or witnessing somebody in their house experiencing them. So our kids come full of so many things, so much hardship. But, again, that resilience that we're trying to build that voice that Paulo Friere imagined or as you and I said that relationship so that when we get to the math classroom, our kids are ready to do math. They can, like, open up a piece of their hearts and minds and learn about algebraic expression. Otherwise, they're full of something else potentially. And how would we know unless we created that space for kids?

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:17:28]:
Well, how did you create a space? Because a lot of folks will say, oh, I don't have the funding to provide. Now do you have traditional school counselors, or do you have, like, mental health specialists? Or is there like, tell us a little bit more about that.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:17:41]:
Thank you for that question. So we do not have traditional school counselors.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:17:44]:
Okay.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:17:45]:
We blew that up into a 3 prong counseling process in our schools. So we from the economics, the question about how does that get funded. Mhmm. We are lucky to be in L region where there are many universities who have family therapy programs, masters of family therapy. So we have certified family therapists on our staff, not many. We pay those folks. Mhmm. But then there are interns in family therapy at, call it, University of Pennsylvania or Drexel University or Temple University who are becoming fully certified family therapists and have to do their hours of experience in the field.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:18:22]:
And so they work full time for us. And in exchange, our certified family therapists support our up and coming family therapists, and those up and coming family therapists work on our team seeing kids 1 on 1 all day long. And so that way, it's almost cost neutral. The second kind of counseling support is what we call academic advising, which is having our academic advisers help link our students and their families to the supports we offer, such as the power of yet. So that if a student is not well doing well in something, an academic adviser's job is to review grades and talk with students and families and teachers and make sure the linkages are happening so the kids are taking advantage of the power of yet or after school centers where kids are getting 1 on 1 help from peers or from adults or they're going to family therapy with somebody who can help them with whatever's going on for them sort of at home in a hardship kind of way. So that's the second kind of counselor we have. And the third is a college counselor because our mission and vision is that every and any kid can go to college or do something similar. And then we wanna make sure we have adults in the building who are helping to to get our kids onto the next road, whatever that is.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:19:39]:
In fact, of our 300 graduates last year, a 151 colleges individual colleges accepted them for $24,000,000 of scholarships. So college, whatever's next for kids, I believe, can be attained by anybody. As long as the school has high expectations, rigorous supports. Kids are working hard and believe they have fire in their bellies and believe they can get to wherever it is they wanna go next.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:20:04]:
Wow. So just the levels of mental health support that you have there, and and you said there's multiple. So, I know sometimes we'll just have just a school counselor and and that's it. Again, funding is all often an issue and that school counselor might be like a 500 to 1 ratio at that level as well. But it sounds like you have multiple layers of support for students. And, obviously, that that shows that it works because you just said, you know, $24,000,000 worth of scholarship opportunities for your graduating class. I mean, so that does work. Is this something that was like, when you founded the school, was that part of the very beginning, or is this something where partnerships Eakins of developed over time, or you've something happened to where it's like, you know what? Maybe we need to try to partner with or bring in some more support for students.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:20:54]:
It was how how did all that come about?

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:20:56]:
For the first school, our cofounder, his name was his name is Alphonse Pignataro, and he is a certified family therapist. And he built this program with the local universities right away. I don't think I said it clearly enough a couple minutes ago, but when we have our intern family therapist working with our students, that's cost neutral. We don't pay for that. We are giving an opportunity. Now these are younger family therapists, and they're growing, but they're also being mentored by Alphonse and his team of certified family therapists. So that was built from the fabric on day 1 into our community. The power of yet has evolved over time.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:21:34]:
I mean, we all as educators have heard about the growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. Or as you said at the beginning, assets asset based teaching.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:21:43]:
Mhmm.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:21:44]:
So wrestling with that over time, this has been the best manifestation that we have come up with inside a traditional and rigorous academic environment to allow kids to prove themselves over time.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:21:57]:
Nice. I love this method. And and I I like to ask you a question because, I mean, obviously, sounds like I mean, there's always room for growth, but it sounds like what you have going on right now is is pretty established at some point. But I know that there's maybe school leaders right now or there's some teachers right now that are listening and thinking to themselves, well, what we're hearing is sounds amazing. What are some things that I can do maybe tomorrow or maybe something that we can work towards at our school? What kind of tips or strategies could you give to our listeners out there who, you know, again, loving what they're hearing, but they don't have the infrastructure set up? What kind of tips or tools would you give out to those who are who are listening to this?

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:22:39]:
One of my favorite experiences in graduate school at University University of Pennsylvania when I was in my doctorate was a professor who would bring his mail. He was a principal at a local high school, and he would bring his mail from his mailbox to class. And he would read out loud what the letter was, and then it would either go into his do something with it or his trash can

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:23:02]:
Mhmm.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:23:03]:
Pile. And what I learned there was profound, I think, that there's so much in public education that's noise and trying to figure out where the noise is and make sure the noise goes in the trash can, or strategically gets assigned a small portion of your day. So that the things that really matter, like the grammar of school and making sure that kids have voice and get opportunities like the ones I'm talking about, can play, like, a higher and better part of your day than what goes in sort of your mailbox on on the day to day. Remember too that, like, school was sort of made up. We made up school. We made up the Carnegie unit. We created this thing called the Carnegie unit, which has not served our Eakins, in my opinion, especially our kids of color, especially our kids who are coming from places of poverty or under resourced environments or hardship of any kind. We made up this arbitrary unit that is affecting the delivery of our schools.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:24:04]:
And I think that you as educators have a divine responsibility to reinvent school so that it's still rigorous, but so that our kids can prove themselves in different and alternate ways. For example, think about a student who's had incredible hardship, but who's been working your your program of going to family therapy every day and is really were winning and learning an incredible amount. What if that student could write about their experience and we could assign them credit for that? Why does the Carnegie unit have to be only in certain things? So that I guess what I'm saying is I would invite all educators to think about how to use the resources and pull the levers that you have in front of you, though they may be limited, to make sure that the most important things, kids learning, kids developing resilience, kids actuating their fullest potential can be achieved. And I think you have the right to do that as an educator.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:25:02]:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And how for worse there? At the end of the day, take what you got. Use the resources that you have available in front of you. Was it make lemonade out of limit? What whatever the Well, the

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:25:15]:
kids are so Eakins are so deserving of that, and I've never I've never met a student who didn't when given the right sunlight and the right water and the right soil, I've never met a student not thrive. So it is our job to provide those three simple things every day. No matter what's going on in your mailbox, that has to be done. That has to be priority 1.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:25:37]:
Yep. L, Kelly, if we got some folks that want to connect with you, what's the best way to reach you online?

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:25:44]:
Probably to send me an email at L L. Love to hear from you.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:25:54]:
Thank you again. Once once again, I have doctor Kelly Davenport with us today. Kelly, you have clearly shown me a lot of things to think about, and I'm glad that we have a favorite book in common. So that's awesome to know as well, and I and I wish you all the best. Thank Thank you so much for your time.

Dr. Kelly Davenport [00:26:12]:
Thank you, and thank you for taking a stand about equity for each and one of every one of our kids. Appreciate you.

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