Systems Literacy for an Engaged Citizenship

Resources for Looking Closely at OUSD's proposed school closures

By Brooke Toczylowski, Susan Wolf, and Paula Mitchell

Wondering what’s going on in the Oakland Unified School District?
Want to figure it out for yourself?
Need to help your students develop their own understanding?

Once you look closely and explore the complexity of a system, you can start forming your own understanding and then find opportunity to change it. We use these three capacities to help us structure our learning and ultimately guide what actions we choose to take. This framework is useful for developing agency around systems, for both adults and young people.

This work grew out of the seven years of research we collaborated on with Project Zero, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Learn more at www.agencybydesign.org.

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Looking Closely: 

What are the Parts, Purposes, and Complexities of Oakland’s proposed school closures and consolidations?

The Parts, Purposes, and Complexities thinking routine allows us to get a grasp on the puzzle pieces and to start to identify how things are connected. It can be used over and over again throughout a learning experience and can also be used as an assessment to demonstrate how our thinking has deepened or changed. 

Oakland Unified School District board members at an August meeting. Credit: Kathryn Styer Martínez Credit: Kathryn Styer Martínez. Image published in the Oaklandside, here.

Choose one or two of the articles below, or others, to read. For young students or English Language Learners we recommend narrowing in on one paragraph and/or using the audio interview and creating a transcript of what you hear.  

Wait, what’s going on? What happened at last week’s board meeting?
KQED Interview with Oaklandside reporter Ashley McBride
School Walkout & Overview

How are we in this situation?
How is OUSD’s budget set? Explainer by The Oaklandside
The county’s concern over OUSD’s budget

What was the Small Schools Movement?
Small Schools Overview, KQED, 2019
10 years after the Small Schools Movement, 2009

What about California’s education budget?
How is CA’s education budget created?
Recent News: Budget increases , SF Chronicle, 2022

After reading or listening, begin to process your understanding by organizing your thinking on the Jamboard below, also linked here. This Jamboard is open and editable to the public for collective thinking by adding a virtual sticky note. You can also make a copy for your own use. New to the thinking routine? This explains how to use it.

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Exploring Complexity: 

How do people Think, Feel, and Care about the proposed school closures and consolidations?

Community rally in downtown Oakland on February 4, 2022.
Photo taken by Paula Mitchell.

This routine develops empathy and helps us develop perspective taking. But it also invites us to consider our own biases and the judgements we hold about other people, and it reveals the gaps in our understanding. 

Read about the recent community actions:
Oaklandside, East Bay Times. For young students or English Language Learners you could look closely at one or more of the images. 

Choose one person or one perspective to dive into. Here are some choices:  

• Consider the perspective of André San-Chez and Moses Omolade, educators at Westlake Middle School on Day Seven of a hunger strike. Watch this interview with Mx. San-Chez.

• Consider the perspective of a student whose school is slated to close. Consider their background and identity - race, socioeconomics, and academic experience. Question your biases and assumptions.

• Consider the perspective of an educator. Read long-time Oakland educator, Paula Mitchell’s, story “We’ve Been Here Before.”

• School Board Members—Here’s a list of who they are. Here is Sam Davis’s recent newsletter. Shanthi Gonzalez’s January blog post, or Mike Hutchinson’s tweet, which is possibly how this information became public (It appears the original is deleted).

• County superintendent L.K. Monroe’s “Lack of Going Concern” letter to OUSD’s Board

Record your thinking on the jamboard here. This Jamboard is open and editable to the public, for collective thinking, but you can also make a copy. Check out the original Think Feel Care thinking routine here.

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Finding Opportunity

Imagine If... the system of public education was fully funded, was more equitable, more caring, inclusive and joyful. 

The Imagine If... thinking routine is an expansive idea generator. It helps us envision and dream out loud. It can sometimes turn something sour into something sweet. It opens up a pathway to action.

Opportunity comes in many shapes and sizes.
Opportunity can be a scream or a whisper.

Within a Pandemic we are already situated within cycles of concern and trauma. What opportunity looks like will be different for each individual. It may be pulling back, setting boundaries, and finding space to nap, hike in the woods or in the kitchen chopping up ingredients for a big pot of soup. Finding opportunity may also be fierce. It may launch you into community organizing or activism.

The things that people care about inform and inspire your next steps. 

1. Revisit the wisdom resulting from your individual or community engagement with the Think, Feel Care routine. Take time in your journal to reflect, to write or draw. Where do you find yourself? Where are the places you find hope or joy? 

2. Think, Pair, Share is another thinking routine. It is a guide for conversation. From your journal reflection, discuss emerging insights with a partner.  If you’re able, find others to share with and learn from. This thinking routine builds our capacity for dialogue. 
   Spanish version here.

3. Imagine If...  is a thinking routine for envisioning the future.
   Find the thinking routine here
   For younger children here
   Spanish version here 
   Record your thinking on the jam board here

What is your creative response? What can we make, together?

• Visual Art: poster, drawing, painting, social media graphics, murals, mandalas, sculpture

• Written: Poem, I believe... Statement, Letters: Truth to Power

• Media: interviews, film, storytelling, journalism

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We have the tools to look closely at systems, to examine them inside and out, and then come up with solutions to these problems. It is our hope and expectation that the school board has been, and is, doing this kind of critical work. The recent birth of The Oaklandside means we have more tools at our disposal than other cities. In a country where local journalism is almost non-existent these days, we have access to important information and reporting to help us navigate these systems. But we must also hone our skills, and our students’ skills, in looking for sources, deciphering their reliability, engaging in our own investigations, and coming to our own conclusions.

It’s going to take everyone to solve complex problems like this one. And these challenging circumstances demand rigorous critical thinking in order to spur innovative and creative ideas.

These tools are not new, but they are useful routines that can be used in new ways to look at emergent problems. Since 2011, Agency by Design Oakland has been working with Oakland teachers around maker-centered learning and systems thinking. There’s a large network of Oakland educators who have grown their expertise around using these thinking routines and how to engage young people in critical systems thinking.

Interested in learning more?
Want support facilitating the work of looking at systems together?
Email us at info@abdoakland.org.

Radical Imagination as Healing Strategy

By Susan Wolf, Resident Disruptor on the Agency by Design Oakland Fellowship Leadership Team

In the 2020-2021 school year teachers, families and communities were challenged by the experience of rapidly shifting and morphing complexities of teaching and learning. Distance and hybrid landscapes left many of us feeling disembodied and exhausted. Moving into summer I was personally striving to recenter myself and somehow find my way toward a restorative practice. I sat to reflect. This generally takes the form of writing and drawing. I drifted to the language of “pandemic as portal” or perhaps a “puncture,” and tried to find opportunity in that. The metaphor of a doorway that questions space and time is something that has always appealed to me. It speaks of alternatives, transformation and transit, from here to there. Travel beyond the stuck places that invites expansive creative thinking.  

Over the summer I opened up a doorway that literally goes nowhere. It is located in my sunporch studio and work-space.  I don’t know its full story other than that is where there used to be stairs that would take you into the backyard, now it's just air and a good view of a Jacaranda. It has been closed off because of how tempting we knew it would be for our young son to use in creative and potentially dangerous ways. When my son (now 27 years old) recently visited, I was happy to see him sit in the doorway and dangle his feet.

This doorway helps me think. It lengthens my vista and sends in a breeze. It helps me remember how important it is for me to sit and draw or stitch or write. 

Susan looks out from her studio standing in what she calls the door to nowhere or pandemic portal. Wearing a T-shirt designed by Christine Sun Kim. The graphic in sign language says “stop Asian hate.” 

“This year and for several years forward our learning spaces will need to move more slowly as we provide welcoming, creative making opportunities for our fully activated reptilian brain to reset.”

As the Agency by Design Oakland leadership team (Paula, Brooke, Susan and Alia) was planning for our day long retreat in August we knew we wanted to support teachers by making intentional connections to the California Initiative for a restorative restart. We wanted teachers to feel cared for but we also wanted them to walk away with ideas on how to care for and love their students. Art and making have an important role to play in healing and meaning making. For us, we clearly envisioned an open-ended inquiry or invitation, aka a Design Challenge, with a wide variety of materials available. Time for making that values individual voices and spirits while inviting space for dreaming creatively of the world we see coming. AKA The Radical Imaginary!  

I first heard the term Radical Imaginary from a Claudia Rankine book about a project that began in 2017 as an open letter inviting essays about race and the creative imagination. A website continues to host ongoing dialogue and performances. https://theracialimaginary.org/.  However, this thinking does not stand alone. Other writers contributing to this idea of inviting and holding cultural change with divergent thinking and dreaming, include Octavia Butler, adrienne maree brown and June Jordan. Larger, cultural manifestations of the radical imaginary are held by Afrofuturism and National Equity Project’s protocols for Freedom Dreaming. 

Locally, for us in the Bay Area, we are fortunate to be close to cultural institutions that are exhibiting work that documents and holds radical imagination in interesting ways. After spending over a pandemic year away from museums and exhibition spaces I celebrated a return to several to see evidence of creative practice, making and radical imagination. If you are nearby I highly recommend visiting:

• Oakland Museum of California  Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism 

• Legion of Honor Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Can You Hear Me? 

• Berkeley Art Center Afro Hippie Preview — Berkeley Art Center 

• KALA Art Institute Sea of Fertility - Looking at the Invisible

You might wonder what radical imaginary has to do with being educators and why it is important to evoke our individual and collective radical imagination now.  While experiencing a dramatic shifting of values and systems within our pandemic response the subtle cracks and fissures have become conspicuous, unavoidable chasms. We don’t need anyone to tell us how the system of educating our youth is beyond broken. White supremacy continues to recreate and uphold these inequities. It is not unintentional. This year and for several years forward our learning spaces will need to move more slowly as we provide welcoming, creative making opportunities for our fully activated reptilian brain to reset. It is a time in which we need to stretch and dream to be able to see beyond the mire into a future that will work better for our students. 

During our daylong retreat in September it was important to us to model what a restorative restart might look and feel like. It was important to us for there to be time to envision and make with our hands something personal that could be useful for our collective processing. It was important to us to be making, in community in an outdoor space, wearing our masks while smiling with our eyes. 

The Design Challenge prompt asked the teachers in the fellowship to: 

Create a magical object that transforms and heals what ails you.

Envisioning and Figuring it out: Abdul-Haq Khalifah using hot melt glue to attach wooden and metal pieces, and Mx. Cory figuring out how to use a sewing machine to piece together fabric.

During this time we noticed teachers finding materials that spoke to them and finding their happy places to work. There was a choice. Working indoors or outdoors. Sitting on the ground or around tables. In the sunshine or shade. Some worked independently, quietly, focused upon their making. Others collected on blankets or tables and were busy talking, sometimes laughing. We also noticed the makers who drifted from place to place to see what others were doing, to both get inspired and to visit. 

This is what it looked like:

Elisabeth Barnett, Secondary Math & History, Community Day School 

The Z-Axis tool allows for travel to new dimensions. Changing and rotating in response to how it is held. 

Deirdra McKnight, 2nd grade, ​​Lazear Charter Academy/Education for Change

Stuffed fiber Pillow My Heart is a visual reminder to give and receive love.

Mx. Cory, 6th Grade Humanities (History & English), Urban Promise Academy 

Comfort Cape, fabricated using a sewing machine; wraps around like a hug and connects to the wearer's legacy of matrilineage. 

Rachel Abramson, International Science, Castlemont HIGH SCHOOL

Weaving through life, How to use and combine your experience with others and the world.

After walking the runway to hoots, snaps and cheers, fellows transitioned to planning time. 

How can we cultivate a restorative restart through hands-on learning?

What Maker Centered Learning strategies will you try? 

What will they prototype and test out with students that will then be shared with each other to receive feedback at the next gathering? This is an ongoing practice that supports our inquiry cycle. 

A sneak peek of what is being reimagined includes:

At Met West, in Linh Linh Tinh’s Advisory, cardboard looms and fiber for hands-on reflective making following a community circle check-in.

At Urban Promise Academy Mx. Cory’s connects students to community in restorative community circle practice before entering a process designing murals. 

Connecting to the maker-centered learning strategy, tools as teachers Andrea Gonzalez, Garfield Elementary teacher is working with student collaboration to make a “squishy school” that you could hug or lay on for comfort. Also helps kids “learn to read and do art.”

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Susan Wolf is an artist, caregiver and educator.

“I am always practicing.

How to take care of my spirit and body. How to age gracefully. How to be a good friend, an anti-racist, and advocate for equality and change. And most recently, how to step into a complex dystopian future without losing my heart or mind.”

Three Strategies for Shifting Power in Math Class

By Quinn Ranahan, Math Teacher, Montera Middle School, Oakland Unified School District & Agency by Design Oakland Senior Teaching Fellow 

Math class is frequently the most challenging for students due to the stigma that there is one way to be smart. If a student doesn’t receive an A in math there’s an immediate jump to thinking they’re not “good” at it. Math smarts can look like many things—changing your mind, taking your time, looking closely, thinking critically, asking questions, or putting yourself out there to get out of your comfort zone.

Last year, the pandemic and Zoom pushed me and my math colleagues to double down in our never-ending quest to help students build a positive math identity. My beginning of the year surveys underscored the importance of our needing to figure out this new form of school; on a scale of one-to-five students were asked “Do you think you’re smart at math?” with 5 meaning “I am smart at math.” Only 52% rated themselves with a four or five and only 13.6% at a five. 

“Math smarts can look like many things—changing your mind, taking your time, looking closely, thinking critically, asking questions, or putting yourself out there to get out of your comfort zone.”

— Quinn Ranahan

A survey of students revealed most students don’t feel they are “smart” at math.

I found myself constantly asking, How can I shift mindsets and make class less intimidating, when it feels like the world is falling apart? How can I create a math space that students do not dread? Over time, I came to understand there were three key parts of my practice that I needed and wanted to push on: Thinking Routines; intentional "humanizing" or connecting with and among students; and a regular exchange of feedback—in both directions. 

An example of how Ranahan used the Parts, Purposes, Complexities thinking routine to develop and assess students' understanding of the parts of a virtual software program.

Thinking Routines 

Thinking routines provide multiple access points for students. They can be used in the chat, out loud, on paper, or in groups. I also like thinking routines because they give me immediate information on what the students know or understand about the assignment and topic; it asks them to do the heavy lifting and therefore builds their capacity to be independent learners. Furthermore, school settings often give extroverted students praise for raising their hands and being quick to share. Crisis distance learning has provided more space for students who may be introverts, to contribute to class discussions through typing and messaging versus sharing out loud. 

Even in distance learning I continued to use the Parts, Purposes and Complexities from Harvard’s Project Zero, a thinking routine to engage students in breaking apart and looking closely at math systems. I’ve even used it to have students break down parts of a website, so that the confusion of the many buttons are made clear when dissecting and looking closely at each part of the webpage. I asked the questions: What are the parts? What are the purposes of the parts? How do the parts work together? What is the relationship between the parts? How are they connected? 

An example of how Ranahan used the Parts, Purposes, Complexities thinking routine to have students look closely at a math equation and explain their thinking.

Humanization & Connection 

During distance learning most of my students were represented by small, faceless boxes on Zoom, which is why humanizing and connecting was so important. The intervention strategy I chose to try out was to ask students questions a few times a week that would be fun and/or relevant topics in their personal lives. For example, 

• Would you rather be a Twitch streamer or YouTuber? 

• Would you rather eat gummy worms or carrots for the rest of your life? 

““I wish my teachers knew that [distance learning] is not ‘the exact same as in person learning,’ it invades much of a child’s personal privacy when teachers guilt-trip students into turning their cameras on and spam the unmute request button after a kid says, “No I can’t turn my mic on.” ”

— 7th grader

What I learned from doing this is that slowing down and hearing opinions about different subjects has provided space for students to be themselves and to find joy during a challenging time. Kids that normally never unmuted themselves laughed and joked and had an opinion! Kids that I hadn’t heard from, and who seemed to not have an opinion during math conversations, all of a sudden were awakened and had something to say.

I am still doing this in person; last week during the first week of school I asked the question above about gummy worms & carrots. (Surprisingly, most kids want to be healthy and eat carrots.) But what I realized is so important about these seemingly silly questions is that it gives the kids a place to disagree in a safe way. So that when we get to the math we have already practiced disagreeing and now we can do that and make sense of the math content. It allows them to practice listening to each other’s opinions and reasoning. So not only are these questions a way to humanize and connect; they’re also a scaffold for academic discourse.  

Implementation of Feedback

“I wish my teachers knew that [distance learning] is not ‘the exact same as in person learning,’ it invades much of a child's personal privacy when teachers guilt-trip students into turning their cameras on and spam the unmute request button after a kid says, "No I can't turn my mic on." Also it's funny how most teachers are like: "O I carez about ur mental health", and then they give like 19 assignments that are due by the end of the day. Homework is stressful and not fun really- maybe it used to be but now I wonder why school keeps going if it just makes everyone suffer.” - 7th Grade Student

At times it feels like getting feedback is personal and threatens the power dynamic, but getting feedback actually creates trust and agency over learning. When a student provides feedback and it is implemented, there is a slight shift in who has power to impact what class looks and feels like. What I learned from asking my students for their feedback is that you don’t always know until you ask. People want to be heard, students want to be heard and everyone has an opinion. So just asking and getting feedback reinforced that I was listening and it wasn’t an echo chamber of me talking to screens. I did this through written surveys as well as conversation. I remember in one instance the students complained about a teacher talking and saying the same thing over and over again so I asked them if I did that too. They said I didn’t, but I told them to let me know me if I did. So it’s making sure people can share their opinion and inviting students to be heard. 

New Year, New Inquiry 

All three of these areas that I invested time in supported my students’ experience of distance learning and I plan on leaning into them during in-person teaching as well. Using thinking routines increased participation, in a time when it was difficult to engage in a virtual learning environment. I found success and glimpses of joy when I heard students laugh or spam the chat with their strong opinions about YouTube versus Twitch. And getting feedback allowed me to push through the feeling of being in an echo chamber and it opened a path for students’ opinions to be heard. 

As we re-enter the classroom, I’m thinking about the kids for whom distance learning actually worked. Even after just a few days in class I’m noticing that the kids that worked the chat in zoom are still not unmuting themselves in person and I know I have to find new ways to engage those students. There’s a lot more under the surface for those kids—the hand raisers versus the quieter folks who have something they want to share. So I’m thinking about continuing to have more access points, like with thinking routines, but also thinking about other ways. I wonder if this highlighted the safety that they needed in order to learn?  So this is the current inquiry on my mind—What will we do for the introverts that thrived on zoom? 

Quinn Ranahan just started her 8th year of teaching last week. She is a Math Teacher at Montera Middle School in the Oakland Unified School District, CA.

“I think that creating is liberating. Last year the moments where I felt at peace in Agency by Design Oakland was when I was making and reflecting. I think that maker-centered learning provides many access points for students and as a math teacher that is constantly on the forefront of my brain. Math has so much stigma and maker-centered learning provides space for all types of learners and that is what I am constantly thriving for as an educator.”