40. How teaching critical thinking can improve equity. Meet ThinkLaw Founder Colin Seale
Colin Seale was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, where struggles in his upbringing gave birth to his passion for educational equity. Tracked early into gifted and talented programs, Colin was afforded opportunities his neighborhood peers were not. Using lessons from his experience as a math teacher, later as an attorney, and now as a keynote speaker, contributor to Forbes, The 74, Edutopia and Education Post and author of Thinking Like a Lawyer: A Framework for Teaching Critical Thinking to All Students (Prufrock Press, 2020) and Tangible Equity: A Guide for Leveraging Student Identity, Culture, and Power to Unlock Excellence In and Beyond the Classroom (Routledge, available spring 2022), Colin founded thinkLaw (www.thinklaw.us), a multi-award-winning organization to help educators leverage inquiry-based instructional strategies to close the critical thinking gap and ensure they teach and reach all students, regardless of race, zip code or what side of the poverty line they are born into. In 2021, Colin launched The BEE Project, a non-profit organization redefining who qualifies as gifted and who gets to teach gifted children by inspiring, training, and certifying Black and Latinx educators to equitably design and lead gifted programs. These programs identify and meet the unique needs of brilliant Black and Latinx children and their families who have been overlooked and underestimated by our current system. When he’s not serving as the world’s most fervent critical thinking advocate or tweeting from @ColinESeale, Colin proudly serves as the world’s greatest entertainer to his two young children.
TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:
We are all neurodivergent, none of us is identical. But some of us are part of the outliers.
Children can have behavioural challenges because they are not being challenged at school!
Teachers might label twice-exceptional children with gifted “but” instead of gifted “and”!
The order of being identified can have a big impact of how we get support! For example Colin got identified gifted at age 7 and with ADHD at age 37! His life would have probably turned out differently if the order was reversed!
Being diagnosed with a learning difference in adulthood will improve quality of life. However, we ask ourselves, why hasn’t anyone noticed or pointed it out before?
The label doesn’t matter, the support matters!
High achieving is not the same as being gifted.
Understanding “the game”, it’s not about the achievement itself, it’s about the performance of the achievement! And the performance needs to be tailored to the audience and their expectations. A lot of people have the same way of performing or also “conforming”.
Critical thinking skills is crucial but we treat it as if it is a luxury good! What would it look like if we gave all kids access to critical thinking?
Recognise that none of my learning was actually objective
Although brilliance is distributed equally, opportunity is not!
Doing right is more important than being right! What if we taught our kids: “Just because I can, doesn’t mean I should!”
We can say, we've come a long way. And we can also say, we still have a long way to go.
We came to normalise inequity.
There is no master plan. Most people don't really know what they're doing. No one has all the answers! We wait for someone else to have the answer, to have a plan. But we need to be the ones!
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Learn more about Colin Seale and ThinkLaw on his websites: thinklaw.us and raisingcriticalthinkers.us
Follow Colin on Social Media: Twitter @ColinESeale @thinkLawUS | Instagram @ColinSeale @thinkLawUS | facebook thinklawUS and the facebook group tangibleequity | LinkedIn Colin Seale and his company ThinkLaw
Colin Seale’s books:
Thinking like a Lawyer - A Framework for Teaching Critical Thinking to All Students
Tangible Equity - A Guide for Leveraging Student Identity, Culture, and Power to Unlock Excellence in and Beyond the Classroom
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TRANSCRIPT:
Hello and welcome to Unleash Monday, where we talk about the brain, especially the gifted brain and how does it affect our thinking and experience of the world differently. There are a lot of stereotypes and stigma around giftedness, and I'm here to challenge those. I'm here to raise awareness and to have a conversation around this topic of what does it mean to be a gifted adult common experience among gifted folks is that they feel out of place.
They don't quite fit in. They are too sensitive, too intense, too emotional, too, over excitable and too deep thinkers about the world and about themselves. So if you have been called too much of about anything, then this show is for you. My name is Nadja. I'm too loud, too colorful, too bodily, too bossy. And I love to talk too much.
So welcome to my world. And I'm so happy. You're here. Hello and happy Monday. I hope you're doing well. And I'm so honored. You are here listening to this podcast. If it's your first time here, welcome, you're exactly at the right place at the right time. Enjoy exploring new concepts and new perspectives. And if you have been listening for awhile,
thank you for coming back and showing up. It means a lot to know, to be able to serve and support you in your journey. Maybe you are listening because you know, someone who fits the profile of gifted or twice exceptional, or maybe to someone is you and you are exactly why I'm making this podcast. So enjoy today's conversation. It is a real treat to have Colin Seale on the podcast.
I heard Colin speak before, and I was inspired by his story and his message for the gifted and twice exceptional community. He is also part of the G word partnership and was the speaker at jewelry school. Next let's talk to econference for twice exceptional adults. I will share my affiliate links for you in the show notes. It's not too late to get access to all the previous.
Let's talk two E conferences. So today I have the pleasure to sharing with you. The conversation I had with Colin, like a lot of two E adults. He is a multipotentialite. He studied computer science, became a teacher, and then decided to go to law school on the side, learning to think like lawyers do changed how he sees inequities formed already in the classrooms by denying students to learn the concept of critical thinking.
So he created his own teaching framework, which can be incorporated in any classroom, which you call think law, but I don't want to share too much already up front. I would love for you to hear this conversation and Khalid's passion for teaching. So enjoy this conversation. Here's Colin Seale welcome Colin. I'm super excited to have you on the show today.
I'm excited to be here. I'm actually a little bit starstruck when I learned about you and your story, I was really interested and I'm super excited to have you on this show today. And as a lot of people working in the gifted and twice exceptional field, you probably have a gifted story. So why don't we start with like who you are and how did you learn about your own neurodivergent For sure.
It's really exciting to be able to share these stories because while I understand that being gifted and having ADHD or any other combination of twice exceptionality is often talked about in these neural diversion conversations, I think it's important to step back for a second and recognize that every single human being is neuro diversion, right? Like we're, none of us are wired identically, but there's some people that are,
you know, only outliers sort of levels. And I think for me, what really hit me was growing up in the United States in Brooklyn, New York in a situation where my life story was one where a lot of kids that I grew up, like me typically are not very well served by our systems. So I was on free and reduced lunch. I had families that were immigrants.
We were our family's all from Barbados. And I was the first generation born in the United States. And on top of that and type of growing up in the struggle and this single parent home had a father who was incarcerated for a decade from selling drugs. And on top of all of that, I would say when I was in the first grade and I'm six,
seven years old, I'm not going to say that I was like a bad first grader. It's messed up to call first graders bad, but I was gifted at being bad. I went above and beyond. I was like really creative about all the ways I can cause mischief in the classroom. And what really got me was I also had a very bad speech impediment.
And for people who are like speech therapists, they can often hear some evidence that I used to struggle with a stutter or some evidence that I used to have really bad Lisbon pronunciation issues with certain kinds of words and letter sounds. And in that process of being evaluated, it turned out that I should have been to gifted and talented classes since I was in kindergarten.
And all my behavior challenges actually resulted from a lack of being challenged. And the thing that gets you the most about this is that at this point I began to get bused to a school that was not my neighborhood school. My neighborhood didn't offer. I get the mentality that program and the school was revolutionary. This school was transformation, but the biggest transformation of all was that I didn't actually change.
It just so happened that in this classroom space, me asking questions all the time. It was no longer disrespectful. And this class was based on me saying, Hey, we shouldn't do it this way. We should do it that way. That was no longer a willfully defiant. This was place where it was actually psychologically safe to be brilliant. And I don't know what my life would have looked like if I never had that psychological safety.
So I think I come to this work and I come with this level of passion around this work, because for one, our kids really need psychological safety to demonstrate their brilliance, whether they're identified, gets it or not. And I think when I look at that part of my gift, the journey where so many people in this space and education were trained and a developed around gifted education in general,
that I worked with that were my teachers, but they didn't understand gifted. And they understood a gifted, but so gifted, but I talked too much in class, get the, but I never really finished my activities or I was too sloppy or disorganized instead of gifted and super creative and divergent as a thinker and different as gifted and all these other things that truly could have been no barrier for me,
blossoming, if they actually were able to just re realize they needed to nurture and support me, instead of just presuming that my struggles were coming from a lack of effort or a lack of will. So that's the other aspect of, we've got a lot of selective achievement, a lot of underachievement and gifted education because we don't recognize the way to really support people for the individuals that they are.
Yeah. And as you just mentioned, like by chance, you got selected for this gifted program and it changed your life and you said you didn't change, but you know, your surroundings change and you finally got the schooling and the support that help you thrive and be quote unquote, better behave. But as you say, it wasn't, it was new that change.
It was the environment that changed. And that probably also got you later on reflecting that not everybody gets the chance and not everybody is as lucky to be identified and given such a support. Right. And I think the order matters to being identified and gifted at seven and being diagnosed with ADHD at 37. I'm not sure I would have ever happened that I would have been identified with ADHD at seven years old.
And somehow I would have gotten this chance to realize I was gifted at 37. I think what would have happened at that point was borrows would have been lowered for me. I would have been sort of, kind of tracked into a very different kind of academic track. And the possibilities would be much more limited, not because of myself, but because of the adults and the systems deciding to have a much more scarcity based mindset about what I could do.
So I look at that as definitely a blessing and a huge privilege that it went in that order. Hmm. And I guess my listeners here, I really am on two ends either. They have been diagnosed with ADHD or giftedness or both in childhood and then thought, oh, I grew out of it and rediscover it as an adult or to have children now in this situation.
And usually through them learn about their own ADHD, giftedness, autism as an adult, but you actually mentioned something very interesting. You got identified gifted as a child. And then as an adult had an ADHD diagnosis, how did this journey go for you? Like my mom would ask me, so what does it help you figuring out having ADHD at 37?
What, what did it change for you? How, how did your life improve or what was your struggle? How did you get identified? So let's talk about how that even happened. I know myself, right? I know the sharp cause I had to have in place. And right now I'll leave this organization. Think law, whatever, doing all this work around,
critical thinking all around the United States and got two different books out and design this whole curriculum that uses legal cases and upper grades and fairytales and nursery rhymes and lower grades because all kids started looking at all these really shady characters and children's stories and going back and forth about how Goldilocks is just a really scandalous individual breaking, entering into people's homes and stealing their porridge and violating their beds.
Just a very, very nasty girl. But these are the things that we get our kids to analyze and all this creativity, all these things kind of went into this program. And at the same time that I'm doing is I've got two children. I was married at this point as well. And I had already lived through this adulthood of recognizing that there's some things that do really,
really well. There's some things that are very dreadful to me. I would know the drain and sucking up my energy. That would happen. I'm the one certain kinds of clerical tasks and organizational tasks. I sort of saw this cycle of, although law school was a place where I graduated top of my class. And when I was a lawyer, certain things about practicing law were amazing to me and really kind of locked in.
But when I did things that were a little bit less interesting, a little bit more kind of like overkill on the administrative aspects of it, I would zone out. I was face out, I will make glaring errors. That would be like, what are you doing? I saw these patterns. I recognized where they were pouring into my life. I recognize the ways that a lot of those things became issues.
Even being a parent of young children while being married and starting this company. And in like maybe one of my final rounds of couple of constantly before getting a divorce, it was brought up and it hadn't been the first time it was brought up like, you know, have I ever considered looking into whether I have ADHD and I have thought about, and then I have to think about it.
And at this point I'm doing a lot of training in the gifted and talented circles all around the country. So I'm meeting people who specialize in twice exceptional kids and then looking at me like, well, duh, but I'm sitting in the actual, when I'm getting my evaluation. I remember being in his office doing this different tests and whatever. And I got to a point where the psychiatrist is like,
well, I'm pretty much off the charts. And a lot of my, my intellect and my giftedness has kinda got me to a place where I was able to like build a lot of structures around it. But I mean, I was really off the charts and I was in a kind of role where, for me, the way he described medication and impact of medication was going to be life-changing life-changing.
And when he talked about medication as light changing, and I thought about all the different stress and pressure that I had when I thought about the fact that I'm the CEO of a company where most meetings I have to end with, like this five minute buffer of silence, because I'm like, I think I'm forgetting something, but hang on, we just got to wait or I would have massive insecurity of spending hours and hours and hours looking at emails just to see if I forgot something.
If I started a draft, didn't send it. And all I thought at that point was a massive set of like, let down, let down from my family, let down from my former educators, because my label ultimately didn't matter. Why didn't I get the support? That was my issue. Like, why couldn't you just give me the support? Well,
you knew that I was struggling with these different things. We'd be in executive functioning of an organization. Like, why would you not just give me more support? Why would you let me struggle? So mightily. So that's kinda how I felt. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's so many people's struggle. Right. And giftedness is not just, there's so much prejudice around the topic,
especially if you identified as an adult, like, oh, life should be so easy. Why does it matter? Do you think you're better than others now? Or, you know, it's, it's not, it's not the easiness. It's more like the challenges that come with it and the support that people need. And the life-changing, it's like, it's not me as a person,
as a character that's at fault, but it's really me as, you know, my brain is wired differently. That's why I'm forgetful. That's why I struggle in daily activities. And then finally getting to support. And it, for me, it was very empowering. And as you say, life changing, just knowing about myself, having vocabulary and being able to explain myself and especially gifted people can probably compensate if they do have a learning difference that if they have ADHD or autism or some other neurodivergence that they can compensate,
but it's not, it doesn't level itself out. Right. You still struggle, but you, you have this capacity, but it's tiring. So I'm really glad you're sharing this so openly that you say you got the support at 37, but it is very frustrating at this point. I'm like, okay, I suffered for a lot of time, but I finally got to understand who I am.
Let's talk a little bit about after you went to the gifted program and you were really off the charts also in school, like you were very good at math. I, I, I learned, and then you went into law school. And so you want to talk a little bit about your school path and how you got into law. And then we talk about,
I think cloth. Yeah. So when I look back at going to school, I was in a school environment where particularly when I was in elementary school and to a large extent in, in middle school, that to be in 12, 13 years old, I was taught from second grade on by teachers that really understood how to nurture giftedness, how to find and nurture passions.
And I was part of a opportunity to take accelerated math. So we were two grade levels ahead in math. By the time I went into high school. And I remember being in middle school was like finding my groove. You know, I had an opportunity to be a part of the drama and dance program at my school. Cause it was a performing arts magnet.
And we had like a musicals every year, but travels, he brought away shows all the time. And I remember I was also playing piano, classically trained to play in piano and just was like, everything was interesting. My classes were exciting and I would still get in certain kinds of trouble. You know, I remember one time my notebook fell in English class.
I was in eighth grade. My notebook felt my binder and it was right before a parent teachers night. And I remember I took a midterm in that class and I got a 100, I got a perfect score on this midterm. And I remember my binder looked like a cry for help. I mean, it was half torn papers all over the place,
all this scribble Scrabble, it was terrible. And I remember my math teacher, my English teacher bringing into parent teacher conferences and telling my mom about it. I remember being in this conference, I was like, who cares? Who cares? I got a hundred and midterm who cares, like, why are you pressing me over these things? And they wouldn't think that didn't really seem to matter to me that at that point,
but at the same time, I think that's when all these aspects around like studying skills and organization and note-taking, and not really been pressed had not really been pushed, had not really been necessary. And now I'm going to this high school called the Bronx high school of science, which is one of the specialized high schools in New York. You gotta take a test to get into.
And I remember for one academically, it was at a very different level of rigor because it wasn't a school for gifted kids. It was a school for high achieving kids who did very well at hotter faster, more. That really wasn't my thing. I could do a hard and fast and more if it was interesting to do a harder, faster, more,
if you kind of tied it to one of my passions, but just in generally that wasn't something that I was prepared for. Also, I wasn't prepared for the kind of note taking and executive functioning and kind of management that it took to Excel in a high school where you had seven or eight classes a day, what every teacher had enormously high expectations and it was kicking your butt.
But more than anything while there's a lot of research that talks about the benefits of academic acceleration and the proof that accelerating a kid academically actually has little to no harm to a child. It does actually matter to focus on the social emotional and the social adjustment aspects of being 13 years old in classes with 16 year olds and 17 year olds. And that was something that really wasn't talked about at all.
So when I felt intimidated and I went months and months without submitting a homework assignment on a blank notebook and didn't take any notes and couldn't follow along and was cutting class and just not going to classes and had a lot of absences stack up, it's just, again weird. Why not give me support? I was at a school where to get into this school.
I had to show a certain level of academic promise. If you see that promise not being fulfilled, why would you just sit in your hands and just watch me fail and just watch me struggle to this day. It makes no sense to me that you wouldn't have intervene and done something earlier. So that was a tough moment because I had all the potential in the world,
but a lot of my struggles are very fixable. How did you pull through the high school? You mentioned in your book it's it was hard just for the sake of being hard. And if, as a, give the person, if you're done to understand the why you're not really motivated. Exactly. So how, how did you pull through? So it was a combination of things and the thing,
I'm not the lawyer book. I get that story about having this global studies teacher who wanted us to watch Gandhi the movie. And that was back in the day when he used to have the VHS tapes. And I'm like, you're talking about like a two tape movie, like three and a half hours of God. God needs a hell of a guy,
but I'm not watching this movie. I'm not watching three and a half hours and answering 50 questions about it. And the thing about the questions is they weren't questions that were like really in depth or about our kind of perception that will push us to make sure we're actually watching the movie. I'm not doing that. Never. I'm not doing that. What happened was I ended up because I was behind on some credits and whatever I had to take summer school.
And I remember one year, summer school couldn't be at the school. I had to be at the school next door to it. And the school next door. It was a kind of a neighborhood school kids from that school used to beat up kids from my school because my school had all the nerds. And I remember going to this school and I was just so interesting because the teacher in my art class,
because I was taking art in summer school, her that I was from Bronx science and then presumed that, that meant I must be smart. And I felt like at that point, I conflated smart with achievement and I felt like I really wasn't smart, but she wants to act like I'm smart. I'm going to keep up the act. I'm going to keep on pretending.
And it was one of those things where the simple act of being called an achiever, changed my mind about my level of achievement. And as a researcher out of Michigan, then Dante Dixon who actually does this work about what happens when young kids in poverty, young kids of color are actually told that they're achievers and they see that possibility. He compares it to Steph Curry,
the basketball player. Well, his dad was in the NBA. And when you get told, when you have NBA potential, when you see it, when you believe it, then shooting 300, 3 20 hours a day when you're 13 makes sense to you because you can actually believe that it's going to translate into these options. So when I started like going through this,
I kind of felt like, well, kind of worked for me in summit school to fake the funk. I just, I'm going to keep on faking it. I'm going to keep on pretending and lying to these people. And then at certain point I realized, wait a minute, all this fake in a funk and play in this ad, this is really what the game was supposed to be,
to begin with. Nobody ever told me that this was the game, but this is all there is to it all. I mean, the dude was like playing this game, fake it till you make it. Yeah. And the thing about it is we actually look at the tools involved in fake it until you make it. It's actually not even fake exactly.
Just doing these different tasks because what happens and what happens all along when we're talking about our lives as adults and in corporate world or nonprofits from whatever, or like, like to be successful, to be an achiever, what are you looking at? Like on social media, when you look at what it looks like in our classrooms is not about actual achievement.
It's about the performance of the achievement. And I felt like no one ever talked to me about that performance. I know when, as you like it, when my favorite Shakespearian plays, it talks about all the worlds of stage. But have we really thought about what that means? That all the world's a stage, all the world's a stage. Why do we teach our kids that like sitting down and putting your head down or doing all this work?
It's like all there is to it. The performance matters, the performance isn't there. An isolation is done with an audience in mind. So how do I make sure that I understand what this audience right here is looking for? What they're going to value, what they're asking for and customizing what my performance is based off of what the audience wants to see is the game.
That was kind of like my hidden education. I wasn't planning on learning that nice. Well, that wasn't part of the priority in high school, but by the time I got into college, my high school was harder than college. And for a lot of kids that go to very rigorous high schools, I think the college experience is so much lighter. It's so much more choice driven,
insurance driven. You kind of treat it like you have some level of sense, you treat it and you got some level of maturity. So college to me was one this kind of leadership journey of getting involved in different things. And I talk about that in my second book, tangible equity about how some of the ups and downs of like leadership and struggles that you face or you're developing as a young adult,
could definitely start to shape your mind and your attitude towards risk taking. And what I started to realize was part of that performance aspect was that a lot of people performed in the same way. A lot of people had a very kind of common conforming way of showing achievement of showing success. And it was kind of weird cause we're talking about performing, but I'm also talking about conforming.
And I remember being student body president at Syracuse university, and a lot of my colleagues were going into law school and I had wanted to water in law school. I was a computer science major. Then I was like, ah, these people are kind of jerks. I don't really want to be like, I don't want to go where they go and do what they do.
I don't like the way that they perform this. I don't like the way they conform to the performance of being a jerk all the time. So I got pulled into education, started teaching and thought about getting a master's in public administration because in public administration I'll be able to actually do stuff, not just talking about doing stuff. And long story short, what happens is I go from being the computer science graduate,
who gets accepted early into this master's program in public administration at the Maxwell school at Syracuse, which is the top ranked program in the country for that. And then I ended up going to teach, like I defer admission to this program and I'd go to teach for two years in Washington, DC through teach for America. And I go back to this master's program and I'm focusing on the financial management and state and local government,
because at this point I'm recognizing when I'm teaching kids have all kinds of issues outside of school. Like I have one girl whose asthma is so bad, cause our building has asbestos in it. Or I have one kid who's caught up in, you know, the child welfare system and it's always going back and forth. I'm like, right, we got to fix things outside of this and that relocating in the Las Vegas,
working in the child welfare system there as an analyst and realizing that the only time something changes is when we get sued and the law to me ends up being this bottom line thing. So I go back into teaching about a law school at night and for the first time ever, I'm experiencing extraordinary, massive success, extraordinary mindset because law school wasn't about memorizing nonsense and regurgitating crap.
It was about thinking your toes and planning all the angles and seeing different perspectives. And literally it was the opposite of conforming because to perform in law school, what does a mandatory courage you got to stand out the way that you argue has got to be different. It's got to be at something that would a professor will be like, woo, cause they're blading them blind,
the great newspapers without knowing who wrote them and then stacking them in order from the best to the worst. And it's hard to get an a in law school it's even harder to get this coveted award called the Cali award. When you get this Cali of what it means you had the number one overall essay response or final exam. So most people go to law school barely getting any,
A's never getting a Cali. I got a lot of eggs. I got five different Cali awards, right? Just to show you that, that the benefit of kind of thinking differently, what were those Kylie awards in contracts, wills trusts in the states, divorce, mediation property in constitutional law, very different types of questions, very different types of things.
But I was a very different kind of thinker and law school was the first time that I really set out. But then when I got back into working for a law firm, it went wrong back to the conforming view of things. And the performance stuff was something that could happen at a much higher level, or if I were to open up my own firm and had my own clients.
Right. But, but in the big firms structure, when you're doing junior associate kind of work, that's just not, that's not the space for it. So when I started looking at, yeah, so that's a little, my educational journey of how I got to that point. And I think it ties in nicely into like what I'm doing now you have,
please tell us. So one of the good things are interesting things about being a former teacher. It's really actually disrespectful is that the second you leave education, everyone cares. Well, what you had to say about education, that's really weird, but I'm an outsider now, but I'm an insider outsider. I'm at a big firm and being a part of this big firm being active in the community meant that now I'm on this Nevada stem coalition about really advancing stem careers for our kids throughout the state of Nevada.
And then I'm on this diversity coalition for the department of higher education and all these other things. And we're talking about the future of work and all these different things and college and career readiness. And one of the things we won't keep on talking about is critical thinking. Made sense. Critical thinking is key for college and career readiness. Critical thinking is key for the kind of world they're going into,
where they've got to be adaptable and flexible and agile. And yet show me the evidence of critical thinking. Show me where it's happening. And I'm going through these schools and doing these tours of an aviation program or robotics program that five kids out of 2005 kids, oh, we got a mock trial team here, 12 kids. We have a models. We win eight kids,
80 kids, even still a fraction of the kids. We answered that these schools are not AP programs, advanced placement. I got international baccalaureate. I've got magnet programs again, serving a small fraction of these young people. So we say critical thinking is crucial, but we treat it like a luxury. Good. This doesn't make sense to me. What would I look like if we actually gave all kids access to critical thinking,
what would that look like? How would that shift the game? Cause I moved that when I was busted at school in Brooklyn, when I was younger to be a part of a gifted program, there were only 12 kids per grade level. In this program, my class had 24 kids. There were 12 kids per grade level be a busted this program.
So what that really young age, I knew that although brilliance is distributed, equally opportunity is not. And if we wanted to create that opportunity, it had to be building a pathway to critical thinking. So I started think lot with this idea that there's something about tapping into our kids' sense of justice and fairness or injustice and unfairness that speaks to this thing that makes them want to dig deeper.
That makes them want to push a little bit harder and look at this. And I start talking about critical thinking. First people will kind of saying, that's not really for them because critical thinking that's for like gifted kids or kids in top tier stuff. We're just trying to get these kids to pass tests. We're just trying to get this kids to get through school,
but is a deeper level. It's not just critical thinking skills. It's not just habits and mindsets. It's also this idea, the end of society that focuses so much on being right. At what point do we actually teach our kids explicitly that do we right. Is more important than being right. Doing right. Is more important than being right. Imagine what I wore,
what looked like today, if kids became adults who understood just because I can doesn't mean that I should. Could you even imagine, have you been to a doctor recently? Yes. Now there's really two types of doctors and there's nothing in between there's doctors who get it and doctors who don't get it. I'm not talking about medicine, right? Because medicine is one of those fields where like,
if you're a practicing medicine, you have been decided that you understand medicine it's do you understand people? Right. We talk about being told they have a good bedside manner or whatever. Like, can you speak English to people? Can you speak in terms that people can actually understand? They can actually comprehend that or non-doctors, you know, and we'll do this in education in the United States.
We love acronyms this alphabet soup of blood. Well, according to the, and the SSOs talking about why do we personally complex these things, making things more complex than it needs to be. Because when our understanding people, I just saw a story today that the head of the CDC, the centers for disease control in United States is going in for media training.
And there's two things about that. That really stand out one, the humility that it sends to make a public announcement that I'm making an effort, I'd be a better at communicating to people because she does not have government experience. She had evidence analogy training as she is brilliant, but broilers doesn't matter if we get communicate brilliance, you know, at the end of the day that the Fowchee is someone that has been polarized unnecessarily in the United States,
but he's just the guy from Brooklyn at a time, my mother-in-law was talking about COVID like, it was just a flu. He sat and talked about and making very simple analogies and talking like the guy on the corner, not the guy with all these advanced degrees. And I'm like, that's huge. That's huge. So when we look at critical thinking,
there's work I'm doing with big law has a lot to do with like working with parents, or I have a whole website that's called raising critical thinkers.us. And here we're recognizing that some parents are apprehensive about what kids are learning in school. Why? Because you might be justifiably worried about your kids, learning what to think in school. If you haven't taught them how to think at home,
we've spent a lot of energy on like, how would they, how do we create our kids to think about different perspectives, to analyze positions from different stakeholders and really be able to dig in to different things in more detail. So we have the thing even called like informed opinion, informed opinion, where you look at a headline and your headline, right?
And the question we ask is like, what do you need to know? What question would you ask to be able to have a more informed opinion for this thing, whatever it is like, what would you ask that a more informed opinion about this? So I'm looking at CNN right now. I see a new star that says party passengers stuck in Mexico.
The airlines declined to fly them home. What would I need to know to have a more informed opinion about what this headline is all about? Or even as idea after a series of messaging, missteps, CDCs, Willinsky six out media training. Okay. What do I need to know about this? Cause what we're doing is recognizing that there's an intellectual humility that plays a huge role in critical thinking.
It's one thing to say. I don't know what I don't know, but I'm actually humble about that. I'm actually like constantly positioning myself as a learner in real time. And I recognize the limits to my learning in terms of none of my learning was actually objective. There's no such thing as truly unbiased learning. Everyone has an angle. Everyone has an angle,
right? So being able to approach the world with that level of helping skepticism means that I'm more flexible in my thinking. I'm more adaptable and being able to change my mind, changing my mind about things is not a horrible thing. It makes sense someone actually call it science. Well, thank you. And yeah, exactly. These different angles. And I think for me growing up,
I remember being at, you know, dinner table with my stepdad and we have like discussions and debates and I loved it. And sometimes you take just the stance or the role of the other opinion just to discuss it out. And I think that's something I took for granted growing up. But I think a lot of people do not get to experience that growing up and having really this different approach of yeah.
Having different opinions or just putting yourself in the shoes of somebody else, you know, seeing it from their perspective and taking on this, this arguments. So you published a book and then in 2021, you also launched B E project, a nonprofit organization. You call it B project, sorry. Yeah, That'd be project. Yes. Publish the book,
thinking like a lawyer. And they got like a lawyer it's been really kind of wild because I've got educators from Australia to France and I mean, to be an education bestseller, you typically sell 5,000 copies of a book. This book is sold over 20,000 copies in the midst of a pandemic. And it's just my first book that was wild about that is if reached number one on Amazon at one time,
you know, a category, special education, special education, because critical thinking is for everybody. And if you give access to critical thinking, practical tools, like it light people on fire. I bet people who are not even parents, nor educators who are really thinking like a lawyer being like, I've never really thought about critical thinking this way. And that's been really exciting.
It's been even more exciting to be able to like build that into the work we do and all over the country where we're doing trainings of educators and parents and poured a lot into my second book, tangible equity, which is now available for early release. But the B project is a little bit different. It's a little bit different than what I've been doing because one of the big problems we have in the United States around every aspect of education is the racial injustice that plays into education.
And the thing about this is I want people to sort of realize that I'm of the MLK sort of mantra. And when I say MLK, I'm not talking about that. The King's Fraser that he's always being quoted on, but there's a speech that he made where he talked about the problems with progress. And there's this idea that some people are that hopeless pessimist.
And there's some that are kind of crazy like cockeyed optimists, where it's like, okay, two things can be true at the same time, we've come a long way. And we still have a long way to go. Those two things can be true. It used to be illegal for black folks to be able to go to school. The public education mandate that everything has is to make sure that everyone has access to a free and appropriate public education in school that said,
I can say, we've come a long way. And also say, we still have a long way to go. If you look at like how kids do on like reading proficiencies and how they're doing in terms of the racial disparities and the academic performance. Like I can name all of that. But when it comes to gifted education, that particular get that education has become a really challenging issue in the United States because we've got a lot of states and it's,
it's so crazy to look at it. The states where we have the most number of black kids in public school have the fewest number of gifted programs, period. So forget about identify, get the kids. There's no program to have them identify four and states that have a lot of gifted education programming. We're seeing all of these disparities about not seeing a lot of black kids identify instead of the point where people are talking about let's get rid of giftedness altogether and get the programs all together.
Let's just presume every kid is gifted, whatever have you, here's what I'm going to say. I'm going to say, I like to work with things within my scope of power, in my scope of control. What I know is that when I go to get the conferences all throughout the United States, there are very few black and Hispanic gifted educators. Very few.
Now it turns out that when I asked the question why you will give to the educator, what drew you to this typically 80 to 90%, the people who teach and get that education will either get it themselves, have kids who are gifted or have someone very close to them who was gifted or whatever, right? So like if you have inequities in the system,
they tend to stack over time. So my idea is that if you're going to change the face of who gets to teach, give, given might be able to change the face of who gets to be gifted. I can't tell you how often I speak to people who are part of programs, running programs, and they actually identify some number of black and Hispanic children and the black and Hispanic parents say,
no thank you. No thank you. Because it can feel really isolated. I, for one, I have a gifted daughter that before she's in her district right now, when I knew she was going to probably be assessed as gifted, we lived in a neighborhood where she would have been the only black child in her class. Nope. Not doing that,
not doing that. I'm not going to have a go to this place where, and it wasn't just the only black child in her class. She was in a district where there was known to be some racial hostilities around because by the time she was in pre-K and free kindergarten at a Montessori pre K none the less. And I actually wrote an article about this,
my ex-wife and I wrote an article about finding like a green book for public schools, for our kids, because the green book is its infamous manual that black folks used to have to use in the sixties and seventies. And before that to like find a safe place to travel in the United States, we have a lot of sundown towns, a lot of places where you can stay in a motel or hotel,
if you were black roads that were dangerous to be at after dark. But we need this idea of a green book to say like, where can I go to a school that I could thrive academically? And five has a human. And she was already been told at that. pre-K that, oh, you have come to my party because we don't like brown people at my house.
Nobody wants to play with you. That's why nobody likes brown people. Like all this kind of mean nasty stuff. And I don't know about you, but I'm fairly certain that three-year-olds and four-year-olds, don't just learn. Racism just cuts. Clearly that's be a model of something different. That's it? The B project is amazing Christie burden and the Burton foundation here in Arizona,
where I live now sponsored. So that we're going to actually be rolling this out. Fairly silverware. We're paying educators of color who are already in the classrooms, $2,000 a pop to earn their, get the credential early. They'll get their credential is a teaching investment. And because when you can teach to the level, that's going to really challenge to get the kids.
Even if you're not teaching and get their programs, it's going to change the access that kids have. The critical thinking. It's going to increase the number of kids that have pathways to advance academic opportunities. And you know, what's going to really happen here. That excites me. We've got kids right now who are square peg, round hole, kids, square peg round hole kids,
because anyone could tell me this. Cause we all went to some kind of school, but we know all kinds of family members that are younger. We all know these people who were brilliant, but criminal brilliant but bad as hell. Brilliant, but always in some kinds of deep trouble. And it never occurred to me to understand a genius. We leave on the table until I went and I worked in my juvenile justice clinic.
When I was in law school, that juvenile justice clinic, I was like, this could have been the student council. This could have been the national honor. Society could have been the collection of celebratory his anatomy of all the schools in this district because these young men and women were brilliant. The challenges, they never got the chance to show that brilliance in the classroom space.
So when I look at the B project and what it could do to change, who gets access to this kind of programming, who gets access to this kind of development as a teacher, I'm very excited about this next level of advocacy and now work. I'm excited. I will closely follow. I'm super, super excited that you're doing this. Thank you.
And you have your second book coming out very, very shortly. So time's running out. I really want to talk to you also about your new book and how is that different from your first book and where can people pre-order. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So both books are available on Amazon or wherever you buy books, you want to get bulk copies might be better to go through myself at Ben GLAAD at us,
or do the publisher Routledge. And the thing about the second book, tangible equity and tangible equity, the full title is a really trying to get to a bigger point. I look at tangible equity. The full title is a guide for leveraging students' identity, culture, and power to unlock excellence in and beyond the classroom. And here's how that book connects with the first one.
When I look at thinking like a lawyer and critical thinking skills, the critical thinking gap, this idea that we don't teach critical thinking to all kids, that's a massive symptom of an audible education system, but it's a symptom. If you want to get down to the root of it, though, we got to get into the root of the idea that we've come to normalize inequity.
And part of it is we don't even really understand what we say when we say equity work. So when I talk about doing equity work, I'm talking about reducing the predictive power that demographics have on outcomes. And I don't care what country you live in. I don't care what kind of space we're in. We all know that predictive power in our communities.
We know whether it's the other side of the tracks or up the hill down the hill or north of the freeway, south of the train station, we all see these different dividers wherever you can. So commonly done. Oh, that's where the infant mortality rate is going to be the highest. And the schools are going to be the poorest and the outcomes are gonna be the lowest.
Like we know this. So if we do an equity work with disrupting that predictability well in the midst of the racial flare ups, that's what happening with the brutal murder of George Floyd had a lot of educators coming to me like, okay, what are we going to do? What can we actually do? And I remember what they really wanted it. They were coming to me asking.
I was like, I want to have more courageous conversations about race. And I said, why, why, why do you want to talk about race? I don't know how courageous a conversation is going to be. If it never leads to action. How about you don't talk about race anymore. How can we think about what is going to actually take to disrupt that predictive pattern?
And here it's of thinking about a couple of different attitudes, shifts, a couple of things that it's like, wait a minute. As an individual educator, you can sometimes feel powerless. It's a massive system. You can feel powerless. I like to call it the paper straw problem. You have a drink out of a disgusting paper. Straw is gross.
I hate papers. Trust. They come into a big thing of Bush, two minutes after you start your drink, but what's even worse is you're going to pay for the straw. It feeling like if you're doing it to save the environment, but that factory already has putting all those chemicals into the air and that manufacturing plants put all these houses into a water,
but we can feel like that sometimes, unless we recognize we actually do have a lot of power. So in this book, we actually get our readers to think about the power within the systems that they're actually more proximate to this, this whole view of social change. We've been doing it wrong, the best people to solve the problems, but mostly the ones that are closest to those problems.
So we've got to find the things that we're close to. And we've got to start unraveling that through a mantra that recognizes that we can sit around and tell people about academic success and merit. And we can recognize that merit is not useless, but we can also say it merits not enough. We want academic success so our kids can play a game. Why are they playing the game so they can slay the game so they can create a different kind of opportunity so they can make it an actual more level playing field and create things that are more just,
I have got to admit, I am more optimistic than the facts should leave me to be. When you look around at things going on in that world, beings will make you feel very pessimistic. What I can not be pessimistic about is these kids, the adults forget us. We're done. But these kids, these kids across the world are inherently special.
I don't know where they came from. I don't think we had anything to do with it zero, but their creativity, their openness, their accepting this, we can't blow it. We can't blow it. And if you had to build equity gives a lot of strategies that we can use to really tap in to degeneration, to be the one that actually gets us to our promise as a global society.
Oh, I can wait. I can't wait to read that book. Thank you so much for sharing. And where can people find you if they want to reach out if they want to learn more about you, about all your projects, the books, and the B project. So if you on Twitter, follow me at ECL Instagram at Colin Seale, you can follow our work.
I think lot of us on either platform and turn it on at work. I think lot at us by our books, wherever you do that. And we are very excited about getting into more international work. So if you got no work at international schools, private schools pay thing like that would love, love, love to talk about how we can bring those models there.
Our biggest thing I could say is that we don't want any of this to feel like one more thing. So ultimately if you work with in school systems that work with you within the curriculum, who already has to try and make it connect better with the kids in front of you. So I appreciate you all for following our work and please for more information,
check out, think GLAAD at us. And we even have a Facebook group has become a more and more popular called the tangible equity community and its community as a way that we can share lots of ideas for educators and ideas. We're really being able to push things. And if you're a parent basic critical thinkers.us, there'll be a really good way to be able to dig into that.
Thank you. I will put all of these links that you just mentioned in the show notes. So people can just scroll and click on the links and get right to you as the last question. Is there anything else that you would like to share something you wish people knew something you wish you knew earlier? I guess the one thing that I wish I knew was that there is no master plan.
Most people don't really know what you're doing. There's a sense sometimes that if you're in this big chop position or whatever, you've got all the answers, no one has all the answers. They're waiting for. You waiting for your kids, the waiting for us, but we need to be the ones we need to be the ones. Stop thinking that the answers is going to come from some up high.
Like the answer might be the thing that you're holding inside that program, that idea, that creative spot and embrace the fact that our differences can be the very thing that can light our world on fire in a good way. We need your differences. Thank you. I have nothing to add to this. Thank you. That was beautiful. And thank you again for showing up for being here and I will stay in touch with you.
Thank you. I hope you enjoy this conversation. The hour rescheduled went by way too fast. All the resources are linked in the show notes, and you can find more information about the episodes and about the podcast on unleash monday.com. You can sign up for the very sporadic newsletter and to be the first, to know any announcements. And if you're a gifted or a twice exceptional woman,
or identify with the social experience of a woman, then I invite you to join the unleash Monday community. You can find more information as well on the website. There's a link to the community. And if this episode gave you insights and inspiration, you can support me by subscribing to the podcast on apple podcasts or wherever you listen to the podcast, you can rate it with stars.
Hopefully you give me five stars and you can leave a written review. This means a lot to me. I really read all the reviews and it helps the algorithm to show the podcast to others who might need to hear about this topic. So of course, I invite you to be brave and also share this episode with a friend who you think might be gifted or learn about giftedness or twice exceptionality in adulthood.
So again, I would like to say thank you for being here and for being part of this amazing journey, have a wonderful day. And I see you in two weeks. Bye.