The PLC Meeting That Made Me Cry, And Became My Origin Story
Updated: 5 days ago
Second year teaching, and I had a PLC meeting where I was struggling to help my students understand a concept I couldn’t quite crack open myself. I asked my math coach the question out loud, in front of everyone: how do I get my students to actually understand this?
Her answer was, “Well, I don’t know nothing about that. I don’t know nothing about that. You’re gonna have to ask somebody else.”
I started crying. I mean really crying, and trying to hide it, which if you’ve ever tried to cry quietly in a meeting, you know that never works. One of my colleagues saw me. He told me afterward, “I saw you crying. I thought you were one of those crazy teachers. I thought you were out of your mind.” It took him a minute to realize that what he was actually looking at was how much I cared.
I was a second-year teacher with a real question and nowhere to take it. My coach didn’t know the answer, and instead of saying “let’s figure this out together” or even just “I don’t know, let me find out,” the response I got was a closed door. She cared about me. I think she didn’t have the content knowledge either, and there wasn’t language yet for saying that out loud without it feeling like an admission of failure.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that meeting became my origin story because of what I decided to do with that feeling afterward.
Now here’s the mirror. 🪞 I became the educator who broke a lot of systems in my school district. I redesigned things. I rebuilt things. I pushed until the processes that weren’t serving students changed, and eventually that made me a target, because pushing that hard, that consistently, makes people uncomfortable even when your students are outperforming everybody. My students did outperform, every year I taught. Clearly something in that discomfort was working.
I think about how we answer people when they’re asking for support, especially a novice educator standing in a room asking a real question. “I don’t know” can be the beginning of a conversation or the end of one. That day, it was almost the end of mine. I decided it wouldn’t be.
Support means never leaving someone alone with the question.
DOPE MATH® in Practice
The moment someone asks you a real question about their own understanding, you have more power than you think. You can close the door, or you can open one. The educators who go on to change systems are often the ones who were once standing where you’re standing now, asking, and not getting an answer, and deciding to build one instead.
Put This Into Practice
Notice who is asking and answer like it matters. A novice educator’s question in a PLC is rarely small to them, even when it sounds routine to you. Treat the question as a real bid for support.
Never let “I don’t know” be the end of the conversation. You don’t have to have the answer. You do have to say what comes next, “let’s find out together,” “I’ll bring someone in,” “give me until Thursday.” A dead end and an honest limit are two different things.
Make room for passion before you judge the delivery. What looks like instability from the outside is sometimes just how much someone cares showing up without a script. Get curious before you get concerned.
Track your own results. If you’re the one pushing for change and it’s making people uncomfortable, let your students’ outcomes be the evidence.
Expect resistance when you start doing things differently. Systems don’t reward the people who redesign them, at least not right away. Build your resolve around your students, because it won’t always come from your colleagues.
Every educator who eventually becomes fluent in their content was once standing exactly where a struggling novice stands now. What you do with them in that moment either builds their expertise or quietly convinces them there’s nowhere to take a real question. Choose to be the door that opens.
Ready to Build Real Subject Matter Expertise?
Strong mathematics curriculum starts with educators who understand the standards, can design meaningful mathematical tasks, and know how to make intentional decisions about what students learn and how they learn it.
The DOPE MATH® asynchronous learning series is designed to help you strengthen your subject matter expertise and develop the skills needed to design, write, and evaluate high-quality mathematics curriculum.
Whether you're expanding your expertise or preparing to take on more curriculum development responsibilities, you can learn at your own pace and apply what you learn to your work.
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Continue Being DOPE,
Jaliyla Fraser
Creator of DOPE MATH®
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