Too Dope Teachers and a Mic

This week, we are fortunate to bring you a conversation with Denver Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Alex Marrero! It is unusual to break down the walls between leadership and teachers across the system, but our new supah-intendent is game! Listen to his story, as a kid from the Bronx who became a district leader. Hear what he has to say about staff shortages and teacher evaluations. Hear his Top...

This week, we are fortunate to bring you a conversation with Denver Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Alex Marrero! It is unusual to break down the walls between leadership and teachers across the system, but our new supah-intendent is game! Listen to his story, as a kid from the Bronx who became a district leader. Hear what he has to say about staff shortages and teacher evaluations. Hear his Top...

We’re back this week with some things on our minds. It’s November, but for so many educators, it feels more like February. We are aging and exhausting quickly. In the first segment, we discuss mental health. The struggles, the challenges before us, and what can be done to protect and heal the spirits of teachers, students, and communities. We shout out the professionals doing the important work, b...

We're back this week with some things on our minds. It's November, but for so many educators, it feels more like February. We are aging and exhausting quickly. In the first segment, we discuss mental health. The struggles, the challenges before us, and what can be done to protect and heal the spirits of teachers, students, and communities. We shout out the professionals doing the important work, b...

We are so humbled and blessed to bring you this conversation with the inimitable Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, author of Cultivating Genius, a seminal work in antiracist and abolitionist pedagogy. Dr. Muhammad shares with us a new vision of what teaching may look like. Dr. Muhammad discusses the potential to develop living teaching frameworks, and ways to cultivate genius for ALL students. A keeper. And a...

Michael Diaz-Rivera was a brilliant and respected teacher with a reputation for empowering and inspiring his Black and Latinx students. He rose quickly to prominence for his unapologetic radical love for his community and our children. A frequent advocate and organizer for his professional association, school, and district, Michael was featured in local stories across the city for his tireless adv...

Michael Diaz-Rivera was a brilliant and respected teacher with a reputation for empowering and inspiring his Black and Latinx students. He rose quickly to prominence for his unapologetic radical love for his community and our children. A frequent advocate and organizer for his professional association, school, and district, Michael was featured in local stories across the city for his tireless adv...

We. Are. Back. We follow the wildest school year on record with thee wildest return to school on record. Amid social unrest, some on silly ish like masks, some more insidious, like attacks on educators and communities of color, we're back with students, masked and maintaining flexibility as we live and work on the knife's edge. Things are hard, y'all. And we got jokes.

If you are a Latinx or Chicanx/Xicanx person, you probably remember the very moment you first read Luís J. Rodríguez's Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in LA . For me, it was when I had just finished college and happened upon a copy at my school. I had just read Monster: The Autobiography of an LA Gang Member , written by Sanyika Shakur, and I was searching, unwittingly, for a way to humani...

When I first learned of the "I notice/I wonder" approach, I was not aware that the concept had really gained traction as a math practice in the work of Annie Fetter. Fetter, who trained to become a teacher but quickly became one of its most humanistic and revolutionary trainer-experts, had revealed that allowing students the space and freedom to simply describe what they see in a math lesson deepe...

Jaer Armstead-Jones is the definition of persistent. He has experienced life's struggles and beauty alike. He has found healing through spirituality and creativity. And over the past few years, he has been writing tirelessly, consistently, and patiently to put a story into the universe. Drawing on experiences lived both by him and others, My Invisible Father asks important questions of fatherhood,...

Just wanna tell you that the mixtape doesn't have a specific order. Track 2, the one we did SECOND, is very meta and reflective. In the winter of 2020, Asia approached us with an idea. Having been forced from her teaching position a few years before, Asia was keenly aware of the conditions faced by Black teachers in these schools. This has been the basis of some of her research around Dr. William...

Owen is a quintessential disruptor. Owen is punk rock. Owen radiates love and revolution, which is why he is the Michigan Teacher of the Year for 2021. If you haven't had the please of hearing his ideas, learning about his message and platform, you are truly missing out. He is funny, brilliant, and ready to burn some things down for justice. Since recording this episode, we did indeed attend Space...

We are beyond blessed and fortunate to bring you our much-anticipated interview with the venerable and brilliant Angela Watson, who has been working to abolish the notion of the teacher as martyr for years. Her 40 Hour Teacher Workweek program saved Gerardo's teaching career, ultimately helping him to be named the 2021 Colorado Teacher of the Year, and she stands poised, in the wake of her recent...

Since coming to Colorado and hoping to become an educator, Jenny Medrano has been at the forefront of change and liberatory thinking and youth development. We first crossed paths when she mentored youth leaders as a part of Building Bridges, later Shift, and has recently struck out on her own, in a world desperate for a new kind of healing. In this expansive conversation, we discuss healing advoca...

YALL READY FOR THIS?? Track 3 of the mixtape is FIRE, pure and simple. We sit with Elijah Wright and Hasadiah Israel for an encompassing, energetic, funny, engaging and convicting conversation. It is rare for authentic cross-generational exchange to occur, especially for teachers. We often act on the assumption that because we are in the presence of young people, that we engage in such exchange, b...

Space Camp was soooooo much fun. Gerardo made new friends, solidified relationships with old ones, and the general feeling of the 2021 State Teachers of the Year was positivity, solidarity, joy, and a newfound exuberance about what education and educators could be. Though not every Teacher of the Year could be present, it was a special gathering of special spirits that could have lived on as a pri...

Kevin and Asia have been hosting The Exit Interview for the last few months. The Exit Interview is a TooDope Production that was formulated by Asia as part of her doctoral work around Racial Battle Fatigue, Dr. William Smith's concept of the labor and burden that is disproportionately shouldered by educators of color, especially Black teachers. The Exit Interview is profound, emotional, and authen...

Kimberly Dickstein-Hughes, the 2020 New Jersey State Teacher of the Year, brings joyous and disruptive energy to her work, both in her school and the teaching community at large. Whether helping students think critically about Shakespeare or facilitating their own engaged and authentic work, "Kimmy D" is a transformative force in the lives of her students, and for public school educators everywher...

Asia and Kevin's interview with Dr. William Smith of the University of Utah was so saturated with wisdom that we brought him back for a part II! Dr. Smith has probably forgotten more about racism and education than we currently know, and for that reason, we decided that a single conversation cannot hold him! In this conversation, Dr. Smith shares his wisdom, doing a deep-dive into Racial Battle Fa...

The 2021 Summer Revolution Mixtape is here! Track 1 features the brilliant, insightful, funny and honest Desmond Williams, author of The Burning House: Educating Black Boys in Modern America, founder of Nylinka Educational consulting and former principal. This conversation is in-depth, so pace yourself! We discuss, well, everything, from trauma to institutional racism to self-employment to hip hop...

And in the blink of an eye, we have reached 100 episodes. In this season finale, we reminisce about the good times, the funny times, the difficult times, and the moments of inspiration. As we help you reflect on this, the wildest and most difficult year that anyone can remember, we take a look back as we look forward. We have each made a list: Our ten most memorable moments since December 2016, wh...

Equity is the goal for nearly every diverse school district in the country. As the ripple effects of generational trauma and systemic oppression continue to be felt in communities of color, especially Black and Brown communities, districts like the Denver Public Schools have created positions and offices of equity, inclusion, or both. Dr. Darlene Sampson, equity specialist coordinator at the Weste...

Welcome to the Habitually Disruptive podcast, hosted by me, 2021 Colorado Teacher of the Year Gerardo Muñoz. This TooDopeProduction aims to celebrate and amplify folx disrupting traditional education in favor of liberation and change for ALL students. In this pilot episode, I interview Aspen High School's Tameira Wilson, a seventeen year veteran who has dedicated her career to teaching multicultur...

About 14 months ago, COVID-19 brought school as we knew it to a grinding halt. In the weeks and months that followed, the US education system scrambled to adapt, modernize, move all school operations online and generally attempt to continue business as usual over video calls and virtual learning platforms. We struggled with this. If you caught our episode "Pump the Brakes" in the spring, we expres...