Joy Lin was an excellent student growing up, graduating second in her high school class. After earning three degrees in natural sciences that put her on the path to medical school, she realized she wasn’t cut out to be a doctor because she didn’t like blood or needles. So, she turned to education. Joy started her teaching career with troubled kids and ended up in the juvenile detention center, where kids are held between arrest and sentencing.
“I was dealing with a group of students who typically do not like to learn from textbooks. They varied in age from 10 years old to 18, “ she says. “I was forced to come up with some kind of a lesson that they could all participate in. The solution I came up with was Marvel DC movies. We would watch a movie and, periodically, I would pause the movie and talk about the physics behind each feat they were accomplishing on screen.”
This superpower approach to teaching took off and eventually led to a series of popular TED Ed videos, putting Joy’s work on the map of education innovators. Now, she is a math teacher in the Austin Independent School District, where she is working on a different way to teach math that involves sentence diagramming.
Understanding the Sentence Structure
She and her colleagues noticed that excellent math students were doing poorly on state math exams because of the word problems. As she says, the math test was more of an English test. As someone who was not a native English speaker, she knew that getting the students to at least understand the basics of the sentences of math problems would help.
“And that’s where sentence diagramming comes in,” she says. “You have to break down the sentence to realize what words are the important verbs or important nouns and what words are just descriptive. You’re trying to get the essence of what the sentence is saying.”
Joy’s approach is working in Austin, and other educators are starting to take notice.
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With Christopher Stewart, it all started many years ago when his oldest son started school. That’s the reason why he got involved in education and as he says, “It’s the reason I’m here, and that’s the only reason why we’re having this conversation.”
“For black kids who have a black teacher once or twice in their school career, it makes a big difference in their graduation rates and their college acceptance rates,” he says. “There is a push almost everywhere to increase the rates of people of color leading educational initiatives, but it’s not fast enough, and it’s not producing enough leaders.” He says there is a real lack of incentives to attract the brightest minds to come back to education as a profession after college. 
Chris Stewart is Senior Partner and Chief Executive of the 
Kara Mulkusky, the MTSS Instructional Specialist at Bay City Schools, takes it a step further. She sees an urgency in teaching kids the social and emotional skills needed to succeed far into their futures. “What are we doing to teach those students on a school-wide level,” she asks? “What are our expectations that we want our students to learn? How are we modeling those expectations for our students? And what are we doing to make sure that those positive behaviors are reinforced appropriately so that they’re maintained throughout life?”
Using restorative discipline, they ask students with behavioral issues, what happened? Why did it happen? What were you thinking? How can we fix it? They follow what they’ve termed the “R cubed factor” which represents recover, reflect, and return. Sarah adds, “The most critical factor is the second ‘R’ which is to reflect. It’s the reflection piece that includes all five restorative questions ending with ‘What can we do to repair the harm that’s been done? What can I do to make things right?’”
Sarah has been in the educational field for 15 years, 10 of which were in the classroom at the elementary level. Upon obtaining her Master’s Degree in 2014, Sarah pursued her passion for Educational Leadership and accepted the Coordinator for Student Placement Options position with the Bay District Schools in Panama City, Florida where she could share her passion for student success through social and emotional avenues. Viewing discipline as a learning experience that must be taught and focusing on positive relationship-building rather than punitive consequences, Sarah hopes to be a change-agent for this restorative discipline approach. 
Kara is originally from Pennsylvania where she graduated from
It’s not just the testing; it’s also the mindset of the way we traditionally teach our kids. And that starts with the teachers. Her district is a member of the Texas Public Accountability Consortium (
As an undergrad at 
“Corporate America is a bureaucratic organization,” he says. IBM doesn’t do a lot of innovations internally; CISCO doesn’t do a lot of innovations internally. They go out and buy nimble, innovative companies and introduce them into their model.”
Dan Forest has served as 