What changes when students are invited to help design the classrooms and supports they both need to thrive? In this episode of the Black Teacher Project Podcast, BTP Founder and Executive Director Dr. Micia Mosely is joined by Black educators Albertina Carillo, Christine Daniels, Jahvan Russell, and Paul Jackson, all past participants in the Black Teacher Design Lab, for a conversation about what becomes possible when teachers move from designing for students to designing with them.

Across elementary and high school classrooms in California and Florida, the teams of two reflect on co-designing healing-centered responses to challenges their students identified as part of the Design Lab. They share how young students helped create their own wellness spaces, bringing imagination, joy, and ownership to a process usually led by adults, and how high school students worked alongside their teachers to address math anxiety while building classrooms grounded in trust, cultural connection, and student voice.

The conversation also turns to what the Design Lab created among Black teachers themselves. The four educators reflect on the affirmation, care, laughter, shared learning, and honesty they found in community with Black educators across the country, and how those relationships became spaces to exchange practices, talk openly about the realities of teaching, and pour back into one another. Together, their stories offer a vision of support rooted in presence, empathy, compassion, collective action, and relationship. This episode asks what becomes possible when classrooms become communities where teachers and students listen to, learn from, and build alongside one another.

Explore Designing for Liberated Learning, BTP’s collection of healing-centered solutions co-designed by Black teachers and their students through the Black Teacher Design Lab. Black teachers interested in joining the Fall 2026 cohort can learn more about the opportunity here and apply with a teammate by Monday, September 28.

“The Black Teacher Project is an expression of love.” Ten years after BTP began, Dr. Micia Mosely sits down with two people who have helped shape its story from the beginning, LaShawn Routé Chatmon, founding CEO and President of the National Equity Project, and Kia Walton, former Oakland math teacher, founding BTP Fellow, and current BTP Program Manager.

Together, they look back at what it took to build a space where Black teachers could be seen, supported, and trusted to name what they needed. Chatmon reflects on BTP’s beginnings within the National Equity Project and the vision of centering Black educators’ experiences, knowledge, and leadership in the pursuit of educational equity. Walton shares what it meant to encounter BTP as a young teacher and find Black affinity space , whole-person care, rigorous professional learning, and a community that affirmed that Kia belonged.

Looking ahead, the conversation turns toward what Black teachers will need as education continues to change. From AI and threats to public education to the enduring need for human connection, the three imagine a future where Black teachers are not simply navigating the systems they inherit, but leading, designing, and transforming what comes next.

As BTP begins its next chapter as an independent 501(c)(3) organization, this anniversary conversation honors the people, relationships, and vision that made its first decade possible while dreaming toward the next.Support the Black Teacher Project and help make the next decade of Black teacher thriving, leadership, and possibility possible.

What happens when we stop asking students to regulate themselves and start asking schools to become more human? Social emotional learning is about far more than managing behavior. In this episode of the Black Teacher Project Podcast, BTP Founder and Executive Director Dr. Micia Mosely is joined by Dr. Dena Simmons, founder of LiberatED and former Assistant Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, for a powerful conversation on what it means to teach the whole child through relationships, healing, and racial justice.

Drawing on her experience as an educator, teacher educator, and nationally recognized voice on social emotional learning and liberatory pedagogy, Simmons challenges conventional understandings of SEL, exploring how it can reinforce harm when disconnected from identity, justice, and community. Together, she and Mosely share practical examples of building trust, honoring student agency, integrating emotional learning into everyday instruction, and creating classrooms where every student feels seen, valued, and free to learn.

This exchange between two great friends reminds us that teaching the whole child begins with caring for the whole educator. As Simmons reflects on the inseparable relationship between teacher wellbeing and student wellbeing, she offers a vision of schools rooted in humanity, collective care, and liberation. For educators seeking to move beyond compliance and toward deeper connection, this conversation is both an affirmation and an invitation to reimagine what social emotional learning can make possible.