Up Close with Tavon Lawrence

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Lawrence dishes on the impact of entrepreneurship on the community and shares his thoughts on the crisis in education in Baltimore.

Mr. Lawrence can be described as nothing less than a powerhouse of transformational leadership. I chose Mr. Lawrence as one of our first personalities to profile for our Pop Up shop as he not only improves the community through his entrepreneurship but he also lives a life of service as he has a deep commitment to education and the students and teachers of Baltimore City as he has served as a Baltimore City Public Schools Teacher, a Teacher Development Coach for the Baltimore City Teaching Residency (BCTR), Site Director for BCTR and now Senior Director of Internal Learning at the New Teacher Center. 

He has done all this while successfully running his own business, One Accord Productions. As a business owner he works to further enhance the community as he provides top-class media production services such as general photography, video production, editing and other a la carte services. His commitment to leadership and service is truly admirable and unparalleled! 

Today I had the pleasure of meeting up with Mr. Lawrence to discuss his thoughts on the education crisis in Baltimore, the teacher shortage, improving our communities through education and entrepreneurship and of course he dishes all about his business One Accord Productions!

Tell us about yourself. You are a force to be reckoned with as you function both as a leader within education as well as a business owner. Can you tell us about your work at the New Teacher Center as the Senior Director of Internal Learning?

"I’ve been working for the New Teacher Center for just about a year and a half now and I’m currently serving as the Senior Director of Internal Learning. My work focuses on learning and development for our organization. I work with individual contributors all the way to our managers. Our organization is currently focused on diversity, equity and inclusion within the organization and what it looks like to lead in truly equitable and diverse environment. To that end right now I am focused on our all-staff retreat which is a convening of our hundred plus staff members coming together in one place to do learning in development ownership of our DEI strategy for the organization."

Why choose this particular line of work? What is it specifically about the work of education that resonates with you?  

"I was working in human resources in a retail environment and I was doing a lot of work in  employment and that felt good but, I wasn’t making an impact on my community. I had always thought about being a teacher and I had a number of educators in my family. In fact a few of the educators in my family were like “What are you doing? Why go into education? You do not want to teach!" Yet I did it anyway and it has been one of the best decisions that I have made in order to give back to my community. I was able to give back what I believe my teachers gave to me: access and opportunities. Students don’t have access to opportunities not because they don’t have good educators in front of them but because of all of the systemic inequalities dealt to them. That’s why I do this work, to make sure that there are students in schools who have access the same opportunities or better opportunities than I had."
 

Between Project Baltimore, the teacher shortage and historically low achievement rates, how do we begin to heal the education crises in education in Baltimore?

"Project Baltimore does a really interesting job of highlighting all of the problems within Baltimore City Public Schools but we all know that Fox news comes with a lot of bias as well. It hasn’t been until quite recently that I’ve seen Project Baltimore covering more stories outside of Baltimore City Public Schools. They do a really good job of trying to highlight everything that’s wrong with our school district and that is one of my biggest problems with Project Baltimore. On the other side, project Baltimore also brings to light some of the problems that do exist within the public education system, however, it’s not just in Baltimore.  Project Baltimore or any news outlet that’s reporting news about schools needs to start digging into the historical aspects of education.

They need to start thinking about how the systems were set up to intentionally disadvantage students of color. These systemic injustices lead to a lot of the things Project Baltimore reports. A lot of these issues and problems have not just shown up but they have been intentionally embedded into the system to make sure that little black children and brown children don’t succeed at the same rate of the kids in in other districts.

In regards to the teacher shortage, there is an extraordinary teacher shortage. As you know I used to work for a alternative certification program, BCTR, which was all about bringing new teachers into the program. Our job was to recruit teachers for the district and we were recruiting a few hundred teachers on average every year. In addition to our program, there were also multiple programs in the district as well that were also recruiting new teachers. So in total you had about 700 to 800 new teachers coming to work in the district every year. 

That tells you that you don’t have a recruitment problem you have a retention problem. So when we talk about the teacher shortage what are we doing in our schools to first support teachers? Not only to get them into the classroom but to continue supporting them throughout their career? Then, to make the job of an educator more manageable. An educator is someone who wakes up and goes to the school and teaches all day then comes home and writes lesson plans for the next day. They create modified work for students with special needs. They then build relationships with parents and families. They grade papers on the weekend and do their reports. All of this while trying to have their own life and family.

It’s time to think about how do we make the job of a teacher one more sustainable. How do we see teachers as actual human beings and not machines? I think that if we start to look at some of those things and we start to reshape what education looks like and how we support our teachers as human beings and not just only as teachers. Only then will you have more people who want to stay for longer. It’s a dicey subject area because the job of a teacher is is a science, but teachers need balance and a lot of teachers don’t have that." 

From your special vantage point, what impact does quality education have on the community?

"I can’t help but think about what we’re labeling as a quality education. As we step back and we think about what’s happening in our country right now with divisive concept laws saying things like you can’t say 'equity' in the school; saying things like we can’t teach certain books in school. Right now I think we have too reshape what we label as a quality education. When I think about a quality education I’m thinking about making sure that students have access. 

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad has done a lot of work around the purpose of education. In her book she talks about these five pursuits of culturally and historically responsive teaching. She doesn’t call them like learning objectives because objectives are a lot different than the purpose or pursuit of quality education. She calls out identity, skills, intellectualism, criticality and joy.

When I think about quality education there is a curriculum where students can see themselves, their identities and their culture being represented. It’s time for students to see themselves along other cultures and get the balance right because there’s a lot of white-washing within our curriculum. Are we providing the truth about who we are as a society or just creating a long-haul battle that they have to fight in life for equity. 

In order to start to dismantle the systems that have been intentionally designed over years and years we have to start giving them something greatly differently than what we’ve been doing. Only then do I believe that our students will receive a quality education."
 

What advice do you have for other community leaders and activists to improve the community through the avenues of education, activism or entrepreneurship?

"I think community leaders improve the community by listening. We need to do a whole lot of listening in order to help support communities. For a long time, many people whether with a ‘white savior’ mentality or a ‘know-it-all’ mentality came into the community and tried to do things with the wrong mindset. Those days need to done and what we need to do going forward is to be listening to folks in in the community again. Those working through education and entrepreneurship need to be listening to community members. We need to be doing things ‘with them’ not ‘to them’. If you’re going to be working in a community and you’re gonna be of service to the community you need to be actively listening. As an entrepreneur how much listening are you doing to your clients? If you are not listening to your clients to find out what their needs are before you try to produce a product then you’re producing an irrelevant product. Your products should provide solutions for a group of people. If you know nothing about their needs then nine out of ten times you will be creating from a deficit mindset.

Our communities are full of knowledge and I get to hear from a lot of amazing folks. So it’s all go back to Dr. Muhammad who talks about the art of braiding. When we look at the art of braiding which originated with slaves who were home doing certain designs on their heads with braids. To the naked eye it was just a hairstyle but for the slaves it was actually a map. She calls it unearthing the genius of our thoughts. So again when we’re going into communities how are we going to unearth the genius that already exist in those communities? How do we use that genius to push education or business development to push that community forward?"

In your opinion how does entrepreneurship impact the community? 

"I mean the first thing that comes to mind when you read that question is that entrepreneurship is an opportunity that people can use to build something to possibly outlast them selves and their lives for years and years. For years we have always had to support folks who came into our communities with funding and resources. So take for instance I’m from East Baltimore and when I think about growing up and access to supermarkets. Back then, there were very limited supermarkets within our neighborhood that were walkable. That means we had limited choices as to where to go for food. To talk about entrepreneurship within communities it gives community members options as to where and how to spend their money. When people come from outside then that money leaves the community but when it comes from local entrepreneurs then we can keep that money in the community to continue to build." 

Tell us more about your business, One Accord Productions.

"One Accord Productions is a media company that was started in 2007 right after I graduated from undergrad with a degree in Electronic Media and Film.  In our region we have a strong need for quality media for businesses. We work with businesses of all sizes. We do general photography, video services as well as family portraits. We do it at an affordable rate with top-class quality production so that we are making sure that folks get good quality products."

What makes One Accord different from other business models?

"We really try to ensure that our clients are like family. There is nothing worse than doing a photo shoot or trying to produce a media product with someone who you haven’t spent time; someone you having a conversations; with someone who doesn’t listen and we talked about that listening earlier. So we try to do some listening, we do some relationship building and also try to create an inviting environment where you can come and you can get the products you need while feeling at home. We do weddings and some of our brides that we did very early on way back in 2007 we’re still in contact with because we are very intentional about building relationships with people. So we aim to do that intentional listening and ensuring that people get what they need."
 

How do people contact you for more information?

"The photography website is www.oneaccordproductions.com. You can also follow us on Instagram @PhotographybyOAP. If you would like to follow me in all things education then you can follow me at Twitter handle @LawrenceTavon."

Any last words?

"Thank you for this opportunity Claudia and for thinking about me!"

The pleasure was mine! Thank for you for this wonderful opportunity! I'm sure our readers were enlightened and took away important information from this interview!

Follow One Accord Productions on Instagram @PhotographybyOAP

Follow Tavon Lawrence on Twitter @LawrenceTavon