In this season’s second episode of Noble Schools’ video podcast, “Changing the Course: Building An Antiracist Education”, we talk with Ayanna Banks and Yesenia Maldonado, leaders of student experience and social-emotional learning* at Noble Schools.

In their roles, both Banks and Maldonado have a great impact on how Noble Schools listens to students and what they do with that knowledge. In this episode, they talk about how Noble Schools is incorporating social-emotional learning into classrooms, how that learning is informed by student voice, and why it is important to building antiracist schools.

You can read more about Banks and Maldonado below.

*Social-Emotional Learning: The process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply knowledge and skills to manage their emotions, understand and relate to others, and make responsible and caring decisions.

-CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning)

Ayanna Banks currently serves as the Manager of Academic Operations at Noble Schools. In this role, she manages a portfolio of projects, including the Student Experience Survey, and directly coaches instructional leaders at Gary Comer College Prep and Gary Comer Middle School.

Prior to transitioning to Noble’s support team, she was honored to serve the historic North Lawndale community as DRW College Prep’s STEM dean of instruction and later assistant principal. In 2010, Ayanna was named Teacher of the Year at Austin High School in Sugar Land, Texas and later named one of three Secondary Teacher of the Year Finalists for Fort Bend Independent School District. She left the classroom to create a math curriculum hub and published her first book, Quick Lessons for Algebra Readiness.

Her freedom-fighting work extends beyond the school walls. She co-founded the Chicago Alliance to Free Marissa Alexander, which later became Love + Protect. In 2015, she was a founding committee member of Liberation Library, an organization that sends books to young people incarcerated in Illinois juvenile facilities. In recent years, she’s partnered with the Illinois Prison Project’s Women and Survivors Project to tutor survivors incarcerated in Illinois facilities in preparing them to earn their GED. Through this work and more, she was recently awarded a fellowship.