Embedded Files
Triangulating evidence
Street Data
Ensuring high outcomes for all is not a task that can be checked off a list. Equity isn’t a destination but an unwavering commitment to a journey. It can be easy for us to focus on where we hope to land and lose sight of the deliberate daily actions that constitute the process. Day to day fires and the weight of the system make it enticing to hold others and not ourselves accountable.
29
Equity Traps and Tropes
Traps and Tropes
Description
Doing Equity
Treating equity as series of tools, strategies, and compliance tasks versus a whole-person, whole-system change process linked to culture, identity, and healing.
Siloing Equity
Locating equity work in a separate and siloed policy, team, or body
Spray and pray equity
Engaging “equity experts” to drop in for a training with no ongoing plan for learning or capacity building.
Navel-gazing Equity
Keeping the equity work at the level of self-reflection and failing to penetrate the instructional core and/or school systems and structures (e.g., instructional planning, student tracking).
Structural Equity
Redsigning systems and structures (e.g., master schedule) without investing in the deeper personal, interpersonal, and cultural shifts.
Blanket Equity
Investing in a program or curriculum rather than building the capacity of your people to address equity challenges as complex and ongoing place of inquiry.
Tokenizing Equity
Asking leaders of color to hold, drive, and symbolically represent equity without providing support and resources to thrive nor engaging entire staff in the work.
Superficial Equity
Failing to take time to build equity-centered knowledge and fluency, leading to behavioral shifts without understanding deeper meaning historical context.
Boomerang Equity
Investing time and resources to understand your equity challenges but reverting back to recycled status quo solutions.
33
Satellite Data
Large grain size
Illuminate patterns of achievement, equity, and teacher quality and retention
Point us in a general direction for further investigation
Map Data
Medium grain size
Help us to identify reading, math, and other student skill gaps (e.g., decoding, fluency, fractions), or instructional skill gaps for teachers.
Point us in a slightly more focused direction
Street Data
Fine-grain and ubiquitous
Help us to understand student, staff, and parent experience as well specific misconceptions and mindsets.
Help us to monitor students’ internalization of important skills.
Require focused listening and observation
Inform and shape our next moves.
55
Satellite- By attempting to distill the kaleidoscopic process of learning into a metric and promoting a narrow discourse of achievement
Satellite data lack context and nuance, failing to account for phenomena like stereotype treat or ground us in the layered, human experiences that young people bring to learning.
Street data are the qualitative and experiential data that emerges at eye level and on lower frequencies when we train our brains to discern it. These data are asset based, building on the tenets of culturally responsive education by helping educators instread of seeking out what’s wrong. Street data help us reveal what’s getting in the way of student or adult learning.
57
Listen -reflect & collaborate
Uncover- Reflect & collaborate
Reimagine- Reflect & collaborate
Move- Reflect & collaborate
74
Sample Questions:
Student Listening Session
Sample Questions: Parent Listening session
Sample Questions: Adult Listening sessions
What is going well for you in school right now? What is something you feel proud of?What is your biggest challenge or frustration?
(If an inciting event has happened) How did the incident affect you? What feelings came up?
What do you want or need to heal?
What changes would you like to see (in our classroom or school), and why do they matter to you?
What feedback do you have for me to make our school or classroom more equitable and inclusive.
What is going well for your child right now? What is something you feel proud of?What is your biggest challenge or frustration about their school experience?
What should we know about your beliefs,values, and/or culture to best support your family and child?
What changes would you like to see in our classroom or school, and why?
What feedback do you have for me to improve your child’s experience or the school in general.
What is something in your proactive that you’re feeling good about/proud of right now?What’s frustrating you/keeping you up at night?
(if an inciting event has happened) How did the incident affect you? What feelings came up?
What do you want or need to heal? What do you think our community needs to heal?
What is one critical change you’d like to see in our school culture, systems, or structures?
What feedback do you have for me as a leader/colleague to support equity and inclusion?
80
When you feel wiggly in your body, what kinds of movements do you want to make? (Students could draw or write their response before sharing verbally.)
What’s great about feeling wiggly, and what’s difficult about it for you?
If you had a magic wand to change one thing about carpet time, what would it be?
Where and how could we make movements in class so that we don’t accidentally hurt others?
What do you want me to say or do to help you when you feel wiggly?
89
Agency is the idea that people have the capacity to take action, craft and carry out plans, and make informed decisions based on a growing base of knowledge. In the social ecology of the classroom, agency is about connection to self, peers, adults, the community beyond the classroom, and ultimately the world. Agency doesn’t emerge in a vacuum, nor does it flourish in a traditional classroom where the teacher is postiitioned as a content expert dishing out knowledge. It emerges in a learning space where power is distributed, knowledge isdemoncratized, diverse perspectives are welcomed, and children are intellectually and emotionally nourished.
102
Belonging, which is encapsulated in the statement, “I see myself, and I am senn and loved here.” Belonging emerges in a classroom characteried by deep and caring relationships. Author Zaretta Hammond frames relationships as the onramp to learning, particularly for marginalized students who may have little reason to trust their educators (Hammond, 2004).
103
Efficacy- a feeling that “I can make a difference here”. Collective teacher efficacy, the shared belief among teachers in their ability to positively affect students, has emerged in John Hattie’s research as the number one influence on student learning (Hattie, 2008). For our purposes of assing studnet agency, efficacy means the learner’s ability to set an intention and produce a desired result, and it is abosltuely crucial to healing from and transforming opporession.
104
Warm Demander
Develop your students as human beings first.
Family & Culture: Understand and honor the strengths of the community
Authenticity: Model vulnerability and humility; be an ally; respect your students
Clear Boundaries: Show strength, listen and affirm, challenge and offer a choice
Growth Mindset: Believe in the “impossible,” embrace failure
140
Warm demander and safe classroom community
Teacher
Is in control
Treats students like family
Takes consideration of students’ feelings
Is understanding
Shows respect
Brings positive energy
Students
Equality for all students
Safe environment
Happiness and quiet
Feels like a family
Closeness with each other
Stronger mindsets
224
Warm demander leaders: Leaders, such as superintendents, directors, coaches, principles, assistant principals, who expect a great deal of their colleagues, convince them of their capacity to grow, and use street-level data and adaptive coaching moves to transform mindsets and practices. Rather than call people out, warm demanders call folks in and up to the work of equity.
Warm demander teachers: Teachers who expect a great deal of their students, convince them of their own brilliance, and help them to reach their potential in a disciplined and structured environment (Delpit, 2013).
235
Page updated
Report abuse