It’s hard to take a big difficult topic like Equity and distilling it into action items. It’s difficult to disseminate that information to the teachers. I like that this team doesn’t shy away from “conflict” or “going against the grain.” From conflict comes our greatest work. I’m glad our admin is open to being challenged.
We distilled our conversation down to several action items.
- Shared Reads. We talked about making the curriculum more culturally responsive. It’s difficult because we have an evidence based viable curriculum for students. The teachers will be reading about Culturally Responsive Teaching and what it means, but there was no plan for implementation.
- Common Language. We need to have a common language around diversity and inclusion. We need to shift our language from focusing on deficits to building on strengths. I shared an example about some teachers using the word “can’t” when it comes to student achievement. Let’s take the word “can’t” out of our vocabulary. It’s important to show how our language can be informed by our implicit bias. The team agreed that tackling teacher’s implicit biases may be too much too quickly. This led to a conversation about team building.
- Team building and psychological safety- getting vulnerable with each other. There was an exercise that I did about our misconceptions. As a Black female, it’s easy for this to turn into an education session. It’s a good exercise, but tread lightly with this one. It’s easy to fall into this trap where there’s an imbalance of vulnerability.
One of our admin last year shared a story about her Filipino culture. She shared how it informed her practices and identity. Her mother was half Filipino and bullied of because of it. She talked about the politics of passing. She and some of her siblings look more Filipino while some of her other siblings could pass for white.
It was a profound experience to get that vulnerable with people.
My group had people share incredibly deep seated traumas and vulnerabilities. While others had surface level things that didn’t get to the heart of who they are.
That imbalance in vulnerability made the whole activity disingenuous.
Not that someone needs to bare their entire soul in front of strangers.
In past experiences, sometimes it’s not psychologically safe to share. I’ve shared deeply personal things with colleagues in the past. Next minute I know, the director is asking me things that I’ve only shared with that one person.
Our equity team stalled because the school culture wasn’t psychologically safe.
If it wasn’t safe for teachers and staff, how could we possibly make it safe for students?
There has to be a level of vulnerability that needs to match the energy of the others.
4. Our team wanted to generate questions that were embeded in every system that we created.
- Questions about equitable practices.
This was the heart of what our team wanted to get at. We wanted to develop questions that permeate everything we do. It’s hard to distill such a big all encompassing topic and not make it feel like a checklist. We had disagreements about where to start on this.
As a school psych, the best place to start is looking at the data.
What is the data trying to tell us? Why are only 48% of our Black students reading proficiently compared to 60% of white students? We need to identify the gaps in our system before we actually tackle them.
How many BIPOC students are being disciplined vs. percentage of representation? What’s the racial breakdown? What’s the breakdown by gender, language, ethnicity, and SES? How many students are being referred for special education? How many students are being referred to our MTSS?
This website has some good questions around equity that our building can use. The data is available but nobody’s using it.
We need to have open-ended so that teachers and staff are having ongoing discussions. It’s all too easy for this questions to become a checklist and all of the equity work to become performative.
Before you start an equity team, you need to look at the data. We’re not drawing any conclusions or anything, you need to pull it up and break it down.
Not only that, but after everything we do, we need to have reflective questions as well.
- I made a suggestion that we have a mission statement. Apparently the district already has a mission statement. I wonder how we can break these tenets into goals and action items. How do we ensure our students are receiving an equitable education? How do we make sure our curriculum is culturally responsive? There’s a tendency to tackle everything all at once. Teams get overwhelmed and the issue of equity gets pushed to the back burner. Our team only needed a handful of things to tackle. As we tackle problems more will arise. The rest will come with time. The biggest thing we need to focus on is making our team sustainable.
We need to take that mission statement and break it down into measurable metrics. That’s how we can look at it through the lens of equity.
Our equity team meeting ended on a strange note. We spent most of our time choosing roles. I didn’t stay in the district long enough to figure how everything panned out.
If I could back in time and do this over again, our equity team time would have been better suited if had:
- Simplified the roles that people played. There was a huge document of roles that people could chose. Every minute people were changing roles. It felt like watching kids play a game of “House” where they spend 20 minutes trying to figure out who does what. By the time they’ve figured it out, recess is over.
Same thing happened with our equity team. We lost so much of the school year because of it. I hate wasting time. That was the kind of “busy work” that made it feel like we were doing something when we actually weren’t.
You really only need a notetaker, a facilitator, a timekeeper, and a records and data analyst. Just use the TIPS framework, no sense in reinventing the wheel every time. - Focus on inner work. It was hard to convince the team that this was the most important step of equity team. My inner work as a Black woman is going to look different than my white coworkers. For me, it’s going to look like embracing cultural humility. Another part is healing the harm that was done to me by the school system.
You can’t enter a community without healing yourself first. You can create a community with out acknowledging the harm that was done. Our equity team wanted to do this on their own time, but it’s not something that can be skipped. Touching basis on our own inner work journey and sharing is important.
Some of the goals I wanted to accomplish moving forward were:
- Breaking down the district mission statement into 3-5 measurable goals. Academics, behavior, and school climate and culture would be a good place to start.
- We need to create something that allows for student input, like a student leadership team.
- Start creating 10-20 comprehensive and open-ended equity questions.
- Working within our current constraints regarding curriculum to address being culturally responsive. Somewhere at the district level, there is a disconnect between teams. We can’t deviate from our core curriculum. If the district is not picking cultural responsive curriculum, what can we do.
- Constant and consistent data review and making adjustments as we go on.
- Creating sustainable systems that are not so person dependent. There needs to be a binder or some form of documentation that can be picked up and continued.
Equity work is never easy, but it’s worth every step when we commit to making real, sustainable change. To truly impact our students, we need to move beyond performative gestures. We need to live an anti-racist philosophy. It’s about progress, not perfection—building systems that last beyond us.