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Algorithmic Bias in Coding and Facial Recognition Software

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Algorithmic Bias in Coding and Facial Recognition Software

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How I'm fighting bias in algorithms | Joy Buolamwini

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Def Poetry - Taylor Mali - What Teachers Make

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Current Hardcore History Available for Free

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Dan Carlin's hardcore history - Like history? Check this out. Fantastic site for boning up on history, compelling presentation, opinionated, you will learn so much about World War 1, the Khan empire etc. Actually more of (free) Audio book than podcasts, hours of listening here. (USA, 2011) [...]

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At American Public Media, we make podcasts for curious listeners. Our shows explore new ideas, uncover truths and tell human stories. All of our shows are powered by you, our listeners. Discover your next favorite podcast below.

Interested in underwriting opportunities or supporting our programs? Connect with us.

In the Dark

Terrible, Thanks for Asking®

You know how every day someone asks, "How are you?" And even if you're totally dying inside, you just say "fine," so everyone can go about their day? This show is the opposite of that. Hosted by author ( It's Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool Too)) and notable widow (her words) Nora McInerny, this is a funny/sad/uncomfortable podcast about talking honestly about our pain, our awkwardness, and our humanness, which is not an actual word. Visit the website and subscribe to the podcast.

Julie's Library

Join beloved icon Julie Andrews for story time! Julie and her daughter, children's author and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, invite you into their library to read their favorite children's books. Every story comes to life with sound, music and activities. Authors, kids and other special guests chime in, too! It's a show that will inspire lively conversations and a lifelong love of reading. Visit the website and subscribe to the podcast.

Spectacular Failures

The Slowdown

Decomposed

Decomposed breaks down the stories that have shaped classical music, from secrets and scandals to acts of sheer genius. Hear these stories accompanied by the symphonies, operas and other masterpieces they inspired. Hosted by Jade Simmons, a classical concert pianist and storyteller, the first season of Decomposed takes on gender expectations, Cold War propaganda and the danger of putting your personal life on the stage. Produced in partnership with Classical Minnesota Public Radio. Visit the website and subscribe to the podcast.

The Hilarious World of Depression

Tremendous Upside

What happens when an athlete's body is in peak condition but the mind is throwing flags? On Tremendous Upside, Women's Basketball Hall of Famer Chamique Holdsclaw interviews some of the most fascinating stars in sports who, like Holdsclaw herself, have faced real mental health issues. Featuring conversations with athletes like Metta World Peace (formerly known as Ron Artest), Theo Fleury, Suzy Favor Hamilton, Briana Scurry and more, Tremendous Upside reveals a side of top athletes never shown in their highlight clips. Visit the website and subscribe to the podcast.

The Weeknight Kitchen with Melissa Clark

Weeknight Kitchen with Melissa Clark takes on one of the biggest dilemmas of busy people: what are we going to eat? In each episode, you'll join cookbook author and New York Times food columnist Melissa Clark in her kitchen, working through one of her favorite recipes and offering helpful advice for both beginners and seasoned cooks. It's a practical guide for weeknight eating, from the makers of The Splendid Table. Visit the website and subscribe to the podcast.

The Splendid Table

The Splendid Table, hosted by award-winning food writer Francis Lam is a culinary, culture and lifestyle program that has hosted conversations about food culture, eating and cooking for more than two decades. Listeners get a modern, multicultural weekly snapshot of the food world - exploring different cultures, cuisines and ideas. You'll hear conversations with chefs as well as home cooks and the small personal stories that come out of the expansive world of the table. Visit the website and subscribe to the podcast.

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B rains On!® is a science podcast for curious kids and adults from American Public Media. Co-hosted each week by kid scientists and reporters from public radio, we ask questions ranging from the science behind sneezing to how to translate the purr of cats, and go wherever the answers take us. Visit the website and subscribe to the podcast.

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Forever Ago is a history show for the whole family. Every episode explores the origin of one thing - like sandwiches, video games and clocks - while teaching listeners to think critically about the past. Produced by APM and Brains On! Visit the website and subscribe to the podcast.

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Historically Black

Objects hold history. They're evocative of stories stamped in time. As part of The Washington Post's coverage of the Smithsonian's new National Museum of African American History and Culture, people submitted dozens of objects that make up their own lived experiences of black history, creating a "people's museum" of personal objects, family photos and more.

The Historically Black podcast brings those objects and their stories to life through interviews, archival sound and music. The Washington Post and APM Reports are proud to collaborate in presenting these rich personal histories, along with hosts Keegan-Michael Key, Roxane Gay, Issa Rae and Another Round hosts Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton. Visit the website and subscribe to the podcast.

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At American Public Media, we make podcasts for curious listeners. Our shows explore new ideas, uncover truths and tell human stories. All of our shows are powered by you, our listeners. Discover your next favorite podcast below. Interested in underwriting opportunities or supporting our programs? Connect with us.

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Revisionist History Podcast - Malcolm Gladwell Podcast - Pushkin Industries

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Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell’s journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood. Click now to listen to the Revisionist History podcast on Pushkin Industries.

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Think about your elementary school.

If you attended an American public school, chances are you went to that school because your family lived in that school's attendance zone. You probably didn't think twice about it.

We tend to assume these are neutrally drawn, immutable borders. But if you take a step back and look at the demographics of who lives in each attendance zone, you're faced with maps like this:

Once you look at the school attendance zones this way, it becomes clearer why these lines are drawn the way they are. Groups with political clout - mainly wealthier, whiter communities - have pushed policies that help white families live in heavily white areas and attend heavily white schools.

We see this in city after city, state after state.

And often the attendance zones are gerrymandered to put white students in classrooms that are even whiter than the communities they live in.

The result is that schools today are re-segregating. In fact, schools in the South are as segregated now as they were about 50 years ago, not long after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.

But this exact strategy - gerrymandering school districts to include certain kinds of students and exclude others - can also be used to integrate a school, rather than segregate them.

In America, there is already a massive amount of residential segregation, shaped by a long history of racist government policies. This is why everyone going to the nearest school perpetuates very segregated classrooms. But using school zones, we can actually gerrymander these lines so we're not recreating the underlying segregation.

But that's not happening in most places.

Two recent studies - one by Meredith Richards and another by Tomas Monarrez - find that most districts draw these lines to perpetuate the underlying residentialsegregation.

Some even make it more segregated.

I get that this is a problem, but what does this have to do with me?

The decisions of where to draw these attendance zones are made on a very local level, which means we have a lot of influence on this matter.

In fact, recent research shows that school boards with members who are registered Democrats tend to draw lines that reduce segregation.

This means you can play an active part in deciding which children should be allowed to run bake sales together, learn their multiplication tables together, and shuffle through book orders together.

That's why we're using data that Monarrez shared with us to see how your own district is faring.

First, we'll show you what your district would look like if everyone went to the nearest school. Using that baseline, we'll show you whether or not your district reduces segregation - or exacerbates it.

Why thinking about segregation in the context of school attendance zones is important

There's kind of a twisted reason why we focus on school attendance zones.

On one hand, there is a lot more stratification between districts - between, say, an urban district and a suburban one.

This is a product of the white flight that ensued after the Supreme Court integrated schools in the 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education, which was aided by government policies that backed development loans to suburbs that would guarantee only white residents.

So a truly comprehensive integration plan would require a solution that mixes students from different districts together.

But in the 1974 Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley, the court ruled that school districts did not have to integrate among each other if the district lines weren't drawn with racist intent. Segregated geography, created by government policies, would just be recreated in our schools. As Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in his dissent, the decision meant "school district lines, however innocently drawn, will surely be perceived as fences to separate the races."

This still left room for districts to make sure their classrooms weren't separated by race. But the Supreme Court put limits on that, too. In a 2007 decision, the court ruled that school boards can't use the race of an individual student to decide where they go to school. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that schools could instead use demographic data to decide where to build new schools or draw attendance zones.

But even with the incredibly limited scope of this action, a huge portion of American districts are using these attendance zones to exacerbate segregation.

It's important to clearly state what's happening here:

Government policies created segregated neighborhoods.

The Supreme Court said we couldn't integrate schools across the most stratified boundaries.

School districts could still ameliorate segregation within their own district.

But even then, a huge portion of districts used these school boundaries to actually further the segregation that exists in each neighborhood.

Meanwhile, a growing number of people are side-stepping integration efforts by attending charter schools, private schools, or even seceding from their school district - all of which further segregate schools.

This is what happens to school boundaries when racial demographics shift

In a 2013 paper, researcher Genevieve Siegel-Hawley studied Henrico County Public Schools in Virginia and she found that, in this racially changing suburb, "school officials responsible for the district's rezoning process failed to embrace the growing diversity of the school system and instead solidified extreme patterns of racial isolation within high school attendance areas."

She cited a blog post written by a parent who lives in heavily white areas:

This is clearly the hottest topic at the bus stop each day. ... My first reaction was that we would just move if the schools changed to ones which we do not want to send out kids to.

This anecdote plays out on a larger scale, too.

Richard's 2014 study found that districts with rapid changes in racial makeup end up having school attendance zones that are gerrymandered to further segregation. This indicates that white communities see an influx of minority families move into their neighborhoods and assume the defensive stance of fencing themselves in.

Richards also found that stable communities - ones where the demographics have stayed steady - also have high levels of gerrymandering toward segregation. "It seems as if [the boundaries] have been there so long that people have sorted across them," she told me. "The cusps of those boundaries are extremely strong."

This means that, when the dust settles, white families insist on moving next to other white families and recreating white havens.

This is what happens when school districts try to reduce segregation

Some districts, however, are using these school attendance zones to try to reduce underlying segregation. A 2015 study by Saporito and David Van Riper suggests some schools boards may be drawing irregular shapes that aren't just drawn on top of the existing segregated geography, and ultimately creating more diverse classrooms.

"This correlation implies (but does not prove) that some school boards adopt school zoning plans with weird shapes in order to integrate children who live in separate residential clusters within a school district," Saporito wrote to me in an email.

And this year, researchers Hugh Macartney and John D. Singleton published a paper that found that school boards with members who are registered Democrats tend to create more integrated schools within their district. It's an encouraging finding - one that shows local elections can have a big impact on how inclusive our schools are.

But they also found causal evidence that this integration causes "white flight" out of public schools.

It falls in line with a 2007 paper from Saporito which shows that the children in neighborhood public schools tend to be less white and significantly poorer than the neighborhoods in which they are located. In other words, white families in diverse neighborhoods are opting out and sending their kids to private or charter schools.

It also falls in line with Monarrez's findings, which show that when students in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district were exposed to more black and Hispanic students, it caused a certain amount of white flight between 2000 and 2010.

And it falls in line with the increasing number of communities who, instead of moving, are using their political power to draw new school district boundaries and secede from the existing district. They are essentially fencing themselves in with the people they feel belong in their community, while excluding others.

In short, the way the courts have interpreted the segregation laws, white communities with political and economic clout still have quite a bit of agency to determine who their kids go to school with. And they're deciding that they only want a certain amount of diversity in their schools before they decide it's better to opt out of the system.

The maps in our heads

The maps at the top of this piece should create a sort of segregation baseline for each district.

Our neighborhoods are already quite segregated, and it's important to know if school attendance boundaries are being drawn to segregate our classrooms even more.

But groups that resist school rezoning often make the argument that there has been a valuable and strong community that has formed around a school. In Henrico County, Virginia, one couple wrote a letter that read:

None of these options shows the dire need to redistrict our small group of subdivisions, but ALL of these options uproot a longstanding Godwin community, potentially split close knit relations, and rob us of a nationally recognized school and education that many of us consciously chose when we purchased our homes.

This couple clearly has a map in their head of which neighborhood blocks belong in a group together, and which ones don't. It might be based on who they know, where they spend time, or what they've heard about other areas. In short, they have formed a geospatial bias based on their experiences.

But it's important for us to understand how much this country's racist history has shaped these maps that we've internalized.

One of my favorite pieces of research is by Maria Krysan, a University of Illinois sociologist. In a 2009 paper, she describes talking to a bunch of people who live in Chicago and asking them if they know anything about certain neighborhoods.

What she found was that white respondents had a blind spot for neighborhoods that were more diverse, even if they were majority white. Meanwhile, African Americans were less likely to know about far-flung suburbs.

This means America's long history of socially engineering where people live has not only segregated neighborhoods and schools; it's also created maps in our heads that tell us what is familiar, what is not, what is scary, what is safe.

And ultimately, we make small decisions based on these emotions that accrue into segregated neighborhoods and segregated schools.

That's what makes this data and research so powerful. They give us some baseline to challenge the imaginary fences, which ultimately allow schools to be separated by race.

Correction: A previous version of this piece said American schools were as segregated now as they were 50 years ago, but it's actually schools in the South that are as segregated as they were 50 years ago. That said, in the last 30 years, black students who attend heavily black schools has increased in every region in the US.

Read the conversation

Tomas Monarrez, a UC Berkeley economics PhD candidate, joined me for a discussion in Vox's The Weeds Facebook group about how school districts could be gerrymandering attendance zones to reduce segregation - but generally don't. The conversation ranged from what parents and school board members can do to the underlying housing segregation. Catch up on it here!

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We can draw school zones to make classrooms less segregated. This is how well your district does.

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Think about your elementary school. If you attended an American public school, chances are you went to that school because your family lived in that school's attendance zone. You probably didn't think twice about it. We tend to assume these are neutrally drawn, immutable borders.

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 Johns Hopkins University Good Behavior Game

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 Johns Hopkins University Good Behavior Game

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Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine

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I t's a mild October morning in northeast Baltimore. At Govans Elementary School, a tidy brick building nestled in a cluster of equally tidy brick bungalows, 25 kindergarteners are sitting at tables bearing variously colored book bins.

Their teacher, Mrs. Nemeth, suddenly makes the peace sign with her right hand while gently blowing a chord on the blue plastic harmonica that hangs from a lanyard around her neck.

The children instantly grow hushed.

"We are going to play the Good Behavior Game," Mrs. Nemeth announces, referring to a classroom management tool that has been studied by researchers at the Bloomberg School for more than 30 years.

Often referred to simply as "the game," it is remarkably effective at tamping down aggressive and disruptive in-class behaviors such as fighting and yelling. Its long-term benefits are even more impressive: A series of longitudinal clinical trials initiated in 1984 by Sheppard Kellam, MD, now a professor emeritus in Mental Health, and currently led by Professor Nicholas Ialongo, PhD, have demonstrated that exposure to the game at a young age can dramatically reduce a child's risk of everything from drug abuse to suicide later in life.

The children, of course, are oblivious to all of this. To them, the game is just a game. And that is what makes it so effective.

"While we play our Good Behavior Game, you are going to be reading," Mrs. Nemeth continues. She then asks the children for examples of behaviors that might earn their tables demerits-behaviors that are defined with input from the children themselves, and which are known by the fanciful word "spleems."

"Making funny faces at somebody," says Claudia, a little girl with elaborately braided hair.

"Not reading your book," says Tyrell, a little boy wearing a bright red shirt.

Mrs. Nemeth reminds the children that any table that racks up more than three spleems will lose the game. She then sets a digital timer for five minutes.

"Our Good Behavior Game starts now," she says, blowing an arpeggio on her harmonica.

For the next five minutes, Mrs. Nemeth walks around the classroom, calling out violations.

"Red table, that's a spleem. Green table, that's a spleem..."

To an uninformed observer, it's hard to see what the children, who seem remarkably compliant, are doing wrong.

"Can you guys tell me why you might've gotten spleems during this game?" Mrs. Nemeth asks once it has ended.

The children correctly surmise that some of them did not have their books lying flat on their tables, while others simply weren't reading at all. But not a single student was called out for talking, or making faces, or otherwise disturbing their peers.

In the end, every table comes out a winner. And now it is time to choose a reward from a list of activities that would, were the game still underway, qualify as spleems.

"Nevin, what would you like to do?" Mrs. Nemeth asks a tiny boy.

"Under the table!" he blurts.

And quick as a flash, 25 children disappear under six low-slung tables, crowding behind their miniature red plastic chairs like delighted participants in an indoor round of hide and seek. But there is no seeker. Just lots of smiles, plenty of giggles-and the prospect of brighter futures for all.

Positive Peer Pressure

The Good Behavior Game was first described in a 1969 paper in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis by the eminent psychologist Montrose Wolf and two of his graduate students at the University of Kansas, Harriet Barrish and Muriel Saunders.

The origins of the game remain unclear: According to one source, Barrish may have seen a teacher playing it in a classroom; according to another, Wolf came up with it himself. (He had already invented the timeout, a disciplinary technique well known by the parents of unruly children.) In any event, the game is simple enough that more than one desperate educator might well have improvised something like it over the years.

"I'm sure there are many teachers who have played a version of the game without realizing that it was the game," says Kelly Schaffer, MS, a research associate in Mental Health who coaches teachers to play the game and gathers data on its use through classroom observation. Schaffer herself first encountered the game 12 years ago while teaching second grade. Like many educators, she was skeptical at first. "My initial response was that my kids may not do this," she says, but the game quickly won her over.

On the face of it, the game looks like a straightforward example of operant conditioning, a form of learning in which behaviors are strengthened or weakened through reward or punishment. The theory behind operant conditioning was first elaborated by the famed behaviorist B.F. Skinner nearly 80 years ago, but the concept is far older. Any parent who has ever told a child that they can't have dessert until they've eaten their vegetables has employed operant conditioning. So has every dog owner who has offered their pet a treat in return for sitting and staying.

There is a twist, however. While demerits are given for infractions by individual students, their consequences are collective: Little Claudia might be the only one on her team whispering or making silly faces, but everyone sitting with her will lose their chance to dive under the table.

Thus, while the game reinforces positive classroom behaviors, it does so through group-based prizes that reward individual inhibition, effectively yoking the success of the team to each child's ability to manage his or her behavior.

Psychologists call this group-contingent reinforcement. Everybody else calls it peer pressure. Whatever it's called, it gets results. When Muriel Saunders played the game in a fourth-grade classroom loaded with misbehaving kids, the incidence of disruptive behavior declined by 80 to 90 percent.

Additional small-scale studies of the game conducted in the 1970s and early 1980s showed similar in-class effects. It was not until Kellam discovered it, however, that the game's preventive properties became evident.

Benefits for Life

In the early 1960s, Kellam and a couple of colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago established a community mental health center in Woodlawn, a low-income African-American neighborhood on the city's South Side. At the time, only half of the community's students completed high school, and Woodlawn's residents were especially interested in giving their kids a good start in school.

Kellam and his associates focused on behaviors that signaled when first- and second-graders were struggling with the demands of the classroom, from punching their classmates to not paying attention. Longitudinal studies of the effects of these behaviors identified aggression as a significant early risk factor for problems ranging from poor academic performance to criminal behavior.

In 1982, Kellam came to Johns Hopkins, where he became founding director of the NIMH Hopkins Prevention Research Center. (The latter eventually evolved into the Center for Prevention and Early Intervention, which Ialongo currently directs.) Building on the Woodlawn studies, he sought to answer two fundamental questions: Is it possible to reduce aggressive behavior as early as first grade? And if so, what might be the impact later on?

When Kellam and his team searched for an intervention that specifically addressed aggressive, disruptive classroom behaviors, they came across the Good Behavior Game.

A colleague translated the original 1969 research paper into a protocol for implementing the game within a large-scale randomized clinical trial. And with the support of the Baltimore City Public Schools, Kellam and his collaborators conducted a study that ultimately involved more than 2,300 children in 41 first-grade classrooms spread across 19 schools in five urban areas that were primarily low- to middle-income and mostly African-American.

Some of the kids played the game, some got a different intervention aimed at helping them learn to read and some got neither. All were assessed at the outset to see how they were adapting to the classroom environment, with follow-up assessments and interviews in third grade, in middle school and at ages 19 to 21.

The researchers quickly found that the game markedly reduced aggression. But the first sign that something else was going on appeared in the late 1990s, when Kellam and James C. Anthony, PhD, now an adjunct professor at the School, discovered that children who played the game were less likely to take up smoking-as much as 87 percent less likely, depending on their gender and initial level of aggression.

Subsequent analyses revealed that the game had all manner of preventive effects.

Although the game's protective influence varied by gender-it exerts a greater effect on boys than girls, who display fewer disruptive and aggressive behaviors in class to begin with-those who played it were half as likely to think about or attempt suicide later in life, and less than half as likely to suffer from antisocial personality disorder, a condition associated with drug abuse and serious violent and criminal behavior. They were less likely to engage in risky sexual behavior; required fewer services for problems with emotions, behavior, drugs or alcohol; and were more likely to graduate from high school. (Linda Taylor, the principal of Govans Elementary, points out that students who are better behaved spend less time in her office and more time in class, receiving instruction.)

"We were overjoyed," says Kellam.

Those same studies revealed that the game worked most powerfully on the kids who needed it most: highly disruptive, aggressive boys. Astonishingly, the most aggressive boys who played the game saw a nearly threefold reduction in their risk of drug use disorders.

By the time those results were in, Kellam and his colleagues-including Ialongo, who came to the School in 1988-had already embarked on subsequent generations of trials that combined the game with other interventions, such as programs to help kids deal with bullying and depression, or to help parents support good behavior at home. Not long afterward, they began using a version of the game called PAX GBG ( pax is Latin for peace) that was developed by psychologist Dennis Embry, PhD, who is now an investigator for the Center for Prevention and Early Intervention. (Having trained at the University of Kansas, Embry had long been aware of the game, but he only discovered its long-term benefits in 1999, thanks to Kellam's research.)

Now Ialongo and his team are comparing the individual and combined effects of the game and an intervention that teaches children conflict resolution.

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The Good Behavior Game: The Game that Keeps on Giving | Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine

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I t's a mild October morning in northeast Baltimore. At Govans Elementary School, a tidy brick building nestled in a cluster of equally tidy brick bungalows, 25 kindergarteners are sitting at tables bearing variously colored book bins. Their teacher, Mrs.

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Math Education Teacher Resources Common Core Cool Video Lesson Free Worksheets Elementary Middle High School Homeschool Algebra Geometry Lessons Help Tutor Homework

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The book covers a topic in a period of American History of which that I was unaware. I have found no other source that speaks to the conditions that existed in the deep south for Blacks between the end of Reconstruction and World War II. While the contents often left me angry for a moment because of the way people were treated, in the final analysis I was left with a better understanding of why Blacks generally have had such a difficult time progressing in so many areas of society in the U. S.. I think the book or others that cover the same topic should be required reading for ALL high school children and properly discussed to promote better understandings between races. No guilt should be felt by anyone due to what happened during the period in question nor should anyone expect anything but a better understanding of some contributors to differences in progress made by members of different races. Summarily, I think it is a great book! Read full review

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Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II [Book]

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The book covers a topic in a period of American History of which that I was unaware. I have found no other source that speaks to the conditions that existed in the deep south for Blacks between the end of Reconstruction and World War II.

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The Zinn Education Project is my compass in a sea of corporate textbooks, packaged common core curriculum and standardized testing. My entire curriculum is based on lessons that can be found on the Zinn Education Project.

High School Social Studies Teacher, Portland, Ore.

Your support is needed to help more students learn people's history. 100% of Zinn Education Project funding comes from individuals like you. Donate today.

By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

From voter ID laws to voter-roll purges, gerrymandering to poll closures to the deadly in-person voting conditions during a pandemic, the right to vote is under attack and the stakes are high. It is critical that students learn about the fight for voting rights, past and present.

Nov. 30, 1924: Shirley Chisholm Born...

Teaching About the Violence in Palestine and Israel...

I can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don't BELIEVE in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don't need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.

-Howard Zinn

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Zinn Education Project: Teaching People's History

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The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people's history in middle and high school classrooms across the country. Based on the lens of history highlighted in Howard Zinn's best-selling book A People's History of the United States, the website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and reading level.

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A look back in history at a time of great promise and great disappointment for Black Americans who dreamed of and struggled for the promise of community and full citizenship.

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Project Lit Community

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We express ourselves in different ways. On Flip, you can use our simple and fun built-in camera to record your thoughts, add effects and share within your Flip group as video, audio only or text in your web browser or mobile app.

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Flip is a video discussion and sharing app, free from Microsoft.

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Flip (formerly Flipgrid) is a video discussion and video sharing app, free from Microsoft, built for classrooms and beyond. Learn more.

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Wesley Lowrey: Why Minneapolis was the breaking point
One of the classic texts in African American studies is Zora Neale Hurston's 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me." Her playful yet profound articulation resonates for me now. She wrote, "I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it ... No, I do not weep at the world-I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."

Some of her words, I must admit, are too hopeful, at least for me right now. In fact, I do weep at the world; I am, in a sense, part of the sobbing school; and I am skeptical that my lone oyster knife can cut any of the rot out of this nation. But, like Hurston, I refuse to see the story of who I am as a tragedy.

Joy is not found in the absence of pain and suffering. It exists through it. The scourges of racism, poverty, incarceration, medical discrimination, and so much more shape black life. We live with the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow, and with the new creative tides of anti-blackness directed toward us and our children. We know the wail of a dying man calling for his mama, and it echoes into the distant past and cuts into our deepest wounds. The injustice is inescapable. So yes, I want the world to recognize our suffering. But I do not want pity from a single soul. Sin and shame are found in neither my body nor my identity. Blackness is an immense and defiant joy. As the poet Sonia Sanchez wrote in a haiku about her power-and her struggles:

Come windless invader

I am a carnival of

stars a poem of blood

People of all walks of life are protesting the violent deaths handed out by police officers. This is extraordinary both because the victims were black-and when does black death elicit such a response?-and because Americans in general have a hard time dealing with death. Think about how uncomfortable many Americans are with grief. You are supposed to meet it with a hidden shamefulness, tuck yourself away respectably for a season, and then return whole and recovered. But that is not at all how grief courses through life. It is emetic, peripatetic; it shakes you and stops you and sometimes disappears only to come barreling back to knock the wind out of you.
Rebecca Carroll: You should be feeling miserable
Black Americans right now are experiencing a collective grief, one that unfolds publicly. And we are unable to tuck it away. I do think Hurston would have to admit this too, were she around today. She wrote her essay before Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham crusade, the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Acts, the rise of black mayors, the first black governor, the first black president. She wrote her essay before we understood how tightly this nation would grasp onto its original sin even after legions of black people came with razor-sharp oyster knives and hands full of pearls.

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Wesley Lowrey: Why Minneapolis was the breaking point One of the classic texts in African American studies is Zora Neale Hurston's 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me." Her playful yet profound articulation resonates for me now. She wrote, "I am not tragically colored.

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sankofa read aloud "sankofa read aloud" "read aloud" "online read aloud" "stories for elementary school teachers" "stories for black girls" "stories for blac...

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At Sankofa Read Aloud your child will encounter a variety of short stories written for them by amazing authors. It is my mission to be a resource for teachers, parents, students, and children in the online learning community as well as inside the classroom.

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106 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

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Note 1: This article was last updated on February 5, 2022.
Note 2: Our work is to fix what we broke and left broken. The work isn’t done…

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Open-and-go lessons that inspire kids to love science.

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Mystery Science offers open-and-go lessons that inspire kids to love science. The hook, visuals, and activity have all been prepared for you. Less prep, more learning.

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Triumphant Moments in Sport / Olympics - Top of the World

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Strengths-Based Teaching and Learning In Math

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Strengths-Based Teaching and Learning In Math

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Shared by Monica Roth

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the warmth of other suns: the epic story of america's great migration

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ethnic studies - african american studies - general

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african americans - migrations - history - 20th century

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social science / ethnic studies / african american studies

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social science/ethnic studies - african american studies

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social science / ethnic studies / african american studies

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social science/ethnic studies - african american studies

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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

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In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.NATIONAL B...

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The impulse to create is one of the most basic human drives. As far back as the Stone Age, we were using materials in our environment to fashion tools for solving the problems we encountered. And in the millions of years since then, we have never stopped creating. In fact, the rise of civilization is largely defined by the progress of technology of one kind or another.

Today, the availability of affordable constructive technology and the ability to share online has fueled the latest evolutionary spurt in this facet of human development. New tools that enable hands-on learning - 3D printers, robotics, microprocessors, artificial, virtual and augmented reality, e-textiles, "smart" materials and new programming languages - are giving individuals the power to invent. We're not just talking about adults. Children of all ages can use these tools to move from passive receivers of knowledge to real-world makers. This has the potential to completely revolutionize education as we know it. And the movement has already begun.

Welcome to the maker movement

The key to the explosion of the maker movement is accessibility. Today, ingenious new inventions are affordable and often free. Anyone can find and share tools, instructions and ideas online, where a vibrant community of hundreds of thousands of global problem solvers congregates - when they're not collaborating face to face.

In 2006, 22,000 people attended Maker Faires around the world, according to Make magazine. In 2017, global attendance reached 1.6 million. You can now find makerspaces in school and city libraries around the world, as well classrooms, civic buildings and city parks.

In this magical environment full of fire-breathing sculptures; cupcake cars; bicycle-powered rock bands; soda and Mentos-propelled fountains; and workshops in programming, soldering, welding, lock-picking, knitting, crocheting and robot making, it is expertise - rather than the age of the expert - that is the coin of the realm. Makers are constructing knowledge as they build physical artifacts that have real-world value.

Making in the classroom

Fortunately for educators, making overlaps with the natural inclination of children to learn by doing. The maker movement values human passion, capability and the ability to make things happen and solve problems anywhere, anytime.

Classrooms that celebrate the process of design and making, which includes overcoming challenges, produce students who start to believe they can solve any problem. Students learn to trust themselves as competent problem solvers who don't need to be told what to do next. This stance can be a crucial change for children who are used to getting explicit directions every minute of every day. It can also illuminate for teachers how authentic assessment can really work in the classroom.

The learning-by-doing approach also has precedents in education: project-based learning, Jean Piaget's constructivism and Seymour Papert's constructionism. These theories explain the remarkable accomplishments of young makers and remind educators that every classroom needs to be a place where, as Piaget taught, "knowledge is a consequence of experience."

Constructionism. Papert's theory of learning provides the theoretical basis for making, which is a stance toward learning that is predicated on the active construction of a shareable artifact. Making asks teachers to create settings where students are, for example, mathematicians rather than passive receivers of math instruction.

Papert also introduced the metaphor of "computer as material," part of a continuum of materials used to make tangible artifacts and ideas. This continuum spans everything from common arts-and-craft supplies to cutting-edge technology. Indeed, teachers in our Invent to Learn workshops often begin the day working with cardboard construction to house microcontrollers they'll program later in the day.

Project-basedlearning. Some of the time-honored practices that were common in classrooms a generation ago - art, music, drama, woodshop, sewing, cooking, playing with and using real tools and craft materials - need to return to the daily experience of children trapped in schools with no time for anything but test prep. For too long, schools have undervalued learning with one's hands. Schools must stop sorting kids into academic or vocational tracks because such distinctions no longer make sense. Many of the same technologies, process skills and conceptual understandings are found in the physics lab, art studio and auto shop.

The key to making is using authentic tools to create meaningful projects. It is a natural fit for the STEM subjects or the arts, but historical research, producing documentaries and writing for an audience are also forms of making. Computers are not required, but they supercharge project development by expanding the breadth, depth and sophistication of what's possible.

For the first time, students can use their own powerful ideas to create real things, not just make-believe models. Kids can solve real problems with their own inventions. And we can focus technology instruction on providing authentic interdisciplinary experiences rather than isolated tech skills.

Game-changing technologies

Our book, Invent to Learn - Making, Tinkering and Engineering in the Classroom, identifies three technological game changers that are transforming learning and everyday life in the digital age. These tools allow students to solve real-world problems and should be on every educator's radar.

Personalfabrication. Until recently, the only things you could make with a computer resided on the screen or paper. Today, additive (3D printers) and subtractive (laser cutters, vinyl cutters, computer-controlled mills and lathes) technologies allow users to design an object on the computer and "print" it out in a variety of materials. Websites such as thingiverse.com are teeming with STL files that are compatible with most 3D printers and allow users to "remix" physical objects. 3D scanners can also turn existing objects into computer files that you can then modify and print out into new objects. Kids can print replacement parts for their bikes, limbs for their dolls or that Lego piece they wish existed. You can already print many of the parts to build a 3D printer on a 3D printer. You can even print circuitry with conductive ink that you can turn into objects with embedded microcontrollers.

The most significant development in personal fabrication may be 3D design software. Once too complex for most users, now software like cloud-based TinkerCAD and SketchUp put 3D design within students' reach. Among other things, this will allow us to concretize mathematics instruction: Instead of having to memorize an abstract formula to calculate the volume of a pyramid, for example, you'll be able to learn it while creating a pyramid that you can hold in your hand.

Physical computing. The ability to embed interactivity or intelligence into everyday objects is another aspect of the maker trend. Robotics may be the best-known form of this. Robotics kits, like those made by Lego and Vex, hide all the messy electronics and limit you to already set projects and materials. But microcontrollers like the Arduino make circuitry more transparent, increasing students' understanding of electronics.

They also expand the range of possible projects because you can combine them with items from your environment, such as broken toys, craft materials or appliance parts, to construct inventions that interact with their surroundings. The community is continually inventing new shields, which are small boards that piggyback on the Arduino to add new functionality, such as wireless connectivity or radio control. If you are a kid armed with downloadable plans, sufficient motivation and a number of broken refrigerators, you can even build your own Arduino.

Microcontrollers are also surprisingly affordable. They continually increase in power and functionality while the cost remains low - about $25 for the most popular Arduino standard board. The web is also full of free "sketches," short programs you can use as is or modify to control your projects.

To be able to assist students, teachers will need to have a good conceptual understanding of how microcontrollers work, because they're always changing. For instance, the blue board you bought last month could now be red and have the pins in a slightly different location. Luckily, student leaders can learn these new technologies, increasing your school's pool of expertise while building their own skill sets and confidence.

Another exciting development is new ways to create electronic circuitry. We have taken electronics for granted for so long that most kids know little about this phenomenon that shapes our lives. Now they can learn the basics while making their own interactive greeting cards and hand-drawn or light-up pop-up books with conductive pens, Circuit Stickers and metallic tape. They can whip up homemade Squishy Circuit dough to make electrified sculptures. They can create wearable projects by sewing the machine-washable Lilypad Arduino into fabric. And with the MaKey MaKey, they can turn Play-Doh into a keyboard and mouse, create a drum set out of bananas or a piano out of the school's stairs, and control a PowerPoint presentation with a croissant.

Computer programming. Every child needs experience programming computers, and not just for their future careers. This important skill plays a major role in many other disciplines, and it can give students control over their increasingly technological world. Computer programming even prepares students to be better citizens in an age dominated by debates over privacy, intellectual property, polling and investment in the computer-based modeling that's central to scientific inquiry.

Advocacy events like the Hour of Code represent progress, but the truth is, an hour of anything is insufficient. Programming is a skill developed over long periods of time. It is like learning to write, paint or dance. You become a better programmer by programming, and access to a teacher with expertise doesn't hurt.

A maker option for school computing

The edtech community is engaged in a seemingly endless battle over what device provides the most bang for your district's buck - laptops, iPads or Chromebooks. Yet there is now another option: microcomputers.

Eben Upton was a computer science professor at Cambridge when he grew concerned that computer science majors had little experience making things with computers. He imagined producing a computer so inexpensive that universities could give it away to potential students and ask them to show what they made with it when they visited campus for the interview. This idea gave birth to the Raspberry Pi, a baseball-card-sized $35 Linux computer with USB, composite video, Ethernet and HDMI ports.

Unlike a microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi is a complete computer. You can use it to program microcontrollers or interface with them. Connect an old keyboard, mouse and display, and you're all set to run OpenOffice, Scratch and other software. You can use it to power your home entertainment system, or you can ask a fifth grader to build a Minecraft server with it. New hardware, like the Arduino Yún and Intel Galileo, combine both computer and microcontroller in the same small package.

Makerspaces for all

Classrooms should embrace the joyful approach of Maker Faires by creating space for kids to engage in complex, personally meaningful projects. But some schools seem more willing to spend a lot of money building special makerspaces or fablabs (fabrication labs) to house professional-grade hardware than they are to change classroom practice. The lessons from three decades of computer labs should dissuade us from building a special bunker that kids visit once a week. This is not to say that you should not have a killer makerspace filled with state-of-the-art technology, proper ventilation and comfy working conditions. But you should keep in mind that every classroom can be a makerspace where kids have the materials, time, flexibility and support to learn by doing. Educators need to create space for making in their heads as well as in their classrooms.

They also need to drop any preconceived biases about who can be a maker. The range of potential projects and constructions available to makers supports a diversity of activities, genders and learning styles. When presented with multiple activity centers featuring a variety of materials, boys may gravitate to Arduino and girls to wearable computing/e-textiles. Both activities require engineering, circuitry, microcontroller programming and debugging, and although there may be surface differences in the product, the process is the same.

For example, the Flora wearable microcontroller system includes a sewable GPS element that lets your clothing determine your location. Designing a shirt or necklace that warns you of an approaching friend or arrival at your favorite classroom may include more complex engineering and computing challenges than your standard robotics competition, and it may appeal to children who would otherwise miss out on such learning opportunities.

Our colleague, teenager Sylvia Todd, has done as much as anyone to inspire girls to engage in engineering projects through her popular website, Super Awesome Sylvia's Super Awesome Maker Show. Millions of viewers have learned about the joy and power of making from her since she produced her first video at age 8. Scratch users have also shared more than 4 million projects online - a testament to the creativity of kids.

Much of what is presented as school technology is concerned with doing work more efficiently. But when educators embrace a more expansive view of computing, provide access to a variety of high- and low-tech construction materials, and encourage choice in project selection, a larger population of children will enjoy rewarding computing experiences. These experiences may not result in more professional computer programmers, but they will produce more adults who are capable of understanding and mastering their increasingly technological world. If you care about equity or closing the digital divide, you will advocate for all children to have rich computer programming experiences with a competent teacher.

Time for change

Schools usually do not consider the worldview of their new kindergartners. Before they start school, many children have already used Skype or FaceTime to communicate with others over great distances. They already know that when they have a question, an answer is just a click away.

A kid who has had the ability to Google anything since she was a toddler has a different sense of herself as a learner. Unfortunately, this image of learning as an active personal process may be in stark opposition to what she will experience in a "standards-based" school, where the teacher and textbook are the limits of allowed expertise. When a child can 3D print and program her toys at home, school as it currently exists will feel like an episode of "Land of the Lost."

The maker movement treats children as if they were competent. Too many schools do not. Making builds on each child's passion by connecting their whole being with constructive materials in a flow that results in fantastic artifacts that almost always exceed our expectations. We want our kids so engaged in projects that they lose track of time or wake up in the middle of the night counting the minutes until they get to return to school. Never before have there been more exciting materials and technology for children to use as intellectual laboratories or vehicles for self-expression. You can empower your students while preparing them to solve problems their teachers never anticipated by embracing the tools, passion and projects of the maker movement.

The ISTE Standards and making in the classroom

Here are a few ways that making meets the ISTE Standards.
ISTE Standards for Students
* Standard 1: Empowered Learner. Students understand the fundamental concepts of technology operations, demonstrate the ability to choose, use and troubleshoot current technologies, and are able to transfer their knowledge to explore emerging technologies.

* Standard 4: Innovative Designer. Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions.

* Standard 5: Computational Thinker. Students develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions.

* Standard 6: Creative Communicator. Students choose the appropriate tools for meeting the desired objectives of their creation or communication.

ISTE Standards for Educators

Educators manage the use of technology and student learning strategies in digital platforms, virtual environments, hands-on makerspaces or in the field.

ISTE Standards for Education Leaders

Leaders create a culture where teachers and learners are empowered to use technology in innovative ways to enrich teaching and learning.
This is an updated version of a post that originally published on July 21, 2014. Sylvia Libow Martinez is a writer, speaker, maker, mom, video game designer, and electrical engineer. She co-authored the book, Invent to Learn - Making, Tinkering and Engineering in the Classroom. Gary S. Stager is a veteran teacher-educator and keynote speaker. He co-authored Invent to Learn - Making, Tinkering and Engineering in the Classroom and is a host of constructingmodernknowledge.com. He has taught making in the classroom, from kindergarten to graduate school, for more than 30 years.

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The impulse to create is one of the most basic human drives. As far back as the Stone Age, we were using materials in our environment to fashion tools for solving the problems we encountered. And in the millions of years since then, we have never stopped creating.

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NNSTOY Social Justice Book List

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WeAreTeachers - 21 Anti-Racism Videos to Share w/ Students

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WeAreTeachers - 21 Anti-Racism Videos to Share w/ Students

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The United States has a racism problem. The idea of tackling such complicated and hurtful topics in our homes and classrooms is daunting, but we can't look away. We MUST face it. Fortunately, we live in a time when technology provides resources, such as the anti-racism videos below, designed to support us as we navigate these difficult and painful conversations.

For Parents and Educators

It's crucial that you feel confident and prepared to lead important discussions about what it means to be not only "not racist," but resolutely anti-racist. Here are some resources to help you get ready.

Be Boldly Anti-Racist

Elementary school educator, Naomi O'Brien, asks: "How did I become boldly anti-racist? By following my mom's example. How can you be bold and set an example for your kids and students?"

How to Talk to Kids About Race

In a new episode of Home School, The Atlantic's animated series about parenting, author Jeremy Tisby offers advice on how to have a conversation with children about race, from experiential learning to watching classic animated films.

How I Teach Kids About Racism (Kindergarten and 1st Grade)

This video is about elementary school teachers sharing the lessons they teach each year to introduce the topic of racism to their kindergarten and first grade students.

How Parents Can Help Kids Understand the Protests and Fight Racism

Dr. Janet Taylor shares advice with parents who may be struggling to talk about racism and the unrest that has erupted after the death of George Floyd.

For Kids and Students

Whether you're curled up with your kids at home or leading a group of students, here are some educational anti-racism videos to help get the conversation started.

Let's Talk About Race

The Tutu Teacher made this video for kindergarten students. In the video, she discusses what racism is and how it's impacted the lives of Black and Brown people. She also reads aloud the story Let's Talk about Race.

Sesame Street: Color of Me Song

Sesame Street explores: "What is the color of 'you?' Is your skin color tan, light brown, milky white, or dark dark brown? Whatever color you are, be proud and sing along."

Sesame Street: Song: I Love My Hair

Sesame Street invites children to "...sing along and make the world aware that YOU love your hair!"

Systemic Racism Explained

Systemic racism affects every area of life in the U.S., from incarceration rates to predatory loans, and trying to solve these problems requires changes in major parts of our system. This video offers a closer look at what systemic racism is, and how we can solve it.

Discrimination Explained for Kids

In this video, Pop'n'Olly discover what discrimination means and provide a few examples. They also talk about discrimination and the law.

Sesame Street Explains Racism and Protesting

Sesame Street and CNN worked together to create the "Coming Together: Standing Up to Racism" town hall for kids and families.

Woke Read Alouds: Wings

In this video, Ki reads the story Wings by author/illustrator Christopher Myers. They take readers on a fun, animated, and thoughtful journey through the book, leaving time for think alouds and responses from kids. They also include reading strategies, resources, and tips for parents throughout. This resource serves as a full academic read aloud.

Kids Talk About Segregation

It's been 62 years since Brown v. Board of Education, but the percentage of racially segregated schools in the United States has been growing steadily over the past 15 years. New York has the most segregated schools in the country. This video talks to Bronx 5th graders about what segregation looks like today.

A Kids Book About Racism

This read aloud is, as the title suggests, a kids' book about racism. Inside, you'll find a clear description of what racism is, how it makes people feel when they experience it, and how to spot it when it happens.

A Kids Book About Belonging

This read aloud tackles what it's like when you feel like you belong to a group or family or team and what it's like when you don't. It addresses what it feels like when you don't fit in, or when others don't want you around. This book teaches kids how to belong to themselves and how that helps them belong anywhere.

SAY SOMETHING Read Aloud

This read aloud of SAY SOMETHING helps explain race to kids as well as the importance of speaking up.

Students Learn A Powerful Lesson About Privilege

Using a recycling bin and some scrap paper, this video showcases a powerful exercise about privilege. Do all students have the same opportunities?

Black Parents Explain How to Deal with the Police

Brave parents and their curious kids confront some of life's biggest and most uncomfortable lessons.

Film Kits for Classrooms

These classroom-friendly films and user guides will help you bring social justice topics to life. Incredibly, Teaching Tolerance offers these film kits for FREE for use in K-12 schools, public libraries, schools of education, houses of worship, and youth-serving nonprofit organizations.

Designed for in-service programs, this training tool for early grades educators profiles classrooms in which peace, equity, and justice are guiding themes. (Available for order.)

This film takes viewers to the very communities where heinous acts of violence took place, offering a painful look back at lives lost to lynching and a critical look forward. (Available for streaming only.)

The film tells the story of a courageous group of students and teachers who, along with other activists, fought a nonviolent battle to win voting rights for African Americans in the South. (Available for order.)

This special teachers' edition of the Oscar-winning documentary film tells the heroic story of the young people in Birmingham, Alabama, who brought segregation to its knees. (Available for order.)

A Time for Justice, an Oscar-winning documentary, captures the spirit of the civil rights movement through historical footage and the voices of activists who sat, sang, and marched. (Available for order.)
What anti-racism videos do you feel are important to education? Share in the comments below. Also, 19 Black Teachers on Instagram to Listen To and Learn From.

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21 Anti-Racism Videos To Share With Kids

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The United States has a racism problem. The idea of tackling such complicated and hurtful topics in our homes and classrooms is daunting, but we can't look away. We MUST face it. Fortunately, we live in a time when technology provides resources, such as the anti-racism videos below, designed to support us as we navigate these difficult and painful conversations.

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Flipgrid

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We express ourselves in different ways. On Flip, you can use our simple and fun built-in camera to record your thoughts, add effects and share within your Flip group as video, audio only or text in your web browser or mobile app.

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Flip is a video discussion and sharing app, free from Microsoft.

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Flip (formerly Flipgrid) is a video discussion and video sharing app, free from Microsoft, built for classrooms and beyond. Learn more.

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A great tool for learning and assessing.

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From classroom management, to project ideas, to script writing and planning, the resources in these guides will help you implement creativity with technology across your curriculum.
View the guides

The Creative Educator has lesson plans for Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies to help you get started integrating Wixie into your curriculum. At Creative Educator you will also find articles, classroom stories and ideas for infusing project-based learning into your classroom.
Explore the lesson plans

Wixie has many uses. Teachers around the country are sharing all of the amazing things that they are doing with Wixie in their classrooms. Maybe their ideas can spark some ideas for you.
See what students are doing

Explore projects created in Wixie by students around the country and across the curriculum.

Enhance your reading program

A combination of activities and open-ended project work in Wixie can help you assess basic literacy skills, and engage students in the practice necessary to build these skills.

Tech4Learning has developed technology extensions for popular reading programs to help intergrate creative technology into reading.

Treasures - National
Treasures - California
Wonders
HMH Journeys

Wixie Playlists on YouTube

If you are looking for an introduction, training, or new ideas, we have a video for you. There are playlists for Wixie on YouTube with:
Wixie Tutorials Wixie and Curriculum

Wixie Questions

Wixie has an extensive library of tutorials and reference materials to help you get started using Wixie and make the most out of your subscription.
Visit the Training Library
Tech4Learning has a community driven question and answer site to help support your use of Wixie in the classroom. Here you can find the answers to common questions, as well as post your own questions to be answered by Tech4Learning staff as well as other Wixie users.
Go to the Q&A site

Wixie Tips

Subscribe to the Wixie Tips email to get tutorials, videos, and project ideas delivered to your inbox.

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From classroom management, to project ideas, to script writing and planning, the resources in these guides will help you implement creativity with technology across your curriculum. View the guides The Creative Educator has lesson plans for Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies to help you get started integrating Wixie into your curriculum.

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What Anti-racist Teachers Do Differently

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What Anti-racist Teachers Do Differently

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They view the success of black students as central to the success of their own teaching.

Editor's Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The "On Teaching" series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers.
Ask black students who their favorite teacher is, and they will joyfully tell you. Ask them what it is about their favorite teacher, and most will say some version of this: They know how to work with me. So much is in that statement. It means that these students want to work, that they see their teachers as partners in the learning process, and that they know the teacher-student relationship is one in which they both have power. In other words, black students know that they bring intellect to the classroom, and they know when they are seen-and not seen.

As the principal of San Francisco's Mission High School and an anti-racist educator for more than 30 years, I have witnessed countless black students thrive in classrooms where teachers see them accurately and show that they are happy to have them there. In these classes, students choose to sit in the front of the class, take careful notes, shoot their hands up in discussions, and ask unexpected questions that cause the teacher and other classmates to stop and think. Given the chance, they email, text, and call the teachers who believe in them. In short, these students are everything their families and community members have raised and supported them to be.

I have seen some of these very same students walk into another teacher's classroom, go to the last row of desks, and put their head down. I have seen them sit frozen in their seat, staring at an assignment-when earlier I had heard them make jokes, talk excitedly about the content of their history class, celebrate solving a vexing algebra equation, or shake a test tube with authority, waiting for a result. Their report cards often reveal this disparity in classroom experiences: A's and B's in classes where they feel valued and C's, D's, or even F's in classes where they don't.

When black students' academic strengths are overlooked, black students are marginalized. They are kept out of advanced courses, given bad grades, and sent to the dean's office. Over the years, the power that they initially bring to school is siphoned off by educators at every level of the educational system who do not respect, and in some cases do not wish to respect, the intellectual contributions of black students.

Anti-racist teachers take black students seriously. They create a curriculum with black students in mind, and they carefully read students' work to understand what they are expressing. This might sound fairly standard, but making black students feel valued goes beyond general "good teaching." It requires educators to view the success of black students as central to the success of their own teaching. This is a paradigm shift: Instead of only asking black students who are not doing well in class to start identifying with school, we also ask teachers whose black students are not doing well in their classes to start identifying with those students.

I spent the majority of my career in the classroom, and I loved it because-to do it well-it required that I call on all aspects of my humanity. Standing in front of my black students, I knew that it was my responsibility to invite them into the classroom and then to see, push, and protect them once they were there. Over the years, collaborating with other anti-racist educators, I co-developed an approach that was successful-and it showed in the students' attendance, grades, and quality of work.

We read articles and books, and we attend workshops centered around black pedagogy. That helps us examine cultural differences in discourse styles, so we can better understand black students' analytical approaches in essays. We learn how to integrate oral language into our curriculum, such as adding a debate unit or a poetry-recitation assignment, and to provide ample opportunities for students to work together. And we learn that nothing goes without saying and that praise and direction should be plentiful. In essence, we do what works for black students, which also works for all students.

Educators who are committed to black students use evidence in their own classrooms to find ways to improve. They analyze the assignments handed in, identifying ways in which their teaching reached-and didn't reach-all of their students. They recognize the brilliance of a black student's contribution to a class discussion and seize on it. They disaggregate data such as grades and attendance by ethnicity, look for patterns, and problematize their own practice-rather than assume that their students weren't motivated or sufficiently prepared to engage with challenging material. They ask themselves: Why did Taylor get a C on the final when he earned an A or a B on all of his other assignments, many of them equally demanding? Why is Vince silent in his group? What inspired Hile to write multiple drafts of her essay, each time asking for more detailed feedback? They seek support from colleagues who are effective teachers for all of their students, including black students, because they know that the changes they make to their teaching practice will have an impact on their students' achievement. All of this makes them better educators.

Teachers who do not value black students will shift the discussion away from their own practice when they see that black students are not succeeding in their classes. They will create bonds that eventually turn into factions with fellow educators who are also unwilling to change their approach.

To fight against systemic racism means to buck norms. Educators at every level must be willing to be uncomfortable in their struggle for black students, recognizing students' power and feeding it by honoring their many contributions to our schools. Teachers need to insist on using their own power to consistently reveal and examine their practice, and seek input from black stakeholders; they must invite black parents to the table, listen to their concerns and ideas, and act on them. Principals must clearly and consistently communicate the anti-racist vision for their school, create professional-development opportunities for staff, recognize teachers who successfully teach all of their students, and intervene when they see problems. District-level administrators must more firmly root their anti-racist messaging in black students' school experiences, making expectations for educators clear. And school-board members need to listen to educators who have shown efficacy in educating black students. They must enact policies that hold us all accountable to our black families. We must make demands of ourselves and work together in our communities.

The only measure of our anti-racist teaching will be the academic success of all of our students, including our black students.
This article is part of our project "On Teaching," which is supported by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Panta Rhea Foundation.

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What Anti-racist Teachers Do Differently

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They view the success of black students as central to the success of their own teaching. Editor's Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The "On Teaching" series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers.

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What is race explained by Neil Degrasse Tyson

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What is race explained by Neil Degrasse Tyson

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https://youtu.be/W0CqE-4md0Q

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Disrupt the status quo.  Teach with relevance and truth.  Be unapologetic in your efforts.

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Disrupt the status quo.  Teach with relevance and truth.  Be unapologetic in your efforts.