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COURAGEOUS CONVERSATION® is our award-winning protocol for effectively engaging, sustaining and deepening interracial dialogue. Through our Framework for Systemic Racial Equity Transformation, we help individuals and organizations address persistent racial disparities intentionally, explicitly, and comprehensively.

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COURAGEOUS CONVERSATION® is our award-winning protocol for effectively engaging, sustaining and deepening interracial dialogue. Through our Framework for Systemic Racial Equity Transformation, we help individuals and organizations address persistent racial disparities intentionally, explicitly, and comprehensively.

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The Case for CRP

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NHPS training resources

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"Every policy and practice decision should be filtered through this lens: How will this policy impact families of color? How will it improve conditions for students of color?"

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Imperatives for America's Schools

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Educational leaders share insights about race and equity in schools and districts

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Learn how digital classrooms can mirror students' use of content outside the classroom to create deeper engagement and improve academic achievement.

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This images shows the CCAR compass, four agreements, and six conditions that are all part of the protocol.

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"No Hats Allowed" - A Euro-Centric Tradition that Upholds the Racist Practices Embedded in Colonialism.pdf

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CCAR_Agreements-and-Conditions.jpg

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Panel discussion 5-20-22.mp4

Panel Questions

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In what ways did the panel discussion challenge your thinking about wearing hats and hoods in school?

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (McIntosh)

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (McIntosh)

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Look deep within yourself to find where areas of Whiteness reside; use this article to take inventory of your progress

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Article: The Importance of Strong Relationships (Ed Trust & MDRC, 2021)

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Article: The Importance of Strong Relationships (Ed Trust & MDRC, 2021)

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This article was shared by our CREC team supporting our Equity Review. It represents the foundation of what we do in schools.

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A Strategy to Solve Unfinished Learning

Anxiety, stress, and in some cases, trauma are prevalent as we live through the COVID-19 pandemic. Students are facing food and housing insecurities, isolation caused by school and business closures, uncertainty due to parents losing jobs, and the fear of catching the coronavirus or grief of losing family members to it. Educators are facing their own personal stresses, in addition to being concerned about teaching academic content and about the well-being of their students, which can ultimately wear on their well-being.

But even with all of these stressors, teachers and students are trying to remain connected to schools and each other. Strong relationships with teachers and school staff can dramatically enhance students' level of motivation and therefore promote learning. Students who have access to more strong relationships are more academically engaged, have stronger social skills, and experience more positive behavior. Unfortunately, too many students do not have this experience. A survey of 25,400 sixth to 12th graders in a large diverse district, found that less than a third of middle schoolers had a strong relationship with their teachers, and that number dropped to 16% by the time students reached 12th grade. Students from low-income backgrounds report even fewer strong relationships with their teachers.

When schools closed their doors in March 2020, these connections went away for many. But building trusting relationships will be critical to addressing the months of stress and missed classroom instruction, or unfinished learning, that has followed. Estimates show that as many as 3 million students are offline, hard to find, or have left school altogether as a result of school closures. In some places, data shows as many as 1 in 5 students did not participate in virtual learning in the spring. Building and maintaining strong "developmental relationships" that reconnect students with adults in school buildings will matter more now and in coming months than in previous school years. Without these trusting relationships and connections, educators cannot catch students up.

Strong relationships between adults and students must include: expressing care, challenging growth, providing support, sharing power, and expanding possibilities (see related chart for explanations). Importantly, these relationship-building actions must be done with an equity lens, one that supports positive racial, cultural, and ethnic identity development. The country's attempt to reckon with 400 years of anti-blackness in response to recent acts of racial violence and injustice is highlighting the long-standing systemic inequities affecting students of color. And the pandemic is exacerbating them.

Creating strong relationships between students and those charged with educating them therefore will require adults to acknowledge the long-standing harms caused by racism in schools. Bias and discrimination, both implicit and explicit, can easily lead to harmful in-school practices that erase students' cultural identities. Relationship building, however, must be done intentionally with the needs of students of color in mind and with a strength-based lens that recognizes and values the rich cultural and linguistic assets they bring to the classroom.

In this brief, we highlight the important practices of fostering strong relationships between students and adults, as well as how to build these relationships in ways that encourage and support students to engage in tasks that move them beyond their current understanding and skills.

What Do We Know About What Works?

District and school leaders considering emphasizing relationships as a strategy to help students catch up and stay connected with school will have to make intentional and important decisions about structuring time for teachers and staff, investing in activities, training on building developmental relationships, and about how to most effectively group students.

As school leaders consider what type of strategy could work best with their staff and students to build strong developmental relationship, they will have to make challenging decisions based on their specific circumstances or contexts. These decisions will come with tradeoffs. In this brief, we draw on research on strengthening student-teacher relationships, school-based mentoring, school-based after-school programming, and school-based case management to provide insight on those tradeoffs. The following chart shows how implementing different elements of building strong developmental relationships impacts the effectiveness of those relationships.

How Effective are Strong Relationships?

We looked at the research to help leaders navigate complicated decisions. The chart below shows how implementing various features of strong relationships impact effectiveness.

Critical Questions for Leaders

Who benefits most from strong relationships?

Students from all backgrounds and ages benefit from strong relationships.

Below are critical questions to ask, based on available research, as schools and districts are building plans to completed unfinished learning.

Why are strong relationships important?

Strong relationships provide a foundation for student engagement, belonging, and, ultimately, learning. The more high-quality relationships students have with their teachers, the better their engagement in school.

How can schools strengthen relationships among students and staff?

The most important thing schools can do to foster these relationships is to have a culture that explicitly values adults nurturing relationships with students and providing teachers and school staff with the time, space, and occasions to interact repeatedly with individual students, especially those that seem less engaged.

Which adult relationships are most impactful?

All in-school adults should strive for strong relationships with students. When students have strong relationships with their teachers, in-class motivation increases the most. In these instances, students are motivated by teachers' high expectations as well as their own.

How should schools group students to foster relationships between adults and students?

Smaller groups are most effective for fostering relationships. One-on-one interactions allow for the greatest opportunity for individualized attention and support, but some adults and students benefit from a larger group setting.

What tasks will foster strong relationships in individual or group settings?

Activities are most effective when they are based on students' interests or goals.

What training do adults need to build strong relationships?

Schools should provide all the adults in the school building with training on the elements of developmental relationships, time, and strategies to build developmental relationships. Schools should also provide individual feedback based on observations of adult interactions with students. This training will ensure that relationships are stronger and more effective in accelerating academic learning.
students of color.

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The Importance of Strong Relationships - A Strategy to Solve Unfinished Learning

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Strong relationships with teachers and school staff can dramatically enhance students' level of motivation and therefore promote learning. Students who have access to more strong relationships are more academically engaged, have stronger social skills, and experience more positive behavior.

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Article: Creating an Identity-Safe Classroom

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Article: Creating an Identity-Safe Classroom

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Pay close attention to the topic of colorblindness

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Article: The Importance of Windows and Mirrors in Stories

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Article: The Importance of Windows and Mirrors in Stories

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This article highlights the importance of representation in what we choose to put in front of students.

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Being an English Language Arts teacher is about sharing your love for reading with students, bringing characters to life, modeling how to evaluate and think critically, and artfully choosing texts that help students build knowledge about themselves and the world around them. It is also about storytelling through written and verbal expression and giving students the learning opportunities to practice these skills and find their voice.

As teachers, what we choose to teach and talk about matters, and it is our job to choose topics and texts that reflect our students because they matter. For far too long, our Black, Indigenous, and students of color have either seen themselves tokenized, misrepresented, or not represented at all. It is time to reconsider what texts we view as canon, what voices we regard as worthy, and what themes, storylines, and storytelling mediums are considered academic or rigorous. It is time to select the stories that really matter: ones that center and empower our BIPOC students.

Those whose classes are predominantly white, these stories still matter and are critical to your work as an antiracist educator. I challenge you to assess your existing curriculum, make shifts in your instruction, and commit to bringing diverse voices into your learning spaces (and not just during heritage months or on multicultural diversity day).
Stories as Windows
A window is something you can see the world through, and the texts we put in front of our students should share this quality. When it comes to reading, we have all heard the narrative that books transport readers to different realms and allow us to escape. Or, books give us a way to experience another culture or live the life of a person who may be different from us or may have come long before us. While this all may seem harmless, one can argue that these thoughts are insensitive and lack critical awareness. When we teach students this, we give students the impression that cultures and places in the world require escape, that they are different in a bad way, and this can perpetuate ideas of xenophobia and assimilation.

Instead, what if we were to use windows to learn history, authentic perspectives, and perhaps, shared experiences? What if these windows could help us be better global citizens and teach us ways to navigate, honor culture, and make prosocial choices?

When thinking of windows, consider:

Who are my students?

What are their interests?

What do my students find curious?

What world knowledge can we build together?

What connections to prior knowledge can we make?

Through what ways can I learn different things about my students?

Stories as Mirrors
Mirrors allow us to see ourselves. They show us what we look like, they let us examine ourselves, and they can give us a glimpse of our ancestry and heritage. Sometimes a mirror will show you a part of you that you did not notice before, and there is beauty in that. When choosing stories, they should reflect images of our students' multiple identities and the world we truly live in.

Seeing ourselves in literature is a gift. It is an empowering experience as a reader to see a protagonist who has a similar name to us and shares a similar background. It is uplifting to meet a character who is like you in some way and relate to them, watch them develop and grow over time in a way that is not cliche. It is inspiring to read an author's work whose voice feels like that of a family member. It is special to be able to connect with a person you will never get to meet. These mirrors help us see ourselves in relation to the world and help us build connection and a sense of belonging. They also show readers what is possible.

When thinking of mirrors, consider:

What more do I need to know about my students?

What are their funds of knowledge?

How does intersectionality live in our learning spaces?

How do my students see themselves?

What activities can I design to help students explore their identity/identities?

How can I prepare myself so I can best support students in this process?

Thinking Critically About The Texts
We love to tout "rich texts" and "complex texts" but what does that really mean when white authors are massively overrepresented and authors of color are virtually absent in our public school curricula?

When selecting texts, some teachers use the Text Complexity Model, which takes into account:

Qualitative measures: the makeup of a text including its knowledge demands and levels of meaning

Quantitative measures: things like Lexile level, text difficulty, and readability.

The reader and task: the reader's background, their reading skills and metacognitive reading strategies, prior experiences and funds of knowledge, developmental levels of appropriateness, and the task itself.

I would argue that teachers should also use a critical race lens when selecting texts. To have a critical race lens means to understand oneself deeply in relation to dominant culture and its racist and oppressive systems and policies. It also involves seeing how our experiences may differ from others based on these systems and policies. Teachers who have this awareness can call out racism in various settings. In terms of text selection, they can choose texts that counter the single story and false narratives as well as challenge token inclusion and interrupt dominant ideologies around assimilation and meritocracy in the existing curriculum.

Here are some questions to help facilitate your text selection process:

Author and Identity-- Who wrote this? Can you use poets, artists, and other creatives as storytellers? What values do these authors stand for? Do they have the right to carry BIPOC voices?

Characters and Character Development-- Who is the protagonist and how are they developed? What characters are represented and are they misrepresented? Does the character development perpetuate stereotypes or false and harmful narratives? What role does intersectionality play in the story? Do characters look like the different yet full selves of your students?

Themes and Ideas-- Do themes mirror assimilationist ideology and make students feel like they need to conform to dominant culture? Do themes teach students that working hard is all you need to do to succeed? Do the hardships and resolutions of stories encourage students to follow the status quo? Are you willing to get rid of texts that do this? Are you prepared to provide students with counter narratives? Do the ideas of the texts uphold white supremacist culture or capitalist culture? For example, ideas of false urgency, perfectionism, and individualism?

Joy and Resilience-- Do your texts highlight and showcase the joy of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color? Do your texts (stories, songs, poems, narratives, articles, art expressions) tell and showcase counter narratives? Do you celebrate joy and tell stories of joy beyond heritage months? If you recognize and applause students for resilience, how do you demonstrate to them why they're resilient and have had to be resilient? How often are the stories you tell ones of destruction and death? Do your texts explain why students have "grit" and resilience?

Language-- Does the language in a text cause harm, marginalize, exclude, etc.? How is language or differences in language portrayed in the text? Is it negative? How can we honor students' home language and language variants in the texts we put in front of students?

A Quick Note About Nonfiction Texts

There is an abundance of nonfiction texts to choose from in the age of information and ever flowing news cycles. You may choose to analyze articles, news stories, opinion pieces, Tweets, headlines, graphs and charts, and other informational texts. Either way, it is equally important that we choose texts that help teach students about themselves and social issues that arise and those that are all around us. Consider the role you might play in gatekeeping or withholding important information our students deserve to know.

I know that we are all doing and holding a lot as teachers. Whether you are teaching in a classroom, from a distance, or in a hybrid or blended learning environment, know that you are not alone. May you continue to show up and bring life to the stories that matter.

Thank you for the support around this post. The purpose of this edit is to amplify and give credit to Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop. I would be remiss to not name Dr. Bishop and her influence on my understanding of this analogy. Whether it was through a video I watched, a professional development session, or an article I read, her work made a lasting impact on my instructional practice.

In our collective mission of becoming actively antiracist and pushing our practice when it comes to elements like critical literacy, diversifying and decolonizing our libraries, and cultural responsivity, we encounter the work of tremendous and revolutionary thinkers, many of whom are Black women. As we continue to study, learn, and spread knowledge, I encourage you to do some intellectual digging! Who influenced this? Where did this idea come from? Who led this work? And then share and credit that knowledge.

Learn more about Dr. Bishop:

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the importance of windows and mirrors in stories

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The Importance of Windows and Mirrors in Stories | PBS Education

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Your source for teaching inspiration, blogs, and online professional events.

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Ken Williams presenting at the 2023 National SAM Conference