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INKendi, Ibram X., author.Antiracist Baby

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Diversity is key : a story about embracing differences

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Diversity is key : a story about embracing differences

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Intersection allies : we make room for all

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Intersection allies : we make room for all

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Equity and Cultural Responsiveness | Fairfax County Public Schools

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Fairfax County Public Schools will eliminate gaps in opportunity, access, and achievement for students.

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One Fairfax | Fairfax County Public Schools

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School Board and Board of Supervisors Joint Policy

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Equity Profile - Goal 1: Student Success

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We commit to reach, challenge, and prepare every student for success in school and life.

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D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice is a network of educators who seek to strengthen and deepen social justice teaching. The mission statement is:

We are a community of mutual support for educators to collaborate on curriculum, professional learning, and activism. We challenge systems of oppression through anti-bias, anti-racist, and multicultural education. We work with students, families, and other educators in and outside of our classrooms to create a more just and equitable world.

The network:

hosts working groups, public forums, workshops, and courses

documents and shares stories from the classrooms of social justice educators

plays a lead role in the annual D.C. Area Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action

publicizes events of interest to social justice educators

coordinates speaker visits to classrooms

and more.

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D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice is a network of educators who seek to strengthen and deepen social justice teaching. The mission statement is: We are a community of mutual support for educators to collaborate on curriculum, professional learning, and activism. We challenge systems of oppression through anti-bias, anti-racist, and multicultural education.

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EdChange - Equity, Anti-bias, & Diversity Activities & Exercises

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Multicultural, Anti-bias, & Diversity Activities & Exercises

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Skip to main content

From film kits and lesson plans to the building blocks of a customized Learning Plan-texts, student tasks and teaching strategies-our resources will help you bring relevance, rigor and social emotional learning into your classroom-all for FREE.

Not sure where to begin? Get to know our Social Justice Standards, anchor standards and age-appropriate learning outcomes divided into four domains-Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action. The Standards provide a common language and a road map for anti-bias education at every grade level.

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From film kits and lesson plans to the building blocks of a customized Learning Plan-texts, student tasks and teaching strategies-our resources will help you bring relevance, rigor and social emotional learning into your classroom-all for FREE.

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Recently, national media published several articles that examine educational inequality in our country. The New York Times analyzed the correlation between money, race, and success in different school districts, while National Public Radio produced a series titled School Money: The Cost of Opportunity.

This information about schools and the disparate daily realities of students are a reminder that educators must develop pedagogy that speaks to and examines a range of understandings and experiences. To ignore the lives of young people and the current state of affairs is to fail students and miss the potential for education to inform, challenge, and inspire change. There is work to be done in classrooms at all settings -- exclusive institutions, high-poverty areas, mixed-population schools, and environments not easily summarized -- but the work differs depending on the community and the individuals.

Windows and Mirrors

Gregory Michie and many other educators speak about the importance of windows and mirrors for students. This framework and reflection on unequal education leads to questions:

What is the role of windows and mirrors for a student in an affluent community and school?

How does this contrast with windows and mirrors for students in marginalized communities and schools?

Chris Emdin developed the idea of reality pedagogy for urban classrooms, where "teaching and learning [are] based on the reality of the student's experience." This pedagogical vision, an extension of the work of Paolo Freire and Gloria Ladson-Billings, can be used to develop guidelines and help root educators who use reality pedagogy, regardless of the students they serve.

Once there is a vision and a goal, educators can continually modify the guidelines. Here is a start:

Validate and Acknowledge

Students will not invest themselves in complex intellectual work unless they feel that their voice matters in the classroom. Depending on where we teach, some of our students may arrive at school not having had their basic needs met. At the other end of the spectrum, our students may come from environments steeped in vapid materialism and overconsumption. Maybe they're set in certain belief systems and unwilling to listen to the ideas of others. We can acknowledge that all students face challenges and struggles without ignoring larger struggles for social justice. Any community that asks people to learn, to be vulnerable, and to transform (Freire's idea of conscientization) must be a place where people know that they can be honest and that they will be heard.

Expose and Reveal the Unseen

Windows expose us to the others' realities. For students who grow up in what many call the mainstream of this country and are conditioned to think of themselves and their lives as normal, windows provide necessary access to different realities and understandings of the world. These windows allow students to begin questioning their own realities and assumptions while developing compassion for and understandings about the experiences of others.

No one should grow up without mirrors, feeling that their experiences or voice are without value. For some young people in our society, the public representation of their reality is regularly negative or lacking in complexity and substance. Learning that can access the familiar while providing opportunities to develop a public voice and examine one's own story and history is crucial to developing feelings of belonging and agency.

Question

When curriculum is framed around inquiry, the status quo is open to examination and debate. Susan Lytle, an education professor and author who influenced me greatly, speaks regularly of problematizing ideas. When units of study and classroom practice are based on inquiry, teachers can help students develop the intellectual feistiness to question what many of us have learned to accept as given:

Why is it that richer families live in certain areas and poorer families in others?

How can we explain the continued lack of diversity in different sectors of our society?

Why do schools in different neighborhoods look so different?

These types of questions encourage investigation and help people develop clearer windows and mirrors.

Reflect

Learning is so much deeper when students have opportunities for metacognition. Opportunities for reflection also allow students to begin sorting through different emotions related to learning. Did information about injustice lead to anger? (That's a natural response.) Did some feel guilt for their participation in unjust systems that they didn't choose or create? (That's natural as well.) Opportunities to articulate and process one's learning allow people to move toward informed action.

Growing Into Consciousness

Our country has a remarkable education system that allows millions of youth to be nurtured, challenged, and encouraged every school day. In this context, with a vision of the potential of democratic education, we should acknowledge the ways in which we fall short and the need for students from different backgrounds to be challenged and/or validated.

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote to his son, "I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness." We should wish -- and create -- the same for our students.

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Teaching Toward Consciousness | Edutopia

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Recently, national media published several articles that examine educational inequality in our country. The New York Times analyzed the correlation between money, race, and success in different school districts, while National Public Radio produced a series titled School Money: The Cost of Opportunity.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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The act of listening is perhaps the most underrated skill there is in education. As teachers, we are often asked to "do" a lot more than necessary: memorize standards, plan lessons, prepare for various assessments, call homes, provide a warm environment for our students (and visitors), attend faculty meetings with varying effectiveness and relevance, grade mounds of papers, and take what little time we have left to eat and sleep, usually less than we should.

Yet, with the laundry list of things that teachers do, check for, and assess, we might be better off staying still and letting students tell us more about what they need.

This is especially crucial in situations where we may or may not share similar backgrounds with the students we teach. We've known for decades that building relationships is a central part of our work, but this has even larger implications when we work with disadvantaged students. The teacher-student relationship has so many subtle nuances across race, gender, and class lines that opening our eyes to these nuances would make us better educators. Time and again, we see a growing number of educators willing to forgo the need to jump directly into teaching, educators who are more into getting to know the students.

After all, we shouldn't be preparing to teach content or the students we imagine might be there, but rather the students in front of us.

We can do this by taking up some of the skills we wish to impart on our own students. In our classrooms, however, that's not enough. For excellence, we may need to switch the way we talk to and about students. Here are some workable strategies that I've used and observed.

Build Relationships, But as a Teacher First

Everyone has a different approach to classroom management. Some don't smile until December, if ever. Others can't help but smile and laugh throughout the year. Some impart their wisdom with diatribes and speeches, while others know how to quietly move about the room and make their presence felt. The common thread in all of those cases is students understanding that the teacher cares and has a specific way of showing that he or she cares. A few teachers have said, "The student might not be able to read, but they can read you." That's powerful in the context of schools where teachers don't have the same cultural background as the students. When teachers have a passion for the students in front of them, and not just for the subject they're teaching, everyone wins.

This also means, simultaneously, that teachers shouldn't seek to create friendships in the normal sense. Many of my students would shake their heads at other teachers who tried to create friendships with them, saying they wanted a teacher, not another friend. While this might seem counterintuitive to progressive education (whatever that means), we must recognize that many students find comfort in having someone who provides stability and structure. Speaking of which. . .

Create a Fair and Equitable Environment

Currently, we've seen a surge of research that shows how real the school-to-prison pipeline has gotten. Black girls, for instance, face suspension at three times the rate of white girls, and black boys face suspension at six times the rate of white boys in NYC and Boston schools. With harsher systemic punishment doled out in our most vulnerable places, we need to recognize that classrooms are often the first place where students see inequity, and it's usually not in the resources but in their treatment. We can create rules with students and believe in restorative justice, but until we reflect on the ways that we interact with students in their weakest moments, we will continue to perpetuate inequity.

For instance, when a student comes in late, do we first ask why they're late or do we yell and banter about their lateness? Do we address individual students' weaknesses in front of the entire class or seek to have private conversations first? Do we try to build a community of learners or do we harshly deny student agency? There are ways to be strict without being inhumane, but too often, some of us think quiet is the ultimate goal by any means necessary. Instead, we should strive to understand the students individually and develop a common sense of purpose for them collectively.

Ask Questions as a Form of Disarming

Too often, we come into situation with inherent biases that we might not recognize. Works from Peggy McIntosh, such as "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack (PDF 18KB), and Project Implicit underline the need to work against some of our deeply-held beliefs. In the classroom, we need to recognize the privileges we bring and ask better questions. Humility in some aspects can make us more attuned to the needs of all students, but especially underserved students. When we ask good, honest questions of our students in the moments when we as teachers don't understand something, we seem more genuine.

Earlier in my career, for example, I thought I knew all about my students, so when I saw someone sleeping in class, I would attribute that to laziness or apathy. One day, we called his parent into school to find out what was going on and why this student couldn't pay attention. As it turned out, his mother worked weird factory shifts, from 3PM to midnight, often leaving him with little supervision. One night, he accidentally left his keys inside his apartment, which meant he was locked out until she got home. Every teacher needs that sort of humility, even if we share a cultural background, because it can be easy to forget that we teach students.

After that experience, I tend to ask more than I assume, which should be a general rule of thumb for all teachers. Those with even less information about the students should ask more questions. Some of our most intelligent civil rights organizations recently joined forces to make recommendations to President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about the future of education. The one that stuck out the most for me was the idea of cultural competence as professional competence. In many circles, this matters more than our current debates on testing, Common Core, and school funding. For our students, the person who they see as the beacon of hope or the agent of their oppression (and everything in between) is their teacher. Excellent educators embrace this for themselves and for all of their students.

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Empowering Educators Through Cultural Competence | Edutopia

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The act of listening is perhaps the most underrated skill there is in education. As teachers, we are often asked to "do" a lot more than necessary: memorize standards, plan lessons, prepare for various assessments, call homes, provide a warm environment for our students (and visitors), attend faculty meetings with varying effectiveness and relevance, grade mounds of papers, and take what little time we have left to eat and sleep, usually less than we should.

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Ideas include knowing every child, celebrating their potential, recognizing their challenges, acknowledging inequity, and using culture as a resource.

I coached Jane in her third year of teaching ninth-grade English in a high school with many English language learners (ELLs). Her style leaned toward direct instruction, and she did a great job of modeling literacy strategies. One day, I observed Jane leading a mini-lesson on paragraph revision. As I sat beside an ELL named Veronica, I noticed that her "paragraph" was one long run-on sentence. With Veronica's permission, I made a copy of the paragraph for Jane.

"Ugh!" she sighed when she saw it. "What do I do with this?" Veronica had a clear learning gap around punctuation and syntax.

"Well," I said, "you get to teach her. What do you know about her schooling experiences in El Salvador? You set a goal to individualize instruction this year, and this seems like an opportunity to practice. Why not pull Veronica aside tomorrow to offer targeted support?"

"But we have a quiz!" Jane responded, almost forlorn. "There's never enough time."

"Why," I pushed gently, "does she need to take the quiz more than she needs to sit with you and learn how to structure a paragraph?" It was a simple question, but I saw signs of awakening on Jane's face. "You're right," she finally said. "I never considered my ability to make choices like this. Tomorrow, I'll work with Veronica one-on-one."

Equality vs. Equity

This vignette cuts to the heart of equality vs. equity in the classroom. If equality means giving everyone the same resources, equity means giving each student access to the resources they need to learn and thrive. As those of us who are parents know, each child is different. It can be tough to meet their competing needs, but this is pretty much the job description for parenting and, I would argue, for teaching. Jane could have modeled paragraph revision until she was blue in the face, but Veronica lacked the building blocks of a sentence. Instead, Jane provided this learner with a critical resource: the attention of her skillful teacher.

If we're committed to the success of every child, we must acknowledge the uneven playing field that exists for many: ELLs, students with special needs, children experiencing trauma or relentless poverty, and students of color who confront unconscious biases about their capacity. Walking toward equity will help us to create inclusive, 21st-century classrooms.

6 Steps Toward Equity

It's hard to sum up what it means to embrace equity in the classroom. My partner and I are veteran equity-driven educators, and we wrestle with this question. Complexity duly noted, here are six ways to walk toward equity.

1. Know every child: First and foremost, get to know each student as a unique and layered individual. Embrace storientation to learn where they're from, what they love to do outside of school, what their family is like. Don't subscribe to a single story about any child. The more you know, the more you can build trust and differentiate instruction.

2. Become a warm demander: Author Lisa Delpit describes warm demanders as teachers who "expect a great deal of their students, convince them of their own brilliance, and help them to reach their potential in a disciplined and structured environment." An equity stance pushes us to couple high expectations with a commitment to every child's success.

3. Practice lean-in assessment: As you gather a student's human story, start to piece together his or her learning story. How does she approach tasks? What are his strengths as a learner What does she struggle with?

No standardized test will provide you with quality data on these questions. Use proximity and lean-in assessment to diagnose students' learning needs. Carry a clipboard with you while students are working, and take careful notes on what you observe.

4. Flex your routines: Remember that one-size lessons do not fit all. Jane had mastered the art of the mini-lesson, but she was losing learners in the process. Be willing to flex or set aside your well-laid plans to individualize instruction. If pulling a student out of an activity to support him or her makes you uncomfortable, notice your discomfort and try not to let it control your decisions.

5. Make it safe to fail: Teach students that failure is just another form of data. When a child feels shame about his learning gaps, he'll hide behind quiet compliance or bravado and acting out. In an equitable classroom, there's no need to hide because struggle and failure are neutralized, normalized, and even celebrated. Consider this: Once a week, have students meet in groups to share something they struggled with and what they learned in the process.

6. View culture as a resource: Finally, don't be culture-blind. When we ignore students' identities, we efface who they are in the world and lose a rich resource for learning. Understand this simple, powerful truth offered by my friend Zaretta Hammond in her recent book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: "Culture, it turns out, is the way every brain makes sense of the world." Help students activate their cultural schema to access challenging content. Invite them to share where they come from, not just with you but also with each other. Value and affirm all forms of difference.

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Equity vs. Equality: 6 Steps Toward Equity

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Ideas include knowing every child, celebrating their potential, recognizing their challenges, acknowledging inequity, and using culture as a resource. I coached Jane in her third year of teaching ninth-grade English in a high school with many English language learners (ELLs). Her style leaned toward direct instruction, and she did a great job of modeling literacy strategies.

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Follett Destiny