Some of the resources I will use are the film “Black Girl in Suburbia” and Teaching Tolerance readings. I’d also like to find some scholarly articles on implicit bias and racial injustice in classrooms and in schools. Finally, I’ve looked at Edutopia and some other websites at possible “implicit bias checklists” for teachers. 

I want to first address my team. Because we first already created targeted literacy groups, I want to make sure that everyone is on board for integrating out Math groups and recess (Which will be my two focus areas). Before integrating our classes, I would like to discuss anti-bias with our students. Then I would like to move on to our principal and lastly our community with a parent night to start the initiative and get volunteers from different backgrounds representing our classes. This will build community and create an integrated atmosphere where all students have a more equitable access to our teams’ resources. 

We will have one community recess a week, where parents and teachers can plan games for the students and we will play as one big class, not three separate classes. Math will have an enrichment period where we will work specifically on skills based items so that all students received targeted instruction. We would have our three teachers, our literacy coach, an EA, and a parent volunteer. Lesson planning for this would occur on a bi weekly basis, by looking at student work, identifying areas of growth , and creating small groups. These groups would change often. I will choose my allies from outside of the team through our parents/community night. As team teachers we can work together to find parents that would want and are able to work with a small group. I know this would be a big undertaking. But we have done it before for literacy. It will be a challenge to apply it to recess and to math, but it has been one of the biggest factors in eliminating racial disparity in our content areas. 

I want to draw on the expertise of as many colleagues from across the district as possible. I will reach out to staff members who are on their school’s equity team to invite them into the planning process and use their ideas to strengthen my PLO. One of the most important things I’ve learned from this course is that people often have the perception that leadership is enacted by one leader, and that person is “in charge.” The reality is, though, that true leaders invite others in to be leaders with them. Although I am bringing forth a suggestion for a PLO, I want the process of creating the PLO, and the learning that is done in the PLO to be collective and collaborative. I think this approach will allow me to create and maintain professional working relationships. As discussed in our texts, teachers are more willing to collaborate when they feel invited into the work, not excluded from it. Their voices should be a powerful part of the process of implementing this PLO in order to sustain engagement. 

As suggested to me by Karen, I will develop allies by starting with reaching out to the equity teams that exist in different schools across the district. The voices of these teachers will be invaluable to my PLO because they have already done equity based work in their schools and will be able to provide insight for the best and most effective ways to implement my PLO districtwide. 

I am hoping that this leadership role will not only give me the opportunity to learn about my colleagues’ perspectives on anti-bias education, but will also give me the opportunity to see the perspectives and draw on the expertise of educators across my district. A dominant factor in my choosing a districtwide PLO for this project was the opportunity to work with educators from other schools. Working with my colleagues in my own school building has been and will continue to be so valuable, but I think that too often districts don’t provide teachers with the opportunity to to collaborate with teachers outside of their own building, unless it’s for standards based curriculum design. In my own district, I wish we’d communicate or come together more often to share in anti-bias learning. 

I think the biggest hurdle of my PLO is implementing it district wide. To take this on at my school alone would be much easier and quicker to implement, but I believe there is so much value to having the whole district engaging in collective learning. The solution to this hurdle is to build strong partnerships with educators from different schools. I’d like to work with these educators first, so they can eventually facilitate and lead this PLO at their own schools. This project cannot be done alone and will require strong collaboration with others, who feel strongly about the purpose of this PLO.

Being a neighborhood teacher who lives in the same community that I teach in, I see the struggles of my students. I live by the same loud distracting train that wakes up my students in the middle of the night, when they are awoken, I am awoken. When a man was killed on the corner of North Willis and Portsmouth, it was my neighborhood that was shaken as much as it was theirs. And when the Black Lives Matter Movement of Portland began their vigil for George Floyd and later for Elijah Mcclain, it happened at Peninsular Park. A park they know well, the same park I walk to weekly with my partner. It is for this reason that I was inspired to do something about the blatant tracking that occurred in my school. The neighborhood track, the track with a myriad of languages and rich cultures, but also the victim of  much larger classrooms, and many more traumas was creating students that had tremendous gaps in their learning. Be it because they were missing class for punitive measures, or be it for a reason outside of the school’s control. But either way I saw these gaps and that is why I decided that the school needed to A share students, B integrate students and teachers, and C have daily lessons designed to clarify anything that they may be missing. 

I am finding that by expanding this philosophy I have found many cognitive intersections in the class.  From our reading in Danielson I felt very connected to the teacher in Ohio who noticed the same tracking based on race and gender. In our fliprid discussions my colleague Maricela said that she too became a teacher leader without knowing it. By seeing that her students needed to connect culturally, she decided to create a folk dance club. My philosophy with this innovation is based solidly in Shmoker’s words which were also related to by my online colleagues that stated “ You cannot conform practice without evaluating its worth.” Well I have evaluated its worth and I see its need. “Teachers need to support one another (Maricela in response to my question on burnout). This is imperative in order to create a school where teachers see all students as their own, teachers themselves need to share students and support each other in the efforts. Johnson and Donaldson 2007 agrees that there is an absurdity in putting a novice teacher alone in a classroom. They also state that as teachers we need to transcend the barriers of autonomy, and deference to seniority. By sharing students we dispose of that. By giving up some autonomy  we help the novice, and simultaneously rely not only on the most senior among us. We work together in tandem to help all students and integrate our most underserved students. 

My innovation acknowledges an inequity in the school of Cesar Chavez and remedies it with targeted instruction, and integration. We need to close the learning gap of our Black and low SES students. And these are ways to do it. Integration however does not look like deficit thinking, it does not mean we see origins as less than. It does not mean taking students out of a “bad class” or bad neighborhood. That would be no better than the failed school busing projects, or worse, the “Indian” boarding schools. Integration means taking down the barriers to access. All students deserve access to small class sizes and instruction that meets their needs, regardless of what their background is. Regardless of if their family language is the officially taught language of our school like Spanish or English, or if their family speaks K’iche or Somali like how many do on the neighborhood side. This project helped me learn that there are solutions to issues, and that I need to trust my instincts, and trust the data even more. With passion, drive, and intentional progress an individual can accomplish so much.