Leading for Equity: Take it Up!
Our Work Together
The California Department of Education, in partnership with the National Equity Project, launched an equity learning series for the K-12 education leaders from across the state in the Fall of 2020. Utilizing the statewide System of Support through its Geographic Lead Agencies network, various leaders from school sites, school districts, and county offices of education were invited to attend the four-part series. Together, we embarked on a year-long conversation about what it means to take leadership for equity now, reconnected to the why of our work, and reflected on how to center equity in all that we do. This opportunity was made possible by the generous gift by the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation.
Over the course of 2020-2021, we:
Aligned around shared language and understanding about concepts related to equity, bias, oppression and advantage
Surfaced and examine our systems’ equity situation and challenges, and developed a better understanding of the contributing factors that might be holding those challenges in place
Considered what it will take to disrupt problematic ways of working and catalyze opportunities for change and action in our system, and in the districts and schools we support
Supported ourselves and our colleagues to design and deliver equity-centered professional learning and technical support to schools and districts
Resource Overview
This online resource features an overview of each learning session, as well as linked resources and recommendations on taking the work forward in your context. As with all conversations and work related to equity, move forward with care, center the experiences and voices of BIPOC youth and families, and remember that everyone is starting from their own place. Onward, Rebel Leaders!
A message from Tony Thurmond, California State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Video thumbnail of Tony Thurmond’s message. The background is half light gray with text that reads “National Equity Project in partnership with the California Department of Education, Tony Thurmond, California State Superintendent of Public Instruction”. The other half is a close up shot of red flowers with blurry red flowers and greenery in the background.
Land Acknowledgement
“This is a great opportunity for us to express that land acknowledgement is an empty gesture without action. When we conduct our “land acknowledgement” we make the above observation, and follow with a ceremonial expression of the sacred nature of the land – Mother Earth to be specific. This land is actually a living being that we are a part of, Mother Earth, and we have despoiled this cosmic entity. So we are all, indigenous and non-indigenous to the Americas or other “lands,” human beings. Humankind must unite at this most critical and urgent of times, to repair the damage we’ve done and save ourselves from extinction. So our ceremony reflects this sacred responsibility and is a prayer that we hope moves people to realization and action.”
– Maria F. Rocha
Our work spanned across the state of California on indigenous land. Our lifelong work to decolonize and indigenize is in recognition, celebration and honor of Indigenous peoples, histories, ancestors and futures. Visit native-land.ca and usdac.us/nativeland to learn more about whose land you are on.
Questions to Reflect On
How do I honor the Native history and people of the land I am occupying?
How do I want to grow my understanding and practice here?
How might I move beyond acknowledgment toward action? (land tax, contribute time/ money, teacher’s guide, etc.)
Moving Past Acknowledgment
There are many ways that we can move beyond acknowledgment to supporting indigenous sovereignty and decolonization, such as:
Personally contribute money and time to indigenous-led efforts, including land back, cultural and linguistic revitalization efforts in your area
Amplify voices of indigenous leaders who are advancing grassroots change
Teach the true indigenous history of your region
Integrate learning about current indigenous-led campaigns into your curriculum
The Water We Swim In: Implicit Bias & Structural Racism
Fish did not discover water. In fact, because they are completely immersed in it, they live unaware of its existence. Similarly, when a conduct is normalized by a dominant cultural environment, it becomes invisible.
– Marshall McLuhan
Session Overview
Video thumbnail that consists of a background that is half light gray with text that reads “National Equity Project in partnership with California Department of Education” with both organizations’ logo above the text and half a picture of clear blue and purple octopuses in dark waters with overlay text on both halves that reads “The Water We Swim In: Implicit Bias & Structural Racism.”
Resources
Breaking the Cycle Implicit Bias, Racial Anxiety, and Stereotype Threat (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
While most Americans espouse values of racial fairness, Black, Indigenous, & People of Color (BIPOC) experience challenges rooted in racial and ethnic differences at an alarming rate. This article highlights implicit bias and stereotype research while offering solutions for non-discriminatory decision-making. Use this resource to deepen your understanding and awareness about how bias operates and what you can do to counteract it.
Combatting Bias: SODA (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
Self-management steps can help calm the brain once triggered. Stop – pause for mindfulness. Observe – recognize what is happening for you. Detach – shift attention from being defensive. Awaken – shift to another person’s experience (empathy stance). Use this resource in your own practice as well as when you are supporting others - especially around emotional topics related to equity.
Diversify Your Book Collection: Guide for Selecting Anti-Bias Children’s Books
Children’s brains are primed with stereotypes and negative associations unless we are intentional around our book choices. Take into consideration: stereotypes/tokenism/invisibility, the effects on children’s social identities and intersectionalities, author’s and illustrator’s backgrounds and perspectives. Use this resource when working with schools and teachers as a way to mitigate against the harmful effects of stereotyping and implicit negative messages and images.
Don’t Talk about Implicit Bias Without Talking about Structural Racism
It is critical that any learning about implicit bias includes both clear information about the neuroscience of bias and the context of structural racism that gave rise to and perpetuates inequities and harmful racial biases. Use this resource to deepen your understanding of how structural racism is embedded in all we do and build your capacity to recognize implicit bias as one manifestation of it.
The Lens of Systemic Oppression
Systemic oppression is rooted in ideologies of oppression that manifest on individual, interpersonal, institutional, and structural levels. Click through for detail on each of the levels and information on applying a racial equity lens to uncover the structures, policies, and behaviors that sustain systemic oppression. Use this resource to choose a set of questions you can run as a filter while you do your work, planning and decision-making.
Microaggressions in the Classroom (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
Examples of microaggressions that show up in classrooms, reported and documented by students. Use this resource as you support teachers to examine their own stance and behavior as they interact with students.
The Mindful Reflection Protocol: A Process for Checking Unconscious Bias (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
A tool for reflecting on and interrupting unconscious bias, adapted from Barbara Dray and Debora Wisneski. Use this resource in your work with teachers or other colleagues during observation or feedback sessions as you support others to examine their own behavior and its effects on others.
Responding to Microaggressions and Unconcious Bias
Microaggressions are the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership. The first step in addressing microaggressions is to recognize when a microaggression has occurred and what message it may be sending. The next step is to have an approach to engage another person about the impact of their comment. Use this resource as a guide for when you have witnessed bias in an interaction or are receiving feedback on your own behavior.
Takeaways
What did California Department of Education colleagues take away from The Water We Swim In learning session?
“A new perspective – I found the counter stereotype imaging very powerful and see it as a great tool.”
“I feel better prepared to create new narratives and use counter stereotype imaging.”
“I want to be more intentional with my thoughts and deeds toward other people especially when I am questioning why we are doing something. I tend to 'jump' in with out enough intentionality and respect for the 'place/being' of others.”
Designing and Facilitating Meetings for Equity
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
– Maya Angelou
Session Overview
Video thumbnail that consists of a background that is half light gray with text that reads “National Equity Project in partnership with California Department of Education” with both organizations’ logo above the text and half a picture of people huddled at a table with overlay text on both halves that reads “Designing and Facilitating Meetings for Equity: Part 1: Building Community & Stages of Team Development.”
Video thumbnail that consists of a background that is half light gray with text that reads “National Equity Project in partnership with California Department of Education” with both organizations’ logo above the text and half a picture of people huddled at a table with overlay text on both halves that reads “Designing and Facilitating Meetings for Equity: Part 2: Designing Equity Work & Whole Person Meetings.”
Resources
Art of Conversation: Some friends and I started talking…All social change begins with a conversation
Change doesn’t happen from a leader announcing the plan. Change begins from deep inside a system, when a few people notice something they will no longer tolerate, or when they respond to someone’s dream of what’s possible. Use this resource with your teams and in your meetings as a way to align around a set of behaviors that can help take your work and conversations to a deeper level.
Developing Community Agreements
Community Agreements are vital to building an effective team. This process involves understanding what each team member needs in order to commit, feel supported and be productive. Click for strategies to use when developing community agreements. Use this resource any time you have new colleagues join your team or group to set forth aspirations for working and learning together.
Community Agreements: Implementing, Monitoring, and Repairing
Community agreements must be a living breathing entity. Click for a set of principles and processes for maintaining a group's commitment to community agreements. Use this resource for helpful tips for maintaining a healthy, productive, aligned team able to think, learn and act together on the things you care about.
Constructivist Listening Overview
Constructivist listening is an effective strategy for engaging in conversations that are both intellectually demanding and emotionally challenging. It is distinct from most forms of listening in that its purpose is for the benefit of the speaker, not the listener. Use this resource to better understand the underlying theory, essential guidelines and potential outcomes for using constructivist listening structures with groups.
Educational Equity: A Definition
The meaning of Educational Equity and working towards equity in schools. Use this resource when you want to start a conversation about what equity looks like, sounds like, and feels like. Invite others to react to this definition on the way to articulating your own.
Experiential Learning Cycle Agenda Planning Tool (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
Use this agenda planning tool for your next meeting. Use this resource as a template for planning your own meetings to ensure you are paying attention to whole-person learning and the needs of your participants.
Facilitator Tips: Challenging Meetings
Contentious statements made in meetings make it challenging to have productive conversations. Here are six guidelines for facilitating challenging meetings. Use this resource for ideas about what to do when you find yourself leading a meeting or conversation and it doesn’t go exactly as you planned.
When leading for equity, it is imperative to take time and name a clear and compelling moral purpose that will drive the conversation & the work. Use this resource whenever you begin a new project, initiative, or program to help you articulate the why of it. And keep coming back to your own why as a leader, manager or coach.
The Lens of Systemic Oppression
Systemic oppression is rooted in ideologies of oppression that manifest on individual, interpersonal, institutional, and structural levels. Click through for detail on each of the levels and information on applying a racial equity lens to uncover the structures, policies, and behaviors that sustain systemic oppression. Use this resource to choose a set of questions you can run as a filter while you do your work, planning and decision-making.
Managing Group Dynamics: Challenging Behaviors (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
Tips for managing 10 challenging behaviors in team or group settings. Use this resource before (or after) a meeting you are leading to anticipate and get yourself ready for whatever reactions might occur.
SCARF Summary: Social Emotional Needs
Advances in neuroscience have provided new insight into human behaviors and experiences, specifically related to how the brain responds to perceived social threats. Click for a framework in understanding the 5 domains of social needs that can provoke a survival response when threatened. Use this resource to better understand your own social needs - both triggers and rewards - and that of others that you support and work with.
Stages of Team Development Using an Equity Lens (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
A tool for understanding both the technical and practical needs as well as the relational and cultural dynamics of group development. Use this resource anytime you are initializing a new team or have new members join to locate where you are and what kinds of work might be necessary to continue to strengthen as a group.
Virtual Facilitation Guidelines and Resources
Equity-focused conversations continue as we navigate working and educating virtually. Here are principles and resources for virtual facilitation of equity-focused learning and dialogue. Use this resource as a reminder of all the important considerations for creating and leading optimal learning spaces where everyone can participate and contribute.
Takeaways
What did California Department of Education colleagues take away from the Designing and Facilitating Meetings for Equity learning session?
“As we continue to try to "braid" equity and improvement science, I found so much connection here. Specifically, in the shared focus on team learning. Really appreciated how you took some key ideas from the teaming and facilitation literature, centered them on equity with your deep experience there and put forward many practical ideas and nuggets of wisdom.”
“I'm going to try the planning tools. I like the idea of including a quote, music, storytelling with purpose. My "team" (teaching staff) has a common goal & purpose, but it needs to be UPDATED. Looking forward to some hard, messy work. :)”
Coaching for Equity
“We need to discern who we are and expand on our humanness and sacredness. That’s how we change the world, which happens because we will be the change.”
– Grace Lee Boggs
Session Overview
Video thumbnail that consists of a background that is half light gray with text that reads “National Equity Project in partnership with California Department of Education” with both organizations’ logo above the text and half a picture of an adult holding a mug facing another adult with their back to the camera at a table with overlay text on both halves that reads “Coaching for Equity”.
Resources
Art of Conversation: Some friends and I started talking…All social change begins with a conversation
Change doesn’t happen from a leader announcing the plan. Change begins from deep inside a system, when a few people notice something they will no longer tolerate, or when they respond to someone’s dream of what’s possible. Use this resource with your teams and in your meetings as a way to align around a set of behaviors that can help take your work and conversations to a deeper level.
Coaching Framework & Core Beliefs
Coaches for Equity can help catalyze and influence the emergence of living systems that create opportunity and value for historically marginalized communities. View NEP’s framework for developing a vision for equity in your coaching. Coaching begins internally as you connect with and clarify your driving beliefs and values. At NEP, we developed a set of 10 beliefs that can guide you in understanding your beliefs as a coach. Use this resource when you are planning your own path forward with the people you manage, supervise, coach and support, and as a provocation to surface your own beliefs that may consciously or unconsciously be guiding your work supporting others.
Coaching Cycle: Establishing Relationships (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
Establishing relationships is critical to coaching for equity. Here are six characteristics of effective relationship builders. Use this resource to remind yourself of the many ways you can get into helping relationships with those you support.
Coaching Cycle: Enrolling the Client/Colleague (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
Enrollment is a stage in coaching where expected outcomes are made explicit, possible barriers and breakdowns are anticipated and addressed ahead of time, and mutual commitments are made. Often a skipped step, click here to understand its importance. Use this resource for some ideas about how to ensure you and the people you support are clear and aligned on what you are doing together.
Coaching Interventions: Responding to Bias and Deficit Thinking (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
Sample coaching questions and statements for responding to actions that demonstrate deficit thinking, negative assumptions, or unconscious bias against a particular student, adult, or group of people. Use this resource for tips about how to recognize and respond to limiting thinking as you support others to get ‘unstuck’ and take more productive action.
Coaching with Grace (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
Coaching with Grace involves practicing empathy, respect, and distress-free authority, which author John Heron calls “Keys of Grace”. Read through for more on the importance of cultivating three qualities as a coach for equity. Use this resource to remind yourself of your intentions about how you want to be experienced as you support the learning, growth and development of others.
Constructivist Listening Overview
Constructivist listening is an effective strategy for engaging in conversations that are both intellectually demanding and emotionally challenging. It is distinct from most forms of listening in that its purpose is for the benefit of the speaker, not the listener. Use this resource to better understand the underlying theory, essential guidelines and potential outcomes for using constructivist listening structures with groups.
People are experts in their own experience. In order to be of service as a coach, you must first listen with care and attention to the person you aspire to help. Use this resource to remind yourself that listening is your best tool when supporting the learning, growth and development of others.
Six Coaching Interventions (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
These interventions describe what people in the helping professions do when they work with others. Effective coaches are clear about the intention of their interventions and are skillful in their choice and application. Click here to learn about the 6 types. Use this resource as you plan for a coaching session to identify your intentions and important ‘moves’ you want to take during that interaction.
Takeaways
What did California Department of Education colleagues take away from the Coaching for Equity learning session?
“The concrete tools (Coaching Interventions/Styles, Responding to Bias, etc.) will help me frame the conversation and provide a structure when needed”
“Coaching is about building trust and relationships. The coachee needs to be ready (enrolled) in order to truly benefit from the coaching experience.”
“My key takeaway was that we are all coaches. Coaching has to go from the top down and to the top up. It is not a linear path.”
Navigating Complexity
“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”
– Angela Davis
Session Overview
Video thumbnail that consists of a background that is half light gray with text that reads “National Equity Project in partnership with California Department of Education” with both organizations’ logo above the text and half a picture of swirling galaxy with overlay text on both halves that reads “Navigating Complexity.”
Resources
Studio Be challenged young people in our community to share what they want most for themselves and their futures through radical imagination and freedom dreaming. Use this resource to unleash your imagination about what is possible, think out of the box, and support others to do the same.
Leading for Equity – Expanding Our Mental Model of Leadership (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
Direct yourself to page 2 – Expanding Our Mental Model of Leadership. This is a critical part of recognizing and appropriately responding to complex problems. Use this resource as a reminder of the many dimensions of leadership - especially when tackling equity challenges in complex situations.
Leadership in the Age of Complexity: From Hero to Host (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
In order to address and navigate complex systems, leaders must change their leadership approach. Click here to understand the leader-as-hero metaphor versus the leader-as-host metaphor. Use this resource as a reminder that the stance you take as an equity leader matters! There is a helpful checklist reminding us that hero leadership is not sustainable (nor required) when doing equity work.
A Leader's Framework for Decision-Making
Before tackling a problem or addressing a situation, a leader must first understand the context it is within. Snowden and Boone offer the Cynefin framework designed to help sort issues into 5 main contexts: simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, disorder. Use this resource to deepen your understanding of the importance of matching your leadership approach, actions and decision making to the type of problem you are trying to solve.
Liberatory Design is a creative problem-solving approach and practice that centers equity and supports us to design for liberation. It is made up of mindsets and modes. Mindsets invoke stances and values to ground and focus our design practice, and modes provide process guidance for our design practice. Check out this website when you are ready to use a fresh approach to identifying, understanding and tackling your equity challenges - in ways that are liberating, not oppressive.
Stacey’s Agreement-Certainty Matrix (link opens a pdf in a new tab)
Click here to understand the method behind selecting the appropriate management actions in a complex adaptive system. Use this resource to map out a direction forward when faced with wicked, adaptive, complex challenges.
Takeaways
What did California Department of Education colleagues take away from the Navigating Complexity learning session?
“Leading for equity requires authentically engaging others (especially those most affected) as partners whom you can learn from and who can co-design the change with you. Also, culture is a web, not a pyramid, and so top-down leadership isn't as effective when you're trying to change the culture.”
“[A key takeaway is] Complicated vs. Complex and do not allow a problem that is complex to get stalled because the answer is not already known. Embrace the messiness and the unknown.”
Taking it Forward
“While policy, processes, and practice change are all necessary they're insufficient, because people create change. We think there's good news in that… There is a role for each of us right now to play, in order to call forward a shared vision for public education.”
– LaShawn Routé Chatmon, from Leading With Courage and Commitment: Reclaiming the Narrative for Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in School
Revisit these videos and resources as much as you need. Let us know your thoughts!
Want more? Check out NEP’s upcoming courses and workshops and additional NEP resources & tools.
Music: Pålsundet by Gustac Lundgren, Gustav Lundgren Trio, Thomas de Paula Eby
Videos and Images: Unsplash.com, Canva.com, Gabriel C. Pérez, Yousuf Karsh, Corbis, Robin Holland, John Edmonds, MS Photography