For the past two years, I have been working for Partners in School Innovation. My work focuses on the East Side Alliance (ESA) Transformation Network, working with schools to interrupt patterns of inequity and increase the number of Latine, multilingual learners, and low-income students who are on track to excel in high school, college, career, and life. In the fall of 2022, I began working with Christopher Elementary, a TK–8 dual language school in South San Jose in the Hellyer-Christopher neighborhood in California’s  Oak Grove School District. Christopher is one of nine schools that participated in the ESA Transformation Network.

I’m going to share with you how undertaking antiracist and antibias work with schools forced me to confront my own blind spots. In particular, I want to share insights I gained from taking part in the Improvement for Equity By Design Fellowship at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education in 2023–2024. But first let’s go back to how this work began.

In the spring of 2022 as the Christopher Elementary leadership team reflected on their School Transformation Review (STR) results, they noticed that scores on line items related to Race, Culture, Class and Power (RCCP) and Equity remained low despite their staff having strong equity mindsets and intentions. In addition, there was persistent bullying of queer kids and other middle school behaviors that were bringing up the need to be more specific about what they meant by equity. The team conducted equity-focused school walkthroughs and observed that while teachers were recognizing and celebrating various heritage months, these celebrations tended to be superficial and sometimes reliant on stereotypes. The leadership team expressed a need to prioritize this in order to go deeper to meet their vision of having a welcoming and affirming school.

Based on this data, school leaders held focus groups to ask students, teachers, staff, and families the following question to unpack their vision:

What do we believe the student, teacher, and family experience should be at Christopher?

The leadership team’s hypothesis: If we change mindsets and instructional practice, then we will create an environment where students feel connected and affirmed. But where to start? Partners in School Innovation coach Jesse Roe suggested they anchor their work in the book, Start Here Start Now: A Guide to Antibias and Antiracist Work in Your School Community by Liz Kleinrock.

Christopher Elementary’s principal, Marie Mabanag, along with instructional coaches Eva Marcoida and Karin Viera, began the journey to support their school and district explore antibias and antiracism. I was invited to support Eva and Karin to create a professional learning series that would engage people deeply in conversations and interrogate how systems, processes, and procedures could change. To guide this work, Christopher’s school leaders and teaching staff utilized Kleinrock’s Start Here Start Now and the Learning For Justice Anti-bias Framework Social Justice Standards.

Eva, Karin, and I created a scope and sequence (see Table 1) for the series that began with following the chapters in Start Here Start Now.

Table 1: Antibias, Antiracist (ABAR) Professional Learning Series Scope and Sequence

As we discussed additional resources to include, I suggested incorporating Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” in the sessions because I believe that gaining a deeper understanding of historical context of the design of education, paired with seeing how supremacy culture impacts our day to day work, helps us release vulnerability and embrace change. This was facilitated in small groups, where Eva, Karin, and I asked teachers and leaders to choose a white supremacy characteristic and collaboratively unpack it using a T-chart that included words to describe what it meant, where they saw it happening in the school system, and where mechanisms might be in place to disrupt it (see Figure 1). In one workshop, participants asked us, “Do we have to follow the T-chart format?” Leaning away from having it completed in an “only one way” mindset, Eva told them to make it their own. As you can see in Figure 2, these participants shared the information requested, in a format that focused more on the antidote than the “characteristic of supremacy”.

Figure 1: “Perfectionism” T-Chart

Figure 2: Individualism (notice: not a T-chart!)

In 2023, in the High Tech High Improvement for Equity by Design Fellowship, I was able to tune in tighter on thinking about how I’m supporting equity with my team and those I coach. Two times during the year, the resources and learning in the fellowship had a profound effect on my thinking around supremacy culture and how it impacts my work. The first is Daniel Lim’s “Qualities of Regenerative and Liberatory Culture.” This article is an important complement to Okun’s work because it names ways to do more than counteract the dominant culture’s destructive characteristics and become more regenerative, defined by Lim as “the creation of conditions that help all of us replenish ourselves, enjoy life and work, and fulfill our highest creative potential.” Although I appreciated the call for regenerative and liberatory qualities, I wasn’t quite sure how to incorporate this into my day-to-day work. I let these concepts percolate in the back of my mind throughout my year.

In preparation for the last session of the fellowship, I was introduced to the second impactful article: “Swimming Against the Current: Resisting White Dominant Culture,” by Amanda Meyer. Reading this article helped click things into place for me. Meyer’s assertion that “equity-centered improvement feels separate and insufficient” resonated with me because often we check after the fact if we have included equity, instead of incorporating it in our planning. The questions posed at the end of the article, including “Which harmful patterns of white dominant culture have you observed in your own continuous improvement work?” and “What structures, supports, or resources do you think are necessary for improvement teams to consistently apply an anti-racist lens to their work?” (Meyer, 2022) gave me pause to ask myself three questions: How am I pushing against policies, practices, and expectations that perpetuate white dominant culture? Where am I seeing and doing harmful practices? How am I doing something different to change those practices?

With the work I’ve been doing with Eva and Karin, along with reading and learning about white dominant and supremacy cultures, I am beginning to recognize that I instinctively rely on the characteristics “perfectionism,” “one right way,” and “defensiveness.”

This brings me to the story about my own blind spots.

For our 2024 end-of-year cycle review and celebration, my team at Partners in School Innovation decided to give schools a choice of three options to share their story: case study, storyboard, or “Ignite” presentations. In January, we shared a storytelling guide with the schools and asked them to make a choice. Of the nine schools in the network, six chose to do Ignite presentations, while the other three chose other options.

As a team we came back together in our planning meeting to determine next steps. One member of our team suggested that since six of the nine schools were doing Ignite presentations, we should try to get other schools to do the same to make the final presentations easier to organize.

Not everyone on the team was convinced (myself included), but in the end we made the decision to have all the schools do the presentation in what became the “one right way” to do it this time. I worked with my schools to put together presentations that fit into the strict parameters that had been established by our team to ensure the product was perfect.

At Christopher Elementary, I explained to Marie, Karin, and their improvement team that the Ignite presentation should be 20 slides, auto advancing in 15 seconds each for a total of 5 minutes. As they began their planning, they asked, “Can we do it in a video?”

Like a lead weight, I was hit with the realization that even though I had been coaching their team to push against supremacy culture and was trying to incorporate more liberatory practices, I was actually perpetuating “perfectionism” and “one right way.” I was talking the talk but not walking the walk.

So I went back to our celebration planning team and asked them to embrace the purpose of the storytelling (to tell their improvement story); to focus less on the “right way” and let these teams utilize their five minutes to tell their stories their way. I asked our team to “let go of perfectionism” at that moment. The result was nine great stories, some in the Ignite format, others in video, and one team with a hybrid solution.

I pondered this with curiosity: How might I help myself lean into more liberatory qualities to change how I approach my work? Inspired by the words of Okun, Lim, and Meyer, I created a checklist for myself to utilize as I create agendas and deliverables and facilitate convening activities.

First, I identified three regenerative and liberatory qualities that I want to focus on for the upcoming year: learning culture, complexity and uncertainty, and relational knowledge. I chose these to specifically address my tendency toward perfectionism and one right way, as well as wanting to lean into the experiences and knowledge of those around me and who are at the center of my work. Next I looked for things to add to the checklist that I think will help me embrace a more liberatory way of thinking. I utilized questions for the first column to support my thought process and to help this be more than just a list of rules to follow. The second column is a reminder of other ways to disrupt dominant patterns, and to help me remember to incorporate these in my work. The last column is a reminder of the characteristic I am trying to disrupt.

Using this tool

This tool is not one size fits all. Continuous improvement leads us to take small steps to implement a change. The first is to determine which regenerative and liberatory qualities you want to target. My suggestion is to articulate no more than three. Determine where, when, and with whom you will use this tool. Here are some suggestions.

This past year I met my goal to move from theory to practice in regards to RCCP by modeling equity practices in network sessions and individual coaching. In modeling these practices and supporting this school to implement antibias, antiracist professional learning, along with learning more about supremacy and white dominant culture and leaning into more liberatory practices, I’ve realized that my learning is still in the infancy stage. As I begin my work for the new school year, I will test out this tool by using it to plan coaching and learning sessions in order to check myself about when and why I am asking for something specific and where I can let participants/coachees share in the planning. To support my learning and include reciprocal accountability, I will use this checklist with my coachees and team members, testing it out to learn more about how we can work together to create regenerative and liberatory systems.

References

Lim, D. (2020, July 26). Qualities of Regenerative and Liberatory Culture. Medium. https://regenerative.medium.com/qualities-of-regenerative-and-liberating-culture-9d3809b30557

Meyer, A. J. (2022, December 1). Swimming Against the Current: Resisting White Dominant Culture. Unboxed, 23. https://hthunboxed.org/swimming-against-the-current-resisting-white-dominant-culture-in-improvement-work/

Okun, T. (2021, May). White Supremacy Culture—Still Here. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XR_7M_9qa64zZ00_JyFVTAjmjVU-uSz8/view