Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally Responsive and Historically Responsive Literacy presents background and a tool based on the rich practices of Black Literary Societies of the 1800s. The framework includes 5 Learning Pursuits: Identity, Skills, Intellect, Criticality, and Joy. These pursuits are empowering and connected to the lives of students. They are used to design interdisciplinary unit plans through the use of multi-modal layered texts. Because most traditional unit planning is focused on Skills and Intellect, I am shifting to focus more on Identity, Criticality, and Joy in my planning and coaching. In this post, I will focus on the Learning Pursuit of Identity.
Awareness
Self-Compassion
Last week, when talking with my Kid Equity group about activism, we considered how self-care is a part of effective activism. By taking care of ourselves, we are better able to be co-conspirators who stand up, speak up, and act in order to build a more socially just world. So, when I read Fernandez and Stern’s Self-Compassion Will Make You a Better Leader, I saw many connections to the work I was doing with students. To hear more, keep reading….
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
It is said “you don’t know what you don’t know,” which is why it is critical to lean in, listen, and leverage voices and stories of others…. and to check your assumptions and biases, to learn. Have you ever noticed that once you realize or come to know something, it comes up in multiple ways? It may have been coming up all along, but now that it is in your conscious mind, you see it in many places. This happened to me this week while reading a memoir, Untamed and a book on conversation, Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart.
Having a Positive Racial Identity
There are many strategies and ideas for developing/deepening identity, in order to be an anti-racist human. This starts with knowing the “Why” and includes developing understanding of the intersections of the different parts of one’s identities. Below find some ideas around identity exploration.
Belonging and Dignity
Always, especially now, people need to examine and learn more about their identity in order to understand the identities of other people. This nurtures an understanding of other people, an understanding of their story, and helps surface the ways in which we are alike and difference. It is critical that we do this work in order to nurture a sense of belonging and dignity and humanity for all people. When engaging in identity exploration, people may start feeling uncomfortable with some of their thoughts and feelings. This is okay… it is part of our process that people go through as they grow in our identity. Meaningful learning often puts people outside their comfort zone. In this post, I want to explore some strategies to develop a sense of belonging.
Equity and Access: The Universal Design for Learning Guidelines
Just as we design buildings to be accessible by all people, we should design accessible learning opportunities. No two learners are alike – we are as unique as our fingerprints. If anything is a constant in education, it is that we can expect variability in the students and the adults with whom we work, each with individual strengths and goals. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework through which educators can intentionally plan for a variety of ways to access, engage with, and express learning. The learning is towards rigorous and meaningful goals. This is a huge move toward high outcomes for all learners. In this post, I want to share some thoughts and resources around UDL.
Continue reading “Equity and Access: The Universal Design for Learning Guidelines”
The Power of Questions and Prompts
In last week’s post I wrote about a thought-provoking activity, Banned Words. This week I want to discuss a powerful follow up to addressing Banned Words/deficit language. Elena Aguilar’s Coaching Sentence Stems is one of the most useful tools in my coaching toolkit. When used within a trusting partnership or team situation, the stems can lead to shifts in language and in the focus of a conversation.
Shifting Language, Shifting Beliefs
We are living in extraordinary times. Six months into a pandemic, everything in our world seems to be changing. Some changes include: virtual learning, working from home for many, safe physical distancing and mask-wearing to protect others, and an increased awareness in how people feel belonging and community. At the same time, we have seen a growing focus on anti-racism through protesting, a commitment by many to center voices and experiences of Black people and people of color, and in some places – policy changes. In this post I want to share some of the shifts in language I am seeing as a result of our intention to the words we use. The words we use impact our beliefs, and our beliefs impact the words we use, so shifting language is imperative for a more just world and for expanding our beliefs toward shared humanity.
Engagement and Interactive Read Aloud
This week I am co-presenting a professional development session on increasing student engagement. We are modeling strategies to use both face to face and in a Zoom platform. The strategies are designed to increase student thinking and discourse, decrease teacher talk, and provide a variety of ways for students to respond. We choose to model our engagement strategies through Interactive Read Aloud (IRA), because IRA is one of the strongest equity moves in reading instruction as it models the work of a proficient reader, exposes students to diverse texts, provides opportunities for rich accountable talk, and texts are above what students can read independently thus giving a glimpse of what lies ahead for readers. In this blog I want to share some of the strategies we plan to share.
“Student engagement is the product of motivation and active learning.
It is a product rather than a sum because it will
not occur if either element is missing.”
– Elizabeth Barkley
Co-conspirators: Three Recommendations
In How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi writes that an anti-racist is “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.” Percy Brown and Rainey Briggs, in their Critical Consciousness training, define co-conspirators as “people who, no matter how hot it gets, stay and fight for you. They know that sacrifice is required and are willing to lose a friend” by standing up and acting. Now more than ever, I’m trying hard to listen to the voices of people of color who are often silenced and have so much to offer. I preface this post by acknowledging that I am a white, cisgender heterosexual woman trying to synthesize my own thoughts. In many of my recent learnings, recommendations from my valued colleagues and network, typically recommend three key ideas in antiracist work.