Implementing the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework Session 1

Nikevia Thomas:

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining the Implementing the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework sessions. We invite you to, as you come in, write in the chat your name, your state, the entity you’re representing, and the role that you are representing. My name is Nikevia and I am a Senior Specialist at MAEC.

Yes. City or location. I think mostly everybody is in New York except for me. Hi, Jennifer. Nice to meet you. Maisy, nice to meet you. You’re a Staff Developer. Nice to meet you. Maisy-

Maisy:

Nice to meet you too.

Nikevia Thomas:

Desi or Desiree, Desi from Canton. Nice to meet you.

Desi:

Nice to meet you. Yes, Desi.

Nikevia Thomas:

Desi. Thank you. Tanya from Mid-State. Nice to meet you. Janet.

Tanya:

Pleasure. Nice to meet you all.

Nikevia Thomas:

Nice to meet you. John, who you’ll meet momentarily. Hi again, Jennifer. Juanita, nice to meet you. Oh, let me, someone’s up in the waiting room. I’m going to let them in. Hi, Elizabeth. Nice to meet you. Alyssa?

Alyssa:

Alyssa.

Nikevia Thomas:

Alyssa. Sorry. Alyssa, nice to meet you. All right. And oh, Rosa, nice to meet you. Pamela. Nice to meet you.

So in the interest of preserving as much time as we can for the overall presentation, I would like to advance to the next slide, please. Thank you. So today’s session has been brought to you by the Center for Education Equity through MAEC and it’s one of our biggest projects. And we partner with WestEd and the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and CEE is one of four regional equity assistance centers across the country, funded by the United States Department of Education under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Next, I would like to give you some background information about who we are, what we do, which will help us understand why we strive to connect and support all communities. MAEC was founded in 1992 as an education nonprofit dedicated to increasing access to high quality education for culturally diverse, linguistically and economically diverse learners. MAEC envisions a day when all students have equitable opportunities to learn and achieve at high levels and our mission is to promote excellence and equity in education to achieve social justice. We believe that all students deserve to feel welcome, respected, and safe at school, and provided with the opportunities to thrive.

The image that you see here is an overview of the region covered by region one at the Equity Assistance Center. So as you can see, we reach all the way from Maine down to Kentucky, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. CEE’s goals are to improve and sustain systemic capacity of public education systems to address problems caused by segregation and inequities, increase equitable educational opportunities for all students regardless of race, gender, religion, and national origin.

Next. And with that, I would like to introduce you to your facilitators for today, John Jacobs and David Lopez.

John Jacobs:

Hello. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome. I’ll go ahead and jump in, David and introduce myself first. My name is John Jacobs. I am coming to you from, as I said in the chat, Washington Heights in New York City where I live with my wife, my five-year-old who’s getting ready to embark on her own New York Public School journey this fall, and our dog. And I’m really excited to be here with everybody. Excited to meet and work with everybody.

I’m a former, also a former New York State Technical Assistance Provider with stints at NYU’s Metro Center Technical Assistance Center for disproportionality. And then more recently with Bank Street Center for Culture, Race and Equity at the Technical Assistance Partnership for Equity under the Office of Special Education, so I’m really excited to meet everybody and to work with you today.

David Lopez:

Hey, everyone. David Lopez coming to you from my home office in Brooklyn, but I’m from the Bronx, New York. I’m a Senior State Technical Assistance Specialist – that’s a mouthful, right? – at WestEd. A lot of my work centers around culturally responsive-sustaining ed disproportionality, creating equitable systems. I also started at – we see you Gloria! – at NYU Metro Center under the Technical Assistance Center on disproportionality. Happy to be here.

I went to public school in the Bronx my whole life. Well, I see some other folks I know. Tanya, what’s up? Been around New York State. Done a lot of work out that Western region, the Midwest region, Lower region, so we’ve been out here with y’all a little bit, so happy to do it again, even if it’s through a different project. So a lot of love, and thanks for having us.

John Jacobs:

Cool. And we also want to make sure that we introduced the webinar support team y’all met: Nikevia; we also have Ian here with us supporting us today, so we wanted to make sure that you all knew what was making this move, what was making it move smoothly, what was keeping us on time, and where all the links and everything are coming from. Ian, Nikevia, I’m not sure if you want to say anything, introduce yourselves any further.

Nikevia Thomas:

Oh, I’m just delighted to be here with you all today and if you have any questions, please, technical questions, you can feel free to send them my way.

John Jacobs:

Cool. Awesome. Thank you, all. You can go ahead and go to the next slide. We have live captions turned on here, the directions for turning them off in case anyone is having any issues. We’ll pause for a second to make sure folks have a chance to do that or ask any questions if they need to pause for a second. Is everyone good? Are there any issues with live captions? I’m trying to look at my screen so I can show you where it is, but I can’t even see it myself. Looks like we’re good. Go ahead, David.

David Lopez:

It’s on that bottom toolbar where everything else is.

John Jacobs:

Cool. So before we dive into the content of today, we thought we want, we wanted to make sure that we gave folks an idea of what this was that you are embarking on or taking part in today. So what this is a partnership between the Region I Equity Assistance Center that David and I work with to support the implementation of the New York State CRSE framework.

And really this is the first of two sessions this year with the goal of building capacity of staff in both the S/CDN and the RBERN networks to facilitate PD around the framework to support the framework.

And I think to build on that a little bit more, our thinking here isn’t to supplant your expertise or to assume that folks aren’t coming in here with experience, expertise, knowledge around culture, identity, equity, and in particular like the CRSE framework, right? We know that you do. Our goal here is to introduce some professional development resources to you and to develop a sort of community of practice for us to learn together and build capacity continuing to learn, to facilitate professional learning to support the implementation of the framework. I’ll pause there for a second. David, anything you want to add? Are there any questions, clarifying questions?

So today, what today will be is here in a moment we’ll begin what will be turned into a PD package that you all will receive that has handouts, a completed PowerPoint, and other supporting documents for you all to use in the field. The goal of today was to introduce you all to this potential series. This was intended to be one out of potentially four PD packages. We’re rolling out the first one.

Today, the Setting the Stage for Equity, which is an introductory session. We’ll start that here in a second. But again, the purpose isn’t to assume you all don’t have expertise. It’s to experience the session together today and then for session two. And that’s on the, yeah. Thank you. So today we’re going to, here in a moment, jump into the content and then for session two, session two will be about reflecting and applying some of the learnings from session one, right?

Sort of harvesting some strategies for folks, talking about how to manage and deal with certain types of pushback and resistance to culture responsiveness, to equity, to having conversations about culture and race and power and privilege in general and to learn from one another. I’m going to pause again.

Are there any questions about that? Is everyone registered for both sessions? I think it’s important for folks to attend I think both. We can make sure everyone has the link to register for, excuse me, for the second session before our time is done today. Are there any questions? I’ll actually pause because I keep saying I’ll pause and then I keep talking.

David Lopez:

We’ve got Tanya not dying. You are doing that.

John Jacobs:

Everyone here facilitates PD. Y’all act like you, don’t act like nobody here says I’m going to pause and then you keep talking as a facilitator. I know how it goes. This is what we do.

David Lopez:

What I will say to hear from y’all, don’t be afraid. I saw some thumbs up.

John Jacobs:

Cool.

David Lopez:

Put some thumbs up. We’re not going to tell anybody you have to get off camera because that’d be foul. You’re adults, you know what you need to, but please it’s two hours. I always say don’t have us just talking, the two guys, right? Talking and yapping, it gets awkward for us, at least for me. I get weird, so I’ll start behaving weird if I don’t get some feedback from folks so show some love however you can. We hope this is useful for y’all. So push, get off mute, ask the questions, push back. We’re here to be in community with one another.

John Jacobs:

Yeah, ditto. Ditto to all that.

David Lopez:

Or I’ll start making all kind of noises if… No, I’m just messing around.

John Jacobs:

Ditto to all that. I think, and we don’t have a ton of, there’s 16 of us total on here, so we hope that this can really be a little informal and kind of learning together today. So yeah, I appreciate that, David. That makes a lot of sense.

So starting here, this is kind of us beginning the current iteration of what will be a PD package that you all will have access to at some point in the near future. Cool. So give folks a chance, if you haven’t already, to skim through these learning objectives and then we’ll hit some main points from them.

So this first session is really about laying the stage, setting the stage as the title says, for having conversations about equity. It’s about establishing working agreements and protocols to sustain engagement. As a part of that and to build on that, we’ll introduce a framework for us to use that’s pretty central to both David and my own work that we really like that supports individual and collective reflection, the three core tensions.

And then we will explore both some foundational elements of culture responsiveness in general, and then some of the specifics of the NYSED framework. Are there any questions, any additions to what our goals are for the session?

Great. We can go ahead and go to… So here’s our agenda for today. We’re kind of in the midst of our, we’ve given our welcome and series overview. We’re getting ready to do our grounding and getting to know each other. Working agreements. We’ll do our core tensions. Lay a foundation and common understandings of culture and then right around where we are, it depends on where we are. But right now we’re planning to take a break after the culture section before we really dive into understanding culture responsiveness and the CRSE framework.

Any questions about, and our goal is to be a little after 3:00, 3:15 for our break just in case folks are wondering. Any questions about or additions to the agenda? Cool. I’ll go ahead and hand it over to David for our little grounding and getting to know each other a little bit.

David Lopez:

All right, super dope. Appreciate you, John. All right, let’s get to it. So this is where we always like to start. Let’s just head to the next slide. What we want you to do is just take about 60 seconds a minute, and we just want you to reflect on your favorite educator. It can be K-12. For some of us that might be outside of K-12. There’s no real rules there. Just think about who that person is, what they were like, and what makes them your favorite. Feel free to start jotting that down if you like, keep it in your head, whatever works for you.

All right. So now that we… Okay, I see y’all. Y’all already are ready to break out on my end. All right, cool. I appreciate y’all. So I think what I would like you to do is out of that, I want you to think of two to three adjectives. We’re going to put that into a Padlet and then we’re going to break you out into pairs. There might be a group of three and you’re going to introduce your name, sort of that intro information, make sure you know each other, whatever information you want to know to make sure you know each other and then share those adjectives and a little bit about your favorite educator. And we’ll take about five minutes.

So I’m going to give you another minute just to add to the Padlet. Let me open this chat. Jamboard. My bad. One of them. Right. So the Jamboard is in the chat. So if you just hit there and then, I don’t know, Ian, maybe if you could just pull up the Padlet yourself just in case anybody…

Ian:

Yeah. Would you like to do that right now, or, I thought we were doing it right after?

David Lopez:

I know I switched it up.

Ian:

Okay. Just give me two seconds.

David Lopez:

And then, John, you need to change from view only to editor.

John Jacobs:

Thought I did that. I appreciate it and apologize. It should, everyone should with the link should be able to add to it now.

David Lopez:

And if you opened it already, just refresh. That’ll be the thing that’ll allow you to now add. Right? So what we’ll do is we’re going to break you out, but don’t forget to add those two to three adjectives. Does anybody need help on what you need to click on? All right. Super dope. It seems like you don’t. So if we could just throw folks into pairs or trios, however the math works out.

Ian:

Everyone should be in breakouts now.

David Lopez:

All right. Thank you.

Ian:

Great. And you said about five minutes for that?

David Lopez:

Yep.

Ian:

Awesome. I’ll send out a two-minute warning at 2:24.

David Lopez:

Perfect.

John, I’m going to have somebody read them all out and then just ask them what do they notice? What are their noticings about what’s up there?

John Jacobs:

Cool.

David Lopez:

And then we’re not going to make any grand sort of conclusion out of it, but that will come back to this as we think about the framework.

John Jacobs:

Cool.

David Lopez:

And what it means to be a culturally responsive educator.

John Jacobs:

I like it. I like it.

David Lopez:

Cool beans?

John Jacobs:

Yeah. Sounds good.

David Lopez:

Double check for the fifth time. No.

John Jacobs:

Right.

Ian:

And hey, if you guys ever want, want me to advance the slide, just say next or next, please. Sometimes I can’t always guess.

David Lopez:

No, next, now, Ian. No, I’m just messing with you.

Ian:

Thank you.

John Jacobs:

We’re only five minutes off right now, so that’s good. We’re basically on time. There’s no such thing.

David Lopez:

Time is a social construct. We’re there in White supremacy.

Nikevia Thomas:

You all are very funny.

John Jacobs:

That’s right. That’s right.

David Lopez:

We’re here to do equity work.

John Jacobs:

That’s right.

David Lopez:

And I only like agendas to know when the break is anyway.

John Jacobs:

David, did you add to the thing?

David Lopez:

I didn’t add, but you could feel free.

Ian:

Looking like some great participation in there. Kudos.

David Lopez:

Yeah, this one’s always good. It’s a good, really grounding to remind each other, this is all we really want and need, right?

John Jacobs:

Oh, it’s great.

David Lopez:

Question is why Black and Brown children don’t always get this kind of love. But we busy talking about curriculum changes.

John Jacobs:

It’s true.

David Lopez:

I mean that’s important too.

John Jacobs:

Man. The teacher I’m using, we used to be able to talk this guy into, he would delay quizzes and tests and stuff for us and would straight up, he would have the test in his hand to hand out and we could be like, “We don’t understand. We don’t know. We’re not ready. We didn’t study,” whatever. He’d be like, “All right, let’s postpone it.” It’s the person I always use for the favorite educator.

David Lopez:

Mine is Mr. Santos. It’s popping.

John Jacobs:

Oh, yeah?

Ian:

Sorry to interrupt. People are starting to trickle back in.

John Jacobs:

Cool.

Ian:

I’ll pull you back in 30 seconds.

John Jacobs:

Great.

David Lopez:

Thank you.

John Jacobs:

Go ahead.

David Lopez:

Y’all back fast. Don’t wait. At least there’s no zoom whiplash, right? Like when it just cuts you off because I get cut off even with the 30 seconds minute timer.

John Jacobs:

Yeah, same.

David Lopez:

We know you do, John. No, I’m just messing with you. Lot of love, right? We don’t even don’t know each other that well. I shouldn’t be making those jokes.

Ian:

All right. Everyone should be back in the main room.

David Lopez:

All right. Super dope. So what I would like is for somebody to ground us by reading out loud what we see on the Padlet.

Tanya:

Sure. Inclusion, good listener, has patience, funny, 10th grade social studies teacher, passionate, invested, understanding, kind, caring, outgoing, mutual respect, real, empathetic, compassionate, funny, strict, caring, real, empathetic, knowledgeable, responsive, compassionate, knew the school community, funny, was proud of us, funny, caring, gave us freedom, responsibility, cared, loving, responsive, happy to see me, approachable, interested in the world outside of school.

David Lopez:

Whoo. Tanya took us to church, right? What do we notice about the adjectives that are up there?

Speaker 1:

I think a lot of stuff about how teachers make us feel.

David Lopez:

Yep. I see also they’re positive. What else?

Desi:

They’re all about relationships.

David Lopez:

Mm-hmm. What’s not up there? What don’t we see up there?

Speaker 2:

Content, not a lot of content, the things that people typically think of when they think of school. Can I just say too, in our breakout room, we had a unique, well I feel it was a unique, perspective of somebody who didn’t have a favorite teacher in school. And I think, feel free to step in if that was you and you don’t want me speaking for you, but I think often as educators we assume that everybody had a positive experience of some sort in school, and there are students and adults out there that did not.

David Lopez:

Almost every time I do this activity, there’s at least one or two folks that are like, “I didn’t have one.” And I often notice, it’s not always, they’re often Black or Brown folks, participants.

So I’m not going to… Is there anything else? Any last thoughts from the group around what we’re seeing? All right. So what I’m going to say is one, remember, we want you to both hold this as participants but also think how this might be useful for you as you go out and do your work. And I’m not going to make any grand conclusion here or grand connection per se, but I want you to hold these adjectives throughout, I want this to be our grounding when we think about culturally responsive education. And I want us to begin to think about, as we go through this, often what students are treated this way and who isn’t, by our systems of education. All right. I just want us to hold that as we move forward. Can we head back to the…

John Jacobs:

Cool. I appreciate that, David. I think it’s a super powerful, yet simple way to ground ourselves and start any conversation about equity, any conversation about how to make schools more humanizing is to consider who our favorite educators and to consider for whom that that isn’t the case. You can go ahead and go to the next slide. And I think it builds off of this and the point that David just made. In order for us to do our work, in order for us to have conversations about equity and implementing culturally responsive education, we have to be willing to do what we call naming the elephant in the room, or sometimes David says, naming the thousand pound gorilla in the room, and do what Micah Pollak calls pursuing an urgent language of communal responsibility. And what we mean by that is we have to be willing to talk clearly about who and what is impacted by educational systems.

And what we mean by that, here’s some examples that I’ll give for us. When it comes to student, family, and community groups, in addition to culture and cultural and identity groups, often we use coded language, we’ll use insider language to refer to certain groups of students. So if it’s a local community, you might hear a school member or maybe you yourself have, or you’ve heard people in your own educational communities refer to a certain apartment complex or a certain neighborhood of town. When I worked, when I would do TA sometimes right outside of New York City, they would say, “Well, those are the kids from the Bronx. They’re just coming over here. These kids from the Bronx, they’re coming over. I’ve heard it.” And I’m like, “Which kids are you talking about? Which kids are you talking about? The kids from the Bronx? Is that code for Black kids, for Latinx students, for poor students, for all of the above?”

Often as a White person, I was socialized into an environment where it wasn’t appropriate to talk about race or to talk about politics or to talk about religion. All of those are elephants that need names. When we don’t name who is impacted most by educational systems – our Black students, our LGBTQ students, our students with IEPs or differently abled students – we allow the systems that create, drive, sustain, perpetuate inequities to go unchallenged. Other examples of elephants might have to do with beliefs, stereotypes, and different types of prejudice. It feels uncomfortable at work in particular, under predominant notions of professionalism, sometimes the talk about whether something somebody said or a policy is problematic, is racist, whether somebody is showing a form of bias, whether we ourselves are acting on a bias or a stereotype and are able to name it, be honest with ourselves, share, talk about that with colleagues, coworkers, those around us. We have to be able to do that to do this work.

And lastly, we have to be able to name any issues or challenges that are impacting our work. So for an example, I’ve been in districts where there’s certain political dynamics at play, be it between the union, a teacher’s union or an administrative union, or a parental group and the schools or the districts, and you don’t talk about it, you don’t name it, you don’t talk about it. Or maybe I’ve been in other schools where nobody wanted to talk about all of the wild racism and xenophobia that our former president would spew, in terms of the political dynamics impacting students. We have to be able to have these conversations with our students, or excuse me, yes, with our students, with our coworkers, with our colleagues today in our session. To help us do that, to support this kind of language of communal responsibility, we’ll offer some working agreements. You can go ahead and go to the next slide.

So I’ll give folks a chance to – this is a start to a list, I know we have seven already. I’m going to give folks a chance to read through these, see if there’s any that we want to add, any we need to operationalize, or any we have questions about. I’ll pause, give us a chance to read, to process sort of our elephants and then how these support us in doing the work that we just talked about on the elephant slide. Are there any that we want to shout out? Any we want to operationalize? Is there anything missing here? See, we have these nice spaces for any additional ideas here.

I’ll go ahead and choose one to highlight. One of the ones that’s standing up for me is expect to experience discomfort, knowing that everyone here is participating in this, yes, as a learner for the content, but also as somebody who may already know many of the things here and thinking about it as a facilitator. And I would encourage us, and we’re getting ready to talk about tensions here in a minute, David’s going to talk about tensions, I would encourage you to be mindful of where you’re uncomfortable, both as a participant in this learning space now, and then when you think about what it would be like to facilitate conversations like these in educational organizations, in schools throughout New York State. What is the source of that discomfort? Just expect it and lead into it and reflect on it a little bit. David, I don’t know if there are anything that you want to add or anything to operationalize here.

David Lopez:

Well I often will use to experience discomfort too. And I was out in the field and a person raised a hand and said, “What if we change that to be willing to experience discomfort?” And I felt like that was a lot more powerful. In particular, if we’re talking about race, racism, it’s impact on the world, our willingness to experience discomfort is different than expecting to feel it, because you could expect to feel it but not be willing to experience it. And I think that willingness is what actually allows us to stay engaged, to participate and struggle together, to push our growing edge, to do a lot of the other pieces that hopefully we’re all okay with here.

And then the other one that’s big for me and I’m hoping that you all use out in the field, even though I think these should be co-created, not just given, but is the focus on impact over intent. That one’s a really, really big one for me. And the analogy that I’ll often use out in the field is if you’re driving a car, I’m in Brooklyn and there’s a lot of traffic, if you’re driving a car, you eat the stop sign because you were distracted and you smacked me with your car. What I don’t need from you is to run out the car and tell me you didn’t mean to hit me.

I could care less that you didn’t mean to hit me. What we need to focus on is the impact of that hit. I might need you to call 911, I might need an ambulance because my leg’s broken, I might need your insurance information to get these hospital bills paid. But I really do not care, as I’m lying there on the floor, about whether you meant to hit me or not, because the fact is, is that you hit me. And that’s where I would like us to focus. And nor do I want the group of bystanders to come by and run to the person who did the hitting and leave me on the floor suffering. And so how do we begin to focus on our impact and not run to our intent? You got good intent, keep the good intent, take that intent and let’s work on the impact.

Gloria:

That analogy, David, actually both points, the part to change the word expect to willingness, is very powerful because I really do feel that when you use the word expect, there’s a level of judgment there and it kind of closes the door right away. Because when we say expect and the person that’s, let’s say we’re doing the workshop, the person’s going to feel like, oh they’re going to expect me to blah blah blah. Well, willingness kind of leaves the door open to have an open mind, so it kind of sets the stage that the participant is going to be a better listener. That’s one thing that I really wanted to say that I agree with and I think it’s a good idea.

And the other part is the impact over the intent. Starting with an analogy that can happen to any of us, it kind of puts them in a, how would I say, less…it makes it real, and it kind of doesn’t put a judgment again on anyone. It’s just saying we’re not going to be looking at intent here, we’re going to be looking at impact and this is why. Because if any of us was in a situation, we really wouldn’t want people, especially talking about the populations that we just mentioned, we wouldn’t want the peoples around us to be focusing on intent, but actually how to help me, how to do a better job of helping me. So it kind of takes it to a personal level, kind of getting them into the frame of mind that they have to be before you start doing the presentation. I think that’s a good idea.

John Jacobs:

I appreciate that. I think that both those things make a lot of sense. And I think about it helps lay the foundation, and this is to your point, is we’re not having conversations here about necessarily what’s in your heart. I don’t know what’s in your heart, you know what’s in your heart. If what’s in your heart is good, keep that in your heart. I can’t know that. What we do know is that we’re human, we’re all going to make a mistake, not if, but when. And having conversation rejecting this good, bad binary that we have, either you’re perfect or you’re a horrible person, is sort of a part of what underlies the impact over intent work as well. That we’re going to have conversations about impact, because we all sometimes have negative impacts, and that’s not to dismiss it and say that it doesn’t matter, because all of us do it, but it’s to build, lay the foundation of that openness for folks to accept that.

And for us as facilitators, to hone our role a little bit around, we are facilitating the, I don’t want to use discovery, that’s not the word because it’s not discovery, but for lack of a better one, we’re facilitating the understanding rather of what people’s impacts are. We’re not here to indict your character, we’re here to make you understand your impact and how to fix inequitable race systems that impact students and centering the students is what we’re here for.

Janet:

I feel like I wanted to throw something out about the push your growing edge indicator there, where I feel like over the last few years I have repeatedly had it revealed to me that I did not even know what I didn’t know. So for me it’s like, “Oh my God, I had no idea.” And it follows along with that intent a little bit, where you want to defend why you didn’t know it, but you just didn’t know stuff. So it’s having your eyes open and be willing to be humbled a little by that, I don’t know what I thought I knew. Just a experience I’ve had over the last couple years with all this.

David Lopez:

I really want to appreciate that and I want to name a strategy as we do this that I think is really effective maybe that you intended to do, Janet, or not, I’m not sure. But really personalizing and sharing your experiences with your journey can be really powerful for folks, especially folks who share a perceived shared racial identity and that’s rooted in that racial identity development theory research. That can be really helpful for folks to say, “Oh, okay,” especially if you’re the facilitator or the person that’s coming in because you hold a certain power dynamic there, for them to say, “Oh, you’ve also done it or you’ve also been through this,” can often disarm folks, but allow us to also be honest and real, because we’re not here to coddle anybody either.

John Jacobs:

Are there any other additions? I know we have a shift from expect to willingness. This focusing on impact over intent has been highlighted. Give one more opportunity for folks to offer….

Alyssa:

One of the things that I really appreciate is the expect and accept a lack of closure. Sometimes when we’re doing this work or having these types of conversations, sometimes people want there to be like, okay, so how do we fix it all? But it really is a gray area and when doing this work, there’s always more work to do. It’s not like you go feed a homeless person at a homeless shelter and then you’re like, “Oh, I’ve solved poverty.” But there’s always going to be more work to do, so I think that’s important to expect and accept a lack of closure.

John Jacobs:

I appreciate that.

David Lopez:

I love that Alyssa, another, that you gave a metaphor for folks to understand the importance of your point. I think that can be really effective. So I really appreciate that.

John Jacobs:

Thank you everybody for this discussion. When we do work agreements, we’d like to offer some for folks as a starting point and really try to co-create them, as David said, and I think it can really lay the foundation. I always say the work that you have to do to do the work is still the work. Taking a moment to really intentionally craft the container and think critically and reflect and name how we go about our work with one another, this social process that is learning, even as adults, is necessary. And so I appreciate everyone taking a moment to engage in this and we’ll keep that moving for the second one as well. And imagine if we did this more with our students. That’s right. You can go ahead and go to the next slide.

I think we’ve made many of these points around being specific about whether a policy moves students actually toward access and opportunity and more equitable practices. I know this shows up a lot in behavioral systems where here’s this intervention, we call it an intervention, it’s really a punishment, nobody actually asks if it’s improving and increasing access and opportunity. They’re just, “Here’s the policy.” Speak in detail about which students need which opportunities. We’ve made that point. And to speak clearly about the causes and solutions to inequities as we emerge. And as we go through trying to practice these things and other practices toward our work and absolutely hold our work agreements, that we use those as the foundation for ourselves and for each other. You can go ahead and go to the next slide. Cool. So I’ll turn it back over to David for our core tensions activity.

David Lopez:

So if we just head to the next slide as well. That’s the problem with these pretty title slides, you’re like-

John Jacobs:

Don’t hate on my pretty title slides. David’s hating on my pretty title slides-

David Lopez:

They’re really nice. John, I love your slides.

John Jacobs:

Everything’s sectioned off very nicely.

David Lopez:

But I’m like, just read the next one. No, I’m just messing with you. But we want to take just…how much time we want to give here, John, I haven’t been able to really check the time.

John Jacobs:

I think we’re a little behind, but we’re okay. I think for this, we’ll do two minutes or so of reflection.

David Lopez:

All right. So what we want you to do is just, again, you reflect how you feel you need to reflect, but we want you to think about the work that you’ve engaged in with folks, whatever region you are, whatever schools you work with, or BOCES you might be working with, wherever you’re doing in your thing, where you’ve engaged directly in addressing inequities. And we want you to think about what has come up, what dilemmas and questions, what uncertainties might have you had or has the folks you’re working with had, what considerations might have you taken into account, barriers, challenges, or any other thoughts. And to give somewhat of an example, for me, I have different things that come up for me doing a training in Brooklyn, where most of my educators are Black and Brown, than when I am up in Wheatland-Chili, in the Midwest region, and most of our educators are White, there’s different things that come up for me and those spaces as based on who I am, different considerations. So I want you to think a little bit about that. We’ll take about a minute or two.

When you’re ready and you’re feeling brave, if you want to just share with the group some of your thinkings, that would be awesome.

Elizabeth:

Hi, I’m Elizabeth, I’ll share. Sorry, I have a bum camera on a computer, so I’m just a black square talking at you here. But this is making me think about a couple encounters I’ve had with people. You’ve given me permission to speak precisely, so I will. When I was in my literacy specialist program, we were in a course for literacy instruction for linguistically diverse students. And I’ll never forget that a girl who had a background, she was a White girl from an affluent suburb, and she said, “We only have so many problems in our society because Black people keep bringing stuff up. If they would stop talking about it, it wouldn’t be a problem anymore.” And our whole class just kind of sat there with our jaws on the floor, like, “Really?” And it was just so shocking. And even our professor was just like a deer in the headlights. Where do you even go from there?

And so understanding that that is legitimately some people’s baseline, how to reach that chasm to do this work, because it is very challenging when people have those biases just so embedded in their own fabric. And then I’m also thinking about an experience I had with a co-teacher who, there’s a no hoodie policy in the whole school, but it seems like the only kids he ever had a problem with their hoodies were Puerto Rican kids. And the kids noticed that kind of stuff. And so that was another supremely frustrating situation where it was so obvious that some of these deeply ingrained biases and prejudice was on display. And it’s always been such a challenge for me to figure out where to even go from there. What’s step one, knowing that that’s somebody’s attitude?

David Lopez:

Another working agreement, because I don’t think that they should just be a slide, that I like to add and often will use is permission for a collective breath. And then for me, I like to use that, especially when we share stories. I’ve heard all of this stuff, I’ve heard it in New York and other places, everybody tells me it’s down south, but I’ve heard it straight in New York. I don’t know what y’all talking about. But I want to offer that as an addition to our working agreements, a permission for a collective breath, because I think sometimes, and Elizabeth, I’m not implying that you did anything wrong, but hearing those kinds of stories, at least for me and my own social identities, can trigger racial trauma that I’ve experienced either in schools or in the field. So I’m going to ask us to just take a collective breath. I won’t lead us in one, I’ll just ask you to take one with me. All right. Oh, I needed that.

John Jacobs:

I appreciate that, David. I think as a White person confronting other White people, knowing where to start and how to address blatantly racist comments, actions, is a lot. It’s tough, it’s hard. We’ve been socialized into a world and benefit from a world where when that happens in school, we get a deer in a headlights, our teachers get deer in headlights. Everyone looks at whoever said it, everyone looks at the teacher, professor, professional, developer, facilitator, to see what’s going to happen. And often it’s left, the facilitator doesn’t handle it, nobody else in the class addresses it and that’s a problem. Clearly that’s a problem. We’re going to talk about, part of what we’re getting ready to talk about is how we process and make sense of, and think about a challenge like this, knowing where to start, knowing how to address an issue for folks.

I see… Yeah, go ahead.

Jennifer:

Hi. And along the same thing where I’ve gone into different districts and it’s almost like a checkbox when I go in there to work with students or staff, okay here, now we have it, but not really buying into it or just going through the motions and then behind and sometimes not even behind closed doors, just taking no accountability, no responsibility, thinking everything’s okay. It’s not an issue about race, it’s an issue about poverty. It’s a… And just really trying to ignore, almost like the ostrich putting their head in the sand. So, that’s where I’ve been frustrated in doing some of the work. And the students, they feel the impact. They know when they’re being treated differently. Conversations with them where another student has said something racist and they’ve gone to report it and it’s like, well they didn’t really mean that, or providing an excuse and just not feeling supported and hearing their stories. That’s challenging.

David Lopez:

I really appreciate that. Ian, do you mind just taking down the slide deck? So, stop sharing. Thank you for sharing that, Jennifer, and I quoted you right? “Cause that’s the one that I want us to live with.” I think that adults forget, the students feel the impact. And how do we begin to really remind our educators? And I’m not just talking to our teachers, I intentionally mean educators, from the crossing guard to the superintendent, everybody in between that our students feel the impact. Alyssa, I saw you had something to offer.

Alyssa:

Hi. Yes, so for me it’s feeling like that elephant is in the room. And I’ve been doing these activities where I have people look at their subgroups or their different demographics and nobody wants to put down White, Black, any of that. Or they don’t want to put politics down. Any of those ones that we were told never to talk about on a first date, they don’t want to put down. But I’m seeing time and time again and there’s this, with the phrase BIPOC, and I feel like we’re always trying to find a word that doesn’t hurt, right?

That’s what you get with like LGBTQ, or we’ve gone from negro, to colored, to Black, and it’s always trying to find the word that doesn’t hurt. And I feel as though this is me personally, that BIPOC has become a way to erase Black. And so, as I’ve been doing these groupings, every time I’ve had to ask the people that I’ve been putting these groupings together: should each of these groups, these cultures, these races have their own card, or should they all be together?

Because it’s kind of like this thing, well – White gets a card and then we’ll put BIPOC or people of color, and I recently had someone who’s very negative response that, “Well, then we could do that with all these groups like LGBTQ.” And I was like, “Oh, well you made a point.” Because if a student is gay, they’re four times more likely to attempt suicide, but it increases with trans students. But that is, I guess my big thing is making sure when doing this work, all these subgroups don’t get erased. ‘Cause I don’t want Black students to get erased. I don’t want students with disabilities to get erased. And I don’t want just cis women to be erased either. ‘Cause I feel like these are the groups that we start to, I guess assimilate into the other groups when we have these conversations.

David Lopez:

I really appreciate what you put in the room and I’m going to sort of take out what I heard. What I will also want to offer is if I say things like, “This is what I heard,” and that’s not what you meant, shut me down, right? Don’t let me out here miss quoting you, ’cause that’s not ever what I want to do. And there’s real impact for that, especially in my own maleness that I want to acknowledge. But I think what I heard the connection, Alyssa, you made is to how we speak precisely about who was impacted. I heard that as we group folks – and it is true – we often erase the struggle that’s particular to folks that are Black, by including Latinos who look like me, who may not have the same lived experience as a Black Latino or Black American, right.

So I heard that. The other thing that I want to, so how do we talk precisely about it? How do we get folks to talk precisely about it and name it? And then the other thing that I wanted to offer as well, because we do it with English language learners a lot too. I know we have the RBERN here. Well, this is English language learners. You ain’t treating a French national the same way you’re treating a Haitian student who talks Haitian Creole. Stop it. So how does that… We also live in the intersection because folks are more complex than just one identity. So for instance, I heard the rise of suicide from gay students to transgender students, but the highest rate is trans Black women.

When we disaggregate by race for disproportionality and suspensions, Black girls often get left out of the conversation when we use that. So, how do we both…are very precise, and then work to know when we need to talk about folks at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, as Kimberlé Crenshaw would push us really to do. And I think for us here, the goal for us here again ’cause we don’t want to speak to the choirs, how then do we get our schools, the folks we work with to do that? How do we bring that to the forefront? How does Gloria head back to NYU Metro and say, “Hey, we got to talk. We might need to look at intersections when we’re talking about English language learners.” And I call out Gloria because we, that’s my former colleague. That’s the only reason. And so I think that becomes important. But I see you, Gloria. Talk to us.

Gloria:

Yes, so it’s interesting you just finished with that because for me, for at least I’m talking for myself and I’m sure that’s a lot of my colleagues from the RBERN have the same issue. One of the biggest barriers we have is how the schools are structured, how schools carry out procedures, and how they set up their protocols. And I’ll give a very good example that’s very blatant and it just was mind boggling that people couldn’t see this because it was so obvious. So, the state education department has a big push for the seal of biliteracy being part of every child’s diploma showing that the bilingualism and being bilingual is something that is an asset for every student. And yet, we have in New York City, one of the largest population of English language learners, they all bring a language. And the fact that I have to go into schools and sit with principals, APs, and teachers, take the data for English language learners and show them how many are not following a path that will get them the get the seal of biliteracy.

That is so obvious. So for me, it’s a barrier because sometimes when I start the conversation the way we started, people shut down because they don’t want to see, like Alyssa said, “Oh, I’m not a racist. What are you talking about?” and they focus on that: “What are you saying to me? I’m a racist? No.” But I found that when I actually take the Black and White because those [inaudible] don’t lie, the fact that those child, so many of them came at a high school level from a country that they had to go to a Spanish-speaking school system and speak Spanish better than probably most of the Spanish teachers they have, and I have to sit there and convince the administration to open additional AP classes. This is an example of, bluntly, how it is done and what many times I done that with people that really meant, they really meant well. They open AP classes, baccalaureate classes, and they have all these monolingual students get the seal of biliteracy and then I go and I say, “So, let’s look out of that group, how many of them are ELLs? And why is it they didn’t get the same opportunity?” and there’s always a question about money. And then, I take that opportunity honestly to actually open the door about, let’s look at how much you are really spreading the wealth among all students regardless of who they are. Because it happens with special ed, it happens with children of color. It happens with everybody. So what happens sometimes is we have it so ingrained, like somebody said before, that sometimes the elephant is right there in our face and we don’t see it.

I think it’s smart to start undoing how we’re weaving, how the rug was weaved, and showing them fiber by fiber, these are all the things that we’re doing, and can you do it better? Because sometimes, it’s a matter of bringing it up and saying, all I did with that particular school when I started was I showed them was: “This is a number of ELLs. I did some investigation. I asked the teachers, all of these kids were able to, should have been from day one in a path to get a seal of biliteracy because they finished the ninth grade in their school when they were in their country. They can read, they can write, they can speak. And they really are at an upper level. They’re your counterparts to your ELA students that passed the regents. Okay? So why can’t you continue to give them an opportunity and maybe every year open an additional class and offer it to those children?”

And maybe, not only that will increase the amount of seal of biliteracy recipients in your school, but it will also open the door to so many ELL students that do not get an opportunity to get advanced placement courses in their schedule. So, those are some of the challenges that we deal with. In addition to the issue of the fact that, of course, if the English language learners and you have to service them, many people still even in administration, perceive them as it, I have to take from Paul to give to Peter. [Speaks in Spanish.] I’m still an ELL. So they feel they have to take from the monolingual students to give to the ELL students. When the ELL students bring their own from sources, but many people still give you those excuses. But sometimes you have to teach them, “No, I think you are wrong. Let me explain to you what an ELL student brings with them. This is the pot of money they bring. You are wrong. You’re not understanding how this works.”

And maybe that’s one way that actually we can open the door to some of these things, but because there’s a lot of barriers there. These schools, from the materials they use, to the structures that they have in place, to the way they track people because supposedly tracking is illegal. Well no, they still track people until we actually address it that way, and we start getting these people to actually see these subtleties also mean you’re discriminating. It doesn’t free you. And I have to say that many of the people that I work with, once they realize those things, they become mortified because really, did you become an educator to help children? No, I don’t think most people didn’t. So it’s not… I don’t think it’s an impossibility, it’s we have to find ways to actually get in the dorm and get them to open up to these conversations.

David Lopez:

I really appreciate that. So there’s a few things I want to pull out of what you offered, Gloria, connected to the three core tensions that we spoke about, that we’re about to speak about. So one, and Gloria, you might be familiar with this a bit that I want to pull out that’s out of, it’s not on the slides, but we often talk about the causes and remedies of inequities lying within the beliefs. And we heard a lot of beliefs in Gloria’s example, right? The policies, procedures, and the practices, right? And folks are often looking for that policy, practice, procedure piece. And we don’t often push as the TA providers, as the – that a lot of this is belief work. And I’m not saying that we’re going to change everybody’s mind. I don’t live in no fantasy world. This isn’t Disney.

But we do have some research to talk about school improvement, implementation science, and the folks that we do need to do that belief work because people make policies, people enact practices, right? So, you gave a great example of when you believe that our ELL students can’t achieve the practice of who gets to go into the AP. We build our policies out of that, the guidelines under which we need to operate. NYSE [New York State Department of Education] does it all the time, it’s why they exist because they’re not on the ground as a whole. But what I also want to hold that we’re also talking a lot about how do we start this conversation and sometimes when we get racked back in the difficulties we lose what we just learned and all the strategies that were just shared around working agreements, around all these other places, about naming our groups precisely as Alyssa challenged us to do.

You gave us some, in your explanation, Gloria, about pulling out the fibers piece by piece so that it’s doable. But what we also want to offer, if we could pull back up the PowerPoint, is another place to start with folks, is for them to begin to identify what is showing up for them, what are the tensions that they’re experiencing as we’re having conversations about equity around race so that they can begin to identify and it becomes less of back and forth between me and the educator or me and the person or the principal or the teacher group. They’re like, no, let’s begin to name what’s happening with us. I do a lot of therapy. I often say if you’re dealing with depression, but you don’t know that you’re dealing with depression, folks are like, “Well, I don’t know. I’m tired. I’m this. I’m this can’t… I’m not productive.”

And when you don’t know, you’re dealing with pre-depression, you have a really hard time managing the things that are happening in your body, but when what’s occurring in your body, you’re better equipped to manage what you’re feeling, what you’re going through. And so, this is why we offer the three core tensions and something that can really help you all so that you can pivot for when folks are like, “Why are you calling me racist?” We could pivot to the tensions.

I explained a lot of why we use it without explaining what it is. So there’s three of them. The first one is a personal tension, and that’s around what is our personal readiness to engage in conversations about race and racism, and how that impacts our practice. Gloria gave us an example of, I don’t want to talk about that. I’m going to name something else. Or it’s not about race, it’s about poverty. It’s another example of often a personal tension that folks, how do I escape this conversation about race? Or I heard somebody said that we’re asked not to bring it up in the first session. Folks using that equity detour to coddle the privilege because of their personal tensions. That does very little for the impact that’s happening to students of color as we talked about, right? Somebody said, let’s talk about the impact to our students. So, being able to name that personal tension –

Gloria:

Can I just ask you a question?

David Lopez:

… Yeah.

Gloria:

But wouldn’t you say that this all these way, all these things, it also depends who we are speaking with?

David Lopez:

Absolutely.

Gloria:

Because as you going into a school building – and some people in the RBERN can give you their own experience – they can just throw you out, plain and simple. Plain and simple. However, if I’m having a conversation like this with a group of people or a group in my office, I will not go around it. I will just address it, period. If I am in my own personal space, I will address it, period. However, it really depends on a lot of factors. That’s why I said that procedures, practices, who’s in the building, it depends on so many factors, how you address it. And at the end of the day is: do I get the school to engage in the conversation some way? Do I find a way to get in the door, or do I leave it alone because it’s a lost cause, right? I don’t believe in lost cause, so –

David Lopez:

What we’re trying to offer…

Gloria:

I’ve got to find a way.

David Lopez:

…as a way to offer those folks so that you can ground that conversation with those folks who might want to throw you out in these tensions that are research based as a tool. But yes, in practice, your personal tensions are all dependent on who’s in front of you, but also who you are. So I gave the example of… I hold different, I always hold personal tensions showing up in front of y’all. I lived throughout this whole two hours with personal tensions. How do I engage with y’all for the folks that don’t know. But I also gave the example of when I’m in Brooklyn doing professional learning and my audience is primarily Black educators, I hold a different personal tension in my own identity, both as a Bronxite, as a White-passing Latino talking about race than I do in upstate New York where all the educators are White.

And so yes, your personal tensions – but being able to name that that’s happening to you allows often the power of it is that it, you’re more likely to be able to stay engaged in the conversation. And so I want you to think about those pieces, right? Does that make sense to folks around the personal tension? Hold on-

John Jacobs:

[inaudible]

David Lopez:

John, let me check in.

John Jacobs:

Yeah.

David Lopez:

Because I’ve been talking a lot. I don’t want to throw more at them. Let me check in with y’all and then John can clarify some other pieces based on what you all are thinking. Do we feel we understand what the personal tension is? It’s somewhat, I can’t expect you to be like, “I deeply understand it.” There’s an article we could share with you, but as it’s been explained, so I could get a thumbs up this way. At least if you’re on-screen you could, “Eh, I’m not sure.” Or a “David, you did a… Do it again. We need to hear from John.”

John Jacobs:

I was just going to name an example that folks kept were thrown out, David, in the, yeah, in the-

David Lopez:

[inaudible]

John Jacobs:

Go ahead? Okay. In the first part when we were talking about folks willingness to engage, the tensions are powerful in lots of ways. One of them is thinking about it as a facilitator, as a TA provider to recognize the need to give people space to reflect on and to name and to dialogue about in some form or fashion where they are in their journey. The pausing and considering, naming as a facilitator, we’ve looked at data, I heard come up, the data, people’s willingness to name and engage it.

It’s learning. And it’s necessary as a facilitator to name those dynamics as they’re happening, and to anticipate the need to do that work with them and to say, “I’m noticing that this group is having a hard time, or we’re not naming the fact what’s clear here on the chart is showing that there’s disparate rates of suspension between our Black and our White students, and I’m curious about how we’re feeling about that.” Give folks a chance to name it, work through it and recognize that as that’s just a necessary, not just resistance isn’t just anything. Resistance is resistance, but it’s a part of the learning journey for folks.

Jennifer:

Pamela? Thank you John. Sorry.

John Jacobs:

Yeah.

Pamela:

I just want to clarify something for myself because I’ve worked a little bit with the three core tensions before. But what I appreciated about what you said, David, was you can always go back to it. And one of the examples when you were asking us to reflect that I was thinking about was somebody who said to me in a training, “We’re here, you don’t have to sell this to us.” So when we’re working within your own personal belief systems and thinking about your own internal bias and that type of thing, “Why are you focusing on this, Pam? We’re here. You don’t have to sell it to us.” And so what I’m thinking, and this is where I might need clarification, is I could pivot a little bit and what they were saying is, “I’m not comfortable right now working on the personal, but maybe I could shift to a strategy or structural tension to get them back in to the space, into the game.” Is that what you’re saying? Or am I off the mark?

David Lopez:

No, I don’t think you’re… That’s not what I’m saying, however, hold on, however, I think you offered something valuable, right? Doesn’t have to be what I said, right? I think for some folks, they do want to move to strategic or structural a tensions that they might be holding. I would say if you are deep in your journey of doing racial equity work, the likelihood that you’re saying comments like that is low.

Pamela:

Correct. Mm-hmm.

David Lopez:

Because for me, we think about this as a journey, not a destination. And if you think you’ve arrived, I think you still have some work to do. Because I don’t know every, again, accept and expect non-closure. We don’t got all the solutions to solving racism. I wish I did. We learn new language of how we’ve been offending folks that we were talk about color evasiveness, because we used colorblindness and it was ableist language. We used to talk about Latinos very different until we started really inserting conversation around race… For other Latinos. I think Black Latinos have been pushing us to do that for a long time.

So, I think if you think… Now, there are some folks I want to give, there’s always nuance. I never speak in absolutes. So do I want to show up to a training, mostly talking to White people about race as a participant in my identity where I’ve been? Probably not, because my experience is that often that space isn’t safe and we start to center Whiteness. So I’m saying that for a very different reason. So, I think the other lesson learned is that we need to hold nuance. I think somebody said that earlier. I can’t remember exactly who might have been… Let me not just point to somebody ’cause that’s what I was about to do. But somebody told us that we really need to hold the complexity, we got to use different words here. So, I think that’s one way right to think about it.

So let me offer the other tensions. Is that okay with you all? So, that maybe we can have a… We’ll take a break ’cause oh, it’s already almost over and we only got to the tensions, which is okay, ’cause I think we’re really talking about how do we do this out in the field, which is what we said we were here for, not so much just to learn new content. The next… I’m going to actually step to the third one is a structural tension that our educators may hold. And that’s often around, “Well, this thing is outside of my control. David, I believe you about racial inequities, but-”

David Lopez:

“I believe you about racial inequities, but we don’t have the funding,” to Gloria’s example. And I don’t use that to say that there’s not real structural tensions. “Oh, David, you’re telling me to do culturally responsive instruction, but our regions aren’t culturally responsive. Those questions aren’t culturally responsive.” So, those things are real. I don’t want to minimize them, but I do want to push to back to what is in our locus of control. What can we do? How do you do culturally responsive instruction and still teach the objectives and the standards? Because I don’t need Shakespeare to do phonics.

And then lastly is a strategy tension that often will sound like, “David, again, I believe you, David. All good. We’re here. We’re with you. But just tell me what to do. I promise you I care. I love all kids. I love the kids from the Bronx, but I just need the strategy. Just tell me the one, two, three, four, five, and I’ll promise I’ll do it.” Think somebody brought, also mentioned earlier today, I’m doing, I need to jot down names. I’m doing a bad job. Somebody told us that they walk in and folks are like, “Give me the strategies, the solution.” I think it was while we were talking about the accept and expect non-closure, as if there’s some silver bullet. They gave the example of poverty and feeding somebody at the shelter. Oh, now we solved poverty because you went to the shelter and fed a unhoused person? No. But it doesn’t mean there’s not a place for strategies, that we don’t need some steps of what to do next.

But what I like to caution people, if there’s something that I like, especially for you all to think about as you go out and work with people… I think they’re all real. I think in the article, she’ll talk about how they’re dynamic and they’re all real and yes, yes, yes. But what I want you to be mindful if you decide to use this in the field is that what often I’ve experienced in the field is folks will weaponize their structural and strategic tension to avoid the personal tension. “Oh, David, I don’t know. You threw out that R word a lot. I don’t really want to talk about it. Give me a strategy, please. NYSED, all of my people, we’ve done the… that’s the foundational stuff. We don’t really need to talk about it. Just give them strategies. My folks just need strategies.”

I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but as I’ve been around the state, I think we need to do a both end. So, an example that I often give out in the field is if we don’t do that personal work, so I’ll talk about the ways that can often play out that’s connected to the beliefs, policies and practices. If I hold this belief and I allow that… Back track. If I hold the belief that students learn through punishment, I’m a teacher or I’m an AP or I’m a principal and I believe, “Listen, our kids will change behavior when they’re punished.” That often shows up in our code of conduct, and then is enacted in the classroom. Often, that outcome in that practice is the disproportionate referral and suspension of children of color; in particular, Black children.

Now, we can go and say, “Okay, you know what? Let’s not talk about that personal tension about how we’re pushing out Black children. Let’s just give restorative practices and scratch that strategy tension.” What often happens in our schools, now our students are being punished in a circle, or we’re using a restorative conference to make sure that Black child or that Puerto Rican child is apologizing to me, the teacher. So, we allow folks’ personal tension to allow us to not do the belief work, and we focus on the strategy and structural tensions. Again, we need to do that too. We’re not going to convince some people. Sometimes we just need to hold some folks accountable. How do we use that when we’re out there? How do we apply that, as a member of RBERN, to our English language learners of color in particular, that are being impacted by our policies? Or our practices or our beliefs?

I’m going to stop us there. I know, I see some folks want to say some things, but you deserve a break. I need some water ’cause I’ve been yapping a lot. And we’ll come back. It’s 3:30. Are we okay shortening till like five minutes? Yeah? All right. And we’ll pick up right where we left off. So, come back at 3:36 please. You okay with that, John?

John Jacobs:

Okay. So, as we move on from that conversation about the tensions, we want to pause and give folks an opportunity. A lot was said, a lot was talked about. We want to give one moment to jot down anything that’s rattling around your head, anything you’re chewing on, anything that you may want to revisit or share later, as we will, there will be one chance to get into a breakout room before we wrap up today. So, take a moment now and jot that down. We’ll give you about 30 seconds or 2 minutes or so to jot down any thoughts you have, anything that’s rattling around your head, anything you’re processing from our conversation about the tensions.

So, what we’re going to do with the rest of our time, the next two sections we had were about culture and then the framework. What we’re going to do is we’re just going to briefly talk through the culture section. We’re not going to do all of the activities. We have a whole other session. It’s okay that we spent time talking about the tensions and our experiences, how we make sense of them as facilitators, as TA Providers and so on. We really wanted to make sure that we offer them, because they offer a really good framework for how we as TA providers, as coaches, as facilitators can think about the dimensions along which our work happens. We facilitate personal reflection, we maintain that balance between theory and reflection and strategies, and we recognize big, structural forces, but act anyway and recognize the agency and the responsibilities we do.

Those are the dimensions along which our work happens, and those are the dimensions that we try to bake into our facilitation and our practice. And so to that end, before we dive into talking about the framework, we like to ground ourselves in an understanding of the definition of culture. So, what we have in here is a piece of the definition taken from the NYSED framework. We’re not going to spend too much time unpacking it here. What I would typically do is we would read it and then we would try and surface some of the key elements or points from it. It talks about culture being about identity. It transcends art and music and celebrations to include values and forms of expression. It’s in constant flux and evolution. We might talk about the interplay of identity and culture; how identity impacts culture, how identity is not culture though. We might talk about how yes, it goes below the surface to include deep culture like values, and that it’s in flux and some pieces like that, the ground ourselves and then definition here. You can go ahead and go to the next slide.

We’ll offer a metaphor of Culture Tree. And as I say this, I’ll pause for a second and say, what we’ll do is all of this is going to get baked into a professional development package that has slides, that has one iteration of some speaking notes, and then some citations for the content for you to read yourself to internalize it and make sense of it and how you would present it and talk through it, and then some additional resources to support facilitation. So, that’s what’ll be baked into here. So on this slide, we’ll have some citations. This is the Culture Tree taken from Zaretta Hammond’s book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. I always talk about why we’ve shifted from the iceberg, which has benefits as a metaphor that many folks are familiar with, to the tree. And we talk through each level, and talk about different levels of emotional impact. And we’re not going to do that now, so we can hopefully get to our breakout room. But you go ahead and go to the next slide, please.

We try and make some points, some key points about culture, that culture is about making and finding meaning, as I always say it. But we also know there’s lots of pitfalls around culture when we talk about it. Some people might say there’s a culture of poverty. We like to dispel that. Some people might say that certain behaviors are rooted in responses to oppression, like drug use or I know that there’s in the news all the time right now, there’s tons of people complaining about shoplifting. I’m not here to endorse shoplifting, but I am here to say that people stealing diapers isn’t something that we’re going to sit and necessarily complain about. And we want to ground ourselves in the cultures that supports people, not destroying them. And we would go much more deeply into each of these things in session, and all the resources to do so will be provided for y’all. You can keep going.

There’s some flexibility we have baked into this PD package. Here’s some questions that we’ve pulled from Zaretta Hammond’s book to help us explore culture. There’ll be options with you all. One option might be to give us a chance to read through these and just have an open-ended conversation around, how do these connect to and show up in educational spaces that you’ve been a part of, either as a participant parent, family member, TA Provider? What happens when there are cultural clashes in any of these elements? You can go ahead and go to the next slide. They’re still on the next slide as well. You see on the left? We might do a breakout room where you share one or two of these. I like to use these as a chance to talk about how these intersect with different elements of identity, how cultural clashes show up in various elements of school systems; behavioral systems, academics, curricula, physical environment, outreach to families.

All to set us up. You could go ahead and go to the next slide. For understanding the importance of recognizing how culture, and how the ways identity mediate culture, show up in schools. And that, this is another quote taken from the NYSED framework, that if we don’t pay attention to the ways in which culture shows up in schools, in which students show up as their full selves and their families show up as their full selves and we don’t recognize that, we’ll automatically reproduce deficit-based approaches, forms of bias, and cause harm to our kids. And as an anecdote to that, cultural responsiveness presents us a way forward, a way to think about embedding asset-based pedagogies throughout our practice. So, you can go ahead and go to the next slide.

So, I’m just trying to think. It’s 3:45. What I want us to do is, what I think we’ll do with the rest of our time is jump to… and you all have the slides for this, and we’ll share them again and we have another session to talk through and experience some of these things and talk through what it would be like to facilitate some of these. But what I really want us to get through, to get to today, is looking at the framework. So, we always like to ground ourselves in the research that informs the framework. Gloria Ladson-Billings is one. And if you go to the next slide, Django Paris is another in culturally sustaining pedagogies. It’s important to give folks an understanding of what some of the key elements are before diving in. You can go ahead and go to the next slide.

Give folks an understanding of what the background is of it. All of this would be in the speaker notes with some citations and readings for what’s the story; how did this framework come to be? This nation-leading, I should say. I’m a New Yorker, I’m biased. I use it in a lot of my work across the country. But this nation-leading framework, how did it come to be? Give folks an understanding of that. You can go ahead and go to the next slide. And then talk through what the sections of this framework are. And that’s what I really want us to spend some time on. So before we dive into that, I want to make sure, I want to pause for a second, make sure everyone has access to the link that has our handouts there. That includes the one-pager, the agenda, and the slides. Did everyone have that?

Gloria:

No.

John Jacobs:

Great. No?

Gloria:

I don’t have that.

John Jacobs:

Okay. We’ll go ahead and we’ll put that link into the chat again and make sure you can access that and you’re able to download these. There’s a link in the chat. So, while we’re making sure everyone has the access to it, I’m just curious, by a show of digital or real hands, who has experienced, however much or however little, working with the NYSED CRSE framework? I see Pamela. Okay, so we have some. I know it lives in OBEWL, the Office of Bilingual Education and World Languages. I know that many of the members of the RBERN were critical in putting the framework together. So, that’s awesome. There’s a lot of experience with it. Cool.

So, what this PD package is really meant to do is to just introduce folks to some key information from it to build some interest in the framework from folks that are in schools, and to really get them to think about, what are the underlying foundational elements of it? This isn’t something that’s going to give them all of the exact practices. This is something that’s going to lay a foundation and get them thinking about culture responsiveness. You can go ahead and go to the next slide. Am I able to move the slides too? No, I’m not. I thought that there might be a thing here.

So, what we’re going to do too, we’re going to take five minutes in a breakout room. We may not get through all of it, but I want us to take a second, take an opportunity to do it before we wrap up. And we’re going to get into pairs and we’re going to utilize, it’s called a say something structure. If you pull up the NYSED CRSE one-pager from that link. I see Gloria. Gloria has her hand up. Gloria, go ahead. Are we good? Cool. I think it looks good.

Gloria:

That’s when you asked if I was familiar with the framework.

John Jacobs:

Oh, okay. Cool. Cool, cool. I wondered. All right. What this activity is really meant to do is to just get the participants to read and to just have a second to process it. To read, to have a second to process it. You’ll see the one-pager. For this activity, what they would do is read each section, maybe not including the overview, but read about the vision, which has some key elements copied from the NYSED framework. Read that. Pause for a second. Just give a brief reaction. It’s not a thesis, it’s one or two sentences. A thought, a question, a reaction… Partner an opportunity… Can you all hear me? My headphones just died, I think. Hold on. Give everyone an opportunity to read it, share one or two sentences, a connection, for each section, and then move on.

Are there any questions about the say something structure? And the idea here would be, and I don’t think, we’re not going to have time to do this. The idea here is to get folks into breakout rooms, give them a chance to read and start to process it. Have them come out. We’d watch a video, and the directions would be for them to make connections to the video, that they’re making from the NYSED framework. It’s a video on culturally responsive education. They’ve read this one-pager, reacted a little bit to it. Now they’re going to watch something, make connections between some core elements of the CRSE framework that are surface level, albeit while also being deep, if that makes sense at all, and connect it to the video as a way to process it. So, if you want to go ahead and go to the next slide, I’ll just walk us through those to give some orientation and idea.

So, there’d be the video. We’re not going to watch it. And then the idea is the whole group processing comes as we walk through each section. So, if we had just read this one-pager, you talked about it in your groups, you watched the video. We come back. You can either get them into whole groups or back in to breakout rooms to discuss it. Or as facilitators, you would walk through each section of it and say, “And the vision is grounded in students who experience academic success, who know themselves, are socially, politically conscious, understanding of their identity and their culture and their experience, and they have a critical lens. What connections, what came up for you all in your conversations about the vision? What connections to the video did you make with regard to the vision?” Have a brief conversation. Move on, to the next slide.

Definition, same thing. You read about the definition, you watched the video. What connections are you making to, when we talk about affirming racial and cultural identities, what are the impacts that came up in the video when that isn’t happening? What are the practices that are given in the video to support this happening? Again, have a dialogue and continue to move on. The idea here is to give the participants an opportunity to engage with the ideas, process them with a peer, relate them to a video, and then have a conversation together.

And by the way, this is the conversation where we use our tensions. You’ll hear, as people process these things, personal tensions come up. Take time to name those and explore those with participants. You’ll hear them grappling with strategy tension. “Yeah, but this is great that we say affirm them, but how do I do it?” You’ll hear them talking about structural tensions. “Yeah, but I don’t have any common planning time. How am I supposed to do this?” This is where we start to manage, in these open-ended conversations, about implementation of cultural responsiveness. That’s where many of these would come up for us. You can go ahead and keep moving. Mindsets; same thing. We’re not going to jump into these now. You can go ahead and keep going.

The principles that form really a foundation for how we can think about implementing this in our environments, and our belief systems when it comes to expectations in our instructional strategies, in our curriculum, in our assessment, in how we develop staff capacity. This is really kind of the implementation piece, but the idea would be we process the reading and the video via each component of the framework. You can keep going. So, I just went through an hour to two hours worth of PD in about 20 minutes.

Oh, this lastly. Lastly, there’s some opportunities we want to highlight for folks to continue their learning. This is not for you. I think these will be great things for you to do. To review the framework. If you haven’t already, read the framework cover to cover. I think it’s a really, it’s not short, but it’s a nation-leading document. The rest of the country is looking at and using it. It’s a great resource, especially the guidelines in the back. The framework is broken down by different groups. They’re all listed there. And there’s a reflection on the back of that one-pager that participants could use to continue their learning as a group. That’s not something that we would do today necessarily, but that’s there. Now you can go ahead and go to the next.

So for our next steps, we do have our next session in about a month, about four weeks from now. Please make sure you are registered. We’ll dive further into the rest of the session. We’ll share a follow-up email that includes some pre-reading for that session. And we haven’t hammered out, I don’t want to give a timeline necessarily yet for when we’ll deliver the professional development package for folks to utilize. We still need to talk to our partner at NYSED, who are working with about what the exact timeline is for that, but that will be forthcoming at some point before September 30th. Now, I covered a lot, or at least said a lot in 20 minutes. I don’t know if I would say I covered it. Are there any questions? Any reactions? Anything you’re grappling with that you want to share?

Speaker 4:

No. I just appreciate that additional tools are being created; a roadmap, if you will, now. We have the roadmap, we have this framework. Where do we start? And it’s very validating what you have put together. I appreciate it, because a lot of different places have had to build this, so it just makes things a lot of easier, and we were on the right track. So, we’ll just calibrate and fine-tune it and enhance it, and I’m just grateful that these tools were made, so thank you.

John Jacobs:

Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for that. Anything else? We appreciate you all. Please feel free to reach out with any questions you might have. Make sure you’re registered for the second session. Look out for the email with pre-reading and anything else related to the second session that we’ll try and make sure we get to you with plenty of time. We wouldn’t spring pre-reading on you like a week before. We’ll try and make sure that there’s at least two weeks for you to look at anything that will be used for this next session. And we can go ahead and go to the survey. Please take a moment. You can scan if you have, I think all phones, but you can also click the link in the chat. But all phones, I think if you open up, whether it’s Android or Apple, the camera and scan the QR code in the middle of the screen, it’ll take you to the survey.