FU Racial Identity Questions

Answer  those three questions in file- Response My identities  are Asian, middle class, female, English language learner.Reading sources includes OSPI Report card(link in file, search Bellevue school district or Jing Mei Elementary)class reading reference for question 3 are

http://progressive.org/magazine/schools-work/

and “learning to lead for racial equity” in attact.

Think  youself as a teacher who would like to teach all student and change the  inequities in teaching. To be clear that the answer should emphasize  educational equality and inclusive culture, no privillage and  discrimination.

Teacher Identities and Positionalities in School Contexts
To more deeply understand how your identities impact your role as teacher
(candidate) in the context of your placement school (and in future schools), first select
two or more of the following identities we have studied to focus on: 1) race and
ethnicity; 2) socioeconomic status; 3) gender and sexual identity; 4) language and
immigration status.
For each of these identities, you will compare your own with those represented in the
student body and teaching staff of the school identified in Item 1. To gain
comprehensive data about each, first consult the school’s OSPI Report Card, and
school website. LGBTQ, language, and migration status identities may not be
counted, but any resources, groups, events, teacher/curriculum committees, or staff
that reflect those identities openly (or their absence) can reveal much about the school
culture overall. For teaching staff representation, look at website photos. While photos
don’t tell the whole story, you can glean some ideas to make inferences.
2.E Assignment: Respond to the prompts below in the box that follows. (1 page)
1. Which of your two+ identities are mirrored or not in the student body and
teaching staff? Clarify how you know by including specific references to the
number of students and faculty who share those identities, to the extent
possible, including OSPI School Report Card demographics and other
sources you name.
2. What aspects of your two+ identities are made visible or privileged in this
context, or not? Explain how this visibility/privilege (or lack thereof)
manifests your observations of classrooms and other school spaces.
3. Speculate/imagine what assets and challenges do your two+ identities present
if you in this school setting? Name at least one asset and one challenge, and
reference at least two of our class readings (e.g. Noguera, 2015 and others).
Consider, for example:
If it appears that most of the teachers in the building share your two identities and
they happen to be dominant/privileged ones, how might you take efforts to more
effectively support and serve students who do not share them (a challenge)?
Or, if one of your identities is mirrored in the student body and one is marginalized or
stigmatized, how can you harness that nondominant identity as a teaching asset
(relationship-building with __ students; curriculum on __, etc.)?
1.
2.
3.
learning to lead for racial equity
To help K-12 educators confront racial inequities, school and district leaders
need to provide sustained, intensive, and carefully designed opportunities
for professional learning.
By Gislaine Ngounou and Nancy Gutierrez
I
f education leaders aspire to confront and undo severe racial inequities in
schools and school systems, they must create opportunities for teachers
and staff to engage in productive discussions about questions that many of
them will be reluctant to consider. Those could include questions about
how race affects their decisions about which students to place into basic
and advanced courses, which teachers to assign to which children, which
parents they see as “engaged,” discipline practices, and on and on.
Given how complex and how deeply felt Americans’ beliefs about race and equity
are, these topics cannot be addressed effectively through the onetime workshops
that too often pass for professional development in K-12 education. Nor is it effective to lecture educators about racial bias, bury them in data and research findings, or treat social justice
as just another initiative for the school to adopt. Rather, conversations about these issues have to be frequent,
ongoing, and handled with great care and skill.
GiSlaiNe NGouNou (gngounou@pdkintl.org; @gislaineedspeak) is chief program officer, Phi Delta Kappa International,
Alexandria, Va., and NaNCY GuTieRReZ is chief strategy officer at the New York City Leadership Academy.
Illustration: iStock
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Conversations about racial inequity have to be frequent, ongoing, and handled with
great care and skill.
Later in this article, we offer guidance on researchbased practices that can help school- and districtlevel educators engage in meaningful professional
learning about race and equity. But we begin with a
vignette that illustrates just how easy it is for educational leaders — even those who are deeply committed to the pursuit of racial justice — to underestimate
the complexity of this work.
How easily it can go wrong
Bryar Middle School (not the school’s real name)
serves students from various neighborhoods, who
were brought together when several schools were
shut down due to school consolidations and closures.
Like many schools, it struggles on a number of fronts
at the same time: Over the past two years, it has
experienced a significant decline in student achievement; faculty morale is low; unplanned teacher absences are frequent, creating a daily scramble to find
multiple substitute teachers, and student disciplinary problems are common — though it’s important
to note that while a little over 40% of the student
body is made up of students who identify as white,
students of color make up 99% of all documented
disciplinary referrals.
Bryar’s assistant principal, Ms. Miles (also a
pseudonym), wishes that she could devote herself
to providing instructional leadership but instead
spends most of her time fielding complaints. Every
day she hears from teachers who are at their wits’
ends dealing with students they refer to as “unmotivated” and “disrespectful.” She hears from Hispanic students that their teachers misunderstand
and disrespect them; why, they want to know, is
the Spanish teacher the only Hispanic teacher in
the school? And she hears from parents who worry
that the teachers and staff don’t know how to relate
to their children.
Earlier in the month, she had a difficult conversation with an African-American father who had come
to the school to share his concerns about his son, a
6th grader, who had been sent to the office multiple
times for “not paying attention.” In her last note
home, the boy’s teacher had warned that the behavior
needed to be corrected to avoid further disciplinary action. “But Ms. Miles,” the man asked bluntly,
“how am I supposed to build a relationship with my
son’s teacher when the look in her eyes is one of
38 Kappan
November 2017
fear, and when she physically backs away every time
I approach her?” Without waiting for an answer, he
added, “I know that these teachers mean well. But it
is hard to communicate with them if they are afraid
of me and my child.”
The next day, Miles went to her immediate supervisor, principal Nelson, to have a heart-to-heart
talk about the increasingly tense environment in and
around the school. It was time to do something, she
argued, to change Bryar’s culture and offer better
support to teachers, staff, students, and families. She
asked Nelson for permission to attend a regional equity training, which she hoped would equip her with
ideas for improving the school community.
During the one-day workshop, titled “equity and
identity,” participants were led to reflect on their
own biases, life experiences, and racial backgrounds
and to discuss how those things play out in their
work. Miles found it to be an enlightening conversation, especially in that it got her thinking about
— and gave her language to describe — the ways in
which Bryar’s teachers were singling out students of
color for disciplinary referrals. She left the workshop
inspired to share what she had learned and to give
her staff the same opportunity to think about racial
and cultural dynamics at the school.
She spent the weekend thinking about ways to
introduce these issues to her staff. It occurred to
her that she had often worked effectively with her
teachers to review the school’s performance data
and use it to identify student needs and drive instructional decisions, so she decided to apply the
same strategy here. That Sunday, without checking
with principal Nelson, she created and promptly
sent a survey meant to gather data from her teachers about their demographic backgrounds and the
ways in which they defined their own identities.
Drawing upon materials from the workshop, she
included questions such as: What is your family history of immigration? When did you first become conscious
of your race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, social
class, mental and physical “ableness,” faith/religion/
spirituality (or the absence thereof)? What is your first
memory of interacting with racial or ethnic difference?
What patterns, if any, do you notice in how you respond
to those different from or like you? Can you describe any
associations you see with your life experiences and your
professional practice?
She hoped the survey results would prompt a discussion among the teachers about their own backgrounds, how different they were from many of their
students, and how this affected their classroom practices. Ideally, the survey would serve as a warm-up
for a conversation at the next staff meeting similar to
what she had experienced at the workshop. She and
the teachers would engage in deep discussion about
the ways in which identity shapes their interactions
with students and parents.
To put it mildly, the survey was not well-received.
It was an intrusion on their privacy, teachers argued, demanding that principal Nelson explain its
purpose and intent: “Are the survey results going
in our professional files? How will these results be
used? Is this a way to blame white teachers for the
way our kids are acting? Isn’t this a form of reverseracism? What does this have to do with me doing
my job here?” Feeling caught off guard and unsure
about how to respond, Nelson mostly listened and
nodded. Later in the morning, Miles would have
to come in and explain what in the world this was
all about.
Some mistakes to avoid
Miles’ decision to send this survey to her teachers
could be written off as the sort of thing no seasoned
school administrator would do. But in fact, she did
have several years of experience in the job, and her
story nicely illustrates a few common mistakes that
we often see when school and district leaders set out
to confront racial inequities.
The first is to overestimate one’s own competency
to lead this work. The workshop on equity helped
Miles define a specific injustice at her school, gave
her words she could use to describe the problem,
and inspired her to act. However, the one-day training was simply not enough to equip her with the
depth and follow-through skills necessary to design
and scaffold a productive experience for her teachers. Indeed, while they may serve as adequate entry
points (we must start somewhere), such brief workshops rarely provide in-depth or effective professional development on any topic (Loucks-Horsley
et al., 1999), and certainly not on topics as complex
as race and equity.
The second is to underestimate the time and effort that this work requires. Miles may have expe-
rienced the one-day workshop as a transformative
experience, but it is much more likely that the event
helped her crystallize some thoughts that had been
percolating in her mind over a long period of time.
Nobody changes their beliefs about race, equity, and
education in an instant, or even a day.
And the third is to assume that everybody is equally
ready and willing to discuss these issues. Miles may
have been inspired to act, but that doesn’t mean that
her teachers were prepared do so. Not that school
and district leaders can afford to wait for just the
right moment to dive into a discussion about race
and equity — if that were the case, the discussion
might never begin. However, resistance increases
when educators feel surprised or caught off guard
by the work and if it comes across as an abrupt intrusion into their professional lives. If the intention is
to disrupt the status quo in this way, leaders should
have a plan and skills to shift the momentum and
energy toward learning.
Confronting racial inequity: Key principles
To do this work effectively, school and district
leaders need to study, honor, and understand the
complexities of both individual experiences and the
long-standing history, biases, and deep-seated effect
of inequities in American education. They need to
understand that discussions about race and equity often bring up emotions, beliefs, and experiences that
must be handled with great care. No issue requires
more skillful facilitation.
Drawing from the research on race- and equity-focused professional development, and from our own
experiences leading such work, we see four principles
as absolutely critical for leaders to understand:
#1. Professional learning about race and equity
requires a systems-thinking approach.
There is a tendency for educational leaders to view
equity-focused professional learning as an add-on, a
box on their to-do list to check off, perhaps because
treating it as a more complex adaptive challenge
requires new learning and more time to construct
solutions (Heifetz, 1994). Typically, they hire external consultants for a onetime workshop on equity,
or equity becomes one topic in a yearlong scopeand-sequence of professional learning topics. If any
changes are implemented as a result, they tend to be
Nobody changes their beliefs about race, equity, and education in an instant, or even
a day.
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rushed and poorly designed, which turns everybody
off to the work and makes them resistant to future
efforts to promote equity.
In its report about equity in the age of the Every
Student Succeeds Act, the Learning Policy Institute
lays out an opportunity to achieve equity at scale:
“An equitable system does not treat all students in
a standardized way but differentiates instruction,
services, and resources to respond effectively to the
diverse needs of students so that each student can develop his or her full academic and societal potential”
(Cook-Harvey et al., 2016). Achieving this vision for
equity goes well beyond simply paying attention to
a list of technical tasks, the report argues. Rather,
schools and school systems only begin to make progress when they integrate equity-related issues into
learning very intentionally, when all stakeholders are
able to see how equity (or the lack of it) permeates the
fabric of every aspect of their work, and when they
implement a thoughtful and well-designed scope of
professional learning.
When equity training takes place across multiple
levels of the system — involving a range of constituencies, from teachers and administrators to central
office staff, parents, students, community leaders,
and others — powerful changes have a chance to
take root: People are better able to see that inequities result from conflicting interests and beliefs systems, and to look for effective ways to share and
allocate resources, resolve conflicts, and dismantle
unjust structures.
concrete ways in which they can have positive influences on their students and colleagues.
For example, how would things have been different if Miles and Nelson had set the stage for
equity work at a faculty meeting during which they
acknowledged staff’s hard work, modeled their own
vulnerability by sharing what they’ve learned about
race and equity and ways in which they are personally impacted and involved, acknowledged the
discomfort that this discussion often engenders,
and promised that the discussion would be both
ongoing and focused on concrete ways in which to
improve practice?
#2. Professional learning about race and equity
requires some willingness to experience
discomfort.
The type of skilled facilitation required here calls
for an ability to push people to the edge of their
knowledge and competencies, to a space of vulnerability that opens the raw channels of deep, honest,
and brave learning without letting them fall over
the edge (Armor, 2006). This could include having an intentionally diverse team of facilitators with
backgrounds and experiences that spread across a
spectrum so that they can present different viewpoints and push on participants to engage in different ways.
In the case of Miles, it might be helpful to engage a trained equity facilitator, who could introduce some key findings from the research on race
and education (such as the data from a recent Johns
Hopkins University study that found that white
teachers consistently hold lower expectations for
their black students; Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2016) and raise questions that are likely to
push Bryar’s teachers to reflect on their own beliefs:
When evaluating the same black student, why are
white teachers 30% more likely than black teachers to predict that the student will not complete
a four-year degree? Why are white teachers 40%
To promote powerful discussions about race and
equity, facilitators need to know how to identify
processes that advance or shut down conversations,
especially when working with participants who are
just starting their equity work or who feel uncomfortable with it. It’s important to create and maintain
a supportive learning environment while at the same
time pushing people to confront truths and realities
that may make them feel uncomfortable (Garvin,
Edmondson, & Gino, 2008; Singleton, 2014).
We are not advocating for what is often referred
to as “safe spaces,” whereby educators refuse to participate in discussions of race and racism unless the
facilitator guarantees that they won’t be made to feel
personally attacked, blamed, or guilty. Rather, we are
talking about the capacity to keep people engaged in
the work by helping them to find their entry points
into the conversation, to examine their own actions
and reactions, to acknowledge that they have been
shaped by their own experiences, and to look for
40 Kappan
November 2017
School and district leaders need
to study, honor, and understand
the complexities of both individual
experiences and the long-standing
history, biases, and deep-seated effect
of inequities in American education.
less likely to expect their black students to graduate from high school? And is it possible to engage
in effective practice as an educator while holding
personal beliefs that discriminate against certain
groups of students?
#3. Professional learning about race and equity
requires people to tell their stories.
Educators cannot create a new narrative about race
and equity in their schools unless they are willing to
attach words to their experiences, beliefs, and aspirations. For leaders, especially, it is important to
develop and share a personal narrative that speaks to
the purposes and values that drive them, and which
can move others in the school to articulate their own
goals and values (Ganz, 2009). In particular, we’ve
found it useful for educators to share their own racial
autobiographies (Singleton, 2014) — stories about
the ways in which race and awareness of race has
shaped their lives, including the work that they do
in classrooms, schools, and school systems. Many
times, we have seen such storytelling have a profound
and positive impact on educators, helping strengthen
their professional relationships, reveal their differences, and clarify their shared values.
Further, we have found that educators have
deeper and more productive conversations about
race and equity when they consider not just their
own stories but also the stories of their students and
the narratives revealed by looking at the research
literature, popular media, and other sources. Few
teachers and administrators have the time to treat
their professional development work as if it were a
graduate seminar, but it can be a powerful experience for colleagues to engage with each other, their
students, and their communities, and to read and
discuss books and articles that relate to the challenges they face in their own schools, especially
when leaders or facilitators are clear that they will
not ask others to engage in work that they are not
willing to do themselves.
#4. Professional learning about race and equity
rarely leads to closure.
Professional development activities in K-12 education tend to provide far too little time for teachers and staff to process what they are learning and
figure out how to apply it to their work. Herein lies
the danger of one-off trainings: They falsely suggest
that there is closure to the day’s session, as though
educators could fully rethink their core beliefs, attitudes, and practices in a matter of hours.
One-off workshops on a topic as complex as race
and equity are particularly dangerous, given that a
single day’s work can only begin to tease out the is-
sues that need to be discussed. Such sessions are just
long enough for facilitators to pry open what Kegan
and Lahey (2009) describe as educators’ “worry box”
— the mix of feelings, fears, and goals that drive
their current behaviors and practices — and then,
just when the real work has begun, they come to an
abrupt stop.
School and district leaders need to understand that
if they are going to raise these issues, they have to
be committed to wrestling with them over the long
term. Questions about race, equity, and schooling
reach people at a level that is deeply personal, emotional, and moral, and they need to be able to work
through what they have uncovered. Further, not only
must we assume that this work takes time, but we
should recognize that it may never come to a tidy
resolution. As our colleague Glenn Singleton often
points, we should “expect and accept nonclosure.”
But as difficult, messy, and inconclusive as it may
be, the work of promoting racial equity in K-12 education is also non-negotiable. We owe it to all our
children, especially those who are most vulnerable,
to push ourselves constantly to ensure that our policies and practices are truly just. 
K
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opportunity through the Every Student Succeeds Act.
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Ganz, M. (2009). Why stories matter. Sojourners Magazine, 38
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Garvin, D.A., Edmondson, A.C., & Gino, F. (2008). Is yours a
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Gershenson, S., Holt, S.B., & Papageorge, N.W. (2016). Who
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