Understanding Bias

On Monday, April 22nd, I was able to co-lead a professional learning session on bias for my building. I haven't spent a lot of time in front of my whole building, and this session included teachers and paraprofessional staff. More so, I hadn't spoken with peers about matters of bias and culturally responsive teaching, and I am grateful to my principal, Dr. Hoff, for the opportunity to do so. This post will focus on the process of getting prepared for that session and a reflection on that process as well as on how the session ultimately turned out.

I must say that in my district, the realm of culturally responsive teaching is very unexplored territory, and I think this means that people are understandably apprehensive about broaching the topics and understandings that we must have to be more culturally responsive. This doesn't only extend to each individual's concerns about what they will discover about themselves and their interactions with kids but also how the people around them will react. These feelings certainly came out as the idea for this session was presented to various members of the staff, and immediately there were concerns about both areas.

On the other hand, some also expressed concerns that this work would come up short of what we need. Some staff were worried that we might not give this learning the continuity it needs. I personally was concerned that people would be in a wide range of readiness and previous experience with CRT and understanding bias and might need personalized lessons.

Throughout all this, my principal seemed to really want to carefully control the messaging of the purpose and necessity of this training, a point I now really understand, as the more cynical or anxious members of our staff would certainly look for holes to poke in our work, if they don't understand the purpose of what we are doing.

Just to add to all the different opinions and objectives of everyone, I was asking to be a part of leading this session. Fortunately, my principal was very open to this, but I wasn't sure how to really insert myself into this work. Sensing all the tension around the topics we would cover, I was hesitant to be more assertive--something I think I need to work on. Ultimately, I was able to sit down with my principal, who had already outlined the lesson for that day. We discussed what everything would look like, including learning outcomes and activities to get us there. I finally felt more comfortable adding my touch into this lesson. We also established what parts of the presentation I would be able to lead.

The next step of all this was designing the lesson and the accompanying slideshow. As a classroom teacher, this is an area of familiarity, and I felt very comfortable and really enjoyed bringing the information together in a way that would be attractive for our audience, and I was also able to include resources that staff could use to follow up after our lesson.

I was very nervous leading up to the lesson, not so much for talking in front of peers as much as how people would react to everything. Fortunately, many of my concerns would be a little overblown. The lesson was a success, and the feedback we received was very positive, both informally as people patted me on the back in the halls and also from the feedback form we asked the staff to respond to.

In the end, I really only got to lead one activity and the reflection to accompany it. The activity I led was really cool and involved having people organize themselves into groups. This was meant to highlight the way we categorize ourselves and how we tend to organize ourselves based on affinities. One common outcome in this activity is that few people if anyone will intentionally create a group based on their differences instead of commonalities. The conversation we had after the activity was great, and I think people really surprised themselves with how they had so naturally organized themselves the way they did.

I also sat in on some conversations among our paraprofessional staff, who had amazing conversations that were open and honest and questioning of the status quo. It really gave me the impression that we were more ready for this than I had given us credit for. As a whole group, a common theme was sexism, not too surprising considering that so much of our staff is female and certainly something they have experienced. I think that was a great opening for the forthcoming discussions we will be able to have about other power imbalances.

At the end of the lesson, we asked everyone who attended to answer an anonymous Google Form with three ratings on their level of discomfort, the learning they acknowledge they need, and the reflection this would create in the coming days. Most people expressed some level of discomfort (a sign of success, as we suggested), but even among those who expressed they had felt no discomfort, they almost all shared that they had much to learn and would be reflecting on this. To me, this suggests that the level of discussion and the activities were probably pretty easy and not very shocking, but they acknowledged that the themes we were addressing are very important.

Overall, I think this was a successful first dip of my toes, and I learned a bit about myself and more about our building and what we are able to learn and accomplish in a morning. Though we are just beginning with our work here, I believe we can do this, and it will have a powerful impact on our students' learning.

On a final exciting note, this presentation inspired me enough to suggest to a classmate and colleague that we offer a similar lesson in our "Teaching and Learning Academy" in August, so we submitted a proposal and hope to have the chance to hold a similar lesson with other colleagues from around the district.