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This article originally appears in the February 1, 2022 (Vol. 79 No. 5) post by ASCD. Incremental equity initiatives often just paper over the status quo. How can schools be bolder and more strategic? Abstract In our combined 60-some years pushing schools toward transformative equity visions, we’ve navigated innumerable roadblocks. But only rarely is the…

Last year we released our first article– a collaboration between Due East Educational Equity Collaborative and Sourcewell called Recognizing and Addressing Harmful Language — which helped us think through language choices connected to race, gender and relationships, social constructs and the white racial frame. This article focused on recognizing the impact of the words we…

2020 has fostered reflection and awareness in many areas of personal life, family life, community life and institutional life. One area of growing collective reflection and awareness is around the fight for social justice and the advancement of systemic equity. Previous levels of injustice, inequity, racism and unwillingness to see systemic power and privilege paradigms…

Earlier this year we wrote the blog Equity and Justice: Facilitating Groups Through Resistance attempting to provide context and answers for the often-asked question: When facilitating racial equity and social justice group sessions, how do we navigate resistance in the room? In that blog we identified why we encounter resistance during these sessions, when to…

Think of a professional coaching success story… One where you were either the coach or the person being coached. What made the coaching experience successful? Think of a professional coaching failure… One where you were either the coach or you were the coachee. What made the coaching experience unsuccessful? I have been in both positions:…

It is that time of year again… I hear sleigh bells! Well actually, I’ve never heard sleigh bells ring, but it is the time of year that we call the Holiday Season. The season that kicks off with Thanksgiving, reaching a crescendo with Christmas, and culminating in New Year celebrations. All these holidays are fully…

In a previous blog post, Marceline DuBose and I wrote about the resistance educational equity facilitators can expect. And it is unsurprising that someone standing in front of a room full of people arguing that perspectives should shift and resources should be reallocated would receive that kind of push-back. But when one educator makes an…

So far, I’ve ended the lives of two cars from all the time I’ve spent accumulating miles on Interstate 94 during the course of my life. Many midwesterners won’t be surprised by that–like me, they likely spent a lot of time in a car as a child, when driving at least 30 minutes was the…

I remember sitting through a teacher workshop where the trainer taught us exactly as she thought we should teach our students, modeling the tone, demeanor, and sequence of the lesson. Walking us through simple steps of cutting out shapes and writing our names on the back of the project. It was excruciating. And I remember…

She was a bright-eyed and enthusiastic student, one who eagerly pored through the list of Black authors in my syllabus, excited for what she’d encounter in AP Language and Composition that year.  Her heartbreak was real when she told me she’d have to leave my class; as a Magnet Student, she was required to take…