Callaham Thesis Finalv 2

Building
Effective Tools to Encourage Consistent, Constructive, and Explicit Discourse about Issues of Equity Among Staff and Students in a School Setting
Building Effective Tools to Encourage Consistent, Constructive, and Explicit Discourse about Issues of Equity Among Staff and Students in a School Setting Greg Callaham HTH GSE School Leadership Resident, 2012-2013
Building Effective Tools to Encourage Consistent, Constructive, and Explicit Discourse about Issues of Equity Among Staff and Students in a School Setting

ABSTRACT:

As a bicultural person of color, issues of equity have strongly shaped my identity and career, and I have subsequently spent a large portion of my career working with educational organizations and staff in creating safe spaces for self-reflection and action regarding these issues. Within an organization such as High Tech High that intentionally integrates its student population, these conversations and safe spaces become even more important, as integration without understanding can tend towards increased feelings of isolation by members of non-dominant groups, as well as general conflict between groups. Therefore, I chose to focus my Action Research on working to encourage consistent, constructive, and explicit discourse about issues of equity among staff and students across HTH sites. This work consisted largely of individual interviews and conversations with staff and students across multiple HTH sites, as well as facilitating large-group workshops and conversations with all faculty at High Tech Middle School, and a select group of students at High Tech High International. Based on participant feedback, I was successful in creating safe spaces in my own workshops, and helped teachers and students feel more aware and motivated to increase the level of equity conversations in their own classrooms. However, I did not have the same level of success in terms of capacity-building, as many participants struggled to follow up on their desires to do this work due to a perceived lack of knowledge of how to carry it out. To deal with this, as I continue this work in the future, I will do more work building capacity with a select group of individuals prior to bringing the whole group together. On an HTH-specific level, I believe that very intentional reflection on how the HTH culture of autonomy can sometimes clash with the consistency and structure necessary to achieve regular, safe, and constructive conversations about issues of equity would be necessary for work along these lines to be carried out effectively across the organization in the future.
INTRODUCTION

The Pinnacle

Some of the best youth work I have been a part of occurred almost two years ago, when I was Assistant Director for a summer program led by Caldera Arts (an educational program that serves a diverse group of middle school and high school students - ethnically, socio-economically, and geographically - from rural Central Oregon and urban Portland). There were a lot of reasons I found the work my co-workers accomplished so amazing, but a series of events highlighted our core strengths as a team. We were in the middle of our all-staff training, in discussions about culture and how to work with kids from different backgrounds from ourselves, when one of the staff members asked to speak to the whole group. He told us that he had just shared with his small group how uncomfortable our Mens Group sessions with students (and staff) had made him feel in the past, and he found it important to share with the rest of the staff. The Mens Group he was addressing referred to how, every morning during our summer programs, various staff and students would facilitate all-community meetings, one being our once- a-session meetings when staff and students split off by self-identified gender to form our Mens Group and Womens Group. In the Mens Group, various staff members would share some thoughts on what manhood meant to them, followed by creating a space where all students and staff shared moments of vulnerability together, without fear of being ridiculed. These groups had always been moments of pride for male staff, as we watched our young men grow and take one more step towards being the strong grown men we knew they could be. Or so we had thought, until our co-worker (well call him P) opened our eyes by sharing how, as a gay man, he felt that the various staff definitions of Manhood that came out made a lot of assumptions about where our students came from, and did not leave room for students that felt like he did. He shared how isolated that made him feel - and how it must be even worse for some of our kids. Even bigger was the fact that he had worked with us for two years prior to this moment, and he had only felt safe enough to share at this particular training. Why he felt safer this time around became clear in how his co-workers responded. There was no defensiveness or excuses. Nobody argued that he was being sensitive. Even though we had always been under the (false) understanding that these sessions had been strong moments of identity-building for our kids, Ps point was clear, and the staff unanimously agreed that anything that could hurt our kids was unacceptable, and we needed to change. Once P had spoken, it was so obvious how we had been doing things wrong. Without him speaking up, however, Im sad to say it may never have occurred to me (or my co-workers), and I would have thought the work we were doing was powerful and positive - all while some of our own kids became more isolated and disconnected from our program. To address this issue, we got a diverse set of male staff together (in every sense of the word we could come up with) and began the process of re-thinking our Mens Group meetings and how we could create opportunities for ALL of our male students to create their own positive male identities, and give them role models to talk to, as well. And, although we came up with structures
that seemed to address these issues, we resolved to continue to reflect back on meetings and work with students to make sure that everybody felt fully included. And that precedent - right in staff training - set the tone for the rest of our summer sessions. We had another staff member mention how a skit that was performed with staff members could have been interpreted to be joking about gender roles, and so we worked with students and staff to make it right. A long-standing reference within Caldera culture about Flat on Back time (referring to resting and relaxing and abbreviated to F-O-B) was pointed out to sound a bit too much like wording used to degrade Asian immigrants. That was handled immediately. No argument by staff. Simply an understanding that if we did not look at everything from an angle of whether or not it could possibly hurt our kids - and take diverse backgrounds into account - then leaving things as they were could only hurt our kids. On top of that, we could never assume that anything we said or did was inclusive for all of our students, so we would need to be diligent in questioning ourselves, and encouraging a structure of safety so that students would let us know if we had missed anything. It wasnt about being PC. It wasnt about not being able to take a joke. It was having a staff with backgrounds diverse enough to fill in the gaps for all of us who had great intentions, but couldnt possibly have every experience, to minimize trial and error cultural learning. On top of that, it was about a culture of inclusive communication and safety, so everybody felt comfortable enough to honestly share with the rest of us. Without both of these things, we could not have had the conditions in place to pull this off, no matter our intentions. Interestingly enough, this intentional work around equity and inclusion didnt just enable us to better react to incidents as they came up, but they actually seemed to prevent incidents from occurring. Throughout the summer, I had multiple staff members - and students - come to me and tell me how they were not seeing off-putting behaviors (by staff and students) that had regularly occurred in past years. Sure, we had the incidents I mentioned, but things that had always happened before just were not happening. Suddenly, staff and students of color, females, and LGBT youth and adults were talking about how different things were - and how great it felt. Because the pressure was off. We could all just talk about these things and teach each other without worrying about how (the other people) were going to react - because this was just how we handled things. It was a given. Of course, I cannot prove that this work affected disciplinary issues that summer, but I believe it did. A major part of my role during the summer was to serve as a sort of Dean of Students, managing conflicts, initiating behavioral interventions, etc. And, that summer, for the first time, I got a little bored - because I just didnt have that much work to do. Conflicts were still happening, but my staff were handling the conversations immediately, and in a way they had never felt prepared to do before - keeping the small conflicts that are natural to adolescent relationships from escalating into the much bigger drama that I was used to getting called in to help handle. On top of that, I recall numerous incidents where the students did not even allow the staff to get involved - because they had already handled it on their own. We had established a culture where we did not let things go, and so the students began to hold the same expectations for each other. We definitely didnt get to this state overnight. In spite of great staff with amazing intentions and a very progressive organizational model, Caldera was not like this when I started working with them six years prior. At that time, I recall being part of a Caldera leadership meeting where one of the people present mentioned that we could all gather some information and then
powwow again later. Everybody nodded until one of our staff members - a Klamath Native - described what a powwow really was (a major convening of Native people, important on a spiritual level, among other things), and how, in no way was the previously-mentioned meeting a powwow. He wasnt angry, but he was bothered and wanted to make sure that misusing that particular term didnt happen again. He understood that nobody said it because they were racist or otherwise disrespectful of Native culture. But it had to be pointed out. And I think back on that as the eye-opener for Caldera that began the organizations slow - and painful - process of creating a culture and environment where these conversations were just part of who we were, and where we would greatly reduce how often we would feel that heart-sunk feeling of getting something so obvious (in retrospect) pointed out so long after the fact. Of course, its much bigger than sparing feelings, as the gap between those with power and those without continues to grow. In spite of the re-election of a black President and the many ways in which our society has seemed to progress in terms of equity in the decades since the Civil Rights era, positive intentions alone have yet to break down the various achievement gaps between different racial, socioeconomic, and gender groups in our country. No matter how good people are, we still need help to know what we do not know, and to avoid the mistakes that we do not even know we are making. But we also need to learn these things in a way that we can hear, as a regular occurrence, as opposed to only when something big happens, and we are on the defensive. Therefore, I believe that to adequately support a diverse group of students, even the most progressive youth organizations must consistently implement explicit protocols and structures of inclusion and equity, and regularly reflect back on these practices with staff and students.

Round II

A few years after my experiences with Caldera, I found myself in San Diego, CA, enrolled in the High Tech High GSE Student Leadership residency program. (Before going forward, I should note that High Tech High (HTH) is an organization that includes 11 schools, as well as the name of the original school from which that organization began. From here on, when I refer to High Tech High or HTH, I am referring to the organization, as a whole, unless otherwise noted.) I chose this program for two reasons - the first being HTHs innovative practices around academic programming and conscious design for educational improvement, and the second being their core mission around integration, equity, and inclusion. When I arrived, I was blown away by the very intentional protocols and structures in place to create a culture of collaboration and innovation around project-based learning and teaching, in general. The Dilemma Consultancy and Project Tuning protocols, especially, stood out to me as brilliant methods for creating safe settings for constructive feedback and dialogue around class work and leadership structures. I heard about staff attending workshops with the Stanford d.School around Design Thinking and how they could apply the process towards education, and the ed-tech side of me stood up and cheered. Throughout the different school sites, I watched classroom teachers push past the boundaries of traditional teaching to move towards building learning environments where students create work that is truly valuable outside of school walls, and I saw conscious structures
within the organization such as a blind, zip-code based lottery to create a student body as diverse as the communities served, and efforts to build new campuses (in Chula Vista and North County) to access students that a more central location could not reach. All of these things spoke to me as indicators that HTH was not like other organizations. At the same time, however, I kept getting this uncomfortable feeling that maybe HTH was not as different as I had hoped, from an equity and inclusion lens. Because, at first glance, from a race/ethnic diversity standpoint, the HTH staff did not look very different from most other schools I had seen around the country, as the staff make-up noticeably lags behind the ethnic diversity of the students served (staff being ~ 70% white versus only 41% of the students being the same). And, although these staff numbers were similar to overall teacher diversity in the area and at many schools across the nation, I still found myself wondering why HTH, with a national reach and stated emphasis on diversity and inclusion, could not recruit a diverse staff at the same level of other schools (public and charter) recruiting from the same pool of potential applicants. These thoughts were reinforced when I sat in my first meeting with all of the directors and other organizational leadership and looked around a room of 16 other people to see that only two of them were people of color (12.5%; one Asian-American female, and one mixed-race Latino male), and although half those present were female, those in roles with titles other than Director were all male. And I could not help but wonder if something was missing--especially after I spoke with various directors and learned that very conscious efforts to recruit more diverse staff have been underway for years. If that was the case, was there something about current staff culture or outside perceptions that kept qualified candidates from showing up? I wasnt seeing a culture of explicit conversation about diversity and issues of equity like I had experienced in the past, but did that mean it wasnt happening? My fears, built up over a lifetime of being one of only a few people of color in a room, took over and made me wonder if that might mean that HTH wasnt following up on their ideals . . . or maybe a push towards more explicit conversation about these topics might help build towards more successful recruitment efforts across sites. That was a key part of the culture of Caldera, where we had had great success recruiting staff of color (even though the Portland education field is even less diverse than San Diego), so perhaps that was all that was needed here? Of course, the longer I worked at HTH, and the better I got to know the folks working here, the more I realized that--staff make-up aside--there was some equity work being done across High Tech High campuses, although it was not yet universal. On top of that, it also occurred to me that the reason that I wasnt seeing the level of explicit conversations about equity issues that I had experienced in the past was not really about HTH it was about Caldera, and the fact that we were doing amazing, innovative work around communication and equity there, and thats where our focus was. On the other hand, our teaching practices and structuring were not as innovative and progressive as HTHs. So I started thinking what if our kids could get the best of both worlds? What kind of amazing work could our kids do then? At this point, I must note that the need for this work is not and never was - specific to High Tech High. This is an every school problem. In fact, its an every organization problem. And if we could figure out how to effectively address it here, we could bring it to other organizations struggling with the same issues. So I set out to answer some questions: How do you tap into the power that diversity brings? How do you get everyone in an organization to regularly bring out their different perspectives and viewpoints and challenge
everybody involved to think deeper and be better prepared to work effectively with everyone they serve - without putting people on the defensive or damaging relationships? Nobody can be culturally knowledgeable in all situations (or even in most) so how can we build up structures to get around that? And no matter how diverse a staff is, we will always be working with students that have completely different cultural backgrounds from ourselves, so how do you create structures to allow everyone to address diverse needs? So how could I, as just one individual in an organization with no delegated power to directly enact change, work with all of the staff to, well, enact change? With all of these questions, there were a number of ways I could tackle this issue, but my primary aim was to answer the question:

How can I support more consistent, constructive, and explicit discourse about issues of equity among staff and students?

But why do this work at all? UNDERSTANDINGS

Put simply, HTH has a diverse population of students. Across the organization, there are significant numbers of white students, students of color, students from middle or upper-class families, students that qualify for free or reduced lunch, LGBTQ youth, straight youth, students on IEPs, students labeled in other schools as high-achieving, etc. And, since one of HTHs core values is the belief that academic tracking is a form of segregation, all of these students share classes with each other. Put another way, HTH reflects the real world, where there are all types of people interacting together, as U.S. public schools were (in theory) intended to do. As a result, there is conflict. Not conflict in the way that the public expects of our schools in terms of physical fights (in fact, HTH is very safe, on that level), but in terms of the natural conflict between cultures, perspectives, and ways of being that happens when not everybody is the same. In an ideal world, we would all be well-equipped to welcome that conflict and turn that to our favor - the value of true diversity. However, the real world does not work like that, and, in spite of our best efforts, we cannot prevent the real world from entering our schools and affecting our students. And this is true for any educational organization that serves a heterogeneous student population (no matter the specific combinations). Therefore, to best serve all of our kids, as educators we need to know all the many, subtle ways that our identities and self-belief can be subverted when we are in a group of people that are not exactly like us. Of course, there are many different variables involved in this process, but I chose to focus on the key concepts of Priming and Stereotype Threat, Unconscious Bias, and Code- Switching.

Primed to Fail: How Stereotype Threat works against equity in our classrooms
When trying to figure out how equity is supported or damaged in schools, we have to begin with the concept of stereotype threat. But to understand stereotype threat, we have to begin with the concept of priming - which is the well-documented tendency for small actions, words, etc. to change how we act and even think. A famous example involves a study in which a researcher asked study participants to hold a cup of coffee while he dug out an article for them to read. (Williams & Bargh, 2008) He then took back the cup of coffee and had participants read a short, vague description of a man named Joe. After reading, he asked them one question - How do you feel about Joe? Every participant read the exact same description of Joe, but half of them decided that they felt negatively about Joe - they didnt like him. The other half felt positively about Joe. Of course, this is not a surprise - 50/50 mixed feelings brought on by a vague description of Joe. Except that how people reacted to Joe was very strongly connected to one thing - the temperature of the cup of coffee that the participants held prior to reading the description. Those that held a cold cup of iced coffee didnt like Joe (felt coldly toward him). Those that held a warm cup? They liked him just fine. The implications behind this experiment are hard to believe, however many more experiments testing the concept of priming have shown similarly dramatic results - in essence, we are all much more susceptible to suggestions and subconscious cues in the environment around us than we would ever willingly believe. (Tulving & Schacter, 1990; Todorov, et al., 2005; Bargh & Shalev, 2012; among many more) As educators, just imagine the many ways in which we unintentionally prime our students to behave a certain way, or believe certain things about themselves. Without being aware of this power of the little things, we can quite easily make mistakes that end up negatively affecting our students. For example, the very common practice of referring to mixed-gender groups of students as you guys, although seemingly a little thing, unintentionally primes students with the idea that teachers are more interested in hearing what the male students have to say, or that the learning going on in the classroom is more appropriate for the male audience. Could something like this somehow contribute to gender achievement gaps? Judging from research on priming and stereotype threat, it very well could. Studies on stereotype threat, the idea that we will perform to expectations based on a stereotypical belief about a group we belong to under certain conditions, demonstrate how this might work at a deeper level. For example, in one study, researchers were able to induce an academic achievement gap in test scores between black and white students simply by calling attention to students racial identities and then calling tests tests of intelligence in the descriptions prior to beginning. As stereotypical beliefs (encouraged by popular media) designate black folks as less intelligent than white students, the researchers surmised that black students were primed to believe that they could not do well on a test of intelligence, and so they were more likely to give up on challenging questions that white students with the same skill level would spend more time on, believing that they could be successful. (Steele & Aronson,1995) Similarly, Asian-American women taking a math test can be induced to greatly underperform when made to identify strongly with their female identity (thus achieving the women are bad at math stereotype) or greatly over-perform when made to identify with their Asian identity (Asians are good at math) prior to testing. (Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady,1999). And blond women have been
primed to underperform on intelligence tests when made to associate with their blond peers (the dumb blond stereotype). (Bry, Follenfant, & Meyer, 2008). Of course, the findings from these studies could easily be misconstrued to suggest that as long as an educator doesnt explicitly call attention to race or other identities, stereotype threat is no threat at all. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Simply looking around a room and noticing who is sitting together can cause us to identify with certain groups in the moment, and advertising and media sources constantly reinforce identity stereotypes and are sometimes even intentionally designed to force us to identify with certain groups as an advertising strategy. (Weisbuch, Pauker & Ambady, 2009; Givens & Monahan, 2005) Since we, as educators, cannot keep our students in a media-less vacuum, simply ignoring identity groups will not avoid the problem. These studies may seem to paint a gloomy picture of teaching in the U.S. - that well-meaning people are no less susceptible to the priming and the power of stereotypes, and that we often hurt our kids in ways that would appall us if we were doing it consciously. So are we destined to make these mistakes no matter what? Fortunately, knowledge of priming and stereotype threat can also be used to combat - and even flip - these negative results. Stanford researchers have found ways to improve the achievement of new African-American students by holding workshops - specifically for these students - in which they talk about how hard adjusting to college can be for everyone - not just black students. (Walton & Cohen) Other researchers have found that creating a sense of belonging and pride in underrepresented groups can combat the negative effects of social stigmas in elementary schools. (Gillen-ONeel, Ruble & Fuligni, 2011) Steele and Aronson (1995) were able to reverse the effects of their study by consciously not referring to intelligence in the descriptions of their tests; and Bry, Follenfant, & Meyer (2008) found that the dumb blond effect could be flipped when testees were primed with thoughts of their independence and how they did not fit perfectly into descriptions of any one group. Negative priming effects, in general, have been regularly shown to dissipate with conscious, structured efforts to counteract them. With this in mind, I began to wonder about how I could work with HTH staff to grow our awareness of how priming and stereotype threat worked, as well as how to explicitly address these issues in our schools and classrooms to prevent their negative effects. Would simply having conversations with staff and students mitigate these effects, or would we have to address other issues, as well? And to be able to effectively examine these concepts, what other understandings could help us with the work?

Good Intentions Arent Enough: Unconscious Biases

Unfortunately, knowing about priming and stereotype threat alone does not prevent negative stereotypes and bias from entering the classroom. Due to the priming power of media messaging and popular culture in our country, all of us all of us bring unconscious biases against some of our own students into the classroom, in spite of conscious beliefs and desires to build up students of all backgrounds. Different cultural norms as compared to dominant (generally heterosexual white, middle class culture, in the U.S.) and media stereotypes have been shown to play a role in disciplinary outcomes for students from non-majority groups. Students of color tend to be disciplined more
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often, and to harsher degrees, than their white counterparts. (Townsend, 2000) Since this leads to students of color being suspended from school (and pulled out of classes) more often than other students, it can create a cycle where these students miss vital class time and fall behind their peers, academically, as well as setting them up to feel disengaged from school, in general. Recent literature has also suggested that LGBT youth are also 40% more likely to be punished by school authorities than heterosexual counterparts, possibly leading to similar results. (Himmelstein & Bruckner, 2011) In both cases, the implication is that common stereotypes cause the vast majority of us to have unconscious biases - no matter our conscious intentions and beliefs - against certain non-dominant groups, leading us to expect and seek out deviant behavior in those groups, and overlook similar behaviors in other groups. Along gender lines, math teachers have shown an unconscious bias to overrate the abilities of their male students, while simultaneously underrating the abilities of their females - which can lead to lack of confidence in female students. (Riegle-Crumb & Humphries, 2012) Outside of the classroom, Foschi, et al. (1994) demonstrated a tendency for job evaluators to judge male applicants as more competent than similarly-qualified female applicants. Again, these are unconscious biases brought on by media and cultural stereotypes independent of positive intentions or conscious beliefs, and it takes very conscious efforts to counteract these biases to make up for how this happens in the classroom. In a literature review citing nearly 100 different studies, Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross (2004) found consistent evidence demonstrating how, by nature, human beings are blind to their own bias - again and again severely underestimating their own biases and actions contributing to these biases based on their conscious beliefs in their own good intentions and objectivity. Similarly, in the classroom, Reed and Oppong (2005) found in their research on equity in education:

. . . teachers with seemingly reflective definitions of equity still have trouble with respect to holding high expectations for all students . . . their teaching fell short of being truly equitable with respect to their minority students.

Of course, the problem with unconscious bias is that it is so easy for individuals to think Wow, thats bad, but I know that doesnt apply to me. Sadly, it does. For those of us who believe that we are above such things, the Implicit Association Test, derived by researchers at Harvard (and accessible through this website: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/), has demonstrated, time and again, the prevalence of these biases across all types of backgrounds, no matter our conscious beliefs. (Dasgupta, et al., 2000; Karpinski & Hilton, 2001) Of course, knowing that we all carry unconscious biases that can hurt our kids whether we consciously agree with them or not can be more depressing than useful unless we can figure out how to negate their effects. Luckily, as Pollard-Sacks (1999) reported in her study on unconscious bias, the first step towards combating our own biases is to practice self-reflection and determine the difference between our own conscious values and our unconscious biases. Dr. Sondra Theiderman (a Psychology PhD with 25 years of experience studying and leading intercultural communication efforts at a variety of organizations) also reports that a way to combat unconscious biases in other people is to actively and regularly highlight and show examples that counteract
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stereotypical depictions of various groups. (S. Thiederman, personal communication, March 18, 2013) The key is regularity as only consistent counter-examples can keep up with the consistent stereotypes we are given daily through media sources. In the classroom, an ideal way to achieve this would to simply have teachers of different backgrounds teaching subjects that run counter to stereotypes of groups they represent. Of course, this is not always possible from a staffing standpoint, so at least having teachers regularly highlight professionals in their field that counteract stereotypes is better than doing neither. In terms of my own work, this made me think that - to help teachers address these issues at their own schools - we would need to start with an emphasis on self-knowledge and reflection (and general awareness of common unconscious biases) and develop working knowledge of examples of success stories that counter stereotypes within different subject areas (as well as avoiding common stereotypes, of course).

Mixed Messages: Cultural Expectations and Code-Switching

Sometimes, however--whether biases are in play or not--simply being unfamiliar with other cultural values can affect our kids negatively. This is due to a concept called code-switching, which refers to the extra stresses and cognitive strain individuals undergo when having to adjust back and forth from common cultural values and norms shared within their own cultural in-groups to different values and norms as determined by outside groups. For example, Calarco (2011) found that working-class parents teach their children different coping mechanisms for solving problems than their middle-class counterparts - in that working-class parents teach their children to solve problems on their own, avoiding asking for help from authority figures, while middle-class parents teach their students to immediately seek help from teachers when they have problems, and raise their hand and ask questions when they have problems. Since most schools are based on a middle- class cultural model where students are encouraged to ask questions and expected to seek adult help when they have problems with peers - and are rewarded for doing both, it is not too much of a leap to assume that this makes it more difficult for working-class students to adjust to their school culture. Therefore, without conscious coaching to this effect from teachers, these students tend to fall behind as they must do twice the work of their middle-class counterparts - not only learning the expected academic content, but also the cultural expectations that must be learned in order to be successful. Also, if these differences are not understood by teachers with middle class backgrounds, working-class students will be more likely to be punished for trying to settle conflicts on their own, instead of going to an adult, as they are so often told to do. However, as this runs counter to home culture, it is more difficult for these students to change behaviors, compared to their middle class peers, which results in more time spent outside of class being disciplined, which means more time falling behind. Of course, code-switching does not only pertain to cultural adjustment between different socio-economic classes, but is a fundamental aspect of diversity any time a person from one background (defined by race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, etc.) has to adjust to the culture of another groups background, the stress and extra work of code-switching plays out. So in an
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inclusive school setting, where diverse students and teachers are constantly interacting? Students and teachers are juggling the anxiety of code-switching at all times. Looking back to my own experiences as a born code-switcher (I am bicultural, with a Russian-Irish white American father and a Chinese-born mother), I have found that explicit explanations of cultural tendencies helped alleviate a lot of the stress inherent when trying to navigate between cultures. So, perhaps in our classrooms, our teachers could figure out ways to make the cultural expectations that we take for granted more explicit for those students who come from backgrounds that teach them different values. On top of that, the ability to reflect on our own cultural assumptions can better enable us to be aware of times when what we are asking of students is not as obvious as we may believe so could we build that into our staff culture simply by having some direct conversations about our assumptions and how they contrast with other cultures? What do other educators do? Of course, I am not the first person to ever think of directly addressing issues of equity in schools. In her work, Townsend (2000) runs down a series of practices that can lead to more equitable practices in our schools. There are too many to list here, but key themes are pro-actively examining practices and reflecting on organizational - and individual - biases that may affect students in the classroom, explicitly discussing issues of cultural differences between staff and students, and doing consistent, ongoing work to regularly self-reflect, never assuming that the work is done. Many of the things Townsend mentions in her study parallel my personal experience at Caldera, which, for me, suggests that directly addressing equity issues really can make a difference in behavioral issues and discipline. Interviews with the director of another organization (Open Meadow Middle School) in Portland, Oregon that has been practicing similar proactive measures to increase equity at their school revealed that their work has actually led to students of color exceeding the achievement of white students in terms of benchmark tests (12-point increases in African-American students, 11-points for Latino students, and 8-point increases for white students) . (E. Jensen, personal communication, October 19, 2012; data received October 20, 2012) It is important to note here that all students at the school posted huge gains (normal at the public schools is about a 3-point average gain), and that higher achievement by students of color is not reflecting decreases by white students. Beyond test results, Open Meadow Middle has seen a 10% increase in rates of attendance by all students, 20% increase in amount of classes passed, and close to a one-third decline in major disciplinary issues over the three years that they have been doing this work. In these cases, the key revolved around proactive, explicit, and consistent work around equity and inclusion. At Caldera (and currently at Open Meadow), conversations and structures around equity and inclusion were built into the everyday aspect of the program, with constant self- reflection on practices and checking in with students to verify progress (or expose mistakes). On a more national scale, Tom Malarkey (Friedrich, et al. 2005), in his work examining inquiry-based models of equity found that explicitly naming equity work and directly addressing it enables teachers and students to communicate more effectively, and at a deeper level than is
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possible when we talk around the issues. Naming the issue allows discussion participants to address direct concerns that they do not voice when explicit naming does not occur. In the same paper, Sarah Capitelli echoes my personal experiences with consistent equity work as an everyday aspect of what we do as most effective:

Inquiry (for equity) has worked for me because it has become part of my classroom practice. I dont think of it as an extra thing that I do, but as part of my teaching, an extension of my practice.

Similarly, one HTH director told me about an equity-related intervention that he believed had been quite successful - and that was one in which student leaders and some staff carried out a LGBTQ workshop for other faculty, not in response to a specific incident, but as a means to be proactive and raise overall awareness around an issue. (B. Peterson, personal communication, October 17, 2012) It is important to note that this successful intervention was described in contrast to other interventions - all led by outside organizations, and all in direct response to specific incidents - that he felt had been mostly unsuccessful in building community and awareness in addressing the issues at hand. On hearing these contrasting interventions, I found myself reflecting on my own experiences--and the differences between what I had seen succeed, and what had failed. And, just like the director above pointed out, the successes were based on work that was proactive--not waiting for something specific to go wrong--and were spearheaded by co-workers in our organization, as opposed to coming from people outside. So my belief going into this research was that, to be successful, we couldnt effectively do this work in reaction to specific incidents (when staff are feeling defensive, hurt, and the need to take sides), but rather as ongoing, explicit work that is just part of what HTH does. That way, it wouldnt feel like a big deal and put people on edge, and it would also make it easier--and more comfortable to everyone--to address issues that did come up before they became incidents that divided the staff. Diversity work tends to be uncomfortable and frustrating for staff from all backgrounds when it only happens on rare occasions, never giving participants a chance to learn how to be comfortable with the work before something bad happens and emotions take over. On top of a need to do proactive work, these reflections made me believe that we needed to personalize the work to the people involved. Just as good teachers dont assume that one particular style or lesson is going to work for all kids, we need to customize work with organizations based on their own particular culture and strengths. Bringing in HTH students, and respecting the autonomy of HTH sites and teachers would be necessary to successfully achieving this work. Anything else would not seem like High Tech High, and would only feel like something an outsider was trying to do to people here a principle that runs counter to the whole concept of equity and inclusion, which is something that is done with everybody. Therefore, to counteract negative effects of priming, unconscious biases, and code-switching, we would need to start with sharing of knowledge and experiences to know what to direct our energy towards. But to make this work lasting and consistent enough to find ultimate success, we would need to collaborate and find solutions that felt like a right fit for HTH sites, specifically. So thats what I set out to do.
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METHODS

My work towards encouraging more consistent, constructive, and explicit discourse about issues of equity with HTH staff and students focused on three different pieces: Cultural Fact-Finding and Collaboration, Staff-Centered Conversations, and Student-Centered Conversations.

Cultural Fact-Finding and Collaboration: I set out to investigate the existing culture at HTH in order to inform my work concerning equity and equitable practices, and as a means to personalize this work to HTH (and HTM, specifically). To do this, I would need to get individual and group perspectives on HTH culture and how issues of equity tied into that. On top of that, I would need HTH collaborators to work with to check my own biases and serve as clarifiers as I proceeded, to make sure that I did not just try to do whatever I thought was important, but what was useful and necessary to the specific groups I was working with. To achieve these goals, I conducted interviews with individuals across HTH campuses (speaking with individuals from all Point Loma locations, as well as individuals from the middle school and high school in Chula Vista) including Directors, Deans, teachers, and other staff members. Although I was only able to interview about 3-4 people from most other sites, I made sure to have conversations with all of the 20 full-time staff at HTM, as much of my work was focused there. These interviews were relatively informal, giving interviewees the opportunity to steer the conversation where they wanted to go, and in directions they thought were important. With many of the interviewees, I had multiple follow-up conversations to clarify details and dig deeper. I also formed a small Equity Team that consisted of individuals from each of the 5 schools on the Point Loma campus. This team drew from my base of interviewees, focused on people who expressed an interest in playing a more direct role in the work I was doing. I did my best to balance the group for gender, school, position, ethnicity, and sexual orientation; ending up with three teachers, a Dean, and two Directors (plus myself) in the group. This group met every two weeks (for two months) to discuss perspectives on issues of equity across HTH sites, and gave me input on my general research plan and possible action steps at various levels. Various members of this group continued to serve as collaborators and partners in my ongoing work beyond the Equity Team meetings, themselves.

Staff-Centered Conversations: A large portion of my actual action focused on working with the staff at High Tech Middle, where I spent most of my days. Beyond individual conversations and interviews with staff members, I facilitated a series of Professional Development workshops and activities with all staff. These workshops ranged from 20-minute experiential learning activities with short debriefs relating them to equity concepts, to full 3 hour workshops focused on deeper work building empathy, self-reflection, and communication skills. I wrote down participant comments and
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collected exit slips with feedback from each session to track our progress and determine next steps in the work. Many of these conversations/activities led to staff developing collective action steps towards addressing issues of equity at HTM. I also carried out follow-up interviews with individual staff members regarding their experiences in these workshops and their attempts to apply new skills to their classrooms.

Student-Centered Conversations: I did not work directly with HTM students in regards to conversations about equity, preferring to work with staff, so that they felt free to authentically work with their own students on these issues. However, I did collaborate with Nikki Hinostro, Dean at High Tech High International, on an Equity X-Block elective class with a small group (~ 10) of their students. Much of the work with this group mirrored work I did at HTM with staff, but with a student-focused perspective, and an overall goal of building leadership capacity with the students to lead their own workshops/activities with peers and staff around issues at their own school site. Participant comments and exit slips were collected from these conversations/activities, as well. This work is ongoing, so final interviews with students will not be included in this paper.

FINDINGS

Before diving deeper into what I learned from this research, I think it is important to highlight the general outline of the first all-staff professional development workshop I carried out with HTM staff. This is to give a context for how the Cultural Fact-Finding and Collaboration portion of my work dictated my conversations with staff, as well as a baseline from which I further adjusted going forward, based on what I learned in that process. The basic structure of the first workshop (which remained much the same throughout) was very important to me, going forward. Therefore, I made some specific choices about room layout and seating, as well as the specific forms of visuals I chose to use. First of all, I pushed all tables to the edges of the room, so that the entire process was carried out in a large empty space in the center of one of the teachers classrooms a blank slate to work with, to not only prime thoughts of starting fresh, but also doing things differently from the start. I chose a classroom with a carpet to have a more intimate, safe feel. Staff then sat in a circle of chairs so that we all could see each others faces, and we were in close proximity with no barriers in between. I have found that this seating arrangement alone makes a huge amount of difference in terms of how people interact with each other during these types of conversations. Finally, I chose to forgo PowerPoint to use flip- chart paper to convey ideas to the group. This tends to give a more sketchy feel to what is on paper, and the facilitation, which causes participants to feel more open to a fluid format where they actually have say over directions we go, and how much time we spend in particular conversations. Printed agendas and more slick PowerPoints tend to give a fixed feeling to the proceedings, which changes how people interact (often holding back their thoughts at times due to a feeling that they have to move on or that it is not an appropriate time to share). Finally, flip- charts enable the facilitator to write participants thoughts directly--right in front of them, and not
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removed behind a computer--to further emphasize the value of their contributions, and the more fluid feel of our conversations. We started out with a quick check-in, where I asked a simple question, if your current mood was a movie, what kind of movie would it be for everybody to go around and answer. This again primed all of the participants to know that everybody was going to be heard in this process, as well as having them starting off sharing something about themselves. From there, we went through some basic expectations of our time to come, and went over some agreements on how we would interact in the space we were creating (starting from a few that I proposed, and having staff contribute additional agreements to help them feel safe as they saw fit). The next piece I worked through with the group was Empty the Cup, which is something I will explain in greater detail below, due to its profound effect on our staff. After that, we walked through and reflected on an experiential learning activity touching on the concept that every behavior we exhibit is an attempt to get needs met including negative behaviors that we display. We again focused this time on self-reflection on our own behaviors, as a way to encourage deeper sharing and open acknowledgment of our own behaviors. Finally, we ended our time together reflecting on moments when we, as students, felt unfairly treated and without power at the hands of a teacher, and shared in small groups. We then reflected on all the ways in which similar things could happen to our own students in class totally by accident on our part and what we could do to prevent that. Again, the structure of this first workshop was meant to bring our staff together, while pushing our levels of self-reflection, beginning to talk about the differences between us and how to communicate through those, so that we can better serve our kids. I came in operating from the assumption that we were all coming from the same good place, and worked to build the same feeling in our staff which, I believe, was largely successful, as demonstrated by the feedback I received afterwards (over 80% of exit slip responses suggesting a desire to continue this work with staff and students). Again, many of the comments were about Emptying the Cup, which I will now describe below.

Empty the Cup The concept of Emptying the Cup is not one that I came up with myself, but was one that I learned while working under Hanif Fazal,a youth work trainer and facilitator in Portland, Oregon (from whom many of the techniques and activities I employ came). My version is slightly modified, but the general idea goes as follows: Imagine a student as an opaque cup. That cup already has some water in it, but, as the cup is opaque, we do not know how full it is. Everything that that student has on their mind over the course of the day is something that fills the cup a little more with water. For example, perhaps, on the way to school, the student misses the bus, making them late. The frustration from that adds a little bit of water to their cup. Then, when they arrive (late) to school, their teacher calls them out without giving them an opportunity to explain more water for the cup. Then they go to their next class, and another student makes a rude comment towards them more water. This continues until their cup is just about full, and they have no more room. They are on edge and unhappy, and they walk into a teachers classroom at the end of the day. Just as they walk in, another student accidentally steps on their foot, and that puts a little bit more water in the
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cup. However, since there is no more room at this point, the students cup overflows, and the student starts yelling at the other student, or crying, or fighting, or shuts down--or any of a million things people do when their cups spill over. From the teachers perspective, the student is totally overreacting to a small thing because they do not know what else is filling the students cup (be it home life situation, things at school, struggles with material, etc.). However, the only way to help the student keep from overflowing is to provide opportunities for the student to empty their cup of some of the things bothering them. That may look like one-on-one sharing, or writing prompts, or all-class discussions but unless they can pour out a little bit of the things in their cup, they are going to have a hard time. This concept applies to adults, as well. Teachers cups are generally extraordinarily full, not even accounting for our outside lives. So understanding this concept of emptying the cup and its importance in allowing us the mental capacity to be our best selves (teachers with over-full cups just are not going to handle interactions with students as well as when they have nearly-empty cups) has served as a great point of reference for the staff and students I have been working with, especially in regards to self-reflection, sharing, and empathy for other people. Since introducing this concept to the HTM staff, as well as the students at HTHI, I have found both groups regularly referencing Empty the Cup throughout our discussions. Which was interesting to me, because I only originally introduced the concept with both groups as a means to explain why, when I facilitate, I offer an opportunity for participants to empty the cup and share things on their mind that keep them from being present in our discussions. However, when I began that process with the HTM teachers, they began to share concerns about their personal lives about financial concerns, the possibility of moving, juggling family life, etc. that their peers in the building had not been aware of until that moment. In spite of the collaborative nature of HTM, and the positive relationships between the staff, there were big life moments being brought to our attention during this empty the cup time that nobody in the room had been aware of. And I believe that the power of that moment--establishing how seldom we carve out time to acknowledge our real lives--is what gave Empty the Cup such power with the staff and allowed them to reflect on how important it is to create similar opportunities for our students. Quite simply, getting a chance to empty our own cups, just a little, feels really good--and they saw that. To emphasize how strongly this concept struck our HTM staff, in our post-workshop exit slips after my first introduction of the idea, all but one of the 17 staff members present referenced a need to create more space for our students to empty their cups at our school (in an open-ended format the only prompt was what would you like to see us do as a group to continue with this work in the future?). The next most-cited need? Carving out more space and time for the staff to do the same (from 77% of the staff). As a result, I returned to the theme of Emptying the Cup consistently throughout conversations with staff as a key concept to remember tying it to new themes and, whenever possible, explaining other topics through a related lens.

Now that I have laid out the basic structure of the first all-staff workshop as a means to give a little bit of context for much of this work, I will proceed to share the Findings from this work, highlighting the strongest themes within each area of focus from the Methods shared above.
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CULTURAL FACT-FINDING and COLLABORATION: I learned a lot from my many conversations with HTH staff members, but a few themes in particular stood out as the most effective practices, as detailed below.

Talk to everybody, and just ask questions. I came to the HTH community with a lot of experience facilitating conversations about equity with students and educators, and that, oddly enough, made it difficult for me to remember that I had not done this work at HTH. As a result, in my first few conversations, I made the mistake of sharing a few too many of my own opinions of what could work without enough working knowledge of HTH culture. However, I soon realized that my stance or beliefs were irrelevant to that phase this was about relationship-building and cultural understanding as I found that my best success came when I simply stuck to asking questions. Its probably been said before, but people really like to share their opinions. With everybody I talked to, once I committed my focus to simply asking questions, folks were very happy to speak their minds. I also believe this built trust, which is absolutely the most important tool towards successfully carrying out this work. Without trust, none of this work would have been possible. And if I had chosen to spend time stating my opinion of HTH without spending drastically more time gaining understanding of all that went into the HTH culture - people, structures, history, etc. - that trust could not have been built. Equity is a potentially controversial topic for most people, so for me to simply come in and ask questions truly meant to just find out what people thought allowed people to relax and open up, trusting that I was committed to true equity - which means including every perspective possible. Anecdotal evidence suggested exactly this, as a few of my first informal interviews in which I guided the conversation more directly towards more specific topics such as staffing ended up being much less informative (and friendly) than subsequent conversations when I stopped probing and left a lot more flexibility for the people I was talking to to guide our conversations. In terms of getting wider perspectives, I found that asking general questions (such as what types of things does your school do to address potential or existing - issues of equity with staff and students) created space for interviewees to drive our conversations in directions they felt important, as opposed to following my lead in any way. This is in direct contrast to what I touched on above, when I asked more pointed questions such as is your site doing work to actively recruit staff that is more representative of the student populations? More often than not, more open questions allowed individuals to bring up their personal concerns regarding equity and to feel more comfortable in my intentions, as opposed to questions focused on my personal definitions of equity. And I really talked to as many people as I could: the CEO, the CAO, Directors, Deans, teachers, academic coaches, parents. To truly understand the culture of a place, you need to know all the different perspectives and angles on it from the participants, so thats what I tried to do. Even when I thought I had a good idea of where somebody stood on a topic, I regularly found myself surprised by some great new ideas or possible action steps that I got from every conversation.
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Without the knowledge I got from this phase (or if I had tried to debate folks about what I thought), I would not have been able to move towards real action, as I would have lacked understanding of how to personalize goals to HTH a topic I will describe in more detail in the following section, Find the Elephants. On top of that, these conversations allowed me to get to know as many people as possible in a very short amount of time, so that, as I continued this work, no matter where I went, I had a connection to somebody involved in what was going on (at both leadership and staff levels). This proved absolutely necessary to finding key people to talk to when I needed specific information or advice. The main take-away from these conversations was a fundamental truth everybody cares about equity for our students. They really do. We just all have different perspectives on what equity actually means, and we all have our focuses and blind spots, based on our personal experiences. On top of that, every single person brought a valuable perspective on what did or did not work for them, specifically, when having conversations about equity which went a long way towards finding solutions that would feel positive for everybody involved. At the same time, literally everybody agreed that there is always room for growth in this regard, and many specifically referenced a lack of regular conversations and clarity about equity as possible directions to go with my work. But outside of the specific topic of equity, I found that many of the staff at HTM simply thought better communication, in general, about uncomfortable topics would be helpful for the team. Such topics included equity, but giving and receiving individual critical feedback and hesitation to bring up topics for discussion with all staff also came up multiple times. This is where flexibility and refraining from pushing my agenda really paid off as the bigger concerns around communication would have been lost if I only focused on my vision of equity. This also was the kicker for the second phase.

Find the Elephants From my discussions with HTH staff across sites, it quickly became clear that each site had its own particular staff culture, and, with that, their own set of elephants in the room that their particular staff saw as an issue, but did not feel comfortable confronting. This, of course, is true of any group of people, across any culture, but for me to try to help encourage tough discussions at my own site, and in collaboration with members of our Equity Team, I had to know what these particular elephants were. Without diving in and constantly talking and getting feedback on facilitation ideas with multiple staff members, I would not have known about various site-specific, sensitive topics that can instantly bring up strong emotions and old baggage within the group. For example, for our second all-staff PD, based on the themes that came up in the first PD, we set a target of finding out how we could all work together to consistently call out common behaviors and sayings that could potentially hurt our students from an equity standpoint. However, talking to multiple staff members in advance made me aware that a conversation about being consistent in consequences across staff could easily end up bringing up past concerns (that had not been successfully put behind) regarding enforcing dress code on campus. Knowing this, I was able to adjust the facilitation and the specific wording I would use to keep the focus on our ultimate goal of addressing issues of equity, and making sure I had a few back-up plans to immediately redirect
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the group if we started sliding in a direction of a conversation about dress code. As a result, when the topic did come up in our discussion, I was able to leverage my prior knowledge to acknowledge it as a valid concern while keeping us focused on a present attempt to come up with a plan to help us stay on the same page and stay consistent regardless of the behaviors we were working to address. On top of that, I added a question about how we would all come to agreement on a plan if less than a majority of staff were concerned about an issue so that we could have this plan in mind before a concrete, personal issue came up. Therefore, having this wide array of perspectives in mind before even beginning more focused group discussions as well as throughout the rest of the process I was able to successfully navigate these potentially treacherous topics on the way to building empathy and trust with the staff. Interestingly, it was the specific nature of each sites elephants that hurt the potential of our Equity Team for enacting concrete change across sites. Since each group member was focused on their sites own, particular issues, it was difficult to have constructive conversations about any one particular topic. As a result, we ended up moving our focus a little away from direct action as a group towards support for individual members to try to enact change at their own specific sites. This ultimately proved much more effective, as we also struggled with getting every member present to these cross-site meetings, due to constant scheduling conflicts. The changed emphasis to support made it less of an issue when individuals could not make it. Interestingly, the struggles with carrying out effective work with the Equity Team did not come as a surprise to me, as four different HTH leaders (from different sites) mentioned the exact same difficulties in bringing together cross-site groups as a step towards concrete action. Of course, that alone was not reason enough not to try and I did get a lot of useful ideas and support from those involved in our Equity Team but being prepared for these obstacles from prior conversations with HTH staff in the know made it easier for me to adjust and make sure I put more weight on other means towards action, so that when we had to make this change, it did not greatly affect this work.

Empty Your Own Cup I have always been a firm believer in the idea that you need to deal with and be aware of your own issues before you try to help somebody with theirs, and this certainly applies to this kind of work. What I mean by this is that we can only bring our best, most open selves to a given situation when we are at our best. And we are only at our best when outside stressors and biases are not foremost on our minds. If I do not sleep all night, I am not going to be the most effective teacher in the classroom the next day. Therefore, I need to take care of my own needs, so that I can better take care of the needs of the folks I serve. More specifically, equity work is seldom fun. It is often frustrating, hurtful, and defeating. In spite of all the good intentions in the world, if you are conscious about issues of equity, there are a million painful examples of our lack of understanding that hit us daily. It is very easy to feel like it is impossible to enact meaningful change in this area. As a result, my cup was filled to over-flowing over and over again throughout this work. That is just how it goes. So if I did not have my own ways to safely empty out my cup throughout, I would not have been able to push forward the way I did. I have many different ways I
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empty my cup that I have developed throughout the years (spoken word and music, visual art and design), but the most helpful, every time is simply having a handful of trusted allies to get to talk to when things are getting hard. It is key to note that there is a fine line between safely venting with allies and being destructive when doing this work, though. When our cups are full, it is easy to feel like people are doing things we do not like on purpose or that they are not on our side but that is not the case. Therefore, safely venting with allies means having a few trusted people that understand that when you are venting, it is not necessarily truth. It is off-loading negative thoughts and getting valuable outside perspectives, so that we can have the mental capacity to be positive and work with our colleagues as allies and with respect at all times. If we do not have a safe space to empty our cups, we will end up doing it, nonetheless except in a damaging way. This is when we break trust, stop being allies, etc., and then our work cannot continue. I cannot stress the importance of emptying our own cups enough. When I first began this work, before I knew the organization or individuals within it well, I did not yet have folks to safely empty my cup with, and, as a result, I found myself in a number of conversations that did not go as I hoped, as I made over-generalizations about what staff believed or did in response to reaching over-flow. However, once I finally built enough trust with my advisor and other colleagues and was able to safely empty my cup my work became much more effective (and felt much more positive, to me). Emptying our own cups in this way also keeps us free to practice empathy for our partners in the work, which helps keep in mind that equity is for everybody and not just the groups that we, ourselves, represent. The times when I was least reflective and did not reach out for enough perspectives on my work from colleagues always aligned with when I my cup was the most full and that was when my personal mission started toeing a line that felt less inclusive (and thus, less effective/useful).

All of the previous themes are focused on the preparation phase of this work, and are not as specific to my target of increasing explicit and constructive discourse about issues of equity at HTH. That said, they each proved vital to even getting to the more direct portion of my work, the Staff and Student-Centered conversations.

STAFF-CENTERED CONVERSATIONS:

When it came to larger-scaled discussions and activities with HTM staff, overall, there was very positive support for this work and a stated desire to continue it and bring it into the classroom with our students (90% of 17 participants). That said, follow-through was not as strong (only 47%). Therefore, as with the previous section, I will share my Findings from Staff-Centered Conversations via key themes that help to explain this discrepancy, starting with the use of time and ending up with delegation of ownership. However, before I describe those pieces, I want to start with what I found to be the strongest piece in terms of helping build buy-in with our staff and create the culture we needed to have these potentially uncomfortable conversations: Self-Reflection.
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Self-Reflection as a Foundation for Equity Work: In the same way that I found Empty the Cup to be a powerful reference point for this work, I found that a focus on self-reflection has been the most successful method for building towards empathy and safe spaces for discussion. The basic formula looks something like this: engage in an activity/discussion where individuals self-reflect on a target concept (i.e. priming, code-switching, unconscious bias) as it pertains to themselves. Generally, I like to use experiential activities that make folks be participants in a demonstration of the concept, so that, when they self-reflect, its on a concrete experience that just happened (with everybody else present). Folks then get the validation of sharing their own thoughts/feelings, which builds connections within the group. Then the next step how does what you shared about yourself apply to your interactions with students or colleagues? At this point, folks can more freely admit the ways in which we may not do our best work, because of the connection built with colleagues, as well as having been primed, as a group, to be honestly self-reflective. As sharing revolves around the built trust and honesty we showed earlier, it continues at this stage, which is when we can really examine an issue without feeling blamed. For example in one activity meant to convey an understanding of code-switching, staff were seated at various tables to play a silent game of cards. They received rules to memorize for a few minutes before I took these rules away and had them play a few hands. After a little while, select individuals from each group rotated tables and joined another group to continue playing. Of course, there was a trick and that was that each group got a slightly different set of rules, so as the tables got more and more mixed, players got more and more confused about what led to a winning hand, etc. The resulting behaviors I compared myself to the other players and how they seemed to know the rules, and I kept wondering what was wrong with me for not getting it, I got frustrated with what seemed like arbitrary decisions by the dealer on who had won, so I just quit trying, I felt like the rules were so obvious, and everybody else was dumb all mirrored what happens to our own students when they are thrown into cultural situations where the expectations are different from what they know and are not explicitly conveyed. By playing this game and having concrete moments of frustration and different coping mechanisms displayed to reflect on, the concept of code-switching became a lot more personal for staff and allowed them to realize how it might affect students in a way that simply talking about it never could. An emphasis on self-reflection also built trust and safety in the group as it seemed to eliminate the urge some folks had for calling out behaviors of their peers that they did not agree with as many individuals in the group, while reflecting on their own experiences and behaviors, tended to call themselves out and take responsibility for these behaviors, completely un-elicited by other members of the group. The power of those moments which happened many different times throughout cannot even be compared to the limited effectiveness (if any) of calling out other peoples behaviors in a blaming way, as that is a divisive technique clearly not aligned with the goals of our work together. This emphasis on self-reflection and folks calling out themselves helped to ease tensions that were referenced in a small-group conversation regarding feedback held earlier in the year (with randomly-selected staff), in which all four participants mentioned a hesitation to give critical feedback to co-workers outside of their own teaching teams out of a feeling that it is not (our)
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place to tell (another staff member) what to do (even if it involved actions that they saw that might negatively affectother students or classes). Exit slips from our first all-staff session seemed to support an appreciation for the focus on self-reflection, as well, with nearly 2/3 of responses for what worked for participants being focused on being pushed to be more vulnerable and reflect more deeply; and about the same amount highlighting the chance to hear colleagues stories and perspectives. Some highlights include, other people sharing stories made me feel confident about sharing, its so easy to get caught up in your life and situation and forget about others and a great reminder of how we always need to clean our lens . . . this workshop really touched on a miscommunication I had with (a student with whom staff often struggle with, behaviorally) yesterday I want to follow up! Of course, self-reflection and this level of sharing was aided by the fact that I primed the group by modeling my own self-reflection and vulnerability up-front with our staff you cannot do this level of work without being more than willing to go there, yourself. As one staff member wrote, Your story as a model pushed us to think of a strong experience. Although I touched on the topics of priming and stereotype threat in our first group facilitation, the real goal was to practice deep self-reflection and sharing with each other, as a means to set the table for follow-up when we would begin talking about more specific, and potentially uncomfortable, issues. Luckily, the set up proved a success, as multiple teachers expressed thoughts like this one about going deeper with this work: I hope this becomes a bigger conversation because it allowed peopled to take it seriously and really be thoughtful about the topic of equity. And the self-reflection train continued into the next workshop, where we dug deep and began to talk about how the staff interacts with each other on a group level, and possible inequities in staff group discussions which, obviously, could have ended up being a very negative experience, to say the least. However, due to the safety, trust, and emphasis on self-reflection that was continued into this facilitation, all but one staff response highlighted the tough conversations as the major area of strength of the workshop. Some comments include, we were able to get to a safe space where people were willing to share their real feelings, (we should) continue to discuss challenging issues even though they are difficult/uncomfortable, (we should) keep supporting each other and talking about issues that arise, and it was a difficult meeting, but long over-due . . . this very heavy door was finally cracked open! Of course, inspiration and safety in one context does not always lead to action and/or a continuation of those feelings in other contexts, and so now I will touch on some pieces that, if strengthened, would likely have led to more lasting impact from this work. Carve out Plenty of Time (and then carve out some more) The most common reason given by staff for not having more discussions around issues of equity and/or addressing specific situations with students (or staff) was not about desire. It was about time (nearly 80% of responses regarding obstacles to doing this work). Teachers have very full plates. There is always something that they should be doing that they cannot currently do because something else is happening. Unfortunately, discussing/addressing issues of equity often loses out to those pressures.
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Even harder still is the fact that doing this work takes time. A lot of time. Because it involves sharing stories and having one-on-one conversations. It involves a lot of talking and communicating that simply cannot be done in brief. Building safe spaces, structures, and trust takes a lot of sessions together. Every conversation we have with staff or students about issues of equity only brings up more questions and only increases the number of follow-up conversations that are necessary. As one staff member noted, will a series of short activities (in a progression) be useful if you dont/cant commit to them fully? . . . this work needs to be structured and carried out consistently over time, so I did not think it was helpful to try one activity when I do not have the class time right now to follow up. (M. Vasquez, personal communication, March 6, 2013) I was lucky to have a generous Director who agreed with my general vision and gave me multiple professional development sessions (two to three-hour blocks) to work with the full staff, and I still came out each time thinking, I wish I had more time to talk about ------! Therefore, it is no surprise that teachers had the same frustrations with smaller chunks of time to work with their students. As a result, finding consistent, ongoing time to carry out these structures is vitally important to this work being meaningful.

Delegate Ownership and Build Capacity: Ultimately, our staff are all very busy. As a result, there were many times when we did not have time to finish a discussion, and these discussions did not get full follow-up later on. This is not necessarily because people did not find them important, but because our staff have full cups, and things got forgotten or overlooked in place of more immediate concerns especially when no specific individual was responsible for reminding them. I have found that, with these discussions about equity, staff have been happy to fully participate (I have not yet received feedback that any aspect has been a waste of time or that they would rather be doing something else), and I believe a lot of it is due to the fact that I have taken on the individual responsibility of keeping the conversation going. On top of that, I have been sharing comments and themes from each meeting with the rest of staff, and extrapolating next steps to propose to staff from their own feedback, which a majority of staff members have specifically noted and appreciated in their comments. However, after our most recent three-hour all-staff workshop, over half of the 18 participants mentioned a fear that there may be a lack of follow-through on conversations that we did not finish in our time together (Im hoping there is true follow-thru (sic) after our discussion; we need to actually continue the tough conversations; (we must) keep supporting each other and talking about issues that arise). This seems to be an indicator of a staff culture in which this follow-through does not regularly happen, and I wonder if that is a result of a lack of capacity in facilitating these conversations. This theory is reinforced by the fact that of the 8 staff members who attempted to carry out activities with their students in which every student would have a chance to share (mostly along the lines of the basic check-in I carried out with staff in our first PD), 6 of them described the activity as not feeling safe or positive overall and mentioned wanting more support in developing setting up these activities or creating safe structures with students. As a result, I cannot help but wonder how many of the rest of the staff members who did not attempt an activity did so due to a lack of understanding of how to best facilitate them.
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Although I did work with three staff members more closely in developing these facilitation skills, I did so in a limited manner, and I now wonder if I had focused more strongly on this part of the work, if more follow-through would have occurred (and more teachers would have felt enough success in their work to want to continue to do so). The three staff members I worked with most closely regarding facilitation skills (not coincidentally, I am sure) also happened to be the most vocal and active (outside of myself) in bringing up this work and its importance with the rest of the staff going forward. Again, this made me wonder if focusing more strongly on that side of the work would have been a more effective use of my time, in terms of affecting staff culture and making it more likely for this work to continue after I have left HTM, myself. To follow up on this line of thought, I ended up facilitating one last 3-hour workshop on Facilitating for Equity focused on teaching and practicing building and holding concrete structures that aid in having safe, equitable spaces (in classrooms, or with adults). However, this workshop occurred late in the year, and was attended on a voluntary basis, so few teachers from HTM attended. That said, all those that did attend (eight people - a mix of teachers, deans, and directors from other HTH sites) left the workshop stating that they now had tangible pieces and skills that they could apply to their sites on their own.

Create Simple Routines and Structures to Reinforce Goals: Throughout my work with staff at HTM (as well as other HTH sites), I regularly encountered situations where structures in place (or the lack thereof) made explicit conversations with whole groups difficult. The biggest of these was a tendency to forgo facilitative leadership during group conversations meaning individuals spoke up or shared views when and how they wished, with no clear facilitative leader helping the group move toward a particular end. Even when this type of facilitation did occur, it was generally within the limits of running protocols which are great tools for sharing feedback and ideas with small groups, but do not serve too well at helping a group come to cohesive decisions, or encourage large-group communication. As a result, there were many times when short discussions related to equity came up in staff meetings and otherwise, but a lack of clarity on facilitative leadership led to little progress, with the conversations being tabled not to be picked up again. Therefore, at some point, we had to pull themes from our conversations and push staff to thinking towards coming up with some effective next steps to apply what we talked about as a group to their work with students in a classroom. On top of that, as mentioned previously, many teachers expressed difficulty maintaining safe structures with their students, and wanting some more explicit guidance on how to create that safety with their students. Therefore, to attempt to address these issues, we decided to start looking at ways to routinize these spaces (with students, and staff), as opposed to having to regularly carve out extra time to do these things. If we had a few simple routines, we believed that time would be less of a consideration, as the time to carry out these routines would be given. Having a few simple structures to fall back on also seemed important in making it possible for already-overwhelmed teachers to do deeper equity work (so as to keep it from feeling like something extra to do). Although we have not yet fully solved this issue, we have been looking to Advisory time as a potential solution for the time question. As our staff have Advisory (and with a smaller group
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of students) every day with no direct academic goals, the time is there to routinely carry out opportunities for emptying the cup and sharing and connecting with each other. On top of that, Advisory also provides an opportunity for testing out structures and practicing reinforcing them, so that all students can become used to some similar structures of equity that can later be brought into the rest of classes. If all students have become used to these structures in a phased-in way like this through Advisory, it should make the adoption easier. On the staff side of things, we are currently working to re-structure our regular all-staff Tuesday meetings to make that time more consistently focused on empty the cup opportunities for staff, as well as possible opportunities to have ongoing equity conversations. The time is there, and staff have not been fully satisfied with the current structure, so it seems that this will be the likely solution. Staff have also discussed creating some more explicit structures (based on the protocols with which they are already comfortable) for how they will go about discussing possibly contentious issues in order to keep safe spaces and prevent folks from being scared to bring things up with the group (an issue that multiple teachers raised at our second all-staff PD about equity).

Student-Centered Conversations:

Unfortunately, due to various logistical issues, our (myself and Nikki Hinostros) student- centered work with our Equity X-Block students at HTHI is still very much in progress at the time of this writing, with few concrete Findings to report out at this time. However, even at this stage, some interesting themes did come out. Similar to our work with HTM staff, a need for more time jumped out immediately, so I will touch on that briefly in this section. However, the strongest theme which has become our major area of focus was in regards to the students Advisory groups, and so I will mostly focus on that aspect here. Before jumping into any of these, however, I would like to share the students voice in a small way by simply listing some of the equity issues from their school that came up in our conversations:

1. Racial, gendered, and homophobic epithets, jokes, and comments being directed at targeted students during class time (when teachers were present) every student agreed that this happens in classes, not quite regularly but certainly every week. Student cliquing and self-segregation (and lack of communication) across class and racial lines the majority of our students mentioned that, although all the students were integrated into the school, they often did not learn to communicate effectively across various boundaries, and thus, did not feel integrated, as a school. Divisions between grade levels our younger students mentioned feeling intimidated by upper-classmen, while senior students mentioned divisions within their own grade level, and a general lack of meaningful interaction with younger students.
2.
3.
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In regards to the work we were attempting to do with this specific X-Block group of students, to help them most effectively address some of these issues, we found a need for time and directly addressing Advisory as important areas of focus.

Give Students Time to Connect:

Almost immediately after beginning our Equity X-Block sessions with students, we realized that we needed bigger blocks of time to work with the students. Although we were able to accomplish a lot and broach a lot of subjects in the 40-minute sessions we had together, we quickly found that we were having to cut every conversation short in order to release our students from school on time. The group we worked with (although largely self-selected) were very eager to share and talk about various equity concerns at their site, and at least 75% of our 20+ sessions together felt unfinished when we had to dismiss class. As an attempt to address this issue, we ended up taking a full-day retreat off-campus, where we worked through more intensive workshopping and facilitative skill-building with our students (going through many of the same activities that the HTM staff went through together, as well). And, although we still ended up having to cut some sections short, the students unanimously agreed that that full day had been our best use of time over any other period of time we had spent together.

Inconsistent Advisories as an Equity Issue:

Over the course of our time working together especially during our full-day retreat students repeatedly brought up their Advisory classes as priority points of concern regarding issues of equity (and/or as an area for change that could have the strongest effect on building a more equitable culture at school). Not only did every single one of our 10 students share in this opinion, but more importantly when they went out to interview other randomly-selected students during one session (specifically staying away from their own friend groups), about 75% of their 10 interviewees shared concerns about the structures in place in their own Advisory classes. Although this was a small sample size, the numbers seemed extraordinary. Our conversations about Advisory stemmed as a result of the student belief that, to truly address issues of equity at school, it would make the most sense for student leaders to run activities and conversation topics through their Advisory groups. However, due to a perceived inconsistency in Advisory groups, our students feared that lack of safe structures in many Advisories would keep them from being able to do any meaningful work in those classes. In spite of work building facilitative leadership skills in our group of students (and the fact that many serve in leadership roles at school already), every one of our students continued to express a belief that trying to go into Advisories and do this work would end up with inequitable results, completely dependent on which teachers were leading the Advisory groups. Interestingly, when asked about what keys led to safer Advisories where students were able to connect and discuss more serious topics, one of our students said, Sitting in a circle. After explaining further, the rest of the students in our group agreed, noting that the Advisories that they deemed safer and more likely to feel more equitable, overall, were groups that consistently sat in a
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circle. Whether sitting in a circle was a direct cause of safer Advisories, or rather a coincident result of other types of structuring that leads to safer Advisories was unclear. Other things that the students said they felt led to stronger, safer Advisories were: teachers sharing/participating at a deeper level and sharing a bit of themselves with their students, opportunities--in the first week of school or earlier--for Advisory groups to spend a whole day working together to set the tone for interacting with each other and connecting, and (with 100% agreement) Advisors treating Advisory like it was a big deal (or mattered at all--many students noted how obvious it was when teachers did not put thought into their Advisory classes, and how that set up unsafe spaces). As a result of these conversations and the felt need to address this issue, the students came up with a plan to work with teaching staff to communicate these concerns and help them develop safer, more effective structures in their Advisory classes, so that students would have a better venue for bringing up and discussing issues of equity at school. However, this work is still in the planning stage, so I cannot share any concrete findings from this line of action here.

DISCUSSION Through the process of this research (as well as my work at Caldera Arts, in retrospect), I have been consistently reminded that lasting work towards conversations and true understanding of equity issues comes through the creation of structures and a culture that supports these conversations. These structures must emphasize self-reflection, communication, and collective value-setting (similar to successful work I have been a part of at both Caldera Arts and Open Meadow). But to do these things well, we need large amounts of time, as well as the skill-set to create and maintain these structures with a group of people (whether they are adults or students). And that, I believe, is exactly why so many of us with a focus on equity often misplace an emphasis on creating awareness through sharing information over the more important, and more impactful, work of creating structures and building culture. In a line of work where time is in such short supply, it feels a lot better to pretend that a few brief exercises or workshops sharing information and building awareness can adequately address such a huge issue, because the truth - that we have to spend drastically more time on structures and culture - feels frustratingly impossible to achieve. These short workshops and awareness-builders also seem like things that we can effectively carry out without a larger skill-set for structure-building that is so hard to come by. With this in mind, it is no surprise that equity issues continue to be an every organization problem in this country - no matter so many great intentions. However, everything is not as bleak as this may make it seem, due to the fact that strong structures that promote group cultures with the buy-in, self-reflection, and communication necessary to have consistent conversations about issues of equity are precisely the same structures that create strong organizations, as a whole. Few people would argue that any of these pieces are undesirable to the overall success of an organization, or that these traits would not go a long way to helping a school be stronger in its overall purpose of building its students towards general and academic success. As a result, taking the time necessary to build out and maintain these structures (seating arrangements, writing ideas in front of the group, active facilitation to achieve equitable
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contributions, etc.) and is hugely worthwhile - and is likely to lead to saving more time for a school or organization in the long-term. Therefore, although taking the time necessary to do this work well may seem costly in the short-term (as something else important may not happen in the meantime), it will build out stronger foundations that will serve beyond the presence of a few key individuals who must always leave at some point. And as these systems and structures become established, most of the work can become focused on new staff training, opening up the time for veteran teachers to build on this and other work. Ultimately, I do not believe I was very successful in achieving my goal of increasing the level of consistent, constructive, and explicit discourse about issues of equity among staff and students at HTM and beyond due to an over-emphasis on knowledge about equity issues over direct skill- building and structures. When I look back at my original thoughts going into this work - as well as the most prevalent literature - I see an emphasis on getting across specific information about equity issues, in the name of raising awareness. This is an extremely common approach, of course, as the basic assumption behind it is if I can just make people understand what is going on, and see how various inequities affect our kids, then people will become more self-reflective and stop unintentionally hurtful practices. This is so often my first, gut-reaction when I see or experience inequitable interactions between adults and students (or adults-adults, students-students). Of course, the truth is that this is an incredibly inefficient (and thus, ineffective) way to go about eliminating inequity in the world - as it is reactive in nature, necessitating us to go about addressing individual issues only as we become aware of them, and doing nothing to address the next issue until somebody else is hurt by it. It is also dependent on a major assumption (that I believe was proven mostly false in my own work) - that we actually know how to enact this change once we become aware of what is going on. That said, this was a problem with my own research, due to the very limited time-frame that I was working within. Not only did I attempt to begin the real culture and structure-building too late in the year (halfway through, when teachers are already falling behind and momentum makes it extremely difficult to change how we do things), but the large amount of time between conversations, and the fact that we never had time to re-structure our own general staff meetings to follow up on these discussions caused us to lack active follow-up on initiatives that came about as a result of this work. This was a key difference between my work here at HTM, and my previous success with Caldera Arts - as I worked at Caldera for a number of years, as well as having 3 full-day staff training days with new staff prior to beginning our sessions, so that we had plenty of time to focus our work and plan structures to follow up on and build on (but not try to change completely) once the students were present. As far as my actual PD facilitation went, I believe I was successful in creating safe spaces where all staff were able to bring up concerns and feel heard, and I received positive feedback about the workshops, themselves, and the push to do some more reflection on what we bring to our work with students and staff of different backgrounds and perspectives. On the other hand, in regards to the lack of knowledge of how to go about creating these structures, I believe this is an area where a stronger focus would have resulted in more lasting work at HTM. While a majority of teachers were inspired by our conversations to attempt to carry out
30
changes in their own classrooms, I did not spend enough time explicitly building out teachers concrete skills to do so, which led to teachers not knowing what to do next, and subsequently being unable to follow up - by no fault of their own. Therefore, as I look towards carrying out this work with other educators in the future, I will more strongly emphasize the teaching and sharing of facilitation skills and structures with my colleagues over any particular bits of information, especially in situations where time is limited. With these reflections in mind, I did end up facilitating a final three-hour workshop involving a number of HTH directors, deans, and teachers precisely focused on these skills and structures, and I did see participants coming out of that work with a more concrete sense of how they would continue this work on their own. In practice, a more effective plan would involve spending much more time focused on working with a small group of teacher-leaders at our site, doing regular workshopping, practice, and feedback sessions to grow the skills necessary to facilitate this type of work, prior to attempting any bigger work at scale. Due to time-constraints, I found myself feeling a need for the entire group to work on this together from the start - which was not wrong, but proved ineffective due to the lack of time. HTM would have been better served to have a group of their own staff lead the larger-group work from the very beginning, so that, had we run out of time as we did, that smaller group would still be carrying out work with their own students to bring back to staff and help build out skills moving forward. Although I did a little bit of this work at HTM, I treated it as peripheral to the core of this work, and I believe that ended up limiting its effect. It is interesting to note here that both students and teachers targeted their Advisory classes as possible focal points for carrying out this type of work while also citing structural and HTH cultural concerns that may keep that from effectively happening. From a personal standpoint, as somebody who has been part of programs (at both Caldera and Open Meadow Middle School, where I was a math teacher-advocate) that strongly leveraged Advocate groups (similar, in theory, to the HTH Advisory model, although with strong structures and cross-organizational consistency in support of social-emotional skills development) to address exactly such issues, I know that changes in that direction could have a huge impact on the school culture. However, due to what I have felt to be an HTH cultural resistance to the level of consistency and structured training across classrooms that would be necessary to do that work well--a theme that came up in a number of my personal interviews with HTH staff members-- I fear that it may be very difficult to turnaround HTH Advisories (which seems to have already proven to be the case, as at numerous sites I was told that there have been regular efforts to change up Advisory structures, and almost none of them have felt successful through a majority of classrooms to this point). This HTH culture of autonomy may also come at odds with creating consistent, safe structures at a staff level, as well. This is a fear I hold based on my personal observations (and conversations with HTH staff) regarding a tendency for topics of discussion to be brought up in meetings (staff meetings, director meetings, etc.) without clear plans for follow-through on a large scale due to the desire to leave each individual the autonomy to follow through or not on their own. Facilitative structures to create safety and equity also tend to fall away at these times due to this culture of autonomy as individuals are hesitant to facilitate conversations with their peers, instead relying on more casual discussions with no clear lead facilitator. Of course, the freedom that comes to teachers and directors as a result of this autonomous culture is a highly-prized aspect of HTH, and often leads to the innovation and successes the organization regularly sees from its faculty, so I
31
do not feel that this culture is wrong in any particular way. However, my personal belief is that some deep re-thinking of how autonomy can be balanced with equity and safety would be necessary before consistent, constructive discourse about equity can be realized at an organization- wide level. Conversations do occur, of course, but, as part of this every organization problem that we face, there is always room to improve, and I believe that movement in this area would be helpful for that growth to occur. That said, I believe this work has taught me a lot about my own leadership, and has changed my perspective as I move on. I still feel very strongly that creating a culture where all staff members can come together and communicate safely--giving positive feedback as well as criticism-- is vital to an organization, and I would continue to work with all of my staff together to achieve this. However, I now see that focusing on building facilitative capacity within a few teacher-leaders at the same time is even more important for the maintenance of that culture. I found myself too confident in my own facilitative abilities, believing that I could facilitate a process that brought all staff together at the same pace - which was naive, at best. Although I focused on collaboration in my work, I now see how I needed to dig in much earlier to find ways for me to hand off larger portions of this work to a few individuals at our site from the very beginning, instead of the slow build that seemed logical at the time. The strategy I did choose would likely have worked given another year on-site, but without that option, we did not reach the critical stage where this began to stop feeling like my work soon enough for momentum to take hold. Focusing on a few individuals would have made that much more likely in the short time-frame I was working with. But there were also many positives in this work, and I learned just as much from them. Heavily involving different perspectives throughout this work helped me avoid many mistakes that I could have made had I tried to be THE lead on this work, and I will continue to pass my thoughts and facilitative plans through a number of different staff members for feedback no matter what I am working on in the future. The shortened time-frame of this work also pushed me to build relationships in a much more intentional manner, and I found that I was actually able to do so in much less time than I would have expected possible before. This success was from a consultant style of relationship- building - simply scheduling out blocks of time to sit down with every staff member and just ask questions and allow staff to be experts and take the conversation where they want to go - which is not too different than I had done before, except for the very systematic way of doing so that I had to employ for this work. Without employing that systematic methodology, I would normally end up starting with people who I naturally felt more comfortable with earlier on, only getting to other folks later - which is clearly not an equitable way to go about building relationships, and also is costly in terms of lacking a valuable diversity of perspectives right from the beginning, which can lead to some poor decisions. As a result, I will continue to employ this consultant style of relationship-building right off the bat wherever I go next - with staff, students, and community members. So, ultimately, do I believe that I will come back to HTM a few years down the line to see echoes of this work being carried out across the school? In all honesty - probably not. Unfortunately, those HTM staff who participated in my final skills-focused workshop were staff members who will not be teaching at other schools in the future, and thus will be able to continue this work with other HTM staff. However, I am now able to look back at my work as a bit of a
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prototype - and I believe that the adjustments I will make as a result of this attempt will lead to strong structures encouraging consistent, constructive and explicit discourse about issues of equity among staff at students at my next site. And as I have said multiple times - since this work is an every organization issue, that will be important wherever I end up. It is also ongoing, never- ending work that I hope to continue to hone and improve upon as I move forward, and, if we can ever get it close to right, there is no reason the work wont find its way back to HTH in the future - with or without me.
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