As director of school support for a network of pre-secondary and secondary schools, I work with teams who help schools reflect and be better. One of the many ways we do this is by shepherding schools through a comprehensive self-reflective review process. This particular review process for schools is in its second year of pilot development, and three schools have moved through it. This process, with is various components and school support tools, is effective because it helps school’s study and reflect, identify their own strengths, pinpoint some challenges, seek outside support from experts, as well as develop authentic action plans for growth. The following are general components of this review process that could perhaps be helpful for schools as they continue to be professional learning communities that are full of reflective practitioners:
As the school moves through this process, it should challenge itself to continue to create, review, and revise consistently-developed resources during this process that tie directly to the set of standards the school uses and that help the school during the process. Such tools could include a self-study timeline paradigm, artifact list/examples, stakeholder perception surveys (students, adult school personnel, parents, board, and alum), small group conversation prompts, a self-study narrative template, a visiting team resource booklet, class visit rubrics, a school visit exit report template, and a school action plan. Processes such as the one identified above engage everyone at the school, allow the school to identify strengths and areas for growth based on study data, invite outside experts, and help the school toward getting better.
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“Defining what it means to be a model Alum Service Corps (ASC) mentor and teacher is like trying to put a puzzle together without the picture on the box. Each of us brings different gifts and talents to the table, and each of our schools has different needs that we try to fill” (Anthony Re, Alum Service Corps Teacher, Cohort 27). I am Director of the Alum Service Corps, an organization that places volunteers who graduate from Jesuit institutions back into our network of pre-secondary and secondary schools to give back for one year of teaching and mentoring. They do this, out of gratitude. Our ASC communities strive to live simply, grow spiritually, and build community. We are, I believe, counter-cultural. This is a wonderful organization with beautiful people – in fact, with well over 300 alums, 27 years strong. And when I reflect on the type of education we offer students in our six schools – Jesuit education – and as we near the end of another ASC cohort year of service and begin to think ahead to what awaits next year’s cohort of teachers and mentors, I am wonderfully surprised by the wisdom of our ASC teachers and mentors – that their extraordinary lives of service are lived in very ordinary ways but are beautifully illustrative of what even seasoned Ignatian educators perhaps sometimes fail to live. Captured here are some of their reflections, during an ASC year well-lived. May we all strive to live this deeply, care this authentically, and exercise this degree of Ignatian indifference in our lives . . .
“World and action are intimately interdependent. But action is human only when it is not merely an occupation but also a preoccupation, that is, when it is not dichotomized from reflection” (Freire 53).
In our classrooms, knowledge is constructed by students and teachers, ideas become experiments, and skills are fine-tuned for use in the world. Perhaps the classroom is also where student action-experiences are conceived of, reflected upon, and supported . . . where community is built, and students learn confidence. Our hope as professional educators is that what we do in our classes is eventually internalized and lived by students out in the larger world – as they learn to become reflective agents for positive transformation. Recently, I visited a new teacher during a class where the central focus was exploring and defining terms: holiness, virtue, perfection. Students engaged with one another through reflection, handouts, a video clip, conversations, and teacher and student examples from life outside the classroom. What especially caught my attention was reflection and action near the end of class, when the teacher challenged students to connect the discussion by recalling specific action-oriented personal goals they had set for themselves earlier in the semester. At first, students looked puzzled, but when the teacher continued, they paged through class notes, looked in subject folders, and finally found their personal growth goals. The teacher continued, “Today, I’d like us all to reflect on the personal goals we set earlier in the semester and recommit to them by sharing these goals with one another, whereby encouraging each other to be accountable to what we wrote and work toward achieving our goals.” There was silence. And I could sense there was hesitation among students, when the teacher continued, “My goal, as I have stated earlier in the semester when I made it, is to lose some weight. Clearly, my first year of teaching has not been kind to my waist! Over the past 7 months I have gained weight by eating a lot of food that is not all that healthy for me. And today I find that I am not happy with my physical weight. So, my goal is to lose some weight by eating more healthy foods and exercising more. I’d love it if you all kept me accountable.” The authenticity and honesty with which the teacher shared his own personal goal with the class modeled a way of proceeding for students. His example gave students permission to share whereby, “The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical co-investors in dialogue with the teacher” (Freire 81). One student shared she wanted to be more patient with his parents. One shared she wanted to be more respectful toward her little brother. One student shared he wanted to be a better team player on the school’s baseball squad. And one wanted to be more present for a struggling friend. Every student shared during class and each share was overwhelmingly affirmed by the teacher – no exceptions:
Each affirmation from the teacher, who was carefully facilitating this conversation, encouraged students to share and support one another. There were smiles all around. And the feel of this class was almost retreat-like. Leaving class, I was conscious of three simple take-aways:
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000. Let me start with who I am. I am the director of school support for a network of private, faith-based, academically-rigorous high schools. For 19 years, I taught English at a school within this network, as well as was the assistant principal for staff development there. In the middle of my work, I served in a leadership role at our national network of schools, in Washington, DC. This network of schools has been my pipeline for success – helping me grow professionally and personally, helping me stay spiritually balanced, ensuring some financial security, and allowing me to be a more productive human being than I otherwise may have been: serving with and for others. Rewinding a bit, I graduated from the high school where I taught, and earned two degrees at a private, faith-based university. Later, in 2012, I earned a doctorate in education from a private university, with the financial help of my employer (the high school where I taught). I am male, and I am white. I have been given a lot despite some mistakes I have made along the way. Mostly, I have been in the right places at the right times. Luck has played a part along my journey. My gender and race surely have positively impacted my life. I don’t feel entitled, though I see a spirit of entitlement in others and in the world around me. I do have a sense of gratitude for the gifts I have been given – and realize those gifts are opportunities . . . that not everyone enjoys. Soon after I arrived at my current job in St. Louis, Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson – 5 miles from where I work. The impact of this shooting sent shock waves through our local communities and nationally. His death challenged educators in our schools to revisit social justice . . . this time hopefully with an even sharper focus on institutional decisions, racism, and its impact on students their achievement in school. How can schools look more closely at decisions as we examine racism related to student achievement? Approaching this work throughout my career – moving through my pipeline as a white educator – I have had limited experience. More times than not, others have lead me. Today I know that I don’t know what I don’t know. I try to be an attentive observer, a careful listener, and a reflective practitioner engaged in an active, diverse world. And, I find comfort in Teilhard de Chardin’s prayer for accepting the anxiety “of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.” In the fall of 2004, during my first year as assistant principal for staff development, I participated in an academic department chair meeting and wondered out loud, “How we could begin to look at student data – to disaggregate it by race so that we could objectively explore how we serve black students?” At that meeting my question was considered racist by some – mostly by those who perhaps failed to see own biases – personally and institutionally. A few years later, while I worked with the school’s first black diversity director to create programming examining race, which included beginning a Courageous Conversations About Race faculty discussion group, I was disappointed because our efforts were never authentically embraced and institutionalized. In the two years immediately after I left, the school moved through two diversity directors and a period of instability and mistrust – despite continuing to accept larger numbers of black students. I suppose that these diversity directors experienced similar school challenges: part-time administrator status with teaching responsibilities that did not allow them to be fully immersed in the work; isolation from being not fully integrated into the leadership team of the school and not regularly attending the school’s leadership meetings; and not enjoying a support network of colleagues to help them navigate in the school. So, while the school may have had noble desires and solid hires, there remained significant obstacles to success. Those directors both left . . . having not been able to make lasting changes. Today, the school is making slow progress, with a new director of diversity who enjoys the full support of the president and his team and initiatives in the building, not the least of which are uncomfortable conversations with adults. Perhaps this progress comes because of the tireless, messy work, and institutional mistakes of the past? At times, people comment that tensions which bubble up to the surface are indications of setbacks. But we know, surface tensions are true signs that the work is working – it’s impacting how people think and will ultimately impact how people act. Obviously, these challenges happen at other schools. As my work continues today, I witness schools budget for, accept, and support black students, while at the same time grapple with how a more diverse student population positively contributes to and enhances the school’s core mission and identity. I observe students of color attending our schools while struggling academically and culturally, when expectations are different. I see schools struggle to maintain and increase enrollment of black students so that their admissions demographics more closely reflect the community in which they thrive, even when financial resources for students dwindle. But, I notice best practices that work to ensure more meaningful relationships are developed among networks of schools. I know that schools work to guarantee that financial resources are appropriately allocated for greater student diversity. Finally, I see universities and colleges examining their histories and admitting the sin of the purchase and sale of slaves. During my doctoral work’s Urban education course, I participated in a Courageous Conversations About Race adult discussion group, based on the Singleton and Linton text. Regularly, there was a deep divide among black and white educators in class, because we did not know how to process traumatic experiences of conscious and unconscious racism, along with unresolved feelings that the conversations produced. And despite her best intentions, the professor was unsuccessful at facilitating dialogue. When I return to today, I consider that I work for an organization whose makeup is predominantly male, predominantly of European (Caucasian) descent, and whose primary focus has not been on exploring issues of race, but whose focus is one of a commitment to justice to serve with and for others. So, we collaborate with race experts locally and nationally to create a school survey tool that helps leaders identify patterns and perceptions about decisions and identify components as they relate to race and student achievement. And while the initial draft was wonky and therefore not well received by leadership in our schools, we keep moving ahead – imaging a different iteration of this tool, with broader input. In addition to trying to rework the survey with a group of national diversity directors and aside from scaling down our expectations that schools approach this work wanting to see results of disaggregated data by race to help them understand the experience and the achievement of all students, we continue to be engaged – at the grass-roots level – aiming to built a support system for those working directly with diversity, equity, and inclusion in our schools. We continue to be engaged, despite fumbling and making mistakes that occasionally push us back. Building on the success of participation at conferences nationally and regionally, for the past few years our school directors of diversity support one another during monthly conference calls. And now, in year two, we are engaged in a pilot project of adult Courageous Conversations about Race. But, the excitement I felt earlier in the year about a Courageous Conversations About Race regional conference calls in our province has been tempered a bit recently because of a decrease in participation. Something happened between January and March. Perhaps because it’s springtime and we can’t seem to agree upon a time to have a conversation. Unfortunately, few people in our discussion group wrote race autobiographies (our homework from February), which is a time-consuming, emotionally-draining, and daunting task. And frankly, after talking with people in our group, I realize that uploading these autobiographies to a shared folder online and exposing them to others in the group is difficult. Doing so, we are vulnerable because we get real about our experiences with race . . . perhaps revealing embarrassment, humiliation, anguish, and trauma. This is tough – to be fully present and human (sins and all) with one another. We continue to make mistakes. However, last week I had a glimmer of hope when five of us from across the region did in fact gather by conference call to re-start the conversation, pray with one another, reflect on our overall experiences in the group, and identify the group’s possible obstacles. That day, we spoke more deeply about our written race autobiographies – the processes we used, along with trends we noticed, and conscious and unconscious racism within our narratives and lives. Two take-aways for me, from that discussion are:
I suppose these are truthful insights and reflections from our work. We challenged one another to move from exploring race in our own lives to agree to some data collection points for looking at students by race, in our schools – to keep the spotlight on race (Singleton). And, as Singleton and Linton suggest, we resisted the “natural inclination to move away from the conversation . . . to disengage” (60). We practiced, as they suggested, “being absolutely honest about your thoughts, feelings, and opinions, and not just saying what you perceive others want to hear,” striving to realize that the “solution is revealed in the process of dialogue itself” (64). Leaving the conversation, we agreed to collect student data by race: GPAs, ACT scores, and discipline records (detentions). After collecting that data, we are going to practice looking at it and develop summary statements to share with our group. It’s a start. And perhaps our efforts – though slow and sloppy – provide some insight into how things can unfold with hope, toward change in the future. Here are five key take-aways that could be helpful for any group engaged in conversations about race and student achievement in schools:
Despite obstacles along this journey, I finally take comfort in the prayerful words of Thomas Merton when he writes, “I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.” |
Pete MussoAssistant Principal, Curriculum & Instruction Archives
May 2022
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