Antiracist School Leadership: 6-Session PD Series
Each session considers the key components of corresponding chapters in The Antiracist School Leader: What to Know, Say, & Do.
Educate Yourself and Commit
In this session, we’ll review information and history regarding antiracism in education. Our conversation will highlight how school leaders recognize the roles that school policies and practices play in reinforcing systems of oppression that lead to disproportionate racial outcomes. Through the consideration of Fear Zones, Learning Zones, and Growth Zones, school leaders can assess the antiracist readiness of their staffs and themselves to determine entry points that support everyone’s learning.
Cast an Antiracist Vision
In this session, you’ll develop a personalized vision for your own antiracist journey. You’ll learn how to address the flaws in our disproportionate focus on the inputs (like students, families, and staff) and outputs (like test scores, graduation rates, and discipline referrals) of organizations, at the expense of reflecting on the mechanism that transforms inputs into outputs, which is the system itself. You will consider strategies, visuals, and communication practices that antiracist school leaders can use to share their antiracist visions with stakeholders.
Plan Professional Learning Experiences
This session presents professional learning
experiences that give staff multiple opportunities to engage with various media, colleagues, students, and members of the broader school community to achieve the goal of critical consciousness. You will explore Whiteness, White supremacy culture, and historical forms of anti-dark oppression. You will learn how to use backward design to create goals, strategies, activities, and milestones that shepherd learners toward the ultimate target—critical consciousness in students. You will consider options for developing assessments that help to monitor short-, intermediate-, and long-term progress.
Encourage and Embrace Resistance
In your work as an antiracist school leader, you should expect challenges from stakeholders of all categories. This session provides current and aspiring antiracist school leaders with strategies to recognize resisters, understand their triggers, and prescribe responsive measures. In addition to learning strategies that antiracist school leaders can use to support stakeholders’ fears, deflections, or rejections of antiracist work, you will learn how balancing whose perspectives get centered, recognizing intersectionality, and cultivating allies can reduce the likelihood of resistance.
Elevate Antiracist Curriculum and Instruction
History demonstrates that racism influences
curricula selection, instructional practices, stakeholder relationship building, and staff evaluation, among many aspects of schooling. Antiracist school leaders promote awareness of racism’s manifestations across areas of schools, and they lead the development of antiracist practices that counteract racism’s effects. This session describes how educators can present educational opportunities that are connected to their students’ lived experiences and how they should be prepared to confront issues related to race and language. You will learn how to audit processes related to curricula selection, instructional practices, stakeholder relationship building, staff evaluation, and other aspects of teaching and learning.
Monitor Your Impact
Once you’ve implemented your strategies and advocated for what’s important, you need indicators of your effectiveness beyond a single summative assessment. This session suggests some options for building a system of ongoing assessment that gauges the clarity of your plan and effectiveness of your strategies. You will
consider the data points that are essential, whose input is critical, and helpful frameworks for analysis. You will hear about ways that school leaders have shared their data about their antiracist efforts in ways that clarified their intentions and motivated their school teams.