What we were asking we make assumptions about who's
in our community is underestimating
the drive of young people, the drive of
families
the drive of communities
to uplift ourselves.
The first step in pursuing equity is really defining equity
for your community. What kind of school do
we want to have? What kind of community are we
solving for? And then when you do that you're
starting to think about? Okay. Well who would need to be at the table? What voices
would be that the table in order to get to that
outcome? And then what are the methodologies that
we're using to incorporate these voices particularly when
they're not all on same page to come to
a common outcome to come to a consensus to move us forward.
When young people or people come to a space and they
don't feel heard they get louder.
And and they get louder and they get louder until
people are shouting.
And one reaction to people getting louder is
you're shouting at me.
You know, why are you shouting?
But when you realize that people are getting louder because they don't
feel heard.
And you speak take time to listen, you'll know
that they tend to get softer because they don't have to shout
to be heard.
And so when we make assumptions of people we make
them have to shout to be heard.
And when we listen to people
we allow them to tell their story and their narrative in
a way that's respectful and honored.
We used to have social emotional learning showcases when
I was director of social emotional learning at the Urban Assembly and
we ask what SEL skill do students, did they
think that teachers could best develop?
And inevitably our students would say listening active listening.
To listen to young people is to
be able to connect the ideas that you're trying to teach
to the things that they care about the things that they're
they're passionate about. When we are paying attention
to how students learn who the learning
from we're paying attention to young people.
And young people know when we're paying
attention to them.
There was an idea for a long time that
pulling parents into the school
was the only way to represent what parent
engagement could be.
What we learned in the pandemic was if we go to
parents through virtual opportunities to engage with young
people to engage with the school to engage with
the school administration and staff,
parents wanted to do that.
So it turns out the constraints were
not parent will and when we opened up the opportunities
for parents to engage in different formats and
different modalities parent engagement went through
the roof.
Right, and this is a really important lesson for us. It's not about
being school-centric. It's about
being people-centric.
And when we are people-centric and we're listening to
young people
we understand the purpose of a public education and
different ways. When we're parent-centric and
we're paying attention to where parents are, we're
opening up access to all parents across
social economic status across racial categories, so
they can be involved in young people's learning. And
those are the processes that are going to move us forward to come
into a more perfect union by incorporating
the voices that we need in order to move forward.