Mrvaudrey

Tag: whiteness

  • Big Shifts, Little Trainings

    There’s a 100% chance that I’m paraphrasing this idea from someone, but it was a half-baked idea we discussed over lunch, and I’m expanding it here.

    <triumphant voice>

    The Biggest Challenge in Effective Professional Development

    When getting a group of Educators in the room for P.D. (Professional Development), there are three forces at play.

    1.) What the administrator or director thinks is necessary.
    2.) What the teacher thinks is necessary.
    3.) What the trainer or consultant thinks is necessary.

    In a dream sequence, the teachers and administrators both have a shared idea of the work, and they bring in an expert to help them make progress.

    three people pulling the same chain, which is attached to a weight

    Sometimes those three things are all pulling in different directions; I’ve definitely sat in trainings where I wanted practical classroom management strategies, the administrator wanted to raise math achievement, and the presenter had a litany of software tools to show me.

    three people holding chains, pulling in three different directions

    Not much progress was made.

    Robert Kaplinsky notes (and cites some research) about how Teachers don’t often get the amount of P.D. they want/need, and it’s not a stretch to suggest that neither Teachers nor Admin are aware of that research (I definitely wasn’t).

    As a classroom teacher, I was often confident that I understood best what we needed. After all, we’re the ones in the classroom with our kids all the time.

    Sometimes the teachers and administrator are united in what they want, but the presenter…

    b+ might have some new research to share,
    b+might extend the idea past what the teachers and admin were expecting,
    b+or they might be all excited about a fresh idea and completely ignore the contract they signed with the school.

    You know… hypothetically.

    two people holding a chain, pulling against a person holding the other end of the chain.

    When I’m consulting with a district or speaking at an event, I’m most often the person on the right in the image above; trying to convince a room of people that they’ll like what I’m cooking, even though it’s not what they ordered.

    a pile of pasta with peas and parmesan.
    “Yeah, I know you ordered a bacon burger, but this is better for you in the long run and you’ll be glad to got it. Trust me; we’ve just met and I don’t know anything about you.”

    Here’s an example: earlier this month, I kicked off day two of #AddItUp in St. Louis, and my keynote focused on bravery and transparency in risk-taking.

    I gave lots of research backing up my idea, concrete examples of how to encourage risk-taking, and some free takeaways so teachers could start being braver.

    And.

    I bookended the teacher-stuff with a lot of hard topics for white folks to think about.

    b+Students of color are suspended and expelled more frequently than their white peers, beginning before Kindergarten.
    b+If we aren’t brave with stuff we don’t understand, we’ll never get better, and that includes interacting with race relations.
    b+We must model bravery for students and staff, and that means failing publicly because growth is important. Watch me as I do that exact thing.

    Consensus is hard, and it’s rare to get 100% agreement, even with a school site that serves the same population of students. If we wait until everyone is ready, we’ll be too late.

    Quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: "The time is always right to do what is right."

    And yeah, I lured my audience to the auditorium to discuss risk, then offered input on whiteness, a dish they didn’t order.

    It’s my hope that they will be more interested in the dish after seeing it. Maybe not today, but eventually.

    My role as a P.D. provider is to smush big-picture change (Equity, racism, special education) into accessible topics (bravery, Appetizers, Desmos). On conference applications, I don’t often mention those big-picture topics, but I sure as hell will mention them once y’all are in the room.*

    Equally important is a humility on my part; I must be open to the idea that I’m pulling hard on something that isn’t important, but I think it is.
    Gotta keep listening.

    That’d be a good sticker to put on a laptop.

    ~Matt “Keep Listening” Vaudrey

    P.S. If you have research or ideas about this kind of thing, I recommend you hop into this thread with author and education expert Ilana Horn, who has much more academic chops than I do about this (and about everything).

    *If you’re an administrator or conference-application reader, and the above post sounds like a bait-and-switch, ask yourself; how many workshops that explicitly mention the hard topics are you supporting?
    Most often, it’s zero, so that’s why I smush equity into a workshop on warm-up activities.

  • White Folk and White Spaces

    As a white person, there is a hesitance about intrusion into black spaces.

    On the podcast The Sporkful, the interviewer sits in an all-black diner and asks the owner about white people being welcome. The owner responds, “Do you have the same concerns for black people who are in all-white spaces all the time?b

    Since I spent most of my life around people who looked just like me, I feel no qualms voicing my opinions in those spaces, but I am more reticent to inject myself into mostly black spaces. This could be fear of rocking the boat, some sense of sacredness, or wanting to keep a respectful distance, and is likely some combination of all three.

    Much has been said this week about the white privilege article from a white basketball player. If you haven’t yet read this article, go do that, then come back.

    Done? Okay, cool.

    Now this quote:

    Itbs not enough to say bI donbt think about race.b  Because in a community, how one member is doing affects the whole.  And for those of us not in the dominant racial group, we donbt have the luxury of saying bI donbt think about raceb because racial issues affect us on a daily basis.  So let me encourage all of us to try having these conversations, to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and quick to forgive each other when we say something stupid.  Thatbll happen if you start to have conversations, and we just have to have grace for each other if we make mistakesbitbs better than not talking. 

    ~Francis Su, Mathematics for Human Flourishing

    Still here? Okay.

    Last week at NCTM, I spoke to a group about building Bravery in teachers and students. In an attempt to model bravery, two things are happening:

    1.) I will continue to invite white folk to discuss hard issues in mostly white spaces. We (white folks) are more likely to engage with a hard topic if we donbt have to couch our language; my goal here is long-term change, not policing or shame, so I’m willing to sacrifice a bit for people coming up the Equity trail behind me.

    2. The other goal is to continue improving myself, modeling vulnerability and humility around things I donbt understand, and paying close attention to those up in front of me on the the Equity trail, stumbling as I go.

    This means getting involved in the Twitter chat tonight, even though I might say something unintentionally ignorant. Ibm prepared to be brave around things I donbt fully understand in hopes I can improve.

    One of the most obvious ways I can improve is tied to my musings above; I feel more comfortable joining a Twitter chat led by a white person than the wildly successful #ClearTheAir chat earlier this year, led by people of color.

    I’m weak, but getting stronger. But I’m going to engage in this chat anyway instead of shaming myself out of it.

    And if my kids take my time, I’ll get on it later tonight or tomorrow.

    ~Matt “Weak, but Getting Stronger” Vaudrey