Silence is Acquiescence

“What I permit, I promote. What I allow, I encourage. What I condone, I own.” – Michelle Malkin.

The above quote has been a touchstone for me as a new principal, and provides direction in the way that I want to shape the vision and direction for our school. If I truly wish to address inequity in our school system, I need to start by working with my staff. In my last post, I carefully reflected on the importance of collective teacher efficacy and my proposed actions to make a unified move to create complex change positively affect our students.

In my course shell, which you can find here, the proposed professional development is broken down into 10 professional learning sessions experienced monthly throughout the year. For this week’s assignment, I focused in on Topic 6: Silence is Acquiescence. The content within this topic explores the Inspiring Success: First Nations and Metis PreK-12 Education Policy Framework and the application of this framework to Equitable School Transformation in our local setting.

This topic can be explored synchronously (at a monthly staff meeting) or asynchronously (on the educator’s own time). There is one group activity that must be completed collaboratively, and I expect that I might have one group of commuters agree to do this activity virtually together.

The lesson starts with a self reflection where learners examine their personal and professional understanding of anti-racist and anti-oppressive education. ‘

Key terms to be explored are:

• Power
• Positionality
• Equity

The “Minds On” activity has learners score themselves on the classic privilege walk exercise, and then view my Lumi interactive video to begin the reflective process.

A side note on the Lumi app — I LOVED USING IT! It will be a wonderful reflective tool. I sincerely appreciated the ability to have open ended questions and questionnaires, however I wish that there was a way to collect questionnaire answers for later reflection. I will combat this issue likely with an anonymous google form for completion in the lesson, unless I can figure out a way to view this data before my module is released.

I also included the famous equity cartoon, but illustrating one more scenario with inclusion as food for thought.

https://twitter.com/ClinPsychDavid/status/1407103431718969345?s=20

The next part of my lesson is a collaborative Jamboard activity where we develop group norms for professional conversations about race and inequity as they might be sensitive topics for some, depending where they are on their journey towards anti-racist and anti-oppressive education. I chose to use an adaptation of the Circle of Courage model for professional collaboration by Dr. Martin Brokenleg, as all staff will be familiar with this format because we are a Circle of Courage school. This is followed by another Jamboard called Someone on my mind… which will help staff to personalize this issue to their everyday lives through a focus on a student they care about.

As a “summative assessment”, the learners will work in groups to complete the Indigenous Education Responsibility Framework for our school (The readability will be best if you download it to view in excel). This framework has been created by the Saskatchewan School Boards Association and the Strategizing Continuum includes Observing, Supporting and Disrupting, which I think is quite progressive and a bit rebellious — and I love it!

In closing, I will have students revisit “Someone on my mind…” to add the larger systemic impacts that might be made on the student in mind.

The main resources I used for this topic’s development include:

The Listening Leader by Shane Safir (THIS IS A MUST READ!!!)

In addition, I used an old PD Resource-  Leading to Learn: Impacting First Nations, Inuit and Metis Student Outcomes: Signpost 1. This was a training that was put on by Student First and the STF Professional Development Unit, therefore it is tricky to share the source. If it is ever offered again — definitely sign up!

This is a big topic, and we know it is a long road. In closing, I will share one more encouraging quote, near and dear to my heart and important to my practice:

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” – Maya Angelou