Arria Coburn:
I said, “Okay, Arria, I’m going to try. I’m not even going to write it. I’m just going to go in there and speak off the cuff.” And she said, “Oh, you got to let the seniors go. We got to hear this because we’ve been waiting for this moment.” And I remember I was nervous because I script everything. So I went in there and everyone was looking and I said, “All right, I need to talk to you guys about something.”

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton and I’m coming to you from the 2022 Deeper Learning Conference back live and in person after two virtual years. It feels so good to be back. This episode is a Deeper Learning Den Talk, hosted by the one and only Ron Berger, senior advisor for teaching and learning at EL education. Ron spoke to Laina Cox, who’s the middle school principal at Capitol City Public Charter School in Washington, DC. Justin Lopez-Cardoze, who’s an instructional coach and curriculum coordinator at the same school. And Arria Coburn, who’s principal of Springfield Renaissance School in Springfield, Massachusetts.
They talked about tackling racism and inequity at their schools and what school is like when you prioritize creating a community where every kid knows they belong. One little note, they took audience questions and those questions are pretty much impossible to hear, so you’ll hear my voice at a few points in the episode telling you what the question was. With that, I’ll get out of the way and let Ron introduce the speakers.

Ron Berger:
Before we get going with the conversation, I got to brag about these three people for a moment, so you’ll understand why I’m so honored to be here. I’m going to tell you right now, I’m going to do two rounds of bragging. So first, let me give you the big world bragging.
So Washington DC State Teacher of the Year, EL Education’s National Principal of the Year, and the Magnet School principal of the year for the entire Northeast. And then just on a smaller level, if you read Larry Ferlazzo’s incredible Ed Week column, this week, it’s featuring Justin’s incredible piece on listening to students as a part of staff development. Having staff development includes students, an amazing piece.
An update on Laina. She is one of seven educators in the entire country that was asked by the US Department of Education to be an educator on assignment. A fellow, a national fellow to share her wisdom around the entire country.
And then my last brag. In December, I visited Arria, who’s the leader of a high school and middle school. And we have a structure in EL called Crew where we have an advisory structure where every adult pretty much has a crew of students they meet with every day. Arria traditionally did not have a crew because as principal of an urban high school, she was always putting out crises and she felt, “It wouldn’t be fair to have a crew because I’d have to leave them so much.”
When I showed up in December, Arria said, “Do you want to sit in on my Crew?” And I said, “Arria, I didn’t realize you had a crew.” And she said, “Things have fallen apart since the pandemic. Kids are falling apart. I needed to take a crew.” And then she said, “Let me tell you about my crew. I asked all the teachers, who is falling apart in crew, who is struggling in Crew, who is feeling suicidal, who wants to drop out of school? Send them to me, they’re going to be my crew.
And she put together a crew of students who were not managing even in their existing crews. And then a week ago, we learned that her students from her crew just won a statewide contest. Say a couple of words about that contest.

Arria Coburn:
So it is called Tenacity, and it is for African American and Latinx students to look at our social justice issue. And so the students did a leadership project and they also did a two voice poem on the book, The Other Wes Moore, and connected it to their personal life. And so we took away the state title.

Ron Berger:
So you can see why I’m so honored to be here. This is what this conversation is about. All of us in this room are working to create schools of equity. And by equity we mean that every child, no matter who they are and what their identity is, feels welcome and valued. That they truly belong. And by belong, we don’t just mean included. We don’t just mean they’re allowed in your school, allowed in that classroom. It means that they feel they’re valued, their voice is heard, that people care what they think, that people listen to what they think. It’s a really hard thing to do.
It’s especially hard to talk about race, about gender identity, about sexual orientation, about body type, about neighborhood, about primary languages, about immigration status. The things that can keep a child from feeling they belong are many. And you know that in order to address that, the key move is to have your staff of your school be ready to be there, to be ready to value and honor every kid. Because no matter what’s on the walls, no matter what your school code says, no matter what your initiative for the year is, no matter how much you say we care about equity or belonging or identity, it’s actually how your staff members treat those students every minute of every day that makes them belong or not.
So for all of our frameworks, for all of our ideas, it’s really about changing the hearts and minds of your staff to really value the potential of every kid and challenge every kid to be their best self. That’s what our conversation is today. These are two different schools represented here. Springfield Renaissance School, which is a public district school in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Capital City Charter School, which is a public charter school in Washington, DC. 1.000 kids in this school. 700 kids in this school.
In both places, mostly students of color, mostly from low income families. Both schools have never graduated a student who was not admitted to college. Over 15 years of 100% college acceptance for their graduates. And they’re not culling out kids. More than 95% of the kids are graduating on time in these schools. So this is their credibility.
But the reason that I ask them here is because they’ve done some really deep work with their staffs about how do you get your staffs to talk about race? To talk about gender identity, talk about sexual orientation, to talk about body size, to talk about all the things that make kids feel like they not belong. Because if your staff can’t talk about that, honestly, how can they talk about it with kids? How can they do that? They’ve made incredible strides and also had real problems because this is not easy work and it never ends, and the pandemic has made it even harder.
So Arria, I’m going to start with you. Can you talk about what are the things that have worked best and where are some of the places where it just went wrong?

Arria Coburn:
All right. I’ll start off with sort of my journey. So this is my seventh year as principal. I can remember my first year, I had just finished up reading, Your 100 Days On The Job. And so I had gone through it. I had my checklist ready to go, but what was not included in that was how to talk about race issues. I also was very much aware as a new principal, principal of color that I wanted to keep my job, so I didn’t want to ruffle feathers because that’s always something that you’re thinking about. I worked really hard to be here so that I could represent the students that look like me, but I have to sort of walk this walk.
And so when I started professional development, it was very cookie cutter. It was sort of just checking off the boxes. We’re going to talk about race inequity. We’re going to talk about making sure that our curriculum is diverse and then we feel really good about it. So we had guest speakers come in. I partnered with different people to present to my staff, and we had some progress, but it never sustained, right? And so September, everyone’s really excited. “Oh my God, I’m going to try this in my class. I’m going to ask the kids, I’m going to do these interest surveys.” And then in November we were back to where we were in the previous year.
We also had some major missteps that pulled us apart that had us pause. And so one misstep was just partnering with people that, you read their profile, you talk to another school and they say, “Oh, this person is great.” They come in and they do this professional development, and it’s a one size fits all, and that doesn’t work when you’re talking about race. And so we had a presenter come in and we did a crossing the line, and then we created infinity groups. So at the time that we were doing infinity groups seemed a good idea, but it didn’t, and it pulled our staff apart and it was really hard to come back from that.
And so one of the things that I had to do as a principal was to figure out really quick how we were going to lean into this conversation about race, but not pull my staff apart. Because if the teachers weren’t ready and hadn’t done some work with within themself, they weren’t going to be ready to talk to students. And so one success was that we did something with a woman from Harvard, and it was the story of self. And so every staff member had to create a personal story of how they entered this conversation of race. Then they had to stand up and talk about it.
So they created this kind of seven minute speech and they presented it in two minutes. And that was hard. And so it was the first time that many staff members talked about, “So I grew up in an environment where I wasn’t around students of color, I wasn’t around people of color. So this conversation is hard.” And it was from that work that we were able to build, I guess a platform to have easier conversations. And so the misstep was partnering with different presenters to come in to talk to my staff. It wasn’t personalized. The great success was being able to push my staff to dig deep within themself.
And then those stories, every staff member had to share those with students. And so I had events, right? Because everyone’s like, “Oh my God, I can’t wait to share this at the beginning of the year. It’s going to be great.” And then it doesn’t happen. So I built in time. You can share it with other adults during lunch. You can share it at the community meeting, you can share it on the morning announcements, but you need to figure out when you’re going to share this story and where we’re going to come back to it.
Each staff member had a poster with words from their story of self that was hanging in the wall. So every time something happened, they would pause, mark the moment and talk about, okay, so especially if they had to apologize for something. So those mistakes that happened with race, they would go back to, “This is how I’m entering this conversation. So I want to just apologize. So this is who I am.”

Ron Berger:
That was beautiful and so specific. So Capital City, I’d like you each speak to this. Of the schools I work with, I think your school does the best job I know of making understanding of belonging and race and identity part of your process for interviewing future staff members and part of your process for orienting staff members. Can you each speak about that?

Laina Cox:
Okay. So one of the big things for us, and it came from a misstep and feeling like equity work is a huge part of our professional development, and it’s a huge part of our mission, and we named that. But what we weren’t doing, we were waiting until it was too late. We had certain people in the building that weren’t ready to do that work. And it was important when you’re sitting in an interview, part of it is both we’re interviewing you as a staff member to see if you fit with us, but that candidate should really be interviewing us as well to see if, “This is the type of school that I want to be in.”
And so we decided we wanted to make sure you knew what you were signing up for. And so in our series of questions, and they happened in the first four questions, we directly ask teacher, the candidate to talk to us and give us specific examples on how you work to be an anti-racist educator. And then we just sit there and stare at them and we wait for that answer. And that answer determines if we go to question number five or if we jump to question number nine and end the interview a little sooner than normal. Because it’s no point in us continuing through this process if you can’t directly tell us what work you’re doing to be an anti-racist educator, because then I can’t have you in front of my black and brown students.
And so we started doing that as a part of the interview process, and it started to weed candidates out that on paper would’ve been on the top of our list. And there were candidates that were coming in with experience and they were strong and they would’ve had great references and all of that. But that key part of who we needed to be standing in front of our children was missing. We weren’t finding it out until they were already hired and we were in the middle of a professional development and we were like, “Good Lord, what did we do? And how are we going to fix this?” So that was kind of the backwards mapping to that.
The other piece around professional development. Our new teachers start three weeks ahead, and our returning teachers have two weeks of professional development. We do equity training within that first week to at least get everyone on a foundational level and kind of catch up our new staff to where our returning staff is so that there’s common language. The priorities, the goals around our equity work specifically is really understood. And then we do more equity work as an entire staff once everyone is back.
So we’ve built that into our summer professional development. And then it’s on a six week kind of every month cycle within our school year professional development as well, which includes equity work specific to affinity groups. So we are a staff of about 200, and everyone participates in affinity groups if you are student facing or family facing or staff facing. So from our maintenance staff all the way up to our head of school, everyone participates in affinity group work.
And Justin, I know will probably talk about this some too, but one of the biggest pieces has also been about who does the planning? Where you already going to talk about that? Great. Okay, good. Who does the planning for these professional development sessions? Because I think that that’s critical to the sustainability and the capacity and bandwidth.

Justin Lopez-Cardoze:
Thanks, Laina. So it’s really interesting that you’re bringing up that question because I remember in 2016 when I was in my teacher interview with Laina, that question came up for me. And just in quick reflection, I wonder how my answer has changed since then and the accountability that I have had to undergo as an educator at Capital City to consistently reflect on who I am, what is my role in this work, and how ready am I to continue this work every single day?
Just speaking on behalf of how Capital City runs our structure. We have an Equity Core Committee. I’ve been a representative on our Equity Core Committee for four years now, and it takes reps across our entire LEAs. So representatives from our lower school, middle school, high school, and central office to really think about the work that is absolutely necessary in order to move the needle to strive towards the academic justice of our students and the academic justice and liberation for our staff.
So many of the conversations that we have in our biweekly meeting is to assess what inequities are specifically happening? What are the biggest troubles in prioritizing justice and decolonization? I think our conversation across the years that I’ve been on the Equity Core Committee have shifted away from equity to just say the word equity. We’ve heard equity so much and preaching it and hearing it, and it just has become such a buzzword in my personal opinion and not enough work. There are folks that are just not ready to do the work to really begin actively working towards that justice and decolonization.
I think that that is what our Equity Core Committee does, and we do it through multiple priorities. So for example, on sustainability. What does sustainability look like through a justice and decolonization lens? What does that look like for our students? What does that look like for our staff? And how do we want to make sure that the personal and professional learning experiences that our students and our staff have access to when we are having these conversations actively as a staff, and not just starting in the interview, not just starting it during orientation. But really ensuring that these experiences are consistently happening across the school year and years for staff who continue coming to Capital City on a mission to strive towards the academic justice of our students.
So we have developed a strong model that has gained a lot of reputability as an LEA in bringing the creativity of our teachers and of our staff to come together in this Equity Core Committee and to be real with one another and work on what matters the most.

Ron Berger:
Thank you. And this time I’ll go Justin, Laina, Arria. One of the things I admire about all three of you is that you’ve had the courage to bring your full identities in front of your staffs and your students. And by full identities, it’s countering this just my race, my gender, my size, my age is my identity. We are all way more complex than that. Camille Farrington would say, “Our integrated identities.” And you have all had the courage of bringing your full identities to your colleagues, your staffs and your students, and you’ve expected your teachers and your staff members to step in as you are. Can you each talk about how you’ve done that and what’s hard about it or what’s been gratifying about it?

Justin Lopez-Cardoze:
Sure. So I identify as multiethnic, and so it has constantly been a struggle for me in my racial identity to think about who I am as a Latinx person and who I am as a white person. It’s something that I grapple with every single day. And I think that I have continued to come to terms with how I am dismantling what my white ancestors have done to cause harm for the folks around me, for the histories that they have infiltrated and they have completely been incredibly problematic towards, and how I’m honoring my Latinx family. How am I honoring and bringing the voices of my ancestors from my father’s side into the conversation?
I think that, well, one of the stories that I have is being in administration at Capital City and thinking about some of our policies. One of the things that we do on a quarterly basis is we have to go through grades and comments and how we’re providing narratives to our families. Well, the semester mark happens to be one where we have to provide narratives to every single family across every single discipline on how our students are doing. And one of the policies that I just coming into my first year of being an administrator was putting comments for translation into the narratives.
Typically, how I experience this as a teacher is you put the English version of the comment first and then the translated version after that. And for me and my identity as a Latinx person, that didn’t make sense because whenever I would bring my report cards home or my cousins would bring their report cards home and it was like, “Here’s this English comment and then a Spanish comment,” if it even existed, right? “But why isn’t that Spanish comment first?” It’s something that my father, that’s something that my aunts and uncles grappled with, and I would experience that. So I decided to make an explicit point in our policy that the translated comment would go first.
I had a staff member come up to me and ask, “Hey, a couple of my colleagues are confused on why we have to do this. Why is this a change? Why do we need to do this now?” And I remember telling my principal, Laina over here, that there are some teachers who are grappling with this decision in the policy. And I simply expressed to Laina, “If anyone has a problem with this, then they can come see their Latinx administrator. If they want to have any dialogue, I’m here to have it, but let’s have a critical conversation about this.”
And I think that having Laina’s support was not allyship it was her being an accomplice for me. And I think that… How many of y’all are familiar with Dr. Yaba Blay? Okay. Phenomenal. She’s really particular when it comes to language about allyship versus being an accomplice, right? I think that the examples of how we do justice to honor our perspectives and to honor our identities is to be an accomplice. And so to have Laina’s support and to fight this work with me as someone who is very passionate about policies was an example of how she was an accomplice for me.

Laina Cox:
So when I think about the identity that I bring to my school community, I always describe myself to my teachers, to my students, to everybody, “I am an unapologetic, proud black woman.” I wear natural hair. I wear big hoop earrings. I wear clothes for my culture, all of those types of things. I bring that very intentionally and very purposefully knowing who my students are.
And I think about, I work in a middle school, and one of the activities that we do at the start of every year with every group of new staff is I make them think back to their middle school years. And I make them think, recall a teacher and think about that. It doesn’t have to be your favorite teacher. It could be the worst, a really bad teacher, but I have them really think about middle school experience. And most times when I say, “Let’s go back to middle school,” there’s groans and nobody wants to think about middle school.
And my whole conversation is, “If your students are sitting in a room in 20 years and someone says to think back to middle school, do you want them to groan or do you want them to remember the joy and the space that they got to be in as a middle school student?” In order for them to do that, they have to be able to be themselves. And in order for them to be themselves, they have to have people being their authentic selves and teachers coming in as their authentic selves.
And so one of the other parts of my authenticity that I do share with my students and my staff, while I am a proud black woman, and if someone sees me, they might assume my background or my experience or that it directly aligns with my students and all of that. I come from a very educationally privileged background that I own and that I accept that my parents sacrificed for. So I went to the fifth oldest private school in this country. I went to Spelman College. I went to Harvard University. I went to all of these top schools, and I purposefully choose to bring that education to my students, to my 90% percentage of black and brown students.
That’s an educational privilege and I expect my teachers to run a school similar to the background, the educational background that I had. That’s a part of my identity and so that then leads into my community and who I am in front of my community as well.

Ron Berger:
Great. And then we’ll do Arria and then we’ll do questions about any of this.

Arria Coburn:
So I struggled with sharing my identity with my staff. It just wasn’t something I was comfortable with. I grew up in a household where we didn’t talk about race or politics outside of the household. So when I stepped into this role, I struggled with what to communicate to my staff. And when we did the crossing the line activity, I knew that I would be in a different infinity group than my teachers of color because similar to Laina, I grew up in, and I had certain privileges growing up that my staff didn’t and so it was really hard to talk about it.
But the coming to moment was we had an incident at school and the N word was used. And so we had a student of color use it. We had a white teacher repeat the word. Then we had the secretary say it. It was a mess. And so I was like, “Okay, I need to pull students together.” So I had the student of color in there and the non student of color, and I’m talking, and I was neutral, right? I’m like, “Okay, so we want to be listening to each side, right? We don’t want to be judgey, and let’s listen to the student’s perspective.” And the kids were upset with me.
So one of the things that we always do is we always pull the students together. So the whole middle school, I knew I had to pull together last period. And at the time, I had a student voice group, and it was high school students. And so I pulled one of my seniors down, Audia, and I had wrote this speech same as I always do, and I was pumped. I felt good about it. And I said, “Audia, I got to talk to the kids. I can’t believe they’re doing this.” So I shared it with her and she looked at me and she said, “I don’t know. Can I be honest with you?” And I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “I’m kind of disappointed.”
And it hurt me. I was like, “Why?” This was a speech I was passionate about. And she said, “I just don’t know who you are. When we’re in our groups, you are a strong, confident black woman. In front of the staff or the students, you’re just neutral. And this is what this reads. And so people aren’t going to listen to what you have to say because it’s not real.” And it took me a while, and I remember I went back and forth with, “Should I cancel this community meeting? I’m not ready to talk about this. I’m not ready to be who I am.” And I knew at that moment that if I didn’t, I would lose the work that I was doing with staff and students.
I said, “Okay, Audia, I’m going to try. I’m not even going to write it. I’m just going to go in there and speak off the cuff.” And she said, “Oh, you got to let the seniors go. We got to hear this because we’ve been waiting for this moment.” And I remember I was nervous because I script everything. So I went in there and everyone was looking and I said, “All right, I need to talk to you guys about something.” And for the first time, I was me and I was emotional, and I was stuttering, my voice was quivering. And I didn’t know how the students were going to receive me because I was making a stand.
I said, “In this building, we will not use that word. I don’t care who you are. It’s not acceptable.” And so I gave this kind of personal connection to my own black son who was dealing with some issues at school. And when I finished, everyone was quiet and I was like, “Oh, I messed up.” And the kids clapped, and they were like, “We needed that from you.” It was the first time that I realized how important it is to be your authentic self. And I felt I earned some cred because after they’re like, “Yeah, Coburn.”
But it was such a pivotal moment because after that I realized that you cannot be neutral on those things. And so here I am trying to tell my staff, “Let’s talk about race. Let’s talk about equity, be your true self, story of self,” and I wasn’t sharing who I was and where I stood on certain things. It was from that conversation that we actually developed a set of norms about what language would be allowed in the building. And then I shared it with staff. And then after that, I just felt like I was on fire. I was like, “Okay, I can do that. The bandaid is off.” And so I always lean into those conversations.
At Renaissance, we call it marking the moment. And so anytime there’s anything race related or anything that is creating some tension, I mark that moment. I don’t script it. I go in, whatever comes out, it’s authentic. And sometimes I have my seniors join that conversation and we’re just raw and real, and the students really appreciate that authentic conversation.

Alec Patton:
This is a two-part question from an audience member. The first part is how much time are you spending on this work versus your school’s other goals? And the second part of the question is, when you asked that hiring interview question about being an anti-racist educator, how much wait time do you provide?

Arria Coburn:
So in the beginning when we had our school goals, we had our statewide goals that the students would make a certain amount of progress on their math and ELA goals and then we had a race goal separate. That was wrong. That’s where we were making our mistake. All of our goals, there’s a race piece. If we’re talking about state progress, there’s a race piece connected to it. So it isn’t sort of this afterthought, it isn’t the checkbox that we’re filling, it’s the thing that we do. It’s our identity. So every goal has a racial piece to it.

Laina Cox:
As far as wait time, I have OCD tendencies so there’s a timer to all of our questions, just a little bit. It’s three minutes. So you use whatever wait time you want. If you want to wait and process for two and a half minutes, you have 30 seconds to tell me how you’re an anti-racist educator, but it’s three minutes. We don’t have time to wait. Either you are or you aren’t. And you’re going to explain and you’re going to give some examples.

Justin Lopez-Cardoze:
One of the, if I can a add on to the time, one of the things that I have needed to take myself out of is to obsess with time so much so that way there’s enough of it to be critical. So really listening to staff as they’re engaging in equity experiences and coming together and being able to synthesize that feedback in a way that is always questioning, what, why and how?. And I know that sounds really basic, but it is going to take time striving towards justice, decolonization, DEI, all of it. One of the things that I need to do that I’ve been actively trying to pursue in my practice is to not be so mindful of time and more so on the quality of us being critical as a staff.

Alec Patton:
Okay, so this is a question from the audience. The question is how do you measure student voice around the idea of belonging?

Laina Cox:
So we actually, it’s funny you asked that. So we just did a survey with our entire student body, and today and tomorrow, I don’t know what today is, I have jet lag. I’m sorry, Wednesday. What’s today? Tuesday, okay. Wednesday, our staff as a part of the equity work is looking at that survey data and we’re really categorizing it. We’re calling it empathy interviews and really thinking about our empathy plan and how students do feel in school, and then what that evidence is.
So the questions were very specific about their sense of being included or belonging and how and what practices are in place or not in place that make you feel that way and all of that today. Senior leadership looked at that data to think about what that’s going to look like directly at each of our campus levels. And then all of the staff will be looking at that as a part of our Equity Professional Development Tomorrow to really dig into that. And that’s how student voice gets into the conversations around structures and policies and things that we’re putting in place because we’re asking the kids how they feel and giving us specific examples around that.

Arria Coburn:
Just to jump in really quick, we also do a survey, and so our students create that. One of the pieces that we spent a long time diving into is having the students tell us what belonging meant, because our definition was different. So we had to do three to four surveys back and forth because for us, belonging meant that the kids love our class. That’s not what they think. That’s not it for them. And so the students defined it, and then we measure it with them. “Great. So this is how you’re defining it, so now hold us accountable for it.” So we do a survey about six times during the year, and the students oversee it for us.

Ron Berger:
And I’m going to add one story. Many of our EL schools use a survey that we worked to collaborate with Camille Farrington from the University of Chicago around belonging. And those data were disaggregated by many identity factors. And the most surprising result was that there was one subgroup for whom belonging was profoundly lower in middle schools, and it was the subgroup of students who didn’t identify by a binary gender. Okay?
That’s not shocking that if you are a non-binary middle schooler, you’re going to feel not that they belong. Here’s what was shocking. Every school leader that we went to said, “Oh, we’re aware of the two kids who are non-binary in our middle school, and we try really hard with them.” And we had to say, “But it wasn’t two, it was 15.” And it was a real wake up call for all of us that the few students that you know are having gender identity issues are just the tip of the iceberg of the students who would never want to share that openly with you. Those are the students we need to most worry about. And it was just powerful data for us.

Alec Patton:
Question from the audience. How do you keep equity work going for your staff throughout the year?

Justin Lopez-Cardoze:
So we want to make sure, so there are two parts. The first part is to ensure that there are experiences where staff are coming together through our professional development cycle. So every six weeks staff will convene and engage in an equity-based activity, whether they are affinity groups, whether they are coming together. I know that we normally do a data dive that really brings a lot of the academic experiences that students are going through and allowing staff to reflect through a lens of equity.
So we want to make sure that the Equity Core Committee is planning those professional learning experiences for all of our staff, but being very careful and not saying, “Oh, we’re meeting every six weeks to come together and talk about equity,” and boom, go off into our classrooms, go off into our offices, into our hallways, and not be about the life that we brought into those professional learning experiences.
So one of the things that we do is to make sure that in all of the professional development that we’re designing, that we are bringing in, for example, equity pauses, where we’re allowing our staff to think critically about the systems instructions that are happening at the table, right? Who are they benefiting and who are they not? And being very open and very real about, “Well, this might not be a structure or a system that is supporting all of our students.”
And so making sure that through team meeting… I mean, there are so many experiences. Team meetings through our academic professional developments, through all of, and restorative justice, all the things that we do, we want to make sure that equity is not existing in a silo. I think that is one of the biggest challenges that many of the schools that I’ve worked with are trying to navigate.

Laina Cox:
I would just add to that the reality of it as well is you put time in what you’re prioritizing. So there’s always going to be the tug and pull. “Well, we need more planning time, we need grading time, we need to be in departments,” and all of that. Equity is going to show its face in every single one of those aspects. So you can either choose to proactively talk about it and deal with it and think about how that’s going to play out in a department meeting, or you’re going to end up reactively dealing with that, right?
And so you have to carve the time out and you have to name the time. That time is set. It is not flexible. We do not touch equity days. It doesn’t matter what’s going on. We might shift the conversation based on what’s going on, but we don’t change those things. That has been a huge push as we’ve reentered during this pandemic because everybody is pulling us to do every other imaginable thing during this time, and that that’s supposed to be the priority. And yes, we were in a global pandemic and we were also living in a racial epidemic, and we still are.
So we need to be talking about that because it is playing out in every other aspect of school life so you have to make the time. If you’re going to truly name it as a priority, then you will find the time and you will hold to that time.

Ron Berger:
Great. And we have five minutes left, so really only one or two questions, I think. But I do want to say the good news is they’re going to be here at this conference. You can ask them questions anytime, which I do all the time.

Laina Cox:
You’ll get real interesting answers at the reception tonight with the drink tickets too so ask us then.

Speaker 8:
[inaudible 00:38:15]?

Ron Berger:
Sure. The question is, can you make a connection between EL education and the EL model and what we’re talking about today?

Arria Coburn:
I definitely think that being part of the EL network is a platform. I think that EL is very responsive to what’s happening in the world and also helping us think deeper about curriculum. And so I always use it as a basis for conversations that I’m having with staff. When I think about [inaudible 00:38:46], what happened with that, EL has something that they put out in a newsletter. Great. So I use that with my staff. So it isn’t something that like, “Oh, we have this situation. How do we talk about it?” So I think that EL has provided a lot of professional development for myself, for my staff, and then it’s embedded in everything that they do. So it makes it easier for you to have that discussion with your staff.

Justin Lopez-Cardoze:
So I immediately think of the tenets of character in EL education. So thinking about how we’re fostering a sense of belonging, how we’re working with purpose and how we’re working with agency. And you can’t do that if you are not bringing your full self and if you are not honoring the folks around you as students, as staff members. The majority of our work, in order to be successful educators in any model, is to work on character and allow character to be the lever for our three disciplines, which are the producing high quality student work and mastering knowledge and skills. That cannot happen without the character, in my personal opinion. And that character work cannot happen if we are not having the real conversations around justice and decolonization. Period.

Alec Patton:
Question for the audience. What protocols do you have for responding when someone does say something that causes harm in your school?

Arria Coburn:
So the quick answer, we have a document called Talking Points. And so that talking point is a platform for every conversation that needs to happen that has created a disruption. So there’s one for if there’s a fight in the building, there’s a race issue, and every staff has been trained on it and they know it’s coming. In addition to that, we also have a protocol where it’s kind of restorative circles. So when a situation happens, I have a group of seniors, some juniors on that circle, and they’re going to pull that student in and we’re going to have a conversation, and then we’re going to have a community meeting.
So we do have a response for if there’s a race issue, there’s talking points coming out, and it is my expectation that they are delivered within 24 hours. And so I’m giving you the framework, you’re going to do it, I’m going to come around to make sure that you do it. And then I’m going to provide space for students who want to continue the conversation at lunch so that they can come. In addition to that, there’s going to be a community meeting, and then there’s going to be a smaller conversation with the offenders for us to talk about. All that is happening right away. So incident happens, here’s the response.

Ron Berger:
And I want to end with bringing in one other kind of identity. I’ve asked Justin to share a really touching story that he has shared before about his personal identity and sexual orientation with his students, and an unexpected response.

Justin Lopez-Cardoze:
So it’s one that I shared last year, and I know I need to make it super quick. But I think as a queer educator, one of the things, one of the worries that I have every single year is coming out. I feel like I come out to a whole new population every single year and have to relive those traumas of like, “Oh, what are they going to think of me? What are my kids going to think of me? What are the boys going to think of me?” Right? Because the boys who I grew up with made me incredibly uncomfortable and would call me all kinds of names. I just don’t want to let them down because I see them looking up to me as an ed leader and as a teacher.
So in identity work, the oh.

Speaker 9:
I’m sorry.

Justin Lopez-Cardoze:
Oh, it’s okay. Is everyone good? Hearing aid. All right, great. It’s all good. So I think one of the things was, well, my last name was changing in 2018. I can’t believe it’s already been that long because I married my incredible husband and thanks, we love him. So I was so nervous about my name changing and what kids would ask, and particularly how parents would respond and I got a lot of support. But particularly from my families, it means a lot because the family that I had access to growing up didn’t necessarily accept me.
And so I will never forget where one of my families, a mom brought in some desserts for me and just said, “Congratulations.” And they were decked out in ROYGBIV frosting, and it just humbled me and made me question, “Why do I have all of this doubt? Why do I have all of this fear when there’s so much love surrounding me?” And I think that the more we talk about it as educators and the more, I guess, bravery we have to embrace ourselves and to show who we are and our beautiful colors, that’s going to lead to the change that we wish to see in the world of education in our own worlds. And I thank you for inviting me to share that story.

Ron Berger:
So we’ve got to end, but you can see why I’m so proud to be on stage with these three people.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. If the names in this episode sound familiar, it’s because we put out an episode a year ago where the same group got together in the Virtual Deeper Learning Conference. They’re just such an awesome crew. To find out more about the Deeper Learning Conference, visit the website deeper-learning.org. That’s deeper-learning.O-R-G. Thanks for listening.