Equity Teams
Building Equity Teams
Addressing inequities in schools requires that adults and young people work together to explore, assess, and transform school culture. This kind of equity work:
- supports each participant to learn and reflect on their own role in maintaining the current school culture;
- considers academic and policy issues that contribute to inequity;
- examines the issues that contribute to a sense of belonging and exclusion in the school; and
- fosters the skills and commitment needed to build joyful, relational, inclusive, and academically rigorous learning spaces.
CES provides a highly skilled and racially diverse co-facilitation team to walk your equity team through this important, complex, and intersectional work. We work closely with an equity-focused point person in the district and provide support materials for recruiting and structuring the equity team. The point person should be able to take care of logistics and be a person with key relationships and some decision making authority within the district. This work is offered in virtual, in-person, and hybrid structures.
“Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass–build the resilience by building the relationships.”
– adrienne maree brown (2021)
First Steps
In order to ensure that stakeholders from across the school community are involved, one of the first steps is to convene a team comprised of stakeholders that include students, caregivers/parents, educators, and administrators, which meets monthly to:
- Build a team that can openly and effectively discuss the relevant equity and belonging issues in the school and community.
- Develop a plan for this team to assess equity and belonging issues in the school which might include community dialogue/sfocus groups; listening sessions, curriculum review, policy review using an equity framework.
- Develop a plan of action to implement sustainable change that includes all stakeholder groups.
We recommend that members of this team be identified through a thorough recruitment and application process conducted by a point person in the school district and supported by facilitators from CES. Members should be people who have the capacity to participate in an initial 2-day training/orientation and then meet monthly to continue the work. Equity team members must be willing to productively engage in a relational, respectful, and dialogic process with each other, with students, and with other members of the school community. These team members will also commit to working on this project in-between meetings in dedicated workgroups.
Orientation
A diverse co-facilitation team designs this foundational relationship-building and data-driven orientation specifically for your school district. The orientation serves to engage in team building and establish a process and practices/agreements for brave conversations; surface the known equity issues in the school district; set the stage for a loving and critical reflection; and collaboratively develop goals for the coming year. This time is flexible and customizable.
Monthly Workgroup Meetings
During this phase, our team will co-plan and co-facilitate monthly equity team meetings that build collective reflection, inquiry, and sustainable action. Participants will need to be supported by a point person at the schools to keep work moving in between meetings.
(Optional) Professional Development, Coaching/Technical Assistance
There are goals that the equity team may want to implement that require additional support. For example: professional development workshops, affinity groups, classroom observation, community dialogues/listening sessions, curriculum review, student equity action-research projects, etc.
For More Information or a Conversation:
Please contact Angela Burke at aburke@collaborative.org, or Safire DeJong at sdejong@collaborative.org, or complete the form to the right.
