Thinking Behind the Strands

Assets: Thinking Behind the Strand

An assets-based approach to teaching is central to educational justice and equity. As teachers we must face the biases and ingrained assumptions we may have of students, families, and their communities. Focusing on people’s strengths and assets can feel both empowering and vulnerable - in particular if it sheds light on our own shortcomings or miseducation about individuals and groups of people. By insisting on drawing on assets and strengths, we see our students more holistically, recognize their contributions to their own learning, and reimagine what is possible in our teaching and learning contexts.

Using an assets-based approach to teaching

The definition of an asset is something useful or valuable. Assets can also include contributions a person makes to an organization or a group. The term ‘asset’ might also be used to describe a quality held by an individual or school or neighborhood. When we think about the assets of our students, families, and communities, these can be cultural, linguistic, interpersonal, intellectual, academic, physical, artistic, and economic attributes (among others).

From an educational standpoint, deficits encompass that which is lacking, missing, or absent. Sometimes teachers describe students, their families, or their communities by what is missing and/or not visible to them. The use of a deficit lens can obstruct a teacher’s ability to see the positive attributes and strengths a student brings to the classroom.

Types of assets

When we think about the assets of our students, families, and communities, these can be cultural, linguistic, interpersonal, intellectual, academic, physical, artistic, economic, ways of healing, types of knowledge, knowledge-sharing, spiritual, movement & transportation, health & nutrition, land care and sustenance, family structures, peace & reconciliation practices, navigating systems & situations, organizing & group dynamics, ethnomathematical processes, understanding of the natural world, among others.

Recognizing deficit images and stories

Seeking out assets and breaking ourselves of implicit biases can be easier said than done. Sometimes we lack awareness of the assumptions we carry of others and the ways these assumptions contribute to our framing of our students, their families and communities. We regularly see images and hear stories of personal weakness, poor parenting, weak financial planning, low literacy, disinterest, tendency towards violence, brokenness of spirit, and unwillingness or incapacity to be self-determined, intellectually inquisitive, or empathetic. These images are often conflated with parts of our identities: race, class, language, religion, gender roles, and sexual orientation. These deficit narratives play out in our teaching in numerous ways. For instance, they can inform split second decisions we make in the classroom, assumptions about what a student might find interesting, how they might respond to something, what they are capable of, and what they already know. They can keep us from recognizing our own lack of knowledge, or the power and knowledge students - from different perspectives - bring to a discussion. Deficit narratives can hold us back from being our best selves, prevent us from connecting with one another, and make us feel nervous, defensive, or overly protective. By recognizing what these deficit narratives are and the ways in which we replay them to ourselves, we are more likely to stop them and, instead, write new stories, replacing them with the assets and strengths of our students, their family members, and the communities that raise them.

Guiding ourselves toward assets

For some of our students, it is easy for us to recognize the assets they carry with them. Sometimes we can name them, and sometimes we act and respond with an assets-mindset without being able to pinpoint exactly what they are. Getting to know our students, their family members, and the communities where they live opens our eyes to our students’ assets and strengths. This includes spending quality time with them, hanging out and doing our errands in our school’s neighborhood, attending community events where our students are involved, and using our classroom learning and assignments to allow students to explore, name, and map the powerful and positive attributes and networks they carry and are part of. Focused on assets, teachers are more creative with instruction. Such teachers facilitate learning environments that allow students to hone their assets and draw on their strengths in order to build confidence and expand perspectives and skills. An assets-based approach to teaching enables teachers to raise expectations of students because instruction and assessments build from the strengths and gifts students bring with them. An assets-based approach enables teachers to trust their students and relinquish control of learning, placing students in positions of power over their own education.

Role of Self: Thinking Behind the Strand

Coming to know who we are as human beings and as teachers is an on-going and never-ending process. As teachers we strive to continually examine, with a critical eye, our teaching identity and consider the ways in which who we are impacts how and what we teach as well as how we are perceived by our students, their families, and our colleagues.

Examine your own lenses

Our own identities and experiences shape the ways we see and understand others and the world around us. Just like when you put on a pair of tinted sunglasses, you are aware that the world did not darken, but that you are wearing lenses that alter what you see. Our gender, racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and socio-economic identities all color and frame what we see of the world and how we see it. We must take the time to, first, recognize the lenses through which we view and interpret the world around us and, second, question how our lenses alter what we see and understand.

Check your assumptions

“I grew up in a tiny unincorporated town in rural WI,” said one teacher. “Everyone I knew was white. It wasn’t until I got to the UMN that I met someone who didn’t look like me. Once I arrived on campus though, I realized there were all kinds of things I didn’t know. As a teacher, I recognize that every year, I have more work to do unlearning my assumptions and biases and getting to know my students. I can’t generalize about any of them or I’m in trouble. Each individual kid brings their own story to the classroom. It’s worth the time to get to know those stories.”

It is this questioning of our lenses, this analysis of how our identities and experiences inform the way we see and understand the world that leads us to a process of checking our assumptions.The more we unpack our understandings and interpretations of the world, the more we start to question the validity of those assumptions.

This is a critical task for us as teachers, because every child deserves to be known as a whole and complex, unique individual, and not simply as a member of a sub-group, neighborhood, or category.

If we base our educational decisions on assumptions we make of students, families, or their communities, we can negatively impact our students’ sense of self-worth, their learning, and their educational opportunities.

Larger systems of power and hierarchy

We must also examine the ways in which our students read us, as teachers, and our many identities. Who we are, how our students identify us and place us within larger systems of power and hierarchy, impacts our teaching.

An alumni of the UMN social studies program draws a connection between her skin color and considerations she makes when teaching U.S. history: “I know as a white woman, when I teach the history of slavery in the United States, my students hear my words, my descriptions, my judgments of the texts we examine and the questions we raise differently than they might if I were African American. That awareness pushes me to think carefully about how teach this unit, so that it’s clear that am an ally for justice and fairness.”

The ways our students read our us impacts our classroom management choices as well. Another middle school teacher explains,“I’m a big guy, 6’4”. My cooperating teacher is this smaller woman, maybe 5’2”. Her classroom management style has everything to do with her physical size and her gender. She has to be fierce in a way that I might not. I’m still thinking about that.”

Critically aware presence

Another important awareness for teachers has to do with our teaching presence: how we communicate with our bodies, our tone of voice, our inflections, our movement in the room. So much of what we do with our mere presence impacts the tone, character, and climate of our classrooms. We are models for behavior and arbiters of kindness and justice in how we talk to students, the ways we interact with them and facilitate their learning.

Communication: Thinking Behind the Strand

Taking opportunities to communicate and collaborate

Both communication and collaboration are key to successful teaching and learning. But sometimes, both communication and collaboration can be challenging, difficult, or uncomfortable. That said, teachers can’t avoid or neglect opportunities to share information that needs to be shared. Nor can they pass up chances to collaborate with others to strengthen their teaching and deepen their understanding of their students, school, families, and community.

How you communicate matters

Central to good communication is listening and responding to questions and concerns raised. This is time well-spent, as it helps to clarify your assignments, expectations, and concerns, to better understand your students, and to demonstrate to your students’ families that you respect them and their children. Communication with colleagues is key as well. Whether you’re sharing space or sharing students, charged with completing a task for a school committee or participating in classification to help decide where your students are placed for the following school year, open and forthright communication with colleagues, where you listen and share your ideas, supports your own teaching and the creation of a healthy and positive professional culture at your school.

Opening Doors

It’s easy to get into a pattern as a teacher where you spend most of your time in your classroom, with the door closed. There is so much to do and your students and their learning will ask for every minute of your time and attention. That said, we are all better when we collaborate with others. Our teaching improves because collaboration requires that we listen, consider, and factor in the perspectives and ideas of others. Many teaching jobs require collaboration: through grade level teams or departments, on interdisciplinary units or to meet our students language or learning needs. Other times, opportunities present themselves to us that require collaboration: a visiting artist to collaborate on a teaching unit, parents who hope to volunteer in their child’s classroom, or an effort by the school to rethink and reimagine its structure. In all cases, our students benefit from the intentional and thoughtful collaboration of the adults in their lives.

Be Proactive

“I’ve had many families tell me that they only hear from teachers when something bad happens” writes one middle school teacher. “I had one mom just gush about how much she appreciated hearing how well her son was doing in my class!”

Too often, teachers wait to connect with their students’ families until a situation arises in the classroom that necessitates communication. Studies show that making connections with families to communicate the events of the classroom, a student’s successes, or just to check in helps to build relationships with families and supports a positive classroom community. Those positive connections communicate to the family member that you welcome their help, their insights about their child, and that you are working as a team to support their child’s education.

Entering into collaborative work requires the same proactive, open mindset. Collaboration is likely to go better when we approach such endeavors with an equity lens, assuming positive intentions of all involved. We also should be open to collaboration with our students. Especially in adolescence, young people have strong opinions about what they want to learn and how. The more we can view our teaching with a collaborative lens with our students, the more our students have opportunities to co-construct their own learning opportunities.

Modes of communication

Communication with students, families, colleagues, and the community takes multiple forms, due to the nature of the teacher’s audience or the developmental needs of the students. When students are younger, they’re less reliable to communicate what’s taking place in their classroom, what they’re learning, or what is expected of them. Elementary teachers rely on written communication, through newsletters sent home, but also through webpages, emails, and phone calls home, to make sure families are kept informed. When students hit middle childhood and middle school, they sometimes work towards thwarting communication between their teachers and families. Middle school teachers sometimes have to be particularly wily about getting through to families. Once students hit adolescence, teachers should include students among their audiences, and include ways of communicating that best meet their students’ needs. Teachers who work with large numbers of English language learners may need to tap colleagues and/ or school/ district translators for better communication with their students’ families. Finally, sometimes face-to-face communication is needed to best communicate with students and their families. Conferences with students and their families offer tremendous opportunities for communication. Home visits, taken up with respect and care, are powerful opportunities to learn about your students’ home lives and communities and communicate effort on a school and/ or teacher’s part to work as a team with a student’s family.

Care: Thinking Behind the Strand

Creating a caring environment and relationships with our students asks us to see students as people and children first, to show empathy and consideration, to honor their experiences, and to let ourselves be touched and changed by our relationships with them. Caring for our students translates into meaningful interpersonal relationships, instructional choices, and willingness to move outside of our comfort zones. Importantly, showing care does not equate to engaging in relationships with students that are inappropriate, misguided, harmful, or unprofessional.

The trouble with caring

The absence of a caring relationship with students is evident in teaching, learning, and a lack of trusting classroom community. Sometimes we struggle to cultivate positive relationships with certain students. We are all human and this can happen for a number of reasons. Finding a connection we can have with one another can take time and energy and may include feelings of failure, frustration, and structural constraints:

● “There isn’t enough time in the day,”

● “We’re expected to cover so much content, it doesn’t leave space for that,”

● “I’m under so much scrutiny. People say if I’m focused on being my students’ friend, the kids can’t be learning much,”

● “Let’s be honest, the students never going to like me as much as my colleague,”

● “What if they don’t respect me because I come off as too nice?”

Although it is difficult to face, sometimes we struggle to show care for particular students because we are unable or unwilling to. This can be linked to our own identities or insecurities, and our implicit biases about a child’s identities and abilities.

Showing care, recognizing care

Care becomes more complex when we consider varying cultural norms or personal preferences of exhibiting care. Social and professional contexts further complicate the ways we show and recognize care. Yet we have to be self-aware in our caring: showing regular approval and leniency for some students while at the same time ignoring or being sarcastic to others communicates a discriminatory care, affording privilege to some and relegating others to second-class status. As teachers, we have to ask ourselves, do I provide positive feedback to all of my students or only those who get good grades? Or only those who are compliant? Do I let kids know that I care for them, whether they perform well academically or not? How do I make sure to show a student I care for them, even when they’ve made a mistake? Although a teacher may insist on giving positive comments to each of their students on their academic achievement, some students may still say that their teacher cares about their grades but not about them. Teachers exhibit care for their students through connection, sharing pieces of themselves, joking around and being tough, listening and asking hard questions. And teachers show care through their pedagogical choices, the ways we structure our curriculum and choose to teach.

Students recognize care when they feel it from a teacher. Ask any student, at any age, and they can identify when a teacher genuinely cares for them. Care is present when a child feels cared for. Younger and older children alike talk about when caring feels authentic or real. Youth describe caring teachers as people who show concern for how they are and what they do, who don’t yell at them - but do make it clear they are not going to give up on them - who express an interest in their well-being and how things in the world are treating them. Care can be as concrete as pronouncing a child’s name correctly (even when it is not one you are familiar with and is difficult for you to pronounce at first), using their preferred pronouns, and organizing your classroom so a child is not disabled from taking part in learning. Care also manifests in how we talk about our students when they are not around or we don’t think they can hear us. Authentic care shows respect and acceptance. When kids feel that genuine interest in who they are from a teacher, respect and care become two-directional.

Caring in critical ways

Care does not end at relationship building. Our learning spaces can - and should - also be places where “critical care” is felt. Critical care recognizes that social, historical, and political contexts have not - and do not - treat each of us the same. Recognizing the realities of different lived experiences and taking seriously the desire in each of us to live a life that is healthy and fulfilling calls for critical care for all of our students. This includes a willingness to accept different perspectives and experiences, undertake difficult conversations, acknowledge blind spots and ways we may be causing harm, and change our thinking and practices to create circumstances where all of our students have opportunities for deep learning and self-determination. Showing critical care can also include speaking up, standing in solidarity with, and acting against policies and actions that are not in the best interest of a student or group of students - particularly those who come from communities that have experienced marginalization and inequitable school experiences.

Care and resilience

Resilience is when we keep trying for something when things are tough and are met with obstacles. Although resilience is often talked about as an individual character trait, resilience can be seen across entire communities - groups of people who refuse to give up, be moved, or be silenced, regardless of the pressure placed on them to acquiesce, conform, or disappear. When individuals show resilience, sometimes they turn inward, often they turn to others they know they can rely on and who can provide support in the ways they need to persevere.

What does a disposition of care have to do with resilience? Research tells us, kids who have authentic, caring relationships with adults who play significant roles in their lives (outside of school and inside of school) are more resilient. They are able to draw on this resilience to overcome difficult circumstances. For some students, care provides a sense of support, assuring them they can persevere, even though things might be tough in the moment. Teachers can be that caring adult to fortify students’ resilience. In other instances, teachers must recognize the resilience students draw upon to come to school and make it through, even though they feel marginalized, silenced, misrepresented, or isolated. Caring teachers can recognize the range of resilience students have had to develop depending on their circumstances, draw on the resilience students already have, strengthen their networks of resilience and belief in themselves, support them in applying their resilience to new situations, and do what they can to mitigate the need for some students to have to be disproportionately resilient than others. In other words, caring teachers must find ways to use their influence to make schools places where youth do not need to be as resilient, rather than simply praising them for their resilience.

Intentional professional choices: Thinking Behind the Strand

Early in our teaching careers, it often feels like things that go well - or don’t - happen at random. It’s common for newer teachers, in particular, to have difficulty naming their instructional strengths and using them strategically. Often, it’s easier to point to outcomes - successes and failures - than it is to pinpoint the nuances of why a lesson succeeded or a transition bombed. However, through such self-reflection, teachers can be more intentional about their planning, content and instructional choices, interactions with students/families/colleagues, and our personal and professional development in the field of education.

What intentionality offers

Being intentional as a teacher is about strategy. It means thinking through the particulars of a situation or moment and strategically choosing from different approaches and resources to capitalize on the moment. Such intentionality is rooted in analysis of our practice: working to recognize why something didn’t go as hoped and evaluating our repair attempts. This process of analysis and decision-making builds confidence as as we expand our comfort zones. Master teachers never stop this two-step process; their professional decisions are based in continued inquiry into their practices, knowledge of the students each year, teaching and socio-political contexts, and disciplinary content. As these elements shift, a teacher’s analysis must continue so as to inform the best possible decision-making for their students. Our own learning impacts our professional choices as well. We collaborate with a colleague who offers up a new instructional strategy; or we participate in a valuable professional development workshop; or we have an informative conversation with a parent, and our perspectives change. Our understanding grows. These rightly inform our professional choices.

Coachability and Feedback

Our teaching perspectives and practices may be questioned by colleagues, students, parents, and even ourselves. It can even come from our students, through their words and behaviors. This can be both unsettling and revealing. Aspiring and novice teachers often have access to mentoring and coaching during their preparation and first years in the classroom. The feedback offered by a mentor can also be a powerful source of learning and analysis. But it requires an openness from us, as teachers, to listen and reflect. Not every morsel of feedback offered by a mentor will meet our needs, but the willingness to be coached, to take that feedback into consideration, supports our accumulation of strategies and develops our self-reflection muscles. The more we are open to constructive feedback about our practice, the more comfortable we become with a teacher identity of continuous learner.

Teacher Agency and Identity

Intentionality speaks to the agency a teacher has. This agency includes how a teacher chooses to interact with students and colleagues and the ways we represent ourselves professionally in the world. Stepping into the role of teacher, we take up an ever-present identity. Our choices in the classroom, how we carry ourselves, the clothes we wear, the ways we speak, and our work ethic are all viewed as part of our teacher identity. When our students see us in the grocery story or on Instagram, they don’t separate us from our teacher selves. Thus, our professional teacher identity must inform our decisions in the classroom and at school, but also beyond the school walls. At times, this can feel burdensome. As teachers, we must include self-care as part of our professional regimen: time to just be, to restore ourselves and re-energize for the next day, semester, and year, so that we can be our best teacher selves for the young people who rely on us.

Navigation: Thinking Behind the Strand

On any given day - and throughout a school year - teachers navigate multiple contexts and situations. At times moving across these varied situations feels natural, as expectations seemingly clear. Other times, we face situations rife with complexities: moving from one school to another, each with its own community, student, and professional topography (sometimes within a single day!), a new student added to a class weeks after the school year starts, or even a single student with whom we struggle to connect. It takes time to get our bearings, familiarize ourselves with the personal and political forces at play, unpack, recognize, and reconcile our expectations with those others hold of us. As teachers, we must navigate across these spaces in ways that are responsive to the needs of our students and support teaching and learning.

Searching for a compass

“When I’m in my classroom - when the door is closed and it’s just us and we’re doing our thing - I feel like we’re working. But then I sit in a meeting and it’s ‘data cycles this’ and ‘test-readiness that’ and I can’t figure out how to say ‘Look - the stuff that matters isn’t always on that test.’ We’re missing what matters and I can see it when my kids shut down. I’m on a renewable contract as it is and I don’t know what happens if I do say something. I’m not sure whose job it is to say all that.”

Teaching asks us to navigate a number of layered and intersecting worlds - our classrooms, school environments, neighborhoods, larger socio-political contexts, the demands and expectations of school and district policies, the desires and demands of students and their families, pedagogical approaches that can conflict with one another, content and/or mandated curriculum that may only represent a portion of our students’ best learning potential, discipline protocols that require conformity. Within our classrooms many of these ‘worlds’ can come to a head. We must sift, prioritize, and differentiate, show creativity and initiative, and be responsive and adaptive. Such navigation can be an arduous task. Not having the navigational skills and resources to move through this complexity can lead to feelings of personal and professional failure, which can negatively impact our students’ learning experiences. However, when we “find our compass” we can begin to synthesize how multiple dispositions, pedagogical skills, and knowledge of disciplines, schools, and society can help us make our way (with others) through these shifting contexts.

Following your compass (together)

Once we recognize the multiple influences on teaching and learning, we can also consider multiple definitions of success. These definitions should be informed by youth, parents, and community desires, the insights and support from colleagues and mentors, as well as the preparation and theory we draw from. Navigation requires that teachers do more than wait for opportunities to learn about the complex experiences of their students. Master teachers create these opportunities. By doing so, we meet our students where they are, invite and engage them, and work together with adults and young people towards greater equity in schools. Doing so is difficult - if not impossible - when we attempt to navigate in isolation. Finding like-minded people, drawing on the wisdom and learnings of those who have navigated similar situations, and standing together with those whose approaches and expectations for equity align with your own are all ways to ‘find and follow your compass.’

Sometimes, what matters most to students and parents does not align with what teachers and schools are told must matter most based on district, state, and national disciplinary standards. As an educator we must navigate both and recognize that there will be times that they will be in conflict with one another. At those times, we will need to figure out both how to decide where we will align ourselves and how to defend our decisions. We must assess the risks when we contemplate our choices, and determine our willingness to take those risks. Regardless of how we navigate, we will need to be able to stand behind our choices. Navigating these complexities gives us opportunities to recognize and work towards creating situations where we - and our students - act as teachers, learners, leaders, and spokespeople.

Imagination and innovation: Thinking Behind the Strand

As people, contexts, and technologies change, teachers are preparing students for worlds we haven’t yet built, problems we haven’t yet encountered, and societies we haven’t yet experienced. Thus. teachers must be innovative, thinking beyond the status quo and the now, into realms teeming with bold, adaptive ideas and approaches to tackle questions, solve problems, and reach deeper and in new directions. Classrooms, learning, and children are dynamic, although we don’t always teach in institutions that appreciate or allow for it. True education requires and offers opportunities for imagination and innovation for teachers and students. An innovative classroom hums with the combined energy of collaboration and imagination, where teacher and students explore together and uncover new means of applying, testing, and synthesizing ideas and information. Teachers must pull together what they know about the content, their students, and the world, consider all the future what-ifs and possibles, and imagine ways to create vital and intriguing learning environments.

Beyond the way “we’ve always done it”

Especially early on in our teaching, when we feel under pressure or challenged in the classroom, teachers fall back on the teaching practices they know best, those they experienced as students during from their own years in school. Researchers call this the “apprenticeship of observation” (Lortie, 1975). This apprenticeship of observation is also the reason everyone assumes to be an expert in how schools should best be run and how teaching and learning should best take place. Nearly everyone in the United States has years of experience as students in classrooms. These years of being on the receiving end of schooling inform policy makers and educational critics and parents, creating an invisible force that pushes on schools and teachers to maintain the status quo and recreate schools and classrooms of the past. It is this invisible force to maintain the status quo that prevents the lessons of powerful teaching that occurs outside of school and innovative research from making their way into education policy, schools and classrooms. When we revert to pedagogies from our past in schools, we are more likely to reach students most similar to the kinds of students we were. While it can be comforting to stick to what what we know, the same-old, same-old practices don’t usually work in classrooms with a diverse group of students, because each complex individual student requires something different. At times, acting on our imagination and innovation takes guts. But the payoff is worth it for you and your students!

Envisioning possibilities, enacting visions

As teachers, we must recognize that learning and teaching in themselves are creative acts. Learning expands us and should propel us into imagining new possibilities and creating new versions of how we understand the world and ourselves. Sometimes we may realize a learning situation needs “something else” to make things click, but we can’t figure out what that is. It can be a struggle to come up with a different way than what we’ve already tried. In these situations, we can turn to the learning experts in our lives: teaching colleagues, educational resources, community educators, and our students themselves.

By turning outside of ourselves and our own experiences to our co-learners and colleagues, we open pedagogical doors to more opportunities and options for teaching and learning - including content and approaches we were not yet aware of. Seeking out our own coaches and supports as we do this is key to figuring out what’s working, how, with whom, and why. Through this intentional exploration with others and examination of “what happens if…”, what started as alternative ideas can become core to our teaching and learning environments. An innovative educator sees opportunity in challenging situations and in conflict. These become places to collaborate on creating solutions together with students and colleagues. Embracing innovation and creativity means that there will be times when we model imaginative thinking for our students, others when we inspire one another to think and act in alternative ways than “has always been done”, and when our students will do the same for us. It also means that we must get comfortable with making mistakes, with uncertainty, and with starting something over from the beginning. If we frame failure as part of the learning process, we help our students take up that same intellectual risk-taking in their own learning. Teaching and learning will never be the same - and that means a great deal for a great number of young people.

Advocacy: Thinking Behind the Strand

As a teacher, you are always striving to work in the best interests of your students, both as individuals and collectively. A teacher’s advocacy work happens constantly in many subtle and nuanced ways: recommending to a student and their family that the student needs summer school for enrichment or remediation; suggesting that a student take up a particular instrument for band; encouraging a student to apply for a particular college; suggesting a student speak to a social worker about a situation at home. In each case, the teacher has made a judgment about what is best for a particular student and from a place of care and support, advocates for steps the student might take next.

The tricky part of advocacy has to do with your role and position as a teacher. Our profession both affords and assigns us with formal and informal power and influence. Families, students, and community members look to us for guidance and expertise. When we offer a student advice or we make suggestions to a family about how to best support their child, our words carry significant weight because of the position we hold. Thus we must be extremely judicious, responsible, and thoughtful in our role as advocate.

There are times when we think we may know what is best for a student or family, when in fact we don’t have a full understanding of the student or their situation. Especially in crisis, circumstances can change quickly, and we may not have considered the student or family’s perspective as the situation evolves. In such instances, our advocacy can come across as condescending, paternalistic, and/ or disrespectful, as we may have assumed a position of superiority over our students, their families or communities. Thus, it is critical that we are constantly aware of racial, cultural, religious, and class differences when acting as an advocate for our students, their families and communities. We must be avid and respectful listeners in our work as advocates. Even in the most challenging situations, such as a student who is being abused or bullied, or a family that is homeless and whose child is struggling in school, we must always listen first. What do they want for themselves? For their child? How can you help them take steps towards that end?

From there, we can be a powerful resource: Does the student and/ or family know their rights? Do they know what they are entitled to receive with regards to support? Are there resources - within and outside of the school - that can be helpful to the student and/ or family?

Sometimes, your most powerful role can be facilitating a student or a family to connect with those more expert resources -- a social worker, after-school programs, college-preparatory support, etc. And if you don’t know, ask! Every school has seasoned and skilled educators who know the network and the local context. Seek out their support and/ or connect your students and families to those in the know. But most importantly, listen first and work responsively to support your students and their families.

References

Dewey, J. (1909). Moral principles in education. Houghton Mifflin.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American

Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools. Educational Researcher, 35 (7), 3-12.

Lortie, D. (1975). Schoolteacher. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Murrell, P.C., Diez, M. E., Feiman-Nemser, S., & Schussler, D. L., (Eds.), Teaching as a moral practice: Defining, developing, and assessing professional dispositions in teacher education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

MnEDS™ Research Group