Guiding Teams to Excellence With Equity

Culturally Proficient Facilitation

John J. Krownapple

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781506343570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

Guide your school through its cultural proficiency transformation Despite the best efforts of equity leaders, our schools suffer from persistent inequities. Guiding Teams to Excellence with Equity is a must-read for anyone who values equity and excellence and supports the professional learning of adults in our schools. Author John Krownapple helps readers develop as culturally proficient facilitators, and equips them with the skills, tools, and techniques to navigate the obstacles that arise during systemic equity transformations.

• Includes a powerful, running vignette that illustrates common challenges, principles, and solutions
• Focuses on mental models for managing group energy
• Is grounded in a systems model for personal and organizational transformation
• Provides a range of tools for planning culturally proficient learning experiences

This is the book leaders need to learn how to facilitate a group's journey from awareness to commitment to action in support of inclusion and equity. "What John has done here is remarkable. He?s taken the intuitive art of facilitation, illustrated it with a story, and explained it with theory, data and graphic examples. It?s clear, cohesive, comprehensive, and integrated. I like that we follow one story throughout, and that a plethora of facilitation techniques are embedded in that story. I particularly like how facilitation is contrasted with training. John has broken the facilitation rubric into bite-sized pieces, which makes it useful to leaders of professional learning. I love this book; Guiding Teams to Excellence with Equity is a book we?ve all been waiting for."
Kikanza Nuri-Robins, Author of Fish Out of Water

"Based in abundant research, this valuable book contains myriad strategies and protocols for building collective efficacy in educational teams. It is a must for those who wish to perfect their facilitation skills, who desire a deeper understanding of the emotional and cognitive transformation during the human journey of personal enlightenment, and for those who believe that the future of our democracy depends on equity and cultural proficiency."
Arthur L. Costa, Professor Emeritus
California State University, Sacramento

Part I Why—An Effective Approach to Excellence With Equity

Why do we need Cultural Proficiency? Why do we need culturally proficient leaders of professional learning? Those are two separate questions with two separate answers. However, both answers begin with the recognition of purposiveness in Cultural Proficiency: its goal of excellence with equity in education.

This goal can’t be limited to equity-focused professional development specialists. It’s much too important. Excellence with equity is the ultimate goal for all responsible educators, including those of us who take on leadership roles supporting the professional learning of our colleagues, as well as those of us in curriculum planning, special education, administration, math, reading, science, performing arts, and every other nook and cranny in the field of education.

If we want excellence with equity, we need to be excellence with equity. We need to “be the change we want to see in the world,” to paraphrase words attributed to Gandhi. If we want the goal of excellence with equity in education, all of us in education need to be culturally proficient educators.

That’s why we need Cultural Proficiency, and that’s why we need culturally proficient leaders of professional learning. We need ten thousand culturally proficient teachers who will teach ten thousand more.

The goal of excellence with equity is easily defined: every student benefits from a culture of high expectations—and not just those students lucky enough to attend schools in advantaged communities, and not just those students fortunate enough to benefit from the self-fulfilling prophecies of placements in “high” tracks in segregated and homogeneous classrooms.

It means every student has the specific supports they need for equal access and opportunity. It means every student feels a sense of belonging, benefits from tapping into the power of diversity, and develops the aspirations and skills to form authentic relationships across differences. Providing our students excellence with equity is clearly the moral duty of schools in our diverse democracy.

Our schools play a vital role and have grave responsibilities in supporting the development of a diverse society that keeps the promise of democracy for all its citizens. These responsibilities include providing environments, curricula, and instruction that ensure high expectations, inclusion, cultural competence, and equity for every student.

Fulling the responsibilities nested within the commitment to excellence with equity is critical in a culture whose legacy of systemic oppression is made visible through artifacts such as predictable and disproportionate educational outcomes according to race, family income level, language, and disability. To neglect these responsibilities is to collude with forces of social dominance that corrode and decay our democracy. This is true whether we are leading classrooms full of youths or professional development workshops full of adults.

Since our goal is excellence with equity, we must find a means (in other words, a process) to reach that goal. To be effective, the process must be predictable and grounded in proven theory. It must produce the desired effects. It must be capable of being replicated and sustained.

That process is Cultural Proficiency.

Part I of this book explores the why behind our need for Cultural Proficiency and culturally proficient leaders of professional learning. To that end, Part I balances and illustrates informational text with narrative episodes involving a fictional character named Jack McManus. Although Jack is fictive, his experiences, perspectives, and transformations are not. They are drawn from the lives of many individuals involved with Cultural Proficiency, including me.

Jack is an educator who has an awakening and emerges from his initial complacency and reluctance, and becomes an ally for social justice and a culturally proficient facilitator of professional learning. Our story begins before that emergence, when he served as the math curriculum specialist for Stocklin County Public Schools.

He loved his work, the students, and being an educator. He’d started his career teaching two years in elementary school. He then taught middle-school math for eight years, before moving into administration in the district office five years before our story begins. Although he misses the classroom, he finds real fulfillment through helping math teachers build classroom community and engage diverse learners in mathematics.

Then, one quiet Monday morning, Jack was blindsided by an “invitation” that led him into the world of Cultural Proficiency as a reluctant seminar participant. Let’s follow Jack as he embarks on this unexpected journey through an unwanted invitation. To his surprise, this journey changed his life—both his professional and his personal life—for the better. It can do the same for you and me.

1 Why This? Why Now? Why Me?

Words like “freedom,” “justice” and “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous, and above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.

—James Baldwin (The Price of the Ticket, 1985)

The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart.

—Mahatma Gandhi

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

—Michael Eric Dyson (I May Not Get There with You, 2001)

Until the great mass of people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice can never be attained.

—Helen Keller (Out of the Dark, 1920)

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it themselves.

—Galileo Galilei

I have made myself what I am.

—Shawnee Chief Tecumseh (Address to General William Henry Harrison, 1810)

We have to confront ourselves. Do we like what we see in the mirror? And, according to our light, according to our understanding, according to our courage, we will have to say yea or nay — and rise!

—Maya Angelou (Mother Jones, 1995)

Getting Centered

You have most likely chosen this book because you want to help yourself and others work in a way that fosters diversity and inclusion, high expectations, cultural competence, and/or equity. In short, you want to do your best to guide the Cultural Proficiency journey for yourself and others. Take a few moments to write your response to this question: Why do you do this work (or aspire to do this work)?

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Episode One: An Invitation that Didn’t Seem so Inviting to Jack

Jack’s heart sank as he read the e-mail from the director of his department. It was an invitation—a summons, really—to attend a Cultural Proficiency seminar. For a full five days! The term Cultural Proficiency was new, Jack observed, but surely this seminar was just another cultural diversity training effort? With his heavy workload and the fact that he had already completed several diversity presentations, surely he didn’t need another one?

What had begun as a promising Monday was quickly going south. Jack had dropped off his two daughters at school, rushed to his office, and arrived ten minutes early. With those ten precious minutes, he’d hoped to get a jump-start on his week. He was behind on three deadlines and had two observations of math teachers that afternoon. His main project of overhauling the district’s math curriculum was more demanding than he’d anticipated: his calendar was jammed for months with meetings, workshop presentations, and observations and consultations with math teachers.

This invitation to a five-day seminar seriously disrupted his plans. The seminar was in three weeks, and his director had instructed him to clear his calendar for those five days. With so many pressing tasks and deadlines, how would he make up that time? What’s more, Jack had never experienced those types of presentations to be particularly helpful. The topic may have been diversity, but people—perhaps including himself—had always been reluctant to discuss anything of substance having to do with the subject. He didn’t need a repeat of these tedious sessions. But apparently Lillie Cohen, the director of his department and his immediate supervisor, thought differently.

He read the e-mail again.

Dear Jack: You are invited to participate in a leadership cohort that will explore Cultural Proficiency through a five-day seminar facilitated by two international consultants, Drs. Barbara Campbell and Frank Westman. Over the past few months, they have served as facilitators of a similar process for the superintendent, senior leadership, the board of education, local government officials, and community leaders. As a result, Stocklin County Public Schools leadership has recommended and approved formation of this leadership cohort, tasked with supporting the start of a widespread focus on facilitating Cultural Proficiency for Stocklin staff. You would be an important asset to this group and overall process. If you accept, please clear your calendar for the first week of next month. Thank you for your commitment to every student in Stocklin County.

Sincerely,

Lillie Cohen

Director of Curriculum and Instruction

Stocklin County Public Schools

“Cultural Proficiency . . . what the . . .” Jack’s grip tightened around his coffee mug. Surely Lillie had made a mistake? He was already culturally sensitive! What was Cultural Proficiency anyway? Some sort of “sensitivity training” for staff who didn’t have any common sense when it came to dealing with people who didn’t look like them? Or who’d broken the “rules” of political correctness? Or didn’t know the rules to begin with? There were people around with bigoted backgrounds or tendencies, but Jack, as the product of a multiracial high school and a liberal city, knew the score.

“Can’t I just take a test that proves I’m not a racist?” Jack muttered. “I don’t have time for this!” Dark clouds seemed to gather over his head. Moments ago, getting caught up on work seemed within his grasp. Now he felt that possibility slip-sliding away. Snatched away, rather, by this lesser priority.

Jack’s jargon detector went into high alert. What was up with the term facilitate? It seemed like the latest edu-speak buzzword. Perhaps the district leaders were rebranding diversity presenters as facilitators to make these tiresome workshops seem more interactive. Lillie’s phrase that these international facilitators had facilitated “a similar process” had Jack scratching his head. Since when was a seminar a process? Was this more jazzed-up jargon?

Even the name of the workshop was annoying. Cultural Proficiency. He’d first heard the term a few months ago, and its use was on the rise. Without questioning anyone or putting much thought into it, Jack figured it was the most recent trendy term for diversity or maybe multicultural education.

Like many of his colleagues, Jack had only cursory knowledge of district leadership’s recent involvement with Cultural Proficiency consultants. He knew they’d been meeting in response to numerous issues—some downright troubling issues—that had emerged as the result of the growing diversity of the student population in Stocklin County. The leadership had stated that their goals were to improve the school system. Jack knew what some of these issues were:

• Stocklin staff members were struggling to have productive conversations in response to disaggregated data. Results were mixed. District-wide student data had clearly exposed disproportionate student outcomes according to race and ethnicity as well as between and among other student groups. But it was almost as if some staff members would rather not engage in the equity conversation at all than to risk saying the wrong thing or using the wrong term with the result of possibly being labeled as prejudiced by what some staff referred to as “the political correctness police.”
• Public response to the recent school redistricting process had become racialized and politicized. The community seemed divided. At least one hate group had emerged, writing threatening letters to district-level administrators and to an African American school principal. The messages were to keep “those” kids out of “our” community.
• To date, Stocklin County School System had experienced two decades of population growth, doubling in size from approximately twenty thousand to forty thousand students. Student demographics according to race shifted from
  • 76% to 47% White,
  • 10% to 16.5% Black/African American,
  • 8% to 16% Asian,
  • 3.5% to 12% Hispanic,
  • 0.5% to 0.5% Native American, and
  • 2% to 8% Two or More Races.
• Families in the district now spoke more than twice as many languages as they had one decade prior: fifty-three different languages, representing seventy different nations. Most spoke English, Spanish, or Korean.
• At the start of the school year, the headline in the local newspaper read, “Stocklin: Now a Majority Minority County.” This headline spurred polarizing conversations. A local blogger wrote about how the increasing diversity was “ruining this once-great community.” Meanwhile, a national magazine had identified Stocklin as the country’s second-best community in which to live, citing its high-performing school...