Uprooting Instructional Inequity

The Power of Inquiry-Based Professional Learning

Jill Harrison Berg

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781416630692
• eBook ISBN: 9781416630715
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Noted leadership coach Jill Harrison Berg offers a comprehensive guide to help school and teacher leaders amplify the power of collaborative inquiry as a means for identifying, interrogating, and addressing instructional inequity.

At the center of the book is Berg's i3PD Planning Map, an invaluable tool for enhancing inquiry-based professional development experiences so that they become engines for schoolwide transformation. The map guides teachers to recognize and reform ways their instructional practice may be contributing to inequity, bolsters facilitators' abilities to help their colleagues become more effective agents of their own learning, and cultivates a culture of organizational learning in schools.

Berg lays out the process in four parts:

1. Establishing a solid foundation for your improvement cycle with a deep understanding of the three components of your instructional core: content, participants, and facilitators.
2. Attending to the three Rs—relevance, rigor, and relationships—representing the connections among the core components.
3. Designing your improvement cycle and planning it out as a series of session agendas.
4.Planning for impact by thinking through what you will accept as evidence of success and how you will use that information to take your school to the next level.

If you're ready to see your school start to work smarter toward instructional equity, and if you're eager to be a part of that change, Uprooting Instructional Inequity provides the design principles and sample tools you need to get the transformation started.

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Chapter 1

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Foundations

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Today it is abundantly clear that we, as a profession, do not yet know what we need to know to ensure that all students get the education they deserve. Many students do develop mastery of critical competencies, learn to investigate questions with passion and skill, produce clever and beautiful products of their learning, and put their hard-won knowledge and skills to use in meaningful ways that help them achieve their dreams. But these outcomes are not widespread, and the demographic patterns that describe who succeeds are not random. Students with Black and Brown skin, some of whom are from the same few zip codes, speak languages other than English at home, or are from families with a low income, and some of whom are not, are less likely to attain the education they need to achieve these outcomes. We are failing these students because of our inability to address inequity.

Educators do not want to leave children behind. If we knew what to do, we would already be doing it. We need to learn our way to more equitable schools. Yet too many of today's professional learning experiences engage educators in merely trading ideas that largely haven't worked, given the fact that they have led us to produce the inequitable results we see today. What we really need to do is grow new ideas that can produce greater shifts.

One might ask, isn't that the role of education research? Education research can play an important role in ensuring educators build on prior knowledge even while they question it; better understand the social, political, and geographic contexts in which they work; and identify potentially promising practices (National Research Council, 2002). But best practices offer only possibilities because of the enormous variation in classroom conditions. What works with my constellation of learners might not work with yours. What works in my small, tight-knit community school may not work in your large, comprehensive one. What works on Tuesday might not work on Friday. These contextual variations are not adequately accounted for in traditional research, and educators know that in schools, variation is the rule, not the exception. We need to narrow the gap between research and practice, and to do so, we need to get better at learning how to learn together in schools.

Many educators are already committed to doing so. They help one another interpret and respond to formative assessment results, unpack the misconceptions represented in a student's response and address them, or codesign unit plans based on identified patterns of performance in common writing prompt responses. In lines of inquiry such as these, teachers collaborate colleague-to-colleague in ways that benefit those individuals. But we cannot achieve an ambitious goal like educational equity through an effort focused merely on individual change. We need a more deliberate and more timely system for learning together from the test kitchens of our own classrooms about what we need to start and stop doing as a community of professionals. We need professional learning experiences that can help us get smarter collectively and finally start making the systemic changes our students need us to make to confront educational inequity.

This book will guide educators in amplifying the power of collaborative inquiry as an engine for identifying, interrogating, and addressing instructional inequity throughout their schools. The goal of i3PD is to engage educators in advancing equity by helping them elevate inquiry as a catalyst for needed individual and organizational change.

Unpacking Equity and Inequity

The Latin root aequus—meaning level, even, or just—has given us the terms equity and equality, two different words with distinct meanings. The distinction between the two has to do with whether we're taking the circumstances of the situation into consideration while making judgments about what is "even" or "just." If we are not, we have equality; if we are, we have equity. The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) explains that "a decision 'in equity' was 'one given in accordance with natural justice, in a case for which the law did not provide adequate remedy, or in which its operation would have been unfair.'"

While you consider this Latin word, aequus, and its meaning (level, even, or just), conjure up the image of a large balance or scale (see Figure 1.1). The divergence in meaning between equity and equality comes from whether or not we account for tare weight. That is, when we want to trade a pound of water for a pound of sand, should we account for the container the water is in? By the law of the scale, there is equality when the scale balances. There is equity when we consider the context of the question, recognize that "the law did not provide adequate remedy," and determine that "natural justice" requires subtracting the weight of the container.

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Figure 1.1. Aequus: Even or Just?

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It wouldn't occur to us to blame the water or think it inferior because it needs a container. In truth, the need for the container has less to do with the water and more to do with the characteristics of this particular flat-plated scale. Other objects might have different requirements for being measured by this scale. A marble might need a container underneath it to keep it from rolling, whereas a frog might need to be contained on all sides. In each case, we could achieve equity by accounting for the tare weight of the container. Thinking more expansively, we could consider designing a new scale with built-in buckets or boxes that would be appropriate for a wider array of objects. Further, we could question whether the scale is the right tool at all. We could even reexamine whether comparing the two really accomplishes our goal and innovate to create a system that would more adaptably meet the needs of each and every object.

In today's schools, we want to achieve equity. But our education system in the United States was not originally built to educate each and every student. It's a scale built with a particular purpose. The first semblance of our U.S. school system appeared in the colony of Massachusetts in 1635, when Boston Latin School was established. Modeled after a school in England, it was designed to ensure white male students could provide both moral and intellectual leadership to the developing settlements. In the following decade, more schools were established throughout Massachusetts to further perpetuate the Puritan values of personal responsibility and self-control and to ensure the colonists' male children would be able to read the Bible and perhaps even meet the entrance requirements of Harvard University. Eventually schools proliferated throughout the colonies. Puritan values were pushed into the background as reading, writing, and math skills came to the fore due to the cultural influence of the rise of capitalism and its need to build capacity for the Industrial Revolution (Goldin, 1999; Jeynes, 2007; Rury, 2004).

Black, indigenous, other people of color, and women were systematically excluded from these schools. In fact, by the 1830s, many states had gone one step further by passing laws to prohibit enslaved people from learning to read (Angulo, 2016). When Horace Mann, the "father of public education," began advocating for universal education in the 1850s, his rationale—that the United States needed qualified voters to elect qualified governors—further reinforced assumptions about the priorities and population that U.S. schools should serve (Mann, 1855). Thus, for these first 200 years and more, formal U.S. schools were institutions for cultivating sensibilities about what is right, wrong, and true, and what we want for the country—from the perspective of white, voting-eligible males for white, future-voting males.

Meanwhile, the majority of the population (that is, nonwhite nonmales) had a range of other priorities. Native Americans actively passed on their wisdom, traditions, and language through elders, people of African descent learned trades and histories through apprenticeship, and women built their talents and faculties through homeschooling. Interestingly, in the 17th century, Native Americans outnumbered whites on this continent; by the end of the 18th century (the height of the slave trade), Africans outnumbered whites in some parts of the South; and in the 19th century (due to immigration patterns and the American Civil War), women outnumbered men. Yet the prevailing form of schooling today—in fact, compulsory today for all people, regardless of race or gender—is the one established by and for one narrow purpose and population.

Now as we approach the 400th anniversary of the establishment of that first school, whose purpose, structure, and values became an early model for others throughout the U.S. education system, it is interesting to watch society puzzle over why students from historically marginalized groups are less likely to attain the education they need to succeed. It is compelling to speculate what U.S. schools might be like today if the purpose, structure, and values of Native Americans', Africans', or women's education had not been marginalized, but, instead, had prevailed. For over a century, we have tried to make an increasingly diverse array of learners fit a mold of schooling that was built for a narrow selection of students, where success is measured by putting every student on the same scale. It is a fundamentally inequitable system.

The fact is, we don't yet know what to do differently. As products of the system ourselves, we cannot easily see what mindsets have to shift, which of our practices we need to abandon or adjust, or how a system that is grounded in more balanced cultural assumptions might work.

The good news is that our system of schooling continues to be an institution that cultivates our sensibilities about what is right, wrong, and true and about what we want for the country—and educators have begun to realize that we are the system. Increasingly, we represent a wider diversity of perspectives; we recognize that it's our job to teach the way our diverse students learn, not their job to learn the way we teach; and we are willing to go outside the box to do what it takes to rebalance the scale for students from historically marginalized groups.

The answers are not going to be handed to us. We need a way to do some research and development in schools.

Taking an Inquiry Stance

Where historical assumptions and cultural norms have perpetuated the idea that all students are basically the same, it might have seemed appropriate to assume that what works for one student should work for others and that when it doesn't, something must be wrong with the student. Further, it might even suggest that when those patterns persist among groups of students, something is inferior about those groups.

This line of reasoning has several problems. First, even when students were more homogeneous, schools never worked for everyone. Students who did not learn what the teachers were teaching had other options within schools, such as vocational education, or outside of schools, where dropping out opened the door to agricultural, manufacturing, or creative lines of work. One size has never fit all.

Second, regarding the student as the dependent variable in the experiment of teaching and learning is highly problematic. If we teach something and find that students don't learn, the problem is not the student; it's the teaching. The teaching practice must change to suit the student. We can be so sure of ourselves when implementing best practices, including ones we grew up with in our own education experience, that we don't see them as variables in the equation. From a moral point of view, we need to take responsibility when our professional practice comes up short of meeting students' needs and stop blaming the victims or making judgments about their characteristics.

Third, this line of reasoning elevates unfair observations of individuals in ways that contribute to and reinforce forms of oppression of whole groups of people. It supports problematic power structures—such as rac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Praise for Uprooting Instructional Inequity
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Foundations
• Part 1. Taking Your Core Components into Account
• Part 2. Creating Connections for a Productive Learning Environment
• Part 3. Designing Your Inquiry Cycle & Learning Sequence
• Part 4. Preparing for Continuous Learning at Three Levels
• Appendixes
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright