Although data and data privacy are now regular news stories we are only beginning to understand the ramifications of our technology filled and connected world.
It is important for everyone who is interested in the transformative power of education to understand how this new data-rich world might impact inequalities in education systems. Data-driven decision-making presents opportunities that could benefit all learners, but only if those learners’ interests are represented in both data collection and analysis. One of the benefits of diverse school settings is that they provide opportunities to ask different questions of data. In this workshop participants will be led through a series of decisions around a hypothetical situation involving diverse schools, student data, education technology and data science. The exercise is designed to give participants experience in navigating the novel problems associated with online data and its impact on education and the multiple understandings of racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse learners. Participants will learn some basic data science concepts and with this information attempt to navigate the trade-offs of a real world problem in which data is being used within an educational context.
Presenters: Charles Lang is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Learning Analytics at Teachers College, Columbia. His research interests center on the use of big data in education and the role of online assessment data in accurately determining student learning. Specifically, Charles studies innovative methodologies for understanding student learning through predictive analytics, personalization and graphical models. Suchi Saxena is a national education consultant leading work on systems change towards realizing diverse, equitable and inclusive schools. Her areas of focus include school improvement and education innovation, particularly in examining and improving practical measures of intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies.
How might teachers maintain high expectations in the classroom but also honor students’ multiple literacies, lived experiences, and existing knowledge bases? Building on the ideas of educator Django Paris, middle- and high-school English teachers are invited to join a dialogue about (re)imagining culturally sustaining assessments. This workshop will encourage participants to generate new curricular approaches that activate a more pluralist and expansive vision for language arts mastery. After a brief introduction, attendees will spend the first half of the workshop in small groups interrogating current assessment practices, then identifying more intentional ways of exhibiting greater fidelity to students’ multiple identities. Culturally sustaining pedagogies help shift conversations so that assessments are not simply a purportedly objective measure of student growth informed by predefined standards but a recognition of cultural diversities and multiliteracies. Attendees will then craft diagrams and visuals that outline concrete unit plans. These will be refined iteratively as participants share ideas, questions, and suggestions with one another. Finally, once a few sample student pieces are shared by the facilitator, attendees will have an opportunity to participate in an interactive Q&A that may include topics such as grading and differentiation. Ultimately, participants should come prepared to challenge existing assumptions, share innovative ideas with thoughtful colleagues, and expand their own pedagogical practices. Attendees are encouraged to continue to build on these ideas with others from this learning community and with colleagues at their home institutions.
Presenters: Ah-Young Song is a doctoral candidate in English Education at Teachers College. She has had the joy of teaching high school English students in New Hampshire, Taiwan, South Korea, and Massachusetts.
The purpose of education is both academic and civic, but the pervasive segregation in public schools threatens both of those ends by instigating inequitable resource distribution and robbing children of the benefits of diverse perspectives. This session hopes to encourage education leaders and community stakeholders to imagine an education system that is no longer separate and unequal, but that instead is truly integrated by race, language, and socioeconomic status - beginning with examining enrollment systems. What can education leaders do to disrupt the injustice of school segregation? Which methods of student assignment work well to desegregate which districts, and how might leaders tackle political or logistical challenges in the face of those efforts? Using research by the presenters, other sources, and real-life examples, this workshop aims to provide those seeking to build and sustain more diverse schools with guidance on how to do so. It will also examine historical struggles for integration in order to better understand and advance contemporary efforts. Participants will have the opportunity to reflect upon and discuss their own districts' or schools' efforts to desegregate and consider how they might be able to advance this work going forward. Participants should be able to leave this workshop with a deeper understanding of how schools and systems pursue desegregation, and how those tools might impact in-school and community dynamics. Ultimately, we hope that participants will be able to imagine and work toward a society where desegregated schools are not only the norm, but are a launching pad for greater equity and justice within those schools and the education system as a whole.
Presenters: Kimberly Quick is Senior Policy Associate at The Century Foundation. She conducts research on school desegregation and integration, equity within schools, charter schools, and race and identity. Kimberly has led several PD sessions including for district leaders at the National School Boards Association and the New York State Integration Project's Professional Learning Community. Halley Potter is Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation. She conducts research on school desegregation and integration, diverse charter schools, intentionally diverse charter schools, and early education equity and diversity. Halley has led several PD sessions around the country and in New York in addition to working closely with the National Coalition on School Diversity and the Diverse Charter School Coalition.
The quality of the relationships within a school community has an impact on how kids feel, and on how well they learn. When school and parent leaders can model a constructive partnership—including managing conflict well—the entire community benefits. Over the past six years, the presenters, a parent leader and a principal, have developed a good working relationship, based on trust and built into friendship, with room to respectfully disagree. This workshop will tell the story of their partnership, and of how they have worked with other school and parent leaders to build community. It will touch on:
We offer tools that participants can take back to their own schools, and a discussion period. School and parent leaders alike have questions about how to locate, summon, and wield their power in the context of a diverse school community and in respectful partnership, building on each others' strengths. We welcome this opportunity to learn from others as we lead. Our school and others like it do not have all the answers, but they are places of shared investment where we can come together to figure them out.
Presenters: Sandra Soto is Principal of Brooklyn Arts and Science Elementary School, a racially and socioeconomically diverse community. Kelly Bare is a parent leader whose oldest child started pre-K in 2012, the year the school was founded. He will graduate 5th grade next year.
From classrooms to coffee shops, it is clear that we must address deeply held biases and questions of equity that affect our schools. However, these biases are not just individual in nature but are systemic and historical, and the legacies are real. If we are to effectively create more equitable education experiences and outcomes we must explore their historical context. How did we get here? How do we avoid mistakes of the past? How can facing this history lead to a shift from simplistic solutions to more effective and authentic change? Join Facing History and Ourselves for an interactive session that will engage participants in an exploration of the historical foundations of school inequity that we see today. Content to include American history resources and is geared towards middle and high school educators.
Presenters: Daniel Braunfeld is the Senior Program Associate for Special Projects at Facing History and Ourselves, an international educational and professional development non-profit. Facing History educators work with millions of students each year, engaging in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. Before joining Facing History, Daniel was a history teacher and teacher-leader in Boston, NYC, and Santa Monica and wrote and consulted on curriculum for the GRAMMY Museum, Hearts on Fire, ITVS, and PBS. Daniel lives in NYC and primarily works with schools and teachers throughout the city.
The forces of globalization that converge to produce contexts of “super-diversity” in 21st century classrooms call our nation to reimagine and reshape delivery of social services such as education to ensure that it is culturally sensitive and sustaining. Students’ individual and academic identities are defined by multiple and often complex sets of variables, including not only ethnicity and race, but also linguistic repertoire, legal and socioeconomic statuses, and pre-migration experiences. This workshop is geared toward those who seek to improve their knowledge of current theory and effective strategies for being culturally and linguistically responsive to young people, particularly recent immigrant and emergent multilingual students, in educational settings of great diversity. Educators and those who manage or make policy affecting them can become familiar with the backgrounds and languages of the youth they serve as well how students’ home language(s) and knowledge(s) can be leveraged to foster academic achievement. Rooted in a strengths-based perspective - building the competencies of educators to engage in and leverage immigrant students’ rich funds of knowledge – this workshop will touch upon 1) strategies to address diversity within diversity; 2) language learning theories and their pedagogical implications; and 3) multi-modal teaching activities, particularly in middle and high school classrooms. As educators are the best experts on their own students, this workshop format will be interactive and participatory, with small group activities designed to deliver new material while also engaging participants in peer-to-peer knowledge exchange.
Presenters: Amanda Earl is an Ed.D. student in the International Educational Development Program of the International and Transcultural Studies Department at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is also a doctoral recipient of the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship through Columbia's Institute of Latin American Studies where she is learning Náhuatl, a language indigenous to Mexico. Her research interests converge around educational policies and teaching practices that affect marginalized and Indigenous students in Latin America and Latinx and recent immigrant students in the US. She has worked as an educator for over nine years, both as a teacher in Philadelphia and Argentina and in college access for recent immigrant high school students in New York City. She holds an M.A. in International Educational Development from Teachers College, Columbia University and a B.A. in Classics from Brown University.
Geared for teachers, this workshop will explore the intersection of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy. It will extend participants’ previous understandings of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and racial privilege by inviting them to include (dis)ability as an identity category. This workshop is designed for individuals who are new to the concept of ablest privilege, but are familiar with racial privileges. Participants will begin by creating a collective definition for the concept of privilege. They will extend previous understandings of race-based privilege to ability by engaging in an ability privilege unpacking exercise. After considering some of their own ability privileges, participants will critically read a vignette of classroom teaching that applies an identity-sensitive form of pedagogy to UDL. Finally, using this example, participants will brainstorm ways that they can apply this intersectional understanding of identity to the design of their own curriculum. Participants will come away with a clearer sense of how race and (dis)ability intersect in classroom practice and how they can use this understanding to design engaging, relevant curriculum for students.
Presenters: Laurie Rabinowitz is a fifth year doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University in the department of Curriculum and Teaching. Her dissertation looks at how inclusive educators sustain their practices in light of the accountability climate in which they often work. She has experience leading professional development as the former Director of Instruction of an inclusive charter school in Brooklyn and former Special Education Coordinator. She has also taught graduate and undergraduate education courses at Hunter College, Barnard College, New York University and Teachers College. This spring, she taught a course at New York University in the Special Education masters program in behavior management and a course on methods for teaching writing to students with learning disabilities at Hunter College.
Whose knowledge counts in the curricula we teach? Whose voices are included/excluded in our classrooms? In what ways can/should educators and students engage in social action? This interactive workshop will engage participants in exploring pedagogies that center youth voice as culturally sustaining and humanizing pedagogy in schools, with particular emphasis on youth participatory action research (YPAR). During the workshop, participants will see youth projects, use/create tools for classroom use, and discuss some of the possibilities, challenges, and potential misunderstandings of youth participatory action research in curriculum and pedagogy. All are encouraged to bring ideas, questions and materials to "workshop" during part of the session, and/or engage with samples provided.
Presenters: Dr. Limarys Caraballo is associate professor in the Secondary Education department at Queens College, and in the Urban Education program at The Graduate Center of CUNY; she is also a Research Fellow in the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests include the impact of youth research on teachers’ curriculum and pedagogy. Dr. Caraballo directs the Complicated Conversations Series to encourage dialogue about complex topics among students, faculty, and staff in a diverse campus context. Jazmine Estremera has been teaching high school English for four years. She currently works at John Bowne High School in Flushing, Queens, where she teaches sophomore and senior English. Jazmine is interested in teaching about social justice and topics/literature relevant to her students and their needs. She is a Masters student in English Literature at Queens College.
We are often asked, "How do I know which books to keep and which books to get rid of?" The truth is we can utilize most of our books and reading materials, as long as we are asking the right questions. In this workshop, we will share examples of classroom practices that cultivate critical literacy development. We will share units of study that have been redesigned to incorporate critical literacy skills as well as examples of individual lessons within other units that also include critical literacy skills. Our goal is for participants to leave with ideas they feel confident utilizing in their classroom.
Presenters: Kristen Kaelin is a special education certified teacher and has been teaching for 14 years in public, private, and charter schools. She is currently a 4th grade teacher in a co-taught classroom at Community Roots. Kristen is a member of the school’s Diversity Working Group and collaborates with other staff members to design professional development for staff connected to their anti-bias approach and curriculum. She is also a Responsive Classroom consultant and leads workshops for educators across the country and is a workshop presenter for Roots ConnectED. Michelle McCree is a 2nd grade teacher in a co-taught classroom with Community Roots and has presented her work through Roots ConnectED workshops. She has led professional development about early childhood literacy with Uplift Education, Teach for America, and The New Teacher Project. Additionally she has lead workshops around organizing and advocacy in education with Educators for Excellence and the New York City Urban League.
This workshop will help participants identify ways in which educational systems perpetuate racial microaggressions, both within classroom practices and within the institutional climates. The first step to dismantling this insidious form of racism is to make it visible to both perpetrators and those who are aggressed upon. The workshop will bring to light ways in which well-intentioned actions and attitudes may be discriminatory and deleterious to the learning efforts of students of color. Participants will be presented with real-life incidents that illustrate the disguised and problematic dynamics of racial microaggressions. The training will help educators to (a) increase their capacity to recognize racial microaggressions in themselves and others; (b) understand racial microaggressions’ averse impact on students of color; and (c) gain accountability in taking remedial action to overcome racial biases that lead to microaggressions.
Presenters: Mariel Buque is a Ph.D. Candidate in Counseling Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University and the Founder of Cultural Therapy (www.culturaltherapy.health) , an online platform that connects people of color to culturally-affirming mental health care. Her work focuses on the advancement of culturally affirming practices in institutional climates and on increasing access to therapy for People of Color. She is the writer of the Psychology Today blog called Unpacking Race, which focuses on improving access to care and racial health disparities, and she also trains therapists, educators, and companies in the areas of cultural competency, implicit bias, and microaggressions. She has led this workshop for two years at Reimagining Education and has received positive feedback from educators and administrators as to how they can implement workshop materials into their respective schools.
This workshop will explore the experiences of the school community at Park Slope Collegiate, an integrating school in Brooklyn NY, and the role of collective action against racism in creating a student, parent and school culture where all school community members feel welcome. In the spirit of Civil Rights struggles that inspired activists to link arms against injustice and changed the hearts and minds of many, school leaders, teachers, parents and students have found that “learning by doing” applies as much to efforts to create integrated and equitable schools as it does to academic subjects. In addition to addressing implicit bias and culturally relevant pedagogy, active participation and civic engagement in addressing policy issues plays an important role at the school level. Parents and educators at racially diverse schools will learn some of the key strategies that PTA’s, school clubs, classroom teachers and school administrators can use to bring parents and the whole school community together instead of fostering separatism.
Presenters: Jill Bloomberg is a long-time public school educator with over 30 years first as a teacher in the Chicago and NYC public schools and currently as the Principal at Park Slope Collegiate at the John Jay Campus where she has been for the past 14 years. She is also currently pursuing a PhD in Politics and Education at Teachers College Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis. Jill is a committed advocate and student of school integration as an avenue toward combating the racism and inequities that exist in our school system.
This workshop will explore the conceptual and practical links between progressive education and culturally relevant/sustaining pedagogy. The tenets of a progressive approach to education require us to connect to students' cultural ways of knowing and being in the world in a manner that supports a culturally relevant or sustaining pedagogical practice. The facilitators of this workshop are two school leaders of progressive public schools with a commitment to culturally relevant / sustaining practices. Participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to explore the tenets of progressive education and culturally relevant/sustaining pedagogy and draw connections between the two, examine models of culturally relevant / sustaining progressivism from the schools of the two workshop facilitators, and apply lessons learned from the workshop to their own practice.
Presenters: Julie Zuckerman currently serves as the Principal of Castle Bridge Elementary School in Manhattan. Julie Zuckerman has spent her whole adult life in the NYC Department of Education, as a parent of 2, an elementary school teacher for 21 years, and a principal for 13 years. She is currently the founding principal of Castle Bridge School a dual-language, progressive, inclusive and integrated elementary school in Washington Heights, and founding board member of PENNY, the Progressive Educators Network of New York. Vielca Anglin is a biology/STEM teacher at City-As-School High School. Additionally, she has taken on the role of Model Teacher and is a facilitator of the science team meetings. She further supports the school community through the professional development committee and helping to spearhead a quarterly school town hall. She continually strives to create and incorporate high-interest and current scientific issues into her teaching repertoire to pique student interest, connect them to social justice, and give each one an entry point into content and how it connects to them and their community. She is a 2013 Math for America Master Teacher, a 2017 Renewal Master Teacher and was a 2016-2017 Sci-Ed Innovators Fellow. In addition to being very involved in her school community, Vielca is very active in the Math for America community, serving as a mentor to Early Career Fellows, leading mini-courses and professional teams.
Muslim youth are pushed to the margins of society as both an invisible people through an erasure of Muslim history in the United States, yet hypervisible as a flawed caricature portrayed in media and, yes, in schools. This workshop will offer a historical perspective on missed cultural wealth, facilitate discussion around myths, and offer pedagogical strategies for teaching about (or with) Muslim students. And, a broad range of film, images/symbols, and legal proceedings will also help educators examine the perils of racialized religious discrimination in the United States and collectively work toward an answer to "where do we go from here?”
Presenter: Nora is an adjunct professor at Teachers College, Columbia University in the English department. She is also proudly a Brooklyn public school teacher. Her research interests focus on religious minorities, racism, queer and gender oppression, and the intersections of these marginalized groups. She also facilitates professional development workshops freelance across New York City.
Participant will enhance their understanding of how racism manifests in classrooms, schools and lived experiences of students and practice applying a racial equity lens to scenarios related to race and racism in educational settings. More information to come.
Presenter: Border Crossers trains and empowers educators to dismantle patterns of racism and injustice in schools and communities. At Border Crossers, we envision a world where young people of all racial identities learn and thrive in equitable, liberating and empowering educational spaces.
There are unprecedented and considerable shifts in education and the provision of schooling: the marketization, commodification of education and the student learning experience; emphasis on accountability and assessment measures; increased school choice "options"; changing racial and cultural demography of student populations; gentrification of neighborhoods and resultant polarized interests amongst parent constituents. Yet, schools in general, and models of school leadership in particular, extensively continue to apply a "one-size fits all approach" to school leadership and administration. In this session we encourage participants to reimagine a model of school leadership that is "customer" centered and focused. Who are our customers/constituent members? How do we identify them, their interests, and specific needs? And how might we as school leaders respond to these differing customer needs? Drawing on significant years of customer services oriented leadership, as well as school leadership, the facilitator will engage participants in culturally responsive/ culturally sustaining leadership practices. The session will highlight effective strategies to enable school leaders to engage in deep self-introspection. Participants will also be encouraged to think critically and to be more responsive to the innumerable ways in which race, racism, negative stereotyping and labeling of children from race marginalized backgrounds, and the ways in which these manifest within the school, community, and district settings. Participants will leave the session with practical strategies to support the development of a culturally sustainable, customer service school leadership orientation.
Presenter: Carland Washington is the principal of West Prep Academy, a public school located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Carland attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina Central University for his undergraduate degree and teaching certifications. He is a graduate of the Summer Principals Academy and holds a master’s degree in Education Leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University. Carland has led West Prep Academy since May 2014, after serving as an assistant principal and staff developer. He is the co-author of “Authenticity and the Female African American School Leader” published in the edited book, Racially and Ethnically Diverse Women Leading Education. Carland frequently serves as a panelist for selected topics in education such as race and diversity, social and emotional development, closing the achievement gap, and has been featured in Time Magazine for his work in wellness education.