Unfinished Teaching is Unfinished Leading

The Problem
 
In many conference rooms and libraries across the country, teachers are receiving professional development and participating in professional learning communities that are addressing Unfinished Learning. These school and system leaders understand that Black children need access to grade-level content today. They get that their teachers have to be the ones to create those opportunities for students and they might even understand that whenever Unfinished Learning pops up, it’s really Unfinished Teaching* hiding in plain sight. 

So these school and system leaders take action and set out to arm their teachers with the skills and knowledge they need to create meaningful access for the students next Monday morning. 
 
Yet after countless hours spent on coaching teachers on how to improve and tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on hiring professional development vendors to help their teachers understand and apply strategies that create access to grade-level content, October is coming to a close, access for Black children seems to be decreasing and school and system leaders are starting to increasingly hear this: 
 
“My kids just can’t do this.” 
 
“I know my kids and I know what they can handle.” 
 
“I need to bring it back two or three grade levels so they can understand.” 
 
“I’m going to cut this, bring in this other text, or make the numbers smaller here so they can be successful.” 
 
How is this possible? My teachers know the strategies they need to make this accessible. They had the PD for it. They learned about the research that proved any kid can access complex text if we build the background knowledge. Why are my teachers not even trying to help our Black students show mastery on grade level? Why are my teachers choosing to spend days, weeks, and months of instructional time on content from one, two, or even three years below grade level? 
 
Why? Because they have been conditioned to. We all have. Educators in this country are systemically conditioned to limit access to grade-level content for Black children. Inequity for Black children on this scale is not possible without this being true. This means that identities as allies or anti-racists don’t absolve us from being participants in the education system; we are a part of it. Furthermore, expending energy and resources to prove that this doesn’t apply to you does not change outcomes for Black children, which means you’re still participating in it.
 
Until teachers have professional learning experiences that actively disrupt that conditioning and actively build a new understanding of what it means to create access, regardless of a student’s ‘level’, their Unfinished Teaching is our Unfinished Leading. 
 
As long as we allow fixed mindsets about what Black children can do to inform and determine instructional practices, their Unfinished Teaching is our Unfinished Leading. 
 
Upon reading this, you might want to go to your teachers and say: 
 
“You have a fixed mindset around what Black children can do and that’s problematic.”
 
“You have to create access for Black children or that’s contributing to racism.” 
 
“You’re not trying hard enough to support your kids. And because of that they are falling further behind. We’re supposed to be helping them grow, not slide back.” 
 
HARD STOP.
 
NO. 
 
FOR THE LOVE OF IYANLA AND RUPUAL DON’T SAY THAT TO A TEACHER. 
 
You can think those thoughts. And have those insights. But what will saying that to educators accomplish? Will it be the impact that you want it to have? Are your teachers going to have aha! moments about how their instructional decisions contribute to inequity because you told them they have fixed mindsets, are not trying hard enough, and are ultimately contributing to racism? 
 
You might feel courageous for saying these things. You might even consider yourself an advocate or champion for Black children when you’re done. But how can you be a champion for Black children when the outcome is teachers who shut down, close their classroom doors, and continue to do the same thing because they felt judged, think you have no empathy, and now just tune you out on auto-pilot? End result: Black children continue to be denied access to grade-level content. 
 
No, I don’t think it is your responsibility to take on the emotional labor that comes with tiptoeing around mindsets, decisions and instructional practices that produce inequity for Black children. Please don’t.
 
Instead, what I am suggesting for you as school and system leaders, is another way. 
 
The Call to Action
 
Instead of this narrative about teachers: 
 
“They are problematic, have low expectations.” 
 
“Who am I to change how a grown person thinks? People can’t change the mindsets of other grown people, especially if they don’t want to change or think that they are right all the time.” 
 
“Those teachers just have fixed mindsets. How can you work with a fixed mindset? It’s fixed!”
 
Choose this narrative about teachers: 
 
“All educators, including myself, have been conditioned to have limiting beliefs about Black children.” 
 
“These beliefs are pervasive and will continue to inform all instructional decisions until I find a way to actively disrupt them.” 
 
“I can create professional learning experiences and cultivate instructional habits and ways of thinking that actively disrupt this.”
 
Why? If you unlearn the old narrative and make a choice to accept this new narrative, you can actually reclaim your instructional power as leaders within your schools and school systems.
 
You can let go of the endless, expensive, and time-consuming cycle of providing teachers with resources, telling teachers what to do, and writing them up or repeating yourself when you don’t see that compliance. That’s exhausting and is probably shortening your lifespan in this role before you burn out. 
 
You can start to design structures that require teachers to make evidence-based decisions and desystematize implicit bias. 
 
You can start to facilitate professional learning experiences that allow teachers to foster insight and generate solutions for creating access for Black children. 
 
You can start to create space for the conversations grounded in evidence and content that cultivate an educator’s capacity for the kind of paradigm shift that allows them to see different and do differently. 
 
It’s possible. That’s what Equitable Outcomes trains leaders how to do. Not only is it possible, but it’s also what we need. A paradigm shift. And you are the one to nurture them into fruition. But this is only possible if you let go of the model of professional development and coaching that puts no heavy lifting on teachers by ‘giving them’ knowledge and research or by telling them what’s wrong in their classroom so they can fix it. 
 
My last call to action for you, and this might be the scariest – allow and encourage dissonant thinking about the curriculum and instructional practices to be named, interrogated with evidence, and tested. Without that experience, those dissonant thoughts will fester into things no leader enjoys: seemingly needless resistance, petty battles, and a complete breakdown of trust. All of which ultimately results in a rejection of the same strategies + instructional materials that create access to grade-level content for Black children. 
 
Without unlearning and choosing to accept a new narrative about Unfinished Teaching, we participate in Unfinished Leading. We function as the gatekeepers that allow conditioning designed to limit access for Black students to walk through our school doors, right past the time, effort, and money your school system has invested and directly into educational experiences that reliably and predictably lock Black children out.  
 
What narrative are you going to choose to unlearn? Which narrative are you going to choose to accept? And once you’ve made those decisions, what are you going to do about it?