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Leading for Equity

Susie -

Maya and I and a few others on this team attended a webinar given by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan, who are the authors of the book Street Data: A next generation Model for equity, pedagogy and school transformation.

This webinar happened last Thursday and it included many educators from all over North America. It was a very interesting experience to discuss different aspects of equity work with other educators and system leaders.

Today we thought we would share with you some of the things we learned about during this webinar.

Just a little bit about Street Data: - Author Shane Safir describes Street Data as a book about radical dreaming and about cracking open spaces of possibility. They wrote street data with the thought in mind: What is measurable is not the same as what is valuable.

Literally on the back of the book it states “education can be transformed if we eradicate our fixation on big data like standardized test scores as a supreme measure of equity and learning. I think so many people in this webinar wrote in the chat at this time “like EQAO”. Instead of focusing on ‘fixing’ and ‘filling’ academic gaps, we must envision and rebuild the system from the student up -- with classrooms, schools and systems built around students’ brilliance, cultural wealth and intellectual potential. Street data reminds us that data can be humanizing, liberating and healing.

Like I said, today we are going to share with you a little bit of our learning and hopefully that sparks a discussion about what this might means for schools.

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Consider:

What is the purpose of education anyway?

Do we teach and lead to simply reproduce reality, or will be teach and lead to transform?

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A: For all our talk of being student centred, we have bought into a success paradigm that robs many children of their voices, marginalizes their gifts, and prioritizes measurement and incremental improvement over learning and transformation.

How do we reorient public education around another set of values and approaches?

We begin by reclaiming the village, centering the experiences of children - particularly children at the margins - and working to heal wounds of racism and oppression in our schools.

B: What if, because of what we’ve deemed valid and reliable, we have been asking the wrong set of questions? What if the achievement gap itself is a mythology?

As we reckon with these histories, we must interrogate our assumptions about knowledge, measurement, and what really matters when it comes to educating young people. What if there were a completely different way to think about all this? What would a more expansive and culturally sustaining epistemology yield?

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Street Data: Leading for Equity

Know why
Choose the Margins
Deepen the Learning
Transform the Culture

“Street Data” by Safir and Dugan, pg. 20

Susie

The framework in Street Data incorporates four main areas of focus and within these areas are guiding principles and core stances

The 4 parts are:

To understand the why: We reimagine what is possible and we recognize the barriers that get in the way of equity work, the ‘equity detours’ or the traps and tropes as they are referred to in the book. We take core stances of holism, the cognitive, emotional, spiritual and physical wellbeing, and awareness - recognizing what is happening in the world around us
Choose the margins: we intentionally centre voices of the most marginalised and seek root causes over quick fixes. We take core stances of anti-racism and deep listening
Deepen the learning: We redefine success, we focus, we make learning public and value teacher voices. We take core stances of agency, coherence and symmetry
Transform the culture: We embrace vulnerability and call folks in and up. We break the cycle of shame and recognize that every moment is an equity moment. We take the core stances of vulnerability and being a warm demander

In this webinar, I spoke to two women who were Principals in British Columbia and we realized that we all had a background and a love for the Early Years. So we began a discussion about assessment in Kindergarten and what that looks like. We talked about what we value and what we are documenting. They were telling me about a project that is happening in BC called ‘Play Now” and its a research project about looking at intentionally bringing Indigenous ways of knowing into the classroom, not only when designing provocations for play but also understanding how they view play and to use that to inform us about what we value in play and what we assess and evaluate. I highly recommend looking at that if you are interested.

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Tips for Collecting Street Data

Level 1: Satellite Data

Large grain size
Illuminates patterns of achievement, equity and teacher quality and retention
Points us in a general direction for further investigation

Level 2: Map Data

Medium grain size
Helps us identify reading, math and other student skill gaps or instructional skills gap for teacher
Points us in a slightly more focused direction

Level 1: Street Data

Fine-grain and ubiquitous
Helps us to understand student, staff and parent experience as well specific misconceptions and mindsets
Helps us to monitor students’ internalization of important skills
Required focused listening and observation
Inform and shape our next moves

“Street Data” Safir, Dugan, pg. 55

Susie

I love in the book how the authors say “Data can be humanizing, data can be liberatory, data can be healing”

They talked about how we collect data as a system. They talked about the 3 levels of data:

Satellite data: That large view of how we are doing as a system. Its the ‘broad brush, quantitative data like EQAO scores, like graduation rates, attendance data” It points out trends and allows system leaders to make sweeping decisions to make change. It can also serve to reinforce implicit bias and deficit thinking about the most marginalized learners. We know that equity is very complex. If we only focus on satellite data, this is how equity can quickly become a set of check boxes and transactional. In order to make the work of equity transformative, we need to focus on student asset and understand root causes, and that requires context and story.

Map Data: This set of data hovers ‘closer to the ground’. It provides a GPS of social emotional, cultural and learning trends within a school community. This might look like PM Benchmark scores, or CASI testing. It provides a richer picture of what is happening in a school, but still doesn’t have a focus on the humanity that is needed to make necessary changes.

Street Data: This is at the ground level - when we listen and observe and gather artifacts from lived experiences. We use an asset lens when looking at students, schools, and communities instead of seeking out what’s wrong. Street data helps us to see what is getting in the way of learning, think about holistic goals to determine what might come next. It is more than just stories, it is look at how a student is performing based on developmental expectations, how they are feeling about themselves and their learning and what might be impeding a child’s ability to thrive in order to understand what instructional or leadership move comes next.

This speaks to me personally, through the learning I have done around self regulation, I fully believe that all behaviour is communication of a need unmet. When we reframe behaviour, and seek to understand the root cause of the behaviour, we see the child differently and react and respond differently. This, to me, is the same thing. When we think about our school communities, whether they are thriving or not, that is very complex. Its not just about instruction, its not just about relationships or school climate, But its about all of that and more. It is very complex. How might we consider intentionally gathering and using street data to inform our next steps with the equity and anti-racism work in our schools?

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Street Data Action Plan

Make a copy of the Action Plan for September (forced copy)

Deficit thinking Shaming Lagging Objectifying Static What’s wrong with you?	Asset thinking Showcasing Immediate Agentic Dynamic What’s right with you?

Maya

Having this at the front of mind

Reimagine your school, what would it look like, what will your focus be? How will you continue to move your staff from the deficit to asset based mindset.

How you can use the LEIT

Susie

How will you focus on mental health and be prepared for unexpected behaviours from being away from school for so long

Stressors that come from this transition back

At this point in the webinar, we came together to discuss a plan for September. One thing that came up that I felt was really important was having the understanding that we are all coming back to school at the end of a global pandemic and how this is trauma. Really being prepared to understand what that looks like or could look like both with students and with educators. How can we create a community of support and be trauma informed with our actions and our practice to support each other as we return to school

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