September 2011 – West Wind Education Policy

Month: September 2011

What Binary?

Posted on September 30, 2011October 7, 2011 by Alyssa Rodriguez

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Everyone looks out their own window.

White and black make up a spectrum that our society resorts to in conversations of race. By today’s standards, this binary is simply not sufficient. My vacation to the Southwest was a harsh reminder of this.

Recently, I returned to the Southwest for a range of reasons. First and foremost, it was a vacation. But by today’s standards, that does not mean I was not busy. As a former AmeriCorps volunteer in San Antonio, Texas; I find it important to not treat my year of service as only a year of service. It has shaped me in immeasurable ways. I was born and raised in Iowa, but have felt strongly rooted and cultivated in Texas.

I was 23 years old when my AmeriCorps placement in 2009 took place at a local community center. My primary responsibility was to interact with youth between the ages of 5-17 in an after school setting. That experience largely inspired me to further my work with youth, hopefully impacting their lives for the better and providing them a role model as fellow children of color.

Yesterday I visited the community center and spent the afternoon and early evening catching up with the youth I had previously worked with. This visit was bittersweet. On the one hand, it was like any other day at the community center, as though I had never left. However, some of what I saw as a visitor reminded me of why I am so grateful to work at West Wind—why working to infuse race and equity into education policies is important.

Having recently moved back to Iowa , I am still experiencing the impact my year in San Antonio has had on me; spiritually, vocationally, etc. I reflect on my own childhood, growing up as one of the only Latina children in my classroom(s). To witness the youth at this community center in quite a reversal of settings (their neighborhood being 98% Mexican), and in relating it to my work thus far at West Wind, I have gained many insights:

Being the majority, obliviousness to “the other” is almost unconscious.
The other is either and both invisible and hypervisible at once.
Being Latino further complicates the self-identification process for all Latinos; including those who are a part of a majority group like the youth I served on the San Antonio Westside.

These youth freely use the n-word. With conviction. To which their peers laugh. This created for me lumps in my stomach and pain in my heart. A third-grader, knowing how to use that word so harshly and not knowing at all the hurt it stemmed from and its persistent consequences is difficult to see.

They mention a student in their class who they make fun of because, “she is brown”.

“But, you’re brown; too,” I retort.

“No miss, I’m white. I’m Mexican.”

In a world where labels are forced upon all of us, but with the complexity of having to be succinct in our self-labeling , we rush to fit ourselves into boxes that can be easily checked. White. Latino. Non-White. Latino/Hispanic, and so on.

I grew up, the rare Latina in my classroom(s), molding into that binary of black or white. (No in between existed, or at least it wasn’t prioritized in conversations on race.) I wanted badly to be positioned with the white majority, but learned that would never happen, no matter how hard I tried because of how I looked. I responded by aligning with my black peers.

These youth grow up, only surrounded by “Mexicanness” in their homes and classroom(s). But they also are unconsciously aware that, “White is right”.

In 2011, narrowing one’s identity down between White and Black is not that simple.

As I experienced while living in San Antonio, most of these youth will be born, raised, rooted and cultivated in their current neighborhoods. They will only encounter other Mexicans and, if a black person is seen walking the sidewalks, he/she would be immediately questioned. If, by chance, one of their classmates is black, that student will struggle to confidently identity as such.

Black, white, brown, Latino/Hispanic or not. The checkmarks we so frequently are asked to make in a hurry, imply a lot more than we realize; more irreversibly than we realize.

Instructional Rounds: A Powerful Reform Strategy

Posted on September 29, 2011September 30, 2011 by Deb Hansen

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Collaboration, networking, school improvement, instructional support, a collaborative learning culture, knowledge building, and rigorous and relevant teaching—these are all attributes and practices school reformers strive for by awarding funds, promulgating rules, instituting strategic plans, launching training initiatives, and extending promises to stakeholders. One approach that truly advances all of these attributes and practices is the instructional rounds process – “an explicit practice that is designed to bring the discussion of instruction directly into the process of school improvement.”[1] Instructional rounds are adapted from a routine used in medical education in which interns, residents, and supervising physicians visit patients, observe, discuss evidence for diagnoses, engage in dialogue to analyze the evidence, and share ideas for possible treatments. Educational rounds brings networks of educators together using protocols and routines to articulate a theory of action, identify a problem of practice, observe classroom instruction, debrief with colleagues to analyze any patterns that emerge, and recommend the next level of work to help the school achieve their desired goals.[2]

Richard Elmore, Lee Teitel, Liz City, and their colleagues from Harvard have developed processes, protocols, and technical assistance resources for establishing networks to implement instructional rounds. They have worked closely with networks and district leaders to apply the practice of rounds, refine the model based on lessons learned, and to expand the community of learners who are able to facilitate the rounds process. Examples of these networks include the Cambridge Leadership Network, the Connecticut Superintendents’ Network, the Ohio Leadership Collaborative, and the Iowa Leadership Academy Superintendents’ Network. I have had the privilege of being a member of the Iowa Leadership Academy Superintendents’ Network – an experience that has allowed me to participate in intensive training provided by Dr. Elmore and the Harvard team, engage as both a member on various rounds teams and as a facilitator of the rounds process in several Iowa school districts, and to continuously learn from my fellow rounds facilitators through our Network meetings.

The instructional rounds model seems to be gaining more traction and is recently being advanced as a model for school leaders and teachers as a means to transform educator practice. What I have noticed in my work with the rounds model in Iowa is that it offers tremendous benefit to the Network members and to the participating schools. The process focuses the district’s efforts on, what Elmore calls, the instructional core. Engaging in rounds builds the capacity of superintendents to recognize quality instruction, enhances trust among Network members, increases their willingness to take on the challenges of influencing change, and leads to a culture of inquiry that enhances professional learning.

On a cautionary note, I have also noticed some aspects of the model that anyone aspiring to adopt this approach should consider. Some of the lessons learned from my own work with rounds and from sharing experiences with other facilitators in Iowa are listed below.

Though the steps for conducting rounds may seem straightforward, in practice, it is a very difficult program for participants to implement.
Establishing a network takes an extraordinary amount of work and leadership. In Iowa, Bonnie Boothroy of School Administrators of Iowa and several of the Area Education Agency Chiefs have committed extensive amounts of time and effort to establish and sustain Iowa’s Network.
Being a member of a network takes a lot of time, commitment to learn, and perseverance to follow through and apply new learning. It is not a model for anyone who wants their professional growth to be quick and easy. Becoming a facilitator is an extremely valuable professional learning experience, but the work of developing the skills needed to support a network and run the rounds process can’t be shortchanged. The “faint of heart” should not apply.
New capacity building is needed to do this work. School leaders shouldn’t consider running rounds without background knowledge. Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning a well written book by City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel (2009) is a great resource, but just reading the book is not a substitute for learning how to conduct rounds from those who have had extensive direct experience.
Going to scale across multiple districts and running rounds with fidelity is a constant effort and requires ongoing vigilance. Our network meets several times a year to address how best to support the rounds process and we continuously confront issues that have the potential to seriously domesticate the delivery of the model.

It takes a community of committed practitioners for the networks and rounds process to work well. Isolated implementers who just pick up the book are likely to implement the model partially or incorrectly. Plus, the experience of engaging in collective learning in an organized way will serve school leaders well as they work to establish learning communities in their schools.

School reformers might want to take a look at this promising and exciting approach to school reform. While they should be excited about the potential, reformers also need to be cautious about selecting a model that is demanding to implement. To fulfill the promise of this approach, school leaders will need to make a serious commitment to engage deeply in the work and be intentional about fully learning the model from experts. The policy makers and administrators who are responsible for designing the roll-out of the rounds networks must attend to the all the factors that are necessary to advance a model to scale and be vigilant about expecting careful replication of the model.

[1] City, E., Elmore, R. , Fiarman, S. and Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional rounds in education: A network approach to improving teaching and learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

[2] Ibid.

Policy Institute on Race and Education

Posted on September 20, 2011October 10, 2019 by West Wind

Reading Time: < 1 minute

[box class=”grey_box”]Presented by Circe Stumbo and Deanna Hill[/box]

Download the Presentation (PDF)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: A Story Worth Telling and a Model for Storytelling

Posted on September 12, 2011September 12, 2011 by Circe Stumbo

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I just read the New York Times best-seller “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” Henrietta Lacks was a black woman treated for cervical cancer at John Hopkins in the early 1950s. It was during this treatment that her cancer cells were taken without her knowledge, grown in a laboratory, and sold to scientists around the globe. Henrietta died in 1951 at the age of 31, but her cells, known to scientists as HeLa, live on in laboratories and medical schools around the globe. HeLa was vital to the development of the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and much more. In 1996, Roland H. Pattillo, M.D., a professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Morehouse School of Medicine, began the annual HeLa Women’s Health Conference, and the BBC filmed part of its documentary “The Way of All Flesh” at the event. Yet, before this book, her family was virtually unknown to the general public and could not afford health care that would give them access to the medical advances their own mother made possible.

While the book could have easily been couched as a “historical” account, white, female author Rebecca Skloot carefully demonstrated the very real, very contemporary significance of the story. As noted on the author’s website: “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. It’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we’re made of.” In fact, the last chapter of the book describes the yet unsettled legal context in which these debates continue. I hope we can expect the same treatment by the Oprah Winfrey/Alan Ball HBO movie being made.

I was especially impressed with the author’s continuing commitment to Henrietta Lacks’ family and to others like them. The author founded the Henrietta Lacks Foundation. According to the foundation website: “The Henrietta Lacks Foundation strives to provide financial assistance to needy individuals who have made important contributions to scientific research without personally benefiting from those contributions, particularly those used in research without their knowledge or consent. The Foundation gives those who have benefited from those contributions — including scientists, universities, corporations, and the general public — a way to show their appreciation to such research subjects and their families. The Foundation has already awarded 19 grants, including grants covering tuition and book expenses, health care expenses and emergency needs of multiple members of her immediate family. The Foundation’s goal is to continue to help the Lacks family as well as others with similar needs who may qualify, such as descendants of research subjects used in the famous Tuskegee Syphilis Studies, those injected with sexually transmitted diseases without their knowledge by the US Government, and others. To be eligible for a grant, an applicant must prove financial need and have made, or be the descendant of someone who has made, a significant contribution to scientific research as a research subject, including those who have unwillingly or unknowingly been used in research or contributed biological materials for research.”

This book will change how you think about race, medicine, science, and your own control of your body. Not only it is a must read, but I believe it is an example of responsible and ethical storytelling with and for the people whose stories are being told.