Getting Unstuck: Creating Safe and Inclusive Schools
“We need to create schools that are safe and inclusive for all students. And the way you provide social emotional learning is by learning to develop a student learner-centered classroom, so that we’re equipping educators with the tools that help them give voice to their students, and how to recognize the student’s lived identities and experiences, to validate those to allow those things to come and flourish in the classroom and to use them as the tool of teaching and learning in the classroom.”
Today on Getting Unstuck
For the past few weeks, we’ve been focusing on answering a single question: How might we reimagine schools to better support our kids for the world today? Today we welcome Dimitry Anselme, the Executive Program Director for Professional Learning and Support at “Facing History and Ourselves.” The mission of this nonprofit organization is to use lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate. In this episode, we’ll learn about Dimitri’s and Facing History’s vision for how schools can create educational experiences that combine social and emotional learning, equity, and civic education.
Facing History created the Pedagogical Triangle for Historical and Civic Understanding to serve as a touchstone for balanced program and lesson planning. The arrows between intellectual rigor, emotional engagement, and ethical reflection are bidirectional, as these processes strengthen each other. At the center is the students’ civic agency, their belief that they can play a positive role in their peer groups, schools, communities, and larger world.
Dimitri’s transformation ideas
We need to start thinking around what's the post high school career or college life for our students.
Bring graduates back to school to speak with middle school and high school kids about their college experience.
Give students greater agency so that they can begin to determine their future.
We need to retool the curriculum so that it is more exciting and relevant to kids of color.
Create safe environments that encourage the development of relationships and academic risk taking.
Ensure that students who are black and brown or are coming from these marginalized communities have the skills for civic engagement – so that they see themselves as young citizens who can participate.
Give kids the tools to understand themselves and others.
Redefine civic education so it includes activities to support the student’s local environment, including how to protest effectively.
Connect with Dimitry
“It seems like every year we try a ‘new’ educational initiative – something that somebody read about or experienced at a conference. We never seem to stay with it, though, because there’s always something new following on its heels. And our problems remain the same.” — A teacher
Tired of chasing the next shinny thing?
From our publisher:
In Shifting, educators and leadership experts Kirsten Richert, Jeff Ikler and Margaret Zacchei empower educational change leaders to proactively and coherently navigate complex change in schools to achieve the desired outcomes. Using a three-part framework—Assess, Ready, Change—this book leads educators to examine a school’s imperatives and readiness for change, identity the tools and abilities required to manifest change, and take action by defining the roles and processes necessary to effectively implement both sweeping change and smaller day-to-day adjustments.