On School Shootings, Freedom and Restrictions

Then and Now. . . and Now, and Now, and Now

I was teaching at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics (VSAA) during the Springfield school shooting. Almost everyone in my class knew someone - friends or cousins - who had survived it, and it was obvious that we couldn't have regular high school biology class that next day. So we stopped and talked about it. A couple of important points were raised by the students: First, that our school didn't have the typical power structure of Jocks, Cheerleaders, Brainiacs, etc. Instead we had kids whose identity sprang from their art form(s), and who had mad respect for kids who were different by virtue of the passion they had for a different form. Everyone had status.

Second, one student said that most kids in our school had at least one adult they trusted and who cared for them, that they could talk to if they felt on the edge. I asked about that one - I mean, we had designed the school for this outcome but I had to make sure it wasn't just one voice. Sure enough everyone in my class was close to more than one adult. And then, one student said, "You know what else? If I had a friend who I was worried about, and who didn't have a close adult, I'm close enough to my advocate that I'd talk to him way before it got that bad."

So there it is. What we need in schools is not more metal detectors, more police, more rules, less freedom. What we need is better relationships in schools and communities - between adults and young people, among students, and between adults and young people in their neighborhoods, work, etc.

Leading from the Emerging Future!

I'm excited to participate in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) from MIT entitled Leading from the Emerging Future. The one they did last year had an impressive 70,000 participants worldwide, all seeking to make the world better through a process of deep listening. Today I'm posting my intention: To help birth a new racial awareness that will pervade the new educational paradigms.

Here is my video intention and research questions:

I'm feeling pulled toward connecting the advocacy I do around Reggio-inspired and other child-centered education that connects the head-heart-hand with the work I do educating people to talk about race. Ever since reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, I've been struck by his metaphor of the dream in which white people live our lives. I've thought of it as a bubble as well, one that seems protective but is really a fragile construction with a curved wall that distorts our view of the world outside it. Last fall, while marching in a #Justice4Jamar demonstration here in Minneapolis, I took this photo that to me sums up the idea of the bubble. Take a look at the people in the skyway, watching at a safe distance from the messy protest below, with their lattes and packages in hand. I used to be up there. But it feels good to be in the crowd, messy as it may be down here, with comrades from all races. How do I pull that energy and urgency into the beauty and calm of progressive education? 

I'll be listening for my emerging answer, along with people from around the world who want to focus on similar issues.

PS - if you want to participate in the MOOC, you'll need to start with the 90-minute introductory course, 

Awareness-Based Systems Change with u.lab - How to Sense and Actualize the Future

available here.

"A New World for the Teaching" - Belief Statements in the Des Moines Teacher Flash Mob

Have you seen the "Les Mis" flashmob video that has gone viral this week? Teachers in the Des Moines, Iowa school district broke into the final day of workshop week to perform a back-to-school version of One Day More. If not, take a minute to watch it, and scroll down on the YouTube page for the lyrics - as sung, they overlap so are hard to discern. 

It is well done, and even just looking at the surface level, and it speaks plenty of truth - these really are the thoughts that go through the heads of teachers I know, these are their cares and worries as they head into a new school year feeling like they have not and could never have enough time to truly be ready for the kids. Watch it once that way and have a good laugh. And then consider why it's funny - the idea of teachers being as committed to their beliefs as the French revolutionaries of Les Mis. Preposterous! In my work I see that teachers, as a group, are more willing to speak of their thoughts, feelings or actions than their beliefs - particularly white teachers who form the majority of our nation's teaching force. When educators do try to articulate beliefs, they are not often helped by their district's or school's mission statement - frequently just a lukewarm rehash of some platitudes about all children being ready for college and life, etc. Hardly something to spill blood over.

But, Is There More?

Looking underneath the seeming breeziness of this light parody and comparing it to the original, we can find a deeper truth. Hidden underneath the comic presentation are some underlying beliefs that fuel an actual controversy in education, something for which blood is indeed being spilt - though the casualties are often the students. 

In the play, One Day More is set on the eve of an uprising. The men with the flag are singing about their ideals and how the time has come for action - trying to recruit a young man who has been on the edge of their group. They are willing to risk their lives to end the inequities they see. In the play, most of them die. The parody lyrics of this group and their prospective recruit are: 

One more day before we start!  

                                 Do I join her for PD?  

Learning targets bring you freedom! 

                                 Shall I join their PLC?  

Common assessments shall be made. 

                                 Formative or summative?  

Will you come and plan with me?

So, the revolutionaries’ sleeper cell is now a PLC and their ideology is a very technical focus on learning targets and assessment literacy. Good ideas and ones that I’ve espoused in public before, but hardly something I’m willing to spill blood over. Hmm. Stay tuned for the deeper beliefs. 

Les Mis contrasts the revolutionaries with the aristocrats, older men who in the play fully believe that they will put down this nuisance of a revolution led by the younger generation. They dismissively call the revolutionaries “schoolboys,” and sing “they will wet themselves - with blood!” This group is clearly confident in themselves and their belief in the status quo. In the parody they sing:

One more day to education, 

We will help these students grow!

We'll be ready for these schoolboys,

We will teach what they don’t know!

To my mind, this actually is the sound of the education status quo - that mindset that students are empty vessels and we will just open up their heads and pour in what they don’t know. Notice who is in the position of power in this scenario. Like their counterparts in the play, these teachers believe their status is part of the natural order and don’t see anything wrong with their domination of the classroom. They come right out and say it. 

Comic Relief?

In the play the comic relief is a husband and wife who are essentially con artists, existing on the edges of society and bilking the unwitting, wealthy or poor. They survive no matter what turn the economy takes because there’s always someone to take advantage of, and they themselves don’t connect with either ideology. They are benevolently treated as kind of an inconvenient fact of life. In the parody, they appear to represent the early childhood teachers:

Watch 'em run around,

Catch 'em if they fall,

Making sure the classroom’s ready for them all!

Here’s a little crayon,

There’s a little glue,

Markers, pens, and pencils -

They know what to do!

Notice that the implied mindset of this group stands in opposition to that of the teacher aristocracy above. Rather than being empty vessels, these kids “know what to do.” The teacher’s job is to prepare a learning environment, allow children to be active and take chances, then act as the safety net - both intellectual and physical. Reggio, anyone? These teachers are the committed 

constructivists with a view of the child as competent - and notice that they are the comic relief. What’s going on in those rooms doesn’t seem very serious or connected to the common core, etc. I am reminded of the cartoon show, Recess, where the Kindergartners were portrayed as a tribe with rules of their own. (Of course the Recess depiction itself references both white society's appropriation and dismissal of indigenous ways, also not to be taken seriously in schools - but that's another post!) Furthermore, these early childhood teachers are so busy being and doing with their children that they don't always advocate well for their beliefs. I mean, just look at the woman in the picture, clearly an experiential teacher. Her high school AP and IB colleagues - the literal and figurative "upper class" of any school district - could learn a lot from her, but how many would take her seriously enough to listen? Or do they believe that this level of constructivism is essentially a long con?

Finally the Revolutionaries Spit It Out!

Next, the revolutionaries come back in with their underlying belief: 

There's a new world for the teaching! 

                              There's a new world to be taught!

OK, there's a subtle difference there between the revolutionary and the recruits - who is doing the teaching, the world or the teacher? The belief that is beginning to appear is truly revolutionary: the world is new and we as teachers must be responsive to it. We must understand that the students are already living in the new world and we need to meet them there. And this isn't always easy. This world is new in many ways that may be foreign to us - it constantly sprouts new technologies, is connected by social media, recognizes gender beyond a simple binary, and is full of the multiple perspectives of people of different colors. No one can know this whole world, or even the sum of the experiences of all the students in a single classroom - so we must turn the learning back over to them.

But then the old guard reiterates their position:

We’ll become these student’s heroes,

We will lead and they will go.

We will build them a bright future,

We know things that they don’t know!

Now they also have belied their underlying belief. The world isn’t new so much as there is a future to be built, by the teachers, for the students, using the teachers’ superior knowledge. For this to work, the students must follow the teachers as heroes. If we take this metaphor out to its logical end, we can’t then tolerate dissension in the ranks, and we will call it “insubordination,” because it is getting in the way not just of our teaching, but of all of their bright futures. 

So, What are the Patterns?

I want to be clear that these patterns show up across the country, not just in the particular district that produced this musical moment. But, as with all art, the composers may not be consciously aware of all the influences that they have channeled. As with education, the arts can be a provocation for social construction of knowledge. So here is what I see, through my critical lens as a white, female, Reggio-inspired educator: 

Those who believe in the heroic myth of the status quo do hold a beautiful vision of a bright future that must be built; but their deficit view of the child dictates a teacher-centric approach.  

The revolutionaries do sense that there’s a new world for the teaching but may or may not understand how to go about that.   

And, as in the original, the early childhood constructivists who don’t relish conflict go on surviving at the margins, keeping their heads down and ignoring the battle between the revolutionaries and the status quo. 

But, 
Imagine if we started the school year as true revolutionaries; 
Imagine a school where the mission statement was that inspiring; 
Imagine a district whose flag actually caused teachers to rally, to put an end to the inequities they see despite the highest of stakes. . . 

Common Ground on Common Principles: Reflections on Reggio & Essential Schools

Synergy: CES Common Principles & Reggio Key Principles

When I started teaching in an arts-centered, project-based school, I was addicted to that exhilarating "build the plane as you fly it" feeling. We all were. It was a grand experiment. And yet, we had the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) 10 Common Principles to guide us in our planning, to tell us how but not what to teach. When our district curriculum people scrutinized our program, we could remind them that our mission was to emphasize depth over coverage. When parents questioned where our "honors" classes were, we could proudly state that our goals applied to all our students. At about the same time, my son began Kindergarten in a Reggio-inspired program and, out of curiosity, I volunteered to be on the curriculum committee. What I found as I immersed myself in the Reggio philosophy blew me away! Me finding the Reggio principles was like an arctic explorer discovering a cache of nutritious food - something to sustain and inspire me as I continued in the work of student-centered, emergent, project-based education. Reggio helped me connect the dots to understand why some of our CES principles worked, how they fit together, and how they might be leveraged for even greater civic good. For some time I have wanted to sort out the commonalities between what I think of as "little kid" (Reggio-Inspired) and "big kid" (CES) emergent learning. What I found in this project reminds me that, just as with all our students, what we're hungry to learn is what we're ready to synthesize.

Learning From What Is, and Isn't Clustered:

The diagram above is my visualization of the interplay between the 10 Common Principles of CES and the Key Principles of the Educational Project of Reggio Emilia, Italy (from Reggio Children's 2010 booklet, Indications: Preschools and Infant-Toddler Centres of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia). Principles are italicized (Reggio) or not (CES) to show their origin. The commonalities of the two approaches are shown as clusters in the same petal of the flower, and written in the same color (I have continued these colors throughout the post so you don't have to keep scrolling back up). This is still a work in progress with some rough edges. For instance, neither CES nor Reggio Children cluster their principles into broader topics. The names I've chosen for some clusters above are a somewhat uneasy fit, e.g., Reggio educators don't really think about "Curriculum" in the way that has been instilled in US educators. Still, when I clustered like ideas from the two approaches there was a clear clump of the what and how of learning, so "Curriculum" was the closest English word for this petal. 

Documentation completely defies categorization. It permeates every category and supports each of the other principles. This concept can be one of the hardest ones for US teachers to really wrap their heads around, and now I see why: depending upon the context of your question about it, you could get a valid answer that makes you think it is really part of Curriculum, Civic Engagement, School Logistics, Student-Teacher Relationships or View of the Child. And, really it is - the danger is in thinking that it is only related to one or two of them. Interestingly, there is no analogous principle in CES. Perhaps this is because older students are often the ones responsible for gathering their own work into reflective portfolios. Still, this misses the entire teacher/team reflection of Reggio-style documentation. One interesting development in the US is the Critical Friends Group (CFG) work that the National School Reform Faculty and others are doing. CFGs may start with data, but their questioning approach moves quickly into the personal beliefs, assumptions and actions of the presenting teacher, supported by other teachers as “critical friends.” It has transformative potential exactly because it encourages the kind of reflection on student work that occurs in Reggio-style teacher reflections on Documentation. CES has embraced this approach and included several sessions on its use at this year’s Fall Forum.  

There are a handful of principles that have roots in more than one cluster. For instance, when CES schools "Model democratic and equitable practices," they are both structuring their Logistics of school governance and inviting Civic Engagement. Similarly, requiring students to Demonstrate Mastery via Exhibition  is definitely a CES Curriculum mandate and, if adults outside the school community participate, also a powerful Civic Engagement tool. Even more subtly, the design of the learning Environment is part of the Curriculum - indeed, Reggio-inspired teachers I know invest a good deal of their time in preparing their environments - but it both requires and reinforces a view of the Child as Competent. If you close your eyes and imagine children in an environment that "fosters interaction, autonomy, explorations, curiosity and communication," you can't help but see Competent children, going about the business of Constructing learning as Protagonists of their education. 

CES Word Cloud

Comparing Apples to Apples?
After first focusing in on the commonalities, I next zeroed in on the contrasts. I then realized I needed to shake up the familiarity of these phrases to get a sense of the overall nature of Reggio and CES principles - so I reframed each as a word cloud. In fact, as I took a deeper look at the actual language, I realized that CES' principles are generally much more concrete. More of the words in its cloud are adjectives delineating the processes of learning: personalized, democratic, demonstrated. Many of the principles can serve as goal statements for program evaluation: do you require Demonstration of mastery via exhibition, or not?  

Reggio Word Cloud

This is quite different from the bulk of the Reggio 

principles, more of which are abstract nouns: environment, interaction, protagonist - not to mention progettazione! The principles themselves tend to be more conceptual: Assessment as ongoing public dialogue and interpretation is more difficult to quantify than Demonstration of mastery, and is itself less goal-oriented. Even where Reggio principles are at their most concrete (Organization of work, space & time assumes shared responsibility) CES takes one step further into the "how" of it (Develop budgets & student loads that support the principles). Sometimes, an abstract Reggio principle implies the concrete CES ones. Within Student-Teacher Relationship, Reggio's notion of a Pedagogy of Listening can include all of the CES specifics: Personalized Learning, Teacher as Coach, and Tone of Decency,Trust and Unanxious Expectation.

It's no surprise that the more concrete principles arose in response to the US educational system, where school leaders needed to be able to parse their philosophies in concrete terms. What’s more, CES got its start in high schools - where, for example, that Tone of Decency, Trust and Unanxious Expectation had often been abandoned - so they spelled it out for us. By contrast, in most US early childhood programs there is at least an awareness that children are developing social skills, and that modeling of decency, trustworthiness and respect are necessary.

Iceberg Model 

Perhaps the reason that the concrete of CES can be implied in the abstract of Reggio can be explained by Stanley Herman's Cultural Iceberg model. The Reggio principles are the why of the matter, the values underpinning the visible iceberg of the school, the “if . . .” to the CES “then . . .”  If you see children as competent protagonists of their own learning, then your goals will apply to all. If you value shared inquiry across 100 languages in carefully prepared environments, then you'll end up with depth over coverage and students learning to use their minds well; what's more you'll have opportunities to see students demonstrating mastery. If you assume shared responsibility, then your teachers are going to have to be generalists. Try it yourself: say "If," and then read any italicized statement in the diagram; then say "then" and read any regular statement in the same color, and see where that thought experiment takes you. 

This is why the two methods complement each other so well. The Reggio philosophy conceptually articulates a set of values within which professionals, parents and children define their own work. These principles testify to a system that has continued to refine itself over more than half a century. It takes time. By contrast, CES is just celebrating its 25th anniversary - still quite a milestone in the consumer culture of US secondary education where reforms are often discarded long before they have a chance to take root. CES' principles walk the tightrope of defining the common work to jump-start the logistics of the reforms, but not prescribing a cookie-cutter product. 

And, after 25 years, perhaps the time has come for us all to articulate the values that underpin our observable structures. After all, our goals, technologies and structures can all be imposed from above; our beliefs can be questioned; but our values are our own. In reality, our values have always mattered deeply to us, but, as members of a culture that values all those overt things that top the iceberg, we have not taken the time to articulate the covert underpinnings. Fortunately, the educators of Reggio Emilia have.

The Arts, Four P's and the Plastic Brain

OK, I was a kid who was saved by the arts. No surprise, as an adult I'm an educator who believes in Arts Education. So I am always both saddened and surprised when I hear of others who have had a negative experience in the arts - that audition that publicly pointed out students' flaws; that program that was all about stars and status; those endless, mind-numbing drills; that teacher that believed in talent, not teaching. Why is it that some auditions can be positive experiences and others devastating? How can some teachers balance the "perspiration" with the "inspiration" of arts learning? Why is community so important in the arts?

I recently picked up a book that seamlessly connects with Dr. Rex Jung's work described in my Teaching Through The Prism posts,and begins to explain the above questions.

I picked it up while staying with my elderly parents, who are interested in keeping their brains as sharp as possible as they enter their 90's. They heard about it, as might some of you, on a PBS fund drive - it's Dr. Norman Doidge's The Brain that Changes Itself. I've included his site in my links at the right.

What Drs. Doidge and Jung have in common is an understanding that what we do, think and learn actually changes the structure of the brain. The new adage is, "Neurons that fire together, wire together." This phenomenon is referred to as brain plasticity - so, as entertaining as it is to think of the "plastic brain" as something you buy for Halloween decor, it's actually something you have in your cranium right now. What's revolutionary about this idea is that the brain is now known to be plastic through your whole life span. There are times when exponential change occurs - as in the building of language during early childhood and the development of judgment in the frontal lobe in adolescence. But, incremental change is always possible. And the key to continued learning is not only in practicing the skills and knowledge we currently have, but in continuing to learn and experience radically new things.

So what does it take to learn something - really master it - at the brain level? Dr. Jung gave us "Four P's" at Teaching Through The Prism:

1. Practice - Yes, Martha Graham was right, it does take 10 years to make a dancer. Or, more specifically 10,000 hours of practice to develop a skill. Ten-thousand! Actually, neurons begin to wire together to facilitate the coordination right away - it can be noticed in as little as 3 months. But, with this shallow pool of learning, the neurons can also unwire in a short time. The 10,000 hours gives you a wealth of connections, such that a short break won't significantly detract from your skill. Also, over the course of those years, skill and knowledge interconnect as you put new skills and ideas to work in useful ways. I'm thinking this is the subtlety, the nuance, perhaps the part we call wisdom. Interdisciplinary Artist and Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts founder Kristy Edmunds (an early advisor of the Vancouver School of Arts & Academics program) maintained that, although creative breakthroughs come when boundaries between disciplines are breached, both skill and integrity come when a discipline is taught first as an intact system. This is why our arts specialists are necessary in an arts-integration system. They need to demonstrate the intact system of the discipline.

"Teaching students to self-censor is much worse than any judgment passed on completed work because it leads to the loss of ideas before they are even born."

2. Play - Unstructured activity helps us achieve that state of transient hypofrontality 
(see my Teaching Thru the Prism 4 post for more on this). In addition to this being required for creativity, it's also required to put any kind of information together. 
There really is such a state as information overload and it occurs when the brain has not had time to down-regulate. Much has been made of this in early childhood learning of late, but it is important for us to understand that we all need this free play time in order to consolidate our learning and make solid, meaningful connections. By contrast, activities that bombard our brains with a constant stream of information take away from our processing time.For this reason, Dr. Jung referred to iPhones and the like as "autism generators." Yikes! The moral for all of us arts integrators is to keep encouraging play alongside its partner, skill.

3. Productivity - Jung defines this as "putting a lot of ideas out into the world." Again, the more ideas you have the more likely it is that one will be great. An important piece of this is getting things out before you think they are perfect. I have to say that I have known many students who seem unproductive at first glance - but when you ask them why they aren't turning things in, completing projects, or even brainstorming, they will say they don't want anyone to see their ideas before they are "done." One of the big contributions of the arts here is the work in progress showing, the critique session, the workshop. By carefully managing the development of critique skills, we can help students learn to share their bare bones, their blueprints, thumbnails, studies, études and sloppy copy - in and out of the arts. Of course, this is where building community comes in - a studio with a true sense of community can engender sharing the imperfect work; without it, students learn that it is too risky to share - in or out of the arts. This teaching students to self-censor is much worse than any judgment passed on completed work because it leads to the loss of ideas before they are even born. If ideas are not born they cannot be shared, critiqued or improved. 

"The arts are the enticement to grapple with difficult skills or understandings - but in the grappling we actually open a much larger door for our students."

4. Perseverance - that ability to keep trying, take a rejection, refine the work and put it back out there. The understanding that it's possible to fail forward. I always think of 
Wile E Coyote, who can fall off a cliff, get hit in the head with an anvil or experience an exploding stick of dynamite yet respond with a nonverbal, "Oh well, back to the drawing board."  Dr. Jung goes on to discuss the personal characteristic necessary to bounce back from failure - not self-esteem, which may be a hollow, praise-based confidence, but self-respect which he defined as a skill-based sense of dignity and integrity. We come by self-respect when we struggle with something truly challenging and master it. Dr. Doidge points out that the largest changes in brain structure come with learning something truly new and different. As we engage in difficult learning, our brain-level attention is activated in a way that allows us to learn more and faster. When this focus is activated, we increase our abilities to learn other things as well. Wow. Is this one of the secrets of arts learning - that it may turn on students' brains and facilitate other learning? I had always just thought it was about motivating students to persevere; the truth is it is both. The arts are the enticement to grapple with difficult skills or understandings - but in the grappling we actually open a much larger door for our students.

At the top of this post I posed some nagging questions about the difference between arts experiences that are life-affirming vs. those that are crushing. Is it simply the balanced application of the 4 P's across the learning experience? What do you think? What have you seen?

Why Should Coaches Care About That White Teacher's Look of Panic?

I empathized with that deer-in-headlights look right away. It was the look of a white teacher who has just realized how much she doesn't know and is right on the edge of panicking about where to find it out. 

I saw it plenty of times last November at the Coalition of Essential Schools "Fall Forum" 

Conference. The Coalition had recently merged with the Forum for Education and Democracy, whose august members include Pedro Noguera, Gloria Ladson-Billings and Linda Darling-Hammond. In practice this means that the equity-policy lens of the Forum will be merged with the practical in-school expertise of the Coalition. It also means that the Common Principles of the Coalition (whose wording is intentionally vague so as not to become a shallow, rigid checklist) are now subject to examination through that equity lens. Statements such as "Goals should apply to all students," and "The school should . . . challenge all forms of inequity," now give rise to the question, "Who do we mean by all?" And, more pointedly, "Who is the functional all of our school?"

And so, a lot of well-intentioned white teachers found themselves where I was back in my first Beyond Diversity class - smack in the middle of an identity crisis stemming from the simultaneous realizations that: 
1) White is an identity and 
2) I am white and 
3) I haven't examined what that means and 
4) My unexamined whiteness is throwing its weight around in my classroom in ways I don't even perceive yet. 

It's like finding out that someone has released a hungry tiger in your room, then realizing that you did it; moreover like a spirit animal, familiar or daemon, it is deeply tethered to you. You can't call the tiger-catcher because only you can tame it. At first all you can see is the sheer danger to your students - you begin to engage in the work for them. Eventually you come to see that the untamed tiger was harmful to you as well. 

But back to the premise of this post - Why should we care about that look of panic? As I see it there are two lame reasons and two strong ones. 

1) Because these people need external praise and encouragement to stick with the work.
Nope. I've recently read several posts from bloggers of color who rightly point out that whites shouldn't expect to "get a cookie" for doing the right thing. Besides, this is hard work, and if you're not internally motivated, no amount of praise will keep you at it. 

2) Because someone needs to swoop in and fix these teachers. 

Nope. Adults, like kids, needn't be "fixed," but can in fact grow and change. The best we can do to help is to help them identify the issues in front of them as what Reggio educators call "provocations."  A good provocation causes just enough cognitive dissonance to prompt the student (or teacher) to reexamine their assumptions.  

Provocations Intentionally Tip the Equilibrium

The difference between the work of a teacher with students and that of a coach with teachers is that the teacher may need to place provocations strategically in front of her students, whereas the coach simply frames as provocations the situations the teacher is already experiencing.

3) Because that look of panic is fueled by Stereotype Threat (see previous post). 
If left undisturbed it will just create a thicker cocoon of 
ineffective, generic niceness insulating the teacher 
from her own untamed tiger. And she needs to look 
her tiger in the eye in order to tame it. And she may need help seeing past the stereotype threat in order to do this.





4) Because that look of panic is a signal that she's ready to work more deeply.
This work has to be done in two phases, the woven warp and weft of constructing new understanding. We have to do the internal work, signaled to our consciousness by cognitive dissonance, of examining our own identities - and their consequences. And we have to reach across difference to do the external work of seeking others' perspectives. The look of panic means that the internal work has begun, and that by offering her the prospect of real growth, we model this transformational mindset.

As coaches of white teachers new to equity work, then, it is our job to provoke enough individual cognitive dissonance to motivate internal work; and at the same time to set up a growth mindset for the external work by making clear that the work we do in community is itself a learning process. Because the only thing worse than a white teacher frozen in panic is one who is caught in her cocoon.

More on Why We Segregate

I just heard last weekend's This American Life, all about how "voluntary" segregation got its start in this country - sadly, by being promoted by FDR's housing policies. It is no wonder so many of us grow up without tools to communicate across difference. Click here to listen to the podcast.