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.