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.

Stereotype Threat & White Teacher Inaction

Ever since I first heard about Claude Steele’s research with college and high school students, I have thought about Stereotype Threat applying to students (Details in Whistling Vivaldi). But in his recent lecture, Steele called out a form of it that gets to the root of the adult choices that lead to neighborhood and school resegregation, and that I believe explains why it is so hard for well-intentioned white adults to work across difference to create equitable schools. Ironically, the more concerned a white person is about seeming racist, the more she will buffer herself from situations in which her conversation might make her seem to reinforce the stereotype.

Remember that there are three conditions that allow stereotype threat to take hold:

1) A negative stereotype exists about one of your identities

2) You are engaged in an activity in which you want to do well and beat the stereotype

3) You encounter a difficult, frustrating level of this activity

"What is the role of Stereotype Threat in interracial interactions?" 

This was the animating question for Steele and his graduate students as they started out this phase of research. They devised a test using white males - a group for whom the stereotype “racist” could apply. Their pool was students at 

Stanford University,where their preliminary research showed most students would not want to be labeled as racists. And they gave these students a task that would probably be more difficult than they were accustomed to - talking about racial profiling with two black strangers. They knew the students would likely be unused to such interactions because an earlier survey had shown that the average Stanford student has less than 1 friend of another race among their 6 closest friends. 

In the experiment individual white male Stanford students were told that they would be discussing either the relatively innocuous topic, "Love and relationships" or the more charged "Racial profiling." The white subjects were then shown photos of two discussion partners. In one case, the discussion partners were also white men; in the other, they were both black men. The actual experiment came when the experimenter stood up, ostensibly to go and get the discussion partners. Before leaving the room he would say, "Would you do me a favor and arrange those three chairs for your group?" 

Perhaps not surprisingly, white men who were told they would be chatting with other white men grouped the chairs closely together - not much difficulty expected here. The same applied when they thought they would be discussing Relationships with either white or black men - no stereotype would apply here. But if they thought they would be discussing racial profiling with blacks, all three conditions were met and they put their own chair farther away from the other two. 

To check for the presence of the stereotype in the men’s minds, Steele and his group added a word-completion task that included words that could be completed with terms related to racial stereotyping or not, for instance, "Rac_ _ t" could be "Racist" or “Racket.” This came directly after the subjects were informed of their 

"What we have here is a failure to communicate"

partners and topics.Participants who expected to talk about profiling with black partners clearly had the white racist stereotype on the brain as they completed significantly more blanks with racism-related words. And, the number of stereotype related words was positively correlated with the distance at which they set their chair from the others - as in, the more I think about racism the less I want to blow it in this discussion. This fear of fulfilling the stereotype - just as with women and math tests, black students and high level verbal tests, and all the other cases - operates subconsciously.

This is, as Steele puts it, "a glum conclusion" for our country. No wonder we choose to live, shop, eat and worship with people who look like us. And no wonder so many white educators will, on a subconscious level, do anything to avoid working across difference, even though this is absolutely necessary in schools of today - let alone those of tomorrow! The fact is that there are many, many white educators in our country for whom the stereotype, the desperate need to break it, and the difficulty and frustration of doing so have presented themselves. This makes for a preponderance of teachers who are susceptible to this type of Stereotype Threat. 

A Dweckian Antidote

So how do we get past that? The researchers - as have many professional developers - tried stating at the outset that they "valued multiple perspectives," or that participants "would not be judged" by their remarks. Neither of these techniques worked, and sometimes they even led to chairs being placed farther apart. But, really, why should people believe these things unless they have already experienced them over time and in community?

Next, Steele and his colleagues tried using the work of Stanford colleague Carol Dweck. They tried to invoke her Growth Mindset by telling participants: 

1) That tension is natural in a discussion of racial profiling

2) That it is difficult for everyone, and 

3) That participants should treat the conversation as a learning experience, both about racial profiling and about how to talk about charged subjects with people who might have different perspectives. 

Voila! The white participants under this condition moved their chairs as close to black partners as to white partners. They were ready to work across difference. Steele and his group had created conditions wherein racially isolated whites could have the subconscious permission to enter into a difficult and potentially frustrating conversation with partners of another race. But, as the children and teachers of Reggio Emilia have been telling us for some time, these tangled and difficult learning conversations are necessary:

Tangled, Difficult, Necessary Conversation

Next time I’ll explore more about how to use this breathtaking finding in coaching our white colleagues to become the allies they want to be. 

Mining to Farming: A Paradigm Shift to Close the Gaps

I once attended a workshop with Dr. Pedro Noguera, during which the noted education author and NYU professor of Sociology joked that he still didn't quite have the teaching metaphor that we could all relate to. He tried some sports ones, then moved into gardening, still not quite fully embodying his ideas. I'd like to offer an image used by my former Blake School colleague, Rand Harrington: moving from "mining" to "farming." Rand used this to describe the difference between the hiring process and the staff development process. Hiring is much like mining - you delve into a mountain of resumes, tossing aside anything that's not the element you're looking for. Hopefully you end up with a gem of a teacher. But in the staff development process, you become more like a farmer - watering, feeding, weeding, sometimes pruning, and generally doing what you can to help him or her grow. 


This metaphor seems even more fit to the paradigm shift that must happen in teaching if we are truly to reform an education system that was formulated to create and sustain inequity. After all, wouldn't you call a system in which the goal was to sort and measure, in which the products that don't measure up are discarded, and in which the most resources are allocated to the most productive vein a "mining" system? And isn't a system in which the goal is cultivation to maximize future productivity, and in which resources are allocated according to need more like "farming?" To take the metaphor even further, I believe we need to develop a sustainable farm of education, one that knows that it is part of an ecological community and leverages the relationships within it - as opposed to a monoculture that must apply ever more toxic substances to ensure a harvest of identical and travel-tough, if bland, crops. 

Clues from Language, Links to Mindset
Let's take a look at language that teachers use to see if we can discern the dominant metaphor of their system. Often in conservatory style programs there are discussions about "stealing" students from other programs, leading staff members to "guard" their rosters. Students with latent talent are "diamonds in the rough" who just need "a little polish." All of this implies a mining system where there is ownership of a scarce resource; 
underlying this is a talent mindset - a belief that intelligence and talent are fixed quantities. 

Stanford researcher Dr.Carol Dweck has described this as a "fixed intelligence" mindset. By contrast, her research shows that all the intelligences are able to grow via training and practice. I'm reminded of Kennedy Center Arts Consultant Deb Brzoska's comment, "Show me a 5th grader with 'talent' and I'll show you a 5th grader with private lessons." This became a guiding principle of the admissions process at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics (VSAA). Rather than skill, we looked for passion and excitement about the arts. We knew that where there was a will to grow on the part of the student, we as a staff could cultivate that growth. 

Brzoska, who was the founding principal of VSAA, understood the power of language to direct mindset. She actually fined staff for using the term "My" in relationship to the school. We had a "My-jar" into which we had to place a quarter any time we referred to "My students," "My program," etc. They were "Our" students, and time that our shared students spent in another teacher's class was understood to contribute to their "Growth." All classes in any discipline were referred to "Skills" classes, where students could "Develop" artistic or academic competencies. All of these imply a farming system, undergirded by the growth mindset. This, according to Dweck, is necessary for the development of talent and intelligence.  

But What About the Gap?
What Dr. Noguera was trying to metaphorically describe in his workshop (as well as his book) was a way of teaching that could ameliorate the gaps we currently see.

Yes, gaps, plural. Noguera and co-author A.Wade Boykin brilliantly split the achievement gap into several component gaps so that we can understand some of its complexity. Once the parts are untangled, it is easier to understand how to address each one - and easier to see how many well-intentioned reforms that target one dimension may derail another. Think of them each as a former mine site that needs to be replanted and carefully restored into a balanced ecosystem.These sub-gaps include: 

• the Preparation Gap 
• the Opportunity Gap 
• the Discipline Gap 
• the Parent-School Gap
• the Ability-Performance Gap

For now, let's focus on just one: the Ability-Performance Gap, defined as that place from which students check out. Noguera suggests that to combat this we must make learning more active and relevant. In the schools at which I've had the privilege to work, Arts Integration is the strategy we've adopted for this. And it works. We may have drama, but not boredom. We may have teen anxt, but it's meaningful. We may have what looks like chaos, but it's creative chaos and if you look for it, you'll see both the structure undergirding it and the learning students are constructing within it.


Still, there are arts programs that are vibrantly active and clearly relevant to the few, selected (read: Mined) students within them. Here's where promoting closure of one gap can magnify another. These programs may eliminate any Ability-Performance Gap, but open an Opportunity Gap for students whose "talent" is not obvious at the outset.

Even in programs that eschew the conservatory approach in favor of skill development, hence bypassing the Opportunity Gap, there is a corner of the White, Western-European arts culture that can unwittingly contribute to the Ability-Performance Gap. We often have rules, explicit or unwritten, against "poaching" students from our colleagues' programs. These may not be a holdover from the conservatory paradigm, but rather a nod to diminishing FTE in the arts as well as sensitivity to students' crowded schedules. The gist is that teachers are not allowed to recruit students from others' classes or programs. Sometimes this gets generalized to include encouragement to continue the study of a discipline. I once moderated a heated discussion at a school over one teacher's written comment along the lines of, "I hope to see you in Level 2 next year." While it is unhealthy for kids to be placed in a tug-of-war between teachers, there's a big difference between that and encouragement. That difference is a focus on the student, rather than the program or the teacher. Many successful adults tell stories of that teacher who saw their development and encouraged them to keep on, often just when they were doubting themselves. We owe it to kids to do the same - and then to step back and let them decide how and when to act on our encouragement and possibly that of others. Isn't this just farming at its best? Applying a touch of fertilizer, watering a curious root, pulling a weed of self-doubt? (And don't get me started on heaping up the manure of false praise to keep a student in your program . . . it only burns them in the end). 

As we encourage our students to continue in the active programs they find relevant, we'll be helping to close the Ability-Performance Gap.