Take Action
Change Starts With You
All of our individual actions matter. Together, we can shift the trajectory for students in this country when we teach and lead for equity.
- On this page, we offer a few ways to support your current practice with tools or ideas from the framework. As we learn more from your experiences and those of your students, we look forward to sharing additional resources and stories.
How to Use
There are many entry points to Teaching for Equity depending on your role, identity, context, and experiences. To get you started, we’ve named a few guiding ideas to keep in mind!
Get Started.
Read through the “Framework At-A-Glance” to understand how the five strands braid together.
Reflect on the Inner Resources.
Which beliefs come easiest to you and which ones challenge you the most? Why? How have your own educational experiences influenced your beliefs? Self-awareness and an understanding of our own experiences will help us to see and build on our strengths and also to be mindful of what we need to take sustained action.
Listen to Students.
No matter your role, start a conversation with the students in your lives about their educational experiences. Ask them a couple of the guiding questions. Listen to what students have to say, which experiences are meeting their needs, and where they want to see or experience something different. Let us lead with students’ voices and opinions, not our own.
Try it Out.
There’s no one right way to use this framework. Once you’ve reflected on the beliefs and connected with students, here are some ideas for how you might try using ideas from the framework in practice:
Ideas by Role
If you’re a classroom teacher…
- Select a classroom strand and use the guiding questions to reflect on your instruction. What strengths do you see? Where are areas of opportunity for you?
- Select a practice to try out based on your reflection. Commit to trying something new each week, and invite your students to give feedback on how their experiences change as a result.
If you support teachers…
- Create space for open and honest discussion about strengths and opportunities.
- Celebrate and share examples of teachers who are developing or exemplifying equitable beliefs and practices to honor growth and build collective wisdom. There is also power in learning from past mistakes.
- When observing and coaching teachers, look for, celebrate, and build on their strengths. Especially amid periods of change, it’s vital to create space for teachers to reflect and leverage their strengths.
If you work at the school or system level…
- Reflect on your school or system’s current instructional vision as well as the current experiences of students. Where do you see evidence of the five strands of the framework coming to life? Where is there room to grow?
- Celebrate and share examples of teachers, leaders, and schools who are developing or exemplifying equitable beliefs and practices to honor growth and build collective wisdom.
Learn With Us
To bring the ideas in Teaching for Equity to life, we are hosted a series of free learning events this spring. These discussion focus on equity from different vantage points, starting first with students.
Watch all three on demand now!
Long-Term: Make A Plan
Our Theory of Action tool provides a method for setting goals that cut across student outcomes, teacher practice, and collaborative planning and practice.
It’s designed to jump start a variety of planning processes tied to instruction. Try incorporating it into an upcoming professional development after you read through the Teaching for Equity framework.
Share Your Learning
Are you seeing changes in your classroom (and yourself) from using the practices in Teaching for Equity? Are there others you would want to recommend to fellow educators? Let us know!
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