We began our systemic partnership with the district in 2014 after conducting introductory racial equity training in the region to address stark racial disparities in the Minneapolis-St. Serving 5,000 students, the district includes four elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. Louis Park Public Schools is a small public school district in a first-tier suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The following are two examples of the systemic partners we have worked with.
#Glen singleton courageous conversations professional
This begins with racial equity professional learning at the executive levels of the district and then strategically moves to scale for schools, educators, families, and communities. Systemic partners are school districts in which leaders commit to using our tools to develop and use a racial equity lens to facilitate districtwide improvement and strategic planning. In communities around the country and the world, we work with systemic partners to implement Courageous Conversation. As noted leadership and management consultant Margaret Wheatley reminds us, “Human conversation is the most ancient and easiest way to cultivate the conditions for change - personal change, community, and organizational change.” LESSONS FROM PARTNER DISTRICTS Specifically, Courageous Conversation engages those who won’t talk, sustains the conversation when it gets uncomfortable or diverted, and deepens the conversation to the point where authentic understanding and meaningful actions can occur.Īs schools engage in open and honest dialogue about racial achievement disparities, they can identify and effectively address obstacles to success that exist for all students. With these tools, educators can participate in interracial dialogue about race, develop racial understanding, and address racial issues in schools. It offers school systems a protocol and strategy to exercise the passion, practice, and persistence necessary to examine systemic inequity. Courageous Conversation is a dialogic approach to doing so. To systemically transform professional learning to integrate a racial equity lens, we need to address this paucity of dialogue about race. For example, “broadening” - that is, shortening - the term “racial equity” to just “equity” reflects a paucity of knowledge, skill, and will to engage with race. The language in these statements is revealing. This is especially true when those beliefs have been polished with the superficial and aspirational jargon of mission and vision statements. But in 25 years of working with schools and organizations in the United States and abroad, I have learned that educational systems are deeply challenged to examine their beliefs about racial equity. Schools cannot achieve racial equity without explicit processes for leaders and staff to examine their personal, professional, and organizational beliefs about race.
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