Frameworks
Our Leading for Equity Framework provides a frame of reference that enables leaders to navigate the complex territory of equity challenges and to develop the capacity to engage in purposeful leadership action. In its simplest form, the Framework helps build habits of mind that are continually in practice. In its more elaborated form, it provides a set of tools, frames and processes that leaders can use in their work.
There has never been a greater time to come together and rebuild the education system into one that truly serves every student. We partnered with the BELE Network to develop this guide to support those inspired to get the future right for our young people.
Coaching Framework & Core Beliefs
Coaches for Equity can help catalyze and influence the emergence of living systems that create opportunity and value for historically marginalized communities. View NEP’s framework for developing a vision for equity in your coaching. Use this resource when you are planning your own path forward with the people you manage, supervise, coach and support.
Constructivist Listening
Constructivist listening is an effective strategy for engaging in conversations that are both intellectually demanding and emotionally challenging. It is distinct from most forms of listening in that its purpose is for the benefit of the speaker, not the listener.
Educational Equity Definition
Educational equity means that each child receives what they need to develop to their full academic and social potential.
Implicit Bias and Structural Racialization
In order to lead to meaningful change, an exploration of implicit bias must be situated as part of a much larger conversation about how current inequities in our institutions came to be, how they are held in place, and what our role as leaders is in perpetuating inequities despite our good intentions.
Effects of Oppression on the Learner’s Brain
Negative experiences have a powerful impact on the human brain, which is wired to recognize threats more readily than rewards. Research in neuroscience has revealed that the brain responds to perceived social threats in the same manner as threats to survival. For marginalized students who are highly attuned to potential dangers, survival mechanisms can kick in quickly in response to a perceived social threat.
Learning Partnerships
Each school has a “sphere of success,” a set of students for whom current practices are working to get on the path to college and career-readiness. Regardless of how successful a school is, not every child is within its sphere of success. In order to bring increasing numbers of young people into that sphere, educators have to learn to do something differently through fostering intentional “learning partnerships” with specific students.
Lens of Systemic Oppression
The lens of systemic oppression is a lens we intentionally employ to sharpen our focus on the ways in which any given form of oppression (race, gender, class, language, sexual orientation, etc) may be negatively impacting people’s ability to make progress on the things they care about and/or preventing individual or collective action toward achieving a particular goal.
Levels of Healing
Healing is capacity building - when we attend to healing we expand our ability for ourselves, our organizations, and our movements to evolve and grow, and it ensures that change is sustainable, grounded, and rooted in community needs, desires, and dreams. Explore four levels of healing - individual, interpersonal, institutional, and structural.
Liberatory Design Introduction
Liberatory Design is an approach to addressing equity challenges and change efforts in complex systems. It is a process and practice to:
Create designs that help interrupt inequity and increase opportunity for those most impacted by oppression
Transform power by shifting the relationships between those who hold power to design and those impacted by these designs
Generate critical learning and increased agency for those involved in the design work.
SCARF Summary
Adapted from David Rock, neuroleadership.com.
Over the last two decades, advances in neuroscience have provided remarkable new insights into human behaviors and experiences based on a deeper understanding of the brain. One of the most striking findings from this work is that the brain responds to perceived social threats in the same manner as threats to survival. This means that a social threat can trigger a survival response (such as “fight, flight or freeze”) as easily as a threat to one’s physical well-being.
Seven Circle Model
The Six Circle model (Dalmau Consulting, 2016) can be envisioned as a Seven Circle model when considering equity, power, and other social dynamics at play.
Social Emotional Learning and Equity
The promise of social and emotional development as a lever for increasing educational equity rests on the capacity of educators to understand that all learning is social and emotional and all learning is mediated by relationships that sit in a sociopolitical, racialized context – for all children, not just those who are Black and brown.