Leading through Scholarship by Michelle Li and Edna Attias

I was invited to serve as third author on a paper on entitled “Imagining and Enacting Liberatory Pedagogical Praxis in a Politically Divisive Era,” along with Dr. Camille Wilson and Margaret Hanna. This paper has many nuggets for educators who lead for equity! The following is the abstract: “In this essay, the authors challenge the myth of political neutrality in teaching and emphasize the urgent need for teachers to imagine and enact liberatory pedagogical praxis that sensitively responds to the nation’s divisive political climate. They point to U.S. political shifts and changing federal policies in education as catalysts for the social and cultural exclusion of vulnerable children of color. They suggest how teacher educators and in-service teachers can use media sources that reveal how children experience and navigate increasingly xenophobic and polarizing political climates as critical texts. Critical pedagogy and civic education scholarship offer frames to further explain how such texts serve to enhance students’ learning, sense of belonging, and their ability to contribute to a democratic and just society. The authors conclude with strategies for supporting teachers’ development and advocacy.” My role in the paper was to serve as a thought partner who has deep practitioner experience in classrooms and schools. It can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FCQFMATKDCMZFUPHTHDG/full?target=10.1080/10665684.2019.1656563 as well as by emailing me directly michelleli@clee-ri.org.

Our School Climate Transformation (SCT) network fits perfectly with my dissertation since both explore the relationship between social-emotional skills and students’ academic achievements as the ultimate outcome. The SCT network is learning how to improve school climate and the social-emotional (SEL) piece is a big factor of school climate. Many times, schools try to address SEL in order to improve or control students’ behaviors.

However, in our network, we are looking to address SEL learning in order to improve students’ ability to access to higher-level cognitive skills that are aligned and demanded by the Common Core and NGSS. The idea is that once students explicitly learned the skills needed in order to be academically successful as 21st-century learners, the climate of the school will transform to a more scholarly one and will be owned by well-adapted and balanced students.

My dissertation tests this hypothesis by researching teachers who have been trained with SEL pedagogy and looking at their pedagogical practices. Do the SEL structures and explicit learning carry over to the way teachers teach academic content? For example: Are they using reflection as a tool? Are students in the center of planning and organizing their learning? Also, how do students access the cognitive tasks? Do they seem to have a sense of self-efficacy? Do they manage their emotions when encountering a difficult task? Are they able to take the perspective of others? etc.

In our last SCT network day participants engaged in an academic task of analyzing a text in small groups, and then identified the Rhode-Island SEL standards and skills that they specifically accessed during this task. The insights were large in magnitude as participants are adults who on average accessed about 10 skills within a 30 minute period. This is what we expect of our students as a result of the instructional shifts of the Common Core. Yet, oftentime we take these skills for granted, teach them in isolation, or give consequences to students who do not display them. How equitable is that?