Goalbook’s Initial Approach to Anti-racism
Part 4: Learning From Equity In Action
Edited by Ryan Ingram
This is the fourth and final article of this series that addresses how the Goalbook team is making a concerted effort to learn about anti-racist teaching practices from the educators who are and have been engaging in anti-racist teaching. By learning from others, we hope to contribute to a more racially equitable US public school system through our own products and services.
View the other articles in the series here
I believe that Goalbook can have the greatest impact on racial equity by strategically focusing our efforts where we have the greatest leverage rather than attempting to address every area of racial inequity in the education system. As we do so, we must continue to learn and evolve what is the best part for Goalbook to play towards a school system where ALL students succeed.
I can summarize Goalbook’s initial approach to supporting a more racially equitable school system:
- Focus on the most powerful equity lever — the teacher.
- Prioritize improving Quality of Service and Culturally Informed Practice
Focus on the Most Powerful Equity Lever — the Teacher
Goalbook started with a deep conviction about how impactful an individual teacher can be. That is why our products and services have focused on supporting teacher practice since the beginning. We aren’t the only ones who believe in the power of a teacher. In fact, decades of educational research have documented and measured this power as well:
“When it comes to student performance on reading and math tests, teachers are estimated to have two to three times the effect of any other school factor, including services, facilities, and even leadership.”
RAND study, Teachers Matter: Understanding Teachers’ Impact on Student Achievement
Principal Pirette McKamey, who I presented in the first article of this series, saw Black students at her school being happy and high achieving in one class and those same students in the very next class being disengaged and making little academic progress. I’m sure her observation is one that many of us have also observed, can relate to, or have experienced ourselves as either educators or students. In fact, I can say that in my own experience teaching middle school, I might have often been the unfavorable comparison in Principal McKamey’s eyes many times.
Our focus on the power of the teacher and how they teach does not mean that creating a more equitable school system is solely the teachers’ responsibility. School funding, staff salaries/benefits, buildings and infrastructure, extracurricular activities, attendance and discipline policies, … there are many many other important levers of change. But I believe that Goalbook presents the school system with a unique theory of change specifically in how to improve teacher practice; by integrating professional development, implementation support, and instructional tools, we can help teachers turn best practice into classroom practice. And we can have the greatest impact by ensuring that the classroom practices we empower teachers to implement, are those that are shown to improve racial equity.
Prioritize Improving Quality of Service and Culturally Informed Practice
In part three of this series, I explored four different anti-racist teaching approaches that were useful to categorize different anti-racist teaching ideas and practices.
- Quality of Service
- Culturally Informed Practice
- Student Agency
- Social Justice
Of the four antiracist teaching approaches, I believe that Goalbook is best positioned to support districts, schools, and teachers in the Quality of Service and Culturally Informed Practice approaches. At a high level, Goalbook can integrate these approaches helping all students reach higher achievement and excellence by distributing general best practices more equitably (i.e. Quality of Service) as well as incorporating both specific content and instructional methods that leverage the distinctive cultural assets and experiences of Black students and other students of color (i.e. Culturally Informed Practice).
Pursuing the Quality of Service approach is really a reaffirmation of our existing work which has focused on supporting teachers in providing rigorous grade-level instruction while providing access and support for their diverse classroom and caseloads. Many of our school and district partners want us to engage in this work organization-wide.
Other times, the need is seen through the differences in student outcomes between schools, neighborhoods, or grade levels and across groups of students such as by disability or race. By continuing to invest in our ability to support districts in implementing effective instructional practices more evenly and consistently throughout their organization, we can improve our ability to positively impact equity.
Through our ongoing partnerships with third-party educational research organizations we’ve been able to more objectively measure and visualize the impact our work together with districts and schools is having on teacher practice and student achievement.
- Increased Usage of Goalbook Toolkit Leads to Increases in IEP Present Levels Quality, Student…
- Evidence of Impact: Goalbook Pathways Leads to Literacy Growth
We’ve also continued to see areas where our work can improve in our Quality of Service approach. For example, we recently audited our social, emotional, and behavior goals and discovered that many of our goals centered on student compliance rather than the best practice of centering social-emotional and behavior skills and capacities.
The Culturally Informed Practice approach is one that we have been pursuing, but truthfully, it has been underdeveloped relative to our work on Quality of Service. Therefore, it is the approach that we have a greater need to improve our internal skills, capacities, and systems around. Cultural difference makes a difference and I believe that Goalbook can have a contributing role in helping the diverse communities throughout the US feel seen, understood, and fully included in our schools and classrooms.
Years ago, we did an audit of the images and texts we used in our products (e.g. reading passages, math word problems). We discovered that most of our texts featured white male protagonists and most of our images had light skin tones — reflecting a disparity that has been long observed and documented in children’s literature in general. Even more of a surprise to us, were our math word problems, problems we wrote from scratch ourselves. There, we found that names of characters in the problem reflected a very narrow range of “typical” names and not the true variety of names of students in the school system. Thematically, we found that if the problem featured a boy or man he would likely be earning money, driving a car, … whereas if the problem featured a girl or a woman, she would be more likely to be baking cookies, buying clothes.
Since then, we’ve continued to evolve our editorial processes and content monitoring to ensure that we are continually increasing the diversity of what we are representing in our content. Most recently, we’ve enhanced our content analytics database and tracking systems to record multiple elements of representation including the race/ethnicity/geography of the central character as well as the author.
We also record multiple thematic elements of the passage to help us check that we are not reinforcing stereotypes and “single stories” of race, gender, … and instead be intentional about representing the variety and complexity that exists within all people groups and identities.
In the past year, various teams have also done their own research and learning around instructional practices that support Black students and students of color. Important work has emerged from these internal learnings:
- Our Spotlight Webinar Series for special education administrators feature speakers such as Andratesha Fritzgerald (author of Antiracism and Universal Design for Learning) and Sowmya Kumar (president of Systemic Special Education Support) who will be sharing their expertise on topics such as How Your Teachers Can Honor and Empower All Students by Design and The New Blueprint for Creating Inclusive, District-Wide Practices that Yield Better Outcomes for All Students.
- We’ve hosted a practical and action-oriented 3-part webinar series for educators, Using Goalbook to Support Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning featuring some new and enhanced practical strategies in the areas of academics, social-emotional learning, and culturally responsive instruction.
- Internal peer-to-peer learning sessions we refer to as “Just and Equitable Classrooms’’ focused on Black pedagogy and practitioners. Emerging from these sessions were new UDL strategies and resources such as Windows and Mirrors, Restorative Questions, and Co-generative Dialogues.
A significant area of improvement when it comes to the Culturally Informed Practice approach that we have been aware of and are just starting to push forward on is that our products have, to this point, assumed an English-only instructional environment. Educators who teach in bilingual settings have long shared with us their experience of having to painstakingly translate our materials — unfortunately, an experience they also experience widely and not just with our products.
To be honest, this isn’t just a technical or cost issue for us, it is personnel capacity and speaks to the importance of diverse teams. Our content team while all having full-time public school teaching experience generally lacks experience in teaching in a language other than English, including myself. In 2022, we plan to open new full-time roles for educators who have taught in bilingual / dual-language instructional settings so that we can begin offering content in languages other than English.
Final Thought
I came across this quote from the book, Unconscious Bias in Schools, I find it extremely compelling as a “reality check” for myself and Goalbook to keep in mind as we continue to improve our ability to support antiracist teaching in the school system:
Along with fair treatment, students need excellent teaching, a quality curriculum, high standards, and nurturing school communities. One state education leader told us, “We don’t need a bleeding heart principal who talks on and on about racial bias but can’t lead a school. My kids deserve better than that.”
– Tracey Benson and Sarah Friarman, Unconscious Bias in Schools (p 28)
I interpret the quote above also as a warning. To not forget that actually being anti-racist, i.e. achieving a more racially equitable outcome in the real world, requires a comprehensive set of skills that are executed with a high level of excellence — it seems that one cannot be ineffective and anti-racist at the same time.
I am committed and compelled to make sure that Goalbook has an antiracist impact on the school system. I hope you are too. I hope the ideas and approaches here will be useful for us moving forward so that we have a more equitable school system for our Black students and other students of color and in doing so, get closer to a system where ALL students succeed.
Read the other articles in this series on Learning from Equity in Action.
Follow our publication Innovating Instruction to stay up to date on all our product updates and to read about the impact Goalbook is having on our partner districts.
