Marin Community Foundation Summer Workshop

1. Marin Community FoundationSummer Workshop Building Teams for Educational Equity Kathleen Osta kathleen@osta-associates.com

2. Journal Prompts ∂ Where does your commitment to children and to educational equity come from? ∂ What life experiences have been most significant in shaping your commitments?

3. Welcome and Overview of Day

4. Constructivist Listening Guidelines Each person... has equal time to talk. does not interrupt, give advice or break in with a personal story. agrees that confidentiality is maintained. does not criticize or complain about others during their time to talk.

5. Building an effective team for equity focused work Dyad Prompt: What hopes and fears do you have about participating on this team to take up this work?

6. Willing to Be Disturbed Sometimes we hesitate to listen for differences because we don’t want to change. We’re comfortable with our lives, and if we listened to anyone who raised questions, we’d have to get engaged in changing things…yet, most of us do see things in our life or in the world that we would like to be different. If that’s true, we have to listen more, not less. And we have to be willing to move into the very uncomfortable place of uncertainty. We can’t be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion: cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for the new. Of course it’s scary to give up what we know, but the abyss is where newness lives. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing. If we can move through the fear and enter the abyss, we are rewarded greatly. We rediscover we’re creative.

7. Session Learning Outcomes • Build knowledge of key components of high performing teams working toward educational equity; • Share and learn key practices, tools, and protocols that support effective team development and sustained equity work; and • Come together to form a team;identify next steps for team development.

8. Community Agreements Show up (or choose to be present) Pay attention (to heart and meaning) Tell the truth (without blame or judgment) Be open to outcome (not attached to outcome)

9. Team Work Time Depending where you are as a team, take time as a team to: • Complete the Reflection Tool and discuss your reflections with one another • Select one of the “elements” in the Action Plan and discuss and plan your work in this area

10. Building an effective team for equity focused work Reflection questions…find a partner from another team: • How did you experience this team work time? • What conditions supported it to be productive? • Where did you see the Community Agreements showing up? • Where did you get stuck?

11. Building an effective team for equity focused work Call up a positive experience you have had leading or participating on a racially or culturally diverse team. • What made this experience positive? • What conditions allowed for this? • What role did you play?

12. Building an effective team for equity focused work Trios 1- Each person take 2 minutes to share the positive experience and what conditions led to the team being effective. 2-Discuss any patterns that you heard in your trios.

13. Building an effective team for equity focused work Whole Group Trios share out any patterns or reflections [Chart conditions]

14. Reflection on Community “Community isn’t always synonymous with warmth and harmony. Politeness is often a veneer for understanding, when in reality it masks uncovered territory, the unspeakable pit that we turn from because we know the pain and anger that can dwell there. It is important to remind ourselves that real community is forged out of struggle. This is the crucible from which a real community grows.” -Linda Christensen Reading, Writing, and Rising Up

15. Building an effective team for equity focused work Key Ideas • Teams focused on equity assume that there will be conflict and strong emotions • To make progress on equity issues, effective teams plan for and use structures to ensure that both conflict and the expression of emotion is productive

16. Clarity of purpose and shared goals (be explicit!) Community Agreements Clear team member roles & responsibilities Agreed upon decisionmaking processes Structures & routines that tend to the affective and cognitive (check-ins, pair shares, dyads, appreciations, etc.) Diverse, distributed leadership* Formal time to reflect on progress toward goals (celebrate!) and team learning Practices and Tools for Equity Focused Teams

17. Team Time Discussion Prompts: 1. To what extent do the proposed Community Agreements support us to work together effectively? 2. What adjustments or additions to the Community Agreements might we need to support our work?

18. Team Time Reflection If you were the facilitator, take a moment to reflect on your facilitation. What do you feel you did well? What might you do differently the next time? If you were a participant, take a moment to reflect on your own participation. Which of the Community Agreements worked well for you? Which one was more challenging? How might you approach your participation differently the next time?

19. Turning to One Anothersimple conversations to restore hope to the future “Human conversation is the most ancient and easiest way to cultivate the conditions for change. If we can sit together and talk about what’s important to us, we begin to come alive. We share what we see, what we feel, and we listen to what others see and feel. . . The simplest way to begin finding each other again is to start talking about what we care about.” Wheatley, 2002