Creating and Sustaining Culturally Proficient Leadership Practices

1. Creating and Sustaining Culturally Proficient Leadership Practices CAPEA Spring Conference Delores B. Lindsey Associate Professor California State University San Marcos

2. SessionPurposes: • To apply the lens of Cultural Proficiency to view our work with today’s school leaders, and • To embrace Cultural Proficiency as our personal work that builds upon our assets and informs our continued professional growth.

3. In appreciation of the gifts from: Terry Cross

4. Raymond Terrell KikanzaNuri Robins Delores B. Lindsey Randall B. Lindsey Brenda CampbellJones Franklin CampbellJones Laraine Roberts Richard M. Martinez Stephanie Graham R. Chris Westphal, Jr. Cynthia Jew Linda Jungwirth Jarvis Pahl Keith Myatt Michelle Karns Diana Shephens Our Community of Practice

5. Cultural Proficiency • It is an inside-out approach and the theme for our sessions together • It is a world view. • It is about being aware of how we work with others. • It is about being aware of how we respond to those different from us.

6. Cultural Proficiency is • Values and beliefs held by individuals, and • The policies and practices of a school or organization that enables that person or school to interact effectively in a culturally diverse environment.

7. Leading today means . . . • Knowing and using standards-based instructional leadership skills • Understanding high stakes accountability and responsibility • Engaging the community in new and different ways • Leading change as “process” focused on clear outcomes for all

8. CPSELs: Standard 4 • … an educational leader who promotes the success of all students by collaborating with families and community members, responding to diverse community interests and needs, and mobilizing community resources.

9. NCATE: Standard 4 • NCATE expects that a professional education unit’s conceptual framework include a commitment to preparing candidates to support leaning for all students. • Standard 4: Diversity expects that the unit designs, implements and evaluates curriculum and experiences for candidates to acquire and apply knowledge, skills and dispositions necessary to help all students learn. It includes the expectation that candidates have the opportunity to interact with candidates, faculty, and P–12 students from diverse groups.

10. DIVERSITY Is Not a problem Is Not a deficit Is Not a program DIVERSITY Is an opportunity Is an asset Is! What’s diversity got to do with it?

11. Culture and diversity include all shared characteristics of human description • Race • Ethnicity • Age • Gender • Geography • Ancestry • Language • History • Sexual orientation and identity • Faith • Physical and mental abilities • Occupations • Affiliations

12. In today’s challenging times, • Leadership is about . . . • disturbing the system, and • creating conditions

13. Leadership in context • Professional Learning Communities • Teacher Leadership development • SAIT/DAIT work • Relationships with school communities • Social Networks and Learning Communities • Your work and your learning

14. Telling Our Stories • Individually: quick write, talking points • In groups of 3: to the extent you are comfortable, tell your stories

15. The Danger of a Single Story

16. Telling our Stories • First story: What happened? • Second story: What are you feeling? • Third story: Finding the balance of perspectives and feelings • Leaders are intentional: Engage the community from the teaching stance or the learning stance?

17. The Cultural Proficiency tools • The Guiding Principles Underlying values of the approach • The Continuum Language for describing both healthy and non-productive policies, practices and individual behaviors •  The Essential Elements Five behavioral standards for measuring, and planning for, growth toward cultural proficiency • The Barriers Four caveats that assist in responding effectively to resistance to change

18. Name 5 Things List 5 things about you, that if taken from you, you would not be the same person you are today.

19. The Guiding Principles • Culture is a predominant force. • People are served in varying degrees by the dominant culture. • Acknowledge group identities. • Diversity within cultures is important. • Respect unique cultural needs. The Guiding Principles are the core values, the foundation upon which the approach is built.

20. Guiding Principles, con’t • The best of both worlds enhances the capacity of all. • The family, as defined by the culture, is the primary system of support in the education of children. • School systems must recognize that marginalized groups have to be at least bicultural. (‘Community-centric’ vs ‘School-centric’) • Schools must recognize and adjust to effects of historical oppression - over representation in special education and under representation in gifted programs

21. Social justice is . . . • Social justice: The fair distribution of advantages, assets, and benefits among all members of a society. • Alberta “maverick” teachers • http://www.glenbow.org/mavericks/teacher/english/thm_poli/glossary.html

22. Social justice is … • Social justice: Refers to the concept of a society that gives individuals and groups fair treatment and an equitable share of the benefits of society. In this context, social justice is based on the concepts of human rights and equity. Under social justice, all groups and individuals are entitled equally to important rights such as health protection and minimal standards of income. The goal of public health — to minimize preventable death and disability for all — is integral to social justice. • U.S. Public health http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/ccph-cesp/glos-r-z-eng.php

23. Social justice is . . . • Social justice is also a concept that some use to describe the movement towards a socially just world. In this context, social justice is based on the concepts of human rights and equality and involves a greater degree of economic egalitarianism through progressive taxation, income redistribution, or even property redistribution, policies aimed toward achieving that which developmental economists refer to as more equality of opportunity and equality of outcome than may currently exist in some societies or are available to some classes in a given society. • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice

24. What is social justice? • Quick write: In the next 3 minutes write what you know and think about “social justice”. • Pair with a neighbor and share your thinking. • Pair square—continue the conversation, and agree on a definition that you will share with the class.

25. Making connections • What might be some connections between “social justice” and the learning gap in today’s public education system?

26. Cultural destructiveness Cultural incapacity Cultural blindness Cultural pre-competence Cultural competence Cultural proficiency There are six points along the cultural proficiency continuum that indicate unique ways of perceiving and responding to differences. The Continuum

27. Proficiency Incapacity Pre-Competence Destructiveness Downward Spiral Conversation Blindness Competence Upward Spiral Conversation

28. Essential Elements of Cultural Competence • Assess Culture • Value Diversity • Manage the Dynamics of Difference • Adapt to Diversity • Institutionalize Cultural Knowledge The Essential Elements of cultural proficiency provide the standards for individual behavior and organizational practices

29. Barriers to Cultural Proficiency • Systemic Oppression • Privilege and Entitlement • Unawareness of the need to adapt • Resistance to change

30. Match.com • What are 2 barriers to sustainable improvement for your work? • What are 2 assets that sustain improvement for your work? • Partner share - 2 minutes per person • Reflection

31. Curiosity and Disturbance • Most people I meet want to develop more harmonious and satisfying relationships--in their organizations, communities, and personal lives. But we may not realize that this desire can only be satisfied by partnering with new and strange allies- curiosity and disturbance. • Margaret Wheatley

32. Leverage for change:2 new allies • Disturbance • Leverage points for disturbance and change: Curriculum-Instruction-Assessment, Parent engagement, Professional learning. • Curiosity and Inquiry • What is our “third story”? • Change our questions

33. Framing Leadership Questions • What is your role in disturbing patterns of racial disparity in your schools? • What changes are you willing to lead to improve student experiences and achievement? • What role will leadership play in bringing about racial equity in your schools and districts?

34. Culturally Proficient leaders ask: • In what ways do we adapt to students who have a different culture, different set of values, different behavior patterns, different languages, and different learning styles? • Different from what or whom?

35. The Moral Imperative . . . , listening . . . requires not only open eyes and ears, but open hearts and minds. We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. . . . It is not easy, but it is the only way to learn what it might feel like to be someone else and the only way to start the dialogue. - Lisa Delpit

36. Culture is a problem-solving resource we need to draw on, not a problem to be solved. Terry Cross 36

37. Other Cultures The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you: They are unique manifestations of the human spirit Wade Davis, Anthropologist

38. Culturally Proficient Leaders ask: • What have we done or not done to cause the patterns that persist? • How can we recognize what is going on in order to effectively intervene? • How can we recognize and change our behaviors to get the results we want? • What is it about my thinking and beliefs that allow the results to persist?

39. Resources • Georgetown University website • TED: The danger of the single story • North, Connie (2008) What is all this talk about ‘social justice’? Mapping the terrain of education’s latest catchphrase.

40. Resources • When counter narratives meet master narratives in the journal editorial-review process. Christine Stanley. Educational Researcher, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 14–24. January/February, 2007 DOI: 10.3102/0013189X06298008 • Cultural Discontinuity: Toward a Quantitative Investigation of a Major Hypothesis in Education (AERA, Kenneth M. Tyler, 2008)