You need to understand where people came from to understand where they are now and how you can help them move forward. True in schools. True in business. True in life.
Lacey Robinson and UnboundEd envision a “world in which educators actively work together to dismantle systemic racism by providing grade-level, engaging, affirming, and meaningful instruction.” (GLEAM) They are “focused on justice in the details of teaching and learning to eliminate the predictability of educational outcomes by race.”
It’s a really important cause with implications well beyond Black, Brown, and Indigenous students because we all need everyone to be the best they can be to deal with the problems we’re all facing together.
But this article is not about schools. Instead, we’re going to re-apply the GLEAM framework from Robinson’s excellent book, “Justice Seekers – Pursuing Equity in the Details of Teaching & Learning” to other organizations, re-naming “Grade-Level” as “Standard-focused” to distinguish it from schools. Here’s that adapted framework:
Standard-focused. Banish low expectations based on people’s background or perceived abilities resulting from unconscious or implicit bias. Build learning, practice, and experience scaffolds to move all to the standard of where they could be, should be, and need to be.
Engaging. Active learning beats passive learning. Get people involved in and excited about the productive struggle of learning, thinking, and creative processes. Find different ways to engage different people and bring their lived experiences into the room so all benefit from everyone’s contributions.
Affirming. Making people feel valued and respected in the present requires valuing and respecting how they got here – their full humanity including cultural identities, linguistic backgrounds, innate talents, learned knowledge, practiced skills, hard-won experience, and apprenticed craft-level caring and sensibilities. This requires flexibility, humility, and releasing control.
Meaningful. Move from the theoretical to the practical. What (data)? So what (conclusions)? Now what (actions)? Some applications are technical or tactical (solvable with existing know-how and problem-solving processes), some strategic, some cultural (requiring adaptive problem solving and individuals altering their ways of thinking and working.)
Imagine a still picture of a ball on a table. Can you tell which way it’s rolling? No. Now imagine a video of that same ball rolling. It pauses into a still frame. Can you tell which way the ball is going to roll next? Of course, you can. This is Newton’s first law. In the absence of an offsetting force, the ball will keep going in the direction it was going.
If you want to help people be the best versions of themselves, start by recognizing and mitigating your own biases to banish low expectations, get people involved and excited, make them feel valued and respected, and move from the theoretically elegant to the practically useful.
Start by recognizing and mitigating your own biases to banish low expectations. There’s no way people without the same education and experience that you’ve got can perform at the same level as you do in the way you perform. But that’s not what you want. You want them to think differently so the whole group can perform at a level beyond what any of you can do on your own. Help them learn and grow so you can all learn and grow together.
Then get people involved and excited. What excites others is not what excites you. Flip from telling your stories to getting others to tell their stories about their experience so you and others can learn from them. If you really want someone to learn a lesson, get them to engage by teaching it themselves.
Then make them feel valued and respected. This means you have to value and respect each of them – their legacies, layers, and lenses. This is not just about seeing them, but seeing things through their eyes. This is about noticing and appreciating what made them who they are and letting them take you down a different path towards a different decision than you would make.
All the while, move from the theoretically elegant to the practically useful. It’s not a test. You’re not looking for compliance or adherence to the current ways of doing things. You’re looking to co-create a new future with people with different perspectives so you can adapt to ever-changing circumstances together.
