Middle School Monday: A Crucial Strand of PD. Part Two.

After last week’s post on Day One of a Reflective Literature professional development strand, readers reached out to learn more. As we had Day Two of our strand just last Friday, I thought I’d do two things today. 1: tell you what our plan was for that PD and 2: first, briefly talk about the most critical part of this sort of PD.

What is the most critical part of PD on equity training/culturally relevant pedagogy? Answer: It’s ongoing. It’s daily. It’s never finished.

How do I engage in this PD daily? 1. By learning from my students. 2. By following and learning from educators, authors, and activists on Twitter who are experts in this field, including:

@TheJLV @djolder @debreese

@davidekirkland @chrisemdin @CrazyQuilts

@zettaelliott @jbakernyc @Tolerance_org

@malindalo @RafranzDavis @EvaVegaWorld

A reminder: engaging in equity training requires that we be willing to sit in discomfort as we examine our own bias, identify structural inequities in our own institutions, and engage in discussions with colleagues.

One. Implicit Bias.

To jump start our discussion on implicit bias, I used the beginning of a presentation from the 2014 YALSA Young Adult Literature Symposium titled Using Multicultural YA Literature to Examine the Impact of Racism on the Lives of Teens of Color. Full disclosure–it’s a presentation I worked on that explored the realities of institutional racism, the reasons why talking about race and racism is necessary, and ways to use diverse YA literature to open up these dialogues with teens. We only did the first few slides, but there are certainly different portions that could be used in these discussions.

Two. Checking in with our #ownvoices novels.

It will be lovely if at each PD meeting, a member discusses the #ownvoices novel she/he chose to read at the first session. On Friday, I talked about Ghost by Jason Reynolds. Well, I didn’t talk about it…I wanted my colleagues to hear Jason Reynolds talk about it. [We watched a portion of his talk at the National Book Festival.] I’ll talk more about Ghost with all of you down the road, but, I:

1. Loved it.
2. Want to use it as a sixth grade class text in the Spring.

Three. Individual Work.

After introducing Harvard’s Project Implicit, I shared the link and suggested that we all engage in at least two of their implicit bias tests.

I’m Julie Stivers at @BespokeLib and I hope you have a great week. I’d love to hear about your favorite/most crucial Twitter follows!

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