![]() The white teaching faculty’s choice not to participate didn’t raise an eyebrow during the session but surfaced later in a discussion between the entire teaching team when Tracey and another teaching-team member of color pointed out that they had courageously sat with and participated vigorously with the student-of-color affinity group. The three white members of the teaching faculty elected to sit at the center with the white affinity group but did not verbally participate. However, the people-of-color affinity group immediately struck up a deep conversation and talked honestly during their entire time in the center. During the session, we noticed that when the white affinity group was at the center of the fishbowl, they chose to remain mostly silent during their 15 minutes at the center. With our teaching-team colleagues, we had convened a racial-affinity fishbowl activity with our students. One such discussion exemplifies the difficulty in facilitating open and honest conversations about race. We had many honest and uncomfortable discussions about race and racism with each other that year. The course-planning sessions and class-session activities revealed two important things to us over the course of our time working together: Our students deeply needed these opportunities to navigate topics of race prior to stepping into leadership roles and our teaching team was not immune to racism and racial biases even as we planned learning opportunities for others. The most powerful experiences from our time together as a teaching team were when we developed opportunities for students to engage in conversations about race and racism and debriefed them together. As teaching teams sometimes go, we spent almost as much time planning as we did teaching, in order to ensure everyone had equal say in designing each lesson. We began our journey together as colleagues teaching in the School Leadership Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. LF: Your book covers so much ground and is introduced in an unusual context-the role of unconscious bias in the relationship between the two of you.Ĭould you describe what happened and a few key things you each learned out of it?ĭr. ![]() Fiarman is a former elementary school principal and now an educational consultant. ![]() Benson, a former high school principal, is currently an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.ĭr. Fiarman agreed to answer a few questions in writing about their book, Unconscious Bias In Schools: A Developmental Approach to Exploring Race and Racism. ![]()
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