Equity-Centered Leadership Development Across Jefferson County Public Schools in Partnership with Spalding University and 2Revolutions

Transcript for conversation between Dr.Glenn Baete and Dr. Shamara Graham. (The transcript is generated via an APP so there may be grammatical and/or punctuation errors throughout. Listen to the audio to hear directly from those being interviewed.

2Revolutions:

Tell me about this work, why it's important, what are you most excited about? And since our theme right now at 2Rev is realizing the possible, making what's possible real and making it happen.

You can start with how it came about.

Glenn Baete:

Okay, I'm Dr. Glenn Baete. I'm the Director of Advanced Programs at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. And my current role related to the Wallace work is I'm the Director of the Principal Preparation Program. So I'm responsible for facilitating a partnership between Spalding and Jefferson County Public Schools to prepare the next generation of equity centered school leaders for the district. 

We've been involved in this work alongside Jefferson County for the past four years where we have taken our programming and aligned it to the strategic priorities and academic systems of the school district. The academic priorities of Jefferson County Public Schools being racial equity, climate and culture, and something called the backpack of success skills. That's essentially disposition-based work from students where they show resiliency, effective communication, and productive collaboration doing that work.

So, what we have spent our time in the past four years doing is going through a redesign of our course content, our course assessments, and our clinical field experiences to ensure that they align to the district's strategic priorities. Two and a half years ago, we were fortunate to be a partner with Jefferson County to receive a Wallace Equity-Centered Pipeline Initiative Grant, which deals specifically with how large urban school districts develop, maintain, and support an on equity-centered principal preparation ecosystem. 

Everything from alignment to standards to pre-service programs to developing existing school district administrators. So we are really heavily involved in the pre-service portion of the program, aligning our work to the districts again, the district's priorities, and then actually looking at our course experience for students, our program experience for students through the lens of equity-centered leadership. And specifically, our work with 2Revolutions has been in the development of an equity-centered leadership framework, which we call the Spalding Six. 

We know that principles are key influencers of student achievement. They're key drivers of school improvement and they're key promoters of positive school culture. And so how do we train our learners to have a mindset and a skillset that reflects what an equity centered leader should be? So that's been the work that 2Revolutions has been involved in.

As we've articulated the vision, we've collaborated to develop some anchor, some anchor documents and anchor framework. And then actually spending time with our instructors who teach the courses and aligning assignments, clinical field experiences to those equity-centered leadership dispositions and using a continuous improvement process in order to plan the work, execute, teach, deliver the content, and then take a step back and reflect upon it and make appropriate adjustments.

2Revolutions:

Thank you. Shamara, do you want to add anything to that or have any specific more targeted questions within there?

Dr. Shamara Graham:

Yeah, I think the only other piece that I'll add is like coming in as a consultant to support the work. Glenn is uniquely positioned because he was a leader with JCPS  and now he's at Spalding. So that pipeline is not just a checklist of something that he's doing. He's actually been like in that space. And I think because we do not live myself or Kate, who also supports this body of work, in Louisville and we don't have that same context. 

A lot of the work that we're providing when we're supporting, whether it's within that partnership for how equity is manifesting itself through Spalding University is from like a national perspective and not specific for JCPS. So it gives like another perspective of what's happening on the ground. And we get to go back and forth on like what's actually most important, this national thought process, a very specific one for what's currently happening or we building towards the future of what JCPS will look like and the students that they're servicing there. And then also with the content partnership, there's been a lot of opportunities to enhance some of the existing content that they've been working on. We're getting ready to have another meeting with a leader who's also a faculty member. So she's a principal who's also a faculty member through Spalding University and reviewing the course content that has just finished and enhancing it even more. 

So I think the opportunity to revise and refine each time is a beautiful opportunity as opposed to doing the exact same thing that's happened. And I think over the last four years, I know that I've seen the program enhance as far as the content, the faculty members being able to reflect and refine on their own practices and looking up different activities while also still holding the traditions of what's needed there in Louisville. I've learned so much about Louisville, Kentucky with working with this particular body of work there.

And I had a firsthand experience, this is just a caveat, in a different body of work that 2Revolutions was doing on the ground there, of actually meeting a leader who's gone through the program and working closely with them and seeing not just like the theory of what could be, but the practice of this is what's happening with those leaders who've completed the program and how they approach the work on the ground.

2Revolutions:

That's my next question, what impact have you seen and what feedback have you gotten about the program and what's changed?

Glenn Baete:

Well, what I will say is that our work around equity centeredness and developing and articulating a vision for what an equity centered leader looks like, permeated itself through all aspects of the program. So when a learner leaves our program, they're actually creating a body of evidence that shows their work as an equity centered leadership candidate. Opportunities where they have observed equity leadership work in action, where they participated in equity-centered leadership work, and where they've actually led equity-centered leadership work.

And so what we see is that, you know, the evidence of that is the fact that our graduates are being hired as administrators in Jefferson County Public School System because the district, you know, they screen for equity centered leadership dispositions. And our framework is, you know, it was aligned to the school districts equity leadership framework. 

They had four dispositions that were very specific to a role of a school leader. We took a bit a more broader approach because there are so many facets in leadership preparation, everything from academic and student support programming to talent management, operational management, community resources, but we also wanted to make sure that our candidates can practice disruptive leadership, how do they mitigate power and balances and systemic oppression in schools, and how can they how can they self-reflect? How can they become a more culturally humble individual in order to make them make them a better leader? And that's something that many most principal programs, preparation programs, lack. 

And so we when we set out to develop this it really started out as a result of dissatisfaction. We were seeing candidates go through our capstone program and doing, completing work and reflecting on tasks. And they knew that something needed to be done, but they did not have the tools to be able to execute that. So our work originally started with some collaboration with our school of social work at Spalding University, where we said, hey, how do we train individuals to be disruptive leaders and that's where we landed on this whole concept of cultural humility. Cultural humility has been around for a while. It's been around since the, you know, early 2000s. It was originally started in healthcare with training healthcare providers and how to work with diverse patient groups and to be culturally humble, it's a lifelong journey, a lifelong process of self-reflection. It's helping work to dismantle systems of oppression and to speak truth to power. And then finally, this whole concept of institutional accountability, because as a leader, if it is to be, it begins with me. I have to be the driver of that work. So that resonated with us as a great framework to start to develop equity centered  leaders because our teachers in many school systems across the country are receiving training in equity and inclusion you know and I say this with love and respect is that the graphic of the baseball field, I know Dr. Graham has heard me talk about this, the equity versus equality graphic that you see where you have the three individuals standing, I say I'm tired of seeing that, not meaning that I don't agree with it. It's like, okay, I get it. We understand the differences between equity and equality, but the real work is how do you make that work happen?

Artist: Angus Maguire interactioninstitute.org + madewithangus.com.

What do you do when you're interacting with curriculum or you're interacting with the challenge of hiring staff or you're confronted with the challenge of allocating resources within a school building? How do you do those things through an equity centered lens? That's what we, that's the difference that our leaders who are coming out of our program now have as a result of our collaborative work in developing the framework just to serve as an anchor. And then the supports that we have through challenging our instructors to look at course assignments, to challenge our learners to create body of evidence portfolios where they have to reflect on those dispositions and defend them. So I think that's sort of really the impact that it's had on us.

2Revolutions:

That's really big. Shamara, do you want to add anything to that?

Dr. Shamara Graham: 

Yeah, I think even from two revs position, we don't get to actually meet the candidates or the learners in person. So there isn't that same level of relationship building. And it's definitely more of like an objective role of just looking at what they produce. So there's a lot of time that we get to look at the content or portfolios that they're putting together. And I think about like the Myers-Briggs personality test.

Glenn Baete:

Yes.

Dr. Shamara Graham: 

Where I think the first time you look at a student's work, you're judging. And then eventually you get to this level of perceived reality of like, what are you giving the feedback for and what is your hope for? And then you also get to see the journey through their work submission, where they may have started off writing off just an initial paragraph to explain something. And then by the end, they're going in with grave detail and vignettes to support their answers. And it just, you see the enhancement from a very different perspective and I think that's what I've been able to see from my seat because I'm not able to be on the ground but I have been able to see the faculty members reflect in a way of really being creative and thinking of what haven't we tried and like why not try this now and seeing how they have been able to progress and bring in different initiatives and say like I've been teaching or working in the district for blank number of years, it is time for us to do this and I think with this particular body of work.

The time is now, there isn't a hesitancy of, oh, we could try this in five years. No, like right now, what can we do to make impact? And you see, I see Glenn do it, and I also see all of the faculty members that I had the opportunity to be able to connect with, make those changes and implement them immediately. Even this Spalding Six was introduced after the kickoff, and they've all been able to leverage it and utilize it within their courses, reflect on it so that now this year. It's like a major part of the work that they're also doing. Like they know to lean back into that body of work.

Glenn Baete:

We used some rapid prototyping is sort of a, and a lot of times in education, you do not see rapid prototyping as a way of thinking of design. And being a small university with a small number of faculty members, but faculty members that we know that are proven have experience as leaders in the school district and in their own fields to be able to take something like an equity framework and say, okay, let's, we agree upon this, let's try a few things out and then we'll come back and discuss it to see how it works. And if we think that if we have good proof of concept, then we sort of, then we sort of stabilize it through the creation of a more formal anchor document. I mean, we prototype the framework along the way, but as we started to land in places where we knew we were in a really good spot, we said, okay, let's go ahead and solidify this aspect of the framework. And I think that has really helped us because one of the challenges that you sometimes run into in higher ed is a siloed approach and then this willingness to not be innovative and do not prototype. And what are we trying to do as teacher educators and as principal educators? 

We're trying to teach leaders and teachers and school leaders and school counselors to be innovative, right? But then again, in our own practice, we do not do that. And so that's where I think the support in the collaborative relationship between Spalding and Two Revolutions has been able to help us do that work, is that we wanted a pair of external because we were all internal Jefferson County people. I worked 27 years in the school district as a teacher, 10 years as a principal, and I retired as an assistant superintendent.

I develop the actual academic systems that the district use. That's my work. So it's my baby. But having the ability to engage in some consultations, some consultancies, some coaching with regard to what equity looks like and how I think about it as an instructor and my colleagues as well, because the way that our current course development system works is we assembled teams of the consisting of elite instructor and practitioners in schools in Jefferson County to redesign courses with an equity centered lens. 

Dr. Graham and Kate McClinton served as the from 2Revolutions where our are they were sort of our equity friends, they were our champions with regard to be thinking about how we can continue to move that work forward. So as we developed and created enhancements to our courses based upon our equity centered framework, our courses were revised. Then we ask our instructors, go teach the class, teach it. And then a week or two after the course ends, then we want to put that instructor back in the fishbowl with us. Dr. Graham sort of facilitates a discussion where the instructor reflects on how the course went. Did we meet objectives with regard to the equity-centered work that we were doing? And then we also invite those design teams to sort of sit in and listen to hear. And then the next round of corrections aren't quite as intensive. It's a lighter touch. It's a fine tuning, so to speak, to a course. And then we're in the second year of that process where we actually, a week or two after courses in, we engage in some reflection. 

And as the lab, I facilitate all the laboratory experiences, the clinical field experiences for learners in the program. And we meet weekly. We actually discuss student work, which is great. We pull the assignments, because we've been looking at the assignments. We've been making revisions to the assignments. So now, with Dr. Graham and Kate, we sit, and I'll pull up samples. I've already received the work. I've looked at it. I bring a few samples.  Here's a really good example of the work. They really met the objectives that we really wanted to set out. Here were a few that really didn't get it, and then we start to have questions about, okay, what's the response? Is the response enhancements to the assignment? Is it a question on, okay, how do we coach and mentor and support learners who aren't meeting the expectations that we have and because what we don't want to do is have a learner spend a year's worth of time and a year's worth of tuition to go through a program and not be successful because we haven't provided support along the way to say hey look here's some you might want to think about this in another way so that's really informed our coaching and support because we do as instructors provide formal coaching to learners in our program. And so, you know, there's this connection between course content and content delivery, the assessments, clinical field experiences, and coaching. I mean, they are all linked. If you don't do one well, then the others can't work at optimum levels. So you have to really do the more you work on all of them, they strengthen each other. And that interdependence between them, I think is really important.

2Revolutions:

Anything to add to that?

So would a fair question be like, what's next? What's the next step in this process and this partnership?

Glenn Baete:

Well, this year what we've really leaned into is the link between our clinical field experiences and coaching, how we provide candidates with coaching and how we train our candidates to be coaches. This whole candidate as coach. So it's really, there's two facets of that work.

And so what 2Revs has really, we spent some time doing an intensive redesign of the, our clinical field experience. And so we're spending a lot of time, actually weekly, examining samples of student work, looking at assignments, making the equity centered connections, making sure we're getting the most from a learner, from an experience and then thinking about how we as university leaders can provide our candidates with coaching and support. I was engaged in a coaching conversation this morning with one of our candidates and one of the areas that she really wanted to focus on was delegation. She does a lot. She's an indispensable person at her school. She does a lot.

And what you learn as a leader is that you can't do everything. And so her principal had told her that. And as I had some initial coaching conversations with her, we had spoken about it. So when I asked her to reflect on how things were going today, she mentioned an opportunity where she sort of delegated the responsibility to work on a task that she would normally do to someone else. So we spent time letting her process through that and how she felt about it and what she learned from it. And then at the end of that session, you know, I was able to capture that work and actually sent her a little blog on tips for delegation. So that, that development, but that would have never have happened had we not revised our candidate growth plan around equity-centered leadership dispositions. You know, so that redesign work has opened up opportunities for us to provide a better experience for aspiring school leaders. That's what we do. We train principals. So, and we want to train them the best we can. So, I think those types of experiences, you know, we're seeing that with all of our faculty members and their relationships with learners. So, that's our next work is just to be better coaches and to train our candidates to be strong instructional and leadership coaches as well.

Dr. Shamara Graham:

I love working with Spalding in all things. So it's not necessarily what will happen next, but a hope of what could happen next is that we're able to see the celebrations of learning and those demonstrations of learning that happen at the end. It's not a thesis paper or a test that they're taking at the end of the year. 

They're proving through a portfolio and engaging in a conversation with Opportunities for Feedback on how they did throughout the year and preparation for what's next. I would love to be able to go and attend and be a part of that. I would also love during those coaching sessions to possibly be able to join on another previous medical term of instructional rounds of, let's go to these different aspiring leaders schools. Let's walk around and see a day in the life of, see how things are going, how can they be a little that maybe they don't get to see or see each other in their roles in a different way, as opposed to like only within that classroom setting. 

But that is maybe not just tied directly to the Wallace body of work, but just in general with 2Revolutions continuing to support and work alongside of their aspiring leaders. Because like I said, I have been able to meet one of those graduates and she's doing phenomenal. And we'd love to see all these other learners that have been coming in. The application process has also shifted a little bit and they've tightened up from beginning, so generation through fruition, Genesis, excuse me, through fruition, seeing the differences that have happened, I would love to be able to see it on the ground in action and not just through reflection, but genuinely during the actual time. But I don't know if that will ever be able to happen, but that's my hope, if it could.

2Revolutions:

Before we sign off here, is there anything else that either of you want to say about the program or how you're feeling about it or anything else that you want to share?

Glenn Baete:

I just think we're, you know, it's been great. And we had previous history and a positive working relationship with 2Revolutions with regard to our competency-based education work with Jefferson County and some other cohorts. So when we had the opportunity to engaging the Wallace work with regard to principal preparation. It was a really easy fit for us because we already had, one, we had a strong working relationship. We believe in the work and mission of 2Revolutions and the work that they do. And they all had very talented people -

our consultants all the way up to just knowing the investment in the work and the passion in the work, we knew that would be a really easy transition to get our faculty to trust and be able to work alongside. Because sometimes when you bring consultants in to do work, it becomes, there's always an issue of being authentic and being open and being willing to share your work. And we haven't had that with this project made from the beginning. Dr. Graham, she was a school administrator. She has background in the work. She has credibility. And so when she joins our faculty meetings, our professors and instructors, they just open up and we just continue right along as she is a member of our development team. So it's important.

2Revolutions: 

Well, thank you both.