I was inspired by a colleague in Illinois, Mark Heintz, who spent a year writing about his learning and teaching process for an entire year.  I'm going to try and do this myself.  I hope those that join me on this journey will learn something from this journey.  

This week, I spent the entire week in professional learning.  New York City has given education leaders an amazing opportunity to learn together this summer about Equity.  I have already taken part in Mentoring for Equity, Beyond Diversity, and in many equity-based conversations with my critical conversational friend, toni.  I knew I had more to learn, and I was excited to take part in the learning this week.  

Day 1 - Solving Disproportionality

My expectations were being fully met on Day 1 as I learned from Dr. Ivory Toldson about disproportionality.  I already had seen important data about disproportionality in New York City schools when I dug into the Calculus of Race article.  I learned a lot by examining schools' data in the Civil Rights Data Collection about Schools and Districts.  I had never seen this data source before, and excitedly examined a variety of schools from across New York City and in my District.  There are definitely stories being told in this data, and some of these stories are not pretty.

I am pretty intentional about defining words in education that we often take for granted.  When Dr. Toldson asked us, "What is the achievement gap," we had time to talk through what we thought was a best answer.  When he then asked, "Shouldn't we first ask ourselves, 'What is achievement?'," I was really happy.  I love to tackle ideas like this with colleagues.  You learn so much about your own beliefs and the beliefs of others when you start to challenge yourself to really define what you think you know and often take for granted.  

I spent a little time thinking about my "Why" in this work.  Why am I working to dismantle inequity and oppression?  What drives me to get out of bed, even in the deepest of Winter, on the most unfortunate mornings, to push through these days and still come in to work and do my best to lead education and schools to provide the best learning conditions for all students?  What gets you to work every day when it's -2 Celsius, sidewalks packed with dirty snow and unseeable ice, and you spill your coffee down your shirt before you have even left the house?  What drives you to want to do the work?