Designing Professional Learning to Support District and School Administrators of Color
摘要
While a growing body of scholarship has examined professional learning communities for teachers of color, only a paucity of research has explored a community of practice (CoP) for district and school building leaders of color. This study investigated a 1.5-year CoP for traditional public school district and charter management leaders (n = 27) across five geographic regions in the United States. We drew on the Equity Action Conceptual Framework and used a pre-, mid-, and post-professional learning community survey and two rounds of semi-structured interviews to understand how these leaders reported and described learning dispositions and skills to support their school systems’ most historically resilient and marginalized students. We analyzed survey responses both across the professional learning community (PLC) and within the five geographic regions. Across the CoP, participants reported learning how to assess the organization’s will, skill, knowledge, and capacity to disrupt inequitable policies and practices. A within-team analysis revealed that one traditional district and two charter school districts reported their greatest learning around maintaining critical social perspectives; two teams, both traditional public schools, reported their learnings related to maintaining and including critical instructional perspectives. To understand the mechanisms contributing to leaders’ learnings, we asked participants to describe how the CoP supported their learning. They described how the requirement of a “small test” or an action research project requiring leaders to identify their organization’s most marginalized students and redesign the necessary liberatory policies and practices needed to bring those students to the center supported their learning. We end by providing implications for future research, policy, and practice.