Four school leaders explained how the art of persuasion aids them in reframing dialogue today about diversity, race and equity during a workshop at the AASA national conference on Friday.
The hour-long session was titled “Persuasive Conversation About Race and Equity: How Educators Can Reframe and Reclaim the Dialogue.”
Lee Teitel, founder of Reimagining Integration: Diverse and Equitable Schools Project at Harvard University Graduate School of Education, introduced METCO, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity in Boston, Mass. The goal of this program is to provide inclusive, equitable and antiracist education to children, Teitel explained.
Presenting via video was Darnisa Amante-Jackson, founder and president of the Disruptive Equity Education Project. “Which communities are you most likely to empathetically listen to?” she asked the audience.
Learning to listen differently was a key point in the presentation. Teitel and Amante-Jackson introduced METCO’s interactive two-hour Zoom workshops, which are offered to school administrators in the Boston area. “We are building empathy by deepening our understanding of people’s reactions [to DEI initiatives],” Amante-Jackson said.
J. Malcolm Cawthorne, who serves as the METCO director in the Brookline Public Schools in Brookline, Mass., and Gabriel McCormick, senior director of teaching and learning in Brookline, shared their experiences as part of METCO’s program.
Cawthorne and McCormick emphasized the importance of persuasion skills. “By listening differently, we are proactively persuading,” McCormick said.
Cawthorne explained how persuasion helps him work with principals in Boston schools. “I need to persuade them that I’m not judging them, I’m here to be a thought partner to them, to collaborate with them,” he said.
McCormick summed up the program by explaining how he collaborated with other school leaders in a low-stakes environment. “As educators, we perform more than we practice,” he said, expressing appreciation for the chance to practice his listening and persuasion skills as a part of METCO’s program.
(Sia Moon, a junior at Benjamin Franklin High School, is a reporter for Conference Daily Online.)
