Claudia Lee, the site director for Downtown Charter Academy in Oakland, talked with TeachFX about equitable classrooms. We are excited to share the takeaways from our conversation below.

In your experience as an educator and school leader, how has the focus on equity evolved?

• Equity is one of the three priorities in our school, and we identified that student engagement was the biggest equity challenge of the pandemic. To address equitable engagement, we’re doing more classroom observations and coaching alongside professional development workshops.

How are people thinking about equity differently, because of the Pandemic and virtual learning? Can you share some examples?

• It’s been really interesting to hear teachers thinking and talking about participation in the virtual world. They are able to notice more when kids are participating, engaging, turning on their cameras, etc. and they are doing what they can to bring students in. As challenging as virtual teaching has been, it has forced us to be more reflective and look at teaching in a different way. 

How do you know you’re making progress when it comes to equity?

• We observe and coach teachers on a regular basis. We put specific targets on student engagement and we look into that. We did this with questioning technique and wait time. We also always try and practice the same process in our coaching sessions (so we had to work on our questioning and wait time as well!).

• Just look at ONE thing at a time, little by little. When you’re having multiple coaching sessions on one specific thing, then you can see the progress AND it becomes part of the teachers’ practice.

Let’s talk about data… How are you and your DCA team thinking about and looking at data? Particularly, who is talking, who is not talking…?

• We’re using Equitable Classrooms data from TeachFX. When I saw the results for the first time, I was beside myself! This automatic tool gave anonymized objective data at the larger scale, and for an extended time period (not just one lesson). 

• THEN we showed the data to our teachers to reflect on, and they started to talk about equity right away (without any coaching or prompting). They were talking about language acquisition, access to technology, conversations and topics. They started coming up with more interesting topics to inspire students to talk more given the challenges of distance learning, etc.

Let’s look at the slides together and you can walk us through your thinking and reflections!

Slide: looking at changes from 6th - 8th grade (increase in talk in 8th grade)

• This surprised me! I had assumptions… but I was happy to be wrong! Students know each other better, feel more comfortable, and they have the tools they need to be able to express themselves

Slide: Student talk by race and grade level

• This was powerful. One of the teachers in the session wanted to share this data with STUDENTS to see what they thought - “who has a voice in our school?”

What do you do now with this data?

• With this data, we plan set goals and identify little changes we can make that will lead to incremental improvements in equity and engagement. 

Q&A Discussion

Tell us more about your teachers.

• Teachers got to choose if they wanted to participate/record their classes, and I did not know who did/did not. Once I saw the presentation I said “teachers have to see this!” The tool is for them - they manage it themselves, decide which classes to record and share - they know it is for them and it works better!

Let’s look at the slide that showed the “long tail of student talk”...what conversation was generated by teachers from looking at that?

• Regarding the slide: really surprised by how many students did NOT talk, it seemed to me that they were not aware of that (and it was safe data because not personalized); also wanted to talk about who are the students who are not participating… and the teachers were asking if we could do more with the data, more specifics!

Want to learn more about TeachFX at your school? Let us know!