3. Anti-Racist Advocacy for Educational Leaders with Michelle Young

Episode 3 Transcript: https://tinyurl.com/ydbp4ys3

In Episode 3, Professor Jabari Mahiri engages in a conversation with Michelle D. Young, Dean of the Berkeley School of Education. 

Young discusses the significance of leadership development and effective learning experiences for school leaders, particularly emphasizing the need for equity-oriented and culturally responsive leadership. Highlighting the importance of authentic learning experiences in educational leadership preparation, Young stresses the essential characteristics required for educators in today's dynamic learning environments. She notes how engagement, active participation, problem-solving, reflection, and collaboration are essential traits for sustaining effective leaders.

The episode explores the complexity of adopting multiple perspectives and challenges leaders to think beyond their comfort zones. Redesigning principal preparation programs is identified as a critical step toward promoting transformative learning and equity leadership, with a focus on organizational culture and values. Berkeley's PLI program is emphasized as a beacon for redesigning education programs with an equity lens, seeking to enhance capacity through resources, collaboration, and partnerships. 

Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from pre-K through university settings who transform structures and strategies for educating students, particularly for those from historically marginalized communities.

Transcript

Anti-Racist Advocacy for Educational Leaders

with Michelle Young

Berkeley School of Education: Leadership Programs

Jabari Mahiri Host, Editor, and Producer

Brianna Luna Audio Editor and Production Specialist

Mayra Reyes External Relations and Production Specialist

Becca Minkoff Production Manager

Diana Garcia Communications Manager and External Relations

Audra Puchalski Communications Manager and Web Design

Jennifer Elemen Digitally Mediated Learning Coordinator

Jen Burke Graphic Designer

Robyn Ilten-Gee Editor and Media Consultant

Rian Whittle Sound Technician

Transcript

Brianna Luna  0:17  

Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from Pre-K through university settings who transform structures and strategies for educating, particularly for those who are marginalized. We complement the mission and goals of the 21st Century California School Leadership Academy, 21CSLA.

Housed in the Leadership Programs of Berkeley School of Education, we acknowledge our presence on unceded Ohlone Land. We explore innovative ideas and compelling work of educational leaders at the intersection of research, policy, and practice, to realize individual, social, and environmental justice, because our democracy depends on it.

Jabari Mahiri  1:08  

Dean Young has numerous publications, and over 100 refereed journal articles that have been published. She's also the Executive Director of the University Council of Educational Administration for many years. And we are so pleased to have her here at the School of Education. She started in the summer and is sort of maybe, nearing the end of our honeymoon period. But we'll get more into how she's feeling about the work that she's doing here as we have our conversation today. Dean Young, welcome to Equity Leadership Now!

Michelle Young  1:39  

Thank you, Jabari. I'm so happy to be here.

Jabari Mahiri  1:41  

Thank you, too, for agreeing to be the guests of, probably our third episode. We'd like to begin by asking, how do you identify yourself?

Michelle Young  1:52  

That's a great question. I say, personally, that I am a white woman, I'm the oldest child. I've been shaped by so many factors throughout my life. I was lucky to have met an amazing supportive partner, and have two boys who, between the three of them, have made me a stronger, wiser, and more loving person. 

Professionally, I would identify myself as an advocate for strong public education, and a benefactor of many wonderful and excellent mentors. And I'm deeply committed to giving that back to all the folks that I work with. I identify as a servant leader and somebody who's really strongly committed to building diverse and equitable organizations that foster community and belonging.

Jabari Mahiri  2:52  

Thank you as the new dean, how do you see Berkeley's Leadership Programs and the 21st Century California School Leadership Academy, fitting into your vision and goals for the school?

Michelle Young  3:04  

Well, leadership, as they say, is second only to teaching when it comes to helping a student thrive. And I think that that makes leadership essential to pretty much any endeavor that we were, were to undertake here within the Berkeley School of Education. And I think that that's important because what we do here in the Berkeley School of Education is cultivating a lot of different educational professionals. But one thing that they all have in common is that they're supported by leaders. If leaders can't develop, identify talent, to be able to help build a sense of efficacy among teachers, school psychologists, and others who are working in the school, then we're not going to see a truly thriving organization if we don't have a leader that's equity-oriented, that understands how to engage in culturally responsive leadership practices. 

For example, if they don't know what good culturally responsive teaching looks like, then they're not going to be able to do the things that they need to do. So I would say for the Berkeley School of Education, leadership is central to my vision for the school. And it's one of the things actually that was very attractive about coming here to Berkeley because there are such strong leadership programs, the PLI, the LEAD program, the 21CSLA Leadership Academy, which is statewide and partnering with a whole variety of different organizations is already really high quality. But it's also not well integrated into the rest of the work that's done within the Berkeley School of Education. And I think that by integrating, we can increase and support and build strength In so many other areas too, and, by doing so will also strengthen the leadership programs. 

Jabari Mahiri  5:06  

Yeah, agree that we need to have better integration with our leadership programs as well as 21CSLA. And of course, we use powerful learning characteristics identified in some of your research, can you talk a bit more about key characteristics of effective learning for school leaders?

Michelle Young  5:23  

Sure, and powerful learning experiences framework that I've developed, over the years with a whole variety of different co-collaborators was, initially imagined when we were engaging, as part of my work as the executive director of UCEA, and an urban Leadership Development Initiative. And we were trying to figure out, you know, what was not just what effective and equitable leadership looked like in the field, but how you could backward map that, to the educational leadership preparation experience, we drew on adult learning literature. 

When we started looking across some of the programs that had been identified, the United States has been truly excellent. What were they doing in their classrooms, we came up with a framework that at the time, I think had around nine components. And that's kind of built out to 10. But one of them, which is not shocking is that learning experiences should truly be authentic, they should reflect authentic problems, a practice that a leader would find within a K-12 setting. 

So you can find that oftentimes, through using problem-based learning through using cases, having folks engaging in action learning or action research projects in the schools. And that kind of leads you to the second characteristic, which is engagement. And active engagement is incredibly important. 

You may recall, back in the day when graduate programs did a whole lot more of kind of the sage on the stage, more lecturing, and students were taking notes. What you see more of today, thank goodness is active engagement, where people are, are not just kind of passive recipients of information, they are engaging in the process, of learning. And in so doing, they're diagnosing they're examining, they're addressing problems of practice, and so forth. 

A third characteristic is since making so since making is that whole process of you identify a problem and practice really trying to understand it pretty deeply as to what the problem the problem actually is working with people to understand that and really rat grappling with all of the different characteristics and elements that are feeding into the problem. But doing that kind of sense, making is incredibly important. 

The fourth characteristic is centering equity. And you know, you sometimes you'll find in lessons that this particularly happens, like when in more stem fields where they're like, Oh, well, you can't send her equity in this particular lesson. But, you know, over time, I think we've learned that that is not the case. But it's particularly important within leadership because part of the kind of essential role of a leader is to support equity. And so if you're not also building in the central role of equity within the learning environment, and then the different problems of practice that you're putting in front, of your candidates, you're doing them a disservice. 

A fifth one is reflection and that's kind of self-explanatory, but being able to really reflect on both what you're experiencing, why you're experiencing and dig down into your, into trying to understand not just what's happening, but how you're how you're feeling about it is very important. 

The sixth one is collaboration and independent interdependence. And one of the reasons why this is really important is that no leader and a school building will ever be successful if they're not engaging in collaboration and if they don't realize the importance of interdependence, and all that they do. You can't do a strategic plan without them being collaborative, you can't implement a strategic plan without being collaborative and you are interdependent, you depend on other people to help you get the work done. So those are both very, very important. 

Another characteristic is this notion of responsibility for learning that, again, not being a passive recipient, it's not the faculty member's job to ensure that you are taking responsibility for your learner, but you need to come to the experience knowing that this is your responsibility. You are here for a reason, you didn't just come here because you want to get another letter behind your name. If you are working within the program that selected you because they know that you can be an equity leader, you too should have an opportunity to really think about yourself as being responsible for your own learning. 

That's going to be important too when you're a leader because then you are the key learner within a school. This notion of the next characteristic is being a learner and a knower. This is particularly important within professional programs because professional programs are populated by people who have significant life experiences and expertise. They bring knowledge they bring expertise to the classroom, and not acknowledging that as a faculty member is is is you just have to because I, the students are there, they're there others to learn to build their skills to learn from one another. But they're also there to offer their own experience, and you want them to be fully willing to do them. 

The ninth character characteristic is broadening perspectives. And what we mean by that is that you come into a program and you've been a teacher, let's say for 567 years, you may have a sense of what it means to like think, more broadly outside of your classroom. But at some point in the program, as you've had experiences taking on more responsibility within a school, as you've had an opportunity to shadow a principal to serve as an assistant principal, your perspective shifts, there's like this aha moment for you where now you understand what happens within each one of the classrooms, and how that fits within a larger organizational structure. And the same goes true for people who are who are training for district-level positions. Being able to think beyond the organizational structures within which you've been typically working to think more systemically about how the organization is nested. 

And then the final one is competence building, that, you know, if you've done all these preceding characteristics within your learning environment, you've likely had an opportunity to practice leadership, to get feedback on it, and to learn how to improve and that over time begins to build your confidence in your ability to lead. And you don't want to be graduating students who don't have confidence in their leadership. This becomes a critical part of our job here as prepare future leaders.

Jabari Mahiri  13:52  

We really appreciate you, delineating all of these important characteristics, what we're calling powerful characteristics. I noticed since you were talking to us about them. You weren't reading from a script, these characteristics you've internalized in terms of your understanding of how they all intersect with each other and build upon one another. And I'm sure that comes from your years and years of research and working in leadership capacities, as we've noted before, with the University Council on Educational Administration, where you are Executive Director, but want to twist this a little bit more to some of your other research that clearly will build on what you just described for us as these powerful characteristics. However, we want to talk about how leadership programs might work specifically toward aligning frameworks and identifying capacities for anti-racist advocacy and educational leadership.

Michelle Young  14:46  

Yeah. So what I just described are kind of like the practices that you can use within a classroom that help develop leadership capacity, but That's like a generic set of tools that you would use when Angel Nash and I started working on this notion, of anti-racist advocacy leadership. It was after several years of teaching culturally responsive leadership, instructional leadership, and advocacy leadership. And trying to figure out how I merged the model of those different frameworks. We're showing up and a number of the students are coming through our programs. 

So one of the first things that's important about this framework is that you can't have an excellent educational organization if you don't have equity at the center. And you can't have an equitable organization if you're not also working to ensure excellence for all of the learners in there...when he was in Montgomery County, Maryland, he used to talk about how you raise the bar and close the gap, raise the bar and close the gap constantly trying to not just ensure that learning opportunities are provided to everyone, but that learning opportunities themselves are increasingly raising the bar. So to do that kind of work, it takes both understandings how, you know, Leith would talk about the Ontario framework for organizational leadership, which is like setting direction, it's about developing people developing relationships, it's, you know, using accountability, making sure that you're, you're always driving forward towards greater student achievement. 

It's those things mapped on to also, this notion that Khalifa and his colleagues talk about in terms of critical reflection, community engagement, really building, building allies, making sure that you're able to get the resources that you need, understanding, stepping back and seeing the system. So we pulled those two frameworks together, mapped them, and then began thinking about the powerful learning experiences. And from those, these three, these three, what we call kind of core propensities kind of bubbled up as most critical if you're trying to develop anti-racist advocates and advocates. Those are critical reflection, critical consciousness, and multiple perspective-taking. 

You know, we've talked a little bit about critical reflection, but I think one of the questions that you opened up, asking me about, you know, how do you identify yourself? Critical reflection is so incredibly important to that like understanding who you are, as a leader, understanding why it is you do the things that you do, you know, I just gave you a very thin brushstroke of what makes me me, there's so much more there that would take an entire podcast to uncover and I'm not sure why I would want to do that on the air. But being able to you when you encounter something that you know, you need to do something about, but not quite sure how to do it. 

Critical reflection becomes important as does critical consciousness, this notion of being able to dig in and take a micro level what is exactly happening and then pulling back out and trying to understand it and kind of a bigger picture sense. The same goes for these multiple perspectives taking no one of the earliest kind of ways that this was incorporated within leadership preparation programs was the Bolman and Deal’s framework, you know, let's take a political look at this, let's take a symbolic look at this, etc, etc. But that's not exactly what we had in mind. What we mean is like putting yourself in the other person's shoes, trying to In a different theoretical framework, for example, what would this look like if I applied the tenets of critical race theory to it? Or feminist theory? What would this look like if I tried to shift perspectives even just a little bit, or I talked with a couple of other feet, people about you know about what is happening here? It’s really important to be able to collect that kind of data to shift your perspective in that way. As you're as you're grasping with different problems of practice.

Jabari Mahiri  20:36  

I love how you're delineating these ways that just being an anti-racist advocate is predicated on certain key or as you call them core principles, like critical reflection and critical consciousness, taking multiple perspectives, in your work with leaders, um, sort of pushing again on this, how anti-racism might intersect with this. Have you found that there may be different ways that different racial groups or different gender positions now are these different geographies in terms of where people are coming from, might play themselves out differently across these core principles of critical reflection, critical consciousness, and multiple perspective taking? 

Michelle Young  21:25  

Absolutely. I think that that's one of the reasons why having a very diverse cohort can be incredibly helpful and helps all the members of the cohort learn from one another that that coming as a knower and as a learner. Different people do you experience it differently, you may have some who come to it through critical reflection or critical consciousness. And they go through a mourning period, even because they're like, I wish I didn't know this life would be so much simpler if I didn't have my consciousness raised about this particular issue. You know, I would, I would follow this little rational plan. You know, and, you know, when this is said black, and I would say white and data and you know, this is up, and that's down, it's so much easier to take than it is when you complexify things, and you are much easier to complexify things if you've got really good thought partners. And really good thought partners are often people who are very different from yourself.

Jabari Mahiri  22:43  

Just want to stay with this for one second more. Multiple perspective-taking doesn't necessarily assume that all perspectives are equally valid. So how would you engage, you know, leader preparation settings where people want to say that, hey, I'm taking a multiple perspective, but many people might say, well, that perspective is problematic. Because, you know, history tells us or other, you know, evidence in society tells us that being able to hold that perspective, say a person who might be patrilineal, for example, that's one of the perspectives. So I'm trying to dig just a little bit deeper into the core principles. Well, these are two core principles with these core considerations that underlie anti-racist advocacy. Because I guess the question is, is there a point where this leader prepares to have to take positions, on the kinds of perspectives that we're ultimately promoting?

Michelle Young  23:52  

Yeah, certainly, I mean, in the whole purpose behind taking multiple perspectives is to try to get a more kind of a bountiful understanding of of a problem practice. But then there's the Okay, what do we do about it? And what do you do about it? You know, in the improvement science literature there, after you're diagnosing, you're coming up with a variety of different possible ways. You also take a look at what would happen if this was if I continued with this perspective, came up with this as a solution, and tried this out, what are the different things that might happen here and again, having good critical friends who are helping you think this through enable you to kind of hopefully prevent individuals from making decisions that might not be in the best interest of the children that they've been placed in their care. 

So absolutely as faculty, I mean, being able, to provide that kind of guidance as the conversation is going, asking questions that help people pause for a moment. And think about the implications of, of the way that they're thinking about something or something that they said, is, is essential. So it's not just multiple perspective taking for multiple perspective taking. And it's more about the process of thinking of understanding that there's more than one way to think about issues. And that you have to challenge yourself and sometimes stretch beyond the ways of knowing and doing that you are comfortable with, to truly be able to have a transformative learning experience, but then also to be that transformational equity leader that you want to be.

Jabari Mahiri  26:08  

And I think that's where we want to begin to wind our conversation down toward a close, we know that you've just published this award-winning article in the Journal of Research on leadership, education, and title program capacity for redesign and educational leadership preparation. So you've given us this good backdrop for all of these perspectives and principles and core considerations? How do we employ those in the redesign and launch of principal preparation programs in an effective way?

Michelle Young  26:46  

Yeah, that's, that's a really good question. And the article itself was trying to kind of get at whatever conditions not so much the specific practices, but the conditions, and, you know, part of them. So sort of, like creates, an opportunity for a redesign, like, how do you how do you know, you're ready for a redesign? Part of it is the culture and values of the organization. So what is the mission of the organization, you know, I'll backtrack just a little bit, because this study was done as part of some work for the Wallace Foundation, as they were trying to understand how to build a more diverse leadership pipeline in the United States. 

We looked across a whole lot of different programs and analyzed, where there were pockets of pretty exceptional patterns of preparation, like places where the teacher, candidate population was not very diverse at all, and yet, the leadership population of candidates was incredibly diverse, you know, like, what was happening in these places? And that led to the question of like, well, then, okay, you have these places, then how do we get more out of them, like what needs to be there to enable that to happen? So, this study was trying to understand that. 

So this notion of culture and values is incredibly important, because, you know, you, you have you have a program mission for PLI, right? And, for L.E.A.D., equity is, is even in the program names that you have. So you're the culture and the values of your programs here at Berkeley. The mission is pretty aligned with that your curriculum is well aligned with that. Your adaptiveness to change. I understand that, you know, program leaders, you, Rebecca are members of the Learning Policy Institute group, you are going to UCEA and a week and a half or so. So you are curious, you want to improve you're looking for new resources and insights, collaboration, your way 21CSLA program is just an excellent example of that, you're seeking allies, you're seeking ways to improve. So that's one of the critical components of the capacity for redesign. 

Resources is another one, and this was the one that was super all over the place across the United States, but in those places where they had been able to get grant funding or there was a state allocation around leadership development. Those are the places that had a greater capacity for redesign if resources weren't more and more plentiful. A third area was this notion of collaboration and partnerships. Partnerships are so incredibly important. Having places to place your candidates, you know, making sure that you have voices from the field that are feeding into the types of problems or practice that you're taking up so that they are truly authentic. But partnerships, in and of themselves don't just sort of happen, right, you have to engage in that kind of constant nurturing of partnerships, people come and go, you need to make sure that your programs can in your partnerships can sustain beyond individual people, that it's a partnership between the two organizations. And that you're, you're constantly kind of feeding and nurturing those relationships. And then governance is kind of the fourth area, that's important. That means you've got the support of your administration, within the university, and the support from the school district perspective or the school. Also, governance is about making sure that there are ample faculty and staff to be able to facilitate the program. And tenure is another one that's that was sort of important because in some places, tenure requirements are not aligned with the hard work of redesigning, and not just redesigning any old program, but redesigning a truly powerful program that is aligned with the needs of the field.

Jabari Mahiri  32:06  

So let's conclude Dean Young with a focus on that redesign. But let's turn it toward the redesign of our School of Education itself, you've given us these interesting principles and ideas, resources, and needed governance, and partnerships. How will you factor all of these considerations into what you want to achieve in terms of your vision and goals for the Berkeley School of Education?

Michelle Young  32:34  

Well, I would definitely say that the three core propensities are incredibly important. And they're things that I practice on an ongoing basis. So that's, again, the critical reflection, critical consciousness, and multiple perspective taking. But then also coming back to our earlier conversation about the overlay of Khalifa frameworks, that ability to see this system is really important. And you and I have had a couple of conversations how important it is to get a sense of what the organization is doing, and how things are working. So that then you can step back and say, Alright, if we want to do this, then we can tweak these levers, or we can do this right. And then, probably most important to all of this is also keeping equity at the center, keeping equity at the center, equity for students equity for staff equity for faculty equity for our partners, and how we then are cultivating equity for all of the all of the folks that are going out into the field so that they can do the same.

Jabari Mahiri  33:53  

Did we not get into anything that you want to share in the conversation that we've had, as we close for our conversation today? Is there something else you would want our listeners to know?

Michelle Young  34:06  

Oh, well, I enjoyed this conversation. And, you know, one of the things that you may not know is that before coming here, I edited a special issue that was focused on building a diverse pipeline. I read an article as part of that special issue by Rebecca and a few of her colleagues here at Berkeley about the way that they are thinking about not just the preparation experience, but also about building that kind of learning network that is post-preparation. And I think you know that that's a that's also a critical piece of of the work that we're doing is how do we ensure that these amazing leaders we're putting into the field have this support and the resources and the professional learning opportunities that they need to help them be successful and thrive and stay. Because we know that leadership turnover can do a lot of damage. Sustaining an excellent leader within the field can have an amazing and very positive impact.

Jabari Mahiri  35:25  

Dean Michelle D. Young, thank you so much for sharing your ideas and the work that you're doing. We wish you all the best in this new role that you have as the dean of the Berkeley School of Education. Thank you so much.

Michelle Young  35:37  

Thank you, Dr. Mahiri. 

Mayra Reyes  35:56  

Our podcast team includes Jennifer Elemen, Robyn Ilten-Gee, Andrea Lampros, Brianna

Luna, Jabari Mahiri, Audra Puchalski, Mayra Reyes, Dara Tom, and Ryan Whittle.