The devastating police killing of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant, mere minutes before former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all three charges for the murder of George Floyd, cut a wound through many of our hearts and deepened the trauma that so many Black Americans experience in the wake of police violence. The [...]
"Now more than ever, the world needs to be turning its hearts and minds to the wisdom, knowledge and experience of Indigenous people all over the world. For thousands of years, we’ve raised our children, we’ve grown them to be productive members of our communities, we’ve laid to rest our loved ones and done [...]
Greetings, community! Happy New Year. These days, I am filled with cautious hope as I think about what we all survived last year and what lies ahead. It was a difficult year for my family, as I know it was for many of yours, and I am sending you so much love, grace, and healing [...]
[Source: This slide was presented by University of Alberta professor Cathy Blackstock at the 2014 conference of the National Indian Child Welfare Association. It compares and contrasts Western and First Nations perspectives.] For the last few months, I’ve been wincing a bit every time I see a reference to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or [...]
A few days ago, I tweeted the following: We cannot traumatize people by jumping into business-as-usual as schools reopen. We MUST create space for healing, reflection, & metabolizing the pain of the moment we are in. Set the task list aside and create space for affinity groups, deep listening, and restorative practices. Within hours, hundreds [...]
Last Sunday, I attended a 15-minute virtual church service with author Brené Brown. I was not raised with any religion per se, having come from both Catholic and Jewish traditions, and I sometimes vacillate between faith and agnosticism. But in the first days of “shelter-in-place”—the executive order issued by Governor Gavin Newsom in California—I felt [...]
Greetings community! It’s been a while since I’ve written a post, mostly because I’ve been engrossed in writing the proposal for my second book. This next project will dig into the concept of street data (which made a cameo in Book 1) and its connection to educational equity. I am thrilled to be collaborating with [...]
I just got back from chilly Minneapolis, where I delivered a keynote to over 200 superintendents on "Listening and Leading for Equity." I escaped the Midwest just before a storm moved in that would have trapped me! In the keynote, I spoke about three levers that I believe make a big difference in schools: deep [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot about my journey as a reader and, specifically, my journey to become a critical reader of complex text. According to Jennifer Duncan at the University of Toronto, "Critical reading is a more active way of reading. It is a deeper and more complex engagement with a text. Critical reading is [...]
This summer, my family and I went on a tandem biking expedition in Connemara, a rugged area in County Galway, Ireland from which part of my lineage traces. We rode 20-30 miles a day in a rare Irish heatwave, through rolling green hills and endless pastures of sheep, with nary a car in sight. By [...]
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