Reflecting on the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action

Now that February is ending (how is it already March?!), we are looking back to the beginning of the month when we participated in the nationwide Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.  When talking about something like Black Lives Matter with third graders, we work hard to make sure that the points of entry and examples are tangible, accessible, and developmentally appropriate.

As we reflected on Dr. Martin Luther King Day, anti-bias education is not something we do just one week (or day, or month) out of the year. It is something we try to do all day, every day as part of our curriculum, teaching philosophy, and classroom culture. The people we highlight and celebrate in our classroom day to day reflect the diversity of our world (just like we the teachers do!).

Image from https://wearoutthesilence.org

Image from https://wearoutthesilence.org


We started our BLM week by asking students: What do you know about Black Lives Matter? We showed them the image above and then had them reflect using an I think/I wonder chart on large notecards. We were impressed with the thoughtfulness of our students’ responses. They understand that “Black Lives Matter” needs to be explicitly said because we still don’t have equality (as you can see from a few of their responses pictured above).

We continued sharing images throughout the week as an image is a tangible and accessible way for our students to start a discussion or learn about something new. When showing a new image, we would ask: what do you notice? What questions do you have? What do you think you know?

This is a great way to incorporate social justice work on all levels into your classroom - always start with an image! Ask what students notice. Ask what they think they know. Ask what questions they have. They will often surprise you and will have space and time to think deeply and reflect in a meaningful way.


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Later in the week, we read this article from Newsela about implicit bias in teachers and how black preschoolers are 3.6 times as likely to be suspended as white preschoolers. After reading the article, we had students write three statements (responses or questions) after reading it (one student's responses are pictured above), and then had a whole class discussion. This example (black preschoolers being suspended at far higher rates) is really helpful for pushing our students to move beyond the idea of history and past discrimination. It provides a way to explain systemic and institutional oppression through a concrete example. The idea of preschoolers being suspended also really upset our students. Many of them made connections to their Kindergarten Reading Buddies (who they read with once a week) and they were shocked that children so young could be discriminated against and suspended.

 

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Another resource we loved (and are keeping until the end of the school year) was our “Black History Month” book bin! As you can see (above), it is bursting with books. Students enthusiastically asked to read books from that bin and recommended them to each other. Important note: these are obviously not ALL of our books about black peoples (or that have characters of color). We have many that infiltrate all other categories. This was one way to organize some books related to Black History Month and Black Lives Matter that really worked for our students.

 

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We also did a read aloud of Milo’s Museum by Zetta Elliot and discussed the book afterward. During the read aloud, students volunteered to explain why Milo might be feeling uncomfortable, and said it’s racist because the painting is uncomfortable (referring to a painting of a white woman and a black woman who appears to be a slave), she’s the only black girl there, and she’s not in the museum! This was another tangible and concrete example of institutional exclusion. Students connected to Milo feeling upset about not seeing herself in the museum and many of them empathized (either through the read aloud or from their own experiences) with the concept that representation matters.

We culminated our week of action by asking students to write their own statements of what Black Lives Matter means to them, and why it is important. We told our students before they started writing that we would read and combine their responses into one piece for all of us to sign and display on our door with our “everyone is welcome here” sign. The process of taking all of their ideas and combining them into one overall statement is familiar to them as this is how we created our class contract.

After we received all of their statements, we spent some time paring them down and choosing parts that summarized overall ideas and came up with the statement pictured below. Finally, we had an  unveiling of our finished class statement and each student came up to sign their initials in cursive (which was a big deal because we had finally finished learning how to write all of the letter in cursive the week before!).  Some of our students also surprised us by creating their own Black Lives Matter poster as a small group and asking us to “put it up somewhere everyone can see it!” So today we have two posters up outside our door.

Did you participate in the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action? What resources or activities would you recommend? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

 

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Sinking Ship Simulation: Who do we VALUE?

"Well in the real world not everyone can get everything and this kind of showed me that not all our decision making processes are fair."

Notes on our whiteboard from the students' brainstorming and decision making process.

Notes on our whiteboard from the students' brainstorming and decision making process.

How it Works:

Yesterday in Social Studies, we did our Sinking Ship simulation (idea credit: we first read about this here). We had the students in half groups (when half the class is with us and half the class is with a different teacher) so we only had 13 students at a time. For each group, we started by handing out “assignments” on folded slips of paper.

The different roles were:

migrant worker

senator

someone who is currently unemployed

child

firefighter

teacher

nurse

doctor

babysitter

college student

taxi driver

lawyer

scientist

 

We then asked our students to get in a circle and told them that they were on a sinking ship, and there were only FIVE spots in the lifeboat. They had to work together to decide as a group which five people should go in the lifeboat.

Students immediately started making arguments for why they should be on the lifeboat. The senator claimed that he should get on the boat because he is important. Another student countered, “Not on the lifeboat!” One of our favorite funny moments occurred when someone agreed with the “senator” that he should be on the boat and another student said quietly to himself, “It depends if he is a Democrat or a Republican.”

Why We Love this Simulation:

We love this simulation for so many reasons--

  • It is fascinating to watch the students work it out amongst themselves!

  • It’s also interesting to hear the arguments the students come up, and note which students give up immediately when they read their assignment and decide that their job isn’t “good” enough.

  • It is also very telling (and part of our debrief) to note when students laugh. Some laugh out loud when they read their role to their classmates and others start play acting their preconceived idea of that role. For example, the student who received “you are currently unemployed” said, “I just graduated from college. I don’t have a job and I live in my mother’s basement!” in a goofy voice as if he was acting out a role, and put labels on himself.

The Two Group's Decisions:

In the first group, the students worked collaboratively and ensured that everyone’s voice was heard (with some raised voices, but general agreement), while in the second group, one student took charge and made decisions for the group that were later challenged as “unfair.” The two groups also came to different conclusions about who should get a spot on the lifeboat. Their final choices for which "characters" should be on the lifeboat were:

Group One:

  1. Doctor

  2. Child

  3. Nurse

  4. Scientist

  5. College student

Group Two:

  1. Child

  2. Person who is currently unemployed

  3. Doctor

  4. Senator

  5. College student

Student Reflections:

"I thought it was unfair because it was based on stereotypes and generalization."

"One thing that did not go well was there was a lot of stereotypes of "taxi driver" and the "currently unemployed". This is bad because just because someone does not have a job does not mean they are not smart. Also people were saying things like how can a taxi driver help. This made us choose people whose jobs make more money, not on their basic humanity!"

"I can connect this to the real world with people who say people who have bad paying jobs aren’t smart. In this I felt stereotyped and I can connect that with the real world because people were using the same stereotypes."


Who would you choose to go on the lifeboat? Do you have other ideas for collaborative problem solving simulations? How else can we push our students to think critically about who is valued in our society and how different people or roles are valued?  We’d love to hear your ideas!

 

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Preparation, Race, and Field Trips

We must be the luckiest humans in the world! (Well, that and Nina spent a good 7+ hours on the phone listening to Wade in the Water). Can you guess where we are going with our students?

We are going to the NMAAHC!

After this elated moment of realization, it hits us.. Wow. We are going to the NMAAHC. That is phenomenal AND… How in the world do we prepare fifth graders for such a monumental moment, challenging and remarkable history, and then of course, logistically how many hours can we stretch with 26 ten and eleven year olds in a museum?! The questions, concerns, and backwards planning gears all began cranking at terrifying speeds. 

So here we are. Sharing with you some of the first pieces of preparation before we head to the museum on Tuesday (!!).

1. We think together as a class about: why do we learn about history? Why does it matter? We did this before we studied Indigenous People's Day/ Columbus Day and we also did some class thinking around why we celebrate holidays. If you don't have these kinds of thought circles before content-- we highly encourage you to do so. They set the tone for what you are about to embark on and we refer back to these throughout the entire year-- case and point, right now to prepare for this museum!

2. We've already modeled in our classroom that we call time outs and pause for real conversations and learning around race. Just yesterday a student said something that another student found offensive and replied "That's racist!". We paused our lesson as teachers and as a class.. And we talked about it together. Our students already know that conversations about isms (like racism) and identities are not distractions from our learning. They are our learning

3. We work on a definition of racism ahead of time. It is going to come up. They (and many adults) don't actually know what it means. We use the equation:

Racism = prejudice (against a race) + institutional power

It doesn't quite make 'sense' to many of them and very well may not until the end of the year or in ten years. However, we believe in teaching into the complexities of these conversations and cheering students on as we converse and question about all the confusing nuances together. We also believe in being honest with our students and so already in October (yesterday) we got sincere questions like, "These black boys said what is this white girl doing here?' was that racist?" Questions like these are honest and we love to encourage our students to be available for the heavy thinking that comes along with answers that are sometimes (often) quite counter to what they have been taught. The answer to that question was, "Ouch, that doesn't sound like it felt good. No, it was not racist.." And then we talk about WHY!

4. We celebrate and learn from Black excellence all. Of. the. Time! From our This I Believe pieces in which we used Howard White's "The Power of Hello" recording to the many amazing authors we have been using already in our Poetry unit… our students have already seen (and are learning from) phenomenal black thinkers. We hope this has set them to be even more excited about the NMAAHC.

5. We have an overview of SOME* major moments of American history from some black perspectives. We have them go over these (they will by no means take most of them in) so that by the time we get to the museum they at least have a general sense of how history has gone. We also are explicit about the weight of some of the subject matter/imagery and we go back to our earlier conversation about why we value learning about history

*There is a LARGE emphasis on the some because I (Gabby) had a tremendously hard time figuring out exactly what pieces to add into our timeline. I ended up adding poets we have been studying and other authors we know well (Like Jacqueline Woodson) so that this timeline is personalized to our classroom learning. We also, of course, have moments like Emancipation all the way to Michael Brown… This final lesson hasn't happened yet so you might want to stay tuned to see if it goes terribly! It is an clear overload of information and they will not t retain all of it, but we are aiming for it to provide some grounding for students and moments they personally gravitate towards.

6. We do pre-museum homework. In our classroom, one key way we are doing this is by reflecting ahead of time using the 5 W's. Some of these include reflecting on why we are going, why it is important to go, what we are excited about learning etc.. This also includes who will be there and who we might be in this space, along with how we should act. How we should act can include the basic metro safety tips, but can also include identity politics (we love promoting self-awareness!).  This also gives us as their teachers a moment to see where different kids are coming from before we take them. We can assess nerves, discomfort, excitement, and so on.

7. We model excitement (because we are!) and we tag some awesome colleagues to join us on this journey. We are grateful they have agreed to weave their way through this museum and experience it with ten and eleven year olds.

8. There's always more but we are leaving you with these. How would you all prepare? What have we missed? How do you prepare for field trips with your students?