In 2021, Reynoldsburg City Schools, with support from Digital Promise’s Center for Inclusive Innovation (CII), engaged in a project to design open educational resources (OER) to create a model for supporting classroom and community discourse about racial inequity and social injustice.
Our Inclusive Innovation Team was composed of key partners who are representatives of the Reynoldsburg community: two city council members, a community business owner, parents, students, teachers, and administrators. I served as co-lead alongside my colleague, Lisa Floyd-Jefferson. Over the course of the project, the Reynoldsburg Inclusive Innovation Team, Digital Promise, and our professional development partner, Teach Diverse Lit, journeyed through the Inclusive Innovation research and development (R&D) process. Our goal was to disrupt the issues of: paucity of inclusive curriculum, identity suppression, lack of belonging, the intersection of real-world issues meeting the classroom, and—for some of our educators—a diminished comfort and confidence about how to teach and facilitate conversations about race and justice in the United States.
The first step in the Inclusive Innovation process is Connect and Commit. During Connect and Commit, the team had the opportunity to learn more about one another, and each other’s “whys” for wanting to do this work. Connect and Commit allowed us to build necessary and meaningful relationships with our team members. These relationships were a driving force behind our progress through Inclusive Innovation; we were not only working to provide a solution to racial inequity and social injustice discourse, we were literally working for each other, knowing that our solution would have a substantial impact on the school atmosphere and would provide a better experience for students, teachers, families, and our community moving forward.
Throughout the Inclusive Innovation process one of our main focuses was to ensure that our students were directly involved in designing our solution and that their voices were amplified. When voting on possible solutions, student votes received more weight than adult votes. Additionally, our students engaged in leadership and skills-building opportunities within the Inclusive Innovation process such as public speaking and facilitation.
Our final solution, classroom and community Socratic Circles, a teacher guidebook, and professional development modules, are truly the result of our co-leadership with educators and the community and centering student voice and leadership.
Prior to receiving training and completing the modules, some of the teachers felt extremely hesitant in their ability to facilitate a Socratic Seminar to engage students in racial equity and/or social justice discourse. However, after receiving training and working through the modules, every teacher on the team felt confident that they could successfully facilitate a Socratic Seminar in their classroom. Furthermore, all teachers felt that the resources that we collectively developed could prepare any teacher to conduct a Socratic Seminar on racial equity or social justice. As an administrator, what I know to be true from this process is that it is not enough to communicate or have a blanket expectation for teachers to be more culturally competent. If we really want to see change in this area, we must provide training and resources.
The impact of the Inclusive Innovation process and our solution has been groundbreaking for our teachers and students. Each time teachers planned lessons utilizing our Socratic Seminar solution, the anticipation and excitement from both teachers and students was tangible! I would hear students talk about the lessons in the hallways and in the cafeteria. In our eighth grade humanities class, students participated in a lesson titled, Two Americas. Students examined the poems, “I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman and “I, Too” by Langston Hughes. In African American literature, students read articles about the removal of Confederate monuments and discussed both the pros and cons. One of our science classes had students compare and contrast tables, charts, and graphs related to race and gender in STEM careers, and in a math class, students interpreted graphs illustrating race and gender inequities across education, net worth, and employment. In each class, across content areas, every student was engaged. Students who typically never spoke in class shared their stories. Every student had a voice.
Reynoldsburg City Schools has a student population of just under 8,000 students, 75 percent of whom are students of color. When teachers integrate lessons with a model for engaging in meaningful discourse about racial equity and social justice effectively and with fidelity, the classroom curriculum and space become more culturally inclusive. As teachers and classrooms become more culturally inclusive, teachers become more culturally competent by increasing their ability to reach and engage all students. Why is this important? When teachers are culturally competent and curriculum and classroom spaces are culturally inclusive, academic engagement and performance increase and student engagement improves. Students in the Socratic Circles pilot reported feeling more ownership over their learning and felt more engaged.
After establishing classroom practices and building capacity for student leadership, we conducted a student-led, community Socratic Seminar with central office and building administrators, teachers, parents, students, the Mayor of Reynoldsburg, and Board of Education members. We heard from eighth grade students, children of refugees and new U.S. citizens, English learners, people in positions of power, people in the LGBTQIA2S+ community, adults and students who have experienced racism, and people with disabilities. That night, everyone’s voice was heard and respected. No matter their age, everyone was on the same level. Rather than being suppressed, everyone’s social identities and lived experiences were honored. That night, I felt like we could have solved the problems of the world.
After working hard on implementing these materials at our district level, we are proud to share and publish the modules and guide with other educators. I am excited to be supporting the scale up of the community Socratic Circles in additional districts with the CII team in their new project that launched at the beginning of this month. The Community Socratic Circles to Increase Teacher Capacity for Culturally Responsive Teaching project aims to train teachers to implement Socratic Circles to increase teacher skills and engage students and communities on a deeper level. We are working with three districts in the northeast region of the United States to implement Socratic Circles in their classrooms and expand them into the community. Locally in Reynoldsburg City Schools, our goal for this year is to expand the work of Socratic Circles to prepare teachers and students to facilitate important conversations around racial equity and social justice in the classroom and the community. These conversations are key in building a positive school culture that honors the diversity of experiences of our students and families.
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