2. Orchestrating a Community of Diverse Educational Equity Leaders with Rebecca Cheung

Episode 2 Transcript: https://tinyurl.com/5n9988ce

In Episode 2, Rebecca Cheung, director of the 21CSLA State Center, delves into her leadership journey and discusses the crucial intersection of equity, leadership, and public education with Professor and 21CSLA Chair Jabari Mahiri.

Cheung shares her accidental path to leadership shaped by her experiences as a first-generation immigrant and Asian American. Her realization in college that giving back to the system was essential motivated her leadership journey. Drawing from her musical background, Cheung highlights how her skills in orchestration and collaboration have been instrumental in achieving shared visions.

Cheung also discusses equity consciousness, where she emphasizes the importance of critiquing existing practices for inequity and working towards inclusive systems. She underlines the significance of elevating and supporting leaders from marginalized communities in schools to drive equity-conscious change. Cheung advocates for more research on leadership development from an equity perspective and reflects on her early negative schooling experiences that led her to reimagine education as inclusive.

The episode explores the importance of leaders as continuous learners and the potential of digital tools in enhancing accessibility and accommodations in professional learning. Cheung underscores the necessity of embracing new ways of learning and engaging with diverse school communities to promote marginalized students' academic achievement.

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

Orchestrating a Community of Diverse Educational Equity Leaders

with Rebecca Cheung

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  0:27  

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  1:10  

Rebecca Cheung is the Assistant Dean of Leadership Development Programs at the Berkeley School of Education and the Director of the 21st Century California School Leadership Academy which has a State Center and seven regional academies. Rebecca Cheung, welcome to Equity Leadership Now. 

Rebecca Cheung  1:28  

Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Jabari Mahiri  1:30  

We want to begin by having you identify yourself. 

Rebecca Cheung  1:35  

Sure. So well, you've already said my name and my title, so I won't go there. In other contexts, I think some folks might know me as a mom, that I'm a daughter, that I'm a partner, and also my lived identity. I'm Chinese American. First generation born in the United States. Bilingual. I still consider myself an immigrant because a lot of my thinking is influenced by my parents who are immigrants to the United States. I'm an east coaster. What else do you want to know Jabari?

Jabari Mahiri  2:13 

Those are good beginnings. But let's also see how you feel about how the US society identifies you.

Rebecca Cheung  2:21  

Sure. So in US society, I think I will be identified as an Asian female. And also, I might be identified as short, because I am. And what else? A parent, a mom, a middle-aged person, I don't know what else. What else do you think?

Jabari Mahiri  2:48  

Well, I think that's enough to get us started in a conversation today, which is more focused on your leadership, and a number of arenas and we'll start with having you give us a sense of some of the key milestones in your leadership journey.

Rebecca Cheung  3:03  

Sure. I often like to describe my leadership journey as an accidental journey of events. I wasn't someone who dreamed about being an Assistant Dean my whole life, I never dreamed about being a teacher. I went to college, not really knowing what I wanted to do. I knew what my parents wanted me to do. They wanted me to be an attorney, or maybe get an MBA and go work for a big company. I got to Berkeley, and it gave me an opportunity to think about why I was so disaffected by my own public education as a child. I came to understand, because I went to school and didn't speak English, for instance, why I was treated so harshly or with such disregard by my teachers. 

My leadership journey began there in a way because I decided that if someone like me, who had had so many difficult experiences in public education didn't give back to the system, many other generations of kids, just like me, would continue to suffer, and continue to have to survive the way that I did. So I started when I was very young in college, thinking about that. 

From there, I became a teacher. I was a teacher in Oakland Unified School District, and then I got tapped on the shoulder and that's when my accidental journey began. I only got to the teacher part, I knew I wanted to be a teacher. From there I had many mentors and leaders, who continued to tap me on the shoulder for position after position from assistant principal to principal, from principal to elementary principal to middle school principal, from middle school principal to district office, from the district office to UC Berkeley, and even at Berkeley from being the director of the Principal Leadership Institute to becoming the Executive Director of Leadership Programs to becoming the Assistant Dean of Leadership Development Programs.

Jabari Mahiri  5:19 

The notion of being a music major who ended up going on this journey to become Assistant Dean of Leadership Development at UC Berkeley, I think is encouraging for all of us to, pursue our interests, whatever they may be, and at the same time, be poised to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves, that we refocus the direction that we may have wanted to go in initially. So in terms of that, you've achieved all these milestones, but what were some key obstacles to you achieving other milestones and leadership that you've achieved?

Rebecca Cheung  6:00 

You know, it's interesting that you bring up my musical background, because I think about how that's really helped me become the leader that I am. So one of the metaphors I personally use around leadership is this idea of conducting, being the conductor, and how the conductor's job is not to play any instrument, but rather to orchestrate and bring out the best in all the other instrumentalists to the same vision, and to the same goal for the piece, and in a way that will speak to the audience. And so I think about that a lot, you know, we might set the pace, or we might cut, we might run the rehearsals, that's a big job of the conductor is to listen, to assess how things can improve and practice in those ways and to guide. Ultimately, the realization is a collaborative and cooperative process, a conductor can't do their work alone. A conductor can't do their work with all the different instruments. 

Other ways that I think I've been able to be a successful leader include some of my own cultural upbringing and the ways that I learned to see the world as a Chinese-American Girl, oldest daughter, oldest granddaughter, and also one of the few bilingual of my generation between Mandarin and English. I had a lot of responsibilities from a very young age around translating really important information for family members speaking for my family, and advocating for them simply because I could. And I think that those early experiences made me think a lot about being of service to a greater community or to a greater group of people, instead of having very individualistic ideas about leadership, the sort of dominant way that people think traditionally about leadership in the United States; the single person that saves everything by themselves.

Jabari Mahiri  8:25 

Where are the obstacles in your leadership journey, moving through the milestones that are also tied to your positionality, background, and experiences as a Chinese-American woman?

Rebecca Cheung  8:38  

Certainly, I mean, there's nothing like being a short Asian woman walking into a room in Sacramento, at the state agency level where people might not know who you are, and being expected to observe the conversation instead of participating in the conversation has certainly happened to me many times in my career. Figuring out how to get into that space and establish yourself very quickly, as someone who should be invited to participate, not just observe, it occurs fairly frequently. 

I didn't choose a profession that was common for Asian Americans. And even now, I remember the first year I went to a Research Conference for professors of educational administration. There were 1,000 people at the conference, and I never saw another Asian person. And I thought, okay, here we are in the 2000s and there's not another Asian person here.

Jabari Mahiri 9:53 

Now, you're leading a really powerful organization in the 21st Century California School Leadership Academy, which we will continue to refer to now as 2CSLA. A lot of what we're doing in our orientation to Equity Leadership Now is attempting to really focus on equity, and that's what is at the center of 21CSLA. So can you give us your definition of equity consciousness? What is an equity-conscious leader?

Rebecca Cheung  10:23  

Sure. So my definition of equity consciousness might be what other people would call anti-racist or social justice leadership but it's very much about being able to critique the current existing and historical practices for inequity, for oppression, for systemic oppression, subsist more specifically. We see ourselves using that consciousness as leaders to ameliorate or improve the system to have more access, more opportunity, and more inclusion for those who have been marginalized by the system. So that's how I think about it.

Jabari Mahiri  11:13  

Then, let's further that conversation a bit to a term that we're beginning to embrace in our Equity Leadership Now podcasts, which is educate like democracy depends on it. Our Leadership Program, Leaders for Equity and Democracy also tries to attempt to focus on the connection between education leadership and democracy. So does our democracy depend on how we educate members of our society? And if so, how?

Rebecca Cheung  11:43  

Well, from my perspective, it's pretty clear that public education is one of the few institutions we have in the United States that actually is universally experienced by the majority of the population and so, the ability to influence how future generations think about or how we enact the ways that we govern and lead each other. It is the right place to do that work. 

I have had the privilege of working with several colleagues in the country of Chile, where we've had many discussions about this and much younger democracy there. I think what they've taught me through the years of working with them is how critical it is for us to not forget the role of our public institutions in improving our country in our society. In this country, you look at the voting participation rate and how low it is, for instance, one could make an argument that we've taken for granted our democracy that we've taken for granted, many of the things that many generations of people not only fought for but also sacrificed for today. Every time I get a chance to hear my Chilean colleagues, I'm reminded of how critically connected these public and social institutions are, to the way that we uphold and think about our country. 

The US is a place that really focuses on individualism, a lot of things are individualistic, and a lot of the systems are designed from, really an individual level. Individualism only goes so far when we think about how individuals ultimately do influence each other and it's through institutions that we see that. So for me, public education is critically important to thinking about the future of our country, and how we want to live out our democratic ideals because it's one of the few places where we actually do engage in systems, processes, and ways of learning from people who are different than us and also how we learn to influence and govern each other, how we learn to live as a group, not just as individuals, since our society is so individualistic.

Jabari Mahiri  14:10  

Thank you. So you've arrived at a place at a major institution in our society, a major institution in the world, where you are able to advance your own equity agenda. What are some of the main strategies and activities you engage in or initiate in order to facilitate the advancement of the inequity agenda at an institution of higher education?

Rebecca Cheung  14:34  

So, at Berkeley, you know, I think one of the real luxuries we have is that we have a lot of freedom to choose what we think is important and I think that that's already in and of itself, quite a privilege. I often asked myself,  what are you doing with the privilege you have? What are you doing with the opportunities you've been afforded, or as I would say, to my students, how are you stewarding what you've been given? What does your stewardship look like of your leadership or your opportunity? 

For me, the first has been to really elevate and make the case and continue to make the case for why leaders are a critical part of school improvement and why investing, investigating leaders, supporting leaders, and amplifying the needs of leaders is a critical part of improving our schools. This is a case that we still have to make on a regular basis. There are so many people who think that leaders in schools are paper pushers, they're middle managers, they're bus schedulers, they buy the paper for the copier, and they don't really make transformative changes. You can see that reflected in the very small investments in scholarship, for instance, about leaders, how to support leaders, how to help leaders learn how to support leaders to grow in their careers. 

I think what I see as my role here is to continue to better understand what leaders need in order to be able to lead from this equity-conscious equity perspective, and also, what our systems need to know about creating the conditions for leaders to do that work. 

Jabari Mahiri  16:34   

You know, I've said about you that I think that you're a master administrator, but you have this unusual combination of also being a true visionary, in conjunction with being a scholar. You said that there was a dearth of scholarship on these issues of leadership, actually, we will be producing some of the scholarship ourselves as we interview people like yourselves and others who are leading us in these areas but, is there a piece of literature that you can think of that has significantly influenced you around considerations of building leadership from an equity-conscious standpoint?

Rebecca Cheung  17:10  

You know, when I knew you were going to ask me this question, I went all the way back to thinking about when I first became a teacher, because as I shared with you, I had a lot of negative or as some scholars say, subtractive schooling experiences as a child. I think a lot of the early scholars that I read helped me to reimagine schools and schooling as something different. I think about the work of Bell Hooks, for instance, and Teaching to Transgress. I think about when Lisa Delpit first coined the phrase "other people's children". 

Those pieces, even though they were about teacher education, weren't necessarily geared towards leaders really helped me to imagine a different type of schooling, a different type of schooling environment. The other thing that helped me do that was not a scholar, but I think, the arts also helped me do that. Really, truly, as a child, I think if I didn't have the arts, I would have had a much more difficult time. I experienced it very viscerally in a way that helped me to see how these different modes of learning and expression really helped more with what I think of as thriving than learning, that they were social-emotional. 

There are so many, Gloria Ladson Billings, I could go on, but I think, of that time period when I was becoming a teacher, those pieces were really important for me, because it helped me to reimagine the kind of education that I wanted for future generations. It wasn't just about what I didn't want, because I think that's always easier, it's easier to critique someone than to envision something better. I think that those scholars helped me to do that. From the leadership standpoint, I get asked this a lot, who are the leaders who inspired me? I've had a lot, I've just been really lucky to have a lot of personal mentors, mostly women of color, in my career, who have really taken me under their wings. Even if we had different lived experiences, they helped me see the world from their lens. They shared with me how they navigated education, and through those processes, I could then begin to see how I could find a way for myself how I could craft my own way. 

Jabari Mahiri  19:42  

Now you've been positioned to mentor other leaders coming on, you've done the foundational work to develop our Principal Leadership Program here at UC Berkeley. You've done the foundational work to relaunch our educational doctorate, which is, as we mentioned before, Leader for Equity and Democracy. So talk a little bit about the central components of the pedagogy these leadership programs employ under your guidance and direction to train leaders to be both equity-conscious and effective. I'm gonna also sneak a question right after that, is there really any difference between being an equity-conscious leader and an effective leader?

Rebecca Cheung  20:23  

Well, the last question you asked is easiest to answer. Yes. I think we do that in our program design, we think about those issues. So the Principal Leadership Institute now 20-something years old, is a place I've been connected to for a long time. In the first 10 cohorts, I didn't teach but I mentored a lot of the people in the program because I worked in one of the partner districts as a school leader. Many of the students in the PLI would come to work for me for summer school where they would shadow me or they would interview me for the various assignments or whatever else it might be. So I always felt adjacent to the Principal Leadership Institute, because I got my master's credential before it existed. But yet, because I worked in a nearby city, I had this sort of connection with the organization. I think what's special about the PLI are a few things. One is that, it's a program that really focuses on integrating research and practice.

One of the ways that I think we're really unique in doing this is through a transformative pedagogy that focuses on performance, because leadership is enacted. It is an enactment. It is in its very nature a performance, on a certain level, and it's public. It doesn't mean you make every decision in public, but the actions are public, and there's public accountability for them. We've thought a lot about that in the design, how our students have opportunities to practice and try to enact their own ideas and values in their leadership. So for instance, we have a lot of simulation activities, we have a lot of activities that require them to stand up and pretend that they're a principal even when they're not. And more than that, we ask them to learn in that way. How do you learn in public and in groups, another part of it is collaboration, this idea that we don't ascribe to the superhero, we're not a superhero academy here at the PLI, but rather collaborative leaders and creating coalitions, thinking about how you do that. 

Another hallmark in addition to the performative aspects and the collaboration is our commitment to a strong use of evidence and I don't just mean student achievement data, but how we use evidence to lead. Leaders should see themselves as learners and they should also see themselves as researchers, in the sense that they should be constantly collecting information that informs both their individual and their teams. I think when they engage people in that way, it is more collaborative.

[Music Break: “Hoist Up the Banner” by Eric Bibb] 

Those are some of the hallmarks that I think of. Our team, as you know, is a very unique team. It's a highly collaborative team that works together to enact what we think of as the best of professional learning in a graduate degree program. Many people might think coming to Berkeley to get a master's or doctorate means listening to a lot of lectures, because, frankly, that's what we did in undergrad, or at least that's what I did in undergrad I listened to a lot of lectures. It's a very passive learning experience. We think of these learning experiences for leaders as opportunities for them to have their best learning experiences, so that they can begin to inform themselves of the visions they want to have for how they want to lead, and what kinds of schools that they want to lead. What kinds of instruction do they want happening in those schools? Well, we want to give them some new things to think about.

Jabari Mahiri  25:48  

There's certainly a lot to think about. Beyond your work, and building and shaping these Leadership Programs at the School of Education at UC Berkeley. You are also the director of the 21st Century California School Leadership Academy, as we mentioned earlier, can you talk to us a little bit about this mission and goals and why this work is needed?

Rebecca Cheung  26:09  

Yes. So 21CSLA is a state effort to provide equity-centered professional learning for leaders in California at no cost. Professional learning is centered around continuous improvement, the evidence-based leadership I talked about earlier, and certainly expanding capacities for equity. 

The last time that the state invested in professional learning at scale for leaders was in the 80s. The way they did it, then, as I understand it, for many people who went through the program at that time, including some of our collaborators in the 21CSLA. They were participants in the original CSLA. They tell me to imagine a shelf of binders, there was a set curriculum, and that it was by job level, think assistant principal binder, principal binder, direct coordinator, binder director binder. I think at that time, that makes a lot of sense. That's how we thought a lot about administration and a lot about leadership. What do you need to know, before you get this job? Then, what do you need to know about the next job? That's a very classic, career ladder-based model for training, rather than professional learning. Here 30 years later, it's a new century of learning for leaders, it's a new approach to leaders, one that's much more localized and customized individual leader interests, one that is focused on improving our schools and ameliorating some of the harms of the past. There are no more binders and there are no more levels. Rather, there are different forms of professional learning approaches. So we're trying to really also set some expectations for how leaders learn. They learn in community, they learn in networks, they learn in role-like groups. They have capacities that need to be expanded. They can be expanded at the individual level, they can be expanded in group settings, to really think more about the leader, who is the learner, as opposed to the content. I think that's a that's a big shift.

Jabari Mahiri  28:29  

And we know that we're looking at leaders as learners at the district level at the school site level, teacher leaders. Let's just focus a bit on how this learning contributes to a new arena that the 21CSLA is moving in, which is Universal Transitional Kindergarten. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Rebecca Cheung  28:56  

Sure. So, you know, Governor Newsom really took on an ambitious equity agenda in his time and one of the major policies around that is to try to improve access to high quality preschool for children, and specifically this initiative called Transitional Kindergarten, which is kind of, it's hard to understand sometimes for outsiders. I often describe it to people outside of California as preschool for four-year-olds, at least eight hours a day, get really down to the basics, because it's hard for a lot of people to understand what we're talking about exactly. And we got involved in this initiative because of the very idea that leaders are important implementers of policy. I'll be perfectly honest with you, we also got into this because the preschool community has identified leaders as a barrier to successful implementation. You could see both sides of the coin, if you're a leader who doesn't understand the equity promise or the vision for the policy, they may be a barrier, because they have a lot to do already. They don't need additional projects or complications to their daily work. And so leading to me becomes an important part of them being strong implementers. 

We were asked to take our professional learning approaches, and add infuse, or intersect them with content that is connected to the implementation of Transitional Kindergarten. Some of those topics include parent and family engagement, authentic parent and family engagement, using assessment how we use assessment with four-year-olds, how we think about that, and thinking about the importance of developmentally appropriate practices and play. So really, in California, the goal is to take a lot of the best of early learning and transform our early elementary grades. I mean, very explicitly, they've said this--especially when we have the high stakes accountability under No Child Left Behind for all those student test scores, you know--third grade got moved to second grade, and second grade got moved to first grade and in first grade got moved to kindergarten. Soon before we knew it, we had been asking five-year-olds to sit at their desks all day and not move, not wiggle. We were taking a lot of those test-based strategies and simply thinking that more exposure to the same kind of teaching was actually going to improve outcomes. And it did in some cases. 

But long term, what we know is we need to have a teaching pedagogy and an approach in the early years that's much more responsive to developmental, what scientists and psychologists have long documented as important developmental milestones that children go through physically, and emotionally, and intellectually. Ultimately this initiative about four-year-olds is really about four-year-olds through eight-year-olds, and improving schooling for all of them.

Jabari Mahiri  32:29  

So leaders as learners, they have a lot on their plate. We know that 21CSLA has developed a number of strategies for encouraging, guiding, supporting, and providing resources for leaders as learners. We have Communities of Practice. We have Professional Learning communities, we have actual coaching of leaders in place by people who themselves are being coached to be better--coaches of leaders. We also have a Digitally Mediated Learning Hub, trying to leverage some of the 21st-century ways of thinking about learning. 

Rebecca Cheung  33:11 

So as a professional learning project, that's really what 21CSLA is, I think it's important for us to have future-facing ambitions and goals around the future of professional learning. We know that our society will continue to change. That was most clearly evidenced when the schools had to close.

So related to 21CSLA, we're really clear, I think at this point that, we're never going back to fully in-person again. There will always still be a need for some in-person interaction, schools will never be completely virtual either. Professional learning is the same. We've seen a lot of accessibility issues, and accommodations that can be provided through digital tools for instance. In fact, just a few hours ago, I was in a meeting with our State Agencies, and they came to our retreat virtually. I invited them to come to a big event we had earlier this weekend, and one of the State Agency leaders said, "I've never gone to an online professional learning like yours." And at first, I was a little nervous because I didn't know what she meant. And she said, "I felt like I was in the room. How did you do that?" She says, "I've been to so many offerings of the state, none of them has ever been like that. I felt like I was there. And I got to talk."

I think what we're trying to do with the Digitally Mediated Learning is, to position ourselves to look forward. We're all going out of our comfort zones. We've not done these things before, but it doesn't mean that that means we can't do them. I think the idea is to remind us that we are responsible for learning and forging what professional learning looks like for leaders over time, and that means with the digital tools that come with it.

Jabari Mahiri  35:21  

So just one last question, and it touches on what you just said. We know that the COVID pandemic has changed everything forever in terms of how we engage in teaching and learning in schools, and how we engage in the professional development of leaders. We're in a moment where we have cultural wars that are raging and vestiges of them are entering into the school setting, also. So, how do equity-minded school leaders engage the entire school community, as diverse as it might be in its perspectives and priorities, teachers, staff, families, students, community members, etc to promote the academic achievement of particularly marginalized and underperforming students?

Rebecca Cheung  36:11  

Well, that's a really big question.

Jabari Mahiri  36:16  

It's the last one.

Rebecca Cheung  36:17  

This is how I've been thinking about education. I think that education in the United States is going through a period of deep disruption. It's been going on for a while, and the pandemic was an accelerant on some of those disruptions, or made some of those disruptions more public, but I believe our system has been going through a period of that historians will look back on and see it as a period of disruption. And why I say that is because I think about just even my short time here at Berkeley, how it started with the Occupy movement, and then there was the Occupy after the Occupy movement. At least here on campus, we had all those conservative speakers that were invited by the Young Republicans, and all the different issues that came out of that, or I think about, the issues with undocumented, ICE, and immigration, then there was DACA. There's just been a series of major up swells from our young people about the things that they're demanding their leaders to pay attention to. It's been going on for over 10 years now. 

Of course, during the pandemic, we had some really clear examples around the policing. That was one of the major contributions I think that young people made during that time. When you asked me about leaders and what they should do now, I think they should listen to young people. I think young people have a lot of ideas about the kind of world they want to live in, they have lots of things they're worried about, like the planet, global warming, climate change. They're worried about buying homes and having jobs, they're worried about homelessness, real problems, they have serious concerns that we should be paying attention to.

I think coming out of the pandemic we have every reason to just listen more to what young people want from their schools, what they want from their institutions, what they want from their communities, and to figure out how to craft what that world of tomorrow looks like for them, and the kinds of schooling experiences they want to have.

I forgot to mention the fourth most important element of the Principal Leadership Institute. The fourth is critical reflection, and the absolute necessity for aspiring and practicing leaders to have opportunities to critically reflect. By critically reflect I don't necessarily only mean self-critical. Of course, we might self critique. We really have to, that's a big part of how leaders learn. If they really deeply reflect about it it can have great spillover into many of the future actions that they take. They're not one for transactions. I made a mistake, I reflected on it. Now I'll fix that mistake for leaders who deeply critically reflect and we've learned a lot about how to support them to do that. They can make one mistake, critically reflect on it, and change many practices and approaches for how they do their future work. So it's really important that we do that as a part of our training in our professional learning.

Jabari Mahiri  40:10  

It reminded me of one more question. Yes, absolutely the last one. When we talked about a person from the State System of Support, saying, "I'm here on Zoom, but it feels like I'm in the room", I want you to help us understand why that might be from the standpoint of what you've talked about, as the 21st century California School Leadership Academies way, the 21CSLA way, and also just as a way of anchoring how we see this way, having been a part of the larger State System of Support, since this person is here not to oversee and evaluate what we're doing, but actually to learn about what we're doing, to refurbish their thinking about the policies that are needed to facilitate support, and help guide this way that's becoming more universalized. We'll end on this note, what is the 21CSLA way?

Rebecca Cheung  41:18  

Well, the 21st Century State Center CSLA way, includes four dimensions. The first is a focus on equity. In this particular scenario, the leader was coming to a session that focused, on how 21CSLA can better support leaders of color in the field, and how our professional learning can support leaders of color, because, as I mentioned earlier, we believe that diversifying the workforce is part of how we enact and create a more equitable system. So right there, you know, she started in that space. 

The second tenant of the 21CSLA way is around individual and collective reflection and how we do that, you might remember that there were a lot of different levels of reflection that were incorporated into the learning design. The session started with the Center team listening to those who facilitate racial affinity spaces within 21CSLA for underrepresented leaders. By listening to them, we were able to make a list of some of the common challenges that they experience as leaders of color in the system. We then reflected that back to the larger group of 21CSLA leadership, not just those who lead the racial affinity groups, but those who don't lead the racial affinity groups to say, these are the lived experiences of leaders of color in our state at this time. What do you think about that and reflect on your own experiences? Have you witnessed this happen? Have you experienced this yourself? There were many different layers of reflection involved. 

The third part of the 21CSLA way is about transformation. It's about focusing on transformation, not replication. We also used the dialogue, which is the force tenant of it, use of evidence and improvement. In this case, you led an amazing and transformative dialogue between two scholars who study the lived experiences of people of color, not specifically leaders, but people of color. We were able to ask our leaders to take that scholarship, support each other, and take that scholarship into their practice. That's a transformative part, to say, how can we change? How do we facilitate our professional learning? How can we change how we design our professional learning? How can we change who we hire to deliver professional learning so that we are better equipped to support these under-represented leaders in an effort to diversify our workforce? I think it is a great example of how that was all embedded.

Another transformational experience to the online piece, because the State Agency leader was online. She said I got to see everyone in the room. I got to hear every single speaker in the room because she said online a lot of times you only hear, for instance, maybe the Keynote or the primary speaker, but she could hear all the audience members and she could see them, because of our camera setup. She said, "I got to hear the scholars. And then I got to go to my own breakout room where I got to dialogue with other people who participated," she said, "and then the kicker was, someone reported out what we said. She said, "Usually the voices on Zoom are silent. They're mute. A different use of the word mute. We couldn't speak out to the audience, but our conversation was reported back to the main room. To her, she really named a lot of the elements of that transformational learning process for her and she said it was the most engaged that she had been in an online offering to date because, you know, we will think of something else, and maybe six months or a year or two years to make it even better.

Mayra Reyes  45:58  

Our podcast team includes Jennifer Elemen, Robyn Ilten-Gee, Andrea Lampros, Brianna Luna, Jabari Mahiri, Audra Puchalski, Mayra Reyes, Dara Tom, and Ryan Whittle.