#NAISAC2017 Takeaways: Getting Strategic about Cultural Compentency Leadership

Almost two weeks ago, I was in Baltimore at the 2017 NAIS Annual Conference. The thing about large scale conferences is that you attend all of these sessions, take tons of notes, eat up all this inspiration, and then return to your school not knowing where to start or what to do with all of that inspiration that now lives in a notebook in your desk. With that said, I decided to take some time to think about what were those things, those takeaways that really resonated with me. What did I hear that I can apply to my work to positively impact my school, my students, and my own professional (and personal) growth. So instead of doing a large scale information dump, I have broken up my takeaways into a five part blog post series so I can hone in on 5 sessions from which I walked away with a nugget or two that really spoke to me. So here we go.....

On Day 1, I started my day at 8:00am with Ronnie Codrington-Cazeau and Robert Greene who were presenting "You Can't Get Strategic, Unless You Get Strategic: Cultural Competency Leadership in Practice". Ronnie is the Head of School at the Evergreen School (WA) and, full-disclosure, she was also my mentor during my 2016-17 year in the NAIS Aspiring Heads Fellowship. Robert Greene is a diversity practitioner and consultant with Jones Consulting (CA). Ronnie hired Robert as a consultant to work with her and her senior leadership team at Evergreen, and the presentation took the audience through some of the work they did together, lessons learned, and progress made. So while I found the entire presentation so useful and applicable, my goal of this post is not to recap everything they took us through. I just want to share 3 things said during the presentation that continue to resonate with me two weeks later.

1. One of the key cornerstones to advancing a school's accessibility, diversity, and inclusion efforts is that they need to "identify and reduce internal and external obstacles to promoting, maintaining and supporting a climate of inclusivity for students, faculty and families." This is critical. Schools work so hard in to creating cultural programming, talking about bias, stereotype threat, and privilege (hopefully), commit to being an inclusive community, aim to have a diverse student and faculty body, and yet, if time is not spent one this key element then we'll keep spinning our wheels. Tackling this means being willing to take a good hard look in the mirror and acknowledge what may really be standing in the way of a school having a truly inclusive school climate and community.

2. A part of the work with the senior leadership team focused on culturally competent communication. Robert and Ronnie shared the 13 Skills for Cultural Competent Communication and while I had encountered some of the skills (or a version of a skill) on previous community norm lists, it was the skills listed first and last that really stuck with me.

** "Greet others genuinely and make an effort to pronounce their name accurately"
    This skill stuck out to me as something I make an effort to have in my daily practice. Some of it comes from my name sensitivity that stems from having grown up with a maiden name that often got butchered. I also grew up overseas and so part of the education of that experience was learning to pronounce people's name correctly and to not short change a name for my own personal ease. So seeing this skill in right was a first for me and yet, I can not say enough how important this is in a school community.

** "Celebrate Successes and Have Fun"
     I loved seeing this skill and was surprised at how its absence from list had never stood out to me before. Equity and Inclusion work can be hard, personal draining, rewarding, impactful, and forever ongoing. Through all that work, there does not seem to be enough moments where we celebrate our successes and embrace the fun. Simply put, we need to do this more.

3. "If you don't have a diverse pool of candidates, then you are not looking hard enough."
   Schools have a variety of methods when it comes to hiring that may include using particular search firms focused on this area, reaching out to affinity groups and organizations, connecting with nontraditional teaching candidates (i.e. career changes), etc. So there is tons that can be done to positively impact a school's results in this area and yet, some will still default to the reasons why they believe they cannot attract a diverse pool of candidates and hires. It definitely begs the questions - are schools really looking hard enough and are schools really stepping up their efforts and exhausting all the ways in which they build their candidate pools?