By Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, Institute Scholar, gcLi
It’s 4 pm on Friday night before a long weekend and the building is practically empty. A white teacher walks down a staircase, onto a landing adjacent to a popular hangout spot for students of color. The teacher walks by and observes a group of Black students, all talking at once, upset, agitated and alternately whispering and yelling, huddled around a girl who is the most upset. It is really hard to tell. The teacher has never taught these students and they don’t know her.
The teacher says, “Is everything ok?” They answer dismissively saying, “We’re fine.” The teacher continues down the stairway and stops in her tracks. Her antennae are on high alert. She feels like something is amiss and she should go back. She has heard that one of these girls had been caught vaping, and two have previously gotten in trouble.
She decides to go back to them and see what’s going on. Her hunch leads her to believe they are doing something questionable.
She approaches the girls and says, “What’s going on here? Are you doing something you shouldn’t be doing?”
The girls are triggered by her words and approach. They are furious and even more upset than before. They yell at her to leave them alone and accuse her of racial profiling.
The girls go to the Dean and complain about her and the moment. The teacher insists she did nothing wrong. She complains to the Dean that the girls were rude, swore at her, and they should be made to apologize to her.
Before we dive into the details of this case, let’s warm up by reflecting on what it feels like to be approached when you are very upset. Think about a time when someone asked you, “are you okay?” and it felt like a genuine invitation to be vulnerable and honest. Now think about a time when those same words felt like a trick question or even threatening, and you walked away feeling worse. Add to this reflection, a racial lens. When surrounded by people who identify as you do during challenging times, you’re in an affinity space and that likely feels more comfortable and safe. When someone who doesn’t racially identify in the same way you do approaches you, what reaction do you have? What made the difference to you?
We’ve all had the experience of walking by an upset group of students and our spidey sense antenna tells us “something is not right here.” It’s incumbent upon us as educators to act on these moments in a way that serves all involved while considering multiple factors as we plan our approach. We can’t always get it right, but there are some things we can do to minimize the likelihood of creating more distress.
Students often screen us when we ask them personal questions like “are you okay?” Students run through their inner trustworthiness inventory. In other words, “Who are you? Why are you asking? Can I trust you? Why should I trust you? Do you really care about me or do you care about maintaining systems of power and control?” In this case, there were several overlooked critical considerations through a leadership lens that are central to our Pedagogy of Leadership® at gcLi.
Dr. Deak, gcLi Scholar Emerita, would have us start by considering everyone’s brain. Clearly the girls are upset, redlining, and have zero interest in telling the teacher what is upsetting them. They want to be left alone to focus on their group. When she comes back, we can anticipate that they will be more angry that she didn’t respect their clear message, ”We’re fine.” As in: We don’t want to talk to you; Leave us alone.
The teacher is right to trust her antennae that something is amiss when five girls are clearly very upset. It’s always tricky to re-engage someone who has told you they are fine. It’s imperative to think before you act so as not to be experienced as disrespectful, intrusive, and a host of other possible negative reactions. Approaching any situation with anything other than an open mind cuts off any learning and is a potential liability, especially when students are upset. It is therefore prudent to carefully consider what would make these girls feel like your intentions are sincere and empathic, first and foremost.
Indeed, it’s impossible to know why the girls were upset, but the teacher jumped into inference (they were misbehaving) without having any facts. This approach strongly suggests that the teacher was acting on assumptions that were likely both racially informed. These assumptions might have been informed by previous information about two of the girls and the previous infractions that involved them. This language is also heard through the lens of racial identity and social policing. Like the officers walking their beat and only asking Black men, “Hey, what’s going on?”, Black students often experience teachers ‘checking in’ as policing and biased, communicating racially informed suspicion, particularly when the person asking is white.
There’s a crucial difference between intent vs. impact, especially in difficult conversations. Black students go through their lives being approached with suspicion in ways white students do not experience. All the more reason the teacher should have carefully considered what would make these girls feel like your intentions are sincere and empathic, first and foremost. The teacher’s failure to lead with empathy, to communicate genuine concern, and convey an awareness of the dynamics of race and power that were at play, and then gather information before making any assumptions, undermined any glimmer of positive intent.
So, what do you wish you would have said if you were in this situation?
In a soft, quiet, unhurried tone, – “I’m so sorry to come back and interrupt you, but I’m really concerned about you … I see how upset you are … and I just couldn’t walk away without wondering if there is anything I could do to help you? I know you don’t know me. I’m Susan Jones (I’d use the less formal first name if there is precedent in your school for that), and I teach math here- and I’d be happy to try to help you.” Or- “Is there someone who can help you who you know and trust because I can see you’re all really upset about something…”
School is supposed to be a safe place, certainly a safer place from the endless experiences of racial profiling Black students experience throughout their daily lives. As Jenna Chandler Ward would remind us (Teaching While White), these students have most likely been experiencing this kind of implicit bias since preschool and we know that students of color are disciplined at a higher rate than other students. In this scenario, a group of white girls might still reject the teacher’s offer and resent the question, but they wouldn’t feel personally threatened by her whiteness, just her position of power and authority.
For Black students (and other non-dominant culture students), we need to understand that microaggressions happen often, the effect is cumulative, and this will not be the first time they’ve heard something like that. Black students live with the psychological burden and heightened awareness of having to be concerned about being judged negatively for anything due to conscious and unconscious racism.
It’s hard to know the extent to which the Black students at this school had experienced school-specific structural and systemic injustice. If so, it is understandable that they would bring a cumulative reactivity of mistrust to an unknown teacher’s concern, and be predisposed to see this encounter as another experience of suspicion couched in caring. It is incumbent on us as educators in schools to speak up on behalf of ongoing professional development to ensure that students feel equally respected, and valued for who they are.
In this case, the teacher was struggling to understand the impact of her words as she defended her intention and expected the Dean to force the girls to apologize to her. The teacher’s defensiveness and expectation of an apology revealed the depth of her lack of understanding of her students’ experience of her actions, her understanding of herself, and unexplored white fragility. While some kind of restorative practice and conversation may lie ahead for this teacher and these students, that should not happen until the teacher understands herself and the girls better, and can be accountable for her interactions, and is willing to apologize to the students for the impact of her words and actions. White teachers need to ask themselves: what additional steps should a white teacher take before approaching a group of upset students of color? We need to have ongoing conversations about the dynamics of race and power. The tensions in our schools, as well as in society, impact how a student of color experiences interventions from adults who don’t look like them. That is a reality of people of color within predominantly white institutions (or PWI’s).
We all are works in progress, and as educators we are on the front lines of social change, learning with our students as well as about our students. We all need ongoing professional development in the leadership competencies that we hold dear at gcLi: understanding our brains, building empathy, and how to give and receive feedback. The role that DEI, SEL, gender equity and research has on how we live, learn, and lead well cannot be underscored enough. These critical skills are the heart of the matter when it comes to the Pedagogy of Leadership®.
Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair is an internationally recognized clinical psychologist, school consultant, speaker and author.