Becoming a More Equitable Educator: Mindsets and Practice
by MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab
This course is a minimally-formatted version of Becoming a More Equitable Educator: Mindsets and Practices, a massive open online course (MOOC) by the MIT Teaching Systems Lab that originally launched on the edX platform. The text is basically the same as the edX course, but when helpful, we have removed material that is relevant only to the MOOC learning experience.
Download Full Course DOCX
Download Facilitator guides PDFs
Download Mindset Tables PDFs
Download Classroom Templates
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Teaching Tolerance is an organization that offers age-appropriate resources to help students learn to affirm diversity, stand up to bias, and talk about topics like gender, identity, or family. Lessons teach “hard history,” social justice, and other topics.
Zinn Education Project offers lessons and multimedia resources from different periods in American History, with a justice and equity lens.
Talking About Identity
Sarah Ahmed’s book, Being the Change: Lessons and Strategies to Teach Social Comprehension contains many detailed lessons to help students talk about identity, bias and current events. Ahmed suggests that if we as adults want to do work around bias or identity with young people, it’s always best to try the activity with adults first. This allows us to practice responding to emotions, comments and questions that may come up before we try out the lesson with children.
Teaching Tolerance. Discovering my Identity. In this lesson, created for grades 3-5, “students will describe aspects of their identities such as race, gender, ability, religion and more.”
Facing HIstory and Ourselves. Teaching Strategy: Identity Charts. Learn how to use identity charts to describe our own identities, as well as those of people from history or fiction.
Bailin, Emily. 2014. The Power of Digital Storytelling. TEDx. In this short video, Bailin shares an activity she uses to open up conversations about identity with students, and explains why it was a game-changer for her in the classroom.
Assorted Best Practice Guides
Teaching Tolerance. 2017. Best Practices for Serving English Language Learners and Their Families.
Collins, Cory. 2018. LGBTQ Best Practices Guide. Teaching Tolerance.
GLSEN. 2019. "Erasure and Resilience: The Experiences of LGBTQ Students of Color." A series of four research reports that examines the school experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), Black, Latinx, and Native and Indigenous LGBTQ youth.
Thurber, Arnie and Brandy, Joe. 2018. Creating Accessible Learning Environments. Vanderbilt University.
Strategies To Talk About Challenging Topics
“Let’s Talk!” Discussing Race, Racism and other Difficult Topics with Students (a Teaching Tolerance Guide).
ACT (affirm, counter, transform) framework and Talking About Race Toolkit.
Michael, Ali, and Eleonora Bartoli. “What White Children Need to Know About Race.” National Association of Independent Schools. This article describes the ways that White children are socialized not to talk about race. It includes suggestions to help educators create healthy conversations about race and a positive, anti-racist White identity that students can work towards.
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Camera, Lauren. 2019. "White Students Get More K-12 Funding Than Students of Color: Report." U.S. News and World Report. February 26.
National Opportunity to Learn Campaign. "Closing Opportunity Gaps in Education is the Only Way to Close Achievement Gaps." Schott Foundation for Public Education.
Boser, Ulrich, Megan Wilhelm, and Robert Hanna. 2014. “The Power of the Pygmalion Effect.” Center for American Progress. October 6.
Johns Hopkins. 2017. “With Just One Black Teacher, Black Students More Likely to Graduate”
Gershenson, Seth. 2015. “The Alarming Effect of Racial Mismatch on Teacher Expectations.” Brookings. August 18.
Geiger, A.W. 2018. “America’s Public School Teachers are far Less Racially and Ethnically Diverse than their Students.” Pew Research Center. August 27.
National Education Association. 2019. “Students Affected by Achievement Gaps.”
Gewertz, Catherine. 2017. “U.S. Graduation Rate Hits New All-Time High, With Gains in All Student Groups.” Education Week. December 4.
Grindal, Todd and Laura Schifter. 2017. “The Special Education Graduation Gap.” HuffPost. December 6.
Musto, Pete. 2017. ”Low-Income Students See Low Graduation Rates.” Voice of America. November 7.
GLSEN. 2016. "Educational Exclusion: Drop out, Push out, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline Among LGBTQ Youth." The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.
Losen, Daniel, Cheri Hodson, Michael A. Keith, Katrina Morrison, and Shakti Belway. 2015. “Are We Closing the School Discipline Gap?” The Center for Civil Rights Remedies, UCLA Ed & IS. February.
Malik, Rasheed. 2017. "New Data Reveal 250 Preschoolers Are Suspended or Expelled Every Day." Center for American Progress. November 6.
