Building an Environment of Care, Safety and Respect

Creating and maintaining a learning and work environment that holds at its center a sense of sincere caring, safety and respect is critical to student success.

It can be easy to become caught up in simply completing daily tasks. Building inclusive learning environments for each student requires leaders to act beyond mere task completion.

Paul Gorski, who directs EdChange, a Virginia-based consulting firm that works to cultivate equity literacy in schools, offers the following strategies to become a more equitable education leader:

• Pronounce every individual’s full name correctly. No student or staff member should feel the need to shorten or change her or his name to make it easier for others to pronounce.
• Explore how one’s own identity impacts the way one sees and experiences different people.
• Grow, learn and change at the same rate the world is changing. By doing so, leaders won’t lose touch with the lives of students with whom they interact. Be open to learning from the experiences of others and being challenged by diverse perspectives.
• Be open to critique. Be dedicated to listening actively and modeling a willingness to be changed by the presence of others to the same extent they are necessarily changed by you.
• Center student voices, interests and experiences into conversations and decision making.

It is important for those of us working in K-12 education to take the time to reflect on our behavior as a means to ask why we do what we do.

When educators undertake this reflection, it allows us to examine the impact our actions have on others and has us consider if we are moving toward a stance of inclusion, as opposed to inadvertently excluding others.