Creating Awareness and Checking Our Biases

Creating Awareness and Checking Our Biases

Dawn: I'm so glad that we have you here also to talk about challenging behaviors and relationships and these preschool suspension/expulsion rates that I'm hearing so much about. These rates are very upsetting.

Gail: They are extremely upsetting, and, you know, we have been studying this for over a decade now, where we've known that the rates of preschool suspension and expulsion are far higher, and it happens far more frequently than we see in kindergarten through 12th grade.

And I think that some people might find that surprising. Dawn: It is.

Gail: And in fact, a recent study where they looked at data from across the United States, a representative sample, they found that as many as 250 preschoolers are expelled on a daily basis. And I think that while that in itself is upsetting to us because we can imagine how families must feel when they show up and children are no longer welcome, we can imagine how teachers must feel when they feel like they've exhausted all of their strategies, and this is what it results in. But I think that what is even more upsetting and I think incredibly important to talk about is that we also know that these rates are very racialized, that African American children are far more likely to be suspended and expelled than white children, and that we see that there's this disproportionality, right, that we can look at and see that African American boys might make up 50 percent of the preschool population, but the rate at which they're suspended and expelled is in the 80-plus percent, you know. So, there's this disproportionality. We see this on gender lines, too. We see that children who identified as male are far more likely to be expelled than children who identify as female. So, we see both this gender and this racial piece.

And I think that there's some digging into this, too, because I think we want to know, why is this happening? And so, there's been some digging into this, and in particular there's an interesting study that was done by Walter Gilliam and his colleagues at Yale. Because I think what we all think is going on, he actually has some data to say, yeah, we might be onto something there, and that is implicit bias, right, of teachers. What he basically did is he recruited some teachers into a study, and he said, I'm going to show you a videotape of children. And in the videotape, there were four children. There was a white girl, a white boy, an African American boy, and an African American girl, so it was four at a table. And he tells them, OK, I want you to watch for the challenging behavior that's going to occur in these videos. And had this kind of cool eye- tracking device, glasses on, and basically could see where they were looking. And they, with that setup, looked for challenging behavior.

Dawn: Yep.

Gail: Who do you think they looked at? Dawn: The black boy.

Gail: Yeah. And there was no challenging behavior. Dawn: There was none in the video.

Gail: There's none in the video. Dawn: But they still saw that.

Gail: But they see that, they look there. And so, there's this bias. And, you know, these biases occur. We live in a very racist society. You know, media images. There's all kinds of ways that we grow up with these biases. And they happen, we bring them into the door of our preschool classrooms, right? Dawn: Yep. Gail: And so I think about, too, I mean it was years ago that I was a teacher, but I had a very diverse classroom, and I wonder, too, like, how was I acting? Was I seeing that the African American boys in my classroom were having more challenging behavior? Did I regard them as having more challenging behavior? And then I think the other piece of that is, did I – when they had challenging behavior, did I react and interact with them in a way that was different than what I did with white children in my classroom? Right?

Dawn: Right, right.

Gail: And it's one of these cases where I wish that I knew what I know now back then because I would have been really mindful of that, and I think I would have asked for my supervisor and my coach to watch for that, right, to give me feedback on that. Was that happening? Because we know that we have implicit biases. I have implicit biases. How were they acting in those classrooms? And I think that that's where we get to this disproportionate number, right, that we see an African American boy, and we maybe think – again, with our implicit bias – maybe they are more aggressive or more, right, and then we can see that my interaction is influenced by that in a really negative and unhelpful way.

Dawn: I was thinking about some ways that you could become aware of that, right, in the classroom. I know that CSEFEL has a positive attention tracking sheet. So, even if you tracked over the course of a week just who you were giving positive attention to, and that would just give you some data at the end of the week. Who am I saying positive things to, and who am I not saying as many positive things to? And is it happening at certain times of day? And it's a personal tracking sheet for you, but it just – it's implicit. So, some ways to really become more aware of it. And it's worth everyone giving it a shot.

Gail: Right. That is a great strategy. I mean, because you just need someone to watch it or even for you to keep track of it and say, "Wow, I want to change that, and I'm going to make a goal to change it tomorrow and do even better the next day and even better the next day." To really kind of be aware of it and then take some action, you know, against it.

Dawn: Right. The checking the positive attention is one helpful thing, but you also mentioned coaches supporting in that process.

Gail: Yes, yes. So, I think it could be a coach, it could be a mentor, or even just another teacher that was observing you. And similar to the positive attention tracking sheet, what you could do is have somebody observe for you. And they could track, of all of the children that you have in your classroom and kind of what's the proportional makeup in here – in particular, we're thinking about kind of race and ethnicity and gender, what's the proportional makeup. So, if you have 25 percent African American children in your classroom, as an example, and then look at the proportion of who gets positive attention and who is getting some more behavior correction, right? And then being able to just look at that data. So, a coach could take that data for you, right? So, they could observe and they could see kind of who you're paying attention to and what that type of interaction – what's the flavor of that interaction, if you will. Is it behavior correction or is it supportive, positive interactions? And then just present the data back in terms of what's the proportion – how's the proportion of your attention kind of aligning with the proportion of the children being served, or that you're serving?