What is ARC?
Funded by The Skillman Foundation and with collaboration from the Black Male Educators Alliance, Allies for Radical Collaboration (ARC) is a year-long fellowship for white-identifying educators who lead, love, and nurture Detroit students. In this extended, cohort-grounded experience, I have the privilege of working with our fellows as they explore how their social identities impact their teaching practice while developing culturally responsive and restorative skills and strategies to build strong connections with their students, families, and greater school communities. Together, we engage in community experiences throughout Detroit to foster authentic community connections. ARC fellows ultimately conduct a culturally responsive personal action research project within their classroom or sphere of influence inside their school community.
Effecting Change through Action Research
Last year, the ten fellows from our pilot cohort launched the first round of ARC personal action research projects. In education, a good amount of research is conducted by educators who are often removed from the environment they are studying. Action research empowers teachers to look carefully at their own classrooms, their own teaching practices, their own instruction and assessments, and their students’ experience to understand both their instruction and their students better and ultimately improve student learning outcomes.
Action research allows teachers to examine changes to their practice and to learn from the effects of those changes. As participatory research, teachers work towards improving their teaching practices through a self-reflective cycle of identifying areas for improvement, planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. Teachers, as action researchers, systematically collect data, including teacher and student reflection, student artifacts, observations, and assessment plans and rubrics. Collaborative in nature, action research requires a professional learning community of critical friends who will offer critique and provocations.
Fostering Culturally Responsive Teachers as Leaders
Our ARC fellows focused on a range of culturally responsive practices within their personal action research projects. One examined the impact cogenerative dialogues have on student leadership, student participation, and teacher comfortability in redirecting off-task student behavior. Another examined the effectiveness of engagement techniques for English Language Learners through a voluntary peer observation protocol with their colleagues. A school leader studied how professional development around reflecting on, identifying, and growing in warm demand focus criteria affects students’ self-reported sense of belonging. Lastly, an instructional coach focused on the impact culturally responsive coaching around common triggers has on increasing inquisitive probes and identifying student needs.
ARC fellows provided one another feedback on their projects every step of the way. They helped one another troubleshoot and search deeper within their results and analyses and, ultimately, shared their findings, implications, and recommendations for next steps at our Show and Share Celebration. It was powerful to experience educators learning from other educators. That afternoon was the embodiment of a culturally responsive professional learning community.
Excitingly, our second cohort of ARC fellows is currently organizing and planning for the second-semester launch of their culturally responsive action research projects. We hope you join us in May 2025 as they share their results, the implications of their findings, and the proposed next steps. Stay tuned!
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