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make sure this doesn’t happen again.” By placing value on the impact or outcome, you are communicating that even “good” people can make mistakes. This allows teachers to reinforce the importance of working together as a community to reduce the number of mistakes we make.
Reach Out to Families Let families know right away when something happens, and be transparent about how you dealt with it in the classroom. If the incident involves a clear victim, as the one on the playground did, reach out separately to those families to gather their feedback about what they hope will happen in resolving the incident. Looking back, I wish we had held a mandatory meeting after the playground incident. Bringing everyone together to address what happened would have been a powerful opportunity to read, recast, and resolve. As I discovered later in my own research, parents of color at my school had reason to be concerned that White parents weren’t necessarily going to have conversations about what happened on the playground at home.
Work Through Racial Stress Building competency for working through racial stress is different from teaching math or reading. When students or adults make mistakes or say something insensitive, the impact can potentially be harmful; that’s much less likely in conversations about academics. So, how can teachers proceed with care and sensitivity toward
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» Try role-playing—Students in grades K–2 respond well to puppet plays and other role-playing activities, where the focus and attention shift briefly away from them. This allows them to act as problem solvers, to “help” the puppets work through their problems, and to practice scripts they can then use with each other when necessary. Choose two puppets that are similar. Have the student act out a scenario where they make fun of another puppet for being different or not like them. Ask your students to name what’s happening (read the conflict), making sure to name bias and prejudice if the students don’t, and ask them what the puppets should do to resolve the conflict. Young students will often talk directly to the puppets in earnest, even if afterward they say that they knew “those were just puppets.”
