Teaching Lab’s Commitment to Educational Equity, Racial Justice and Liberation
We understand that to fundamentally shift the paradigm of teacher professional learning for educational equity, racial justice and liberation, we must fundamentally shift our personal and collective paradigms. We know that in order to pursue this mission with integrity, we must authentically and consistently center the past, present and future lived experiences of those our educational system has historically and brutally marginalized. We believe that those closest to this harm should determine the priorities for change and be at the forefront of that change with us; they should be centered. At Teaching Lab, we specifically center students and educators identifying as Black, Latinx, Native American/ American Indian, Asian American/ Pacific Islander, and/or ethnicities that have been marginalized and students from families experiencing low-income.
Our Commitment
We commit to doing this work in ourselves, our families, our personal networks, our professional networks, and our communities so that generations in the future will be liberated. We commit to leaning into our Head, Heart, Habits and Equity professional learning model as a core vehicle for this work. We commit to doing our own work of introspection and self-reflection, truth-telling, and healing. Equipped with this knowledge, we commit to standing up, speaking up, and taking action, especially when it is not comfortable, in order to achieve educational equity, racial justice and liberation in the world, in our organization and in this lifetime.
We Are Committed To:
Collaboration & Responsive Service
We know that the best way to consistently deliver high impact work for our clients is to build high-trust, civil, collaborative relationships, rooted in a deep understanding of and respect for the contexts of our internal colleagues, partners, and the teachers we support. We understand that sometimes the preferences and needs of clients and colleagues are in tension, and when tradeoffs need to be made we do so carefully, with a focus on both short-term and long-term impact on our ability to reach our mission.
Resilient Solution-Finding
We have built the internal strengths and skills to troubleshoot challenging relationships, bounce back from setbacks in the work, and persevere through challenges in our organization, in the work, and on our teams and encourage our direct reports to do the same. We resist abdicating responsibility or “giving up” on problems, colleagues, or goals and instead innovate to find solutions that would bring us back on track in these areas.
Research & Learning With Humility
We use best practices, data, lived experience, cultivated expertise, and research to drive our work and support our partners to do the same. We take responsibility for learning from our mistakes and using new insights to improve our work. We seek to consistently learn and improve the content of the work and our understanding of the context in which our work happens.
Accountable Excellence
We seek to provide the best support, programs, and work products possible for our clients within our constraints, whether delivered internally or externally. We hold ourselves personally accountable for delivering effective, intentional, and high-quality work in every context we operate while being sensitive to the impact of our requests on other colleagues and their goals - especially across lines of difference and power.
Equity & Justice
We seek to bring a lens of equity and justice to everything we do and the relationships we build internally and externally. As leaders, we personally strive to embody the cultural humility, inclusive leadership and management practices, and equity lens needed to achieve our mission, live our values internally, and advance educational equity in the communities where we work.