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ICS for Equity in Action - Kelly Steiner

Added Apr 05, 2021 •

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Shorewood Intermediate School science teacher Kelly Steiner shares her thoughts on and experiences with the ICS for Equity framework so far this school year.

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My name is Kelly Steiner and I'm a science teacher at Shorewood Intermediate School. I've been a teacher for 18 years and in Shorewood for 16 and equity work or diversity work or inclusion work or however it's been called over the years has always been my groove. Every time I go to a conference, it's the sessions I sign up for, it's what I read about, it what's my professional learning is always centered on. it's always been the lens of what I really look for continuous professional learning on and I've learned some really great things but in all that time and all that learning I didn't feel like things were really changing for my students. I kept trying to change what I did in my science classroom and finding other ways to support ideas for lots of ideas if I was an english teacher or lots of ideas if I was a social studies teacher or an art teacher but really trying to find ways to integrate  culturally responsive practices into my science classroom was a change. and then even as I started to feel like I was making some growth in my science classroom, I felt isolated in doing this work, like I was on an island of trying to do this work. When I did the training to become an ICS facilitator, it blew my mind. It was an entirely different way of approaching the whole thing. ICS is really a system to change the system. So it had a whole bunch of pieces of all those modules, a bunch of them were pieces I had done work in. I had done a lot of identity development work, I have done a lot of understanding the history of our school system, and seeing how it  impacted our students. I had done a lot of looking at our classroom data and our District data with an equity lens, and saying "oh yeah, we really don't do a good job of being equitable,"but not in a way that provided a step by step way of changing it. So to be able to have these professors who have thoroughly researched it, who have created this multi-step system for changing the system and then who have successfully implemented that in lots of districts including some that look a lot like Shorewood has just been incredible. And I feel like for the first time in my career we're actually moving somewhere and it's a little bit of a slow start because it has to be get the weight of the system moving but I really believe that once we start moving this system, we will keep moving and we'll move ourselves to a place of better equity where at the beginning and ending of every training we look at our data and say "oh well we tried a lot of stuff and we still suck." I'm really encouraged and enthused. It's hard in a good way, like  we have to get uncomfortable with ourselves and the fact that we have become complicit in a system that we would not have designed for or chosen for our children. And those are not my words, they're Dr. Capper's. Even the way that ICS is designed to support the continuous movement. Staff have modules that keep going and it's led by a cohort of trained staff so if one person leaves or has a baby the whole thing doesn't fall apart. The District Administration team has their own modules that they have to work through, our school board was involved in the training so it's both top-down and bottom-up at the same time. On top of all that, the ICS system builds in supports to keep us going. So for example, as a member of the leadership team for my building, after we meet twice a month with our staff to move forward, once a month we also meet with Dr. Capper who asks us how things are going, who looks at our evaluations from the staff, who calls us out on things that we could be doing better and pushes us to continue to move our process forward. I love that about the system, I love that the train and the momentum means everybody is moving but we don't wait till everyone is on board. We've got to move things to make things better for kids now. We will never get everyone on board but the train is leaving the station and we are heading towards equity with all of the supports that it would take to really change the system. And I have faith that a few years from now we'll look back and have a different system that's better for all kids.

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ICS for Equity in Action - Kelly Steiner

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