Why Peer Coaching and Social Justice at the UCLA Lab School?

If we acknowledge the value of teaching to a global view of the child—considering background, strengths and areas for growth—it follows that a child needs to develop a global view of the world, including context, possibilities and challenges. To be prepared to explore these issues with children, teachers must first engage themselves in inquiry about social justice theory and practice. This inquiry must take place in a safe and intellectually stimulating space with trusted colleagues.  It is our belief that through careful planning, implementation and reflection teachers can develop the skills to engage students to think critically about issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity.

With our TIIP 2 Grant Funds, our team explored the following key questions:

 UCLA Lab School TIIP 2 Team

                                

Each member on our TIIP-2 team represents a different grade level and classroom teaching team. We bring a variety of expertise and experiences to our school. We meet regularly with our own teaching partners and levels to plan, do research, and conduct professional development. Previously, two or more of us have worked on various curricular committees and outreach institutes together. This fall, our entire team wrote and received a mini-grant from the Cotsen Foundation. With those funds, we have begun our investigation of inquiry based learning, and have started reading about various coaching models.

Project Details

In order to work "alongside" each other on the grant work while actually working in different classrooms and sites, our team felt it was important to Build Collegial Relationships.

As we developed our grant proposal, we considered multiple models for furthering our professional development goals in ways that supported our desire to work from a place of respect and support. Click here to see what the principles of Peer Coaching are and to read our reflections on this learning process for our grant team.

Deliberate and meaningful integration of Social Justice concepts and practices into our teaching is what we are striving for each day.  Here you will read about steps we have taken to tie-in what we believe with our work with students. 

TIIP 2 Funded Activities

Sharing our CCRSJ Work

• Christopher Wilson created a Prezi to describe our grant work and led the presentation at the CONNECT Research Session at UCLA Lab School

• We presented our first year of TIIP work to our staff at a research professional development meeting in April of 2012.

• Creating Collegial Relationships for Social Justice: A Teacher Initiated Inquiry Project, presentation at the VIII International Meeting of the Paulo Freire Forum: Imagining a World Where it is Easier to Love: Paulo Freire's Social Justice Education

• We presented our project design, experiences with peer coaching, and emerging curriculum work to educators from around the world in September of 2012.

• Creating Collegial Relationships for Social Justice: A Teacher Initiated Inquiry Project, presentation at the Annual TIIP Meeting in April of 2013. We presented a summary of our project work and shared next steps for ourselves and our respective sites.