Understanding how our Identities Shape our Perspective on a Team

We think about social identities as the groups to which we belong. These groups may be shaped by race, ethnicity, nationality, language, gender, sexual orientation, age, geography, ability, religion, class, or another affiliation. They’re also shaped by our communities, families, careers, interests, and talents. Social identities are both overlapping and fluid – we belong to many groups and our identities related to these groups are always changing.

Understanding our social identities helps us to figure out our positionality*. It helps us to know who we are in relation to each other. Most importantly, it helps us to know which perspectives we’re bringing to our team and helps us to uncover which perspectives we may be missing.

When we build an inclusive team it is important to name the power that we have on the team due to our positionality. The team will be more likely to share decision-making and prevent tokenizing the voices of community members, families, and/or students who historically do not have as much power in the system. When we own our own power, which is often unearned, we can work to relinquish it to create more equitable teams.

The graphic below provided by Equity Meets Design shows 11 ways that power might show up on teams. The assumption is that in our culture, the characteristic on the top is given more power in most spaces. Spend time noticing and owning what other positionalities might be on your team that bring a power differential, such as role in the organization, years of experience, or team facilitator.

Organizing Your Team on the Problem of Practice

A theory of improvement is essentially a hypothesis about the conditions and changes needed to achieve an aim. Children’s Institute has worked with a diverse set of districts to build and start testing a theory of improvement to help school districts get started on their early learning alignment goals. The figure above is a visual representation of this theory.

A theory of improvement is not intended to be an exhaustive list of everything you might do to meet your goals, nor is it a comprehensive to-do list. Its purpose is to help you:

• • Prioritize among the many possible strategies for accomplishing your goals
  • Organize the different parts of a system to ensure that system change is effective and sustainable
  • Organize the efforts of different parts of your team working on this goal
  • Select the best ways to measure toward your goals
  • Capture what is occurring by revisiting and revising your theory

To use this theory of change with your team, start by identifying your strengths in the secondary drivers, or the specific aspects that your systems need to design or improve in order to meet your aim. Have all team members reflect on evidence of strengths. From there, have your team members discuss opportunities for improvement. It is important to remember that “Every system is perfectly designed to get the outcome it gets” and keep the discussion focused on the system and not on individuals or groups of individuals. Listing growth opportunities can be overwhelming, so be sure to elevate a starting position once you’re done.

Some suggestions for prioritizing a starting place are to identify:

• • Where does this team have access?
  • Where is there improvement work already happening?
  • Where are there currently resources?
  • Where is the will of the team?

Be Problem-Specific

Once you have prioritized a starting place it is helpful to name the problem your team seeks to solve related to your prioritized starting place. A problem means an issue or outcome that is negative – something that you want to improve. A good problem statement is critical to guide and focus the work as well as to create a shared understanding of what we hope to improve. There is not a single path to developing a problem statement. Some teams may identify a problem quickly and early and move on to a root cause analysis. Other teams may need to spend more time investigating local data and research before identifying a specific problem.

Being problem-specific helps teams avoid three key improvement missteps:

1. 1. “Solutionitis”:  Solutionitis occurs when solutions are named with little input from the children, families, and communities experiencing the problem. This practice often leads to solutions that are misaligned with community needs, resulting in damaged community trust and resources wasted on a solution that does not match needs.  
   2. Blame: Blaming people or community behavior and not the environments that enabled those behaviors to happen 
   3. Believing the barriers: There are so many perceived structures and rules that stand in the way of improvement. When we believe that all obstacles are immobile, improvement is limited from the beginning.

When your team is drafting various problems, ask the following questions:

• • Is the problem blame-free? 
  • Is the problem solution-free?
  • Who is experiencing this problem? 
  • Is the problem a reasonable size and level of complexity for our team to tackle? 

Some examples of problem statements in our work are: 

• • Students do not have opportunities to apply mathematical learning in an authentic and meaningful way. 
  • Young students’ mental and behavioral needs are not being addressed in school.
  • Our system is not designed to fully include our children with disabilities in all early learning classrooms.
  • Our system is not designed to provide culturally sustaining, anti-bias early learning instruction.

Adjusting Your Team

Teams must examine their own role in the current system and how they might be part of the power structures that perpetuate the status quo. We must ensure that we have included diverse perspectives from the community who have had different experiences in the system on our team. We know which perspectives are included on our team, and when we think about the problem of practice we will be working on, it is important to acknowledge which perspectives we’re missing.

To adjust or expand the team, we encourage you to invite and center those marginalized by the system, instead of planning for the “average” child or “average” educator. Those who are being disenfranchised or ignored have important perspectives and insights for designing solutions. If we center those marginalized by the system, everyone benefits.

As we learn more about our system and notice that perspectives are missing, we may need to add new members to the problem-solving team. When this is challenging due to time or resource constraints, we need to find creative ways for people to participate, using technology, translation, transportation, food, and child care to support inclusion. We need to remove barriers to participation.

Not every social identity may be represented on this problem-solving team. What is important is that the team acknowledges the existing positionality, and finds ways to bring in perspectives that are missing.

Additional Resources

Stages of Team Development © Elena Aguilar, The Art of Coaching Teams: Building Resilient Communities that Transform Schools. Jossey-Bass, 2016.

Tips for Inclusion

• • Expect discomfort. New members will have different ways of thinking about a problem, describing it, different solutions, and even different ways of just participating in a group.
  • Be adaptable. Multiple perspectives may take you off your agenda to attend to issues that others feel may need to be addressed first.
  • Plan for uncommon meeting times based on family schedules.
  • Speak First, Speak Last: Give the first and last opportunity to speak to the people who are typically least represented.
  • Think through how time, technology, transportation, food, and child care can support an inclusive team.