Faculty Conversations

While St. Albans students enjoyed last Friday off, faculty and staff gathered in the Cafritz Refectory for an intense and invigorating professional day workshop on race and implicit bias in teaching. Led by Shayna Hammond, founder of the professional development organization Teach to Lead, the program aimed to help teachers and staff recognize the assumptions and beliefs they have about people and cultures different from their own; to examine how those biases might affect school life; and to identify strategies to counteract racial bias in the classroom and out.

“We all see through different lenses,” noted Headmaster Jason Robinson at the start of the program. “The goal today is to make us more thoughtful and intentional in our work … What can we do to be a more perfect embodiment of our mission? How can we push ourselves to be better?”

The workshop was part of a series of faculty initiatives focused on diversity and inclusion, including parent-listening sessions hosted last summer by division heads Ben Labaree and Fred Chandler; an August professional day on diversity and equity led by Randy Kennedy ’73, the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School, who has devoted his career to teaching and writing about race relations in America; and a discussion of issues relating to gender and race at an October professional day led by psychologists Carrie Friend and Joe Viola.

Special thanks go to all who helped organize the productive professional day, including Kelly Castellanos Evans, Fred Chandler, Donna Denizé, Jim Ehrenhaft ’83, Kristin Elliott, Carrie Friend, Ben Labaree, Sherry Rusher, Sam Schaffer, and Joe Viola.