Uprooting Instructional Inequity

Noted leadership coach Jill Harrison Berg offers a comprehensive guide to help school and teacher leaders amplify the power of collaborative inquiry as a means for identifying, interrogating, and addressing instructional inequity.

At the center of the book is Berg's i3PD Planning Map, an invaluable tool for enhancing inquiry-based professional development experiences so that they become engines for schoolwide transformation. The map guides teachers to recognize and reform ways their instructional practice may be contributing to inequity, bolsters facilitators' abilities to help their colleagues become more effective agents of their own learning, and cultivates a culture of organizational learning in schools.

Berg lays out the process in four parts:

1. Establishing a solid foundation for your improvement cycle with a deep understanding of the three components of your instructional core: content, participants, and facilitators.
2. Attending to the three Rs—relevance, rigor, and relationships—representing the connections among the core components.
3. Designing your improvement cycle and planning it out as a series of session agendas.
4. Planning for impact by thinking through what you will accept as evidence of success and how you will use that information to take your school to the next level.

If you're ready to see your school start to work smarter toward instructional equity, and if you're eager to be a part of that change, Uprooting Instructional Inequity provides the design principles and sample tools you need to get the transformation started.

Reviews

Efforts to promote racial equity in schools have frequently ignored or provided little concrete guidance on how to improve the quality of teaching and the learning experiences of students. In this important new book, Jill Harrison Berg shows us how we can impact classroom practices through processes that foster professional collaboration and enhance the efficacy of teachers. Written in a straightforward, accessible style that practitioners will enjoy, this book will be an invaluable resource to all educators who seek to advance equity by making a positive difference for the students they serve.

— Pedro A. Noguera, PhD, Dean, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California

In Uprooting Instructional Inequity, Jill Harrison Berg helps us level up our understanding and skill around inquiry as a powerful tool for making progress on eliminating gaps in practice that lead to learning and opportunity gaps. She reminds us there are no magic strategies or silver bullets, but there’s clearly a road map to change. Berg has shown us a path forward.

— Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

“Uprooting Instructional Equity is a thorough and highly practical handbook for practitioners. Based on Jill Harrison Berg’s extensive experience leading professional learning, this book provides a roadmap for designing and facilitating meaningful instructional improvement. Berg goes beyond the usual recommendations as she guides educators to examine systems and beliefs that undermine the achievement of black and brown students and other marginalized student groups. Berg is an important voice in the movement to (as she writes) “get better at learning how to learn together in schools.”

— Sarah E. Fiarman, EdD, co-author of Unconscious Bias in Schools: A Developmental Approach to Exploring Race and Racism and Instructional Rounds in Education: A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning

This is the charge: Interrogate Inequity through Inquiry! Easy to say; harder to do. Jill Harrison Berg provides teachers and school leaders with tools and guides to create effective professional development. This is a book I will both teach and use with my colleagues.

— Linda Nathan, Co-Founder & Co-Director, Perrone Sizer Institute for Creative Leadership; Author, The Hardest Questions Aren’t on the Test: When Grit Isn’t Enough

Jill Harrison Berg is one of the foremost voices on teacher leadership and offers a blueprint of the work she’s put in with thousands of us. To do the work means to interrogate the deep, structural inequities of our day and understand how that gets into our classroom spaces. So many books ask you to change how we do professional learning in this light. This book shows you how to do it.

— José Luis Vilson, NBCT, New York City public school teacher, executive director of EduColor and author of This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education