Brown Bag: How Teachers Learn Racial Competency (3/21/23)

Catch up with the recording and slides from RPPL’s March 2023 Brown Bag on how teachers learn racial competency as they seek to engage with diverse students.

By Dr. Constance Lindsay | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In this session, the team will discuss preliminary results from an ongoing project that explores how teachers learn racial competency and from their peers as they seek to engage with diverse students. The goal of this project is to further the understanding of how teachers improve over time—and specifically how white teachers can increase their racial competency and become more effective teachers to students of color—by bridging 3 previously distinct literatures in education research: the returns to teaching experience, teacher peer effects, and the impact of same-race teachers. Specifically, researchers will answer two broad research questions: First, does the racial makeup of a teacher’s same-grade colleagues affect their teaching effectiveness or persistence in the classroom? For example, do black colleagues increase white teachers’ racial competence and effectiveness teaching black students? Do black teachers benefit from having black peers in terms of teaching effectiveness or remaining in the school or profession? And if so, through what mechanisms do these peer effects operate? Second, do the returns to teaching experience depend on the demographics of the classrooms in which that experience was accrued? For example, does white teachers’ effectiveness teaching black students increase with repeated exposure to black students? If so, why does this happen? The research team is using a mixed-method approach to answer these questions.