The Equity Leadership Model provides leaders a framework for creating a learning environment where students, across their many differences, engage deeply and achieve at higher levels while staying true to who they are. It requires a change in perspective and how things get done―shifting the focus away from equal inputs to equitable outcomes.
It involves making a commitment to equity; changing systems, processes and practices; and building the capacity to deliver the new way of doing business. There is a whole field of study around critical dimensions in making strategic change. In this model, Kitty Gogins has combined the key dimensions that drive successful strategic change with the learning from many researchers on building equity centered capacity, as well as practitioner’s equity best practices.
At the heart of transforming to an equitable learning environment is having leaders begin the journey with self-reflection. Leaders need to understand their own culture and racial identity and how it impacts their decisions and relationships. Further, how racism and other ‘–isms’ are imbedded in our community’s socialization and institutions. This will enable them to look at their organization’s policies, practices and programs with a lens broader than their own culture and lived experiences. Until leaders broaden their lens to see how the system benefits some while putting others at a disadvantage, the work to change the system is not possible.
Education leaders then apply their broader equity lens to their area of responsibility―the organization’s systems. They need to partner with the community to develop the organization’s mission, vision, and strategies that define what the organization will strive to be. Then develop organization capacity, allocate resources, define policy and redefine how the work gets done to deliver the vision and mission.
By applying an equity lens to the five critical dimensions of systems change (outer-ring), education leaders drive broad process and practice change in the organization, transforming the student experience.