One -on-One Coaching: Annie
A Case Study
When I met Annie, she was not a new teacher. She’d been teaching for over ten years and was proud of her work as a social studies teacher, especially the recent work she’d done to develop her eighth-grade curriculum. But then she hit a bump in the road. A Black student’s mother had complained about a book she was using to study slavery.
The mother felt the book focused too much on the suffering of Black people during enslavement rather than the ways that people fought back and resisted, or the ways that Black people found joy despite slavery. Annie was devastated. As a white woman, she’d worked hard to create an inclusive and culturally relevant curriculum. She felt profoundly misunderstood. Plus, this was an award-winning historical fiction book! What was she supposed to do?
In our first meeting, as Annie described her feelings, I saw so much of myself in her. I too had been a proud social justice teacher. I too had taught slavery with a strong desire to tell the truths that I had never been told in my schooling. Yet, Annie’s frustration was about so much more than this text or this parent. And so, together, Annie and I began to unravel what this moment meant; how her body had reacted, how her mind had wanted to do nothing but defend her choice, and how she now felt unmoored. Annie and I reviewed her books and made some changes, but we got to this point through conversations that went much deeper.
As a result, Annie is thinking (and feeling) her way through her curriculum differently. She has some new tools and strategies, but perhaps more importantly, she now engages in a different internal dialogue about what it means to be a white woman teaching Black history. It was through slowing down and taking the time to stand still and look around, and within, that Annie made these changes.
