Praxis Lead Equity Consulting consists of certified Culturally Proficient P-16 educational consultants with leadership, administrative, and teaching experience in primary, secondary, and higher education. Using Transformative leadership theory and the conceptual framework for culturally proficient practices developed by the Center for Culturally Proficient Educational Practice (CCPEP), consultants synthesize theory and practical application with a focus on building capacity for sustaining equity and access initiatives for change. Praxis Lead Equity consultants can provide the CCPEP Cultural Proficiency 10-day certification professional devleopment or can assist and guide site and district leaders and teams in developing their own tailor-made equity action plan or equity self-assessment for optimizing and improving equity and access for all students.
This begins with an “inside-out” approach that challenges individual, group, and institutional perspectives as they relate to power, privilege and entitlement, equity, inclusion, and access issues that can influence and impact achievement, opportunity, and equity gaps.
Cultural Proficiency is about educating all students to high levels through knowing, valuing, and using as assets their cultural backgrounds, languages, and learning styles within the context of our teaching. A central tenet of Cultural Proficiency holds that change is an inside-out process in which a person is, first and foremost, a student of his own assumptions. Initially, educators must have the capability to recognize our own assumptions in order to retain those that facilitate culturally proficient actions and to change those assumptions that impede such actions. Similarly, educators as a community apply this inside-out process to examine school policies and practices that either impede or facilitate culturally proficient practices. This ability to examine one’s self and organization is fundamental to interdependent thinking needed when addressing achievement gap issues. Cultural Proficiency is about being effective thinkers and educators in cross-cultural situations
Cultural Proficiency provides a comprehensive, systemic structure for school leaders to discuss issues facing their schools. The Four Tools of Cultural Proficiency provide educators with the framework to assess and change one’s own values and behaviors and a school’s policies and practices in ways that better serve the needs of students and their communities. Cultural Proficiency challenges communities to use prevalent assessment tools to examine their current reality and establish desired outcomes for more students than ever before to achieve at levels higher than ever before—all students! Then, the community of educators uses the Tools of Cultural Proficiency to determine a path by which they will achieve those outcomes for all students.
Table 2.1 below shows the two theories side by side. On the left in italics are phrases related to transformational leadership, as described by Leithwood and Sun (2012). On the right side are the eight tenets of transformative leadership, identified by Shields (2012, 2016).
Table 2.1 Comparing Leadership Theories
“Overall, the argument is that transformative leaders are not only concerned with what happens within their schoolhouse walls, but with what happens within the wider local, national, and global communities as well…what I am arguing is that transformative leaders must pay attention to what happens to students and their families outside of school.” (Shields, 2018, p. 22).
CLEAR Board attends Cultural Proficiency Certification Training with Dr. Randy Lindsey
Overcoming barriers to change: Joseph Domingues, Peter Flores, Delores B. Lindsey and Randall B. Lindsey
Leading from the strawberry fields: transformative leadership in Santa Maria Peter Flores III and Joseph Domingue
