COREY YEAGER: Welcome back to the third and final webinar for The Bias Inside Us. I am Dr. Corey Yeager. We have, in the first two webinars, begun to deconstruct what exactly implicit and unconscious bias are.
And then we began to dive into some of the blossoming and profound research, the cornerstones, the convergence of neuroscience and social science, which is the realm that I work within. In my work with the Detroit Pistons-- I am the team psychotherapist for the Detroit Pistons-- I'm using this concept of bias, and how we see the world, and how players may be viewed. I'm using the framework of bias in that work day to day.
Also I've used this work-- I'm wearing my Office of Black Male Student Achievement from the Minneapolis Public Schools sweatshirt today. I thought it was appropriate as we begin in this final webinar to discuss what it is that we may be able to do once we've established what this concept of bias is, how it may be impacting us, and then what we can do as we move forward. It's not an overnight situation or sensation that we can just impact and say, OK, well, I'm not going to do that anymore, because the brain doesn't work that way. So I want to dive into some more conversation around where we are and where we're headed.
So if you look at that article that I sent to you, that hopefully accompanied these webinars, called the "Understanding Implicit Bias," if you look on page 33 of the article-- I'll give you a second to pull it up-- I think it really captures in a few pieces there exactly where we can head and what these implications for implicit bias really are. So the first part I'll read on page 33 on the right side, 1, 2, 3 paragraph-- the third and fourth paragraph. I'm just going to read some portions from it that I think are really important.
One aspect says, "While the notion of being biased is the one that few individuals are eager to embrace, extensive social science and neuroscience research has connected individuals' System 1," which is that unconscious aspect, "associations to disparate outcomes, even among individuals who staunchly profess egalitarian intentions." So it is this concept of, even though we can be well intended in any category, all intentions hold consequences. So if these biases are moving, and I know explicitly my intentions are to nurture and educate all students, this implicit bias may get in the way of those explicit intentions. So recognizing that that may be a rub is a critical piece of understanding where we may go.
I said earlier in my-- in the first webinar, one way that we can impact implicit bias is through relationships. The more relationship, the more that we know individuals, the less prone, the less space implicit bias has to work its magic per se. So educating ourselves on engaging our students and the families from which they come, which pushes back against this implicit, unconscious version of bias that may be playing out, is important.
Right below that statement that I read, this last piece that I think is profound says, "In education the real-life implications of implicit bias can create invisible barriers to opportunity and achievement for some students, a stark contrast to the values and intentions of educators and administrators who dedicate their professional lives to their students' success." Again, it's that what we talked about in webinar 2, this cognitive dissonance. And we don't know that there's a dissonance there if we can't move things into a more conscious space. So just a couple of pieces that I thought were really important from there.
So we'll get rolling in this last seminar, webinar to talk more about how kids, and students, and families may be feeling and how we may be able to better support them and push against this implicit bias. Many of you may know or have heard the name Claude Steel. Claude Steele is a cornerstone psychologist and does a lot of work in the educational realm.
And one of the things that Claude Steele came up with in his work and some of his writings, he was focusing on specifically on African-American teenagers, but this is applicable across others, if you will, is that he said African-American teenagers enter our schools, enter our classrooms with what he phrased and called "a burden of suspicion." And that burden of suspicion means that students that look like me, that are 10, 12, 14 years old, the hippocampus, the brain, the society has told a certain narrative to all of us about those students. So it is not just teachers, not just students, but all of us have been given a narrative about others.
And if those individuals, especially, as Claude Steele talks about, African-American teenagers, enter your classroom with this burden of suspicion, what they do is, as they enter is, they say, OK, I don't think you're going to give me a fair shot. Based on what everyone has said, based on what society has told me, I don't think you as a teacher will give me a fair shake. So I enter with this burden of suspicion that you hold against me. And then as a student of color, they are holding the suspicion against the teacher and oftentimes are looking to prove or disprove that suspicion.
That's what we all do. Any suspicions we have, we move to prove or disprove them. And all too often, students of color, different sexual orientation, gender seek to prove or disprove the negative suspicions that they enter the classroom or school setting with.
So recognizing that students may be entering with this burden of suspicion is a critical, critical component to being able to push back against those suspicions. So making sure that we verbalize as teachers that I'm going to make mistakes, but I am focused on pushing back against some of the things that I may be biased with and am open to those conversations with students as they may feel that that suspicion, that burden may be lingering for them. So being open to those conversations and sharing-- again, sharing our stories and listening to the stories of the students that come to us.
One of the things that I talk to students and families a lot about is that students often sometimes come to our school settings and have to make a decision about what is most important. So if mom, and grandma, and dad are using a certain way of speaking and dialect in the home that I come from, and then I go to school and I'm told, that's absolutely wrong, you can't talk that way, not-- and that's not being-- not cursing or anything, not negative, but just the fragmented versions of how I may speak. I'm told, well, that's unacceptable and that smart people don't talk like that. But I'm then battling the fact that my grandma, who's very smart and wise, talks that way. And the people that I talk to every day talk that way.
So then a student gets stuck having to figure out, which one will I be loyal to? That's hard for a student. So if, as teachers and administrators, we could take into consideration and give the benefit of the doubt to students, we may be able to learn from them. And in turn, master teachers take the information that is being bantered about in their classroom and apply it to the curriculum and the learning. I think that's a critical way that we can begin to push back against bias.
One of the things that we talk about is the initial step in addressing or undressing implicit bias is to admit that those biases are learned early and are counter to the way that we want to be as teachers and administrators in supporting all students. So recognizing that difference is a critical aspect. Hidden biases are not a sign of a bad person.
I said it before. I'll say it a million times because I think it's critical. When we hear this concept of bias, we quickly move in to saying, oh, somebody is going to call me homophobic. Oh, they're going to call me racist. But that's not the case.
Recognizing that these biases are in place for all of us and what we can do about them is the point that we want to make. Everyone has them. Once we've accepted that, it allows us to talk about these in a nonjudgmental type way. Even though judgment is always in play, what we do with that judgment, as I said before, is critical. And that's really been the focus of all three of these initial webinars for The Bias Inside Us.
Moreover, what really is bad is not trying to understand what your unconscious biases are. That's the struggle. If we won't begin to unpack or dive into what our biases may be, there is no possible way to address them.
So if we talk about what we can do, there's really a two-strategy solution. The first part of that solution is to consciously override bias. So that means if I'm in the classroom and I've been thinking about this bias, I've watched these webinars-- now one of the things that we say is once you become conscious or aware of something, you don't get to turn it off. You're thinking about it. So if you've watched this webinar, you go back into your classroom setting, the thought about implicit bias will play out.
So one way to counter these biases is to begin to try to make them more conscious. And once you become more conscious of them, make different choices based on that level of consciousness. So consciously overriding the bias of saying, OK, so this student that doesn't look like me did something. And this student that looks like me did something.
They're quite similar. Normally I would send this other student out because he seems or she seems to annoy or get in the way of the learning of others. And my M.O. is to call the dean and get them out of my classroom. If we consciously override, we may then in the moment begin to ask ourselves questions about why we are choosing to send this student out and not the other. And we can begin to make different decisions based on that consciousness.
Now, that doesn't mean we're going to make the right choices every time. But we can begin the process of questioning what it is that we are struggling with and the actions that lead from our beliefs. Discipline in the school setting, which the article talks a lot about, is one way in which we can begin to do that. That's something we can do immediately.
We can build a relationship immediately. And the more that that relationship blossoms and burgeons, the less chance for bias to occur. Those are things that we can immediately do. And from consciously overriding those biases, those unconscious spaces, we will begin to slowly change our implicit associations.
So if we change those implicit associations, they will begin to-- we'll start to see different versions of individuals. And we'll start to say, well, I thought that most kids that look like that dealt with things in this way. But now I'm starting to see that that's not the case. So all of a sudden, we can start to change our implicit associations. That is not an overnight situation. This is a more slow, intentional, and methodical space.
One of the things that we should be dealing with and talking about more is that-- this rub between ethics and morality. What I'm discussing here is not an ethical issue. Ethics is just, what do you have to do to not get in trouble? We all understand that as teachers.
But morality, the moral compass of who I am and how meaningful I am in the lives of my students pushes us to begin to deconstruct the information that we've received as human beings. And if we can deconstruct that in a way that's beneficial to our students, I really think that's the work that the educational realm should be engaging in. And this work around The Bias Inside Us, and the webinars that we're talking about, and all the other aspects of this work are really an attempt to poke at that level of consciousness.
You heard me say earlier that cognitive processes versus social constructs are critical. And we hear this phrase of "social construct" quite a bit these days just in saying that society constructs how we see and deal with many things, but recognizing that implicit bias is not a social construct. So racism and classism are social constructs. They were built socially. We abide by them or attempt to push back against them.
Bias is not that. It is a subtle, cognitive process. So if that is the case, then we know that it's not constructed socially.
It may fall into those periods as we go. But individually, it is a cognitive process. And cognitive processes can be changed. They will push back. Biases will push back against change. But if we stay the course, we can begin to impact those biases in a profound way.
So a question that I have I want you to ponder-- we don't have to do it now, but you may want to consider it, write it down, think about it as you move through your hallways, move through your district offices-- is this question. To what extent are the assumptions about children from low-income, impoverished communities seen in the structures and practices in your classroom, or your school setting, or your administrative space? So we want to take some time to reflect on those because those assumptions are connected to what we've been talking about in this space of bias.
So what are those assumptions? First of all, recognize how-- what do we assume about students of color? What do we assume about students from LGBTQ backgrounds? What do we assume about students from different socioeconomic statuses than where we are, what we grew up?
There are some built in assumptions that we have about them. And what those assumptions do is find a way into the structures and practices daily of our work. So that is a way that we can really start to push through some of where we are and where we're headed. So that's just a bit of a thought experiment, is to think about those assumptions about those students that we work with that don't come from the same background that we come from. We want to consider what those assumptions may or may not be, and how they may be impacting, and then lastly, what we can do with those assumptions once we hold onto them.
Once you begin to scratch the surface and figure out what some of those assumptions are, what you're doing is moving that bias from an unconscious or implicit layer to a more conscious level. And once we get into a conscious space, we get to wrestle with it. So it's not a bad thing to wrestle with. We're not going to make the right choices all the time. But just in the process of being able to grapple and wrestle with these issues, we begin to have an opportunity to make a different stride on what that is.
So one way to check in on where we are with our implicit biases is to engage in a process or kind of a survey-- not a survey, but a little test, examination of our own biases. It's called the Implicit Association Test, the IAT. Many of you, I'm sure, I've heard of it.
And you can log in to-- it's a Harvard University process. And if you just google "Implicit Association Test, or IAT," it'll pull up the website. And the website is www.implicit.harvard.edu/implicit.
If you go to that site-- it's easier just to google it and to pull it up that way-- it has a ton of different implicit examination tests to let you gauge where your holes may be. What we have many times are blind spots or all the time are blind spots with our implicit bias. This IAT allows you to see what blind spots you're holding on a daily basis. Critical, critical information.
This is the work that I've been doing for the last 10 or 15 years. And I've taken the IAT, and I'm amazed at all the different levels of implicit associations that I have that forces me and pushes me to work on those on a more consistent basis. So I really think engaging this IAT is an extremely important space to allow you to get some insight into where you are. It's a reflective process.
So I would challenge everyone that's listening to these webinars to go to that Implicit Association Test, take a few of them, and see what you come up with. It may surprise you. And it speaks to what the article talked about, is that explicitly, we wouldn't claim any of those negative things because we've chosen the field of education to make a difference.
So many times, you will be surprised at what these tests come back and reveal about us as individuals. And that's really the first step, is that I need to know where my blind spots are first to begin to work and work towards fixing them. So I think it's a really good space for all of us to play out that coincides with that, a little phrase that I found that I think is important.
And it says, "It can be easy to reject the results of the test as not me when you first encounter them. But that's the easy path. To ask where these biases come from, what they mean, and what we can do about them is the harder and more personal task." So you see where this is more of a moral issue. Where are we in terms of the moral compass and where we have bias with our students? We have got to engage and be critical of our own moral compass.
And also, Carl Jung, the psychologist, began to speak about what we call a collective unconscious. So there is a collective unconscious in the educational realm and a collective unconscious that describes and assumes deficiencies with different groups of students. And biases is the way in which those assumptions are carried out every day. So attacking those assumptions is what we want to be doing and not looking for ways to describe why we don't have them, because we all do.
There's a little piece I talked a bit about earlier, but I thought this was extremely important, that teachers-- it says that teachers are the real masters of multitasking, that 1,500 educational decisions are made by an average teacher every school day, 1,500 educational decisions. That's a ton. I mean, if you're at a 7-hour day, that's 210, 220 bits of information every hour that you're trying to manage that are based in the educational realm, that multitasking. It says, "There are four educational decisions made by an average teacher every minute."
The responsibility that is placed at our feet with the students that we are charged with educating is critical. But teachers are inundated by so many layers of need from their students, demand from our districts. All these things come to place. And what we know and we've discussed before is that all of the sudden, if you're doing all of that work, you're multitasking like that, then that is a space where bias ends up finding a home.
There's a phrase that says, "Everyday automatic preferences steer us towards less conscious decisions, but they are hard to explain because they remain resistant to the probes of conscious motivation." Just, again, describing the nuance of engaging these biases in a way that makes sense is tough. It's not easy. Resist those changes. We've got to double our efforts in understanding ourselves in this moral judgment.
So one of the final pieces that I think is an important thing that connects to what I talked about in terms of Claude Steele's work-- and it's connected to what teachers do, and administrators do on a daily basis. All human beings do this. And it's this concept of confirmation bias. And what confirmation bias is-- the tendency to search for, and interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one's own perceptions, preconceived conceptions.
So if we have these assumptions and these biases that are operating at a process below consciousness, what we'll consciously do is look for confirmation of these biases. So we can say, see, I knew those kids. They're not going to listen. See, I knew those kids' parents wouldn't show up at parent teacher conferences. See, I knew that that kid-- from what the teacher last year told me about them, I knew they were going to be a struggle.
So we've confirmed our bias against those students. And it can be any student. So how do we find the ability to check ourselves when we begin to do that, especially in the context of having all of these different things, 1,500 bits of educational pieces that we're doing every day, 4 every minute that we're doing that we have to do every day? So then the system of default that we have that it feeds us in what to do and not do must be uncovered. That's the work that we must do.
I will reiterate as we close the importance of building strong, genuine, secure relationships with our students and the families from which they come. All too often, we've went-- we have gone through training programs as teachers that say, hey, become a content expert in biology. And you're going to be a great biology teacher. But no one has talked to us about building relationships with our students.
What we've done is say, hey, I'm to be the content expert, have great curriculum. I know how to manage a classroom, all of those things. My students should learn. And I think a lot of students will learn based on that content expertise. But then what we're doing is saying, the byproduct of my content expertise may be that I'll build a few relationships, but it's not the focus.
I submit that that's backwards. My submission is that if I build genuine relationships from the beginning, how I start the school year will find its way throughout. If I tell my story, let you know who I am, what brought me to where I am today as your teacher standing in front of you, and I ask you to share a bit of your story with me and the classroom, what I'm doing is creating aunt-hood and uncle-hood in the classroom. And I'm creating cousin-hood amongst my entire student population.
If that is the case, the byproduct of those relationships is I can teach you anything because we've built a genuine relationship. Now, that's not easy, but it's the most quick and thorough approach to attacking this concept of bias. So my submission is build those strong relationships from the outset, and see how that may be beneficial. Continuously building on any of those relational aspects will reap benefits from whatever my content expertise is, so finding ways in which to blossom those relational aspects.
So as we close, I just really want to say I appreciate you following through these three webinars. This work of implicit bias and what The Bias Inside Us and Smithsonian have done to couple around this work is very, very important, not only to where we are but to where we're headed, especially in the realm of education.
I wish each and every one of you the best in this journey and hope to continue this conversation as we move forward. Best of luck. Build relationships. Thank you. Appreciate your time.
