From classroom resources to personal anecdotes to directly addressing the disparity that still exists between gifted black/brown students and their white counterparts; the thinkLaw team has been hard at work this year sharing provoking and insightful thought leadership pieces driving home the need for critical thinking in all tiers of our education system. Read more for their perspectives and proposed solutions for how teachers, parents, and policy-makers alike can systematically repair the inequity that exists in education today.
A Critical Thinking Strategy for Student Note-Taking
In this piece for Edutopia, Colin outlines the WICK charting process – a graphic organizer that gives students an easy-to-implement method to deepen their engagement during lessons. Read more for how to shift students from sit-and-get mode to sit-and-get-and-scrutinize-and-discuss mode.
From Playing the Game to Slaying the Game: Why I Wrote ‘Tangible Equity’
In this piece for The74, Colin dives deeper into why he wrote his book Tangible Equity: A Guide for Leveraging Student Identity, Culture, and Power to Unlock Excellence in and Beyond the Classroom. Read more to learn about his demographics-defying story and how it shaped his passion for building instructional models that give students frequent opportunities to go beyond analyzing the world as it is and push them to question what the world ought to be.
‘Tangible Equity’: Excelling at — and Then Dismantling — an Unfair System
In this second piece for The74, Colin shares why it’s not enough to teach students how to overcome the odds, but to challenge how those odds are stacked against them. Read more to learn why he believes it makes no sense to have this beautifully diverse set of students and ask them to spend most of their time conforming to what we deem “normal.”
Finding the Funk: 3 Ways to Add Culturally Responsive Critical Thinking to Your Lessons
In this post accompanying his interview with Jennifer Gonzalez (host of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast), Colin shares three strategies for regularly integrating culturally responsive critical thinking into the content you’re already teaching. Read more to learn how finding the funk in your day-to-day instruction gives you a sustainable pathway to help students go beyond studying the world as it is to a place where they are frequently thinking critically about the world as it ought to be.
Educator’s View: My Former TX District Has Collapsed into Cruelty and Absurdity
In this piece for The74, Clint Von Gundy shares a personal account of his time spent as a student and educator at Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, a school district in north Texas. He laments the “collapse of this once stellar district into cruelty and absurdity with great personal sadness.” Read more to learn how recent policies voted into effect are harming black, brown, and LGBT+ students.
Hocus Pocus in the Public Schools: The Witch Trials Come to Texas Education
In this piece for Ed Post, Clint Von Gundy expands on the chaos that ensued after the citizens of Grapevine-Colleyville elected an “ultraconservative school board.” He likens the mania to a modern day witch hunt for students and teachers of color, members of the LGBT+ community, and any allies to these populations. Read more to learn about the policies and practices enacted by this new regime.
Black Brilliance Is Still Being Overlooked Because White Systems Of Education Don’t Want To Change
In this piece for theGrio, Autumn Arnett shines light on the deep-rooted inequity in the whitewashed school system of America. While it may come as no surprise that black and brown students are less likely to be identified as gifted than their white peers, did you know that black and brown students from low-income households are almost never identified? Read more to learn how giftedness can look different, but is still identifiable, in different cultures.
Who Gets To Be Brilliant?
In this piece for K-12 Dive, Autumn Arnett points out the alarming number of black and brown children missing from gifted education in the U.S (roughly 1 million). She shares her personal experience with her own two gifted children, and how the way giftedness is measured in American education benefits one but not the other. Read more to learn how to identify all gifted students.
Meet The Authors
Clint Von Gundy
Director of Professional Learning, Clint Von Gundy, believes that closing the excellence gap by developing the gifts and talents of our young people, regardless of where they come from, is our last best hope for a peaceful, prosperous, sustainable, and humane future. Check out his pieces for The74 and EduPost.
Autumn A. Arnett
Autumn A. Arnett is the Executive Director of thinkLaw’s nonprofit arm, The BEE Project. Autumn is a fierce advocate for Black and Brown children, in whatever environment they may find themselves. Her work primarily focuses on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in education, and her professional background includes a mix of research, advocacy, and communications.
Colin Seale
Colin Seale is the CEO & Founder of thinkLaw. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, struggles in his upbringing gave birth to his passion for educational equity. Colin founded thinkLaw to help educators leverage inquiry-based instructional strategies to close the critical thinking gap and ensure they teach and reach all students, regardless of race, zip code or what side of the poverty line they are born into.
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