Lead Your Own Training: The Social Justice Standards

Helping students understand and like their own identities without devaluing others; encouraging them as they find the ways we’re all connected and deserving of respect; teaching them to recognize injustice and showing them how to act against it—this is the work that social justice educators choose to do.

To support educators in this work, Learning for Justice developed the Social Justice Standards, a road map for anti-bias education at every stage of K–12 instruction. This set of standards—a full framework—divides social justice teaching and learning into four key “anti-bias domains”: Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action.  

Taken as a whole, this framework is the cornerstone for all of Learning for Justice’s anti-bias resources. It features anchor standards, descriptive scenarios and learning outcomes tailored for every grade band. The standards provide the foundation for the Learning Plan Builder, where educators use the age-appropriate learning outcomes to begin their backward-design process.

We’ve always offered online resources for self-guided professional development (including PD around the Social Justice Standards). But we know that in-person training and the opportunity to process information with colleagues is invaluable—especially when a staff is making a point of learning and growing together. With this in mind, we are pleased to share our new, free guide for facilitating PD around the standards: the Social Justice Standards Professional Development Facilitator Guide. 

The guide empowers educators already familiar with the standards to share them with colleagues. If you like the standards but you don’t yet feel ready to lead others through them, you can brush up on your own knowledge with our online PD. When you are ready, our PD facilitator guide provides all of the resources you’ll need to train colleagues in using the standards and in taking the first steps toward integrating them in your department, school or district.

Here’s some of what you’ll find when you download the guide:

• Activities to build familiarity with the Social Justice Standards.
• Case studies describing creative ways other educators have integrated the standards into their teaching.
• Handouts and activities to practice writing essential questions based on the standards.
• Guided questions to explore the difference between prejudice reduction and collective action and why that distinction is especially important in today's classrooms.

You’ll learn how to introduce the standards to colleagues, to explain their origins and to offer concrete ways of embedding them in lessons, classrooms and curricula across your school or district. The guide includes all the handouts, readings and presenter slides you’ll need for a complete training. (We’ve even included the evaluation!) 

The format is flexible; you can plan to share the standards with colleagues in one longer meeting, space the guide’s six units over several weeks or share only the units that are most relevant to your PD and implementation goals. 

We’re excited to share this new resource with you, and we can’t wait to hear how you use it. Download it and give it a try—and be sure to let us know how your training goes!