Hi, everybody. I decided to turn on my video just so you could see who was going to be speaking to you today. I'm Cynthia Peters. I work at World Education and I'm also an adult ed teacher. And I have been for many years in ESL, ABE, GED, all sorts of different subjects. And I'm really happy to be here with you today to share some information about implicit bias and to think about what we learn here could impact our teaching and our programs, and even the field.

So I want to echo what Veronica said. I really hope people will use the chat to ask questions or make comments. I'm going to pause a lot to see what's going on in there. And it just makes it more interactive. So please chime in. And there's a few places where I'll be specifically asking you something. So especially then be ready to chime in, if you would.

Thank you. I was really struggling to choose between two videos that I wanted to share. And this is the one I decided not to share with you today. But I encourage you all to go check it out. It's a really cool way to notice how our minds get going on a one-way track and we can't get off of it.

And so it's a little experiment where this guy tries to get people to figure out what the mathematical rule is to something. And you watch everybody just say the same thing over and over again. They can't get off the track. So I can drop that link into the chat. Or, it's shared with you on the last slide. So you'll have that link.

But the video that I ended up deciding on is this one. And this is just a way to kind of warm us up to start thinking about implicit bias. And I'm going to go over to my browser and share this video. And I want, if some people-- I can see some of you. If you don't mind just giving me a thumbs up when I start playing it, that you can hear it, OK? All right?

Your brain making a mistake in real--

We'll start it from the beginning.

Want to catch your brain making a mistake in real time? Take a look at this checkerboard created by vision scientist Edward Adelson. The squares labeled A and B are exactly the same shade of gray. Don't believe me? I don't blame you. I see them as different, too. But here's the proof. Simply connect the two with this gray bar. And voila.

Suddenly, it's obvious. A and B are identical. Here's the strange thing. Remove the bar and the illusion comes back immediately, just as strong as it was before. We can do this again, for the skeptics. Different shades of gray. Same shades of gray. Different. Same. Our eyes can see that A and B are identical, but our brains fall for it every time, no matter how often you debunk the illusion.

Why? Professor Adelson points to two specific details. First, contrast. A looks darker because it's surrounded by lighter colored squares. The opposite is true for B. Second, take a look at the soft edges of this darker section. Our brains see this and think, ah, it's a shadow. We know that objects and shadows look darker than they actually are. So our brains compensate for that by making us actually see B as lighter.

Something else to consider. We all know what a checkerboard pattern looks like. So we come into the solution already expecting A and B to be different, and that could influence what we see. What about expectations we have about people? Which face is darker? The one on the left, or the one on the right?

Psychologists Daniel Levin and Mahzarin Banaji found that most people, including Mahzarin herself, see the Black face as darker than the white face, even though the two faces are the exact same shade of gray. Again, debunking the illusion is simple. Here's an idea from Dan.

Just cover up the lower parts the faces. You'll be left with two foreheads, and they'll look exactly the same.

The features of the face matter. But in a second study, the researchers showed that you could create this illusion using the same face. People saw a racially ambiguous face labeled Black as darker than the same face labeled white. Did you? Think about what this means. We see two faces. They are identical.

But we're so used to associating different races with different skin tones that we misperceive a simple physical reality, all because of a single word. That's how powerful our expectations are. Now, when it comes to judging the brightness of objects, the errors seem pretty harmless. But research shows that we also see the exact same action as being less bad if the perpetrator is attractive.

We read the same musician as more masterful if she's described as a natural, rather than a hard worker. These illusions are more costly. So what are things we could do to base our decisions in fact, rather than fiction? Think back to how we debunked illusions before. We needed to have the true tiles, the two faces, in front of us at the same time to really prove the truth.

So when you have multiple options in front of you, whether it's job candidates or health insurance plans, consider them side by side. Not only does this let you test your intuitions, research shows that you'll be more likely to. When people evaluate things together, they're more likely to use the same specific benchmarks to compare them.

Want something stronger? If you want to avoid illusions altogether, try blinding. We've talked about this technique before. When orchestras put a curtain between musicians and judges during auditions and let the music do the talking, a new crop of players rose to the top. Sometimes, we perceive more than what meets the eye. But a few tweaks to the process can help outsmart your mind.

OK, so let's see. Yeah, I would love to hear if there's any comments about that, if that took you by surprise. Maybe some of you have seen that before. Does anybody have a response to that? Somebody says wow. I'm with you, Tiffany. I love the way they open. They say, want to catch your mind making a mistake?

And I love that opening. And I want to go forward, when we think about bias, with this idea that it's really our mind making a mistake, that implicit bias isn't an intentional act of discrimination. It's not even intentional at all. And it doesn't mean that we're bad people. It means that we're hard-wired in certain ways, that we have a lot of training. And that, when you put those things together, our minds can make mistakes.

And then, like they say in the video, there's some things we can do to help our minds not make those mistakes. And that's what I want to try to talk about here in this workshop, is exploring how our minds can make mistakes, and then what kinds of things we can do to preempt that.

So let's go to the next slide. Oh, before I do, I just want to-- one good thing about this video is they really do, you know, I thought there was some interesting things about how, you know, we have a preconception of what a checkerboard is. So we just assume, of course, A and B have to be different.

The green tube makes a shadow. So that makes us think, oh, well, it's just in shadow. But it's really lighter, but it's just in shadow. That's why it kind of looks darker than it should. You know, we make all these little micro adjustments to try to make it make sense. So just keeping that in mind as we go forward would be good.

So let's look a little bit at what implicit bias even means. And before we go forward I just want to-- when I click on the chat, I don't-- oh, I see what's happening. It takes up my whole screen. OK. So Stacy says, fascinating study. Implicit bias is hard to unpack and avoid.

And then Tiffany, says, I looked at the features. Yeah. So basically, our minds are working hard to make sense of things and they might make little mistakes here and there. So implicit bias includes attitudes and beliefs, positive or negative, about other people, ideas, issues, or institutions that occur outside of our conscious awareness and control. And these things affect our opinions and behavior.

So everyone has implicit biases. They have developed over a lifetime. However people can work to combat and change these biases. So again, I'm just really stressing that if you catch yourself being biased, it doesn't mean that you are bad. You are just human. Everybody has implicit biases. And the interesting challenge that we have ahead of us is to figure out how to unpack it and put up guardrails.

You're going to hear me talk about guardrails a little bit. We can put a guardrails against it. There is another important kind of bias that feeds into implicit bias, and that is confirmation bias. And that's the selective collection of evidence that our subconscious-- that it is our subconscious tendency to seek and interpret information and other evidence in ways that affirm our existing beliefs, ideas, expectations, and/or hypotheses, and to ignore contradictory evidence.

Now, this is incredibly important to understand, especially in this day and age of social media that uses all these algorithms to feed us information that it thinks we want to hear and that we're going to like. So we are getting a constant stream of information that's confirming or already existing biases.

So just a good thing to remember and understand about our current environment or the current-- what I call the water we swim in. If you want to push back against your own biases, might have to work hard to get out of your social media bubble. So another way to explore implicit bias-- and we're not going to take the time to during this webinar, but I wanted to give you this resource in case you haven't heard of it.

A lot of people have heard of it. Millions of people have taken this implicit bias test. It's the Harvard one. Do people know about this? You can go to this website and they have a lot of different possible tests around race and around other kinds of ways of identifying people.

And I took it and I, of course, went forward with this kind of arrogance that it wasn't going to prove me to be biased. And of course, it did, in all kinds of different ways. And I encourage you to try it. If you're working on bias with your students, it might be a fun thing to try with your students.

They have so much data now. And there's critiques of this data. You can explore that if you like. I mean, no test is perfect. But they have millions of people, millions of data points on this since so many people have taken it. And overwhelmingly, the data shows that people do tend to be biased. However, there is not necessarily a strong connection between being an individually biased person and actually acting on discriminatory behavior, sort of showing explicit bias.

So you could have lots of implicit bias. We all do. You do have it. It doesn't necessarily mean that you go around acting like a discriminatory fool and treating people badly in an explicit way. So here's another place where there's a lot of data. I think this is so fascinating. Apparently, in New Jersey, there's a sort of a bunker with all these screens showing all the basketball games being played from multiple angles.

And experts sit in this room and watch the multiple games from multiple angles in order to give feedback to the referees on their calls. Now, they don't give feedback always in real time. I think they might actually do that if there is a big game at stake, or if a big play is at stake, or something-- you know, there are certain rules where maybe they do give their input to the refs on the floor.

But mostly, they're just sitting there collecting data and analyzing whether the ref made the call correctly or not. Right? And they can be pretty objective about it because they can see it from a lot of different angles and they're not, in real time, hearing crowd yelling and having all the influences on you by being on the actual basketball floor. And what they found was referees are biased. They tend to favor home teams in their calls and they show racial bias in their calls.

So they tend to call against the black players more than the white players in the similar situations. So there are some really interesting people who have studied this data. And I love this one guy I listened to talked about-- he's like, I could care less about basketball, but I'm a sociologist and I study bias, and I was really interested in this because I have lots of data about bias.

Now, referees are actually get promoted and get paid more based on not being biased. They have an incentive to make the calls accurate and to not show bias. And even with that incentive, they still are biased. OK, so tell me something from you. I would like to hear it from somebody else now. Do you have an example of implicit bias in your life?

Maybe you have witnessed an example of it, or you've experienced it yourself, or you've expressed it yourself? Maybe there is a time when you just noticed yourself-- wow, I just assumed that without even thinking. And I'm totally taken aback. Has that ever happened to you? If you could put something in the chat, I would really appreciate it.

So I'll just pause here for a second. And it can be a small thing or it can be a bigger thing. Whatever might have happened to you, maybe in the classroom you got surprised by somebody, or just in everyday life. Linda says she did the Harvard study and she said this revealed about me. Yeah.

Thank you, Linda. We can all confess that, indeed, we have implicit bias. Does anybody want to share a story or unmute, even? OK, I don't see any volunteers. Stacey says, I have accidentally tried to communicate in Spanish to students who are not Spanish speakers.

Yes. Oh my gosh, that reminds me of something I did in my office. An IT person came to help me with my computer and his name was Jose. And I assumed that he could speak Spanish and he couldn't at all. And I was just so embarrassed to have been made such a stupid mistake.

We have all different people of all different ethnic backgrounds in our country who may or may not be able to speak whatever the language is implied by their name. So Peggy says, one of my biases, someone who is outwardly Christian is suspicious in terms of whether they are inclusive of all people, like LGBTQ people. Yes. Thank you, Peggy.

And then Tiffany says, I was told to speak well from a parent of a student. She said she was really shocked by it. I was told I speak well. Oh my gosh, I'm sorry, Tiffany. Wow. That's really shocking. These are the kinds of things that are happening all the time. Peggy says, I'm working on not judging them.

OK, you're referring back to an earlier thing in the chat. Yeah, these little micro and not so micro moments are happening all the time. And it's really good to be aware of them. Kim says, being told I'm different than other Black guys. Wow. OK. Because there's really just one kind of Black guy, right?

These are the little storehouses of information that we carry around with us from a lifetime of existing in this society and consuming media, consuming religious practices, consuming habits from our families and our communities. Somebody else says, my husband is from Peru and he's a nurse. But when patients meet him, they think he's the janitor. Wow.

Also, my neighbors at first thought he was a landscaper because he likes fixing up our front yard. They told me I'm so lucky my husband's a landscaper. Oh my goodness. And you know, like a white man in the suburbs who is out working in his yard is not mistaken for a landscaper, right? Well, thank you for these. Is really helpful to hear. That really kind of populates our discussion about what implicit bias is.

OK, so remember, it does apply to all of us. We're hardwired to make snap decisions. I'm sure it was part of-- and still might be- part of our survival in the world. We have to figure out what's safe, what's comfortable, what's valuable. We might have to do it kind of instantly, so there may be a sort of a survival thing going on in there.

And like the referees, we all have countless discretionary moments in a day, moments when we may be driven by bias. And in the classroom, we just have hundreds of these discretionary moments, right? Where we look at someone a certain way, invite a conversation a certain way, ask somebody to hold off or not. You know?

All the little things that we do. The eye contact. The tone of voice. Those are all the little discretionary moments that we have in front of us. So our biases show themselves in all these ways that we've talked about. The micro, the affirmations, the devaluations, the affinity bias. Like, oh, you're like me.

That's another thing that we didn't actually talk about. You're like me, so therefore X, Y, or Z must be true. And then there's this fourth thing, which is sort of underlying worldview. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that in a second. But before we do that, I just have a slide about thinking about where implicit bias comes from, just remembering that it starts early. We learn it in our families, in our culture. We learn it from the media.

We learn it from all of our life experiences, our schooling, our education, and our religious practices. So it's an onslaught. This is not an easy thing to work on. I'm having a little trouble forwarding my slides sometimes, so that's why you might notice a pause. I want to get to this what I mentioned about the underlying things.

So what we've talked about, some of the surface things. But there's this other idea, this kind of idea about world view. How we think the world works. You know, we have a lot of training in this. Like, how our basic relationship to nature, our relationship to other people, what we think is basically true about people.

These are all things that come from our world view, which we get from our communities, our religions, the media, from our country. You know, there's all sorts of ways the US thinking might be slightly different than other cultures' thinking, or other countries' thinking. One way this came up for me was when I edited the indigenous peoples issue of The Change Agent. And I was really immersed in all these contributions coming in from indigenous people.

And I felt like, wow, there is a whole different feeling, a whole different relationship to nature that indigenous people talk about. And they always seem to be touched down into this idea of having a reciprocal relationship with nature. And it just came out in all kinds of ways. It was like the air. It was just written into how they viewed themselves in the world.

And I thought to myself, that's so different from how I view myself in the world and how I've been trained to view myself. You know, I come from much more of a kind of a Western, probably white Western idea about being separate from nature, being better than nature, being smarter than other species, and other-- you know, than all of nature together.

Not being in a reciprocal relationship, but being kind of almost against nature, needing to overcome nature. So that's a huge amount of learning that just influences my everyday thinking. And that was just an example of world view to other people have. Examples of how world view affects your orientation.

So Patricia Hernandez-- I don't know how you would like to pronounce your name-- she says that she had a school language specialist compliment her on her English, and she's a native English speaker. It's the name that threw her off. Yes, you have Hernandez for your last name. And really scary was that she was the school language specialist. Wow. Yeah. Even the person who's been trained to try to think about this stuff is still kind of slipping.

So thank you for that. Anybody else want to add anything about this larger idea? Because this becomes even more challenging, then, to try to affect not just our individual behavior, but the larger structures that are constantly feeding us information.

Let's try this exercise. So let's find the implicit bias. So let's say your students say that they're having money problems. And as their teacher, you conduct a search for financial literacy resources to help them make sense of and address the challenges that they face.

You find one source that offers workshops such as tips for managing your money, how to make informed retirement decisions, use Google spreadsheets to make a budget, three strategies for saving for college. Is there an implicit bias in this set of workshops?

What's the overall kind of approach of all of these workshops? Now, you're a teacher. You want your students to have resources. They've asked you for help around their money problems or financial literacy needs.

The implicit bias-- Peggy says the implicit bias is they are poor. Hold on. I lost it. They are poor versus rich and their money problem is being rich. Huh. OK. Dina says the assumption is that students have money to manage. OK. Interesting. Bertha says retirement, adult ed ADE student, retirement probably isn't even a consideration.

So some of these ideas are just even off the charts. They're not even going to-- this assumes a middle class income. Gosh, living paycheck to paycheck, pretty hard to save up, at this point, for retirement. Assume students have income. Yes. So all those are true. I was looking for an even kind of more macro bias.

And then, Stacy saying that these seem well-rounded, but are they workshops digital? They also address typically middle class issues. So living for the day versus living in the future. Yep. Yeah, these are all really good things to point out. I think perhaps most interesting is that our students don't even have money to manage.

So that's actually the first problem. And if people don't have money to manage, what kind of workshops are we supposed to have for them? What can we offer them? All these solutions are very individual-based, right? There about what you, as an individual, could do to try to succeed. They don't get to anything around, well, do you not have access to a living wage job?

Or, what's the minimum wage in your state? What the-- what are the options for advancing in your workplace? Are those options available to you? None of the workshops are about possibly changing the structures that we live in that might make it more possible for people to not have money problems, to address your money problems as if they have a root in something collective in the way that we structure the economy.

Does that make sense? To me, it feels like the bias is like this. Do you see this image? This cover of this navigating the financial course. What does this image show? What's the idea about how to navigate financial issues? You're kind of alone in a boat, right?

What do you notice here? You're alone in a boat. A wave could come up. Try to make it. Oh, there's white people. Yep. A lot of money in their bag and a piggy bank Yup. A big bag of all their money. Yeah. And they're not part of any kind of society. You know? We don't know anything about these people.

What are they actually navigating? Are they navigating a job with no career ladder? Are they navigating a low wage? Do they have benefits? What exactly is the ocean that they're trying to get through here? You know, you see the lighthouse off in the distance. You see a rocky shore. And it just kind of looks like it's all on them to steer the boat properly.

There is no sense that there are structural issues that could affect their navigating this financial course. Does this make sense to people? Are you kind of following where I'm going with this, that the implicit bias here is that if you want financial literacy skills, you know you're going to think of yourself as a lone actor.

You're going to think of it-- it's your responsibility. If you didn't start saving when you were younger, that's your fault. If you don't have a retirement plan, that's your fault. It's on you to get the budget done and to make it work. Somebody says, exactly. There is a big difference when you have the whole community and a large family that you can lean on and share resources with. Yeah.

Yes. Thank you. There's no analysis of the structure, Patricia Hernandez is saying. Structure is the given. Yes. And so when something is a given, then it's implicit. It's kind of implicit. It's not unpacked. We don't notice it. We don't name it. We can't address it because we haven't surfaced it. And so we stay in the soup of-- it's all on me as an individual to navigate the rough oceans and the rocky shores of my financial journey.

Now, of course, a lot is up to us, individually. We do need to save. We do need a budget. We do need to think about our individual choices. But we also need to open up our gaze and look at how the world works. Is it set up for success? And what can we do to shift things to make it work better for me, my family, and my community?

So, yes. Stacy says the rugged individual approach, as opposed to a collective approach. This is huge. Because in the United States, this is a really strong cultural message, right? You can pick yourself up by your bootstraps. As an immigrant, you can come to this country. You can succeed if you just try hard enough. If you don't try hard enough, it's your fault. If you don't succeed, it is your fault because you didn't try hard enough. Now, this isn't to discount that trying hard is great. Many people do work hard and make it. That's not to discount that or to discredit that. But it's just to say that, in addition to looking at that, we need to also look at the larger structures that might be playing a macro role and having a macro effect on all of us.

Burr says, for so many, their boats have holes and didn't benefit from the rising tide. Yes. Yes. I love the metaphor. The extended metaphor is really happening here, people. The boat has a hole. I can't even row it. There is no rudder. I'm sinking. It doesn't even matter if some people are getting lifted up. I'm going down. And all I'm being told is that it's my fault and that I should make a budget.

Assimilation versus acceptance. Yes. Thank you. This is great. This is so rich. I love all the words that people are using. And I hope that you can appreciate this example of kind of unpacking implicit bias in a tool that could very well be in the adult ed classroom, something like a financial literacy package.

Now, just to contrast that, I have the cover of the economic crisis issue of The Change Agent. I think this came out in 2009. It was right after the economic collapse of-- gosh, how long? It was 12 years ago already. Amazing. But this was the image that I chose for the cover of the magazine, partly because I wanted to push back against the implicit bias that we have in the United States whenever we talk about the economy.

We talk about it as a whole bunch of individuals, not usually asking how the economy is working for everyone. And so these signs kind of show a different bias. And how would you describe the bias of these signs?

I know you have to both think and then type, so it's a lot to ask. I guess one option is that it's possible to have an economy that works for everyone, right? But that's even a possibility. Like, right now it's pretty clear we don't have an economy that works for everybody. Many people are at the bottom of the heap.

We have a lot of information about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. And no matter where you fall on any political spectrum or what you think about the US economy, I think probably almost everybody would agree that it's not working for everybody. And so these signs kind of imply that it's possible to have such a thing.

Tiffany says they are white old people. I would assume otherwise that this does not affect them. Yeah, many elderly people do suffer from a lot of poverty. Of course, definitely way disproportionately more people of color do than white people, but certainly a lot of white people who are white seniors are quite poor.

Stacey says, maybe ageism is an issue for these protesters. Yeah. It is true. It's a pretty demographically not diverse group on the cover of the magazine. But Diana says, yes. I would think others may think their economic problems are different than many people. Yeah. OK. Thank you all.

So let's see. I know that Veronica shared in the chat some of the handouts. And I wanted to give people a lot of materials to take with them out of this webinar so that you could maybe try things in the classroom, or if you're not a teacher, if you're an administrator, you could take it back and share it with the teachers in your program.

And the two that I have to kind of go with this part of the section that we've been discussing are this lesson package 10, which is called taking action at work. And it's a collection of seven articles, mostly first-person stories, of people speaking up at work for better conditions and against wage theft. And it includes ideas about how to connect with communities, with community efforts that are trying to win better conditions and wages for workers.

So the idea is that one of the ways we can think about how to improve life for ourselves is not just getting a job, But once you're in that job, making that job better by learning how to advocate for yourself or speak up for yourself at work. And not just individually, although individually, as well, but also collectively. So possibly joining with others to figure out how to make something better.

So in this collection, for example, there's a story about a woman who says that, in the factory where she works, the lunch room was filthy dirty. And she just got really tired of it. And she figured out how to make a change.

So that's one example of an individual, kind of in a micro way, standing up for herself at work and making her conditions of work better. And then there's another story about the car washieros, the car wash workers in New York City who were experiencing wage theft and they joined with an organization to kind of fight to stop the wage theft.

There are stories by undocumented workers, as well as documented workers, immigrants, as well as non-immigrants, thinking about how to connect with others to shift something about work. And then there's also two stories by moms who tell the story about how they stood up for their children, both in kind of school-related situations.

And these are really interesting because one of the moms says she has a disabled son. And the bus that picks up her son and takes him to his day program, she can never depend on this bus. So she can't really go to school. She can't really get a job. She never knows if the bus is going to come.

She never knows if the bus is going to come late. She doesn't know if the bus will bring him home or if she'll have to try to find a family member to go pick him up. I mean, it's sort of a terrible bus situation. And it's affecting her whole life. And so it's almost a matter of financial literacy for her. To be able to improve her financial situation, she needs to get this bus thing worked out.

So she has to advocate for herself and her son's bus situation in order to improve her own life. So that's kind of where advocacy is a part of financial literacy and would really benefit our students for us to not be caught up in the implicit bias of financial literacy is just getting your boat with your piggy bank and try to just individually take care of yourself.

But maybe, actually, look outward. Think of the places where you can advocate for yourself and your family and your community. And that's another piece of financial literacy. Is that making sense?

OK, let's get back to thinking about implicit bias and whether it's really a problem. I think we would all agree the answer is yes. Here's an example of how implicit bias just shows up in this homework example, right? You've got two white kids and two children of color. The white kids have the words happy and proud underneath their names and the brown children have sad and angry.

You know, was this explicit bias? I mean, did the maker of this page literally sit there and go, I'm going to do something racist here? Probably not. I mean, probably they didn't mean to. Maybe they did. But probably this is the kind of slip-up that happens that then becomes information for our brains. And it becomes something that we take in unconsciously and then start to replicate unconsciously.

So yes, implicit bias really matters. When they look at certain metropolitan areas with greater average implicit bias as they have measured it in their research studies, they show that there are larger racial disparities in police shootings. And counties with greater average implicit bias have larger racial disparities in infant health problems.

So sociologists can study this and see that, yes, implicit bias has outcomes for people's lives, including more people of color getting shot and more children of color having problems with their health.

Also, bias yields racial disparities in expectations. So studies show that non-Black teachers of Black students have significantly lower expectations than do their Black teachers. These effects are larger for Black male students and for math teachers.

So yes, it's affecting, wholesale, our Black children growing up. With teachers who have implicit bias, it's affecting them in a wholesale way. White male names get more responses. Many of you have probably heard about this study where people found that-- OK, so, well there was one with resumes where, if a resume has a white sounding name, it's more likely to get responded to.

This is a field experiment conducted by people in adult ed and they found that instructors of online courses were nearly twice as likely to respond to discussion forum comments placed by students who were randomly assigned white male names. So of course, there's no such thing as a white male name.

But we read names a certain way. Like Patricia Hernandez was read as speaking Spanish and she doesn't speak Spanish. So same with names. We read names as having certain meaning. And so if you have a Black sounding name or a Latino sounding name, you weren't as likely to get responded to in a forum as if you had a white. How about stereotype threat?

This is another way that implicit bias really affects people. Studies show that just the fear of being stereotyped will cause students to de-identify with the school or the field of study and it will lower test takers scores. So if you're a girl in a math class dominated by boys, just the fear of being stereotyped as a girl who's not good at math or science or something, that's going to make you score lower on tests.

Does anybody feel like they have any examples of stereotype bias in their lives where maybe somebody might react angrily to something and you might think, well, wait, that's kind of out of proportion or something? But the trouble is that people who are accustomed to being stereotyped are so used to having that used against them that they're constantly alerted to that it might happen again.

And so it creates this negative feedback loop. And that's a real problem for our students and it's something that we have to watch out for. People come in sometimes angry, defensive, because they are so used to being treated a certain way in school, they did they just assume you're going to treat them that way, too. Even if you're very much not treating them that way, it doesn't matter.

So you get locked into a little kind of lock horns. Has that ever happened to anybody in their class, or does anybody want to share an example of that? I'm just checking the chat to see. OK, I see some comments. Yes, about the names. Stacey says, I was told by my junior high counselor that girls aren't good at advanced math so I did not take advanced algebra.

Oh my god, Stacey. I'm so sorry to hear that. And just multiply that by millions, right? And we see how people get squashed. People automatically assume students who are in adult education are at the bottom. Thank you, Tiffany. Thank you for reminding us of that. And you know, yeah, we should check ourselves.

I want to tell you a story about, in one of my classrooms when I had asked-- I had this one student who I felt like I was not really getting close to. I wasn't really finding myself getting a relationship with him the way I wanted to. He wouldn't look at me. I couldn't get him to respond to me. And anyway, I was working on it.

And anyway, at one point, I asked my class to get into small groups to do a little project together. And he stood up and he pointed at me kind of aggressively and he said, you know what? I don't like you very much. And it really took me aback. I felt so mad, and upset, and criticized, and of course, hurt.

And all my authoritarian kind of teacher lady stuff came up, and I felt like pointing at the door and saying, well, you know what? You don't have to be here, then. There's the door and you can leave if you want, if that's how you're going to talk to me. That's what I wanted to say. I managed to check myself. I managed to try to slow down.

And instead, what I asked him was, why did you pick right now to tell me that? Because I just asked people to get into small groups. And it was really-- I was so glad that I could ask that question. I could calm down my ego a little bit and my feeling criticized and just get him to say what was going on.

And he was able to say that he had recently been stabbed. He doesn't trust people. He doesn't want to learn from these other people. He wants to learn from the teacher, not from these other people. He just was able to say a lot of stuff. And it was really helpful. It broke the ice completely and the other students were able to say to him, hey, it's OK. Wow, I'm so sorry you got stabbed. What happened? And they got to talk about that. And I just feel like everything broke open in that moment, you know?

So sometimes, if you can pause and try to unlock the horns that have joined together and just try to investigate what's going on and show curiosity about why something's happening. And yeah, we can't always do that. But sometimes we can. And the outcome isn't always great, but sometimes it is. And it allows a little oxygen into the space, where before, we were crowded into our stereotypes.

OK. So I've already started talking about what we can do. And one of the things is slowing down and just developing your awareness. And so remember the referees? This has an interesting end to the story. Or, it's not really the end because it's not over.

So the study was published at first in May 2007. And it was sort of an academic study. Nobody really paid attention to it at first. And according to the sociologist who studied the referee data, the referees just continued doing their regular amounts of bias. But then, the media picked up on this somehow. And it just became a big huge media splash. And so the referees found out about it and their behavior changed.

Their awareness was raised. They were kind of schooled in how it happened and it started to change and shift. Now, it would be really interesting to find out what has happened now. Over time, this study has kind of fallen away from people's minds. It's not on their radar anymore. There's a new crop of referees coming up. They're not even aware of this.

It could be that the bias has snuck back in. I don't know. But it's pretty interesting that when there was a big huge amount of media attention to the referees being biased, it really changed their actions. They double-checked themselves. So it's really positive. It means that we really can shift things.

So for us, what this looks like is we can build our own self-awareness, just as individuals. We can examine our biases so they can shift it, try to move them from unconscious to conscious. Because when they're unconscious, we don't even access them. We can get them up to the conscious level, we can start to try to address them. We can do this by taking the implicit bias tests and just testing ourselves and seeing it.

We can make a conscious effort to slow down and monitor our own beliefs, decisions, and behaviors. So that's that example from the story that I told, from all the stories that have been generated here, just where we could slow ourselves down. We build in checks on ourselves because we know that our biases in there. And so we have to assume it's going to come flying out. So can we put in a filter?

Remember that it's not about whether you're a good person or not. Because I fear that some people feel so embarrassed when they do something that showed their implicit bias that then they have shame come in, and then they can't think very well anymore. And that's not helpful. We have to just remind ourselves that there's not anything wrong with us, that we were trained in this way. But what is our responsibility now is to address it.

So yes, we need to shift away from blame and shift towards trying to affect the structures that we're in, the environments that we're in, and our own access to time and resources to make things change. And one of the ways we can do this is we can invite feedback.

So we can collaborate with peers, we can create an observation protocol, we can get student feedback, right? And these are hard things to do. I mean, we don't necessarily want to hear from people that they think we're being biased when we do that. And you might not agree, even. And that's OK, too.

But inviting more people's perspectives into your private space will help you think better, I think. And it doesn't mean you have to agree with whatever anybody says. You can say, well, I have a different perspective than that. That's OK. But you're opening yourself up. Same as when you get student feedback.

Students might say, I want more quizzes. I want more-- they might say something where you're teaching doesn't tell you to go that direction. So you don't take every bit of feedback you get and act on it, but it might inform how you go forward. So Henry says, thank you so much. I have to hop off for another workshop.

OK. Bye, Henry. Hope you're able to watch the recording. Tiffany says the problem has always been that there just has not been-- it's always been there, but it just hasn't been exposed until now. And the question is, why now is it important? And why was it not before? Like the refs situation.

Good question, Tiffany. And I wish I had an answer. And I honestly don't. I think that honestly, what I think is happening historically right now is that because of the uprising in defense of Black lives, which has happened in a big way over the summer and of course started-- it's been going on for centuries in this country. People have had to fight hard to defend Black lives.

But in the recent history, there have been specific uprisings against police violence and Black Lives Matter has emerged. And what I noticed happening in adult ed is people are suddenly kind of going, gee, we should be figuring out how to talk about this in our classrooms and in our programs and amongst ourselves.

We should be looking at how adult ed might be replicating racism, racist practices, not intentionally, but we should be investigating this. Also, it's a major current events moment in our country. To understand what is happening in this country, we should be trying to figure how to talk about it. And so I think that there has been a lot of interest. And where are the materials for teaching about this and thinking about this?