What might it look like to treat the late majority in your community as the sages of your change effort? To seek their counsel before a plan is finalized—to design with them rather than defend against them? 

The integrity between what we say and what we do, that gap I noticed as an aspiring leader (the one that made me a gadfly in someone else's estimation), is exactly what the late majority are paying attention to. They’ve seen that gap before. Some have fallen into it. Many have been harmed by it.

Imagine what’s possible when we stop seeing the late majority as the people we need to move, and start seeing them as the reason we can all move together.

Many teacher evaluation systems don’t embed culturally responsive teaching patterns into their evaluation rubrics. Or, if culturally responsive teaching is embedded in the evaluation framework, it’s typically an add-on that teachers haven’t received enough support and training on. Inspired by the work of Chism (2022) and del Carmen Salazar and Lerner (2019), the Integrated Classroom Practices for Equity Rubric and Observation Guide can support observers in identifying equitable patterns of instruction.