Should I lead, facilitate, or get out of the way?

Expert is a term often thrown around in variety of professional circles. In education and edutwitter world “expert” implies a variety of things and often is tossed around rather freely and sometimes brings along with it some pretentious behavior. I believe many individuals (especially in edutwitter land) have self-designated expert labels almost as similar to the hearing someone of referring to themselves in third person. Now when discussing someone in education who might be an “expert” of a edtech tool or teaching strategy it can be somewhat easier to quantify or “show my work” similar to how one would earn a MAT, Ed.S, or Ed.D. However when we get into complex, multi-layered topics like racism, equity, or social justice who should be considered or labeled an expert or leader tends to become a little more tricky.

This past Sunday, I posed the following poll on Twitter. The results were interesting and the comments that followed even more intriguing.

When framing the question, I purposely used the verb lead. When one leads, it brings with it the connotation that a person has an extensive amount of experience, deep knowledge, understanding and expertise about a particular topic. So based on these 1000+ votes you would think that people of color should be leading most professional development sessions regarding racism in schools. Let’s just say our educational…