School and system leaders have a close-up view of how our society’s most noxious ills manifest in our education infrastructure. Whether we’re standing in front of a classroom, behind the principal’s desk or in a hidden corner of the central office, we bear witness to myriad ways that the system can make our professional preparation seem inadequate and irrelevant. After years of service, small injustices come to seem routine and we can become inured to even the largest systemic failings.

These feelings about injustice and how we as educators bear witness to its starkest manifestations were piqued after a recent conversation with a group of teenagers at an ostensibly high-performing California high school. Each student at the school expressed both hope and frustration at the various challenges along their pathway to lifelong success and liberation: Difficult high school courses, impenetrable college admissions processes, multi-generational poverty, systemic racism and complicated relationships with their families, to name a few. The range and extent of the issues did not surprise us, but the students’ response to them did. When we asked a simple question — “Who can you rely on when the stuff gets hard?” — everybody had an answer. Kids sought help from sisters, brothers, cousins, the older kid down the street or that one family member who went to college.

Not a single student mentioned reaching out to an educator.

The conversation had a profound effect on our thinking. Could it be the case that some educators’ pragmatic jadedness was getting in the way of fostering caring, authentic relationships with marginalized students?

When we probed deeper — not just with this particular group of kids, but with other young people — we saw a pattern. Students, often avoid having difficult conversations about systemic injustice with educators, because they view teachers and administrators as gatekeepers. The adults in a school — not just in students’ minds, but in reality — possess a great deal of power with respect to the present and future of the young people around them. We make the rules of the road, set the standards for success, provide feedback on student progress against those standards and make high-stakes judgments about whether or not kids are prepared to achieve critical next steps. While this gatekeeping function can be important at times, it also can be a barrier to relationship building. If students view adults, first and foremost, as defenders of a standard, little room is left for them to be allies in breaking through to what lives on the other side of that standard.

Something’s gotta give, and each interaction with a young person calls for a subtle variation in approach. After decades of collective experience in school leadership, we have come to the conclusion that shifting one’s posture from being a “gatekeeper” to being a “critical ally” is one of the most fundamental adjustments that an educator can make.

Critical allyship means ensuring that your disposition reflects an anti-racist mindset, while also being a constructive partner to students, evoking multiple meanings of the word “critical.” This work requires demonstrating adaptive leadership, so that you can have real conversations with adults that address the racial climate and equity in your school. This work also includes fostering strong parent and family partnerships, flattening decision-making structures, engaging in real conversations about race with stakeholders in ways that promote culturally responsive instruction and integrated SEL programming.

Perhaps more than anything, though, critical allyship means leaning into the discomfort inherent in discussing how our own schools — and often our own peers — contribute to the explicit political oppression of Black and Brown minds.

While this shift may seem abstract, there are specific ways we can ensure that we are showing up for our students to propagate allyship and collaboration, rather than gatekeeping and authority. Those approaches fall into four categories: disposition, awareness, language and decision-making.

Students have an innate ability to suss out our adult mindsets. More explicitly, Black and Brown students possess the social awareness and cultural aptitude to know when adults care and are acting in service of their needs. This sort of resilience tactic allows them to protect themselves, while navigating the nuances of power, race and culture in their classrooms. They know, almost before a conversation starts, whether we are approaching them as problems to be solved, puzzles to be assembled or as delicate humans with a range of complex emotions. They recognize that their struggles as learners pit them against forces larger than themselves — racism, oppression, discrimination, poverty and more — which makes it easy for some gatekeepers to avoid feeling responsible for upending these systems.

Educators, fortunately, can be disruptors to that dynamic. The first thing we can do is to approach challenging and courageous conversations with young people from a place of humility and vulnerability. When a student comes to us with a challenge, and we immediately jump to problem-solving, that can come across as insensitive and impersonal. A disposition of humility allows us to recognize that we do not have all of the answers, nor do we understand the full extent of the context and history our children bring to us.