I was most struck this week by the end of Brantlinger’s essay, “Who Wins and Who Loses?”, where Bratlinger describes an “imaginative” way “to bridge the great divide between the social classes.” What follows is a description of “families” composed of students and adults that are used to prepare students for a “high stakes exam”. While it is easy to identify the source of my immediate feelings on high stakes exams, I am more struck by a connection to a recent article I read about Google’s understanding of successful teams through its “Project Aristotle”. In this project Google executives explain that the best teams are not necessarily composed of the best workers — instead the strongest teams are those that allow space for process and that share clear goals while being fully present as individuals within a collaboration. I am left wondering about the ways in which systems of power, especially noted this week in race and class, foreclose on individuals’ possibilities of being collaborators with valuable investments in their own education. By valuing these individuals emotionally, physically, and intellectually with resources, presence, time and experiences, educators can expand their own understandings while nurturing learners from a variety of lived experiences and identities.