This is PART 3 in a series on student well-being. Throughout this series, I will explore what recent research has revealed about ways to create an environment in which all students can thrive.
For this series, I will be diving into my file of half-written articles and dust-covered books to learn more about topics like mastery learning, youth mental health, culturally responsive education, culturally proficient SEL, the psychology of learning, the use of praise, equity in grading, and universal design of learning.
"It's important to meet people where they are, not where you would like them to be." -Arlette Watwood
Culturally Responsive Teaching
Culturally responsive teaching is a framework designed to accelerate the learning of all learners by connecting students’ cultures, languages, and life experiences with what they learn in school. These connections help students access rigorous curriculum and develop higher-level academic skills. Culturally responsive teaching is not the same thing as critical race theory, social-justice education, or even social-emotional learning.
Many teachers have been implementing culturally responsive teaching practices for years without knowing the "why" behind it. They incorporate their students' strengths, interests, and cultural backgrounds into their lessons. They intuitively know that students are more engaged when their interests are brought into the classroom. They believe that relationships matter and are the cornerstone of a safe learning environment. They commit to making every student feel seen and heard in their classrooms. In fact, one of the seminal articles about culturally responsive teaching was called "But That's Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy" (1995).
According to Zaretta Hammond, the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students (affilitate link), culturally responsive teaching is
"An educator's ability to recognize students' cultural displays of learning and meaning making and respond positively and constructively with teaching moves that use cultural knowledge as a scaffold to connect with what the student knows to new concepts and content in order to promote effective information processing. All the while, the educator understands the importance of being in a relationship and having a social-emotional connection to the students in order to create a safe space for learning (Hammond, 2015. p. 15).
Hammond's "Ready for Rigor" framework contains four main components that work in tandem to set the stage for independence and rigorous work: Awareness, Learning Partnerships, Information Processing & Community of Learners. You can see a brief description of each component on the "Ready for Rigor" below.
Before I share what I learned, I would like to recommend the following resources:
Please check out these resources if you want to learn more about this topic. I cannot possibly address all of the nuances in a short blog post.
Ready 4 Rigor Framework
Awareness: This is the "inside-out" work for educators in which they examine their own socio-political lens. If we are to believe that we are the total sum of our experiences, then we must evaluate the impact of our own life experiences on our world view. This allows us to manage our own unconscious response to student diversity. This includes an awareness of the roles that schools play in perpetuating and challenging inequalities and how our own cultural experiences shape the way we view the world around us.
In her book, Hammond shares a story about an exchange between an African-American student and a White teacher.
The student was up and out of his seat sharpening his pencil along with other students as the teacher was about to begin with the lesson. She got his attention and said, "James, would you like to take your seat?" James said no and continued to sharpen his pencil. The teacher became outraged and sent James to the principal's office for being defiant. James was surprised and didn't understand why he was being sent to the office. When asked about what happened, he said his teacher asked him a question and he answered her question (Hammond, 2015, p. 58).
Take a moment to consider how you would have reacted in this situation? I, too, would have considered his response to be disrespectful. In reality, this was an example of cross-cultural miscommunication. The teacher DID ask him if he would like to take a seat. She DID NOT direct him to sit. He was not used to this form of communication. At home, directives were directives and questions were questions.
This story was taken from the work of Lisa Delpit. Please take some time to check out her work on the culture of power. It is powerful and thought-provoking.
Learning Partnerships:
At the core of a learning partnership is trust which is anchored in affirmation, mutual respect, and validation. A trusting relationship and safe environment are necessary to learn. At the center of this is the belief that all children not only can learn, but that they will learn. Humans are social animals. We are wired to connect. We can leverage those connections to challenge students to take appropriate risks. A culturally responsive classroom actively demands more of students because the teacher knows who each student is and what each student is capable of.
Information Processing:
This component is focused on delivering instruction in a way that the brain learns. As a psychology teacher, I love the psychology of learning. I could talk about the information-processing model, elaboration, dual-coding, chunking, and retrieval practice all day long! If you would like to learn more about these topics I suggest you check out The Learning Scientists webpage or the book Powerful Teaching (affiliate link), Teaching students the skills they need to know how to learn empowers them to become independent learners. This process is much more than rote memorization; the students become active processors of information.
Community of Learners:
A community of learning is a safe, scholarly environment in which the students feel supported and ready to learn. This includes classroom aesthetics, routines and rituals. One way through which students develop a sense of autonomy is through communication with others. For this to occur, the students must be the ones doing the talking. There's an old adage that says, "the one doing the talking is the one doing the learning." This hardly means that one must talk to learn, but one must engage with the material to retain it. Talking can be an important part of this process.
Here are some of my thoughts as I began to unpack each of the components in the Ready for Rigor Framework.
- It is my position that this shift to culturally responsive teaching should be teacher-driven. Teachers who are curious or interested in implementing this framework should be targeted to begin a school's trajectory towards a culturally responsive education.
- The "learning" part of the brain and the "emotional" part of the brain do not exist in isolation. I'll be blunt, we know that stress affects learning. We have no clue what baggage our students are carrying with them or where they are coming from. We need to create an environment in which the student all of our students feel safe to learn.
- We need to teach students how they learn. I spend the first days of class teaching my students the principles of learning and communicate the rationale behind what we are doing in class and why we are doing it that way. This not only increases their buy-in but it also gives them tools for the learning they will do in their future.
- Part of this process involves helping students reframe failure. Failure is a part of the learning process. We need to assist them in analyzing their errors and teach them straegies to overcome them.
- Students need to feel a sense of autonomy and control over their learning. One of the most common barriers I see to creating this environment is power struggles. Power dynamics are powerful, often unspoken, forces within a school. We do not want to create an environment in which they feel powerless thereby activating a fight or flight response which, in turn, INHIBITS learning leading to an even larger achievement gap.
If I am being candid, I had a really difficult time wrapping my head around Culturally Responsive Teaching. I am a classroom teacher so I wanted lessons!! I wanted to know how I am going to TEACH this skill to my students? What I realized is that this really isn't a pedagogical shift; it's a CULTURAL shift. It is not limited to the classroom. It is embedded within the culture of the school itself. It is rooted in relationships built between students, between teachers and students, between parents and teachers, between the school faculty and the school community as a whole. Most importantly, we need to meet our students where they are, not where we want them to be.
If you are familiar with the CASEL-5 framework for social-emotional learning, you might have already identified some similarities between the culturally-responsive and social-emotional learning frameworks. In the next post of this series, I will take a closer look at the intersection between these frameworks as it relates to student well-being.
Be Well,
Cori
Other Posts in this Series:
Resources:
The 180 podcast: Zaretta Hammond: What is culturally-responsive teaching? Turnaround for Children. (2021, August 16). Retrieved April 7, 2022, from https://turnaroundusa.org/the-180-podcast-zaretta-hammond-what-is-culturally-responsive-teaching/
Culturally responsive teaching and SEL: A ... - youtube.com. (n.d.). Retrieved April 8, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J0LFPGp0T8
Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin, a SAGE company.
https://www.avid.org/cms/lib/CA02000374/Centricity/domain/35/BLM-Culturally-Relevant-Teaching-Resources/Rigor-and-Culturally-Relevant-Teaching--AVID-Activity-with-Educators.pdf
Ladson‐Billings, G. (1995). But that's just good teaching! the case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159–165. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405849509543675
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