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Gloria Ladson-Billings makes the case that many culturally relevant practices are simply "good teaching." 

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Gloria Ladson-Billings makes the case that many culturally relevant practices are simply "good teaching." 

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ADL's Working Definitions for Equity and Inclusion

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ADL's Working Definitions for Equity and Inclusion

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4 Tools for Interrupting Implicit Bias, Z. Hammond

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4 Tools for Interrupting Implicit Bias, Z. Hammond

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Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain

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I will never forget my first experience with implicit bias as an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley. I had turned in my first in-class writing assignment in Medieval Literature. I loved the topic of courtly love and whatnot. The professor was an older White man and nice enough. There were no other people of color in the class, but I shined that on. I was excited to be reading these literary classics. I got my assignment back and his comment at the bottom was, "actually this is quite good." I was stunned. Actually? Clearly he had a different expectation of my knowledge and skill, a lower expectation. I couldn't believe that he put that thought in writing. That's implicit bias in action.

While on Spring break this past week, I thought a lot about implicit bias. That's when I remembered my professor's micro-aggression. The topic of implicit bias is so complex and emotionally messy that it's tempting to just want to gloss right over it jump to culturally responsive lesson planning and instructional strategies. But an important part of being culturally responsive is the ability to build trusting relationships with diverse students and to validate their experiences. If you are genuinely validating them then that means you don't trivialize bias. That means as culturally responsive educators we educate ourselves about implicit bias - how it operates and what we can do to interrupt it.

In Part I, we looked at how the Department of Justice's findings on the culture and climate in Ferguson city government. It exposed a pattern of explicit racism and implicit bias. Naming and exposing these patterns is part of recognizing the effects of structural racialization. This is the first step in interrupting unconscious bias.

In Part II, I explained what's going on in our brains when our amygdala gets triggered. We learned that the amygdala has been unconsciously programmed with subtle messages aimed at dehumanizing the "other" - be it people of color, women and girls, or immigrants. Because it's passed off as "joking," we let these messages into our subconscious. That why they are so hard to get rid of.

The $64,000 question we are trying to answer now is - how do we stop implicit biases if they are unconscious? It's a good question because it turns out that even if we call ourselves social justice educators, implicit bias gets triggered because of our hidden beliefs. Interesting three-year study done by Dr. Stephanie Jones at the University of Georgia documented the experiences of student teachers who self-identified as social justice or anti-racist educators but when actually in physical proximity of a diverse group (especially when they were in the minority) they experienced classic signs of implicit bias - irrational nervousness, anxiety, and fear - when they were in no immediate danger.

The Good News! - Implicit biases are not permanent.

According to folks studying implicit bias change or "de-biasing" as they call it, our biases are not permanent; they are malleable and can be changed by re-programming our brains and creating new "cognitive habits." The catch is using the right strategies.

What doesn't work?

I know over the past two decades, in education there have been a lot of equity focused trainings and workshops to address issues of racism and implicit bias. Some are helpful; some are really harmful. So, before sharing what seems to work, I want to say a few words about what doesn't work and why.

There are three common approaches I've seen schools try in an effort to address implicit bias in the classroom. Research backs up their ineffectiveness.

Whole staff "diversity training". Most diversity training focuses on having white people look at their white privilege or explore the painful racial history of the United States through a rational lens. While this approach makes people more knowledgeable about past history and injustices, it doesn't do much to educate people about structural racialization or to change deep-rooted, unconscious biased beliefs.

The race talk (aka cross-racial dialogue). Another approach has been to have cross-racial dialogues. Sometimes it's bringing together Black or Latino parents to talk with a mostly White teaching staff. The belief behind this strategy is that ending bias will happen when there is more racial harmony. While cross-racial dialogue is important in building strong communities, this alone does little to actually shift deep-rooted unconscious beliefs. Without skilled facilitation, these conversations can become very harmful. People of color can carry a great deal of hurt and anger over everyday micro-aggressions that others often trivialize or invalid as "being too sensitive." White teachers often come to these discussions concerned about being personally blamed for racial inequality or accused of being racist.

This only triggers the brain's amygdala, reinforcing unconscious biases around people of color being "out of control" or "violent". The presence of stress, anger, and negative emotions without proper processing leads people to shut down.

Data-driven equity conversations. By far the most popular approach since we began disaggregating data under No Child Left Behind is the data-driven equity conversation. The idea is that every teacher disaggregates his student achievement data and gets a clear picture of who is achieving and who isn't, which usually creates a color line with culturally and linguistically diverse students regularly at the bottom. The belief is that seeing this predictable pattern will shift beliefs or at the very least spark some call to action to change this.

Neuroscience tells us why this strategy hasn't been successful. The brain has what they call confirmation bias. Without new beliefs, data simply leads to a person interpreting information in a way that confirms his preconception. So when students of color end up at the bottom of the achievement scale, many teachers say, "See...their parents don't value education," or "they don't apply any effort." The data simply confirms implicit bias rather than interrupts it.

What does work?

One of the nation's leading implicit bias scholars, Patricia Devine of the University of Wisconsin, compares implicit bias to habits that, with intention and practice, can be broken. Her research has found that three conditions need to be in place for individuals to successfully "de-bias":

1. Intention: You have to acknowledge that you harbor unconscious biases and are motivated to change.

2. Attention: You have pay attention to your triggers and know when stereotypical responses or assumptions are activated.

3. Time: You have to make time to practice new strategies designed to "break" your automatic associations that link a negative judgment to behavior that is culturally different from yours.

De-biasing requires a level of metacognition. In this case, you are not thinking about your thinking, but thinking about your unconscious reacting.

Devine and her colleagues developed a "multi-faceted prejudice habit-breaking" intervention that lasted eight weeks. Participants were given a "toolkit" of five strategies, and asked to practice at least three (3) of them consistently on a weekly basis.

Here are four of them:

Re-Association (Stereotype Replacement): An individual recognizes that he or she is responding to a situation or person in a stereotypical fashion. (S)he considers the reasons and actively replaces this biased response with an unbiased one. Another way to use this strategy is to reframe negative associations such as, "Black students are loud and disruptive. A reframe would be, "African American students are enthusiastic and energetic."

Refuting (Counter-stereotypic Imagining): Once a person recognizes she's stereotyped a student of color, she thinks of examples that prove the stereotype to be inaccurate.

Perspective-taking involves stepping into the shoes of a stereotyped person. What does it feel like to have your intelligence automatically questioned, or to be trailed by detectives each time you walk into a store? Perspective-taking can be very useful in assessing the emotional impact on individuals who are constantly being stereotyped in negative ways. It is also a way to checking one's self if you begin to judge a person of color for reacting a particular way in a stressful situation.

Increasing Opportunity for Positive Contact: Another strategy for reducing implicit bias is to actively seek out situations where one is likely to be exposed to positive examples of African Americans, Latinos or others people of color. This can involve either being in a very diverse social setting such as going to a farmer's market in a more diverse part of town or seeking out personal contact through shared group activities with a diverse community.

It's important to point out that interrupting implicit bias requires self-motivation. That's why it's nearly impossible to "make" someone confront his biases. As coaches, parents, or teachers, we may see a teacher behaving in ways that are biased, but we can't make him change. He has to want to change. Or, we have to help that person experience a shift in consciousness by helping him entertain different interpretations of students' behavior or learning moves.

Interrupting implicit biases is a complex work. I've only scratched the surface here. More in the future.
What's been your experience with interrupting implicit biases - yours or another's?

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Four Tools for Interrupting Implicit Bias - Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain

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I will never forget my first experience with implicit bias as an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley. I had turned in my first in-class

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Overview

People don't always say what's on their minds. One reason is that they are unwilling. For example, someone might report smoking a pack of cigarettes per day because they are embarrassed to admit that they smoke two. Another reason is that they are unable. A smoker might truly believe that she smokes a pack a day, or might not keep track at all. The difference between being unwilling and unable is the difference between purposely hiding something from someone and unknowingly hiding something from yourself.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures attitudes and beliefs that people may be unwilling or unable to report. The IAT may be especially interesting if it shows that you have an implicit attitude that you did not know about. For example, you may believe that women and men should be equally associated with science, but your automatic associations could show that you (like many others) associate men with science more than you associate women with science.

We hope you have been able to take something of value from the experience of taking one or more of these tests. The links above will provide more information about the IAT and implicit attitudes; we will periodically update the information to reflect our current understanding of the unconscious roots of thought and feeling.

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People don't always say what's on their minds. One reason is that they are unwilling. For example, someone might report smoking a pack of cigarettes per day because they are embarrassed to admit that they smoke two. Another reason is that they are unable.

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Implicit Bias: Peanut Butter, Jelly and Racism

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Valerie Purdie-Vaughns on Unintentional Bias, Video

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Valerie Purdie-Vaughns on Unintentional Bias, Video

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Valerie Purdie-Vaughns on Unintentional Bias  | Big Think

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"Radical Care" to Let Black Boys Thrive (Summer Reading)

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"Radical Care" to Let Black Boys Thrive (Summer Reading)

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“Radical Care” to Let Black Boys Thrive - ASCD

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The education of Black boys has been a topic of discussion for the past four decades. Scholars, practitioners, and policymakers have all weighed in on the challenges affecting Black male students (Harper & Wood, 2016; Howard, 2014). Despite the increasing body of research and commentary, however, di

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How We Pronounce Student Names and Why it Matters

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How We Pronounce Student Names and Why it Matters

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Listen to an Extended Version of this Post in a Podcast:
Samira Fejz ic was used to people saying her name wrong, especially in school. "Through the years, as roll would be called, I would wait for that awkward pause-this is how I knew I was next. I accepted this ritual."

Fejzic (FAY-zich), whose family left Bosnia in the early nineties and moved to the U.S. in 1999, experienced this ritual for ten years, and she understood that people in her new town weren't used to names like hers, despite the fact that the area's Bosnian population had grown massive in recent years.

"It never hurt me until high school graduation," she recalls. "This was a big day for me. My grandparents from Bosnia came just to watch me get my diploma and of course, my name was butchered."

If you're in a position to say lots of student names-in your classroom, over the P.A. system, or especially at awards ceremonies and graduations-no one will be surprised if you mess up a couple of them. But this year, maybe you can do better. If you make the commitment now to get them all right, if you resolve this time to honor your students with clear, beautiful pronunciation of their full, given names, that, my friend, will be the loveliest surprise of all.

Three Kinds of Name-Sayin'

I grew up with a hard-to-pronounce name. Actually, it wasn't that hard; it just looked different from what people were used to: Yurkosky. (Kind of rhymes with "Her pots ski," minus the "t" in pots.) Year after year, i t threw everyone off. And the way they approached the name put them into one of three camps: fumble-bumblers, arrogant manglers, and calibrators.

The fumble-bumblers I didn't mind so much. They'd mispronounce the name, slowing down and making their voice all wobbly, not trusting themselves. They'd grimace, laugh, ask me how to say it, then try again. But then they sort of gave up. Over the next few attempts, they'd settle into something that was a kind of approximation, and that would be that. What made me not mind these people was that they put the mispronunciation on themselves- their demeanor suggested the fault was with them, not me or my name.

The arrogant manglers were another story. They assumed their pronunciation was correct and just plowed ahead, never bothering to check. In many cases, an arrogant mangler will persist with their own pronunciation even after they've been corrected. Adan (uh-DON) Deeb, whose family hails from Israel with Palestinian roots, experienced this as a middle school student in the U.S. "Every time I was called up to the office, EVERY SINGLE TIME, they would mispronounce my name, no matter how many times I corrected them. It made me angry. To me that shows that they just don't care enough to get my name right."

This group has a couple of sub-categories: One is the nicknamers-people who come across a name like Rajendrani and announce, "We'll just call you Amy." The other is the worst kind, the people who start with the first syllable, then wave the rest of the name away like so much cigarette smoke, adding "Whatever your name is," or just "whatever." I don't have a creative name for this group. Let's just call them assholes.

Finally, there was a small group I think of as the calibrators, people who recognized that my name required a little more effort. They asked me to pronounce it, tried to replicate it, then fine-tuned it a few more times against my own pronunciation. Some of them would even check back later to make sure they still had it.

My cousin Laura, who has the same last name I grew up with, remembers a professor who was a true calibrator. "It did take him a bit of time to learn to pronounce my name, but he was always apologetic when he said it wrong, and always insisted on the importance of getting such things right. He was easily the most inspirational and challenging teacher I've had...he just insisted that every student feel important."

If you're already a calibrator, keep up the good work. If you're not-if you've let yourself off the hook with some idea like "I'm terrible with names"-know that it's not too late to turn things around, and it does matter. Though it may seem inconsequential to you, the way you handle names has deeper implications than you might realize.

Kind of a Big Deal

People's reaction to this issue varies depending on their personality. If your student has a strong desire to please, wants desperately to fit in, or is generally conflict-avoidant, they may never tell you you're saying their name wrong. For those students, it might matter a lot, but they'd never say so. And other kids are just more laid-back in general. But for many students, the way you say their name conveys a more significant message.

Name mispronunciation - especially the kind committed by the arrogant manglers-actually falls into a larger category of behaviors called microaggressions, defined by researchers at Columbia University's Teachers College as "brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color" (Sue et al., 2007).

In other words, Although most of your students may not know the word mutilating someone's name is a tiny act of bigotry. Whether you intend to or not, what you're communicating is this: Your name is different. Foreign. Weird. It's not worth my time to get it right. microaggression, they're probably familiar with that vague feeling of marginalization, the message that everyone else is "normal," and they are not.

In her piece What's in a Name? Kind of a Lot, writer Tracy Clayton (under the name Brokey McPoverty) rails against Ryan Seacrest's move to shorten the name of actress Quvenzhané Wallis to "Little Q." She points out that Seacrest and other media figures treat the names of some actors-who happen to be white-differently: "The problem is that white Hollywood...doesn't deem her as important as, say, Renee Zellweger, or Zach Galifianakis, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, all of whom have names that are difficult to pronounce- but they manage. The message sent is this: You, young, black, female child, are not worth the time and energy it will take me to learn to spell and pronounce your name."

This, by the way, is how you say Quvenzhané:

This issue goes beyond names rooted in cultures unfamiliar to the speaker. Whatever it is your student prefers to be called, it's worth the effort to get it right. I'm sure I've not only mispronounced my own students' names, but I've probably also called them something that was not their preference-realizing in April that the kid I've been calling Stephan all year actually prefers to be called Jude.

And before you get all defensive about the bigotry thing, let's be clear: Discovering that something you do might be construed as bigotry doesn't mean anyone is calling you a bigot. It's just an opportunity to grow. An opportunity to understand that doing something a little differently shows others that you respect them. At some point in your life, someone probably taught you to hold the door open for the person coming in behind you. Before then, maybe you didn't know. Opportunity to grow. It's that simple.

How to Get it Right

The best way to get students' names right is to just ask them. Pull the kid aside and say, You know what? I think I've been messing up your name all year, and I'm sorry. Now that graduation is coming, I want to say it perfectly. Can you teach me?

By humbling yourself in this way, you let them see that you're human. You're modeling what it looks like to be a lifelong learner, a flexible, confident person who is not afraid to admit a mistake. Regardless of the outcome, a genuine effort on your part will mean so much, and when the big day comes, they might even root for you to get it right.

If you have hundreds of names to learn, get systematic: Starting now, carry around a clipboard with all the names you'll need to say - even those you think you already know, and start checking in with kids in the cafeteria, in the halls, in the stands at a basketball game. And for God's sake, write down what they tell you. When the big day comes, the page of names you read from should look something like this:

Do whatever it takes, using whatever kind of symbols or notes you need to get the right syllables out in the right order. (The apple is there to remind the speaker to say that "a" like they would in the word apple.)

If you've run out of time to ask students themselves, or if doing that is too uncomfortable for you, you can get some help online. On Pronounce Names, you can find a huge collection of names and their pronunciations.

Whatever you do, do something. For some students, you may be the first person who ever bothered. If the only time you say their name is in the classroom, your correct pronunciation will help the whole class learn it, too. Eventually that will ripple through the school, making that student feel known in a place where before they felt unknown.

And if you have the honor of announcing them on the day they receive their award, their diploma, the day that marks some big achievement, you have a unique opportunity to make it even more special, but you only have two seconds: Make it count. It's a gift they'll remember for a long time. ♥
Reference:
Sue, D.W., Capodilupo, C.M., Torino, G.C., Bucceri, J.M., Holder, A.M.B., Nadal, K.L., & Esquilin, M. (2007). Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice. American Psychologist, 62 (4), 271-286.

There's more where this came from.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. To thank you, you'll get a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half.

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How We Pronounce Student Names, and Why it Matters

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Listen to an Extended Version of this Post in a Podcast: Samira Fejz ic was used to people saying her name wrong, especially in school. "Through the years, as roll would be called, I would wait for that awkward pause-this is how I knew I was next. I accepted this ritual."

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A 4-Part System for Getting to Know Your Students

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A 4-Part System for Getting to Know Your Students

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A 4-Part System for Getting to Know Your Students | Cult of Pedagogy

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Relationship building is key to good teaching. This system will help you quickly get to know students and benefit from those connections all year long.

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Every Kid Needs a Champion Ted Talk, Video

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Every Kid Needs a Champion Ted Talk, Video

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Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, “They don’t pay me to like the kids.” Her response: “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.’” A rousing call to educators to believe in their students and actually connect with them on a real, human, personal level.

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Every Kid Needs a Champion Ted Talk, Video

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Every Kid Needs a Champion Ted Talk, Video

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Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, “They don’t pay me to like the kids.” Her response: “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.’” A rousing call to educators to believe in their students and actually connect with them on a real, human, personal level.

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6 Exercises to Get to Know Your Students Better

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6 Exercises to Get to Know Your Students Better

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While get-to-know-you activities are typically earmarked for the first weeks of school, they shouldn't end there, say educators and researchers.

Whether it's that they love to play baseball, have three brothers, or enjoy writing or photography, celebrating your students' unique experiences and identities can bolster connections that keep them engaged and performing better in school. Students who have a deeper sense of self- and purpose -are also better able to define their goals and stay focused on pursuing them, concluded a 2014 study from David Yeager, Angela Duckworth, and colleagues.

We collected an array of class exercises from interviews with teachers, online resources, and our archives that will help students develop greater self-awareness and purpose. These insights can also give you a better sense of who they are, so you can be responsive to their interests-even if you're separated by screens or masks.

Reflecting on Experiences: 'Laws of Life' Essays

In the early 2000s, educators in an urban, high-poverty district in New Jersey gave their middle and high school students an interesting essay assignment: Write about the values and principles that guide your life.

The seemingly small activity, called "Laws of Life," is based on the work of philanthropist John Templeton, and it turned into a much bigger project that helped students develop a stronger sense of self, purpose, and possibility for the future, according to Maurice Elias, a psychology professor at Rutgers University. The project has since been replicated all over the world.

To run the assignment in your class, Elias recommends asking students to reflect on their past-in and out of school-and the experiences and people that made them who they are. From there, have students discern key characteristics that have influenced their lives and then craft an essay-or create a video or other multimedia content-focused on the "laws" or principles that drive them.

Question prompts like "Who do you admire? List three of their admirable traits" and "Describe an incident or event from which you learned a lesson 'the hard way'" can help guide students. Periodically throughout the year, have students refer back to their essays to reflect on what they wrote and ask themselves, "What's changed?" and "What's stayed the same?"

Exploring Identity-and Perceptions About It: Identity Charts

To get to know her students and ensure that they felt seen in her classroom, middle school teacher Shana White created a lesson to help them explore their identities. First, White set a foundation for discussion by defining identity and explaining how identities can sometimes be visible, like age, or invisible, like a person's life experiences.

Then, with the permission of six of her friends, White shared photos of their faces and had students guess their "identity characteristics." Afterward, she revealed the true details and led a class discussion about making assumptions about others based on how they look or act. To finish the project, students drew their own "identity portraits" or a picture of their face with half the face showing visible characteristics and the other half showing invisible characteristics.
Courtesy of Shana White
The education organization Facing History and Ourselves recommends a similar exercise called the "Who am I?" activity for middle school students. To start, select some key historical figures or fictional characters-think inclusively and avoid stereotypes, selecting a wide range of people from different backgrounds-and ask students to discuss "factors such as religion, gender, and geography" that influenced their identities.

Next, have students read the chapter "My Name" from the book The House on Mango Street, where the main character, Esperanza, talks about her name, revealing details about her culture. Ask students to create an identity chart for Esperanza, answering questions such as "What is her family like?" and "What does her name reveal about her personality?" Guided by the reading, students can then create identity charts for themselves and share them with the class.

Learning Important Details: Student Inventories

Student inventories can help teachers quickly discern details and facts about students that shape who they are, and can be used to plan further class activities and lessons. Ask students to list their favorite musicians, songs, sports, activities, games, or food, for example, or probe deeper with questions about their culture, memories, and family.

Another option is having students write 20 sentences that complete the prompt, "I am someone who..." or asking a short list of thought-provoking questions in one-to-one Hopes and Dreams conferences. Target questions that tap into who students are now and who they hope to be, such as "What are some things that bug you about the world?" "What inspires you?" and "What dreams do you have after high school?"

Look for patterns in student responses, and use what you learn to make classroom lessons and activities connected to students' interests, advises Rebecca Alber, an education professor in California, who says, "Students need to see connections between learning and their lived experiences."

Understanding Interests: Passion Blogging

In Allison Berryhill's high school English class, literary analysis exercises left her students "frozen," and free-writing assignments produced hard-to-read rants. Influenced by the book Beyond Literary Analysis, Berryhill started offering a new exercise called "passion blogging" last year, in which students write about topics that interest them.
Courtesy of Allison Berryhill
Students start by drawing "heart maps," or large hearts filled with illustrations and words that represent their passions. Then, they select one or two topics to explore further and look for related articles, images, and videos. Berryhill also gives accompanying class lessons on attribution of sources, texts, quotes, and imagery, and shares mentor texts to guide students' writing.

Students' blogs have run the gamut in subject matter, from pheasant hunting to hunger strikes to hiking, and give them an opportunity to dive deeply into things they care about. As part of the process, students are also tasked with reading and evaluating several of their classmates' blogs. Overall, the low-stakes activity has served as a springboard to build students' literary analysis skills for harder assignments, says Berryhill, while helping her get to know them better.

Documenting Your Life: Movies, Photos, and Podcasts

Though many teachers and students are feeling virtual brain drain, digital tools can provide new, creative outlets for students to share and define their interests and personalities. Teachers are having students create autobiographical mini-movies or trailers about their lives and produce podcasts or write articles for digital school newspapers on issues they care about.

Influenced by her community's experiences during the pandemic, Wendy McElfish, a high school teacher in California, taught a lesson on Dorothea Lange's famous black-and-white photography from the Great Depression. Then, she had her students take their own photos with phones to document their lives. She guided them with the themes "life outside your door," "through a window," "different life inside," and "porch photos of your family."

"When kids are faced with terrible circumstances, sometimes it helps to take an artistic approach," she said. "A lot of kids aren't good writers, but they have an eye and they have a voice... [and] they can show the world what I see."

Similarly, Lori Wenzinger, a middle school social studies teacher in South Carolina, paired up with a local photographer to create a three-week multimedia project called "Finding Your Joy." After the photographer taught two classes on photo composition and mood, students were tasked with taking photos that "capture joyful moments throughout their day," sharing and reviewing them as a class, and selecting their three favorites to keep in the class Google Drive.

Having Fun: Icebreakers, Games, and Accolades
Courtesy of Cathleen Beachboard
In addition to more comprehensive assignments and lessons, teachers can build in short, entertaining activities that keep students engaged and reveal insights about who they are.

Trevor Boffone, a high school teacher in Texas, asked his students to submit their favorite song to a list at the start of the year. Now, at the beginning of each virtual class, he plays music to kick things off, incorporating students' picks and his own.

Throughout remote learning, Cathleen Beachboard, a middle school teacher in Virginia, says she's including fun activities like show-and-tells and theme days. This fall, she also adopted a practice that her superintendent uses for staff meetings called "Three Cool Things I've Seen." Once a week, Beachboard calls out three things she's observed about students from classes that week that recognize them for their individuality.

"I know a lot of teachers are struggling right now getting students pulled in. I found the more encouragement and authentic praise we give to students, the more they dive in," she said. "These are scary times, but by giving students time to showcase their individuality, they will feel safe and ready to fully engage in learning."

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6 Exercises to Get to Know Your Students Better-and Increase Their Engagement

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Celebrating your middle and high school students' unique identities can bolster connections and improve performance in school.

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2x10 Strategy, A Miraculous Solution for Behavior Issues

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2x10 Strategy, A Miraculous Solution for Behavior Issues

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The 2x10 strategy: a miraculous solution for behavior issues?

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The 2×10 strategy is simple: spend 2 minutes per day for 10 days in a row talking with an at-risk student about anything she or he wants to talk about.

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Overcoming the 3 Biggest Obstacles in Relationship Building with Kids

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Overcoming the 3 Biggest Obstacles in Relationship Building with Kids

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Truth For Teachers - Overcoming the 3 biggest obstacles in relationship building with kids

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So the 2×10 "miraculous" behavior management strategyreally resonated with a lot of teachers. It's a simple method for making the nebulous goal of relationship building much more concrete and achievable-simply spend 2 minutes a day for 10 consecutive days talking with a challenging student about anything she or he would like.

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At the beginning of the school year (or any time) you can get to know your students much better by having them complete a "get to know you" form. For this purpose, I have created a collection of Student Inventories-one for each of four different age levels-that ask important questions about students' interests, home lives, learning history, medical and health issues, and other information that will help you be the best teacher for them.

Early-grades forms are written in simpler language and address more basic topics; forms for the older grades address transportation issues and responsibilities outside of school, and ask more sophisticated questions about learning preferences.

Each printable form is available for $3.00 from my Teachers Pay Teachers Store, is FULLY EDITABLE, and can be re-used every year. They also come in a Google Forms option which you can use in your own Google Drive and collect responses electronically.

Click on the images below to go to each product's page, where you can see a full preview of the questions on that form.

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At the beginning of the school year (or any time) you can get to know your students much better by having them complete a "get to know you" form. For this purpose, I have created a collection of Student Inventories-one for each of four different age levels-that ask important questions about students' interests, home lives, learning ...

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Watch Your Demonstrative Adjectives: Culturally Responsive Teacher Talk

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Watch Your Demonstrative Adjectives: Culturally Responsive Teacher Talk

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The Adjectives

Demonstrative adjectives are simply adjectives that are used to modify or describe a noun. Grammatically, they are necessary so that one knows which specific person, place or thing is mentioned. In the context of language and grammar study, demonstrative adjectives are important; however, in the context of teacher talk, these types of adjectives can be detrimental. It is unfortunately all too common to find these adjectives used in conversations to vent frustrations about certain student groups or academic levels.

The Water Cooler

We've all heard them. The seemingly small adjectives used around the water cooler, whether that be the teachers' lounge or a PLC meeting. As teachers discuss students and progress, words and phrases emerge such as:

Often these phrases are followed by frustrations of an unwillingness to work, lack of achievement, or an emphatic description of why kids will not succeed. Harmless? Just venting? Nothing deeper? I beg to differ. As cultural responsiveness becomes the latest trending topic for professional development across districts, we would be remiss if we didn't take the time to truly evaluate our own speech as educators. Student relationships are paramount and what we say, think, and feel are translated into our instruction. Let's not be naive in thinking that our words don't matter, or that they don't bleed into mindsets about students.

Let's not be naive in thinking that our words don't matter, or that they don't bleed into mindsets about students. Click To Tweet

Here are two reasons why we need to watch our demonstrative adjectives:

It's Not Culturally Responsive

Typically, when teachers are using the terms "these and those kids" they are referring to either low performing students, students of color, or students with behavioral or linguistic challenges. Using these terms to reference a marginalized group of students is simply not culturally responsive. In the words of Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain , as told to Cult of Pedagogy , "For students who have been marginalized and don't feel welcome, that relationship becomes important because you want them to actually do the heavy lifting of the cognitive work, (and) that's not going to happen if you can't get the student to be in a trusting relationship." Establishing student relationships is key to academic progress and success. When teachers create a detachment in their speech about students (these/those kids), this detachment can also come across in their relationship with their students. Kids are very perceptive and our words and actions reach deeper than we can fathom. We need to choose our words wisely in and outside of the classroom because what we speak will internalize and become prominent in our instruction.

It Shows Deficit Thinking

Think about it. If teachers are translating negative attributes to "these and those kids," what high expectations do they truly have for students? Deficit thinking is when we blame the student solely for their failure. As educators, we have all experienced students who lacked motivation and drive. Students who did not place their priorities in the same order as we would have liked. Nonetheless, as educators, we also know that there is always a reason. A backstory. If kids had all the tools, they wouldn't need us to guide and provide instruction. This unrealistic or mismatched scope of expectation is partly what fuels frustration and deficit thinking. "These kids can't get through this paragraph. They can't even bring supplies to class." Instead of focusing on the deficits (what you feel they cannot do), focus on where they are and what they can do.

Also, the better matter to seek is to analyze why they are having difficulty. What is the stumbling block and how as a teacher, can you remove or lesson that block? Additionally, we should be cautious about our expectations as sometimes we place responsibilities on students for areas in which they have no control. Supplies, timeliness to school, and home support are often areas in which students receive reprimands from teachers. Are students truly able to control what parents may or may not do? How can we support students in the midst of these circumstances while still holding them accountable for their portion? Building relationships and REALISTIC expectations are how kids who know they are loved and valued will rise to the occasion each and every time.

Let's Get Back to "My" and "Our"

While I believe that most teachers truly have a heart for kids, I also know how quickly one can get caught in the derogatory loop of those adjectives. Managing students at varying levels and personalities is challenging. However, we have the opportunity to change lives. We have the opportunity to help create better citizens. We have the opportunity to impact the world, daily. So, since we have such a duty for impact, what happened to reference kids as "our students" and "my students"? Demonstrative adjectives create a clear separation from teacher and student, while possessive adjectives create a connection. We need educators to be connected to students in a way that fosters growth, progress, and success. How often, especially in our current climate, are students hearing and seeing messages of division and separation? I challenge educators to think about how our words impact our craft. John C. Maxwell's quote alludes to this idea, "People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude." Saying we care about students, but subconsciously or consciously thinking, "these/those kids can't/won't..." prevents students from being pushed into to their full potential.

Challenge yourself to be more intentional about the verbiage you are using in reference to kids; especially if you are typically in an environment of negative speech. Use words that edify, connect and foster understanding. If you find yourself frustrated with your students' actions or progress, try reframing the problem. Dig deeper and begin to ask questions before you place labels and constraints on their abilities. Ask why? Search for the breakdown in understanding or any barriers that are preventing students from being successful. Often we realize that sometimes that barrier is us.

Change your adjectives. Change your thinking. Change THEIR lives.

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Watch Your Demonstrative Adjectives: Culturally Responsive Teacher Talk - The Educators Room

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Guest Writer By LaToya Morrison The Adjectives Demonstrative adjectives are simply adjectives that are used to modify or describe a noun. Grammatically, they are necessary so that one knows which specific person, place or thing is mentioned. In the context of language and grammar study, demonstrative adjectives are important; however, in the context of teacher...

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This week on the Truth for Teachers podcast: I'm talking to Dave Stuart Jr. about humanizing the learning space whether you're teaching in-person or online. We'll be unpacking the classroom practices that can help students feel known, valued, respected, and safe.
My guest today is Dave Stuart Jr. His articles have consistently been one of the best in the education space for many years now.

If you're new to his work, Dave is a classroom teacher in Michigan, as well as a published author and exceptional keynote speaker. The thoughts he shares on his blog and his weekly email align so well with everything that I share with you, and I know if you like my work, you will like Dave's. We're talking today about the ideas from a blog post he wrote called "How to humanize your classroom or school when teaching from a distance."

I think almost every teacher, at least in the U.S., is feeling a distance from their students this year, whether it's from trying to stay 6 feet away or teaching remotely. Humanizing your classroom is a big part of bridging the gap, according to Dave.
I'll recap the big ideas below, with an embedded podcast player for listening to the interview and a full transcript to follow underneath.
Recap and Big Ideas

A humanized space is a space in which less of us is hidden and more of us are known. In humanized school classrooms, students feel valued, known, respected, and safe.

Getting to know more about a child as the year goes on or knowing the child's profile as a learner and their strengths and weaknesses, and then bringing this knowledge into conversations and feedback are ways that humanize school classrooms pre-COVID, and they humanize it now.

Seek to know the stories of your students in an effort to help deal with children's trauma and stress in this difficult time.

There are certain people, certain humans you are going to have to work harder to build relationships with and connect with.

Recognize that you can quickly make a child feel valued, known, or respected.

Who you are as a person influences how you show up in the classroom. It's not just about what you do with students, but about who you are. We don't see all students the same and this goes beyond even just prejudice and stereotypes.

We have to get real about when we're connecting with other kids as humans, we have to be willing to see them for who they are, and not for who we think they are or who we assume they are.

Partner your systems and instructional practices with the fact that a child always has autonomy.

As a warm demander, teachers should recognize that you have something to offer your students, but also recognize that you have to enlist them in choosing to learn and that you can't force them.

Combine truthful feedback with your belief in the student. Make use of the various education technology available today to make giving feedback easier. Audio and video feedback allows the teacher's nuance to shine through.

Subscribe in your podcast app,

or download the MP3 here and listen on the go
ANGELA: Dave, talk to us about what it means to really humanize your classroom. What does that phrase mean to you?
DAVE: Well, I think there's a couple of pieces to it. First, this idea that human beings are naturally, mostly invisible. I can see a child's physical body when they're with me, but I can't see their thoughts, emotions, feelings, fears. And that's our default - we're mostly hidden.

So a humanized space is a space in which less of us is hidden, more of us is known. And very importantly, that's okay. Right? So in a humanized space, four words that I think will become hallmarks - you'll observe them, you'll feel them, and sense them - would be where people feel valued, known, respected, and safe. Those four words ring around in my head as I'm moving throughout a classroom, or built in a digital space where people are humanized.
Known, valued, respected, and safe.
Yes. I think it's that simple. I think all the most beautiful places and groups we've been a part of - if we look back and think of our emotions - we will recognize those.
We know that strong teacher and student relationships have a positive impact on student learning. A lot of people like to say, "It's all about relationships." I disagree with that. I think teaching is about more than just relationships. You can have a great relationship. Matter of fact, let's just go ahead and go down this rabbit hole a little bit. I think you can have a great relationship, but parents don't send their kids to school to have a relationship with the teacher. They send their kids to school to learn. And we want kids to be mastering skills, so I think it's reactionary to say "relationships are everything", or "it's all about relationships" because for so long, we weren't prioritizing relationships at all, and now it's sort of a pendulum swing. We were moving from this authoritarian, fear-based thing, and to now, it's like it's all about relationships. But it's not, it's not about just getting kids to like you. It's not about just having rapport. You're using that rapport so that you can actually get through to kids and help them learn and engage with the content and the skills. Can you say something about that?
I mean, I just think you should drop the mic because that's right. Everyone who's ever said, "It's all about relationships," has amazing intentions. Right? It's not about the intention behind our language, but our language is powerful. I think it was Einstein who said, "You've got to make things as simple as they can be, but don't go simpler because then they're not the thing anymore."

So the truth is that relationships, and this is how I think about it, they're one of our most valuable currencies in the classroom, no doubt. You try to maximize the mastery outcomes of your learning space without relationships with students, and you're going to be leaving a lot of learning on the table. They're a huge valuable currency.
That's really well said. And you're right that relationships are really one of the highlights for teachers. And so I think we also have to be careful not to make that too teacher-centered. We get into education because we want to make a difference for kids. We live for those light bulb moments. We live for those moments where we feel like we're making a difference. And so in a way, that can be a teacher-centered approach: to think that it's about relationships because it's meaningful for me personally.
And they're also all of our favorite things about education too. They're education's greatest reward, those relationships we build with students, the relationships students build with one another. We look back, we think back, and sure, we learned some things that year, and that was important. That's the job. But it's the relationships we really smile about when we think back. So we can't lose those truths, but we also can't go so far as to say it's all about relationships because truly, I don't think any parents, like you said, are sending their kids to school thinking, "Well, I just hope my child has a good relationship with their teacher." They expect us to promote their child's long-term flourishing.
And so I really want to think that through a little bit more, especially when we think about the challenges for the coming year, because it's difficult to have to distance yourself from students, where you're either teaching them remotely, or you're having to change how closely you can interact in person. So I think for both remote and in-person learning this year (those are probably two realities that most teachers are going to end up facing at some point). I think there's a lot of overlap between the approaches. So I want to start by acknowledging something that you shared on your blog, which is that when you don't know what to do, you should build on what you do know. So how can our regular practices for humanizing the classroom be a good starting place for planning to address the unique challenges where we're distanced from kids more than we'd like to be?
Right.

Yeah, Angela. You do such a good job on this in your work too in helping teachers with overwhelm. The top thing we can do with overwhelm is to return to our strength, return to our knowledge, return to our experience. And every teacher in the world knows things for connecting with students, for humanizing a classroom, every teacher in the world. And these things don't perfectly translate to a classroom with social distance, or masks, or an online learning space. They don't translate perfectly, but they do transfer. So knowing a child's name, what they prefer to be called, how to pronounce their name, super basic things, really fast at the start of the year. That works normally. That worked this year.
What are some new things that we need to consider this year for kids, maybe some important things for teachers to keep in mind regarding the trauma, or the stress, or the challenges that their students may be facing?
Knowing more and more about a child as the year goes on, so that we can connect with them in deeper ways, knowing the child's profile as a learner, their strengths and weaknesses, and our discipline, and bringing this knowledge into conversations, into our feedback that we give students. Those things humanize the classroom normally, pre-COVID, and they humanize it now.
Yes.
Well, this is such a good question because people have experienced this pandemic very differently. Right?

Basically, a lot of teachers all had to shift last spring to teaching remotely. And for many of us, we were given a lot of flexibility with our job and how that looked. I mean, again though, this varied so greatly around the country and the world. But we have to understand that a lot of the children in our classrooms, they experienced extreme hardship. They experienced extreme danger. They experienced perhaps the ultimate tragedies of losing a loved one, or watching a loved one pass away.

And these types of things, the reason I'm bringing it up is because I think this year especially, we need to seek to know the stories of our children. And the best way to probably do that would be to just develop a system of calling three to five homes per week, working that into your weekly routine.

And we're not talking about long, in-depth interviews. We're talking about, "Hey, I was thinking about your child this week, how much I appreciate having them in class. I love the contributions that they make to our discussions, the way that they light up the room with their smile." Whatever it is, it needs to be genuine. "I'm just wondering. How does your child seem to be doing? What are you seeing at home? Is there anything I should know?"
I know another practice that you recommend for teachers when it comes to really getting to know kids and their stories, is finding what you call moments of genuine connections, so MGCs. And I know that when this episode airs, you will have also been on Jen Gonzalez's Cult of Pedagogy podcast talking about this. But I think it's a cool idea, and I'd like to have you give an overview here because when I read about it on your blog, I was like, "This sounds something similar to what I did with my kids." I have a resource called Daily Connections that I make available to teachers. I taught elementary, so I had one group of kids all day long. I divided my class list up into five sections. So if I had 25 kids, there would be five Monday, five Tuesday, five Wednesday, etc. And I had the kids' names there, and I made an extra effort to connect with those five students on that day. And of course, it doesn't mean I ignored the rest of the kids. It doesn't mean I showed favoritism. It doesn't mean that if it's not your day, you didn't get a connection. But it was just a way for me to make sure I was seeing ALL of my kids. Because I had kids in my class who were quieter, who maybe we didn't share the same language, so it was harder for us to have conversations. I had kids who honestly? Their personalities conflicted with mine. They were just harder for me to like, harder for me to really connect with, kids whose identities were different than mine, and so we had maybe fewer things in common. And I had to work harder. There are certain people, certain humans you are going to have to work harder to build relationships with and connect with. And I think we need to just acknowledge that. If anyone wants to learn more about these moments of genuine connection, make sure to check out Cult of Pedagogy, episode 152, because Dave is going to be talking more about that there. And the thing is, a lot of the kids that I liked were kids that other teachers complained about ... and vice versa. Like, I just had the hardest time with this kid and my colleague would be like, "Are you kidding? I think that kid is amazing." So much of this is personalities too, and you really have to be aware of that, be aware of the kids that are harder for you to engage with, and to be really intentional about reaching out and making sure that you're listening to them, and you're giving those moments of genuine connection. So that's what it looked like for me. What does it mean for you?
These can be as brief as five-minute phone calls. Every teacher knows they sometimes can become quite long too. But what we're trying to do right here is to gain knowledge about the children on our roster that will empower us to be compassionate, empower us to empathize with the different circumstances that look us in the face every day on Zoom or in the classroom through a mask. I think that's the number one base level act or routine that we can take this year is to just give ourselves the information that can make a path to empathy.

That's honesty. Yes, that's right. That's reality.

I want to point out this pro-teacher move right here of just so much of our best teaching doesn't even have a chance to begin until we decide, "I'm going to partner with reality." What's real? How many of us get into teaching and we think, "I'm going to connect with every single child and I'm going to love every single child. And it's going to be easy because my heart is pure"? But the simple reality is that human beings are so multifacetedly diverse that there are some combinations that don't fit together super well, and it takes work to make a moment of genuine connection with some people.

That word genuine is intentional. It requires that I do the inside work, that I explore my negative emotions around children I'm having a hard time with like you're saying. Just those personalities or whatever, they don't mesh, so that I can seek to genuinely connect with them, so that I am working to like all the children on my roster. So genuine, we key in on that word. We recognize that there's an easier path of just going through the motions of trying to connect with a child versus trying to do it genuinely. That's really important. I love that you talked about this system of tracking moments of genuine connection because this is not an original idea, not at all.

Every teacher in the world knows you have to connect with students. The power comes when you have a system for making sure that you attempt to connect with every child regularly. That's the power. That's the humanizing for all students in the room, and to just some of the students, not just the students that you're naturally inclined, or you're biased toward connecting with. I think about all those students around the country and the world who just come into class, into school, and they just kind of don't catch anyone's attention because they're not flagging us for behavior or something like that. They're not flagging us because they're super outgoing. They're those middle kids, for lack of a better term.

How many of them don't have regular connection with their teacher because the teacher leaves it up to chance that they're going to connect with all the kids? I mean, again, we've got to partner with reality. The reality is we have biases. We have blind spots. So I love your system. It is beautiful and simple. I have a clipboard with every child on each of my rosters. As you said, I teach secondary, so I've got multiple classes per day. And I just seek to connect with, to attempt to connect with three or so per class, per day. And then I can usually get through every child every two weeks or so.
I feel like there might even be some potential for more of these moments this year. I mean, it depends: as you acknowledged, there are so many different ways that teaching is going to look this year. Certainly, if you are, for example, live streaming your in-person instruction for all the kids at home, six hours a day, this is not going to be possible. But I'm thinking about the teachers who have the benefit of being able to do some synchronous learning and some asynchronous learning. I've heard some really cool things coming out this past spring, and even a little bit in terms of what's planned for this school year and what we're doing here at the beginning in terms of being able to offer more office hours for kids, where they can sign up for times to meet individually, more small group instruction, more time if you have kids with IEPs, being able to meet with them one-on-one, or in groups of two to three, in ways that maybe weren't possible before. Because when you have a classroom full of students in front of you, giving one kid your undivided attention for 30 seconds is a luxury. But with everybody in their own homes learning, there may be more potential there too, so I'm excited about the possibilities there are for some teachers and kids to have more connections this year.
And the last thing that I'll say is, well, I'll say two things very briefly. These are moments, meaning that they're brief. We're pressed for time. This year, I feel that more than ever. And it's important to recognize that you can make a child feel valued, known, or respected very quickly. That does not take a long time. It could be, "Angela, I want you to know that the other day when I was reading your paragraph, there was this little spark of humor at the end, and it just made me laugh. Thank you." That took me 15 seconds to say. It could be, "I was thinking about you when I was watching the football game the other day because I know you love this team. And you just popped into my head, I wanted you to know that." That's what I mean by moments.

And then the last thing I want to say is that we are attempting these. You can't ensure, you can't guarantee that in a given connection attempt with a child that the child will feel valued, known, and respected. I love this about teaching, that my power is finite. There are only so many things I can do. That frees me to just focus on my work and leave the results up to the child, all the other variables. So we're attempting and we're tracking these moments of genuine connection. That plus nothing will give you 80% of the relational power of all the strategies out there.

I mean, can I just call out the fact that this is a beautiful thinking habit that we all need to just practice, practice, practice? It's finding the opportunity in the difficulty. This is a tough one to talk about because like you said, there are so many scenarios that people are experiencing right now. Am I live streaming every single second of every day? Do I get to do office hours? Do I get to do asynch/synch?

So we have to take our constraints, take whatever the schedule is, and just: "Okay, how could I connect with a feasible number of kids per day without reducing education to relationships is what it's only about?" If you have to Zoom with all your students 60 minutes a day, per class, or something, you could ask three students to stay after every day. Just start the day with, "Hey, I need you to stay after. I want to just quick chat with you." You could do that.
What are some other ways that you focus on relationship and community building, and letting kids connect with you, human to human? I'm thinking specifically in ways that you really honor kids' full identities and try to see them for who they are.
You can have office hours where you expect every child to attend or whatever. They get scheduled to attend and use some type of waiting room feature. And you bring them in one at a time. You could do flip grid. I mean, we just have to take the tools that are available to us, which are dizzyingly idiosyncratic right now, totally depends on your school or your setting.

And just like we were talking about a bit ago, try to make simple adaptations. I love the thread of your work, the thread of your work that has always been that there are only so many hours in a week. If you give every single one to teaching, you'll actually die. You have to sleep. Your body needs to eat. Very few of us are doing that. But many of us are sacrificing our performance as teachers. And we're sacrificing our lives outside of the classroom by just trying to do everything equally well, and so we're just working too many hours.
Yes, it is. Who you are as a person influences how you show up in the classroom. It's not just about what you do with students, but about who you are. And I think we also have to get real about the fact that we all have implicit bias. And we do not treat all students the same. We don't see all students the same. And I think we're lying to ourselves when we insist on that. And this goes beyond even just prejudice and stereotypes. How many times have you had a kid in your class where you taught the older sibling, and you remember what that older sibling was like? And you assume that sibling is going to be the same way, that the older kid was a problem, so you just are automatically tougher on the younger sibling? Or maybe the older kid was an angel, and then with the younger kid we're thinking, "Well, I don't understand why you're not like your sibling." We come with all of these preconceived notions about who kids are, how they should be, what we think they're like based on their hairstyle, the way they dress, the way they carry themselves, their facial expression, their family, their socioeconomic status, their race. There are so many different things that factor in here. And I think we have to get real about when we're connecting with other kids as humans, we have to be willing to see them for who they are, and not for who we think they are or who we assume they are.
So I just want to encourage folks listening. I know that you might be in the worst scenario possible in terms of demands on you, pressure on you. If you're in that circumstance, you have to adjust with what we're talking about right now and just find a workable solution that doesn't destroy your sanity.

Well, I mean, you said it right there. Right? I'm convinced that so much of this that we're talking about is really work that I do inside of myself. It's work that I do when no one's looking, work that I do outside of the classroom. When I detect I'm kind of bitter at this kid right now, I'm kind of bitter at this parent right now, what happened? So I remove myself on a regular basis, and I go into solitude, even if that solitude is just my classroom door is shut, the lights are off, it looks like I'm gone so that I can have a minute to sit down with a pen and paper and say, "Okay. This negativity, where is it coming from? What happened?"
I want to talk a little bit about mutual trust because I think that one challenge for teachers this year is not being able to control - and that is a loaded word - control students' home learning environments the same way that they may try to control the school learning environment. And I see this as an opportunity to let go of oppressive systems, to really disrupt power structures and micromanagement of students' time, micromanagement of students' bodies, and shift into a way of schooling that is more respectful of student autonomy. So are there some things that teachers can consider this year about trusting students and building the kinds of relationships where kids can exercise more choice? Is there something that we can tie in here when we talk about humanizing the classroom?
Oftentimes, I'll just find that the person hurt me, I experienced pain from what they said, or did, or didn't do, or a comment that they made. And I need to process through that. Other times, I may be harboring some guilt because I know that I spoke flippantly, or I said something that could've really hurt this student, given what they've shared with me before, giving the different facets of their identity. I need to go and try to repair that, even if they didn't experience pain from it. I'm going to pull them aside tomorrow and say, "Hey, I said this the other day. It didn't feel right to me afterward. I just want you to know I'm going to own that I shouldn't have said that, and I want to apologize." Basic things, right? Inner work is so important for teachers.

Yeah, because it goes back to humanization. I mean, a humanized space is where someone, and maybe this actually refines the idea, it's not just that they feel valued, known, and respected, it's that they are valued, known, and respected. The shortest blog post I ever wrote, the title, The Best Way to Make a Child Feel Valued, Known and Respected, the blog post, is to actually value, know, and respect them. The end.

To use your example with the older sibling, if we're viewing a younger sibling through the lens of the older sibling, we don't actually know the younger sibling. We know a photocopy of them, a counterfeit, oversimplified version of them. I mean, so many of our conflicts in life and our difficulties in the classroom come from the fact that we over reduce what our hyper complex beings, wrought with dignity, full of dignity, and we reduce them. We caricature-ize them. And as you said, so much of that is invisible even to us. It is implicit.

Yeah. And also, partnering with reality because you can't make a child do things. A child always has autonomy. Human beings always have autonomy. The question is: Do our systems, do our classes recognize that truth? You can certainly come up with ways to micromanage a child's body, or at least create a ton of consequences so that the child is likely to do what you want them to do with your body. But you can't with their mind. You can't with their heart. This is fundamental human freedom.

So schools, teachers, we need to partner with that truth. And we need to build, as we're talking about, learning spaces that are humanized, relationships that are real, so that we as teachers can enlist our students in a learning regimen.

Because here's the thing, Angela. If I come to you, and I should, and I say, "Angela, I'd like you to help me become a better writer. I would like you to do that," and if you do good by me as my teacher, you are going to tell me, "Okay, Dave. There's some things you need to do with your body, like don't write late, late at night while you're slouched in your bed just before you go to sleep. I want you to give the better portion of your day to writing. I want you to get in a space where distractions are minimized. I want you to turn off your smartphone. Or I want you to turn on the app that blocks distracting websites. If you're serious about this, Dave, I'll help you. But there's things that you need to do, things that I know because I have knowledge about this, experience about this. In other words, I have power, Dave, for writing. And I, as your teacher, I want to give you that power. I want to give you access to that power."
That's really well said. I'm going to link in the show notes to an article that you wrote about being a warm demander because I think that's really key. There's an episode of Truth for Teachers about it too. It's episode 157 about being a warm demander. I too found her work super powerful and really influenced the way that I try to show up with kids in the classroom.
We can't pretend that we as teachers have no power. Right? We do. We have the power of a whole lifetime of learning. And what we're seeking to do in a class is to partner with young people and give them access to that power, so that they can go out and live choice filled lives of long-term flourishing. So I just think we need to look at our systems. We need to look at our policies. And we need to say, "Okay. Where are we just straight up going for coercion? Where have we completely given up the idea that this can be a partnership, and instead, we're just going to coerce? We're going to make it happen, and they'll thank you later."
It's amazing.
And how could we instead be a place where we acknowledge our power, we acknowledge our authority? Those things exist, whether we want to acknowledge them or not. I mean, I guess what's coming in my mind is Judith Kleinfeld's work on culture responsive pedagogy way back in the '70s. She had this term, a "warm demander". Teachers who were having the most success with the populations Kleinfeld was observing, they were warm demanders. They did take on the mantle of authority and power.
Yes, we do. How about when kids aren't meeting expectations? How about when kids maybe aren't showing up to class, they're not engaged, they're not doing their work? What are some best practices for reaching out to those students in ways that will help reengage them and maybe give them some feedback that will help them improve?
They recognized that they had something to offer their students, but they also recognized that they were going to have to enlist their students in choosing to learn from them, that they can't just force learning on a human. They're going to have to be, that's what she means by warm, it's going to have to be a relationally rich context, an invitational context. So that's the tension. I mean, I'm not giving any easy answers there. I recognize that, and I apologize. But this is the wrestling match that I think our systems are being called to.

Your article really reminded me of this old dusty thing from college. It's like, "Oh, yes, exactly. That's right." That is such a useful concept for today. I mean, she developed that in 1975.

But we need some of that in 2020.

So for the reaching out aspect, the earlier that we can identify a dip in engagement, a dip in attendance, and reach out, see what's going on, the better. In cases where the child is just psychologically becoming disengaged, oftentimes just the quick reach out, the direct message, the Google Voice text, etc. "Hey, I noticed that you haven't been attending as much. Everything okay? What's going on?" And this is where we can bring in some of that warm demander pedagogy too. And we can say, "I know that you can succeed. I know you want to. Let me know how I can help."

Earlier we can do that, the better. So I think having a system for just every week checking, some simple tool that you have for engagement. It could be if you're in person in class. How frequently are kids putting their head down during class? If you're online, then you can be looking at usage statistics or whatever you have.
That's such a good point because also, giving audio feedback is sometimes faster. I talk on the podcast about the app Voxer, which I just love. It's kind of like What's App. If I have something that I need to say to someone that it's going to take me forever to type out, I can just hop on Voxer and say it in a minute. So it's a time saver, but also, as you're talking, I'm realizing how much more humanizing it is for kids, particularly if you're giving them constructive feedback or something they need to improve on.
The feedback to help them improve, I'm thinking of some research - Dan Coyle is where I first learned of this. He calls it magic feedback. I think he's got a blog post on that, Angela. He talks about it in his book, The Culture Code. But researchers have found that when you give feedback on student work and you say, "I'm giving you this feedback because I know what you're capable of, and I believe that this will help," when you combine truthful feedback, so accurate, in the case of the students that we're talking about, they're not meeting expectations, so it's negative. Right? It's not good news, but it's real.

When you combine that with messages about belonging, about your belief in the student, researchers find that it really improves follow-up behavior on the feedback. So one other study that is coming to mind is, this one kind of blew my way, but it's from the distance learning research, and they took two groups of learners in a distance learning setting, and they gave one group feedback on their projects in writing, and one group feedback on their projects via audio.

And the audio group had way more evidence of using the feedback in subsequent work in a much higher appraisal of the degree to which the teacher cared. And with the tech tools available to us today, audio feedback has become easier to give than ever - not all work, but certainly some. We could bring in some audio feedback, and that might engage some of our learners who are slipping away or at very least help them to use our feedback for improvement because that's what we're after.
This is such a good point. If a teacher wants to give audio feedback or video feedback, are there any tech tools that come to mind, or any real simple ways to manage this that you can think of?
I spend a lot of time when I'm writing trying to soften what I'm saying sometimes, adding in emojis, adding in, rethinking my word choice. But the thing is, if a person can hear my voice, you can hear I'm not angry at you. I'm not trying to criticize you. You can hear the warmth and the care in my voice. It just comes across totally different.
One thing that I'm trying to ask everyone that I talk to this season on the podcast is about something they are optimistic about for the coming year because I think right now we have sort of a dearth of hope. Things are so uncertain. There's not that much to look forward to.
People read tone into words, and that's what makes giving written feedback so, so challenging. Sometimes they didn't mean it to be as harsh, but I mean, it takes longer and it takes more words to say things gently. And so I think a lot of times, we just write, fix this, or this is wrong, kind of feedback on students' papers. When we talk about audio feedback, yes, it gives you the chance to be more thorough and accurate.
And so I think that optimism - having something to look forward to, having something to be hopeful about and excited about - is life-sustaining for us at this point. So what is something you are optimistic about for the coming year?
Yep. And that was the researchers' theory, is that the audio allowed for the feedback recipient to understand the teacher's nuance. I'm going to be real direct with you. This thesis makes no sense. But I see how you got here, and this is something that could maybe help. When I say that to you in person, it's just a lot easier for you to get my heart for you than it is if I write that down. Chances are, that child might be talking about that in 10 years like, "Yep, I remember this teacher said this to me, and that's when I knew I can't write, and it marked me permanently."

Vocaroo is something that I've used on Google Classroom. But some of the LMSs that schools are rolling out this year, like Canvas, enables you to do that. I remember five years ago seeing Jim Burke, English teacher extraordinaire, he was sending MP3s to students' emails from his phone, so it's gotten a lot better. I would just find the tech savviest teacher in your school and ask them, "Hey, with our setup, do you know anything for audio feedback?"

So true.
I agree. I think this is a game-changer. This is a pivotal year for the teaching profession. We are not going back to what it was before. This is the reimagining. We've had a lot of conversations about reimagining schools lately, and people think it happens behind closed doors, people just dreaming things up. No, we're living it out. The daily work IS the reimagining. The way we're showing up for kids every single day, the practices we're doing, the things we're emphasizing, the relationships that we're building, I think this IS the reimagining. This is the shaping of what is to come. And I think any period of transformation is going to be a bumpy ride. It's not going to be a smooth, easy, comfortable process. And when we come out on the other side, we're going to look back and say, "Wow, this changed me as a person. It changed me as a teacher." And we can make those positive changes. I'm really energized by what you shared, as you can see.
I was revisiting this idea the other day, the Stockdale paradox, which this admiral in a Vietnamese prison camp back in the '70s, he noticed that the people who survived the prison camp the best were both optimistic and deeply intimate with the brutal reality of their circumstance. So you've got to embrace the brutal facts and be optimistic.
I want to close out the show with a takeaway truth. What is something that you wish every teacher understood about humanizing their classroom?
Well, most of us are pretty intimately acquainted with the brutal facts of this school year. We know this is about to be all types of difficult all year long. I am so optimistic that teachers are going to demonstrate to a watching world that we do care about students. We don't just say it, we mean it. You're going to see us adapt. You're going to see us learn. You're going to see us innovate responsibly, recognizing that your child is in our class right now, and they're not a guinea pig, and we will honor them with great work. That is going to be witnessed in every community around the country and the world. I'm convinced of that.
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And what makes me most excited about that is what we as teachers are going to take away from the experience. I think we're going to be deeper and stronger every year of our career after this. And I'm so thankful for that.

I love it.

For all of human history, education has always been a fundamentally human and interdependent endeavor. You've never been able to just have a one-party education. It's always taken two. And at the same time, in teaching, there is always one party who knows something, has a skill, has experience that the other party could benefit from. And I think in schools, where children are forced to attend school, compulsory public education, we just have to be so humbled by the fact that we do have things to share with our students that are valuable and beautiful and life-expanding. But we also have to find a way to invite our students to partner with us voluntarily.

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How to humanize your classroom so kids are known, valued, respected, & safe

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This week on the Truth for Teachers podcast: I'm talking to Dave Stuart Jr. about humanizing the learning space whether you're teaching in-person or online. We'll be unpacking the classroom practices that can help students feel known, valued, respected, and safe. My guest today is Dave Stuart Jr.

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It's a moment most educators will recognize: A student has said something biased or promoted a stereotype. There's a ripple through the classroom, but the speaker hasn't noticed. Students look to you expectantly, and you know the statement can't go unaddressed.

Most teachers look for opportunities to build a human rights culture and to counter hatred, bigotry, fear-mongering and intolerance. One way to do this, when students make a mistake, is to call them in rather than calling them out. Doing so prepares them for civic engagement by encouraging a sense of hope and possibility.

Guiding Instead of Dragging

In conversations and debates about social justice issues, insisting someone take responsibility when they say or do something hurtful-regardless of their intent-is a common way to protect vulnerable communities and individuals. It's often necessary, but not every correction allows both parties to move forward. Calling out happens when we point out a mistake, not to address or rectify the damage, but instead to publicly shame the offender. In calling out, a person or group uses tactics like humiliation, shunning, scapegoating or gossip to dominate others.

In our society, call-outs have become a way of life. They are generally done publicly, either in person or online. Extreme calling out is when a person or a group expresses their disagreement cruelly, sometimes grandstanding. Fearing they may be considered politically backward if they don't prove their "wokeness" on trending social justice issues, witnesses to the conflict may pile on while bystanders silently withdraw.

Calling in is a technique that does allow all parties to move forward. It's a concept created by human-rights practitioners to challenge the toxicity of call-out culture. Calling in is speaking up without tearing down. A call-in can happen publicly or privately, but its key feature is that it's done with love. Instead of shaming someone who's made a mistake, we can patiently ask questions to explore what was going on and why the speaker chose their harmful language.

Call-ins are agreements between people who work together to consciously help each other expand their perspectives. They encourage us to recognize our requirements for growth, to admit our mistakes and to commit to doing better. Calling in cannot minimize harm and trauma already inflicted, but it can get to the root of why the injury occurred, and it can stop it from happening again.

Calling in is not for everyone or every circumstance. It's not fair, for example, to insist that people hurt by cruel or careless language or actions be responsible for the personal growth of those who have injured them; calling in should not demand involuntary emotional labor.

Calling in is also not a useful response to those who intentionally violate standards of civil conversation. When powerful people use bigotry, fear and lies to attack others, calling out can be a valuable tool, either for the individuals they seek to oppress or for bystanders who choose to interrupt the encounter. When people knowingly use stereotypes or dehumanizing metaphors to describe human beings, their actions victimize targets and potentially set them up for violence. Calling out may be the best response to those who refuse to accept responsibility for the harm they encourage or who pretend they are only innocently using their right to free speech.

But, if call-ins can occur without demanding undue emotional labor or allowing space for hateful behavior, this approach offers a way forward that increases the potential for learning-particularly in activist and academic spaces. This practice works especially well when allies call one another in or when leaders, such as teachers, use it to model speaking up without losing the opportunity for learning. By teaching our students how to call one another in, we're providing them the tools and skills they need to gather up those who share their privileges, to offer patience and grace when they can, and to facilitate growth-so others won't have to.

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A veteran human rights educator explains the value of teaching students to call each other in rather than out.

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It's a moment most educators will recognize: A student has said something biased or promoted a stereotype. There's a ripple through the classroom, but the speaker hasn't noticed. Students look to you expectantly, and you know the statement can't go unaddressed.

Most teachers look for opportunities to build a human rights culture and to counter hatred, bigotry, fear-mongering and intolerance. One way to do this, when students make a mistake, is to call them in rather than calling them out. Doing so prepares them for civic engagement by encouraging a sense of hope and possibility.

Guiding Instead of Dragging

In conversations and debates about social justice issues, insisting someone take responsibility when they say or do something hurtful-regardless of their intent-is a common way to protect vulnerable communities and individuals. It's often necessary, but not every correction allows both parties to move forward. Calling out happens when we point out a mistake, not to address or rectify the damage, but instead to publicly shame the offender. In calling out, a person or group uses tactics like humiliation, shunning, scapegoating or gossip to dominate others.

In our society, call-outs have become a way of life. They are generally done publicly, either in person or online. Extreme calling out is when a person or a group expresses their disagreement cruelly, sometimes grandstanding. Fearing they may be considered politically backward if they don't prove their "wokeness" on trending social justice issues, witnesses to the conflict may pile on while bystanders silently withdraw.

Calling in is a technique that does allow all parties to move forward. It's a concept created by human-rights practitioners to challenge the toxicity of call-out culture. Calling in is speaking up without tearing down. A call-in can happen publicly or privately, but its key feature is that it's done with love. Instead of shaming someone who's made a mistake, we can patiently ask questions to explore what was going on and why the speaker chose their harmful language.

Call-ins are agreements between people who work together to consciously help each other expand their perspectives. They encourage us to recognize our requirements for growth, to admit our mistakes and to commit to doing better. Calling in cannot minimize harm and trauma already inflicted, but it can get to the root of why the injury occurred, and it can stop it from happening again.

Calling in is not for everyone or every circumstance. It's not fair, for example, to insist that people hurt by cruel or careless language or actions be responsible for the personal growth of those who have injured them; calling in should not demand involuntary emotional labor.

Calling in is also not a useful response to those who intentionally violate standards of civil conversation. When powerful people use bigotry, fear and lies to attack others, calling out can be a valuable tool, either for the individuals they seek to oppress or for bystanders who choose to interrupt the encounter. When people knowingly use stereotypes or dehumanizing metaphors to describe human beings, their actions victimize targets and potentially set them up for violence. Calling out may be the best response to those who refuse to accept responsibility for the harm they encourage or who pretend they are only innocently using their right to free speech.

But, if call-ins can occur without demanding undue emotional labor or allowing space for hateful behavior, this approach offers a way forward that increases the potential for learning-particularly in activist and academic spaces. This practice works especially well when allies call one another in or when leaders, such as teachers, use it to model speaking up without losing the opportunity for learning. By teaching our students how to call one another in, we're providing them the tools and skills they need to gather up those who share their privileges, to offer patience and grace when they can, and to facilitate growth-so others won't have to.

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A veteran human rights educator explains the value of teaching students to call each other in rather than out.

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Jack was a white man and veteran high school science teacher. He had coached football at his school for more than 20 years. Anyone who talked with Jack for a few minutes could tell he cared about students and was committed to constantly improving as a teacher. In fact, he had just joined our research project, which aimed to provide professional development to physics teachers across the state of Michigan on incorporating computation into their curriculum in equitable ways. But when we first met Jack, equity wasn't central to his practice. Like so many teachers, he acknowledged that racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression were still problems in society, but he wasn't sure how they might be playing out in his classroom.

Over the course of that school year, we supported Jack in collecting data and reflecting on equity patterns in his own classroom. We focused on which of his students were and were not getting opportunities to participate in class discussions. Our goal was to identify inequities and deploy instructional changes to mitigate them.

Midway through the school year, we started to notice something. In our conversations, Jack was asking new kinds of questions related to equity and new questions of himself as a teacher. In one of our data reflection sessions, Jack said, "I've asked myself that question. I've asked myself: Am I biased toward Caucasians? Or Hispanics? Or African Americans? It's easy for me to say I'm not. But sometimes it can come through in such subtle kinds of ways."

Earlier in our collaboration, Jack had often explained inequities in terms of his students' personalities or perceived deficits. But here he was looking at himself and his own potential biases. How did this happen and why?

Bias at the Classroom Level

Bias operates at multiple levels and settings of social life, often in implicit forms (Staats et al., 2017). In education, school leaders have known for years about biases in curriculum, discipline, and course placement (i.e., tracking). Teachers alone didn't create biases, but they are often influenced by them in the classroom. As Khalifa (2018) writes, "Oppression is not always intentional and at the forefront of the minds of educators. Oppression is historical, yet its structures continue to shape the lives of minoritized people. It is reproductive and requires little effort to reproduce" (p. 18).

A crucial site of bias in classrooms is class discussions. Teachers must decide who they call on (and who they don't), and also the quality of participation opportunities they make available to different students. Despite teachers' good intentions, amidst the complex and fast-paced work of teaching, biases can take over. Research shows that teachers tend to privilege participation from students who look like them, talk like them, and produce knowledge like them. This matters because participation in classroom discourse has a significant impact on student learning. When teachers aren't purposeful about who gets to participate and how, minoritized students usually end up with fewer learning opportunities.

Fortunately, this is also a place where anti-bias work can be made concrete. Although the issue of educational inequity can feel overwhelming, equity in classroom discussions is one area where teachers can exercise their discretionary authority to produce fairness for minoritized students (Ball, 2018). The challenge for school leaders is to put in place structures and resources to support teachers in this anti-bias work at the classroom level.

Of course, addressing the issue of teacher bias in classrooms can't substitute for attention to policies and ideologies that perpetuate structural oppression. For example, the anti-Black biases that so many students experience daily in classrooms are fueled by anti-Black narratives about intelligence, motivation, and other traits. Those same racist narratives also helped build the policies and practices of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and other white supremacist systems. So in our work with teachers, we think of a problem like inequitably distributed participation opportunities as just one way that histories of oppressive ideas and structures play out in local classroom interaction.

Reducing Bias Through Active Monitoring

Anti-bias workshops are a common way that school leaders support teachers in amplifying equity. The main purpose of such workshops is usually to make people aware of the science behind implicit bias, an approach we call the "inoculation model." The underlying assumption is that when people realize that they can be biased, that they will become immune from actually being biased. What research tells us, though, is that biases are sticky and difficult to change. One-time or even multiple trainings focused on awareness are unlikely to change actual teaching practice.

What teachers need is support in actively monitoring how their biases are affecting students in real-time. Some teachers have taken an Implicit Association Test (IAT), which can illuminate potential biases related to race, gender, and other social markers. Although it's useful for a teacher to know they might generally associate math ability with boys rather than girls, for example, an IAT can't tell a teacher how that bias actually shows up in the classroom.

As a first step, teachers need access to data on potential biases connected to the everyday work of teaching, such as participation patterns in class discussions. It's one thing to know that Black boys don't get a fair chance at academic success, but it's another to see how you might be marginalizing Black boys in your own classroom. Data can help make inequity a tangible, local problem.

Disaggregating Participation

To address these issues, our team has developed a free, web-based tool called . EQUIP is a research-based classroom observation tool designed to empower teachers with quantitative data on equity patterns in classroom interaction (Reinholz & Shah, 2018). EQUIP, which stands for " Equity QUantified In P articipation," focuses on students' actual participation and students' opportunities to participate in the learning process. The tool analyzes how discourse opportunities-both their quantity and quality-get distributed in a classroom, broken down by social markers and by individual students.

EQUIP is customizable, so it can be tailored to specific school and community contexts. Teachers decide which aspects of classroom discourse they think matter most for learning (such as cognitive demand of teacher questions or length of student responses). They also choose the social markers along which they want to disaggregate classroom discourse.

Disaggregating participation patterns by social markers, such as gender or race, is critically important. Slogans like "algebra for all," "literacy for all," and "science for all" are common in education, but to actually realize those equity visions, it helps to specify the all in "for all." Too often educators pursue a generic version of "equity," rather than racial equity or disability equity or linguistic equity. Naming what happens in classrooms in terms of social markers can help teachers avoid common obstacles like color-evasiveness, which obstruct the pursuit of all kinds of equity in classrooms (Martin, 2003).

Typically, teachers use EQUIP on video recordings of lessons they've taught, or they have a coach or colleague use EQUIP in real-time as they watch them teach. When a student participates, the observer codes that moment of participation in the EQUIP web app. Over time, hundreds of moments of participation accrue, which can then be analyzed through multiple data visualizations available in the EQUIP platform. These visualizations make it easier for teachers to see whether one or two students are dominating a class discussion, or whether girls mostly get opportunities to make factual contributions rather than rich scientific explanations (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. Sample EQUIP Graph: Type of Teacher Question Distributed by Gender Categories

Figure 2. Sample EQUIP Graph: Heatmap Showing Individual Student Participation

It's important to note that these quantitative data are best used in concert with qualitative data on equity and inequity, including minoritized students' subjective experiences in classrooms. Even though EQUIP analytics may indicate equitable levels of participation, students might not feel that they have fair opportunities to participate. Equity can never be reduced to a collection of statistics. This data merely provides an anchor that allows teachers to dive deeper into equity work.

Based on our work with teachers, we have developed an approach to professional development using EQUIP. Here we offer three principles that inform our approach: (1) make anti-bias work local; (2) interpret data and set equity goals in historical context; and (3) collaborate and iterate with colleagues. To illustrate these principles, we draw on examples from our work with teachers in STEM education.

1. Make Anti-bias Work Local

Inequities can differ in form and root cause from district to district and school to school. Anti-bias work in a racially diverse suburban district will differ from similar efforts in an all-white rural district. A key question to ask is: What kinds of hierarchies are present at my school and in my classroom? This helps teachers think about inequity and bias in terms of locally relevant social markers.

Many educators we work with are curious about inequities related to race and gender, although the specific racial and gender categories they track vary based on student demographics in their classrooms. For example, one leader of an all-Black school who was thinking about using EQUIP pointed out that using traditional racial categories didn't make sense in his context. This opened discussions about colorism, and how EQUIP might be used to identify potential biases that favor lighter-skinned students.

Another example is a physics teacher who taught at a Catholic school and had only white boys in one of his classes. In reflecting on local hierarchies in his community, he realized that there was a longstanding false narrative about non-Catholic students being less academically prepared and less competent than Catholic students. This prompted him to customize EQUIP to help him identify potential biases related to religious affiliation.

The key idea is that when we make anti-bias work local, we stand a better chance of improving learning opportunities for minoritized students across different communities.

2. Interpret Data and Set Equity Goals in Historical Context

Data do not speak for themselves- they require interpretation. Although quantitative information can be useful, numbers only tell part of the story. Teachers need to think carefully about how and why they interpret equity patterns the way they do.

One challenge teachers face is how to balance thinking of their students as individuals with recognizing them as members of social marker groups. To illustrate, consider the classroom depicted in Figure 2. The heat map shows that two boys, Rick (white) and Jalen (Black), have been dominating class discussions, while a Latina girl named Julisa had no opportunities to participate. Many teachers find this scenario problematic, but they do so for different reasons. If students are only seen as individuals, then teachers might take up equality as the primary goal and look for all students to participate at the same rate. On the other hand, if one takes into account histories of Black boys not receiving a fair share of learning opportunities, Jalen's participation might be seen as a sign of relative equity. From a historical perspective, that is, quantitative inequality can be interpreted as equitable in certain cases.

In thinking about Julisa, we have also seen teachers interpret zero participation as evidence of individual personality traits (for example, the student is just "quiet"), or take a deficit-oriented view that Julisa lacks the competence to participate. However, we encourage teachers to think about how pedagogical structures and classroom norms affect what students do in class. To that end, we always try to interpret EQUIP data in relation to teachers' own professional knowledge of their students, as well as other data sources, such as the classroom video itself. Coaching conversations with teachers can also open dialogue about how white supremacy, patriarchy, and other oppressive forces might explain the data.

All of this matters because it influences how teachers set specific equity goals. If biases are historically rooted, then anti-bias efforts should attend to historical context. Doing so can support teachers in coordinating individualistic and social marker-based understandings of minoritized students and their learning needs.

3. Collaborate and Iterate with Colleagues

Anti-bias work can be lonely, difficult work. Interrogating the ways one might be inadvertently causing harm to students can produce feelings of shame and anxiety. Educators we work with have found success pursuing anti-bias work in small learning communities.

For example, over the course of a school year, we supported a group of middle grades mathematics teachers in the same district as they engaged in cycles of action research using EQUIP. A cycle began with teachers gathering for lunch, discussing their EQUIP data, and sharing ideas about new teaching practices to address any inequities. They kept a running Google document where they maintained action plans. At the end of a cycle, the teachers reconvened after collecting another round of data and collectively reflected on and revised their action plans.

One reason this group found success is that relationships matter. The teachers developed trust with their colleagues, a trust that allowed them to share their struggles without being judged. It helped that all of the teachers discovered at least one bias that was previously unknown to them. The emphasis was on growth, not perfection. Also, the iterative nature of the approach signaled to the group that anti-bias work is long-term work.

Making Equity Work Actionable

Bias in class discussions is just one facet of the complex inequities that minoritized students face every day in schools. But it is also something that teachers have a degree of control over, which makes it an important lever for change. It is a practical place where the rubber meets the road in terms of students' opportunities to learn.

For teachers like Jack, active monitoring of potential biases through classroom-level data-coupled with opportunities for coaching and collegial feedback-can open new pathways toward more equitable forms of teaching. School leaders can support anti-bias efforts by empowering teachers with the longitudinal resources needed to do this work in collaborative ways.

In all of our work with teachers, we have yet to meet a teacher who says they are actively trying to marginalize students. And yet, we know this happens. As educators we must move with urgency to close the gap between intentions and action.

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Jack was a white man and veteran high school science teacher. He had coached football at his school for more than 20 years. Anyone who talked with Jack for a few minutes could tell he cared about students and was committed to constantly improving as a teacher.

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Is Your Approach to Continuous Improvement Colorblind? (Summer Reading)

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Is Your Approach to Continuous Improvement Colorblind? (Summer Reading)

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The Black Lives Matter protests aren't just about police brutality. The movement asks all institutions, including schools, to take a hard look at themselves and identify policies that contribute to systemic racism-and then to reform them.

Data is a crucial tool for teachers, administrators, and principals to begin this reflection process. But too often, racial blindness and deficit-based thinking can corrupt data analysis. When they do, school personnel may inadvertently arrive at conclusions that mischaracterize or harm students of color.

This is where data equity comes into play. Having an equity approach to data analysis means maintaining an awareness of potential distortion and taking proactive steps to counteract it. We must adopt an equity mindset in the collection, interpretation, and use of education data.

Equity in Collection

Collecting the right information is the first step of any data project. Racial equity analyses often seek to understand how or why school opportunities, outcomes, and environments differ along racial lines.

This project requires collecting student race and ethnicity data in a way that allows for disaggregation by demographic group. For instance, in addition to examining your school's or classroom's test scores, you could break that data down by race. Maybe as a school, your test scores sit above the state average-but are below the average for particular racial or ethnic groups. To see that trend, you must collect the data.

It's important to keep in mind that racial equity issues also intersect with matters relating to other demographic groups, such as gender and class. Breaking up data only by race may reveal that Black students disproportionately receive disciplinary action, as is true in many schools across the country. But adding in gender may uncover connections between race, gender, and specific disciplinary policies, such as how school dress codes often discriminate against Black girls. Collecting and then disaggregating for a variety of demographic factors can help uncover such inequities.

Equity in Interpretation

After you've collected the data and identified some trends, the next step is interpretation. If you see racial disparities, ask why they're present in your classroom or school. It's a difficult question, and the answer will depend on your unique context. That said, you can improve interpretation by using two practices: avoiding deficit-based thinking and using qualitative data.

Deficit-based thinking in interpretation means attributing differences in education outcomes among racial groups to student deficiencies while ignoring the impact(s) of systemic racism on those students. By failing to address systemic issues, deficit based thinking tacitly accepts them-and expects more of students with fewer resources.

Take SAT scores as an example: Black and Hispanic students tend to score below the national average. Deficit-based thinking might conclude that Black and Hispanic students need to spend more time studying to close this gap. That would ignore phenomena like intergenerational systemic racism, which has privileged White perspectives in curricula, produced racially segregated schools, and caused students of color to internalize negative stereotypes. Some describe the persistent discrimination against these students as creating an " educational debt," so that simply providing them test prep or other services wouldn't be sufficient. Avoiding deficit-based thinking means understanding these systems of oppression and taking the time to look beyond the student to explain trends in your data.

A helpful tool for avoiding this pitfall is using qualitative data. Relying only on quantitative data often leaves out students' contexts and lived experiences. Interviews, surveys, and focus groups that allow students to describe their experiences can often help explain trends in your data or spark ideas for new investigations.

Educators already use a host of qualitative data-gathering techniques. Parent-teacher conferences offer a window into students' home lives, and educators often speak with students one-on-one to learn their perspectives. Free survey services, such as Google Forms and Survey Monkey, offer methods of collecting qualitative data and have easy-to-use interfaces. Focus groups can be difficult to facilitate, but guides abound. They can also be much less formal than the guides recommend, and could simply mean taking aside a group of students and asking them a few questions.

Equity in Use

If your analysis reveals troubling trends, then it's time to act. The specifics of how you change classroom culture or school policies will depend on your particular circumstances, but two points of guidance can make a difference.

First, don't get stuck on symbolic changes like affirmatively stating support for anti-racist movements or adding racial diversity to leadership staff without doing the hard, necessary work to dismantle racist systems.

Second, after you make a change, test whether it had the desired effect. No plan is perfect, and implementation often reveals unforeseen hiccups and hurdles. I've witnessed this many times. Once, I worked with a program that primarily served low-income children of color, and it identified that there were many students who had low attendance. Unfortunately, the program initially fell into the deficit-based thinking pitfall, decided that the low attendance resulted from students and families not valuing education, and "solved" the problem with harsher penalties for absences.

We evaluated whether implementing the harsher penalties improved outcomes; it didn't. Students still had low attendance and now had the added stress from the penalties. So we altered our approach. We started collecting qualitative data by having conversations with families and students to try to understand their perspective. Far from the faulty deficit-based thinking rationale, we discovered that usually the causes were transportation issues or other commitments. After this realization, we changed our approach. The harsher penalties stopped, and instead the program began calling the families of chronically absent students to try to better understand their individual circumstances. The program then worked with these families to create a flexible plan that suited their needs.

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The Black Lives Matter protests aren't just about police brutality. The movement asks all institutions, including schools, to take a hard look at themselves and identify policies that contribute to systemic racism-and then to reform them. Data is a crucial tool for teachers, administrators, and principals to begin this reflection process.

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Three Ways Student Data Can Inform Your Teaching

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Three Ways Student Data Can Inform Your Teaching

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Culturally Responsive Teaching is Not a Quick Fix

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(This is the final post in a four-part series. You can see Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here.)
The new question-of-the-week is:
What are specific ways to make lessons more culturally responsive and culturally sustaining?
In Part One, Dr. Rocio del Castillo, Dr. Julia Stearns Cloat, Lisa Stringfellow, Valentina Gonzalez, Maurice McDavid, and Cathery Yeh shared their suggestions. You can listen to a 10-minute conversation I had with Rocio, Lisa, Valentina, and Maurice on my BAM! Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

Today, this series is being "wrapped up" by Barbara Leilani Brazil Keys, Altagracia H. Delgado, Saroja Warner, Amanda Branscombe, and Becky Corr.

The next question-of-the-week can also be found at the bottom of this post.
Three reflective questions for culturally responsive teaching Barbara Leilani Brazil Keys taught for 15 years in Oakland, Calif.; Honolulu; and Charlottesville, Va., before taking a position as an educational equity specialist in the Albemarle County public schools, in Virginia. Alongside a team of committed educators, she currently helps teachers refine their instructional practices for the purpose of achieving equitable outcomes for all students through Culturally Responsive Education:
The education world is trending with the term "Culturally Responsive Teaching" right now, but the concept of teaching that is relevant to our students' home cultures is age-old! I received my best lessons in Culturally Responsive Teaching when I went home to Hawai'i to teach students in an indigenous charter school on Oah'u. Student learning was steeped in culture, from the foundation of the science curriculum, which embedded traditional Hawaiian ecological practices, to the social studies lessons, which incorporated comparisons of world cultures to Hawaiian indigenous culture. This curricular approach made Culturally Responsive Teaching truly culturally sustaining because it did not ask students to leave their own cultures at home. Students could be who they truly are when they entered the school each morning, learning in ways that empowered them culturally.

Years later, after moving to teach on the East Coast, my application of Culturally Responsive Teaching took on a new meaning. Not only was I faced with a more culturally heterogeneous group of students and families to learn about and from, I was also impacted by the lack of academic success of many of my students of color, students who, not unlike the indigenous students that I taught in Hawai'i, were eager to express themselves culturally. However, my new students were often hindered by well-meaning educators who did not relate to their students' cultural meaning-making or expressions of cultural pride.

Though I recognized the need for Culturally Responsive Teaching in my own secondary classroom, I felt pressure to address numerous academic standards in a short time, and, more difficult to admit, I felt disconnected to the cultures of my students and the region in which I was teaching. I resorted to quick-fix strategies to make my lessons more relevant and more engaging. However, the gains made by employing various "strategies" were not impacting long-term academic outcomes. As I sought methods that would be more culturally sustaining, I realized I had to make a commitment to teaching that would embed students' home cultures into my whole curriculum, while guiding students toward academic success. I used reflective questions to consider the ways my teaching was addressing, or failing, my students' cultural needs as learners. Here are those questions with three tips for applying CRT in your own classroom or context:

Are my class rules and expectations culturally empowering to my students? First, acknowledge your own culture and consider how it is different from your students' cultures. Reflect on your upbringing and the values that your family and community passed down to you. Take it a step further by analyzing your core values and how they manifest in your teaching. What are the rules and non-negotiables in your classroom, for instance? In your estimation, what does it look like to be a "good student?" Your answers to these questions are deeply embedded in your cultural background. Could the cultural norms that you have created in your classroom be dissonant to your students, creating a cultural divide of you may not be aware? Make your classroom norms more inclusive so they are not stifling to students whose cultures are different than yours. This can be done by guiding students to create a set of classroom expectations together, drawing upon what expectations work for families at home.

Am I teaching in a way that my students learn best? To make our instruction relevant to our students, we have to think about the way they learn, not get stuck in the way we learn. A teacher recently told me that her student's house was so loud that she didn't know how he could learn at home. Perhaps this teacher's way of learning isn't the way this student learns with his family: cross-talking, summarizing various perspectives, and coming to conclusions, which are then challenged by his family members. This student may synthesize oral information at a faster rate than you are teaching content and be bored in class!

Am I being a cultural ally to my students in support of their academic success? Begin to develop alliances with your students by authentically getting to know them better. Build trust by following through and validating when they express feelings of injustice, unfairness, or feelings of unworthiness. Create alliances with students around academic goals that they are interested in accomplishing. Pinpoint and often celebrate their successes so that they build trust in you and confidence that they can reach their goals. Do this by meeting with students regularly, having personal conversations with them, and giving them one-on-one attention.

Culturally responsive teaching is not a quick fix, nor is it a simple strategy to add into your lessons. It takes reflection upon your and your students' cultural lenses. It takes an inquiry stance and an audit of practices that may be limiting student access to your curriculum. Above all, it takes a deep connection with students and their families, and a commitment to support their cultural needs, even if what is required is for you get outside of your cultural comfort zone.

Restorative Circles with children's literature Altagracia H. Delgado has been in education for 24 years and currently works as the director of language acquisition and early childhood in the Brazosport Independent school district, in Texas:
Classroom environment is one of the most important areas a teacher must address. It sets the tone for the time students will spend together and it should be one that it is supportive to all. Lately, we have seen a push for more culturally responsive classrooms that embrace acceptance and inclusion of all students. Putting practices in place to ensure this happens can be daunting for many teachers. Accepting and understanding one's biases must be a first step in order to get out of our comfort zones and ensure that our students feel accepted and included in all aspects of the instructional process.

One project that we have started at my school district in order to address culturally responsiveness in the classroom is through the use of restorative-circle practices with the support of children's literature. Allow me to explain. Particularly in our secondary classrooms, we have seen a great deal of disengagement in students' classroom participation due to many factors including the age group, peer pressure, difficulties to communicate in new languages, and a lack of representation in classrooms texts. Based on this, the idea to use restorative circles as a medium for classroom conversations and language development was created. The structure of circles allows for students to engage in a safe space for discussion, but we needed an anchor to help with the process; something to engage students in a more meaningful way.

We decided to anchor our conversations in culturally relevant children's books with which students could relate. For example, using the book Alma and How She Got Her Name, by Juana Martinez, students were able to engage in conversations about belonging to cultures with different pronunciations of names and how those names connect us to family members near and far. In addition, the value of correct pronunciation of one's name became relevant because names are important to one's identity, and as such, they should be respected. This conversation opened doors in a classroom community that houses multiple native languages and helped in building a community of support for these students. The books stay in class so students can reflect on these stories, while helping them develop a language that may not be their first. Once these connections have been established, additional ones can be created through music, food, and the sharing of common experiences. In this manner, everyone's culture has a space and is appreciated and respected in the larger community.
Three strategies for culturally sustaining teaching Saroja Warner works as a senior state technical-assistance director in Learning Innovations and co-director of the Mid-Atlantic Comprehensive Center at WestEd where she helps build the capacity of states and school districts to develop and successfully implement education policy and practices to support equitable and positive outcomes for all learners. WestEd is a nonpartisan, nonprofit research, development, and service agency working with education and other communities throughout the United States and abroad to improve education and other important outcomes for children, youths, and adults:
There are no quick tricks for ensuring that your lessons are culturally responsive and sustaining, but the process starts by making sure that you ARE a culturally responsive and culturally sustaining teacher. How do you do that? I've learned some valuable lessons over the course of my 15-year teaching career and offer the following suggestions.

Grow your knowledge base. You cannot create culturally responsive and sustaining lessons until you understand what it means to be a culturally responsive and sustaining teacher. Becoming familiar with the work of Gloria Ladson Billings, Geneva Gay, Zaretta Hammond, and Django Paris are a perfect place to start.

Collectively, they describe culturally responsive and sustaining teachers as those who:

believe all students can learn and hold high expectations for each student;

have deep content knowledge about the subjects they teach;

understand the cultural experiences and expressions of their students, their histories, and the communities in which they teach and draw from that knowledge and understanding to develop learning opportunities that validate students' lived realities, cultural identities, and heritage;

are reflective practitioners routinely examining their own life experiences, cultural knowledge, and explicit and implicit biases; and

support students' ability to recognize, understand, and critique both historical and current social inequalities.

I recommend adding the following books to your library:

The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teaching for African American Students by Gloria Ladson-Billings

Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice by Geneva Gay

Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta L. Hammond

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World by Django Paris (Editor), H. Samy Alim

Of utmost importance is to keep learning-both about the content you teach and how to make it relevant to your students. Remember that culturally responsive and culturally sustaining teaching is rigorous and relevant.

Plan lessons with students and culture in mind. Begin lesson planning by considering who your students are: where they live, what language(s) they speak at home and in the community, how they identify themselves, what their learning styles and needs are. Do your recon to really know your students. Some intelligence-gathering can be done by just paying attention to students and what is happening in their world. Another way is to talk with them, their families, and members of the community. Remember that the most effective teachers are able to draw on students' prior knowledge, experiences, and culture to connect students to and help them learn new ideas, concepts, and information.

Create options for students. Adapt instruction to meet your students' diverse needs and interests. In lesson planning, explore ways to accommodate this diversity by creating multiple paths for students to learn new content as well as demonstrate their learning. One framework for increasing student choice and autonomy while ensuring rigor, relevance, and authenticity in your lessons is the Universal Design for Learning. With its focus on providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and actions and expression, it offers strong guidance for creating culturally responsive and sustaining learning experiences.

Engage in culturally responsive data use. Culturally responsive teachers are data literate. Data literacy is broader than assessment literacy. As noted in Data Literacy for Educators, by Ellen Mandinach and Edith Gummer, data-literate teachers transform information into actionable instructional knowledge and practices. These teachers collect, analyze, and interpret all types of data, not just assessment results, to help determine instructional steps that will advance student learning. Culturally responsive teachers look for, gather, and analyze a variety of culturally relevant data to advance student learning. This includes information about students' personal and lived experiences, learning styles, the culture of the communities where they live, attendance, and student behaviors, to name a few. Culturally responsive data use allows teachers to triage information to design rigorous and relevant lessons for diverse students.

In sum, making lessons more culturally responsive and sustaining starts with learning what it means, in both practice and mindset, to be a culturally responsive and culturally sustaining teacher, and committing to reflective practice and growth. I encourage you to check out this tool that was developed by the Mid-Atlantic Comprehensive Center at WestEd to support teachers' reflective practice and to guide professional learning and development of eight core competencies for culturally responsive teaching. Shout out to New America for the paper from which this tool was adapted.
Sharing stories Dr. Amanda Branscombe is an associate professor at Athens State University in Athens, Ala. Her research interests include play, young children's early writing, social justice, and teacher education. Before beginning her career in teacher education, she directed child-development centers and taught at the kindergarten and secondary education levels:
I suggest that teachers create learning environments that welcome the conversations, questions, and stories of multiple voices. In addition, teachers should help learners engage in the subject matter that they, the learners, wish to pursue as well as the means that they want to use to explore that content. How do such learning environments develop? I offer a brief overview of three approaches for teachers and their students to consider: an inquiry stance for teacher/student research; shared journal stories; and innovative partnerships. In many respects, these approaches guide teachers in sorting out teaching and learning throughout their careers.

Learning environments emerge when teachers take on an inquiry stance and begin using their funds of knowledge-their "already existing" teaching experiences and practices-as information or data for researching the teaching and learning that is happening in their classrooms (Berthoff, 1987; Lankshear & Knobel, 2004; Rust, 2018). That information can be in the form of questions and stories as learners attempt to make sense of their experiences. Whatever the form, it has conversation, inquiry, and reflection that deepen the learners' knowing about who they are and what they know. Berthoff (1987) calls it "re-searching" or making sense of the information that they generate about the subject matter and themselves as learners.

I recommend inquiry-based teacher research as a way of looking at culturally responsive and sustaining teaching because it allowed me to see the complexity of my own teaching and learning environment.

My first inquiry-based research study with my 9 th grade students who were labeled as remedial predelinquents and Shirley Brice Heath, whom I had the privilege of having as a teacher at Bread Loaf School of English. Because I viewed myself as an advocate for social justice, I questioned the school's view of my troublemakers and potential dropouts. I questioned my understanding of the students' definition of literacy. Heath and I had them make a list of the kinds of literacy that they encountered every day. Needless to say, they defined literacy as the texts on cereal boxes, beer cans, eviction notices, etc.. After this project, the students posed their question: "How are we supposed to make sense out of literacy in this 'rich folks' school?" These questions led to deeper and more complex questions that the students initiated. I set up a pen pal writing exchange with students in advanced, "rich folk" classes to help the students answer those and other questions. In addition to the pen pal project ,the students, Heath, and I did investigations on Shakespeare and rap music, the language of baseball, and reading stories to toddlers (Heath, 1984; Heath & Branscombe, 1985; Heath and Branscombe, 1986).

That first research project and becoming-a-teacher researcher caused me to begin to understand the seditious role cultural power plays in teaching and learning.

The second approach, the Shared Journal Process (Taylor, Branscombe, Burcham, and Land, 2011), was developed by Taylor and several kindergarten teachers. The approach involved having three students share a true story from their lives each day. The other students would listen, ask questions to learn more about the facts of the stories, and then decide which story would best represent the history of their lives during that school year. After the sharing, students would write and draw in their journals about a story. The students were in charge of the sharing event even though teachers monitored. Often they asked the storyteller to speak louder or reminded him/her that the story had to be true. As one boy said to the storyteller, "I go by your house every day on the bus, and you don't have a new swimming pool." At the end of the month, each student's set of stories was placed in the class library so that they and others could read those stories.

This shared-journal process really created what Bishop (2011) described as creating windows and mirrors in the classroom. The children's Shared Journal stories became windows and mirrors into their lives. "The mirror reflects the life of the child and includes context-specific references to the things they experience and the surrounding community where they live. Windows are openings to the world around learners and include consideration of all things that are possible in the world today." (Catapano, 2018, p. 45).

The Shared Journal Process values the student's voice, celebrates the students' culture, and even welcomes it into the classroom. Not all teachers embrace this process. They fear that it breaks down the social and cultural barriers within a classroom. Interestingly enough, parents and guardians value it because they learn about their children's lives.

These three approaches alone will not offer teachers culturally responsive and sustaining classrooms. They require that teachers engage in the complexity of teaching and learning. They require that teachers have the courage to face themselves, their students, and the learning environments that they've created. The approaches require that teachers ask hard questions about privilege, culture, and what we want for the students. By engaging in the questioning and reflecting, teachers and students begin to examine the complexity of what it means to be culturally responsive and participate in a culturally sustaining learning environment.
"Practical ways to make lessons more culturally responsive"
Becky Corr is the president of EdSpark Consulting, which is dedicated to igniting partnerships for diverse learners through professional development, technical writing, and systems analysis. In her role as an the English-language-development team lead in the Douglas County school district in Colorado, she coaches, mentors, and supports teachers and facilitates family-engagement opportunities:

OK, I have to confess. In preparation for writing my response to this question, I had to do a little research. I've studied and utilized culturally responsive teaching in my classroom, but I wasn't sure what "culturally sustaining" meant. Luckily, Larry Ferlazzo has a blog post for that! This author interview with Django Paris helped me to clarify CRT and CST. What I noticed is that the overarching theme of CST was an asset- based approach. The asset-based approach aligns with WIDA's Can-Do philosophy and the new WIDA Guiding Principles.

So, what are some practical ways to make lessons more culturally responsive? Start by preparing yourself.

1. Check your biases. Examine your own assumptions and biases. This is a very important part of the process. It uncovers areas of growth and opens opportunities to engage in culturally responsive teaching.

2. Be open to new approaches. What worked for your own personal education may or may not work in your current setting.

3. View cultural and linguistic diversity as an asset. Value all

4. Get to know your students and their families. This article from Colorín Colorado has some great tips.

5. Research the linguistic and cultural diversity represented in your class. Author Jeffra Flaitz has two excellent books that can serve as a jumping-off point for starting conversations and asking questions about students' cultures. Keep in mind students' backgrounds are different, even if they are from the same country. These books are a starting point for beginning to understand culture on a deeper level.

These practices should not only occur in the classroom on holidays or heritage months. Culturally responsive practices are a guiding value or North Star by which a teacher charts the course; they are infused into classroom routines, everyday practices, and intentionally woven into lessons. Below are some practical ideas:

1. Invite families into the classroom. Asking parents to read books or tell a story in their language can be the start of a great partnership. Inviting parents to view student work or presentations and celebrate their child's success is a great place to start.

2. Play music from students' home countries. Many teachers play music as students enter the room, to facilitate an activity, or as students leave. If you are concerned about appropriate lyrics, you can usually do a quick Google search to find the lyrics in English or use Google Translate to get a good idea of the content of the songs.

3. Intentionally plan for students to use their home languages in the classroom. You can choose to group students with the same language background together. Or, if students in your class do not share a common language, they may gain an appreciation for the linguistic abilities of their classmates as they listen.

4. Consider the cultural values of your students when planning a lesson. Are you asking students to do something contrary to their deep cultural beliefs? For example, in many cultures, it is disrespectful for a student to tell the teacher that they don't understand something. It reflects poorly on the teacher that the student doesn't understand. So, if I ask students to self-assess their learning, some students might be reluctant because they do not want to critique the teacher. Instead, ask students to evaluate their effort or provide a performance task so that students can demonstrate their learning.

5. Consider the cultural practices that you can bring into your classroom. Do your students value community over individuals? Do they value individuals over community? Getting to know their deep beliefs will help you to design lessons that play to the strengths and deep beliefs of your students.

6. Make sure that your students' cultures are represented on the walls and within the physical space of your classroom. It is very important that students take ownership of the classroom space. Displaying student work and artwork from their cultures provides students with a safe and welcoming environment that they can thrive in.

Honoring and celebrating all cultures provides a safe environment for students to challenge themselves and be challenged, to take the necessary academic risks, and to be successful. The culturally responsive classroom helps children to appreciate cultural and linguistic diversity and to grow to be culturally proficient adults.

Next Question!
The next question-of-the-week is:
Who was your favorite teacher when you were attending school and why was she/he your favorite?
Thanks to Altagracia, Barbara, Saroja, Amanda, and Becky for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.
Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email or RSS Reader. And if you missed any of the highlights from the first eight years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below. The list doesn't include ones from this current year, but you can find those by clicking on the "answers" category found in the sidebar.

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'Culturally Responsive Teaching Is Not a Quick Fix' (Opinion)

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(This is the final post in a four-part series. You can see Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here.) The new question-of-the-week is: What are specific ways to make lessons more culturally responsive and culturally sustaining?

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Culturally Responsive Teaching Video, Z. Hammond

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Culturally Responsive Teaching Video, Z. Hammond

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Zaretta Hammond "Culturally Responsive Teaching" at the San Francisco Public Library

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The Power of Protocols for Advancing Equity

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The Power of Protocols for Advancing Equity

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Structured protocols can help teachers ensure equitable participation and create more culturally responsive discussions.

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Who Does Science?
Using data to explore society, inequality, and social justice in the context of science

For many years, I didn't know that social justice could be a part of my science teaching. I had been taught that science was a purely objective process, unrelated to the humans who practiced it (beyond, perhaps, a few examples of geniuses seemingly born to do it), existing contentedly above the fray of humanity. The ways in which I was taught science reflected this apolitical view; we learned the content, rarely applied it, and never talked about the nature of science itself.

It is easy to see that the biases present in American society affect the practice of science as well. Underrepresentation is endemic across disciplines and across time ( National Science Foundation 2019), and extensive research clearly shows that this reflects bias and a lack of access, not a lack of ability in students from those underrepresented groups ( National Research Council 2012). Systemic injustice is present in the teaching ( Moss-Racusin 2012), learning, and practice ( Leslie, 2015) of science, both historically and today.

This is a moral problem, and also a pragmatic one. Research has shown that less-diverse scientific groups do less impactful work ( Freeman and Huang 2014). Moreover, a purely objective view of science is simply not an accurate one. The Next Generation Science Standards clearly state that "science is a human endeavor" and remind us that "science and engineering are influenced by society" ( NGSS Lead States 2013) (see NGSS Connections box for other connections to education standards).

Crucially, nobody is better positioned to address these systemic imbalances in science than science teachers. As Editor Ann Haley MacKenzie recently wrote in these pages, "schools and science classrooms should be places for a more just society than currently exists." (Mackenzie 2018) We must help our students see through science how society needs improvement and give them tools to bring it about. Taking steps to undo the systemic imbalances around us is how I define social justice, and helping students to do so is how I define teaching for social justice ( Teaching Tolerance 2018). But few resources exist for science teachers who want to bring social justice into the science classroom. In this article, I share one such resource and how I implement it.

The Underrepresentation Curriculum

The Underrepresentation Curriculum (URC) is a free set of lesson plans and resources, created and curated by a group of science teachers, to help fellow science teachers bring social justice to their classrooms. The URC begins with a question: does the population of scientists match the population of America? This question can be answered by giving students access to freely available datasets ( National Science Foundation 2019; U.S. Census Bureau 2019) and asking them to make the comparison. Teachers can focus by discipline and by whichever aspect of demographic identity they choose. Since I am a physics teacher particularly dedicated to anti-racism, for example, my students explore how physicists identify by race.

Through this comparison, students gain relevant experience with the science and engineering practice (SEP) of Scale, Proportion, and Quantity and the crosscutting concept (CCC) of Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information. The question of "match" is a mathematical one; students often reach for graphs as a way to organize their thinking ( Figure 1). In my class, for example, students come to see that white Americans are roughly three times as likely to become physicists and astronomers as black Americans.

This is a new twist on a familiar idea: using an anchoring event to motivate student engagement. As described in Ambitious Science Teaching ( Windschitl, Thompson, and Braaten 2018), an anchoring event is "any complex phenomenon for which students can develop models and explanations over the course of a unit ... What all good anchoring events have in common is that they motivate students to try to explain what is going on." In my class, this engagement is clear; students immediately jump into asking questions about the data they see, and I steer them towards generating hypotheses for the inequality.

From there, they research the validity of their hypotheses-Are white students more interested in majoring in physics? Do black students have equal access to high school physics?-and share what they've learned with their classmates. In this unit, it is an observation of science itself that is the anchoring event, and students use the tools of science to revise and improve their model of how science is influenced by society.

Each context is different, with different emphases, curricular flexibility and student interest, so the URC lessons are modular and flexible. Teachers can choose the parts that work for their setting, and modify them to fit their needs. Figure 2 shows two examples of implementation by teachers. The first shows how my high school seniors explore race in the context of physics over seven class periods, and the second comes from the AP Chemistry class of a colleague exploring sexism over four class periods. This flexibility makes it more challenging to write a description of how the URC looks in practice, so in this article I describe three key lessons that many teachers tend to include in their implementation of the URC in detail.

Examples of implementation

Having recognized and explored the lack of racial diversity in physics, I ask my students whether they think it matters to the field. Embedded in this question is another about the nature of the science itself: is physics objective or subjective? If it is objective, if it exists outside of human experience, then perhaps racial demographics aren't relevant to the practice of physics itself.

As described in Daane (2017), I ask them to stand in a line across the room, making a spectrum from objective to subjective based on their current views of physics, and then partner with a peer standing in a different location to share their thinking. I encourage students to try to be as convincing as possible when they speak and as open to being convinced as possible when they listen, and when we reform the spectrum after discussion it has often shifted.

There is no "right" answer revealed at the end-the point is to develop their thinking and to understand how others might think differently ( Figure 3). Nonetheless, preliminary observations suggest that the conversation tends to leave students moving towards more subjectivity in their understanding of physics, which aligns with the NGSS CCCs "science is a human endeavor" and understanding that "science and engineering are influenced by society."

In addition to students' own experiences and perspectives, I use case studies to organize discussion of related topics. When they are generating hypotheses to explain disproportionate representation, inevitably a student suggests "racism." When I press for more detail, it becomes clear that different students are using different definitions of this word. They know from our previous explorations of acceleration and work that precise definitions of words matter, and that an expert's definition can differ from a layperson's. I ask them to put into writing how they define racism and share with them the case of Paul Sherley, a scientist denied tenure. Sherley claimed his rejection was because of racism, whereas the university suggested it was not ( Bhattacharjee 2007). I ask the students whether this fits their definition of racism. Having a concrete example leads to animated revision, thoughtful reflection, and engaged discussion.

The discussion that follows often leads to a more systemic, less individualized definition of racism; this, I'm happy to share with them, aligns with the definition that experts in the field use ( Kendi 2019). I generally finish with my students reflecting on the costs of systemic racism to them and their communities, not only because making it personal can make it meaningful, but also because it helps to reinforce the last discussion norm ("we are all in this together;" see Facilitation and Figure 5) and how systems of oppression hurt us all. By the time we loop back to the anchoring event of disproportionality in physics ( Figure 1), students tend to see and understand the pie charts in new ways.

No matter what lessons teachers choose in their implementation, closing with a lesson about taking action provides a powerful culmination. We live in a time when our students see their peers taking and leading effective political actions at a national and global scale, and creating a curricular space for students to apply what they've learned feels like an opportunity to create the more just society that Ann Haley MacKenzie wrote of recently.

Students not used to thinking of themselves as agents of social change sometimes balk when asked what action they'd like to take, and so the intentional scaffolding offered by the URC lesson plan is helpful.

I begin by asking students to reflect on what they've learned throughout this unit, and to reflect on what resources-influence, experiences, interpersonal skills, and so on-they have to make change. We use "chalk talk"-style whiteboard conversations ( Elliot et al. 2017) to get the conversation going, and I intentionally frame the question in terms of collective action: what steps do we want to take to make a difference in our school, in our city, and beyond? I have learned that it is important to keep the focus on taking action now (not someday), and that students always rise to the challenge.

Throughout the URC, students are given the freedom to come to their own decisions and I'm routinely amazed by their ambition, engagement, and ability to take concrete steps to make the world more just. If science teachers are to help students see how society can be improved and help students bring about change, the URC offers a powerful template that leads to action. Recent STEM-related student actions included designing and delivering a lesson about underrepresented racial minorities in our school's attached middle school classrooms, a letter to the administration advocating for the hiring of more science faculty of color, and the creation of a mural of physicists that hung in our school's entryway for several weeks ( Figure 4).

Facilitation

As our group of teachers designed the URC, we recognized that many science teachers have minimal or no experience facilitating conversations about identity and social justice, and might feel reluctant trying to do so. For this reason, the URC includes extensive resources to help empower and support teachers in their facilitation. In this section, I summarize a few resources in the hopes of encouraging teachers to give the URC a try.

It turns out that many of the routines I had already developed as a physics teacher are useful in this novel setting. I often start a URC lesson by prompting students to reflect on what they already know about the topic for that day and what personal experiences might be relevant, and lessons generally move from individual to small group work to whole-class discussion. These are familiar patterns to the students from our prior study of physics, and help to keep our discussions engaging, inclusive, and meaningful. Throughout the year I use Peer Instruction ( Mazur 1997), in which students reflect on a question, anonymously choose a response via Plickers or PollEverywhere, discuss with peers, revisit the question, and then discuss as a class to deepen their understanding, and have found that this structure works beautifully to promote discussion in the URC. In every lesson, students work in pairs or trios to reflect and share ideas, just as they do all year; in the URC, my stepping out of the center of discussion seems to open up more honest, engaged learning for my students.

Some routines do change slightly during the URC. Many science classrooms establish community norms to foster collaboration, inclusion, and learning ( Chowning 2009; Windschitl, Thompson, and Braaten 2018), and I do this at the start of the year. For this unit, though, we co-construct unique norms ( Figure 5) to help all students participate while making sure that everyone feels safe in the discussion.

These norms are designed to encourage reluctant students to contribute, make sure that our discussion does not harm or marginalize, and to promote the maintenance of the learning community that we have spent the prior months building. We find that, given space and support to share their thinking, all students make significant contributions to our classroom discussions and activities, and report fantastic levels of engagement in post-unit surveys.

If I had access to the facilitation resources in the URC during my first years of implementing it, I suspect I would have gained confidence more quickly. But I also know I would have still felt nervous. Like any new thing, it's a risk to try facilitating conversations about race in the context of physics, and it has taken time and commitment for me to grow more comfortable. For me, the risk has been worth it (especially when I consider the harms that persist if I'm not teaching for social justice). The URC is one way I answer the call to be a socially just science teacher, and like any pedagogical skill I have set out to gain, I've grown more skillful and more comfortable with it over time.

Teaching social justice inclusively

I initially worried that talking about underrepresentation with students might inadvertently reinforce it-would students from marginalized identities feel further marginalized? I was heartened to learn that discussing underrepresentation is a powerful way to undo its pernicious effects ( Hazari et al. 2010). I take additional steps, too, to ensure that these students feel safe in our discussions by checking in beforehand and during the unit, and then afterwards using surveys to make sure things have gone as planned.

The URC lessons, however, do not exist only for the benefit of students from under-represented groups. As a white man, my implementation of the URC is likely different from that of a Latinx woman. Both of us have strengths and blind spots; recognizing the value of this unit for white students, who happen to be in the majority at my school, is one thing that my identity affords me.

For students with identities overrepresented in positions of power and in society, learning to talk comfortably about representation and society is a critical skill that they need practice to develop, and I see no reason why science class should be exempt as a setting in which students can learn this. We remind students who initially feel guilt or shame that none of us are responsible for what happened before us, but we are responsible for what we do and what we learn in our lives.

Social justice efforts are often perceived as forcing one political viewpoint or another, and about making students from privileged identities feel guilty. We have taken pains to structure lessons and assignments so that there is no "right" answer. Teacher facilitation takes the form of asking questions, not giving answers, and the class norms emphasize that being willing to listen to ideas different from yours is critically important. Many of our students will enter the STEM fields we are studying, and we expect that by helping them to see how identity and the practice of science relate to one another, we are helping them to improve the culture of science itself.

We remind students who initially feel guilt or shame that none of us are responsible for what happened before us, but we are responsible for what we do and what we learn in our lives. Many of our students will enter the STEM fields we are studying, and we expect that by helping them to see how identity and the practice of science relate to one another, we are helping them to improve the culture of science itself.

Student assessment and response

While I have concrete learning goals for the URC lessons I do with my students ( Figure 3), I recognize that they are not yet part of canonical presentations of physics. For that reason, all of my assessment of student learning thus far has been formative. I respond in writing to their writing, and I use pre- and post-unit anonymous surveys to measure shifts in their understanding of the topics we discuss. Next year I plan to assess some of this learning summatively-testing to see whether my students can, for example, find an aspect they agree with in a statement they broadly disagree with (an exercise we do in a formative way throughout the URC lessons).

We have yet to perform a systematic study of the impact of the URC on students, but seven years of survey data from my own class begins to paint a powerful picture of the URC's effects. I began doing these surveys because I believe it is important for teachers to test their own assumptions about teaching and learning, and because this was an area where I felt particularly unsure of myself. The data were aligned with my learning objectives ( Figure 3), and student narrative feedback was similarly enthusiastic: By discussing [society] in physics, we are able to connect what we have learned to other things in "real life." By learning about it, I feel less discouraged from perhaps pursuing a course in math or science.

I was particularly heartened by responses to questions about whether all students felt comfortable sharing, even when their views were unpopular: 97% said that they did.

For many years, I used these pre- and post-unit surveys to check whether students were meeting my learning objectives ( Figure 3). Recently, however, I have started asking my students about how the URC changed their relationship with the discipline of physics as a whole.

As shown in the last row of Figure 6, this unit increased the proportion of my students that felt they could succeed in physics. Even if this were our only goal as science teachers (it is not), the URC would be a valuable part of our curricula.

Ongoing evolution

Like any good curriculum, the URC has evolved as student experiences and ideas have changed. I've learned to bring parents into the process-at my school, I begin the unit with a letter home explaining my plans and how they connect to my learning objectives for the entire course, and host an evening at school in which interested parents experience one of the lessons. As American politics have grown more polarized, I have put more emphasis on listening across differences through the introduction of new activities and discussion scaffolds.

The URC is continuing to grow, too, as new teachers add to the resources. Based on teacher feedback, we hope to add lessons helping interested classes explore socioeconomic class and political correctness, and expand the online discussion forums for users of the URC. Every new user is invited to join our group of curriculum editors, and we expect that the resource will continue to evolve as our community grows and diversifies.

A year into the launch of the URC, we are extremely proud of what we are making available to teachers interested in social justice in the science classroom. By going to , teachers gain free access to detailed lesson plans, including activities and resources, as well as teacher guides and resources for facilitation. Over 1,100 teachers have accessed the resources ( Figure 7), from middle school to university-level science teachers, and we estimate that more than 10,000 students have experienced these lessons.

As science teachers, we are in a unique position to address the ways injustice influences science, society and the experiences of our students. In the powerful words of Na'ilah Suad Nasir (2016), "to not discuss or address issues of race, culture, and inequality is to accept the current patterns of inequality and marginalization." Even though many of us have not been trained to do so, the URC offers interested teachers an engaging and science-focused way to engage in social justice teaching. Our charge to help students change the world is a daunting one, but scientists and science educators do hard things all the time. We invite interested teachers to access the resources (and to contribute to them if they are so inclined), and to make their classroom into a space of social justice transformation.

References

The Underrepresentation Curriculum The Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards PollEverywhere
Bhattacharjee Y. MIT Hunger strike: Sour grapes, or the bitter taste of racism? Science 315 (5814): 920.

Chowning J. 2009. Socratic seminars in science class: providing a structured format to promote dialogue and understanding. The Science Teacher 76 (7): 36-41.

Daane A. et. al. 2017. Teaching about racial equity in introductory physics courses. The Physics Teacher 55 (6): 328-333.

Elliott L.A. et al. 2017. Composing Science: a Facilitators Guide to Writing in the Science Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

Freeman R.B and Huang W.. 2014. Collaboration: Strength in diversity. Nature 513 (7518): 305.

Hazari Z. et al. 2010. Connecting high school physics experiences, outcome expectations, physics identity, and physics career choice: a gender study. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 47 (8): 978-1003.

Kendi I.X. 2019. How to Be an Antiracist. New York: One World.

Leslie S., et al. 2015. Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines. Science 347 (6219): 262-265.

Moss-Racusin C.A. et al. 2012. Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (41): 16474-16479.

MacKenzie A.H. 2020. Social justice in the science classroom. The Science Teacher 87 (7): 6-7.

Mazur E. 1997. Peer Instruction: a User's Manual. Upper Saddle River N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Nasir N.S. 2016. Why should mathematics educators care about race and culture? Journal of Urban Mathematics Education 9 (1): 7-18.

National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. 2019. Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2019. Special Report NSF 19-304. Alexandria, VA.

National Research Council. 2012. A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

NGSS Lead States. 2013. Next Generation Science Standards: For States, by states. Washington, DC: National Academies Press

Teaching Tolerance. 2018. Social justice standards: A framework for anti-bias education. Teaching Tolerance (60).

U.S. Census Bureau. 2019. Resident population of the United States, by sex, ethnicity, race, and age. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Windschitl M., Thompson J., and Braaten M.. 2018. Ambitious Science Teaching. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

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feature Using data to explore society, inequality, and social justice in the context of science For many years, I didn't know that social justice could be a part of my science teaching.

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The Underrepresentation Curriculum Project – A flexible curriculum designed to help students critically examine scientific fields and take action for equity, inclusion and justice.

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What if we could equip students with the tools of science to examine science itself?

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Learning for Justice Social Justice Standards

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Learning for Justice Social Justice Standards

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A Framework for Anti-Bias Education

The Social Justice Standards are a road map for anti-bias education at every stage of K-12 instruction. Comprised of anchor standards and age-appropriate learning outcomes, the standards provide a common language and organizational structure educators can use to guide curriculum development and make schools more just and equitable.

Divided into four domains-identity, diversity, justice and action (IDJA)-the standards recognize that, in today's diverse classrooms, students need knowledge and skills related to both prejudice-reduction and collective action. Together, these domains represent a continuum of engagement in anti-bias, multicultural and social justice education. The IDJA domains are based on Louise Derman-Sparks' four goals for anti-bias education in early childhood.

Each of the IDJA domains has learning outcomes and school-based scenarios organized by grades K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12.

Download the Standards

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The Social Justice Standards are a road map for anti-bias education at every stage of K-12 instruction, providing a common language and organizational structure educators can use to guide curriculum development and make schools more just and equitable.