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Teacher Competencies that Support Culturally Responsive Teaching

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Teacher Competencies that Support Culturally Responsive Teaching

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An analysis of teaching standards in all 50 states to better understand whether states incorporate culturally responsive teaching.

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A Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching

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A Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching

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Four Tools for Interrupting Implicit Bias

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Four Tools for Interrupting Implicit Bias

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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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Teaching Tolerance

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Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL)

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CASEL is committed to advancing equity and excellence in education through social and emotional learning (SEL). CASEL's definition and framework for SEL provides a foundation for all communities to use evidence-based SEL strategies to advance the goals of equity and excellence in ways that are most meaningful to their local context.

Developing and Refining Transformative SEL toward Equity

CASEL is refining a specific form of SEL implementation that concentrates SEL practice on transforming inequitable settings and systems, and promoting justice-oriented civic engagement-which we are calling " Transformative SEL. " Through our long-term learning agenda and ongoing collaboration with practitioners, policymakers, and researchers, CASEL continues deepening what we know about how to implement Transformative SEL toward equitable learning opportunities and developmental outcomes. Together, we will continue learning through our collective commitment to continuous improvement.

Defining Transformative SEL

"Transformative SEL" is a process whereby young people and adults build strong, respectful, and lasting, relationships that facilitate co-learning to critically examine root causes of inequity, and to develop collaborative solutions that lead to personal, community, and societal well-being.

This form of SEL is aimed at redistributing power to promote social justice through increased engagement in school and civic life. It emphasizes the development of identity, agency, belonging, curiosity, and collaborative problem solving within the CASEL framework.
Core features of Transformative SEL include:

Authentic partnering among students and adults with a deep focus on sharing power and decision-making between young people, educators, families, and communities.

Academic content that integrates issues of race, class and culture.

Instruction that honors and makes connections to students' lived experiences and identities, and scaffolds learning to build an understanding of others' lived experiences.

Enhancing and foregrounding social and emotional competencies needed for civic engagement and social change, such as reflecting on personal and social identities, examining prejudices and biases, interrogating social norms, disrupting and resisting inequities, and co-constructing equitable and just solutions.

Prioritizing students' individual and collective agency to take action for social justice.

Focus on creating belonging and engagement for all individuals.

Read more:

Transformative SEL: Toward SEL in Service of Educational Equity and Excellence (2019). This article first introduced Transformative SEL with a focus first on race and ethnicity. Access the research article.

Equity and Social and Emotional Learning: A Cultural Analysis (2018). This brief explored the alignment between equity and SEL, eventually informing the updated definition of SEL in 2020. Access the brief.

Identifying Effective Programs, Practices, and Strategies for Implementing Transformative SEL

While our research and learning agenda informed our definition of Transformative SEL based on current science and developmental principles, in practice, there are currently limited options for evidence-based programs and implementation models for Transformative SEL.

To address this need, CASEL is leading collaborative efforts with partner organizations to develop a more robust foundation for Transformative SEL that supports researchers and practitioners in identifying and refining evidence-based programs, professional learning, and assessments. Through our research-practice partnerships, we are also learning alongside schools and districts how specific practices, policies, and processes can best be implemented to achieve the goals of Transformative SEL.
Read more:
Rising Up Together: Spotlighting Transformative SEL in Practice with Latinx Youth (2021). This research brief is part of our initial efforts to illustrate transformative SEL in practice based on surveys with youth, interviews with teachers, and observations during dedicated SEL instruction time in a predominantly Latinx school in a large urban district. Read the brief.

Building Equitable Learning Environments (BELE) Framework: CASEL is part of a collective of diverse educators committed to tackling the inequities in our school system. The collective developed a framework to guide the redesign of public school systems that center the experiences of young people with evidence-based practice and resources to support lasting change. View the framework.

Sharing Practical Insights and Expertise

As Transformative SEL is being tested and refined, we will continue sharing practical insights as we learn them and lifting up expert voices with the broader field.
Read more:

Emerging Insights on Advancing SEL as a Lever for Equity and Excellence" (2020). This report provides five key, emerging insights from our partner school districts working to leverage SEL in service of equity. Read the report.

CASEL CARES Webinar Series: SEL as a Lever for Equity and Social Justice (2020). These are recordings from our 5-Part Webinar Series discussing equity and racial injustice through the lens of social and emotional learning. Watch the series.

Equity and SEL: Districts Share Strategies and Best Practices (2018). This webinar features two CASEL partner districts, Chicago Public Schools and Tulsa Public Schools, on their efforts to integrate SEL and equity in their community. Hear from partner districts.
For more recommended resources on Equity and SEL, click here

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Transformative SEL as a Lever for Equity & Social Justice

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CASEL is committed to advancing equity and excellence in education through social and emotional learning (SEL). CASEL's definition and framework for SEL provides a foundation for all communities to use evidence-based SEL strategies to advance the goals of equity and excellence in ways that are most meaningful to their local context.

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The goal of this website is to collect and share resources for families, students, and educators in response to protests across the country calling for justice after the death of George Floyd. We hope these resources will be helpful in guiding important and difficult conversations about racism and social inequities. This site is a living document, and we will strive to continuously update it. If you have a concern, a suggestion, or a resource you'd like to share, please email GreatIdeas@venturausd.orgor go to the Thank you for your support, and we are honored to be learning alongside you as we engage in this crucial work.

1. Open a search engine and go toYou don't need a Google account to access it; it's free for everyone.

2. In the text box on the left, type the full URL (including of the website you want to view.

3. On the right, choose the language in which you want to view the website.

4. Click "Translate". Click on the new link on the right, and enjoy!

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La meta de este sitio es a colectar y compartir recursos para familias, estudiantes, y educadores en respuesta de las protestas en todo el país pidiendo justicia después de el muerte de George Floyd. Esperamos que estos recursos sean útiles para guir conversaciones importantes y difíciles sobre el racismo y las desigualdades sociales. El sitio está cambiando, y vamos a intentar a actualizarlo continuamente. Si tiene una preocupación, una sugerencia, o un recurso que quiere compartir, favor de mandar un correo electrónico a GreatIdeas@venturausd.org o va a la . Gracias por su apoyo, y estamos honorados a aprender con ustedes cuando hacemos este trabajo importante.

2. En la casilla de texto a la izquierda, escribe el URL completo (incluyendo el del sitio web que quiere ver.

3. A la derecha, elige el idioma en que quiere ver el sitio web.

4. Haz clic en "Translate" (traducir). Haz clic el nuevo link a la derecha, y ¡disfrute! ​

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The goal of this website is to collect and share resources for families, students, and educators in response to protests across the country calling for justice after the death of George Floyd. We hope these resources will be helpful in guiding important and difficult conversations about racism and social inequities.

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Edutopia

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Teachers shaken by recent events and wondering how to work for change in our society and schools can start with these lesson plans, videos, and other resources.

John Minchillo / Associated Press

Protesting the killing of George Floyd, a crowd gathers for a rally at Cadman Plaza Park in New York City on June 4, 2020.

"I'm a White educator, where do I start?"

"How can I help?"

"What if I get it wrong?"

Recent events have shaken me to my core, and the nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd suggest that people across the country are similarly shaken. These are dark times, but if there's anything that seems like a glimmer of light to me at the moment, it's the fact that so many teachers are reflecting on how to fight racism:

For me, a Black educator and mother to a Black 16-year-old who has reached the appearance if not the legal age of manhood, these questions stir hope. Folks who don't look like me are embracing the idea that the fight for equity has to be everyone's fight. But fighting racism is a big job, and when the fires of outrage cool, we teachers will be confronted with the reality of planning deadlines, testing schedules, and another hundred things that are all in a day's work. The difficult work of equity may become just another item on a desk crowded with to-do lists.

What Can Teachers Do?

The answer, an old joke: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, of course-and achieving equity is no different. Take small bites that can have big impact and don't worry about getting it wrong sometimes, as you inevitably will. If you keep going, you can do something that brings about change.

Reading: Even if you only have 10 minutes, you can learn something to help you create a more equitable classroom. Websites like Teaching Tolerance, the NEA's EdJustice, and KQED's Mindshift feature resources for lesson planning as well as lessons for you as a teacher. Teaching Tolerance is the perfect place to start, whether you want to use bias-free language to teach tolerance through reading with young learners or plan a social action campaign with high school students.

In addition to a rich collection of K-12 classroom resources, the website features self-guided PD, on-demand webinars, and podcasts that may enable you to earn a certificate-check with your administration first. Those can easily be broken up into small chunks of time. And note that many of the site's feature articles list recommended actions at the bottom.

If your goal is to understand the Black community better, sites designed for Black audiences like The Root, The Undefeated, and Huffington Post's Black Voices are good places to start. These non-mainstream media outlets feature content by minority and minority-supporting journalists. You'll find content on topics not covered in mainstream media, like coverage of historically Black colleges and universities, news about Black brands and influencers, and stories like this one on MIT's first Black female student body president in its 159-year history. If you're teaching Black children who are generally inundated by media that does not reflect them, these are priceless ways you can enrich your current events and show-and-tell circles.

Watching: You can improve your cultural competence and learn about Black Lives Matter by watching " 4 Black Lives Matter Myths Debunked" on YouTube, which will answer quite a few questions on social justice issues, probably including some you didn't even know you had. And if you want help in having real discussions on complex issues with young children, the YouTube show LivingRoomProtest will lead you through conversations on being Black, politics, pride, and even death and the afterlife-try the episode " Education Is a Human Right " for starters.

If you want entertainment with a cultural component, Netflix has a host of shows that cater to a Black audience, as well as original content that regularly features diverse character lineups. Hulu has not only a small curated selection of Black Stories but also six seasons of the binge-worthy, socially conscious Black-ish and its spin-off prequel Mixed-ish. While Black-ish might be a little campy, it tackles real issues surrounding racism, bias, and social justice issues that arise within the Black community.

Taking action: For the civic-minded, the Kellogg Foundation has put together a website that lets you create your own personal plan to support, donate, or volunteer in the way you find most relevant. This site can help you focus your attention on one or two civic tasks with broader impact.

Social action is also a great way to involve students, which multiplies your impact. You can teach students how to write emails or letters by asking them to write to your local government in favor of policy changes banning the eight most deadly policing strategies listed at 8 Can't Wait, which has ideas on how to call or email your government yourself-there's a script you can use or adapt.

Looking within: Finally, and perhaps most importantly, take inventory of your feelings. It's normal to be most comfortable around people who are like you. It's just not good when that makes you and those like you an "us" and those who aren't like you a "them." Use a journal to sort through your personal feelings on racism or read books that provide perspective on systemic inequities and bias. These long-haul strategies will produce change in you while you take more immediate action in other ways.

The devastating events of the last days have left me shaken. I have felt anger, fear, grief-so many emotions. But I have also felt buoyed by the great outpouring of support from my less melanated colleagues who want to listen, learn, and find out how to do better. So many of them are already doing amazing things with diverse students. This piece is dedicated to them. They give me hope that this time, we will fight racism together and bring about lasting change.

Don't stop now. How do you eat an elephant? One small bite at a time.

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A Guide to Equity and Antiracism for Educators

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Teachers shaken by recent events and wondering how to work for change in our society and schools can start with these lesson plans, videos, and other resources. John Minchillo / Associated Press Protesting the killing of George Floyd, a crowd gathers for a rally at Cadman Plaza Park in New York City on June 4, 2020.

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Making Connections: Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain

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Making Connections: Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain

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Elena Aguilar

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In reality, cultural responsiveness is more of a process than a strategy. It begins when a teacher recognizes the cultural capital and tools students of color bring to the classroom. She is then able to respond to students' use of these cultural learning tools positively by noticing, naming, and affirming when students use them in the service of learning. The most common cultural tools for processing information utilize the brain's memory systems -- music, repetition, metaphor, recitation, physical manipulation of content, and ritual. The teacher is "responsive" when she is able to mirror these ways of learning in her instruction, using similar strategies to scaffold learning.

For example, a science teacher I mention in the book wasn't having much success with her sixth-grade students learning the science vocabulary. Rather than continue assigning a word list and have kids look words up in the dictionary, we looked at how she could redesign word study using some combination of the cultural tools familiar to her students.

Afterwards, learning weekly vocabulary was more active and game-like. She reported that students were not only re-engaged, but made noticeable progress in using their knowledge of science vocabulary during the lessons.

You'll notice that there's no mention of Africa, Mexico, or race at all. It's a misconception that culturally responsive instruction has to mention race. It's not race that matters in culturally responsive teaching but awareness of implicit bias that gets in the way of healthy student-teacher relationships and narrow interpretations of learning that ignore the cultural tools students bring to class.

Who is the primary audience for your book? Who do you hope will read it?

This is the first year that our public schools have a majority minority student population. That means our classrooms are more racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse than they have ever been, but the majority of our teaching force is still white.

Historically, students of color experience cross-cultural equity issues that contribute to the achievement gap. Closing this gap is where teachers need support. I believe the book will be a resource for instructional coaches as they build their own knowledge and skill around how to help teachers increase their cultural responsiveness.

I hope every teacher gets a copy of the book and reads it with other colleagues. Hopefully it will spark classroom inquiry in identifying what cultural capital students are bringing to school and how to mirror them during instruction.

What are three things that you hope readers will take away from your book?

First I want teachers to get that you don't have to learn 19 different cultures to be effective. Teachers need to simply begin with understanding the cultural dimensions of communalism -- most communities of color have this cultural trait in common, namely a focus on the interdependence of the group. It can be summed up in the African proverb, "I am because we are." This way of being is contrasted with our dominant culture's more individualist, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps worldview.

The second thing is how important it is to build trusting relationships with students who feel marginalized or misunderstood. The neuroscience is clear on the connection between emotions, trust, and learning. Stress hormones from mistrust block cognition. Students respond to a teacher's focus on care by giving her permission to be tough and push them toward higher achievement.

And last, I hope they take from the book new processes and strategies for operationalizing culturally responsive teaching. I see a lot of school districts using the term, but there isn't much guidance to help teachers build the routines, processes, and structures in their classrooms so that it becomes more than a gimmick.

I'm most intrigued by the title of chapter three, "This Is Your Brain on Culture." Can you give a quick synopsis of that chapter?

This is where the neuroscience is so cool in helping us understand the role of culture in learning. It is like software that programs our "hardware" (the brain). Cultural values and learning practices transmitted from our parents and community guide how the brain wires itself to process information and handle relationships. Neural pathways are over-developed around one's cultural ways of learning.

Culturally responsive teachers know this and piggyback on these well-developed neural pathways with similar types of instruction. Tapping into these neural pathways can help students accelerate their own learning.

I have a huge stack of education-related books that I want to read. Can you convince me why I should read your book?

There are so many good books out there we should be reading that provide new strategies and best practices. But this book isn't a collection of so called "best practices" for African American students or English learners. Instead it provides a framework that helps teachers learn about the resources any group of students brings to class.

The added bonus is that sharing the neuroscience behind culturally responsive moves can help teachers really get it.

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Making Connections: Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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In reality, cultural responsiveness is more of a process than a strategy. It begins when a teacher recognizes the cultural capital and tools students of color bring to the classroom. She is then able to respond to students' use of these cultural learning tools positively by noticing, naming, and affirming when students use them in the service of learning.

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Using Call and Response to Deepen Thinking

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Using Call and Response to Deepen Thinking

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Zaretta Hammond

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All Teachers Should Be Trained To Overcome Their Hidden Biases

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All Teachers Should Be Trained To Overcome Their Hidden Biases

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Soraya Chemaly - Time

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How Teachers' Hidden Biases Are Hurting Our Girls

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Two new reports have found teachers are unintentionally steering girls away from math and penalizing young black girls for being assertive.

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VUSD Resolution - Ethnic and Social Justice Studies

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VUSD Resolution - Ethnic and Social Justice Studies

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Resolution #19-20 Regarding Ethnic and Social Justice Studies

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Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Guidelines

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Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Guidelines

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The following guidelines are based on requirements in the authorizing statute (Assembly Bill 2016, Chapter 327 of the Statutes of 2016), feedback collected from the public at the Webinar held on January 9, 2018, and other public comment.

These guidelines, approved by the State Board of Education (SBE) at its meeting on July 11-12, 2018, will direct the work of the contracted primary writer(s) and the Model Curriculum Advisory Committee when it convenes in February-April 2019 to create a first draft of the curriculum. The model curriculum will undergo a public review and editing by the Instructional Quality Commission prior to being recommended to the SBE.

1. Statutory Requirements

The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum must reflect the requirements in the authorizing statute as well as other legal requirements for curriculum in California. These include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following topics:

The model curriculum shall be written as a guide to allow school districts to adapt their courses to reflect the pupil demographics in their communities.

The model curriculum shall include examples of courses offered by local educational agencies that have been approved as meeting the A-G admissions requirements of the University of California and the California State University, including, to the extent possible, course outlines for those courses.

The model curriculum must meet federal accessibility requirements pursuant to Section 508 of the United States Workforce Rehabilitation Act. Content that cannot be made accessible may not be included in the document.

2. General principles. The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum shall:

Include accurate information based on current and confirmed research;

When appropriate, be consistent with the content and instructional shifts in the 2016 History-Social Science Framework, in particular the emphasis upon student-based inquiry in instruction;

Promote the values of civic engagement and civic responsibility;

Align to the Literacy Standards for History-Social Studies within the California Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History-Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects, as appropriate;

Promote self and collective empowerment;

Be written in language that is inclusive and supportive of multiple users, including teachers (single and multiple-subject), support staff, administrators, and the community;

Encourage cultural understanding of how different groups have struggled and worked together, highlighting core ethnic studies concepts such as equality, justice, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, etc.;

Include information on the ethnic studies movement, specifically the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), and its significance in the establishment of ethnic studies as a discipline and work in promoting diversity and inclusion within higher education;

Promote critical thinking and rigorous analysis of history, systems of oppression, and the status quo in an effort to generate discussions on futurity, and imagine new possibilities.

3. Course Outlines. The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum shall:

Include course outlines that offer a thematic approach to ethnic studies with concepts that provide space for educators to build in examples and case studies from diverse backgrounds;

Include course outlines that allow for ethnic studies to be taught as a stand-alone elective or integrated into an existing course (e.g., sociology, English language arts, and history);

Include course outlines that allow for local, state-specific, national, and global inquiry into ethnic studies;

Have the capability to engage multiple languages and genealogies;

Engage a range of disciplines beyond traditional history and social sciences, including but not limited to: visual and performing arts, English language arts, economics, biology, gender & sexuality studies, etc.

4. Audience. The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum shall:

Be sensitive to the needs of all grade levels and incorporated disciplines, providing balance and guidance to the field;

Engage pedagogies that allow for student and community responsiveness, validate students' lived experience, and address socioemotional development;

Be inclusive, creating space for all students regardless of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, or citizenship, to learn different perspectives.

5. Administrative and Teacher Support. The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum shall:

Be easy to use both for teachers with educational backgrounds in ethnic studies, and those without such experience;

Provide resources on professional development opportunities;

Provide information for district and school administrators to support the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum and instruction;

Provide examples of different methods of instruction and pedagogical approaches;

Provide support for a collaborative teaching model that encourages teachers to work with colleagues across disciplines, further highlighting the interdisciplinarity of ethnic studies;

Provide support for the use of technology and multimedia resources during instruction;

Include access to resources for instruction (e.g., lesson plans, curricula, primary source documents, and other resources) that are currently being used by districts.

Questions: Curriculum Frameworks and Instructional Resources Division | CFIRD@cde.ca.gov | 916-319-0881

Last Reviewed: Thursday, November 03, 2022

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Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Guidelines

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Guidelines for the 2020 Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.

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CDE Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Update

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CDE Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Update

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California Department of Education
News Release

California Department of Education
News Release

The Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) was charged with developing an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum that shall be a guide to allow school districts to adapt their courses to better reflect the pupil demographics in their communities. Last week at the IQC meeting, California Department of Education (CDE) staff presented a brief update on the status of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. CDE recommended that revisions to the draft follow the State Board of Education guidelines and follow Assembly Bill 2016, the legislation that directed the state to create a model curriculum. This will ensure that the curriculum is written to encourage cultural understanding of how different groups have struggled and worked together, as well as highlight core ethnic studies concepts such as equality, justice, race, ethnicity, and indigeneity. CDE also recommended that it be written in language that is inclusive and supportive of multiple users.

Since the last IQC meeting in November, much work and outreach has been done by CDE after receiving thousands of public comments about the draft released in summer 2019. In October, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond hosted a panel discussion that included subject matter experts as well as legislators. The panel provided different perspectives on ethnic studies implementation at the K-12 level. CDE staff have also used this time to review, analyze, and synthesize the more than 20,000 public comments to make recommendations to the IQC in spring 2020. WestEd is currently conducting focus groups for CDE that are comprised of teachers with ethnic studies experience as well as teachers who have not taught ethnic studies but may in the future. CDE is also working with districts that have implemented ethnic studies to utilize their learnings in our recommendations.

Keeping in mind that ethnic studies has traditionally been a higher education course, the model curriculum that the IQC is charged with developing will serve as a guidance document to schools that choose to implement ethnic studies in the K-12 system. Over the course of history, both in our state and nationally, specific ethnic groups have had unjust treatment even from respected institutions of authority. The curriculum taught in our schools has not done enough to highlight and preserve the contributions of people of color and has actually minimized the importance of their role. A movement to create a better model of inclusion to be taught in our K-12 system was established in the hopes of teaching a history that is more representative of what actually occurred. Ethnic studies as a whole should represent a broad range of topics, but it must devote a special emphasis to people of color, including their experiences and their important role in our state and national history.

Therefore, our recommendations will acknowledge and honor the four foundational groups: African American, Asian American, Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x, and Native American. By providing guidance to teachers on how to make connections to student population demographics utilizing various resources, including the History and Social Science Framework, we must also honor the human experience and the intersectionality of all students that we serve.

We are proud of the efforts that have been made since our last update, and we look forward to providing our recommended revisions to the IQC in spring/summer 2020. As of now, the legislation allows that a final draft will go to the State Board of Education for adoption in March 2021.

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Tony Thurmond - State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5602, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100

Last Reviewed: Friday, January 24, 2020

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California Department of EducationNews Release California Department of EducationNews Release The Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) was charged with developing an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum that shall be a guide to allow school districts to adapt their courses to better reflect the pupil demographics in their communities.

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Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete

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Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete

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Dr. Jeff Duncan Andrade - Harvard Educational Review

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Why Critical Hope May Be the Resource Kids Need Most From Their Teachers

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Why Critical Hope May Be the Resource Kids Need Most From Their Teachers

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Dr. Jeff Duncan Andrade - KQED

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"There are a lot of other things that we're not attentive to enough, and that we're not measuring, to make it important in schools," Duncan-Andrade said. Educators have known about Maslow's hierarchy of needs for decades, but Duncan-Andrade contends it has to be at the center of everything educators do. He's found it essential that students believe he cares about them on that basic level before they'll be willing to learn from him.

Research coming out of the medical field about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) fuels Duncan-Andrade's argument that inequality has a huge impact on the health and learning of children. Some researchers estimate that one in three residents of urban areas with high rates of violent crimes has post-traumatic stress disorder. But even worse, these young people aren't "post traumatic" because the trauma they experience is ongoing, around them always. Researchers have come up with a new name for this disorder: complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

"The symptoms are more complex than what they're seeing in the military," Duncan-Andrade said, and schools are not equipping teachers to handle this health crisis. "The best I see in schools is a one-off training on trauma, and now you're trauma-informed and go help those kids." That's nowhere near enough to equip people to show up for kids in the difficult but necessary ways required.
THE ROLE OF HOPE
"Hope is the best indicator for the degree to which kids will successfully navigate toxic stress, and the degree to which kids are less likely to engage in self-harming behavior," Duncan-Andrade told me in another interview. But he warns the hope he's talking about can't be a false hope -- kids see right through that.

Too often, he said, teachers send the message that if students come to class and study hard they will succeed. The problem is that's often not true, and kids know that. It's a type of hope that comes from outside the community, based on assumptions that aren't rooted in the reality that many of the most struggling students experience. Parroting this message devalues the lived experiences of kids by ignoring them.

But there's another kind of hope that's equally bad -- deferred hope. This is when people know better than to blame the kids, so they blame the system instead. "The problem with this is, of course, that their critique never results in a transformative program for the kids," Duncan-Andrade said in a talk he gave at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Blaming the system defers a solution for the kids in school right now, waiting for a utopian society where inequality, racism and poverty don't exist. Kids need hope now.

That's why Duncan-Andrade advocates for something he calls "critical hope." To achieve critical hope educators have to combine material resources, like great teaching, with fierce love for students demonstrated with actions, not words. This is incredibly hard work, but through all its ups and downs critical hope requires educators to continue believing they can do what they've never done before. Duncan-Andrade knows what he's asking is hard, but he also knows that students are watching the adults.

"Wounded children tell the most truth," Duncan-Andrade said at the Deeper Learning Conference. "And they tell it in the most raw ways. And it's painful to hear that." But when teachers send those wounded children out of class, passing them off to someone else in the building, it sends a message that they're too difficult to love. He's clear that fiercely loving students does not mean there is no conflict. Any good parent knows sometimes doing what's best for kids doesn't make them like you, but it should always show your love.

"You win the heart to get to the head," Duncan-Andrade said. "We keep banging on their heads."

The most "hopeful" teachers for Duncan-Andrade are the ones who see their classrooms as microecosystems. Teachers have no control over the institutional racisms kids face, the families they come from, where they live, or what happened on the way to school that day, but they can control the conditions of their classroom. They can create a new kind of soil for the roses to grow in, soil that isn't toxic, that allows them to flourish.

"No master gardener blames the seed for not growing," Duncan-Andrade said. "They know they have to change the soil. You've got to license yourself to be audacious."

Students will make mistakes on this journey; they'll lose all the progress they've made when another destabilizing event happens. And it will be incredibly frustrating to the teachers that love them. But, "We have to learn to love that about kids. And when we learn to love that about kids, we can remain audaciously hopeful," Duncan-Andrade said.

As a high school teacher, college professor and founder of the Roses in Concrete Community School in Oakland, Duncan-Andrade tries to embody the tenets of effective teaching that he champions. He admits he doesn't have it all figured out. He has never had a perfect day, but he hopes that approaching teaching as "radical healing" will start to heal the community, too.

He doesn't want the battered roses growing up in his square of Oakland concrete to get transplanted to a rose garden, never to return. He wants them to go off to institutions of higher education and take advantage of the knowledge, resources, opportunities and access found there before coming back to reinsert themselves into the concrete. Because when the people who "got out" come back, they widen the cracks for the seeds coming up behind them.

"So much of what we teach our young people is that those battered petals are bad, as opposed to that's what enabled them to reach the sun," Duncan-Andrade said. He thinks young people still love Tupac because his narrative is about staying connected to the concrete -- the parents, community and places of one's childhood -- even when one has become a healthy, thriving rose.
*A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Duncan-Andrade was still teaching at Fremont High School. He no longer does. We regret the error.

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Why Critical Hope May Be the Resource Kids Need Most From Their Teachers

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"There are a lot of other things that we're not attentive to enough, and that we're not measuring, to make it important in schools," Duncan-Andrade said. Educators have known about Maslow's hierarchy of needs for decades, but Duncan-Andrade contends it has to be at the center of everything educators do.

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Whistling Vivaldi and Beating Stereotypes

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Whistling Vivaldi and Beating Stereotypes

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Dr. Claude Steele - NPR

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NEAL CONAN, host:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. Im Neal Conan in Washington.

Our social identities come from a lot of places: our race, our sex, our age, our political affiliations, our medical diagnoses, our high schools, colleges, our favorite baseball teams. And each of those identities comes along with a set of expectations or stereotypes.

We all know that women can't compete with men at higher math. We all know that white men can't jump. And then there's a curious fact: When confronted with those negative stereotypes, female math majors do perform worse on tests, and white jumpers fail to clear the usual bar. Take away the threat to their identity, and they'll do fine.

It's a phenomenon social psychologist Claude Steele calls the stereotype threat, and his new book looks at the many and surprising ways that these expectations affect our lives. He also lays out a plan to minimize the impact.

So call and tell us what situations you've had to deal with in which your social identity and the expectations that come along with it presented a challenge. How did you overcome it, if you did? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our Web site. Thats at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

Later in the hour, actor, producer and now Broadway director Stanley Tucci joins us to talk about his new revival of the 1989 farce "Lend me a Tenor." But first, Claude Steele. His book is called "Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affects Us." He joins us from our bureau in New York City. Nice to have you on TALK OF THE NATION today.

Dr. CLAUDE STEELE (Author, "Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us"): Great to be here.

CONAN: And let me ask you to start with your realization of your own social identity, when you were a kid going to the swimming pool.

Dr. STEELE: Well, as I begin the book with the story of trying to remember when I first became aware I was African-American. And to the best of my ability, we psychologists know that memory is a construction. So you're always cautious, but to the best of my ability, it was one day, the last day of school, second or third grade, coming home with kids in the neighborhood. And the conversation came up that gee, we couldn't go to the swimming pool that was three or so blocks away, in a white neighborhood, and that we'd have to except on Wednesday afternoon. So if we were going to swim that summer in that pool, we would have to go only on Wednesday afternoons. And the reason for that became because we were black, because we were African-American.

And that was, in some ways, the first realization I had of being black and that the other kids I lived around were also black and that we had this contingency of identity, as I've been calling it, to deal with.

CONAN: The identity, being black, the contingency being you can't swim at that pool except on Wednesdays.

Dr. STEELE: Exactly.

CONAN: And you write later in the book that, in fact, had someone sat you down at that age and said son, let me tell you about discrimination, that you would have listened politely for a little while. But if they told you can only swim at the pool on Wednesdays, suddenly you were pretty interested in race.

Dr. STEELE: That's correct. I mean, it really the swimming pool restriction really affected how my life was going to be. The instruction from adults that this is important and you should think about it and understand it, those things are kind of abstract and may be interesting, but they wouldn't be nearly as compelling psychologically, and they sort of take over your thinking and functioning as much as a real restriction tied to an identity.

CONAN: And a lot of your book is, in fact, a result of your investigation as to why specifically African-American, but later minority students, seemed to do so poorly academically at big institutions like the University of Michigan, where you worked, or at Stanford University, where you also work. And indeed, what you found out was it was this social identity and the negative consequences of it.

Dr. STEELE: Yes, the prospect if you can imagine, you talked to - you had a woman at the beginning of the hour talking about her experience in math. You can imagine being a woman taking a difficult math course, let's say in her second or third year of college, and experiencing frustration at that.

That frustration in math occasions the relevance of the stereotype about women's math ability. And if she's invested in doing well at math, she could worry that oh my goodness, you know, I've invested so much in it, but here it is. Maybe what they say is true. And that could be upsetting and distracting and interfere with her functioning right there in the middle of that course or in the middle of taking that standardized test. And that has been what our research is focused on, is trying to test that idea, put it to test. I and my colleagues have done that over the last 20 years.

CONAN: And one of the fascinating findings is that, in fact: A, you do have to care about the outcome of this performance, and the more accomplished you are, the more this effect shows up.

Dr. STEELE: Yeah, yeah, you have more invested in it. So the if you really, if you don't care about if you're a woman, and you don't care about doing well with math, your life is on another path, then the prospect of confirming such a stereotype about your group's ability or - it isn't as upsetting to you because you're not invested in that area, but when you've really invested yourself, then the prospect of that stereotype being true or its being seen to be true and you being treated accordingly, that has considerable impact. It scares you, and that fear can directly interfere with your functioning.

CONAN: And you go on to prove this, as you mentioned, with white, female math majors, well, female math majors in general. There's a fascinating part of the test where, in fact, you somebody tests Asian female math majors to see whether both stereotypes will work: A, they're failing at math because they're female, or their expectation that they will succeed because they're Asian.

Dr. STEELE: Yes, yes. I didn't do that, but some other very clever researchers did, and they found that the performance follows whichever stereotype you make most salient in the situation, most obvious. If you remind them of their gender, then they underperform, being affected by that negative stereotype. If you remind them of their ethnicity, then they don't underperform in relation to men. So whichever stereotype is in the air seems to drive the direction of performance.

CONAN: And this goes to white sprinters, you also found out when they're posed against black sprinters - and let me read you a quote from later in the book: There exists no group on earth that is not negatively stereotyped in some way: the old, the young, Northerners, Southerners, WASPs, computer whiz kids, Californians and so forth. In other words, all of us, no matter who we are, somewhere there's a negative stereotype that we all bear.

Dr. STEELE: Indeed it's true.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Dr. STEELE: I could never haven't yet found a group that doesn't have at least some negative stereotype about them.

CONAN: And does this help explain to you why we seem to live in a nation where there is no group that does not feel like an aggrieved minority?

Dr. STEELE: Well, it's probably part of it, that there is no group that doesn't have a negative stereotype, and when that if that stereotype is relevant to them in an important set of situations, like the classroom or the workplace or the basketball court or something that they care about, then they're going to feel this pressure.

I mean, the beauty, of course, is that from this analysis grows some convincing strategies for reducing this threat. And some people, of course, know these, learn these strategies on their own, but I think we've got a long way in kind of isolating some.

CONAN: Indeed, that experiment with the women Asian women math majors points to one. If you tell them a positive part of the stereotype, that'll help.

Dr. STEELE: That's right. That's right. Being reminded of positive role models can greatly reduce the otherwise damaging effects of the negative stereotype.

CONAN: Let's get some...

Dr. STEELE: That's one strategy.

CONAN: Let's get some callers in on the conversation. We'll get to some of the others a little bit later in the program.

Dr. STEELE: Great.

CONAN: Our guest is Claude Steele, author of "Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us." 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. When has stereotypes about your social identity affected your life? John(ph) is on the line from Manchester, New Hampshire.

JOHN (Caller): Hey, yeah. This is John. How are you guys doing?

CONAN: Good.

Dr. STEELE: Fine.

JOHN: Yeah, hey. I want to say something about the (unintelligible) goes beyond, like, gender or race or class like that, but I found that since I've graduated high school, and I've yet to go to college, but I'm in the U.S. Forest Service. And so I'll show up on the worksite, and right away, they'll have this instant stigma that since I've not attended college, that they have stereotyped that I am not as qualified or capable, but it turns out I'm able to par, if not excel past their expectations. So that's one stereotype, one that maybe you guys could address for me.

CONAN: Okay. As a fellow non-collegian, John, I hear you. But go ahead, Claude Steele.

JOHN: Yeah, thats, like, that's what I'm talking about. It goes beyond, like I've seen - so I've worked with females, blacks, whites, every race you can think of, every demographic, every background. And the thing is, is like it comes down to the end of the day, you're sitting around the fire after you've just worked really hard all day in the Park Service that it'll come down to the fact that, like, they'll look at you less respectively in the one fact that you don't have that piece of paper saying you know what you know, but all the while, I've had three or four years experience now past anything that these college graduates really have.

Like, they're all greenhorns compared to me, but since I don't have the piece of paper, there's instantly a stereotype that I don't know exactly the same, like, how to make a grade in the trail, or I don't know the same, like, the same...

CONAN: We hear you, John. And let me ask Claude Steele about this. In fact, this sort of comes up with an email you got from somebody who attended one of your lectures and said: Gee, you've listed all these things that have negative stereotypes. You didn't mention mental illness.

Dr. STEELE: Yeah, that's a good example, and it connects to the caller's concern that this was, I was going on and on about these other stereotypes and performance in math and athletics and the like, and the email reminded me that in her case, she was manic-depressive or bipolar and that in the audience, she felt reluctant to raise her hand and ask about that because she thought everybody would begin to see her that way and to see her as having a mental illness and that that might affect her employment options and how people related to her.

And she provided a perfect example of the vast array of forms of negative of stereotype threat that people can experience, just as the caller's experience does. That's one that I hadn't really thought of, but as he describes it, it's a very compelling experience. And it's precisely an example of stereotypes around in that there's something about him that, you know, authorizes this kind of stereotype, and he becomes aware of it, and that's the experience of the threat. And it affects his relationships with other people, his functioning at various times and so on.

CONAN: And let me ask you about the title of your book, "Whistling Vivaldi."

Dr. STEELE: Yes, that comes from a friend, Brent Staples who writes for the New York Times, and his autobiography called "Parallel Time," a great book I can plug. He describes being a graduate student, an African-American graduate student at the University of Chicago, walking down the street dressed as a student and realizing that his mere presence was making whites uncomfortable.

And they would avoid him or sort of cross the street to get away from him and so on. He realized from this kind of behavior that they were seeing him through the lens of a negative stereotype about African-Americans in that neighborhood, that perhaps as a young male, black male, he might be violent. And it was making his whole experience of the situation tense and awkward. He learned how to whistle Vivaldi to deflect that stereotype.

CONAN: When they heard the classical music being whistled, they said oh, this is a man of refinement.

Dr. STEELE: Exactly. And he relaxed, they relaxed, and the situation went on.

CONAN: Another cue, perhaps we'll get to it a bit later. We're talking with Claude Steele about his book "Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us." Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. Im Neal Conan in Washington.

No one is immune from stereotype. Every one of us is part of some group affected by negative perceptions, and we know we may be judged by it. Claude Steele calls it stereotype threat, a topic he studied for many years. He writes about it in his latest book, "Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us."

So call and tell us what situations you've had to deal with in which your social identity and the expectations that come along with it presented a challenge. How did you overcome it if you did? 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our Web site. Thats at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

And let's go next to Tonya(ph), Tonya with us from Madison.

TONYA (Caller): Hi, Neal.

CONAN: Good to talk with you.

TONYA: You, too. So I'm an engineer. When I was in K through 12, I had showed that I had a lot of apparently from that age - some good mathematical skills, and by my senior year, I was taking, like, honors calculus.

And then I went to a community college, a small college in Southern Michigan and was valedictorian with my associate's in engineering and had won the engineering department award. And I transferred to the University of Michigan, and suddenly I was in a very different place.

I was in a place that had people from all over the world, you know, predominately men. And I think that in retrospect now, listening to this, that it seems to make sense because when I would take an exam, I would get everything right that I would finish, but I almost feel like I was trying to be so meticulous because I was fearful that I wasn't going to perform how I was used to performing that I actually didn't perform as well as I was used to performing.

CONAN: And that seems like an accurate description of this effect, Claude Steele.

Mr. STEELE: Yes, that really is a perfect description of it. And it is at the University of Michigan, although all schools have this, many schools, especially stronger schools, have this kind of experience is rife - can be rife there.

That's a perfect description because somebody - it's not an effect that's tied to their real abilities. It's, in effect, it's almost like an intimidation factor, and the other critical thing in the caller's description is place.

In some places, it can be very powerful, where there are a lot of cues that make one aware of one's identity and the contingencies that can be tied to it. That can make the experience of stereotype threat much worse, whereas in other situations, where maybe there are more women, you know, you're in a high school, and the girls are just as good at math at the boys, and there isn't as much visibility of this stereotype to give it credibility, it isn't a powerful thing.

But as you move up the ladder, and there are fewer women in the classes and the like, the stereotype and the pressures of it become more intense.

CONAN: The examples you use in your book is Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman justice of the United States Supreme Court, felt intense pressure until she was joined on the court by another woman.

Mr. STEELE: That's right, Ginsburg.

CONAN: Indeed.

Mr. STEELE: Which she describes as the happiest day one of the happiest days in her life was when Ruth Bader Ginsburg showed up on the Supreme Court. That made it so that she wasn't the only woman, and everything she did wasn't interpreted in terms of her being a woman.

That put a lot of pressure and made all the stereotypes constantly irrelevant to her functioning and I'm sure must have made her miserable, as she describes. But then when another woman comes, her decision is not just a woman's decision. There are several women's decisions here, and it dissipates.

CONAN: And it raises again and Tonya, thank you very much for the call -raises another one of the solutions you suggest in your book. It's an idea called critical mass. If you have enough of a member of whichever minority it is, and again you use the example of women in a philharmonic orchestra.

Mr. STEELE: Yes, that sends a strong signal that that identity is not itself a source of disdain, or in the situation, that that identity can be valued there, and it's possible to be there and to function effectively. That kind of a message that critical mass sends, relaxes the sense in a person that they're under this kind of threat.

CONAN: And that number is a little hard to judge in each situation, two enough apparently for the Supreme Court, but 40 percent as it turns out for a philharmonic orchestra.

Mr. STEELE: Yeah.

CONAN: But anyway, let's go next to Chris(ph), and Chris with us from Rehoboth in Delaware.

CHRIS (Caller): Hi. I am a 53-year-old woman. So I grew up in the '50s and '60s, and I have to say that my personal response to anyone telling me you can't do that because you're a girl has consistently been in my life to say, well, yes I can. And I'm going to prove it to you, and I'll do it better than you do.

Mr. STEELE: Yes, it's important to realize that the causes of underperformance in our research are not from women giving up. They don't give up under that kind of pressure. They do try extra hard, but sometimes, that can not foster. That can interfere with, performance in its own right.

What's happening when you're doing that is that you're it affects the allocation of your cognitive resources. They're you're paying more attention to trying hard. You're paying more attention to thoughts that are kind of resisting thoughts that are disturbing and so on. And with that kind of activity going on in the background, there's less attention to be allocated to the task at hand, and that's how this kind of threat can interfere with performance.

CONAN: As you Claude Steele puts it in his book, you're not only doing the test or whatever it is, you're slaying a ghost.

Mr. STEELE: Yes, you're multitasking.

CHRIS: But that hasn't I haven't had the experience of ever underperforming in my field. I mean, I don't I understand what you're saying, and I think I probably agree with you.

CONAN: He's talking about generalized situations, not obviously, there are individuals individuals vary.

CHRIS: Right.

Mr. STEELE: Individuals vary, and situations vary. There are some situations where the stereotype about gender is more or less relevant. The relevance of the stereotype varies. It's very pointed in the area of math and quantitatively based fields.

CHRIS: Well, I'm a clergy person. So it's very pointed in my field, as well.

Mr. STEELE: Did you say clergy?

CONAN: Yes.

CHRIS: Yeah, clergy.

Mr. STEELE: Oh, well, I guess that's true.

(Soundbite of laughter)

CHRIS: Yeah, yeah. No, I just wonder if I mean, to me, it's not a threat, it's a challenge. It's an opportunity. It's an invitation. Is that just the personal part or is that...

Mr. STEELE: Well, I do think that's the most constructive way...

CHRIS: Huh?

Mr. STEELE: I do think that's the most constructive way to regard it. I really do. It's just that in certain situations where performance on a difficult task is the issue and is persistently the issue, one is at the frontier of their skills, moving through a math curriculum or a physics curriculum, or that's where this sort of daily pressure can begin to have more of a wearing effect.

CONAN: And indeed thank you very much, Chris indeed not just a wearing effect. You come across a phenomenon called John Henryism, which may help explain the shorter life spans, due to hypertension, of some African-Americans.

Mr. STEELE: Yes. This is again not my own research, but it's very relevant in the sense that it describes some of the costs of trying hard over a lifetime to resist a stereotype, that it can cause be a source of hypertension and other related diseases, the effort to if you're in a situation where you're consistently pushing against that and pushing against that, a tax is paid eventually, and some of that tax has to do with one's health.

CONAN: There are other implications to this, and you don't go into this in great depth, but you present some research, again not your own, about how easily we humans discriminate against each other, even when the categories we're divided in are seemingly meaningless: over-estimaters and under-estimaters, whatever that may mean.

And yet when placed in those categories, we will work on behalf of our own group, to individuals in our group to the detriment of people in other groups, and this helps explain, to some degree, this phenomenon seemingly we're hardwired with it why - this is interestingly presented in the context of a young man from Lebanon, who is well, he's got all kinds of stereotypes, but he writes about violence in the Middle East.

Mr. STEELE: Yeah, the first it turns out this is again a whole lot of social-psychological research, not mine but just the minimal divisions among us, if they're made salient, we can begin to identify with whichever side we're on. It's like identifying with something like our school.

It's not really rationally, from a distance, that great an identity, but we identify very quickly with it and feel those feelings very deeply. It's something fundamental about being a human being. It becomes part of our identity.

And so it the point there is that it just takes as kind of a minimal division of people for this whole apparatus of stereotype threat to get underway. We start to stereotype the other group. They stereotype us. We react to the stereotypes, and you have a situation of the sort we're describing.

CONAN: And then they are the other, and you can do terrible things.

Mr. STEELE: Yes, in the name of having one's group identity threatened, to protect a group: your country, your school. The argument is that people can do things, be more violent, than they would be sometimes even in defense of themselves.

CONAN: Let's get another caller in on the conversation. This is J.R., J.R. with us from Circleville in Ohio.

J.R. (Caller): Yes, I was born in southeast Ohio, and I think I first realized that I was being stereotyped as, you know, an Appalachian when I made it to grad school, and I was helping teach a class for high school teachers. I was one of the grad students who was TAing, and I had a teacher from northeast Ohio say well, you know, you're awful smart, or you know this very well or whatever she said, and where are you from?

And I said, well, I was from Southeast Ohio. And she said, well, you did very well for yourself.

CONAN: Hmm.

Dr. STEELE: Hmm.

J.R.: Get out from where you were. And now I'm a school teacher. I'm working back in Southeast Ohio. And now I think I've come to realize the stereotype (unintelligible). I didn't realize it as a student so much. But now I'm trying to teach students and I'm trying to help them overcome these stereotypes that they've become So...

CONAN: And what techniques do you use to do that?

J.R.: Well, I wish I could tell you I was very effective at it. I don't know how effective I am. I'm only three years into teaching now, so I'm developing these things. The real ideal is to hold them to the highest standards that I can and I make them realize, hopefully, eventually, sometimes I fail at this, but I try to hold them to the highest standards and let them know that they can succeed even when it's hard. And that it being hard doesn't mean that it's -you don't - you're not smart. It just means it's hard. It's hard for everybody. It's hard if you're from Southeast Ohio or if you're Brooklyn, New York, if you're from Boston, Massachusetts, this is hard for everybody to understand.

CONAN: Well, that's one technique, Claude Steele.

Dr. STEELE: Yes. I - you've - most of the solutions we've come up with people have found in their own lives, and this is a perfect example of that. One of the - to put - bring it to a sharp point, one of the things we found is that if you give - if you're very demanding in a classroom situation of that sort and, at the same time, you affirm the students' abilities to realize those high standards that you're setting, you - the combination of things is very effective at the reducing the effects - the negative effects of stereotype threat. It signals to the student that they're not being seen as having limited ability. They're not being seen through the lens of that stereotype. And then they can rise to the call of doing better and, you know, working hard in the -with the material.

CONAN: This was described in your book as something you stumble across by accident when, again, testing some of those female math majors and the expectation that they might do worse, you inadvertently reminded them that, well, you're from Stanford.

Dr. STEELE: Yes.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Dr. STEELE: And with that frame in mind, they relaxed, they did a lot better. It made the stereotype about women's math abilities just less relevant to them. That's one of the sort of tricks of reducing this threat is to do something that makes the stereotype that would normally be relevant to them, not relevant in that situation. And that's one strategy we used, was to remind them of being that they were from Stanford.

But the gentlemen's strategy is another one. If - it tells his students he's not seeing them through the negative stereotype about their background. He's demanding a lot from them and he's affirming their ability to achieve it.

CONAN: J.R., good luck to you.

J.R.: Thank you very much, Neal.

CONAN: Appreciate the phone call.

Dr. STEELE: Yeah.

CONAN: We're talking with Claude Steele about his book, "Whistling Vivaldi," and other clues to how stereotypes affect us.

You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And we have this email from Glen(ph) in Kansas City. My name is Glen. As a female filmmaker, it's been intimidating to get my projects noticed. One of the things that's helped me most is submitting to festivals so many times it's assumed Glen is a male, and ironically, this has helped me. Once when I checked in at a festival, they asked me if I was his assistant, withholding the badge until I explained I was Glen.

And it's interesting, that email came in and reminded of the story you tell about Anatole Broyard.

Dr. STEELE: Yes. Yes. This is a strategy used to avoid stereotype threat. And I think, in some ways, it's some of the more compelling evidence of the existence of stereotype threat in real life that a couple of strategies, both passing, where people change their names, or if they have the appearance to do it, shift from being black to being white; representing themselves as white to avoid the experience of being negatively stereotyped. Or another strategy is to expatriate...

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

Dr. STEELE: ...to move to another society where the stereotypes are different and one doesn't have to, therefore, experience the same kind of stereotyping.

CONAN: Oh.

Dr. STEELE: I think both of those strategies, passing and expatriation, are similar to the Glen strategy that she's using there where she's deflecting being seen and treated in terms of the stereotype by representing herself differently.

CONAN: Let's see if we can go next to John(ph). John with us from Flint, Michigan.

JOHN (Caller): Yes. I have a situation where my daughter is, not just (unintelligible), also my daughter is in grade school. We lived in an affluent neighborhood and went to a nice - very nice school. And she did great in math and all her subjects. We had to move to another neighborhood, but went to an intercity school. And immediately, all her grades dipped because they were treating her as with the other African-American students, as if their level of comprehension is at one level.

It's kind of funny, because at home, we would do her homework and she'd get everything right. But when she went to school, her teachers said she had a notable difficulty in solving problems. And then we - to solve to remedy the situation, we took her out of that school and put her into a private school. And lo and behold, she's almost like a math whiz of her grade.

So we're trying to figure out, you know, what was the situation with the one school. We have a before and after picture, but now we can see that, you know, maybe she was being stereotyped as far as, you know, what - relationship with everyone else.

Dr. STEELE: Yeah. It sounds like in the school where she did poorly, did worse than expected, she was under some low expectations on the part of her teachers and that maybe the whole climate there had that. I'm not sure that's all together stereotype threat, but it's nonetheless a powerful social psychological pressure to be seen in terms of - and treated in terms of low expectations that can undermine motivation and undermine interest, and all kinds of things that you're describing were evidenced by your daughter.

CONAN: And we wish her continued good luck, John, in pursuit of math.

And - but let me - we just have a minute left, but I wanted to ask you about the alternate theory, which is if you're looking at the situation, yes, there could be this psychological pressure that people are responding to. It can also be something inherent, that maybe women aren't as good as men at math, biologically, and something in their brains or that white men can't jump.

Dr. STEELE: Aha. You'll have to read the book for how we sort out these explanations.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Prof. STEELE: But we do, I think, definitively, over 20 years of research. And you do it by putting people in performance situations and showing that their performances can be equal when you get rid of this stereotype threat. Whereas the other theory - the different God made women and men different theory...

(Soundbite of laughter)

Dr. STEELE: ...to put it nicely, that theory would predict that nothing you did in the situation would change. If you give them difficult math, women are always going to under-perform. If you give difficult problems, African-American students are always going to under-perform. Well, they don't. When you do things in those situations to reduce stereotype threat and that is probably the principal evidence that - in behalf of this argument.

CONAN: Claude Steele, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it.

Dr. STEELE: Thank you. It's my pleasure.

CONAN: Claude Steele's book, "Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us." And he joined us from our bureau in New York.

Coming up, Oscar-nominated actor Stanley Tucci on his career, his Broadway directorial debut and the value of farce in tough times. If you'd like to join us to talk with Stanley Tucci, 800-989-8255. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

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'Whistling Vivaldi' And Beating Stereotypes

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Women taking a math test will perform worse when reminded that women aren't expected to do well in math. Social psychologist Claude Steele calls this an example of the "stereotype threat." In his book, Whistling Vivaldi, he lays out a plan to reshape those expectations.

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Culturally Responsive Teaching Mindset in Writers' Workshop

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Culturally Responsive Teaching Mindset in Writers' Workshop

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Writing Mindset

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Ideas to Spark Your Culturally Responsive Teaching Mindset in Writers' Workshop - Writing Mindset

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Zaretta Hammond's book Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students provides the link to understanding the importance of being culturally responsive and the science behind our students' learning.

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We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be

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We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be

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Cornelius Minor

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We Got This.: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who O...

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Read 251 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. "That's the problem with you, Minor" a student huffed. "You want to make everything about ...

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Teaching Tolerance

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During and after reading

Why?

The world looks different depending on who and where you are, and students need practice understanding multiple points of view. The study of texts that reflect their own identities, experiences and motivations (mirrors) and also provide insight into the identities, experiences and motivations of others (windows) can move students toward more nuanced perceptions of the world around them.

How?

Before you begin

1. Read Emily Style's essay "Curriculum as Window and Mirror."

2. Sign up for a free account on polleverywhere.com. (With the free account, polls process up to 25 responses.)

3. Create a poll asking, "Is this text a window or a mirror for you?" Provide two answer choices: window and mirror. Note: polleverywhere can receive responses via text message or through a tablet or computer.

4. Choose a text to use with your students. Read the text and highlight sections that could be a window or a mirror for your students.

With students

1. Introduce students to the theory of windows and mirrors.

2. Share the text. Read the author and title. If necessary, have students conduct research about the identities of the author(s) and the background of the text. Alternately, provide that information for students.

3. Have students compare the author's identity groups to their own identity groups (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, class, ability, religion). What identities are shared? What identities are not shared?

4. Read the full text. Re-read the text if necessary.

5. Assess students' understanding of the text. Require students to cite textual evidence in order to demonstrate their understanding of the text's central message.

6. Ask students to take out their cellphone or device to participate in the real-time poll.

7. Display polleverywhere question with directions for voting. If possible, project the poll for the whole class to see. If projection is not an option, write the directions on the board.

8. Read one of the preselected excerpts of the text aloud to students.

9. Ask students to consider if the text excerpt offers a window or a mirror for them, make their selection and vote.

10. Announce the poll results to the class. Display them if possible.

11. Use the following questions to discuss poll results.

Why was this a mirror for you? Use text-based evidence to explain.

Why was this a window for you? Use text-based evidence to explain.

12. Conclude by having students discuss how the text-based evidence relates to the text as a whole.

English language learners

Excerpting the text will help English language learners isolate a smaller portion of the text and increase their comprehension. Highlight the excerpted section of the text ahead of time for ELL students. Chunking the text in this way can aid their understanding and increase their participation.

Connection to anti-bias education

Text as Window and Mirror incorporates identity and diversity domains of Teaching Tolerance's Anti-bias Framework. Seeing their identities mirrored in texts can foster positive social identity development in students by increasing their pride, confidence and healthy self-esteem, and recognizing traits of the dominant culture, their home culture and other cultures (Identity). Viewing a text as a window allows students to explore the lived experiences of others, building empathy and understanding while examining diversity in social, cultural, political and historical contexts (Diversity).

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This task helps students consider if the text is a window or a mirror through practicing literacy skills and using technology. Students will decide if author, speaker, characters or content in a text reflect students' lived experiences (mirror) or provide a window into the lived experiences of people whose identities differ from the students'.

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Paolo Freire

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...thinking which occurs only in and among people together seeking out reality. I cannot think for others, nor can others think for me.

Fascinating as a foundational piece of critical pedagogy (theory of education), Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed was originally published in 1968 and remains a heavy-hitter in the study of education. I purchased the 50th-anniversary edition that included some updates. Not entirely aligned with current pedagogical theory, but worth a read for any educator trying...more

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thinking which occurs only in and among people together seeking out reality. I cannot think for others, nor can others think for me. Fascinating as a foundational piece of critical pedagogy (theory of education), Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed was originally published in 1968 and remains a heavy-hitter in the study of education.

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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Zaretta Hammond

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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A bold, brain-based teaching approach to culturally responsive instruction The achievement gap remains a stubborn problem for educators ...

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Kadhir Rajagopal

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by Kadhir Rajagopal

The CREATE model asks teachers to provide culturally responsive instruction for their students. Culturally responsive (or relevant) teaching has been described as "a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes" (Ladson-Billings, 1994, p. 382). What does this mean? It means that teachers make standards-based content and curricula accessible to students and teach in a way that students can understand. To do this, teachers must incorporate relatable aspects of students' daily lives into the curriculum. Such familiar aspects include language (which may include jargon or slang), prior knowledge, and extracurricular interests such as music and sports. Once students feel comfortable with how a teacher talks and discusses academic material, they will feel comfortable enough to focus and try to learn the content.

A common misconception about culturally responsive instruction is that teachers must teach the "Asian way" or the "black way." People often get intimidated by the words culturally responsive because of the incredible number of cultures and mixes of cultures in today's classrooms. Too often, teachers subscribe to the misguided idea that students of different races need to be taught differently, and they waste an enormous amount of effort in the process. Another result is that teachers usually appear fake by simply trying too hard to impress students of different backgrounds.

The key point here is that we don't need a different teaching method or curriculum for students based on race. I teach the entire class in a way that all of my students can relate to and understand, using aspects of their cultures with which I am comfortable. I don't want to stray too far from my comfort zone and consequently appear fake to the students I'm trying to engage. For example, I like to incorporate hip hop music into my lessons because many of my students relate to this style of music and I am also comfortable with it.

Hip hop is something my students (and many students) relate to and understand. You don't have to be African American, Latino, or from any particular cultural background to listen to a specific type of music or like a specific musician. When I teach complicated mathematical concepts, I tend to make analogies to cars, animals, sports, or other topics that will pique student interest. I try to capture their attention and find interests that are common to as many kids as possible. I don't teach by race. I teach to their collective culture. I find what appeals to most of my students-that I am also comfortable using-and then exploit these commonalities. Any teacher can do this. Any teacher of any race or gender has something in common with or can find something that relates to most of his or her students. Remember, though: Put it in their language, but don't come off as fake.

According to Crystal Kuykendall, a former executive director of the National Alliance of Black School Educators, "culture determines how children perceive life and their relationship to the world. Because culture also influences how and what children learn, educators can use culture to improve self-image and achievement. Not only must teachers show an appreciation of cultural diversity, they must also incorporate teaching strategies that are congruent with the learning styles of their students" (1989, pp. 32-33).

Culturally Responsive Relationships

This has been repeatedly confirmed; if educators do not have some knowledge of their students' lives outside of paper-and-pencil work, and even outside of their classrooms, then they cannot accurately know their students' strengths and weaknesses (Delpit, 1995). This theme is also echoed by Pedro Noguera, who concludes that, in order to engage urban students, teachers must adapt their teaching to the way in which those students learn rather than the reverse (expecting students to adapt their learning to the way in which they are taught). Therefore, teachers need to know how to make ideas and knowledge meaningful to urban students and how to use students' culture and interests as tools to teach them (Noguera, 2003).

We must teach the way students learn, rather than expecting them to learn the way we teach.

-Pedro Noguera

During the first week of school, I begin building relationships with my students by using surveys and questionnaires to learn about some of their interests, I make time to talk with each of them, and I encourage them to share information about themselves. I have my students describe what a "good teacher" does in the classroom, and I then ask them to tell me what I can do to be the best teacher for them. Finally, I encourage them to share their negative experiences with previous math classes and give me ideas about how they would like to be taught.

As a result of talking to students and learning about their individual needs, I successfully convince them that I am an ally and willing to listen to them on their own level. This communication tends to make students feel hopeful because they recognize that their teacher is willing to adapt his or her teaching to their needs. I make an assertive effort to talk to students with a history of failure, behavioral challenges, or suspensions from other teachers' classrooms, as well as to students at risk for future failure.

We must keep in mind that education, at its best, hones and develops the knowledge and skills each student already possesses, while at the same time adding new knowledge and skills to that base.

-Lisa Delpit

Early in the school year, I make sure to develop a connection with the most challenging students and gain a clear understanding of what may cause them to lose interest or emotional stability in the classroom. During the first few weeks, I strive to learn about all of my students, but I focus on the most challenging students so I can develop positive relationships with them and adapt the curriculum and my instruction to their way of learning. Usually, the most challenging students develop into the best leaders in my class-if I can engage them, I am usually able to engage the rest of the class.

Culturally Responsive Curriculum

After teachers have gained an understanding of where students come from, they can incorporate learning styles, culture, background, prior knowledge, vocabulary, music, and sports into the curriculum. Keep in mind that the CREATE model does not ask teachers to replace the mandatory standards-based curriculum. Instead, it asks the teacher to integrate the traditional curriculum with material that is relevant to students' lives. Urban educators must question their teaching practices and develop culturally relevant teaching strategies to hook their students. To this end, teachers must use the cultural capital available in their classrooms to capture attentions, engage students, and make the academic curriculum relevant. The goal is for students to have increased access to the standards-based content they will need to take and pass district and national tests.

Students must be ... allowed the resource of the teacher's expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own 'expertness' as well.

-Lisa Delpit

In his book The School and Society, educational philosopher John Dewey argued that the development of curricula should be based on students' own interests (Dewey, 1889). Education, he felt, should be a child-centered process. Dewey believed strongly in connecting curriculum to the interests and activities of students. He felt that effective education required teachers to use students' interests to guide them toward an understanding of the sciences, history, and the arts. Dewey also urged teachers to connect each child's life experiences and interests to the existing curriculum. As a result, students would be able to understand and succeed in the traditional curriculum.

Dewey's philosophy has contemporary echoes as well. Robert Moses is a civil rights activist and founder of the Algebra Project, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to raising the academic performance of every child in America, a cause Moses describes as a modern-day civil right for minorities. One of the underlying principles of the Algebra Project is that "people talk" is used to relate math concepts to students. This principle implies that mathematical concepts in general, and algebra in particular, are discussed in language that is natural and intuitive for students before those students are exposed to the technical terms found in textbooks. Analysis of schools using the Algebra Project has shown improvement in test scores; supporters, however, point to the more important result: the perception that inner-city kids are neither interested nor proficient in math has been effectively shot down (Cobb & Moses, 2001).

In my own classroom, I am culturally responsive because I teach in a way that every student can understand. I use student-centered stories, vocabulary, and language. Student-centered stories and language are critical to hooking students' attention and making them receptive to learning the curriculum and textbook vocabulary. I constantly try to find ways to infuse hip hop, sports, and other student interests without seeming fake. It is important that you connect to your students, but it is even more important to be sincere and be yourself. Students have an innate ability to know when you're not being yourself.

For example, I use "street language" to explain the concept of isolating the variable in algebra. I say to students, " X is like a dog that wants his own block or neighborhood. Solving for X implies that it must be alone in its own neighborhood. X's neighborhood is separated from the other neighborhood by the equals sign, which acts as a gate. So there are two different neighborhoods. Any number on X's block is like an enemy. In order for the number to leave X's block, it must change its operation when it crosses the equals sign (or gate). Therefore, if the problem is X + 4 = 6, then the positive 4 must leave the block and become a negative 4. 6 - 4 is 2, so X = 2, and X is alone. The goal of solving for X is to get X (or the dog) alone."

Once students understand the story and the concept of isolating the X, I go back and teach the academic vocabulary. At this point, X becomes a variable. The students are more prepared and willing to learn because they already have a sense of confidence that comes from an increased level of comfort with the material.

Let's consider another example of culturally responsive teaching. English teachers can use a variety of methods to teach similes, including examples with familiar sports stars and relatable situations that involve similes and metaphors. For instance, "Kobe flies like an eagle to the basket, and the crowd is frozen in anticipation." It's also possible to use hip hop lyrics to teach literary elements, such as theme and tone. Many lyrics easily lend themselves to interesting and engaging lessons on mood or character analysis. Once the teacher hooks students' attention and makes sure they understand the relevant concept, he or she can then incorporate the standard textbook, which may include more traditional literature by Shakespeare, Faulkner, or Salinger. Students will likely be more willing to analyze a Shakespearean conflict if they already understand the concept from exposure to lessons that dealt with hip hop or stories that directly relate to their lives.

Within the confines of standard textbooks, teachers can often find multiple opportunities to connect a theme with their students' lives. For example, there are many Shakespearean themes-such as jealousy and greed-that students can easily relate to if the connection is made clear. The tension between the Montague and Capulet families in Romeo and Juliet is similar to the tension that might arise if two lovers belonged to rival gangs or came from different cultures. Though it is an unfortunate situation, students in many urban settings can relate to the tensions that often lead to violence because of animosity between gang "families." Examples that build on experiences and situations such as this will usually get the attention of students in inner-city environments.

Creating Similies (In a Culturally Responsive Classroom)

Relevant vocabulary will hook students' attention so they can eventually learn and understand academic vocabulary, the textbook, and the real world. Grab students' attention with their own language and stories before presenting academic language. Each population is different, though, and it would be a mistake for teachers to assume that all urban kids relate to gangs, basketball, or hip hop. The key here is that each teacher makes an effort to learn more about his or her students, puts himself or herself in their shoes, and figures out what it takes to make learning more accessible.

Culturally Responsive Delivery

Another aspect of culturally responsive instruction that has been effective in urban schools concerns the delivery of instruction to students. Though it is critical to make the curriculum accessible and relevant to students, it is also important that the content be delivered in an engaging and interesting way. All too often, a teacher has a brilliant idea or lesson, but the delivery is so boring or didactic that students get turned off and miss out on the experience.

The CREATE model asks teachers in urban classrooms to make a focused effort at establishing an interactive dialogue with students, instead of delivering a one-way lecture. Lectures often cause students to lose interest, and when their interest is lost, students are more prone to act disruptively. Effective teachers use a conversational approach and personally interact with many different students during the lecture portion of the class.

Research has shown that students typically retain the most information during the first 10 minutes of a lecture, so it is important to put limits on the amount of class time consumed by lectures. In fact, a traditional lecture may not improve student understanding at all, since it forces learners into passive roles. In order for learners to process and understand the relevant information, they need to be cast in more active roles within the classroom. Breaking the lecture into smaller chunks, and incorporating group discussions and activities into the curriculum, are ideal ways to accomplish this (League for Innovation in the Community College, 2006).

In urban settings, culturally responsive delivery of instruction requires continual interaction with students and frequent feedback. This highly interactive pedagogy can be conducted in a variety of ways, including question-and-answer techniques-the most powerful method I use to keep my students engaged and involved.

Institutions that are culturally responsive and that systematically affirm, draw on, and use cultural formations of African Americans will produce exceptional academic results from African American students.

-Theresa Perry

It has long been understood that questions are effective educational tools when asked before, during, and after a learning experience. The question-and-answer instructional style, then, has a significant impact on learning because questions are major vehicles for frequent interaction and academic feedback. One of the major factors that determine the extent of a positive effect and influence on students is the frequency with which teachers pose questions; the most effective teachers ask approximately three times as many questions. Dialogues that comprise question-and-answer exchanges allow for frequent academic interaction and provide numerous opportunities for students to be actively involved and receive immediate feedback. Students also feel an enhanced sense of self-esteem when they receive praise for positive input (Brophy & Good, 1986).

Academic discussions driven by question-and-answer exchanges also provide students with opportunities to receive immediate feedback they can use to control for mistakes, correct errors, develop as learners, and benefit from a more efficient learning process (Hannel, 2009). Questions must be specific and goal-oriented, and teachers must continually keep students focused on the established learning goals. Presenting too much information can cause cognitive overload or result in superficial learning. A step-by-step lesson driven by questions and answers provides opportunities for elaborate feedback in digestible chunks that does not become overwhelming or ignored (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999).

These interactions are especially important for low-achieving students (or those with low self-efficacy) because they allow these students to improve learning and performance through a scaffolding process that encourages a step-by-step approach to problem-solving, allowing teachers to help students build from their existing skill levels (Graesser, McNamara, & VanLehn, 2005). For students new to or unfamiliar with a specific task, this process provides an avenue toward understanding while reducing potential frustration. High-achieving or more motivated students also benefit from the process by receiving feedback that challenges them, such as hints, cues, and prompts.

In the classroom, the CREATE model asks that teachers use questioning as a vehicle to keep students engaged during instruction. Make it a 30-way conversation, where you fire questions at all kids and everyone is in the "hot seat" and involved. In my classes, I ask a question every few seconds and have students teach back the step or concept I just covered. I do not wait for hands to go up voluntarily, and I try to keep everyone involved. By the end of a 15-minute lecture, I will have elicited at least 25 different responses, and I will have rewarded those students with points toward their grades (publically awarded on the whiteboard).

It is important that teachers use interaction that is more personal than general. I especially call on the target population (students who struggle and act out loudly and students who stay "under the radar") because I am aware that they will be the first ones to drift off or get lost. I avoid general questioning and instead call on individual students randomly. If only cream-of-the-crop kids are questioned or volunteer answers, teachers may mistakenly assume that everyone is listening. When a lesson favors students who are more attentive or already know the material, the target population can easily get lost, frustrated, or caught up in daydreaming. Unfortunately, these students won't reveal their confusion or boredom right away. Instead, those feelings will eventually manifest themselves as discipline issues or poor achievement on tests.

As I explain a concept or solve a problem in class, I make sure to ask three or four questions every step or two of the way. I also make a point to call on struggling students more frequently to ensure they are still engaged and following along. This interaction must occur logically and personally. For example, I might say, "John, tell me the next step in this problem." After John is done, I immediately call on another student to reiterate the same point or continue to the next step. I choose students to teach back to the class every concept I introduce and every step of a problem. I make every effort to interact with as many students as possible, but I focus my attention on the target population. Therefore, if I ask 10 questions, 7 will be directed toward students in the target population. If they can understand the material and stay engaged, then there is a good chance the rest of the class will also follow along.

In addition to question-and-answer techniques, I occasionally divide the class into teams and have them play math-related games. Playing games not only lightens the atmosphere, but it also helps students collaborate with one another. Even mildly competitive games encourage students to pay attention and be involved. There are many ways to conduct an interactive dialogue with students and keep them actively involved in the learning process. Remember that the key is to maintain an interactive lecture and to get personal with your questions.

Key Points
Relationships

Learn about your students' individual cultures.

Adapt your teaching to the way your students learn.

Develop a connection with the most challenging students.

Curriculum

Teach in a way students can understand.

Use student-centered stories, vocabulary, and examples.

Incorporate relatable aspects of students' lives.

Delivery

Establish an interactive dialogue to engage all students.

Stay within your comfort zone and don't come off as "fake."

Continually interact with students and provide frequent feedback.

Use frequent questioning as a vehicle to keep students involved.

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by Kadhir Rajagopal The CREATE model asks teachers to provide culturally responsive instruction for their students. Culturally responsive (or relevant) teaching has been described as "a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes" (Ladson-Billings, 1994, p. 382).

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3 Tips to Make Any Lesson More Culturally Responsive

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3 Tips to Make Any Lesson More Culturally Responsive

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Zaretta Hammond - Cult of Pedagogy

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Last month, I reviewed Zaretta Hammond's fantastic book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Now I'm proud to have Zaretta here as a guest writer to share some specific strategies with us.

Culturally responsive teaching. Everybody is talking about it. The big question is: How do you actually make lessons culturally responsive? That comes up regularly when I am working with groups of teachers to improve outcomes for diverse students who are struggling. I remember working with a group of sixth grade teachers on improving learning for their at-risk students. These teachers were frustrated that their students, 95 percent of them students of color and English language learners, were not applying themselves to learning.

I suggested that we explore making lessons more culturally relevant in order to accelerate student learning. I remember the reaction of Janice, the science teacher. "I am not going to be rappin' about the periodic table," she said defiantly as she crossed her arms and sat back in her chair.

I couldn't blame her. Google "culturally responsive teaching" and you can find a dozen videos of well-meaning teachers leading some call-and-response chant about exponents or rapping about the Boston Tea Party while students sit back and giggle. That's because we usually talk about culturally responsive teaching only as an engagement strategy designed to motivate at-risk students to take learning seriously. Or we try to find a race-based connection to the content to make it "relevant" to minority students.

One of the biggest misconceptions about culturally responsive teaching is thinking you have to tie the lesson's content to African American or Latino students' racial background. The common belief is if you mention Africa, Mexico, or famous black and brown high achievers, it will spark students' attention. Then they will be motivated to participate.

In reality, culturally responsive teaching is less about using racial pride as a motivator and more about mimicking students' cultural learning styles and tools. These are the strategies their moms, dads, grandmas, and other community folks use to teach them life skills and basic concepts long before they come to school and during out-of-school time.

Culturally responsive teaching leverages the brain's memory systems and information processing structures. Why? Many diverse students come from oral cultural traditions. This means their primary ways of knowledge transfer and meaning-making are oral and active. It's a common cultural tradition that cuts across racial groups: African American, Latino, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander communities all have strong oral cultures. Each of these cultural groups uses the brain's memory systems for turning inert information into useable knowledge. They use memory strategies to make learning sticky, like connecting what needs to be remembered to a rhythm or music (that's why we still know the ABC song) or by reciting it in fun ways like a poem, riddle, or limerick.

I asked Janice what area of learning she wanted to help her kids improve. She said science vocabulary; they weren't learning the weekly words and it was getting in the way of their understanding of key concepts. She was frustrated and at the end of her rope. I asked how she was teaching it. She used the typical approach: On Monday, she listed the words on the board. Students copied them down and were required to look each word up and use it in a sentence. On Wednesday, there was a vocabulary test.

I suggested that we design word study to be more culturally responsive by making it more like the students' own cultural learning process. She was open for trying something different.

I offered her these three tips for transforming any lesson into something that looked and felt more culturally responsive to diverse students, something that would allow them to engage more and process the content effectively.

Games are the power strategy for culturally-grounded learning because they get the brain's attention and require active processing. Attention is the first step in learning. We cannot learn, remember, or understand what we don't first pay attention to. Call and response is just a way to get the brain's attention. Most games employ a lot of the cultural tools you'd find in oral traditions - repetition, solving a puzzle, making connections between things that don't seem to be related (Ever play Taboo or Apples to Apples?).

Organizing learning so that students rely on each other will build on diverse students' communal orientation. This communal orientation can be summed up in the African proverb, "I am because we are." Even making learning slightly competitive in a good-natured way increases students' level of attention and engagement. It's why the T.V. show Survivor has been around for so many years; it's a social-based game.

The brain is wired to remember stories and to use the story structure to make sense of the world. That's why every culture has creation stories. In oral traditions, stories play a bigger role in teaching lessons about manners, morality, or simply what plants to eat or not eat in the wilderness because it's the way content is remembered. Diverse students (and all students, really) learn content more effectively if they can create a coherent narrative about the topic or process presented. That's the brain's way of weaving it all together. (Bonus: It also offers a great way to check for understanding and correct misconceptions.)

So Janice took her weekly list of science vocabulary and created a variety of sorting and matching games for students. She built a set of simple card games based on Go Fish or Old Maid. In addition she created some team games. Each week students had different active ways to learn the vocabulary. For 10-15 minutes a couple of times during the week, students got to play these learning games rather than look up words in a dictionary. She gave them instructions for making the games at home if they wanted to.

Instead of the traditional weekly vocab test, she asked them to "storify" their understanding of key concept words like metamorphosis, using vocabulary from past weeks.

When I checked in with the group a few weeks later, she was the first one to share. She said student engagement was like night and day. Now all students were participating. She said she knew they were learning the vocabulary at a deeper level because they were actually using the new science terms during discussions and in their writing with no prompting from her.

The big A-ha's for the group that day were that (1) Culturally responsive teaching doesn't have to be some performance the teacher does to entertain students and (2) It doesn't have to mention race or reference culture at all. Instead, what makes a practice culturally responsive is that it mimics students' own cultural learning tools. They all realized that these practices are helpful for all students, not targeted at minority students.

The real trick is to use these strategies regularly as part of your instructional routine rather than doing them randomly every now and then. Consistency is the key. ♦

Learn more about how to improve diverse students' information processing skills and actually grow their brains in Zaretta Hammond's book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students .

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3 Tips to Make Any Lesson More Culturally Responsive

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Google "culturally responsive teaching" and you can find a dozen videos of well-meaning teachers leading some call-and-response chant about exponents or rapping about the Boston Tea Party while students sit back and giggle.

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circleways.org

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To build a healthy community we must turn toward one another, as we do when we gather together in a circle. Circle ways come from people who lived close to the earth and the cycles of life, who knew something many of us forget-that we belong to each other. No one is expendable, least of all our children. We gathered in circles to dance and to drum, to celebrate and grieve, to share stories, make decisions, govern, dream, do justice...and more.

At Circle Ways we are part of the remembering and the continuing of these ancient ways and of their practice and development in schools. With more than 30 years of experience in public, private, and parochial schools, Circle Ways provides training, coaching, facilitation, materials, and other support to help schools implement circle practices, including: way of council, restorative justice, and nature connections.

Circle practice is not an add-on program requiring additional time in the school day, but a pedagogy that shifts the way we interact and learn. With Circle Ways' support, educators and administrators bring this shift to the academic curriculum, social-emotional skill building, and student-directed curriculum, as well as in the engagement of staff, students, parents, and community members in the art of collaboration.

Read about our offerings on this website. Contact Us with your inquiries or comments. Scroll to the bottom of this page to subscribe to our email list so we can keep you informed about our events and happenings.

Register for one of our Upcoming Public Workshops, our free monthly Educators Circle (last Wednesday of the month) , or come for a free sample of council at a Friday happy hour-and-a-half Circle Ways Taster. We look forward to being with you in the circle.

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To build a healthy community we must turn toward one another, as we do when we gather together in a circle. Circle ways come from people who lived close to the earth and the cycles of life, who knew something many of us forget-that we belong to each other.

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Getting Started with Culturally Responsive Teaching

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Getting Started with Culturally Responsive Teaching

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Edutopia

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Getting Started With Culturally Responsive Teaching

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Understanding students’ lives can help teachers foster a sense of belonging and ensure that all students feel respected and challenged.

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Brown University

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This collection holds materials from the Education Alliance at Brown University. The Education Alliance was a reform support organization committed to advancing equitable educational opportunities that prepare all student populations to succeed in the 21st century. From 1975-2021, the Alliance partnered with schools, districts and state departments of education to apply research findings in developing solutions to educational challenges. Its mission was to enhance learning for culturally and linguistically diverse students and focused on district and school improvement with special attention to underperformance and issues of equity and diversity. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/7eez-dz04

The Education Alliance archived website can be found here

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Brown Digital Repository | Collection | The Education ...

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This collection holds materials from the Education Alliance at Brown University. The Education Alliance was a reform support organization committed to advancing equitable educational opportunities that prepare all student populations to succeed in the 21st century. From 1975-2021, the Alliance partnered with schools, districts and state departments of education to apply research findings in developing solutions to educational challenges.

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Culturally Responsive Teaching: 5 Strategies

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Culturally Responsive Teaching: 5 Strategies

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Northeastern University

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Over the past few decades, students, their experiences, upbringings, and backgrounds have changed. Classrooms now reflect families of varying races, cultures, and socioeconomic statuses. As a result, the way teachers educate these students must change, too, says Cherese Childers-McKee, assistant teaching professor in Northeastern University's College of Professional Studies. One of these shifting approaches to education is known as culturally responsive teaching.

Below, we explore the concept of culturally responsive teaching, compare it against traditional teaching models, and offer a number of strategies that you can use to incorporate the approach into your own methods.

Download Our Free Guide to Earning Your EdD

Learn how an EdD can give you the skills to enact organizational change in any industry.

What is culturally responsive teaching?

Culturally responsive teaching, also called culturally relevant teaching, is a pedagogy that recognizes the importance of including students' cultural references in all aspects of learning. Traditional teaching strategies emphasize the teacher-student dynamic: The teacher is the expert and adheres strictly to the curriculum that supports standardized tests while the student receives the knowledge. This teaching method is outdated, Childers-McKee says.

"Teachers have more diverse classrooms today. We don't have students sitting in front of us with the same background or experience, so instruction has to be different," she says. "It needs to build on individual and cultural experiences and their prior knowledge. It needs to be justice-oriented and reflect the social context we're in now. That's what we mean when we talk about culturally responsive teaching."

Culturally Responsive vs. Traditional Teaching Methods

Culturally responsive teaching can manifest in a number of ways. Using traditional teaching methods, educators may default to teaching literature by widely accepted classic authors: William Shakespeare, J.D. Salinger, and Charles Dickens, for example, adhering to widely accepted interpretations of the text.

Culturally responsive teaching, on the other hand, acknowledges that there's nothing wrong with traditional texts, Childers-McKee says, but strives to include literature from other cultures, parts of the world, and by diverse authors. It also focuses on finding a "hook and anchor" to help draw students into the content using their past experiences.

"This way, students can see themselves in some of what they're reading and not just the white, western world. The learning is more experimental, more hands-on," she says. "Instead, you're showing them a worldwide, multicultural community and looking for different interpretations while relating it to what it means for society today."

Why is culturally responsive teaching important?

Culturally responsive teaching is especially pertinent today because the traditional education path from school to college to a career and life in the suburbs isn't a reality-or desire-for everyone, Childers-McKee says. Educators' approaches to teaching need to reflect these differences.

"That typical, mainstream education is not addressing the realities of today's students. Culturally responsive teaching isn't just for those students who don't come from white, middle-class, English-speaking families-it's an important teaching strategy for everyone. When done the right way, it can be transformative."

When integrated into classroom instruction, culturally responsive strategies can have important benefits such as:

Strengthening students' sense of identity

Promoting equity and inclusivity in the classroom

Engaging students in the course material

Supporting critical thinking

Here's a look at five culturally responsive teaching strategies all educators can employ in their classrooms.

5 Culturally Responsive Teaching Strategies for Educators

1. Activate students' prior knowledge.

Students are not blank slates, Childers-McKee says; they enter the classroom with diverse experiences. Teachers should encourage students to draw on their prior knowledge in order to contribute to group discussions, which provides an anchor to learning. Taking a different approach to the literature that's taught in classrooms is one example of this.

2. Make learning contextual.

Tie lessons from the curriculum to the students' social communities to make it more contextual and relevant, Childers-McKee advises. "If you're reading a chapter in history class, for example, discuss why it matters today, in your school, or in your community," she says. "Take the concept you're learning about and create a project that enables them to draw parallels."

3. Encourage students to leverage their cultural capital.

Because not all students come from the same background, it's important to encourage those who don't to have a voice. Say, for example, you teach an English class that contains ESL students. It's important to find ways to activate the experiences they do have-their cultural capital, Childers-McKee says.

The teacher may choose a book for the class to read in which the ESL students could relate and feel like they could be the expert, for instance. As a teacher, Childers-Mckee's once chose a book that told the story of a child of migrant workers because some of her students came from an agricultural background.

"When you have a mixed classroom, you want those in the minority to feel like they are an expert. You want to draw from their experiences," she says. "I do caution that you don't want to cross a line and make 'Johnny' feel like he needs to speak for all Mexican people by putting them on the spot, for example. That's a line you need to walk."

4. Reconsider your classroom setup.

Take inventory of the books in your classroom library: Do they include authors of diverse races? Is the LGBTQ community represented? Do the books include urban families or only suburban families? Beyond your classroom library, consider the posters you display on your walls and your bulletin boards, too. "These are all small changes you can make to your classroom more culturally responsive," Childers-McKee says.

5. Build relationships.

Not all students want to learn from all teachers because the teachers may not make them feel like they're valued, Childers-McKee says. Teachers need to work to build relationships with their students to ensure they feel respected, valued, and seen for who they are. Building those relationships helps them build community within the classroom and with each other, which is extremely important, she says.

"When we think about culture and diversity, people often automatically think about black students, but people need to think broader than that, now," Childers-McKee says. "Some teachers whose students are all white and middle-class struggle with how culturally responsive teaching strategies apply to them. It's equally important for them to teach students about diversity. These aren't just teaching strategies for minorities, they're good teaching strategies for everyone."

Educating for the Future

Educators have the unique power to impact the lives of their learners. Making use of thoughtful, inclusive instruction can have positive effects on students that last far beyond their time in the classroom.

Employing culturally responsive teaching strategies is a small step toward enacting meaningful change in education. If you're interested in leading your organization toward positive change on a larger scale, earning an advanced degree is one way to gain the necessary knowledge and skills to do so.

Pursuing a degree, such as a Doctor of Education , will empower you to address the challenges currently facing education and improve the learning experience. Students of the program work with industry-aligned faculty on real-world organizational issues, allowing them to have an immediate impact on their professional environments.
To learn more about how an EdD can further your career while improving students' educational experiences, explore Northeastern's Doctor of Education program page, or download our free guide below.

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Culturally Responsive Teaching: 5 Strategies for Educators

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Culturally responsive teaching values students' cultural references in all aspects of learning. Here are five strategies to bring to the classroom.

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Student Centered Skills: Closing the Opportunity Gap

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Student Centered Skills: Closing the Opportunity Gap

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Stanford University

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Curated Resources - VUSD

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Mental Health and Trauma Informed Care / Salud Mental y el Cuidado Informado de Trauma

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What is CAST UDL Exchange?

It is a place to browse and build resources, lessons and collections. You can use and share these materials to support instruction guided by the UDL principles.

UDL Exchange includes

UDL Resources

Materials such as websites, documents, images, presentations, audio, video, etc. that support implementation of UDL.

UDL Lessons

Lesson plans that address the variability of all learners through the application of UDL.

UDL Collections

Sets of resources/lessons organized around a theme to support UDL practices.

UDL Exchange Tools

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It is a place to browse and build resources, lessons and collections. You can use and share these materials to support instruction guided by the UDL principles. Materials such as websites, documents, images, presentations, audio, video, etc. that support implementation of UDL. Lesson plans that address the variability of all learners through the application of UDL.

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CAST

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Universal design for learning (UDL) is a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.

UDL at a Glance

See how the UDL framework guides the design of instructional goals, assessments, methods, and materials that can be customized and adjusted to meet individual needs.

Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice

Anne Meyer and David Rose, who first laid out the principles of UDL in the 1990s, provide an ambitious, engaging discussion of new research and best practices. This book gives the UDL field an essential and authoritative learning resource for the coming years.

Read the book

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Universal design for learning (UDL) is a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. UDL at a Glance See how the UDL framework guides the design of instructional goals, assessments, methods, and materials that can be customized and adjusted to meet individual needs.

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Katie Novak

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Ellen Ullman - eSchool News

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I thought I had a pretty good handle on universal design for learning (UDL), but after chatting with Katie Novak, Ed.D., I realize I didn't understand the framework at all. Novak, author of UDL Now! A Teacher's Guide to Applying Universal Design for Learning in Today's Classrooms, Second Edition and assistant superintendent of schools at the Groton-Dunstable (MA) Regional School District, helped me truly understand what UDL is and, perhaps more important, what it isn't.

Q: What exactly is UDL, and why does it matter?
A: Our classrooms today are incredibly diverse. As we embrace equity and inclusion, we have to meet the needs of all students. To do this, we have to change the way we "do" school. When I was young, we were tracked, starting in first grade, into "high" or "low" reading groups, gifted, etc. Now we know that's not good for anyone. Classes have a wide mix of strengths and weaknesses, and a one-size-fits-all curriculum does not meet most children's needs.

In 1990, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) renewed our national focus on the least-restrictive environment. As more and more students were educated with their peers, we started to realize that having all students read the same book and take the same test doesn't work. We began providing accommodations through differentiated instruction and teachers figured out what to change or modify to accommodate "disabled" learners. Although this allowed students to access knowledge, they weren't empowered to become learners and make choices for themselves. Instead, the curriculum was compartmentalized and decisions were consistently made about students without their voice.

The UDL framework starts with the belief that every student is different and that's the norm. We call these differences "variability" and we embrace it. When students come to us differently, and they face barriers to learning, it's our curriculum that's disabled, not our students. All students have assets and strengths and goals and interests. UDL lets us offer them options and choices to create personalized pathways to meet very rigorous goals. Our job is to teach them as they come.

Q: Can you give me an example?
A: Sure. In English language arts, students need to analyze how complex characters develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot. Ten to fifteen years ago, the whole class would read The Old Man and the Sea, analyze how Santiago develops over the course of the text, and write an essay. But that doesn't tell the teacher if the students understand characterization; it only proves they can answer questions about that novel.

With UDL, you look at a traditional lesson and start by identifying the barriers. For this example, the barriers of handing out the same novel to every student could be that the reading level is too rigorous, or not challenging enough, the students lack necessary background knowledge, or visual processing is challenging. To eliminate those barriers, I would provide options like listening to the novel, providing visuals or supporting background knowledge through a video, reading with a partner, or choosing a different book. To teach about characterization, I'd provide students with the option to work individually or in small groups and offer resources and videos so they can personalize their learning and connect it to a text that's relevant, authentic, and meaningful to them.

After that, I'd ask students to express what they learned about character development by either writing an essay, creating an infographic, doing a presentation, creating a vlog, working alone or with partners, and so on. In UDL, I start with the goal and consider which options and choices students need to achieve that goal. There are numerous pathways to reach the same destination.

Q: That sounds like differentiated instruction.
A: UDL empowers students to recognize their own interests and needs and personalize learning to their standard. Differentiated instruction is about what the teacher will do, based on her perceptions of students' needs. With UDL, teachers proactively design the curriculum to eliminate barriers. Differentiated instruction emphasizes the teacher's role to address students' needs; the teacher constructs activities based on different groupings of students. UDL empowers teachers to design lessons for the broadest possible range of students.

Q: Wow; the two are really quite different. Tell me more about UDL.
A: With UDL, we let students make choices and then participate in a self-assessment. They learn how their choices allowed them to work toward their goals so they can make adjustments and learn about what works and what doesn't.

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I thought I had a pretty good handle on universal design for learning (UDL), but after chatting with Katie Novak, Ed.D., I realize I didn't understand the framework at all. Novak, author of UDL Now!

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Dr. Debbie Donsky - Medium

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I had a powerful conversation with a colleague this week about the concept of discomfort while engaging in equity work. He suggested that we all have different understandings of what this means. The notions of discomfort and safety are often conflated. Discomfort occurs when we learn. Steven Katz defines learning as "​the process through which experience causes permanent change in knowledge or behaviour​". This is hard work and is meant to be uncomfortable. I recall, many years ago, when I was doing my graduate work, the professor calling attention to this stance. She explained that safety and discomfort were different and that in this work, if we don't experience discomfort, we just aren't doing the work.

The discomfort comes when we are made to see and feel our privilege. We have been socialized to not see it. That's how it works. The whole idea that one can work hard and succeed is a fallacy created by those who hold power. We must feel the dissonance of learning in order to grow. Without that commitment, the equity work will not move. We need to move from "But I'm not racist! I am a good person!" into a deeper understanding and willingness to see the systemic structures of oppression that exist around us. In education I am referring to the classrooms, the curriculum, the way we communicate, the policies, the hiring practices, how we give precedence over some holidays and not others, the books we share, how we assess and how we teach - literally everything. Schools are one of the many structures that were created to uphold white supremacy. If we are not actively disrupting it, we are upholding it. Until we are willing to see, we remain ignorant and complacent. We must start with ourselves. If we think we know it all and we are done, that is the surest indication that we are not.

The experience of safety is quite different from discomfort and is relative to each person's social location in the room based on how they self-define their social identities including race, gender, faith, nationality, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, language, class, ability, level of education, body type, employment.

In each of these areas, and others, we either hold more power or less power. Those who hold more power have less risk. It is that simple. The inverse is true as well. Those who hold less power have more risk. In addition, these social identities do not function independently from one another - they are intersectional and that in all cases, race is a salient factor. This is explained clearly by George Dei in a dialogue, The Foundations of Transformative Anti-Racism: A conversation with George J. Sefa Dei and Andrea Vásquez Jiménez:

The term integrative anti-racism comes from the argument and fact that no one is one thing. Our identities are not just all about race, just as we are not all about class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, etc. In order to understand the full effects of race, we have to see how race intersects with other forms of differences. Talking about intersections is necessary. This is the integrative lens and that's where the integrative anti-racism is coming from. In the discourse of anti-racism it is important to talk about the integrativeness, but also to recognize the saliency of Blackness. It speaks to the fact that there's a hypervisibility of Blackness, and that Blackness is consequential. That Blackness, when it is seen as transgressive, is punished, and that Blackness is coded for punishment, just as whiteness is for privilege and power. While we talk about the intersections, let us know that there are aspects of race and racism that also speak about the saliency.

Our claims of feeling unsafe stem from the experiences of shame felt when we feel called out about our privilege. Many who participate in equity training will say that facilitators "blamed and shamed" them causing them to shut down. What I have found, in my years of doing this work, is that these messages are heard differently from white bodies than racialized bodies, as is everything for that matter. Facilitating learning in equity has always been a partnership with friends and colleagues who are racialized and in the planning the dialogue has at times been... "Deb, you're going to have to say this part..." We know that the response will be different if it comes from me. White people hear it differently when white people speak about privilege.

We need to get to the place that when racialized people tell us their truth, we listen and recognize that this sharing is done so at great personal risk. In Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, challenges white people to listen:

In my workshops, I often ask people of colour, "How often have you given white people feedback on our unaware yet inevitable racism? How often has that gone well for you?" Eye-rolling, head-shaking, and outright laughter follow, along with the consensus of rarely, if ever. I then ask, "What would it be like if you could simply give us feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change the behaviour?" Recently a man of colour signed and said, "It would be revolutionary."

Robin DiAngelo explains:

White fragility functions as a form of bullying; I am going to make it so miserable for you to confront me - no matter how diplomatically you try to do so - that you will simply back off, give up, and never raise the issue again. White fragility keeps people of color in line and "in their place." In this way, it is a powerful form of white racial control. Social power is not fixed; it is constantly challenged and needs to be maintained. p 110

In her article, White Women's Tears and the Men Who Love Them, Robin DiAngelo writes:

"...as white people who want to interrupt this system, we have to get racially uncomfortable and be willing to examine the effects of our racial engagement. This includes not indulging in whatever reactions we have in a given cross-racial encounter - such as anger, defensiveness, or self-pity - without first reflecting on what is driving them and how they will impact others."

She goes on to say that white fragility is the term she uses:

to describe the inability of white people to respond constructively when our racial positions are challenged. Because we so seldom encounter this challenge, we are thrown off balance and withdraw, defend, cry, argue, minimize, ignore, and in other ways push back in order to regain our racial equilibrium...

When I am facilitating equity training, I wait for the typical responses. Each of these responses holds the status quo and perpetuates white fragility.

The white man with his arms crossed refusing to engage and displaying his anger and disgust.

The white woman who is crying and defending herself saying that she is hurt by the allegations.

White people who have experienced trauma, discrimination and oppression personally or in their family history who believe they have no privilege.

Then there are these participants:

The racialized people who are afraid to speak because they are held accountable by white people for creating this situation in the first place.

The racialized people who do speak and take the risk and then fear for their careers because they have spoken their truth.

The racialized people who nod quietly, hoping this time someone can hear the truth and that it ends quickly before they are asked to speak for all people from their race, faith, gender, ability, sexual orientation group.

The racialized people who do speak, who call it what it is, and then are spoken about and said to be troublemakers, not fit for leadership, unable to control their anger.

I believe that we can learn how to move forward by better understanding our own shame triggers and who better to learn from than Brené Brown?

I started reading Brené Brown about eight years ago when someone told me about her book, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. (I still can't remember who gave me that first book but if it was you, thank you! Her work has changed me profoundly and has made every relationship in my life better.) I have read every one of her books since. Her research is centred around shame and vulnerability - both which are present in this work. It offers insights into how and why we act in the ways we do while also offering concrete steps to move forward.

In her new book, Dare to Lead, Brené Brown writes about the actions we take to "armour up" when we feel shame. She calls them shame shields:

Moving away: Withdrawing, hiding, silencing ourselves, and keeping secrets.

Moving toward: Seeking to appease and please.

Moving against: Trying to gain power over others by being aggressive, and by using shame to fight shame.

We must recognize our shame triggers. Brené has a worksheet to support the process of coming to know our shame triggers and then moving forward from them based on her first book: I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't): Telling the Truth about Perfectionism, Inadequacy and Power.

Brené explains that there are ways we can become shame resilient in Dare to Lead:

1. Recognizing Shame and Understanding Its Triggers: When we understand what are our shame triggers, we are less likely to armour up.

2. Practicing Critical Awareness: We have to "zoom out" and understand our shame triggers in a larger social context (this is where white lady tears really come into play).

3. Reaching Out: Reaching out to others when we experience shame is exactly what will begin to end it. Brené explains that "the experiences that make us feel the most alone are actually universal".

4. Speaking Shame: Shame loves silence; this is where it thrives. She explains that "Language and story bring light to shame and destroy it."

The other piece to this is trust. We talk about the need for these spaces to be spaces where we must trust each other before we can do the work. We also can't do the work until we have trust. So this is a catch 22. How do we build the trust if we don't do this work? How do we do the work if we don't have trust?

In t he Anatomy of Trust, Brené clarifies that "trust is built in very small moments." We can build trust through the small moments we share, from our heart, casting aside our shame and fear of judgement. I am certain that we can embrace our imperfections by sharing what we don't understand. I believe one of the reasons I am able to lead this work is my ability to be vulnerable, share what I am grappling with, and take time to reflect on the feedback I am given, even when it is hard to hear. In this case, #3 on Brené's "Engaged Feedback Checklist" is most relevant: "I'm ready to listen, ask questions, and accept that I may not fully understand the issue." Accept, as a white person, that we will NEVER fully understand the experience of racialized people in our society. NEVER.

Ultimately, she explains, how we treat ourselves is indicative of how we treat others. She quotes Maya Angelou, "I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.'. There is an African saying which is, Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt."

Brené explains, "The thing to examine first is...how you treat yourself. Because we can't ask people to give to us something that we do not believe we are worthy of receiving. And you will know you are worthy of receiving it when you trust yourself above everyone else."

So we must "Dare Greatly" and "Be Brave" and have courage to stand in our integrity. If we believe that all children can achieve then we must make the commitment to understand ourselves in the context of equity work. If we believe that we are doing what is best and serving our students, staff and community, then we must hold ourselves accountable and "practice our values".

So I ask, what is your commitment? All you have to do is listen and believe that it is truth - take the risk. Years ago I heard Sandra Herbst say, "As leaders, we have to be willing to risk our own significance." It is time to embrace discomfort, get uncomfortable and do something positive with the positional power we hold.

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I had a powerful conversation with a colleague this week about the concept of discomfort while engaging in equity work. He suggested that we all have different understandings of what this means. The notions of discomfort and safety are often conflated. Discomfort occurs when we learn.

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Teaching Tolerance

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Brené Brown

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Brené Brown | Daring Classrooms | SXSWedu 2017

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The Warm Demander: How to Raise Expectations (and Have Students Rise to Meet Them)

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The Warm Demander: How to Raise Expectations (and Have Students Rise to Meet Them)

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Angela Watson

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This week on the Truth for Teachers podcast: There's a lot of research out there about what it means to be a warm demander but what I'm hoping to add to the conversation with this episode is a personal touch: What exactly does being a warm demander look like?
"The warm demander" approach isn't something that's brand new. In fact, the term was coined by Judith Kleinfeld back in 1975. It's an equity approach, grounded in showing students that you care and refuse to give up on their achievement. Being a warm demander is about mutual respect, and making it clear from your tone and body language that student effort is non-negotiable and you believe in students' ability to succeed. A warm demander builds trust and relationships by listening to kids and affirming them. Yet, a teacher who takes the warm demander stance also pushes kids and doesn't allow them to settle for less than they're capable of.

There's a lot of research out there about what it means to be a warm demander, and how that approach helps kids (particularly kids of color) be successful in the classroom. But what I'm hoping to add to the conversation with this episode is a personal touch: What exactly does being a warm demander look like? What, specifically, do we mean by being "warm" and what's a healthy model of being "demanding"?

I want to focus mostly on the demeanor of a teacher who is a "warm demander," because I feel like that's the most nebulous part. Everyone knows to have high expectations for kids, develop relationships, teach them to persevere even when things are hard, and so on. But personally, I think the key to making those strategies work is in your demeanor: how you communicate those expectations and care for your students through tone, facial expressions, and body language. I haven't seen very much written or shared online about that part, so I thought it might be helpful to talk about what worked for me and a few of the educators I learned from.

I'm going to give a disclaimer right up front that I am not implying that you as the teacher bear full responsibility for getting kids to stay engaged and do their work. There are many reasons that students fail to meet expectations and many of those reasons have nothing to do with the teacher's rapport or personality or teaching style. There is no implication here that if you execute this strategy perfectly, all your kids' disengagement and behavioral and learning issues will disappear.

But I'll tell you why I like this approach. The warm demander stance is focused on something you can control - your own behavior - rather than on manipulating or cajoling or rewarding or punishing students for THEIR choices. Trying to control other people leads to frustration. Focusing on you is where the real power's at because you can choose how you show up in your classroom each day. There's something very empowering about setting boundaries and limits to what you will accept, and then choosing to respond in a firm yet warm way when those limits are pushed.

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Let's talk a little bit about what's meant by being "warm." This is something that will look different for each person depending on your personality type. I was a warm demander in the classroom, even though I didn't know what it was called at the time. I just knew that I could say what I needed firmly AND with a smile on my face. Don't get me wrong, I could also be ice cold - there were many moments when I snapped and glared because the kids had pushed me too far and I lost my patience. I'm a human, not a robot, after all. But my default demeanor was that of a warm demander.

Here's how I developed that style. I had a professor in undergrad that always smiled when she taught us. She'd teach with a relatively straight face, but anytime she asked a question, she'd smile, and then maintain that smile while waiting for a response and listening to the student answer. So she'd say something like, "Piaget was a child development expert. Who can summarize his work for us?" and she'd start smiling during the question, then stand there, sort of beaming at us. The look on her face communicated, "I can't wait to hear these answers, someone's about to say something really good."

A question sounds different when the person asking is smiling. Your willingness to be vulnerable as a student and participate increases when the person is smiling. It was a simple yet profoundly effective way to demonstrate warmth and confidence in us. I really liked the way it felt as a student, so I tried it in my practicums. I found that I also really liked the way it felt as a teacher - it changed my energy and perspective when I spent much of the day smiling at my students, and it became a learned behavior. Anytime I'm teaching now - even when teaching adults - I automatically smile a lot. I get excited and energized by the responses of the people I'm teaching, and I smile more broadly, or my eyes get big and my eyebrows raise as I nod.

The other nice thing about smiling is that it makes the wait time when you ask a question less awkward. You're not just standing there staring the kids down and sort of daring someone to answer. When I ask a question and don't get an immediate response, I'll often just sit on the tall stool that's usually behind me when I'm teaching, and settle in. I'll keep smiling and looking around the room. This communicates: "I know you have something to say and it's worth waiting for. I'm not going to answer my own question or give you a hint, I'm just going to let you think because I have confidence in you and I know that you'll be able to answer this. Think about it, and I'll be ready whenever you are."

Now smiling may not really fit your personality type, and that's just one way to communicate warmth. I'm certainly not telling you to smile more if that's not something you want to do or that feels good to you.

Other ways to communicate warmth can be with playful jokes, inside jokes, and other forms of humor. I know teachers with a rather serious personality who occasionally crack a sarcastic comment or poke fun at themselves and it does so much to communicate to kids that the teacher enjoys being there and finds some fun in the job.

So when you think about what warmth looks like for you, consider what the opposite is. What does cold look like? Have you ever had someone tell you to do something or try to teach you something in a cold way? Maybe there was a customer service rep or a server at a restaurant who was extremely cold while supposedly helping you.

What did that coldness look like? They probably either avoided eye contact or stared you down with a stone face and made you uncomfortable while they waited for you to make a decision or act on what they said. Their tone of voice was probably dispassionate, or maybe condescending, which conveyed they didn't think you were capable of doing what needed to be done. They may have sighed, appeared impatient, or seemed disinterested in helping you.

That's coldness. Everyone dislikes being treated coldly. So watch out for those habits in your teaching, and look for ways to authentically be more warm with students. This could be through smiling, using humor, or being a little silly or crazy. A warm person lets their real personality shine through and tries to make an actual connection with another person instead of going through the motions with no real feeling or connection.

Think about how you treat the people you really like - that's what warmness looks like for you. And then practice incorporating more of those behaviors into your teaching until they feel like second nature.

This is easier when you develop unconditional positive regard. That's a term coined by psychologist Carl Rogers. It has to do with accepting and supporting a person regardless of what that person says or does. Unconditional positive regard doesn't mean you like or accept inappropriate behavior from others. It means you accept and support the person regardless. You do not require them to change in order for you to acknowledge their positive characteristics or have a positive relationship with them.

Unconditional positive regard is a great thing to look up if you're not familiar with it, and I encourage you to start by developing that attitude toward yourself. When you can let go of judgments and labels about who you are, it's easier to extend that same grace to others. Practice accepting yourself just as you are, without beating yourself up about your shortcomings and mistakes. Change the way you treat yourself and that will naturally impact the way you treat others.

So that's the warmth part. Let's talk about the demander part, which I think can be a little trickier to nail down.

The demander part for me manifested in not letting kids off the hook. There were times when I could tell I needed to let something go, of course, but in general, if a student said, "I don't know" or struggled to answer a question, I didn't let up.

I'd keep smiling, nod encouragingly, and ask follow up questions. Sometimes I'd ask a smaller, easier question and use that as a springboard. So if the student couldn't answer 14×5, let's say, I'd ask, "What's the first step in the problem?" and if the student couldn't answer that, I'd say, "If you multiply the digits in the one's place - 4×5 - what do you get?" and if the student was able to say 20, my eyes would light up and I'd nod vigorously. "Yes! That's it. Would you like to tell me the next step, or do you want to call on someone else to help you?" The student could then use this scaffolding to help them solve or ask a friend for help - either way, she or he still has decision-making power and doesn't look bad.

This is one example of being a demander. My students knew that they couldn't just say "I don't know" and have me move on to someone else. I was going to stick with them until they experienced some degree of success, and I would likely come back to them later in the lesson and ask a similar question, this time requiring them to stick with the answer until they got it right.

Providing the support students need to be successful is a major component of being a warm demander: you're not just believing kids CAN be successful or telling them failure is not an option. You're noticing what they need to meet the standards and coming alongside them to offer resources and different approaches to the learning which will help.

When it came to behavior, being a warm demander for me meant issuing reminders and initial corrections with a smile or at least a friendly tone. Then when a student pushed the limits too far, the smile disappeared and I got very serious. Immediately after issuing the firm correction, I'd go right back to being warm with the rest of the class.

This was a strategy I learned from the director of the Head Start program in my first public school teaching job. Her name was Afiya Graham. She taught a model lesson during my first month of teaching and was reading a book to my students while they sat on the rug. One of the kids started calling out during the read aloud. She made eye contact with the corners of her mouth turned up to communicate, "Mmm, I'm really not feeling that behavior," and shook her head to let him know that wasn't okay. Then she looked back at the book. When he didn't stop, she whipped her head over in his direction and stopped reading mid-sentence. He froze, realizing she'd stopped reading the story and was clearly not happy. The moment he was silent, she turned back to the book and kept reading in her warm, happy way.

This process repeated all throughout the lesson, but it worked. She gave a gentle or playful verbal or nonverbal reminder the first time expectations were not met and followed up swiftly with a serious look or reprimand for repeated misbehavior.

When I first tried this approach, I honestly felt like I had multiple personalities, switching from lighthearted to serious and back again in the course of just a couple of seconds. But the kids responded really well. After all, it wasn't fun for them if I had to get serious or mean with one child and then carried that attitude over into my interactions with them. They wanted their happy, fun-loving teacher and they deserved to have her. And, I deserved to be my best self - I didn't want to carry that grudge or annoyance with me.

So this very quickly became part of my teaching style, and I still do this to the current day, even if I'm teaching model lessons in a middle or high school. I am warm and pleasant and smiling with them, but the moment they try to push the boundaries, I have a cold-as-ice look that tells students I am not playing with them, and a cold-as-ice voice that communicates the same. I'll address that and then instantly turn back to the rest of the class with warmth and enthusiasm. I've found this approach to be incredibly disarming for teenagers and therefore, it's been very effective for me. It shows a sense of unflappability - that I will not let a handful of kids ruin my lesson, throw me off track, or cause me to get impatient with the whole class. I'm directing the coldness to where it's warranted and am sufficiently in charge of my emotions to switch back to my natural warm state.

These are just a couple examples of the "demander" portion of the "warm demander" approach. As I mentioned right up front, no method is fool-proof and guaranteed to work with every student.

It takes experimentation to find an approach that works for you and is authentic to your personality, and one that is also appropriate for your students. Being culturally responsive is a critical part of being a warm demander, because our beliefs about what constitutes both warmth and demanding behaviors are based on our own personal and cultural norms.

What is considered playful to you might be considered disrespectful to your students. And vice versa: you might consider something disrespectful that they find playful. What you see as being appropriately demanding might be perceived by kids as aggressive. Or what you see as being warm, like making sustained eye contact, might be perceived by kids as uncomfortable.

Being aware of this and monitoring your students' reactions is key. Get curious about their responses to you, rather than being judgmental. You don't have to label your attempts (or their reactions) as right or wrong, or good or bad. Just notice what's effective, and what doesn't get a great response. Probe into those reactions a bit more: What made this one instance work? What made this other one blow up in your face?

Let your kids know when you mess up, take things too far, or behave in ways that you aren't comfortable with. This sets the precedent in your classroom that people apologize when they mess up or mistreat others. They reflect on their behavior and continually try to do better because they care about those around them. That's being a warm demander.

There's obviously so much more I could say about this topic, but the information about being a warm demander is available online if you want to learn more. What I want to return to is the part that I said in the beginning, about why I think this is such a great goal to strive for as a teacher.

Being a warm demander allows you to focus more on who you are - how you show up in the classroom - rather than getting caught up in students' frustrating behaviors or failure to meet learning goals. This is about thinking about who you are as a person in the classroom: the way you show up, your personality, attitude, and enthusiasm.

If you pity your students or don't believe in them, trying to be a warm demander will come across as fake. If you think you're a bad teacher and have no confidence in your own abilities, it won't work either.

But when you establish the right mindset - the right beliefs about yourself and your students - becoming more of a warm demander will come naturally. You'll notice that it feels more effortless. And in the moments when you find yourself being cold, angry, impatient, or aggravated, you'll know how to self-correct and get back on track.

The only person you can change is yourself. You can't change your students, and you don't need to. When you get frustrated, refocus on the person you want to be each day for your students and expend your energy on being that person - that awesome teacher and supportive adult - rather than on trying to get the kids to be that awesome student.

You're not blaming yourself or putting all the responsibility on your own shoulders. Being a warm demander in an empowering stance, where you realize the tremendous influence your very demeanor can have on children, and how small shifts in your tone and facial expression can make a huge difference in your interactions. Being a warm demander helps you show up in the classroom as the best version of yourself. You can do this. And remember: it's not going to be easy, it's going to be worth it.

Further Reading

Alexander, A. (2016). The warm demander: An equity approach. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/warm-demander-equity-approach-matt-alexander

Bondy, E., & Ross, D. (2008). The teacher as warm demander [PDF file]. Retrieved from http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/marachi/mle/Warm%20Demander%20Article.pdf

McKeown, K. (2018). Why teachers need to be "warm demanders" toward themselves. Retrieved from https://www.teachingbalance.com/blog/why-teachers-need-to-be-warm-demanders

Neesen, K. (2017). Students, especially African-Americans, thrive with warm, demanding teachers. Retrieved from https://news.virginia.edu/content/students-especially-african-americans-thrive-warm-demanding-teachers

Safir, S. (2019). Becoming a warm demander. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar19/vol76/num06/Becoming-a-Warm-Demander.aspx
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The Warm Demander: How to raise expectations (and have students rise to meet them)

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Facebook608Tweet0Pin451 This week on the Truth for Teachers podcast: There's a lot of research out there about what it means to be a warm demander but what I'm hoping to add to the conversation with this episode is a personal touch: What exactly does being a warm demander look like?

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Shane Safir - ASCD

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Abstract

An Old Concept Reborn

Show Strength

Listen and Affirm

Challenge and Offer a Choice

From the Micro to the Macro

Adopting an equity-centered coaching model for school leaders.

Abstract

An Old Concept Reborn

Show Strength

Listen and Affirm

Challenge and Offer a Choice

From the Micro to the Macro

I still remember the look on her face: an African American mother watching her son, once again, being underserved. She was quiet, but her face spoke volumes as she looked straight at me-a young white teacher-with an expression of sheer disappointment. I was giving up on her son.

"I'm just not positioned to serve Jason well," I insisted to myself. "I have tried and failed to build a relationship with this 14-year-old, and we just don't connect. It's better for him to have a second chance with my colleague Greg, a young African American man who teaches the same course. Maybe they will form a better connection."

Greg was at the table, as was my principal (also a white woman), Jason's mom, and Jason himself. I don't think any of us really believed that Jason needed a different teacher. I was more experienced than Greg, who was a brand-new teacher, and therefore had a stronger pedagogical skill set at the time. But somehow I had convinced myself that moving Jason was the best solution.

In truth, what Jason needed was for me to believe in him and persist in finding a way to serve him. He needed me to see that his distracting classroom behavior was an attempt at masking his struggle to read at grade level. He needed me to teach him how to read the complex texts we were studying with proficiency. He needed me to become a warm demander.

An Old Concept Reborn

That moment from nearly 20 years ago still pains me, and I share it with vulnerability and awareness that when it comes to educational equity, we are all part of the problem-and we can all be part of the solution. Becoming warm demanders is a critical approach we can take for increasing equity in our schools. With roots in Native Alaskan communities (Kleinfeld, 1975), this concept can be applied to both teacher-student and leader-teacher interactions.

In the words of author Lisa Delpit, warm demanders are teachers who "expect a great deal of their students, convince them of their own brilliance, and help them to reach their potential in a disciplined and structured environment" (2013). By extension, warm demanders are instructional leaders (coaches, principals, assistant principals) who expect a great deal of their colleagues, convince them of their own capacity to improve, and support them with a range of resources and coaching moves.

When I helped found the June Jordan School for Equity (JJSE) in San Francisco in 2003, I hoped to develop an instructional model with equity at its core. As a school leader, however, I struggled to find the language to convey an approach that would couple high support with high expectations for students and teachers alike. My colleagues Matt Alexander and Jessica Huang, fellow cofounder and the current principal of JJSE, respectively, have since built on the warm demander concept to create an equity-centered instructional framework rooted in four guiding principles. Although their principles were crafted with students in mind, I've translated them here for adults.

1. Believe in the impossible. This principle helps us interrupt the implicit biases and single stories we may carry about colleagues. Do you really believe that every teacher in your building can improve? Brain science, and specifically the concept of neuroplasticity, teaches us that every human being has the ability to grow and change. When you believe this, you convey it. When you don't, it shows.

2. Build trust. Warm demanders understand that all growth and learning is rooted in relational capital, the "resource that leaders accrue when they take time to listen to and convey authentic care and curiosity toward others. ... If relationships function as currency in schools, relational capital is like a big savings account of trust and goodwill" (Safir, 2017, p. 107). Particularly when it comes to working toward equity, trust is the foundation of any warm demander interaction.

3. Teach self-discipline. With trust in place, a leader who is a warm demander can communicate high expectations to his or her colleagues: "I respect you, and therefore I am not going to lower my bar for you." The combination of belief and trust creates a platform from which to help your colleagues develop self-discipline, or the will and skill to apply a laser-sharp focus to instructional improvement.

4. Embrace failure. Warm demanders model a growth mindset toward colleagues and encourage a culture of experimentation. They end coaching conversations with questions like, "What are you going to try out?" or "What are your next steps?" Warm demanders don't expect their colleagues to improve overnight. But they do expect them to take risks, make mistakes, and reflect on what they learn-always through an equity lens. They hold space for teachers to reflect and celebrate growth and failure alike, and they make it safe to fail (Alexander, 2016).

These principles are powerful, but what do they look like in action? What are the listening and coaching moves of a warm demander? Let's examine them from a school leadership perspective, using my story with Jason as a case study. 1

Show Strength

It's not enough to believe in your colleagues' ability to do better by kids. You have to proactively set the instructional tone and direction, and then be willing to interrupt inequitable mindsets and practices when they surface. This requires us to cultivate what I call an orientation to vision -a leadership stance in which we define, coach toward, and message a vivid picture of success (Safir, 2017). As a leader, what are your instructional values? What is your image of an equity-centered classroom or school? Overcommunicate your vision-in meetings, on agendas, on the school walls, on classroom observation tools-so that when a breach happens, you are ready to show strength.

Showing strength means holding the line on your vision and not capitulating to deficit language, single stories, or narrow views of student behavior. In my story with Jason, I misread his behavior in class as him "not liking me" as a teacher. Looking back, I can see how misguided my thinking was. Jason was a 9th grader reading at probably a 2nd or 3rd grade level. He was carrying around a backpack full of shame about his learning gaps and finding all sorts of ways to distract me and his peers. I needed a warm-demander leader to bring me back to our school values and to offer a different narrative about what was happening.

Rather than signing off on the class transition, here is how I imagine my principal could have shown strength:

Me: I don't feel like I am a good fit for Jason. He acts out in my class all the time, and I think he might do better with Greg. Could we move him?

Principal: Shane, moving Jason to another class is a last-ditch option. Frankly, it would make him feel rejected and reinforce his experience of marginalization as a young black man. You are an excellent teacher and I know you can find a way to serve Jason. I am here to help you figure it out.

Listen and Affirm

By shifting the narrative I was holding, my principal would have opened up space for a coaching conversation. First, however, she needed to stand with me in my struggle and shame around not being able to connect with this student. My colleagues at JJSE call this part of the warm demander framework "listen and affirm," similar to the concept of deep listening (Safir, 2017). In my coaching, I see many leaders choose to leapfrog this step, perhaps because they fear the emotionality that may emerge. But leading for equity is inherently emotional work, and we must cultivate our capacity to sit with and hold space for people's feelings. Otherwise, we risk shutting them down.

When we practice deep listening, we tune into the message beneath the words, paying close attention to the speaker's nonverbal signals and affirming his or her capacity to grow and change. What does the teacher's facial expression and body language reveal? As you assess these cues, form a mental picture of his or her experience and model the stance of mature empathy by showing care and compassion (Safir, 2017).

Here are a few powerful ways to do this:

Mirror the teacher's nonverbal signals to activate mirror neurons, a unique type of brain cell that fires when we observe an action or emotion.

Practice active listening by paraphrasing and summarizing what the speaker has said ("What I hear you saying is ...").

Use affirmative language to reinforce that you believe in this colleague ("I really appreciate how you ..." or "I know this is difficult, and I commend you for ...").

Here is how I envision my principal could have listened to and affirmed me. Imagine that I looked deflated as I approached her (for example, on the verge of tears or hunched over).

Principal: ( Taking a breath and accessing her own emotions so she can mirror mine, and putting a hand on my shoulder.) I can see that this is hard for you. What is coming up for you around your ability to serve Jason?

Me: I feel like a failure! I have had four successful years of teaching and now I can't figure out how to help this one student. I don't know why I can't build a better relationship with him.

Principal: What I hear you saying is that you have felt successful as a teacher for the past few years, and this dynamic with Jason has left you feeling like a failure and questioning why you can't build a connection. Did I hear that right?

Me: Yes. ( My shoulders relax and arms uncross. I sit down and lean forward with my elbows on my knees. My principal sits directly across from me, no desk between us, and leans forward to mirror me.)

Principal: Well, Shane, I believe in you as a teacher, and I can see how challenging this moment is for you. I also believe in Jason and our responsibility to serve him, and I am committed to helping you build a stronger relationship with him.

Challenge and Offer a Choice

When a person feels seen and heard, something magical happens. Often, they can breathe deeply once again. They might cry, sigh, or shift their posture in a way that signals increased openness. Look for that signal; it is your opportunity to engage in strategic listening (Safir, 2017), a style of equity-centered coaching that draws on reflective questions and a bias toward experimental action.

Alexander and Huang call this part of the warm demander framework "challenge and offer a choice," and it is connected to the idea of an orientation to vision. The challenge here is to call somebody in and up to their fullest potential, not to call them out. This is the moment to anchor your coaching conversation in school values, instructional vision, or even the teacher's own values.

Another way to "challenge" your colleague is to ask probing questions that invite her to reframe her thinking about the situation-what I call reflective inquiry. A few of my favorites are:

If you step back for a moment, what is a different way of seeing this student's behavior?

What might be getting in the way of ... (building a strong relationship with Jason, for instance)?

What makes this particular situation feel confusing or different?

Knowing that we are all prone to implicit bias, what unconscious biases or single stories might you hold about this student?

When have you successfully addressed a similar challenge, and what can we learn from that?

Finally, a warm demander always moves the conversation to action-what I call taking bias toward action. Remember the principle of embracing failure? This is the place to plant that seed. Offer the teacher small action steps to try, or better yet, ask: "What is a next step you could try?" or "What is another form of data we could gather to help us understand this problem from new angles?" 2 Reassure your colleague that it is indeed safe to try and even safe to fail. Identify a time to meet again to reflect together.

Here is how I imagine my principal could have challenged me and offered a choice:

Principal: What do you think is getting in the way of a trusting relationship between you and Jason?

Me: I think he just doesn't like me.

Principal: Have you tracked your interactions with him to observe the ratio of your positive to negative feedback? Sometimes, our unconscious biases lead us to reinforce a deficit lens on our students. This is especially important to pay attention to as a white teacher teaching boys of color.

Me: No, I hadn't thought of that.

Principal: Well, I'd be happy to come in and do an observation for you with that inquiry in mind. What other interpretations can we come up with for his distracting behavior? What is your assessment of his literacy skills, for example, as the class tackles tough texts?

Me: Well, the first time he read out loud in class, it was very halting and slow. He seemed to be struggling with decoding longer words and with fluency.

Principal: Aha! Have you done a fluency check with him? Do we have a plan in place to accelerate his reading?

Me: No, and honestly, I'm a high school teacher. I don't know how to teach reading.

Principal: I hear you but, if that is what's at stake here for Jason, we have a moral obligation to figure it out. What could be our next steps?

Me: Well, I do think it would be helpful for you to observe the class that he's in and share feedback. I also agree that we need to assess his reading level, but that will require support.

Principal: No problem. I'll ask Johanna ( the instructional coach) to show you how to do a running record. One more thing: Have you had an authentic, face-to-face conversation with Jason's mom? Try listening to an expert in this situation: Ask what she thinks you could do to strengthen the relationship.

Even writing this imaginary script gives me a profound sense of relief. How amazing would it be if all leaders held teachers to the expectation to serve, see, and connect with every child? What if we did this with care, humanity, and the belief that teachers can do better?

From the Micro to the Macro

In signing off on moving Jason from my class, my principal consented to two problematic narratives: First, that Jason couldn't find success in my classroom; and second, that I couldn't learn how to serve him. As I hope this article has modeled, there is another way. We can become warm demanders for equity by leading teachers and students toward a clear vision and values, believing in what may seem impossible, taking time to build trust, and cultivating a culture of risk taking. This approach requires courage, deep listening, and an expanding set of coaching moves.

Much of our work toward educational equity focuses on the problems we need to solve: institutional racism, sexism, exclusion, bias. While we must develop a robust analysis of our equity challenges, the warm demander framework offers us a path forward rooted in hope and possibility. Imagine a school full of warm demanders, where teachers and leaders confront and address deficit thinking and mindsets in themselves, their students, and their colleagues.

In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown writes:

The micro reflects the macro and vice versa-Fibonacci patterns show up from space to cauliflower. The tiniest most mundane act reflects the biggest creations we can imagine. (p. 51)

As we invest in warm demander interactions, we create a new way of being and learning together. We envision the seemingly impossible-a place where every student and every teacher is held to high expectations in a loving and supportive manner-and then we begin to enact it. And suddenly, the tiniest conversation will be reflected in the image of the school we want to create.

Author's Note: All student and teacher names are pseudonyms.

References

Brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent strategy. Chico, CA: AK Press.

Delpit, L. (2013). Multiplication is for white people: Raising expectations for other people's children. New York: The New Press.

Kleinfeld, J. (1975). Effective teachers of Eskimo and Indian students. The School Review, 83(2), 301-344.

Safir, S. (2017). The listening leader: Creating the conditions for equitable school transformation. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

End Notes

1 This framework weaves together JJSE's three warm demander elements-show strength, listen and affirm, and challenge and offer a choice-with the coaching stances outlined in my own book, The Listening Leader: Creating the Conditions for Equitable School Transformation (Jossey-Bass, 2017).

2 "Data" here refers to qualitative or "street-level" data. Examples of data you could gather include: observing the class that has the student the teacher is struggling with; doing an empathy interview with the student; or scheduling a home visit with the student's family.

ASCD is a community dedicated to educators' professional growth and well-being.

Let us help you put your vision into action.

ASCD empowers educators to achieve excellence in learning, teaching, and leading so that every child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.

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I still remember the look on her face: an African American mother watching her son, once again, being underserved. She was quiet, but her face spoke volumes as she looked straight at me-a young white teacher-with an expression of sheer disappointment. I was giving up on her son.

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A Look at Implicit Bias and Microaggressions

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A Look at Implicit Bias and Microaggressions

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Edutopia

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A Look at Implicit Bias and Microaggressions

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A primer on the impact of implicit biases in schools and how they can be expressed by students and faculty.

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Harvard University

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Preliminary Information

On the next page you'll be asked to select an Implicit Association Test (IAT) from a list of possible topics . We will also ask you (optionally) to report your attitudes or beliefs about these topics and provide some information about yourself.

We ask these questions because the IAT can be more valuable if you also describe your own self-understanding of the attitude or stereotype that the IAT measures. We would also like to compare differences between people and groups.

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Important disclaimer: In reporting to you results of any IAT test that you take, we will mention possible interpretations that have a basis in research done (at the University of Washington, University of Virginia, Harvard University, and Yale University) with these tests. However, these Universities, as well as the individual researchers who have contributed to this site, make no claim for the validity of these suggested interpretations. If you are unprepared to encounter interpretations that you might find objectionable, please do not proceed further. You may prefer to examine general information about the IAT before deciding whether or not to proceed.

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On the next page you'll be asked to select an Implicit Association Test (IAT) from a list of possible topics . We will also ask you (optionally) to report your attitudes or beliefs about these topics and provide some information about yourself.

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Washington University

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Strategies for Instructors

Stereotype threat is a phenomenon in which a person's concern about confirming a negative stereotype can lead that person to underperform on a challenging assessment or test. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in laboratory research and in classroom settings, as well as in non-academic contexts (for the most recent review of this research, see Spencer et al., 2016). Stereotype threat can affect anyone, depending on the context, but students who identify with groups that are underrepresented in a field or at an institution may be especially vulnerable to its effects.

What can we, as instructors, do to reduce the potential impact of this "threat" and to create a fair learning environment for all of our students? The following suggestions are drawn from research on some of the interventions that have been shown to reduce or "defuse" the impact of stereotype threat on student performance. (For additional ideas and research, see for example, Killpack and Melon, 2016; Spencer et al., 2016; Walton, Cohen, and Steele, 2012.)

Promote a Growth Mindset about Intelligence

Foster a "growth mindset" by conveying the idea that intelligence is not fixed, but can change and grow incrementally, with practice and "exercise." (Dweck, 2008; Blumenstyk, 2016).

Create a learning environment in which mistakes and missteps are valued as opportunities for learning. Encourage students to "think out loud," to ask questions, to embrace difficult problems, and to take intellectual risks. Model this disposition yourself by providing examples of challenging questions and problems that excite you about learning and scholarship.

Describe for students situations in which mistakes, missteps, and wrong turns have led to discovery and innovation in your field and-if you are comfortable doing so-in your own work. Hong and Lin-Seigler (2012) have found that learning about struggles faced by famous physicists increased students' interest in science and problem solving.

Prompt students to reflect on their work by asking questions such as "Who made an interesting mistake today?" or "Did you find any stumbling blocks or places where you struggled when you were writing this paper? How did you work through those difficulties?" (Dweck 2008)

If a student contributes an answer that is incorrect, follow-up with questions that will help the student explain their rationale and identify any "wrong turns" or missteps. Communicate often with your students about the usefulness of wrong answers-they help us to illuminate incomplete understanding and spur us on to learn more. Sometimes, moreover, what appears to be a wrong answer turns out to be an alternative way of correctly solving a problem or answering a question.

If you make a mistake in the classroom, or in an assignment you distributed to the class, correct the mistake as soon as you can. If a student's question pointed out that mistake, thank the student.

When designing assessments in your class, include "low-stakes" quizzes, homework, and shorter papers and other assignments as well as higher-stakes tests, papers, and projects. Provide students with an opportunity to receive feedback on their performance and to build knowledge and skills over time.

Be careful to avoid assuming that a students' performance on an exam or assignment is evidence of "natural" ability (or lack of ability). When speaking with students who are not performing well in the course, avoid statements such as "some people have trouble with math [or writing] [or critical thinking]"; these statements can communicate the idea that intelligence is fixed and may also remind students of identity-based stereotypes. Instead, work with the student to identify areas where the student is struggling and 1-2 new strategies the student can use to improve in those areas (Rattan, Good, Dweck, 2012).

Provide Feedback that Motivates Students to Improve

When commenting on student work, provide "wise feedback," which combines 1) assurance that you are providing critical feedback because you have high standards, 2) specific commentary indicating where the students' work does and does not meet the standards, and 3) confidence that students can meet those standards. This type of feedback has been shown to improve students' motivation and reduce students' perceptions of instructor bias (Cohen et al., 1999; (Yeager et al., 2014).

Articulate and share with all students the criteria you will use to evaluate their work. When appropriate, grade with rubrics or answer keys that promote fairness and transparency. Explain to students the rationale behind these criteria. For example, is the course designed to help students learn more advanced modes of thinking, problem-solving, or writing that are crucial to success in future courses, graduate-school entrance exams, or professional careers?

Combine these high standards with opportunities for support that can help students when they are transitioning into more challenging curricula. Keep in mind that all students will not be equally aware of-or comfortable in seeking out-campus resources. Therefore, set aside time in class to talk about these resources during the first week of class, describe them on the course syllabus, and-when needed-in individual conversations with students. In addition, describe these resources on your syllabus or course webpage.

Provide students with challenging feedback that identifies areas for improvement and expresses your confidence that they can learn new strategies for studying, writing, or solving problems. Trying to comfort students by, for example, telling them that you will give them easier problems, or call on them less often, has been shown to de-motivate students, while "strategy feedback" has been shown to increase students' motivation. Moreover, students perceive "comfort feedback" to be associated with a fixed mindset, while perceiving "strategy feedback" to be associated with a growth mindset (Rattan, Good, Dweck, 2012).

Foster a Sense of Belonging

When students learn that it is common to experience academic struggle and to be concerned that these experience suggest that one does "belong" at the institution, they have improved academic and health outcomes compared with students who do not receive these messages (Walton and Cohen, 2011).

You can improve your students' sense of "social belonging" by providing narratives written by students who initially struggled and questioned whether or not they belonged in the course or at the institution, but ultimately learned new study strategies and succeeded. Include narratives from diverse students, for example in terms or race, religion, gender, or nationality.

As a second step, ask your current students to write their own narratives about a time when they have experienced academic challenges and ask them if you can share this narrative with future students in the course. This act of writing their own stories of struggles and perseverance can help them internalize the message that academic struggle is common and, often, transient (Aguilar, et al, 2014).

Selected References

Aguilar, L., Walton, G., & Wieman, C. (2014). Psychological insights for improved physics teaching. Physics Today, 67(5), 43-49.

Aronson, J., Lustina, M. J., Good, C., Keough, K., Steele, C. M., & Brown, J. (1999). When white men can't do math: Necessary and sufficient factors in stereotype threat. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 29-46.

Blumenstyk, G. (May 11, 2016). Carol Dweck says theory of educational mindset often understood. Chronicle of Higher Education. http://www.chronicle.com/article/Carol-Dweck-Says-Theory-of/236453

Cohen, G. L., Steele, C.M., and Ross, L. D. (2008). The mentor's dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1302-18.

Dweck, C. (2008). Mindsets and math/science achievement. Carnegie Foundation.

Good, C., Aronson, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2003). Improving adolescents' standardized test performance: An intervention to reduce the effects of stereotype threat. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 24(6), 645-662.

Good, C., Rattan, A., & Dweck, C. S. (2012). Why do women opt out? Sense of belonging and women's representation in mathematics. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(4), 700-717.

Hong, H. Y., & Lin-Siegler, X. (2012). How learning about scientists' struggles influences students' interest and learning in physics. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(2), 469.

Killpack, T. L., & Melón, L. C. (2016). Toward inclusive STEM classrooms: What personal role do faculty play? CBE-Life Sciences Education, 15(3), es3.

Rattan, A., Good, C., & Dweck, C. S. (2012). "It's ok-not everyone can be good at math": Instructors with an entity theory comfort (and demotivate) students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(3), 731-737.

Rodríguez, B.A.(2014). The Threat of Living Up to Expectations: Analyzing the performance of Hispanic students on standardized exams. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 13, 191-205.

Shih, M., Pittinsky, T. L., & Ambady, N. (1999). Stereotype susceptibility: Identity salience and shifts in quantitative performance. Psychological Science, 10, 80-83.

Shih, M., Pittinsky, T. L., & Trahan, A. (2006). Domain-specific effects of stereotypes on performance. Self and Identity, 5, 1-14.

Spencer, S. J., Logel, C., & Davies, P. G. (2016). Stereotype threat. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 415-437.

Spencer, S. J., Steele, C. M., & Quinn, D. M. (1999). Stereotype threat and women's math performance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 4-28.

Schmader, T., & Johns, M. (2003). Converging evidence that stereotype threat reduces working memory capacity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 440-452.

Steele, C. M. (2002). Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do. New York: Norton.

Walton, G., Cohen, G. and Steele, C.M. (2012) Empirically validated strategies to reduce stereotype threat. https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/interventionshandout.pdf

Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., ... & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 804.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. © 2016, Washington University.

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Stereotype threat is a phenomenon in which a person's concern about confirming a negative stereotype can lead that person to underperform on a challenging assessment or test. This phenomenon has been demonstrated in laboratory research and in classroom settings, as well as in non-academic contexts (

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Culturally Responsive Teaching: 4 Misconceptions

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Culturally Responsive Teaching: 4 Misconceptions

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Jennifer Gonzalez - Cult of Pedagogy

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Culturally Responsive Teaching: 4 Misconceptions | Cult of Pedagogy

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In some cases, teachers think they’re practicing culturally responsive teaching, when in fact, they’re kind of not. Zaretta Hammond helps clear things up.

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Teaching Tolerance

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Educators today hear a lot about gaps in education - achievement gaps, funding gaps, school-readiness gaps. Still, there's another gap that often goes unexamined: the cultural gap between students and teachers.

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Educators today hear a lot about gaps in education - achievement gaps, funding gaps, school-readiness gaps. Still, there's another gap that often goes unexamined: the cultural gap between students and teachers.

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Introduction to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

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Introduction to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

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Teaching Tolerance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Introduction to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain

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Zaretta Hammond

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This school year, I have the privilege of working shoulder to shoulder with teachers who are rolling up their sleeves and asking hard questions about how they can better serve their under-performing students who are disproportionately English learners, poor students, and students of color. They are working to incorporate culturally responsive practices into their classrooms.

I believe culturally responsive teaching (CRT) is a powerful method for accelerating student learning. But truth be told, most educators are not really sure what it is or what it looks like. For some, it seems mysterious. A number of leaders discount it because it seems too "touchy feely" or only focused on raising students' self-esteem, when they need to raise achievement levels. But CRT is so much more than that. It's the reason why I wroteCulturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. ( Brief podcast on CRT)

Two of the biggest challenges I see teachers struggle with when first embracing CRT, is understanding the role culture actually plays in instruction and how to operationalize culturally responsive practices. They worry that they have to learn 19 different cultures -- everyone's individual customs, holidays, foods, and language. This simply isn't true. Here are four other big ideas about culturally responsive teaching to keep in mind:

1. Culturally responsive teaching isn't the same as multicultural education or social justice education. Too often we use the terms culturally responsive teaching and multicultural education interchangeably, when they're different things. They are related, but only culturally responsive teaching focuses on building students' learning power. It's important to remember that CRT isn't about diversity training, but about helping students reach deeper levels of understanding.

2. Culturally responsive teaching builds students' brain power by Improving information processing skills using cultural learning tools.This isn't an aspect of CRT we talk about a lot. Instead, educators like to focus on the affective elements. Keep in mind one way that the achievement gap manifests itself is by creating dependent learners who find it hard to do critical thinking or independent learning. When we focus on using culture as a cognitive scaffold, then we're able to leverage students' neural pathways that make learning easier.

3. Culturally responsive teaching is grounded in social and cognitive neuroscience. Neuroscience is giving us new findings every day that support why culturally responsive practices work. For example, social neuroscience reminds us that relationships are the on-ramp to learning, meaning if a student doesn't feel heard or seen, then it leads to increased stress. Stress hormones like cortisol impair the brain's executive function. So in order to create a learning environment conducive to all students learning, we need to lower stress hormones by building those relationships.

4. Culturally responsive teaching requires teachers to recognize the cultural orientation we call "collectivism."Teachers are often confused about how culture plays a role in culturally responsive teaching. They think they have to mention race, ethnicity, or cultural artifacts like ethnic food, music, or literature all the time for every different group. Instead, a key starting point to making cultural responsiveness manageable is to organize instructional activities around collectivist cultural principles -- group harmony and interdependence. Vygotsky talks about this as "socio-cultural learning" and highlights that it is necessary to move students into their zone of proximal development.

Here's another important point to make: Culturally responsive teaching isn't a program or set of strategies. First and foremost, it is a mindset. That means that it's equally important to do the ongoing "inside-out" work to build your social-emotional capacity to work across social, linguistic, racial, and/or economic difference with students and their families. Too often I hear educators say that they are "color-blind" or don't understand the socio-political issues that lead to inequities in education -- like disproportionate discipline outcomes for boys of color or low achievement data for English learners, poor students, and students of color in general.

We have to make it our personal business to build our emotional stamina to address our own blind spots and biases. 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 to 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're not thinking about your thinking, but thinking about your unconscious reacting. Remember, it isn't about getting rid of our biases, it's about rewiring our brains to not respond unconsciously to the negative dominant narratives about the learning capacity of poor students, students of color, and English learners. We have to tame our amygdala, our brain's fight or flight defense mechanism, and take advantage of neuroplasticity - our brain's ability to change itself and respond differently to emotionally charged situations, like talking about race, culture, and inequity.

At the end of professional development sessions with teachers, I usually share this quote from Atul Gawande, author of the Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right: "Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try." Operationalizing CRT may seem overwhelming, but start with something small but high leverage, and grow your comfort and skill level. We can do this!

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Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain

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This school year, I have the privilege of working shoulder to shoulder with teachers who are rolling up their sleeves and asking hard questions about how they can better serve their under-performing students who are disproportionately English learners, poor students, and students of color.

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Brown University

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This collection holds materials from the Education Alliance at Brown University. The Education Alliance was a reform support organization committed to advancing equitable educational opportunities that prepare all student populations to succeed in the 21st century. From 1975-2021, the Alliance partnered with schools, districts and state departments of education to apply research findings in developing solutions to educational challenges. Its mission was to enhance learning for culturally and linguistically diverse students and focused on district and school improvement with special attention to underperformance and issues of equity and diversity. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/7eez-dz04

The Education Alliance archived website can be found here

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Brown Digital Repository | Collection | The Education ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This collection holds materials from the Education Alliance at Brown University. The Education Alliance was a reform support organization committed to advancing equitable educational opportunities that prepare all student populations to succeed in the 21st century. From 1975-2021, the Alliance partnered with schools, districts and state departments of education to apply research findings in developing solutions to educational challenges.