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This platform reflects my deep commitment to culturally responsive teaching and the Ready 4 Rigor Framework (R4RF). My approach is shaped by a focus on creating inclusive classrooms where students' cultural backgrounds and lived experiences are valued. By using culturally responsive teaching principles and R4RF, I aim to ensure all students feel seen, heard, and empowered. This involves understanding their socio-political contexts, challenging personal biases, and fostering an environment of equity, respect, and love.

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What is culturally responsive teaching & what is my commitment to the ready 4 rigor framework?

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Steps to Make Classrooms More Culturally Responsive

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Steps to Make Classrooms More Culturally Responsive

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Culturally responsive and culturally sustaining teaching is all about meeting the diverse needs of students by respecting and valuing their cultures, languages, and identities. In this article, we’ll explore how teachers can apply these ideas in the classroom with advice from experts like Dr. Rocio del Castillo and Dr. Julia Stearns Cloat. The article breaks down simple, practical steps for creating more inclusive classrooms, such as reflecting on our own biases, adjusting teaching methods, and honoring students' cultural backgrounds and native languages. These strategies help create a classroom environment where every student feels understood and respected.

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The new question-of-the-week is:
What are specific ways to make lessons more culturally responsive and culturally sustaining?
Culturally responsive-and culturally sustaining-instruction are both widely recognized instructional mindsets and strategies. Gloria Ladson-Billings is the primary developer of these ideas, and Django Paris built on her work. You can read Professor Ladson-Billings previous contribution to this column at The Importance of 'White Students Having Black Teachers': Gloria Ladson-Billings on Education and Professor Paris' commentary at Response: 'It Is Long Past Time to Meet the Needs of Students of Color.'

This four-part series will look at examples of what these kinds of lessons might look like in the classroom.

Today, Dr. Rocio del Castillo, Dr. Julia Stearns Cloat, Lisa Stringfellow, Valentina Gonzalez, Maurice McDavid, and Cathery Yeh share their suggestions. You can listen to a 10-minute conversation I had with Rocio, Lisa, Valentina, and Maurice on my BAM! Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.
Five steps toward equity Dr. Rocio del Castillo began her career as a school psychologist in Peru and has dedicated her professional career to being an advocate for educational equity and social justice. Her rich and diverse experience includes serving for over 20 years in both public and private school systems, where she has received recognition and accolades for her work in the special education, bilingual, and dual- language settings. Rocio currently serves as assistant superintendent for special services in Huntley Community School District 158 (Illinois) and as an adjunct professor. Dr. Julia Stearns Cloat has spent the past 25 years working in unit school districts in roles including literacy specialist, instructional coach, and curriculum director and has earned awards for her work in student services. Her areas of expertise and passion include educational equity, literacy, curriculum development, instructional coaching, and RtI/MTSS. Julia currently works as a coordinator in Kaneland School District 302 (also in Illinois) and as an adjunct professor at Northern Illinois University:
How to promote a culture in which teachers facilitate lessons that are culturally responsive is a challenge currently being faced by many school districts. The type of institutionalized change that is needed to make lessons culturally sustaining cannot occur through a single initiative or concrete practice. In truth, we must keep in mind that equity is a foundation, mindset, and approach. There are however, steps that school districts can encourage in order to make the learning environment in classrooms more culturally responsive.

1. Assess your own personal biases

2. Get to know your students

Getting to know your students and the factors that make up the students' personal and family lives will help teachers make lessons more culturally responsive and build relationships with their students. Taking factors such as socioeconomic status, family make-up, the educational expectations and goals that a family has for the child, student interests and experiences will enhance the teacher/student relationship and provide opportunities to make the learning experiences more personalized and better meet the students' needs.

3. Adapt your teaching and curriculum

The process of adapting your teaching and curriculum begins by first responding to the assessment of your own personal biases, by considering if your biases are reflected in your current practices, then making strides to correct and to become more culturally responsive. The next step is to consider what you have learned about your students and making sure that your focus, standards, instructional approaches, and materials reflect the cultures of your students and expose them to different cultures. Additionally, authentic forms of assessment tools (e.g., observations, rubrics, conferring, performance tasks) are a more culturally and linguistically responsive way to assess student performance and progress than a more traditional classroom assessment.

4. Elevate the students' culture and native language

There is truth in Menken's (2017) assertion that "not only is English typically privileged in school curricula, but also in ideology" in that schools operate from the assumption that emergent bilinguals lack the resources to be successful in school. As emerging bilingual students are learning English, we must do what Beeman (2019) refers to as "elevating the status" of the language. It is likely that most collective experiences that are a part of the school culture are conducted in English. As a result, we must make efforts to assure emerging bilingual students that first language has value and will benefit the student's literacy life as they become more proficient in English.
5. Involve family and community
Make the learning environment in your classroom more culturally responsive means engaging families and communities in the academic lives of students. By supporting students' bicultural and multicultural identity development, families will feel more included and more comfortable, ultimately, making it more likely that they become partners with their children's school (WIDA Consortium, 2013).
Lisa Stringfellow has taught middle school English for over 24 years. In her work, she focuses on culturally responsive literacy and issues of equity and social justice in the classroom. She currently teaches 5th & 6th grade English at the Winsor School in Boston, where she serves in numerous roles including grade-level co-sponsor, educational technology co-coordinator, and co-facilitator of Sisters/Somos, an affinity group for black and Latina students. Connect with her on Twitter @EngageReaders:
As a middle school English teacher, I have tried to integrate her findings into my practice and made reflection an ongoing process in my professional life. I have focused on making my classroom more inclusive and culturally responsive. One of the ways I do that is by interrogating my practices and my curriculum.
For books that I have on my classroom library shelf, I ask the following:

What books might serve as mirrors for my students of color?

What books are written by authors of color?

What books are #ownvoices (written by an author that shares an identity with the character)

What books have problematic representations that I should consider weeding?

There are numerous people doing great work in this area. Tools you can use are the Classroom Library Questionnaire from Lee & Low Books or Tricia Ebarvia's How Inclusive Is Your Classroom Library Really? Dr. Debbie Reese's blog, American Indians in Children's Literature, is an excellent resource for evaluating Native and Indigenous children's literature.
For the books that I teach, I consider:

Whose voices are included?

Whose voices are left out?

Who holds power and who doesn't?

Where am I placing voices of color (as core texts or independent reading)

When I consider "rigor," is that coded language for anything?

Am I valuing multiply types of literacies?

When discussing books that have challenging or difficult content, it is also important to unpack the texts with students and teach them to take a critical stance. Teaching students to ask questions and look critically at issues of racism, power, and oppression and draw connections to their lives and the real world.
For my practices, I think about:

What is the intention of this practice? What is the impact?

Are there any texts or practices that I've "pledged allegiance" to? Why? How might those negatively impact students of color?

The following are some practical suggestions I have used in trying to center students' needs in my teaching.

Names are powerful and personal. Many students start the first day of school hearing teachers mispronounce their names. Rather than reading names, considering going around the room and having students say their names to you first. Even better, have students record themselves saying their names using an app like FlipGrid. Bonus-you can listen to them again later.

Educate yourself on racial-equity issues. How are your own biases shaping what you value and teach? Have you added "diverse" books to your library or curriculum? If so, it's a great start, but consider how that might be problematic, too. Adding still centers often majority-white voices in the curriculum. Instead, consider whether the structure of your curriculum needs to be different. A great workshop that has influenced my recent thinking is the Institute on Racial Equity in Literacy facilitated by Tricia Ebarvia and Dr. Sonya Cherry-Paul. For reading, teachers should consider We Got This by Cornelius Minor and Being the Change by Sara Ahmed.

Listen to your students. If you want to know how you're doing, ask your students. Do you know how students of color in your class or school feel about their school experience? Where do they see themselves in the curriculum? Who is centered? What practices do you or your school have that makes things harder for them? Open yourself to listen deeply and taking feedback for those who matter most. The kids.
Further Reading

Class meetings
Valentina Gonzalez has served 20+ years in education as a teacher, district facilitator for English-learners, a professional-development specialist for ELs and as an educational consultant. Valentina delivers professional development and coaches teachers on sheltered instruction strategies. She works with teachers of ELs to support language and literacy instruction. Her work can be found on Seidlitz Education and on MiddleWeb. You can reach her through her website or on Twitter @ValentinaESL:

"... culture is visible and large and if we're not careful, our classroom and school culture can work to silence, exclude, and oppress children."-Cornelius Minor

The words Cornelius uses are strong and hit me hard ..."silence, exclude, and oppress children." Three things I never want to do. In fact, I aim to do the exact opposite. To amplify, embrace, and empower children.

Culturally responsive teaching builds a safe, sturdy bridge between students' home and personal lives to classroom instruction. Culturally responsive teaching is not a program we can purchase. It's not a box of curriculum. It's about how we weave our students' lives into daily instruction. We create the culture in our classrooms: the routines, what is valued, what we shine a light upon, how we celebrate, what is respected, how we interact with students and families.

Often culture is viewed only through the lens of a person's race or ethnicity. But culture is more than race and ethnicity, such as age, gender, socioeconomic status, disability, sexual orientation, religion, etc.

The question becomes how are we giving all students no matter their cultural groups equitable access to the curriculum (math, reading, writing, science, history, music, art, physical education, etc.).

Culturally responsive teaching requires:

Knowing students individually

Valuing students' assets

An openness to one's own biases

Building community

Class meetings aim to amplify, embrace, and empower children and foster a culturally responsive environment throughout the school year.
What are class meetings?
Class meetings are brief (15-30 minutes), regularly held gatherings. They are teacher-facilitated but student-led. Class meetings build community and empathy among students while allowing teachers to learn more about the kids in the classroom. Students look forward to class meetings. They know that this is a time when they can share and discuss with one another. The meeting also provides a safe space to encourage individuality.

Class meetings may look and sound a bit different depending on whether you teach primary or secondary students, but in essence they hold the same critical characteristics. In primary classrooms, students may gather in a circle on the floor; however, in secondary classrooms, students may be more comfortable seated in chairs. This physical seating arrangement is important because it brings all students into the conversation much like sitting around the dinner table together versus standing around at a cocktail party. In primary grades, teachers may offer a song, chant, or game for students to play. This may be appropriate for older students, too, depending on the content or context. Some teachers like to give students an object to hold when it's their turn to talk. I've seen classrooms that use a classroom mascot stuffed animal and others that toss a small ball.

One teacher effectively implemented class meetings by intentionally planning for them. She created a schedule that was similar to this but changed weekly to meet the needs of her students:

Monday: Students share what they did over the weekend or share what they are looking forward to about the week ahead.

Tuesday: Students discuss their goals for the week. What do they hope to accomplish?

Wednesday: Students discuss a topic that was in the news (changes weekly).

Thursday: Students share what they love doing for fun.

Friday: Students reflect on their goals.

Culturally responsive teaching can only happen when we know our students deeply. Class meetings provide us with information that we can infuse into instruction. Regular class meetings allow us to sustain culturally responsive teaching throughout the year.
Infusing what you learned from a class meeting
Classroom Scenario 1:

It's September, and school has been in session for a month now. Mr. Ruby has held regular class meetings for his students through which he learned that many of his students are bilingual. He values all languages and literacy and would like to ensure that his bilingual students feel empowered by their ability. He has decided to ask the students to share more about their languages and teach the class some key words in their primary languages.

Classroom Scenario 2:

The students did an amazing job sharing their primary language with their classmates. While sharing, one student mentioned that he was born in Brazil. Since the class was soon to be studying major landforms, Mr. Ruby asked the student if he had any experiences with the rainforest or Amazon River in Brazil. The student shared stories and pictures of his father who had visited both.
Steps to implementing class meetings:

1. Designate a time for regular class meetings.

2. Plan intentional discussions, activities, and/or events for the meetings.

3. Model expectations for students.

4. Facilitate the student-led discussion/activity.

5. Be consistent. Don't skip a day.

6. Take notes and use them to guide instruction.

The routine of class meetings has a powerful and positive impact on student engagement but can also give us a window into their world. Not only can we use the class meeting as a means to embed students' lives into future learning, but the actual act of the class meeting itself is culturally responsive. By giving students a platform to amplify their voice and allowing them to share their stories and who they are, we are creating environments that are culturally inclusive.
Summing it up
Creating and sustaining an environment that is culturally responsive means amplifying, embracing, and empowering children each day each lesson. In this environment, students' voices are heard and strengthened, students are welcomed for who they are rather than made to feel they need to conform, and the environment shares power with students. Class meetings hold the power to do just that.

You can read more ideas about culturally responsive teaching in this article for NCTE or this one here for MiddleWeb.
Image by Valentina Gonzalez Four ways to implement culturally responsive teaching
Maurice McDavid earned his bachelor's degree in elementary education with a minor in history and Spanish. He has taught middle school history, English, and Spanish, as well as high school geography. He was dean of students for three years and is now in his first year as assistant principal at a bilingual elementary school:

Gloria Ladson Billings argues that culturally responsive teaching must include, at minimum, the following: bringing native language into the classroom, family involvement, understanding history and culture and community culture into the classroom.

Looking for connections between English and other languages as related to the content you're teaching is important. For example, when teaching about "vaqueros," some of America's first cowboys, you can relate the word vaquero to vaca, which means cow in Spanish. In math, you can talk about the numeric prefixes and their relationship to Latin-based languages.

In terms of family involvement, many lessons allow for parents to come into the classroom and be the experts. One teacher that I work with recorded parents explaining how they use math in their jobs. She recorded one parent for each unit theme. This gave parents an opportunity to feel like experts and students an opportunity to feel proud about their parents.

Understanding the history and culture of our nation and more specifically the state and community in which you teach is powerful. When developing lessons for my middle school American History class, I was always very intentional in acknowledging the authors of our history books and how their place in culture impacted their telling of the story. I often presented information on how people who didn't seem to be the main characters in the story were indeed major actors. Asking students to think about the role of gender, race, or financial status can impact any lesson in any content area.

Finally, looking specifically at the community culture is a way to make connections to the students. Students cannot be known apart from the context in which they live. Lessons that include landmarks specific to the community or discuss industry that is important in the community allow students to utilize their background information. In my hometown, we are known for our excellent farmland. Whether science, math, or history, the agricultural culture of our community will connect students. At a surface level, lessons can use the topics from the community. At a deeper level, students can begin to inquire about what has made their community what it is and figure out ways in which they can be a part of its future development.
Six categories of a "culturally responsive framework"
Cathery Yeh, @YehCathery, is an assistant professor of teacher education at Chapman University with 20+ years in education. As a teacher, she visited over 300 student homes to develop partnerships with caregivers and centered curriculum on students' lived experiences and perspectives. Dr. Yeh has published over 40+ articles on mathematics education, culturally and linguistically responsive teaching, and video-based professional developments and is the lead author of the NCTM book Reimagining the Mathematics Classroom:

Our students arrive in our classroom with a mosaic of identities. Lessons that are culturally responsive and sustaining need intentional focus on cultural preservation which require us, as educators, to critically analyze how much of U.S. schooling has focused on assimilation and colonization. Education is a system of policies and practices that currently serves to privilege a few at the expense of many. Too many of our students do not see themselves represented in the curriculum: solving problems in a process that is not their own, in a language different from their native tongue, and solving mathematics problems irrelevant to their interests and experiences.

Culturally responsive and sustaining lessons honor our students and their histories, culture, language, and unique ways of knowing and being in the world. I use a framework to design lessons; it builds from a culturally responsive framework developed by Aguirre and Zavala (2012). The framework includes six categories: cognitive demand, student thinking, discourse, power and participation, cultural/community knowledge, and critical knowledge.

Below are a series of questions related to each category that I ask myself during lesson design and reflection:

Cognitive demand: How does my lesson provide students opportunities to grapple with and make sense of important disciplinary ideas and their use? Students learn best when they are challenged to take risks and be authors of their own ideas.

Student thinking: How does my lesson make student thinking/understanding visible and deep? What are the different places in the lesson and ways (e.g., written, verbal, embodied) in which student thinking is made visible?

Discourse: How does the lesson allow students to engage in the ways of thinking and using language relevant to the discipline? How does the lesson allow alternative forms for expression, representation and engagement-beyond verbal talk and written text-to better capture ways of communicating and interacting representative of all students, including emergent bilingual students, students classified with disabilities, and students who may express themselves nonverbally?

Power and participation: Whose experiences and perspectives are valued in this lesson? How does my lesson distribute knowledge authority, value all students' contributions, and address status differences among students?

Cultural/Community: How does the lesson build on students' cultural and community knowledge? How does the lesson build from resources available in students' daily experiences and their community? How does the lesson honor students' and their ancestral histories and stories? How does the lesson allow students to deepen their appreciation of their own culture and the culture of others?

Critical knowledge: How does the lesson allow students to critically examine the world and to take action to promote change?
References:
Aguirre, J. M., & Zavala, M. (2013). Making culturally responsive mathematics teaching explicit: A lesson analysis tool. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 8(2), 163-190.

Thanks to Rocio, Julia, Lisa, Valentina, Maurice, and Cathery for their contributions!

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

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Steps to Make Classrooms More Culturally Responsive (Opinion)

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Six educators share specific suggestions on how to make lessons more culturally responsive, including through having teachers assess their own biases and by elevating students' culture and language.

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“Warm demander” teachers expect great things from their students, convince them of their own brilliance, and help them reach their potential in a disciplined, structured environment.

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

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 5 Strategies for Culturally Responsive Teachers

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 5 Strategies for Culturally Responsive Teachers

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As an educator, I have a powerful ability to shape the future by impacting my students' lives. By using thoughtful and inclusive teaching methods, I can create lasting positive effects that extend far beyond the classroom. Culturally responsive teaching is a meaningful way to bring change to education. If I want to lead larger-scale improvements, pursuing an advanced degree, like a Doctor of Education, will give me the skills and knowledge I need. This article will empower me to address the challenges in education and make an immediate difference in my professional environment.

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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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In this video,Zaretta Hammond explains that culturally responsive teaching (CRT) is an approach that incorporates students' cultural backgrounds into the learning process, recognizing that their experiences and identities influence how they learn. CRT is not just adding multicultural content to the curriculum but creating an environment where all students feel valued and supported. Hammond highlights the importance of understanding the neuroscience of learning, showing that reflecting students’ cultures in the classroom enhances learning. CRT is a mindset that focuses on building strong relationships, understanding students' needs, and adapting teaching methods for equity and inclusivity.

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Zaretta Hammond: Culturally Responsive Teaching 101 | #PLtogether

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In this video,Zaretta Hammond explores the neuroscience behind student learning, focusing on how culture and experiences shape brain development. She explains that the brain is deeply influenced by its environment, making culturally responsive teaching essential. Hammond highlights that understanding how the brain reacts to different teaching methods allows educators to create strategies that leverage students' cognitive strengths. By aligning teaching with how the brain processes information, especially for students from diverse backgrounds, Hammond shows how educators can enhance engagement, retention, and academic success.

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Zaretta Hammond: Using Neuroscience to Help Students | #PLtogether

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Classroom Video is the Most Powerful Tool in Service of Equity

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Classroom Video is the Most Powerful Tool in Service of Equity

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As an expert in culturally responsive teaching, Zaretta Hammond discusses the crucial role teachers play as personal coaches in the cognitive development of students and how they can use video as a powerful tool to achieve better learning outcomes.

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Zaretta Hammond: Classroom Video is the Most Powerful Tool in Service of Equity | #PLtogether

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Zaretta Hammond, an expert in culturally responsive teaching, speaks with Adam Geller, founder of Edthena, about small but impactful changes that school leaders can implement to transform student learning.

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Zaretta Hammond: How to Combat Learning Loss | #PLtogether

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Learn 3 ways to advance equity through culturally responsive teaching and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)

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Learn 3 ways to advance equity through culturally responsive teaching and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)

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In this video will learn:

1) How to build learning partnerships with students

2) The importance of "care and push" when it comes to helping students learn in their zones of development.

3) How to shift student's narratives about their learning capabilities beyond growth mindset/grit messages through error analysis.

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The Thriving School Psychologist Collective

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Culturally Responsive Teaching and SEL: A Coffee Chat with Zaretta Hammond

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ntegrating Culturally Responsive Teaching and Trauma-Informed Practices

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ntegrating Culturally Responsive Teaching and Trauma-Informed Practices

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As educators, it is essential that we create a learning environment where all students feel accepted and understood, especially those who have experienced trauma or come from diverse cultural backgrounds. To achieve this, we must ensure that their cultures are recognized and valued in the classroom, integrating their perspectives into daily learning. Additionally, it is crucial to foster a sense of belonging so that every student feels like a part of the school community. By doing this, we not only enhance their learning experience but also provide the safety and respect they need to feel motivated and thrive.

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Integrating Culturally Responsive Teaching and Trauma-Informed Practices

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Using these techniques together helps teachers support all students and foster a sense of belonging.

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3 Ways to Promote Empathy in the Classroom

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3 Ways to Promote Empathy in the Classroom

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Empathy is such an important skill for young people, as it allows them to connect with experiences beyond their own and gain a deeper understanding of the world around them. It’s about truly feeling for others and responding with kindness and care. While the windows and mirrors framework, which uses literature to foster empathy, is helpful, I believe we can take it a step further by nurturing empathy in real-time, right within the school environment. This way, students can develop a genuine, lasting connection to the world and each other.

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3 Ways to Promote Empathy in the Classroom

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Elementary teachers can embed empathy in assignments and projects to help students grasp its importance.

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Multicultural Resources for the Classroom

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Multicultural Resources for the Classroom

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"Colorín Colorado" is a bilingual website aimed at providing educational resources for teachers, families, and others working with English language learners (ELLs). The website offers a variety of resources, including articles, books, videos, and strategies to support ELLs, with a strong emphasis on cultural responsiveness and literacy development. It is particularly useful for educators looking for practical tools to improve the academic success of their ELL students, while also promoting a welcoming and inclusive environment.

The website is designed to be accessible to both English and Spanish speakers, and it also provides guidance for working with bilingual and multilingual students. It's a great resource for teachers, parents, and anyone interested in supporting language learners in their educational journey.

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Multicultural Resources for the Classroom

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This award is named after Pura Belpré, the first Latina librarian at the New York Public Library. The Pura Belpré Award is presented to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for chi…

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As educators, working effectively with students and families from diverse cultural backgrounds goes beyond simply learning about their cultures. It is essential to develop critical cultural competence, which involves examining our own assumptions, valuing the strengths that students bring from their diverse backgrounds, and creatively utilizing community assets and resources. In this article, we highlight 10 activities designed to help educators build and strengthen their critical cultural competence, thus fostering a more inclusive and responsive learning environment that meets the diverse needs of students.

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Working with Diverse Learners? 10 Activities to Develop Critical Cultural Competence - Corwin Connect

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Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on Linkedin Classrooms in the United States are becoming more and more diverse. Educators are always seeking strategies to work effectively with diverse students and their families. However, just developing knowledge about students and their backgrounds is not enough. Having […]

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Community Walks Create Bonds of Understanding

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Community Walks Create Bonds of Understanding

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When students guide teachers through their communities, it creates a powerful cultural exchange that can deeply impact and transform the school's culture. This experience helps foster a deeper understanding and connection between educators and their students' backgrounds.

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

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Offering opportunities for students to engage with peers beyond their own group, and giving students specific roles can help promote genuine collaboration, strengthen trust among them, and contribute to a more connected and supportive classroom environment.

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Intentionally fostering collaboration in the classroom has a variety of benefits, including increasing students' level of academic engagement.

Collaboration and socialization are key aspects of any workplace. Professionals across disciplines and industries collaborate, debate, and share. In the classroom, healthy socialization patterns can support student creativity and foster critical thinking.

Be Intentional With the Classroom Network

A simple change in seating arrangements can promote collaboration and encourage students to talk with each other. Small-group cohesion is important, but teachers must also promote connections beyond the smaller social units in their classrooms.

Recent research shows that when students have more connections with peers in different parts of the classroom social network, they're likely to show less relational aggression (which includes things like manipulative behavior). Better classroom cohesion correlates with less antisocial behavior and more trust throughout the class.

Form Student Groups

Organizing seating for collaborative learning creates a tricky decision: how to form the student groups. Often, students are eager to choose their own group mates. The problem is that students may struggle to stay productive in groups they chose themselves (not to mention the social stress that may accompany having to pick or be picked for a group). A recent study shows that setting pairings for students can lead them to spend more time on academically relevant discussions and produce higher quality work.

Once you've elected to group students, you must decide whether to randomly assign them or create groups based on particular characteristics. First, determine the purpose of the activity. If you want to help struggling students improve their understanding, look for some mixture of ability among students. If a goal of the activity is to target different ability levels to maximize the desirable difficulty for the most students, group students of the same ability levels together.

Once the groups are formed, consider ways to provide structure for different levels of interaction within and between groups. There is value in students developing a rich social network that includes both strong and weak ties. The work students do within their group helps them exchange knowledge and information. While they do this, they also develop trust in each other and a communal group identity.

As teachers, we should remember to give opportunities to also interact with peers outside the group. These interactions can provide new ideas to a group that change their perspective. They can also help create a larger sense of identity and belonging for the classroom as a whole.

Students need meaningful interactions both within their groups and between groups. One method for encouraging collaboration is to assign group roles in a collaborative project and then schedule times for conferences in which representatives from each group who play the same role meet in groups. They can discuss problems and ideas specific to their roles, offering an opportunity for students to collaborate with peers who are not a part of their nuclear group.

Opportunities Outside of Activities

The classroom environment is a valuable tool in relationship building. Research shows that greeting students at the door improves the classroom experience. Try expanding on the concept by giving students structured socialization time. Spending the first few minutes allowing students to greet one another can yield more academically engaged time during class. The structured opportunity to greet peers outside of their primary social circles also improves the strength of the classroom social network.

Because of a phenomenon called social contagion, teacher excitement to get to know students can yield big benefits for just a small time investment. When students believe the teacher cares about the work he or she does and who the students are, they're more likely to mirror that interest in their classwork.

Support Different Ways of Knowing

The classroom environment is more than the tables and chairs in the room. Teachers can design their rooms to welcome students and promote learning. Beyond the equipment, the interactions also shape our learning environment.

Research shows that music can be an effective classroom tool when used appropriately. If you choose to play music or other sounds in your classroom, be mindful that not every student will react the same way. Some students, especially those who identify as introverts, may find the music distracting.

The best way to ensure that every student is getting what he or she needs in your classroom is to use a variety of techniques, rather than trying to find one strategy that is the perfect fit for everyone. If you've managed student groups with music one day, consider allowing students to work in silence during another lesson. You can assess projects by letting students write, draw, sculpt, act, speak, code. For each work product, find ways to display and honor what students have done.

By communicating that everyone's way of knowing is valuable, you can lay the groundwork for a culture in which students value each other's contributions as well.

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Intentionally fostering collaboration in the classroom has a variety of benefits, including increasing students' level of academic engagement.

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Supporting Multilingual Students in the Early Grades

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Supporting Multilingual Students in the Early Grades

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Five ways teachers can celebrate and extend the linguistic expertise of young students who speak two or more languages.

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Early Childhood Education

Five ways teachers can celebrate and extend the linguistic expertise of young students who speak two or more languages.

Many children in the U.S. live their lives in two or more languages: A child of Guatemalan descent may read bedtime stories in Spanish with their parents and learn in English at school-and perhaps speak K'iche' with their grandparents. Research has shown that these multilingual children may have strong math skills, conflict resolution skills, and executive function skills.

By welcoming the whole multilingual child, including their linguistic practices, we send a powerful message that children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds contribute to the vibrancy of our early childhood programs.

Multilingualism is an asset to be nurtured in our classrooms, and the following five strategies can help teachers strategically and intentionally celebrate and extend multilingual children's existing linguistic expertise as well as their participation in learning activities both in person and virtually.

Incorporate Children's Home Languages

All multilingual children are experts in their home language practices and come with a wealth of knowledge that should be respected. Provide space and time for multilingual children to use all of their languages to think and express themselves.

For example, during partner work, invite children to use their home languages to share what they know. All multilingual learners, whether they're new to English or completely fluent, will benefit from talking with a partner who speaks the same home language. Thinking and sharing in both of their languages solidifies their learning.

In addition, encouraging multilingual learners to make connections between new English terms and words or concepts they already know will support language acquisition. You can invite children to share their linguistic expertise by sharing how to say a new word in their home language. If your class is studying nourishing foods, you might show a pineapple and invite children to share the words they know for it in their home languages, if they feel comfortable doing so.

Teach Anchor Words

Keep in mind that anxiety and self-doubt greatly interfere with the process of acquiring a second language. These negative feelings become a barrier between the speaker and the listener that reduces the amount of language the listener is able to understand. This is called the "affective filter." It's important to keep the affective filter low so that language learners can be successful.

One way to reduce anxiety for multilingual learners is to preview some foundational concepts so that, at a minimum, they have an idea of what is being discussed and, at best, they are confident about what is being taught. Anchor words are vocabulary words such as "farm" or "eat" that activate children's background knowledge from their home language and give them a context for learning a new language.

Most children who speak English at home will not need direct instruction to learn these terms, but for children who are very new to the English language, these words will be absolutely essential. Make a list of relevant thematic words and preteach them to your multilingual learners.

Provide Sentence Stems

"I like..." and "I learned..." are two examples of sentence stems or sentence starters that expand new English learners' comprehension skills as well as oral language development. They provide a framework for children's oral responses when listening to stories or having group discussions.

Sentence stems provide an effective language model and help children to respond in the form of a complete sentence. Stems also provide scaffolding for children to focus on what they want to say rather than thinking about how to formulate their response. Teach a few stems and use them consistently.

Because of the other barriers that exist in the virtual classroom (e.g., kids needing to unmute themselves, feeling nervous sharing with the whole group, being camera shy), this strategy is particularly useful during the pandemic.

Incorporate Visuals

New English learners find themselves in a sea of language that can be tough to navigate. Visuals are a terrific tool for supporting comprehension. Use realia (concrete objects) if you are teaching in person or pictures if teaching virtually so children can "see" the terms you are using.

Try acting out new vocabulary words. If you're teaching children the difference between "washing" and "scrubbing," dramatize it by modeling the actions and then invite children to join you. Another way to incorporate visuals is to point or gesture at what you are referring to: If you're reading a book and referring to an illustration of a horse, point to the horse; when you're describing your thinking, point to your temple.

Use Layered Questioning

When you interact with children, how can you ensure that they all understand and participate, regardless of their stage of language development? One way is to use a strategy called "layered questioning," which means varying the type of questions you ask children based on their language proficiency.

You can ask a question that requires children to gesture in response ("Will you point to the pineapple?"). You can ask a question that requires a child to respond with either a "yes" or a "no" (Do you like to eat pineapples?"). You can ask a question that gives children an either/or choice ("Do you like to eat pineapples for breakfast or for lunch?"). You can also ask open-ended questions so children can share their thinking ("How would you describe this pineapple?").

When you vary your questions based on what you know about your children, it empowers them to express their thinking, extend their content knowledge, and be active members of the classroom community.

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Supporting Multilingual Students in the Early Grades

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Five ways teachers can celebrate and extend the linguistic expertise of young students who speak two or more languages.

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Teaching Black History in Culturally Responsive Ways

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Teaching Black History in Culturally Responsive Ways

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Black history is American history, and it should be taught throughout the year across the curriculum—not confined to a single month.

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As Black History Month kicked off, I was reflecting on my time as a student. My experience all those years ago was similar to that of most Black children today: mostly White teachers teaching Black history primarily in February.

I was told of Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass. I heard very little of Malcolm X, the FBI's campaign against civil rights leaders, the Rainbow Coalition put together by the Black Panther Party's Fred Hampton, or Hampton's assassination. I learned about the struggles of my enslaved ancestors, but not about Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, or Nat Turner.

I was taught about the marches and firehoses in Alabama, but I had to teach myself about the acts of terrorism committed against Black people in Rosewood, Florida; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Wilmington, North Carolina.

Today, teachers continue that tradition, telling students about Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, and LeBron James, as well as King, Tubman, Douglass, and other inspirational figures. These folks are to be honored for their accomplishments-but we should not ignore lessons that explore the impact of racism in the Black experience. It's imperative that teachers not reinforce a milquetoast version of Black history that is anti-Black because of its erasure of painful truths.

No matter what subject you teach, there are ways you can infuse Black history into your daily lessons in a way that is prophetic and purposeful.

Black History Is American History

Infuse Black history into the curriculum year-round: Tom Joyner, the recently retired syndicated radio host, used the phrase "Black history 365 days a year" to mean that Black history isn't a gimmick meant for one month out of the year, with a student assembly or a potluck dinner with traditional Black foods. Black history is American history. Students should learn throughout the year and throughout all disciplines about the accomplishments, experiences, and perspectives of Black people.

How can teachers infuse Black history into their teaching? Here are some simple examples for core content areas:

English: Provide students with texts-poetry and fiction, and nonfiction as well-written by Black people. Teach students about the Africanisms in American English when discussing or teaching grammar.

Mathematics and science: Refer students to famous Black scientists and mathematicians throughout your course. Discuss how Black people showed an understanding of agricultural science in how they used soil in both West Africa and South Carolina to grow rice. Also, you can study the mathematical patterns of African art, and reference the rich history of math in sub-Saharan Africa in the areas of geometry, graphs, and numerical systems-you can engage students by playing African games like mancala that have a strong math component.

Social studies: Incorporate primary and secondary source documents by or about Black people into student reading lists. Create an assignment in which students interview Black history scholars to discuss the Black experience in America throughout a social studies course.

Use texts by Black authors, in every discipline: In history class, I learned from textbooks written by White scholars. I read the works of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare in English class, but never Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, or Toni Morrison. According to a recent report, more than eight of every 10 books that New York City students are likely to see in class from preschool to eighth grade are written by White authors. Students should be introduced to texts by Black authors that speak to Black experiences, Black perspectives, and Black accomplishments. These authors remind children and adults that Black excellence is not confined to athletics and entertainment. How can we promote the academic excellence of Black children without introducing them to Black intellectuals-individuals they can see themselves someday becoming?

Teach students about important Black figures-especially local ones: Teaching about Obama and King is a good start, but you can introduce students to hidden figures as you work through your content during the school year.

If you're a middle school science teacher and your students are interested in cultivating a community food garden, teach them about scientists like George Washington Carver, who developed methods to prevent soil depletion. If you're an elementary teacher teaching students how to tell time, introduce them to Benjamin Banneker, who created the first American clock. Teaching students about important people is a great thing-even better is doing it in the context of your lessons, rather than in a set-aside month.

And if you teach students about the history of slavery in America, remember to include two topics in particular: the economics of slavery, and acts of resistance and rebellion by Black people. The enslavement of Africans built this nation's economic foundation, and the entire nation benefited, so resistance and rebellion were met with brute force. Nevertheless, enslaved Africans and their enslaved descendants resisted through sabotage, running away, and outright rebellion and revolt- hundreds of revolts happened during African enslavement. Communities of formerly enslaved Black people along the East Coast fought to maintain their freedom and to free other enslaved people.

One task of teachers in the classroom is to acknowledge and honor students' humanity-and that means acknowledging and honoring Black humanity. That starts with acknowledging the good, the bad, and the ugly of our history as a nation.

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Teaching Black History in Culturally Responsive Ways

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Black history is American history and should be taught throughout the year across the curriculum-not confined to a single month.

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d well-being, limited literacy and language development, access to material resources, and level of mobility.

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

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Building Belonging With Cultural Ambassadors

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Building Belonging With Cultural Ambassadors

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By asking families to visit the classroom to share their language and traditions, this school creates a sense of community and connection for all students.

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Whiting Lane Elementary School, in West Hartford, Connecticut, is a school that celebrates the diversity of their students-more than 30 different languages are spoken in the building-through cultural ambassadors. The program, developed by an English as a Second Language (ESOL) teacher, is one way they show their commitment to inclusivity-and to making all families feel like they belong. Family members serving as cultural ambassadors are invited to come into the classroom, read a book in their native language, and share aspects of their home culture with the class. Students compare elements of the language with English and are given space to ask lots of questions. As a result, classmates develop a deeper knowledge and appreciation of cultures around the world, and families feel truly welcomed by the school community.

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Building Belonging With Cultural Ambassadors

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This school builds inclusivity and creates a sense of community and connection for all students through cultural ambassadors.

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Strategies That Help Multilingual Students Learn Content and English at the Same Time

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Strategies That Help Multilingual Students Learn Content and English at the Same Time

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Teachers can use these strategies to help keep students who are still learning English on track with their peers.

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Strategies That Help Multilingual Students Learn Content and English at the Same Time

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Teachers can use these strategies to help keep students who are still learning English on track with their peers.

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Creating a Culturally Responsive Early Childhood Classroom

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Creating a Culturally Responsive Early Childhood Classroom

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It's important for all students, even young children, to see their cultural background reflected in the curriculum and classroom materials. This helps them feel valued and understood.

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Early Childhood Education

Ensuring that all students see their culture reflected in the curriculum and classroom materials is crucial.

As educators, we are constantly striving to engage our students in their learning. We know that students are more engaged academically and have improved social and emotional outcomes when they see and hear themselves reflected in the classroom environment and instruction. So, we make our lessons into games, we build positive-incentive systems, and we let our students take the lead in classroom procedures. While these help, they are not enough. Too often, we miss asking ourselves a more critical question: Is this what my students need to be learning? Should my students be engaged in this content?

Many popular, tried-and-true curricula lack diversity in their representation of students, families, and communities with varied and authentic identities as compared with the students sitting in our classrooms. When we use the same curricula that we have for years without questioning the extent to which they reflect our specific students' identities, we're not only failing to maximally engage our students in content-we are actively teaching our students that their identities are less valuable than others. Thus, in order to provide all students with equitable learning experiences, we must intentionally critique and, when necessary, reject using curricula in which our students' identities are not represented. The representation within the pedagogy that we put in front of our students holds power even when we are unaware of it.

This process of reflection and critique is known as culturally relevant teaching (CRT). In her book Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice, educational researcher Geneva Gay defines CRT as "using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them." In CRT, educators intentionally design learning experiences and environments that are reflective of the multiple aspects of the students' identities, which may include (but are not limited to) race, ethnicity, chosen gender, ability status, linguistic profile, family structure, housing status, and cultural identity.

3 Questions to Ask to Create Culturally Relevant, Engaging, and Empowering Learning Environments

Which aspects of your students' identities are visibly present and honored through your classroom environment (books, instructional materials, photographs)? Which are missing?

Are representations of your students' identities authentic and varied? Are there materials that explicitly honor diverse identities as well as texts in which characters with diverse identities are represented without these being central to the plot?

Are there identities your students do not share that are overrepresented in the classroom?

Who and what are your students learning to value in your classroom?

Is language used in the classroom inclusive of all learners' identities? Are there biases being normalized through classroom language (e.g., "families" versus "caregivers")?

1. Who are our students? A culturally relevant classroom is not possible until an educator knows their students and begins to understand the multiple aspects of their identities that they bring with them into the classroom. Educators learn who their students are through robust and caring relationships but also can intentionally plan to learn more about their students, especially at the beginning of the year. Educators can do this by maintaining consistent communication with families, administering student-interest surveys, participating in school and community events, building an asset map of the communities in which students live, and planning instructional activities driven by student voice and experiences.

2. Who do our students see in our classrooms? Educators are constantly learning who their students are, and, as such, they must constantly reflect upon their classroom environment and instruction. Teachers can maintain an ever-evolving map or a list of unique aspects of students' identities and use this as a way to analyze and shape the classroom environment. The identities and the values attached to those identities within our classroom environment influence the ways in which our students develop their understandings about the world and about themselves-even when educators don't explicitly call attention to them. Educators can reflect on their classrooms by considering questions such as the following:

Choose curricula and texts that showcase characters with whom their students share identities and represent these characters in authentic and varied ways.

Remove curricula and instructional materials that disproportionately represent identities not shared by students.

Remove curricula and instructional materials that reinforce stereotypes about any identity groups.

Ask students and families what feels important to learn before planning instruction.

Plan lessons that amplify student voice and that invite students to pull from their experiences, cultural communities, and histories as valid sources of information.

Consistently invite family and community members to deliver instruction in the classroom to position communities as valid funds of knowledge.

Additional guiding questions for educators seeking to implement CRT in their practice can be found here.

3. How can educators move further toward CRT? Once educators have developed an understanding of who is in their classroom and how their current environment and pedagogy reflect students, they can intentionally act to build a culturally relevant classroom within which their students feel valued and empowered. Educators can do the following:

If our goal as educators is to provide high-quality, equitable learning experiences for all students, we must ensure that the pedagogy we're using in our classrooms is reflective of the unique students sitting in front of us. We cannot continue to use traditional curricula and pedagogy without critically questioning the extent to which they represent, honor, and empower our students.

When we fail to ask these questions, when we fail to create classroom environments in which our students feel seen and heard, we are not only failing to engage them as learners but actively standing in the way of our students' development of a positive, empowering, and confident sense of self-efficacy. Thus, we must embrace culturally relevant teaching. We must engage in the process of constant reflection, of constant learning, in order to ensure that every child, in every classroom, feels seen, heard, and valued for being exactly as they are.

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Creating a Culturally Responsive Early Childhood Classroom

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Ensuring that all students see their culture reflected in the curriculum and classroom materials is crucial.

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A Better Way to Teach the Civil Rights Movement

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A Better Way to Teach the Civil Rights Movement

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To improve history lessons on the period, educators emphasize the roles of grassroots activists, churches, schools, and women.

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A native of the Magnolia State, Jessica Dickens grew up just a short drive away from one of the most infamous events of Mississippi Freedom Summer: the 1964 disappearance and murder of three civil rights workers on their way to investigate a church burning. She's also a graduate of one of Mississippi's segregated high schools-part of a group of all-white private schools established in the 1950s to thwart school integration.

Yet even with her personal ties to civil rights history, the central figures in Dickens's history lessons in her early teaching years in Mississippi were Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks-two of the most memorable leaders from her own schooling, and staples of U.S. history textbooks. It was only with exposure to fresh thinking through a teaching fellowship on civil rights history-and after uncovering her state's untold stories-that the 11-year veteran began to shift her teaching approach.

"I realized we were providing an extreme disservice... by teaching the whitewashed version of [civil rights] history," Dickens said, calling that realization her "turning point."

It's a common oversight in America's classrooms. The story of the civil rights movement, as told and retold, generally includes only well-known heroes, heroines, and watershed moments from 1954 to 1968: Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, the Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins, and nonviolent black protests. In assessing states' curriculum standards, a 2014 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center concluded that coverage of the movement was "woefully inadequate" and focused on "a small group of charismatic leaders" and "a series of dates, names, and actions." Five states-Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Oregon, and Wyoming-neither covered the movement in their standards nor provided supplemental materials to teach it.

But a new push is underway among educators like Dickens to correct this narrow view. Prompted by a curiosity about the period's subtleties and complexities, teachers across the country are modifying their curricula and abandoning their textbooks to teach a more accurate history that commonly goes untold: the role of grassroots activists and women, nuanced portraits of leaders like Parks and King, and racial and social justice battles that link the past to contemporary issues of inequality.

"It's very difficult to get down to the nitty-gritty in the few days that some teachers have to cover this content, but still, you can present the 'I Have a Dream' speech as the centerpiece, or you can present the story of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, Gloria Richardson, or other on-the-ground activists," stressed Aaron Broudo, a U.S. history teacher at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in New York City. "It's a choice of where you start, and where you start has a lot to do with the way you're conceptualizing the role of civil rights curriculum in a student's education."

Debunking Common Myths

Motivated by a desire to deepen his historical knowledge, Broudo recently joined more than two dozen middle and high school teachers at Duke University for a three-week summer institute led by veterans of the civil rights movement and recognized experts on the black freedom struggle.

Textbooks were spurned in favor of primary documents-including original curriculum from the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools, numerous in-depth readings on little-known activists of the era such as Amzie Moore, and recorded interviews and archival video footage from civil rights organizers like Ella Baker. Throughout the seminar, a bottom-up teaching of history was emphasized, aimed at debunking many of the common misperceptions and misunderstandings about the period.

Even though participants had sought out the experience, many were still surprised by what they learned-specifically the roles of black churches, youth, schools, families, and grassroots organizations in furthering the movement. In particular, many were unaware of the significance and leadership of black women, which Judy Richardson, codirector of the institute, said is among the most underreported angles in history lessons.

In the mass action against Montgomery's bus system, "women put the leaflets out, they're the ones who tell the black community that Mrs. Parks has been arrested and suggest a boycott of the buses," and yet "the traditional narrative is only men," said Richardson, a veteran of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a prominent group formed in the 1960s, and coeditor of Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. The institute's reteaching of movement history mirrored what many notable researchers have been saying for decades.

In a 2006 paper, historian Derrick P. Alridge scrutinized six widely used high school history textbooks to analyze the depiction of Martin Luther King Jr., finding King was universally portrayed as "moderate, magnetic, and inspirational... rather than the radical and controversial figure he was during his lifetime." Likewise, the image of Rosa Parks as meek and mild is a grossly oversimplified interpretation, writes Jeanne Theoharis, a political science professor at Brooklyn College. Parks was a seasoned organizer and activist in Montgomery, Alabama, for over a decade before the yearlong bus boycott.

This top-down framing in most history curricula-which puts the focus on renowned leaders-obscures the story of the significant local organizing that fueled civil rights victories, said Tina Tosto, an English teacher at Pascagoula High School in Mississippi and former middle school history teacher. Tosto, who attended the institute, added that isolating the period in history lessons also deprives students of an understanding of the key historical events leading up to the movement-namely the role of black World War II veterans who demanded equality at home after serving overseas-and the chronic societal problems it failed to fully resolve.

"The passage of legislation-the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act-was definitely a success of the movement that fell short," she said, referencing present-day injustices like racial profiling and mass incarceration. "The danger in teaching that the civil rights movement achieved its goals is that it implies to students that there is nothing left to fight for in regards to equity."

Sanitizing History

Yet learning new content is one thing-it's another to discuss a historical era rooted in brutality and racism. At the institute, thorny issues surfaced following the screening of Eyes on the Prize, the award-winning series on the civil rights movement. The stark contrast between academic discussions on racial oppression and the raw realities exposed in the documentary footage sparked tough conversations between the black teachers and their white counterparts, who formed the bulk of institute attendees, just as white teachers make up the vast majority of the nation's public school teaching force.

Crystal Proctor, a black social studies teacher at Suitland High School in Forestville, Maryland, said the participants were resisting "what we've always been taught versus the truth," and compared the exchanges to what she's observed in tense, emotional classroom discussions on race.

Teachers also questioned how easy or difficult it would be to apply what they learned at Duke within their schools, which are not necessarily full of peers ready and willing to change their teaching practice, according to a number of participants. "I had a coworker who said that teaching so in-depth about wrongdoings against African Americans was divisive... and that we all need to 'get over it,'" said Tosto, referencing teachers' resistance to embracing a more accurate retelling of the movement. Other teachers pointed to challenges at a higher level, such as a lack of support for professional development from administrators and an overemphasis on state accountability mandates.

These sentiments echo what civil rights scholar Charles M. Payne, a professor at Rutgers University-Newark, explained as a general lack of institutional support for teaching about the movement, and racial conflict more broadly, in American schools. The result, he said, is a "mangling of history" in which the movement is taught as a moral plea rather than a battle for political and economic power.

As with other tumultuous periods in American history, such as the forced migration of Native Americans or the internment of Japanese Americans, Payne said, civil rights education is "cursory and sanitized," often neglecting to emphasize how controversial and disruptive the period actually was.

"Just weeks before the March on Washington [in August 1963], the Gallup poll showed most Americans-60 percent-were opposed and thought it would set back the movement's cause," Payne said. Mass demonstrations, boycotts, and sit-ins "were not considered civil then," he noted. "In classrooms, much of that gets lost."

Payne stressed the value in school leadership taking the lead in changing that framing.

Connecting the Past to the Present

The payoff for students when the civil rights movement is comprehensively taught is considerable, added Payne, noting that young people come away able to interpret social change from a more critical perspective and see themselves as part of it. The impact may even be more sizable for white students, "who are even further removed from the history" than black youth, who may be similarly unaware of the events outside of the standard narrative but do have a "sense of the structural features of inequality" from their daily lives, he said.

To broaden her students' understanding of the civil rights movement, Jann'l Henry, a middle school English teacher at Whittier Education Campus, a K-8 public school in Washington, DC, introduced her class to the biography of Claudette Colvin, a contemporary of Rosa Parks, and a documentary on Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.

The reaction from her majority-black classroom, she said, was immediate and swift: "I thought that Martin Luther King was just a nonviolent person," said one student. "I didn't know that people had to be taught these tactics and how to be a pacifist," a classmate added, while another student said, "I didn't know that there was a black, gay man that perhaps should have been the face of this movement but wasn't."

Similarly, through a role-playing activity on the civil rights movement, Dickens awakened the curiosity of her 10th-grade students in rural Mississippi. " Stepping into Selma "-a city that played a major role in the freedom struggle-allowed her class to take on the identities of activists from the period, many of whom were the students' own age at the time, which increased the relevance and impact of the lesson, she said.

Yet the most enduring outcome of reconsidering the civil rights era, according to Henry, may be helping all students critically examine the influence of social and political movements and connect the past to the present day.

"I teach my students that the civil rights movement is ongoing," said Henry. "You can't look back and say, 'This was when black people didn't have rights. This was when Jim Crow existed.' They know a lot about Ferguson.... We're still fighting for civil rights."

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A Better Way to Teach the Civil Rights Movement

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A native of the Magnolia State, Jessica Dickens grew up just a short drive away from one of the most infamous events of Mississippi Freedom Summer: the 1964 disappearance and murder of three civil rights workers on their way to investigate a church burning.

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Teacher-Parent Communication Strategies to Start the Year Off Right

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Teacher-Parent Communication Strategies to Start the Year Off Right

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By prioritizing communication with families at the start of the school year, educators can foster strong parent engagement, break down barriers, and provide support for all students.

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It's no secret that when schools make a concerted effort to foster healthy, strong relationships with families, students benefit in a number of ways.

Studies suggest that parental involvement can lead to academic gains for students: higher grades and test scores, improved social skills and time on task, better attendance and participation, and decreased behavioral problems in the classroom.

But parent-teacher communication can be challenging, say teachers. In 2006, 50 percent of participants in a survey of more than 1,000 K-12 public school teachers rated parental involvement in their children's education as inadequate; 48 percent reported parental understanding of the curriculum similarly. And a 2016 study revealed that some of the largest barriers to productive parent-teacher communication were trouble getting to the school site, conflicting work schedules, lack of translation services, and consistent requests for donations or fundraising that seem prioritized over all else.

Though parent-teacher communication will always require a mutual effort on both sides, educators shared their best practices-from home visits to in-school parent workshops-for building strong bonds with families, from the first day of school to the last.

Getting Off to a Good Start

Establishing strong relationships and clear lines of communication at the beginning of the year sets a strong foundation for parent-teacher interactions, according to teachers.
© Shutterstock.com/Monkey Business Images
Opening reliable channels of communication: Not all parents communicate the same way. To determine a family's contact preferences, simply ask them directly, says Erin Healey, an English teacher in Rhode Island. Create a beginning-of-the-year Google Form, use an introductory phone call or email, or discuss the topic at back-to-school night. This is also a great time to learn what languages are spoken at home.

A personalized touch: When in-person parent meetings weren't possible due to the pandemic, middle and high school teacher Lauren Huddleston found that embedding short, introductory videos in emails was an effective alternative. The video format allowed Huddleston to virtually "share my personality and warmth with parents" at the start of the year, while also outlining the syllabus and explaining classroom expectations.

Your child, in a million words or less: Eighth-grade English teacher Cathleen Beachboard mails out a "Million Words or Less" survey asking caregivers to tell her everything she should know about their child, with a tongue-in-cheek word limit as the only restriction. Huddleston, meanwhile, distributes a survey to caregivers that is meant to capture their child's attitude toward the subject matter, their motivations, and how they might be feeling about the new school year.

Connecting outside the school walls: To kick off the year, preschool teachers from Educare New Orleans visit the homes of each family. During the visit, parents are asked about their strengths as a family and any goals they have for their child. Educators then help outline what can be done within their classroom to help the child meet and exceed those goals, as well as what families can do at home to help support their child's learning. They have a follow-up visit near the end of the school year.

Establish Back-and-Forth Communication

Two-way communication where parents can listen and receive information, as well as speak and be heard, ensures a healthy exchange of ideas that welcomes parents as partners in their child's education, says Beachboard.

Beyond bad news: Consider sharing regular information about how students are progressing and engaging with lessons at school. This is especially important for families that are newer to the country, as "teacher-home communication may be new and is likely to be reserved for bad news only," explains Louise El Yaafouri, an independent consultant in refugee and immigrant newcomer education.

Get active on social media: Healey recommends creating a classroom Instagram page or Twitter account to post photos and videos of student work, or emailing out a monthly or quarterly blog celebrating student successes and previewing upcoming curricular content for parents. This keeps families in the loop about what their child will be learning next and maintains positive communication with parents, she says.

Real-time tech tools: Platforms like Seesaw or ClassDojo allow kids to share their learning with their parents directly through the app and make real-time updates easier. "If you're in class and you're able to take a video of one of your scholars saying, 'Hi Mom! I'm learning about how to add numbers-10 and 5 makes 15. I'm going to practice tonight when I come home,' and then the [parent] gets to see, that's powerful," says Paul Bannister, a New York-based kindergarten teacher.

Give parents a nudge: Simple text reminders-sometimes called "nudges"-can help parents help their children stay on track. A Columbia University study, for example, found that sending weekly text updates to middle and high school parents about their children's grades, absences, and missed assignments led to an 18 percent increase in student attendance and a 39 percent drop in course failures. Beachboard says she personally utilizes the Remind app to keep families abreast of assignment due dates and bolster back-and-forth communication.

Bring the Parent Into the Classroom

Show off your families' strengths: Give parents a chance to highlight their talents, experiences, and skills to get them more engaged in the classroom, says education consultant and retired teacher Terri Eichholz. Eichholz created a Google Form where families could mention any skills that they might want to share with the class-which led to her finding a parent who was a drone operator. "[He] zoomed with my students (back before Zoom was a thing!), and we built an entire field trip around his expertise," she says.

Provide pathways for entry: At Educare New Orleans, teachers maintain a monthly calendar marked with days on which caregivers are invited to engage with their child inside the classroom. For parents who can't attend, there's a take-home activity that provides a similar experience.

Empower students to explain their best work: At Design 39 Campus in Poway, California, parents attend in-school workshops. During the first half hour, students are in the driver's seat, taking charge and explaining their work to their parents. The second half hour is reserved for parent-teacher communication-including a question-and-answer period-while students attend an elective, gym, or their lunch period.

Making your curriculum transparent: High school history and journalism teacher David Cutler posts two weeks' worth of lessons and assignments online. The practice provides transparency to families about what their children will be learning-and when- while also allowing him to carve out time to meet with students and parents as they prepare for more challenging assignments.

Reaching Every Parent Where They Are

Historically underserved families are often judged before parent-teacher communication even begins, says Angie Shorty-Belisle, school director of Educare New Orleans.

"The biggest mistake is to think, OK, we're at a school where we're servicing [underserved] families; they're going to be difficult parents," explains Shorty-Belisle. "Every parent is their child's first advocate.... No family comes in wanting to be a burden or difficult to the school."
©Nora Fleming
Redefine the perception of participation: Work schedules and transportation can be just as significant of a barrier to parent engagement as language, say teachers. "We often think of parent engagement as PTA, coaching the softball team, or chaperoning the middle school dance," says El Yaafouri, who recommends redefining family participation so that it's more inclusive. "Sometimes, engagement is ensuring that a child has a quiet place to study at home, or making the right calls to get ahold of school supplies, or sharing wisdom that is unique to one's lived experiences."

A more inclusive calendar: One way to show families of diverse learners that they are an important part of the community is by creating an inclusive school calendar at the beginning of the year, says El Yaafouri. Find out what holidays families celebrate-don't make assumptions-and be cognizant of not scheduling school events on days that might conflict, while creating opportunities throughout the year so that all students and families feel represented and valued.

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Teacher-Parent Communication Strategies to Start the Year Off Right

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By prioritizing communication with families at the start of the school year, educators can foster strong parent engagement, break down barriers, and provide support for all students.

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Rita Pierson, a teacher for 40 years, once heard a colleague say, "I'm not paid to love the kids." Her response was, "Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like." This was a heartfelt call to encourage educators to believe in their students and connect with them on a personal and human level.

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Every kid needs a champion | Rita Pierson | TED

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Some ideas on how to minimize gender bias in our teaching practice and curriculum.

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Some ideas on how to minimize gender bias in our teaching practice and curriculum.

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How Teachers Can Set and Maintain Reasonable Expectations for Themselves

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How Teachers Can Set and Maintain Reasonable Expectations for Themselves

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Combat stress and make space for self-compassion by using these cognitive reframing strategies to set realistic expectations.

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Combat stress and make space for self-compassion by using these cognitive reframing strategies to set realistic expectations.

Many of the highly skilled, passionate teachers with whom I work expect a lot from themselves. They offer compassion and kindness to students, families, and colleagues, but they're often critical of their own work.

Below, I offer some ideas regarding how teachers, especially new teachers, can use self-compassion to turn kindness inward, focusing less on perfectionism so that they feel more joy at school.

Turn a mirror on yourself

When you feel like you're not doing enough, imagine how you'd respond to a good friend in the same situation. Give yourself the gentle, encouraging words that you would offer to that friend.

When I've offered this advice to others, I've witnessed a shift in their ability to understand that none of us are perfect. By offering self-kindness, we work more effectively with the tools we have in our repertoire and better serve students. We develop more reasonable expectations for ourselves.

Applying this strategy may mean journaling, leaving encouraging notes to oneself, or identifying cues in the environment that spark a cognitive reframing-like shifting negative to supportive self-talk every time you check email or empty the recycling bin. I put a Post-it note on my door or computer that reminds me of my intention or a meaningful, positive quote. I also try to smile or give myself a high-five when looking in the mirror, just as I would when greeting a colleague or student. Building these strategies into your routine can help to solidify a self-supportive narrative.

Take care of your body in order to feel better emotionally

Step away from work for a few minutes to have lunch. Get some sunshine. Drink water. Get outside for a quick walk, or take the long route when traveling between classrooms. Take a breath.

It is amazing how these short acts of self-care help reset our energy and allow us to be more present with our students.

Connect with others

Be vulnerable with a friend or a trusted colleague, and tell them how you are feeling.

Soak in their attention and love. Observe others, and notice that you are not alone in feeling like there is so much to do. Doing so can help us feel in community with others, identifying our common experiences.

One of my continued goals is to be vulnerable while also being aware of when I vent. I strive to not fall into a cycle of negative talk that snowballs and is not productive, because when I do that, I may start telling myself a story based on my take rather than what is really happening. I am working to interrupt my venting to consider what action I can take or how I can examine a stressor as, instead, a "puzzle of practice" to get curious about.

For example, when I felt tired going into a meeting during a particularly busy time, I talked with a trusted colleague who gave me space to express my wish to show up differently. I came to the conclusion that I would instead take the stance of "curious and compassionate," meaning I would enter the meeting feeling curious about what I could learn from others and compassionate that we were all tired yet committed to our common goal.

Additionally, I recently taught a lesson that teachers were invited to observe. It wasn't perfect, and instead of falling into self-doubt and criticism, I was vulnerable with my colleagues and told them how nervous I was. This admission allowed me to set aside my negative self-talk and focus on their feedback, which included many positives as well as many rich ideas for future practice.

Again, showing up with vulnerability and curiosity helped me adopt a learner's mindset.

This year, I've developed a "WW" mantra. When I feel worried over the weekend, I say, "Work worry" or "Work-related wonder," and then tuck the thought away (or jot it down to remember on Monday) and move on with my day.

The reality is that worries are about the unknown, and though they are often valid, we cannot predict what will happen. Instead, I tell myself that I can take time during the work week to be planful and prepared. I can anticipate strategies, questions, and tools that might be useful in a lesson or conversation. I can pause before a lesson to set an intention to slow down, articulate my "why," and be responsive to the participants' experiences. I can write a reminder on my plans or my computer to take a breath if I feel stressed. I can tell myself, "This emotion (or conflict) will pass."

Reflect and journal

Writing helps get to-do's, worries, and self-criticism off your chest-and it can often help you set negative thoughts aside, at least momentarily. When we do so, we're able to be more creative and open to new ideas and strategies.

Reflection supports learning, especially when we consider and envision what we might do differently in the future. If I am being really hard on myself because of a lesson that wasn't my best or because I forgot something during a professional learning workshop, I imagine how I would "redo" that moment-and then I act that redo out in my mind.

This strategy helps me to rehearse any language reframes and to choreograph different teaching moves I can make next time. I brainstorm solutions from a positive place of creativity, which energizes my artistic side and provides me with a bank of ideas to draw from in the future.

Setting and Maintaining Reasonable Expectations

When we take time to nurture ourselves, we feel more self-kindness. This allows us to be more present for our students and colleagues, with reasonable expectations of ourselves. It also models for students how they can take care of themselves, which is part of being human and critical to their social and emotional growth.

While many of us are really hard on ourselves, we are also learning to be more vulnerable with each other as learners-which leads to deeper, more connected communities.

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How Teachers Can Set and Maintain Reasonable Expectations for Themselves

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Combat stress and make space for self-compassion by using these cognitive reframing strategies to set realistic expectations.

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8 Activities for Students (and Teachers) to Create a Mindful Classroom

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8 Activities for Students (and Teachers) to Create a Mindful Classroom

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Everyone in the classroom benefits when there are opportunities throughout the day to reflect and prepare for learning.

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The value of mindfulness-related activities in schools is not new. Writer and scientist Jon Kabat-Zinn helped legitimize the concept through his research, but its early connection to meditation raised red flags for some and kept its recommended practices from catching on. Now, however, as the adverse impact of stress on learning is quite well understood and the pandemic, along with racial and economic disparities, has escalated stress levels in schools worldwide, mindfulness practices are enjoying a resurgence.

I have had the opportunity to see many mindfulness practices in action in schools and to speak to a number of master teachers of mindfulness. I have identified eight activities that are relatively easy to implement in classrooms and schools. With a little practice, these can be part of any educator's pedagogical toolbox.

Caring Openings

1. Silent 60: Start the class by having all students sit quietly for 60 seconds to get themselves ready for learning. You can add a focus on a particular sound in the room, an image you provide (e.g., a dot on a piece of paper, an abstract picture you put up on a screen), or their breathing. Start with 15 seconds for early elementary students and gradually increase. Begin with 20-30 seconds for upper elementary.

2. Powerful Listening: Ring a bell, use a wind chime, or employ another object that makes a long, trailing sound. Ask students to listen and raise their hands when they no longer can hear the sound. After all agree that the sound has stopped, set a timer for one minute, ask students to sit quietly, and then when time is up, ask them what they heard during that minute.

3. One Minute for Good: Start the class by having students reflect for a minute about something that has gone well or something that they are grateful for. This can be done in writing, pair shares, or small or large group discussions. Larger groups work best for early elementary.

4. Morning Classroom Conversations: Start the day with a quote that can stimulate short conversations to help middle and high school students begin to interact with classmates in supportive ways. Sample conversation prompts can be found here.

In the Moment

5. Three Breaths: Have students take three deep breaths at regular intervals, such as before class changes or whenever strong feelings of anxiety or tension arise. Teachers should instruct students on this breathing technique and create visual reminders and prompting signals for students to begin. This is a valuable practice for staff as well, as expert mindfulness teacher Danielle Nuhfer, who has compiled an array of marvelous techniques in The Path of the Mindful Teacher, shared with me:

"The great thing about Three Breaths is that if the teacher would like to share with students what he/she is doing, they can. I've been known to pause, put my hand on my chest/heart, tell my class that I need a moment, and take three breaths. This is something that is a great way to demonstrate our own emotional regulation. When students witness their teacher work through a stressful situation in a way that demonstrates awareness and presence, they may remember that themselves. Sometimes this kind of role modeling can be more impactful than even teaching a lesson to our students about emotional regulation."

6. Body Scan: Educators benefit from learning to focus on their bodies. Make sure you are feeling centered with both feet on the floor as you teach your classes or meet with students or colleagues. Notice when and where you are feeling tension or when your breathing is shallow or labored, and use Three Breaths (or more!) to help you feel some relief. Don't hesitate to let students or colleagues know that you are taking a few moments to gather yourself via breathing.

7. Speak Your Mantra: Develop a phrase that helps you keep focus and keep perspective. Repeat it often-when you encounter roadblocks and when things are going well. Put it in places where you will see it because when emotions run high, we can lose sight of our more cherished values. Some examples:

"I am preparing all of these children for an uncertain future."

"I want all students to enjoy well-being, happiness, and peace."

"My goal is to prepare students for the tests of life-not just a life of tests."

Ending the Day

8. Concluding Reflections: Many have extolled the value of reflection, from Sir John Templeton, founder of the character-focused foundation with his name, to the SEL exemplar Responsive Classroom. Mindfulness experts like Nuhfer have joined that group. Below are five of her favorites for closing the school day, plus two of my own:

Something I learned today...

I am curious about...

I am looking forward to tomorrow because...

Something I'll do (next, later today, this weekend, before the end of the week, etc.)...

A question I still have is...

I had the best feeling today when...

Something from today that I am grateful for/thankful for/appreciative of is...

Most teachers start off as teachers who use mindfulness; moving to become a "mindful teacher"-what Nuhfer describes as a teacher who "acts with awareness about what is happening in the moment," at every moment-takes practice with multiple techniques, reading the relevant literature, being aware of implicit biases, and being part of a community of like-minded educators who help each other improve.

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8 Activities for Students (and Teachers) to Create a Mindful Classroom

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Everyone in the classroom benefits when there are opportunities throughout the day to reflect and prepare for learning.

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How Text Reconstruction Supports Multilingual Learners

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How Text Reconstruction Supports Multilingual Learners

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This multistep literacy activity gives students an extended opportunity to improve their vocabulary and develop their listening and speaking skills.

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This multistep literacy activity gives students an extended opportunity to improve their vocabulary and develop their listening and speaking skills.

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When students pretend they’re at a fancy party making small talk, a simple brainstorm for writing ideas becomes more lively, more cooperative—and more effective.

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When students pretend they’re at a fancy party making small talk, a simple brainstorm for writing ideas becomes more lively, more cooperative—and more effective.

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With a simple discussion activity that gets every learner in the class speaking and listening, teachers can help students boost conversation skills—and develop their opinions.

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This classroom activity, also known as Concentric Circles or Inside/Outside Circles, helps young people practice sharing their thoughts and ideas with many different partners in a low-stakes environment. It can be particularly useful for English language learners as they work on oral communications, build fluency, and sharpen active listening skills.

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With a simple discussion activity that gets every learner in the class speaking and listening, teachers can help students boost conversation skills-and develop their opinions.

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Culturally Responsive Education: What’s in a Name?

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Culturally Responsive Education: What’s in a Name?

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With all the cultural identities that we have in our classrooms, how can we better promote acceptance and understanding through culturally responsive pedagogy

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Culturally Responsive Education: What’s in a Name? | Tsandlia Van Ry | TEDxAbbotsford