# data[].attributes.body
Education needs to be culturally relevant in order to break from the assimilations concept of teaching. Students are different and we need to take out the best in every student. They have great things they can bring to the classroom and teach each other greatness. This video goes a little far from talking about being CRT but I think this video hits some very major points about education. I am not sure if his sources are credible but this video makes me think and I really enjoyed how he used the same metaphor about having a fish climb a tree which is what we have talked about in class.That isn't exactly scholarly talk but the meaning behind it is.

# data[].attributes.body
Zero-tolerance has been an issue in education. This has caused an issue for students who become involved in minor incidents resulting in becoming suspended or having a record. I see how stressing the importance of keeping out violence and disruption in the school but at the same time we don't need to be ruining a child's life for defending themselves in a fight.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
AN OVERVIEW

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is committed to challenging the "school to prison pipeline," a disturbing national trend wherein children, disproportionately children of color, are being funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children are the most vulnerable, with learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse or neglect, and should receive additional educational services rather than isolation and punishment.

Several policy trends in the public education and juvenile justice systems are to blame for this nationwide epidemic. First, the trend toward "zero-tolerance" policies criminalizing minor instances of school misconduct plays a vital role in pushing our children out of public schools. These zero-tolerance policies often result in children being suspended, expelled or arrested for relatively minor disciplinary infractions. The criminalization of school code violations funnels many children into the juvenile justice system instead of addressing misbehavior through parents, teachers and school administrators. The application of discipline is often discriminatory, with minority students being disciplined and referred to the juvenile justice system at higher rates than their white peers. In some cases, children are directly arrested for school code violations, and in others, they are sent to alternative schools for children with behavioral problems.

Second, schools increasingly ignore and bypass due process protections for children, particularly those with special needs and learning disabilities, in sending these children to alternative schools and the juvenile justice system. Children often receive no or deficient legal representation to aid them in challenging charges resulting from school code violations. Many of the juvenile detention facilities in which they serve sentences provide few, if any, educational services.

Third, various policy initiatives, including the No Child Left Behind Act, place an undue emphasis on high stakes testing, which creates incentives for schools to push out low performing students in order to boost their overall test scores and avoid facing federal penalties. Also in an attempt to avoid NCLB Act-related penalties, some school districts fail to report accurate graduation rates that accurately account for students who dropped out or were channeled into the juvenile justice system. These practices distort the reality that large numbers of minority children are being undereducated and displaced from the public education system.

The ACLU is working to challenge numerous policies and practices within public school systems and the juvenile justice system that contribute to the school to prison pipeline.

The advocacy toolkit contains customizable information on how to address local STPP problems. It includes a video that demonstrates how to access national resources and how to adapt the data to meet local needs. We also include the most recent school discipline and achievement data from the Georgia Department of Education, along with a sample open records to get updated data, and student Know Your Rights cards for selected counties.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
AN OVERVIEWThe American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is committed to challenging the "school to prison pipeline," a disturbing national trend wherein children, disproportionately children of color, are being funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

# data[].attributes.body
Ladson-Billings discusses the types of activities the Ann Lewis and Julia Devereaux used in their classroom. I struggle understanding exactly how to incorporate CRT into my lesson plans and this article hits the nail on the head for me. "The common belief is if you mention Africa, Mexico, or famous black and brown high achievers, it will spark students’ attention. Then they will be motivated to participate.In reality, culturally responsive teaching is less about using racial pride as a motivator and more about mimicking students’ cultural learning styles and tools." So in the article they use examples like Gamify it, Make It Social, or Storify It, which are fantastic ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stick around.
Join my mailing list and never miss another post. You'll get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
3 Tips to Make Any Lesson More Culturally Responsive

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last month, I reviewed Zaretta Hammond's fantastic book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Now I'm proud to have Zaretta here as a guest writer to share some specific strategies with us. Culturally responsive teaching. Everybody is talking about it. The big question is: How do you actually make lessons culturally responsive?

# data[].attributes.body
This is a fantastic article about Culturally Relevant Teaching.  It discusses how the goal of CRT is that  teaching is a two-way street. Students aren't just their to do as they are told they have a role in the process of learning in the classroom. Each student is unique and has something to bring to the classroom to share that is different from someone else.

# data[].attributes.body
Ladson-Billings discusses how throughout history African American slaves were denied the ability to learn to read. By not having the skills to read has displaced many families due to the fact that in order to become successful you have to be able to read and have a wide range of vocabulary. The generation that followed slavery were able to finish school but were not exposed to the literacy that a child from a wealthy family would have. Now this has transitioned to more of a poverty issue. We see in many title one schools students having less exposure to literacy at home. Parents do not have the time to read to their children due to the fact that they are working multiple jobs. These families could also not see the importance in spending money on purchasing books to keep in their homes for their children because of how important the money is to use for other things like food and clothing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Emergent Literacy

Young children are amazing. They're like sponges, they just soak up everything around them. If we maintained that enthusiasm for learning throughout our lives, we'd all be geniuses. But, between roughly the ages of two and five, our brains really enter an ideal stage for learning. We're old enough to want to understand the world around us and young enough that there's not much in there yet. It's the perfect combination of curiosity and ignorance. One of the areas where this is extremely important is in emergent literacy, the first development of reading and writing skills. Emergent literacy generally encompasses the first awareness of vocabulary, letter-name knowledge, which is the familiarity with names and appearance of letters, and phonological awareness, or the familiarity with basic sounds in a language. Emergent literacy is one of the first academic disciplines we learn in our lives, and how well we learn these early literacy skills will generally define how successful the rest of our academic careers will be. These are some of the first things we learn and, therefore, some of the most important.

Impact of Home on Emergent Literacy

Emergent literacy is one of the most important stages of our intellectual development. So, where do we learn it? The majority of our emergent literacy skills come from the home. The home is our first source of education and so it's pretty important. A positive environment can increase emergent literacy, setting children up for a successful education, while a negative home environment can delay emergent literacy skills. So, how do we create a home that positively impacts emergent literacy? One of the biggest things is home reading, frequent communal reading within a family. Basically, this is when parents read to and with their children. Reading with children helps them learn from a young age to associate the concept of printed words with spoken sounds and meanings, which is one of the first emergent literacy skills youngsters learn. Studies have shown that home reading increases a child's familiarity with sounds in their language, the appearance and names of letters, and the concept of text, just by frequent contact with printed material. Beyond that, home reading also increases a child's vocabulary, since books often use words that are more academic and, therefore, less frequently used in daily communication. Research has shown, without exception, that the home is one of the most important sources of emergent literacy skills and that a positive learning environment at home can greatly help children develop full literacy once they start school.

Impact of School on Emergent Literacy

What we learn at home is important, but as anyone who's been through school can tell you, not everything we learn is learned at home. School is, obviously, an important part of educational development and this is true of developing emergent literacy skills as well. Children who are enrolled in preschool programs that teach emergent literacy skills may have an easier time learning full literacy because they are already familiar with an academic setting and the structure of formal education. However, preschool programs are rarely in and of themselves designed to teach emergent literacy. The most successful programs are those that integrate formal academic education with home reading and other types of parental education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
how home & school impact emergent literacy - video & lesson transcript | study.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Home & School Impact Emergent Literacy - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Young children are amazing. They're like sponges, they just soak up everything around them. If we maintained that enthusiasm for learning throughout our lives, we'd all be geniuses. But, between roughly the ages of two and five, our brains really enter an ideal stage for learning.

# data[].attributes.body
This video represents the idea that all students are awesome and knowledge able. We as educators have to provide opportunities for students to succeed. The book discusses how Patricia Hilliard believes that all students know what they are going to be taught in some form or fashion and it is her job to make those connections for them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kid President's Pep Talk to Teachers and Students!

# data[].attributes.body
This video explains the importance of getting students involved in their community and giving back. These experiences allow students to learn how to be empathetic for others while creating support systems amongst each other. They are not alone and they have the power to create the community they want. This corresponds to chapter 4 "Culturally Relevant Teaching Encourages Students Collaboratively and Expects Them to Teach Each Other and Take Responsibility for Each Other.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching Kids About Charity | Adventures in Learning | PBS Parents

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Talking to Kids about charity can be tough, but research shows that talking about charity is more effective than role-modeling. In this episode of Adventures in Learning, we talk about charity and offer a fun idea for making giving a family affair. See the full post at: http://www.pbs.org/parents/adventures-in-learning/2013/11/charity-starts-at-home-video/.

# data[].attributes.body
I like this video because she I emphasizing the importance of teaching as an art. She isn't continuing to go about the years of traditional ways of education and instead creating environments where all students are involved and feel important. I feel the accomplishments she made at uplifting her students is a very difficult thing for teachers to understand. Seeing the positive in even tough situations is something i will strive to do as an educator. Of course I plan to encourage them to do better but I have been the student who hates school and felt stupid and had the life sucked out of me seeing I got a -18 out of a 20 question assignment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Every kid needs a champion | Rita Pierson | TED

# data[].attributes.body
I chose this video because it is so important to understand just how much children see literally everything we do as adults. As discussed in Chapter 3 with Ms. Pauline Dupree's no-nonsense and no-frills. She understood the importance of being the example she wanted the children to be. I find myself thinking very ofter how my son doesn't understand anything Im saying until I hear myself when he begins talking. Like "Hello! I cant hear you!" when I'm asking my husband a question. Now he is saying that to me if I'm not responding to him.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Children See - Children Do - Be A Good Role Model For A New Good Generation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Children See - Children Do - Be A Good Role Model For A New Good Generation

# data[].attributes.body
This school does a great job putting an emphasis on the importance of Collaborative learning.I feel it is a fantastic way to promote a since of community within the classroom. Allowing the students to help each other on their individual work is a great idea and can help students get faster feed back on work. This idea best correlates with chapter 4 "We're All in This Together."

# data[].attributes.body
Winfield's cross-classification system really allows you to see the different approaches of being a teacher and the effect it will have on your students. Many times you may feel as if you are doing what is best for your students and ultimately you aren't. I loved the cross-classification as well as the explanation of the Conductor and the coach classification.

# data[].attributes.body
This is my favorite saying to keep in mind when working with students. We are all here so that we can help guide children to understand the world around them. We have to be able to be culturally congruent and culturally relevant for all of our children. By insuring we are able to accomplish these task we will be able to open the minds and touch the hearts of all our students.

# data[].attributes.body
Students take in everything from their environment. This is the reason for a Hidden Curriculum. Most importantly we as teachers need to be mindful for the different was we may treat our students. Allowing Jimmy to get away with something more than normal because of feeling sorry for him is going to be noticed by the other students. (also don't tell students not to sit on the top of a bench table while you and other teachers are doing it)

# data[].attributes.body
Although Brown vs. Board of education has desegregated schools, they are still majority segregated. The schools in inner cities lack the same resources that suburban schools have. This can also be true for the types of teachers teaching in these schools. Would you want to bring your child to a school in the inner city?

# data[].attributes.body
Undroppable is a website I found on pintrest. This website consists of many motivational pictures, sayings, and videos to help prevent high schoolers from dropping out. A couple videos I watched were of actual students telling their stories. They book stats, "in inner cities, where large numbers of African Americans live, the rate nears 50 percent" and that percent was of dropouts. This is an obvious issue that needs more light.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UNDROPPABLE is a social media campaign and feature length documentary "in the making" to highlight inspiring students who are going through a lot, but somehow are able to muscle through and graduate no matter what. Most of the times you hear about a school on TV it's because something bad happened in that community.