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This visual provides a nice summary of the MTSS approach to solving student problems. This does not speak to culture or diversity (which is the focus of this padlet), but represents the broad topic of group problem solving and tiered support.

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What counts as response and intervention in RTI?A sociocultural analysis

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What counts as response and intervention in RTI?A sociocultural analysis

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Because equity issues for ethnic and linguistically diverse students are purportedly addressed in RTI models, researchers conducted a sociocultural analysis of its building blocks.  This paper discuss how the assumptions of RTI might unintentionally create blind spots for researchers and practitioners about how to design, conduct, and assess learning environments, particularly for diverse students.

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Cultural Competence and MTSS for Behavior

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Cultural Competence and MTSS for Behavior

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According to this resource, MTSS will only be effective when implementation efforts are culturally sensitive to the unique characteristics of school team members, students, families, and community members. School teams that are not sensitive to theses cultural differences may experience more challenges in implementing MTSS for behavior.
Any professional in education can tell you that everyone has a very different perspective about problem behavior. For this reason, understanding patterns of office discipline referrals (ODRs) can be a great deal more complicated than it first appears. In fact, one of the most difficult processes in MTSS for behavior involves coming to consensus with faculty about what problem behaviors should be office-managed versus classroom-managed.

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Culture refers to an integrated pattern of human knowledge, beliefs and behavior that is passed down from one generation to the next. The family stories that each person shares with others contains information about that person's cultural values and beliefs.

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Bias Isn't Just a Police Problem, It's a Preschool Problem

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Bias Isn't Just a Police Problem, It's a Preschool Problem

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New research from the Yale Child Study Center suggests that many preschool teachers look for disruptive behavior in much the same way: in just one place, waiting for it to appear.

The problem with this strategy (besides it being inefficient), is that, because of implicit bias, teachers are spending too much time watching black boys and expecting the worst.

Here is another example of research (in addition to the research cited in Chapter 5 of Friend & Cook's 2017 text, Interactions) that shows the prevalence of implicit bias in the classroom. Friend & Cook state that individual teacher bias can greatly impact the efficacy of group problem solving.

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First, a story:

Late one night, a man searches for something in a parking lot. On his hands and knees, he crawls around a bright circle of light created by a streetlamp overhead.

A woman passes, stops, takes in the scene.

"What are you looking for? Can I help?"

"My car keys. Any chance you've seen them?"

"You dropped them right around here?"

"Oh, no. I dropped them way over there," he says, gesturing vaguely to some faraway spot on the other side of the lot.

"Then why are you looking here?"

The man pauses to consider the question.

"Because this is where the light is."

New research from the Yale Child Study Center suggests that many preschool teachers look for disruptive behavior in much the same way: in just one place, waiting for it to appear.

The problem with this strategy (besides it being inefficient), is that, because of implicit bias, teachers are spending too much time watching black boys and expecting the worst.
The study
Lead researcher Walter Gilliam knew that to get an accurate measure of implicit bias among preschool teachers, he couldn't be fully transparent with his subjects about what, exactly, he was trying to study.

Implicit biases are just that - subtle, often subconscious stereotypes that guide our expectations and interactions with people.

"We all have them," Gilliam says. "Implicit biases are a natural process by which we take information, and we judge people on the basis of generalizations regarding that information. We all do it."

Even the most well-meaning teacher can harbor deep-seated biases, whether she knows it or not. So Gilliam and his team devised a remarkable - and remarkably deceptive - experiment.

At a big, annual conference for pre-K teachers, Gilliam and his team recruited 135 educators to watch a few short videos. Here's what they told them:

We are interested in learning about how teachers detect challenging
behavior in the classroom. Sometimes this involves seeing behavior before it becomes problematic. The video segments you are about to view are of preschoolers engaging in various activities. Some clips may or may not contain challenging behaviors. Your job is to press the enter key on the external keypad every time you see a behavior that could become a potential challenge.

Each video included four children: a black boy and girl and a white boy and girl.

Here's the deception: There was no challenging behavior.

While the teachers watched, eye-scan technology measured the trajectory of their gaze. Gilliam wanted to know: When teachers expected bad behavior, who did they watch?

"What we found was exactly what we expected based on the rates at which children are expelled from preschool programs," Gilliam says. "Teachers looked more at the black children than the white children, and they looked specifically more at the African-American boy."

Indeed, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, black children are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended from preschool than white children. Put another way, black children account for roughly 19 percent of all preschoolers, but nearly half of preschoolers who get suspended.

One reason that number is so high, Gilliam suggests, is that teachers spend more time focused on their black students, expecting bad behavior. "If you look for something in one place, that's the only place you can typically find it."

The Yale team also asked subjects to identify the child they felt required the most attention. Forty-two percent identified the black boy, 34 percent identified the white boy, while 13 percent and 10 percent identified the white and black girls respectively.
The vignette
The Yale study had two parts. And, as compelling as the eye-scan results were, Gilliam's most surprising takeaway came later.

He gave teachers a one-paragraph vignette to read, describing a child disrupting a class; there's hitting, scratching, even toy-throwing. The child in the vignette was randomly assigned what researchers considered a stereotypical name (DeShawn, Latoya, Jake, Emily), and subjects were asked to rate the severity of the behavior on a scale of one to five.

White teachers consistently held black students to a lower standard, rating their behavior as less severe than the same behavior of white students.

Gilliam says this tracks with previous research around how people may shift standards and expectations of others based on stereotypes and implicit bias. In other words, if white teachers believe that black boys are more likely to behave badly, they may be less surprised by that behavior and rate it less severely.

Black teachers, on the other hand, did the opposite, holding black students to a higher standard and rating their behavior as consistently more severe than that of white students.

Here's another key finding: Some teachers were also given information about the disruptive child's home life, to see if it made them more empathetic:

[CHILD] lives with his/her mother, his/her 8- and 6-year-old sisters,
and his/her 10-month-old baby brother. His/her home life is turbulent, between having a father who has never been a constant figure in his/her life, and a mother who struggles with depression but doesn't have the resources available to seek help. During the rare times when his/her parents are together, loud and sometimes violent disputes occur between them. In order to make ends meet, [CHILD's] mother has taken on three different jobs, and is in a constant state of exhaustion. [CHILD] and his/her siblings are left in the care of available relatives and neighbors while their mother is at work.

Guess what happened.

Teachers who received this background did react more empathetically, lowering their rating of a behavior's severity - but only if the teacher and student were of the same race.

As for white teachers rating black students or black teachers rating white students?

"If the race of the teacher and the child were different and [the teacher] received this background information, severity rates skyrocketed," Gilliam says. "And the teachers ended up feeling that the behavioral problems were hopeless and that very little could be done to actually improve the situation."

This result is consistent with previous research on empathy, Gilliam says. "When people feel some kind of shared connection to folks, when they hear more about their misfortunes, they feel more empathic to them. But if they feel that they are different from each other ... it may actually cause them to perceive that person in a more negative light."

It's impossible to separate these findings from today's broader, cultural context - of disproportionately high suspension rates for black boys and young men throughout the school years, of America's school-to-prison pipeline, and, most immediately, of the drumbeat of stories about black men being killed by police.

If implicit bias can play a role on our preschool reading rugs and in our classrooms' cozy corners, it no doubt haunts every corner of our society.

Biases are natural, as Gilliam says, but they must also be reckoned with.

The good news, if there is such a thing from work such as this, is that Gilliam and his team were ethically obligated to follow up with every one of the 135 teachers who participated in the study, to come clean about the deception.

Gilliam even gave them an out, letting them withdraw their data - for many of them, the lasting proof of their bias.

Only one did.

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Bias Isn't Just A Police Problem, It's A Preschool Problem

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First, a story: Late one night, a man searches for something in a parking lot. On his hands and knees, he crawls around a bright circle of light created by a streetlamp overhead. A woman passes, stops, takes in the scene. "What are you looking for? Can I help?"

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Relating curriculum to culture key in educating English language learners with disabilities

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Relating curriculum to culture key in educating English language learners with disabilities

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University of Kansas researchers have recently published a study arguing that culturally responsive teaching — or relating new ideas to the cultural and linguistic experiences students are familiar with — is vitally important, especially when working with English language learners with disabilities. This research aligns with the Friend & Cook's (2017) discussion about the impact that culture and diversity can have on group problem solving in Chapter 5.
Specifically, this research states that teachers often struggle to relate classroom curriculum to the life experiences of their ELL students, even when they know this approach may be helpful. This may be a scenario where a group of teachers with different backgrounds can work together to solve this problem.

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LAWRENCE - For as long as people have been teaching, they have tried to put a new idea or concept "in terms you'll understand." But believe it or not, new teachers are often not trained how to put ideas into terms their students will understand when working across cultural and linguistic lines.

University of Kansas researchers have recently published a study arguing that culturally responsive teaching - or relating new ideas to the cultural and linguistic experiences students are familiar with - is vitally important, especially when working with English language learners with disabilities.

The qualitative case study examines the work of a teacher in a large public school district in the Southwestern United States tasked with teaching reading to a class of English language learners with learning disabilities. An inner-city teacher with 10 years' experience, bilingual, with a master's degree in education, "Mrs. Estrella" had received training in culturally-responsive teaching. In relating reading curriculum to experiences that students were familiar with, she engaged her students more thoroughly and annually improved their scores on the Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey Revised Passage Comprehension Test.

Michael Orosco, associate professor of special education, and Naheed Abdulrahim, a doctoral student in special education and Chancellor's Fellow at KU, detailed their work in an article published in the journal Educational Borderlands. The authors detail several examples of how Mrs. Estrella, in working with her elementary students, was able to link reading curriculum to experiences the students had, such as sewing with family members, attending rodeos or discussing family traditions, all of which were themes in their reading assignments. Orosco and Abdulrahim focused on a teacher having success with English language learners with disabilities in third, fourth and fifth grades, as that is the age when students learning English are most often placed in special education classes.

"You would begin to see the kids engaged in the activity, their eyes would light up and they would take part in the discussions. That was a sign they were starting to comprehend," Orosco said. "She connected the contents of the story to their backgrounds, and connected the unknown to the known."

As simple as the practice may sound, culturally responsive teaching is lacking in policy, practice and in training for future teachers. Most teachers lack the preparation, expertise and experience to teach reading and other subjects to English language learners. It is also largely unaddressed in educational research.

Federal education policy has largely omitted the idea of culturally responsive teaching since bilingual education fell out of favor in the 1990s, the authors say. It also often has to be vague, leaving leeway for state policy, but very few include culturally responsive teaching as a requirement for future educators.

Research has shown, however, that many teachers in the field feel unprepared to try teaching concepts to students from cultural and linguistic backgrounds different than their own, even when curriculum is diverse and opportunities exist to make connections between classroom materials and students' life experiences.

Making those connections is especially important for English language learners with learning disabilities, for whom simply reading text and comprehending is more challenging. However, direct skills-based instruction devoid of cultural and linguistic connections is still the standard approach. Most "evidence-based" practices have not been sufficiently validated for diverse populations. Higher education and teacher preparation programs would be well-served to educate future teachers in how to undertake culturally responsive teaching matched with evidence-based skills instruction, the authors write.

Research can also play a role, not only in better understanding how such approaches can be successful, but in translating the findings into methods teachers can put to work in the classroom. The majority of evidence based research is large-scale, quantitative designed work, aimed at developing new methods and interventions. Although often considered the "gold standard" of research, the approach has an important role. Experimental research studies tell us what works best with the majority of students in a research sample, not all students. Some practices that may be effective have not yet been fully researched.

Qualitative research helps us understand why a practice works or not and factors that can affect implementation, Orosco said. Observation studies in the classrooms of effective teachers tell us a lot about the attributes of successful teachers and the characteristics of effective instruction. It is one thing to tell educators and school administrators that research shows an approach will work, and another to help them understand how to make it work in their own schools with their English language learner population.

"We have very little research in this area. The bulk of it has been quantitative, based on the principle that evidence based practices or interventions should be based on scientific research evidence about 'what works.' However, it is essential to find out what works with whom, by whom, for what purposes and in what contexts," Orosco said. "When you go out and talk to teachers about research, they often say 'I don't know what to do with this. These evidence- based approaches are not working with my ELL students. Who decided if these recommended practices were appropriate with ELLs? Shouldn't it have been validated with students like those with whom it would be applied to?'

"Large experimental design based on the medical model can show what medicine is working, but when this type of thinking has been applied in education, generalizations on the medication have been found to be limited to the particular sample that it has been tested on because the social world goes through such rapid changes."

The demographics of the United States have been steadily changing for years, and nearly every teacher will work with English language learners at some point in their career. Being prepared to put a lesson in terms the students will understand - especially those who are English language learners with disabilities - is vital in helping students boost their reading scores and reach their full educational potential.

"When you use new teaching methods, the question is always 'are you getting gains,'" Orosco said. "These kids weren't doing well, but when their teacher started using culturally responsive teaching the students started improving their comprehension and made gains ever year."

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Relating curriculum to culture key in educating English language learners with disabilities, researchers argue

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LAWRENCE - For as long as people have been teaching, they have tried to put a new idea or concept "in terms you'll understand." But believe it or not, new teachers are often not trained how to put ideas into terms their students will understand when working across cultural and linguistic lines.