Introduction

Culturally responsive teaching informs the way I connect with and speak to my students and families and plan and execute all of my lessons daily. Being a culturally responsive educator is engaging in self-work to understand more of myself, so that I am in a space to help my students understand and appreciate who they are. Being a culturally responsive educator is having an assets-based mentality about my students' cultures and backgrounds. In my opinion, no one starts off being a proficient culturally responsive educator. It takes extensive self-reflection, intentional planning to build classroom culture and relationships, and commitment to see cultural responsive pedagogy in action in classrooms consistently. My personal aim is to each day become a better culturally responsive educator.

Preparation: Internal Reflection and Self-Work

In the process of becoming an anti-racist and culturally relevant educator, I have had to spend a lot of time reflecting on my own background, experiences, and perspective to begin unpacking my biases and how everything that I am impacts the way I view the world. As a Latina woman, I recognize that I benefit from privileges that people who identify differently from me across various identity markers do not. As an educator, it’s important that I am self-aware about how I “show up” in spaces and am reflective about my words and actions because I can intentionally and unintentionally cause harm to my students’ self-perception and concept of others.

Throughout my coursework at JHU, I have had opportunities to engage in this inner reflection. For example, I did an extensive Cultural Self-Study that helped me unpack my identity and action plan to continue doing self-work in Effective Practices Part II. From this inner exploration, two implications arose. I have developed action steps to continue doing self-work and inner reflection and become more intentional in making culturally responsive teaching the foundation in my classroom. Since my Cultural Self-Study, I've also come to learn that culturally responsive teaching is more than just incorporating a few activities into my instruction that are culturally relevant.

Being a culturally responsive educator means fostering a learning environment that values strong relationships with and among students, critically analyzing curriculum to create academically rigorous lessons, and understanding the diverse learning styles of my students. Unfortunately, our educational system isn't designed with culturally responsive pedagogy in mind, so I now approach curriculum, discipline, and family engagement through a lens that aims to keep being culturally responsive at the core. I continue to seek out more ways to foster positive relationships with my students and families, find teaching materials that are relevant and rigorous, and engage my students in learning through meaningful and empowering ways.

Cultural Self-Study

Anti-Racism Book Club

Implicit Bias Tests

Inner reflection through taking implicit bias tests has also been a great source of information to better understand my own critical race consciousness and become more aware of my actions. About six years ago, I recall taking the Harvard Race Implicit Association Test for my undergraduate psychology class and being shocked to find that I showed a "moderate preference for White people over Black people". Frankly, at that point in my life I hadn't had many interactions with Black people and hadn't really become aware of the various struggles the Black community lives with on a daily basis. I somewhat understood why I showed a preference for White people, but I was disheartened to realize that I also held prejudices against a community of people I barely knew. As I finished up college, I knew I needed to unpack my beliefs to understand my socialization as a Latina in rural New Mexico, but I didn't actively start until I moved to Houston to start teaching.

During my time teaching, my knowledge about the Black community and other people groups has expanded exponentially as I've gotten to know my Black students and their families, and interacted with more Black people than I ever had in my lifetime. Once I took the Race IAT again this year, I was intrigued to see a significant shift in my results that now indicate a "slight preference for Black people over White people" (see Harvard Race Implicit Association Test Results). I also took the Skin-tone IAT which revealed "no automatic preference between Dark Skinned People and Light Skinned People". While I acknowledge the Harvard Implicit Association Tests don't capture everything that goes on in our minds, I recognize that my perspective on the world and society has shifted significantly as I learn more about the construct of race in the United States and the role it has played throughout history in perpetuating systemic inequalities, especially within education. Implicit bias tests like the Harvard IAT serve as tools to help me understand the inner workings of my brain to unpack my prejudices and become a better anti-racist educator.

Fostering a Diverse Learning Community

One of the very first things I tell my students on the first day of school is that I consider them part of my family once I'm their teacher. I moved to Houston for my job, so I don't have any family in the area that keeps me attached to the city. I want my students to understand that I choose to stay here for them and am committed to their success inside and outside of school. To truly live up to this ideal, I intentionally seek to get to know my students and families better through surveys, home visits, school events, and continuous reflection to assess if I am fostering a diverse learning community.

Surveys

Surveys and interviews have been a regular source of information for me to gather information from my students and families. Every year I've taught I have given some form of a parent survey that gives me insight into my student's home life, their areas of strength and growth, and also is a stepping stone in building a partnership with their parents.

The student to the left answered mostly neutral, yet they gave me the lowest score in "TEACHER NAME is excited about what we are learning in class" and "TEACHER NAME makes learning fun". The student to the right mostly answered "agree, "but rated me lowest on the two lowest statements from my survey sample.

I reflected further on my students' surveys in my reflection below:

Student Interviews

In order to understand more of the context in which my students are growing up, I have also conducted student interviews to learn more about their interests and home life. These interviews have pushed me to question my preconceptions and biases about my students' upbringing and the reasons for their behavior and performance in school.

One example of student interviews I've conducted was for a JHU assignment, Student Profiles, in which we profiled four of our students to get a better understanding of our school community and the context of our students' home lives.

Responding to Student Surveys and Reflection

Since I found that my students saw the J-Factor lacking in my classroom in my survey analysis, I intentionally leveraged my Love & Logic lesson plan for my JHU coursework as a way to infuse more J-Factor into my classroom. Bringing J-Factor into our morning meetings has positively impacted our teacher-student and peer relationships. In this J-Factor lesson plan, I focused on increasing our class community bond by focusing on fostering a sense of us and them. Although leveraging more J-Factor strategies into my classroom was an initial reaction to my perception survey, they have become a key component within my classroom culture plan.

Culturally Responsive Planning and Teaching

The self-work I've conducted to develop my own understanding of my identity and role as an educator in communities of students of color has equipped me to build relationships with my students and families. These partnership have enabled me to help my students succeed academically and develop further socio-emotional skills they need to be successful beyond the school setting. Becoming a culturally responsive educator didn't happen overnight; it has taken extensive planning and intentionality in analyzing all components of my interactions with my students and families.

Creating my CRT Classroom Plan (below) was part of the groundwork that allowed me to identify cultural elements that I could leverage during learning, think through elements that I can proactively redirect by incorporating them in my classroom, and fostering a space that is culturally sensitive to the learning needs of all my students.

Classroom Management and Routines

For the past four years, my students and I have created together a respect agreement that guides how we interact with one another in a way that is culturally responsive, while learning and working together as a team. Creating a collective respect agreement is an example of culturally responsive pedagogy because students actively participate in creating our classroom norms and voice their expectation of me as their teacher. To ensure we all abide by the respect agreement, my students and I sign the respect agreement and it is a living document on our classroom wall for students and myself to reference when a class agreement has been broken. To reinforce this respect agreement, I leverage restorative practices in my classroom to ensure I am seeking to understand without attacking the individual student. In my classroom, I lean heavily on the Classroom Culture Cycle I learned through Teach For America and reinforce it through intrinsic and extrinsic rewards frequently.

One of the routines I maintain in my classroom is designed to encourage student-facilitated discourse which is a part of having a culturally responsive classroom. Habits of discussion, also known as accountable talk strategies, maintain high expectations in academic discussions and promote critical thinking skills, while also allowing every student's voice to be heard. Throughout the day, my students would reference Talk Like a Scholar Discussion Moves along with the hand gestures we incorporated in group discussions and partner work.

Wax Museum Project

One of the key ways in which I have consistently sought to leverage CRT strategies and curriculum materials into my classroom has been through my yearly Wax Museum Project. Hands-on, project-based learning, was one of the ideas I incorporated into my CRT Classroom Plan.

Most recently, I leveraged a lesson on the Harlem Renaissance as a launching point for our Wax Museum Project. During the Wax Museum Project, my students research an important historical figure of their choice (mostly Latinx or African American), create a visual presentation on their life, and dress up and perform a biographical speech on their contributions to society. I've found that this project-based learning approach has been a major success with my students since they connect with the content, historically enjoy hands-on learning, and are held to high expectations since most of it is independent work. The Wax Museum project is culturally responsive because it is academically rigorous and students have agency and choice in whom they do their project on while collaboration and student discourse are at the center. The goal of the Wax Museum Project is to teach my students independence and responsibility to ultimately take ownership of their own learning through research, trial, and error, while also learning about real-life role models they can identify with and should aspire to be like.

You can find my launching lesson plan, teaching materials, and resources below.

My Harlem Renaissance lesson (below left) served as a a launching point into our Wax Museum Projects. Students were then given a chance to choose choose the important figure they wanted to research (below right). While I encouraged them to choose historical figures that were primarily people of color, they also had the opportunity to defend their choice of someone not on my list.

In the images below, you can see some of my students conducting research on school chromebooks to find important information about their historical figures to write their speeches (left), creating portraits of their historical figure (bottom left), and putting all of their research onto their trifold boards for their presentations (right).

Families and other grade levels were invited to see my 3rd graders dressed up as their historical figure, showcasing their trifold presentation, and reciting their speech. Not only did my students become invested in the final outcome of their projects, but we were able to get high parental involvement during the duration of the projects and family participation at the event. Our families and the school community were excited to see people who looked like them and our children being celebrated!

In the audio files (below), you can see and hear two of my students reciting portions of their Wax Museum speech on the day we held the Wax Museum event at school. Students proudly stood and wore their costume to portray their important figure and embodied their person to share about their lives and accomplishments.

Building Community: Morning Meetings

As I transition into bilingual Kindergarten this year, I decided to continue my focus on becoming an antiracist educator with culturally responsive teaching as my foundation. With my kindergarteners, I decided to begin our conversations around diversity and inclusion within our morning meetings. My morning meetings were also a part of my CRT Classroom Plan. Morning meets exemplify being culturally responsive because we seek to collectively build cultural competence through our discussions that ideally lead to my students' development of a critical consciousness. Each day, I have a morning meeting with my students for about 10-15 min in which I focus on subjects that connect to fostering cultural competence. For a couple of weeks we had a series on what it means to be "different" and how we treat people that are different from us that was at the intersection of socioemotional development and developing cultural competence. You can see a portion of one of these morning meetings in the screenshot and transcription below.

My goal is to continue to leverage my morning meetings as a venue through which I can engage my students in conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion in a manner that is age-appropriate, engaging, and meaningful in their formation of what it means to be kind and considerate of others.

Conclusion

While I've shared some examples of how I have sought to become a better culturally responsive educator - from planning to execution - I recognize it is a continuous process. My commitment is to continue my self-work to unpack and check my biases regularly and to foster relationships with each of my students. I will use what I learn about each of my students to inform the way I deliver culturally mediated instruction, sustain high expectations of my students, and teach them to appreciate who they are and the diversity around them to the best of my ability.