Culturally Responsive Teaching

What is CRT?

To be a culturally responsive teacher, I first must un-learn my own hidden biases as a white woman and continually commit to reflection on how my personal identities inform my practice. Whether I have been given a strictly paced, box curriculum to execute or the autonomy to create a curriculum from scratch, it is my responsibility to provide opportunities for students. These access points encourage students to reflect on themselves, utilize their own prior knowledge, see mirrors of their world reflected in class lessons, and learn more about the diversity in the world around them. In this section, I will demonstrate how my mindsets around the process of learning and teaching have evolved over the past 2.5 years in front of a classroom and how that has benefited the students and communities I spend my days with.

Preparation

Un-learning Through Reading

Since then, we have read books like Ta-Nehisi Coates "Between the World and Me", Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow", Beverly Daniel Tatum's landmark "Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility", and, most recently, Ibram X. Kendi's "How to Be an Anti-Racist". We also watched talks and films like 13th and Just Mercy. The structure of the book club both helped me maintain my focus on self-reflection and un-learning during a turbulent time of being a first year teacher and much personal stress, and also created a small group of other educators on whom I could rely and ask questions. It was to these women I came when I was first called a racist by a student upset at their grade during class, questioned my family engagement practices with non-English speaking parents, and celebrated the win of the first time my 9th graders had a frank discussion about race.

Un-learning Through Webinars and Conferences

Similar endeavors have included attending the Anti-Bias Book Talk Series, which pushed me to reflect on my biases beyond race like ableism and classism; the virtual conference Uplifting Women & Girls of Color Through Antiracist Pedagogy, Practice, & Policy, which pushed me to think about how I frame expectations for black girls in a session framed by Dr. Joshua Schuschke; and the recorded version of DUBs Talk: Conversations that Matter: Supporting Novice Teachers to Talk about Ability and Race with Young Children, which made me think about myself as a new teacher and the support that my black and brown students with IEPs received in my classroom. Where books allow me to interpret materials with my own experiences, webinars and conferences encourage human connection with an audience and speaker as well as allow for questioning on the part of audience members. I initially found these events most worthwhile when speakers provided concrete action steps, but I came to find importance in sitting in that discomfort and reflection as part of a journey. My own anti-racist and anti-bias conversations were not, and are not, to benefit me, but to make my classroom environment one that better fits the needs of my young black and brown students of all classes, languages, religions, and ability.

Un-learning Through Writing

As I learned about stereotypes that harm black and brown students in the classroom, I also had to reflect on how I played into them in front of the classroom, particularly in my messaging via tone, intonation, word choice, and body language. These thoughts, and my desperate wish that good intentions were enough, are evident in one JHU assessment, the Cultural Self-Study from Effective Practices II. Here, just as in my journal, I struggled parsing through how the salient parts of my students' identity and my own could mesh in a way that celebrated our different experiences and valued what we all could bring to the table.

Personal Transformation Award 2020

Execution: Building Relationships

Communicating with Families

Because I currently teach first graders, positive family engagement is more critical than ever. As this was a large growth area for me in past years, I prioritized curating an engagement strategy for SY20-21 that was sustainable for me as well as student-centered. A centerpiece of this strategy is the above parent communication template. In the frozen columns (A and B), all students names are listed. Then, aspects of their identity like home language, race, gender, IEP, ELL are listed alongside their best communication line (email, Teams Message, text, or call). These identifiers are all set up at the beginning of the year so I just update whether the contact was positive or negative and then add the new contact after each conversation. As noted, the first three rows calculate instantly to provide data on rates of overall positive phone calls as well as to students of each subgroup category.

By utilizing the template, I can hold myself accountable for positive family contact for students of all linguistic, racial, gender, and ability diversity. Its intended purpose, therefore, is to make it explicit which students and families need touch points. Unintentionally, it revealed to me during my monthly data analysis (for October 2020) that I tend to be in more frequent, and more positive contact with the families of male students. I have always seen myself as more biased towards females due to my personal experiences, but a look through my call log made it evident that I am currently more likely to reach out to my male students' families. Up to half of my communication with female students families so far this year has been initiated by the family. Whether this is because my male students have been taught how to advocate for themselves, are louder in class, or present as needing more literacy support, I can only begin to theorize; however, the message was clear.

View my template below:

Because of my efforts in logging and utilization of the data it provided, I was able to shift my personal goal from logging at least 5 positive contacts a day and sending a mass message on Fridays for all students with failing grades/missing the weekly homework that was turned in. Now, my goal is to send 5 positive contacts a day by working down my class roster rather than just from my brain. This method ensures accountability and equal distribution of positive contact to all students. Here you can see four examples of family communication from this year wherein ongoing communication has yielded positive results. In fact, my communicating with families, and prioritization of positive outreach has already resulted in more open two-way communication than I have experienced in past years where families are now reaching out to me with questions, ideas for classroom content, and even unsolicited offers to volunteer as chat moderator weekly during digital learning.

Visiting El Salvador

In a school that experienced incredibly high teacher turnover, constant 'culture resets', and had just learned that the school's doors would be shutting permanently at the end of the school year, my students had every right to be distrustful of adults- especially ones that looked like me. They had seen new white ladies come and go every year. For me to show them how invested I was in their lives and experiences as to physically take my week off to go to El Salvador, my students were blown away. When I got back, students made fun of my sunburn, as expected. But I also heard "I can't believe you actually went! most teachers leave for break and never come back after what we put you through" and "tell me all about it! did you see my family??" and "TEACHER NAME I bet your Spanish is awful! Can we hear it?". After that week, my students had changed their outlook on ELA. They knew that I saw them for all of the beautiful things that they are, and that I wasn't going anywhere. That not only did I care about who they had been, but I cared where they were going after their time at CHARTER SCHOOL too.

Co-generative Dialogues

As a first year teacher, I did not feel competent enough in teaching to truly lean into these principles. I now wish that I had, as many of my most successful moments that year were when I did choose to "lean in". While many students told me that I would need to be meaner in order to teach them, I have seen for myself that what students really mean is that they need a teacher who provides structure, making them feel empowered to take control of the classroom for themselves. For example, I chose to create what Emdin refers to as co-generative dialogues, or small groups of dissimilar students who discuss how the classroom functions and action steps for creating a space that better fits their needs.

One such action step created and executed by these student groups was Weekly Shout-out boards (see example below). They pointed out that students were most pointed out in classes when they did something wrong and were to be given a detention or a call home. Written weekly shout-outs were a student initiative to feel celebrated by me and by each other. On Fridays, I would write their names and share positive things about each student. Their warm up would be to go up and write things about each other as well. The first Friday that we did this, one student came into the room, saw the white board and her name, and started crying while two others told me that a teacher had never said something nice about them before. Not only was I the recipient of many hugs, but several of my tougher-presenting boys felt comfortable enough to "roast" me after it became clear that this would be a regular tradition. Creating consistent traditions invested students in the idea of our classroom as a community of learners and encouraged them to take academic and social risks like reading out loud or answering questions.

Feedback from Students

Student Survey Results

Hard data from overall year groups is also essential for accountability. These anonymous student surveys, using the Panorama software, were given to every student I taught at PUBLIC SCHOOL: 5th-8th grade. They show both percentageS of positive ratings for the whole group and comparisons to my ratings at CHARTER SCHOOL using the same question set. I read each question and answer choice out loud to students to ensure access and emphasis on content/ideas rather than on vocabulary. Student answers demonstrate both a strong classroom environment and mindsets as well as strong teacher-student relationships. While all ratings are in the mastery range, I still have growth to reach every student I teach.

Execution: In the Classroom

CRT In Every Classroom, Everyday

Educating students is full of conscious decisions and unconscious biases, particularly in the planning and executing of a lesson. Students learn what is expected of them and use those expectations to inform their ideas about their own capabilities. These mindsets about self and school are developed with both a box curriculum and self-written curriculum. When I have had the chance to write my own units, from scope and sequence to PowerPoints, I have felt free to use the standards and empowered to, in turn, empower my students. This freedom, however, can be deceiving as my own biases can bleed through just as much as any curriculum writer's. However, I may not be able to spot my own as easily, particularly if I am overwhelmed with backwards planning, standards alignment, and lesson creation.

Knowing this, I have approached planning and teaching with intention in each new unit that I present to students. At CHARTER SCHOOL, I transformed a 9th grade box unit on Romeo and Juliet to a multi-media sensation comparing different iterations of the classic play: Warm Bodies, Gnomeo and Juliet, Romeo y Julieta, and even a graphic novel version. Or, when I was able to create my own final unit, I picked four culturally relevant novels and facilitated a mini "book talk" for each one before letting students vote for the novel study of our choice. When they chose Ghost by Jason Reynolds, our co-generative dialogue groups studied 7th grade EOY standards over our regular cookies and lunch, deciding to focus on creating personal connections between the book and world around them. As they approved my activities or suggested ideas to add to the unit plan, we incorporated both literary and informational texts, research tasks, high level Bloom's activities, and collaborative project-based learning. EOY projects where students compared a theme of their choice from the novel to a real life issue exemplify the extraordinary work that can result from student investment as they suddenly started discussing domestic violence, absent fathers, substance abuse, racial discrimination, and more. Several students took this work a step further by writing to the mayor.

Classroom Routines

Routines are critical for the smooth running of a classroom no matter physical vs virtual or grade level. The structure of these routines in my classroom at Legends creates a sense of safety and community around our learning. For example, below is our Daily Slide that welcomes students to class at asks students to check in with their feelings using the zones of regulation and share an emoji representing how they feel in the chat. The use of visuals increase accessibility for emergent readers while the sharing creates a community dynamic even in a virtual environment. We focus on a new strategy every week for acknowledging and dealing with our big feelings (ie: rainbow breathing, taking a movement break, talking to a trusted adult, or draw a picture).

In addition, our daily review of student-created Classroom Norms incorporates our digital context as well as students' feelings of how they want to be treated in the classroom. Norms are shown visually, written, and orally. To create a sense of joy, students are given a movement of the day to do while I verbally review (using a silly accent or while joining them in the movement). Other times, students give me an action while they verbally review the norms as they now know the Norms backwards and forwards. Other routines include reviewing the learning objective at the beginning and end of class to see whether we have met the objective, dancing during brain breaks, and eating lunch together (albeit digitally) as a homeroom on Wednesdays to create community.

Intentional Lesson Planning: If I Ran for President

Weekly Heroes

Community Maps

Another tool to bring applicability of large, abstract concepts like voting and large scale elections into student's immediate worlds was the building of community maps (see above). We started in class and finished these as homework, so students were able to really engage their creative side for this project. First graders also love talking about themselves, so they were eager to share about their church, gas stations, stores, roads, and parks near their house. Maps provide context for students about where they are and how that impacts us on an immediate level. As they completed their maps, we were able to discuss as a class which of these places had been built by the government (ie: roads) and what kind of places you could go to vote (ie: schools, libraries). Students pointed out that we need to vote for "honest" people who "won't steal money" or who "want to help people" so that way we can all have good jobs, money, and houses. Additionally, different issues are important to us depending on where we might live, as someone who lives near the coast might be more affected by climate change then someone in Kansas while someone in Mississippi might care more about getting more good schools (as they currently rank worst in the nation). This simple way of framing why we vote had a large impact as students continued to utilize the activity throughout the unit as a reference point.

Community Issue Ranking

Talking about voting as a responsibility and a right must be contextualized with a 'why'. Just like my CHARTER SCHOOL students learned how to move past saying "Trump is bad!" without supporting reasons, I wanted my students to be able to support their foundational understanding with reasons based on their own life experiences. People vote not just based on a party, but on what candidate best represents their opinions.

We asked ourselves, what issues matter to us here in the metro area? What things do we need really badly? As a class, we ended up choosing 10 issues that the USA needed to work on from ending racism to having more parks and playgrounds (see above). Then, we ranked the issues as a class based on what we as a class thought the USA needed to do better the most. Students then completed the activity individually as well that night.

Campaign Speeches and Posters

After weeks of work building out the content knowledge about voting and important community issues, students were finally ready to run for president themselves. Using a range of project-based and discovery learning strategies, I scaffolded student access to writing a full campaign speech. As students answered questions independently, I called on students to share their ideas (thereby informing each other's ideas, collaborating in a virtual setting, and continuing to build community). Students eagerly shared how if they were President, they would want to keep citizens safe, build more schools, etc. Students then used their answers to the questions to write and record themselves giving the speech as well as a poster advocating for their election as President. Not only do student answers reflect actual community needs that are particularly salient in their lives currently, but the ongoing project promotes an understanding of who we each are as individuals and as a class community.

Reflection and Conclusion

While I feel that I have made enormous progress in both how I understand my own identities and how I interact with a community of students where there are many lines of difference, I cannot become complacent in my efforts to grow and un-learn all that I was taught about myself and others. Combined with my own self-reflection and intentional planning, access and advocacy opportunities continue to empower my students as readers, writers, and citizens of the world. When they know they are change-makers, my students have the power to do beyond what anyone, even themselves, thought they were capable of.

I am going to continue to fail sometimes. As a new teacher overall, and especially to the elementary sphere, I have to continue to learn about appropriate, yet high expectations for students. I have to keep working to understand what they already understand about their own identities and what they have been sheltered from so far in the world. I also have to work extra hard as a white teacher teaching social studies to teach version of history that is accurate and not white-washed without being overwhelming for my 6 and 7 year olds.

In such, I commit to continuing to reflect on my practice through journal entries as well as monthly analysis of my family communication call log and overall family engagement practices. I also will continue to engage with other white female educators of black and brown students to practice anti-discriminatory strategies, particularly in curriculum and discipline. I will also continue to engage with anti-racist literature like Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K-12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development, The Dying House, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Black Feminist Thought, Dying of Whiteness, Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People, Bad Feminist, and Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves. As I continue my career as a life-long educator and facilitator of learning, I endeavor to keep growing in my culturally responsive teaching capacity.

Below is my Ongoing Commitment for JHU's Effective Practices IV and my reflection on CRT in classroom management practices from JHU's Classroom Management II.