About this exemplar
This page features the culturally responsive teaching practices of a teacher's work across 3 charter schools in the DC Metro Area, where they taught 7th grade ELA, 5th-8th grade reading intervention, and now, first grade. This candidate has taught at schools that were either majority Black/African American or majority Hispanic/Latinx.
Culturally Responsive Teaching, also known as CRT, is the research-based practice of seeing a student's unique life experiences (ie what students learn from their cultures, languages, etc.) in an asset-based manner and utilizing them to connect to academic content and skills.
These connections are critical for students' access of rigorous classroom material, practice of high level skills like critical thinking, and mindsets around the relevance of academics in their lives. For these reasons, CRT has become a leading principle in my classroom. CRT guides how I view myself as a facilitator of learning, how I build my classroom community, and how I create and execute my curriculums across the grade and subject levels I have had the privilege to teach.
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.
Some of the books from my personal library, both fiction and realistic fiction, that are dedicated to learning more about the diverse experiences and perspectives of others.
Books have been an integral part of my life for as long as I can remember. When I wanted to know something or travel beyond my own experiences, I reached first for a book. As I began to confront my own whiteness and the privileges that that holds, I again reached for literature from marginalized peoples. I knew that the only way to un-learn what society had taught me in my small town was to listen to the voices of those who had experienced the world in the very ways I wanted to know about.
As I entered the world of teaching, I became increasingly more aware of my identity as a white woman. Throughout Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) work at Institute and my own self-reflection, I became severely uncomfortable and dealt with a lot of white guilt. Indeed, the vast majority of teachers continue to be white women while over half of school children are children of color, cites 2020 federal data, and I kept hearing how my future students of color needed educators of color to act as mirrors.
I decided that reading by myself was no longer enough, and I resolved to establish an anti-racism book club among other white female educators in my corps year. The goal was to read and discuss resources centered on the intersection of race and education, particularly on discipline and the rise of restorative justice. The three other women I recruited and myself felt it a necessity to use the resources on the subject already available rather than dependent on our colleagues of color to teach us.
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.
My student shows off the books she plans to take home over winter break.
My love of learning through books also led me to their inclusion in building a culturally responsive classroom environment. I knew that I wanted to create a classroom library with shelves full of diverse books where students could see themselves in characters and stories while also being exposed to the huge world of different people and cultures that exist. Further, we have discussed YA books that we were thinking of putting in front of students like "On the Come Up", "Ghost", and "Dear Martin", focusing on not only student interest/relevance, but how to expand students self-perceptions of black and brown kids beyond the associations with rap, absent fathers, gangs, etc that those novels focus on.
In my journey of self-reflection, I have also made an effort to attend webinars, conferences, and other events that force me to confront my privilege and strategies to empower my learners. For example, with my school's financial assistance, I had the privilege of attending Teaching for Change's Tellin' Stories Race, Equity, and Family Engagement Summer Institute for Teachers and Staff in DC. The above preparation email shows the goals of the event, centering around family engagement efforts. It was attended by a diverse group of teachers, particularly women from DCPS. This conference was incredibly impactful, particularly in shaping how I communicate with families about students and our classroom happenings. I needed to get to know the community at large as I was coming in as an outsider on many fronts. It prepared me to utilize Northeast Academy's partnership with Flamboyan Foundation to conduct home visits with families, engage with families as part of their student's team (using an asset-based approach), and continue to differentiate both student engagement and family engagement strategies to best fit context.
A screenshot of an email sent in preparation of the Tellin' Stories Race, Equity, and Family Engagement Summer Institute for Teachers and Staff.
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.
Another method of un-learning my hidden biases has been through writing. As an avid journal keeper since middle school, I have found many gems of self-discovery by processing on paper. Particularly during my first year of teaching, I was managing several extremely challenging life events- one of which definitely was being a first year teacher! I regularly wrote about feelings of being overwhelmed and even of being "bullied" by the students who could see straight through the frail vision of authority I was trying to build, with little meaningful consequences to back it up. I wrote about students who I found "aggressive" and those who I found frustrating because they did no academic work in the classroom. These journal opportunities have become invaluable learning opportunities, particularly in hindsight.
To the left is my Cultural Self-Study Paper, written for JHU's Effective Practices II.
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.
These messages are also true in my CRT Implementation Plan from that same semester. Reflected in this document is my profound belief in asset-based instruction as well as my profound frustration and lack of knowledge in my first year of teaching. Many of the structures I talked about here, I did create and utilize in the next school year. On the other hand, SY19-20 was full of learning curves I had no idea I would need to learn. I had to expand my understanding of how, in particular, race and ability played into my new classroom. As part of a large charter network that prides itself on structure and discipline, I was often confronted with the conflict of doing what I knew was better for my students or what was more in line with the school wide culture. I realized that the authoritarian method of teaching was not only not authentic to me, but does not celebrate my students cultural backgrounds. By using CRT and my reflections over time as a guide, I have incorporated restorative justice discipline practices within an overall proactive classroom management approach that emphasizes relationships, community, context, and meaningful consequences that are tied to the violation of community trust.
To the left is my Culturally Responsive Teaching Implementation Plan from JHU's Effective Practices II.
Learning about myself in preparation to bring material in front of the classroom continues to be an essential part of the work. While I have certainly failed at this work over and over, and I am sure that I will continue to, I have also grown into a completely different person than I entered the classroom as. I am now proudly myself, as a person and as a teacher. I do not need to emulate others' teaching styles or be what I "think" a good teacher is.
I have learned that the foundation of good teaching is a daily blank slate for yourself and students, building relationships with students and families, and empowering students to use their voices to better their communities and world. For these efforts, my 60ish fellow '18 DC corps members and the Teach for America regional staff awarded me the Personal Transformation award at our alumni ceremony.
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.
While working at CHARTER SCHOOL, I knew that my students saw my whiteness before anything else. There were so many lines of difference that I had no idea how to cross. One salient identity for the vast majority of my students, beyond race or immigrant status or anything else, was nationality. Being Salvadoran was something to be proud of. With this in mind, I decided to set off to their beloved home country during our February break from school. I shared with students when I bought plane tickets and asked them for help, requesting recommendations for food, places to see, etc. I had never seen students so excited! They all wanted to tell me about the small town that they were from, how I should visit their cousins and tias, and how if I paid more than 25 cents for a pupusa then I was crazy. I took them up on their ideas and took pictures of everything while I was there. All of the people in El Salvador wanted to teach me about their culture too to bring back to my students, from Airbnb hosts who taught me how to haggle at the market, to friendly street vendors who taught me how to make my own pupusas (for 25 cents each!), to new friends who helped me practice my Spanish.
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.
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.
Students describe their own experiences better than anyone else, particularly when this feedback is not required. The following are samples of student writing, all from students who were difficult to reach at the beginning of the year- cited as high flyers due to difficulties with self-regulation, academics, or both. The relationships built throughout the year are evident. In one case, a student reached out the following fall when he realized I was no longer working at his school. He has continued to message me (with his mother's permission), asking for help with reading strategies/recommendations, but also on organization and how to respond when he is frustrated.
Further, during CHARTER SCHOOL'S Teacher Appreciation week, my door was "bombed" by notes from students. They spoke about how they loved that I "always wanted to make our class better", how I saw the best in them even when they didn't see it in themselves, that I listened to what they had to say, and that I showed them how to make actual change, not just "reading silly books for class and never thinking about it again". This form of feedback is some of the most valuable to me because student words affirm the direction and guidance of CRT.
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.
Student annotates text on the board to reflect student oral discussion.
Before I knew what the acronym CRT stood for or even how to write a lesson plan, I knew that social justice and identity work must be the crux of my teaching philosophy. Therefore, through all of my changes in placement schools, subjects, and grade levels in a incredibly short amount of time, this has stayed constant. I have spent large amounts of time in the past few years reflecting on systems of privilege and injustice that shape our world; the community I teach in; the families who have placed their faith, and students, in me; and the students who show up with years of ideas about the purpose of education and its relevance in their lives. For some, education may have even been the institution with which our world has taught students about injustice and discrimination first hand.
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.
At PUBLIC SCHOOL, my students often felt trapped in a reading intervention class for "dumb kids" and "the SPEDs". While I required intentional time for daily independent reading and time on the adaptive computer system, I was able to use our box curriculum and routines to empower student voice as well. I had students researching types of community and advocacy based careers they cared about; speaking in front of the class with prepared presentations; writing, reading, and speaking about social justice issues they cared deeply about; and discussing their own identities in relation to systems of injustice and to goal setting for the people they wanted to be outside of what society told them they could be.
Now, with my first grade students at PUBLIC SCHOOL2, I am able to prioritize these goals in totality. My guidelines are that of the 1st grade standards and the name of a unit that I am to write. We practice reading and writing strategies, but as they apply to community-based justice and who students are. We began the year by learning about ourselves and building relationships through our "How to be a Good Friend and Citizen to the Community" unit. As we take this learning about relationships outside of ourselves, learning in class completely coincides with current events (ie: 2020 Presidential election), resulting in active civic engagement opportunities in real life (ie: going with parents to the voting polls or encouraging family members to vote). These opportunities are only impactful because I have already taken the time to learn about students' identities, connect with their families, and identify what is important to them. Building relationships impacts learning.
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.
During unit 1, I learned so much about my students, their families, and interests. For instance, my students this year are particularly strong at kinesthetic learning; they love story read alouds; they love the opportunity to speak during class. I learned that their families are feeling extremely overwhelmed during virtual learning and seek transparency in curriculum. Families love that their students are being exposed to a variety of historical figures and students love learning about them! Using all of this information gleaned from my relationship building in Unit 1, I began our journey with Unit 2, which couldn't have been more timely. Our mentor text is ripe with rigorous vocabulary words and opportunities for multiple access points to discussion and writing practice.
I created a Scope and Sequence using the Fundations phonics method (reviewing what had been introduced the previous week in Reading class) combined with 1st grade focus standards applied to the mentor text. These focus areas were shared with families in the October newsletter so families could begin practicing difficult concepts or preview the week's material with their student ahead of time. In addition, this scope and sequence intentionally creates opportunities for students to reflect on their own lives and interests by putting them in the shoes of a presidential candidate. As they emulate the presidential race process, students are being asked to engage in relevant, real world issues through discussion, research, vocabulary, and opinion writing. These prompts engage academic skill building and critical thinking.
Below is a copy of the unit's vocabulary cards:
Students are also simultaneously being presented with racial and gender diverse heroes who have positively impacted their communities on the issue of voting and community engagement, pulling students into the overall narrative of history and how people have fought for rights and change from within the government (President Obama) and from outside of it (Fannie Lou Hamer and Ida B. Wells). Samples of daily weekly hero slides are presented to the left with key vocabulary terms bolded, large text, pictures, and probing discussion questions. I have to limit classes to three questions per class because they all want to know more about our weekly heroes! One student, when asked why President Obama is important in a review last week, announced that it was because "he got to be president and he has brown skin like me!"'; seeing heroes that look "like me" is consistent with my messaging that my students are change-makers just like these heroes we talk about every week.
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.
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.
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.
Student A's Campaign Speech
Student B's Campaign Speech
Student C's Campaign Speech
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.