Introduction

Culturally responsive teaching is one of the core ideologies I follow in my teaching. NAME High School is an inter-district magnet school, with a uniquely diverse student population. Meeting the needs of all students in my classroom, regardless of educational or cultural background, is the only way that I can build success in my classroom.

In this section I will highlight the steps taken in my classroom to connect to my students and their families in culturally responsive ways. Giving students choice, allowing them to bring their cultural identities into the classroom, and planning activities that facilitate both of these are central to my classroom.

Self-Examination

Cultural Self-Study

My first step in planning out my classroom was to reflect on the cultural background I was bringing to the classroom myself. My experiences, perspectives, and biases would all undoubtedly play a role in my teaching. It was important to evaluate how much of a focus I've placed on culture, whether or not I have assumed a perspective to give my students the best experience possible, and to plan out the steps necessary to create a welcoming, culturally-responsive environment. I was able to complete this reflection in my coursework in Effective Practices 2: Cultural Self-Study.

In my Cultural Self-Study, I took a look at my own background and the identities I assumed across spectra of race, socioeconomic background, and gender. Every identity I had assumed up until that point was a defining trait, and thinking about myself in an objective sense shed light on how my cultural background would serve in the classroom.

In my self-study, I took a deeper look at how my identities formed and how they were influenced by my culture and community. I thought about the achievement levels that were expected of me and the fact that many of the positions I'd taken were in fitting into my community. I began to see that a large part of my success in school was based on pressure from my family and community, and many of the extracurricular activities that I was involved in were entirely a product of community influences.

In comparing myself to the students that I would be teaching, I saw that my suburban upbringing aligned to only a small portion of my students, the 30% in our school's inter-district, magnet model in which urban and suburban students learn together. The other 70% of students came from environments that were unfamiliar to me, had expectations on them that I didn't understand and had responsibilities that I hadn't experiences as a high school student.

Self-Bias Examination

Additionally, I completed one of of the Implicit Association Tests (IAT) by Harvard's Project Implicit, specifically on internal biases. The IAT pushed me to quickly respond to prompts that would potentially reveal underlying biases that I operate with. The test itself was an odd experience, but reading through the results made me question what internal biases I have and how I should inform my own teaching with the results of the test. The results of the test told me that I have a slight preference for one race over another, and it made me think about how this preference may carry over into my classroom in the opportunities and treatment that my students receive. My self-examination prepared me to be more culturally responsive in my teaching practice by showing me where my biases lie and making me be conscious and cognizant of my tendencies. Seeing that I have an implicit racial preference in my results, I am able to enact strategies to ensure that all students, regardless of my internal biases, get access to high quality education in my classroom.

I reflected on my own cultural identity to inform myself on what internal biases to keep in check, which cultural norms I should be open minded about, and pushed myself to acknowledge that I had to take extra steps to understand the diverse students I was teaching. I worked to understand that this wasn't the norm for many of my students, and for some, school was a respite from the hectic lives they lived at home. I pushed myself to make my classroom a wholly welcoming and comfortable environment. I went on to understand which students were comfortable volunteering answers and which ones preferred a call and response model. I also reflected on the pressures I had at home and how they pushed me to seek success as a student. Growing up in a suburban school environment like some of the students, I was accustomed to advocating for my own needs and took measures to guarantee my success because of the cultural pressures I had at home. As a member of a model-minority population, I was expected to do well in school and didn't need or expect my teachers to push me to work hard. I knew an obstacle that I would need to overcome was to figure out the kind of teacher I could be to motivate and encourage my students to do their best work.

I resolved to model my teaching in an open-minded way - I couldn't ever fully understand the backgrounds of all of my students, but I would take it upon myself to keep an open mind, allow student choice whenever possible, and to be as sensitive as I could to my students' needs. To do that, though, I had to learn more about my students. I work continuously and take steps to learn more about my students and what identities they were bringing into the classroom so I can best serve them and meet their needs.

Careful Classroom Planning

From all of the information that I had gathered, and was continuing to gather on a weekly basis, I felt like I had taken steps to both connect with both my students and their families, and I had begun to identify areas where I could change my teaching. Following the steps outlined in my coursework in Effective Practices 2, I began to work to integrate my understanding of my students' backgrounds into lessons to increase their degree of choice and flexibility in learning and interacting with material.

CRT Classroom Plan: Highlights

The classroom plan highlighted for me the dynamics by which students operated in my classroom. Having a unique class makeup that represented the socioeconomic diversity of the school, students were quick to self-congregate and didn't try to engage with peers they were unfamiliar with. I also found an interesting difference in the priorities different students had in terms of achievement in the classroom. While some worked hard to do their best and create strong, creative work, a large subset of students is only motivated by getting high grades on assignments, regardless of the outcome of the product or whether or not they made something that they're proud of. I realized that for many students, success didn't mean pride or learning, but rather high achievement, regardless of the situation. Students were more motivated to do things when they had a clear idea of how to get an A, and would refuse to take risks in offering answers to questions or responses to open prompts.

CRT Classroom Plan: Findings

From my interactions with students and gaining a better understanding of their needs and backgrounds, I decided to orient my next unit of study towards their needs and interests. Coming out of Unit 1: Mechanics in my upper-division physics class, we'd just completed a two month unit of study heavy with math and computation. Students in my class had struggled with much of the technical skills required for success in the unit, and had been given little opportunity to show off strengths they may have outside of completing physics problems. Restorative circles revealed to me that students often struggled to stay motivated in the class, and felt like they weren't getting a lot of fun out of the material. I leveraged the circle and had students explain to me science questions and wonderings they had, things that could really get them excited. The consensus in all of my classes seemed to be about space and the universe, so I got to work planning a unit of study.

The next module in Effective Practices 2 led me to develop a CRT Classroom plan while learning more about my students. Elements that were brought up in the plan included students' interests in pop-culture, cooperative group networks that students would self-congregate into, and what role technology played in students' experiences.

Understanding that my students felt like the material wasn't connected to them, I sought to bring the material closer to their personal lives. My careful classroom planning as a culturally responsive teacher led me to to design and introduce a new unit to my students with a focus on cosmological physics and that had a much lower focus on math and equations and a much higher one than the wonderment that students got from science and space. The unit focused on the Big Bang Theory (BBT), and touched on different concepts of the BBT that students would be able to find interesting. I put together a reserve of notes for students to access, and I gave them the opportunity to be introduced to different concepts and find a sub-topic that they found interest in.

CRT Lesson Plan

From my interactions with students and gaining a better understanding of their needs and backgrounds, I decided to orient my next unit of study towards their needs and interests. Coming out of Unit 1: Mechanics in my upper-division physics class, we'd just completed a two month unit of study heavy with math and computation. Students in my class had struggled with much of the technical skills required for success in the unit, and had been given little opportunity to show off strengths they may have outside of completing physics problems. Restorative circles revealed to me that students often struggled to stay motivated in the class, and felt like they weren't getting a lot of fun out of the material. I leveraged the circle and had students explain to me science questions and wonderings they had, things that could really get them excited. The consensus in all of my classes seemed to be about space and the universe, so I got to work planning a unit of study.

The next module in Effective Practices 2 led me to develop a CRT Classroom plan while learning more about my students. Elements that were brought up in the plan included students' interests in pop-culture, cooperative group networks that students would self-congregate into, and what role technology played in students' experiences.

Understanding that my students felt like the material wasn't connected to them, I sought to bring the material closer to their personal lives. My careful classroom planning as a culturally responsive teacher led me to to design and introduce a new unit to my students with a focus on cosmological physics and that had a much lower focus on math and equations and a much higher one than the wonderment that students got from science and space. The unit focused on the Big Bang Theory (BBT), and touched on different concepts of the BBT that students would be able to find interesting. I put together a reserve of notes for students to access, and I gave them the opportunity to be introduced to different concepts and find a sub-topic that they found interest in.

Students will spend this lesson combining their content knowledge with the concept of membership in their community and the theme for our project, “Bring space a little closer”. Students are tasked with finding an interesting topic within cosmological physics and then to brainstorm media in which the student can both technically and artistically represent the concept. Students will tap into community resources as they will survey any members of their community to field questions that they have about space and the cosmos and ways that the student can “Bring space a little closer”.

In the Spring semester of 2020, this project became the class's first activity during our extended break. Students who didn't have working computers needed access to class materials, so the notes were truncated and connected to worksheets that they would be able to complete without access to technology. The "learning packet" on the right was an example of a take-home assignment that was printed and physically handed to students and parents to support distance learning.

Specific CRT Strategies

This learning packet was a culmination of all the student-facing resources that were part of this unit. Keeping with the theme of the lesson plan, I used culturally-informed strategies to ensure authentic learning and a culturally-relevant classroom environment. In my class, I took advantage of student choice to the highest degree in designing this lesson. Utilizing student-controlled classroom discourse, I was able to give students the opportunity to control some parts of the lesson. This gave me insight into the ways that students engage with the materials and how they speak in scientific terms with community members and peers. I also took advantage of reshaping my curriculum to focus on bringing the science closer to their communities, rather then going through the same concepts and formulas without any connections outside of the classroom.

The key points of this projects are to convey the content knowledge, but also to give students a way to connect science and their community. Students are also pushed to choose a medium for their project that is representative of their skills and, ideally, impactful to some member of their community. Students are tasked with going to any member(s) of their community to gather at least 5 questions about space, the Universe, gravity, etc. In addition to the 5 of their own. Going to their community can help to create less homogeneous and more individualized projects that are representative of the students interests and skill-sets. Utilizing this active teaching method, I promoted student engagement by requiring that students play an active role in designing their projects and developing a project that could serve as a teaching tool for those members of their community that they had surveyed. My personal goal of this lesson was to teach students material that they cared about in a way that didn't seem foreign or unfamiliar but rather to introduce it in a way that could embed a higher degree of scientific discourse and thinking into their lives - to use culturally-informed strategies as a scaffold to connect student knowledge to new concepts and content.

Cultivating Personal Connections

Student Profiles

Understanding that the next step in advancing my teaching was learning about my students and how to best serve them, I looked to getting a better idea of my students' lives at home, how much time they had to dedicate to coursework outside of school, and what resources they had at their disposal at home. The largest hurdle I had to overcome in my classroom was the apparent achievement gap that existed among my students. While a small portion of my students were performing above grade level and I had no academic concerns for them, a large majority of my students were performing below grade level, despite the prerequisite requirements in place to take my upper-division physics class.

At some point, I began to understand that the differences in my students went beyond a dedication to school and an innate ability, but had directly to do with the influences they dealt with. In class, I switched from asking questions like “How many of you were able to finish the worksheet last night?” to “How many of you had work last night?” or, to some students, “How much time did you actually have after school yesterday?”. This is when I began realizing that the daily lives of my students, the communities and cultures they grew up in and the socioeconomic status of their families, were very much a part of the equation. I transitioned my intervention style to first ask if a student had work, or had to pick up siblings, or was forced to go and be somewhere without access to a table or computer to work on. I expanded my general search by opening up questions like this to our more vulnerable ‘circles’. These restorative circles, which I use from time to time, serve as a chance for the entire class to talk, free of distractions. These restorative circles opened up a line of communication with my students that I didn't know could exist - it was a vulnerable time in which students were more willing to share and open up, and I had the opportunity to learn more about them.

My next step in learning more about my students was completed with my coursework in Effective Practices 2: Student Profiles. In this assessment, I took active steps to learn more about my students and to learn more about the factors that led to their well-being and success both in and outside of my classroom. Conversations with my students revealed that among the teenagers in my classroom were family breadwinners and caretakers. This insight led me to make changes in my classroom that would better accommodate students with minimal free time outside of school. I changed my homework and late-work policies, and I began to look to ways to teach the hard math and science skills that my class demanded in a manner that would be less time-consuming for students while maintaining as much rigor as possible.

Student and Parent Surveys

Learning more about my students' home lives only made me more curious as to what situations they faced but also how I could better serve them with this opened perspective on their needs. I realized that I needed more information about my students, and realized that communicating with families would also provide me with important information that would help to better understand my students. I created simple letters and surveys and sent them out to families, and had students complete surveys as well. The letters were a way for me to introduce myself to families, while the survey helped me to provide more context to my students' home lives. The parent surveys asked questions about their student's learning styles, strengths, and weaknesses in addition to basic information about family situations and important information that I would benefit from knowing.

The survey results were very revealing, as students were able to share their learning styles, motivations, and self image. Parents revealed to me strengths their students had that I wouldn't have otherwise known, gave me additional information about their interests and what grabs their attention. Students and parents both told me about a dynamic environment being better for some, while others benefitted from quiet work time. I've taken the survey results and made changes to my class that reflect the many ways students learn and to give them the best classroom experience possible.

Shown above: The family letter that is sent out to families at the beginning of the semester (top), a Family Survey that is sent out to be completed by parents (left), and a Student Survey that students complete at the beginning of the semester (right).

Shown above: Survey results from when the survey was turned into an online form for students to complete electronically.

Class Discussions

From the information in the surveys, it became clear to me that my students were so varied, I couldn't possibly understand their ongoing situations with just a single point of data collection. From this point on, I began to conduct weekly class discussions in my classroom, allowing students the ability to share their thoughts about class and school, but also share information they needed to process. I borrowed the tenets of restorative circles, as these discussions served to also be a way to open up less comfortable conversations with students about their own goals, hopes, likes and dislikes, and other personal information that helped me to connect on a deeper level.

One time discussions were very effective was when students made it known that they were stressed and they thought class had become very technical. Understanding that I had the freedom to make some changes to my curriculum, I set out to find out how I could best meet students' needs. We convened in a circle and I allowed students to begin by answering the following questions:

• What do you think of class so far?

• Are you enjoying the material we're working with?

• What topics in science and physics would you be interested in covering?

• Do you feel like the material you're learning is relevant to you and your future aspirations?

Students shared that they understood the math-heavy nature of the class to that point, but they were feeling burnout and didn't feel like they were still enjoying the material. Students said that it felt too much like a math class and they wanted to focus on more fun material. Knowing that our next unit was a break from the math-heavy technical material that I was used to as a student, I asked students what they would like to learn. Students came up with questions that they wanted answers to, including:

• What is a black hole and where do they come from?

• Why are there only 8 planets and what's the deal with Pluto?

• Is it likely that an asteroid is going to hit us?

• What's the point of researching space?

I realized that the students did have a genuine interest in the material, but the curriculum I had inherited did little to meet their interests. I decided to take the findings from this and other similar conversations to include more student choice and creativity into my class.

Parent Contact

With such a diverse classroom, it is important to maintain communication with parents in my classroom to ensure engagement from students. Parents are contacted regularly throughout the semester with updates on grades and attendance, behavior in class, and any items of concern that may come up. Parents often engage in the communication back and forth, ensuring that their children are taken care of and are being treated fairly. Parents also regularly engage in video-call check-ins that are scheduled with and without their children as a means of checking in and providing updates on classroom performance.

Building Relationships Outside the Classroom

Strengthening Students' Higher Order Thinking Skills

Connecting Student Knowledge to New Concepts and Content

From the conversations that I was able to have with students, it became clear that there was a genuine interest I could tap into. I needed students to generate a real interest in the subject matter, and decided to create a new lesson format that would better meet their needs. Students had expressed to me that existing notes from online sources and videos were:

• often boring and didn't maintain their interest

• non-interactive and were just places for them to take notes

• organized in non-intuitive ways that made it hard to find information

• written confusingly and didn't make sense with the class notes

• were hard to parse through when there was too much information being shared

Understanding that the current information sharing structure my class took on wasn't meeting the needs of many of my students, I decided that I had to change how I transfer information to students that would better meet their needs. I began by creating a new format of introducing students to new information and allowing them to learn the information at their own pace and with more visual aids than with the stick figures and whiteboard notes I typically used. I decided to create from scratch an interactive, online textbook with a tool we have access to called Microsoft Sway, which would allow students to answer questions and glean information while maintaining a high level of engagement. Over the first week of the unit, students carried out their individual surveys of community members and spent time in class crafting a project around their own interests and to create it in a format that they found interesting.

The interactive textbook took cues I'd learned from students in class - that it was hard to pay attention and take notes at the same time, information wasn't being sufficiently summarized before moving on to a new point, and it had become too passive an experience to listen to lectures. Instead, I flipped the class and had students learn from the online textbook, completing guiding notes and finding out questions that they genuinely had curiosity in. The online notes bring together humor intended to target the students, and includes language that can be found from cultures that reflect students' backgrounds. Once students had done the work to learn the basic material and identify a leading question to format their project around, they were given the assignment shown below to complete. Class time was spent organizing information and collaborating with peers on how to develop their projects and overcome certain roadblocks. From the initial student surveys, I'd found that students enjoyed having music to play during class. Together, we put together a Spotify playlist of pre-approved songs to have playing during work time in class.

The online textbook that was created for students to serve as a jumping off point in their research on their individual project topics.

I put together a plan for the project to be as open-ended as possible and allow students as much choice as possible. I wanted to meet students' cultural needs by giving them as much freedom in choosing what they were spending their time on and allowing them to decide the scope and medium of their projects. Students were given options for different media to use and different types of projects to make.

As highlighted in the CRT Lesson plan above, I created authentic learning experiences that strengthened students' ownership of their learning with high order thinking skills as demonstrated by this activity. Citing concerns that the material we were learning wasn't relevant to their lives and they didn't feel like the knowledge would be applicable, we sought to make the theme of the project to "Bring Space a Little Closer". Through this theme that students came up with, students planned to tap into community resources and survey members of their community to field questions they have about space and ways to "bring space a little closer". This aspect of the project gave students a way to connect science and their community. The culmination of their work was then shared back with family and community members, using their project as a teaching tool to answer their original questions.

Using the strategy of bringing student choice into the mix, the rubric on the right shows the degree of student choice that students had for the project. Given an open choice board, students were able to leverage their own skills and strengths to create a project that answered a question that they had posed and answer it in the way they can be most creative with and have the most skills to show off. Bringing in diverse ways for students to express their own learning and elevating students' projects which contribute to the diversity of class also allows me to turn my classroom into an environment that celebrates their individual diversity and gives each student a chance to become a more integral part of the classroom community.

This project also had the highest degree of students leveraging their specific skills in technology, with well-edited songs, videos, websites, images and interactives created online that reflect students' learning throughout high school.

The week turned out to be the one with the highest engagement I'd ever seen and came out with the most creative projects I'd seen from the students. Students had created videos and songs, letters to scientists, short stories, models and dioramas, and had the most engaged presentations I'd seen as a teacher.

Samples of Student Work

Community of Learners

The first day presentation (below) shows ways that students are asked to engage with the classroom and their peers from the start of the semester. Students begin by sharing how they pronounce the name in the class chat, so that students can go back and reference whenever necessary. I begin class by introducing myself, and then moving into my classroom expectations.

The expectations put forward in class aren't exhaustive or restrictive, but set a foundation for the students and how they should behave. Two major points also brought up are having a growth mindset and navigating the inherent discomforts of online learning. Students then go on to introduce themselves in low-stakes share-outs and then take part in an intellectually stimulating riddle that combines learning new names with opportunities to solve the riddle. Students are given an opportunity to describe their perfect classroom in a class discussion, and share their ideals and expectations from an ideal environment. Students in class are able to take part in a group and team-building activity that furthers the collaborative and interactive sense of my classroom, ensuring that students are not strangers to any of their peers. Assigning team roles, students build free-standing towers using spaghetti and marshmallows as a way to experiment with both physics and interact with their new peers.

Creating a Socially and Intellectually Safe Learning Environment

One of the most common experiences at the beginning of a semester in my school is that many students aren't familiar with many of their peers. A relatively large campus with a total of 1200 students, Fairchild Wheeler has students that are largely able to stay within social and academic circles and interact minimally with other students from different backgrounds or on different tracks than them. This phenomenon furthers the cultural divide that exists in my school, as students tend to self-segregate into groups and are hesitant to speak to those outside their group.

My physics class is one of the avenues in the school where students from many different circles and areas of interest converge. Students of different math and science levels, from different magnet disciplines, and from different socioeconomic backgrounds come together in my class and tend to only talk to those they're familiar with. To combat this, the first week of my class is focused on building a better sense of classroom culture so that students can take part in an environment that's intellectually stimulating but also socially safe and comfortable. One way that I'm able to accomplish this is by pushing students to engage with each other in ways they probably haven't before. Introducing simple activities for them to share their personal information but also take part in an intellectually-stimulating riddle, my first few days in class include opportunities for students to really get to know each other and collaborate to an extent that they haven't before. My class presentation from the first day of school is an example of the activities that students go through, beginning on day one.

CRT Strategies to Encourage Classroom Community

Much of the first unit of physics is heavily based on mathematical reasoning and algebraic skills. Students often enter this class with very varied skillsets and differentiated needs, so teaching the material can be a challenge if not managed well. To address this in my classroom, I take advantage of CRT strategies to help all students as equally as I can. Some of these strategies include:

• Assessing students' knowledge before instruction to get a reading on student achievement during the lesson and deciding if any prerequisite knowledge needs to be re-taught

• Arranging my classroom to accommodate discussions - as you can see in the lesson plans on momentum, students are often grouped together in ways that would encourage discussion and that students aren't feeling left out of conversations. Students are sat next to those that they are able to engage with and are grouped with those that can push and challenge them whenever possible.

• Providing students with a variety of visual aids and props to support learning, modeling with the use of graphic organizers and simulations, and using cooperative learning structures allows me to meet many of the differentiated needs in my classroom.

• Including students' life experiences in lessons, explanations, and activities to connect the learning to their own experiences and lives rather than leaving it as an abstract concept.

CRT Ongoing Commitment

My findings from this module showed me that taking the effort to listen to students' needs was well worth it. Better understanding their backgrounds from both their own and their families' perspectives allowed me to see into what my students needed to be successful. I am committing to maintain a culturally responsive classroom and the ongoing internal work necessary to best serve my students. To this end, I plan to maintain my schedule of holding at least one class discussion with students every week and maintaining ongoing surveys in my classroom to elicit student and family feedback.

Ongoing Engagement to School Community

In continuing my commitment to culturally responsive teaching and being able to engage with my community, I will continue to be a part of my school's leadership to bring activities and events to students in a manner that best serves them. I will also continually engage with student and parent organizations to further engage with students in a transparent setting and to continue to learn how to better meet their needs. I am committed to engaging in ongoing reflection by speaking with students and fellow staff members to see if there are ever any ways to improve students' experiences and to better their access to quality education.

Student Governance Council (SGC) and Parent, Teacher, Student Organization (PTSO)

The SGC and PTSO are both avenues for educators to connect to students and parents and to carry out many of the duties of the school that are oriented towards meeting teacher's needs. The SGC meeting agenda shown below as well as meeting notes from one of our recent meetings are examples of ongoing meetings and conversations that I'm taking part in to engage with the community. Bringing in my areas of knowledge as an educator and resident of CITY, as well as planning and leadership skills, I'm able to make an impact on the school community. In these meetings, I'm able to talk to parents of students who have a strong opinion on the operation of the school and its policies as well as with teachers who are equipped to give students access to more opportunities and experiences. Bringing students closer to professional development in the form of skills-classes and internships, planning out cultural school events to raise a sense of school; pride, and ensuring that the general needs of students are met are all responsibilities of these groups. Taking part in these meetings allows me to take an active role in improving the lives of my students and making the school environment more directly suited to their cultural needs.

Conclusion

Building relationships with my students and families helped to bring down the invisible walls that students often experience in class. Connecting with students on a deeper level than their membership in my classroom and understanding their roles as caretakers and breadwinners helped me realize that rigor didn't have to be the highest priority in my class, especially when only a small portion were capable of meeting the needs of the rigorous coursework. As I transitioned towards units of study that students felt were more interesting and had the ability to bring in community, I saw a stark increase in engagement and joy in my classroom, as students were able to leverage artistic and creative muscles that I never would've seen without listening to their needs and desires.