Culturally Responsive Teaching and Collaborative K-12 Effective Practices

The Collaborative, with the leadership of its diverse members, is making culturally responsive teaching a focus of the 2020-21 iteration of its current National Endowment for the Arts - funded national online teacher professional development.

What is culturally responsive teaching (CRT)?
Bernnell Peltier-Glaze, Ed.D, Interim Dean of the College of Education at Texas Southern University, an HBCU (Historically Black College and University), an expert in CRT who teaches CRT at the college level, and who is leading this work for the Collaborative, provides an important look at this important teaching strategy. She points out that Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994) defines culturally responsive teaching as a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, and emotionally by using cultural references to provide students with knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
 
What are its benefits?
Using a culturally responsive approach, Dr. Peltier-Glaze says, teachers can appreciate each student as an individual informed by his/her background. CRT also helps bridge cultural gaps between teachers and their students. By adapting classroom instruction that overcomes these potential barriers, research shows that teachers can help students overcome obstacles and succeed. 
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How do CRT strategies align with STEAM?
Recent Collaborative K-12 Effective Practices research showed that by using Collaborative STEAM lessons and strategies, students of color performed the same as white students. This is called “closing the gap”, which means that students of color performed as effectively or more effectively than white students in STEAM learning and thinking. Interestingly, many of the strategies that make STEAM effective also are those that are used in culturally responsive teaching.
These include:

• Relevance
  • Emphasizing relevance of the learning by relating the content, practices, and competencies to the student’s life and to something they value
  • Developing and expressing personal meaning through integrating the arts
  • Leveraging the student’s strengths 
  • Promoting sensitivity to other viewpoints and viewing a problem from multiple perspectives
• Higher-order thinking
  • Giving the students real-world problems to solve
  • Using art, simulations, and inquiry
  • Addressing the problems in an action-oriented manner
  • Using critical inquiry
  • Encouraging peer questioning
  • Promoting decision-making using the content
  • Experiencing the concepts in multiple modalities, such as in science, the arts, and language arts
• Competence
  • Conveying high expectations of the student and confidence in his/her abilities
  • Giving the student more autonomy in experiencing and learning the concepts
  • Examining and eliminating any personal biases
• Types of instruction that promotes CRT 
  • Being responsive to different cultures represented in the classroom
  • Assuring the learning is student-centered, where the students are actively engaged in experiential learning
  • Promoting collaborative learning with peers, such as in solving a problem, that also allows for peer mentoring
  • Using multiple ways for students to represent their knowledge and skills
  • Encouraging students to write about observations, learning, and findings
  • Making sure that the teacher acts as a facilitator instead of as a lecturer
• Responsive assessments
  • Focusing on qualitative over quantitative assessments, including using rubrics, portfolios, process-folios that focus on the process, and self-assessments
• From beginning to end
  • Continuously communicating with students these learning objectives and strategies and how they will facilitate learning and thinking.