What is Cultural Responsive Teaching?
Culture is central to learning. It plays a role not only in communicating and receiving information, but also in shaping the thinking process of groups and individuals. A pedagogy that acknowledges, responds to, and celebrates fundamental cultures offers full, equitable access to education for students from all cultures.
Geneva Gay "Cultural Relevant Teaching"
The achievement of students of color continues to be disproportionately low at all levels of education. More than ever, Geneva Gay’s book on culturally responsive teaching is essential reading in addressing the needs of today’s diverse student population. Combining insights from multicultural education theory and research with real-life classroom stories, Gay demonstrates that all students will perform better on multiple measures of achievement when teaching is filtered through their own cultural experiences.
Gay (2000) defines culturally responsive teaching as using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective for them; it teaches to and through the strengths of these students. Gay (2000) also describes culturally responsive teaching as having these characteristics:
http://ceedar.education.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/culturally-responsive.pdf
Geneva Gay "Cultural Relevant Teaching"
The achievement of students of color continues to be disproportionately low at all levels of education. More than ever, Geneva Gay’s book on culturally responsive teaching is essential reading in addressing the needs of today’s diverse student population. Combining insights from multicultural education theory and research with real-life classroom stories, Gay demonstrates that all students will perform better on multiple measures of achievement when teaching is filtered through their own cultural experiences.
Gay (2000) defines culturally responsive teaching as using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective for them; it teaches to and through the strengths of these students. Gay (2000) also describes culturally responsive teaching as having these characteristics:
- It acknowledges the legitimacy of the cultural heritages of different ethnic groups, both as legacies that affect students' dispositions, attitudes, and approaches to learning and as worthy content to be taught in the formal curriculum.
- It builds bridges of meaningfulness between home and school experiences as well as between academic abstractions and lived sociocultural realities.
- It uses a wide variety of instructional strategies that are connected to different learning styles.
- It teaches students to know and praise their own and each others' cultural heritages.
- It incorporates multicultural information, resources, and materials in all the subjects and skills routinely taught in schools (p. 29).
http://ceedar.education.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/culturally-responsive.pdf
7 tips when working with Cultural Responsive Teaching
1.) Knowing the Learner:
- Teachers need to know as much as possible about their students to teach them well, including learning styles and pace, multiple intelligences, personal qualities such as personality, temperament and motivation, personal interests, potential disabilities, health, family circumstances, and language preference.
2.) Traits of a Quality Teacher:
- The teacher believes all students can learn, has the desire and capacity to differentiate curriculum and instruction, understands diversity and thinks about students developmentally, is a risk taker, is open to change and well-versed in best practices, is comfortable challenging the status quo, knows what doesn’t work, is able to withstand staff dissension that may arise.
3.) Quality Curriculum:
- Curriculum needs to be interesting to students and relevant to their lives, appropriately challenging and complex, thought provoking, focused on concepts and principles and not just facts; focused on quality, not quantity; stress depth of learning, not just coverage.
4.) Classroom Learning Environment:
- The ideal learning environment includes a balanced student population, appropriate grade and program placement, priority seating based on student needs, has a reasonable class size, practices positive discipline, arranges furniture to promote group work, uses flexible grouping, and has adequate teaching supplies
5.) Flexible Teaching and Learning Time Resources:
- Includes team teaching, block scheduling, tutoring and remediation within school, before and after-school programs, homework clubs, multiage/looping classrooms.
6.) Instructional Delivery and Best Practices:
- Includes flexible grouping, cooperative learning, learning stations and centers, web quests, tiered assignments, individual contracts, literature circles.
7.) Assessment, Evaluation and Grading:
- Portfolios, observations, skills checklists, oral and written reports, demonstrations, performances, work samples, models, taped responses, drawings, graphs and posters, quizzes and tests, and standardized tests
- Teachers need to know as much as possible about their students to teach them well, including learning styles and pace, multiple intelligences, personal qualities such as personality, temperament and motivation, personal interests, potential disabilities, health, family circumstances, and language preference.
2.) Traits of a Quality Teacher:
- The teacher believes all students can learn, has the desire and capacity to differentiate curriculum and instruction, understands diversity and thinks about students developmentally, is a risk taker, is open to change and well-versed in best practices, is comfortable challenging the status quo, knows what doesn’t work, is able to withstand staff dissension that may arise.
3.) Quality Curriculum:
- Curriculum needs to be interesting to students and relevant to their lives, appropriately challenging and complex, thought provoking, focused on concepts and principles and not just facts; focused on quality, not quantity; stress depth of learning, not just coverage.
4.) Classroom Learning Environment:
- The ideal learning environment includes a balanced student population, appropriate grade and program placement, priority seating based on student needs, has a reasonable class size, practices positive discipline, arranges furniture to promote group work, uses flexible grouping, and has adequate teaching supplies
5.) Flexible Teaching and Learning Time Resources:
- Includes team teaching, block scheduling, tutoring and remediation within school, before and after-school programs, homework clubs, multiage/looping classrooms.
6.) Instructional Delivery and Best Practices:
- Includes flexible grouping, cooperative learning, learning stations and centers, web quests, tiered assignments, individual contracts, literature circles.
7.) Assessment, Evaluation and Grading:
- Portfolios, observations, skills checklists, oral and written reports, demonstrations, performances, work samples, models, taped responses, drawings, graphs and posters, quizzes and tests, and standardized tests