What is culturally responsive instruction?

Culturally responsive teaching is not a “one size fits all” project or program. It's an idea. It's a perspective. It's an awareness of how children learn differently and how teachers need to adapt their teaching so that students learn. And that means understanding who the students are in front of you. Who are they? Where are they coming from? How are they used to learning? How can you build on the way that they already learn so that they learn in multiple ways so that they feel comfortable in different settings?

How can you change your curriculum so that all students feel included? That's culturally responsive. How can you demonstrate in small ways and big ways that you understand the students in front of you, the culture that they're bringing, the assets that they are bringing, so that we go from a deficit perspective, as if these children need fixing, to an asset-based perspective?

How can we build on, I remember in a video that my friend Virginia Zanger, Ginny Zanger, who was president of MABE for years and is also a great artist by the way, but she did a wonderful video that I used for years in my classroom that focused on successful Latino students in a Boston high school. And I remember one of the questions that the students were asked that were sitting in a circle, they were asked, "What would you say to teachers so that they could reach you? " And these were successful students and one of the students said, "You have to build on our ‘already culture.’" What a beautiful way to put it. For someone who is a second language learner, so we might not say that if we speak “standard English,” but it's more powerful saying it that way, I think, because all students and all of us have an “already culture.”

How do you build on that? It means you have to work at it. You have to learn what is their already culture? What are they bringing to school? And so it might be very different in East Flatbush than it is in Amherst, Massachusetts, because all kids bring something. How do you build on it? That to me is cultural responsive pedagogy.

But it also includes having kids understand that they can do a lot more than they're often given credit for. And it's about having them learn to be critical thinkers, so that when they don’t see themselves in the curriculum, that’s not their fault. Also, I think cultural responsive pedagogy is giving students the skills to demand a good education, on that is fulfilling for them and that's not just utilitarian, that also brings them joy because we all need it.