Building Bridges: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and the Achievement Gap

1. Building Bridges: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and the Achievement Gap Roger S. Baskin, Sr. Educational Specialist Office of Student Achievement Fairfax County Public Schools

2. Brief Overview The purpose of this presentation is to accomplish the following: • Briefly discuss approaches to understanding the achievement gap • Provide a definition of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) • Provide examples of CRP • Demonstrate connections between the use of CRP and closing achievement gaps • Provide sources of more information

3. One Scenario A teacher asks the question: “Class, based on the information we have learned this week, was Dr. Martin Luther King a good man or a bad man?”

4. The Dilemma The teacher expects the class to say in unison “He was a good man!” However, one student shouts “He was a bad man!” Some students begin to snicker.

5. The Teacher’s Filter • This child has been giving me trouble all year. • This is just another example of a child who clearly is headed nowhere fast—just another class clown. • Besides, the child has messy handwriting, is fidgety, and does not look like the type that will be successful. • I will ignore the child and move on. This child is just being bad.

6. The Student’s Filter • Dr. King was one cool dude. He was B.A.D. • Bold • Awesome • Determined • A lot of people didn’t like him because of his stance on the Vietnam War, but he was alright with me. He helped a lot of people.

7. Group Discussion • Talk with a partner. • Identify concerns that arise in this scenario that may inform issues relating to student achievement. • What advice could you give the teacher? • What advice could you give the student?

8. Individual Concerns Biological Psychological Cultural Systemic Concerns Historical Economic Institutional Policy Approaches to Understanding the Achievement Gap

9. Complexity of the Problem There are a variety of contributing factors to the achievement gap: • Home environment • Classroom environment • Administrative approach • Youth culture

10. Home Environment • Education level of parents • Intellectual climate • Engagement in student learning • Homework help • Amount of television viewing • Amount of sleep • Social and cultural capital • Leisure reading

11. Proposed Legislation to Impact Homes of At-Risk Children • HR 2343 “Education Begins at Home Act” • This would authorize $400 million in grants to states for programs that offer home visits to at-risk families over three years. • It would also provide two competitive grant programs of $50 million each for expanding home visits to military families who are English language learners.

12. Classroom Environment

13. The Tripod Project

14. Ways to Differentiate • Differentiating the Content/Topic • Differentiating the Process/Activities • Differentiating the Product • Differentiating by Manipulating the Environment or Through Accommodating Individual Learning Styles

15. Individual Activity • Consider each type of classroom in the previous slide. • Write down adjectives describing each type of classroom experience as if you were a student. • Consider ways to help teachers develop high help/high expectation cultures.

16. Administrative Approaches

17. Youth Culture • Noncompliant believers most likely believe in education, but chafe under the culture of schools (restricted clothing, speech, etc.) and are often, as a result, average to failing students. • Cultural mainstreamers focus on success in the greater society, not clinging to their cultural identity. Their success is measured by the approval of teachers, parents, and employers. • Cultural straddlers can operate in both the white culture and their own, fluently switching from the slang and dress of their culturally similar friends to standard English and codes of the dominant culture. Multicultural navigators are teachers, students, and community members who are able, if not fully to bridge the divide, at least to serve as ambassadors between groups.

18. A Definition of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Educators who work as multicultural navigators implement culturally responsive pedagogy. Characteristics: • Seek to learn the various cultural experiences of students and families. • Actively implement the understanding of these cultures in school instruction, assessment, and policy.

19. Culturally Responsive Educators

20. Individual Exercise • List people in your school community (students, parents, teachers, administrators, custodians, etc.) who exhibit the characteristics of cultural navigators. • What characteristics do they exhibit? • Do they currently serve in leadership roles in the school community?

21. Examples of CRP Personal • Identify opportunities to learn about various cultures represented in your classroom. • Visit students’ families and communities. • Participate in reform efforts in your school. • Take courses and professional development that expand your understanding of diversity.

22. Examples of CRP Classroom • Creating a safe environment for students to share their culture and varying perspectives • Formative assessment as a mainstay • Multiple Intelligences inventories that inform instruction and assessment • Multicultural literature fully integrated into the curriculum

23. Examples of CRP Administration • Examining policies that may work to the disadvantage of some groups in the school • Creating professional development opportunities and reading circles that focus on CRP • Utilizing PLCs to study and implement effective approaches to instruction and assessment

24. Group Activity Brainstorm activities that can be utilized to bridge the gap between the cultures of school, home, and peers. 3 Classroom activities 2 Policy or administrative efforts 1 District effort

25. Current Research • A mathematics study conducted among three school districts in Alaska found that 6th grade students from the Yup’ik ethnic group outperformed their peers when taught perimeter and area through the use of traditional methods of building fish racks as opposed to using only classroom textbooks.

26. Current Research • In a study conducted by A. W. Boykin, C. Ellison, K. Tyler, and M. Dillihunt, 5th and 6th grade students (both white and black) preferred cooperative learning opportunities in comparison to competitive and individual learning. • Black students, however, showed a higher rate of preference for cooperative learning.

28. Sources of Information Boykin, A.W., et al., (2005). Examining classroom learning preferences among elementary school students. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal, 33(7), pp. 699-708. Bryk, A. and Schneider, B., (2002). Trust in schools: A core resource for improvement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Carter, P., (2007). Keepin’ it real: School success beyond black and white. New York: Oxford University Press. Committee on Education & Labor U.S. House of Representatives Ferguson, R., (2007). Toward excellence with equity: An emerging vision for closing the achievement gap. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

29. Sources of Information Gay, G., (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Howard, G., (2006). We can’t teach what we don’t know: White teachers, multiracial schools. New York: Teachers College Press. Ladson-Billings, G., (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in u. s. schools. Presidential address at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA. Leithwood, K., et al., (2008). The relationship between distributed leadership and teachers’ academic optimism. Journal of Educational Administration, 46(2), pp. 214-228. Sternberg, R. J., (2007). Culture, Instruction, and Assessment. Comparative Education, 43(1), pp. 5-22.