Zaretta Hammond began this series last year on the common elements that teachers get wrong about culturally responsive teaching, and many more educators will be contributing their thoughts on the topic this year.

Not Just Food and Festivals

Françoise Thenoux is an accomplished educator and advocate with a career spanning nearly two decades. For more information about her work and resources, you can follow her on social media:

In my 20 years of experience, working in different educational scenarios ranging from public spaces with predominantly people of the global majority to private, predominantly white spaces, and observing through the lens of a racialized immigrant, I have seen several common misconceptions that teachers have about culturally responsive teaching .

Despite the good intentions behind efforts to implement culturally responsive teaching, many educators fall short due to a lack of deep understanding and the necessary introspection required to dismantle their biases. Here are some of the most prevalent mistakes:

1. Superficial Engagement With Culture

One of the most common errors is treating culturally responsive teaching as a superficial engagement with cultural artifacts rather than a profound commitment to understanding and valuing students’ cultural backgrounds. Teachers often include elements like food, festivals, or traditional clothing in their curriculum but fail to engage with the deeper, more meaningful aspects of their students’ cultures. This approach can lead to tokenism, where cultural elements are included for the sake of appearance rather than genuine inclusion.

2. Lack of Self-Reflection and Bias Awareness

Many educators have not done the necessary work to unpack their biases. Without this critical step, attempts to be culturally responsive can potentially perpetuate stereotypes or cause harm to students from marginalized communities.

For instance, a teacher may believe they are being supportive by encouraging a student to share about their cultural background but might unintentionally reinforce stereotypes by making assumptions about that background. To truly embrace culturally responsive teaching, teachers must engage in conscious identity work and develop an anti-bias, intersectional lens.

3. Ignoring Intersectionality

Intersectionality, the understanding that individuals experience overlapping systems of oppression based on race, gender, class, and other identities, is often overlooked. Teachers might address one aspect of a student’s identity, such as race, while neglecting others, such as socioeconomic status, family structure, language repertoire, or gender identity. This can lead to a limited and incomplete understanding of the student’s experiences and needs. Effective culturally responsive teaching requires a holistic approach that considers the multiple, intersecting aspects of each student’s identity.

4. Historical Inaccuracy and Lack of Context

Without historically accurate information and context, efforts to incorporate culturally responsive teaching can fall flat. Teachers might introduce cultural elements without understanding their historical significance or the current social dynamics affecting those cultures. This can result in the dissemination of misinformation or a skewed perspective that fails to honor the true complexity and richness of the students’ cultural backgrounds. Teachers need to educate themselves continuously on the historical and social contexts of the cultures represented in their classrooms.

5. Surface-Level Understanding of Students

Understanding students deeply involves more than just knowing where they come from or what languages they speak at home. It requires building genuine relationships, listening to their stories, and understanding their lived experiences. Teachers sometimes fail to go beyond surface-level knowledge, which can hinder their ability to respond to students’ needs authentically.

Culturally responsive teaching is about seeing students as whole individuals, recognizing their strengths, and creating learning environments that reflect and respect their identities.

6. Lack of Social-Justice Focus

Culturally responsive teaching is not just about acknowledging and celebrating diversity; it is also about addressing and challenging the systemic inequalities that affect marginalized communities. Teachers who do not incorporate a social-justice lens into their practice may miss opportunities to empower their students and advocate broader changes in the education system. This includes understanding the structural barriers that affect students’ lives and working actively to dismantle those barriers within and beyond the classroom.

7. Failure to Adapt Curriculum and Pedagogy

Some teachers believe that adding a few culturally relevant texts or activities to their existing curriculum is sufficient for culturally responsive teaching. However, being culturally responsive requires a fundamental shift in how curriculum and pedagogy are designed and implemented. This means creating representative, equitable lesson plans, using teaching methods that reflect students’ cultural ways of learning, and continuously adapting practices based on students’ feedback and needs. It is an ongoing process of reflection, learning, and adjustment.

8. Linguistic Consciousness and Honoring Student Repertoires

A critical yet often neglected aspect of culturally responsive teaching is being linguistically conscious and honoring the repertoires, names, and identities of emergent bilingual students. English hegemony—the dominance of the English language in educational settings—often leads to the marginalization of students’ native languages and cultural expressions.

Teachers, especially those raised in the nationalistic bubble of the United States, may inadvertently commodify and otherize what is considered different, addressing culture on a surface level without truly integrating and valuing linguistic diversity.

To genuinely support emergent bilingual students, educators need to recognize and validate the linguistic assets these students bring to the classroom. This involves creating a classroom environment where multiple languages are seen as valuable resources rather than barriers to learning.

Teachers should strive to pronounce students’ names correctly, encourage the use of students’ home languages in the classroom, and integrate culturally relevant literature that reflects the students’ linguistic backgrounds. This approach not only affirms students’ identities but also enriches the learning experience for all students.

Not ‘One-Size-Fits-All’

Jehan Hakim is a mother and Houston-based consultant with over a decade of experience in empowering educators and organizational leaders through culturally responsive pedagogy and professional development. More at: jehanhakim.com :

Culturally responsive teaching has become a contentious issue in our time. Rather than embracing this critical approach, many school leaders and educators reject it or misunderstand its principles, leading to common missteps in its implementation.

Here are some common missteps and tips on how to avoid them:

Misstep: Many educators believe that incorporating diverse perspectives means simply adding multicultural content to the curriculum.

Tip: While incorporating diverse perspectives is important, culturally responsive teaching goes beyond surface-level inclusion. It transforms teaching practices and curricula to be more relevant and effective for students from diverse cultural backgrounds. Understand your students’ cultural contexts and use that understanding to support their academic success.

Misstep: Some educators think culturally responsive teaching is a rigid set of practices to be followed.

Tip: Culturally responsive teaching is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It is a flexible framework that requires teachers to adapt their strategies to the specific cultural contexts of their students. Be responsive and reflective rather than following a prescribed set of rules. Adjust your methods to meet the unique needs of your classroom.

Misstep: There is a misconception that culturally responsive teaching only benefits students from minority backgrounds.

Tip: Culturally responsive teaching benefits all students. It fosters an inclusive environment that values diversity and promotes critical thinking and empathy. By implementing culturally responsive teaching, you help all students develop a broader worldview and become more culturally competent individuals.

Additional Tips for Effective Culturally Responsive Teaching Implementation for School Administrators:

Professional Development: Invest in ongoing professional development focused on culturally responsive teaching for your teaching staff. This will allow them to attend workshops and collaborate with community partners to enhance their understanding and application of culturally responsive practices.

Family Engagement: Promote an environment built on strong relationships with the families of your students and the communities they come from. Engage families in the educational process and create opportunities for their voices to be heard and valued.

Curriculum Review: Collectively review and revise the curriculum to ensure it is inclusive and reflective of diverse perspectives. Include a variety of voices and experiences and challenge stereotypes and biases throughout teaching materials.

Student-Centered Learning: Place students at the center of the learning process. Create a school environment where students feel valued, heard, and empowered to share their cultural identities. Empower teachers to facilitate student-led discussions, projects, and activities that reflect students’ interests and backgrounds.

Conclusion

By incorporating these strategies, school administrators and educators alike can create a more inclusive and effective learning environment that supports the academic success and personal growth of all students. These efforts ensure that students from all backgrounds feel seen and heard.

Image by Jehan Hakim

‘Part-Time Pedagogy’

Courtney Rose, Ed.D., is a professor, educational consultant, culturally relevant/responsive educator, founder of Ivy Rose Consulting, and author of the book, Woven Together: How Unpacking Your Teacher Identity Creates a Stronger Learning Community. She currently serves as an assistant teaching professor in the Educational Policy Studies department at Florida International University:

Educational researcher Geneve Gay coined the term “culturally responsive teaching” in 2000. However, more than 20 years later, it’s clear that there still remains a large gap between understanding what culturally responsive teaching is and how to put it into practice. In my work with both pre- and in-service teachers, I often focus on providing opportunities to dig into this gap and identify specific misconceptions that can lead to missteps.

1. Part-Time Pedagogy:

The first misstep that I encounter is engaging in, what I call, part-time pedagogy. This typically shows up as teachers relegating practices that are rooted in students’ racial/cultural identities and speak to their authentic ways of knowing and being in the world for use as hooks at the start of a lesson, during “brain breaks” or as nonacademic “culture-building” activities.

While engaging in such activities at any time during the learning process can create a more enjoyable learning environment, part-time culturally responsive teachers often shift away from these materials and practices as the lesson/unit moves into more complex skills or concepts or when moving back into the academic content after a “brain break.” This reinforces the narrative that who students are authentically and the materials/practices that sustain and affirm those identities cannot coexist with academic content—that you are either learning or engaging in culturally responsive activities.

When done comprehensively, culturally responsive teaching intricately weaves school-based knowledge and skills with our students’ diverse funds of knowledge, interests, communication patterns, etc. These threads of their identities serve as the powerful cords that weave together their cultural, social, and academic selves and their understandings of who they are and the world(s) they occupy.

When educators engage in a part-time culturally responsive teaching practice, they teach students that there are times when it is necessary to tuck their authentic selves away, limiting opportunities for deep identification with the learning process and academic content and ultimately reproducing the deficit-based narratives that culturally responsive teaching aims to disrupt and transform.

As Zaretta Hammond, educator, consultant, and author of Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain, noted in a 2023 Classroom Q&A post on culturally responsive teaching misconceptions (‘Translating’ Culturally Responsive Teaching), “… becoming a culturally responsive educator means you not only know what to say ‘no’ to, but you also know what to say ‘yes’ to—like normalizing structures, routines, and rituals from collectivist culture that increases a sense of authentic belonging in the classroom and in adult communities in schools.”

This brings me to the next misstep, which also contains a built-in remedy that may address both of the missteps at once.

2. Student-Centered vs. Student-Driven:

In attempts to bridge the theory-practice gap, or answer the how of culturally responsive teaching once teachers enter the classroom, many educators turn to websites, other educators, friends, books, etc., to identify “culturally authentic, engaging, and motivating” materials and practices to incorporate into their learning environment and instruction. While these efforts are often centered around students’ identities and needs, more often than not they are guided by the educator’s (mis)conceptions of culturally responsive teaching and their perceptions of what students find meaningful, engaging, interesting, and motivating rather than driven by students’ (and their parents’/caregivers’ and communities’) actual sharing of what they need, what they find valuable, interesting, motivating, etc.

For many educators, bridging the theory-practice gap takes them deeper into the theory, when in actuality, comprehensive implementation of culturally responsive teaching requires that they gain deeper understanding of their students, their families, and their communities by engaging in dialogue and community with them.

Want to know what students find meaningful and effective? Ask them. Want to create lessons that are more engaging and connected with the daily lived realities students and their communities face? Invite them, their families, and other key community members to be a part of the lesson planning/implementation processes?

Want to incorporate more relevant language, examples, materials, and communication patterns in your instructional practice? Open opportunities for students to drive the learning process through co- or student-teaching, partner/group work, and student-led/driven dialogues.

While student-centered approaches help educators to plan and teach for students, shifting to a student-driven approach opens opportunities to plan and teach with students, disrupting existing hierarchies and creating more meaningful learning environments for students and educators.

Thanks to Françoise, Jehan, and Courtney for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

What do you think are the most common things teachers get wrong about culturally responsive teaching?

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

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