Those of us who are supporters and practitioners of culturally responsive teaching might be wondering how we should respond to attacks on it today.

Zaretta Hammond has some suggestions for us ...

‘At a Crossroads’

Zaretta Hammond is a teacher educator, independent researcher, and author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting (2015) and Rebuilding Student Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice (in press):

For decades, state and national policymakers have reaffirmed the idea that working toward equitable outcomes in education is in the nation’s highest interest. To combat post-pandemic learning loss and eroding reading and math scores, we have been gathering every instructional innovation at our disposal to make good on this promise, including culturally responsive teaching.

Yet, we find ourselves at a crossroads. A great deal of the equity work that many have worked toward over the last quarter century is at risk due to efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across all sectors, including education.

We now have long lists of taboo words and forbidden topics for professional learning and curriculum development. Many are worried. Regardless of the lists, educators must stay committed to equity and recognize that these actions—dismantling DEI and social-emotional learning—are designed to intimidate and distract.

We must resist the urge to make preemptive concessions to efforts to suppress our teaching autonomy and our right to use the best practices that serve the needs of our students. That includes culturally relevant materials and culturally responsive pedagogies.

Instead, we have to remember the advice Steve Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, gave us: Operate in your circle of influence where we have agency rather than worrying about what’s in our circle of concern where we have no control over what happens.

With crisis comes opportunity.

As challenging as this state of affairs is, with crisis comes opportunity. This is a chance for schools to clarify their understanding of culturally responsive teaching that goes beyond just talking about implicit bias. It is our chance to go beyond performative acts of equity and get focused on strengthening the instructional core so that every child is educated to use their minds well, regardless of Zip code or mother tongue.

Remember that we don’t need permission to teach well, to ensure every child is a critical reader and mathematician. Here are a few ways we can do this as individuals and collectively:

1. Teach to the standards. To continue working toward equity, look to the standards set by independent subject-matter associations. Subject-matter standards over the past decade have become more inclusive in what students need to know and be able to do in order to be career- and college-ready in a multicultural, multilingual, and multiracial society.
   

2. Lean into the responsive part of culturally responsive teaching. While there might be an effort to move away from culturally responsive teaching, we are still charged with teaching. Leverage the science of learning to focus on being the warm demander of students’ cognitive development. Leverage their fund of knowledge and connect it to the curriculum to make it more meaningful. Build your skill and capacity to help students grow their brain power.
   

3. Don’t just talk about, be about it. This is an opportunity to push past performative culturally responsive practices that only focus on talking about issues of racism or highlight themes of social justice. At its core, culturally responsive teaching is also about academic prowess and critical consciousness of our students. Building their cognitive capacity and helping them become critical thinkers is social-justice work.
   

4. Leverage place-based learning to keep content relevant. Check out the rich text, Place-Based Learning: Connecting Inquiry, Community, and Culture (2024) by Micki Evans, Charity Morgan, and Erin Sanchez as well as Tom Vander Ark’s The Power of Place: Authentic Learning Through Place-Based Education (2020).
   
5. Educate your ILT and school board. Instructional leadership teams are a powerful engine for equitable instruction and outcomes. Teacher-leaders and administrators have the moral obligation to educate the board about what their equity initiatives are accomplishing.
   
6. Stay the course in addressing racial disparities and disproportionality in discipline. We can still create humanized classrooms where every student feels a sense of belonging and care. The science of learning tell us that feeling physically, emotionally, and intellectually safe are essential for learning.
   

Now is the time to stay focused and hopeful in our ability and autonomy to teach in ways that affirm our students’ cultural identities and funds of knowledge. This isn’t a time to shrink back from our efforts to promote equity through culturally responsive teaching.

Thanks, Zaretta!

I wrote the first, second and third posts in this series on how educators should respond to recent Trump administration actions.

Morgan Polikoff wrote about education research and researchers.

Christie Nold and Sarah Cooper also shared advice about social studies.

Mary Beth Hertz discussed teaching media literacy.

Christina Torres Cawdery offered recommendations to English teachers.

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.

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email. And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 12 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list here.