Making the Case for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Supportive Teaching Standards

by Jenny Muñiz

For the first time, students of color account for the majority of students in U.S. public schools.¹  There is growing recognition that the unique experiences and perspectives these students bring to learning can benefit everyone in the classroom.² Taking advantage of this opportunity, however, requires that schools meet these students’ unique needs. It is of chief importance that all students have access to well-resourced schools where they can enjoy positive school climates, high expectations, and meaningful relationships with quality educators with whom they can relate. Of equal importance, schools must usher in new instructional approaches, curricula, and communication styles that better reflect students’ experiences, backgrounds, and strengths. Unfortunately, preparing teachers to serve increasingly diverse populations of students has proven to be one of the most formidable challenges facing our education system.

Enduring opportunity gaps in the education system have been widely documented, but they are worth emphasizing: African American, Latino, and Native American students are more likely to attend racially segregated schools, where they receive vastly inferior learning experiences compared to their white and high-income peers.³ They are more likely to experience hostile school environments, rigid instructional approaches, and narrow curricula that often do not reflect their background and culture.⁴ Additionally, students of color are overwhelmingly taught by the least-experienced teachers and often have limited access to teachers of color who can serve as valuable role models.⁵ Indeed, most recent federal government data suggest that about 80 percent of public school teachers are white. These gaps contribute to the many disparities between students of color and their white peers on a range of academic success indicators.⁶

To improve the learning outcomes for students of color, future reform efforts should have a core focus on cultivating a culturally responsive teaching workforce. It is critical to revisit teacher quality reform efforts to ensure they embed a racial equity lens that pays credence to the ways race and ethnicity shape the learning and life experiences of students of color. This brief aims to provide a rationale for culturally responsive teaching by outlining current blind spots in teacher education and offering a definition of culturally responsive teaching. The brief ends with a call for states to leverage their statewide professional teaching standards to embed a focus on culturally relevant competency throughout teachers’ careers.

Preparing teachers to serve increasingly diverse populations of students has proven to be one of the most formidable challenges facing our education system.

The intent is not to present a comprehensive account of states’ efforts to adopt culturally responsive teaching, nor to provide a detailed account of the ways states are currently embedding culturally responsive teaching into their statewide standards for teachers. Rather, this brief should serve as a catalyst for further discussion about how one policy lever—professional teaching standards—can be utilized to ensure all students have access to teaching that meets their needs.

Developing Teachers to Thrive in Diverse Classrooms

Teachers have little control over many of the in-school factors (e.g., district funding, school leaders, work climates) and out-of-school factors (e.g., poverty, housing segregation, a dearth of health care access) that directly and indirectly shape the learning environments of many minority students. Nevertheless, many of the changes needed to address opportunity gaps are within the purview of teachers. Teachers play a central role in selecting and supplementing curriculum, implementing instructional strategies, and fostering positive learning environments, caring relationships, and high expectations for their students. Increasingly, their role extends beyond the classroom, as they participate in professional learning communities, nurture partnerships with the community, and take on advocacy activities that support students and the teaching profession.

Although teacher development has long been a critical focus of education reform efforts, these endeavors have traditionally paid insufficient attention to preparing teachers to affirm and respond to cultural diversity in the classroom. In particular, there has been little focus on preparing, coaching, and assessing teachers in ways that spur critical reflection about their own intentional and unintentional biases toward students of color. Less attention has also been paid to vital, if uncomfortable, discussions about how the education system privileges white students over their peers. Indeed, scholars maintain teacher education systems are far from achieving the “ideological shift” necessary to yield a teaching workforce that is genuinely able to excel in working with students of color.⁷

Current Gaps in Teacher Education

Over recent decades, many changes have been made to the way teachers are prepared, supported, and evaluated in an effort to redress racial achievement gaps. These efforts to improve teacher quality have been laser-focused on preparing teachers to raise student achievement on a narrow set of measures for student performance.⁸ As a result, issues related to race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, socio-emotional health, and school climate have been sidelined.⁹ The result of this long-standing gap in teacher education is that many teachers are not prepared to affirm racial diversity or address the racial opportunity gap head on.¹⁰

Educators report feeling unprepared to work with racially diverse students, even after taking coursework in multicultural education.¹¹ Many educators also have little understanding of how individual and larger social structures drive the unparalleled treatment of minority students in and out of school.¹² It is particularly troubling that educators can actively reject information about social inequality by becoming emotional, avoidant, and defensive.¹³ Without knowledge of structural barriers and an understanding of how their own experiences and identity shape the learning experiences they create for students of color, well-intentioned teachers can adopt practices that range from ineffective to damaging.

Unexamined teacher beliefs can help sustain stereotypes and deficit preconceptions about students of color. If a teacher is never prompted to ask critical questions of themselves—such as: Am I giving harsher consequences to some students for the same behavior as other students? They shouldn’t be expected to change their behavior. Evidence of enduring implicit biases can be found in the disparities between students of color and their white peers when it comes to teacher expectations¹⁴ and discipline choices.¹⁵ These biases are also reflected in the markup of the special education population, where students of color are overrepresented,¹⁶ and in the gifted-and-talented programs, where students of color are underrepresented.¹⁷

Without knowledge of structural barriers and an understanding of how their own experiences and identity shape the learning experiences they create for students of color, well-intentioned teachers can adopt practices that range from ineffective to damaging.

When teachers are presented with these racial equity gaps, rather than reflect on their own beliefs and practices, teachers may say that they treat all students equally because they “don’t see color.”¹⁸ The problem with the colorblind strategy, however, is that it often leads teachers to silence conversations about skin color and inequality when students bring them up. This conveys to students that they, too, should be cautious to notice skin color and that bringing up difference is inappropriate for the classroom. For students of color, the consequences can be worse. These students may experience unfair treatment because of how they look, and ignoring this reality fails to prepare them to overcome these challenges. Being taught that “color” has no bearing, but later experiencing challenges due to the color of their skin, can have long-term consequences for young people of color, including lower self-esteem,¹⁹ decreased academic outcomes,²⁰ and a higher likelihood of engaging in risky behavior.²¹

The reality is that kids notice racial differences from a young age.²² Young people also see, if not experience, prejudice and discrimination. Rather than dismiss this reality, teachers should foster students’ natural curiosity to learn about race and the experience of people from different cultural backgrounds. This is a valuable part of the educational process and should be a foundation for learning in the United States today. Transforming educator practices to be more in line with what historically underserved students need will require states and teacher preparation programs to maintain an unflinching commitment to transparency about these existing biases that are endemic to our education system.

By ensuring teachers are equipped with the necessary skills, competencies, and dispositions essential to working with students of color, culturally responsive teaching has the potential to help meet this commitment. Unfortunately, despite the recent uptick in the number of available and required courses on culturally responsive teaching for prospective and practicing teachers, the approach is still regarded as auxiliary.²³ Seldom is culturally responsive teaching included as part of a long-term effort to improve school culture and climate. Teachers are also rarely afforded the opportunity to practice or receive critical feedback and mentoring to enhance their expertise in culturally responsive practices.

Many steps are needed to ensure culturally responsive teaching has a central role in teacher development. To be most effective, the focus on culturally responsive teaching should carry over at every step in a teacher’s career. This means that aspiring teachers should have access to relevant coursework and receive proper coaching in culturally responsive teaching approaches during their student teaching; new teachers should receive ongoing mentoring in culturally responsive teaching during their induction years; experienced teachers should be able to extend their skills through professional learning and have opportunities to advance along the career ladder when they demonstrate high levels of competency.

Teachers are rarely afforded the opportunity to practice or receive critical feedback and mentoring to enhance their expertise in culturally responsive practices.

No one policy solution will produce the cohesive system necessary; instead, ensuring that the focus on culturally responsive teaching is embedded across teachers’ career continuum requires state policymakers to make improvements in multiple related policy areas, including certification requirements, educator evaluation, professional learning, compensation, and career ladders. This is no easy feat, especially considering the numerous institutions that play a role in teacher effectiveness, which often function in a siloed fashion. Nonetheless, it is imperative that the numerous institutions involved in educating, training, and supporting teachers throughout their careers share a common vision for culturally responsive teaching. Continuing to sidestep culturally responsive education in teacher development, or relegating it to only a few courses and professional development sessions throughout a teacher’s career, will not engender the systemic change necessary to confront the racial opportunity gap.

Defining Culturally Responsive Teaching

Even as the term “culturally responsive teaching” has gained popularity in recent years, interpretations of this approach vary widely. It is perhaps easiest to begin defining culturally responsive teaching by describing what it is not. Culturally responsive teaching is not simply a curricular change that aims to incorporate the culture of students. It is not a “check-the-box” activity whereby teachers devise a one-off lesson on Black History Month but never engage in an examination of their own potential biases and prejudices as they relate to Black students. Instead, culturally responsive teaching is a comprehensive set of practices that allows teachers to reflect on questions of power, ask critical questions about race and identity, and uncover their own unconscious biases while simultaneously supporting students’ social, emotional, and academic growth.

This definition of culturally responsive teaching draws on the work of several innovative scholars, including Gloria Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, Sonia Nieto, and Tara Yosso. While their emphasis may vary, they collectively contribute to a valuable framework that could help guide teacher development and classroom practice. Given the long-standing racial disparities in education, the focus of these scholars is on improving teachers’ capacity to work with students of color, but culturally responsive teaching can benefit all students,²⁴ and the approach has been broadened to consider the many other social identifiers that can define students, including gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, language, and ability.²⁵

Culturally responsive teaching is a comprehensive set of practices that allows teachers to reflect on questions of power, ask critical questions about race and identity, and uncover their own unconscious biases while simultaneously supporting students’ social, emotional, and academic growth.

Currently, culturally responsive teaching is most commonly understood as a strategy for improving curriculum and instructional choices. This is true, in part. Gay defines culturally responsive teaching as “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them.”²⁶ In short, Gay purports that teachers use their knowledge of students to bridge and facilitate learning. She maintains that teachers should select books, instructional materials, and assessments that validate students’ interests and existing funds of knowledge, and suggests that teachers build on student’s existing connections to their home and community life when they design and deliver lessons. Yosso makes the case that teachers who make these informed instructional decisions have the core belief that students of color bring different assets to learning, including community cultural wealth.²⁷

Culturally responsive teaching also calls for supportive classroom environments and meaningful student-teacher relationships.²⁸ The need for stronger student-teacher relationships has taken on particular importance recently in light of mounting evidence that students of color do not experience the same relationships with their teachers that their white peers do.²⁹ Emerging research also points to an uptick in race-related bullying in schools, a sign that teachers are facing new challenges as they try to promote a sense of safety and belonging among all of their students.³⁰

One of the most overlooked elements of culturally responsive teaching is self-reflection. Culturally responsive teachers analyze their beliefs, personal and family histories, and their membership in different groups. Critical self-reflection is an essential step in helping teachers begin to reconcile deficit conceptions, prejudices, or racial assumptions they may have toward specific groups.³¹ In addition to self-reflection, culturally responsive teachers question existing unequal policies and practices that deter student success. Teachers, Nieto argues, should continuously scrutinize “school policies and practices—the curriculum, textbooks and materials, instructional strategies, tracking, recruitment and hiring of staff, and parent involvement strategies—that devalue the identities of some students while overvaluing others.”³² Nieto also contends that a core purpose of teacher education should be to support teachers to “undergo a process of personal transformation based on their own identities and experiences.”³³ Only by undergoing this personal development can teachers indeed begin to develop trusting relationships with all students and create learning environments where all students can thrive.

Although more evidence of the positive impact of culturally responsive teaching is needed, existing research evidence is promising.³⁴ Encouragingly, high expectations from teachers have been linked to positive student academic outcomes,³⁵ and higher multicultural awareness from teachers has been shown to promote more nurturing classroom environments.³⁶ Research is also increasingly demonstrating that building on students’ prior knowledge and experiences can spark future motivation for learning.³⁷ Additionally, among other evidence-based culturally responsive practices,³⁸ the use of relevant learning materials has been shown to increase comprehension.³⁹

Critical self-reflection is an essential step in helping teachers begin to reconcile deficit conceptions, prejudices, or racial assumptions they may have toward specific groups.

Far too often, culturally responsive teaching is espoused by states, districts, schools, and teacher preparation programs, but little is done to outline the day-to-day practices that it requires. Only a few states stand out for synthesizing research findings into guides for their teachers. Wisconsin, for example, developed Wisconsin’s Model to Inform Culturally Responsive Practices, which outlines eight actions for culturally responsive teachers to consider, such as becoming self-aware, examining the system’s impact on families and students, and adopting the belief that all students can learn.⁴⁰

Education leaders should continue to draw from existing research to develop a clearer picture of what culturally responsive teaching looks like in practice.⁴¹ They should seek to develop a framework that outlines a continuum of teaching behavior, ideally across a multi-level continuum, that enables teachers to identify areas for growth throughout their careers. Ultimately, teachers can only become competent in culturally responsive teaching if they have clear a measuring stick and multiple opportunities to improve their competencies throughout their careers.

Professional Teaching Standards

A first step state education leaders can take to support culturally responsive teaching is to integrate this approach into their statewide standards for teaching. Statewide professional teaching standards broadly outline states’ conceptions of what knowledge, skills, and dispositions they value in a competent teacher. Nearly every state in the country has adopted teaching standards; however, the exact purpose of each state’s teaching standards varies significantly.⁴² In a number of states, teaching standards are only used as the basis for teacher preparation and licensure (called “licensure standards”). Other states have developed performance standards that define not just what teacher should know and be able to do but also what performance looks like across different levels. Such standards can be used as tools for self-reflection and ongoing mentoring during early induction years, or as the basis for evaluation systems, professional growth plans, and ongoing professional learning.⁴³

Several states have revised their policies to ensure that teaching standards address these purposes in a more integrated, coherent way.⁴⁴ In a few states, teacher preparation programs and school districts share standards, ensuring that teachers are prepared and coached using the same expectations by which they will be evaluated and supported as practicing teachers. In Massachusetts, for example, the Massachusetts Professional Standards (PSTs) for Teachers help shape the program design and course offerings of teacher preparation programs. They help teacher candidates receive purposeful feedback and set growth goals. Additionally, the PSTs are aligned to Massachusetts’ educator evaluation system, which allows in-service teachers to grow throughout their careers.⁴⁵

New Mexico’s standards are a core part of the state’s three-tiered licensure system, which incentivizes educators to develop and improve their performance as they advance in the career ladder from “Provisional” to “Professional” to “Master.” Progress through each tier hinges on teachers’ demonstrated mastery on the annual evaluation system, the Professional Development Dossier (PPD), which is partly based on the state’s teacher performance framework, the NM Teacher Competencies. The state stands out as one of the few where multi-tiered licensure is tied to compensation.⁴⁶

A first step state education leaders can take to support culturally responsive teaching is to integrate this approach into their statewide standards for teaching.

Although some states have made headway in aligning the teacher-career continuum, there is room to improve, especially in ways that will support advances in culturally responsive teaching. In many states, the various components of the teacher career continuum are uncoordinated, often requiring similar, but unaligned, expectations. The most common missed opportunity involves states adopting rigorous standards for teacher preparation and licensure, but not using or aligning these standards to requirements across a teacher’s career. States should seek to identify areas for alignment or, at the very least, adopt alignment documents that clarify how expectations for teachers remain consistent throughout their career. Ultimately, teaching standards will only raise the bar of teaching–and culturally responsive teaching in particular–if they are embedded within a cohesive and aligned system of teacher preparation and ongoing learning.

The national standards developed by the Interstate Teacher and Assessment Support Consortium (InTASC),⁴⁷ provide a model for how to integrate culturally relevant practices into state teaching standards.⁴⁸ Notably, this national model takes into account the need for teachers to have the appropriate dispositions to work with diverse student populations. The InTASC standards contain one standard explicitly dedicated to outlining the knowledge and skills needed to work with diverse learners. The standards, titled “Learner Differences,” suggest teachers should use their “understanding of individual differences and diverse cultures and communities to ensure inclusive learning environments that enable each learner to meet high standards.”⁴⁹ These standards also encourage inquiry into potential teacher biases: “The teacher reflects on his/her personal biases and accesses resources to deepen his/her own understanding of cultural, ethnic, gender, and learning differences to build stronger relationships and create more relevant learning experiences.”⁵⁰

The extent to which states’ standards currently incorporate culturally responsive teaching should be further explored. A 2005 analysis found that only 16 states explicitly referred to cultural competencies in their teaching standards. Additionally, 28 states addressed culture, while 11 referred to race and ethnicity in some way.⁵¹ Most recently, states have worked to better incorporate issues of student diversity in teaching standards. The CEEDAR Center found that most states included some language about supporting diverse students through quality instruction and positive learning environments, but the way states addressed student diversity was not directly defined.⁵²

Despite the influence of promising models, states’ standards currently vary in the way they incorporate issues related to culturally responsive teaching. Further, there are gaps in knowledge as to whether existing state standards include key references to potential individual and institutional biases. In response, states should analyze their current standards and begin work to ensure these standards place value on the various aspects of culturally responsive teaching.

Conclusion

Ensuring students of color succeed is crucial to the United States’ future prosperity. Culturally responsive teaching offers one opportunity to better support these students by ushering greater racial equity to teacher attitudes, teacher practices, and learning environments. While educational leaders and practitioners are increasingly recognizing the value of culturally responsive teaching, a range of policy changes are needed to ensure that a focus on culturally responsive teaching is endemic to every teacher preparation program, district, school, and classroom.

To propel this vision, state education leaders can begin by coming to a consensus on what culturally responsive teaching looks like in practice and developing relevant teaching standards. State education leaders should undertake an analysis of their current statewide teaching standards to determine how well they integrate culturally responsive teaching and whether their standards currently form part of an aligned, cohesive system of continuous professional growth. This assessment can serve as a foundation for reform recommendations, which may include revising teaching standards, piloting a stand-alone set of culturally responsive standards, or developing metrics, rubrics, and guidance documents.

More urgency is needed around implementing culturally responsive teaching. Due to the vast chasm between students of color and their white peers, states should get serious about helping teachers strengthen their knowledge, skills, and dispositions so that they can be in a better position to support minority students. Investing in culturally responsive teaching can be an important step in bridging the opportunity gap and ensuring students of color have a fair opportunity to succeed.

Jenny Muñiz is a 2017-18 Millennial Fellow with the Education Policy program at New America. She would like to thank her New America colleagues Reid Cramer, Amaya Garcia, Elena Silva, and Emma Coleman for their support and insight.