How Can Teachers Learn to Use Culturally Relevant, Responsive, or Sustaining Instructional Practices?

By Malika Ali (Highlander Institute), Val Brown (Center for Antiracist Education), Bryant Jensen (Brigham Young University), Devon Kinsey (ETS), Jamie Mikeska (ETS), Geoffrey Phelps (ETS), Caroline Wylie (ETS)

March 20, 2023

Educators work within increasingly diverse contexts and need well-designed supports to teach in equitable ways to meet the needs of their students who come from varying cultural, socioeconomic, and racial backgrounds. A long line of research across the last few decades on culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogy has suggested several keyways that teachers can provide high-quality instruction to all students, especially students from marginalized populations (Brown-Jeffy, S., & Cooper, 2011; Gay, 2013; Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2014; Paris, 2012; Stembridge, 2019):

Focus on ensuring students’ academic success by creating rigorous learning opportunities that have multiple entry points, sufficient scaffolding, and require higher-order thinking.
Leverage students’ interests and cultural and community practices to help them make connections between what they know and do outside school to what they are learning in school.
Acknowledge and value social and cultural assets associated with students’ backgrounds by engaging with students’ families and local communities to support their learning.
Center the creation of strong relationships among students, between students and teacher, and with the community by demonstrating a belief that all students will learn and celebrating students’ strengths and personal resources.
Provide opportunities for risk-taking and promote vulnerability by creating a classroom climate where both the teacher and students value all student contributions.
Confront inherent inequities in the educational system by understanding what those inequities are, how they are manifest, and working with students to identify ways to challenge them.
Support students in critiquing the current structures that replicate social inequities by engaging in age-appropriate conversations with students about these issues.

However, one continuing challenge facing proponents of this work focuses on how to provide meaningful and substantive opportunities for teachers across the professional continuum — from preservice to in-service — to learn how to enact and sustain culturally relevant, responsive, or sustaining instructional practices. Addressing this challenge requires innovative solutions to support the work of educators around the world. The good news is that there are several educational groups who have been working to develop and deploy innovations to address this challenge.

In the summer of 2022, ETS researchers facilitated a small convening with external partners to share and discuss five projects that have focused on the design and use of tools or approaches to support teachers as they learn to apply knowledge and beliefs about culturally relevant, responsive, or sustaining instruction to their practice. While each of the projects had distinct features, they served complementary purposes. These projects included:

a tool for supporting the analysis of classroom video to develop a shared understanding of culturally responsive teacher and student actions (Shannon Clancy, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education);
the use of simulated classrooms to provide an opportunity for teachers to practice engaging in antiracist practices (Val Brown, Center for Antiracist Education);
a classroom observation protocol to support learning about and enacting equitable teaching practices (Bryant Jensen, Brigham Young University);
a coaching model to support school and district leaders to engage communities in change efforts related to culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy (Malika Ali, Highlander Institute); and
the use of short performance assessments to support the improvement of critical skills related to culturally responsive pedagogy (Geoffrey Phelps, ETS).

At the four-part convening, the focus was on learning about each of the five projects with discussions about: (a) similarities and differences across these projects and approaches and (b) implications for future work in this space. Across these projects, culturally relevant, responsive, or sustaining pedagogy was viewed as integral to high-quality teaching, although we noted that this value is also a shared challenge because teachers and leaders sometimes see this approach, with a goal of more equitable teaching and learning opportunities for all students, as something separate from day-to-day discussions of pedagogy, rather than as a central part of “high-quality teaching.” Projects also shared a value or belief that teachers, at all levels, can learn a great deal about what it means to teach in ways that are culturally responsive. To support that learning and foster productive change in classroom practice, frameworks or rubrics play a critical role to demonstrate what a continuum of practice looks like as a means of supporting improvement along various dimensions of culturally responsive pedagogy.

A convening overview has been produced as the first work product from this group to share with varied stakeholders interested in this work. Scaling this work has been viewed as a challenge by all convening participants, so the goal is to advance shared efforts by raising broader awareness of the range of work being done in this space. A second publication is planned to provide a more systematic analysis of what we learned from the convening and illustrate in more detail how these tools can be used to support both preservice and in-service teacher learning about culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogy.

The convening overview document contains a description of each project and, where available, provides links to additional information and resources, with contact information for each presenter. We hope that this document is of as much interest to others as it was to us. We invite you to download and share the convening overview with your own professional networks.

The projects represented in this convening overview illustrate ways in which teachers, from preservice teacher candidates to experienced veterans, can learn about, practice, observe and discuss what high-quality, equitable teaching looks, sounds and feels like. As the K–12 student population continues to diversify, students require teachers who are prepared to meet their learning needs in ways that are culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining. They deserve no less than this.

Download the full presentation on Supporting Teachers’ Use of Culturally Relevant, Responsive, and/or Sustaining Instructional Practices (PDF).