“Culturally responsive teaching” has become something of a buzzword in the education world, and rightfully so. But why is it important to be culturally responsive? This post seeks to show why and how to be a culturally responsive teacher and lead a culturally responsive classroom.

Introduction to Culturally Responsive Teaching

In her book Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, Zaretta Hammond defines culture on three levels: surface culture, shallow culture, and deep culture.

It’s easy for us to recognize others’ surface culture, which is made up of tangible elements such as the clothes a group wears and a food that they eat. A teacher that incorporates his or her students’ surface cultures into the classroom — by putting students’ names into worksheets or decorating the room for students’ holidays, for example — might believe themselves to be culturally responsive.

However, understanding shallow culture is more important in building trust and developing a rapport with students. This level of culture is made up of the embedded norms and routines that direct how people engage with one another, such as when eye contact is appropriate or how children and adults interact. 

Perhaps most important is deep culture, which Hammond says shapes the schema through which we both interpret the world around us and come to understand ourselves. A student’s deep culture drives how they think and learn. 

So, with this in mind, what are some culturally responsive teaching strategies and how can you build a culturally responsive curriculum? 

To build a culturally responsive classroom, you need to commit to a long-term partnership of learning alongside your students. This post outlines five strategies to kick-off your journey of culturally responsive teaching, but you’ll never stop growing as a culturally responsive educator.

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1. Establish Emotional Safety and Culturally Responsive Classroom Management

Building a culturally responsive classroom isn’t only about pedagogy; it’s also about creating an environment of emotional safety where your students are best-equipped to learn. That’s why it’s crucial to employ culturally responsive classroom management techniques. 

Let’s take a moment to think about the brain. You’ve likely heard of a part of the brain called the amygdala, which controls the body’s response to fear and stress. When a student feels uncomfortable or unsafe in a classroom, their amygdala triggers a fight-or-flight response.

Note that this response is an unconscious, physical reaction to feelings of danger or exclusion. When this response is triggered, the body undergoes physical changes such as an increased heart rate, faster respiration, and the release of stress hormones. In these conditions, learning is all but impossible. 

So what exactly can provoke the amygdala to have this kind of reaction? Children might feel stress or fear in the classroom when they feel singled-out by a teacher, threatened by discipline, or excluded by their peers. 

While all students will feel stress and fear at some point in their educational careers, this kind of experience is all too common for students who belong to marginalized groups. To help create an environment where all students feel welcomed, accepted, and ready to learn, try out the following tips.

3 Tips for Building a Culturally Responsive Classroom

1. Focus on relationship building first.

At the start of each school year, schedule interviews with each student and their families to get to know the different individuals that will be in your classroom. This also helps establish that you will prioritize relationships first and your gradebook second. 

2. Familiarize yourself with microaggressions and consciously combat them.

Microaggressions are small ways in which our implicit biases and prejudices manifest themselves in our conversations and interactions with members of marginalized groups. We need to proactively educate ourselves about microaggressions so we can work to prevent them. 

3. Be your authentic self.

Maybe you come from the same community as your students, or maybe you don’t. Either way, it’s important to be yourself in the classroom. Your students will see right through any attempts to act like something that you’re not. By being yourself, you’ll empower your students to bring their own personalities and cultures to the table. 

Creating an environment of emotional safety for your students might feel easy enough when it’s smooth sailing in the classroom. But what do you do when student behaviors are getting in the way of learning? 

It’s important to build a culturally responsive classroom management system when things are going well so that you’ll be prepared for stormier seas. Check out the following tips for creating culturally responsive classroom management.

Culturally Responsive Classroom Management Strategies

1. Check Your Thoughts and Feelings

The world sometimes seems to forget that teachers are humans. As humans, teachers bring their own beliefs and experiences into the classroom. With these beliefs and experiences come implicit biases that may affect how teachers interact with students. 

To prevent implicit bias from leaking into your work as an educator, it’s up to you to engage in anti-bias work. Check out this guide from the National Education Association on working to combat implicit biases.

It’s also important to recognize that teachers will have feelings in the classroom just like students will. As a teacher, you might feel sad, stressed, angry, and fearful all in the first period of your day. 

When you start to feel any of these emotions, take a second to name what you’re feeling. This can help you process your emotions and figure out what triggers you to feel different ways. By learning your triggers, you can learn to keep calm no matter what comes your way.

Don’t forget to name your positive emotions as well! Take time to celebrate moments of joy, laughter, and accomplishment with your students. 

2. Take Time Before You React

Sometimes in the classroom, everything seems to move too quickly. One second you’re teaching to a class of attentive students, and the next you feel like the room has erupted into chaos.

It’s easy to feel stress and start handing out punishments left and right. (This is the same amygdala stress response we talked about earlier.) But you’d be amazed what taking a 10-second pause before you react to any student behaviors can do. 

In these ten seconds, you can ward off your body’s fight-or-flight response and regain control of your decision-making. You do not want your amygdala in the driver’s seat! 

During this time, you can also start to think about the different explanations that could be behind your students’ behavior. What you interpret as “misbehaving” might have a completely different root cause than you expect. 

Imagine that you see two students talking while you’re trying to explain a concept to your class. This is the fourth time they’ve been talking during your lesson today, and your patience is lost. You yell at both students and assign them detentions for after class.

In this scenario, you never stopped to consider the “why” behind the student behavior. It’s possible that the students were talking about what happened at recess. It’s also possible that one student was explaining your lesson to the other in other terms. 

By taking 10 seconds to think before you react to student behaviors, you can consider all possible explanations for their behavior and you’re less likely to lose your temper. You can still address the behavior at hand, but in a calmer, more solutions-oriented way. 

3. Let Students Set Norms

Another way to build culturally responsive classroom management is to invite your students into the rule-making process. When you tell your students the rules of your classroom, you’re not giving them any room to create a community that works best for them and their respective cultures.

Conversely, by asking students to join you in creating norms and standards for your class, you can create an environment where everyone feels comfortable. Take time during the first days of the school year to decide on class norms together and hold your students accountable to these standards throughout the year.

The benefit of this process is that students are more likely to follow rules, or at least accept consequences when they don’t, if they had a hand in creating the rules. Students should feel like active participants in building their classroom community.

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2. Make Space for Discussion and Collaboration with Culturally Responsive Activities

The traditional picture of an American classroom is one in which a teacher stands at a chalkboard in the front of the room and delivers information to rows of students at desks. Students raise their hands to share answers and demonstrate their learning on tests and essays. 

In this traditional classroom, each student is expected to conform to individualist culture. In individualist cultures, people are motivated to work by themselves for their own benefits and rewards. In an individualist classroom, students work by themselves for their own grades. 

While some of your students might come from individualist cultures, others might belong to collectivist cultures. In collectivist cultures, people put the wellbeing and goals of their community before their own best interests.  

How does collectivism play out in a classroom setting? Students from collectivist cultures might be more likely to work collaboratively to ensure that their peers are all reaching their academic goals. 

If a student from a collectivist culture sees another student struggling on an assignment, they might feel compelled to offer support. To a teacher from an individualistic culture, this support might look like cheating. But to the students, this support feels like a moral obligation. 

Note that you students might fall anywhere on the continuum of collectivist and individualist cultures. But educators can’t be expected to create a classroom tailored to the culture of our students when we have a group of 30 students with unique cultures and backgrounds. So, what do we do? 

This study from The Qualitative Report on individualistic and collectivistic cultures in educational settings shows how teachers are able to balance both types of cultures. We can create space for students from both individualist and collectivist cultures to succeed using the following culturally responsive teaching activities. 

Culturally Responsive Teaching Activities

1. Get to know where your students fall on the collectivist-individualist spectrum with this survey from Kathleen Kryza. This also helps students feel more aware of their own culture and empowers them with the vocabulary to talk about how they feel in other classrooms and communities. 
2. Create space for discussion and collaboration throughout your lesson. Build in moments where students can turn and talk, work together on group projects, or engage in socratic seminars. 
3. Empower your students with choice. Let your students decide whether they’d rather tackle an assignment individually or with a partner. Give your students the opportunity to perform peer-reviews or self-reviews. Your students will gravitate towards what’s more comfortable for them and everyone will win. 
4. Assign classroom jobs. Giving each student a role in the classroom allows them to feel like they are part of a community. Some jobs might feel better for individualistic students, such as bringing attendance sheets to the office. Other jobs might feel better for collectivistic students, such as arriving to class early to sharpen pencils for everyone. 
5. Create opportunities for students to share. Some students might relish the opportunity to share their supplies and materials while others might feel uncomfortable with this. You can create opportunities for students to share intangibles, such as stories or experiences, so that all students participate in the sharing process. Start your days with morning meetings where students can share how they are feeling or what they did the evening before.

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3. Write Brain-Based, Culturally Responsive Lesson Plans

Our goal as educators is to help our students learn. To achieve this goal, we need to build culturally responsive lesson plans that best prepare our students’ brains for the learning process. 

What is a culturally responsive lesson plan? Check out our list of tips for building brain-based lesson plans for every classroom. 

1. Hook your students to activate schema.

Your students are bringing a wealth of knowledge, experiences, and memories into your classroom. Capitalize on what your students already know by starting your lessons with “hooks” that activate their existing schema. 

Do your students come to school in the morning with snacks they bought at the corner store? Build a hook for a lesson on tax around the prices students see at the store and the prices they actually pay. Did your students come into class talking about how much it snowed last night? Create a hook for a grammar lesson by having students think of as many adjectives as they can to describe the snow. 

Or, use the start of a lesson to find out how much students already know about a topic. You might be shocked by how much prior knowledge your students have. By recording what they already know, you can build upon their existing understanding to teach new concepts and skills.

2. Keep direct instruction short and sweet.

It’s a no brainer that if your students aren’t paying attention, they aren’t learning. Keep each different part of your lesson, especially direct instruction, concise so that students stay engaged and their brains can keep processing new information. 

According to a study on children’s attention spans from the American Physiological Society, there is no “ideal length” of an activity or lecture. Attention is context-dependent.

However, are your students more likely to zone out when you talk at them for an hour or when you have 10 minutes of interactive direction instruction followed by three brief practice activities? The answer is clear. 

Keep any lecture-based elements of your direction instruction brief and follow up with varied opportunities for practice and conversation. 

3. Don’t shy away from repetition-based practice.

Somewhere along the line, practice got a bad reputation. And yes, the rote repetition of a process is not the best way for students to learn. 

However, practicing a skill helps our brain’s neural pathways to strengthen, which means that skill gets easier for us. This is true of both physical activity and mental activity. 

After you’ve introduced a new skill or concept to your students, create dynamic and engaging opportunities for them to practice what they’ve learned. This does not mean filling out worksheets, but rather activities like explaining concepts to a partner, creating a mind-map to show how concepts connect, drawing a diagram to illustrate a problem solving process, etc. 

With ample practice, students will build towards automaticity and permanent memory. For more information on creating opportunities for deliberate practice, read the article “Practice for Knowledge Acquisition (Not Drill and Kill)” from the American Physiological Association. 

4. Plan culturally responsive learning activities.

Keep in mind that some of your students might belong to cultures with oral tradition. In such cultures, information might be communicated via storytelling, movement, and music. Other students might belong to culture with written traditions, where information is communicated via text. 

Take advantage of the different ways your students are primed to learn by creating lesson plans with activities that represent the four learning modalities: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile. Tips for each modality include:

• Visual: Have students draw a picture of the inside of a cell, provide graphic organizers for students to take notes, accompany all verbal instructions with written instructions, have students draw a map of the classroom to scale, have students highlight materials with different colors for different types of information. 
• Auditory: Sing the quadratic formula to the tune of pop-goes-the-weasel, hold a socratic seminar to discuss a short story, have students create songs and mnemonics for important dates in World War I, allow students to listen to an audiobook of a text while they read, have students act out plays and skits. 

• Tactile: Have students play with algebra blocks to build math skills, conduct hands-on science experiments where each student can participate, have students build models of different geographic features out of clay, encourage students to take doodle notes to keep their hands busy during class. 
• Kinesthetic: Create mnemonic devices based on hand movements, play study games that get students out of their seats, chunk directions so that students can complete steps soon after hearing them, have students play charades to practice vocabulary terms.

5. Embrace rigor to help your students become autonomous learners.

Our brains learn through challenge and what some educators call “productive struggle”. When we engage with a complex task, our brains produce something called myelin that helps increase the speed at which our brains can function. 

It’s imperative that we give our students the opportunity to engage with this productive struggle. By giving our students easy tasks that don’t require higher-order problem solving skills, we’re denying their brains the opportunity to grow and strengthen. 

In Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, Zaretta Hammond writes: 

“Classroom studies document the fact that underserved English learners, poor students, and students of color routinely receive less instruction in higher order skills development than other students. […] As a result, a disproportionate number of culturally and linguistically diverse students are dependent learners.”

As difficult as it might feel for teachers and students alike, we need to embrace rigor in the classroom. Check out these four strategies to create meaningful challenges for students from Edutopia. 

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4. Establish a Culture of Feedback

If you are a teacher, you’re likely constantly evaluating your own effectiveness through the feedback mechanisms embedded in your daily life. If your students’ eyes glaze over during your lectures, you know you might need to find a way to be more engaging. If over half your class fails a pop quiz, you know you might need to re-explain a concept. 

Your students also need feedback to grow and improve, but they might need it to be a bit more explicit. And don’t think that grades or smiley face stickers will suffice. Students need regular, detailed feedback to help them reach their goals. 

Why Does Feedback Matter?

There are only so many hours in a teacher’s day. Why should a teacher take the time to provide feedback to each student? 

Feedback is crucial for student growth because…

• Feedback helps build teacher-student relationships. Students are perceptive. If they feel a teacher taking the time to invest in their learning and growth, they come to trust that teacher as their partner in the learning process. 
• Feedback creates independent learners. When we give students feedback that helps them accomplish more difficult tasks rather than supplying them with the right answer, we’re empowering them to become independent learners rather than enabling dependent learning. 
• Feedback can increase student motivation. By giving students detailed feedback rather than grades alone, teachers are communicating that they believe students can improve and even sharing tips on how they can do so. This is more motivating to students than simply receiving a letter grade. 
• Feedback involves students in the learning process. It can be easy for students to ignore their grades until it’s time to bring report cards homes. Providing detailed feedback can keep students involved in reaching their academic goals.
• Feedback keeps high-performing students engaged. Students accustomed to getting A’s might start to check out in school because they don’t feel that they’re working towards anything. Receiving feedback on how they can continue to grow can help these high-performing students stay engaged in school. 

How to Give Culturally Responsive Feedback

Not all feedback is created equal. It’s important for teachers to provide feedback that is empowering rather than discouraging to students. 

It’s also important to remember that students from different cultures might interpret feedback differently. The paper The Mentor’s Dilemma: Providing Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide by Geoffrey Cohen, Claude Steele, and Lee Ross outlines how students with different racial backgrounds respond to feedback in unique ways. 

The following tips can help teachers give feedback that is effective and empowering for all students:

Tip	Example
Give feedback quickly and consistently.	“I reviewed your formative assessment from this morning during lunch and will be conferencing with each of you this afternoon.”
Be clear that you have confidence in your student’s ability to grow and accomplish the task at hand.	“I have no doubt that you are capable of incorporating stronger vocabulary into this paper.”
Be explicit about where the student went wrong or could do better.	“I notice that your third paragraph doesn’t cite evidence in the same way that your first two paragraphs do.”
Provide specific, actionable next steps for the student to take.	“When you’ve figured out the equation you need to write to solve this problem, revisit your notes on inverse operations.”
Remove all conversations around grades from feedback.	“I didn’t give you a grade on this assignment because I’m more interested in seeing how you can grow.”
Keep feedback focused and concise.	“Let’s only focus on these two areas of improvement for today.”

You can learn more about providing culturally responsive feedback through Zaretta Hammond’s asset-based feedback protocol detailed in Chapter 6 of her book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students.

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5. Foster Growth Mindsets in Your Students

Most modern educators have heard the terms “growth mindset” and “fixed mindset” before. Students with a fixed mindset believe they have a static level of ability in a given subject while students with a growth mindset believe in their capacity to learn limitlessly in all disciplines. 

Growth mindsets and culturally responsive teaching go hand-in-hand. Educators need to help students develop a growth mindset to prepare them for the rigor that is integral to a culturally responsive curriculum.

Fostering a growth mindset can be a challenge for teachers, especially when students might have been taught to be dependent learners up until they entered your classroom. It will take time, energy, and patience to fill your classroom with growth mindsets. 

Try out the following tips to help students develop growth mindsets.

Encourage students to classify their own and one another’s mindsets.

Kick off your discussion of growth vs. fixed mindsets in the classroom by having students take a survey to find out what kind of mindset they have. This online mindset quiz from Wabisabi Learning is a great place to start. 

Give your students the space to reflect on their results both individually and as a class. Encourage your students to use the vocabulary of “growth mindset” and “fixed mindset” both in this initial reflection and throughout the school year. Intentionally call out when you see students demonstrating growth or fixed mindsets and allow them to call one another out as well. 

Make self-reflection about mindsets part of your conferences with students’ parents and guardians. Place an equal emphasis on mindset as you do on academic performance so that students can see how much of a priority mindset is. 

Celebrate mistakes as opportunities for growth.

If students are afraid of making mistakes, they won’t want to engage with challenges. Instead, they’ll gravitate towards easier work where they know they can succeed. Fortunately, you can reframe mistakes as sources of information and opportunity in your classroom. 

Start by making intentional mistakes in your lessons. Give students the opportunity to call out your mistakes and ask them what they can learn from them. Make a point of thanking whoever points out your mistake and tell the class you’re glad you made that mistake because now everyone can learn from it. 

You can also model this attitude by celebrating the mistakes you make by accident. If you slip up and spell a word incorrectly in an assignment or do some faulty mental math when solving an equation at the board, don’t try to brush it off. Instead, turn that moment into a learning opportunity and have your students correct you. 

Allow students to retake assessments and redo assignments.

This one might feel odd to some teachers out there, but we believe that allowing students a second chance on assessments and assignments can help them develop growth mindsets. 

If students only have one opportunity to complete a task and don’t feel that they did so to the best of their ability, they can feel frustrated and discouraged. Plus, if students receive feedback on how they can improve, they’ll naturally want a chance to apply that feedback.

Giving students the chance to retake quizzes and tests and have second or even third attempts at other assignments can help students develop the idea that they can improve their work. Check out the article Allowing Test Retakes—Without Getting Gamed from Edutopia for tips on allowing retakes without sacrificing standards and rigor. 

Emphasize progress, not achievement.

In a classroom where a certain level of achievement is the sole target, students are more likely to develop fixed mindsets when they don’t reach that target. Conversely, in a classroom where all progress is valued to the same — if not a greater — extent as achievement, all students have an opportunity to feel success and develop growth mindsets. 

You can foster growth mindsets in your classroom by celebrating progress rather than achievement benchmarks. Some examples of this practice include:

• Instead of shouting out all students who score “proficient” on a standardized test, shout out all students who move up 5 percentiles or more.
• Instead of creating an honor roll for students with straight A’s, create an honor roll for students who brought up their grade level in at least one subject. 
• In conversations with students and their parents, talk about progress with as much enthusiasm and gravity as you would have when discussing grades or test scores. 
• Give out assignments that are intentionally ungraded. Leave your students detailed feedback on these assignments about their progress as compared to past assignments.

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Wrapping Things Up: Creating a Culturally Responsive Classroom

These culturally responsive teaching strategies are designed to be a jumping off point on your journey to becoming a culturally responsive educator. The truth is, you’ll likely never stop finding new ways to improve your teaching practice for all of your students. 

For more information on culturally responsive teaching, check out Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta Hammond. This book includes even more insight on culturally responsive pedagogy as well as a deeper look at the neuroscience that drives teacher and student behaviors in the classroom.