Culturally responsive teaching creates a welcoming classroom where students can feel safe, respected, and engaged. Beyond supporting critical thinking by linking lessons with current events, culturally responsive teaching strategies promote equity and inclusion. Here’s 3 tips to get started.
3 tips for teaching culturally responsive teaching
Use these tips to refresh your teaching methods and develop lessons that strengthen critical thinking and strengthens your students’ self-identify.
- Reassess your understanding of formed stereotypes
Do you understand your own formed stereotypes? Your life experiences shape implicit biases and can affect your relationships with students and parents—even how you choose curriculum.
Take this Harvard test by Project Implicit. Then go to step 2.
3. Reassess your classroom materials
Do your resources represent diversity? Find materials that broaden student perspective with authors from various ethnicities, social, and cultural backgrounds. Click here for Edutopia’s list of 22 diverse books for all grade levels.
3. Incorporate student experience
When you’re stuck teaching traditional western literature, you can still revamp your lessons to be culturally responsive. You can do this by creating a “hook and anchor” to apply lessons to real-life situations that makes learning contextual and relatable.
We want to hear from you. Did you take the Project Implicit test—what do you think of it? Share with us in the comments below
Sources:
https://www.edutopia.org/article/22-diverse-book-choices-all-grade-levels
https://www.edutopia.org/article/getting-started-culturally-responsive-teaching
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
https://www.northeastern.edu/graduate/blog/culturally-responsive-teaching-strategies/
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