“There was a level of respect that [students and teachers] had for one another when they got in the room and started grappling with what would work and what wouldn’t work at our school. Everybody came away and said, ‘I have a different respect for our students’ perspective,’ or ‘I have a different respect for teachers.’”
Former principal in the Long Beach Unified School District41
What Students Need
An important part of creating an educational community in which young people can thrive and learn is ensuring that all students feel valued and seen for who they are. In addition to designing the school for relationships and creating a physically and psychologically safe, inclusive culture, this work involves an explicit commitment to culturally responsive and sustaining teaching, which promotes respect for diversity and creates a context within which students’ experiences can be understood, appreciated, and connected to the curriculum.
This is especially true in today’s U.S. social context, where issues of identity are at the forefront of public discourse, often in ways that may communicate a message to many young people that they do not belong. Indeed, evidence suggests that intolerance is on the rise. In a 2022 survey of California high school principals, 42% indicated that incidents of intolerance on campus had increased since before the COVID-19 pandemic, and only 5% said such behavior had decreased. More than three quarters of principals (78%) reported students making hostile or demeaning remarks toward their LGBTQ classmates, 66% reported racially hostile statements toward Black students, and 50% reported racially hostile statements toward Latino/a students. At the same time, large numbers of principals reported that parents or community members had sought to challenge their schools’ efforts to teach about race and racism, to protect LGBTQ student rights, or to focus on social and emotional learning.
Students who hold one or more identities that are stigmatized in society regularly encounter messages that undermine their conception of their own ability to succeed—and they may have had those experiences in school as well. These identities may be related to race, ethnicity, language background, immigration status, family income, gender, sexual orientation, or disability, among other things. This stigmatization or discrimination can produce what is known as social identity threat, which occurs when people feel they are at risk of being treated negatively based on their identity.42 The pervasive sense of threat impacts the brain by creating a toxic level of stress that can create anxiety, depression, and other health problems and can undermine the learning process.43
In this context, it is critical for educators to be proactive in upholding the dignity of all and for our public schools to see a core part of their purpose as educating young people to be members of a diverse democracy.44 Effective educators proactively seek to create a school environment that is identity safe—where all students feel welcomed and included, where their identities and cultures are not a cause for exclusion but a strength to be valued and celebrated.45
Key Practices
Counteracting Stereotype Threat
In addition to the ways that many students experience discrimination outside of school, social identity threat can also be triggered in schools by many factors. Within large schools, tracking systems often segregate students and allocate lower-quality curriculum and less experienced teachers to those in the bottom tracks, who are disproportionately marginalized students of color.46 Researchers have long found that some teachers hold inaccurate characterizations of academic ability and behavior of students based on race and ethnicity,47 have lower expectations of Black and Latino/a students, and interact with them less positively than with White students.48 These implicit biases are associated with significant disparities in disciplinary actions, as well as lower levels of support for academic performance.49
Young people are very observant. They note these patterns, and they internalize the perceptions that are communicated to and about them. Not only do educators need to overcome their own potential biases, but they also need to be aware of biases that exist among students. For example, at San Francisco’s June Jordan School for Equity the staff held a fishbowl conversation with Black students to better understand their experiences, and one girl explained how her peers treated her as less capable, saying:
If you’re African American, a lot of other students don’t think that you’re really educated. If I’m in class and there are four of us at the table, and I’m the only Black person, [my peers] will ask every other person at the table for help, but not me.
Uncovering this dynamic, and hearing from the student about ways some teachers had successfully interrupted it, allowed the staff to more effectively address the unconscious racism that is present throughout American society.50
Social psychologist Claude Steele coined the term “stereotype threat” to describe the social identity threat that happens in education contexts when one fears being judged based on a group-based stereotype. He and his colleagues showed how it can interfere with academic performance, as anxiety interferes with working memory and focus, as well as how it can be addressed by specific actions taken in a classroom or testing situation.51 In addition to reducing practices like tracking, as the redesigned schools in this publication have done, these actions include means for creating connections to students that allow them to communicate their thoughts, experiences, and aspirations; communicating confidence in students’ abilities while helping them to meet high standards of performance; and creating an open, inclusive environment in which students feel that they belong.
A growing body of research shows how educators can foster identity-safe environments that counteract societal stereotypes that may undermine students’ confidence and performance. Key elements include:
- caring classroom environments in which empathy and social skills are purposefully taught and practiced, helping students learn to respect and care for one another;
- encouraging interactions between the teacher and each student that communicate affirmations of worth and competence, along with public sharing of these perceptions;
- teaching that promotes student responsibility for and belonging to the classroom community, and cooperation in learning and classroom tasks; and
- cultivating diversity as a resource for teaching through regular use of culturally diverse materials, ideas, and teaching activities, along with high expectations for all students.52
Building Empathy
Practices that build empathy and common ground among students and teachers have been found to reduce bias and support the growth of positive and trustful relationships.53 Tools that allow educators and students to learn what they have in common, like “Getting to Know You” surveys, have been shown to build empathy in relationships that, in turn, positively affect student achievement. In one study, researchers found that both students and teachers who learned that they shared commonalities with each other indicated they held more positive relationships, and students earned higher grades when teachers learned about their similarities with students. This was particularly true for teachers’ relationships with Black and Latino/a students, closing the achievement disparities for these student groups by over 60%.54
Empathy interviews represent another empathy-building practice that is growing in use in secondary settings. These interviews are “one-on-one conversations that use open-ended questions to elicit stories about specific experiences that help uncover unacknowledged need.”55 They aim to support deep listening in ways that cultivate care, interest, and a sense of shared humanity between those engaged in the conversation.
The interviews are guided by a set of four to eight open-ended questions that are tailored to the purpose of the interaction and can range from surfacing challenges in schools and classrooms to surfacing insights into an individual’s lived experience. These questions are accompanied by probes like “Tell me more” or “Why” to ensure that the experiences and points of view of those participating in the interview are well articulated. Each person engaged in the empathy interview is both an interviewee and an interviewer, enabling each individual to share their perspective and to understand the point of view of the other.
While seemingly straightforward, empathy interviews often require norms, technical skills, and specific mindsets that should be understood and developed among all participants. These include allotting ample time for each person to share their thoughts without interruption or response; actively listening; and remaining aware of one’s biases, including those related to power dynamics among school actors.
Long Beach Unified School District has incorporated empathy interviews into its efforts to become a “relationship-centered district.” Empathy interviews have become a central practice in the district’s Learning Days, which provide opportunities for educators, leaders, and high school students to learn alongside one another and to discuss equity-focused topics. In this forum, attendees are introduced to the norms and practices of empathy interviews and, subsequently, provided an opportunity to observe them in action and to reflect on the process and its impact. A former principal who participated in empathy interviews during a Learning Day and later engaged educators and staff at her school in this activity described their power in changing perspectives:
There was a level of respect that [students and teachers] had for one another when they got in the room and started grappling with what would work and what wouldn’t work at our school. Everybody came away and said, “I have a different respect for our students’ perspective,” or “I have a different respect for teachers.”
Other Long Beach Unified practitioners also expressed that empathy interviews helped them develop deeper understandings of the issues that students faced and the ways those challenges could constrain positive relationships between students and teachers. For example, practitioners noted that students’ descriptions of unjust disciplinary practices that targeted students of color as well as a lack of diverse representation in curriculum elevated how implicit bias could shape their experiences and sense of belonging in schools. In turn, these practitioners expressed that empathy interviews helped them recognize how certain forms of harm were being inflicted on students while spurring the practitioners’ desire to collaborate with youth and staff to alleviate inequitable structures, practices, and mindsets.
Source: Hernández, L. E., & Rivero, E. (2023). Striving for relationship-centered schools: Insights from a community-based transformation campaign. Learning Policy Institute.
Supporting Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Pedagogy
Effective schools develop and maintain environments that explicitly embrace the identities and cultures represented by the students in their classrooms as well as in the larger society. Research on learning makes it clear that an individual’s social, emotional, and cognitive experiences are intertwined and influence learning.56 These experiences—grounded in place, space, and the multiple communities a person interacts with (family, friends, neighborhood, places of worship, school, and others)—form the cultural contexts within which each person encounters the world. Since learning is a process of drawing connections between what we know and what we are newly discovering, these cultural contexts provide the foundation for learning and identity development. Pedagogies and practices in K–12 classrooms that center the whole child, including their cultural experiences and identities, support learning and development.
Understanding and Connecting to Cultural Contexts. Culturally responsive and sustaining practices require teachers to learn about and from students and their communities through curriculum and instruction strategies that both surface and build on that knowledge. This includes learning what students already know, in what areas they already demonstrate competence, and how that knowledge can be leveraged for deeper learning in the classroom context. Most effective are learning spaces that are not only relevant and responsive to students’ cultures, languages, experiences, and identities but also center them in ways that affirm and sustain students’ cultural ways of being.57
As educator Gloria Ladson-Billings notes, “All instruction is culturally responsive. The question is: To which culture is it currently oriented?”58 There is a large body of research showing that effective teachers of students of color form and maintain connections with students within their social contexts. They understand that adolescents are going through a critical period of identity development. They celebrate their students as individuals and seek to learn about their cultural contexts. They ask students to share who they are and what they know with the class in a variety of ways. They regularly incorporate instructional materials that provide various viewpoints from different cultures.59 Research shows that this approach improves students’ sense of belonging and improves educational outcomes.60
Teachers can use their knowledge of the community to advance student learning and to fortify feelings of solidarity with the students they teach by sharing students’ passions and affection for the community and its multiple cultures. They also can bring community elders and experts into classrooms to support and enhance student learning. (See also Feature 9: Community Connections and Integrated Student Supports.)
Effective schools promote examples of cultural excellence not just in the classroom but across the school as well. They have active cultural clubs and host performances and presentations, often led by students or their family members, that highlight the cultural strengths of the groups that make up the school community. Students are actively encouraged to create and participate in social clubs and activities that reflect the local community’s cultures, values, and traditions. Their families’ participation in the school is a valued contribution that staff members pursue through persistent outreach via multilingual invitations and announcements, home visits, and social events.
Another way of leveraging cultural connections is being familiar with distinctive traditions of excellence—either contemporary excellence or the historical legacy of excellence that can be found in all cultures. Educator Lisa Delpit often does an exercise with audiences of teachers where she says, “I want you to think about a famous explorer, a famous writer, and a famous mathematician.” Almost everyone can give examples. Then she says, “OK, now I want you to think of a famous Chinese explorer, a famous African writer, and a famous Latin American mathematician.” The responses are usually few and far between. Delpit challenges teachers to educate themselves about these examples of excellence so they can inspire students to meet and exceed them.61 Effective teachers do not shy away from talking about the barriers that systems of oppression have created, but they also emphasize cultural strengths in the face of those barriers.
Engaging in Culturally Responsive Practices. The goal of culturally responsive practices is not only to create a sense of safety and belonging but also, as Zaretta Hammond notes, to get students “ready for rigor.” In Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, Hammond identifies four key strategies for creating culturally responsive schools:
Helping educators become aware of how the brain learns, of culture and context, and of students’ learning behaviors.
Developing learning partnerships between students and teachers that cultivate positive mindsets, self-efficacy, students’ ownership of learning, and students’ understanding of their own learning processes, while reducing stereotype threats in the classroom.
Creating communities of learners in a supportive learning environment that is intellectually and socially safe, collaborative, focused on learning, and restorative.
Supporting information processing through authentic, culturally connected tasks that build on students’ experiences and offer the right amount of challenge for what students are ready to do.62
Culturally responsive teachers are passionate about their content as well as about their students’ learning. They use an active approach to teaching in partnership with students—demonstrating, modeling, explaining, writing, giving feedback, reviewing, building on students’ ideas, and pushing and probing for depth of understanding. One example of this active partnership is what educator Chris Emdin calls reality pedagogy, where students take ownership of their learning by codesigning lessons with teachers and their peers, bringing their own cultural and family strengths into the classroom. Emdin recalls a time when he was teaching a lesson on Newton’s laws of motion and he thought students would be fascinated by an imaginary scenario involving two marbles on an endless frictionless surface—but his students were confused or disinterested by this example. So, he asked two students to plan and teach a lesson on the same concept the following day. They used a scenario of someone riding on the New York City subway and asked the class to consider how forces would act on their body if someone pulled the emergency brake. The class was very engaged and understood the concepts related to Newton’s laws. Emdin then used the students’ lesson himself in a different class period, also with success.63
High expectations are a key part of a set of practices used by effective teachers who are “warm demanders.”64 These teachers demand a lot of their students but are warm, caring, and supportive, not punitive or permissive. Warm demanders believe in their students’ potential, and they push them with love and structured support. The warm demander teacher–student relationship is humane and equitable and is characterized by a sense of community and teamwork. Delpit gives an example of how a young high school teacher was a warm demander with Delpit’s own daughter:
Ms. Maggio “read” my daughter’s attitude of academic indifference correctly when she sat down with Maya for a long talk. Ms. Maggio finally broke through Maya’s shell of nonchalance when she said, “You just don’t think you’re very smart, do you?” Through sudden tears, my child admitted the truth of that revelation. From then on, Ms. Maggio proceeded to prove to this child that she was indeed intelligent by pushing her relentlessly to excel.65
This is just one example of how an assets-based perspective can generate a sense of agency that is solution-oriented, whereas a negative perspective can reinforce a sense of helplessness that inhibits problem-solving. Furthermore, an assets-based approach uses students’ existing capacity to build new capacity, just as instruction that builds on students’ prior knowledge creates a base for their learning new knowledge.
Supporting Integration and Community. High expectations with strong supports are key to culturally responsive and sustaining practices. Tracking has been largely eliminated in redesigned high schools, although students can choose different classes based on their interests and aptitudes, especially as they reach their junior and senior years. (See Feature 5: Student-Centered Pedagogy and Feature 9: Community Connections and Integrated Student Supports for the adaptive pedagogies and school supports that make this possible.)
One of the major challenges facing high schools is that there is a tendency for groups to self-segregate even when schools have eliminated segregative mechanisms like tracking. All of us feel more comfortable with people who are like us, whom we already understand and identify with. When students choose different academies, career pathways, or extracurricular activities within a school, those communities can begin to become segregated, and there can be variations in resources, academic rigor, administrative attention, or other factors that lead to inequalities in the quality of education across contexts.
It is a special challenge to create democratic schools, and small learning communities within schools, that seek out diversity, in people, perspectives, ideas, and experiences, and then to work to ensure that the diversity is valued as a great source of strength. In Democracy and Education, John Dewey noted that “a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living.”66 He stressed the importance of creating circumstances in which people share a growing number of interests and participate in a growing number of associations with other groups, observing that:
In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equitable opportunity to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters educate others into slaves. And the experience of each party loses in meaning, when the free interchange of varying modes of life experiences is arrested.67
Communications that, in Dewey’s words, are “vitally social or vitally shared” allow people to experience the perspectives of others, and by that connection to develop understanding and appreciation for that person’s experience of the world, thus expanding their own knowledge and building a broader common ground. This is the fundamental goal of education in a democratic society, a goal that is all the more critical at this moment in our nation’s history.
School Profile: Creating Community-Connected Curriculum at Oakland High School
Additional Resources
- Website
- Blog post
- Website
- Website
- Web page
This website for the book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain also has links to blog posts and videos about designing and implementing culturally responsive instruction consistent with research on brain development and neuroscience.
- Website
- Guide
- Blog post
- Video