How Culturally Responsive Teaching Relates to Instruction in Schools

June 23, 2024

00:00

Cultural Context, Self-Efficacy

The conceptual scholarship on Culturally Responsive (CR) teaching identifies a key problem with its current implementation: schools have taken a “reductionist” approach—reducing CR teaching to a set of instructional practices without considering the crucial aspects of teacher disposition central to CR teaching. Existing studies are primarily small case studies, often focusing on preservice teachers.

The Qualities of a Culturally Responsive Teacher

CR teaching emphasizes several core tenets, including high academic expectations for all students, the development of students’ cultural competence (supporting students to understand and value their cultural identities while also understanding the perceived dominant culture), and critical awareness of power dynamics in society based on race and culture.

CR teachers should combat deficit thinking about students, which involves negative assumptions about students’ capacities and motivations based on their racial or ethnic identities, home lives, or other identity characteristics. CR teachers should also believe in the importance of incorporating students’ racial/ethnic identities into instruction, as race and race consciousness are central to effective instruction. Research has found that teachers with negative beliefs about student diversity engaged less frequently in CR teaching; however, teachers with positive beliefs about incorporating student identity into instruction engaged only minimally in CR teaching. The limited literature on CR self-efficacy suggests that teachers generally feel more self-efficacious about making connections, building relationships with students, and meeting students’ instructional needs than they do about practices requiring specific cultural knowledge.

Successful Teachers Should Have Beliefs That Align with the Culturally Responsive Approach

Participants in the study were racially/ethnically diverse middle school teachers from seven large US school districts engaged in professional learning around equity-focused curricular reform efforts. The participants were administered online surveys, with 417 teacher responses recorded. The survey questions were divided into four categories:

1. CR teaching beliefs scale (6-point agreement response scale)
2. CR teaching self-efficacy scale (10-point confidence response scale)
3. Professional learning on cultural responsiveness scale (4-point extent response scale)
4. CR teaching scale (4-point frequency response scale)

The results indicate that CR self-efficacy and professional learning on cultural responsiveness were correlated with CR teaching use. Having beliefs highly aligned with CR teaching increased the strength of the relationship between CR self-efficacy and CR teaching use. Within-teacher changes in CR self-efficacy were associated with changes in teachers’ reported use of CR teaching, suggesting that changes in self-efficacy may drive changes in the use of CR teaching. On average, CR self-efficacy and professional learning on cultural responsiveness positively correlated with self-reported CR teaching use, controlling for teacher race and experience. The results also showed that having highly aligned CR beliefs was related to the association between CR self-efficacy and reported CR teaching.

Professional Learning Can Help Build Culturally Responsive Skills in Teachers

The authors offered three key takeaways:

1. CR self-efficacy has a positive association with CR teaching use, controlling for teacher demographics, and having beliefs highly aligned with CR teaching increases the strength of the relationship between CR self-efficacy and self-reported CR teaching.
2. Participation in professional learning on cultural responsiveness is positively correlated with self-reported CR teaching, controlling for teacher demographics.
3. Changes in CR self-efficacy are associated with changes in self-reported CR teaching.

Increasing professional learning, including the observation of CR teaching practices, can help build teachers’ self-efficacy in using CR teaching, which may subsequently lead to these instructional strategies being more frequently used. It is also important for teachers to have time and space to examine their beliefs and understanding of race and cultural diversity.

Notable Quotes

“These findings suggest that focusing on building teachers’ self-efficacy for CR teaching may be a critical way to support increased use of CR teaching in the classroom.”

“Prior work suggests that even teachers who intentionally engage with CR pedagogies have difficulty seeing how their own cultural biases influence their instruction.”

“Research suggests that surveys of individuals that address cultural competence can suffer from social desirability bias.”

Personal Takeaway

This article was interesting, particularly the notion that CR teaching cannot be boiled down to a set of instructional strategies. The emphasis on professional development around CR teaching in this article illustrates that CR teaching must be a priority of the school to see it implemented effectively. – Matt Browne

Citation

Comstock, M., Litke, E., Hill, K. L., & Desimone, L. M. (2023). A Culturally Responsive Disposition: How Professional Learning and Teachers’ Beliefs About and Self-Efficacy for Culturally Responsive Teaching Relate to Instruction. AERA Open, 9. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584221140092