Today’s post continues a yearlong series examining common mistakes made in the name of culturally responsive teaching and what to do instead.

‘An Inclusive Approach’

Lou Edward Matthews is founder of the InspireMath, and focuses on STEM learning, teaching, and leadership:

Culturally responsive teaching prioritizes academic success, intellectual and cultural rigor, belonging, critical agency, and collective action. Teachers immersed in culturally responsive teaching find success in various ways. They facilitate critical conversations, build environments and relationships with children and communities, and design relevant tasks that explore who students are and where they come from.

They create worlds of successful academic learning marked by engagement, caring, empowerment, and agency. I asked several of my online communities what they believed were the common things teachers get wrong when practicing culturally responsive teaching. Here are five areas that resonated.

Just One More Thing to Do

Teachers are required to do so much in the classroom—plan around standards, attend to the social-emotional learning of children, and navigate school policies and politics. Teachers often view culturally responsive teaching as an extra task added to their already full plate, rather than an approach that should be embedded in all aspects of teaching. For example, a math teacher might plan a lesson on algebraic expressions and then feel obligated to add a separate activity that incorporates cultural elements.

Because of the disconnected way mathematics is taught—often as lessons on isolated skills and ideas—this makes culturally responsive teaching feel like an additional burden. Complicating matters are the limited ways that some districts approach assessment, which don’t necessarily support the kind of exploration and engagement students desire and teachers want. Instead of adding a separate “cultural activity” to a math lesson, teachers might overcome this challenge by integrating cultural contexts directly into the problem-solving process, such as using examples of budgeting for a cultural event or analyzing patterns in local community data.

We Are in This Together

Because of the emphasis on culture and context specificity, teachers may see culturally responsive teaching as something specifically designed for students of color. Doing so may create communities of isolation and deprive all students of the benefits of learning about each other in important ways.

In a lesson, teachers may leave themselves out of conversations, thus fostering the kind of disconnect they hope to avoid. When teachers view the culture of students as separate from the culture they experience, they miss out on the powerful connections that can be made between students’ cultural backgrounds and their own. The reality is that culturally responsive teaching benefits all students.

Teachers can adopt an inclusive approach where culturally responsive teaching benefits the entire classroom, fostering a collective understanding and respect for diversity. For instance, integrating cultural references and shared histories in all lessons can create a more unified and inclusive learning environment.

Let’s Play Ball: Reducing Culture to Stereotypes

Sometimes, there is disconnection where teachers may know very little of the contexts, environments, and identities of their students. Teachers may also hold unintentional or intentional biases about children and their communities or carry microaggressions, which impact how they create learning experiences.

Some educators mistakenly believe that being culturally responsive means engaging in “popular” stereotypes associated with teaching Black students, for example (rap, basketball). Additionally, teachers may overemphasize focusing on deficit aspects of students’ communities ( cellphone towers in neighborhoods, food scarcity) as the primary driver of culturally responsive teaching.

To avoid these pitfalls, teachers should seek a deeper understanding of their students’ unique cultural contexts and avoid relying on stereotypes. They can achieve this by engaging in meaningful conversations with students and their families and by incorporating a broad range of cultural experiences and perspectives into their teaching.

It’s Messy: Integrating Content and Culture

Culturally responsive teaching seeks connections between student culture and content at its core. But it’s messy. When teaching geometry, a teacher might stick strictly to textbook examples rather than exploring geometric patterns in nature, communities, or various cultural artifacts. By integrating these cultural elements, students can see how math is both a part of and a tool for understanding their cultural heritage. However, much of the grounding of what we teach comes from the textbooks and curriculum. Given that some texts have very culturally-blind content, teachers may accept this as the absolute reality.

Additionally, teachers often have the pressure to ‘cover’ standards goals within unrealistic time frames, limiting how they feel able to make important connections. To overcome this, teachers can use culturally relevant examples that align with standards, ensuring that the content remains engaging and meaningful while meeting curricular goals.

In conclusion, culturally responsive teaching is about creating an inclusive ecosystem that supports and celebrates cultural diversity, enhancing the educational experience for all students.

‘A Way of Being’

Jay Schroder is the author of Teach from Your Best Self: A Teacher’s Guide to Thriving in the Classroom. After teaching high school English for 24 years, he currently works for the Southern Oregon Regional Educator Network (SOREN):

In my teacher-preparation program, I was taught that being culturally responsive meant sprinkling my lessons with allusions to prominent people of color, making sure that Hanukkah and Kwanzaa were mentioned in the build-up to winter break, and teaching books written by people from a variety of cultural backgrounds.

Although it’s good for students of color to see people who look like themselves in the books and lessons I teach, if this is all I do, it isn’t enough.

To become culturally responsive, I needed to learn what culture is. Beneath its colorful surface of holidays and ethnic food, culture acts on the subconscious, embedding stories, values, assumptions, and behavior norms that the members of that society collectively hold and identify with. Culture contains a code that tells us how to belong.

Ideally, the cultures of our classrooms and schools would foster this sense of belonging in every student no matter their background. And yet, students often feel like outsiders at their own schools.

A sense of belonging matters in education. When a student questions their belonging, their limbic system starts assessing for threats. Threat assessment consumes mental bandwidth that is no longer available for learning. The less a student feels like they belong, the more brainpower will be diverted away from learning and toward surviving.

Consider a time when you walked into a room where you were unsure if you belonged. You probably felt keyed up, maybe self conscious, likely anxious. You may have smiled, but deep down, you weren’t relaxed; your nervous system wasn’t settled.

Now, imagine being in that mental state while someone tried to teach you algebra. Your brain would be diverting a portion of your mental bandwidth to address the problem of not belonging; you’d have less bandwidth to use for learning algebra.

We all have to maneuver in spaces that don’t foster a sense of belonging. In these spaces, even small annoyances can lead our limbic systems to plunge us deeper into our survival brains—into fight, flee, or freeze—making learning impossible.

I have felt frustrated trying to get students to connect to what I thought were inspiring, “culturally responsive” texts. What I realize now is that when students’ mental bandwidth is preoccupied with the problem of not belonging, it doesn’t matter what “culturally responsive” texts I use. Students need to know that they belong and that they will be treated with dignity in my classroom. They need to experience the conditions that settle their nervous systems before any story or lesson can speak to them.

To be culturally responsive, I had to imagine myself walking into a room where I didn’t feel like I belonged. What would I need to calm my own nervous system? Most of the time, a friend would do it. Someone I could trust, someone who belonged and who would look out for me. For my students to relax into their learning brains, I needed to be that trusted teacher who would look out for them, making the learning space safe.

This meant that I needed to teach from my own settled nervous system. If I acted impatiently, their anxiety-brains would kick back into gear, hindering them from learning.

To be culturally responsive, I needed to learn to head off the reactivity in my own brain so I could be the calm, trustable presence my students needed. Rather than seeing them as problems to be solved, I needed to see them as complex fellow humans that I cared for, young people carrying their own burdens and stresses. Instead of thinking that I knew what they needed, I needed to be curious, ask questions, and co-create the kinds of learning alliances that worked best for them.

What I see educators getting wrong about culturally responsive teaching is seeing it as “something to do” rather than as a way of being. Successful culturally responsive teaching includes growing our capacity to retain our own best selves, deepening our own resilience so we can sustain classroom cultures in which everyone (ourselves included) can thrive.

‘Starts With a Deep Reflection’

Marta Silva, Ph.D., is a teacher and researcher of Spanish as a heritage language:

As a teacher of Spanish as a heritage language who also holds some leadership positions in a school where diversity includes over 50% of our student population, I have attended several professional development training sessions focused on culturally responsive teaching. I often end up with the same reaffirmations:

1. Most teachers see culture as something others hold, not themselves.
2. Most teachers express culture as either a glorified superficial aspect of a student’s life or a deficit that sets them away from the status quo, aka “the norm.”
3. Most teachers focus on this framework’s “responsive” aspect, without understanding its roots and sense of proactivity.
4. Most teachers look at culturally responsive teaching as add-ons to their curriculum, an extra lesson to teach if we have time, or a specific person of color to celebrate when the appropriate month arrives.

When we stand in a classroom grounded in a conscious or unconscious understanding that all our students deserve the same type of teaching and we give them access to the same information, differentiating just by proficiency levels, we create an enormous gap between us and some kids and a safe bridge with the ones with whom we share cultural and experiential backgrounds.

Culturally responsive teaching starts with a deep reflection and judgment of the self, how our experiences shaped our perspectives, and how the cultural settings we are part of define our beliefs. It starts with a radical disruption of our narratives to question our educational system and wonder why it works so well for some students and poorly for others. If we don’t start with this painful first step, educators will continue approaching culturally responsive teaching as another empty pedagogical tool that we can refer to when we are part of the next diversity and inclusion session in our district.

As long as this theoretical framework stays away from our constant view of education and the lives of the communities we teach, we will keep on wondering why our data for brown and Black kids keeps on bringing back stories of failure and disengagement.

Culturally responsive teaching starts with the educators recognizing that the beginning of each year is an opportunity to understand who their community of students will be and to focus on them before delivering their lessons. Each year will be different from the year before because their community brings different stories and needs. Every educator should become a cultural researcher, a genuine relationship builder, and a creator of spaces where identities bloom in different shapes and colors because they come from various seeds. In a culturally responsive classroom, the teacher should learn much more than their students.

‘Culture Is Not Static’

Keffrelyn D. Brown, Ph.D., is the Suzanne B. and John L. Adams Endowed Professor of Education and Distinguished University Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin:

A few years ago, I explored misconceptions about how teachers and educators understand and approach culturally responsive practices. I started from the belief that what we think we know about something has a powerful impact on how we approach it. I asked: If knowledge matters, what do educators know about culturally responsive teaching and curriculum?

As a former classroom teacher and current teacher educator and education researcher, I brought vast experience and knowledge to this question. Since individuals created this knowledge, if it was flawed, we could create new knowledge in its place.

I offered three misconceptions that impacted how educators approach culturally responsive practice, hoping to change their knowledge and transform their future practice. At a time characterized by heightened efforts to curtail diverse curricula and instruction in K -12 schools, educators must steadfastly commit to do this work well.

The first misconception is that culturally responsive teaching is a set of blanket practices needed to improve the academic outcomes for students of color, ensure student engagement, or a last-ditch effort to work with challenging students who need special attention. Here, teachers believe their goal is to superficially adopt a few methods designed to “add” culture to their curriculum or instructional practice, often without considering the instructional context. When the strategy meets some external resistance or requires more time and skill to meet the goal fully, the educator may shy away from doing this work because it takes time away from “real” teaching.

Culturally responsive teaching is not a Band-Aid or a “quick fix” set of teaching strategies. It is a deeply conceived approach to teaching and curriculum that benefits all students and requires training, sustained commitment, and deep curiosity to enact well.

The second misconception is the belief that teachers should address culture in their teaching without understanding why this is necessary. All teaching is cultural because teachers approach how and what they teach based on societal decisions about students’ needs. These decisions align with dominant cultural practices and fail to account for diverse perspectives outside the mainstream. We need culturally responsive teaching to provide excluded and partial knowledge missing from the school curriculum. We also need culturally responsive teaching to affirm the cultural identities of students whose group community knowledge is unvalued in school.

To fully enact culturally responsive teaching, educators must understand these dynamics, or they may adopt practices that stereotype students based on their cultural identities. Culture is not static or essential to anyone. Culturally responsive teaching must remain dynamic and respectful of diverse cultural membership and individual differences found across its members.

The third misconception is that the curriculum and instructional practices advocated in culturally responsive teaching are different from and deficient in dominant schooling practices. Educators may attempt culturally responsive practice, but this work is viewed as outside the norm, positioned as alternative, additive, and ultimately lacking real value relative to mainstream curriculum and teaching. As a result, the value of culturally responsive teaching diminishes for all students and opens the door for attack. Culturally responsive teaching values diverse, inclusive knowledge and perspectives because all students benefit from this kind of education.

To address these misconceptions, I proposed that teachers adopt what I call a humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge— an orientation to teaching where educators understand and account for:

1. The improvisational nature of instruction.
2. The situated contexts that surround teaching and curriculum work.
3. The all-encompassing way that social and cultural issues impact the entire teaching and learning process.

When teachers work intentionally and improvisationally, they purposely plan instruction, aware of how to engage students and adapt to the daily unfolding of classroom activity. They do not rely on disconnected methods implemented superficially.

When teachers acknowledge the context around teaching and curriculum, they know why culturally responsive teaching is needed and how including diverse knowledge, approaches, and perspectives enriches all students’ learning. Finally, when educators recognize that social and cultural issues impact all teaching and learning, they approach responsive teaching expansively. They don’t simply drop “culture” into their teaching.

Addressing curriculum and instructional practices, affirming student identities, deepening student engagement, and attending to classroom organization are only a few spaces where culturally responsive teaching should occur.

Thanks to Lou, Jay, Marta, and Keffrelyn for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

What do you think are the most common things teachers get wrong about culturally responsive teaching?

Part One in this series featured Zaretta Hammond.

In Part Two, Françoise Thenoux, Jehan Hakim, and Courtney Rose contributed their responses.

In Part Three, Crystal M. Watson, Tiffani Maher, Kristi Mirich-Glenwright, and Keisha Rembert shared their comments.

In Part Four, Gholdy Muhammad, Shondel Nero, and Denita Harris provided their commentaries.

Part Five featured responses from Andrea Castellano and Erica Buchanan-Rivera.

Melanie Battles, Mary Rice-Boothe, and Vera Naputi shared their answers in Part Six.

Part Seven highlighted contributions from Laura Franco-Flores , Esmeralda Cartagena Collazo , and Alexandra Gorodiski.

Part Eight included responses from Laleh Ghotbi, Angela M. Ward, Dwayne Chism, and Shannon Smith.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on X at @Larryferlazzo or on Bluesky at @larryferlazzo.bsky.social

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