STAGE 1 - BUILD THE FOUNDATION - OVERVIEW
TIMING: You’ll spend a minimum of 4 weeks in this Stage.
Watch all videos to the end. See the full Module access schedule below.
Modules in this Stage
Module 1: Foundations of Culturally Responsive Teaching
Module 2: Balancing Cultural Orientations
Module 3: Designing More Relevant Content
GOAL
By the end of this stage, you will have a deeper understanding of how your system is producing inequitable results for students. With this new understanding, you will know what practices need to be interrupted as well as what fundamental conditions need to be in place to support students to accelerate their learning.
Welcome to the journey to becoming a culturally responsive educator.
In this stage, I am going to ask a lot of you — examine inequities in your system, seeing where we are underestimating students’ capacities, rethinking our mental models about how learning happens – all in an effort to interrupt inequity.
I think of this PLC as a type of “hero’s journey,” on the road to building your skill and capacity to move students from being dependent learners to truly independent learners who are in charge of their own learning by choice.
That is the purpose of culturally responsive education Not gimmicky lesson plans and such, as some in education would have you think.
Over the course of the year, we are going to take the conceptual understandings of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain and translate them into a method to build YOUR capacity to coach your students to higher levels of achievement.
In order to do that, we are going to be using a set of core tenets that come with a set of tools, structures, and processes that will be shared along the way.
Remember, we will be returning to these big ideas as well move through the stages and the specific lessons of each module.
LESSON SCHEDULE - STAGE 1
As you know, this program is uniquely designed to help you “go slow to go fast.” Lessons will be available to you sequentially, one after the other. However, we know from experience that those who get the best results from this work take their time between Lessons to do the exercises, review, and integrate the learning into their classrooms. Each Module has a pre-set timeframe, as described below, that you’ll remain in that Module. We encourage you to take your time, do the work, and implement the changes.
For a more detailed description of how this “drip schedule” of content works, please refer to the Tech Doc
Module 1 — You’ll spend a minimum of 1 week here. After you complete Lesson 1, you must complete all remaining Lessons, pass the Quiz, and a minimum of 7 days must have elapsed before Module 2 will be available to you.
Module 2 — You’ll spend a minimum of 1 weeks here. After you complete Lesson 1, you must complete all remaining Lessons, pass the Quiz, and a minimum of 7 days must have elapsed before Module 3 will be available to you.
Module 3 — You’ll spend a minimum of 2 weeks here. After you complete Lesson 1, you must complete all remaining Lessons, pass the Quiz, and a minimum of 14 days must have elapsed before Stage 2, Module 4 will be available to you.
Core Tenets
Our core tenet in CRE by Design PLC is that the student is the unit of change. Our focus is to become the “personal trainer” of students’ cognitive development.
Guiding Questions:
- Who is this child as a learner?
- What does it look like to increase her capacity to carry the cognitive load?
- Who do I have to be in order to get the student to engage in new learning moves?
The instructional core is the idea that the interaction between the student’s cognitive activity, the skill and knowledge of the teacher to mediate learning through instructional moves, and the quality of the content all work together to help students improve their learning capacity to accelerate.
These three interactive elements serve as the engine of learning, not strategies themselves.
The instructional core is the container in which our individual and collective work will happen in the PLC.
Guiding Questions:
- What is the relationship of the instructional core to equity?
- How does the instructional core help us understand how to accelerate learning?
- What are the principles that govern the instructional core?
In order to upend inequity by design, we need to be able to step back and understand how we are either aiding inequitable outcomes unknowingly. Using inquiry processes, we can see what Elmore calls the “unexamined wallpaper” of our classrooms.
Only then can we consciously interrupt practices that undermine the cognitive capacity of vulnerable students. Inquiry helps us know what to keep doing and stop doing, before we start adding new practices that help students grow their brain power.
Guiding Questions:
- What does it mean to have an “inquiry stance”?
- Why does it matter to equity by design?
- What approach to inquiry best serves my effort to improve my instructional core?
Deeper Dive PDF: Hard Questions About Practice
A critical part of instructional equity is feedback for both adults and students. A systems thinking approach to instructional equity requires us to use feedback methodically to spearhead change and shift the learning conditions in our schools. Feedback and formative assessment will be cornerstones of what we do in the PLC.
Why? We know that improvement only comes through practice and corrective feedback. So, while this doesn’t seem to be related to issues of race or culture, it is a key part of equity by design.
Guiding Questions:
- What do my feedback loops look like right now?
- How am I capturing information from my loops?
- How am I providing feedback to my students?
Deeper Dive PDF: John Hattie article
Improvement within a complex system like a classroom (remember that instructional core…) isn’t just a technical fix. In addition to those technical things that need to change, there are internal mental shifts we need to make along the way — both for adults and for students.
We want to not only bring a growth mindset to our work. But, more importantly, we want to uncover and change those mindsets and competing commitments that unknowingly sabotage our best efforts.
Guiding Questions:
- What mental models are guiding my actions as an educator now?
- What do I believe about the capacity of my students to get more than a year’s academic growth in a year’s time?
- What hidden competing commitments do I need to surface and reconcile?
Deeper Dive PDF: Schools That Learn – Mental Models
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