Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta L. (Lynn) Hammond

Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta L. Hammond 

This book presents a bold, brain-based teaching approach to culturally responsive instruction. To close the achievement gap, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement. Culturally responsive instruction has shown promise, but many teachers have struggled with its implementation-until now. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction. The book includes: information on how one's culture programs the brain to process data and affects learning relationships; ten "key moves" to build students' learner operating systems and prepare them to become independent learners; and, prompts for action and valuable self-reflection. 

Take a look inside here.

Ready4Rigor

Culturally Relevant Teaching: Hip-Hop Pedagogy in Urban Schools by Darius D. Prier

Culturally Relevant Teaching: Hip-Hop Pedagogy in Urban Schools by Darius D. Prier

Culturally Relevant Teaching centers hip-hop culture as a culturally relevant form of critical pedagogy in urban pre-service teacher education programs. In this important book, Darius D. Prier explores how hip-hop artists construct a sense of democratic education and pedagogy with transformative possibilities in their schools and communities. In a postmodern context, students’ critical street narratives challenge educators to rethink where «public education» can happen, and the political and empowering purposes to which Black popular culture can serve social justice ends for youth in urban education. This book provides educational leaders in the academy and public schools with new cultural contexts that connect teaching and learning with music and popular culture in relation to race, class, gender, culture, and community.

Click here to read inside.

Bringing Hip-Hop to Education in a Meaningful Way by Sam Seidel

Equity Professional Development at Loring

Post Note: This section (post) is a holding (a bulletin board, a digital file) for articles, definitions, and resources directly pertinent to the current and ongoing effort to learn about and implement the goals of the Equity Focus at Loring Community School. Additional resources will be added regularly.

Creating Your Racial Autobiography

Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education by Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV

Developing a Positive White Identity

White Racial Identity and Anti-Racist Education: A Catalyst for Change by Sandra M. Lawrence and Beverly Daniel Tatum

Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions by Sendhil Mullainathan

What is White Supremacy? by Elizabeth Martinez

Culturally Relevant Teaching Practices - Ideas from the Field - Saint Paul Public Schools

Equity Walk Matrix

Inquiry for Equity: What Does It Mean for Teacher Research? by Tom Malarky

Roseville Area Public Schools Achievement and Integration Plan Components

Six Goals of Educational Equity and School Reform

School Discipline: What Race Has To Do With It by Sheila Regan

Sagging Pants And The Long History Of 'Dangerous' Street Fashion by Gene Demby

A Guide to Culture in the Classroom by Muriel Saville-Troike

Cultural Identity and Teaching

Managing Diverse Classrooms by Carrie Rothstein-Fisch and Elise Trumbull

Identity Work in the Classroom: Successful Learning in Urban Schools

Identity Work in the Classroom: Successful Learning in Urban Schools

by Cheryl Jones-Walker

Teachers College Press

2015 128 pages

This book provides classroom examples to demonstrate how identity-making is integral to the teaching and learning process. Responding to school reform efforts that focus on top-down reform measures, this book proposes “identity work” as an alternative approach. The author argues that efforts to improve urban schools should recognize the importance of relational change that focuses on deepening personal interactions between students and teachers, teachers and other teachers, and schools and parents. Based on an in-depth study of two classrooms in urban K–8 schools, the book illuminates the importance of allowing teachers the freedom to make pedagogical adjustments based on their knowledge of students’ needs, backgrounds, and interests. This volume reframes our understanding of urban schools and raises questions about the goals of local and federal reform and what is at stake for educational systems.

Book Features:

• Provides examples of identity work and its potential for creating individual, institutional, and large scale systemic improvement.
• Identifies how skilled educators make pedagogical decisions that increase student engagement and learning outcomes.
• Examines the challenges of working within a context of increasing mandates and rigid accountability structures.
• Advocates for design improvement strategies that rely on the capacities of students, teachers, and community members.
• Shows how qualitative work that elucidates the experience of students and teachers can inform education policy.

Table of Contents

Be the Change: Reinventing School for Student Success by Linda Darling-Hammond, Nicky Ramos-Beban, Rebecca Padnos Altamirano, and Maria E. Hyler

Be the Change: Reinventing School for Student Success 

by Linda Darling-Hammond, Nicky Ramos-Beban, 

Rebecca Padnos Altamirano, and Maria E. Hyler

Teachers College Press 2015, 264 pages

Be the Change.org

Table of Contents

The Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach: Transforming Schools at Every Level by Anthony Muhammad and Sharroky Hollie

The Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach: Transforming Schools at Every Level 

by Anthony Muhammad and Sharroky Hollie

176 pages Publisher: Solution Tree

School improvement begins with self-examination and honest dialogue about socialization, bias, discrimination, and cultural insensitivity. In The Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach, the authors acknowledge both the structural and sociological issues that contribute to low-performing schools, and describe how leaders can create a healthy school culture. They offer multiple strategies and activities to improve classroom management, increase literacy, establish academic vocabulary, and create an engaging learning environment.

After making a distinction between a staff's will--that is, their belief in all students' abilities along with their determination to make student learning and success a schoolwide priority and a staff's skill their use of quality, responsive methods and activities--the authors submit that healthy school cultures grow out of a marriage of the two.

Examine four broad steps to developing a positive learning environment (aligning philosophies, managing frustration, creating a culture of collaboration, and institutionalizing a healthy culture) and uncover the components of responsive pedagogy--a skillful and balanced framework of traditional and culturally responsive activities used in the classroom.

Benefits

* Reflect on current practices and identify areas for improvement.

* Spot the factors that can be harmful to school cultures.

* Identify your school as high will/low skill, high skill/low will, low will/low skill, or high will/high skill.

* Develop a blueprint for achieving skilled pedagogy and successful school improvement.

* Gain practical classroom management strategies and activities.

When Whites Just Don't Get It OP-ED Series by Nicholas Kristof, New York Times

Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist?

When Whites Just Don't Get It, Part 2

When Whites Just Don't Get It, Part 3

When Whites Just Don't Get It, Part 4

When Whites Just Don't Get It, Part 5

When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 6 

"...So if we’re going to address systemic disadvantage of black children, we have to broaden the conversation to unequal education. There’s a lot of loose talk among whites about black boys making bad decisions, but we fail these kids before they fail us. That’s unconscionable when increasingly we have robust evidence about the kinds of initiatives (like home visitation, prekindergarten and “career academies”) that reduce disparities...

New York Times, A Conversation on Race 

A series of short films about identity in America.