Culturally Relevant Teaching

I read the book "Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning" by Sharroky Hollie.

I think about using CLRT as a way to create the conditions for equity in classrooms (and thus eliminating achievement disparities).  Here is the insight from Sharroky Hollie in four words: validate, affirm, build and bridge. Validate the student. Affirm their strengths. Build on their strengths. Make a bridge with their strengths to new learning. 

What is culture?

"Culture is the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors and artifacts that distinguish one group from another. Culture is further defined as what is right, and what is rude. Culture is the way we do things around here." -Edgar Schein

How do we create social learning?

"An additional benefit of social presence, according to Rourke and others (1999), is its ability to instigate, sustain, and support cognitive and affective learning objectives by making group interactions appealing, engaging, and intrinsically rewarding."

Culturally relevant teaching is the intersection of realness, relevance, relationships and rigor. I would like to continue to explore how learning technologies paired with transformed teaching strategies are responsive to each learner. I would love to read others' thoughts on this too!  

I created a slide deck using Haiku Deck to explain the concepts of the book in a visual way.

Hacking School Libraries - a book review

My friend Joanne and I have known each other since high school volleyball team. She is an amazing teacher, knows kindergarteners well (the grade level I know the least) and is currently a librarian. She has a bunch of words that she hates and regularly tells us about when people say them and in what context. I don’t really have words I hate, but lots of words I love. Do you have a favorite word? I do, it is “ameliorate”. In French, it is a common term, used all the time. It was a happy day in my life when I learned that there is an English cognate, not widely used and sounds super fancy. Thus, when trying to think of a blog title, ameliorate learning was born.

So, here is my old blog, created way back when... when I piloted the first social studies digital curriculum that was collaboratively created in conjunction with District 287. I worked on the creation of the sixth grade curriculum using all open educational resources and culturally relevant teaching strategies in a completely free, online format with the platform of MOODLE. Some of the posts are still relevant, although not sure who still uses MOODLE anymore. 

The book “Hacking School Libraries” is by Kristina Holtzweiss. Read more about her at her website, bunheadwithducttape.com. I am a dance mom (mother and supporter of the teen that does the hard stuff of competitive dance), and so I am wondering why she chose the name “bun head” which in dance circles means ballet dancer. Anyway, her bio is a list of awards and accolades which makes me wonder if she is actually human. Based on all the hype, she seems to know what she is doing. I started following her on the Twitter and am anxiously awaiting a follow back. 

The book is a great source of inspiration and ideas. Mostly in a format that tells the reader what she tried and that makes the reader think, hmmmm, what could I try in my circumstances? She starts with simple, concrete steps to transform an out of date library. Move the furniture, change the policies, paint a wall. Then, she moves into the more complex issues of transforming mindsets. She actually offers good mental health advice about being in a library and trying to move the needle with future ready students and learning. 

In Hacking School Libraries, there are many examples of ways to increase student agency. There are sections that describe ways to involve students in the task and development of the library media center. I recently had third graders diagram and label all of the informational text shelves. Once completed, they were to write their favorite sections where they would like to find books. We compiled the data into categories and chose the books for our last book order from this student created data. I am confident that the research would support our involving students and creating agency in the library book collection.

Reading the book just made me make a list of things we have already done, and all the ways I can’t wait to AMELIORATE student learning in the heart of the school, the library media center.