Culturally Relevant Teaching

How can we help improve student learning? Well according to Good and Brophy’s work, “one is the importance of helping the classroom become a social community, and the other is the power of learning through engagement in real work” (Sergiovanni and Green). As teachers we can teach the standards set by the state but unless our students can relate the concepts being taught to real world experiences they may have trouble understanding the concept. This is referred to as Culturally Relevant Teaching (CRT). Culturally relevant teaching as describe by Gloria Ladson-Billings in 1992, “as a way that would empower students to excel because of the way in which they experience the curriculum makes sense in the context of their lives and helps them develop confidence as a learner.” (Amy Marin Carlson) This makes a great deal of sense because students need to be able to apply what they have learned to everyday life. Teachers need to relate
Academic success is setting high expectations for all students and giving positive to students that have the power to influence their peers, this resembles our “student leadership team,” it is then the teacher’s responsibility to ensure these students experience success. Cultural competence, as teachers we cannot change the background of our students, but what we need to do is help them value their culture. On example according to Ladson-Billings is to “encourage students to use their home language while they acquire the secondary discourse of “standard English.” The third criteria of CRT is developing cultural consciousness which is basically the teacher thinking outside the box when planning and teaching lessons. With outdated textbooks and in some cases lack of textbooks teachers need to bring in sources that up to date and relevant to their