Teaching Strategies
Culturally and Historically Responsive Education50
This unit is designed to be taught as part of a daily Mathematics routine. Laying the foundation for the background knowledge and delving into the key Mathematics skills will be done using a culturally respective framework.
A critical look is being taken at the ways in which African American students are receiving instruction in the classroom, and alternative frameworks for pedagogy are being presented to not only change instructional delivery, but also to shift the focus away from just test scores. This shift is being offered as a way to respect and acknowledge the historical and cultural strengths and abilities of African American children. In doing this, educational institutions can begin to leverage those strengths to restore the historic excellence of academic and social outcomes for African American children, where there is a need. Dr. Gholdy Muhammad makes a case for making this the way to engage and educate African American students who have been in educational systems that are absent of African American histories, identities, literacies, liberation, and academics.
She offers an alternative framework that is birthed from her research into the African American literary societies of the 19th century. As the keynote plenary speaker during Pittsburgh Public School District’s Summer Leadership Academy 2022, Dr. Muhammad drew parallels between her 2020 publication Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy and teaching other content areas. She presented the four layers (pursuits) of the Historically Responsive Literacy (HRL) framework with one additional layer. The purpose: to provide educators of African American students with a broader framework and practical methods for planning instruction that is applicable to all content areas. She called it Culturally and Historically Responsive Education (CHRE). The original four layers of HRL are: (1) identity development, (2) skills development, (3) intellectual development, and (4) criticality.51 The additional layer discussed in the presentation was (5) joy. 52 These five layers were the ways in which she noted that African American literary societies defined and advanced education. She posits them as ways to define, organize and advance education for African American students, today. My unit will utilize this framework to organize the multiple cross curricular intersections and teaching strategies. The classroom activities will provide further detail on each layer and how students will fulfill them within the unit.
Depth Of Knowledge (DOK) Alignment53
Norman Webb’s Depth of Knowledge publications give guidance to states and assessment makers to consider the depth at which students will be asked to demonstrate and express knowledge they have gained. His work also guides how objectives for learning are crafted to align with the assessments. Throughout this unit, my students will be assessed using formative and summative methods to monitor learning. The assessments will ask students to demonstrate and express various levels of understanding after participating in the various activities to be discussed. Objectives, activities and assessments will be planned to allow students to engage at the various levels of complexities: (1) recall of facts, information, or procedures, (2) use information, conceptual knowledge, or procedures, (3) think strategically, (4) and extend thinking.54
Educational Protocols
Educational protocols are a set of guidelines used to structure classroom learning experiences. There are different types of educational protocols, mostly categorized by the purpose they have. This unit will make use of several different protocol categories that will serve 3 purposes: (1) to engage, (2) to check for understanding, and (3) to build academic vocabulary.55 Some examples of engagement protocols include Think, Pair, Share, Turn and Talk, and Admit/Exit Tickets. Some examples of protocols to check for understanding include Equity Sticks, Fist to Five, and Guided Practice. Some protocols for building academic vocabulary include Semantic Webbing, Word Sorts, and Frayer Models. The online curriculum materials provided by EL Education provides a comprehensive list of different educational protocols that can be used to engage and monitor student understanding.56
Varied Learning Modalities
More recently, the widely accepted idea of learning styles has been challenged to be thought of as a matrix as opposed to being fixed.57 Visual, auditory, reading, writing, and kinesthetic are terms that used to commonly be used to describe learners and their styles, however this unit adopts the theory that human beings can typically switch between these modalities to learn. This unit will present instructional opportunities that allow students to engage using more than one modality. The use of videos, literature, music, and movement will invite students to draw on all of the ways we learn as human beings.
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