Guiding culturally responsive teaching in today’s classrooms

Key points:

Equity is a widely-used term in education today.

However, talking about equity is not the same as taking action to create more equitable learning environments that benefit today’s students. For equity to truly exist, educators need to be more culturally responsive in their teaching.

This is a major focus of our teacher certification program at City University of Seattle. We want our teacher candidates to teach with a culturally responsive lens. We want them to know how to support students from a variety of backgrounds. And, we want them to know what equity actually looks like in today’s K-12 classrooms.

So, how do we go about this?

Using video to create reflective teachers

Video reflection is a widely-used professional development method across many professions. Take social work, for example, where the training process is often filmed. Human interactions, such as body language or one’s tone, are then watched back and reflected upon to help social workers improve their practice.

This process of video reflection, in part, prompted us to use video to help our teacher candidates reflect on their own interactions with students as they work to improve their culturally responsive teaching.