She is a former writing teacher and has been consulting with school districts and non-profit organizations around issues of equity, literacy, and culturally responsive teaching for the past 20 years.
You can read our full interview below. Students were breaking down and crying when we would discuss their writing, which made me realize that they were not feeling confident as learners, particularly as writers.
So my goal became to help them recapture a sense of confidence through learning more robustly. That is, when their writing improved their competence , their natural confidence started to come back. I began to see the connection between accepting students as who they are, understanding how they process information, and turning that into a scaffolded approach. When these two things work together, students learn content in a deeper way.
I routinely saw a disconnect in how teachers wanted to close achievement gaps but were still only focused on covering the content rather than helping the learner process information. This is one of the core ideas in my approach to culturally responsive teaching.
A lot of teachers want student engagement and look to culturally responsive teaching as a tool for engagement; yet, they continue to teach in the same way where they are doing most of the processing.
