Who's In My Classroom?. Tim Fredrick
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To address students’ physical needs, look at whether the school is providing opportunities for movement throughout the day. As you have probably noticed, most professional development workshops include activities where participants get up and move because long periods of sitting makes many adults antsy. Yet movement is seldom worked into lessons with adolescents, with predictable consequences. Schools should review school discipline statistics to determine if discipline referrals are triggered by students getting out of their seats or moving in their seats in ways that distract other students. This could indicate that their physical needs are not being met.
To support students’ social and emotional needs, school administrators and school personnel should assess well how their curriculum currently includes lessons that build social and emotional skills in ways that align with state-level benchmarks such as the New York State Social and Emotional Learning Benchmarks (NYSED, 2018). For example, to support the development of social awareness and relationship skills they should also reflect on whether students have appropriate opportunities for peer-based activities in which students must work together to achieve a common goal. In classes like English and social studies, teachers can help students identify and name the social and emotional elements inherent in character development or political conflicts, for example.
Of course, having staff model social and emotional skills is even more powerful than teaching them. Successful schools also ensure that school personnel learn the language of SEL competencies and learn to recognize their own strengths and challenges in relation to those competencies. The Youth Communication website, https://www.youthcomm.org/curriculum-training/#curricula, has SEL resources and professional development that are designed to strengthen students’ and staff members’ SEL skills for grades 6 to 12.
2. Establish norms and expectations regarding the use of developmentally and culturally responsive teaching practices.
To foster a school community that aims to support students’ developmental needs in culturally responsive ways, schools do better when they establish instructional norms and expectations that serve as the foundation for instructional planning and delivery. One way that I have been able to assist these efforts is through working with school administrators and teachers to create guiding questions documents that align with developmentally and culturally responsive teaching. The questions can help schools codify their expectations regarding instructional planning and make them transparent. For example, answering these questions can help teachers design more DCRT-responsive lessons:
What real-world connections do you intend to develop during your lesson?
How does your knowledge of your students inform your instructional planning?
What opportunities for movement will you include in your lesson?
What opportunities for interpersonal interactions will you provide to your students?
What strategies will you use to ensure that all students are engaged in the lesson?
How will you differentiate and diversify your assessments so that they are responsive to the needs of diverse learners?
3. Provide professional learning opportunities for teachers to support the use of developmentally and culturally responsive teaching skills.
It's also critical that schools provide opportunities for teachers to enhance their skills in teaching in a developmentally and culturally responsive way. For example, Youth Communication provides professional development based on stories like those by the teens featured in this book. The stories include students’ out-of-school experiences that show their strengths and provide context for many student behaviors. In addition, when teachers talk among themselves about the stories and their reactions to them, they learn more about their colleagues and about themselves. Youth Communication's curricula also help them to recognize and strengthen SEL competencies in themselves and in their students.
Another often overlooked teacher-to-teacher professional support is intervisitation (when teachers visit a colleague's classroom and observe their teaching). Every school I support has created wonderful examples of impactful teaching practices that often go unnoticed. While formal professional development opportunities can be deeply effective, the opportunity for teachers to observe colleagues and sometimes even teach students they have in common can be far more effective. Drawing on the same guiding questions document, school administrators can focus the intervisitations so that teachers are addressing a specific aspect of developmentally and culturally responsive instruction such as observing how their colleagues provide students with opportunities for movement or the “real-world” connections that they make throughout the lesson.
Notes
1 1 Ladson-Billings 1994; Rogoff 1990; Nieto 2001.
2 2 Goffin 1996; Heisner and Lederberg 2011.
3 3 Bredekamp and Copple 1997.
4 4 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, DHHS 2007, p. 33.
5 5 NCATE 2010, p. 2.
6 6 Bredekamp 1995; Comer and Maholmes 1999; Wilson, Floden, and Ferrini-Mundy 2002.
7 7 Elkind 1967.
8 8 Mayford, Siegelbaum, and Kandel 2012.
9 9 Hammond 2014.
10 10 Bronfenbrenner 1979.
11 11 Arnett, Chapin, and Brownlow 2018; Cole and Packer 2019.
12 12 Slaughter-Defoe, Nahagawa, Takianishi, and Johnson 1990; Keller 2017.
13 13 Tudge 2008, p. 147.
14 14 Tharp and Gallimore 1988.
15 15 Ibid.
16 16 Gay 2000; Ladson-Billings 1994.
17 17 Nieto 2005.
18 18 Hollins and Spencer 1990.
19 19 Howard 2010.
20 20 Brown 2007; Warren 2018.
21 21 Greenfield, Keller, Fuligni, and Maynard 2003; Nielsen, Haun, Kärtner, and Legare 2017.