Mod 17 Discussion: Culturally Responsive Teaching

Resource: Cultural Conversations Through Creative Writing

1. Positive Perspectives on Parents and Families: By connecting student's identity with where they come from it allows them to share their past and culture by reinforcing the positive aspects of it and allowing them to show how they are similar to their peers.
2. Communicating High Expectations: The curriculum is clear about the expectations for each of the lessons provided and how to communicate those expectations to the students. It explains that production of work is required, but that it can take many forms.
3. Learning Within the Context of Culture: The three lessons provided in the curriculum off a variety of differentiated approaches to writing about culture. 
4. Student-Centered Instruction: Each lesson provides a prompt and some text, but allows the student to choose how they respond in writing - poetry, essay, free prose, etc. - as long as they write something that answers the prompt to the best of their ability.
5. Culturally Mediated Instruction: By sharing their responses to the prompt and discussing in small group or as a whole, students are able to understand the different view points and experiences of their peers.
6. Reshaping the Curriculum: This set of lessons is not in the prescribed curriculum. The gap that this curriculum fills would be that the students are connecting both themselves to their culture via writing, but also their peer's culture via their writing.
7. Teacher as Facilitator: In this style of lesson - writing workshop - the teacher is there to direct students when needed, but not to drive them all to the same exact answer.