3 Ways to Build More Culturally Responsive Teaching in ELA

Reading these words was a major aha! moment for me. 

As a person of color, I often felt ignored and unheard as a student. My hand was never seen and my experiences weren't acknowledged. I wanted to be that teacher who invited everyone to the table on their own terms. 

I wanted to be culturally responsive. And after 15 years as an ELA teacher, it’s something I’m still working on.

What is culturally responsive teaching?

Building off of Ladson-Billings’ work, Zaretta Hammond defines culturally responsive pedagogy in the following way:

“The practice of recognizing students’ cultural displays of learning and meaning making and responding positively and constructively with teaching moves that use cultural knowledge as a scaffold to connect what the student knows to new concepts and content in order to promote effective information processing.”

Culturally responsive pedagogy views students’ backgrounds, knowledge, and experiences as assets to build on, not deficits. Educators should consider students’ cultures and histories when building curriculum. They should also actively involve students in creating shared classroom experiences. When this happens, ALL students learn that they deserve to be seen, heard, and valued.

Neuroscience 101: Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain 

When students feel the type of belonging that culturally responsive pedagogy fosters, they invest in that space. They feel the desire to protect it through participation and critical examination. According to Dr. Yvette Jackson, “Finding cultural relevance and personal connections give us perspective, engages our attention, and assists us in interpreting and inferring meaning, enabling the depth of understanding and interest needed for high intellectual processing.”

This is neuroscience 101. The brain looks for patterns and connections to make meaning of content or tasks. When instruction meaningfully guides students into making these connections, learning increases.

When there is a lack of connection, the brain purges this information as irrelevant or not useful. Also, when we feel we don’t belong, our brains naturally monitor for threats. This leaves us fewer cognitive resources for higher-order thinking.

How Do I Make My ELA Classroom More Culturally Responsive? 

Building a more culturally responsive ELA classroom won’t happen overnight. So, where can you start? 

With your students. 

In New America’s eight competencies for developing a culturally responsive classroom, one of the most important is “Draw on students’ cultures to shape curriculum and instruction.” Forty-six states have this tenet as part of their teaching standards. Creating a student-centered learning environment is most effective for student growth in the ELA classroom and beyond. 

I won’t promise that listening to your students will prevent you from ever being culturally insensitive again. You will be. But placing students center stage goes a long way in gaining their trust. This also helps build the type of community where students can take risks while learning skills and concepts relevant to their lives.

Listening to your students will help you build an ELA curriculum that validates and challenges them. Such a curriculum will allow them to explore both themselves and their differences from others. You’ll also be better able to build activities and assessments that measure student learning in its many forms.

So, what are some concrete ways you can center students to build a more culturally responsive ELA classroom? Here are three strategies I’ve used. They worked for me, and I hope they’ll work for you too. 

1. Invite students to weigh in on classroom policies

When I taught twelfth grade in Philadelphia, I started the school year by listing classroom rules and expectations. Students knew they were expected to agree to my terms without question. 

As I gazed over the top of my syllabus, I began to notice my students' visible boredom and disengagement. So I decided to ask them how they felt about the rules. Some shrugged their shoulders and remained silent, but others began to share their thoughts. 

As they discussed the classroom rules, I saw how their cultures, past experiences, and insecurities affected their feelings. It became clear that I needed to invite them to make modifications to the list of rules. While we weren’t going to allow misbehavior, we decided our guidelines could be more flexible. This way, class rules could accommodate a larger, more diverse group of students.

One change I made was to allow students to stand up if they needed a reprieve from the uncomfortable chairs in my classroom.

This simple change made all the difference. Students felt respected when they saw that I trusted them to manage their own bodily needs. My more active or restless students could dispel some of the excess energy that often stood in the way of learning. My sleepier students, who often held part-time jobs, could keep themselves awake.

Students began to view me as a partner in their learning, not a dictator passing down decrees.

This experience taught me that you can set the tone in your classroom from the get-go by inviting student input. The Derek Bok Center is a good resource for helping your students establish group agreements. These empower them to bring their whole selves to class while facilitating a respectful shared space.  

2. Discuss, discuss, discuss!

Another way to make your classroom more student-centered is to invite all students to participate in classroom conversations. 

As an ELA teacher, you’re probably already facilitating discussions. But what do you do when some students fall in the background as more vocal students overtake conversations? The act of discussion itself is a culturally loaded practice. Some cultures encourage children and adolescents to share their thoughts freely and regularly, and other cultures discourage this. 

It’s a good idea to acknowledge this fact with your students. You can then explain that discussion is essential for exploring ideas, learning from each other, and building community. While everyone has a different comfort level with discussions, improving conversational skills is something you can work on together. 

Start by holding regular, short, low-stakes discussions. You can also do plenty of small group discussions. These give students strategies for entering discussions, and show them how to invite quieter peers into conversations supportively.

Lastly, you’ll want to emphasize the importance of everyone's participation in discussions. Every culturally specific voice enriches the thinking of the entire class.  

In my experience, even after you present this information, some students will remain silent. It’s up to you to design discussion activities that require every student to speak. Help them by starting small with highly structured, low-pressure activities.

Here’s an activity I adopted from my work with The National Writing Project. It invites every student to read the same text and share something that stands out to them. When everyone knows they're required to share, discussion becomes the norm. That way, no one feels singled out.

Having a variety of responses emphasizes that we all approach literature through our own identities and experiences. Our different perspectives are valuable and worth thinking more about. 

Here is the activity:  

1. Students read a short selection twice. 

2. I always read it aloud and had students follow along the first time. I told my students not to look for anything in particular. Instead, I wanted them to get oriented to the plot, characters, themes, etc., and to note their reactions.  

3. The second time, students read the selection silently or with a partner. This time, I would ask them to highlight a word and a sentence that stood out to them.

4. One by one, students read their sentences aloud without comment or explanation. In a second go-round, they read their words. Students would likely note that some of them selected the same word or sentence, but they also noticed that responses varied.

The beauty of this activity is that students can connect personally with a piece of literature. They can then share that connection with others. It also allows every student to recognize the similarities and differences that exist in a classroom.

After this icebreaker, you can encourage students to discuss why they chose the words and sentences they chose. This facilitates text-based analysis explicitly filtered through personal experience.  

Once you’ve modeled simple discussion starters such as this one, you can include your students in more of the planning. Ask them to develop discussion activities that empower and engage them. Let them lead conversations, pose questions, take informal polls, and point to passages they would like to discuss.

When students decide what aspects of a text they want and need to talk about, they engage in high-level thinking. They also take responsibility for their own learning, and bring all of themselves to the experience. 

This is cultural responsiveness at its finest.   

3. Put Students Center Stage with Project-Based Learning

Project-based learning is another way to place students at the center of their learning. It took me a while to employ large-scale project-based learning. I was initially nervous that administrators and caregivers wouldn’t think it was as “rigorous” as assigning essays. After my first attempt, however, I knew that the learning students were doing was deep, meaningful, and connected to their lives. 

For years, I read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with my high schoolers. For years, the final project was a seven-to-ten-page essay analyzing a theme from the novel. As the years went by, I began to wonder how much of this work really helped students grow and become change-makers.

How much were they expressing thoughts from their own culturally-specific lenses? Or were they just rehashing what we had discussed in class?

Determined to try something new, I invited my students to choose a theme from the novel. Then, individually or in groups, they'd create a project that would educate and create change.

Students built their projects using an inquiry-based process, and the first task was to create a thoughtful theme-based question. This question helped to center and guide their work.

One of the strongest projects came from a group that began with the theme of curiosity. They specifically cited how Scout and her playmates spent the whole novel wondering about Boo Radley. From there, they started questioning how teachers might cultivate similar curiosity in their students. They ultimately landed on the question: “What will make reading in school more exciting for students?”  

From there, and with minimal guidance from me, they essentially started listing the tenets of culturally responsive teaching. They specifically noted that students need to learn in terms they understand and have a say in how they demonstrate their knowledge. Like Scout, these students were hungry for information but wanted to process and apply it in ways that spoke to them.  

I was blown away, not least because several students were receiving special education services for low reading levels. They often felt overlooked and disengaged. Their chosen topic? Ways to make learning accessible for kids who have been historically and systemically left out of classroom practices. 

Culturally responsive spaces invite students who may seem unable to meet standards to demonstrate their understanding. These students are engaged. They are empowered.

They developed a three-part event that invited classmates to recommend readings and exchange ideas. Some students shared their interpretation of something they’d read that moved them. Others wrote and shared their own poetry, music, or artwork (I still have one of these pieces as the cover of my binder). There was even a small group that presented a dramatic “Where are they now?” segment about the characters from a story they enjoyed.

Since I was the head of the theater department, I invited students to use the auditorium for these meetings. Once word about them spread, the meeting size quickly doubled! 

Students were encouraged to select themes that mattered to them. They crafted their own exploratory questions and shared art and literature that spoke to them. They showed up fully for every facet of the assignment. They learned how to work collectively, how to build on their prior experiences, and how to use art to create change.

These projects proved so powerful that I repeated them in subsequent years. I also found ways to work more inquiry-based project learning into my curriculum.   

Change Only Happens When Everyone’s at the Table