Transform learning experiences to honor student experiences.
Dr. Dolly Chugh came up with an illustrative example that might well be the analogy of the decade when, in 2016, she described implicit bias using a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“I somehow know that if you say ‘peanut butter,’ I’m gonna say ‘jelly,’” she explained in a video for The New York Times. “That’s an association that’s been ingrained in me because, throughout my life, peanut butter and jelly are together.”
The same forces are at play should one hear “poor” and think “lazy,” or hear “American” and think “white.” While the peanut butter/jelly association might not be harmful, the others serve as ill-informed and overly reductive “shorthand” that drives something called “implicit bias.”
Teachers can combat implicit bias in the classroom with culturally responsive teaching—which is easy to agree with but harder to implement. One tangible way to bring it to life is to use The Hope Wheel to design classroom tasks.
And that’s where culturally responsive teaching comes in.
What is culturally responsive teaching?
Culturally Responsive Teaching (the original “CRT”) is a practice that actively draws on students’ cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives to inform and enhance instruction. Coined by Dr. Geneva Gay in 2000, culturally responsive teaching places students’ identities in the driver’s seat of their learning.
Culturally responsive teaching falls under the umbrella of asset-based pedagogies, meaning it believes that students naturally add value (as assets) to their educational experience. When educators honor students’ unique backgrounds and experiences—that is, when educators are culturally responsive—they seek to understand their students’ unique identities, values, traditions, perspectives, and communication styles.
Landing the plane
Many educators get stuck in the 30,000-foot view of culturally responsive teaching. They engage in lofty conversations about the soundness of the theory and the righteousness of the practice. Those conversations are good, but they happen in finite chunks—often in meetings that end without actionable next steps.
So, how can you land the plane in your next conversation about culturally responsive teaching? Design culturally responsive tasks as part of student learning.
Generally speaking, a task is a complex problem or set of problems designed to engage students in exploring a specific idea. This problem (or set of problems) builds on students' current level of understanding to promote reasoning, problem-solving, and discourse.
Creating a culturally relevant task is more than asking students to consider a concept from a different perspective—though that can certainly be part of it. To better understand the contours of culturally relevant tasks, let’s examine one of the best tools out there for designing them: The Hope WheelTM.
What is the Hope Wheel?
Originally created in 2019 by Inspiremath founder Dr. Lou Edward Matthews, the Hope Wheel was introduced to a broader audience in the book Engaging in Culturally Relevant Math Tasks, K-5 that Dr. Matthews co-wrote with educators Dr. Shelly M. Jones, and Dr. Yolanda A. Parker.
The Hope Wheel is meant to challenge and extend the thinking around lesson planning that has persisted for the last several decades. Educators can use the Hope Wheel to create engaging and complex lessons reimagined for social justice and cultural inquiry. In the same way that an educator may refer to Bloom’s taxonomy to create a lesson aligned with higher-order thinking, the Hope Wheel is meant to help teachers redefine the intentions of their instruction for culturally relevant experiences.
Each section of the Hope Wheel is meant to cultivate student hope and joy through correlating verbs. For example, the Inspire section is often paired with the verbs move, empower, model, and encourage. Meanwhile, the Restore section often inspires the verbs salvage, apologize, repair, illuminate, amplify, and forgive.
How to use the Hope Wheel
Using these verbs as a starting point, teachers should consider how their lesson objectives can draw on their students' cultural assets to move, empower, model, or encourage them.
The Hope Wheel can help transform tasks that are cognitively demanding into ones that advance both scholastic capacity and emotional intelligence. These kinds of tasks require students to examine the structure and assumptions of self, community, and the world and ask that they examine conditions of opportunity, justice, suffering, and inequity. Such tasks exist across the content areas.
Transform a basic task into one that is more engaging, relevant, and empowering for diverse students with the following steps:
Developing
Includes all aspects of "Emerging," plus:
Exemplary
Includes all aspects of "Developing," plus:
Transforming a geometry problem
An excellent example of using hope to inspire culturally responsive tasks comes from a geometry teacher who was preparing a lesson on tessellation.
Her original task asked students to analyze a pattern of hexagonal figures and determine the perimeter of the 25th figure in the sequence without drawing all 25 figures.
While cognitively demanding, this task was not culturally responsive until the teacher reframed it as follows:
The octagonal designs in The Alhambra in Spain show various growth patterns in the tessellations. Each figure below demonstrates one such pattern that can be made with octagons. The first 3 figures represent sections of the complete tessellation. What would be the 4th figure (stage) of the pattern in this tessellation? What would the 20th figure be? Develop an explicit rule for any stage of the pattern in this tessellation.
To make this task more culturally relevant, this teacher relied on the Create element of the Hope Wheel by framing it as a culturally relevant one and creating a mirror/window device for all of her students.
This teacher explained that she had a Muslim student in class who was rather withdrawn and wary of participating in class. The teacher explained: “I wanted to address her power/participation and math identity as well as create a window for other students to learn about her culture.” She added: “[The task] empowers students to learn more about their community by looking for geometric patterns in our surroundings.”
By engaging with the Hope Wheel, this teacher created a task acknowledging her students' identities as assets for all. What a powerful way to potentially rewire other students’ associations with Islam.
Using the Hope Wheel across content areas
While the Hope Wheel was originally designed for math, it can (and should) be applied across grades and content areas. Here are a few ideas for what this could look like in different subject verticals:
There are so many more ways that educators across content areas can transform tasks into culturally responsive and engaging experiences for their students. Use The Hope Wheel to initiate departmental discussions and iterate tasks that make students feel truly seen.
Empower students through culturally responsive tasks
Creating culturally responsive tasks can take some practice, but it is one of the single best ways to create an inclusive classroom where all students feel valued. Students in culturally responsive schools are viewed as true value-adds to their learning environment and their peers. The profound dignity and pride imparted to students through the culturally responsive mindset create ideal conditions for productive struggle and concept mastery.
Going forward, how will you honor (or continue to honor) the whole child before you?
Learn more about creating culturally responsive tasks for math and literacy by following the links below.
Special thanks to Dr. Lou Edward Matthews and Albert Madrigal for their help in informing this piece.
Kelly joined Carnegie Learning in 2023, bringing a decade of diverse educational experience. Her career includes one year as a high school Dean of Students and nine years teaching French at secondary and post-secondary levels. An AP French exam reader in 2017 and 2020, Kelly holds ACTFL OPI certification and is versed in various world language pedagogies, including TPRS and Organic World Language (OWL). She taught using Carnegie Learning's T'es Branché? curriculum for six years. As a content writer, Kelly is dedicated to highlighting educator experiences and empowering teachers to enhance student outcomes nationwide.
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