Utilize Culturally Responsive Teaching

edCircuit note: Welda Simousek, an educational consultant who has worked with school districts and state education departments, wrote this guide in 2017 on using differentiated instruction as a route into culturally responsive teaching. Her guide is unchanged below. An update after it adds current data on teachers and students, what the research now says, and where the learning-styles advice has changed.

Working hand-in-hand with differentiated instruction

What do you do, as a teacher, when you have students in your classroom from many different cultures, and most of them are from a culture and background different from your own? After all, statistics show that most teachers are predominantly white and middle class (according to a study by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, more than 80 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in education awarded during the 2009-10 school year were to white students) while their students are not. The first thing that comes to mind is that you utilize culturally responsive teaching (or CRT for short). “But, I already differentiate,” you say. “Isn’t that the same thing?” Well, in many respects, the two go hand-in-hand.

Culturally responsive teaching (or CRT) is about recognizing students’ cultural displays of learning and meaning-making and responding with teaching moves that use cultural knowledge to connect what the student already knows to new concepts and content. Differentiated Instruction (or DI) is about differentiating the content, the process, the product, and the learning environment through students’ readiness, interest, or learning profile.

Viewing CRT Through the Lens of Differentiation

Let’s shift the conversation to looking at CRT through the lens of DI. The content can be differentiated to incorporate information from different cultures by something as simple as using stories or readings from different cultures about the same event or concept. For example, if you are teaching about World War II, you might have the students read the traditional textbook account, an account about the Navajo Code Talkers, an account about African-American troops and officers, an account about Japanese internment camps, an account about the German-American Bunds, and an account about Mexican American participation. You could allow students to pick their own account about the war and then have group conversations where students share information from their accounts. In fact, they could use the differentiated “process” of a jigsaw for their conversations.

The process can be differentiated through a cultural lens by varying the techniques you use along various continuums such as:

• Individualistic…………..Collectivist
• Competitive……………..Collaborative
• Observant………………..Trying out or testing ideas
• On-demand response……………….Reflective response

For example, you could give students a “tic-tac-toe” or “think-tac-toe” board where they pick three adjacent activities that are varied by the above continuums. So, one choice might be to do research on the various cultures’ participation and life influences during World War II; another choice might be to work with a small group on putting together a skit about three different cultures’ perspectives of the war on their lives.

I think you can imagine some different choices for the product area. Students can choose to develop a product demonstrating their knowledge in a mode that also has something to do with their culture.

A Learning Environment of Belonging and Safety

The learning environment is the key piece in this comparison of CRT and DI. It is crucial that the learning environment creates a feeling of belonging and safety for all learners. That means that each learner feels that her/his culture and background is reflected and accepted there. Some of the things that can be done to make sure the learning environment supports both CRT and DI are:

• Individual differences are accepted as natural and positive.
• Each student feels that the teacher respects and supports their possibilities.
• A range of resources are available.
• Flexible student grouping is used to accommodate times for individual, pair, and small group work.
• Students learn to respect and support one another as learners.

The content, process, product, and learning environment can all be varied through the students’ readiness, interest, and learning profile.

Differentiating by Interest and Learning Profile

Differentiating through students’ interest gives many opportunities to respond to and include the study of various cultures represented by the students in a particular classroom. First, you need to set up the parameters for the particular unit of study, including the major concepts to be studied. Then, as students are exposed to the various concepts under study, they can pick a “sidebar” investigation that fits with their interests and/or cultures. Carol Ann Tomlinson, an expert in differentiation, suggests that these sidebar investigations should go on throughout the unit, sometimes as class time work, sometimes as homework, and sometimes as work they could do when they have finished their daily work. Other avenues to have students explore their interests and/or cultures would be to develop interest centers or interest groups or “specialty teams” that look at a particular aspect of what they’re learning (and then share their knowledge from their group work with the whole class.)

Finally, CRT and DI can work hand-in-hand through the variance of student learning profiles. This area is so crucial because of the different styles and cultures that teachers have from their students. As was mentioned earlier, it is the norm for teachers to be of a different cultural background than their students. This makes it imperative to create experiences in the classroom that allow for a wide variety of learning profiles (many of which will be different from your learning profile as a teacher).

For example, according to Carol Ann Tomlinson, you can vary the group orientation, the cognitive style, the learning environment, and the intelligence preference. This means you can respond to the various continuums mentioned under the process area above:

• GROUP ORIENTATION:
  • Independent
  • Group
  • Adult
  • Combination
• COGNITIVE STYLE:
  • Creative or conforming
  • Big picture (whole)
  • Parts or details/facts
  • Outspoken or reflective
  • Linear/nonlinear
  • Group achievement/personal achievement
  • Auditory, visual, or kinesthetic
  • People-oriented or task-oriented
  • Etc.
• LEARNING ENVIRONMENT:
  • Quiet or noisy
  • Busy/cluttered or lean on objects/displays
  • Still or mobile
  • Etc.
• INTELLIGENCE PREFERENCE:
  • Could be one of the many intelligences mentioned by Howard Gardner (from verbal/linguistic to interpersonal, intrapersonal, etc.)
  • Could be one of the three orientations mentioned by Robert Sternberg (analytical, creative, or practical)

These preferences are also affected by culture and gender. So, there are so many choices that you as a teacher have to just center on a few to begin with and work outwards from there. You might begin by presenting your information to your students through auditory, visual, and kinesthetic means. You might even use something like a “Menu for Success” which allows students four different ways to explore a particular concept and allows for students to choose whether they work more effectively alone or with a peer.

Therefore, go ahead and differentiate for your students, but differentiate with cultural responsiveness in mind. In that way, you will meet the needs of most of your students, and engage all of them in learning. Most of all, be sure you teach in a variety of ways, and not just in the way you learn best.

1. ASCD – A Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching
2. Memphis Daily News  – Local Teachers Receive Training in ‘Culturally Responsive’ Teaching
3. Washington Post – Teacher: A one-size-fits-all approach to instruction is stifling our classrooms

Culturally responsive teaching in 2026: strategies, evidence and the learning-styles question

Culturally responsive teaching, often called culturally responsive pedagogy, asks teachers to treat what students bring from home and community as material for learning rather than as background noise. The gap Simousek describes between teachers and students remains. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 80 percent of public school teachers were White in 2020-21, with 9 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Black, while 44 percent of public school students were White in fall 2022, with 29 percent Hispanic and 15 percent Black. The teaching workforce, in other words, is far less diverse than the students it serves, which is the situation her guide was written for.

What the research can and cannot tell schools

School leaders choosing a culturally responsive approach should know how thin the rigorous evidence still is. A widely cited review of 179 peer-reviewed studies of culturally responsive interventions in K-12 schools, published from 1998 to 2014, found that only two measured effects on student outcomes and none established cause and effect, as New America’s Jenny Muñiz explained in 2018. That matters for funding: the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) sorts programs into evidence tiers, and some funds, including Title I school improvement money, are limited to programs in the top three tiers.

Measurement is part of the problem. A 2023 systematic review in the Review of Educational Research by Franco, Bottiani and Bradshaw identified 27 instruments for measuring culturally responsive classroom practice. Most were teacher self-report surveys, few used student reports or outside observers, and the authors judged the evidence for using most of them to be generally insufficient. A school that relies only on teachers rating themselves will learn little about what students experience.

The strongest causal evidence comes from a related approach. In San Francisco, ninth graders with a grade point average of 2.0 or below were automatically enrolled in an ethnic studies course, a rule that gave researchers a way to estimate the course’s effect. A study by Sade Bonilla, Thomas Dee and Emily Penner, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021 and based on records of nearly 1,400 students, found that taking the course substantially increased attendance, high school graduation and the likelihood of enrolling in college. The result comes from one course in one district, taught to academically struggling students, so it shows what a well-supported program can do rather than what any culturally responsive lesson will do.

An update on learning styles

Simousek’s section on learning profiles lists auditory, visual and kinesthetic styles, a framework that was common in 2017. Research since then has tested whether matching instruction to a student’s preferred style improves learning. A 2024 meta-analysis by Virginia Clinton-Lisell and Christine Litzinger pooled 21 studies with 1,712 participants and found a small overall benefit, but only 26 percent of outcome measures showed the pattern the matching idea requires, in which each style group does best with its own kind of instruction. The authors judged the benefits too small and too infrequent to justify the time and cost of matching, and suggested that teaching through several modes may be the better choice. That is close to the advice Simousek ends with: teach in a variety of ways, and not only in the way the teacher learns best, while leaving aside the practice of sorting students into fixed style categories.

Culturally responsive teaching strategies that hold up

• Use several accounts of the same event or idea, as in her World War II example, and have students compare them. This builds both content knowledge and the habit of weighing sources.
• Vary how students work, between individual and collaborative tasks and between quick and reflective responses, so no single cultural norm for participation decides who succeeds.
• Give real choice in products and side investigations, tied to the unit’s core concepts, so students can bring their own communities into the work.
• Build belonging deliberately. The classroom conditions she lists, including respect for differences, flexible grouping and students supporting one another, apply in every subject.
• Ask students. Short student surveys and observation by colleagues give a truer picture of practice than self-assessment alone.
• Expect the same standards for everyone. Cultural responsiveness changes the route into rigorous content, not the destination.

For district leaders, the practical conclusion is to treat culturally responsive teaching as a set of instructional practices to be observed and evaluated locally, with clear measures of student engagement and achievement, rather than as a purchased program with a guaranteed effect.

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