Culturally Responsive Teaching!!! How Should An Educator Reflect On It? What About Dependent Vs Independent Learners? Individualism Vs Collectivism? DEI Coordinator Michelle Cureton Elaborates!

The Best Paragraph I've Read: When the brain encounters information, especially during the act of reading and learning, it's searching for and making connections to what is personally relevant and meaningful.  What is relevant and meaningful to an individual is based on his or her cultural frame of reference.  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 what are considered acts of high intellectual processing such as conceptualizing, reasoning, or theorizing. Unfortunately, teachers are too often unaware of the fact that the connections they choose to assist students in understanding concepts being taught are in fact "cultural," reflective of the lived, familiar experiences of students who are not students of color, leaving students of color in a state of disconnect, and often a deep sense of frustration.  As much as they search to find the relevance that would enable them to be engaged and make meaning, they are unable, so their innate ability for high levels of cognitive processing is inhibited... ... ... Cultural responsiveness is not a practice; it's what informs our practice so we can make better teaching choices for eliciting, engaging, motivating, supporting, and expanding the intellectual capacity of ALL our students.   These paragraphs comes from the book Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain.  The book is written by Zaretta Hammond.  You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Culturally-Responsive-Teaching-Brain-Linguistically/dp/1483308014/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=culturally+responsive+teaching+and+the+brain&qid=1646875792&sprefix=culturally%2Caps%2C168&sr=8-1 Diversity Equity and Inclusion Coordinator Michelle Cureton joins Zac and Don.  They discuss some of the key ideas in Ms. Hammond's book including what it means to be a culturally responsive teacher.   If you have questions or would like to contact Michelle here is her email address: [email protected]