While reading the required reads this week one main question kept popping up in my head. How do we get all teachers to be culturally responsive teachers? What makes one teacher be really successful at it and another not? In chapter 2 “ White Male Teacher, Diverse Urban School” of H. Richard Milner’s book, Mr. Hall was a new science teacher at a diverse urban school middle school. Mr. Hall realized that he was not making the connections with his students that would lead to a positive atmosphere in the classroom and help to teach the curriculum in a more culturally diverse way. Mr. Hall worked to connect with students and really get to know them so he could be more successful in the classroom, and impact the students. Mr. Hall needed to “get his students to understand that they were on the same team. To build such trusting relationships, he and his students had to learn to share aspects of their lives” (53). Considering not every teacher is going to be able to connect with students the way Mr. Hall did, there are still other ways it just takes some creativity. I have been volunteering at an all girl pregnant and parenting high school for a little over a semester now and have been lucky enough to work with a teacher that in my opinion is a culturally responsive teacher. The teacher does not see the students as a group of teenage girls that are pregnant but rather a group of very diverse girls that she has connected with. You can tell just by sitting in on our classroom for a short period of time that the teacher knows each and every girl and that they trust her. I feel that because she has this connection with each girl it helps make her curriculum she is teaching that much more credible. On of the many things she does to make her a culturally responsive teacher is greet each student that walks in the classroom. For example she will ask how baby blank doing today? How did work go for you last night? She knows that girls so well that asking how little activities the girls do outside of school went goes a long way. The girls can tell that the teacher truly does care about them and wants them to succeed. If all teachers could be like this, I think students would be more successful.
On a different note in the book, “Multiplication is for White People” a statement that really stuck out to me is, “ What we call basic skills are only “basic” because they are on aspect of the cultural capital of the middle class” (53). I have never thought about how every culture has a different basic set of skills that their parents, siblings, or family members teach them when they are growing up. Some families will teach their kid to tie their shoes, while others with teach their child the alphabet, and another will maybe learn to take care of a baby. Every culture is different and I believe this is something that should be taken into consideration when students start school. This is part of being a culturally responsive teacher. When a student starts kindergarten teachers should not just assume every student knows the alphabet, or that every student went to preschool before kindergarten. By doing this the students that learned a different basic set of skills will already be considered behind and this will only get worse as they get farther into schooling. This is part of the reason we need culturally responsive teachers to connect with each student, and celebrate what they do know rather than what they don’t know. If we could teach teachers to be culturally responsive I believe students would like coming to school more seeing that their teachers truly care about them.