Culturally Responsive Teaching And The Brain Quotes

One of the goals of education is not simply to fill students with facts and information but to help them learn how to learn.

We routinely put the less experienced teachers with the neediest students. No other profession does this. A challenging medical case gets the attention of top specialists and skilled surgeons. It would be considered malpractice to put someone unskilled or new to the profession on a complicated medical case. Yet, in education, we subject our neediest dependent learners to inadequate instruction given their needs, or we allow them to lose valuable instructional time because of questionable discipline practices.

The old adage we usually hear is that “practice makes perfect.” Based on what we know about neuroplasticity and deliberate practice, we should rephrase that to read, “practice makes permanent.” As you organize yourself for this self-reflective prep work, remember that it is not about being perfect but about creating new neural pathways that shift your default cultural programming as you grow in awareness and skill.

Culture, it turns out, is the way that every brain makes sense of the world. That is why everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, has a culture. Think of culture as software for the brain’s hardware. The brain uses cultural information to turn everyday happenings into meaningful events. If we want to help dependent learners do more higher order thinking and problem solving, then we have to access their brain’s cognitive structures to deliver culturally responsive instruction.

Attention drives learning. Neuroscience reminds us that before we can be motivated to learn what is in front of us, we must pay attention to it.

Culture guides how we process information. Cultures with a strong oral tradition rely heavily on the brain’s memory and social engagement systems to process new learning. Learning will be more effective if processed using the common cultural learning aids—stories, music, and repetition.

In culturally responsive teaching, rapport is connected to the idea of affirmation. Affirmation simply means that we acknowledge the personhood of our students through words and actions that say to them, “I care about you.” Too often, we confuse affirmation with building up a student’s self-esteem. As educators, we think it’s our job to make students of color, English learners, or poor students feel good about themselves. That’s a deficit view of affirmation. In reality, most parents of culturally and linguistically diverse students do a good job of helping their children develop positive self-esteem. It is when they come to school that many students of color begin to feel marginalized, unseen, and silenced.

instructional conversation, the kind of talk that acts like a mental blender, mixing together new material with existing knowledge in a student’s schema. Using discussion protocols like World Café, Four on a Pencil, and Give One Get One help create variety in the ways students talk to each other in the classroom, offering a chance to both work collaboratively and have their individual voices heard.

educators, we have to recognize that we help maintain the achievement gap when we don’t teach advance cognitive skills to students we label as “disadvantaged” because of their language, gender, race, or socioeconomic status. Many children start school with small learning gaps, but as they progress through school, the gap between African American and Latino and White students grows because we don’t teach them how to be independent learners. Based on these labels, we usually do the following (Mean & Knapp, 1991): Underestimate what disadvantaged students are intellectually capable of doing As a result, we postpone more challenging and interesting work until we believe they have mastered “the basics” By focusing only on low-level basics, we deprive students of a meaningful or motivating context for learning and practicing higher order thinking processes

Positive relationships keep our safety-threat detection system in check. There is a reason that collectivist cultures focus on relationships. The brain is wired to scan continuously for social and physical threats, except when we are in positive relationships. The oxytocin positive relationships trigger helps the amygdala stay calm so the prefrontal cortex can focus on higher order thinking and learning. Just as you want to identify and remove things that create an emotionally unsafe environment, you have to also focus on building positive relationships that students recognize based on their cultural schema.

Microassaults involve misusing power and privilege in subtle ways to marginalize students and create different outcomes based on race or class. In the classroom, a microassault might look like giving a more severe punishment to a student of color than his White classmate who was engaged in the same behavior. Or it might look like overemphasizing military-like behavior management strategies for students of color. With younger children, it looks like excluding them from fun activities as punishment for minor infractions. Microinsults involve being insensitive to culturally and linguistically diverse students and trivializing their racial and cultural identity such as not learning to pronounce a student’s name or giving the student an anglicized name to make it easier on the teacher. Continually confusing two students of the same race and casually brushing it off as “they all look alike.” Microinvalidations involve actions that negate or nullify a person of color’s experiences or realities such as ignoring each student’s rich funds of knowledge. They are also expressed when we don’t want to acknowledge the realities of structural racialization or implicit bias. It takes the form of trivializing and dismissing students’ experiences, telling them they are being too sensitive or accusing them of “playing the race card.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the school-to-prison pipeline is a set of seemingly unconnected school policies and teacher instructional decisions that over time result in students of color not receiving adequate literacy and content instruction while being disproportionately disciplined for nonspecific, subjective offenses such as “defiance.” Students of color, especially African American and Latino boys, end up spending valuable instructional time in the office rather than in the classroom. Consequently, they fall further and further behind in reading achievement just as reading is becoming the primary tool they will need for taking in new content. Student frustration and shame at being labeled “a slow reader” and having low comprehension lead to more off-task behavior, which the teacher responds to by sending the student out of the classroom. Over time, many students of color are pushed out of school because they cannot keep up academically because of poor reading skills and a lack of social-emotional support to deal with their increasing frustration.

Damning documentation of LSD experimentation should not have been left in the hands of CIA Director Richard Helms. On January 31, 1973, one day before retiring from the CIA, Helms destroyed files on the fates of minds shattered over the previous ten years. Helms supported the mind-altering projects—Operation Chatter, Operation Bluebird/Artichoke, Operations Mknaomi, Mkultra and Mkdelta. By 1963, four years before Monterey Pop, the combined efforts of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, Army Intelligence and U.S. Chemical Corps launched covert operations that seemed necessary. U.S. agents were able to destroy any reputation by inducing hysteria or excessive emotional response, temporary or permanent insanity, encouraging suicide, erasing memory, inventing double or triple personalities inside one mind, prolonging lapses of memory, teaching racism and hatred against specific groups, causing subjects to obey instructions on the telephone or in person, hypnotically assuring that no memory remains of their assignments. The CIA has poison dart guns to kill from a distance, tranquilizers for pets so the household or neighborhood is not alerted by entry or exit. While pure LSD is typically 160 micrograms, the CIA issued 1,600 micrograms. Some of the LSD was administered to patients at Tulane University, who already had wired electrodes in their brain. Was insanity an occupational disease in the music industry? Or does this LSD, tested and described in Army documents, explain how a cultural happening that took place place in 1967-68 could be altered radically and halted?

First, we acknowledge the realities of inequity that impact students in and out of school. It could be acknowledging that students of color have historically been treated differently at school. Or it can mean that their culturally different ways of learning are often mistaken for intellectual deficits. Often in an effort to be color-blind, some teachers downplay or trivialize subtle but persistent microaggressions directed at culturally and linguistically diverse students on a daily basis. For students, these situations cause stress and emotional pain. As an ally, we have to let them know they are not crazy. Inequity is real.

It is instructive rather than evaluative. The feedback is focused on correcting some aspect of the student’s performance—a step in a procedure, a misconception, or information to be memorized. It isn’t advice or a grade but some actionable information that will help the student improve. It is important to know the difference between the three types of feedback because not all feedback is actionable. It is specific and in the right dose. Your feedback should focus on only one or two points. Don’t point out everything that needs adjusting. That’s overwhelming for a dependent learner and may actually confirm her belief that she is not capable. It is timely. Feedback needs to come while students are still mindful of the topic, assignment, or performance in question. It needs to come while they still think of the learning goal as a learning goal—that is, something they are still striving for, not something they already did. It is delivered in a low stress, supportive environment. The feedback has to be given in a way that doesn’t trigger anxiety for the student. This means building a classroom culture that celebrates the opportunity to get feedback and reframes errors as information. Making Feedback Culturally Responsive: Giving “Wise” Feedback For feedback to be effective, students must act on it.

This type of anxiety attack can also be a form of internalized oppression, whereby the student internalizes the negative social messages about his racial group, begins to believe them, and loses confidence. In the classroom, anxiety interferes with his academic performance by releasing the stress hormone cortisol, which in turns reduces the amount of working memory available to him to do complex cognitive work. It also inhibits the growth of the student’s intellective capacity.

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.

Culturally responsive teaching is also about empowerment and interrupting teaching practices that keep certain students dependent learners. We have to create the right instructional conditions that stimulate neuron growth and myelination by giving students work that is relevant and focused on problem solving.

Entrainment or the management of the body through the heart rather than brain leads to higher functioning mental and emotional states, as well as a healthier body.52 It also enables a person to screen the outer environment for “good messages” instead of “negative messages,” enabling a more positive relationship with the external world.53 This “heart healing power” is possible because of the energetic nature of the body. All energy contains information and all cells are energetic. The closer a group of cells, the more likely they are to oscillate or vibrate in a coordinated rhythm, thereby producing a more powerful and intense signal. Heart cells are tightly organized, thus generating an extremely strong, shared signal, which is both electrical and magnetic. The heart’s internal signal is stronger than any produced by other parts of the body because it is more intense. Thus can the heart dynamically move into the lead position in the body, its rhythms able to modulate or “take over” those of the other organs. What about its relationship with the external world? We are constantly receiving information—sometimes called “background noise”—from outside of ourselves. Not only can the heart override the incoming flow of communiqués, but it can also sort and filter information from the world outside of the body—even intuitive information. As explained by researcher Stephen Harrod Buhner in his book The Secret Teachings of Plants, highly synchronized cells, such as those compactly organized in the heart, are able to use background noise to increase the amplitude of an incoming signal—if they are interested in perceiving it.54 The heart will “hear” what it is programmed to “hear.” If love resides in the heart, it will attune to love. If fear, greed, or envy resides within, the heart will access negativity. Most people believe that the brain initiates the first response to incoming events and then orders our reactions. Analysis reveals, however, that incoming information first impacts the heart, and through the heart, the brain and then rest of the body.55 Our hearts are so strong that they can actually formulate the most well known symbol of love: light. Research has shown that under certain conditions, a meditator can actually generate visible light from the heart. The meditation technique must be heart-centered, not transcendent. When this occurred during studies at the University of Kassel in Germany in 1997, the heart emanated a sustained light of one hundred thousand photons per second, whereas the background had a count of only twenty photons per second. The meditations drew upon energetic understandings from several cultures, including the Hindu practice of kundalini.56 It has been said that the heart is the center of the body, but it might also be the core of a subtle universe—or perhaps a “subtle sun” generated by every individual.

That’s why it is so important for culturally responsive teachers to be well-versed in brain science and cultural understanding.

To empower dependent learners and help them become independent learners, the brain needs to be challenged and stretched beyond its comfort zone with cognitive routines and strategy.

Make a list of your assumptions, reactions, and interpretations of behaviors as the scenario replays. What specific thing did you react to? How did you interpret it? Based on what belief or assumption?

An educator’s ability to recognize students’ cultural displays of learning and meaning making and respond 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. All the while, the educator understands the importance of being in a relationship and having a social-emotional connection to the student in order to create a safe space for learning.

As educators, we think it’s our job to make students of color, English learners, or poor students feel good about themselves. That’s a deficit view of affirmation. In reality, most parents of culturally and linguistically diverse students do a good job of helping their children develop positive self-esteem. It is when they come to school that many students of color begin to feel marginalized, unseen, and silenced. Affirmation and rapport are really about building trust, not self-esteem.

It’s afraid that you will have to talk about sensitive issues such as race, racism, classism, sexism, or any other kind of “-ism.” It is afraid that this conversation will make you vulnerable and open to some type of emotional or physical attack. But this fear is not real. It is just your amygdala’s ploy to get you to stay in your comfort zone.

In culturally responsive teaching, relationships are as important as the curriculum. Geneva Gay, pioneer of culturally responsive pedagogy (2010) says positive relationships exemplified as “caring” are one of the major pillars of culturally responsive teaching.

Culture guides how we process information. Cultures with a strong oral tradition rely heavily on the brain’s memory and social engagement systems to process new learning. Learning will be more effective if processed using the common cultural learning aids—stories, music, and repetition. These elements help build neural pathways and activate myelination. They help neurons fire and wire together in ways that make learning “sticky.” Collectivist cultures use social interactions such as conversation and storytelling as learning aids. Because of society’s history of segregation and unequal educational opportunities, many communities of color continue to use the natural learning modalities in the home and community. As a result, their neural pathways are primed to learn using story, art, movement, and music.

Try on alternative explanations. Select one or two student reactions or interactions (what he said or did) and try to offer alternative explanations for the student’s behavior based on what you are learning about his deep cultural beliefs, norms, or practices.

Leverage technology and watch positive movies or television series that will allow you to virtually step into another cultural experience. Ask for recommendations.

Stop. This first step simply asks you to stop and pause rather than react in habitual ways. When you enter an interaction that feels challenging, work hard to stay open-minded. Open-mindedness means being open to other points of view, other ways of doing things, and staying open to changing your own view point. This might mean not allowing a certain cultural display such as a student’s animated verbal exchange trigger you. Observe. In the second step, check yourself. Don’t react to what is going on. Instead, take a breath. Use the 10-second rule. When the brain gets triggered, it takes stress hormones approximately 10 seconds to move through the body to the prefrontal cortex. In the pre-hijack stage, the biochemicals cortisol and adrenaline are just beginning to kick in. There is still some “wiggle room” to listen to your wiser self and begin using stress management techniques to interrupt the amygdala takeover effectively. Try to describe to yourself what is happening in neutral terms. It is during this step that you can recognize that what was originally perceived as a threat isn’t really. Detach. Sometimes when we get triggered, we get personally invested in being right or exercising our power over others. Deliberately shift your consciousness to more pleasant or inspirational images. If those techniques fail, go get a drink of water, literally take a few steps back to shake yourself up a bit. When we can detach from the goal of being right or defending ourselves, we can redirect our energy toward being more responsive rather than reactive. Awaken. When our amygdala reacts, it’s because we are trying to protect ourselves. Shifting focus from yourself to the other person in front of you helps you “wake up” or become present in the moment. Try to see the other person as someone with his own feelings. He might be scared and reacting out of fear. Ask yourself a few questions about the other person. What are they thinking? How are they feeling in this moment? Shifting over to their perspective will get you out of your own reactive mode and will put you in a better position to have a positive interaction.

The brain seeks to minimize social threats and maximize opportunities to connect with others in community.

Spend some time viewing the replay in your mind. Try to review what happened without judgment. Describe it almost like stage directions.

5. All new information must be coupled with existing funds of knowledge in order to be learned.

6. The brain physically grows through challenge and stretch, expanding its ability to do more complex thinking and learning. The brain’s main purpose is to get smarter at surviving and thriving in life.

Check your explanations. Share your alternative explanations with other culturally responsive teachers in your professional learning community or those in your own personal learning circle.

Microaggressions are the subtle, everyday verbal and nonverbal slights, snubs, or insults which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to people of color based solely on their marginalized group membership.

In recent years, there’s been a lot of talk about the reasons behind the low performance of many students of color, English learners, and poor students. Rather than examine school policies and teacher practices, some attribute it to a “culture of poverty” or different community values toward education. The reality is that they struggle not because of their race, language, or poverty. They struggle because we don’t offer them sufficient opportunities in the classroom to develop the cognitive skills and habits of mind that would prepare them to take on more advanced academic tasks (Boykin & Noguera, 2011; Jackson, 2011). That’s the achievement gap in action. The reasons they are not offered more opportunities for rigor are rooted in the education system’s legacy of “separate and unequal” (Kozol, 2006; Oakes, 2005).

I define culturally responsive teaching simply as . . . An educator’s ability to recognize students’ cultural displays of learning and meaning making and respond 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. All the while, the educator understands the importance of being in a relationship and having a social-emotional connection to the student in order to create a safe space for learning.

Too often, culturally responsive teaching is promoted as a way to reduce behavior problems or motivate students, while downplaying or ignoring its ability to support rigorous cognitive development.

The key to understanding how culture guides the brain during culturally responsive teaching lies in focusing on deep culture. Rather than focus on the visible “fruits” of culture—dress, food, holidays, and heroes—we have to focus on the roots of culture: worldview, core beliefs, and group values.

Despite images we commonly see in the popular media, behaviors such as drug use, violence, or out of wedlock births are not normalized and embraced as lifestyle choices by poor people. Often these behaviors are an outgrowth of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dr. Victor Carrion and his colleagues (2007) of Stanford’s Early Life Stress Research Program point out that as many as one-third of children living in our country’s urban neighborhoods have PTSD—nearly twice the rate reported for troops returning from war zones in Iraq.

Just like our computers, all brains come with a default setting that acts as its prime directive regardless of race, class, language, or culture: Avoid threats to safety at all costs and seek well-being at every opportunity. Neuroscientists have long known that our brains are wired to keep us alive at all costs. Our deep cultural values program our brain on how to interpret the world around us—what a real threat looks like and what will bring a sense of security.

Too often, we focus on only doing something to culturally and linguistically diverse students without changing ourselves, especially when our students are dependent learners who are not able to access their full academic potential on their own.

As you begin your own inside-out work in this area, your lizard brain will start to freak out. It’s afraid that you will have to talk about sensitive issues such as race, racism, classism, sexism, or any other kind of “-ism.” It is afraid that this conversation will make you vulnerable and open to some type of emotional or physical attack. But this fear is not real. It is just your amygdala’s ploy to get you to stay in your comfort zone.

The only way to get students to open up to us is to show we authentically care about who they are, what they have to say, and how they feel.

I remember having a conversation with a teacher who could not figure out why her relationship with her African American students felt strained. She was especially troubled that several African American girls in her class had refused to participate in a mask-making activity in which the kids placed plaster strips across their face all the way up to their hairline. One girl spoke up and told the teacher that her mother would be upset with her if she got water or the grainy plaster in her hair. The teacher causally dismissed their concerns and insisted they do the activity along with everyone else. The teacher was unfamiliar with the significance of hair in African American culture—how it’s cared for, its connection to self-esteem and self-expression. In turn, she missed an opportunity to affirm the students’ cultural needs by simply making scarves available in the classroom when doing activities with water, sand, or any other substance that might mess up their hair. Whether it’s being insensitive to Muslim students fasting during Ramadan by having a class party with food and drink or ignoring a low-income family’s ability to provide money for a field trip, these small actions chip away at trust and personal regard that are at the core of authentic relationships. This lack of care leads to mistrust, which, over time, can put students (and parents) on the defensive. This underlying mistrust is the reason some parents seem antagonistic. They become defensive and protective based on the perception that the teacher doesn’t care.

Often we misinterpret a student’s self-doubt or negative mindset as a lack of engagement or motivation when we see him exhibiting those common symptoms—zoning out, acting up, or shutting down in class. We then focus on trying to increase engagement with high energy starters such as call and response that aren’t connected to deeper learning, hoping that it flips some internal switch for the student, leading to a more positive academic mindset, which will in turn transform their academic performance. In reality, we have it backward. What we believe about belonging, effort, and value of the task leads to engagement and motivation.

Too often, we think of a student’s academic mindset as a personal choice or an extension of his family’s failure to value education. In reality, schools do a lot more to influence a negative academic mindset than we’d like to admit sometimes.

Remember that even as educators, we are subjected to the same amygdala hijack as our students. We feel anxious, fearful, confused, and overwhelmed as we step outside our comfort zone. Embrace this stage and use it as a time for inquiry and reflection because this too shall pass.

Every culturally responsive teacher develops a sociopolitical consciousness, an understanding that we live in a racialized society that gives unearned privilege to some while others experience unearned disadvantage because of race, gender, class, or language.

Classroom structures and processes need to tend to the emotional well-being of everyone rather than just on covering the day’s lesson plan.

We have to create the right instructional conditions that stimulate neuron growth and myelination by giving students work that is relevant and focused on problem solving. Just turning up the rigor of instruction or increasing the complexity of content will not stimulate brain growth. Instead, challenge and stretch come with learning the moves to do more strategic thinking and information processing.

There are five elements of social interaction that activate strong threats and rewards in the brain, thus influencing how we react in given situations: standing, certainty, connection, control, and equity

On his own, a dependent learner is not able to do complex, school-oriented learning tasks such as synthesizing and analyzing informational text without continuous support. Let’s not misunderstand the point—dependent doesn’t mean deficit.

Poverty doesn’t fit the definition of culture in that it doesn’t have deep cultural roots governed by a cosmology or worldview.

Remember that the burden is on you to change the nature of the relationship and build trust between you and your students.

Ladson-Billings (1994) and others emphasize that the point of culturally responsive teaching isn’t just about getting along with students but to use that connection to stretch and empower them as learners.