Culturally Responsive Teaching Essay

Culturally responsive teaching, for me, is teaching with my students’ cultures in mind. It is not about teaching a specific culture, which is a big no-no in an American classroom, but about acknowledging the various cultures students from different racial or ethnic backgrounds bring into the classroom. Bringing culturally responsive teaching into the classroom helps inspire creativity in students in a way that it recognizes their own culture and uses it as one of their tools for learning. A teacher who appreciates and celebrates cultural diversity in the classroom motivates students to highlight very confidently their own culture in whatever assignments they are completing such as essays, projects, etc. Knowing that they are acknowledged, students …show more content…
I had co-exchange teachers from Asia who struggled teaching in an American classroom, some even did not complete their first year or was not renewed at the same school they were initially assigned. Based on my experience, I guess one reason that foreign teachers do not succeed teaching in an American classroom is not recognizing cultural diversity in the classroom. A teacher who overlooks cultural diversity in the classroom most likely invites classroom management issues and unfortunately suffers from them whole year round. In my case, I had to learn to choose my own battle in order to survive. My playing ground started from deliberately reflecting on my own culture and then using it to influence my students to use their own culture as their learning asset and strength. I had to show my students some landmarks of my country, talk a little about them, and use their dimensions to teach measurements. I had to use differentiation strategies to welcome and accommodate my students’ cultural diversity in my mathematics classroom. One of the strategies that I consistently used and experienced more success with was RAFT (Role, Audience, Format, Topic). While I sometimes chose the academic topic in assigning a RAFT activity, I always had my students select the role, audience, and format from a list of menu or their own list. My students’ choices of the role they would like to play, their imagined audience, and their format to show their math learning gave my students the avenue to showcase their cultures, talents, and creativity. For example, while some of my students wrote a letter, dialogue, etc. to explain a math process, others created and performed a song to the