4.3b

Coaches establish productive relationships with educators in order to improve instructional practice and learning outcomes. Coaches:

B. Partner with educators to identify digital learning content that is culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate and aligned to content standards.

Once you have focused on creating a firm foundation of trusting relationships in your coaching practice, you can move to the next aspect of the Collaborator standard. In indicator b, we see that coaches are now to continue in the partnership that has been established, to “identify learning content that is culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate and aligned to content standards”. To me, the first step in this process is to identify what is culturally relevant, and how we go about introducing culturally relevant teaching into our classrooms. After that, we can focus on the developmentally appropriateness of that content while ensuring that it is on target for our desired standard. 

Culturally responsive teaching has always been a critical need of focus in our educational environment, but it feels that it hasn’t necessarily been at the forefront of our minds. This is a topic that I am so thankful to the DEL program for bringing into the spotlight to show me just how vital it is for educators to be focusing on. This opportunity to dive into indicator b helped me to gain an understanding of what culturally responsive teaching is, and how we can start to focus on it in our classrooms. Read more about my journey to begin gaining knowledge on this topic in my post, Culturally Responsive Teaching with Social Emotional Learning. You will also find a list of ways to jump into culturally responsive teaching in your own classroom, organized by academic levels.