The CRE Themes - Chapter Three - Rev - June2019 - EXCERPT PDF

The Six CRE Themes
Engagement......................................................................................................................................2
Cultural Identity ...............................................................................................................................7
Relationships ..................................................................................................................................16
Vulnerability ..................................................................................................................................20
Assets…..........................................................................................................................................24
Rigor...…... ....................................................................................................................................29
References ......................................................................................................................................33
Stembridge, A. (2019 in press). Culturally responsive education in the classroom: An 2
equity framework for pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge.

Engagement
Engagement is both a theme and a goal for CRE. I think of it as a theme because brilliant
teachers have a deep and nuanced understanding of student engagement, but engagement
is also an interconnected function of a larger purpose-driven experience for learners
(Wood, & Bandura, 1989; Ryan, R. & Deci, 2000). There are two overarching points I
want to make about the theme of engagement: first, we must be clear and specific when
discussing the indicators of engagement because it is a concept with (at least) three
dimensions; and second, engagement is a function of identity, and if we can understand
and leverage engagement well, we are in effect supporting students in the cultivation of
identities that will allow them to justify the effort necessary for success in school. In
terms of the former point, I often talk about Engagement as the moneyball of education
by drawing on the moneyball philosophy in baseball because if engagement is present,
then everything else about the learning experience has a greater likelihood for success.
At one point, the moneyball concept, was co-opted by a wing of educators who thought it
could be applied to a hyper-focus on statistics drawn from high-stakes testing – but I
think they are misguided. It is not that I am opposed to statistics, it's that their attempts to
measure some things with quantitative tools lack a certain understanding of the
qualitative nature of engagement. Moneyball is a concept in baseball that governs how
games are managed and teams are put together. First, there are a few key premises that
should be made explicit in order to understand the moneyball philosophy such as there is
no clock in baseball. The game is played in the time-frame of innings.... An inning
consists of both teams having an opportunity to take at-bats on offense. An inning ends
when both teams have made three outs while in their at-bat portion of the frame.
Therefore, the most valuable statistical commodity in baseball is an "out"... meaning it is


finite and final. It can't be recovered. The winning team must record 27 outs and have
scored more runs than the opposition in order to secure victory.
The moneyball philosophy says the ideal scoring strategy is that which puts runners on
base without causing outs. Moneyball thinking seeks to put base runners on the base
paths... in whatever way possible... whether it's a bloop single, a base on balls, or even a
batter who is hit by a pitch... and a home run is not worth much if the home-run hitter is
more prone to strike outs and empty plate appearances than other players thus causing
more outs in the long-run than their home runs offset. The players who get on base
without causing outs, regardless of how they do it, are the players most valued according
to the thinking of moneyball (Lewis, 2003).
I call engagement the moneyball of education because like "outs," I think of students'
engagement as the most valuable commodity in the interest of learning. If a student
checks out during instruction, we can't teach them anything until we re-engage them
(Brewster, & Fager, 2000; Bandura, 2002a; Henry, Knight, & Thornberry, 2012). As long
as students are engaged, we have a chance to teach them. If we can keep kiddos on the
base paths, we know that we will eventually score. Engagement, however, can be an
elusive target, and so we must often innovate and explore to locate the most appropriate
strategies. It is important to keep in mind that strategies for engagement are neither
universally nor objectively nor culturally neutral in how they are defined. They are
always defined in context. The techniques that work to support engagement with one
group of learners may need to be applied differently from one classroom to the next. The
design of highly engaging learning experiences requires a keen sense of context because
human beings are a highly social species and interpersonal and cultural contexts matter.
The moneyball metaphor (like all metaphors) is an imperfect illustration, but it helps to
reveal a simple but significant truth: our students can only learn when they are engaged.
Therefore students' engagement is a central goal for any instructional design. (In chapter
four, we'll talk more about how we can mindfully incorporate our understandings of
engagement in the design of learning experiences.) Engagement is a term that is used
often in education and frequently without sufficient depth of thought to truly give the idea
its just due. We are wise, however, to calibrate our definitions so that we can be certain
that we are conjuring up the same goals and understandings when we use the word
engagement.
Another way to think of engagement is as if it's the output resulting from the
commitments and/or investments that students make in learning. Highly engaging
learning experiences are developed on a premise(s) that addresses the question: Why
should students invest themselves? When we seek engagement, we are asking for an
investment(s) from our students – either behaviorally, affectively, and/or cognitively. The
output of engagement is in large part the function of how worthwhile students imagine
the investment in learning to be. The idea of investment implies that there may be
qualitative differences in the level or degree of engagement.


It's useful to have specific language to describe the engagement that we see in our
students. I've had the experience of going into classrooms with educators and seeing
engagement that others see as disruption, or at other times, I've seen disengagement that
others see as compliant engagement. To reconcile our views, we must ensure that our
terms and the categories we assign are precise. There is an article I like to use as an
anchor for the vital definitions of engagement written by Jennifer A. Fredricks, Phyllis C.
Blumenfeld and Alison H. Paris (2004). It decomposes the general term Engagement into
three types (behavioral, affective, and cognitive) which can be defined apart from each
other though they should not be regarded as mutually exclusive.
Behavioral Engagement can be thought of as the physical investments that students make
in their learning. In the simplest terms, Behavioral Engagement entails the student's
willingness to follow the rules and accept the behavioral guidelines offered in
instructional spaces. It is generally thought of as positive, respectful conduct particularly
toward the authority figures in school. With the adherence to the expectations for
demeanor, behavioral engagement requires the good-faith effort to contribute to the
actions associated with success by complying with the norms for teaching and learning.
These are all minimal and baseline expectations, however, as a student could theoretically
be behaviorally engaged and more or less apathetic to the outcomes of school. As with
any investment, behavioral engagement bears risk for the student. The risk of behavioral
engagement is it may betray their own authentic expressions of self (Bandura, 1977;
Bandura, 1989; Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004).
Affective Engagement can be thought of as the emotional investments that students make
in their learning in ways that yield greater care on their part regarding outcomes and thus,
a greater likelihood for sustained interest in the learning beyond the assessments given by
teachers. Affective engagement is evidenced in students' self-driven effort, persistence,
concentration, and attention to learning tasks. In classrooms, it looks like interest (versus
boredom), active (versus passive) learning, and the students’ feeling of belonging to the
school community (versus a sense of isolation). Affective engagement is often
experienced through interpersonal connections with teachers and peers in school. These
relationships are generally indicative of how much students care about their role and their
sense of self-efficacy in school communities. The risk of affective engagement is
heartbreak and disappointment if the output doesn't match the effort. Hard work that
doesn't pay off in the ways students might anticipate when they are emotionally invested
can be demoralizing (Bandura, 1977; Elliott, & Dweck, 1988; Zimmerman, Bandura, &
Martinez-Pons, 1992; Bandura, 2002b; Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Stevens,
Olivárez, & Hamman, 2006; Orth, Robins, & Widaman, 2012).
Cognitive Engagement can be thought of as the intellectual investments that students

make in their learning. It speaks to the extent and intensity of self-regulation in attending
to one's own learning, and also the willingness and ability to be strategic in the building
of understandings and completion of tasks. It is the acceptance of difficulty in achieving
short- and long-term academic goals. The "conceptualization of cognitive engagement
includes flexibility in problem solving, preference for hard work, and positive coping in


the face of failure. Other researchers have outlined general definitions of engagement that
emphasize an inner psychological quality and investment in learning, implying more than
just behavioral engagement" (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris 2004). The risk of cognitive
engagement is that students may experience vulnerability in revealing that they "do not
know" the sought-after answers.
One way that we can think of academic identity is by its expression through engagement.
In other words, engagement is both a function of and metric for academic identity.
Students are more or less engaged in school to the extent that their academic identity
supports the investments necessary to be successful. Think of it this way. The spaces
where you are most willing to consistently engage, to take risks, to invest yourself fully,
are also the spaces in which you have the strongest sense of identity. You have more in
the way of relationships on the line with other persons who share similar identities and
also with the activities and rituals within the spaces where you are most comfortable and
confident in your identity. In those spaces where your identity is most strongly developed
and supported, you are more motivated to persist and take on difficult challenges than
where you don't feel as meaningful a connection. Engagement inspires and is inspired by
motivation. When students feel committed to and invested in their learning, they are more
likely to be able to sustain that engagement over longer and more focused periods of
time.
The theme of Engagement clarifies several goals of the culturally responsive educator.
(It's also important to note that it's very difficult to engage students if you, the teacher,
aren't engaged yourself.) Though all the different dimensions of engagement are
important, our highest goal is cognitive engagement because with cognitive engagement
comes a self-directed and empowered authority over one's participation and outcomes in
learning. In that regard, a learning experience is most successful when the students are
not reliant on the teacher for their sustained intellectual investments. When they are
autonomously motivated in this way, they are in full control of the learning experience
(which, though we teachers say we want engagement, can be a terrifying experience for
those of us accustomed to being the centerpiece of teaching and learning). Further, the
theme of Engagement reveals the false dichotomy we are often guilty of making between
the academic and non-academic needs of students. This model of engagement shows us
that when students are affectively engaged, for instance, they are more likely to be
cognitively and also behaviorally engaged, as well. Our students' humanity isn't neatly
divided in academic and non-academic partitions. Their academic selves are intimately
connected to the motivations, aspirations, and vulnerabilities of the other parts of their
selves, as well. And finally, teaching self-regulatory behaviors and traditional academics
simultaneously isn't a burden but rather an entirely reasonable expectation of instruction.
Our students learn best how to manage their own engagement when they are taught (and
given support in constructing) the tools and techniques to engage in productive and
disciplined ways. There is no such thing as a purely academic lesson because any
effective lesson conveys both content and tools to manage one's own investment in the
learning.


The questions we can regularly ask of ourselves to ensure fidelity of our thinking with the
design of learning experiences include but are not limited to: How does instruction
engage students behaviorally, affectively, and cognitively? How does the instructional
design model for students what engagement looks like? How does the lesson differentiate
for highly engaged, moderately engaged, and minimally engaged students?


Cultural Identity
I have a thought-experiment that I like to use in introducing the theme of Cultural

Identity that I think facilitates a deeper understanding of the significance of identity and
how we perceive spaces and opportunities in our daily lives. It begins with a question
(and you should think about it too): Where in the world are you most comfortable?
Before committing to an answer, there are a few caveats for the response. First, the place
you identify must be specific, meaning it must have a GPS coordinate. So if you love the
atmosphere of coffee shops like me as an inspiration for your thinking, you have to name
a particular coffee shop for which you could provide the name and address. Second, it has
to be a social environment – i.e an environment where there are other people and you
have to have some interaction with them. (That rules out the cottage on a private beach
somewhere on a South Pacific island.)
Thinking about this particular place where you are most comfortable in the whole world,
consider what specifically it is about that environment that makes you comfortable. Be as
precise as possible because there are valuable clues in those details about your
identities. After thinking about the particular elements of the environment that support
your comfort in that space, think about what would have to change about that
environment in order for you to feel less comfortable? It is in these answers that insights
are available to us about the essence of our cultural identities.
I have heard a range of responses to this thought-experiment. I personally have several

ways I can answer the question myself, but my favorite is probably Yankee Stadium. I


am an unapologetically obnoxious, die-hard fan of the 27-time World Champion New
York Yankees! (This feels like a good time to remind you that the Yankees have won
more championships than your favorite team, so ponder that for a moment before you
continue reading....) I've loved the Yankees since I was a kid growing up in the Bronx,
but as an adult, one of the reasons that Yankee Stadium makes my list is because I have
gone to countless games with my son; and there, together, we have had some of our most
important and intimate conversations. In Yankees Stadium, we are surrounded by people
like us who share the same passion for the Pinstripes, and we have a tremendous amount
of familiarity not only with the routines and customs of a Major League Baseball game,
but we share a distinct historical perspective with our fellow Yankee fans. At Yankees
Stadium, I can talk to almost anyone because there is a shared text available for us, and as
Yankees fans, we all have a perspective that we can reasonably expect to resonate with
others.
For my son and I in particular, I feel most like a Dad at Yankee Stadium, and I know my
son feels his identity as a son especially saliently there, as well. I make no apologies for
essentially brainwashing my kid to be a Yankees fans. Some of his earliest memories are
of us wearing our matching Yankees jerseys and hats to watch a game together. A large
part of the blueprint for our relationship was sketched at Yankees games, and now – even
in his early 20's, that is one of our most cherished pasttimes together. I've given some of
my best fatherly advice at Yankees Stadium, and I've done some of my best listening
there too. We've gone to games together when our relationship was not functioning very
well, but Yankees Stadium is the place where we could always get back on the same
page. I now believe that our sense of certainty in what we can expect from the space is a
strong facilitating factor in that.
You may have answered the question differently. I've heard many people talk about book
stores or churches or dog parks. The most frequent answer I get – especially from women
– is home. I'll usually look for the chance to push the specificity of their reasoning by
asking for a particular event or time when one could come to their home and observe
their comfort. Many people will tell me about weekend dinners when their family is
gathered. When further asked why they feel so comfortable in those weekend dinners at
home with their family (or in any place they've named), the answers are worded
differently but remarkably similar in essence. In the spaces that people name as their
most comfortable places in the world, people say they are comfortable because they know
the rules. They know how people are expected to show up, and they feel as though they
can act like themselves without having to worry about being judged unfairly. If you think
about the spaces where you are most comfortable, you may feel similarly. If so, you
likely understand context and subtext in those spaces differently than an outsider might
because you are familiar with the specific and unique history of the space. That means
you get the meaning of the conversation there on levels beyond merely the literal. If you
think about it, that means that you are smarter and funnier in those spaces. This is where
you share threads of inside jokes so much so that you often don't even have to explicitly
deliver a punch line to draw laughter from others. You are smarter here not only because
you feel "less judged" but because you are more familiar with the concepts shared by


others who have identities also anchored in those spaces. In your most comfortable place
in the whole world, you have greater cultural fluency, and your familiarity with the
"social reality" is more finely developed. We feel most like ourselves in the spaces where
we have the strongest connections to the social realities and the constructions of our
selves (i.e. our identities) therein.
When I ask people what would have to change for them to feel less comfortable in the
spaces they've named, the answer I most often hear is something about a person who isn't
familiar with the norms joining the social space or someone who enters the space with
real or perceived hostile intentions. (Many women have mentioned that a visit from their
mother-in-law to a weekend dinner might make them less comfortable in which case they
would feel more judged. That's no shade to mother-in-laws around the world. I'm just
reporting the data I've collected.)
Cultural Identity is the feeling of belonging to a group. It is part of a person's self-

conception and self-perception and is related to race, ethnicity, religion, nationality,
language, gender, social class, generation, locality or any kind of social group that has its
own distinct cultural norms (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). It's important,
however, to level-set our definitions of both culture and identity as separate constructs
before we come back to understanding how the theme of Cultural Identity informs our
Equity work. Let's start with culture.
Culture. Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917), considered to be the one of the founders of the
field of Anthropology, was quoted as saying that “Culture is that complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of society.” In present day, culture is commonly
understood to mean the shared norms, values, habits of living, customs, beliefs, and ways
of knowing that moderate human interactions and are transmitted from one generation to
the next. As the term and our understanding of it has evolved in the various Social
Science fields, culture has come to be recognized as the very lens through which we
experience our humanity. Your perception of the world, your capacity for meaning-
making, the very ways in which you recognize and understand truth is a reflection of your
cultural indoctrinations (Browne, 2008).
In defining culture, it is probably better that we think in terms of that which is cultural
(e.g. cultural norms; cultural spaces; cultural understandings; cultural references, etc.)
than to try to confine our definition to a static, rigid entity. We experience culture as a
dynamic, meaning-making process that informs us as to what is and is not appropriate (in
terms of language, behaviors, and beliefs) in any given social space. It is a process
through which we trade on previously developed concepts and understandings in the
social spaces we inhabit to interpret meaning and make predictions in the interactions we
have with other human beings. Culture is an idea that must be handled with great
responsibility or it can otherwise become easy to dismiss another's cultural vantage point
because of one's own cultural sense of judgment of right and wrong or good and bad. In


the effort to understand how culture influences the work of Equity in schools, I find it
helpful to think of culture in terms of narratives, scripts, and affects.
Cultural Narratives are shared accounts of connected events – real or imagined –

presented either in written or spoken language, images or tropes that hold meaning for
members of a cultural group. Research from both the Social Sciences and the Cognitive
Sciences suggest that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identities in
recognition and alignment with some sort(s) of narrative themes and/or form (Fireman,
McVay, & Flanagan, 2003; Collins, A. 2015). In both the literal and figurative sense,
narrative is a form of storytelling. Narratives give context to consciousness by directing
our understanding of how to perceive events and personality types. Our conscious
experiences are subsumed by the narratives we construct with other humans and employ
as frames of reference for meaning-making, memory, and self-identity. Cultural
narratives illustrate values and convey life-meaning through morals and the portrayal of
certain character types. Narratives function as conduits for concepts and are well known
in specific cultural spaces. The familiarity with their themes and characters become tools
and signals in the expression of cultural fluency. To the extent which one is familiar with
the narratives of a cultural group, the more or less legitimate their identity under that
cultural banner is thought to be.
Cultural Scripts are patterns and styles of speaking characteristic of a given speech-
community which cannot be satisfactorily described (let alone explained) in purely
behavioral and/or linguistic terms; rather, they constitute a tacit conceptual system of
"cultural rules” that embody norms governing specific groups’ forms for communication
(Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, 1997). In addition to the transmission of literal meanings,
the norms of communication within any given speech-community reveal what cultural
insiders see as core values and beliefs commonly held among those sharing the identity.
The validity of a cultural script depends on its symbolic power, accuracy, and enactment
to cultural insiders. To understand the cultural scripts of groups with which one lacks
fluency can be challenging because it requires that you are able to suspend the narratives
and scripts with which you have been culturally indoctrinated.
Cultural Affects inform our perception and expression of emotion in specific social
contexts. Though all humans are emotional beings, the ways in which we demonstrate
our emotions are a function of our social and cultural indoctrinations which means that
our expression of emotions is neither culturally neutral nor socially objective. Mary
Helen Immordino-Yang's (2010) research considers the neurobiology of social emotions
and helps us to better understand how emotion underscores human social interactions
including cognitive processes such as how one might regard the human qualities and
identity-traits we find admirable (Immordino-Yang, McColl, Damasio, & Damasio, 2009;
Azevedo, Macaluso, Avenanti, Santangelo, Cazzato, & Aglioti, 2013). Our biology and
sociality intertwine to shape the perceptions of our experiences. There is growing
agreement within the Cognitive Science community that the expression and even the
construction of emotions are not hard-wired cognitive processes preloaded from birth into
the human brain but rather the result of social and cultural indoctrinations within social


groups (Bandura, 2002b; Immordino-Yang, & Fischer, 2009). We learn how to feel; and
we are socialized into a social and emotional understanding of how others are likely to
feel given the ways in which we read the social environment and make unconscious
predictions through our brain's categorizing of concepts and precepts filtered through our
prior experiences. We also know every human thought, conscious and nonconscious,
elicits emotion. Affect informs every aspect of our thinking (Barrett, 2017b) including the
ways in which we infer the mental states of others, language, memory, cognitive
representations of the self, and face-recognition (Rule, Freeman, & Ambady, 2013).
Nearly everything about how we as humans think and feel is molded by and through our
cultural indoctrinations which literally starts at birth when the brain is besieged by a
world of new information that is calibrated over time to calculate and regulate one’s
interpretations of the meaning of the social environment and the appropriateness of one's
expressions therein. If culture is the set of norms and shared understandings that govern
human interactions in specific social spaces, cultural fluency is the ability to understand
how signals will be read and registered in various social settings by cultural insiders.
Cultural fluency is one’s ability to send signals that can be read with accuracy and
understanding by others with similar cultural fluencies (Rule, Freeman, & Ambady,
2013). Tapping into cultural fluencies is a function of one's familiarity with cultural
narratives, scripts, and affects.
The Iceberg Metaphor. My colleagues and I at New York University’s Metropolitan

Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools regularly referred to
Edward T. Hall’s Cultural Iceberg Model (1976) to describe the construct of culture
because it is too often understood in a narrow and biased light. Any oceanographer will
tell you that only about 1/8th of an iceberg is visible above the water line. The iceberg
metaphor is useful because it helps to illustrate that culture is both a matter of styles,
surface appearances and also much deeper ideologies that form the basis of core belief
systems. Similarly, the scope and depth of our cultural identities are not easily defined


through the characteristics immediately observed by sight and sound.
At the tip of the iceberg, we think of the three F’s: food, fashion, and festivities…. This
is the surface aesthetic of culture. These include things like dress, music, visual arts,
drama, crafts, dance, literature, language, and games. These are aspects of culture that are
explicit, visible, and taught fairly easily. These elements of culture are fun and
interesting, but if we limit our understanding of culture to the surface domain, we run the
risk of subscribing to a heroes and holidays approach to cultural awareness. That’s cool, I
guess… but it’s thin and ultimately unfulfilling. I call this surface level the symbolic
domain of culture because it is the home to the symbols of culture though the full
meaning of those symbols may not be apparent to the uninformed eye.
Just below the surface of the cultural iceberg is the space of unspoken rules. This is the
area where implicit understandings influence behaviors. I call this area of the cultural
iceberg the comportmental domain because it’s where the interpretations of and social
metrics for mediating conduct and expressions within the range of human emotion are
developed. In other words, this is the space where the significance and meaning of
interpersonal behavior is defined. Notions like courtesy, conversational patterns,
concepts of time, personal space, rules of conduct, facial expressions, nonverbal
communication, body language, touching, eye contact, concepts of beauty, courtship
practices… are all social notions that are familiar to people from every cultural group in
every kind of cultural space on the planet — but the ways in which these are
operationalized and the understanding of the preferred and appropriate expressions of
each is absolutely cultural. The behaviors and the beliefs that underscore them are an
expression of these notions in the comportmental domain and defined by the group’s
social norms.
At the deepest level of the iceberg metaphor are the unconscious rules of culture. These
are the habits, assumptions, understandings, values, judgments... that we know but do not
or cannot articulate. I call this the visceral domain of culture because it’s where social
group members are indoctrinated to feel certain ways based on beliefs and thought-
patterns that have been shared over many generations within the group. It isn’t easy to
explain this deepest level of the cultural iceberg, but I often think in terms of the “Nana
test” to help define how these beliefs inform our identities. The “Nana test” is when you
refer, consciously or nonconsciously, to your sense of whether Nana (your beloved
grandmother) would approve of a thought or behavior. The “Nana test” draws on our
deepest understandings of right and wrong, good and bad, acceptable and
unacceptable. At this level of the cultural iceberg, we consider notions like tone of voice,
preference for competition or cooperation, attitudes toward elders and dependents,
concept of cleanliness, notions of maturity and adolescence, nature of friendships,
patterns of group decision-making, conceptions of past and future, and definitions of
obscenity. These are the attitudes and ways of thinking that we see as representative of
cultural groups’ indoctrinations.


Taken together, these dimensions of culture – symbolic, comportmental, and visceral –
provide the prism through which we make sense of the world and our lived experiences.
One's perception of opportunities, one's capacity for meaning-making, one’s sense of self
in relation to others is a function of social and cultural indoctrination. Culture reflects the
ways in which people give priorities to goals, how they behave in different situations, and
how they cope with their world and with one another. People experience their social
environment through their cultural lens – meaning our understandings of fairness, and
how we're received, our perceptions of others as being kind or unkind, and whether or not
we view an opportunity as worthy of our physical, emotional, and intellectual investment
are all a function of cultural indoctrinations. Further, and this is important, culture is fluid
and dynamic; and we are all multi-cultural beings in one way or another. We read cues in
different social spaces that guide us as to what aspects of our cultural identities are useful
in demonstrating competencies and belonging. While it may be argued that there are
abiding shared experiences and characteristics of specific cultural groups, all cultures
evolve over time. The evolution is most easily seen in the styles expressed at the surface
level, but changes occur at every level of the iceberg.
The responsible use of culture. The subject of culture, in order to be a useful tool for
supporting the design of learning experiences that close Equity gaps, must be handled
with a certain responsibility. If, for example, your goals in understanding culture are to
isolate the deficits of specific groups so as to teach more effectively, you are unlikely to
be as successful as you will if your intentions are to learn more about the habits and
attitudes that support the wellbeing of cultural-group insiders. Another culture can only
be understood from one’s own cultural perspective, and the examination of cultural
others with an eye toward deficits is more likely to yield stereotyped notions and
discourses that classify the problems of opportunity and achievement gaps as endemic to
specific cultural groups – though we are generally unlikely to associate such deficits with
an immutable, inherent characteristic of our own social groups. And further, through a
deficit lens, there is a tendency to conflate culture with condition – as in the myth of the
culture of poverty, a long debunked assortment of stereotypes that explains generational
poverty as a function of the habits, attitudes, and beliefs of low-income people (Gorski,
2012). The inclination to understand culture through a deficit lens doesn’t uncover
promising practices for rigorous and engaging pedagogy. Rather, it will feed deficit
ideologies and the misdirected policies that further exacerbate race- and class-based
inequities in America’s public schools.
Chimanade Adiche gave a brilliant TedTalk titled “The Danger of the Single Story” – a
must see for all interested in this work – in which she warns against minimizing the
identities and indoctrinations of others when they seem unfamiliar to our own. I
understand Adiche's counsel to also mean that we teachers should be careful to not try to
use culture as a predictive tool. Predictions about the behaviors and beliefs of others
based on an assumed understanding of cultural ways of being is dangerous. It leads to
thinly constructed narratives of what are in reality rich, multi-layered stories. While
culture should not be employed as a predictive device, it is a powerful descriptive tool,
one that can be used to understand the nuanced ways in which people interpret and


experience their environments. Students who feel reduced to a single story are unlikely
to trust us enough to engage in the risk of truly rigorous learning. The greatest risk, of
course, with relation to stereotypes is the fear of confirming the worst possible
assumptions about one’s identity groups.
In our work with students, we need to be able to understand how culture mediates a
continuum of perspectives; and yet, we must also remember that all human beings have
individual agency to color outside of the cultural lines. I’ve found it helpful to think of
culture as a tool that doesn’t so much anticipate how people will act… rather, it’s more
about what themes, references, and experiences — individual and shared — that inform
peoples’ perceptions. The key to using culture as a tool in engineering powerful and
effective teaching and learning experiences for students is to embrace nuances, explore
the breadth of stories within the group, and actively avoid unintentionally restricting the
expression of students’ identities with our own limiting stereotypes of them.
Identity. Because culture affects how people learn, remember, reason, solve problems,
and communicate, it is part and parcel of students’ intellectual and social identity
development; and thus understanding how aspects of culture may vary within and
between student populations sheds light on variations in how students learn. A deep
knowledge of cultural identity helps us to understand how behaviors are constructed and
interpreted given the baseline beliefs and experiences – individual and collective – that
inform them. With this understanding, we are ultimately better able to provide students
with the tools and learning experiences needed to fully develop themselves as productive
thinkers.
In the simplest terms, identity is one’s sense of and perception of self. Identity is
determined both from within and without — meaning that as a species, humans have
come to self-perceive on conscious and nonconscious levels by how the world responds
to us and the characteristics that come to most frequently describe us. Cultural identity
includes such measures as race, ethnicity, sex, gender, age, class, language, and ability;
but it isn’t rigidly limited by them. All of these parts of ourselves are always present, and
they guide how we consciously and nonconsciously deduce meaning from the events and
circumstances of life. Cultural identity is a function of the experiences we’ve had
individually and the perspectives we are likely to share with persons of similar cultural
backgrounds. Our cultural identities are formed in the context of our social group
memberships (Alexander, 2012). It is who we are in specific social spaces. It
encompasses the social tools and mental devices (i.e. thought patterns, familiarity with
cultural narratives) we use to engage the opportunities available to us in those spaces. If
you accept the premise that identity is a function of what you can do, where you do it,
and with whom it is done, we can see that all of us are in some way multicultural beings.
We are constantly reading the cultural signals of the social environments we're in to
determine the meaning of things happening around us while we mediate the manner in
which we can communicate our meaning, as well (Nisbett, 2003; Chiao, & Ambady,
2007).


I’ve discussed how engaged learning always bears some risk. Learning means, quite
literally, opening ourselves to new ideas and new ways of thinking which might
undermine some certainties we hold relative to others. In order to invest oneself in any
social space, one must trust that the effort given will not betray one's core values and also
that the risks taken are likely to yield some beneficial end. Thus learning depends on trust
that the ground will not give way beneath us, trust that effort is worthwhile, trust for
teachers, and trust for our fellow learners in a learning community. We all draw on our
cultural fluencies and emotional concepts to determine when and with whom we feel safe
enough to trust another person. Importantly, trust is a two-sided coin; where you feel as
though the persons around you are trustworthy, you too are more trustworthy to others.
Trust and agency are symbiotic: they allow for metacognition, relationships, rigor,
engagement, and the development of academic identity. I've observed that brilliant
teachers possess a certain kind of trust literacy – meaning they are able to read the
emotional economy in their classrooms so that they can earn and employ the trust of
students in the interest of their engagement. Many teachers know and do this intuitively,
but it should be an explicit goal of effective instruction because trust is an enormous
consideration of Equity.
Some students, given their social and cultural backgrounds come with fluencies and
capital that are more likely to be steeped within the dominant indoctrinations of the
hegemonic authority and thus more highly regarded by the school. These students, given
the social and cultural consistencies between their social background and the environs of
school, are more likely to trust the processes and adults in schools and are more likely to
be seen as trustworthy themselves in turn. And let's not shy away from an explicit
reference to race on this point. If/when one's racial identity seems to be an obstacle to
trust and/or in conflict with the pursuit of academic achievement, the effort necessary to
perform successfully is fundamentally and profoundly undermined. If/when one believes
that they must mute their racial- and/or ethnic-identity in order to be successful in school,
then even if/when one accepts those terms, they can never be as brilliant as they might
otherwise because they are only drawing from limited aspects of themselves in the effort
to achieve.
Cultural Identity is a massive and fluid concept. By dint of mission, the practices of
Culturally Responsive Education should affirm students' sense of selves by bridging their
cultural and academic identities. In learning experiences that are culturally responsive,
students should not have to choose between the two. This is an essential goal of CRE
because if a student does not experience these parts of themself as being in synch – or
worse, if they experience their cultural-self to be in conflict with their academic-self – it
will be more difficult for them to make sense of the opportunities available to them and
further to justify the investments which school asks of them (Norton, 2005). When
leveraging the theme of Cultural Identity in the consideration of learning experiences for
students, I ask questions like: In what ways does instruction make reference of culture?
How does instruction allow students to draw from their cultural knapsack? How does
instruction support students in bridging their social/cultural identities with their academic
identities?


Relationships
Shortly before her death in 2013, Dr. Rita Pierson gave a classic TedTalk that
magnificently captures that indomitable spirit of great teachers, that undeniable chutzpah
which insists through persistent beliefs and good practices that students sign on to the
highest view of themselves. It’s something we all want to do for our students. In terms of
Relationships, I’ve been struck many times by the language that students use when
describing the teachers they trust. They’ll say things like: “I don’t do Ms. So-and-So’s
work, but I do my work in Ms. So-and-So’s class.” Have you ever heard that before?
What has been increasingly clear to me in my experiences in schools and with students –
which also bears out in the research – is that students exposed to the risk factors most
predictive of academic underperformance are much more likely than their less impacted
peers to use language which indicates that they learn for their teachers as much as they
learn from them (Skinner & Belmont, 1993; O’Connor, Dearing, & Collins, 2011). It
makes sense that relationships are especially vital for students with more exposure to the
elements of social, economic, and educational disadvantage because these are the
children for whom school is more likely a hope in the unseen rather than a realistic life-
goal supported by the resources and experiences of parents and other adults in their out-
of-school lives. For them, relationships are the channel through which their investment
in school is personalized.
Relationships draw from our authenticity as educators. Interpersonal relationships

involve dynamic social exchanges that occur between teachers and students and among
students and their peers (Ryan, Stiller, & Lynch, 1994). The most effective teachers
leverage dynamic social exchanges best by incorporating their relationship-building


efforts in the context of teaching and learning – which affirms for students that they have
the right to school, that their school identity can co-exist peacefully with their social,
ethnic, racial, and gendered identities, and that meaningful relationships with individuals
in school can extend to relationships with academic content, as well.
When I think of relationships, I envision a triangle. More often than not, we think of the
two points representing students and teachers as of paramount importance. The lines
between these points represent the reciprocal and interpersonal relationships between
students and teachers, the two bound together as part of a larger teaching and learning
community. Similarly, we also think of the relationships amongst students, the sense of
shared identity as part of a group engaged in learning facilitated by the teacher. The third
point to the relationship triangle also deserves attention — the element of content… or
that which we want students to learn. Every credible educator I know would prefer that
their students develop deep understandings and mastery over content rather than mere
rote memorization for the purpose of immediate recall. This depth of learning requires
that students enter into meaningful relationship with the content itself. By that, I mean we
want students to think like scientists, historians, and mathematicians. We want students to
be able to embody literacies beyond the preparation of essays. We want students to
develop a rich appreciation for the creative arts... and so on. In this way, students will be
able to transfer and extend the understandings they gain in one content area into multiple
others. This is often most profoundly facilitated through the modeling of relationship


with content by teachers. It’s why some of the best teachers are the persons who don’t
hide their unyielding love affair with their content. Students often tease them, but the
passion these teachers have for their content is compelling. They are living examples for
students for what it means to be lifelong learners.
There is a wealth of research that describes the impact of relationships on the

achievement and performance of students. The research on Teacher-Student Relationship
Quality or TSRQ shows that teachers who are aligned with the same core values, popular
culture, and family traditions are better able to create meaningful learning in the form of
personal relevance, prior knowledge, personal experiences, and interests. I don't take this
to mean that educators must believe all that our students’ communities espouse, but we
have to be seen as giving the effort to understand without judgment. The research has
shown repeatedly that relationships promote deep understandings, higher-order thinking,
the reduction of school-performance anxieties, effective and efficient information
processing, and long-term retention in learning (Pajares, 1996; Battistich & Horn, 1997;
McLaughlin, et al., 2005; Lahey, 2014). The evidence is clear. Relationships matter.
Relationships support trust, and while many of us educators harken back to the “good ol’
days” when trust in schools was largely assumed, today’s students require that we earn
their trust through the demonstration of competence, fairness, and integrity – and the best
way to do so is through the pathway of relationships (DeSteno, 2014).
To be clear, I am not asking you to be friends with all of your students. I don’t even like
all the adults I work with… much less the students! But I can assure you that when a
student senses your personal dislike for them or your lack of investment in the effort to
improve relationship, they are much less likely to trust you and thus unlikely to work for
you. Yes, there is emotional labor involved in doing this; and yes, you will have to
forgive students in the effort to build relationship. You’re a grown up. You can do it. I
often advise teachers to engineer a success for your most reluctant learners that allows for
you to reflect with them on how they acted in concert with you and your instructions that
led to a win. I want to be forthcoming that this counsel I give to teachers is much less
about the actual win than about the opportunity to reflect with students about the win.
When done authentically, this can be an effective strategy for renewing unproductive
teacher-student relationships. When your students recognize that your guidance and their
partnership with you lead to their success, they are more likely to invest, or at the very
least, they are more likely to reveal the impediments to their success — which then
allows you to employ protective factors more meaningfully.
And in some cases, you aren’t responsible for the breakdown in relationship between
student and school — but if you want to see the student have greater success, you are
responsible for restoring what isn’t working. In my experiences, these efforts can have a
landslide effect especially when coordinated amongst adults working in tandem. Success
yields future success… and once students internalize through supportive reflection what
they have done to contribute to their improved performance, they are much more likely to
buy into our vision for them as successful students.


Ultimately effective instruction is defined by its capacity to support the academic
identities of students and also a healthy and productive sense of community for learners.
In order to ensure the relevance of the theme of Relationships in the design of learning
experiences for students, I give attention to questions like: How does instructional design
and coordinated support affirm relationships between students and teachers? Among
students? Between students and content? How does the lesson and instructional design
further build community in the classroom? How do teachers leverage relationships with
(1) highly engaged, (2) moderately engaged, and (3) minimally engaged students to
maximize learning experiences?


Vulnerability
In essence, I am concerned with two aspects of our educator practice when I consider this
theme of Vulnerability. The first aspect of my concern comes in the form of a question:
How do schools become meaningful protective factors for our most vulnerable students?
The second aspect of my concern with regard to the theme of Vulnerability is of a more
personal nature for each of us as educators. It pertains to our individual willingness to
engage our profession wholeheartedly — which in my view requires the deep-seated
commitment to confront our own limitations in skill and understanding so that we may
evolve into better educators.
Let’s first look at the question of, How do schools become meaningful protective factors
for our most vulnerable students? I have heard lots of well-meaning educators use the
language “at-risk” to describe populations of students most statistically likely to
underperform academically. I, myself, used to use similar language, but over time, I’ve
come to see the term “at-risk” as problematic for a couple of reasons. My first concern is
that is squarely locates the risk within the student, and when we accept the notion that the
risks leading to school underperformance inhere in the student, we disavow ourselves of
the responsibility and potential for re-directing problematic trends in our schools and
society writ large. My second concern is even scarier in that “at-risk” thinking may stain
the self-esteem of our most vulnerable students unwittingly convincing them that they are
hopeless and helpless, and thus resigned to a lifetime of disappointment and failure.
I think it’s more appropriate to think of risk as a universal human condition. Risk is
something to which we are all exposed. Further, all risk is relative. The same


circumstances for one person may not qualify as the same level of risk for another given
the relative access to supports and resources which may otherwise buffer the impact of
the risk. The “at-risk” paradigm, well-meaning as it is, may be interpreted as permission
to release schools and society from certain responsibilities in serving children. If we
believe that the risk inheres solely in the student, then we aren’t responsible as much as
they are for the support necessary to improve performance. Further, the at-risk way of
thinking may lead us to focus on what we may think of as cultural impediments to school
achievement rather than a careful examination for how school and societal structures
stack the odds in favor of some and against others. For these reasons, I try to refrain from
using the term "at-risk" and rather I will refer to students “exposure to risk
factors.” When I’m intentional about referring to risk as something that exists as a
function of students’ lived experience and not as a result of their own deficit, I am better
able to ask and answer what is the most important question: What protective factors can
be provided to mitigate the risk?
This, of course, begs the question: What are risk factors? Generally speaking, risk factors
are circumstances and conditions that we think of as having a mitigating effect on the
likelihood for school success. In defining risk factors, I tend to draw from the Social
Sciences’ literature which qualifies risk as (1) family background – specifically the
education and income level of parents; (2) access to social networks that hold economic,
relational, and experiential resources; (3) and access to high-quality schools and
educational services (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.).
Family background is a strong predictor of stress and stability or instability within the
home environment. Studies have shown repeatedly that the strongest predictors of
student success are the mother’s educational background and the family's zip code
(Wentzel, 2003; Dearing & Tang, 2010; Fan & Williams, 2010; Calarco, 2014; Tang,
Davis-Kean, Chen, M., & Sexton, 2016). Educational background within the family is
not only a strong indicator of economic well-being, but more highly educated parents
generally have more resources to support their students’ learning needs.
Social networks are also an important element in the discussion of Vulnerability. Robert
Putnam, in his book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (2015), makes a
compelling argument that poverty and social disadvantage in America today are
increasingly experienced in socio-economic isolation and segregation. For example,
when low-income and/or racial-/ ethnic-minority children attend schools largely enrolled
by other low-income and/or racial-/ethnic-minority children and also live in communities
with very little racial, ethnic or economic diversity, their social networks and access to
resources are severely compromised. They have limited access to social networks that
hold economic, relational, and experiential resources which allow families to engage
social safety nets when threats to school success surface. Further, in our increasingly
segregated society, students who go to schools largely attended by other students from
high-poverty, low-resource backgrounds are exposed to fewer rigorous and less
meaningful learning opportunities with less qualified and less experienced educators
(Resnick, Bearman, & Blum, 1997; McLoyd, 1998; Yoshikawa, 2013; Putnam, 2015)


These schools have higher discipline occurrences and they tend to levy harsher
consequences for school behaviors, not uncommonly leading to criminal charges. The
schools are often overwhelmed under the circumstances which further causes students to
fall behind their peers in more affluent and better-resourced communities.
Clearly, risk factors confound school achievement, but we shouldn’t think of risk as a list
of isolated circumstances. Rather, risk is a function of a cross-current of circumstances
affecting some groups differently and disproportionately relative to others; and risk
exponentially enhances the impact of other risk, so that one risk factor in the presence of
a second risk factor is far more impactful than the mere presence of one (seemingly)
isolated risk (McGee & Spencer, 2013; Spencer & Swanson, 2013). So Black and Latino
students, for example, in America are statistically more likely to live at or below the
poverty level, but increasingly we are seeing a growing gap in achievement trends within
specific racial and ethnic groups when we control for economic background relative to
these identity measures. So while being Black, for example, has historically qualified as a
risk factor in school achievement, to be economically poor and Black qualifies as
compounded risk when we look to see which factors correlate most strongly with school
achievement (Spencer et al., 2006).
Protective factors are a bit easier to explain than risk factors because protective factors
are anything that has the potential to effectively mitigate risk. Among the most common
mistakes we make in education is the indiscriminate application of what we think are
protective factors to risk circumstances that we don’t understand well. When we do this,
we not only waste time and resources with ineffective supports, but we also further
deficitize our students out of frustration when the poorly conceived protective factors
miss the mark. We say things like, "these kids don’t want to be helped. They won’t help
themselves." Or, "they don’t value education enough to take advantage of the
opportunities." These are the frequently-referenced arguments of persons who lack the
compassion and insight to uncover and engineer protective factors that honor and
empower the students and communities we seek to serve. Don’t mistake me. I’m not
saying it’s easy work, but it’s the work we’ve signed on for.
The second aspect of the theme of Vulnerability is of a more personal nature for each of
us as educators. It pertains to our individual willingness to engage our profession whole
heartedly — which to me means embracing our own uncertainties and insecurities in the
interest of creating the safest and most authentic learning spaces possible for all of our
children. To be vulnerable also means to be willing to take the risks to remain a vigilant
learner in one's own professional development. The absolute most self-destructive
attitude in the profession of teaching is the "I already do that" attitude. It's a poor mental
habit that will halt one's growth. Brilliant teachers are consciously vulnerable in their
craft because they know that vulnerability begets vulnerability and neither trust nor
learning is possible without vulnerability. I am a big fan of Brene Brown's work on
Vulnerability. You can read and watch any book or talk of hers and be a better human
being afterward, but I specifically take her work to mean that when we have personal
courage in our willingness to be present and deliberate on our own growth trajectory, and


when we can treat ourselves and others with compassion, we are in a much better position
to see better those opportunities we have to facilitate connections for and with students in
school. At times these connections are interpersonal and at other times they are
conceptual. Whatever the case, connections facilitate engagement.
The task of teaching is to find methods to support students from a range of backgrounds;
the notion of risk invites us to consider what circumstances and conditions would
otherwise interfere with the instructional support of students. The questions we ask about
Vulnerability include: What environmental risk factors does this student face? What
protective factors are (or could be) in place to mitigate those risks? How does the lesson
and instructional design encourage appropriate risk-taking?


Assets
The theme Assets, as I define it, carries with it an inherent responsibility for the teacher
in the 21st century classroom. This responsibility is two-fold and applies to every teacher
and particularly those with cultural backgrounds that differ from their students. It is to
first actively put in the thoughtful observation and effort to recognize the assets of all of
your students, and second, to leverage those assets of your students into the design of
learning experiences. Very few people would disagree with that sentiment, (and if you
do, you are probably a terrible person) but the operationalization of that mindset may
seem a bit beyond our sense of self-efficacy.
I would argue, however, that this is well within the skillset of competent teachers; but it
requires a mindset that is the result of thoughtful and focused intentionality. Let's begin
by defining assets first because it is a much more sophisticated and subjective notion than
we may initially assume. I have two ways that I like to think of assets. The first is based
on the Habits of Mind, and the other is based on the Social Science framework of
Cultural Capital. Both models work together. The Habits of Mind are a kind of entry
point to the consideration of Assets, and the Cultural Capital model is an extension – but
both are effective constructs for supporting more deliberate thinking in terms of what we
consider in the discussion of students' assets.
In the most general sense an "asset" is something that is regarded as valuable and
accessible for satisfying debts, commitments, or opportunities. In the financial sense, an
asset is defined as a resource with economic value that is owned and controlled with the
expectation that it will provide future benefit. Assets are accumulated or created to
increase the value of the owner's endeavors and operations. An asset can be thought of as
something that has the potential to generate currency-earning opportunities in the future,


regardless of the nature of any specific industry. The ability to successfully engage
students is enhanced through the knowing of their assets and needs in the context of the
learning targets and the classroom environment. Importantly (and remember Gloria
Ladson-Billings here), brilliant teachers calibrate their pedagogy to maximize
engagement without lowering their expectations for students' learning.
The Habits of Mind are a model for thinking about "what intelligent people do when they
are confronted with problems, the resolutions to which are not immediately apparent"
(Costa & Kallick, 2008). Costa explains Habits of Mind as:
A Habit of Mind is a composite of many skills, attitudes, cues, past

experiences, and proclivities. It means that we value one pattern of
intellectual behaviors over another; therefore, it implies making choices
about which patterns we should use at a certain time. It includes sensitivity
to the contextual cues that signal that a particular circumstance is a time
when applying a certain pattern would be useful and appropriate. It
requires a level of skillfulness to use, carry out, and sustain the behaviors
effectively. It suggests that after each experience in which these behaviors
are used, the effects of their use are reflected upon, evaluated, modified,
and carried forth to future applications. (Costa & Kallick, 2008)
I use the 16 Habits of Mind as a teaching tool for both teachers and students. With
teachers, I like to use the Habits of Mind to support our planning and reflection of the
ways the various aspects of students' personalities show up to support successful
performance in school. I also use these Habits to convey directly to students how their
gifts and abilities come in a range of attitudes and behaviors. The Habits of Mind remind
adults that some of the very attributes that can sometimes annoy us (e.g. humor) are the
same qualities that students rely on to support their engagement in difficult learning tasks.
Through the Habits, teachers are better able to conceptualize our students' behaviors as
expressions of engagement which allow us to know them better as learners. In addition,
when students have greater command of their own Habits of Mind, they are more likely
to sustain their engagement and also build new Habits more thoughtfully and with
intention. The Habits work well within the more general definition of assets as something
useful and/or valuable in the effort to meet social and performance commitments.
I am also a fan of the work of Tara Yosso, and in particular, her writing on the Cultural
Capital of marginalized communities. When referring to the work of Yosso, I tend to
frame assets in the fiscal terms of tools and acquisitions. If assets are resources used to
accumulate goods and services, then we can interpret our students' assets more accurately
if we consider them as a function of how they're used to accomplish meaningful
transactions. (The students, in this case, are of course, the arbiters of what is considered
meaningful.) Yosso's often-cited article "Whose Culture has Capital? A Critical Race
Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth" (2005) gives a useful model for
conceptualizing the various forms of capital that students from marginalized communities
bring with them to school. If we are not thoughtful, these can be dismissed or altogether


overlooked by educators and education systems. She identified six types of capital –
familial, social, resistance, linguistic, navigational, and aspirational – each with a strong
and distinct tradition within communities that have experienced historical oppression and
opposition in the collective and individual pursuit of freedom and opportunity.
Yosso reminds us to be mindful of how school norms for the expectations of attitudes and
behaviors are situated against a White, middle-class norm. The notion of Cultural Capital,
then, if not clarified and discussed thoughtfully could be weaponized against non-White
communities as assertions of cultural deficits. In her words:
This interpretation of Bourdieu exposes White, middle class culture as the

standard, and therefore all other forms and expressions of ‘culture’ are
judged in comparison to this ‘norm’. In other words, cultural capital is not
just inherited or possessed by the middle class, but rather it refers to an
accumulation of specific forms of knowledge, skills and abilities that are
valued by privileged groups in society. (Yosso, 2005)
In Yosso's model, for example, resistance may be thought of as a form of Cultural Capital
if the resistance is framed in a social narrative of historical oppression and
marginalization. Resistance can be understood in the context of cultural tradition as
agency and an unwillingness to endorse systems that have been effective largely in
producing inequality. (I've found this awareness immensely useful to me in responding to
disruptive classroom behaviors. It makes it much easier for me to not take the offending
behaviors personally and to place them in a larger narrative.) Yosso's six types of capital,
and also the Habits of Mind can be thought of as currencies in the classroom. They are
the tools, attitudes, and skillsets that students use to successfully participate in life and
learning transactions; and just like in the financial sense, capital is an asset, and assets are
used to successfully participate in transactions, both financial and social.
Our students use their assets to be successful in school. If a student is not invested in the
purpose of school (i.e. they don't find formal education to be meaningful), they are likely
to use their assets to disengage from or even disrupt the proceedings of school. Seeing
their assets, however, rather than merely seeing that which you perceive as their deficits,
is essential for being able to facilitate an enduring investment in their academic identities.
It is difficult for anyone to sustain an investment in any social space or in developing any
part of our identity if we are unable to see how the assets we've already accumulated can
be useful to our well-being in new territories. Our assets show up most clearly when we
are seeking to participate successfully in some (social, financial, or other) transaction.
Thinking about it this way, it can be argued that the best times to learn about students'
assets – and especially our most vulnerable students' assets – is when they feel as though
they are in conflict. I have learned in my work with kiddos of all ages that I am much
more likely to be successful in my transactions with them when I make the decision in
my own mind that they are asset-filled beings and much more than what I may perceive
as the sum total of their deficits. This doesn't mean I ignore their risk-factors and
vulnerabilities. Those are real considerations in my thinking, as well, but I am much more


inclined to secure effective strategies from my tool kit when I set the intentions to see my
students as being capable and competent in specific ways (Moll, Amanti, Neff, &
Gonzalez, 1992; Sternberg, 2000). In terms of planning, a nuanced understanding of my
students' assets allows me to build in opportunities for them to use their tools and
strengths to deepen their engagement in learning experiences. We get more from our
kiddos when we plan with their assets in mind.
But there is a caution. It has two facets. The first is that we must be careful to not
stereotype. Race and ethnicity are big parts of a lot of Americans' identities; and yet, no
one person is exclusively understood in terms of either race or ethnicity. The theme of
Assets reminds us to see students as unique while also allowing for the space to think
about how race may be a contributing factor to their perception of opportunity. Given that
we Americans are all products of a society that was established on the premises of White
supremacy ideologies, I think it's wise to avoid the outright dismissal of race and racism
as a contributing factor at the level of root causes for any pattern or particular instance of
underperformance (Hanley & Noblit, 2009). Yet, our students are not beholden to any
single racial template for their identity. Everyone has the agency to determine their own
relationship with their race/ethnicity.
The second caution is that our ability to recognize the assets of others is a function of our
own cultural fluencies and indoctrinations. As cultural beings, we learn concepts by
comparing them to concepts with which we are already familiar (Barrett, 2017a;
Hofstadter, 2001; Hofstadter & Sander, 2013). We all learn this way. We understand new
concepts either through direct experience or our ability to analogously combine and/or
extend previously developed conceptual understandings to comprise a newly constructed
understanding. If we think of assets as a type of concept that means that our students may
hold or express some assets that fall beyond our own scope of cultural understanding. I
use a few examples to illustrate this point in my work with teachers. My favorite one is
based on the Oxygen Network show Snapped! Snapped!, in its 23rd season at the time of
my writing, is a true-crime television series that is nearly always about women who
murder (or arrange for the murder of) their husbands, boyfriends, or lovers. Whenever I
bring the show up in professional development spaces, I like to pause to see the (often
simultaneously guilty and gleeful) look of recognition in the faces of women in the room.
Some people have never heard of the show while others are enthusiastic (issuing out
high-fives) when I ask for someone to describe for the rest of us the Snapped! premise.
I use Snapped! to make a point about perspective in the recognition of assets. Most
(basically all) women will agree that murder is a bad behavior – even when it comes to an
ex-lover. And yet, the experience of being a woman... in a patriarchal society where
sexism impacts the lives of women as a group and individually... creates certain common
frames of reference for people who share the cultural identity of women. Most women
(nearly all) have experienced the micro- and macro-assaults of misogyny. Most women
(nearly all) have been made to feel unsafe in the presence of a man. Most women (nearly
all) have had the experience of having their ideas dismissed or diminished by a man.
Sometimes in my presentations, I will ask women if they can think of one really


confident and really stupid man who objectifies or treats them as if they are inferior in
some way. I ask them not to name names but it nearly always appears to me as though all
of the women are able to grasp the concept (though many men in the room often seem to
want an expedited point forthcoming at this juncture).
The experience of being a women under patriarchy makes the premise of the show
Snapped! possible. The show can only draw viewers if the weekly protagonists' humanity
is relatable. Otherwise, it would be a show about monsters, and it would terrify us to
know that these sociopaths live among us killing enough men to provide Snapped!'s
producers with more than twenty seasons' worth of murderous content! The show only
works because the primary viewing audience (which I assume to be mostly women)
collectively draws from a set of concepts, experiences, and a shared identity that doesn't
endorse the bad behavior of murder but is informed by a frame of experiential and
conceptual reference that allows a person to reasonably understand the protagonists'
thought processes. A woman is likely to watch that show and say: She shouldn't have
murdered him..., but why do men do such ugly things? And in other cases, we may even
see the act of murder as defensible, but only if we relate strongly enough with their social
perspective to see how the accused was, in effect, drawing on assets to achieve some
meaningful end.
We contextualize in these ways all the time, and it shows up in how we consciously and
nonconsciously measure the assets of our students. If we share a common frame of
reference – that is, similar cultural fluencies and indoctrinations – we are more likely to
understand their actions and the motivations for their actions. When you have a greater
capacity for understanding, you see better how assets may be applied (or misapplied). We
are wise to remind ourselves that our perceptions of our students' assets are centered
around our own experiences, indoctrinations, and fluencies. The awareness of that makes
us more competent in our interactions with students. In order to give appropriate
consideration to the theme of Assets, I like to consult questions like: How are students’
strengths (both in terms of process and content knowledge and also dispositions and
interests) leveraged in instruction? In what ways are students encouraged to understand
their strengths and tendencies as learners?


Rigor
While all of the CRE themes build on and support each other, I especially think of Rigor
and Engagement as sister (or maybe bookend) themes in this framework. It is not
possible to effect authentic rigor without engagement; and conversely, it is not possible to
say that students are authentically engaged – especially not cognitively engaged – in the
absence of rigor... and yet, rigor is often misunderstood by educators. As a theme, the
essential importance of Rigor is clear. Whatever we do in instruction with students,
whatever ways in which we frame and deliver their opportunities to learn – what we offer
in the content of the experience must be substantive and meaningful. It must be relevant
and it must be rigorous. Learning that is rigorous is more interesting than that which is
rote.
Though I loved teaching HS English and I experienced success as a classroom teacher, I

do not hesitate in admitting that my understanding of rigor then was limited. (I'm
admitting that knowing that I am far from alone). Many conflate rigor with "difficult,"
but that can't possibly be true because I can make any learning experience more difficult
for students simply by giving them incomplete or incoherent directions. Others
misunderstand rigor to be a function of volume. That too fails in its explanation because
to give students many opportunities to learn without ensuring that their thinking will
yield the most desired understandings actually defeats the instructional purpose by
reinforcing misconceptions.
I've used a few tools to facilitate discussions about rigor in my work as a technical-
assistance and professional development provider. All of these tools have value. The two


resources I'd used most were Norman Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) and Bloom's
Taxonomy. But then I found the work of Karin Hess, and I became a much more
effective communicator of the concept (Hess, Jones, Carlock, & Walkup, 2009a; Hess,
Carlock, Jones, & Walkup, 2009b). Bloom's Taxonomy is standard learning in just about
every graduate school teacher-training program. It does exactly what taxonomies do: it
categorizes. In this case, it categorizes types of thinking or the mental processes through
which we expect students will learn. It helps us to consider how students will be asked to
think in terms of remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and
creating (which is represented as the pinnacle of the taxonomy). Norman Webb’s DOK
wheel is a great tool too. It speaks to the complexity of thinking we want for students
inside of learning experiences. It highlights four "levels of thought," (i.e. DOK levels);
these levels are (1) recall, (2) skills and concepts, (3) strategic thinking, and (4) extended
thinking. In the descriptions of these levels, words like "design, critique, and prove" are
the guidance offered for teachers in terms of what extended thinking should look like in
the learning of students.
Both Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's DOK Levels have well-known graphs which
represent the big ideas behind the models, but I've found that when teachers study these
graphs without also reading the accompanying literature, the tools end up lacking a
certain clarity and direction for implementation. Hess' Cognitive Rigor Matrix (CRM) is
a happy (research-based) marriage of Bloom's and Webb's work with a graphic that
effectively captures the integrity of the ideas in play. That isn't to say that teachers
shouldn't read the literature which introduces the CRM, but through the CRM graphs, it's
made clear that rigor is a function of both type and complexity of thought. Specifically, in
the CRM, the type (Bloom's) of thought targeted is also aligned with a level of
complexity (DOK) so that teachers can plan for both as targets for students' thinking.
Rigor is a CRE theme because it allows students to extend their understandings in rich
and complex ways so that they are able to leverage their in- and out-of-school
competencies in deep learning. It is often a paradigm shift for teachers, but we must think
more specifically of rigorous instruction to mean that students will be able to own their
learning in such a powerful way that teachers themselves can't even predict exactly where
it will go – and that must be the goal of rigor, or it isn't an exercise in rigor but rather one
in regurgitation.
Let me make the point this way: Do a Google search for the article "What exactly do
fewer, clearer, and higher standards really look like in the classroom?" (2011). The article
itself explains the rationale for the CRM and also describes a study of the evidence of
rigor in a survey of students' work. In the article, Hess et al. (2009b) present the original
version of the CRM. In any cell on the matrix, the description of the task represents a
corresponding type and level of thinking. Look at the far left column of the matrix and
take note of the descriptions of the Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy of Cognitive Process
Dimensions. Then look at the listing of Webb's DOK levels across the top row. Now
carefully read a few of the boxes in the DOK level 4 column, extended thinking. Skim up
and down the 4th column. Study closely one or two of the boxes you read, and think


about your own students or students you know well.... For a student who might be
engaged this way, what would it look like, sound like, and feel like, if your students were
thinking just like it’s described in those DOK level 4 cells?
In any case that I can imagine, if my students are thinking in the ways described in the
DOK-4 column, they are cognitively engaged. And what's more, if they are thinking in
these ways, they are in the unique position to extend their understandings of the academic
content and concepts by finding meaning through and/or with concepts that they have
previously learned – either in school- or social-spaces. That means they are able to
construct their understandings and also perform them based in part on how they represent
what they are learning through some combination of the academic and cultural concepts
with which they are already familiar. If we are able to develop learning experiences in
which students can further bridge their concepts, that means all students are given fairer
opportunities to draw on previous contexts for building and extending understandings.
This is inherently more equitable than learning experiences that fall short of this goal.
This is such an important element of the CRE mental model that it warrants a bit more
explanation. In so many classrooms, teachers are inclined to bring less rigor to instruction
in the effort to make the learning more accessible, and too often students seem to be more
manageable behaviorally when we ask them to do less difficult work. Our students can
become conditioned to low-rigor expectations. This is the "I did my work" mindset of our
students. When students don't have strongly developed academic identities, they will
often offer mindless compliance in exchange for lessons that don't seem too hard to do.
But Rigor is a CRE theme because when students have meaningful opportunities to bring
what they know to support new learning, they have more dynamic cognitive experiences.
My contention (which is based in and backed up by the Cognitive Science) is that the go-
to approach for creating greater engagement in any learning experience is to make it more
rigorous. Less rigor signals to students that they aren't required to make a full investment
in order to meet the success criteria. More rigor compels students to fully own their
learning because they are the only ones who can make all the connections possible within
the fabric of an understanding. If you really think about this, though, it's frightening to a
lot of teachers... because the only way this kind of student ownership of learning is
possible is if the teacher relinquishes control. Look again at the CRM in any cell in DOK-
4 column. If our students are thinking this way, they are in full control. You are a
facilitator at that point, but it is them steering the wheel.
To know that authentic rigor must be owned by the thinker themselves has helped me to
consider a different metric for high-rigor moments than I had previous to my exposure to
the CRM. I now measure Rigor in part through my students' coming up with some
evidence or connection or insight that I had never considered before because it is unique
to their unique conceptual schema. It is precisely those moments in which we can feel
assured that our students are so engaged that they are searching through all aspects of
their identities for the relevant conceptual references. That is exactly what I think of
when I say culturally responsive learning experiences bridge identities. To express what
students are coming to understand in a formal academic space by drawing on the


concepts they have as part of their cultural identities means that kiddos can be successful
in school because of who they are outside of school. Their identity is an asset to their
learning. These are the conscious and nonconscious elements of sustained engagement,
investment, and commitment to successful effort and authentic possession of an academic
identity. Without opportunities to leverage their cultural identities in school, many
students will struggle to justify the risk asked of them in school learning because it's
inherently inequitable when some kids get to draw on their cultural fluencies to prove
competence and others do not.
In fact, I agree with those who argue that a focus on rigor is the best strategy for
addressing classroom behavior problems. Whenever I plan for classrooms with disruptive
behaviors, we plan for the highest possible rigor targets, and we get to the rigor super
early too! In some cases, we've even set up the learning experiences so that the students
have to watch the directions we've pre-recorded on the classroom shared web spaces so
that they don't have to wait for us at all to get started. If we plan well, they will watch the
video and start to get excited about the learning experience because they begin to feel the
challenge and also the opportunities they will have to draw from their own social- and
cultural knapsacks. Students are most often likely to feel this as surges of creativity.
Earlier, I referred to rigor and engagement as sister or bookend themes. Rigor is the flip
side of the engagement coin. True rigor is not possible without the cognitive engagement
of students. In this way, cognitive engagement and rigor generate and reinforce each
other. Neither is possible without the other. We can look at either as en entry point, but
the consideration of one without careful attention to the other will fail to yield the
consistently desired learning outcomes. In thinking about Rigor, I refer to these questions
to guide me in operationalizing it as a theme into learning experiences for students: How
does the instructional design encourage students to employ higher order thinking skills
beyond mere recall? In what ways are students led to construct their own meaning and
interpretations from content? How does the instruction lead students into stretching their
understandings of content?


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The Six CRE Themes

Cognitive Engagement can be thought of as the intellectual investments that students

I have a thought-experiment that I like to use in introducing the theme of Cultural

I have heard a range of responses to this thought-experiment. I personally have several

Cultural Identity is the feeling of belonging to a group. It is part of a person's self-

Cultural Narratives are shared accounts of connected events – real or imagined –

The Iceberg Metaphor. My colleagues and I at New York University’s Metropolitan

Relationships draw from our authenticity as educators. Interpersonal relationships

There is a wealth of research that describes the impact of relationships on the

A Habit of Mind is a composite of many skills, attitudes, cues, past

This interpretation of Bourdieu exposes White, middle class culture as the

Though I loved teaching HS English and I experienced success as a classroom teacher, I

Alexander, J. (2012). Trauma: A social theory. Cambridge: Polity.

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