THE LEARN FRAMEWORK ACADEMY

Designing Culturally Meaningful Activities in 5 Steps!

• What causes this contradiction?

• Why is the contradiction so prevalent among school districts across states?

• What must you and your teams learn to transform the contradiction? 

• What must you know and do to design culturally responsive practices?

• Where should you and your teams start in the design process?

Enroll in our online courses today and learn how to design culturally responsive activities in 5 steps and transform The #1 Contradiction once and for all!

Enroll in LEARN’s Boot Camp today and learn how to design culturally meaningful practices in five steps and transform The #1 Contradiction while at it. 

By the end of our course, you will be able to— 

• employ culturally meaningful tools and templates to explore the cultural climate of your classroom,
• design culturally meaningful activities from start to finish,
• redesign current instructional lessons in culturally meaningful ways,
• develop and implement culturally meaningful data collection tools to identify your students’ cultural values and community practices,
• design culturally meaningful community building activities, using baseline data. 

Design culturally meaningful activities in five steps using practical tools and transform The #1 Contradiction while at it!

During the 2021-2022 school year, Dr. Williams conducted a 7-week PhD teacher intervention study titled: Exploring and Resolving Problems to Designing Culturally Responsive SEL Practices. Teachers and administrators identified a host of problems that prevented them from designing culturally meaningful practices including the following:

• Poor Definitions. “I don’t have a solid definition of culturally responsive teaching.”
• No Starting Place. “I don’t know where to start.”
• No Tools. “I don’t have the proper tools to design culturally responsive activities.”
• No Models. “I don’t have any models to guide me through the design process.”
• No Vision. “I don’t know when I’m being culturally responsive and when I’m not.”
• No Examples. “I have never seen it done. I need to see examples of what it looks like.”
• No Frameworks. “I have never been trained on culturally responsive teaching frameworks.”
• Unsure of Students’ Values. “I don’t know how to gather data on my students’ cultural values.”
• Needing Support. “I just need your help, Dwayne!”

Dr. Williams and practitioners co-designed The LEARN Framework for Practice (LEARN) and used it to identify and transform problems. Then, they used the framework to design culturally meaningful activities. What problems prevent you from designing culturally responsive practices?

After the PhD study, Dr. Williams analyzed the intervention’s activities and tools and explored teachers’ descriptions of problems. Then, he iterated the intervention. He now calls this intervention The LEARN Boot Camp: Culturally Meaningful Activities in 5 Steps! Enroll in our courses today and apply LEARN’s action steps and design tools to develop instructional lessons in culturally meaningful ways!

We believe all educators—no matter their racial and cultural backgrounds—could design and implement culturally meaningful and sustainable activities if they have the following: 

1. an asset-based (rather than deficit-based) mindset
2. knowledge of what culturally meaningful teaching is,
3. data collection tools to identify students’ cultural values, community practices, and lived experiences,
4. examples of what culturally meaningful teaching looks like in the classroom,
5. design templates that guide educators through developing culturally meaningful activities,
6. ongoing coaching to identify when activities are culturally meaningful and not. 

Most educators cannot design culturally meaningful practices because they lack one or more of the six components. 

Enroll in our courses today and learn how these six components are essential to designing culturally meaningful practices and transforming the The #1 Contradiction in the process!