Thousands of educators nationally read bestselling books on culturally responsive teaching and participate in extensive training on the topic. Despite this, they still struggle to design culturally meaningful activities. Is this your experience? Have you read popular books and attended numerous training sessions yet still feel unsure about how to develop culturally responsive instructional strategies? Dr. Williams says this is the #1 contradiction educators experience with culturally responsive teaching.
What Causes This Contradiction?
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. Dr. Williams was interested in studying problems that prevented educators from designing culturally responsive activities. He believed this study would provide insight into why teachers read popular books and attended training yet struggled to develop culturally responsive instructional lessons.
THE TEACHER INTERVENTION STUDY
Problems Practitioners Described
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 transform the problems they experienced. Then, they used the framework to develop culturally meaningful activities. Each letter in the word LEARN is a design principle and action step in the design process.
The LEARN Boot Camp
Designing culturally meaningful activities in 5 steps!
Run That back!
The LEARN Boot Camp
After successfully defending his dissertation, Dr. Williams studied the teacher intervention activities most effective in coaching educators through designing culturally meaningful practices.
Now, he’s “running it back!” He’s launching The LEARN Boot Camp, an online course designed for educators who have read popular texts and participated in various trainings yet still face challenges in creating culturally meaningful practices. Drawing directly from the insights of his teacher-intervention study, this boot camp provides a practical, research-based framework to help you design activities aligned with your students’ cultural values, community practices, and lived experiences!
By the end of the intervention, you will know how to do the following:
Define culturally meaningful teaching in simple terms,
Design culturally meaningful activities using practical tools,
Apply LEARN’s five design principles to redesign current lessons,
Articulate why your designed activities are culturally meaningful,
Coach colleagues on designing culturally meaningful practices – and more!
All educators who enroll in this course will produce a “culturally meaningful design map” (CMDM) as their final project by the end of the course. CMDMs are prototype sketch designs of culturally meaningful activities. CMDMs illustrate your knowledge and ability to design culturally meaningful lessons.
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:
An asset-based (rather than deficit-based) mindset,
Knowledge of what culturally meaningful teaching is,
Data collection tools to identify students’ cultural values, community practices, and lived experiences,
Examples of what culturally meaningful teaching looks like in the classroom,
Design templates that guide educators through developing culturally meaningful activities,
Ongoing coaching to identify when activities are culturally meaningful and not.
The LEARN Framework Academy is 100% confident in preparing you to design culturally meaningful practices from start to finish. We are confident that our courses will help you redesign your current practices in culturally meaningful ways. That is why we offer a money-back guarantee promise! By the end of our Tier 2 Teacher Intervention, if you are unable to design culturally responsive practices or redesign your current lessons in culturally meaningful ways, we will act on our money-back guarantee promise and reimburse you.