My favorite part of my job is the opportunity to be in a myriad of schools each week, collaborating with educators, working with students, and remaining abreast with the educational environment, expectations, and students’ needs. The educational landscape is becoming a minefield of triggers for both students and teachers. Increasing expectations placed upon both students and their educators is transforming how we approach education. We want our students to be successful, and we want to help them meet the extraneous demands placed upon them. However, we are faced with the obstacles of time, paperwork, and an inundation of meetings that take us away from our classrooms. When are we expected to authentically teach? Where are the opportunities to engage in creative, authentic instruction? We are left with standards, expectations, and testing that we must meet each month, with little time for anything else. Out of our desire to care for our students and prepare them for these tasks, we teach them how to take the test. We expose them to the testing process, bombard them with sample tests, and teach them test taking strategies. We essentially teach them coping mechanisms to help them navigate the educational minefield that school has become for so many of our learners. However, are we teaching them strategies that support their ability as learners, or are we enabling a dependence on these strategies without teaching the critical thinking skills that will help students navigate a broaden spectrum of experiences?
Many teachers unknowingly fall into the category of teaching dependence. The enormity of this realization is both transformative and unnerving. We care about our students. We strive to make instructional choices that enhance their educational experiences. Our intention is to fulfill our students’ expectations of themselves and help them recognize their potential. However, sometimes our well-meaning intentions result in softened expectations and the provision of “crutches” to support our students in their educational journeys. We may have students who come to us with significant barriers, trauma, and low perceptions of self-efficacy. We desire to lift them up and remove educational barriers, which sometimes results in adjusting expectations, modifying assignments, and looking at standards that are not grade level and measuring students’ progress according to these new standards. While I fully support measuring students’ progress from where they start, and celebrating each gain, I also recognize that making such adjustments runs the risk of perpetuating the epidemic of learned helplessness afflicting many of our students. Our good intentions can, in actuality, create intellectual apartheid, unintentionally sustaining the achievement gap - keeping some marginalized populations dependent upon the help and guidance of others, while those students meeting or exceeding the rigor of the standards thrive as they build a repertoire of critical thinking skills that support their independence. Softening the expectations in an effort to help students feel a sense of success may feel right in the moment, as we strive to build our students’ confidence and sense of efficacy; however, it also runs the risk of erroneously portraying that we don’t believe the students can meet the standards other students can achieve.
I understand this is difficult for an educator to face. We are not contributors to intellectual apartheid. We combat the achievement gap. We strive to accelerate learning! My claims that we may be “softening” our standards to support our striving students are quite controversial, and I recognize how hard it is to reflect upon. However, my assertions are derived from my experiences in classrooms across the country, founded in conversations with educators, and observed in students’ learning behaviors. Consider your students. Have you observed a lack of stamina in completing tasks? Reflect upon problem-solving – how often do your students engage in creative problem solving on their own? Examine effort – how do your students do when given a task? Do they initiate the work on their own, or do they wait for further support? All students benefit from explicit modeling and direct instruction, making transparent the expectations, but we have a group of students who lack the drive to navigate challenging tasks without the crutch of 1:1 support. They need a catalyst, sometimes a full scaffold to help them maintain momentum. They have come to depend on this support, as it is repeatedly offered. I know what you’re thinking, we are educators, it is our job to support our striving students. But I implore you to consider what strategies do your students have to support them as independent learners? As self-starters? Are they aware they have a repertoire of strategies to help them as learners, or have they become dependent upon someone else telling them which strategy to use? Yes, we are charged with the responsibility of supporting our striving students, but we are charged with the task of helping them think for themselves and recognize what tools they have to help them navigate life’s experiences.
We can only begin to close the achievement gap when we teach students how to be independent learners. Students need and deserve to be taught critical thinking, problem solving, and how to make evaluative decisions based upon experience and the facts before them. Culturally responsive pedagogy, when implemented fully, has the potential to transform students from dependent to independent learners. Culturally responsive pedagogy, or CRP, is grounded on the tenet affirming that educators are to maintain high, rigorous standards for all students, regardless of their circumstances. The aim is to teach students how to overcome barriers, navigate injustice, and empower them as independent, critical thinkers. CRP does not strive to soften standards or cover up inequities and injustices, but rather make transparent the challenges students face, explicating that while these challenges are not necessarily fair, they exist and we must learn how to appropriately navigate and overcome them. This critical pedagogy is appropriate in all grade levels, and is adjusted to meet the cognitive abilities of the students. Culturally responsive lessons are not as forward in kindergarten as they are in high school, but they embark on those initial conversations detailing how students are equipped with tools to help them think for themselves. We begin ripping away the Band-Aid of dependence and teaching them how to make decisions with the safety net of the teacher to provide guidance as necessary.
Culturally responsive pedagogy is a means for elevating a global consciousness, making transparent the varied circumstances we all face and providing the tools and understanding to navigate these circumstances with both empathy and action. A core tenet of CRP is recognizing that school sites, while historically perpetuating systemic injustices, are well-suited to serve as sites for change. Educators, equipped with the knowledge and power of CRP, can begin to transform how systemic injustices are approached and empower learners by equipping them with the knowledge, understanding, and critical thinking tools to navigate injustice and equity, and begin to dismantle these barriers by achieving the same standards as their privileged counterparts.
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