Culturally Responsive Leadership Case Study

Culturally Responsive Leadership

Students in American public schools represent an increasingly diverse population in terms of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other characterizations. Students come from a variety of cultures, backgrounds, and home environments. More specifically, culture includes shared traditions, symbols, language, behaviors, and what is considered normal and abnormal for a group of people. Vygotsky (1978) explained that students come to school with experiences that impact how they assimilate new information. Humans learn through interaction with others and interpretation of information is based upon past experiences and current perceptions. Based on this thinking, educators must develop cultural competence

This has been described as subtractive schooling (Bazron, Osher, & Fleischman, 2005). When this occurs, it likely contributes to the disproportionality of minority students in special education and discipline referrals. Culturally responsive practice does not mean fitting all students into a single mold; but rather, acknowledging and celebrating differences and working together to learn from one another. Madhlangobe and Gordon (2012) describe a case study in which an educational leader, parents, teachers, and students learn from one another in a collaborative effort to increase cultural competence and acceptance. In this case study, researchers followed an assistant principal in a Texas community who exemplifies culturally responsive leadership. Their research methods included observing, shadowing, interviewing, and collecting artifacts. Participants included the assistant principal, teachers, and parents. The authors aimed to identify patterns to explain why school staff acted the way they did and how they got to that point. Madhlangobe and Gordon categorized their findings into six themes necessary for culturally responsive leadership including: caring for others, building relationships, persistence and persuasiveness, being present and communicating, modeling cultural responsiveness, and fostering cultural responsiveness among

When students experience intrinsic motivation, they are more likely to experience deep learning that is retained. This is in contrast to student learning that is based on extrinsic motivation, such as receiving grades or other tangible rewards. Wlodkowski and Ginsberg (1995) note that external motivation is difficult to sustain. In order for students to make sense of what they are learning and achieve intrinsic motivation to learn, teachers need to focus on students’ background experiences, what they bring to the classroom, and importantly, their culture (Wlodkowski and Ginsberg, 1995). Fisher and Frey (2012) suggest a student’s background is important to consider when determining text complexity. Wlodkowski and Ginsberg (1995) offer an intrinsic motivational framework including four conditions: enabling inclusion (everyone should feel welcome in the lesson), developing attitude (offer choices and give students the power to decide what they will do), enhancing meaning (focus on meaning for individual students), and engendering competence (supporting the student based on their background and allowing students to assess their own work). Indeed, in the state of Pennsylvania, teachers are evaluated using the Danielson Framework for Teaching and to be rated as “distinguished” is to have a classroom in which the students are intrinsically