Transcription
[Music] Hello and welcome to our continuing conversation of teaching across differences. Uh, as you know, school reform in the 21st century is primarily about quality teaching across differences. All the differences that our kids bring to us in the classroom, whether it be culture, race, religion, family background, sexual orientation, gender, all the differences that kids bring into the classroom, including learning styles, which make a huge difference in terms of how kids receive and how they respond to the teaching that we're doing in our classroom. So we're going to look at that whole topic today, and we're going to look at it through the lens of culturally responsive teaching. Now, some of you have had a chance to already review the definitions of culturally responsive teaching and cultural competence, but I want to review those just briefly before we go into the seven principles of culturally responsive teaching.
Now, the definition of cultural competence that you've probably already gone over as a faculty is the first page of your packet. The will and the ability to form effective and authentic relationships across differences. This is a huge issue in our classrooms today, in terms of both the will to connect with kids across differences, the ability to do that, the forming of those authentic relationships with our students across their differences that then make a difference in their classroom. What I say repeatedly in my workshops is that differences make a difference in teaching. They don't have to get in the way, but if we're not paying attention to them, it's more likely they will get in the way. So, cultural competence is about our will, our ability to connect with our kids across differences.
Culture responsive teaching, at the bottom of your page, is teaching in such a way, and also leading from a leadership point of view, but teaching and leading in such a way that more of our students across more of their differences are achieving at a higher level. That means in terms of the test measures, as well as daily tracking of achievement that we do in our classrooms. So, our kids are achieving at a higher level and very importantly, engaging at a deeper level. Because we need, in a high test-driven environment that we're in, we need to not only teach those tests, but also teach to the deeper level learning, the engagement with the curriculum, the higher level thinking. And finally, they do this, uh, more of the time. So, teaching in such a way that more of our kids across more of their differences achieve at a higher level, engage at a deeper level, more of the time. It doesn't mean every kid, all the time, every minute. I'm a teacher. Sometimes politicians and people, the rhetoric, want to say, "All kids, all the time, every minute." We know in our classrooms, it's more kids, more of the time, being present, engaged, and real with us in the classrooms. And they also do this, that bottom line in your definition, they do this without giving up who they are. We're not asking kids to assimilate to some notion of who we think they ought to be. We're accepting them, receiving them, relating to them as they are, and also helping them get smarter, increasingly related to the curriculum.
So, the way we do this, and this is the exciting thing that I want to share with you today, which has been very effective with teachers all around the country, is a model of seven principles of culturally responsive teaching. It comes from friends of mine in Minneapolis, teachers, educators, longtime educators in classrooms and diversity, uh, Mary Oberg, Barbara Shade, Cynthia Kelly, amazing educators who put together a book, which is referenced at the bottom of your page. If you turn to the next page with the seven principles of culturally responsive teaching, "Creating Culturally Responsive Classrooms," "Building Community in the in in your classrooms." Excellent book. I'd recommend that you get that book. But this one model is rather a small piece of the book, but we're going to focus on it today. So, let's look at those seven principles of culturally responsive teaching.
The first one is, students are honored in their cultural connections. This is key in today's diverse environments. Uh, the colloquial phrase that I like to use, and I'm going to give you a colloquial phrase, sort of a way that I interpret each of these principles. The colloquial phrase for principle one is, "Kids get it that we get them." Kids get it that we get them. The key is whether the kids understand that we have some notion of who they are. And this means who they are in their gender, in their age group, and their ability, and their learning style, and their religion, their culture, their background, their immigrant status, their sexual orientation. It means who kids are. It doesn't necessarily mean what we normally think of as multicultural education. That's a key part of principle one is including content, including examples, stories, people that relate to the different cultures of kids in your classroom, as well as other cultures. So, part of it is that content inclusion piece. But the more important one, in my mind, is that the student understands that the teacher, if I'm teaching a student, that Mr. Howard has some sense of who this student is. An example of this would be a Latino gay student from Denver that I met at a national conference, who was giving a presentation with some other students. And he said, uh, "I have three types of teachers when I go into my 11th grade classroom." He was a junior in high school. And he said, "As a gay student, and very out, he's a very out gay student. He's not in the closet. He's very present with his gayness, uh, in his life and his presentation of himself." He says, "I come into some classrooms, and I can tell teachers are afraid of me. They don't like me, and they wish I wasn't there." He says, "I get that." On the other hand, I go into some other teachers' classrooms, and they're working very hard at acting as if they get me, understand me, likely like me, but I also get it that they're not really comfortable with that. And the third type of teacher, this is, I think, what we're talking about here. He says, "I go into their classroom, and it's not an issue. I'm just me. I get to be me. They're comfortable with me. It's not an issue. We can talk about sexual orientation, but they don't overdo it. They're not kind of coming out too strong in terms of how they understand me. They're just there. It's real." So, that's one example of getting kids in who, in terms of who they really are. In my wife's classroom, second grade teaching, her mantra throughout her teaching career was to create a culture-safe classroom for her students. So, her students felt safe bringing their culture. She would do this through the lens of talking about cultures that weren't related to the kids in her classroom, so other cultures, different cultures. She did it through the food she ate, and this kids saw her eating her lunch. She did it through her clothing that she wore. So, she presented herself as a person who likes culture, understands differences, and accepts them. So, this is the first principle, that kids feel honored, recognized, and seen in their cultural connections.
Now, let's move on to the second principle, which is, uh, teachers are personally culturally inviting. So, this is the sense that, uh, and the colloquial phrase that I use for this one is that, that kids get it that we like them. Whereas the first one, kids get it that we understand them, we sort of get who they are culturally. But in this one, it's similar, but but different in a way. In in the sense that kids get it that we like them. We enjoy being with them. We enjoy being in their presence. Uh, we are teaching because we like kids, and we also like the diversity in our classrooms. Uh, this is a very important principle, particularly in terms of, uh, kids who perhaps feel uncomfortable in school settings, maybe haven't been so successful in school settings, or their family background would lend them to have some questions or concern about whether the school setting is related to them. Even if the whole culture of the school is not that welcoming, if students have one teacher in that building, which is you, and think about how this is happening in your classrooms, because as we go through the seven principles, I want you to be thinking, "How is this real for me? How am I manifesting this principle?" And I'm hoping that about 80% of what I'm talking about here, you can say is affirmation for what you're already doing. And I also hope about 20% is a bit of a challenge. I think all of us have our challenge areas. But in this principle, uh, students feel it, you know, teachers personally culturally inviting. One of the stories that comes to mind is, uh, uh, an elementary classroom I went into. And and usually elementary teachers are really good at this one, very focused on, uh, on on students, uh, in in that welcoming, safe environment. But in this one, it was a tone of voice issue. As an adult observing a kindergarten classroom, I actually felt afraid. I felt like the teacher's voice was communicating sort of anger and discomfort and not really liking kids. And that is not what I normally see in elementary schools. Normally, I see, uh, teachers with a soft tone of voice or a very engaging tone of voice and welcoming. But in this case, I just walked in the room, and I heard the teacher say, "Sit down and shut up." And I thought, "Whoa." I thought, "Wow, I don't really feel safe here." The kids seemed to be managing okay. Maybe they had worked out a way of doing this. But that's one example of how tone of voice can get in the way.
An example from the high school level of how, uh, this principle is manifested. Comer, a friend of mine, teaching out near Seattle, and he was teaching 11th grade, uh, English. Um, had been teaching for 10 to 15 years at the time. And he said, "Gary, when I really got this principle was one weekend when one of my students died in a car accident over a weekend." So, I lost one of my students, and I realized I didn't really even know the kid. I had 150 kids coming through every day. I'd given him grades. I'd probably spoken to him. I knew his name, but I didn't really know him. And I just started a simple process. He said, this is my friend talking, that I began on Friday afternoons, as the kids left each period of my day, my six periods of teaching, I would be by the door. I'd say their name. I'd say, "Have a good weekend. Have a safe weekend. See you Monday. Good having you here." Handshake, pat on the shoulder, some connection with each student. And it made a profound difference in his classroom. He told me that the students started expecting him to do this. And if he forgot on a Friday and was not at the door, these 17, 18-year-old kids would say, "Mr. Dem, Mr. Demon, get by the door, get by the door. It's Friday." And so, this, this need to be connected with, to be seen, uh, to be welcomed in a personal way, not just in terms of your culture and your ethnicity and your difference, but in terms of your humanness in that classroom. So, that's the, the understanding of principle two is that personal invied. And think about the things you're doing in your school and in your classroom that give students that feeling.
Let's move on to the third principle, which is, uh, the learning environment is is culturally and personally inviting. So, this is about the environment we create in our classrooms, as well as in our schools. So, it's about school culture. It's about the visuals. It's about what people see when they come in your room, or what they come in the school, enter that office, office space, or the gymnasium, or the cafeteria. Uh, what do people see? And I think the colloquial phrase that I like for this one is that, from a student's point of view, is, "School looks like me." So, if you're talking about a kindergartener coming in, my, uh, granddaughter Mina, when she goes to her school, which is a multi-racial, multicultural school, she walks in immediately, and there's Native American images, there's cultural diversity, there's pictures of kids of all different races and cultures, nationalities. There's language differences being spoken. You, you can't move into that school more than about 30 seconds without getting that feeling that diversity lives here, and it's honored. And that's what we're talking about. And think about your, your, uh, school as well. Uh, some of the, uh, counter examples that can happen with this one are are when, when we don't pay attention to what's, uh, visually in our classroom or the environment we're creating. One example was a middle school honors science class I was in, and the teacher was doing an excellent lesson. Very diverse group of kids, which was good to, for an honors class to have black, Latino, white, Asian kids all together in a middle school honors science class. But when I looked around the room, the, the pictures of scientists doing science were all white people. They were men and women. So, we had gender diversity, but not racial. And so, I mentioned her afterwards that, "You might want to have the visuals in your room reflect who, who is in your room." And it was kind of a no-brainer for her. It was kind of, "Oh, I, I never thought of that." It just, it wasn't that she was necessarily, uh, uh, not honoring the cultures of the kids. She hadn't been paying attention to it. So, that's what I call a missed opportunity.
Okay. So, when you go into a building, you also might want to pay attention to your general community spaces. Often, I talk to principals about what's in the cafeteria, what's in the office. Uh, one example that was another elementary school that had probably, I think, uh, kids from 30 to 40 different countries in the school, many languages, a lot of immigrant students. And what they did in their cafeteria, which had been very plain, and many of you may, we've already done this, was simply to put the flags of all the kids. And they gradually built this collection of flags that would be hung as each new student came from a new culture. And as you walk in there, you honor the cultures of those kids. So, this is the spaces and how the spaces reflect, uh, who the students are, who the teachers are, who the community is. So, when you walk in that school, you get a sense of who lives there. Even if nobody's around, you get a feeling for that welcoming, that culture-safe space that my wife talked about in her classroom. So, these are the first three principles. Now that we've looked at principle one, two, and three, and I want you to look at those together, and we're going to have a conversation, just in diad, just a pair and share for a few minutes here, where I'd like you to pair up with a partner, and I want you to address the question, "What do these first three principles have in common?" If you were going to make a statement about the commonality, the connection of principles one, two, and three, what would you say would be the connecting links, the concepts that hold these together? So, let's go to that conversation now in your diet.
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So, having had that conversation in your pairs about what links principles one, two, and three, I just want to make a couple of comments because you probably said things like, "They're welcoming, they're about climate, they're about the environment," or they're about the preset to learning. And that's the thing I want to emphasize. When we're teaching across differences, particularly for students, and our main issue, remember, in 21st century schools is connecting to the kids for whom school has traditionally not worked. In other words, achievement gap issues, uh, equity issues, social justice issues, those kids for whom school was not designed to be successful. And we have more and more kids in our schools from groups who've been historically oppressed. How do we connect better with those kids? So, the first three principles are what I call, uh, "front porch principles." They're welcoming kids into the house of learning at the front porch. If you look at school as a house of learning, that's the academics, the content, the teaching that we do, the instruction. Some kids come naturally to that. They're just ready to learn, and you have students in your classroom like that. But you also know that a lot of the kids are not ready. So, we have to do serious front porch invitation kind of work, or they feel that they're being welcomed into the school environment, and they're being invited into that house of learning that they may not come comfortably to. This is the reason that just instructional strategies is not enough. We're going to move to principles four and five now, uh, and talk about instructional strategies and more the academic part. But the problem in 21st century schools, if we only narrow down, zero in on instructional strategy, in many ways, we miss kids who don't even want to come in to the house of learning. And you see that happening in your classrooms.
So, let's move on from the front porch. We move to principle four, which is that, uh, the, the reinforcement of academic learning and and reinforcing kids in their academic achievement and their their growth academically. Uh, my colloquial phrase for this one is, "Catching kids being smart." And again, catching the kids who maybe don't even see themselves as being smart, catching them in the act of being smart. Now, a story that comes to mind here is an African-American colleague of mine, uh, from Nebraska, who tells a story of meeting, uh, a teacher in, he was in the early desegregation movement, actually the first white teacher he ever had. But she saw something in him that caused her to to really connect with him and and and encourage him to learn and to go on to higher level courses. And this was in the elementary level. Uh, and he said that was really the transition for him. It was one teacher who saw him, and it was a cross-racial experience, African-American student, white teacher, that that caused him to actually begin to see himself as smart. So, that's one example of this happening in the classroom. Uh, the other, uh, things that I, I like to see say here also is that things like RTI, Response to Intervention, Marzano's work, many of the things that you're doing in your school in terms of, uh, initiatives around achievement, come to bear here. There's a lot in those programs and those strategies that help us track and identify and do interventions, uh, to catch kids who are maybe falling behind, but to, to mainly reinforce them in their, in their academic ability and their sense of being smart in the classroom. Principal four is about the belief in our students, the belief in their intelligence. If we don't believe in the intelligence of our kids, it's very difficult for them to believe in their own intelligence. That's not true for every kid, but for particularly those kids who are most vulnerable, who's primarily the, the audience we're thinking about in our work here.
So, principal five is about adjusting our teaching strategy, I, and instructional strategies to meet how our kids are smart. Uh, accommodation in the positive sense, shifting up what we do to to be consistent and and related to who the kids are and how they bring intelligence. So, learning styles is an obvious connection here, to be teaching to the different learning styles our kids have, as well as to some of the cultural styles our kids bring in, as well as to their age group and pop culture, being a young, young person in the 21st century. Uh, related very much to principle one, because if, if we don't understand the cultural backgrounds of some of our kids, then it can be very difficult to accommodate to some of the differences in the classroom as well. Now, the colloquial phrase I like to use for this one, it comes from a music metaphor, which is, "Singing harmony to our kids' song rather than forcing them to always sing our song." So, it's very different. Some teachers only teach how they're comfortable. I did this in my early years of teaching, teaching Gary Howard's learning style, teaching how Gary Howard likes to learn, teaching content that Gary Howard loves, and realizing that I had to shift that over time as my students became more and more diverse, and and assuming, not assuming that they were going to be coming from the place where I was in my teaching, but they needed to be coming, I needed to be coming from the place they were.
So, singing harmony to who they are. In a French class at a middle school level is a beautiful example of this. Teacher teaching French to mostly Latino kids. A lot of these kids are bilingual, Spanish, English. They're learning French at the middle school level. And the teacher had them kinesthetically, uh, standing up, moving to the vocabulary words, acting them out. She did music with them. So, she brought in the musical side, the artistic side, the kinesthetic side. And she also connected the Spanish words, uh, that they knew to the French words that they were learning, uh, in the classroom. So, accommodating who the kids are, understanding who they are, and singing harmony to the music that they bring to us. And as we look at principal five, I want you to also be connecting it to other initiatives in your school district. The obvious one would be differentiation. Tomlinson's work, and most school districts across the country now are into the school reform movement, are actively, uh, focusing on differentiation in the classroom. Uh, I think it's much more difficult sometimes, uh, to do that than some of the theoreticians tell us, because it's difficult to teach to all the different levels in the complex classrooms we have. But what I say is, in the course of a week, look at how you've accommodated across differences. In the course of a day, in the course of a lesson unit, uh, how many learning styles have I connected with? How many, uh, different ability levels have I offered opportunities to learn? So, that we may not be doing that all the time, but in the course of a week, or a month, or certainly a year, we're connecting across those differences.
Principal six brings us to one of my favorite areas of work. In my middle school teaching, my classroom work was in middle school teaching US History, social studies, language arts. Uh, and principal six, discipline in the classroom, was always a challenge for me with my middle school learners. And if you look at this principle, classroom is managed with firm, consistent, loving control. And I can testify to the fact that in my early years of teaching, I had trouble with all those levels, being firm, being consistent, uh, being maybe too loving in the sense of too friendly, trying to connect too much with, uh, being a friend and a peer with kids when I was a young teacher, uh, or, uh, not being able to handle the control piece. So, uh, I empathize with teachers who are sort of bouncing off the walls of those things. What I say is, if we're doing principles one through five effectively, principal six is not so much of an issue. Teachers that have, and some of you may be teachers that have very little problem with, uh, classroom control, and I think if you look at what you're doing, these words, firm, consistent, and loving. Loving isn't in the form of best friends or parental kind of substitute for a parent. It's, it's that tough love. One of my colleagues calls it "mama voice," which men can do too, but that strong, loving voice, high demand but high acceptance, high love, this kind of environment. And my colloquial phrase for principal six is that, uh, "Respect begins with the teacher." I think that's a paradigm shift for a lot of us. Grew up, at least in my era, where respect was supposed to come first to the adult, and then we respect the students. But in today's culture, a lot of kids coming in, again, uh, who may not feel comfortable in the school environment, or maybe have adults in their lives who have, who have been difficult in terms of relationships, and maybe not trusting adults, that, and, and not being respected sometimes by adults, a lot of our kids. And these kids can come from all different cultures, all different ethnic groups, all different economic groups, but kids who come in with that, uh, what I call more difficult, uh, identity issues, respect is key. So, what I say for this one, respect begins with us. We establish and role model that environment of respect.
And one of the stories that comes to mind that represents for me, uh, this, the meaning of principal six, is an elementary school that I went into, and the principal invited me in to help teachers deal with what they saw as the problem of "quote, black male behavior." They were looking at a lot of discipline issues around kindergarten through fifth grade, African-American males. And I went to that school. I noticed most the teachers were white and female. So, I suggested to them, "If we're going to start with the discipline issues, maybe we ought to step back a bit and actually look at race, gender, and relationship." Since most of your struggle, as you say it, is with African-American males, and most of the teachers are white females, let's look at the interface of race, gender, also age, generation, expectations, and particularly at relationship, that firm, consistent, loving sort of relationship. There was quite a bit of pushback in that school initially when we started talking that way, because they wanted to solve the problem of black kids acting out, black males. And actually, through work over time, and with a principal that kind of kept people's feet to the fire on this, the relationship issue really started to come forward, and teachers started seeing that their attempt, initially, and from the get-go, to build relationships with kids actually significantly lowered the kind of discipline referrals they had to do. So, discipline is one. I think you can connect this also with your, uh, work in PBIS and other initiatives you have that, that show that that strong, but also very respectful and, uh, caring, uh, sort of discipline, where discipline becomes instructive, not punitive. I think that's a key issue. Some of the school cultures I go into are punitive environments. It's almost like adults are looking for kids to be messing up. Other environments I go into, there's that respectful environment. High expectation for behavior doesn't mean we're backing off on the behavior expectations. It means we're setting that high standard for respect. We show it, kids bring it back. So, this one is principle, principal six, that one that focuses on classroom management across differences in today's 21st century schools.
Principal seven is about grouping in our classrooms, the final principle in this, in this model, doing, uh, our instructional strategies in such a way that we honor both the individuality and the collectivity of our kids. That means how they perform individually, how they work with each other. And the main thing in principle seven is that we're mixing it up. I think one of the colloquial phrases might be, "Mixing it up in the classroom," in terms of, uh, uh, the delivery system. Often, when I go in and observe classrooms, I feel, uh, that that we're doing too much large group instruction in most of our classrooms. Not all of you were doing that. I know many of you are very good at using grouping strategies, whether you're preschool, elementary, middle, high school teachers, you're good at using grouping strategies and, and kind of mixing up the process in a way that, uh, that there's a, a creative balance of those two. Because it's important our kids learn to function individually, to be able to even compete, have a sense that they can compete in an individually, uh, focused environment, but also, uh, that they can cooperate. And I think if we look at the workplace today, and I've worked in many corporations, the cooperation skills are often the problem. People may be very good at their individual competition and their individuality, but the cooperative skills. So, I think the emphasis, to me, on this one is on grouping. Uh, I was in a, a classroom at the, uh, uh, elementary level where a teacher, uh, was challenged by the, uh, principal to use grouping strategies in her classroom, to use principal seven. The, the principal of the school, Principal P, challenged all the teachers to do something during a week, a given week, that related to principal seven. And she used a math lesson, and was trying to engage the non-engaged learners, by setting up a set of math problems, putting them on 3x5 cards, so they'd have the problem on one card, they'd have the answer on another. And then she divided the group into six subgroups, and put mixed ability levels in each of those groups. And they had to solve six different problems and connect their, their problem card with their answer card, and then come up and show her. And she was, this was a teacher who was very comfortable in large group instruction. She said she almost shut the process down initially when it started, because it was felt to her like chaos in the classroom. Kids were moving, they were talking, there was noise. But then she started noticing that some of her most previously non-engaged students, ones that she thought were not really engaging in the math, uh, work in the large group instruction, were the most engaged in some of the small groups, in terms of taking leadership, in terms of making sure they had their answers lined up, and stepping up. So, the racial, uh, mix in each of these, uh, small groups, as well, was interesting, because some of the kids that, from the ethnic groups that she had a harder time engaging, were taking active leadership in her, in her small group strategy. So, after having done this process, and she talked to the principal, she said she's, she's never going to leave this out again. Where she was very uncomfortable with it initially, she now felt it was, it was the primary, uh, uh, vehicle for her connecting with kids who she traditionally had not been able to relate to in her classroom. So, the colloquial phrase for this one is, "Student-centered learning." The kids are working, not just the teacher working. If we go in a classroom, it's all teacher work and not much student work. We know that that needs to be shifted up in a way that the focus is on student-centered learning, student-centered activity, particularly an issue at secondary level. I think is those of us at secondary level need to really think about how are we getting our kids to do most of the work in terms of creating, uh, uh, the, the learning in the classroom, rather than us delivering, uh, only in a large group setting. So, that's principle seven.
[Music] So, let's look at the whole model of these seven principles. I've given you examples, stories, uh, some colloquial phrases that describe these. I've asked you to think about your own teaching as I've been going through, uh, the sort of talk-through of the seven principles. Now, I'd like you to, to form groups of four. And the, the challenge or the task here is for you to share in those groups of four, uh, two things. One is, I would like you to each teacher, each person in the room, uh, to share an example of one of the seven principles where you feel you're doing some good work, some some high-quality work, some best practice work. Uh, maybe it's you that's doing that, or you want to share an example of another teacher you see doing that, but one example, what we might call best practices, because I think you're already doing this. As I said earlier, 80% of what you're doing in your classroom is probably reinforcing these seven principles. So, give one example, every, be ready to give one example of a best practice, something in your own classroom, something you see in your school related to one of the seven principles. You could do a couple if you want, but minimum level, one principle, one example of a best practice. Then, I would like each person in your group of four to share, uh, something that you feel is in the way, someplace where we're not doing it, someplace where it's not working. Uh, another way to look at that would be a place where we need more work, the challenge area, the growth area. So, we're going to form those groups of four now. Each person going to take a couple minutes. So, this will be maybe an 8 to 10 minute conversation to share examples of both the doorways in terms of what you're creating, and some of the barriers you see or roadblocks or challenges.
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Welcome back from your conversations. And I encourage you to keep the spirit of this conversation and also the content going, uh, uh, following this session. Uh, for me, and some of the, some of the schools I work with around the country, the seven principles have been a guideline, really, for teachers to look at their own professional growth. Some of the schools I'm working in, uh, principles and school systems actually ask teachers to pick one of these principles as their professional growth plan for over a year and report back on it and their progress with each principle. So, you might be thinking personally, which one of the principles would you like to grow in? Which one would you like to improve your practice in? And which one would you be willing to share in terms of supporting the growth of other teachers? Because we all have areas of proficiency, and we all have areas of growth. And remember, the bottom line is, these are behaviors, teacher behaviors, teacher attitudes, teacher, uh, instructional strategies, relationship approach, that is designed to connect with kids who traditionally we have not connected well with in schools. Now, the facilitators in your building, following this conversation, there are many things you could do with the seven principles to follow up, and they will be, uh, guiding you and supporting you in that process, in terms of maybe some self-assessment, some observations in your own classrooms, some deeper look at doorways, barriers, missed opportunities, several avenues of work that can grow out of this. But, uh, the, the bottom line, I'd like each of you individually to continue to pay attention to the principles in your own work, and watch how you are both manifesting, uh, those principles in a good way for your students, and maybe how some of the principles could actually be strategies to improve your practice as well. So, thank you for what you do, and I, uh, look forward to connecting with you again and, uh, and continuing this work around cultural responsive teaching and cultural competence.
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