I started to talk about this topic in the discussion post this week. When I try to reflect on whether I'm being a culturally responsive teacher I'm met with mixed emotions.  The first is usually frustration because being "culturally responsive" has turned into a buzz word that administrators looks for in classrooms and (in my opinion), don't always have a clear understanding of what that means.  I love how Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, defines culturally responsive teaching. I'm going to include the quote below (it's a little long), but it helps me to re-read this to remind myself what my goals should be in the classroom. 

"One of the biggest misconceptions about culturally responsive teaching is thinking you have to tie the lesson’s content to African American or Latino students’ racial background. The common belief is if you mention Africa, Mexico, or famous black and brown high achievers, it will spark students’ attention. Then they will be motivated to participate.In reality, culturally responsive teaching is less about using racial pride as a motivator and more about mimicking students’ cultural learning styles and tools. These are the strategies their moms, dads, grandmas, and other community folks use to teach them life skills and basic concepts long before they come to school and during out-of-school time."

In order to be a more culturally responsive teaching, I need to use a larger variety of instructional activities in my classroom.  I make great use of technology and offering a variety of different materials (video and text) on a class website, but I would like to change the ways the students are interacting with each other in class.  Specifically, I would like to implement cooperative learning techniques in my classroom.  I think students need to learn to talk and problem solve together. They need to discuss study strategies, form their own study guides, and work-through complex notation together.  I liked the idea of rewarding students based on team achievement divisions.  For this, I'm thinking of tracking student mastery by standard. I could form heterogenous groups by ability and compare growth from assessment to assessment. Teams with the largest improvement could be rewarded (although I would have to decide on a reward that is not grade-based).  I also need to think about how I would set "group norms" and provide clear expectations for how group work should take place in the classroom. I think one of the big reasons teachers don't like to do group work is they are worried about students being off-task or not working well together. I will have to think about strategies to set clear expectations from the beginning as well as methods for monitoring appropriate group behavior.