By Meg Stentz
The MC Community supports mastery-based and culturally responsive-sustaining, student-centered practices. But which practices are mastery-based? Which are culturally responsive? Are some practices both? Why do schools need this dual lens?
Four years ago, our community took up these questions and came away with the crowd-sourced Equity Snapshot document. We identified ways mastery learning could be more equitable. Learning targets being shared with students from the outset is more fair than keeping them secret, but this mastery-move doesn’t address students’ cultural or sociopolitical selves. Mastery learning alone is not culturally responsive and sustaining. To fully support all students, to address racial, economic, and other inequities, educators and school teams need to build capacity in culturally responsive-sustaining practices (CRSE).
What is CRSE? There is a rich body of scholarship around this, but the MC community grounds itself in the definition set out by Dr. Gloria Ladson Billings. Dr. Ladson-Billings lays out three components of what she called culturally relevant pedagogy:
Students must experience academic success
Students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence.
Students must develop a critical (aka sociopolitical) consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order.
Dr. Ladson-Billings came to those three pillars by studying teachers who were successful educators of students of color, particularly black students. She chose to center black students because the research usually does not, and because education that supports these students will support all students in becoming independent learners. Zaretta Hammond, who studies the neuroscience of what she calls culturally responsive teaching (CRT), finds that recognizing and valuing students’ identities facilitates a safe, supportive environment that primes the brain for optimal learning. Leveraging students’ strengths, interests and backgrounds increases student engagement, which in turn leads to academic success.
So what’s mastery got to do with it? Mastery is one support for students experiencing academic success. Focusing students’ attention on key skills and knowledge, giving them lots of active practice, and multiple opportunities to demonstrate their learning allows all students to be successful.
MC schools must build cultural competence and critical thinking into their mastery systems. What does that look like? Learning targets can and should address students’ ability to communicate across differences, to analyze a historical moment from a critical race lens, even to advocate for real world solutions. (For more specifics, check out these Social Justice Standards from Teaching Tolerance.) Many teachers also find that once they’ve identified the what of the course--the key skills and knowledge-- they can be more flexible with how students get there. For example, students can learn the skill of analyzing primary documents by studying the Haitain Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, or the Arab Spring. With a clear focus on the skill of analyzing documents, the teacher can use her professional judgement to teach content that supports students in understanding their own and other cultures.
At our most recent full-community gathering, we shared the above slide to guide some reflection. We invite you to join us in thinking about your own mastery-based, culturally responsive practices.
What do you notice about the differences and shared attributes of mastery and CRSE?
What classroom practices are you implementing now, and where do they fall on this diagram?
What would you add to any of these columns?
Huge thanks to the NYU MetroCenter team (Dr. Leah Q. Peoples, Pamela D’Andrea Martinez, and Lindsey Foster) for pushing our work and thinking about differences and similarities between mastery and CRSE. To read more about their work check out their twitter @metro_research @metronyu.