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This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 246 of the cult of Pedagogy podcast. In this episode, we're going to talk about how to keep teaching well when DEI is under attack. I did not plan this one, but recent events have prompted me to add this as episode to my schedule. Last week, on February 27, 2025, under the directive of the new U.S. administration, the Department of Education launched a portal it has nicknamed the NDEI Portal. This online form is a place for students, parents, teachers and the broader community to report illegal discriminatory practices at institutions of learning. Here is what Tiffany justice, co founder of Moms for Liberty, said about the portal in the Department of Education's press release. For years, parents have been begging schools to focus on teaching their kids practical skills like reading, writing and math instead of pushing critical theory, rogue sex education and divisive ideologies. But their concerns have been brushed off, mocked or shut down entirely. Parents, now is the time that you share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools. This webpage demonstrates that President Trump's Department of Education is putting power back in the hands of parents. End quote. The announcement of this portal comes a month after the president released the ending Radical indoctrination in K12 schooling executive order eliminating federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology. Both of these developments have naturally caused a lot of concern for anyone who teaches in a publicly funded K12 school, and these concerns are absolutely legitimate. Many of the practices I have personally advocated for on cult of pedagogy, like calling students by their preferred names and pronouns and teaching accurate history, would likely get a teacher flagged by this policy. And right now I am not sure what the best course of action is when it comes to these practices. I'm very encouraged to read about how individual district leaders are refusing to comply with the orders. I will link to a piece that lists some of these, but to give you a taste of what this refusal looks like, I would like to read a January 30 Facebook post written by Michael Richards, superintendent of Harrisonburg, Virginia Public Schools. This is what he wrote. As you may have heard, the Trump administration has singled out Harrisonburg City Public Schools in a fact sheet accompanying an executive order banning what it calls gender ideology in schools. The claims in their statement are false. We do not have a policy that violates anyone's rights or indoctrinates children. What we do have is a culture of respect, one that honors the dignity and diversity of all students, families, and educators. Naming specific school divisions is using fear as a weapon. Fear to silence educators, Fear to divide communities. Fear to force compliance with an ideology that deliberately targets the most vulnerable. Let me be clear. I will not be intimidated. I stand firm in my commitment to ensuring that HCPS remains a safe, welcoming place for all. My hope is that many others will put up the same fight as Richards, and that we'll see these policies ultimately collapse. In the meantime, you still have to teach. And unless you're willing to sacrifice your job for this cause, and you might be, and I'd stand behind you on that, many of you probably would like to keep your job. So where do we go from here? How do you teach at this precarious time in history when so much work has been done to weave materials and practices that support diversity, equity, and inclusion into our schools? The more I think about it, the more I realize you may not have to change as much as it might seem. When I look over the years of articles and podcast episodes I have done in the service of supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion, so many of the practices we've learned about here would never get flagged by these directives. Along those same lines, I recently spoke to Zaretta Hammond about this. She is the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, which I've referred to many times on this site, and she's one of the most respected voices on the topic of equity driven education. She also recently wrote about this same question I'm asking in this episode in a piece for EdWeek that I will link to in the blog post that I'm gonna put out with this episode. So Zaretta's take on recent events kind of surprised me because she sees some good that could come from them. And this is a direct quote from her. This is what she shared with me directly. I feel like the upside of this is we're going to shake out the performative aspects of teaching that actually do eat up instruction minutes and really get back to the body of knowledge we want students to have the skills we want them to have. Helping students be critical thinkers, critical readers, being able to do critical analysis so they can separate fake news and propaganda from real. We'll be able to double down on those things because those aren't so called woke activities. Those are the things we need to do to make sure every child is learning at a high level. That is our social justice call to action during these times. With all of this in mind, I thought it might be helpful for me to curate some of the most important teaching recommendations that have come through my platform for addressing inequities in schools. Some of the things that have been recommended, like diversifying your school library and some of the practices that we've talked about for making our LGBTQIA students feel more welcome. Some of them, some specific ones, are the things that are being targeted right now and again right now. I don't know what we do about those, apart from just sticking to our guns and doing it anyway and taking what consequences happen, which I would respect that very much. Or, I don't know, toning it down a little bit. I'm not sure. I don't really love all of the options because this is unprecedented. However, the stuff I'm going to talk about in this episode, I feel confident that if you continue to implement those practices, you will not only keep your job, but you'll continue to help all of your students develop the skills they need to be successful in life, including and maybe especially those who have been historically marginalized. Today's episode is brought to you by ListenWise, providing short, high quality, age appropriate podcasts for grades 2 through 12. Save time with pre made lessons designed to build students background knowledge and academic vocabulary. Keep students on grade level with scaffolding and differentiation. Use ListenWise's eld lesson library for WIDA and State ELD Standards aligned podcast and video lessons built for English learners from emergent to reclassification. Listenwise gives you comprehension tools like quizzes, interactive transcripts, crafts, graphic organizers and a text to speech toolbar with translations in over 15 languages. Start a free trial today@listenwise.com okay, so I have eight practices to recommend to you. Practice number one is deep listening. One of the most powerful ways to meet the needs of underserved students is to build in more time to listen to them. The Street Data Protocol, which I have covered here twice in episode 178 and 203, help schools improve through a process that starts with what they call empathy interviews, one on one interviews with students about their experiences in that school. Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan, who developed the protocol, describe these short interviews as a powerful way to identify and include the voices of those who may have never had a seat at the decision making table, but whose experiences and perspectives matter. Another way to do deep listening is through cogenerative dialogues, or cogens for short. Popularized by educator and author Chris Emden and built into the Street Data Protocol. These are informal conversations between a teacher and a Small group of students with the goal of giving feedback to the teacher and co generating a plan of action often around a focused topic or a set of questions. Both of these practices are simple ways to make your classroom a more equitable place for for a diverse range of students. So here's how you put this one into action. First thing would be to set aside time to ask your students open ended questions about their experiences in your classroom. And I would say this goes especially for those that we would consider to be at the margins. Students who don't often speak up, students who are minoritized in some way or who are not performing well in school. These are the experiences we need to be taking up data on and find out what what their experiences are like. If you want to try the empathy interview structure that is used in street data, I have linked to a document that is free. You don't have to buy the book that was created by the authors that actually provides the steps for you. The other thing you can do to put it into action is to try holding a cogen with a small group of students. And I've linked to another document that offers a set of steps and guidelines that you can follow. And then finally, if you really wanted to go deep, you could learn more about the Street Data process by getting a copy of the book and reading that and or watching our video series which we did a few years ago, pretty lengthy video series on YouTube that captures the work of teachers in two schools as they follow the protocol and we produce that with the idea of helping teachers really understand what it looks like when you do the Street Data process. So that's practice number one, deep listening. Practice two is language affirming pedagogy. When we talk about diversity that includes language. Students whose home language is not the same as the standardized English taught in schools will do much better if their teachers adopt certain practices that affirm those languages rather than treating them as if they are incorrect or wrong. So I'm linking to an article and this is from episode 193. This was an interview and an article from Andrea Castellano, who is a New York teacher and she is also a member of our staff at Cult of Pedagogy and she wrote a really comprehensive, detailed article about specific teaching moves that will support and affirm students language use. And we were specifically focusing on what she was calling code switching students. These are students who speak a different language or dialect at home than they do at school. So how do we put into action? First of all, I would recommend listening to the interview and or reading the article. But even if you don't, here's some things that you can do to put this into action. Just a sampling. She listed quite a few practices. Some do's and don'ts to do to use to be more language affirming. But here's just a couple. One is to offer a variety of discussion formats to get students students talking, especially in small groups where there will be less pressure on them to sort of perform in front of a group. Incorporate more think time after asking a question to allow students to process the language that they need to respond because a lot of times they're translating in their heads. Another thing is to activate students background knowledge before giving them a text so that the ones who are less familiar with the language or even the culture can feel confident as they read. And then finally, avoid qualitative labeling of languages. In other words, don't treat or label a student's home language as incorrect or slang, or refer to standardized English as correct English. These behaviors don't recognize the inherent value of students home languages and they treat them as lesser than so the third practice is media literacy. A vital piece of helping students become informed citizens who can advocate for their own needs is is to teach them how to critically analyze all the media they consume. Common Sense Education offers an excellent free digital citizenship curriculum for grades K through 12, and I've linked to that in the show notes. Using these materials and others like it will continue to strengthen students growth and critical thinking skills. So here's one way that you can put this into action because obviously this is a whole curriculum that has lots of different exercises and activities. But one of the practices that I had never heard of before that was recommended in the interview that I did and let me just check and see what episode that was. If you want to listen to the interview that I did, this is episode 184 and I did this with Kelly Mendoza who is part of Common Sense Education. She explained to me about a practice called lateral reading which requires a person, in this case students, to move away from an original news or information source to find other sources that can corroborate the facts presented. This often looks like literally opening a series of new tabs in a browser and comparing the facts in various articles with other sources. So making practices like lateral reading a regular part of students reading and research habits will help them to become more critical consumers of news and media. Practice number four is identity work in Goldie Mohammed's 2020 book Cultivating an Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically responsive Literacy. And Also in episode 151 of our podcast, when I interviewed her, she introduces a framework she built with Black students in mind but that would benefit all students. In the book, she explains that decision this if we start with Blackness, which we have not traditionally done in schooling, or the group of people who have uniquely survived the harshest oppressions in this country, then we begin to understand ways to get literacy education right for all. This is page 22 of her book. Muhammad believes we're not reaching many of our students, especially Black students, because our curricula and standards mainly emphasize skills, skills that can be measured easily on standardized tests and not a whole lot else. Her framework focuses on four identity skills, intellect and criticality. She puts identity first in the framework, and in light of current efforts to remove books that represent a diversity of people, it seems especially important to focus on right now. Here's what she said about the importance of identity work in the classroom. Identity is very important for children of color because when we look at representation in children's literature in society, oftentimes and historically, they are invisible or represented in negative ways. So the classroom needs to be a space for students to affirm and celebrate and validate who they are so that they know that they are enough, so that they know that they are brilliant and that they are excellent and beautiful. Because society doesn't tell us that all the time. So here is how to put this into action. When planning lessons, Muhammad recommends you get into the habit of asking how a lesson can help students learn about themselves and others. In our interview, she gives us an example just from like a science lesson. This is a quote. Some teachers have written it in language like students will understand their environmental identity and their roles and responsibilities regarding the planet. Then in the lesson or unit, there are opportunities for students to deeply reflect about how they recycle or whether they take care of the earth and the planet and the environment. So as you're teaching and as you're planning lessons, look for opportunities to pause and have students reflect on how their own identity interacts with the material that they're learning and maybe even what the things they're learning teach them about themselves. Weave that into the curriculum. And always be looking for opportunities for students to continue to think about and further define who they are and who they are in the world. So so far we have looked at four practices. Practice one is Deep listening. Practice two is Language Affirming pedagogy. Practice three Media literacy and Practice four is Identity work. Practice five is games. So one of the teaching strategies recommended by Zaretta Hammond is to add more games to classroom instruction. This is what she says Games are the power strategy for culturally grounded learning because they get the brain's attention and require active processing. Attention is the first step in learning. We cannot learn, remember, or understand what we don't first pay attention to. Most games employ a lot of the cultural tools you'd find in oral traditions repetition, solving a puzzle, making connections between things that don't seem to be related. Games are also a way of adding more socialization to your classroom, which is another culturally responsive ingredient Hammond recommends. So here's how you put this into action. This is easy. Just add more games to your instruction. I've got a couple suggestions for you if you don't have some already on hand. So one game I loved as a teacher is called Crumple and Shoot. Or at least that's what it was called in my classroom where groups of students work together to answer content based questions. You ask a question, students huddle and write down their answer on a small sheet of paper. Then all at once they hold up their response. Every group with a correct answer sends a representative to the front of the room to shoot their balled up answer sheet into the trash can. If they get it in, their team gets a point. My students from 6th grade through college never got tired of this game. Another is the three round game, which is shared with us by a teacher named Erin Farley in a comment on our Retrieval practice post in 2017. So Erin, if you're listening, hello. Here is how she describes it. There is a large bowl full of cards with key terms people, etc. Like one side of a flashcard. Kids are put into three teams. Round one is kind of like the game Taboo. One player comes up and gives as many in her case social studies clues as possible without saying the word on the card and tries to get their team to guess the word. The student does as many cards as possible in a minute, one point per card. If the team doesn't guess, the card goes back in the bowl. Next team goes, then the third, et cetera. Round one ends when the bowl is empty, every card guessed correctly. Round two, every card goes back in the bowl. So the kids have seen them all. Now it's charades and each card is worth two points. Same idea as round one. One minute per team. But doing charades. The round ends when the bowl is empty. Round three, all cards back in. Kids have seen them twice like the two previous rounds. Kids have to get their team to yell out the answer. But this time the clue giver can only say one word, one social studies related word that will get their team to guess the word and each card is worth five points, she says. This game is crazy loud and fun and they know their stuff after and this is a really good example of another kind of retrieval practice. Pretty much all of this is retrieval practice and if you've never heard anyone use the expression retrieval practice, we use it all the time here. Go look it up and you'll find a lot of Cult of Pedagogy articles and podcasts on it. Okay, finally, there are tons of great tech tools that can facilitate games for you. Just three examples are Kahoot Quizzes and Gimkit. We have a collection of 18 of these game platforms featured in our Teacher's Guide to Tech. So if you go to teachersguidetotech.com, it is a subscription, but we work really hard to keep that updated and fresh and show you new game platforms all the time. So that was practice number five. Add more games Practice number six is mnemonics. In her book Culturally Responsive Teaching in the Brain, Hammond recommends teachers prioritize information processing in their instructions instruction. She says teachers need to understand how to expand students intellective capacity so they can engage in deeper, more complex learning. This requires teachers to learn brain based information processing strategies common to oral cultures like metaphors, rhythmic mnemonics, and storifying the content. We have a long history of examining brain based teaching here and I will link to where you can find our collection of articles on that. But for now let's just stick with adding mnemonics to your teaching. These are tools like rhymes, songs and acronyms that help you remember information. Like Roy G. Biv for remembering the colors of the rainbow or the ABC song. The more you can add these into your instruction, the better your students will learn the material. So putting this into action is pretty simple. Learn about different kinds of mnemonics that are already used in your field and if you have a piece of content that doesn't have a good mnemonic in place already, have your students help you come up with something. It's not like Roy G. Biv or the ABC song are strokes of absolute genius. Even a not awesome mnemonic can probably work better than nothing at all. Practice 7 is Universal Design Universal Design, or UDL, is a framework for designing learning experiences so students have options for how they learn, what materials they use, and how they demonstrate their learning. In a 2021 article and interview with her co author Mirko Chardin and this was episode 166. Katie Novak presents Universal Design as a tool for teaching more equitably, and this is a quote from her article that she wrote for us. When we design the same learning pathways for all learners, we might tell ourselves we're being fair, but in fact, single pathways are exclusionary. It may not be our intent to exclude our learners, but the reality is that many students do not have opportunities to learn at high levels or to access curriculum and instruction that is accessible, engaging, culturally sustaining, and linguistically appropriate. When implemented with a lens of equity, UDL has the potential to eliminate opportunity gaps that exclude many learners, especially those who have been historically marginalized. If we want all students to have equal opportunities to learn, we have to be incredibly purposeful, proactive and flexible. UDL creates a learning environment that is the least restrictive and most culturally responsive trauma informed environment for all students. So how to put this into action? Full implementation of UDL is a process that would require some study and training and I would recommend you start with the interview and Katie and Mirko's book for that. But you can begin very simply by proactively offering more choices in your lessons. Here's an example. If you want students to read a particular text, see if there is an audio option for the same text so they can choose which format works best for them. Even little changes like this open up more opportunities for students to learn in a way that works best for them. Practice number eight Build Partnerships with Families One of the best ways to create a more inclusive environment in your school for all students is to take intentional, thoughtful steps to build collaborative relationships with families. Families. Last year I interviewed Naval Karuni about her wonderful book Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations. This was episode 222 which offers a collection of practices for building authentic partnerships with families, especially those who may not historically have felt welcomed by schools. So putting this into action to really get to know Karuni's approach, I would recommend you listen to my interview with her and ultimately buy her book and read that because it's so good. But for a sampling, I would like to highlight one unique approach she recommends because it was different from anything I'd seen before. Family lab sites where she invites families to school to participate in a mini lesson. So this is like a lesson that she would do in school for her students, but she does it with families. This is what she says they co create something or co think through something and then debrief at the end where you share with families one of these holistic literacy tenets that you're trying to communicate. Doing these little mini lessons builds the relationship between teacher and caregiver and gives families a clearer sense of what's actually happening in school, she says. It breaks down this us versus Them barrier, so she goes into more detail about that in the book. But even something along those lines of inviting teachers or parents in not just to talk about school, but to actually participate in a lesson I thought was a very fresh idea for really getting them to know what's happening in school. So as a review, these eight practices that I am reminding you of are number 1 deep listening 2 language affirming pedagogy 3 media literacy 4 identity work 5 games 6 mnemonics 7 universal design and 8 building partnerships with families. These are troubling times for many of us, and I know there are hundreds of thousands of excellent teachers out there who will still give love and support and high quality instruction to all of their students, regardless of what's happening politically. My hope is that today's episode offers a few extra reminders of what that could look like. Like for links to all the resources mentioned in this episode, visit cultopedagogy.com Click podcast and choose episode 246 to get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses and products. Sign up for my mailing list@cultoppedagogy.com subscribe thanks so much for listening. Stay strong out there and have a great day.