Culturally Responsive Approach to

Closing the Gap

When Stephanie Windham's fifth-grade students end the school year at Atkinson Elementary in Portland, they'll be taking with them a treasured possession. It's a story book about their family, meticulously written and beautifully bound in handcrafted paper. The stories—which reflect many cultures—are the result of a two-month project designed to help students meet state writing standards, honor their cultural traditions, and connect the community to the classroom.

The Family Story Project is one of the examples featured in Classroom to Community and Back, a multifaceted product now entering its final year of field-testing at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. Classroom to Community offers a process for using culturally responsive standards-based (CRSB) teaching to strengthen family and community partnerships and increase student achievement. A teacher's guide, online course, and trainer's manual are all part of the product that is being developed over a three-year period.

Steffen Saifer, who is leading the effort, says the most recent field tests have yielded a few surprises. "The biggest one," he reports, "is like many things that require people to do things differently: it's not enough to just read the manual. Teachers need ongoing support." Saifer and his colleagues also discovered that they need to emphasize not only how to implement CRSB material but also why it's important.

Working with school teams around the country during the coming year, NWREL will gather data on how the intervention affects student learning and behavior. "We strongly feel that to close the achievement gap, you need an approach that's culturally responsive—giving students the engagement and motivation to learn," says Saifer. "At the same time, you need to pay attention to the standards—making sure that the learning is challenging and promotes higher-order thinking." Saifer observes that too often schools see being culturally responsive as something additional, outside their efforts to close the gap. "But," he concludes, "it's really central and critical to the effort."

For more information about Classroom to Community and Back, check out www.nwrel.org/partnerships/pubs/c2cb.html; the anticipated publication date for the guide is late 2005.