It’s Not Hard Work; It’s Heart Work: Strategies of Effective, Award-Winning Culturally Responsive Teachers

With an increasingly diverse, K-12 public school student population, adequately teaching and instructing all student demographic groups is a pertinent educational issue. As such, there has been an ensuing need for teachers to develop the knowledge, dispositions, and pedagogical skills and competencies necessary to teach children from diverse backgrounds. Acknowledging this need, this qualitative analysis examines the teaching strategies that seven award-winning teachers of students in urban schools use to cultivate culturally responsive classroom environments. Considering the disparaging academic achievement of many U.S. public school students, culturally responsive teaching may assist in closing enduring achievement gaps. To this end, this study’s findings indicate four major themes that may inform the classroom pedagogical practices of practitioners. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York.