spices-541974_640As I put the finishing touches to an introductory course on culturally responsive teaching I face once again the challenge of how to evaluate progress.

When I first worked on this topic over 10 years ago, our working group came up with intercultural attainment levels. Attainment levels of Intercultural Competence These were useful for assessing your own intercultural sensitivity but were not geared toward your practice in the classroom.

Hammond’s book CRT & the Brain contains a useful framework for reflection in the classroom rather than the basic concepts included in our intro course.

The ECML website describes the three levels of intercultural competence:

  • Savoir
  • Savoir-faire
  • Savoir-être

which could roughly translate to knowledge, skills and meta-cognition. Since self-awareness and the knowledge that we all look at the world with a different perspective is a very important part of intercultural competence, these three areas could be taken as levels with the self-awareness as the highest level of competence because it allows for adaptation according to circumstance and changing of perspective.

It then became a simple task to extract the learning outcomes and apply the three levels of savoir to each LO.  Still, though, some learning objectives did not have either a knowledge phase or a meta-cognitive level so some squares had to be blacked out. See the final grid in PDF format here and the outline below.AF self assessment of CRT adult teacher

So I am wondering if this is a robust strategy that can be applied to several different courses, with the learning outcomes down one axis and the different levels of savoir along the other.

Introduction to Culture in the Adult Ed Classroom for culturally responsive teaching I know about this

(savoir)

I have done this

(savoir-faire)

I have done this in an intercultural setting and can adjust the way I do it in anticipation of how it will be perceived (savoir-être)
Unit 1. Familiarisation, identity      
Introduce myself to and find out about the other participants on the course
Share my classroom
Negotiate a set of guidelines for effective working with my intercultural course colleagues
Consider teacher and student expectations in a multi-cultural classroom
Describe my own identity
Explore the implications of different scores between me and my students on a cultural dimension      
Unit 2: What is culture?      
Explain the basics of culture
Use metaphors to explore the meaning of culture
To learn how dialogue can be used as a tool for understanding
Examine an incident from an intercultural perspective
Identify evidence of cultural models in my classroom
Unit 3: The darker side of culture, self-assessment and problem identifying      
Assess my intercultural competence
Define what a culturally responsive teacher is
Explain what stereotypes are
Explain the effect of stereotypes
Consider examples of stereotyping in my classroom
Identify the intercultural challenges I face in my classroom
Make plans for what I want to work on in the future re CRT