As 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 |