Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

This document is an action research project that studies a teacher’s growth to include two years of classes and student teaching from Western Oregon University Master of Arts in Teaching: Initial Licensure program. As a student teacher for high school business and technology classes, the primary researcher wanted to ensure that she was continually improving her teaching skills and best practices. Her experience in the classroom led her to the questions listed below in her research to improve her teaching for current and future classes. An expanded version of the primary researcher’s chapters includes philosophy of education, a literature review, research methods, findings, and conclusions. Three specific research questions that were analyzed through various data sources included: observations, lesson plans and journaling. Observations encompassed perspectives of the university supervisor as well as her clinical teacher. The three focus research questions were: how has my lesson plan differentiation changed the more I have taught?; how does my teaching reflect evidence based best practices?; how has my incorporation of culturally responsive pedagogy changed since I started teaching? By examining each question, her hope was to determine if she was increasing her differentiation the more, she taught, that her teaching reflected best practices and her culturally responsive pedagogy strategies were increasing