What About Your Friends: Using a CFG to Make CRSE Instructional Approaches Practical and Palpable in Secondary Classrooms

The purpose of this study is to address the lack and inconsistency of culturally responsive and sustaining education instructional practices in Bronx high school classrooms. Many school leaders do not clearly understand what CRSE is and have received little training in this area, despite the expectations communicated by New York State. The aim of this study is to improve principals’ support of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogical practices and decrease their variation across classrooms by examining the effects of district-led learner-centered professional development support on school leader implementation of CRSE instructional practices. A Critical Friends Group structure partnered with a consultancy protocol was used to support leaders in peer observations across schools, deep reflection, and constructive feedback. This five-month mixed methods study was evaluated using analytic memos, field notes, exit ticket responses, documents collected, and a pre and post self-reflection rubric derived from The Leadership Academy’s Culturally Responsive Leadership Guide: A Framework for School System Leaders (The Leadership Academy, 2022) and the researcher’s prompts. While exit tickets, analytic memos, and field notes suggested that the participants were highly satisfied with working in a CFG and felt it created accountability and a consortium of trust, self-reflection quantitative data indicated that the leaders may not have changed their practice. Furthermore, the study suggested that engaging in across-school intervisitations deepened the principals\u27 understanding of CRSE instructional practices and their connection to student independent thinking. In addition, a foundation was seemingly created to support the participants in operationalizing these practices across their schools