Culturally Responsive Classroom Management: Awareness into Action

This article expands discussions of culturally responsive pedagogy by focusing specifically on the tasks and challenges of classroom organization and management. First, we examine three prerequisite understandings that underlie teachers' ability to manage diverse classrooms in culturally competent ways. We then consider specific approaches and strategies for enacting culturally responsive classroom management (CRCM) and reflect on the ways that management practices promote or obstruct equal access to learning. We stress the fact that developing CRCM is an ongoing, long-term, and often discomfiting process, in which cultural diversity becomes a lens through which teachers view the tasks of classroom management.