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Determine What Behaviors Are Cultural and What Behaviors Are Not Acceptable
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Sharroky Hollie, PhD, is a national educator who provides professional development to thousands of educators in the area of cultural responsiveness. Since 2000, Dr. Hollie has trained more than 150,000 educators and worked in over 2,000 classrooms. Going back to 1992, he has been a classroom teacher at the middle and high school levels, a central office professional development coordinator in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), a school founder and administrator, and a university professor in teacher education at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Dr. Hollie has also been a visiting professor for Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, and a guest lecturer at Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles.
In addition to his experience in education, Dr. Hollie has authored several texts and journal articles. Most recently, he coauthored Beyond Conversations About Race: A Guide for Discussions With Students, Teachers, and Communities (2020), wrote Strategies for Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning (2015), and contributed a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of African American Language (2015).
Dr. Hollie’s first book, Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teaching and Learning: Classroom Practices for Student Success, was published in 2011, followed soon thereafter by The Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach: Transforming Schools at Every Level, cowritten with Dr. Anthony Muhammad. In 2003, he and two colleagues founded the Culture and Language Academy of Success, a laboratory school that demonstrated the principles of cultural responsiveness in an exemplary schoolwide model, which operated until 2013. Dr. Hollie received his PhD from the University of Southern California in curriculum and instruction, with an emphasis on professional development, and his masters in English education from California State University, Northridge.
To learn more about Dr. Hollie’s work, visit the Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning (www.culturallyresponsive.org) or follow him @validateaffirm on Twitter.
Daniel Russell Jr., EdD, is the coordinator of research and development and a lead cultural and linguistic responsiveness (CLR) coach for the Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning. There, he leads training and professional development and provides one-on-one coaching in CLR. He particularly specializes in providing training on how to align positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) with CLR. Additionally, he collects and analyzes data for the Center for Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning, as well as curates resources for the center’s CLR Responds to R.A.C.E. Challenge.
Dr. Russell, who entered teaching in the LAUSD in 1994 through Teach for America, is a former classroom teacher with twenty-one years of experience teaching both elementary and middle school. During his tenure as a teacher in the LAUSD, he also served as a teacher facilitator for the Academic English Mastery Program (AEMP), an English language coordinator, a specially designed academic instruction in English trainer, and an induction coach. He also worked as a corps member advisor at a Teach for America Summer Institute. Dr. Russell followed his years working in the LAUSD by being a founding teacher at Culture and Language Academy of Success (CLAS) with Dr. Sharroky Hollie. From there, he went on to work as a teacher and dean of students at a charter school in the Los Angeles area.
During his career as an educator, Dr. Russell received several recognitions. As an LAUSD intern, he was given the Golden Apple Award for being a distinguished intern. LAUSD’s AEMP also honored him with the Outstanding AEMP Facilitator and Outstanding Teacher awards. In 2005, he and his class were featured on a segment of the PBS documentary Do You Speak American? The segment focused on African American language and what his students learned about linguistic codeswitching through AEMP. He is currently a member of the American Educational Research Association.
Dr. Russell received his bachelor’s degree in U.S. history from San Diego State University in 1994, and he earned his National Board Certification for middle childhood, generalist, in 2001. He completed his final semester at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education in 2021, where he received his EdD in organizational change and leadership. His dissertation focused on the persistent overrepresentation of Black students in exclusionary discipline at schools implementing PBIS.
To book Dr. Sharroky Hollie or Dr. Daniel Russell Jr. for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree.com.
INTRODUCTION
“UBIQUITY DOES NOT ALWAYS EQUAL SUCCESS ” SHARROK Y HOLLIE
My dissertation chair and PhD program adviser was Dr. David Marsh, who, at the time, was a well-known and respected expert on educational systems reform, innovations, and implementation in relation to effective professional development. Because of Dr. Marsh, I had the good fortune of not only becoming aware of research giants like Michael Fullan and Thomas Guskey, but I was able to study their respective work deeply and critically. One of my lasting learnings from Dr. Marsh was looking at prolific or popular professional development programs or approaches in schools and their particular or potential impact as a school innovation.
I remember doing an assignment on Ruby Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty (2019) which was, at one time, one of the most utilized professional learning opportunities in the United States (Bohn, 2006), even before it received noteworthy attention in terms of a researchstudied practice that had been critically analyzed from the academic community in higher education. As of the writing of this book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, now in its 6th edition, has sold more than 1.5 million copies. As Anita Bohn (2006) puts it, Payne’s work has been the singlemost influential voice on teachers’ perspectives about students living in poverty in the past thirty years. Since 1996, Payne has conducted more than
two hundred seminars each year, reaching over 25,000 educators every year. You do the mathematics. Bohn claims that A Framework for Understanding Poverty has been experienced in 70 percent of all U.S. school districts in some capacity.
However, in a critical examination of Payne’s framework, “Questioning Ruby Payne,” Adrienne Van der Valk (2016) says, “The current evidence base for the Payne School Models, as provided in the reports and as reviewed here, simply cannot support confident causal claims about its effectiveness” (p. 4). Without getting into the controversies of Payne’s work, my takeaway from this assignment was that in professional learning spaces, especially in education, ubiquity can overshadow the intended result of being effective and making significant differences for historically marginalized students. The point of this story is not to criticize Payne. From a research perspective, the message was that the ubiquity of an approach or program does not automatically equal overall effectiveness. Payne’s A Framework for Understanding Poverty (2019) is a good example of that dynamic. The central purpose of this book, however, is to increase the likelihood that positive behavioral interventions and supports, better known as PBIS, in its ubiquity will be effective for all students, especially the underserved. PBIS and schoolwide positive behavioral interventions and supports (SWPBIS) originated through the work of researchers George Sugai and Robert Horner (2002) at the University of Oregon, and almost twenty years later in 2021, it is now ubiquitous in 21st century schools.
Since about 2012, very few schools that we support with cultural and linguistic responsiveness (CLR) do not use PBIS in some fashion. In short, PBIS is almost everywhere. We have educated and supported educators in becoming more culturally responsive through professional learning and through school-site, embedded support, which we will reference throughout the text (Hollie, 2018). In most of the districts we have worked, staff raise questions about widespread PBIS professional development and schoolwide PBIS implementation compared to its actual effectiveness, especially with students of color. Therefore, many educators ask us about PBIS’s effectiveness in relation to cultural and linguistic responsiveness.
The Purpose of This Book
At the outset, let us be clear. This is not a book designed to criticize PBIS. We wrote this book to help districts realize their need to align PBIS with cultural responsiveness, thereby positively impacting the learning experiences of all students, and Black and Brown students specifically. But with this purpose comes an irony that is twofold.
The first irony is that although PBIS has a far reach from district to district, we have noticed that culturally responsive teaching, used here as just a generic term for the overall concept of responding to students in a way that meets their needs culturally and linguistically (Hollie, 2018), has little reach in many of those same districts (Russell, 2021). Many districts are hardly scratching the surface of being culturally responsive, while at the same time they are steeped in PBIS. When we look at the wealth of resources that come with PBIS (such as mandated districtwide professional development on PBIS, the infusion of PBIS into school behavioral support systems, and the creation of central office PBIS positions), we compare those resources with what districts are doing with cultural responsiveness. It is never a fair comparison. Meaning that, as it applies to cultural responsiveness, it rarely if ever is mandated, is not infused into school behavioral on instructional support systems, and central office positions intended for support of cultural responsiveness are few and far between. The unintended result is that the use of PBIS is ubiquitous across districts, while the districts have a dearth of culturally responsive teaching.
For example, before the COVID-19 pandemic, we were consulting with a district in the Midwest, and we were sent to the district’s flagship school for PBIS. It was supposedly a model of high implementation, and the school leader and the teachers were very proud of their award banner on the wall. In our discussions about the school’s high levels of PBIS implementation, the staff revealed that their discipline data showed African American students were still being disproportionately suspended and referred out of class in comparison to other student populations in their school. In fact, the rate of disproportionality had increased over the past year. After they presented this data point, the room became silent, which spoke loudly for what could not be said. Despite PBIS’s success and prevalence in this school, it was still failing its students of color, which is the second irony.
Typically, during our work with cultural responsiveness with school districts, district representatives ask what they can do to align cultural responsiveness and PBIS. Our first response is always to find out more about their PBIS implementation and the specific related issues. We find that, for most districts, the main issue is the same—the students of color are referred out of class or suspended from school at rates that are not proportionate to their population in the said school or district. In one district we work in, African American students are only 5 percent of the student population, but they make up almost 25 percent of the suspensions. In education jargon, this is called disproportionality. As far as they are concerned, they are implementing PBIS successfully, yet discipline and disparity issues persist, especially with their Black and Brown students. With our support,
these districts hope they can apply what they are learning about cultural responsiveness to their PBIS and close the disproportionality gap. After dozens and dozens of conversations with schools about this issue, it was clear there was a need for a structured and comprehensive alignment of PBIS to CLR, hence the creation of this book.
Because of PBIS’s ubiquity, we understand the significance of aligning PBIS with cultural and linguistic responsiveness. We have seen the frustration in the eyes of too many district leaders, school-site administrators, PBIS coaches, and classroom teachers. On the one hand, they see PBIS working, but on the other hand, they also see it is not working for all students. With contrast comes a feeling that something is missing. Our hypothesis is that the missing piece is cultural and linguistic responsiveness. We have seen firsthand how when districts align their PBIS with cultural and linguistic responsiveness, it can have positive implications around student outcomes around classroom management and discipline. We have seen schools and districts expend large amounts of time, money, and energy, only to yield returns below what they expected. Most poignantly, we have seen dire results with many students, but especially for those who needed success more urgently or whom we call the underserved. We define underserved as any student, regardless of race or ethnicity, who is not having success academically, socially, or behaviorally because the school is not being responsive to their cultural and linguistic needs (Hollie, 2018).
The Contents of This Book
The book is divided into two parts, and each part has three chapters. Part 1 provides a rationale for why PBIS needs to be aligned to cultural and linguistic responsiveness. Chapter 1 establishes the basics of a CLR-managed classroom, which includes clarity on cultural and linguistic responsiveness as a specific concept and type of culturally responsive teaching. Chapter 2 answers the question, Is PBIS by nature culturally and linguistically responsive for all students? You can probably guess the answer, but this chapter provides the rationale and reasons for that answer. Then, chapter 3 lays out an argument for authentic alignment of CLR and PBIS, which gets at the heart of any potential disconnect between CLR and PBIS, and offers a realistic probability for coexistence.
Part 2 provides the how for aligning CLR and PBIS, using practical steps, suggestions, and recommendations. Chapter 4 shares three steps for starting the process: (1) alignment, (2) assessment, and (3) activation. Chapter 5 presents opportunities for creating situational appropriateness, the goal of CLR within the PBIS framework. Finally, chapter 6 shares language, activities, and procedures for fostering situational appropriateness in various school situations affected by PBIS. Each chapter features personal anecdotes and stories from the authors, which give special insight and life to the research. The end of the book offers an appendix with a list of helpful abbreviations related to PBIS and cultural and linguistic responsiveness.
