The Lived Experiences of Culturally Responsive Educators

Abstract

Educators create lesson plans in order to guide instruction. This researcher will research and discuss how culturally responsive educators are influenced by mentoring and professional development. In order to understand how mentoring and professional development influence these lesson plans we must understand mentoring and professional development. Mentoring – if it existed at all in the culture of a school- was initiated as an informal response to a new teacher seeking help or assistance offered by an experienced colleague willing to share his or her own experiences (Portner, 2008). Teacher mentoring programs are increasingly promoted as an effective mechanism for improving new teacher quality, new teacher retention, and student outcomes (Feiman-Nemser & Parker, 1992). Effective professional development requires considerable time, and that time must be well organized, carefully structured, purposefully directed, and focused on content or pedagogy or both (Guskey & Yoon, 2009). Those responsible for planning and implementing professional development must learn how to critically assess and evaluate the effectiveness of what they do (Guskey & Yoon, 2009). Culturally Responsive Professional Development in Education comprehensively teaches the whole teacher-learner through explicit recognition, valuing, and discussion of the diverse ways that cultural and personal identities mediate styles of cognitive engagement, and explicitly honoring these styles in the instructional design of professional development (Farmer et al., 2005).