The Culturally Responsive Schooling Rubrics are designed to help different school education partners (leaders, teachers, students, parents/caregivers) learn about key aspects of cultural responsiveness and to gauge their current levels of cultural responsiveness with a series of self-assessment rubrics.
Explore by Role
For this pilot study, please follow instructions and steps outlined by each role.
Overview of the Structure of the CRS Rubrics
The Culturally Responsive Schooling Rubrics are designed to help different school stakeholders (leaders, teachers, students, parents/caregivers) learn about key aspects of cultural responsiveness and to gauge their current levels of cultural responsiveness with a series of self-assessment rubrics.
There are four rubrics which characterize four main school areas of cultural engagement:
A Welcoming and Affirming Environment reflects the physical and social climate of the school where all cultural identities (including race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, disability, language, religion, socioeconomic background) are affirmed and valued.
High Expectations and Rigorous Instruction creates learning conditions that are academically challenging and intellectually demanding, while also considering the different ways that students learn. Instruction includes opportunities to use critical reasoning, take academic risks, and leverage a growth mindset to learn from mistakes. Messages encourage positive self-image and empowerment to succeed.
Inclusive Curriculum and Assessment provides the opportunity to learn about perspectives beyond one’s own experiences and elevates historically marginalized voices. It includes opportunities to learn about power, bias, and inequity and empowers learners to be agents of positive social change.
Ongoing Professional Learning creates continual opportunities for school community members to develop and sharpen a critically conscious lens toward instruction, curriculum, assessment, history, culture, and institutions.
There are separate rubrics for each area for leaders, teachers, and students, while parents/caregivers have one combined rubric. Students do not have a rubric for ongoing professional learning.
Each rubric contains about 8-12 central components of cultural responsiveness for that area, broken down into Commitments, Empowerment, Relationships, and Collaboration. Some of the components are unique to a particular stakeholder, while others ask about the same area from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, which allows you to compare the perceptions of different people about the same area.
Each component starts with a guiding question that can help you think about that component in your school. After the guiding question is a Progression of CRS Engagement that asks you to assess your/your school’s current level of engagement with that component.
The Progression goes from Exploring to Growing to Utilizing to Transforming, like this:
Below the progression for each item is a nine-point scale where 1 is Early Exploring, 2 is Solid Exploring, 3 is between Exploring and Growing, 4 is Solid Growing, etc.
Below the progression is a place for you to take notes if you wish. The notes will be saved or printed when you submit the rubric.
Glossary of Terms
Intro copy for Glossary of Terms. Visit the Glossary of Terms.