A Person-Centered Approach to Understanding Teacher’s Culturally Responsive Practices

Introduction: Culturally responsive teaching practices (CRTP) have been identified as a way to improve educational outcomes and reduce disproportionality in disciplinary sanctions for racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse students (Gay, 2002). However, CRTP have not been integrated into broader frameworks regarding what constitutes high quality teaching. The current study uses person-centered approaches to explain variability across behavior management strategies, including CRTP. We also investigate associations between classes of teachers with teacher and classroom characteristics and student behaviors.

Methods: The sample includes 103 teachers (64% female; 47% Black, 23% White) from nine middle schools. About half of the teachers (45.6%) had nine or more years of experience. We utilize teacher self-report of demographic information and classroom observations from the ASSIST measure (Rusby, Crowley, Sprague, & Biglan, 2011). Six behavior management techniques - control (CON), anticipation and responsiveness (AR), monitoring (MON), proactive behavior management (PBM), student-teacher meaningful participation (MP), and cultural competence (CUL) – were rated globally. A median split was created for each teaching practice. Student negative behaviors were captured using event-based tallies of non-compliance, disruptions, verbal aggression, physical aggression, and profanity. Classrooms were observed three times for 15 minutes; scores were averaged across the observations.

The six teaching practices were entered as indicators for a latent class analysis using Mplus 8. The 3-step method was used to examine the role of teacher’s race, years of experience, and classroom composition as predictors of the latent classes. BCH was used to test for differences in student behaviors across the latent classes.

Results: One class of teachers (high-quality; 36%) was more likely to exhibit higher quality teaching practices than their peers on all six indicators and another group (low-quality; 34%) demonstrated lower quality teaching practices on all indicators. A third class (controlling; 11%) was rated higher than their peers on CON, MON, AR, but lower than their peers on PBM, MP, and CUL; the fourth group (relational; 19%) demonstrated the opposite pattern. Teachers with more years of experience were more likely to be in the high-quality class. Students of low-quality teachers displayed more negative behaviors.

Discussion: In addition to identifying generally low- and high-quality teachers, our results distinguish between controlling and relational behavior management styles, with CRTP a defining feature of the latter. This study has implications for identifying training needs and tailoring professional development programs for particular groups of teachers.