NEW TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR WORKING WITH STUDENTS OF COLOR

Background: This study gathers insight into what professional development new teachers believe they need to implement culturally responsive practices in their classroom instruction. Purpose: This study asked the question: What are new teachers’ perspectives of their professional development needs for implementing culturally responsive classroom practices in their classrooms? The study was conducted in a large urban school district in southeast Texas, where the student discipline rates are not in proportion with the ethnic data. Methods: The qualitative narrative case study design shares the perspectives of three teachers, who were selected through convenience and purposive snowball sampling from the researcher’s social network. These educators are new to teaching, with up to three years of experience. Two of the participants are White and not from Texas. One participant is LatinX and grew up in the school district where the study was conducted. They each had no prior experience working in an urban high poverty school district with students of color. The researcher used a latent approach to perform a thematic data analysis. Data collected included the researcher’s journal notes written during the recruitment process and after each interview, two one-hour long semi-structured interviews with each teacher, and one 10-minute follow up interview for member checking. All the interviews were conducted through videoconferencing. Each interview was recorded and the video was uploaded into transcription software to be deductively analyzed to determine removal of bias, with the researcher looking for similarity in the patterns for each interview question response. Results: The findings revealed that these new teachers believe they need support in learning how to build relationships with their students of color, as well as understanding the social and emotional learning needs of both their students and themselves. The findings also showed that new teachers need this support regardless of whether they grew up in socioeconomic environments similar to their students or not. The teachers demonstrated that even in an era when heightened race relations discussions are taking place, they feel a level of discomfort, and still prefer specific guidance, for how to approach culturally responsive teaching practices. They prefer professional development that may include role simulations, book studies, and regular group discussions with other new teacher peers from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Conclusion: New teachers will need a great amount of specific support when implementing culturally responsive teaching. New teachers will benefit from guidance on how to begin relationship building, while not causing harm to their students of color. Whether teachers are originally from affluent or high poverty communities, they will require high levels of support to become more comfortable working with students of color.