How to Keep Teaching Well When DEI is Under Attack

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Last week, on February 27, 2025, under the directive of the new U.S. administration, the Department of Education launched a portal it has nicknamed the “End DEI Portal.” This online form is a place for “students, parents, teachers, and the broader community to report illegal discriminatory practices at institutions of learning.”

Here’s what Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, said about the portal in the Department of Education’s press release: “For years, parents have been begging schools to focus on teaching their kids practical skills like reading, writing, and math, instead of pushing critical theory, rogue sex education and divisive ideologies — but their concerns have been brushed off, mocked, or shut down entirely. Parents, now is the time that you share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools. This webpage demonstrates that President Trump’s Department of Education is putting power back in the hands of parents.”

The announcement of this portal comes a month after the president released the Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling executive order, eliminating Federal funding or support for “illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” 

Both of these developments have naturally caused a lot of concern for anyone who teaches in a publicly-funded K-12 school, and these concerns are absolutely legitimate. Many of the practices I have personally advocated for on Cult of Pedagogy, like calling students by their preferred names and pronouns and teaching accurate history, would likely get a teacher flagged by this policy, and right now I’m not sure what the best course of action is when it comes to these practices. I’m very encouraged to read about how individual district leaders are refusing to comply with the orders. I’ll link to a piece that lists some of these, but to give you a taste of what this refusal looks like, I’d like to read a January 30 Facebook post written by Michael Richards, superintendent of Harrisonburg, Virginia public schools: 

As you may have heard, the Trump Administration has singled out Harrisonburg City Public Schools in a fact sheet accompanying an executive order banning what it calls “gender ideology” in schools. The claims in their statement are false. We do not have a policy that violates anyone’s rights or indoctrinates children. What we do have is a culture of respect—one that honors the dignity and diversity of all students, families, and educators. Naming specific school divisions is using fear as a weapon. Fear to silence educators. Fear to divide communities. Fear to force compliance with an ideology that deliberately targets the most vulnerable. Let me be clear: I will not be intimidated. I stand firm in my commitment to ensuring that HCPS remains a safe, welcoming place for all.

My hope is that many others will put up the same fight as Richards, and that we’ll see these policies ultimately collapse. In the meantime, you still have to teach, and unless you’re willing to sacrifice your job for this cause — and you might be, and I’d stand behind you on that — many of you probably would like to keep your job.  

So where to go from here? How do you teach at this precarious time in history when so much work has been done to weave materials and practices that support diversity, equity, and inclusion into our schools?

The more I think about it, the more I realize you may not have to change as much as it might seem. When I look over the years of articles and podcast episodes I have done in the service of supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion, so many of the practices we’ve learned about here would never get flagged by these directives. 

Along those same lines, I recently spoke to Zaretta Hammond about this. She is the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, which I’ve referred to many times on this site, and one of the most respected voices on the topic of equity-driven education. (She recently wrote about this same question in a piece for EdWeek.) Her take on recent events surprised me because she sees some good that could come from them. 

“I feel like the upside of this is we’re going to shake out the performative aspects of teaching that actually do eat up instruction minutes and really get back to the body of knowledge we want students to have, the skills we want them to have, helping students be critical thinkers, critical readers, being able to do critical analysis so they can separate fake news and propaganda from real. We’ll be able to double down on those things because those aren’t so-called woke activities. Those are things we need to do to make sure every child is learning at a high level. That is our social justice call to action during these times.”

With all of this in mind, I thought it might be helpful for me to curate some of the most important teaching recommendations that have come through my platform for addressing inequities in schools. I feel confident that if you continue to implement these practices you will not only keep your job but will continue to help all of your students develop the skills they need to be successful in life, including those who have been historically marginalized. 

Practice 1: Deep Listening

One of the most powerful ways to meet the needs of underserved students is to build in more time to listen to them. The Street Data protocol helps schools improve through a process that starts with what they call empathy interviews, one-on-one interviews with students about their experiences in that school. Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan, who developed the protocol, describe these short interviews as a powerful way to “identify and include the voices of those who may have never had a seat at the decision-making table but whose experiences and perspectives matter.”

Another way to do deep listening is through cogenerative dialogues, or cogens for short. Popularized by educator and author Chris Emdin and built into the Street Data protocol, these are informal conversations between a teacher and a small group of students with the goal of giving feedback to the teacher and co-generating a plan of action, often around a focused topic or set of questions. 

Both of these practices are simple ways to make your classroom a more equitable place for a diverse range of students.

Putting It Into Action

• Set aside time to ask students open-ended questions about their experiences in your classroom. If you want to try the empathy interview structure used in Street Data, follow the steps in this document.
• Try holding a cogen with a small group of your students. This document offers a set of steps and guidelines you can follow.
• Learn more about the Street Data process by reading the book and watching our video series that captures the work of teachers in two schools as they follow the protocol.

Practice 2: Language-Affirming Pedagogy

When we talk about “diversity,” that includes language. Students whose home language is not the same as the Standardized English taught in schools will do much better if their teachers adopt certain practices that affirm those languages, rather than treating them as if they are incorrect or wrong. In this article by New York teacher Andrea Castellano, who is also a member of our staff at Cult of Pedagogy, you can learn about specific teaching moves that will support and affirm students’ language use.  

Putting It Into Action

The best thing you can do is read Castellano’s article or listen to our interview, but here is a sampling of the practices she recommends:

• Offer a variety of discussion formats to get students talking, especially small groups, where there will be less pressure.
• Incorporate more think time after asking a question to allow students to process the language they need to respond.
• Activate background knowledge before giving students a text so that students who are less familiar with the language can feel confident as they read.
• Avoid qualitative labeling of languages: Don’t treat or label a student’s home language as incorrect or “slang” or refer to Standardized English as “correct English.” These behaviors don’t recognize the inherent value of students’ home languages and treat them as lesser than.

Practice 3: Media Literacy

A vital piece of helping students become informed citizens who can advocate for their own needs is to teach them how to critically analyze all the media they consume. Common Sense Education offers an excellent, free digital citizenship curriculum for grades K-12. Using these materials and others like it will continue to strengthen students’ growth and critical thinking skills.

Putting It Into Action

One of the strategies recommended by the Common Sense curriculum is teaching students to practice lateral reading, which requires them to move away from an original news or information source to find other sources that can corroborate the facts presented. This often looks like literally opening a series of new tabs in a browser and comparing the facts in various articles. Making practices like these a regular part of students’ reading and research habits will help them become more critical consumers of news and media.

Practice 4: Identity Work

In Gholdy Muhammad’s 2020 book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, she introduces a framework she built with Black students in mind, but that would benefit all students. In the book, she explains it this way: “If we start with Blackness (which we have not traditionally done in schooling) or the group of people who have uniquely survived the harshest oppressions in this country, then we begin to understand ways to get literacy education right for all.” She believes we’re not reaching many of our students, especially Black students, because our curricula and standards mainly emphasize skills — skills that can be measured easily on standardized tests — and not a whole lot else. Her framework focuses on four areas: identity, skills, intellect, and criticality.

Muhammad puts identity first in the framework, and in light of current efforts to remove books that represent a diversity of people, it seems especially important to focus on right now. Here’s what Muhammad said about the importance of identity work in the classroom: “Identity is very important for children of color, because when we look at representation in children’s literature, in society, oftentimes and historically they are invisible or represented in negative ways. So the classroom needs to be a space for students to affirm and celebrate and validate who they are, so that they know that they are enough, so that they know that they are brilliant and that they are excellent and beautiful. Because society doesn’t tell us that all the time.”

Putting It Into Action

When planning lessons, Muhammad recommends you get into the habit of asking how a lesson can help students learn about themselves and others. Here’s a science example from our interview:

“Some teachers have written it (in language like) Students will understand their environmental identity and their roles and responsibilities regarding the planet. Then in the lesson or unit there are opportunities for students to deeply reflect about how they recycle or (whether) they take care of the earth and the planet and the environment.”

Practice 5: Games

One of the teaching strategies recommended by Zaretta Hammond is to add more games to classroom instruction. “Games are the power strategy for culturally-grounded learning because they get the brain’s attention and require active processing. Attention is the first step in learning. We cannot learn, remember, or understand what we don’t first pay attention to. Most games employ a lot of the cultural tools you’d find in oral traditions – repetition, solving a puzzle, making connections between things that don’t seem to be related.”

Games are also a way of adding more socialization to your classroom, which is another culturally responsive ingredient Hammond recommends.

Putting It Into Action

This one’s easy: Just add more games to your instruction. Here are a few suggestions:

• One game I loved as a teacher is called Crumple & Shoot, where groups of students work together to answer content-based questions. You ask a question, students huddle and write down their answer on a small sheet of paper, then all at once they hold up their response. Every group with a correct answer sends a representative to the front of the room to shoot their balled-up answer sheet into the trash can. If they get it in, their team gets a point. My students, from 6th grade through college, never got tired of this game.
• Another is the Three Round Game shared with us by a teacher named Erin Farley in a comment on our retrieval practice post in 2017. Here’s how she describes it: There is a large bowl full of cards with key terms, people, etc. Kids are put into three teams. Round 1 is kind of like the game Taboo: One player comes up and gives as many social studies clues as possible without saying the word and the card and tries to get their team to guess the word. The student does as many cards as possible in a minute. 1 point per card. If the team doesn’t guess the card it goes back in the bowl. Next team goes, then the third, etc. Round 1 ends when the bowl is empty — every card guessed correctly. Round 2: Every card goes back in the bowl so the kids have seen them all. Now it’s charades and each card is worth 2 points. Same idea as round one: 1 minute per team but doing Charades. Round ends when the bowl is empty. Round 3: All cards back in, kids have seen them twice. Like the two previous rounds kids have to get their team to yell out the answer but this time the clue giver can only say one word. One social studies related word that will get their team to guess the word and each card is worth five points. This game is crazy loud and fun and they know their stuff after. 
• Finally, there are lots of great tech tools that can facilitate games for you, like Kahoot! Quizziz, and Gimkit. We have a collection of 18 of these featured in our Teacher’s Guide to Tech.

Practice 6: Mnemonics

In her book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, Hammond recommends teachers prioritize information processing in their instruction. “Teachers need to understand how to expand students’ intellective capacity so they can engage in deeper, more complex learning. This requires teachers to learn brain-based information processing strategies common to oral cultures like metaphors, rhythmic mnemonics, and ‘story-ifying’ the content.”

We have a long history of examining brain-based teaching here, and I’ll link to where you can find our collection of articles on that, but for now let’s just stick with adding mnemonics to your teaching. These are tools like rhymes, songs, and acronyms that help you remember information, like ROY G. BIV for remembering the colors of the rainbow, or the ABC song. The more you can add these into your instruction, the better your students will learn the material. 

Putting It Into Action

Learn about different kinds of mnemonics that are already used in your field, and if you have a piece of content that doesn’t have a good mnemonic in place already, have your students help you come up with something; it’s not like Roy G. Biv is a streak of absolute genius. Even a not-awesome mnemonic can probably work better than nothing at all.

Practice 7: Universal Design

UDL is a framework for designing learning experiences so students have options for how they learn, what materials they use, and how they demonstrate their learning. In a 2021 article and interview with her co-author Mirko Chardin, Katie Novak presents Universal Design as a tool for teaching more equitably.

“When we design the same learning pathways for all learners, we might tell ourselves we are being fair, but in fact, single pathways are exclusionary. It may not be our intent to exclude our learners, but the reality is that many students do not have opportunities to learn at high levels or to access curriculum and instruction that is accessible, engaging, culturally sustaining, and linguistically appropriate. When implemented with a lens of equity, (UDL) has the potential to eliminate opportunity gaps that exclude many learners, especially those who have been historically marginalized. If we want all students to have equal opportunities to learn, we have to be incredibly purposeful, proactive, and flexible. UDL creates a learning environment that is the least restrictive and most culturally responsive, trauma-informed environment for all students.”

Putting It Into Action

While full implementation of UDL is a process that would require some study and training — and I would recommend you start with the interview and Katie and Mirko’s book for that — you can begin very simply by proactively offering more choices in your lessons. For example, if you want students to read a particular text, see if there is an audio option for the same text so they can choose which format works best for them. Even little changes like this open up more opportunities for students to learn in a way that works best for them. 

Practice 8: Build Partnerships with Families

One of the best ways to create a more inclusive environment in your school for all students is to take intentional, thoughtful steps to build collaborative relationships with families. Last year I interviewed Nawal Qarooni about her wonderful book, Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations, which offers a collection of practices for building authentic partnerships with families, especially those who may not historically have felt welcomed by schools.

Putting It Into Action

To really get to know Qarooni’s approach, I’d recommend you listen to my interview with her. But I’d like to highlight one unique approach she recommends, because it was different from anything I’d seen before: family lab sites, where she invites families to school to participate in a mini-lesson. “They co-create something or co-think through something,” she explains, “and then debrief at the end where you share with families one of these holistic literacy tenets that you’re trying to communicate.” These experiences build the relationship between teacher and caregiver and give families a clearer sense of what’s actually happening at school. “It breaks down this Us vs. Them barrier.”

These are troubling times for many of us. And I know that there are hundreds of thousands of excellent teachers out there who will still give love and support and high-quality instruction to all of their students, regardless of what happens politically. My hope is that today’s episode offers a few extra reminders of what that could look like.