Are You Culturally Proficient?

Cultural proficiency is an inside-out approach on change in which teacher leaders transform approaches to their personal leadership behaviors and to their school practices. Leaders who manifest cultural proficiency guide their colleagues to examine personal values and behaviors in such a way that the members of the school realize that is is they who must adapt their practices to meet the needs of the students and the community they serve.  Likewise, these leaders support their colleagues and members of the community in aligning the school's policies, practices, and procedures to achieve cultural proficiency (Lindsey, Nuri Robins, & Terrell, 2003; Nuri Roberts, Lindsey & Terrell, 2002).

Becoming culturally proficient does not happen overnight...it's a transformation that occurs over time, like the budding of a rose.  To examine your current level of cultural proficiency, let me introduce the cultural profiency continuum.  It is a tool that offers you a contextual frame of reference that is useful in examining and analyzing your responses to issues of diversity.  From an organizational perspective, the continuum provides a means of assessing how your school or district deals with cultural differences.  It also can assist you and others to examine and evaluate how your organization initiates, implements, and enforces policies and practices that represent its position on issues of diversity.

Cultural Profiency Continuum:

The continuum describes a range of behaviors from Destructiveness, which is the denial and suppression of a people's culture, to proficiency, which is the acknowledgement, celebration and elevation of all cultures. The behaviors identified on the continuum are not fixed points; but rather, each descriptive point represents an array of practices and policies that characterize a developmental stage or phase of social competence.

Continuum Descriptors:

Below is a link to a self-assessment survey that you and your colleagues may take to find out the areas in your classroom and in your building that are strengths and weaknesses for your levels of cultural proficiency.

Divesity Survey: Direct Link 

This Classroom & School Diversity Survey was created in Google Docs.  By clicking on the link below, you are my find it and use it from the Google Docs Template Gallery, so that you may use it with your staff, as this link is for anyone sending the survey to others.  If you aren't sure how to use Google Docs (Forms), there are several tutorials on You Tube.  The link below will allow you to see results of your respondents.

Diversity Survey: Collaborator Link.