The more I learn about culturally responsive pedagogies, the more I’ve realized the importance of more expansive instruction and assessment—which means moving away from standardized rubrics and rigid grading criteria!

Here I share a deep dive into Gholdy Muhammad’s framework for culturally responsive objectives with suggestions for humanizing assessment techniques that you can use to assess a variety of learning activities, particularly for objectives relating to identity, intellect, criticality, and joy.

Muhammad’s Framework for Culturally Responsive Instruction and Assessment

Gholdy Muhammad’s framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Education (CHRE) troubles the idea of “skills-only” teaching and challenges teachers to design culturally responsive lessons and curricula that support children’s genius by embracing more holistic ways of teaching and learning. One foundational way that she shifts lesson planning is to expand objectives to align with these five categories: 1) identity; 2) skills; 3) intellect; 4) criticality; and 5) joy. 

Consider this first example of a skills-only approach to studying Where the Wild Things Are compared to a more holistic approach engaging students in a roleplaying activity with space for exploring their identities, expanding their intellect, taking up critical perspectives, and engaging their creativity:

Skill: Students will analyze the impact of POV by collecting evidence from the text using a graphic organizer.

Identity: Students will make personal choices about creating an original Wild Things characters that reflect salient identities.

Skill: Students will consider the impact of POV by considering the difference between the story from Max’s perspective and their own experiences from the Wild Things’ perspective. 

Intellect:  Students will develop their understanding of character building and characterization.

Criticality: Students will critically examine the difference between these two experiences of the story (text and roleplaying). 

Joy: Students will play the game with their peers with space for creative input and communal goal-making.

As I have been integrating Gholdy Muhammad’s culturally responsive framework into my teacher education courses and professional developments, I have received questions about how to customize assessments for more expansive objectives addressing concepts that we might not be used to paying attention to, like “identity” or “joy.” Muhammad’s newest book Unearthing Joy (released this January 2023) provides a useful list of questions aligned to the five CHRE pursuits that teachers can use as diagnostics, benchmarks, or pre/post assessments (see p. 127-129). In addition to these questions, here I compile a list of example activities paired with assessment tools that you can customize in your classroom to more fully assess instruction in ways that go beyond just points and grades.

Identity

How can I assess how students are learning about themselves or their relationships with others?

Throughout her book, Muhammad invites readers to engage in reflective freewrites. Providing students with prompts and inviting them to write about what comes to mind for them is a powerful tool both for helping them think about identity and also for assessing identity development. Choose one of Muhammad’s identity-related prompts like “How would you describe yourself?” or create your own question relating to an identity-aligned objectives and compare student responses at the beginning and end of the unit. 

To trace ways students’ identities have shifted or developed in your classroom, pair reflective freewrites with I-Poems, a relational tool stemming from The Listening Guide. I-Poems are not just for ELA classes, but can be used with reflections in any subject! To make an I-Poem, you pull out all statements starting with I from a piece of speech or writing (see the example in the table below). You may include subsequent verbs or phrases. You may also be interested in pulling out phrases connecting to other pronouns such as “we,” “us,” “they,” etc. Examine the language your students used in their writing or speaking—how are they describing themselves? How are they positioning themselves in relationship to others? Do you see more powerful verbs or more agentic phrasing emerging over the course of the unit? 

In this example, explore my student Mía’s initial reflective freewrite about a piece of meaningful writing at the beginning of our class together and an example of an I-Poem drawn from this reflection. The I-Poem helped me to see ways that she positions her actions in the world and her relationship to her family and culture, as well as the impact she desires to have on the world around her. I could compare this positioning at the beginning and end of the class through her use of pronouns and verb choice.

Youth Reflection
I wrote about a book over the summer for my summer reading project. It was meaningful to me because it was about this young, Mexican girl who was struggling to fight against the box that culture tends to trap us in. Being a Hispanic girl, I can relate to what she experienced. Although my parents don't abide by the strict rules of our culture, others tend to criticize when you do the opposite of what our culture obligates us to do. For example, in many cultures they believe that women have no say in anything, especially in a patriarchal household. Their cultures make them believe that women should do "women jobs" and that men should do jobs fit for a "real man." Excuse myself but, it is sickening and disgusting. I speak not only as a female but for someone who stands for equality of both genders. Culture should not be the cage, the cell that hold you back from being free. We, the people, define culture and make our own culture. Culture does not define who we are. We are culture. I wrote this for my teacher, but if I were to write it for a specific audience it would be young adults and new parents. I would dedicate it to the younger adults so they can understand that they can be who ever they want to be and that this doesn't have to be an obstacle that holds them back. I would also dedicate it to new parents so that they can guide their children correctly and let there offspring be able to flourish and express themselves without the fear of being reprimanded.

I-Poem
I wrote about a book
I can relate to what she experienced
My parents don’t abide by the strict rules
Excuse myself
I speak
I wrote this
If I were to write it
I would dedicate it
I would also dedicate it

Feel free to engage your students in making these I-Poems from their reflective writing and analyzing how their portrayals of themselves and understandings of their identities have developed over time!

Intellect

How can I assess the ways students are learning to apply their knowledge to the world?

Something that I love about Muhammad’s framework is that she always encourages connecting learning to meaningful applications, as opposed to learning to meet an external standard or performing on a test. What does it look like to assess intellect? To develop her question for students, “What are some issues in society that need change (to be better)?” I suggest designing an expansive performance assessment that encourages youth to apply what they’re learning in a context that matters for them. Some examples include Youth Participatory Action Research projects or assignments that connect classrooms and online communities. 

As part of these projects, have students design assessment surveys or questionnaires around meaningful change they want to see happen. To decide what meaningful intellectual engagement looks like for your students, co-construct success criteria together for what kinds of data they might collect to show how their project addresses real issues or has an impact on communities they care about.

Criticality

How can I assess ways that students are learning to identify and unpack oppressive situations and structures as well as working to undo and transform them?

Many of us know about expansive activities that support critical engagement such as Theater of the Oppressed, multimodal collages, and roleplaying games. Often I pair artistic activities with meta-texts where students explain their artistic choices and articulate explicitly what critical ideas they were exploring and their perceptions of what they learned.

As we think about how to assess this kind of work, I suggest setting up humanizing peer review processes. In my classes, first we brainstorm together what kind of critical engagement we want to see across various projects or performances. For instance, we might detail tools students could use in their artistic creations to address a particular issue of oppression. We might specify how metatexts should take up critical disciplinary tools or methods of critical discourse analysis. If you want to learn more about these tools, I personally recommend Applying Critical Analysis Tools in the Classroom: A Guide for Educators. This guide walks you through a process of how to deconstruct power in any type of text using critical lenses of your choice, including examples of guiding questions and step-by-step instructions.

Next, I turn those categories we constructed into feedback questions that peers fill out via a handout or Google form. For example, some categories co-constructed with students for a critical discourse analysis assignment included: 

• “fandom choice,” with student-generated ideas for what information needed to be included in the essay to situate the fandom choice for our class; 

• “artifact selection,” with examples of different modalities of artifacts students in the class might choose; 

• “implications,” which included space for resources, personal reflections, and suggestions for pushing the fandom community toward social justice.  

Full rubric linked here.

The presenters then receive not only my reflections but reflections from the entire class. I explain that making sense of feedback from different viewers, readers, or audience members is an important part of undoing power hierarchies where only teachers have the final say about assessments. 

Joy

How can I assess joy as a multifaceted anti-oppressive pursuit?

Finally, joy! Muhammad makes the astute point that joy is often missing from our understanding of formal education spaces: “There have been no learning standards for joy, assessments for joy, curricular objectives for joy, teacher evaluations for joy, or a college course on joy in education” (p. 69).  How can we reclaim and recenter joy and where do we even start to think about assessing it?

If you’re interested in learning more about instructional practices that center joy and social emotional wellness and resist oppressive school structures, I suggest checking out the Abolitionist Teaching Network’s Guide for Racial Justice and Abolitionist Social Emotional Learning which attends to the ways that SEL and racial justice are intertwined. 

In terms of assessment, I suggest prioritizing youth self-assessments to do frequent check-ins about students’ feelings about curriculum and instruction. I want to note that joyful activities should not be reserved for after the “main” part of the lesson is done, but integrated throughout. This means you will want to make sure that you use a variety of assessments, from quick to more extensive. For instance, you might adapt a quick formative assessment like the check for understanding finger scale to survey students’ enjoyment of an activity in addition to more extensive summative check-ins, perhaps drawing from Muhammad’s pre/post unit questions.

What are your favorite ways to assess identity, intellect, criticality and joy?

I hope these assessment ideas get you thinking about more ways to align objectives relating to identity, intellect, criticality, and joy with creative and student-centered assessments. 

We’d love to hear your favorite assessment techniques and how you have used them in the comments!

Karis Jones, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English Language Arts for the School for Graduate Studies (Education Department) at SUNY Empire State College. As a teacher educator, literacy consultant, public humanities scholar, and community activist, she studies issues of equitable literacies learning across disciplinary, fandom, and gaming spaces. Connect with her on Twitter @Karis_M_Jones and read more about her work here.