MN-PELSB-007 · Minnesota PELSB Renewal Course Series
Cultural Competency for Minnesota Educators
Teacher Notes and Study Guide · iTeachAI Academy
Clock hours3 clock hours / 180 active minutes
Mandatory areaCultural competency (Minn. R. 8710.0310, subp. 1)
FormatSelf-paced online professional learning with structured discussion prompts
This study guide is a review companion drawn verbatim from the course. Course completion requires the full lessons, activities, and assessment.
Module 1 · Frames of reference and self-reflection
22 required minutes
Lesson 1.110 required minutes
What Minnesota's rule actually requires, and why it starts with you
Design requirement: frames of reference, self-reflection, and discussion
Learning objectiveState the requirements of the cultural competency renewal rule, define a frame of reference, and begin a written self-examination of your own.
Key teaching points
Minnesota's license renewal statute requires continuing education in several mandated areas, and the licensing rule defines what counts as cultural competency training. [S1, S2] The rule's definition is unusually specific. The training must promote self-reflection and discussion on all of the following: racial, cultural, and socioeconomic groups; American Indian and Alaskan native students; religion; systemic...
Notice what the rule does and does not ask. It does not ask you to adopt a particular political framework, and this course will not hand you one.
The rule's causal chain deserves attention: frames contain potential bias, and bias in a frame shapes expectations and relationships. Expectations and relationships are where cultural competency stops being abstract.
A note on tone for this course. Self-reflection is not self-accusation.
Because the rule makes self-reflection and discussion the design of the training rather than an accessory to it, this course uses one structured protocol in every activity, and it is worth learning as a durable professional tool rather than a compliance step. The protocol has four moves.
Structured prompts for each move follow; use them verbatim when an activity feels stuck. For Describe: What did I actually see or hear, in observable terms?
A worked example shows the protocol's texture. At fall conferences, a teacher notices that a Hmong father listens silently while she describes his daughter's strong work, asks no questions, and leaves after signing the form.
Finally, the discussion norms this course assumes. Discussion is where frames become visible, because a colleague's different reading of the same facts is data about both frames.
Frame of reference: The learned lens of experience, culture, language, class, and training through which a person interprets others. Examinable and revisable, not fixed.
Potential bias: Systematic tilt a frame can give to judgments, often without awareness or intent. Potential means it must be examined against evidence, not presumed or denied.
Expectations: Beliefs about what a student can achieve. They influence opportunity: who is called on, challenged, recommended, and given the benefit of the doubt.
Relationships: The working trust between teacher, student, family, and community. Built or eroded through hundreds of small, frame-shaped interactions.
Applied activity
Write a short cultural self-sketch: identify three concrete elements of your own frame of reference (for example, the community you grew up in, your family's economic situation, your religious or nonreligious upbringing, your language history, your own experience of school). For each, write one sentence on how it could shape an expectation you hold for students or families whose histories differ from yours. This sketch is private; you will draw on it in every later activity and in discussion. Artifact specification: 150 to 250 words; three concrete frame elements, each paired with one testable expectation statement; no generalities that could describe any teacher.
Primary sources: S1 · S2 · S3 · S4 · S5 · S6
Lesson 1.212 required minutes
Implicit bias and teacher expectations: what the evidence shows, and where it is limited
Design requirement: potential bias and its impact on expectations
Learning objectiveSummarize the implicit bias and expectation-effects literature accurately, including its evidentiary limits, and identify practice-level responses that do not depend on overclaiming.
Key teaching points
Two research programs are usually invoked to connect frames of reference to student outcomes, and both deserve an honest treatment. The first is implicit social cognition.
The limits matter just as much. A meta-analysis by Oswald and colleagues found that IAT scores are weak predictors of individual discriminatory behavior, explaining at most small fractions of variance in laboratory criterion measures. [S14] A later meta-analysis of 492 studies by Forscher and colleagues found that procedures can shift implicit measures, but the shifts are typically small, and changes in implicit...
The second research program concerns teacher expectations. Rosenthal and Jacobson's 1968 Pygmalion study reported that students randomly labeled as bloomers gained more measured IQ, launching five decades of research on self-fulfilling prophecy. [S10] The study's specific results proved fragile and were heavily criticized on measurement grounds.
How does an expectation held inside a teacher's head reach a student? The question matters because "expectations" can sound mystical, and the rule's language about impact on expectations becomes actionable only when the transmission channels are named.
The feedback channel deserves one more paragraph, because it carries a documented trap with a documented exit. Teachers who fear that critical feedback will be read as bias sometimes respond by softening it, praising work from students of color that they would have marked hard for other students.
It is equally important to state what this research does not license. It does not license diagnosing any colleague, or yourself, as biased from an outcome pattern; patterns open inquiries, and Lesson 2.2 teaches the inquiry discipline.
Why honesty helps. Overclaiming this research invites justified skepticism and makes the whole enterprise easy to dismiss; underclaiming it excuses inattention. The accurate position is demanding enough: your frame can tilt expectations, tilted expectations matter most for the students with the least margin, and the remedy is examined practice rather than either guilt or denial.
Applied activity
Conduct a small expectation audit of your own recent practice: review one gradebook section, seating chart, calling pattern, or set of course recommendations. Describe one pattern you find (or verify its absence), one alternative explanation for it, and one structural practice (criteria before names, decision rule, colleague check) you will adopt. Connect the pattern to an element of your frame from Activity 1.1. Artifact specification: 150 to 250 words; name the actual data source audited, state the pattern in numbers, and give the practice change a start date and a four-week evidence check.
Module 2 · Race, culture, class, and systems in Minnesota
33 required minutes
Lesson 2.111 required minutes
Racial, cultural, and socioeconomic groups in Minnesota classrooms
PELSB topic: racial, cultural, and socioeconomic groups
Learning objectiveDescribe Minnesota's actual demographic landscape, including major cultural communities and urban and rural socioeconomic diversity, and identify where your frame supplies assumptions in place of knowledge.
Key teaching points
Cultural competency begins with accurate knowledge of who is actually in Minnesota's classrooms, because a frame of reference fills every knowledge gap with assumption. Minnesota's story is distinctive.
Socioeconomic diversity cuts across every racial and cultural line and across the state's geography. Median household income among immigrant-headed households in Minnesota ranges from roughly $18,200 for Somali-headed households to $96,900 for Indian-headed households, a spread that should end any habit of treating immigrant or even single-community experience as uniform. [S18] Rural Minnesota carries its own...
Two disciplines keep group knowledge from hardening into stereotype. First, distinguish group-level description from individual-level prediction.
Concreteness disciplines this topic better than abstraction, so consider three Minnesota scenes and the frame work each demands. First scene: a fourth-grade teacher in a consolidated district west of Willmar notices that a farm family's son sleeps through morning instruction every October.
Family conferences are where socioeconomic frames operate at their least examined, so this lesson names the dynamics directly. Conference schedules default to hours that salaried professionals can attend and hourly workers often cannot; sign-up systems default to email and English; the physical setup, teacher behind a desk with a folder of the child's deficits, reproduces every institutional encounter a struggling...
The knowledge this lesson asks for also has a curricular register. Run a short audit of your own materials against your actual roster: whose communities appear in your examples, texts, and word problems, and in what roles; whose appear only as recipients of help or subjects of crisis; whose do not appear at all.
Frame check. Ask yourself which Minnesota communities you can describe from knowledge and which only from media images or secondhand talk. The honest answer defines your professional reading list, and MN Compass community profiles, its race and ethnicity indicators, and the MDE Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Center are sound starting points. [S16, S18, S26]
Group knowledge: Accurate, sourced context about communities. Raises the quality of your questions.
Individual knowledge: What you learn about this student and family. The only basis for decisions about them.
Within-group variation: Differences inside any community routinely exceed the differences between communities. Expect it.
Culture vs. circumstance: Ask whether an observed behavior reflects meaning, situation, or both before you interpret it.
Applied activity
Build a brief community map of your actual school: list the three to five largest cultural, linguistic, or socioeconomic communities your students come from. For each, write one thing you know from evidence, one assumption you have been carrying, and one question you could respectfully ask or look up (start with MN Compass). Note one urban or rural socioeconomic reality in your district that affects your students' school experience. Artifact specification: 150 to 250 words; at least three communities with evidence, assumption, and question clearly labeled for each, plus the socioeconomic reality and its instructional implication.
Primary sources: S1 · S16 · S18 · S26 · S36
Lesson 2.211 required minutes
Systemic racism: examining structures and outcomes honestly
PELSB topic: systemic racism
Learning objectiveDefine systemic racism as an analytical concept, distinguish structural analysis from individual accusation, and examine one school-level pattern within your own sphere of influence.
Key teaching points
The rule requires this training to address systemic racism, so the term needs a working definition an educator can actually use. As an analytical concept, systemic racism refers to patterns embedded in policies, practices, institutions, and accumulated history that produce racially disparate outcomes even when the individuals operating the system harbor no conscious ill intent.
Minnesota supplies sobering material for that question. The state pairs high overall rankings in income, homeownership, and educational attainment with some of the nation's widest gaps between White residents and residents of color on those same measures, a pattern documented across MN Compass indicators and addressed by the Minnesota Department of Education's equity work. [S16, S18, S26] The Minnesota Department of...
Intellectual honesty is required in both directions. Disparate outcomes are the beginning of an inquiry, not the end of one; a gap can have multiple contributing causes, and serious analysis considers them rather than asserting a single explanation.
To make the structural lens operational rather than rhetorical, this course recommends a building-level data walk that any grade team or department can run in under an hour, using data the school already holds. Choose one decision system, not an individual: discipline referrals, gifted identification, course placement, co-curricular participation, or family event attendance.
Facilitating the discussion the rule requires means planning for disagreement, because disagreement will come and its arrival is not a failure. Some colleagues will hear structural analysis as accusation despite every disclaimer; some will hear any alternative explanation as denial.
Minnesota's history gives the structural lens specific local content that walks into school relationships whether or not the school names it. Racial covenants, clauses written into property deeds to prevent people who were not White from buying or occupying land, were used across Twin Cities counties in the first half of the twentieth century; the University of Minnesota's Mapping Prejudice project has documented...
Discussion preparation. The live course pairs this lesson with facilitated discussion. Prepare by choosing one building-level pattern you can speak about from data, and practice describing it structurally, without attributing motive to any colleague.
Applied activity
Select one pattern in your school or district that can be stated from data (course enrollment, discipline referrals, gifted identification, activity participation, family attendance at events). Write: the pattern as a neutral factual statement; one structural explanation; at least one alternative or additional explanation; what further evidence would distinguish them; and one change within your own control that you could make regardless of which explanation dominates. Artifact specification: 200 to 300 words; the pattern must be quantified, each explanation stated fairly enough for its proponents to accept, and the within-control change scheduled on a date.
Culturally responsive pedagogy: from examined frames to teaching practice
PELSB topic: racial, cultural, and socioeconomic groups (applied to instruction)
Learning objectiveExplain the core claims of Gay's culturally responsive teaching and Ladson-Billings' culturally relevant pedagogy, and apply one element to an upcoming lesson without lowering rigor.
Key teaching points
Self-reflection matters because it changes teaching, and the best-developed scholarly account of what culturally informed teaching looks like comes from two bodies of work this lesson treats precisely rather than as slogans. Geneva Gay defines culturally responsive teaching as using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning...
Gloria Ladson-Billings, studying exemplary teachers of African American students, proposed culturally relevant pedagogy resting on three simultaneous commitments: students must experience academic success; students must develop and maintain cultural competence, meaning they are not asked to trade their identity for achievement; and students must develop critical or sociopolitical consciousness, the capacity to...
Application requires equal honesty about what this is not. Culturally responsive pedagogy is not a food-and-festivals unit appended in a heritage month; it is not replacing rigorous content with affirmation; and it is not assigning students to learning styles or topics by their group membership, which is stereotyping with better branding.
A worked example makes the standard concrete. Suppose a seventh-grade mathematics teacher is planning a unit on ratios and proportional reasoning, and her audit from Activity 1.2 showed she recommends advanced mathematics to multilingual students at half the rate their measured performance would predict.
Two cautions keep this work honest. The first is the essentializing trap: preparing "Somali examples" for the Somali students assumes the students are their category, which is exactly the stereotyping this course has spent two modules dismantling; contexts should be drawn from the actual, individual lives in the room, which requires knowing them, which requires the relationship work of Module 5.
Academic success: Non-negotiable rigor. Responsiveness that lowers demands is lowered expectation wearing a costume. [S8]
Cultural competence: Students achieve without surrendering identity; the curriculum treats their communities as knowledge-bearing. [S8]
Critical consciousness: Students learn to analyze and question the social world, a capacity every civic tradition claims to prize. [S8]
Sustaining, not just bridging: Home languages and cultures are assets to keep, not deficits to exit. [S9]
Applied activity
Choose one upcoming lesson. Identify one concrete revision in each of two categories: (a) content or examples that connect the target to knowledge or contexts your actual students carry, and (b) an expectation or assessment practice that raises, or makes more visible, your demand for rigor for a student or group for whom your audit (Activity 1.2) suggested drift. State explicitly what does not change: the learning target. Artifact specification: 150 to 250 words; name the lesson, both revisions, and the unchanged learning target verbatim.
American Indian and Alaska Native students: sovereignty, history, and present tense
PELSB topic: American Indian and Alaskan native students
Learning objectiveDescribe the political status of Minnesota's Tribal Nations, the historical context shaping family-school trust, and concrete practices for accurate, present-tense teaching and relationships.
Key teaching points
Minnesota is home to 11 sovereign Tribal Nations: seven Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) nations and four Dakota communities, each with its own government, and each in a government-to-government relationship with the state. The Minnesota Department of Education maintains dedicated Tribal Nations resources and works with the Tribal Nations Education Committee toward eliminating inequities for American Indian learners. [S17] The...
History bears directly on present relationships. Federal and church-run boarding schools operated for generations with the explicit aim of stripping Native children of language, religion, and family ties; children were removed from their homes, and many suffered or died in these institutions.
Classroom practice follows from both points. Curriculum should be accurate and present-tense: Dakota and Anishinaabe peoples are contemporary nations with governments, businesses, artists, scientists, and language-revitalization programs, not figures confined to a historical unit or a Thanksgiving bulletin board.
Family and community relationships deserve their own treatment here, because the history above is not background; it is operative. When a Native family does not return school paperwork promptly, a teacher who knows nothing of the boarding school era has one available reading, disorganization, while a teacher who knows the history has a second: institutions that request information about Native children have not...
Land acknowledgment practice is a live question in many Minnesota schools and deserves the same evidence discipline as everything else in this course. An accurate acknowledgment names the actual nation or nations connected to the school's location and treats them as present-tense governments; an inaccurate or generic one, recited without curricular or relational follow-through, teaches students that Native nations...
Sovereignty: Tribal Nations are governments. Membership is political status, not just demographic category. [S17]
Boarding school legacy: Schooling was used against Native families within living memory; trust must be earned in the present.
Present tense: Teach contemporary nations, contributions, and language revitalization, not only history. [S2]
Consult, do not improvise: Use MDE Tribal Nations resources, TNEC guidance, and district Indian education staff. [S16, S17]
Applied activity
Audit your own curriculum, classroom materials, and calendar for representation of American Indian peoples: where do Dakota, Anishinaabe, or other Native nations appear, and are they represented in the present tense and with accuracy? Identify one gap or stereotype pattern, one correction using an authoritative resource (MDE Tribal Nations pages or district Indian education staff), and one element of your own frame this lesson challenged. Artifact specification: 150 to 250 words; cite the specific materials audited, the authoritative resource used for the correction, and the frame element challenged.
Primary sources: S1 · S2 · S16 · S17
Lesson 3.210 required minutes
Religion in Minnesota classrooms: neutrality, accommodation, and your own frame
PELSB topic: religion
Learning objectiveDistinguish teaching about religion from religious exercise, plan reasonable accommodations for religious practice, and examine the assumptions your own religious or nonreligious frame supplies.
Key teaching points
Minnesota classrooms hold substantial religious diversity: Lutheran and Catholic traditions with deep regional roots; a large Muslim community, including most Somali Minnesotan families; Jewish communities; Hindu, Buddhist, and Orthodox Christian communities; Hmong families who may practice traditional spiritual ways, Christianity, or both; Native students whose nations carry their own spiritual traditions; and a...
The daily work is mostly accommodation and awareness rather than constitutional law. Students fasting during Ramadan may need scheduling sensitivity around athletics, testing, and lunchtime arrangements.
Your own frame is the reflective center of this lesson. An educator raised in a majority tradition may not notice how thoroughly the school year, the music program, and casual classroom talk assume it.
Two calendar scenes recur in Minnesota schools and reward advance thought. The first: a spring testing window lands inside Ramadan, and a teacher notices her strongest student, fasting since dawn, fading through an afternoon exam.
One more distinction keeps this topic professionally clean: students talk about religion, and that is not a problem to manage. A student may write about faith in a personal essay, pray over lunch, wear religious dress, or argue theology with a friend at recess, and the teacher's neutrality obligation is not violated by any of it; the obligation binds the state's agent, not the students.
A final failure mode deserves its own name because well-intentioned educators commit it most: doctrinal gatekeeping, the practice of evaluating whether a student's or family's religious practice is authentic or consistent enough to deserve accommodation. It sounds like this: "Her cousin doesn't fast, so this family must not really be observant," or "He wore the head covering last year but not this year, so it must...
Applied activity
Review your next grading period: identify any collision between your planned assessments or events and major observances your students may keep (check district resources or an interfaith calendar). Then write three sentences of self-reflection: what your own religious or nonreligious formation is, one assumption it gives you about devout or secular families, and one way you will check that assumption against evidence this term. Artifact specification: 120 to 200 words; list the specific assessments or events checked, any collisions found with their dates, and the three-sentence reflection in full.
Primary sources: S1 · S18 · S19 · S28 · S29
Lesson 3.311 required minutes
Language diversity: multilingualism as capacity, not deficit
PELSB topic: language diversity
Learning objectiveDescribe Minnesota's linguistic landscape, reframe multilingualism and dialect variation as assets, and select one concrete scaffold that gives multilingual students access without lowering the target.
Key teaching points
Minnesota students bring scores of home languages to school. Among public school students who speak a language other than English at home, two-thirds speak Spanish, Somali, or Hmong; Karen, Amharic, Oromo, Vietnamese, Russian, and many others follow. [S18] The first frame correction is arithmetic: a student developing English is not a student minus English; they are a student plus one or more entire additional...
Several practical understandings follow. Conversational fluency and academic language proficiency develop on different timelines; a student who chats easily at recess may still legitimately need years of support with dense academic text, so social fluency is not evidence that supports can be dropped.
In instruction, the standard is access with rigor: keep the learning target, and scaffold the language pathway to it. Useful moves include previewing essential vocabulary, pairing text with visuals and models, providing sentence frames for academic discourse, allowing planning or drafting in the home language, offering bilingual glossaries where the construct being assessed is content rather than English vocabulary...
Consider the interpretation scene in detail, because it is where language policy becomes a relationship. A conference is scheduled with a family that speaks Somali at home.
The classroom half of this lesson also deserves one more layer: the difference between simplifying language and simplifying thinking. A scaffold that rewrites every text into thinner prose forever is remediation drift; a scaffold that front-loads vocabulary, models the academic register, provides frames, and then removes itself on a planned schedule is language teaching.
Asset frame: Multilingualism is added capacity. Two-thirds of MN home-language students speak Spanish, Somali, or Hmong. [S18]
Two timelines: Social fluency arrives before academic language proficiency; plan supports accordingly.
Dialect respect: Systematic varieties such as African American English are rule-governed; teach the academic register as an addition.
Family language access: Qualified interpreters and translated essentials; never the student as conference interpreter.
Applied activity
Create a language inventory for one class: which home languages and dialects are present, and what do you actually know about each student's literacy in them? Then take one upcoming task and add one language scaffold (vocabulary preview, sentence frames, home-language drafting, glossary) that preserves the learning target. Close with one sentence on how your own language history shapes your gut reaction to accented or developing English. Artifact specification: 150 to 250 words; the inventory must distinguish what you know from what you assume about each student's home-language literacy, and the scaffold must name its planned removal point.
Primary sources: S1 · S16 · S18 · S35
Module 4 · Gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and mental health
24 required minutes
Lesson 4.112 required minutes
Gender identity, including transgender students, and sexual orientation
PELSB topics: gender identity, including transgender students · sexual orientation
Learning objectiveState Minnesota's legal protections regarding gender identity and sexual orientation, apply respectful professional practice with transgender and LGB students, and examine the frame you bring to both topics.
Key teaching points
The rule names gender identity, including transgender students, as a required topic, and Minnesota law gives the topic concrete professional content. The Minnesota Human Rights Act has long prohibited discrimination in education, and in 2023 the legislature adopted a separate, explicit definition of gender identity: a person's inherent sense of being a man, woman, both, or neither, which may or may not correspond to...
This is also an area of active public debate, and this course is candid about that. Minnesotans, including Minnesota educators and Minnesota families, hold a range of convictions shaped by religious, philosophical, and personal frames, and the rule does not require you to abandon your convictions.
Sexual orientation is separately enumerated in the rule and separately protected in Minnesota law; the Minnesota Human Rights Act's education section makes it an unfair discriminatory practice to discriminate in the full utilization of or benefit from any educational institution. [S1, S19, S28] The classroom realities are concrete. Students hear casual slurs and "that's so gay" used as an insult; the evidence-based...
The family dimension of these topics calls for particular professional steadiness, because a teacher can stand between a student's disclosure and a family's convictions, and the temptation to freelance in either direction is strong. The floor is procedural: Minnesota districts maintain policies on names, records, and family communication, and the educator's obligation is to know and follow the current local...
The climate evidence gives this steadiness its stakes. The Minnesota Student Survey's findings on LGBTQ+ students' safety and belonging are not abstractions; they describe measurable differences in whether students feel safe in hallways and connected to any adult, and the one-trusted-adult finding is the most actionable statistic in this course, because any staff member can be that adult without any curriculum...
Legal floor: The MHRA prohibits education discrimination based on sexual orientation and, explicitly since 2023, gender identity. [S19]
Names, pronouns, privacy: Use what the student requests; disclose nothing the student has not authorized; follow district procedure.
Consistent climate: Interrupt slurs and harassment every time, briefly and predictably; follow up privately.
Examined frame: Your convictions are yours; your duties of nondiscrimination, safety, and high expectations extend to every student.
Applied activity
Write a three-part reflection for discussion: (1) one assumption about gender or sexuality your own formation gave you, stated honestly; (2) two specific professional duties you hold under the MHRA and district policy toward transgender and LGB students, in your own words; (3) a short script, two or three sentences, that you would actually say the next time you hear a slur or deliberate misgendering in your classroom. Artifact specification: 150 to 250 words; all three parts present, the duties stated in your own words rather than pasted from policy, and the script written as you would actually speak it.
Primary sources: S1 · S19 · S20 · S28 · S33 · S34
Lesson 4.212 required minutes
Individuals with disabilities and mental health concerns
PELSB topic: individuals with disabilities and mental health concerns
Learning objectiveExamine disability and mental health as dimensions of classroom diversity, apply current Minnesota data on student mental health, and define the educator's role of noticing and referring without diagnosing.
Key teaching points
The rule places individuals with disabilities and mental health concerns inside cultural competency, which is a substantive claim: disability is not only a services category governed by IEP and 504 processes, it is a dimension of human diversity about which every educator carries a frame. Two broad models illuminate that frame.
Mental health is the second half of the topic, and Minnesota's data make it urgent. In the 2022 Minnesota Student Survey, 29% of participating students reported long-term mental health, behavioral, or emotional problems, up from 23% in 2019 and 18% in 2016, the highest levels in the survey's history. [S20] Nearly a third of a typical class, in other words, is managing something durable, and the distribution is not...
The educator's role has clean edges. You are positioned to notice: changes in work, affect, attendance, and social patterns are visible from where you stand before they are visible almost anywhere else.
Culture and mental health intersect at the level of language, and conferences are again where the intersection is navigated. In some of the communities this course has studied, direct mental health vocabulary carries stigma or simply lacks a household equivalent, and a conference that opens with diagnostic terms can end the conversation before it starts.
Presume competence: Category does not set capacity. Evidence, access, and instruction do.
Notice and refer: You see changes first. Use the building process; treat self-harm indications as immediate referrals.
Never diagnose: No casual labels, in class or in the staff room. Describe observable behavior instead.
The 29%: In 2022, 29% of surveyed Minnesota students reported long-term mental health problems, up from 23% in 2019. [S20]
Applied activity
Reflect in writing: (1) recall one instance where you or a colleague described a student through a deficit or diagnostic label, and rewrite the description in observable, behavior-based language; (2) name your building's actual referral path for a mental health concern, including the urgent path for self-harm risk (look it up if you are not certain); (3) identify one classroom routine you will adjust to reduce public shame or ease reentry after absence. Artifact specification: 150 to 250 words; the rewrite must be fully observable language, and the referral paths must be named as they exist in your building, verified this term.
Primary sources: S1 · S16 · S20 · S30 · S31 · S32
Module 5 · Families and school communities
10 required minutes
Lesson 5.110 required minutes
Expectations for and relationships with families and communities
Design requirement: impact on relationships with students' families and school communities
Learning objectiveAudit your family communication for deficit framing and one-way flow, and plan reciprocal, asset-based engagement that works across language, class, and cultural difference.
Key teaching points
The rule's final clause extends the frame examination beyond students to students' families and the school communities, and the extension is warranted because family judgments are where educator frames often run least examined. Consider the phrase "these parents just don't care," uttered in some form in most schools.
Reciprocity is the design principle for doing better. One-way communication delivers school messages to families; reciprocal communication also carries family knowledge to the school, on the premise that the family holds expertise about this child that the school needs: what motivates them, what has worked before, what the family's goals are, what the child is like outside your building.
Community is the widest circle. Every school sits inside actual communities: congregations, mutual aid networks, tribal nations, cultural associations, businesses, elders.
Research on family engagement supplies a framework worth naming: effective partnership requires building capacity on both sides of the relationship, not just transmitting information from school to home. The Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships, developed by Mapp and colleagues from the family engagement research base and widely used by districts nationally, describes the conditions under...
A conference protocol operationalizes the reciprocity principle in the highest-stakes twenty minutes of the family year. Before: review the student's work and identify assets first; check language needs and book qualified interpretation without being asked; send the essentials ahead in the family's language.
Evidence over inference: Nonattendance is a datum with many explanations. Investigate before concluding.
Reciprocity: Family knowledge flows in; school information flows out, in a language and format the family can use.
Positive first contact: Make the first entry in the relationship an asset report, not a problem call.
Trusted intermediaries: Cultural liaisons, Indian education staff, and community organizations already hold trust; work with them.
Applied activity
Audit your last five substantive family contacts: for each, note direction (one-way or reciprocal), valence (deficit report, neutral logistics, or asset/positive), and accessibility (language, timing, channel). Summarize the pattern in one honest sentence, connect it to your frame sketch from Activity 1.1, and plan two changes: one positive contact you will make this month, and one structural accessibility fix for your communication. Artifact specification: 150 to 250 words; all five contacts coded on all three dimensions, the one-sentence pattern summary, and both planned changes with dates.
Primary sources: S1 · S16 · S17 · S18 · S39
Module 6 · Apply the framework
38 required minutes
Lesson 6.116 required minutes
Case analysis lab: surface the frame, test the inference, choose the practice
Integrated demonstration across enumerated topics
Learning objectiveAnalyze three Minnesota classroom cases by identifying the frame-driven inference in each, generating alternative explanations, and selecting evidence-based professional responses.
Key teaching points
Case A: the quiet newcomer. Paw Say, a ninth grader from a Karen family, joined the school in November.
Case B: the pattern in the referrals. A teacher reviewing his own semester data notices that of his eleven behavior referrals, eight involved American Indian or Black students, though those groups are about a quarter of his roster.
Case C: the student with the new name. A seventh grader tells their advisory teacher that they are transgender, that they use a new name and they/them pronouns at school, and that their family does not yet know.
For each case, complete the eight-part reflective decision record:
There may be more than one defensible response to each case. A high-quality analysis makes its assumptions visible, refuses to infer capacity or intent from group identity, keeps expectations high in every branch, and names when information is insufficient for a decision.
Artifact specification for the case lab. Complete the eight-part record for each of the three cases in full sentences, not fragments; a complete record typically runs 250 to 400 words per case.
Because the lab is self-assessed in this draft, calibrate against a worked contrast before you write. Here is step 2, the frame-driven inference, for Case B, done twice.
Applied activity
Complete the eight-part decision record for all three cases. Then write a short comparison: identify the single frame-examination move (from Module 1) that did the most work across all three, and one case where your first instinct differed from your final analysis. Artifact specification: 750 to 1,200 words total across the three records, per the case lab specification above.
Integrated demonstration of the rule's design requirement across all topics
Learning objectiveProduce a de-identified professional portfolio that traces your frame of reference, its potential biases, and specific committed changes to expectations and relationships across the rule's enumerated topics.
Key teaching points
The capstone converts thirteen activities of reflection into one reviewable professional artifact. Use your real context, but remove all student- and family-identifying information.
Artifact specification for the capstone. The completed portfolio typically runs 1,200 to 1,800 words.
One section worked twice shows the difference between compliance and use. Section 6, the American Indian students commitment, in compliant form: "I will incorporate Native perspectives into my teaching and be mindful of cultural differences." It names no practice, no date, no evidence source, and no student would ever feel it happen.
Treat the finished portfolio as a working document with a review discipline rather than a completed assignment. The rule's design intent is examination of frames as an ongoing professional practice, not a one-time inventory, and a portfolio revisited on an actual staff-development day with actual evidence is the difference between the two. [S1, S3] At the review point named in section 10, bring three things: the...
The capstone is complete when every section is present, every enumerated topic appears with a concrete commitment, no section relies on group stereotype or unexamined inference, and every commitment names evidence and a review point. Honest uncertainty, clearly stated, is acceptable in any section; vagueness is not.
Applied activity
Complete the ten-section portfolio. Verify against the criterion mapping table that every enumerated topic appears in your section 6 commitments. Revise any section that a colleague could fairly call vague before taking the assessment. Artifact specification: 1,200 to 1,800 words, per the capstone specification above.
Answer all 20 scenario-based questions. The planned completion threshold is 80% (16 of 20). This reviewer copy shows feedback for the specific option you chose after submission; the deployed version must make the same threshold, scoring, feedback, and remediation rules consistent in the interface and server.
Question stems are listed for study purposes. Answer choices and keys are intentionally omitted.
Under Minn. R. 8710.0310, cultural competency training must be designed to do which of the following?
Which statement best reflects the meta-analytic evidence on the Implicit Association Test?
Jussim and Harber's 2005 review of teacher expectation research concluded that expectation effects are:
Gershenson, Holt, and Papageorge (2016), using ratings of the same student by two different teachers, found that:
A newcomer student from a Karen family joins your class mid-year. The most professionally sound first move is to:
A rural student repeatedly submits incomplete homework, and a teacher concludes the family does not value education. The frames-of-reference discipline taught in this course says to first:
As an analytical concept in this course, systemic racism refers to:
Ladson-Billings' culturally relevant pedagogy requires academic success, cultural competence, and:
Gay's culturally responsive teaching is best summarized as:
Which statement about Minnesota's Tribal Nations is accurate?
Which practice best serves American Indian students in curriculum and classroom life?
Regarding religion, a Minnesota public school teacher may appropriately:
A student tells you they are transgender and asks you to use a new name. Consistent with the Minnesota Human Rights Act and professional practice, you should:
You hear a student use "gay" as an insult during group work. The evidence-based response taught in this course is to:
Which statement about language diversity in Minnesota is accurate and reflects the asset frame?
The 2022 Minnesota Student Survey found what share of participating students reporting long-term mental health, behavioral, or emotional problems?
For a conference with a family that speaks Somali at home, the appropriate arrangement is:
A frame of reference, as taught in this course, is best described as:
Why does the rule require the training to promote discussion, not only private reflection?
What is the correct submission status of this pilot course file?
Primary source register
All 40 sources below were individually validated on July 24, 2026: each URL was retrieved live and matched against the claim it supports. The register was expanded to 37 sources under the provider research-validation directive; the graduate-register expansion of the same date appended S38 to S40, each retrieved live before inclusion. Where a publisher blocked automated retrieval, the entry now links a verified persistent bibliographic record (ERIC, PubMed, or an institutional copy) carrying the identical citation; the three state-agency entries marked below respond to ordinary browsers but block automated clients and must be reconfirmed in a browser before filing. Reconfirm current statutes, rules, agency guidance, and data releases immediately before submission.
S1. Minn. R. 8710.0310, subp. 1 - Definitions and general rules for teaching licenses (cultural competency training). Defines cultural competency training: self-reflection and discussion on racial, cultural, and socioeconomic groups; American Indian and Alaskan native students; religion; systemic racism; gender identity, including transgender students; sexual orientation; language diversity; and individuals with disabilities and mental health concerns; designed to deepen teachers' understanding of their own frames of reference, potential bias, and impact on expectations and relationships. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/rules/8710.0310/
S2. Minn. Stat. §122A.187 - Expiration and renewal of licenses. Statutory renewal requirements for Minnesota teachers, including cultural competence and the professional development requirement on the cultural heritage and contemporary contributions of American Indians, with emphasis on Minnesota Tribal Nations. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/122A.187
S3. PELSB - Cultural Competency Trainings. Board guidance: the requirement applies to educators renewing after 2020; a training need not be PELSB-approved to qualify, and educators should work with their local continuing education committee; PELSB approval guarantees the training meets the standard. https://mn.gov/pelsb/current-educators/trainings/cct/
S5. Minn. R. 8710.7200 - Requirements for renewal (clock hours). Clock hours must be actual instruction or planned professional development, professionally relevant, and tied to at least one Standard of Effective Practice. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/rules/8710.7200/
S6. Minn. R. 8710.2000 - Standards of Effective Practice. Standards requiring teachers to understand how learning is influenced by culture, language, family, and community values, and to build on learner assets. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/rules/8710.2000/
S7. Gay, G. (2018). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice (3rd ed.). Teachers College Press. Defines culturally responsive teaching as using students' cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles to make learning more relevant and effective. https://www.tcpress.com/culturally-responsive-teaching-9780807758762
S8. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491. Grounded theory from exemplary teachers: academic success, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness as joint requirements. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ512942
S9. Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: a.k.a. the Remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74-84. Self-revision warning against surface-level use of the theory and endorsing culturally sustaining pedagogy. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1034303
S10. Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom. The Urban Review, 3, 16-20. Original teacher-expectancy experiment; results later shown fragile, retained here as the historical origin of the expectation-effects literature. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02322211
S11. Jussim, L., & Harber, K. D. (2005). Teacher Expectations and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Knowns and Unknowns, Resolved and Unresolved Controversies. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9(2), 131-155. Authoritative review: expectation effects are real but typically small, expectations are largely accurate, and effects may be more powerful for students from stigmatized groups. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15869379/
S12. Gershenson, S., Holt, S. B., & Papageorge, N. W. (2016). Who believes in me? The effect of student-teacher demographic match on teacher expectations. Economics of Education Review, 52, 209-224 (open-access IZA Discussion Paper 9202). Same-student design: non-Black teachers held significantly lower expectations for Black students than Black teachers rating the same students; larger gaps for Black male students and math. https://docs.iza.org/dp9202.pdf
S13. Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464-1480. Introduces the IAT as a measure of automatic associations. https://faculty.washington.edu/agg/pdf/Gwald_McGh_Schw_JPSP_1998.OCR.pdf
S14. Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., & Tetlock, P. E. (2013). Predicting ethnic and racial discrimination: A meta-analysis of IAT criterion studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(2), 171-192. Meta-analysis: IAT scores are weak predictors of individual discriminatory behavior. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23773046/
S15. Forscher, P. S., Lai, C. K., Axt, J. R., Ebersole, C. R., Herman, M., Devine, P. G., & Nosek, B. A. (2019). A meta-analysis of procedures to change implicit measures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(3), 522-559. 492-study meta-analysis: implicit measures can be shifted, but changes are small and generally do not transfer to behavior. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000160
S16. Minnesota Department of Education - Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Center. MDE's statewide resource for addressing educational disparities and systemic barriers and supporting safe, supportive, student-centered environments. Note: education.mn.gov blocks automated clients; reconfirm in a browser before filing. https://education.mn.gov/MDE/dse/edi/index.htm
S17. Minnesota Department of Education - Tribal Nations of Minnesota. The 11 sovereign Tribal Nations in Minnesota (seven Anishinaabe, four Dakota), the Tribal Nations Education Committee, and MDE's collaborative work with the nations. Note: education.mn.gov blocks automated clients; reconfirm in a browser before filing. https://education.mn.gov/MDE/dse/indian/TribalNationsofMinnesota/
S18. MN Compass - Cultural Communities and Immigration data. Nonpartisan demographic indicators: community profiles for Somali, Hmong, Latino, and other Minnesota communities; home-language composition of students; income ranges among immigrant-headed households. https://www.mncompass.org/topics/demographics/cultural-communities
S19. Minnesota Human Rights Act, Minn. Stat. ch. 363A (definitions at §363A.03). Prohibits discrimination in education based on sexual orientation and, under the separate definition adopted in 2023, gender identity: a person's inherent sense of being a man, woman, both, or neither. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/363A.03
S20. Minnesota Department of Health - 2022 Minnesota Student Survey results. Statewide survey of over 135,000 students: 29% reported long-term mental health, behavioral, or emotional problems, up from 23% (2019) and 18% (2016). MDH's Minnesota Student Survey program page (health.state.mn.us/data/mchs/surveys/mss/) was verified live 2026-07-24; this press-release URL blocks automated clients and should be reconfirmed in a browser before filing. https://www.health.state.mn.us/news/pressrel/2022/stsurvey122322.html
S21. FitzGerald, C., & Hurst, S. (2017). Implicit bias in healthcare professionals: a systematic review. BMC Medical Ethics, 18, 19. Systematic review of 42 studies: healthcare professionals exhibit implicit bias at levels similar to the wider population, with evidence it can correlate with judgment quality; supports vigilance without individual diagnosis. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5333436/
S22. Papageorge, N. W., Gershenson, S., & Kang, K. M. Teacher Expectations Matter. NBER Working Paper 25255; published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, 102(2), 234-251 (2020). Causal modeling with national data: teacher expectations affect college completion, and demographic gaps in expectations translate into attainment gaps. https://www.nber.org/papers/w25255
S23. Paris, D. (2012). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93-97. Names and defines culturally sustaining pedagogy as sustaining, not merely responding to, students' languages and cultural practices. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ960396
S24. Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2014). What Are We Seeking to Sustain Through Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy? A Loving Critique Forward. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 85-100. Develops culturally sustaining pedagogy, including its self-critical dimension, as the forward evolution of asset pedagogies. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1034292
S26. MN Compass - Demographics by race and ethnicity. Nonpartisan statewide indicators disaggregated by race and ethnicity, documenting both Minnesota's overall rankings and its racial disparities. https://www.mncompass.org/topics/demographics/race-ethnicity
S27. Minnesota Department of Health - Health Equity. MDH's health equity program: state data and framing of disparities as products of systemic conditions rather than individual behavior alone. https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/equity/index.html
S28. Minn. Stat. §363A.13 - Educational institution; unfair discriminatory practice (MHRA). The Minnesota Human Rights Act's education section: prohibits discrimination in the full utilization of or benefit from any educational institution. https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/363A.13
S29. U.S. Department of Education - Guidance on Constitutionally Protected Prayer and Religious Expression in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools. Standing federal guidance distinguishing permissible teaching about religion and voluntary student expression from state-sponsored religious exercise. https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/religionandschools/prayer_guidance.html
S30. U.S. Department of Education - Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Official IDEA site: free appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment, IEP requirements, and family rights. https://sites.ed.gov/idea/
S31. U.S. Department of Education - Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Section 504's prohibition on disability discrimination in federally funded programs, including public schools, and the basis of 504 plans. https://www.ed.gov/laws-and-policy/individuals-disabilities/section-504
S32. ADA.gov - Introduction to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Federal overview of the ADA's nondiscrimination mandate across public services, including state and local government programs such as schools. https://www.ada.gov/topics/intro-to-ada/
S33. Glisten (formerly GLSEN) - Research and the National School Climate Survey. Long-running national survey of LGBTQ+ students' school experiences, linking victimization and hostile climate to attendance, belonging, and achievement. The organization renamed from GLSEN to Glisten; the survey series continues. https://glisten.org/research
S34. Russell, S. T., & Fish, J. N. (2016). Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Youth. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 12, 465-487. Peer-reviewed synthesis of elevated mental health risk among sexual and gender minority youth and the protective role of supportive adults and school climates. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4887282/
S36. Karen Organization of Minnesota - History and Culture. Community organization serving Karen, Karenni, Mon, and Chin refugee communities from Burma in the St. Paul area; primary community source for context on these students and families. https://www.mnkaren.org/history-culture/
S37. Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. Meta-analysis of 190 studies (18,573 participants): average adult silent reading of English non-fiction is 238 words per minute, with lower rates for difficult text and study reading; basis for this course's 180 wpm time-on-task assumption. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
S38. Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., Hessert, W. T., Williams, M. E., & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 804-824. Field experiments: critical feedback paired with an explicit statement of high standards and belief in the student's capacity increased revision and essay quality, with the strongest effects for African American students reporting low trust in school. Added under the graduate-register expansion; PubMed record verified live 2026-07-24. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23937186/
S39. Mapp, K. L., & Bergman, E. Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships (Version 2). Research-based framework describing the conditions under which family engagement initiatives connect to student learning: learning-linked initiatives, relational trust, families in roles beyond audience, and educators trained for partnership. Added under the graduate-register expansion; verified live 2026-07-24. https://www.dualcapacity.org/
S40. Mapping Prejudice, University of Minnesota Libraries. Project documenting racial covenants, deed clauses that prevented people who were not White from buying or occupying land, mapped from Twin Cities-area county deed records; historical context for present residential and enrollment geography. Added under the graduate-register expansion; verified live 2026-07-24. https://mappingprejudice.umn.edu/
