Cultivated Ground: Effective Teaching Practices for Native Students in a Public High School

In the spring of 2013, the authors participated in a class at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education that connects – who act as consultants – to native communities who want students to work on specific projects. Their project was to assess the effective teaching practices being used in one or more superiorly performing United States public high schools that had a high number of American Indian/Alaskan Native students. A number of factors were cited by members of the school community as essential to the academic success of the native students; many of these fit under the arc of culturally responsive teaching. This research confirms the data in the literature that the inclusion of cultural curriculum is an element that is associated with positive academic outcomes for American Indian/Alaskan Native students.