Tools of Cultural Proficiency

The Tools of Cultural Proficiency

The four tools of Cultural Proficiency combine to provide a framework for analyzing our values and behaviors, as well as reflecting on your school’s or agency’s policies and practices. This toolkit uses this framework as a starting point to consider how we can deepen our understanding of self, others, context, and implementation of educational practices to be inclusive and responsive to the needs of the community served.

Developed by the Center for Culturally Proficient Educational Practice

The Cultural Proficiency Framework helps leaders excel in their professional work using culturally proficient tools. Four tools of Cultural Proficiency combine to provide a framework for analyzing your values and behaviors, as well as your school’s or agency’s policies and practices. This toolkit uses this framework as a starting point regarding culture and further applies the mindsets, concepts and tools to include additional factors of difference such as gender, language, ability, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status. Tools included in this framework are described below with links to more in-depth resources to support administrators and other educators to increase access and opportunity for all members of the educational community. 

This Framework serves as an opportunity to frame one’s own experiences and to explore this toolkit, expanding the lens through which this work is done. It also provides a common language for the toolkit to be more deeply discussed and shared.

The 4 Tools of Cultural Proficiency 

Guiding Principles serve as an introduction for a person or organization to identify their core values as they relate to issues of diversity. The guiding principles counteract barriers and demonstrate how the diversity of students informs professional practice by responding to student learning needs. 

• Culture is a predominant force in society. 
• People are served in varying degrees by the dominant culture. 
• People have individual and group identities. 
• Diversity within cultures is vast and significant. 
• Each cultural group has unique cultural needs. 
• The best of both worlds enhances the capacity of all. 
• The family, as defined by each culture, is the primary system of support in the education of children. 
• School systems must recognize that marginalized populations have to be at least bicultural and that this status creates a distinct set of issues to which the system must be equipped to respond. 
• Inherent in cross-cultural interactions are dynamics that must be acknowledged, adjusted to and accepted.

Overcoming Barriers provides persons and their organizations with tools to overcome resistance to doing things differently.

• Resistance to change 
• Systemic difference in access
• Unawareness of need to adapt
• A sense of entitlement

The Continuum provides language to describe unhealthy and healthy values and behaviors of persons and policies and practices of organizations. The continuum can also help you assess your current state and project your desired state.

• This describes unhealthy practices moving toward healthy practices.
• The healthy practices are informed by the guiding principles and are developmental in nature.
• The Continuum references both personal and organizational practices.
  • Cultural Destructiveness: Seeking to eliminate difference
  • Cultural Incapacity: Seeking to make difference wrong
  • Cultural Blindness: Dismissing difference
  • Cultural Pre-Competence: Seeing difference; Now what?
  • Cultural Competence: Responding effectively to difference
  • Cultural Proficiency: Cross system advocacy

• Essential elements serve as standards for developing culturally healthy values, behaviors, and policies/practices. 
  • Assessing Cultural Knowledge
  • Valuing Diversity
  • Managing the Dynamics of Difference
  • Adapting to Diversity
  • Institutionalizing Cultural Knowledge

The Conceptual Framework is a graphic organizer that summarizes how the above tools relate to one another and how they serve as a resource for productive dialogue around individual and organizational needs. 

Based on Cultural Proficiency, A Manual for School Leaders, 4th Ed.,"
Randall B. Lindsey, Kikanza Nuri-Robins, Raymond D. Terrell and Delores B. Lindsey, 2019.

Going Deeper

Additional resources related to the Cultural Proficiency Framework:

• Cultural Proficiency Leadership Rubric
• Responsibilities of Culturally Proficient School Leaders

Acknowledgments 

This toolkit was prepared in partnership with the Western Educational Equity Assistance Center (WEEAC) at WestEd, which is authorized under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Equity Assistance Centers provide technical assistance and training to school districts, tribal and state education agencies to promote equitable education resources and opportunities regardless of race, sex, national origin or religion. The WEEAC at WestEd partners with Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, and Attendance Works to assist Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, California, Colorado, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Hawaiʻi, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. 
 
The contents of this toolkit were developed under a grant from the Department of Education. However, the contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government. 

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