About > CRSL Framework
The Culturally Responsive School Leadership Framework: Giving leaders a new set of eyes.
With a scholarly, researched-backed perspective, our Culturally Responsive School Leadership framework helps school districts start and sustain their equity journeys. Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL) should not be thought of as having a singular quantifiable definition, or as a practice that can be definitively attained. Rather, it should be thought of as a flexible and dynamic process that educators are constantly honing and working toward. CRSL has a set of practices and traits with which educators and researchers are always seeking and improving.
Our understanding of CRSL is based on recent research encompassing a range of scholarly perspectives. Our updated CRSL framework is based on a recent literature review by Khalifa (2024), which added nearly a decade of research to the original oft-cited literature review by Khalifa, Gooden, and Davis (2016).
Click on each strand below to reveal indicators and key questions.
Our understanding of CRSL is based on recent research encompassing a range of scholarly perspectives. Our updated CRSL framework is based on a recent literature review by Khalifa (2024), which added nearly a decade of research to the original oft-cited literature review by Khalifa, Gooden, and Davis (2016).
Click on each strand below to reveal indicators and key questions.
Strand 1
Strand 2
Strand 3
Strand 4
Strand 5
Strand 1: Critical Self-Reflective Leadership
Learns the histories behind the school-community relationship and regularly seeks to visibilize how the organization’s oppressive practices are being reproduced.
Indicators
- Engages in self-reflection; displays a critical consciousness on practice in and out of school.
- Embraces and moves beyond criticality into asset-identification and the incorporation of ancestral knowledges, community self-determination, and dreaming.
- Engages with indigenous knowledges — including from spiritual, cultural, and linguistic traditions — on the path to developing critical self-reflection.
- Embraces indigenous ways of being and knowing to inform leadership practices.
- Uses community data and histories to measure cultural responsiveness in schools.
- Draws on students’ cultural backgrounds, knowledges, and experiences to inform decision-making.
- Serves as public intellectual and social activist.
Key Questions
- How am I contributing to or reproducing oppression in my organization? What information can help me see this more clearly?
- Non-Western epistemology: Am I aware of the histories and experiences of communities I serve? Have I found a way to incorporate this in how we envision leadership and reform?
Strand 2: Community Engaged Leadership
Resists deficit depictions of students and communities, is comfortable in community spaces, and centers community experiences within school activities.
Indicators
- Engages in community listening tours and supports community-based equity audits of their school/district.
- Develops in-depth knowledge of community histories and experiences while rejecting Eurocentric, colonizing approaches to saving or containing communities.
- Prioritizes community experiences, knowledges, and interests in the relationships between communities and schools.
- Co-leads with community leaders and youth in relationships built on trust.
- Uplifts youth voice and epistemology through practices such as youth participatory action research.
- Centers Indigenous and community-based epistemologies in leadership development and assessment.
- Protects, revitalizes, and uplifts Indigenous, Black, and other minoritized languages and engages with those languages to contribute to cultural preservation and learning.
Key Questions
- How can I engage communities to access community knowledges in ways that benefit schooling practices? How does this knowledge help communities, and how does it help us as educators?
- Community knowledges: What are the community knowledges that my minoritized parents/caregivers and students have? Is it represented in the curricula and instructional methods? Am I appropriately using this knowledge?
Strand 3: Inclusive School Culture and Climate
Strives to establish schools as inclusive spaces, especially for minoritized students, and establishes a sense of belonging that encompasses not only safety and comfort, but also recognition and affirmation of cultural identity.
Indicators
- Promotes and regularly measures the inclusiveness of school climates, including through curriculum equity audits that ensure curricula reflect students’ lives and histories.
- Recruits educators from minoritized backgrounds and promotes environments in which they want to remain; allows community members to co-lead and be present.
- Promotes school environments in which students feel their cultural, linguistic, social, spiritual, and emotional selves are valuable and welcomed assets in school.
- Establishes programming that incorporates the home language of students.
- Removes surveillance and sanction-oriented disciplinary programs; implements policies that challenge exclusionary practices such as exoticization, tokenization, appropriation, deal-making, and cultural shaming.
- Learns the causes of and histories around intergenerational trauma caused by school and uses Indigenous and Black knowledges as sources of healing.
- Pushes back on and redefines White-centered meanings of SEL by insisting that terms like “maturity,” “success,” and “happiness,” be understood in proper racial or cultural contexts.
Key Questions
- How can I guide organizations in a way that affirms cultural identities and promotes a sense of belonging for minoritized students?
- Humanizing student identities: How can I learn the cultural assets and identities of minoritized students in school? How can we ensure they are treated with dignity in school?
Strand 5: Culturally Responsive District Leadership and Systems Change
District leaders understand the importance of establishing a district-wide vision, promote practices that are culturally responsive, and ask how experiential/community-based knowledges and assets can inform systems change reform efforts.
Indicators aligned with Strand 1
- District level leaders ensure that organizational practices address racism by promoting critical reflection in anti-oppressive reform efforts.
Indicators aligned with Strand 2
District level leaders...
- Ensure that community perspectives are present from the beginning of the process; connect community knowledges directly into system change and reform.
- Center community organizing and advocacy in school reform efforts.
Indicators aligned with Strand 3
District level leaders...
- Establish a clear vision, model CRSL behaviors, implement culturally responsive policies, hire equity-focused leaders, and establish teams with real power to make change.
- Build their knowledge of the community and establish rapport, trust, and personal/organizational relationships with communities they otherwise may not have understood.
- Center community organizing and advocacy in drafting district policies such as PBIS.
Indicators aligned with Strand 4
District level leaders...
- Support staff, such as instructional leaders, cultural/community workers, counselors, and school board trainers by including these roles in a district-wide CRSL plan.
- Include parent and student voice, community concerns, and minoritized student and staff experiences and histories in Improvement Science feedback loops.
Key Questions
- How can experiential/community-based and Indigenous knowledges inform and guide district leadership and systems change reform efforts?
- Extra-curricular and out-of-school space: How can leaders support extra-curricular activities, afterschool, summer, and out-of-school organizational learning for minoritized students?
- District leadership: Is there alignment and coherence around CRSL between district-level leaders and building/instructional leaders?
Strand 4: Culturally Responsive Instructional Leadership
Centers equity in supervision, training, modeling, and mentoring teachers to improve learning and sense of belonging of minoritized students. Recognizes that instructional practices cannot be ahistorical or race/equity neutral.
Indicators
- Coaches teachers into equitable practice and ensures that mentoring, observation, and feedback is culturally responsive.
- Establishes clear, measurable learning goals and expectations that foreground the needs of Black, Indigenous, and other minoritized students.
- Uses Black and Indigenous historical models to develop effective instruction that results in high student achievement.
- Uses organizational data to reform teaching and learning while maintaining high teaching standards for those teaching minoritized students.
- Ensures cultural responsiveness and equity are infused into Professional Learning Communities (PLCs).
- Recognizes that not all students have equal access to extra-curricular and over-the-summer activities, and thus works to make access more equitable.
- Contributes to community-based organizations and activities and sees these contributions as pedagogical and leadership behaviors rather than as extra-curricular community activities.
Key Questions
- How can I observe, coach, mentor, train, and give feedback to teachers in ways that improve the learning and sense of belonging of minoritized students?
- Mentoring and feedback: Have I established the proper culture to set the expectation that CRSL is important and will be monitored? Have I shifted my instructional leadership tools to include measures of cultural responsiveness?