Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Tutoring Sessions

Purpose: Culturally relevant and inclusive instruction requires an ongoing commitment to revisiting and reworking instructional practices and involves educators at all levels regularly evaluating their biases. This checklist is not exhaustive, but it is a helpful starting point for tutors to reflect on how seemingly small choices in their instructional practices can have an outsize impact on students’ lived experiences of tutoring sessions.

1. Get to Know Each Student Personally

  • Ask students to introduce themselves first and pronounce their names exactly as they do.
  • Practice saying student names and check privately if unsure.
  • Create a system for learning and correcting name pronunciation (e.g., name repetition, group signal).
  • Use name-based icebreakers (e.g., “share the story of your name”).
  • Encourage students to share about their:
    • Culture and community
    • Interests and hobbies
    • Goals, talents, and skills
    • Important people in their lives
    • Role models or influences
  • Use relationship-building activities to deepen connection and understanding.

2. Foster a Supportive Tutoring Environment

  • Provide consistent, authentic affirmations tailored to each student’s identity and efforts.
  • Use materials that represent diverse:
    • Ethnicities
    • Languages
    • Abilities
    • Identities
    • Socioeconomic backgrounds
  • Eliminate content that reinforces stereotypes or harmful representations.
  • Reference resources like Understood.org for inclusive practices and support for learning differences.

3. Adapt and Elevate Instruction

  • Maintain high expectations for all students.
  • Normalize and celebrate mistakes as learning opportunities.
  • Openly acknowledge your own mistakes and model how to learn from them.
  • Integrate culturally relevant examples and references in:
    • Models
    • Practice tasks
    • Assessments
  • Use student-specific or niche references—not just what’s broadly popular.

4. Cultivate Your Cultural Awareness

  • Share elements of your culture, experiences, and influences (as appropriate).
  • Reflect on how your beliefs about culture, family, and community shape your instruction.
  • Examine your implicit biases and assumptions.
  • Consider how these biases may appear in your actions and their connection to broader systemic inequities.
  • Develop intentional habits to challenge and correct bias-based behaviors.