Supporting Diverse Learners: How School Leaders Can Build More Inclusive Classrooms
At the beginning of a new school year, students walk back into our classrooms carrying very different summer experiences.
One student may have spent the summer traveling internationally or visiting family in another country. Another may have attended camp, played on a sports team, taken classes, or visited museums. Another may have spent most of the summer at home, cared for younger siblings, spent time with extended family, played with friends on the block, or simply experienced their neighborhood in a deeper way.
The mistake schools can make is deciding that some of those students return with rich experiences while others return with very little to contribute.
Supporting diverse learners starts by rejecting that deficit lens.
Every student walks into school with experiences, knowledge, relationships, language, interests, and perspectives that can contribute to learning. Our job is to discover those assets and build from them.
Supporting Diverse Learners Starts With What Students Bring
An asset-based approach asks a different question.
Instead of asking, “What did this student miss?” we can first ask, “What does this student already know, understand, or bring with them?”
That distinction matters, particularly for students from low-income communities. A child who did not travel or attend an organized summer program did not necessarily spend two months learning nothing.
They may have:
- Helped care for younger siblings.
- Spent significant time with grandparents or extended family.
- Used another language regularly at home.
- Participated in neighborhood traditions or block parties.
- Learned to navigate their community more independently.
- Cooked with family members.
- Followed sports, music, current events, or social media trends.
- Taken on responsibilities that developed problem-solving and maturity.
New York State’s Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework specifically encourages educators to treat cultural differences and the knowledge students and families possess as assets for teaching and learning rather than deficits that need to be corrected.
That does not mean lowering academic expectations. It means finding stronger starting points from which students can reach them.
Use Shared Experiences to Create Connection
Teachers do not have to completely rewrite their curricula to make learning culturally relevant.
Often, the opportunity is already sitting in front of them.
A neighborhood block party can become an entry point into conversations about community, economics, music, culture, or local government. A multicultural celebration can introduce literature, history, geography, or language.
And sometimes a major shared cultural moment can open dozens of doors.
Consider the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which concluded this summer after bringing together 48 national teams and millions of families around the world. A teacher could simply ask:
- Did you or anyone in your family follow the World Cup?
- Was there a particular country your family supported? Why?
- Where did people watch the games?
- Did different generations in your family experience the tournament differently?
- What languages did you hear the games discussed in?
- If you did not follow it at all, what captured your attention this summer instead?
Suddenly, geography, statistics, national identity, language, immigration, economics, persuasive writing, and probability can all become connected to something students recognize.
The goal is not for every student to have the same experience.
The differences are the lesson.
Belonging Supports Learning
These moments of connection are not just about making school more enjoyable. They contribute to whether students believe they belong there.
A meta-analysis examining 82 studies and more than 208,000 secondary students found that stronger school belonging was associated with better academic achievement, motivation, self-efficacy, and engagement, as well as lower absence and dropout rates.
The Institute of Education Sciences similarly recommends that educators learn about students’ backgrounds and connect instruction to their homes and communities as a strategy for strengthening both belonging and learning.
This is why supporting diverse learners cannot be separated from relationship-building.
Before we can consistently differentiate for students, we have to know who they are.
Differentiate Without Lowering the Bar
Once teachers understand their students more deeply, that knowledge can also improve differentiated instruction.
Students will differ not only culturally, but academically, linguistically, socially, and in how they best access and demonstrate learning.
The answer is not to create 30 entirely different lessons.
Instead, educators can create more than one pathway into the same rigorous learning goal.
CAST’s Universal Design for Learning Guidelines encourage educators to provide multiple ways for students to engage with content, access information, and demonstrate what they understand. The latest framework also explicitly recognizes identity as an important dimension of learner variability.
In practice, that might mean allowing students to:
- Encounter information through text, visuals, discussion, or multimedia.
- Connect a concept to examples drawn from different communities or experiences.
- Work independently at times and collaboratively at others.
- Demonstrate understanding through writing, speaking, presenting, designing, or solving.
- Use prior knowledge and lived experiences as bridges to unfamiliar academic content.
The rigor stays consistent.
The pathways become more inclusive.
Give Teachers Time to Plan for Connection
There is one major obstacle that school leaders cannot ignore: time.
Teachers are managing curriculum, grading, family communication, data, meetings, technology, behavior, paperwork, and dozens of other responsibilities.
Sometimes the curriculum itself is new. A teacher can become so focused on teaching it correctly that the natural opportunities to connect the content to the students sitting in front of them disappear.
That is not necessarily a lack of commitment. It can simply be a lack of planning capacity.
School leaders can help.
Culturally responsive teaching should not become another initiative accompanied by another binder, training, or compliance requirement. Give teachers a few protected minutes during lesson planning, team meetings, or common planning periods to think intentionally about the students they are teaching.
A small amount of planning before instruction can create much stronger engagement during instruction.
A Simple Inclusive Lesson-Planning Checklist
Before teaching a lesson, encourage teachers to take a few minutes and ask:
- What do I already know about my students that connects to this lesson?
- Whose cultures, communities, languages, interests, or experiences could provide an entry point?
- Am I assuming students lack knowledge simply because their experiences are different from mine?
- Can students access the content in more than one way?
- Can students demonstrate what they know in more than one way while maintaining the same academic expectations?
- Is there a current event, neighborhood experience, family experience, or cultural moment that could make this concept more relevant?
- Whose perspective might be missing from the lesson as currently designed?
Teachers will not make every lesson perfectly culturally responsive.
That should not be the expectation.
The goal is to create the habit of asking the questions.
Final Thoughts: Inclusivity Has to Continue After September
Multicultural days, beginning-of-year relationship activities, and celebrations have value. But supporting diverse learners cannot be something schools check off during September.
Students continue having experiences outside of school every day.
Teachers can keep listening for those experiences and bringing them into instruction: a neighborhood event, a championship game, a song students are discussing, a family tradition, a local issue, or a question that suddenly captures the class’s attention.
School leaders can reinforce this by protecting planning time, encouraging teacher collaboration, and making culturally responsive instruction part of conversations about good teaching—not another separate initiative.
The most inclusive classroom is not necessarily the one with the most elaborate activities.
It is the classroom where students consistently receive the message:
What you know matters. Where you come from matters. Your experiences belong here. And we are going to build from them to help you learn even more.
For school leaders, a simple place to start this week is to give teachers ten intentional minutes to run an upcoming lesson through the checklist above.
Sometimes that small investment in planning is what creates the connection that carries a student through the rest of the year.