Teachers deliberately broaden and label both (1) what counts as competence in a given domain and (2) who is seen as competent in that domain. A “domain” includes academic subject matters and disciplines, but also other areas of learning and practice. To broaden what counts as competence, teachers explicitly name and highlight students’ contributions of specific knowledge, skills, and practices, both individual and collective, that are central to engaging and learning in the domain.
To achieve this core goal of acknowledging competence, teachers attend carefully to who is seen and acknowledged as contributing and who is seen as “struggling” or “not smart.” They explicitly consider social identities. They intentionally call attention to specific competences in what those students say or do. These moves must be done in timely and authentic ways with sensitivity to how students and their peers are likely to interpret and respond to the attention. Teachers can acknowledge competence publicly in whole or small groups, or in one-on-one situations, at various points across a lesson or school day. When done well, acknowledging competence disrupts narrow, reductive conceptions of content, inequitable patterns in who is seen as “smart” or “good,” and negative and deficit views that students carry of themselves.
When teachers understand and appreciate a student’s thinking, they are better able to support that student to contribute in class and to position them as capable among their peers. Patterns of inequity lead to the risk that some students’ thinking will get prioritized in the classroom, while the thinking of others will be seen through deficit lenses. Teachers must be attentive to disrupting these kinds of patterns both in how they interact with individual students as well as in whose thinking is publicly elicited, raised up, and responded to. Teachers’ interpretations of students are often biased by patterns related to race, gender, and other social identities. Interrupting those biases requires listening with a broad understanding of the subject area and a commitment to recognizing the many assets each student brings to school.