As noted in the Introduction, during recent years educators have been on the receiving end of a vast outpouring of resources intended to support multicultural education. Most of these resources were prepared by thought leaders in the United States for K–12 teachers. The pupils and students whom most of the thought leaders had in mind were those customarily encountered in mainstream multicultural K–12 classrooms in the United States.
That limited perspective has an inevitable outcome: Woven among the many useful facts and suggestions in multicultural resources are occasional instances of factual inaccuracy, misguided advice and, in general, naïveté regarding readily available research conducted in educational and business training settings around the world.
Below are six examples of misinformation that I’ve come across. Five come from web pages I found on the internet by using search terms such as “cross-cultural teaching.” The sixth appeared in a well-regarded American magazine for teachers and administrators to which I’ve long subscribed.
1.
Students in a multicultural classroom may have different learning styles and preferences. As an educator, it’s important to accommodate these differences and provide a variety of instructional approaches. Use a combination of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic activities to engage students. Incorporate technology tools and resources that support diverse learning styles. Differentiate instruction to meet the needs of individual students, considering their cultural backgrounds and learning preferences.1
This is misleading.
This quote is doubly misleading. First, it’s accurate that students in any classroom, especially immigrant and indigenous students, have varying expectations about the process of learning. In fact, one of the main purposes of Misaligned Minds is to help teachers become aware of the contrasting cultures of the classroom that prevail in different societies and that shape the expectations of immigrant and indigenous students as well as their parents. Cultures of the classroom have nothing to do with “learning styles” as that term is typically employed. Many proponents of learning styles assume that students’ preferred, or most successful, styles are a consequence of how their brains happen to be wired – for instance, a certain student might be believed to be a “visual learner” – but research by disinterested scholars has never been able to validate any such styles’ reality.2
The above quote also is misleading because, of course, it definitely is a good idea for teachers to use a combination of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and other types of activities and explanations to help students grasp whatever is being taught. But the reason why that’s a good idea has nothing to do with any supposed inborn learning styles of different students.
For additional insight into contrasting cultures of the classroom, read my review of “How can Chinese children draw so well?,” by Ellen Winner, available at misalignedminds.info/Resources.
2.
Deficit-oriented mindsets and [teaching] practices include … primary use of direct instruction and ‘drill-and-kill’ methods versus use of inquiry-oriented, project-based learning.3
This lacks evidence.
We all agree that it’s crucially important for educators to avoid stereotyping individual students as being, because of their background, academically deficient. When students are assumed to be deficient or incapable, the response of some teachers is to avoid challenging them academically, a.k.a., “the bigotry of low expectations.” On the other hand, the above quote points out that the response of certain other educators to such students is to subject them to a pedagogical method of which the statement’s author heartily disapproves: direct instruction.
The preponderance of evidence, however, points in the opposite direction: Students who are thought to be deficient or incapable actually learn best when taught using direct instruction. One of the most extensive and well-funded educational experiments ever conducted in the United States, Project Follow Through, which was reviewed in Chapter 5, determined in reference to first- through third-grade pupils termed “disadvantaged” that direct instruction was the most effective way to make a positive difference in the learning of those pupils.
Black educator Lisa Delpit insists that Black students need not less teaching but more, delivered directly by authoritative teachers. “If such explicitness is not provided to students, it feels to them like secrets are being kept, that time is being wasted, that the teacher is abdicating his or her duty to teach.”4 Many immigrant students similarly expect teachers to unapologetically take a directive role in their learning. These matters are discussed at length in Misaligned Minds.
3.
Provide opportunities for students to share their own experiences and stories. This can be done through group discussions, presentations, or written assignments. By allowing students to share their personal stories, you are acknowledging the value of their cultural backgrounds and creating a platform for them to be heard.5
This has limited applicability.
This advice has wide applicability within the U.S. regarding students usually included in the term “multicultural.” And it likely applies to some immigrant students recently arrived from other Western societies. The content of Misaligned Minds, however, is global in scope, addressing the challenges of American teachers who encounter, anywhere, students at all levels hailing from around the world.
Regarding students from non-Western societies, including most Native American societies, this advice is counter-productive. As mentioned in several chapters of Misaligned Minds, most such students don’t think that an activity that focuses on separate individuals is appropriate in a classroom – or anywhere else. This includes not only students’ “sharing their personal stories” but also participating in any activity that, in any way, appears to set one student apart from his or her group – even activities that identify an individual as a good performer or leader.
Teachers who know of the strong group orientation of most non-Western societies sometimes reason that immigrant students from those societies will prefer to engage in group discussions or projects during class. But many such students think that class time is reserved solely for teachers to teach, i.e., to communicate to students their superior knowledge of the subject matter. In the minds of such students, a precious resource is wasted when class time is devoted to listening to individual peers talk about themselves, their backgrounds, or even their personal perspectives on the subject matter. For an example, see story 7.12.
Some teachers have enjoyed success by asking small groups to discuss narrowly defined portions of the subject to be learned (e.g., the solution to a challenging math problem), then to report out – in which case, everyone’s attention is on academics, not individuals. If you want to gain insight into your students’ personal perspectives, ask them to keep learning journals that they write outside of class, then submit to you periodically, as depicted in story 7.19.
4.
In some cultures, …students are required to memorize pages and pages of information that they subsequently restate on written tests.6
This is misleading.
Yes, there actually are cultures in which students are expected to commit material to memory and then restate it verbatim on tests. However, upon hearing the above claim, a lot of folks assume it refers to students from national backgrounds – e.g., Japan, China – who routinely outperform American students on the international comparative tests such as PISA7 and, after they immigrate to the U.S., on routine classroom tests as well as on the SAT and ACT. This assumption is false.
Student memorization has been a topic of research by scholars for decades. Their findings, too complex to summarize here, are reviewed in Chapter 8 of Misaligned Minds. Based on those findings, the quote above is misleading. One reason it’s misleading is because students everywhere, including in the U.S., will memorize facts and textual passages under certain circumstances. And in those societies where students are often believed to memorize page after page of information – Japan, China – there is wide agreement among educators that rote memorization is not a path to understanding.
The question that matters is this: What are the best paths to understanding? Researchers have discovered that a study process known both as “repetitive strategy” and “rehearsal strategy,” which often is employed by students in East Asia, is an effective first step on the path to genuine understanding. Confusion has reigned because students in any culture who are employing that strategy appear to observers as though they are memorizing the material by rote. They aren’t.
The quote above is additionally misleading because it implies that high marks on important tests such as PISA are attainable by students who replicate long swaths of information they have studied. Not true. An adult American journalist who gained permission to take a PISA test found to her surprise that, in sections testing mathematics learning, the test-taker wasn’t even expected to have memorized the value of π (pi), which was conveniently provided right there in the test materials! She concluded that, “PISA is a test of the ability to do something useful with facts. I was convinced that it measured critical thinking.”8 Her full statement, including examples of several PISA test questions, appears in the section of the Introduction entitled “About the many references to East Asia.”
5.
Engaging with students’ families and communities is essential in understanding their cultural backgrounds and creating a supportive educational environment. Educators are encouraged to build partnerships with families, involve community members in the learning process, and incorporate community resources into the curriculum. This collaboration fosters trust and respect, bridging cultural gaps between the school and the community.9
This lacks context.
This recommendation is a good one if – and only if – several practical hurdles are easily cleared. Parents must be available at times set by the school; many have jobs or family responsibilities from which they cannot be absent without consequence, even during the evening hours. They need to live at a distance from the school that can be traveled without undue expenditure of time or money. And if their expected contribution involves the sharing of ideas, not merely of food or artifacts from their former home countries, they need to speak English sufficiently well to express their thoughts – and to feel sufficiently confident in their ability to do so in a public forum.
Beyond such practical hurdles are the cultural ones. Our American expectations regarding teacher–parent relations assume egalitarianism. Some parents in immigrant, indigenous, and minority communities are conscious of being far less educated than their child’s teachers. Others with substantial levels of education might nevertheless be aware that they have a poor grasp of what students are expected to learn in U.S. schools, how things get done in local districts, and/or ways of being persuasive in English. Remember, too, that in many communitarian cultures, teachers are deeply respected as “the people who know.”
Are these cultural hurdles found only in non-Western communities? No. My own doctoral research focused on immigrant Portuguese in Massachusetts, most of whom, objectively speaking, were less educated than their children’s teachers. Consider these opinions stated to me by those recently immigrated Portuguese parents:
We who have recently come here from Portugal may have been clever there, but here we don’t know anything. The teachers should tell us, “It should be this way” or “It should be that way.” We are not the ones who understand students’ needs. The people who teach them daily know.
The district’s bilingual coordinator is the one who knows what’s good for the bilingual program. It is not the parents who know. It is very interesting, this idea of the collaboration of the parents, but it will never exist. It’s not for parents to teach the teacher or change the methods of education.10
Finally, these parents told me – and I have read of other instances of this – that in the few cases where they did offer an idea, nothing ever was done. Even follow-up acknowledgments failed to appear. Such slights are a big disincentive for parents from further “partnering” with local educators.
Story 1.11 explains why representatives of the Mohawk tribe in upstate New York soured on their attempted collaboration with Anglo representatives of the local school district. The reason the Mohawks disengaged was different from the factors I discussed immediately above.
6.
An article in a 2023 issue of Kappan, the magazine of PDK International, was entitled, “The Power of Teacher’s Perceptions.” Authored by a University of Chicago research professor, it describes a study showing that, among teachers in Broward County, Florida, many did not believe that some of their students wanted to think critically – or could even learn to think critically. Their students’ backgrounds were not disclosed. But the article states that “studies have shown that teachers have lower expectations for low-income and Black students,” adding that “one study found that class-level teacher expectations were significantly associated with students’ academic outcomes.”11
With the objective of determining why a high percentage of students was not learning to think critically, the research team carried out four faculty surveys between 2019 and 2022, and then several face-to-face interviews with teachers and administrators. The most useful finding to emerge, in my opinion, was this: The teachers who believed that most of their students did not want to think critically or could even learn to think critically were more likely to state that they (the teachers) doubted their own understanding of critical thinking and ability to facilitate it.
Taken at face value, this research made a useful contribution. I’m mentioning it here because it’s entirely possible to read this article while confidently assuming that the underlying question is the degree to which these pupils possess sufficient inborn capacity to learn to think critically.
This research lacks thoroughness.
There’s another explanation for why many Broward County students found critical thinking difficult. It’s an explanation that would have been revealed if the researchers had made a few taps on their computers to take them to the most recent U.S. Census data for Broward County.
According to that Census data,12 34.8 percent of Broward County’s residents are foreign born, and 41.9 percent speak a language other than English in their homes. So a significant percentage of Broward County’s youngsters arrive for their first day at school having experienced ways of reasoning, emoting, behaving in groups, and building relationships that are more or less unlike the conventional ways of mainstream Americans. These pupils are culturally different from other pupils, not only in terms of their heroes, holidays, cuisine, and music, but also – and crucially – in terms of their values, habits of thinking, patterns of behavior, and expectations about learning. This possibility was ignored in the Kappan article.13
The author states that critical thinking depends “on the skills of argumentation, using evidence, and communication”14 – all three extremely variable across cultures. Argumentation? In the many societies that prioritize ingroup cohesiveness, it’s not appropriate. Evidence? Not all societies regard “objective facts” as persuasive; in some, emotional appeals are what change minds. Communication? Countless books and journal articles have explored its endless nuances and permutations among the world’s wide range of societies, languages, and cultures.
In Misaligned Minds, the possibility that children in certain demographic groups might lack inborn capacity to do well academically is never considered. Dozens of efforts to demonstrate the accuracy of that belief through research have failed. That’s why Misaligned Minds, from end to end, both book and website, is about the wide range of cultural complications that can upset effective classroom processes.
Endnotes:
1 Reach and Teach (2023). Teaching in a Multicultural Classroom: Embracing Diversity and Creating Inclusive Learning Environments. Available at https://reachandteach.net/post/teaching-in-a-multicultural-classroom-embracing-diversity-and-creating-inclusive-learning-environments.
2 One of the most extensive investigations by disinterested scholars into learning styles is Pashler et al.
3 Education Writers Association (n.d.). Teaching Across Cultural Differences: Equity in Instruction and Classrooms. Available at https://youtube.com/watch?v=aSpAJk4yd9U&t=68s.
4 Delpit, 31.
5 Classroom Management Expert (2024). 25 Strategies for Teaching Culturally Diverse Students in the Classroom. Available at https://classroommanagementexpert.com/blog/25-strategies-for-teaching-culturally-diverse-students-in-the-classroom.
6 Pratt-Johnson, Yvonne (2006). Communicating cross-culturally: What teachers should know. The Internet TESL Journal, 12 (2). Available at https://iteslj.org/Articles/Pratt-Johnson-CrossCultural.html.
7 Programme for International Student Assessment. Copious information about PISA appears on the internet.
8 Ripley, 24.
9 Teach Educator (2025). Cross-Cultural Teaching Strategies and Research Methods in 2025. Available at https://teacheducator.com/cross-cultural-teaching-strategies.
10 Grove (1977), 255, 263.
11 Century, 45.
12 The U.S. Census data I consulted in September 2025 was found at https://data.census.gov/profile/Broward_County,_Florida?g=050XX00US12011.
13 But not totally ignored. In Table 2, it is reported that fully half of the interviewed teachers offered as one of their top three reasons that their “students haven’t had enough practice thinking critically at home.” This reason is not further explored in the text of the article.
14 Century, 46.