ADEYEMI STEMBRIDGE, PhD
What is a Design Studio?
The purpose of a Design Studio is to plan culturally responsive learning experiences that have the potential for closing Equity gaps. Equity in education is the policy and practice directive to provide quality and effective learning opportunities so that background and identity are neither correlative nor predictive of student performance and/or achievement outcomes.
The Design Studio is a space where we work at the intersections of Equity and pedagogy in order to practice planning habits so that we engage our students in rigorous and meaningful opportunities to learn. Culturally Responsive Education is the work that lives in the overlap of Equity and pedagogy.
Design Studios are open to all educators interested in the focus on teaching practices—planning, instruction, and reflection. Teachers and those who support instruction stand to benefit the most from the Design Studio. The goal of the Immersive Design studio is to energize classroom teachers with tools for artful thinking. The discussions and activities will most appeal to classroom teachers, coaches, and administrators with responsibilities for supporting instruction.
All of the content is derived from two books, both by Adeyemi Stembridge, Culturally Responsive Education in the Classroom: An Equity Framework for Pedagogy (2020) and Brilliant Teaching: Using Culture and Artful Thinking to Close Equity Gaps (2023).
What Teachers Are Saying
TEACHER COACH
There was so much time allotted to discussion, reflection, application. I appreciated how Dr. Stembridge chunked the new learning into smaller pieces and allowed ample time for collaboration with colleagues.
SCHOOL DISTRICT PROFESSIONAL LEARNING LEADER
Yemi helped us internalize the need to understand, validate, and care more deeply about our students.
TEACHER/ELA COACH
I really appreciated the five planning questions and they changed the way I do things. I focus more now on what I want students to know and be able to do 5 years from now so that points me more in the direction and thinking about project based learning and subject area integration.