Resources

See Your Lessons Differently

The Three Lenses Framework

You have the perfect lesson planned: design a robot to clean up the leaves in your back yard. You present the task, students dive in — and then one student looks up at you and says:

“Well, what if I don’t have a back yard?”

It’s a small moment that reveals a big problem. No amount of “adding diversity” fixes a lesson that wasn't built with students’ lives in mind from the start.

The 3 Lenses Framework gives you a practical way to look at lessons you're already teaching through the perspectives of Relationships, Identity, and Agency and see what your students need that you might be missing. It won't ask you to overhaul your curriculum. It will ask you to start with one small change this week and see what happens.

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Further Reading

A curated selection of research and practitioner writing that grounds this work

Foundational Research

Gloria Ladson-Billings. Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 1995

  • The paper that established the framework this work builds on.

Gavin Tierney, Rochelle Urban, and Gina Olbuenaga, "Designing for Equity: Moving Project-Based Learning from Equity Adjacent to Equity Infused," Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 2024. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ijpbl/article/view/36891

  • Directly bridges culturally relevant pedagogy and PBL design.

Project-Based Learning

"New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL," Edutopia, 2021. https://www.edutopia.org/article/new-research-makes-powerful-case-pbl/

  • Accessible summary of gold-standard studies showing PBL outcomes for all students, including those from low-income households.

"4 Equity Levers in Project Based Learning," PBLWorks. https://www.pblworks.org/blog/4-equity-levers-project-based-learning

  • A practitioner-facing framework for equity-centered PBL design that maps closely to the Relationships, Identity, and Agency lenses.

In the Classroom

"5 Tips for Creating a Culturally Responsive Science Curriculum," Edutopia, 2023. https://www.edutopia.org/article/5-tips-creating-culturally-responsive-science-curriculum/

  • Practical strategies for elementary and middle school science, with concrete classroom examples.

"Culturally Responsive Project-Based Learning," Edutopia, 2024. https://www.edutopia.org/article/culturally-responsive-project-based-learning/

  • A recent practitioner account of PBL designed around students' communities and identities.