Culturally Responsive Teaching Designer Agent Skill

Redesign a lesson to centre students' cultural backgrounds, community knowledge, and lived experience.

Context cost
6.3k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 25.0 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Redesign a lesson to centre students' cultural backgrounds, community knowledge, and lived experience. Use when making curriculum relevant and inclusive for diverse student populations.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

culturally-responsiveculturally-sustainingdocumentationequitygayhammondinclusionladson-billings

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md25.0 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: culturally-responsive-teaching-designer disable-model-invocation: false user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "global-cross-cultural-pedagogies/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer" skill_name: "Culturally Responsive Teaching Designer" domain: "global-cross-cultural-pedagogies" version: "1.0" evidence_strength: "strong" evidence_sources: - "Gay (2018) — Culturally Responsive Teaching: theory, research, and practice (3rd edition)" - "Ladson-Billings (1995) — Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy" - "Hammond (2015) — Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain" - "Paris & Alim (2017) — Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: teaching and learning for justice in a changing world" - "Aronson & Laughter (2016) — The theory and practice of culturally relevant education: a synthesis of research across content areas" input_schema: required: - field: "lesson_content" type: "string" - field: "student_community" type: "string" optional: - field: "subject_area" type: "string" - field: "student_level" type: "string" - field: "current_approach" type: "string" - field: "school_context" type: "string" - field: "teacher_background" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "crt_lesson_design" type: "object" - field: "cultural_connections" type: "array" - field: "critical_consciousness_element" type: "object" - field: "high_expectations_framework" type: "object" chains_well_with: - "ubuntu-collective-knowledge-task-designer" - "place-based-inquiry-anchor" - "belonging-classroom-culture-designer" - "phenomenon-based-unit-anchor" teacher_time: "4 minutes" tags: ["culturally-responsive", "Gay", "Ladson-Billings", "equity", "culturally-sustaining", "Hammond", "inclusion"] ---
70# Culturally Responsive Teaching Designer
71
72## What This Skill Does
73
74Redesigns lesson content to be culturally responsive — connecting rigorous academic curriculum to students' cultural backgrounds, community knowledge, and lived experiences while maintaining high expectations and developing critical consciousness. The approach draws on Geneva Gay's (2018) framework of culturally responsive teaching and Gloria Ladson-Billings' (1995) theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. The critical principle is that culturally responsive teaching is not about lowering standards, adding a "multicultural day," or replacing academic content with cultural content — it is about using students' cultural knowledge as a BRIDGE to rigorous academic learning. Students learn MORE, not less, when the curriculum connects to what they already know and value. The output includes a redesigned lesson with specific cultural connections, a critical consciousness element (where students use the content to examine equity and power), and a high expectations framework that ensures academic rigour is strengthened, not diluted. AI is specifically valuable here because identifying authentic connections between curriculum content and diverse cultural contexts requires broad knowledge across cultures, academic disciplines, and pedagogical approaches — while remaining sensitive to the specificity of each community.
75
76## Evidence Foundation
77
78Gay (2018) defined culturally responsive teaching as "using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them." She identified five essential elements: developing a cultural diversity knowledge base, designing culturally relevant curricula, demonstrating cultural caring and building a learning community, cross-cultural communication, and cultural congruity in classroom instruction. Ladson-Billings (1995) proposed three criteria for culturally relevant pedagogy: academic success (students must achieve academically), cultural competence (students must maintain and develop their cultural identity), and critical consciousness (students must develop the ability to critique social inequity). She emphasised that culturally relevant teaching demands MORE of students, not less — it raises expectations while making the path to meeting them culturally meaningful. Hammond (2015) connected culturally responsive teaching to neuroscience, arguing that when learning is culturally connected, it activates students' existing neural pathways and prior knowledge, reducing cognitive load and increasing engagement — the brain learns more efficiently when new information connects to existing schemas. Paris & Alim (2017) extended the framework to "culturally sustaining pedagogies," arguing that teaching should not only respond to students' cultures but actively sustain and develop them in the face of cultural erasure. Aronson & Laughter (2016) synthesised research across content areas, finding that culturally relevant education consistently improved student engagement and academic achievement, with strongest effects for students from marginalised communities.
79
80## Input Schema
81
82The teacher must provide:
83- **Lesson content:** What students need to learn. *e.g. "Persuasive writing — Year 9 English, constructing arguments with evidence" / "Fractions — Year 4 Mathematics, understanding fractions as parts of wholes" / "The Industrial Revolution — Year 8 History, causes and consequences of industrialisation" / "Ecosystems — Year 7 Science, understanding food chains and interdependence"*
84- **Student community:** Who the students are. *e.g. "Predominantly South Asian British community, many students bilingual (Urdu/Punjabi and English), strong family and community connections, local area has a vibrant market culture" / "Mixed community in a coastal town — some farming families, significant Eastern European population (Polish, Romanian), local fishing industry declining" / "Inner-city London school, very diverse — Caribbean, West African, Somali, Bangladeshi, white British working class, significant proportion of students eligible for Pupil Premium"*
85
86Optional (injected by context engine if available):
87- **Subject area:** The curriculum subject
88- **Student level:** Year group
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md3,384 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈810
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
5,440
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
3.1%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 31% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

6.3k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 25.0 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md25.0 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Culturally Responsive Teaching Designer · 6.3k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer ] || { mv .claude/skills/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Version1.0
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencegarethmanning/culturally-responsive-teaching-designer

Versions

v1.0 is what is on the shelf; no release here carries a date. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

v1.0
  • No earlier releases have been published to the marketplace.
Pinning

The install command always fetches the release that is current the day you run it — v1.0 today — and cannot ask for an earlier one. The copy on your disk does not change until you run it again.

Reviews

—no reviews yet

Nobody has reviewed this skill yet. The rating is the mean of the reviews written here, so there is none until somebody writes the first.

Sign in to review it

A review is tied to an account so it can be answered, edited and taken down by the person who wrote it.

Sign in
Who can post

Anybody with an account, one review each. It carries the version that was current when you wrote it, and the publisher may reply once.

Publisher
Servers0
Claim this skill