CARES360: A framework for teacher capacity-building in culturally sustaining practices

Developing teachers' capacity to implement culturally sustaining and equity-supportive practices in the classroom is critical for addressing persistent racial discipline disproportionality in schools. However, efforts to inform and evaluate effective coaching and professional development interventions have been hindered by gaps between theoretical frameworks and practical implementation, as well as the absence of robust measurement approaches that are attuned to context, identity, and culture. The CARES360 conceptual framework is proposed to bridge these gaps by operationalizing domains, dimensions, and concrete, actionable indicators of culturally sustaining and equitable teaching and discipline practices. The theory-driven framework has implications for both teacher coaching feedback and future development of a multi-informant outcome measurement system for use in evaluations designed to capture teachers' implementation of these practices in classroom settings.