Fostering trust is the most important thing when teaching (McDermott 1977) and Bartolome suggests strategic teaching as a method to get students and teachers to interact and negotiate meaning together as equals. In this method of instruction students present and discuss their prior knowledge and experiences the teacher legitimizes and expresses value for each students' lived experiences and treats each student as an expert in their own contribution to the cultural ethnography of the classroom. This practice establishes shared classroom goals norms and values. In "The ABCs of How We Learn" Schwartz et al. (2016) present a digital tool called Rate and Relate in which students rank the items that are most important for being a good student from their perspective and then from the teacher's opening a dialogue about classroom norms.
Bartolome (1994) shares two instructional methods: culturally responsive teaching and strategic teaching which she identifies as having the potential to challenge students academically and intellectually while treating them with dignity and respect. She also lists well-known approaches and student-centered teaching strategies such as cooperative learning language experience process writing reciprocal teaching and whole language activities [which] can be used to create humanizing learning environments where students cease to be treated as objects and yet receive academically rigorous instruction (Cohen 1986; Edelsky Altwerger & Flores 1991; Palinscar & Brown 1984; Perez & Torres-Guzmán 1992; Zamel 1982).
She views students as constructors of 1. their own knowledge and 2. representations of the outside world and that new concepts and new discourse skills must be added to not subtracted from the students’ existing background knowledge. This can only happen if teachers alter their perceptions of subordinated (or low class) students and behave in a culturally responsive way. Teachers can serve as facilitators in the master/apprentice* model of instruction which is supported by *strategic teaching and creates mutual respect between people from different socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds. Humanizing the teaching process and sharing power with students means that teachers can create larger democratic bodies out of their educational institutions to mirror the futures their students will create.