KEEP Program

The majority of native Hawaiian students routinely experienced failure in schools in Hawaii. Building on previous research (Gallimore, Boggs, and Jordan, 1974) that had identified major areas of conflict in school for Hawaiian students, the Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP) sought to identify practices that would be both culturally responsive and effective for Hawaiian students.

KEEP developed a successful K-3 reading program, which included changes in instructional practices, classroom organization, and motivation management that were culturally compatible with the culture of the Hawaiian students. The new instructional practices involved the teacher emphasizing comprehension and using an interactional style that is like the Hawaiian "talk story" while working with small groups. This interactional style is characterized by "overlapping speech, voluntary turn-taking, co-narration and joint construction of a story" (Vogt, Jordan, and Tharp, 1993, p. 57). The classroom was organized into independent centers with heterogeneous groups. In the area of motivation, teachers took a "warm but tough" stance toward students, and they used indirect praise or praise to a group rather than "spotlighting" individual children. After these changes were implemented, students scored at or above grade-level norms on standardized reading tests (Vogt, Jordan, & Tharp, 1993). Subsequently, the KEEP program, which was originally developed and implemented in a private school setting, was successfully disseminated to multicultural public school classrooms.

See the KEEP-Rough Rock Project success story for a discussion of efforts to extend the success of the KEEP project to Navajo students.

Relevant CIP Cultural Question

3.3.1 Interactional Styles