The book states that, �Cross-disciplinary multicultural education attempts to infuse the goals of multicultural education in all aspects of the curriculum (p. 229.)� Unlike multicultural education approaches that that focus on helping minority students understand the dominant culture or view multicultural education as simply another unit of study, cross-disciplinary multicultural education focuses on the positive aspects of student diversity. This includes creating a safe and positive learning environment where all students are valued and respected, telling students your expectations of them, regardless of background, recognizing the cultural diversity in your background and actively incorporating it into your curriculum, and incorporating teaching strategies that build on students� backgrounds and strengths. As a biology teacher, I could recognize and incorporate my students� cultural backgrounds by having students from other countries share with the class the different animals, plants, and climate found in their country and how it affects the people and laws there (i.e. is there a strong desire to save endangered species, do most people drive cars or ride bicycles, etc.)
Cooperative learning is one way students from different cultural backgrounds can learn to appreciate others. Research has shown that when students work together to solve a common problem or to reach a common goal, students develop positive attitudes about each other (p. 231.) Three essential characteristics of cooperative learning include group goals, individual accountability, and equal opportunity for success. Having a group goal motivates students to interact and help each other and may also encourage students to ask for help. Rewarding students for good group performance can also motivate students to work together to do as best as possible as a group. Individual accountability is necessary in order to keep some students from doing all the work and others from doing none of the work. Additionally, individual accountability ensures that each student in the group is learning the essential content for the lesson. Equal opportunity for success ensures that all students (both high and low ability) can contribute to the group and experience success. Teachers can provide such opportunities by giving an individual improvement grade. Individual improvement scores can reduce competition among students. In biology class, cooperative learning can be incorporated in laboratory investigations and in teaching a section of a chapter (i.e. each group teaches the class a different section of the chapter.)
There are three major types of cooperative learning: Student Teams Achievement Division (STAD), Group Investigation, and Jigsaw Strategy. STAD encourages high ability students to work with and help low ability students with the end result being that the group is evaluated based on overall team performance. Teachers can determine the ability of each student by pretesting the class, ranking each student on ability and forming groups based on ability. Group Investigations involve groups of students working together to investigate or solve a problem. The Jigsaw Strategy has groups of students solve a common topic. For example, if a science class was learning about mammals, each person in a four-student group would investigate a different aspect of mammals, such as mammalian characteristics and anatomy, environments mammals can be found in, mammalian diets, and mammalian physiology. Each group would have one person investigating aspect A, aspect B, and so on.
Mastery learning is another strategy that can be used to teach learners of varying abilities. Mastery learning allows the teacher to adapt his or her lessons according individual students� abilities. There are seven major components of mastery learning: objectives, preassessment, primary instruction, formative evaluation, alternative instruction, enrichments, and summative evaluation. The teacher will plan a mastery lesson by first deciding on the objectives�what does he or she want his or her students to know? Then, the teacher gathers background knowledge on what his or her students know about the topic (preassessment.) Next, the primary instruction is taught, followed by a nongraded formative evaluation to see if the students mastered the objectives, or �passed the formative (assessment).� Those that pass are allowed to participate in enrichment activities, while those that do not, participate in alternative instruction designed to reteach and reinforce the topic. Ultimately, all students will undergo a summative evaluation, which is a graded test or quiz. While I remember participating in mastery learning lessons in elementary school (i.e. learning cursive, SAR�s), I do not remember being taught this way in middle or high school. The example in the book (p. 239) concludes with this sentence, �The final test would be administered in two weeks *for those who were ready.*� I cannot recall being in a classroom where only some of the students (those who were ready) took a test while others received more time. Is this really more subtle than it seems or is mastery learning simply not practiced at higher grade levels?