education1

Recommendations For Teachers

This webpage provides recommendations for teachers to use in the classroom when working with children of diversity.

All teachers should....

- create a safe, positive, and inclusive environment in which all children can learn.

- use various instructional strategies and materials or resources for each lesson.

- incorporate numerous assessments in measuring student growth.

- use appropriate hand motions and body language.

- incorporate culture into already existing lessons or units of instruction. Do not create new lesson plans...just add to what you already have!

- communicate effectively with parents. Invite parents into the classroom to share their cultural backgrounds.

- create class books that focus on issues of diversity to be placed in the classroom reading center.

- integrate collaborative group work into daily classroom activities (Bailey, Bradbury-Bailey, 2007)

- incorporate the North Carolina Diversity Standards into your curriculum.

- always remember that ALL CHILDREN CAN LEARN!!

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According to recent research, there are many factors that contribute to the inceasing achievement gap between African American students and White Caucasians. These factors include, but are not limited to: low-income (poverty), violence at school and in the local community, racism, and stereotypes that are generally associated with the African American race (Cokely, 2003, cited in Sommers, Owens, and Piliawsky, 2008, p. 2). In order to close this ever-growing achievement gap, educators need to understand the students and compile an in-depth understanding of the African American culture and integrate this understanding into the classroom. Boutte and Hill (2006, pp. 313-324) discovered that "part of the difficulty in teaching African American students is that many educators: 1) do not understand/respect black culture; 2) do no view black students' behaviors as cultural despite the existence of a substantial knowledge base; 3) erroneously define black culture narrowly (e.g., limited to hip hop culture or people living in poverty); and 4) believe that cotent taught in school is neutral or culture-free."

As today's educators are working to close this achievement gap, there are many strategies that can be employed that are research based. According to Young, Wright, and Laster (2005), teaching to a student's learning preference can produce major accomplishments in a student's academic success. A learning style, defined by Dunn and Dunn (as cited in Stevenson & Dunn, 2001; Young, Wright, & Laster, 2005, p.518) is "the way an individual begins to concentrate on, process, internalize, and remember new and difficult academic information or develop new skills."

Often found in the classroom, teachers usually teach to the whole class, and not to the individual student. Academic success can grow in students each year if they are taught using their own preferred style of learning.

Another study, conducted by McLeod and Tanner (2007) found that "teacher efficacy directly impacts student academic success" (p. 205). Teacher efficacy can be described as the belief that good, effective teaching can benefit minority students despite influential external factors. "Teachers' sense of efficacy is one of the few teacher characteristics consistently related to student achievement; in other words, teachers who believe that student learning can be influenced by effective teaching despite home and peer influence and who have confidence in their ability to teach persist longer in their teaching efforts, provide greater academic focus in the classoom, give different types of feedback, and utimately improve student performance" (Gibson & Dembo, 2007, as cited in McLeod & Tanner, 2007, p. 205).

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