What is good teaching? What makes a teacher effective? These are questions that are important for us to address in the education profession. They are necessary for the creation of teacher preparation programs and professional development opportunities. Often times when people attempt to answer these questions, they discuss student achievement on standardized tests. However these are not the only factors that must be included in measuring what is good teaching and teacher effectiveness. As stated by Brown (2001, p. 682), “In the place of good teaching, I am claiming that the current ways teachers are prepared is not effective with respective to the role of identity and science language learning.” Language and culture both play a major role in how students learn in the classroom environment. It is important for teachers to have the tools in their toolbox to adequately provide instruction so that all students may achieve success regardless of differences in language, identity, or culture. According to Brown (2001, p.694), “Pedagogy should be able to insure that all students were able to learn …show more content…
Culturally responsive teaching includes the foundations that students bring to the classroom, which include their culture, identity, and funds of knowledge, in the creating of highly effective classroom instruction. According to Ladson-Billings (1995, p. 161), “Culturally relevant teachers utilize students’ culture as a vehicle for learning.” Various case studies have shown the importance of culturally responsive pedagogy in connecting culture within the content of the classroom. In a study cited by Sleeter (2012, p. 573-574), “Students described the teachers as caring about them, creating community and family-like environments in the classroom, and making learning fun. As a result, they wanted to
To be brief, culturally relevant teaching "is a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Ladson-Billings, 2009, pp. 20)." The emphasis of culturally relevant teaching is to understand that children have different needs and in order to deal with them in the best way possible is equitably. The inability to recognize these differences causes teachers to limit their ability to meet the student's educational needs and prevents them from being culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 2009, pp.37). Contrary to culturally relevant teaching, assimilationist teaching is a style that disregards a student's particular cultural characteristics. This teaching method follows a hierarchical model. According to the assimilationist perspective, the teacher's role is to ensure that students fit into society (Ladson-Billings, 2009, pp. 24). The book is full of amazing teaching strategies, teaching styles, and methods that would help benefit educators working with children of any grade
Ladson-Billings overviews the concepts of cultural congruency, cultural appropriateness, cultural responsiveness, and cultural compatibility. These terms refer to the way teachers can adapt their language and teaching style to better reflect the culture and the language of their students. However, the problems students of color face, particularly African American students, goes beyond the school culture and climate not reflecting their community culture and climate. The primary issue is a lack of cultural synchronization among teachers and students and a need for culturally relevant practices.
Gloria Ladson-Billings supports this idea in her essay titled “’Yes, But How Do We Do it?’ Practicing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy” and also expands upon its importance by adding the insight of how teachers think about the social contexts, the students, the curriculum, and about instruction, all impact the students because how teachers regards these contexts get woven into their pedagogy, which create the very classrooms for learning.
Richards, H., V., Brown, A., F., Forde, T., B. (2006). Addressing diversity in schools: culturally responsive pedagogy. Retreived March 30th 2014from http://www.nccrest.org/Briefs/Diversity_Brief.pdf
In an online article Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, & Practice, by G. Gray, culturally responsive teaching is Validating- using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective for the students. Culturally Responsive Teaching is Comprehensive- develop intellectual, social, emotional, and political learning. Culturally Responsive Teaching is Multidimensional- curricu...
What is more important to education? The content or the how the content is taught? Many policy makers today believe that the former is far more crucial to the development of our youth. With high-stakes testing and an entire industry of textbooks and test making, the current system places empirical results over all else. Unfortunately, this approach only helps with the lower levels on the depths of knowledge (DOK) and Bloom’s Taxonomy charts. It only helps with basic recall of facts and knowledge. A second area of concern with this type of teaching is that only instills one point of view in the pupils. This is also problematic for diverse classrooms with students from various backgrounds. Would an approach that reinforces critical thinking and higher levels of DOK be more appropriate? A technique that incorporates the diversity of the classroom and life experiences of those students can be explained by Christopher Emdin and Django Paris who are two advocates of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy or Reality Pedagogy.
As an educator one must understand that the children you will be teaching will all come from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different homes with different values. No one student will be the same, and no one student will learn the same. The role of a modern educator is to harness this idea of diversity and channel it into a positive learning atmosphere for children of all backgrounds. “I define culturally responsive teaching as using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them” (Gay, 2013, p.50.). The hope for all teachers is to capture the minds of their children, as educators we must learn how our students learn, adapt to their skill set and channel our curriculum to their strength.
To start with, culturally responsive teaching practices recognize the validity of the cultural custom contained by several ethnic groups. In other words, it considers whether different approaches of learning are necessary and worthy in the formal learning. Furthermore, culturally responsive teaching practices are fundamental because they create links between school experience and home and between lived social cultural realities and academic abstraction (Gay, 2000).
Students who are enrolled in elementary schools with a diverse population usually develop an understanding of insights and perspectives of children from different backgrounds and learn to function in a multiethnic, multicultural environment (Morrissey, 2014). Therefore, students need to learn how to interact in diverse environments. Teachers face challenges of making lessons and instructions “culturally responsive” for all students to avoid favoritism (Griner, 2012). Some students’ cultural backgrounds may have a negative impact on them in a modern classroom (Burt, 2013). It is imperative for elementary school teachers to be knowledgeable of different cultural beliefs and practices to help students adjust to traditional classrooms (Nigma, 2015). Defining the
Culturally responsive teaching is very important in today’s day and age. Classrooms are filled with students from different backgrounds, races, and ethnicities. Teachers need to put into consideration those differences when building curriculum and creating a classroom atmosphere. Subcultures might also need to be considered when teaching, such as the culture of the disabled. The culture of students with disabilities is one that may appear within many classrooms due to the increase of students with disabilities. Teachers who are able to maintain a culturally responsive classroom and curriculum will provide ideal learning opportunities for all students and encourage them to succeed. (Darrow, 2013)
Cultural proficiency is seeing the difference and responding effectively in a variety of environments. Learning about organizational and individual culture, in which one can effectively interact in a variety of cultural environments (p. 3). In simple terms in which educators are not only able to effectively work with diverse populations, but also believe that diversity adds positive value to the educational enterprise (Landa, 2011, p. 12).
A culturally responsive classroom creates an environment that is safe and accepting for children of all nationalities. An inclusive environment can include visuals that depict different cultures, inclusion of different cultures in the curriculum, access to bilingual dictionaries, sharing of family artifacts, field trips, and nonfiction picture books to teach key concepts in the content area. Knowing the principles of ELL instruction and characteristics of a successful ELL learning environment will not automatically create a competent ELL teacher. However, this knowledge will contribute to a better understanding of the factors that impact learning for ELL students and prepares the teacher to plan lessons that will result in maximum learning
7). In order to obtain academic achievement learning needs to be challenging, yet exciting. The teacher needs to be able to facilitate the learning process for different cultural and linguistic groups. Teachers also need to understand and teach students that learning does not occur in a box and that there is a world outside of the classroom. In order for a teacher to be effective they need to have knowledge of the three dimensions and teach in a culturally sensitive matter. They need to create structured learning environments, implement a supportive classroom environment, and provide access to resources for CLD students who have learning
Everyone knows that when it comes to making a difference in a child’s academic and life achievements, their teachers play a large role. A teacher’s ability to relate to their students, and teach them to achieve both socially and academically, contributes to how effective they are. What does it mean to be an effective teacher? Overall, there seems to be an emphasis on teacher effectiveness related to how well their students are performing on standardized testing. As teachers, we know there is more to being an effective teacher than just teaching our students based on tests.
Many schools have different frameworks which outline what makes for effective teaching and learning in a classroom, these follow quite closely with the teacher’s standards.