Cultural Walk

My technology journey continues as I learn about how to be a culturally responsive teacher.  A culturally responsive teacher is a teacher that understands and capitalizes on the unique cultural attributes of students, including their experiences, as resources promoting student achievement (Gay, 2002; Villegas & Lucas, 2002).  I always thought I was a culturally responsive teacher but reading this chapter made me fully understand what a culturally responsive teacher is and how I can fully incorporate my students culture in my classroom.  Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer state that being a culturally responsive teacher consist of several components and those components are as follows:

·         Teachers understand that students understanding is influenced by their culture

·         Embrace students diverse backgrounds

·         Take on the responsibility of helping schools be more responsive to all students

·         Understand how learners construct knowledge

·         Know about the lives of his or her students

·         Designs lessons that builds upon what they already know and challenges them to think beyond what they are familiar with

Those are all things that I take into consideration when I teaching and planning lessons for my students.  With all the components listed above collaboration also comes into play.  It is important that teachers create a collaborative environment and that students collaborate in the classroom setting and that they feel comfortable when doing so.  It is important that guidelines are set and that students understand different people have different views and that they should not be criticized if others do not agree with others opinions.  There are several components that go along with creating a collaborative environment which include:

·         Teacher modeling

·         Questioning

·         Quality Responding

·         Peer Interactions

·         Group Inquiry Skills

·         Reflective Journals

Those are practices that can be used in the classroom to support a collaborative environment for students.

            Chapter 11 really made me think about all the strategies I can use to support student learning in my classroom.  Some of those strategies include promoting content learning and promoting student reflection.  Promoting content learning can help students make connections and link activities with the content they are suppose to be learning.  A second way to help students would be to directly reinforce learning goals.  Reinforcing learning goals will inform students of what they are learning as well as keep them on track for the duration of a lesson.  Make sure they are of aware of what they need to know and how they are going to learn it.  Promoting reflection makes students think about their own thinking.  According to Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer, reflective thinking helps students make connections between their learning goals, the processes they use to achieve those goals, and the content they are learning.  Those are all strategies that need to be used in the classroom to support student learning.

            It is important that students understand culture and that they are aware that their classmates come from different cultural backgrounds.  Cennamo, Ross, and Ertmer state that Culture is manifest in a wide variety of behaviors and beliefs some of which are visible and some of which are not.  This past school year my students were not familiar with what culture is.  Giving them explanations and examples really helped them understand their culture as well as other student’s culture.  It is important that students understand that different cultures have different beliefs.  Some discussion topics that can be held among students include:

·         Styles of dress

·         Greetings

·         Beliefs

·         Values

·         Holiday customs

·         Music/ dancing

·         Food

Those are all topics that can discussed when teaching students about different cultural backgrounds.  Another strategy to use is to have students right a report about their family history using presentation software.  That way the lesson has a technology component and it will teach students about other student’s cultural backgrounds.  From those presentations discussions can develop.  It is important that we as teachers promote and support cultural understanding to our students.