Level of Cultural Responsiveness in Your Teaching

I recently watch a DVD by Dr. Roland Tharp called “CREDE Standards.” CREDE is an acronym that stands for Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence. The five standards are:

1. Teachers and Students Working Together

2. Developing Language and Literacy Skills across all Curriculum

3. Connecting Lessons to Students' Lives

4. Engaging Students with Challenging Lessons

5. Emphasizing Dialogue over Lectures

Today, I like to talk about the standard that I effectively implement in my classroom that is 75% Hispanic. That is the first standard, Teachers and student working together. The idea is to use instructional group activities in which students and teacher work together to create a product or idea. Dr. Tharp noted in his video the teacher’s primary role in the beginning is to assist students to work together first, then find out what they need. We as teachers are so ready to just lecture, assign pages to read independently and test students. If you have ELL students that struggle with English, they would have a difficult time with you if just lectured to them. ELL students get lost in a single dialogue classroom. But if you use different strategies such as Visual Scaffolding, one of 50 strategies mentioned in Herrell & Jordan Book, 50 Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners, to stimulate prior learning, and include Cooperative Learning, another one of 50 strategies, so that all students work together in small group to promote more student centered instruction. Using these strategies really has helped me in my classroom. The ELL students, who usually struggle with English, are getting help from each other and other ELL students who may be a little more advanced than them. The idea of Teachers and Students Working Together to promote learning makes my job easier. Instead of running around helping 30 plus student who didn’t understand my lecture, I can now walk around assisting 4 to 5 groups.

Tomorrow, I will talk about ways I could be more culturally responsive in my teaching.