Chapter 3&4

Michele Bateman (Vasquez) Chapter 3 1. Why are today’s classrooms more diverse than they were several decades ago? Today’s classrooms are more diverse because the amount of immigrant students has been increasing everywhere. Today’s society is trying to be more multicultural allowing more teacher’s to be successful in their teachings towards the entire class and not just those who only know English. In order for teachers to be able to teach their students they need to be more aware of their backgrounds, customs, languages, and experiences they have had to overcome to get where they are. In order to do that they need to involve themselves with more multicultural aspects of learning to be able to adapt their culturally responsive classrooms into the lives of those they teach. Which also allows for academic achievement for all the students in the classroom. 2. What are some of the cultural and linguistic di ff erences that students from various racial and ethnic backgrounds bring to classroom learning situations? Immigrant students bring di ff erent ways of knowing, di ff erent styles of questioning, and di ff erent patterns of interaction into the schools they are attending (Learning, Literacies, and Texts Pg. 81). Some societies emphasize memorization when learning than actual hands on or experiments to make predictions on what may or may not happen. In some societies they use their knowledge with their interactions with others in group settings to help them learn more. There are more languages spoken in schools today and more students learning new languages than there was before. As a preschool teacher I utilize ASL in my classroom of two year olds whose backgrounds range if every direction. I have some students who ask a ton of questions, some who don’t say much unless asked to, and others who won’t talk at all, but will sign even though they have speech. 3. What is culturally responsive instruction, and what does it look like in content area classrooms? Culturally responsive instruction is the way students know or learn in a classroom, their motivation to learn, and their funds of knowledge. To make it more simple it can also be the instruction that connects the students with their backgrounds, origins, and interests (Learning, Literacies, and Texts). Students usually maintain their interests when it connects them to what they already know. Allowing students to use small groups or pairs in class to do assignments can help lower anxiety. Culturally responsive instruction in content area classrooms celebrate languages and cultures. In content area classrooms being culturally responsive could be as simple as having a positive relationship with the families and communities of your students, being sensitive to others cultures, involving all students in di ff erent kinds of reading, writing, listening, and speaking while watching their behaviors and how they work together to do certain activities. 4. What can a teacher do to implement culturally responsive instruction in a content area classrooms? Labeling objects in the classroom with more than one language to invite all students to learn new things. Allowing students to be able to read, or write in their own language at least once a day can keep their motivations and allow them to feel like they are apart of the learning process. Always having bilingual dictionaries available for each student to be able to use when they feel the need or don’t understand a specific word. The one thing that sticks out for me is including di ff erent cultures in the curriculum topics. When I was in social studies we had a specific day that everyone could choose any country they wanted to learn more about and create a poster with pictures, words in their language, and a short essay on what we learned, as well as any type of food we wanted to try and create to bring in for the class to have some cultural diversity. It made some of the students more excited than others when they could talk about their homes or just somewhere their ancestors came from.

Chapter 4 1. How does assessment help us set instruction goals? Using assessments for each student to find out what they know and where they struggle is one of the reasons teachers use assessments to set goals for the students to achieve by certain time frames in the school year. It also allows for the teachers to see how or where their lessons might need to be adjusted to improve the way something is being taught to the class. If most students aren’t testing well in an assessment after time in the classroom the teacher can go back and find out which areas needed updated and corrected to help the students better learn and maintain the knowledge they are learning. It also helps set the goals for each student when they can get an understanding on how well the students understand the way the teacher is teaching. 2. How have state and federal policies a ff ected assessment and student achievement? State and federal policies a ff ected assessment by making assessment a score that needs to be met just to get funding to help students to make them look better as a school even if the students aren’t actually learning or maintaining the information they are being assessed on. In same cases if schools didn’t have a certain score for their assessments and achievements they could lose their funding or be shut down. Instead of the state and federal policies being worked around ways to help the students its harming them more by forcing the teachers to only teach what may be on the assessments and what would help get the schools a high score just to stay in business even if that means the students don’t retain any information after graduation. 3. What are some of the informal assessment strategies teachers use in the context of their classrooms? Teachers use the authentic informal way of assessing their students by sometimes allowing the students and teaches to develop the assessments. Which allows for the tests to be continuously evolving and growing by raging from small groups to even one-on-one. They can use di ff erent forms of testing like, observations, tests in the classroom, or checklists created to make sure the information isn’t being missed or skipped over to quickly. Informal testing allows the teachers to choose their own appropriate classroom materials that will help the students in the areas they need most help in and addresses their weaknesses and strengths. In order to give the students the appropriate feedback they need in a timely manner they use notes, discussions in class or one-on-one and classroom portfolios the students can assess at any time. 4. How might teachers analyze the complexity of texts? Teachers can use the publisher-provided descriptions of the way each textbook is supposed to be set up based on the grade-level and readability of the context. The teachers can also have conversations with the students about the texts they have been reading and get the input of others on how they took the information and what made sense to them or how it made sense to them as well as how the teacher portrayed what they read that way it isn’t just based o ff of the teacher’s perspective but the students as well. It can also be the sense of what the teacher thinks makes the textbook a good tool to use for the lessons being taught. eResources Color in Colorado is one of the eResources I looked at when it came to understanding how to implement the di ff erent languages used in each classroom for those who have a di ff erent dialect than our English dialect we may use. The video was about ELL strategies and their accountable talk in the classroom discussions. It gave the children the understanding that everyone is together in their learning and being able to repeat their questions in part of their