Standard 2
The teacher uses understanding of individual differences and diverse cultures and communities to ensure inclusive learning environments that enable each learner to meet high standards.
This Standard focuses on the importance of addressing the many differences within your classroom and incorporating these differences into your classroom environment, especially in regards to lessons and design.
The evidence below exemplifies how I have taken my understanding of my students' context of learning to create engaging lessons and activities, as well as follow through with different levels of scaffolding to help each of my students learn at their own pace.
 This book is very popular with my kinders! It draws on concepts they know, pulls at their imagination and reinforces the names of the months. |
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 This shows an example of how I model and scaffold the daily journals for my kindergarten class. |
 This is an example of student work showing an activity I led with my kindergartners about what the letter Mm looks like. Students had to make pictures out of the uppercase and lower case letters. |
 This is another example of how I model and scaffold the daily journals for my kindergarten class. |
 This is an example of student work following my modeling of the journal entry. |
 This is an example of student work following my modeling of the journal entry with heavier scaffolding in regards to writing. |
Reflection
It is very important for all teachers to keep in mind the fact that all students come to us from different backgrounds, and have different interests , strengths, and challenge areas. There is no cookie cutter definition of what a student at any developmental or grade level should look like, and so as teachers we need to approach each situation as differently as the children who come to us.
Just as each student is different, every culture a student belongs to differs, as well. Not only are there differences between racial and ethnic cultures, but also religious, economic, and social factors that play into the creation of a student's own 'culture'. That they know. Especially in America, where there are so many cultures to embrace and learn about, having an open mind and a genuine interest in discovering details about multiple cultures is integral to teaching in a modern world.
After discovering the different aspects that make all the students I have met unique and special in their own ways, I have really come to understand how important bringing in this uniqueness to the students' learning experience can be. Letting the students know that you understand where they come from and where they are at in their lives and in their academic progress gives them greater confidence in you as the teacher and in themselves as learners in the classroom.
Additional Artifacts
The first link above leads to a website I have created about how to bring the cultures and background of your students into the classroom in a way that is understanding, empathetic, and validating for the students in question. I am very happy to be able to share this comprehensive guide hat details multiple heritages and backgrounds and heritages that our students should be glad to embrace and represent. Within this website are several multicultural unit plans created with my peers in order to integrate these multicultural approaches into everyday curriculum.
The bottom left-hand link leads to the Facebook page for the Umoja program that I volunteered at one fall with my peers in order to help children of African-American heritage who were adopted by non-black parents to embrace their own cultures and to help find a sense of identity. This experience further helped me to empathize not only with potential students of another culture, but also students who may feel displaced in their adoptive or foster homes.
The bottom right-hand link is to a page within the BERA website that details an approach called "Arts Based Research" which is a style of problem based teaching that allows students to look at certain aspects of life through the lense of an artist to express thoughts, solve problems, and to encounter real-life applications. I find this approach to be an engaging way to begin bringing the arts back into core curriculum.