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Effective teachers need an arsenal of strategies for instruction and classroom management. Use the simple tools and approaches below to create a more inclusive environment that promotes student learning
A New Set of Rules
Create a classroom constitution as the school year kicks off.
How Stereotypes Undermine Test Scores
Subtle changes in test environments can improve standardized test scores among students of color and girls.
Mutual Learning Through Conversation
Certain encounters help young students develop values and virtues that open spaces in their minds and hearts so they can see the world and its people in broader terms.
Family Engagement
Most teachers have a technique or two in their back-to-school tool kits for introducing themselves to families and taking those first steps to engage parents and other caregivers in the classroom and the student learning process. And yet, family engagement is a year-long process.
Multicultural Service-Learning: Teacher Planning Sheet
This planning sheet can help educators design and implement service-learning projects that support prejudice reduction. Emphasis is placed on collaboration, direct service and advocacy.
Service-Learning and Prejudice Reduction
Four steps every educator should take to help ensure service projects reduce stereotyping, rather than reinforce it.
Culturally Relevant Curriculum
Curriculum, in its most simple, essential, commonly understood form, is the "what" of education. It is crucial to academic performance and essential to culturally responsive pedagogy. Even the most "standard" curriculum decides whose history is worthy of study, whose books are worthy of reading, which curriculum and text selections that include myriad voices and multiple ways of knowing, experiencing, and understanding life can help students to find and value their own voices, histories, and cultures.
Mythtakes - Working With Racially and Ethnically Diverse Students
This professional development activity examines common beliefs that help and hinder work with racially and ethnically diverse students.
What's a Teacher to Do?
Here are five things you can do to make your classroom respectful and culturally sensitive.
Controversial Subjects in the Classroom
Invariably, issues are raised in classrooms that bring charged responses from students. How can educators set the stage for safe, respectful dialogue and learning?
Interactive Reader
Interactive read aloud places more responsibility on students to share what they are thinking in a way that simulates an authentic reading experience.
Since successful readers read, monitor their comprehension, pause, think about what they have read, and resume reading, teachers can simulate this in a read aloud at any grade level. In this way, teachers who invite more student participation enable students to "pause" the read aloud to share what they are thinking and to "restart" the read aloud when the thought has been sufficiently considered.
A Journal Can Be Anything
Too many educators believe the only way to journal is with the written word. Yes, we want our students to write — to increase their power through literacy. But why can't they use multiple intelligences to prompt the written word?
Successful ESL Strategies
High school teacher Kristan Taylor uses oral history projects and journaling to help ESL and non-ESL students "realize that they often share the same problems, frustrations and hopes for the future."
Say-Mean-Matter
High School teacher, Michelle Rainey, presents the technique Say-Mean-Matter that she uses to help her English students understand and analyze text.
Using Primary Sources
Listen as 4th Grade teacher, Kristen Miller, describes using a viewfinder to help her students test the reliability of primary source art in her social studies classroom.
Reflection: When I Feel...
This activity helps students understand the difference between charity (responsible for others) and service (responsible to others). Use in conjunction with class discussions and activities examining the difference between charity and empowerment.
Honoring Home Languages
Teachers are often a young immigrant's first regular, ongoing contact with someone outside their home community and culture. It's a relationship that can provide the emotional scaffolding necessary to cross the linguistic and cultural divide between country of origin and country of residency.
Overcoming Language Barriers
Many U.S. cities with large, established ethnic enclaves have long sought to welcome newly arrived immigrants and their children. Yet, small towns and cities have less experience identifying and meeting the needs and interests of new immigrants. How can you make inroads when the path to much-needed community assets and resources isn't so well worn — or when it is well worn, but not so well traveled?
Authentic Relationships
Ask any veteran teacher and they will tell you that the stronger the relationship with the student, the less likely behavioral problems will erupt in the classroom. Good relationships equal good classroom management, pure and simple.
Democratic Classrooms
Educators possess different philosophies and styles for their teaching. Some work from an authoritarian perspective, leveraging their power as the teacher to control student behavior and dictate classroom participation. Others employ a more democratic approach, sharing power with students and supporting them in managing their own behaviors.
Engaging Curriculum
"Why do we have to learn this?" It's a question that teachers dread, and it speaks to a curriculum that, for whatever reason, doesn't engage students. Maybe it's a curriculum that is outdated. Perhaps it's presented in such a way that it lacks luster. Maybe it's devoid of any emotional connection for a student.
How to ‘Roar’
Tips for using grassroots organizing to engage your school’s parents.
Motivation
Motivated students want to learn and are less likely to be disruptive or disengage from the work of the classroom. Motivation stems from numerous factors: interest in the subject matter, perceptions of its usefulness, general desire to achieve, self-confidence and self-esteem, patience and persistence, among them.
Reflecting on Practice
Is your classroom a calm, relaxing day or a violent, destructive storm? Is it sunny, cloudy or rainy? Is it frigidly cold? Are you a calm, refreshing breeze or a tornado?
