Priorities for professional development include substantive emphasis on gaps and discrepancies regarding the performance of different groups of students.
Professional development activities help teachers investigate and understand how students’ race, ethnicity, social class and language might be related to learning and behavior.
Teachers are helped to understand how the overgeneralization of characteristics of students’ cultures can result in stereotyping and other unproductive teaching behaviors.
Professional development activities help members of the school staff examine how their own beliefs and dispositions might affect their relationships with diverse students.
Teachers are helped to understand how they react to students’ dress, accents, nonverbal communication and dialects – and how such reactions affect their interactions with students.
Professional development activities help teachers to develop the knowledge and skills to effectively teach students from different racial and ethnic groups.
