This post is focused on culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP). This has been an ongoing piece of professional development for many, yours truly included, and requires a lot of self awareness and evaluation and more important it requires you as educators to ask a lot of questions. Asking questions of your students, about your students, about your community and theirs will give you needed background and personal information to plan content that is engaging, approachable and fun. It is the responsibility of educators and education facilities to implement policies, procedures and practices that reflect their learning communities that help students feel welcomed, but that also sets the expectation high. It is important that we seek to understand how our ELL's engage in the content, how they see themselves in the content and what their learning culture was like in their home language.
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/CBS_ResponsivePedagogy.pdf
“Culture is about ways of knowing ... Culture goes much
deeper than typical understandings of ethnicity, race and/or faith. It
encompasses broad notions of similarity and difference and it is reflected in
our students’ multiple social identities and their ways of knowing and of being
in the world. In order to ensure that all students feel safe, welcomed and
accepted, and inspired to succeed in a culture of high expectations for
learning, schools and classrooms must be responsive to culture”.
This paragraph truly outlines the perspective we all must
take in the classroom. Culture is how
our students identify themselves, identify their learning and communicate that
learning. By seeking to learn about and
through this culture we will not only learn ourselves but our students will
find the most applicable method with which they will learn and communicate that
learning. Connecting their English language
experience with that of their own language experience is a thoughtful and
appropriate place to begin their journey, based on what they already know and
scaffolded to build new knowledge and understanding that they can then associate
to their home language experience. As
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy underscores new curriculum development, and
administration seek to implement in their schools, it is up to the educators to
seek out their own practices and learning to ensure the personal dimension of
CRP is upheld such that students not only feel included in lessons, but see and
hear themselves in the lesson as well.
6 Characteristics of CRP Educators
- 1. Socio-cultural consciousness
- 2. High expectations of ALL students
- 3. Desire to make a difference
- 4. Constructivist approach
- 5. Deep knowledge of their learners
- 6. Culturally responsive teaching practices
“The overall
expectations are broad in nature, and the specific expectations define the
particular content or scope of the knowledge and skills referred to in the OEs.
Teachers will use their professional judgement to determine which SEs should be
used to evaluate achievement of the OEs ….and which ones will be covered…but
not necessarily evaluated” (http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/esl912currb.pdf P. 32)
This quote eloquently illustrates the necessity of teachers
to do more than teach the curriculum. It
outlines the needs of the students being the foremost piece to planning and
assessment strategies, the importance of responsive content in which all
students can hear and see themselves in and further easily latch onto and
freely and confidently participate in. The
hard practice of teaching isn’t just in planning and engagement but in
adaptability; understanding when some students simply aren’t engaging well in a
specific strand or tool and finding an alternative method to assess and engage
these students. WE should preparing
multiple assessment types for given expectations, planning on using them all
and perhaps using a select number of them instead.
Teaching to the overall expectations allows educators the
freedom of various tools and resources to cover, potentially a broader scope to
work from and thereby more room for adapting to students needs, while still
fulfilling the obligations of the specific strands as they are result of the overall
expectations. Trampolining into the ELL’s
in your classroom; specific language skills are needed for every individual
lesson, the structure, the vocabulary are all pieces that need to be included
in your lesson with sufficient time to model and practice for all
students. While this language isn’t
contained within the specific expectations, our students require it in order to
confidently respond and apply the content appropriately.
Comments
Post a Comment