Understanding student diversity and its effects on student lesson acquisition and assessment
can be a huge advantage to a teacher.
I have a better understanding of how to incorporate students' diverse backgrounds in my curriculum
and assessment after reviewing personal incidents where a teacher was unaccepting of students with backgrounds different from
his own and remembering how much that unacceptance negatively impacted my own learning experiences. I know
that schools and teachers need to sensitive to students' cultural learning styles as well as individual learning styles.
I addressed some issues that another teacher was having because of her inexperience with a
diverse classroom environment. I offered analysis of her low success rate in her teaching and presentation and offered
viable, alternative solutions to help her succeed in the future.
I expressed my position in teaching in a diverse environment based upon my personal experiences and made a plan
for creating a new curriculum for a new diverse environment. I discussed why I thought I would be successful teaching,
managing and organizing a diverse classroom in addition to my thoughts on including parents as tools for
educating students.
I read Chapter 1, 7 and 8 in "Classroom Management, Perspectives on the Social
Curriculum" (Powell, Richard R., H. James McLaughlin, Tom V. Savage and Stanley Zehm; 2001) and have written at least three
research reports listed below addressing diversity issues and curriculum development in the classroom. I discussed various
issues related to utilizing student diversity and effective curriculum design with five classmates by reading and responding
to their reports and opinions, as well as discussing my work.
I read the article " Resegregation in American Schools" by Gary Orfield and John Yun (that
was based upon a study by The Civil Rights Project) to get a more realistic idea of what trends are developing in America's
Southern schools where I will be teaching. There seems to be an increasing segregation of Latino students who are on
the verge of outnumbering African-American students. This information will allow me to prepare lessons and activities
that gear these students for success and conduct some research in the community in which I will be teaching for cultural cues
since I am not of Latino heritage.
