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Ready for Anything A paper on how my teacher education coursework has prepared me to work with a diverse group of individuals

Anna Danielle Duran [email protected] 07 April 2006 MA Elementary Education

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In one of the most diverse locations in the country, the communities have precipitated into what some refer to as Language Pockets (Ferrel & Hotz, 2000). Now in my sixth year as an Angelino I have experienced some of these pockets, but I prefer to think of them more as cultural pockets- as their commonalities go much further than language. While the Greater Los Angeles Area contains great diversity, a closer look may reveal that the myriad constituents make up a multitude of these culture pockets that are diverse from each other, but not so much so within themselves. Or so I thought. I grew up in an area that I think was deemed “diverse” because of the population of nonwhite citizens. The population of white to Hispanic according to the 2000 Census only differed by three percentage points (45% white, 42% Hispanic) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000) , however, in my experience, we shared the same culture. We ate the same tortillas and chile, decorated our homes the same southwest style, put out the same lumenarias at Christmas, and drove in the same terrible way. Of course there were differences that I didn’t want to recognize at the time, but reflecting back I think they were more class-based than ethnic. The non-white, non-Hispanic population includes about 10% Native American, 2% black, and 1% Asian (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). But we called ourselves diverse. Los Angeles boasts a much larger diversity of ethnic and linguistic representation, and there are generally a great many representatives of each. However, the fact remains that many of these diverse populations exist in not so diverse neighborhoods where for all intents and purposes a person could be born, live, and die without ever marinating in someone else’s diversity. In the nation’s second largest school district, schools like mine are referred to as diverse. My school is about 88% Hispanic and 12% black—diverse to those whose definition

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means non-white or what is not seen as conforming to American Mainstream. There are plenty of truly diverse schools where twenty-three nationalities and fourteen languages may be represented in one classroom—where they have earned the title of “diverse,” but mine has not. Preparing for my experience as a teacher in the neighborhood in which I teach I attended many class sessions on diversity and read numerous articles on what that means and how it impacts classrooms. When I was hired as a seventh grade teacher at my school I wasn’t sure what to do with my diversity education. I did, however, know what to do with my education on teaching English Language Learners, on the Latino and African American cultures, and on recognizing and including the culture of students; which is part of what I will address further. For the rest of this paper I will discuss how my teacher education supports and impacts my instructional practices with my students, and how I have learned how truly diverse my school actually is. Studying culture and diversity as a Loyola student, a Teach For America corps member, and as a student of my environment at L.A. Academy I have learned a great deal about diversity and how it impacts my own pedagogy. My pedagogical practices are influenced mainly by four ideas: Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, meeting the needs of the whole student, theories of developmental psychology, and always holding high expectations. These four ideas stem from concepts and theories learned in my teacher education coursework and are expressed in the strategies I use in all areas as an educator. During my teacher education coursework at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) I have taken many different and interesting classes that have all greatly contributed to my growth as an educator. Many of them have contained common concepts and addressed them in a variety of applicable ways. One very important concept is learning about the way that the school and

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classroom climate affects student performance. Because of this, teachers must create a safe and positive climate in which learning and achievement is valued. In more than one class we devoted time to learning strategies for the students to get to know one another. I think this has proven especially impactful in my classroom where trust and safety has been born out of getting to know one another and each other’s background. More than one LMU course has emphasized the fact that teacher quality, above any other factor, is the most influential factor in student performance. Learning this fact is important because it has taught me that I need to take ownership over the students in my classroom. It is I who determines if they succeed or fail- both in my class and potentially the future. I cannot blame districts, federal mandates, the community, or culture of the school; if my students are not successful, I must take ownership and turn it around. Of course every student, school, and teacher faces obstacles, but it is our job to surmount those obstacles and ensure that all students will be educated and prepared for life. Many have argued in my classes and at my school site over the definition of our job as educators. How much should we be doing outside of our classroom or school is a great matter of debate. The LMU School of Education Conceptual Framework and what I learned in my Cultural Paradigms class guide my own thoughts on this matter. To be an educator is to take on a role that often goes much further than to teach my students the Pythagorean Theorem, the stages of mitosis, or what caused the urbanization of Medieval China. While my students and I work hard to master their seventh grade standards I must also guide them through a very difficult developmental time of their lives. Especially at this very moment; they are learning what it means to have an individual voice, what implications the law has, and what citizenship really means. In order to help educate my students into becoming whole adults with successful and

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fulfilling lives I must also advocate for them, teach them to advocate for themselves, and lead the systemic change that must happen to ensure all students are given a quality education and they will encounter only justice and respect during their lives. In order to do all these things we must also maintain high expectations of our students, that we expect for them to be successful mathematicians, scientists, writers, readers, and leaders. Another recurring message in my courses, that also addresses culture and development, is learning about the students’ development in the context of their culture (Gardner, 1998) and using this idea to guide differentiation. This is one of the main concepts and theories that guides the way in which I learn about my students and determine the way I should be developing my curriculum and the best instructional practices and which to teach them. In Gardner’s book (1998) he discusses Vygotsky’s claim that “it is social interaction and cultural context that provide the foundation for the development of mental abilities.” It is the manipulation of social interaction to provide for efficient development of abilities that I utilize when planning my instruction. Planning for the development of curriculum and the implementation of instruction has a great deal to do with assessment. Every course in my teacher education experience has included methods of, and theories surrounding, assessment. Assessment in many forms is important to my own curriculum and instruction with includes a variety of pencil-and-paper and performance assessments to evaluate progress. Initial student surveys, parent surveys, and skill diagnostic tests allow for me to get to know my students and decide what is best for them in order to move them toward mastery. Through the year I am able to get to know my students through ongoing assessment and tracking of their progress as well as conversations while I circulate that lends me insight into what band is coming to down. All of this is important to how I am able to respond to

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their needs and meet them at their level to further their achievement. During the Educational Psychology course we learned about “Teacher With-it-ness” and the importance of understanding what is going on in the lives of the students because of how it will impact instruction. Many variables impact the education of all students, one of these is motivation. A humanistic approach to motivation is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need (Wookfolk, 2001), the fact that before students will be able motivated toward “intellectual achievement”, their basic needs related to “survival and safety” must first be met. Even when not always explicitly stated, the hierarchy was part of many course discussions and generally drives many teachers’ first days of the school year. The reason it drives first-day activities is because of how related it is to classroom management. Harry and Rosemary Wong (2001) especially drive this idea home in their book on starting the school year. This book, and even videos of Wong, enriched discussions on the importance of classroom management and being an effective, professional, teacher. Wong seems to base his suggestions on the assumptions in Maslow’s hierarchy of need, not only creating a safe and efficient environment, but one that promotes achievement because the students know that the teacher has high expectations of them. Being able to learn from students immediately and respond by creating a classroom climate that meets their survival and academic needs will allow me to more effectively implement the curriculum. Meeting the needs of the whole student is one of the main ideas that drives my personal pedagogy. Throughout my coursework have been discussions on the aforementioned topics, but James P. Comer’s (2004) book, Leave No Child Behind, is a great example of the developmentalist perspective on education. Many lectures have discussed what it means to meet the needs of our students on a variety of levels, but Comer (2004) explains exactly what that can

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look like. His book addresses school culture, relationships between and among students and staff, and what needs the school must meet before expecting academic improvement. In this discussion he emphasizes the importance of maintaining high expectations of the students and how it is important they are aware of the expectations. It also briefly describes his school improvement methods. There are many educators and researchers interested in child development and how it relates to education and motivation in the classroom. Specifically referring to motivation and meeting the needs of students Rogers and Renard (1999) discuss relationship-centered teaching and a framework of six standards that support it. These six standards are closely related to those needs in Maslow’s hierarchy (Woolfolk, 2004), but serve to reinforce the importance of feeling safe, valuable, successful, involved, enabled, and cared for (Rogers, et al., 1999). Their article justifies the need for relationship-centered teaching by arguing that “learning occurs only when what is being presented is meaningful enough to the student that he or she decides to actively engage in the learning experience,” and goes on further to state that “students are motivated when they believe that teachers treat them like people and care about them personally and educationally.” In my own classroom I try to uphold at least some of these six standards in order to more fully engage my students and make them feel cared for. Meeting the needs of students in regards to content instruction was a very influential part of my teacher education courses. Learning about Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE) has become a key to the way in which I develop and implement instruction that responds to the needs of my students. The SDAIE strategies I learned in my coursework and through professional development has helped me to become a much more effective teacher by utilizing research-proven instructional strategies to guide the development and implementation

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of the curriculum of all four subject areas that I teach. By using SDAIE strategies that begin by building a foundation of knowledge at the lower level of Bloom’s Taxonomy that develop into the higher ordered thinking, my students are met at their Zone of Proximal Development and are guided to achievement of mastery. They achieve by starting where they can access knowledge first, then interpret it as they build their skills. Further, they produce work that may serve as an assessment, and finally, disseminate their achievement to increase its relevance (Action Learning Systems, 2003). This strategy has been very helpful in planning and assessing for my math, science, and history classes. Other than learning how to plan and instruct I have also learned to reflect on my own practices. My teacher education coursework has also helped me to realize that there are many types of good teachers. In an article by Cruickshank and Haefele (2001) the authors describe how different types of good teachers have been recognized throughout the evolution of education. This is important because as we may embrace a particular type of pedagogy now, the field of education is ever changing and so we must also. I would like to think that I am able to embody different attributes of the different types of good teachers, especially that of the effective teacher, the competent teacher, and the diversity-responsive teacher (Cruickshank & Haefele, 2001), and that I will be able to change as time goes on to adapt to changing groups of students. Because our experiences shape us, we must create positive, interesting, and effective learning experiences for our students. In an article by Gladwell (1998) and another by Vendell (2000) the idea of influence by teachers is discussed in terms of a book written by Judith Rich Harris. Both articles somewhat support what she had to say, but emphasize the fact there is additional research that shows that people other thank peers, namely teachers, really can have an

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influence on students. In what I have discussed above I would argue the same point- that we do have an impact and we can make that impact a positive one. We can be the agents of change in our classrooms by being the good teachers of whatever type for our students. By meeting them where they are developmentally and use their Zone of Proximal Development to move them forward, we can move past mountains of curriculum. If we show our students we care and always hold high expectations for behavior and academic achievement, they will succeed. There is a great variety of ways that I have learned from my students and use that information to respond to the on a curricular and instructional level as well as a more personal and developmental level. Beyond instruction and planning and curriculum, over the last two years I have been able to use my coursework to reflect on my teaching experience. I have been able to find that within a location that has seemingly un-diverse groups I have been able to get to know extremely diverse groups of students. They have different abilities, interests, aspirations, and experiences. I focus on the needs of my students, not necessarily their diversity- I know they are all diverse from each other and to most effectively teach them I know that myself as the teacher and the rest of the class as the culture of our environment must embrace each others’ differences. I must teach them from where they are at academically, socially, emotionally, and culturally—whether culture has anything to do with ethnicity or not.

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Citations Action Learning Systems. (2003). The curriculum solution: A system for delivering standardsbased curriculum and assessment. Comer, J. (2004). Leave no child behind: Preparing today’s youth for tomorrow’s world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cruickshank, D., & Haefele, D. (2001, February). Good teachers, plural. Educational Leadership, 26-30. Ferrel, D., & Hotz, R. (2000, January 23). Ethnic pockets amid a vast fabric of English. Los Angeles Times. Gardner, W., Mutter, J., & Kosmitzki, C. (1998). Lives across cultures: Cross-cultural human development. Allyn & Bacon: Boston, MA. Pp 253-263. Gladwell, M. (1998, August 17). Do parents matter? The New Yorker, 54-64. Loyola Marymount University School of Education Conceptual Framework. (n.d.). Retrieved March 16, 2006 from http://soe.lmu.edu/about/info/framework.pdf. O’Neil, J. & Tell, C. (1999, September). Why students lose when tough standards win. Educational Leadership, 18-22. Rogers, S. & Renard L. (1999, September). Relationship driven teaching. Educational Leadership, 57, (1), 34-37. U.S. Census Bureau State and Country Quickfacts. (n.d.) Retrieved April 3, 2006 from http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/35000.html Vandell, D. (2000). Parents, peer groups, and other socializing influences. Developmental Psychology, 36, 689-710. Woolfolk, A. (2004). Educational Psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

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Wong, H., & Wong, R. (2004). The first days of school. Mountainview, CA: Harry K. Wong Publications, Inc.