Educating Everybody's Children by Julie, Heather, and Arlena

Educating Everybody's Children by Robert W. Cole

Introduction

- Students respond to classroom activities differently due to differing backgrounds such as ethnicity and language, but all students are capable if teaching styles are engaging and relevant.

- A lack of understanding and stereotyping of the culture of minority students on the part of both teachers and administration has been an ongoing problem.

- Minority students often attend schools which are sub-par which attributes further to the problem and can create a never ending cycle of poverty.

- The Hispanic population has doubled since 1990. Almost 25% of African Americans and Native Americans live in poverty. Many times those children from homes in which English is not the primary language are already behind when entering school.

- Students from inner urban schools are held to low expectations and are not required to think critically. We agree. We have seen students who come from different school districts and claim to have studied a second language for more than a year yet cannot say the alphabet in the target language. Other students come to school knowing this from "Dora the Explorer".

- Pedagogy of Plenty – Term used to describe engaging students with high expectations, worthwhile activities that are applicable to the students' lives, and incorporating the differing cultures and languages of students.

Chapter 1

- Racism is still present in today's society but might not necessarily be as obvious as it was in years past. Unfortunately, this is true. One group member pointed out that, at a Spanish Honor Society dinner at an authentic restaurant, the principal (who is now retired) stood up during the dinner to address the students. He started his speech by stating, "Back in the 60s when I was in school, you never saw Mexicans on TV except portrayed as the typical dirty guy drinking tequila." She was both embarrassed and horrified. The principal went on to explain that Spanish is more prevalent today and why it was important to study a foreign language, but he never realized that he had said something inappropriate. Therefore, as teachers we must continue to reinforce the importance of learning a second language and teach multicultural diversity.

- Standardized testing and the use of percentiles to decide passing or failing grades contributes to the problem of non-English speaking minority students doing poorly in school, because it automatically expects a certain amount of students to do badly. Rather than achievement being proven by students accomplishing certain tasks, students are rated and compared with the scores of other students.

- Using the "sink or swim" method with non-English speaking students does not do them justice because they become overwhelmed and quickly become discouraged with school. Another group member spent six weeks taking classes in Mexico, and sometimes her brain would just want to shut down because the effort it took to constantly speak a language other than English was exhausting. She did learn a lot in that time and her Spanish improved, but she can sympathize with non-English speaking students. English as a Second Language (ESL) is an important program and should be run by qualified teachers. School districts often do not provide enough ESL teachers, and sometimes there is only one for an entire district. This means that the students who need the assistance obviously are not getting the help they need to learn English.

-INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES DISCUSSED IN THE CHAPTER:

- Provide opportunities for student to work in a variety of social configurations and settings

- Use reality-based learning approaches

- Encourage interdisciplinary teaching

- Involve students actively

- Analyze students' learning and reading styles

- Actively model behaviors

- Explore the fullest dimensions of thought

- Use a multicultural teaching approach

- Use alternative assessments

- Promote home/school partnerships

- Use accelerated learning techniques

- Foster strategies in questioning

- Emphasize brain-compatible instruction

- Activate students' prior knowledge

- Use a constructivist approach to teaching

- Organize instructionally effective classroom environments

MULTICULTURAL TEACHING APPROACH
-Celebrating diversity is not simply reading Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech or other such activities. Celebrating diversity teaches students that each one has different backgrounds and heritages and they are all important. The United States is a melting pot of cultures; understanding and accepting this is a first step towards ending stereotypes and racism.

Chapter 2

12 KEY ELEMENTS FOR EFFECTIVE TEACHING FOR ETHNIC AND LANGUAGE-MINORITY STUDENTS:
1. Teachers have a clear sense of their own ethnic and cultural
identities.
2. Teachers communicate high expectations for the success of all
students and a belief that all students can succeed
3. Teachers are personally committed to achieving equity for all
students and believe that they are capable of making a difference in their students' learning
4. Teachers have developed a bond with their students and cease
seeing them as "the other".
5. Schools provide an academically challenging curriculum that
includes attention to the development of higher-level cognitive skills.
6. Instruction focuses on students' creation of meaning about
content in an interactive and collaborative learning environment.
7. Teachers help students see learning tasks as meaningful.
8. Curricula include the contributions and perspectives of the
different ethno cultural groups that compose the society.
9. Teachers provide a "scaffolding" that links the academically
challenging curriculum to the cultural resources that students bring to school.
10. Teachers explicitly teach students the culture of the school
and seek to maintain students' sense of ethno cultural pride and identity.
11. Community members and parents or guardians are encouraged
to become involved in students' education and are given a significant voice in making important school decisions related to programs (such as resources and staffing).
12. Teachers are involved in political struggles outside the
classroom that are aimed at achieving a more just and humane society.

- Jaime Escalante earned attention by his students' success on the AP Calculus exam and the movie, Stand and Deliver, gave a glimpse of the high expectations he held for his students. Escalante proved that all students are capable of excelling if they have a teacher who believes in them and has high expectations.

- The language problem is becoming more and more prevalent in schools. One group member has a student who moved to the US from Mexico in June. He did not know any English before moving here and is making a lot of progress. He was scheduled to classes in which there were bilingual students so that they could assist him and interpret when needed. While the teacher is very impressed with his progress, she wishes that there were more programs to help him since he only spends 90 minutes every other day with the ESL instructor.
-The chapter says that "Teachers sometimes misinterpret the behaviors of poor and minority students because they do not understand the cultures they come from" and "only when teachers understand their students' cultural backgrounds can they avoid this kind of cultural clash." One group member remembers when she first taught at her inner-city school. Her first year there she was very confused by the behaviors of her students. She did not understand the Ebonics that she heard in the hallways or things like why they brought their entire families with them to parent teacher conferences (now she knows it is because the parents did not have childcare and felt that the students should hear what was said at the conference). She was even called a racist by one of her African American coworkers because she did not know what collard greens were. So one day, the school secretary took her to a restaurant where the students eat, and she had what the secretary called soul food. The teacher also went to the neighborhood grocery store, and the librarian, who lived in the neighborhood, drove her around and showed her the houses where the kids resided. She also found the website www.urbandictionary.com<http://www.urbandictionary.com/> which helped define the Ebonics that she heard daily. Doing so helped her understand her students more and see where they were coming from, although she never learned to like collared greens.

Thought Provoking Question:
The book says that "Racism permits some youngsters access to the very best that U.S. society has to offer, while barring others from an equal chance for success in life." How have you encountered racism in your life, both in and out of the classroom, and how do you teach your students to combat it?