A Brain-based Blueprint for Reaching Diverse StudentsĬulturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain is not just a “bag of tricks” teachers can pull from to help students from more diverse backgrounds do better. If we had read Zaretta Hammond’s book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain, things could have been completely different for us, for Dion, and for so many other students in our school. This practical, insightful, and absolutely necessary book will help teachers do a better job of teaching a more diverse group of students. His skills never improved, his habits stayed about the same, and he went on with his life, like hundreds of others moving through that same school system every year. Dion managed to keep his grades up just enough to move on to eighth grade. “What do you think is the problem here?” from one of my colleagues.įrom another teacher: “And what do you need to do differently?”Īnother shrug. But none of it worked. All of us, his other teachers and myself, met with Dion and his mom more than once to try and figure out how to get Dion to improve. I’d keep him in at lunch and after school, let him do piles of make-up work to try to bring his grade from an F to a D, and talk to him about how he needed to change his habits.
I think about Dion, one of my seventh graders, who sat listlessly through most of my classes, whose assignments were always half-finished, who always scored low on tests, who used his cute, slow smile as a cover any time I tried to push him to get his work done. If you click these and make a purchase from Amazon, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.įor eight years, I taught students who would likely be labeled “at risk.” Not all of my kids fit that description, but at least half belonged to the groups we talk about when we talk about the opportunity* gap: Students whose race, culture, home language, or socioeconomic status are not necessarily a match with what many schools teach and value. I did my best to meet their needs, to challenge them and set them up for success in life, but when I look back with the knowledge I have gained over the last few years, I know I did a crappy job. This article contains Amazon Affiliate links. Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Studentsīy Zaretta Hammond, 192 pages, Corwin, November 2014
0 kommentar(er)
