Victoria Fajardo- Alejandra Peyrot- 4th Grade- English- CeRP Southwest

TEACHING STRATEGIES TO PROMOTE DIVERSITY IN THE

CLASSROOM:
Nowadays, in our classrooms we can observe that there is great diversity that makes
teachers to plan according to different students. Rather than constituting a problem for
students and educators, the growing diversity in classrooms encourages the
development and use of diverse teaching strategies designed to respond to each student
as an individual.
In this essay, we are going to focus on strategies to work with students who have
different culture backgrounds as well as learning disabilities.
First of all, generally, schools provide students of diverse backgrounds with
instruction quite different from that provided to students of mainstream backgrounds. For
example, poor children and culturally and linguistically diverse students tend to receive
inferior instruction because they are usually placed in the bottom reading groups or sent
out of the classroom for remedial instruction. For instance, a clear example could be
those students who belong to controversial backgrounds. These students tend to fail to
accomplish in the educational system and are reinserted in certain courses or groups
which are discriminated in a way. Schools tend to discriminate against students of diverse
backgrounds through assessments that do not value their home language and through
the use of teaching procedures that fail to build on the strengths of their culture or home
languages. Also, teachers may have low expectations for students of diverse
backgrounds and thus fail to present them with challenging and interesting lessons. As a
consequence, learners feel frustrated and desert from the educational system. By the
way, many attempts are set up in order to reinsert these students in the educational
system. In order to make these students to be successful other type of strategies are
needed to be implemented. As it was mentioned before, it is essential for teachers to
develop a plan to work with diverse students, taking into account each learner as an
individual.
In the Technical School, where we are having our practicum, the FPBs courses
are a well-known example of the situation mentioned before. These special courses are
headed to those students who had complex and different cultural backgrounds, and we
as teachers have to take them into consideration when planning our lessons. Not only do
they have different cultural backgrounds which influence their learning process, but also
behavioral problems. As a result, all these controversial issues are to be considered
when designing a learning strategic plan.
Certain behaviors and instructional strategies enable teachers to build a stronger
teaching/learning relationship with their culturally diverse students. Many of these
behaviors and strategies exemplify standard practices of good teaching, and others are
specific to working with students from diverse cultures. A number of these teacher
behaviors are:

Appreciate and accommodate the similarities and differences

among the students' cultures: effective teachers of culturally diverse students
acknowledge both individual and cultural differences enthusiastically and identify
these differences in a positive manner. This positive identification creates a basis
for the development of effective communication and instructional strategies.

Victoria Fajardo- Alejandra Peyrot- 4th Grade- English- CeRP Southwest

Build relationships with students: developing an understanding of

students' lives enables the teacher to increase the relevance of lessons and make
examples more meaningful.

Focus on the ways students learn and observe students to

identify their task orientations: once students' orientations are known, the
teacher can structure tasks to take them into account.

Teach students to match their behaviors to the setting. We all

behave differently in different settings.

Teaching students the differences between their home, school,

and community settings can help them switch to appropriate behavior for
each context. For example, a teacher may talk about the differences between
conversations with friends in the community and conversations with adults at
school and discuss how each behavior is valued and useful in that setting.
In addition, instructional strategies are useful to implement to work with the
students in the classroom, as they offer variety and provide the students with
opportunities to learn in ways that are responsive to their own communication styles,
cognitive styles, and aptitudes. In addition, the variety helps them develop and
strengthen other approaches to learning. One of them are:
Consider students' cultures and language skills when
developing learning objectives and instructional activities.
Facilitate comparable learning opportunities for students with
differing characteristics. For example, consider opportunities for students
who differ in appearance, race, sex, disability, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic
status, or ability.
Incorporate objectives for affective and personal development:
provide increased opportunities for high and low achievers to boost their selfesteem, develop positive self-attributes, and enhance their strengths and
talents. Such opportunities can enhance students' motivation to learn and
achieve.
Communicate expectations: let the students know the "classroom
rules" about talking, verbal participation in lessons, and moving about the
room. Students may need to know that they have the ability to achieve
mastery, but must work through the difficulty.
Provide rationales: that is to say, explain the benefits of learning a
concept, skill, or task.
Use advance and post organizers: at the beginning of lessons,
give the students an overview and tell them the purpose or goal of the activity.
If applicable, tell them the order that the lesson will follow and relate it to
previous lessons. At the end of the lesson, summarize its main points.

Provide frequent reviews of the content learned.

Victoria Fajardo- Alejandra Peyrot- 4th Grade- English- CeRP Southwest

Facilitate independence in thinking and action

Promote student on-task behavior: keeping students on task

maintains a high level of intensity of instruction. Keeping students actively
involved in the lessons helps them to stay focused and increases the intensity
of instruction.
Monitor students' academic progress during lessons and
independent work.
Provide frequent feedback. Feedback at multiple levels is
preferred.
On the other hand, teachers must apply different strategies to work with those
students who have learning disabilities. The majority of teachers do not agree that
these children can develop and improve their learning, although there are some
researches which establish that we can teach students to learn how to learn; in other
words our work as teachers is to put students into a position to compete and hold their
own. Success student with LD requires a focus on individual achievement, individual
progress and individual learning. These requires specific, directed, individualized,
intensive, remedial, instruction for students who are struggling.
Equal important is scaffolding, which makes a real difference in students
process learning. Teachers should start using heavily mediated instruction, known as
explicit instruction, and then slowly begin to let students acquire the skill moving
towards the goal of student mediated instruction.
Even though there are several talks for teachers about LD, most of them do
not know about the strategies and the requirements these students often need. This
means that teachers have to be ready to face different groups keeping in mind the
needs of individual learners. Most of students with LD can concentrate for short
periods of time, so teachers must break learning into small steps providing strategies
o complete the task. IN general, they are not able to organize themselves, so the use
of diagrams, graphics and pictures is necessary. It is essential to provide quality
feedbacks in order to engage and motivate them.
We have to remember that students with LD are often as smart as their peers,
but since they process information differently, they need additional support to
compensate for their disability. Teachers are really important to support these students
who need special attention and special activities focusing on the improvement of
these LD.
In conclusion, we as teachers have to take into account diversity when
planning our lessons. The teacher has to be able to find different strategies to cope
with students who have different cultural backgrounds and learning disabilities. All
students have the right to have access not only to education but also to a holistic
learning process.

Victoria Fajardo- Alejandra Peyrot- 4th Grade- English- CeRP Southwest

Bibliography:

https://www.teachervision.com/teaching-methods/resource/6039.html?
page=2&detoured=1
http://ldaamerica.org/successful-strategies-for-teaching-students-withlearning-disabilities/
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/107003/chapters/DiverseTeaching-Strategies-for-Diverse-Learners.aspx