The Culturally Responsive Teahcer

Below are my annotations for the aticle The Culturally Responsive Teacher-by Ana Maria Villegas and Tamara Lucas (can be read here)

Questions:

What is the eveidence to support the claim that a person's social class is the best predictor of academic success and future social standing? The best predictor is the drive and desire insside of the individual to become successful.

Reaction:

The author(s) did not include if this scenario was from a study or simply one that they made up, however I was shocked by the example of “learning involves questioning” on page 30. The scenario says in a Southwest community with a large Latino population the students went out to the community with a questionnaire and after a class discussion the result was to propose the building of a fence along our boarder. We know that the boarder and the concept of the “fence” or “wall” is controversial, and I am unsure how this scenario helps to understand the perspective of a different culture.

Connections: In the article it outlines how teachers need to know about their students’ lives, I can recall freshman math and a few other classes in high school having us fill out the “About Me” worksheet. As a student I always saw these as busy work to be done on the first day to fill the time. As a future history teacher a way that I would go about something like this is an actual graded project called “My History” which would include aspects of their life and of their families.

Restatements: The statement made by the author(s) “A central role of the culturally and linguistically responsive teacher is to support students’ learning by helping them build bridges between what they already know about a topic and what they need to learn about it” is not and should not be a central role for culturally different students but should be the practice for every student in the class.

Applications: In a day filled with possibly 180 students throughout six class periods it is impossible to fulfill the expectation given by the article of visiting a student’s home. Now I would agree that understanding the culture of your student and their family does aid in connecting the content to them I would go about it in two different ways. First is the “My History” project that I talked about above. The second is make sure that my course syllabus explicitly covers what my expectations are of every student in my class, and if there is anything that I need to know about a specific student the parents can contact me.