Culturally Responsive Teaching OER Resources

Schools have increasingly become more ethnically and culturally diverse. Unfortunately, the diversity among school leaders does not reflect schools’ changing demographics. With the current demands from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, the pressures for accountability and improved student achievement are clearly established. Effective minority school leaders can greatly impact and contribute to school improvement and successful learning for all students. However, a critical first step is the preparation of more principal candidates who represent and reflect the culture and diversity of our schools. It should be noted that, in this paper, the terms, Hispanic, Latino, and Mexican American, are used interchangeably and in accordance with the research findings in order to represent people with backgrounds from or connections to Latin American countries, and minority or minorities are used to represent non-White.

Hopefully I have persuaded you—if you did need persuading—that students are indeed diverse. The important question that follows from this point is what to do about the diversity. I have begun answering that question by including a number of suggestions in the sections and paragraphs of this chapter. But there is obviously more to be said about accommodating diversity—about actually working with students’ diversity and turning it into a resource rather than a burden or challenge. In the rest of this book therefore I offer more suggestions not only about knowing how different one student can be from another, but also about diversifying teaching to acknowledge this fact. Differences among students remain a challenge during all phases of teaching, from planning instruction, to implementing lessons and activities, to assessing students’ learning after lessons or activities are all finished. In the next chapter, I illustrate this reality by describing how students with disabilities can be included in classroom life—one of the more telling examples of accommodating to diversity.