Cultural Understanding Is Love Expressed Through Spotlighting Its Art
Photo Credit by Chicago 2016 Photos
Solving classroom cultural issues are often mistaken for a need to understand race matters. Race does matter in being able to better understand your students, but does not fully help in understanding culture. Race and culture are connected, but can point in different directions, wrapping around an experience at one end and joining back together on the other side.
Embracing a student’s culture helps them to embrace learning.
Back in undergrad I remember reading a professor’s research article that was inspired by her son’s experience as an elementary student. This little boy, we’ll call Tommy, stormed out of school and walked home one day following his first grade teacher’s explanation of a holiday thematic unit. Acting out in this way wasn’t unusual for the little guy as the story was told. The article depicted him having a strong personality that was often misunderstood in school.
If you can’t explain something you may not understand the person holding it?
Students bring their ethnicity with them to school every day. An effective teacher will find ways to embrace her student’s ethnicity in as much of the lesson planning as possible without losing integrity for achieving the overall mission. Tommy’s teacher accomplished that by adopting her student’s culture into classroom art design and lesson planning not just as it related to activities, but as a respect for the community’s culture.
An engaged student equals reduced classroom management issues.
The article reported her student’s curiously engaged subjects with a passion for learning new things after planning the community’s culture into the lessons. Tommy and the other students needed to be affirmed through their cultural identity. Culture looks through a set of lenses that blurs racial characteristics and brings shared beliefs into focus. Understanding culture guides effective teachers to explain concepts and ideas through the eyes of the students, from their world, where they live. Now, let learning begin.
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Where to Go When All Else Has Failed to Produce the Answers You Need?
Photo Credit by Mudeth
When your past experiences aren’t deep enough to provide rules for engaging tough problems you may search Google, Wikipedia, or eHow. But even robust engine optimization and one hundred twenty three comments in the best forums can fail to produce the answers needed to resolve a personal hardship. What answer will matter in an untimely death of a loved one taken home before you got a chance to reconcile your differences?
Some problems simply leave us dumb founded.
Maybe your issue is rapt in the inappropriate behaviors of a child that everything touched seems to blowup in his face. What do you do if your faith and everyone praying for you isn’t enough to reverse the chronic condition of disease that has you feeling like you have nothing left to give? Countless spouses and their children are emotionally traumatized in the aftermath of a divorce gone wild. So, what does a respected mentor say that brings resolve to a problem that leaves you both dumb founded and chanting, “I don’t know what I’d do,” as a better response than unwelcome wisdom?
My grandmother knew what to do.
Nana would often remind me, “Whenever you have looked everywhere in vein to figure something out, you must turn to the God in you for a glory that will out wit, out live, and out shine your problems, baby”. There you will find the answers patiently waiting for you to show up. Always in there, under all the mind chatter banging off the walls of your intellect, wondering how much longer you are going to kick it around like a rejected rock.
Just be the answer.
Now reading this at a glance might have you wondering, Carter, is that all you have to say about where to go when all else fails to give me the answer I need? Yep, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s Run DMC would say, “It’s like that, and that’s the way it – is.” Word. Try getting quiet, separate from everyone, stop all the noise and meditate from within so you can hear how to be. . . one with the Answer. It doesn’t get any more basic than that.
P.S. If you have been inspired from this article please consider leaving a comment and subscribing to the RSS feed (top right column) to have future post delivered to your feed reader. Please send your friends to http://laroncarter.com to connect with me or @laroncarter on Twitter.
7 Steps to Becoming an Effective Teacher
You’ve gone to school, graduated from the college of education, hopefully negotiated more than what they offered you on the union negotiated step level contract, and now you are learning that teaching in K-12 environments aren’t the same classrooms you sat in as a kid. Here are some tips for acquiring effective teacher skill sets so you can reduce the stress and begin teaching with more confidence.
STEP 1
Get you hands on valuable information available from student CA-60 background folders. Documents like IEP’s and medical records provide a snap shot into the student’s academic story as a valuable first source for gathering information. A pit stop to the office several times a week on the way to planning hour or lunch can pay big dividends. You’re a pro, so tap the most obvious info resources before forming a misinformed hypothesis.
STEP 2
Gather current contact information of parents and guardians. You might want to include cell numbers of big brothers and sisters (both siblings and from United Way mentors). Be sure to note phone service carriers, off peak times, and texting plans so that you don’t get screened out unnecessarily. Research shows that many families are more likely to use cell phones as primary phone lines for calling contacts and Internet use so add primary email addresses in your contact list as needed.
STEP 3
Create well-written icebreaker activities. Loosening up the atmosphere not only gets your students connected to each other, but also gives you a starting point for valuable organized intel on your little darlings. Discovering whether a student has a favorite pet that’s sick or has been moving around a lot because of complicated family circumstances will help you more clearly identify classroom problems and develop “how to” solutions.
STEP 4
Do a walk around. The wonderful thing about venturing out into the neighborhoods of your school and meeting the people who live there and work in the retail stores, repair shops, and laundry mats is it gives you an understanding of its culture. You will also find out what works for the community as well as the problems needing to be fixed. Information from the pulse of a community, at ground level, helps to better understand outside issues brought into your classroom.
STEP 5
Make it a rule to contact each parent on your roster at least twice with heart felt positive reports before having to rat a student out. Parents that get regular negative calls from school personnel are a little punchy when seeing the call come in on caller ID. By establishing a genuine service connection with parents, based on trust and credibility, you can easily recruit them as part of your classroom management and support team member for special events.
STEP 6
Create a phone list of highly qualified substitute teachers [from colleagues and secretaries] that are capable of handling your students while you are away from the classroom. Substitutes will always have their work cut out for them, but some will have skill sets that return your students back in one piece and on task to pick up where you left off.
STEP 7
Teach your students to respect substitute teachers before you need to call one in to teach. You may not need a sub often, but incorporating a plan instructing students of proper etiquette practices and consequences establishes standards in your absence that will praise or reprimand behaviors upon your return. The best substitute teachers will want to teach for you if they know you have set them up to succeed.
P.S. If you have been inspired from this article please consider leaving a comment and subscribing to the RSS feed (top right column) to have future post delivered to your feed reader. Please send your friends to http://laroncarter.com to connect with me or @laroncarter on Twitter.
Diversity Teaching | Cultural Understanding
Photo Credit by CGehlen
Stressed Out K – 12 Education Series 4.1
Does It Make Sense?
Many of the post I write on Asphalt Check are inspired from ideas of being able to solve classroom management problems in teaching environments that seem to work against all efforts to achieve. You simply want each student on your roster to make the grade and have fun doing it. Right?
The reality of teaching a diverse student body is that you have to genuinely believe in each student being able to achieve the American Dream. Believing in your students, or someone else’s for that matter, requires having an on going sense of cultural understanding.
Understanding Your Students
Being able to solve your classroom management problems could very well begin with understanding your student’s culture. It doesn’t matter if he or she ever reaches the world’s standards of success after graduating from your class. What’s most important for your success is having high expectations and belief systems that support your goal to provide an undeniable service.
Whose Pie Is It?
Even if we began our careers believing we could make a difference in the lives of students that are often over looked, time evolves and rigor sets in. Then we stop dreaming change is possible and we start buying into the idea of it being easier to blame administration, parents, students, and whomever else we can latch onto for comfort. Think of your students as people in a struggle to bite into their slice of American Pie that might just be graham cracker crusted key lime or mango instead of apple.
P.S. If you have been inspired from this article please consider leaving a comment and subscribing to the RSS feed (top right column) to have future post delivered to your feed reader. Please send your friends to http://laroncarter.com to connect with me or @laroncarter on Twitter.
What I Learned | Leadership Leads With Less
Photo Credit by misery.loves.company's
The Blame Game
You may hear me regularly reference whichever of three books I might be reading from at any one time. This week Russell Simmons’ “Do You” has me celebrating his Law of Success messages. Russell identified how awareness of his own weakness leveraged leadership over fear at his Def Jam Empire once he was able to give voice to mistakes and blunders openly with his team members as their leader. Humorously, Simmons teaches that those you lead already know you messed up, so get out of your own way by openly recognizing having hit a wall and not holding onto the mistake or passing the blame onto someone else.
Learn from Mistakes
Years ago I owned and managed a professional window cleaning service. One day an employee accidentally damaged a customer’s high-end window screens while transporting them between cleaning sites. That was one of the hardest early leadership lessons. I chose to man-up and confess to the homeowner her screens had been severely damaged without passing the blame. Fully accepting responsibility for correcting the problem isn’t an easy task. But, by focusing on the goal of leading with integrity and an ability to take more of the blame you create lifelong learning experiences from mistakes.
Take Less Credit
Paying attention to missteps has brought me to conclude that one characteristic of highly effective leadership demonstrates a genuine quality for taking less credit for success. People want to feel needed and heart felt appreciation leads to more productivity. Pass whatever available credit there maybe onto those that help you get there. Learn from the wisdom of leadership expert John Maxwell, “A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit.”
P.S. If you have been inspired from this article please consider leaving a comment and subscribing to the RSS feed (top right column) to have future post delivered to your feed reader. Please send your friends to http://laroncarter.com to connect with me or @laroncarter on Twitter.
