Inclusive Learning Environment
Fostering an inclusive classroom culture means that all students are valued members of the learning environment. It is helpful for students to be engaged in the experience of learning by actively participating in the process. As such, I like to create anchor charts with my students around classroom norms at the beginning of the school year or for any activity that may require specific norms. When student voices are uplifted in the creative process, they become active agents of the classroom culture and are more likely to feel like they belong.
I collaborated with my students to complete the statement: “We want Crew to look, feel, and sound like…” After gathering everyone's input, we created this anchor chart to illustrate our norms and motto as a Crew: No Sista Left Behind! Together we established an inclusive space where students agreed to support and uplift each other as sisters.
Universal Design for Learning
The classroom I taught in last year fostered a space that I want to model my future classroom after. This room had a variety of seating arrangements for students, including long rectangular tables towards the front and middle of the room. In the back, we had a conference table, as well as a couch and coffee table. These different seating arrangements were great for station teaching, as they depart from the typical desk furniture and make the space more appealing and accessible to our students. According to Simonsen’s (2008) article, “Evidence-based Practices in Classroom Management,” classrooms with more structure tend to promote more appropriate academic and social behaviors. Physical arrangement of the classroom impacts student behavior, whereby the room should be designed to minimize crowding and distraction (Simonsen et al., 2008, p. 358). In order to accommodate different learners in the classroom, I want to have differentiated seating arrangements like the classroom where I formerly taught in. However, I realize that my future classroom may not be large enough for alternative seating, so I will prioritize creating an environment that minimizes crowding while still having at least two different kinds of seating options for my students. I also want to enhance the space by posting the classroom norms alongside motivational messages, relevant anchor charts, and student work that reflect good habits of scholarship in our classroom setting. This will help to create a warm and welcoming environment where my students can feel seen and safe.
One day, I'll have a bean bag like this in the classroom for my students 🙏🏼
Culturally Responsive Teaching
Culturally responsive pedagogy empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes. It affirms differences and diversity by requiring teachers to use knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning more relevant and effective to them. To address the needs of diverse multicultural students in my class this past year, I strove to incorporate an array of culturally responsive material that was complementary to the core curriculum. This was intended to create a “windows and mirrors” effect for my students, whereby the anchor text was likely to be a window into another culture/time period/social context.
In Crew this trimester, I had my students read the poem “Mother to Son” and the Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program in tandem with the text A Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds. These supplementary texts helped to inform my students’ ideas about how African Americans have learned to thrive in the face of adversity. For our final project on A Long Way Down, students wrote a letter
from Shari Holloman to her son, Will, thereby giving voice to her character as a mother. Together, we explored the dynamics between grief, adversity, and thriving, as well as its impact on individual mental health and family relationships.
By including texts that are culturally responsive to my students, I hope to integrate their background knowledge and prior home and community experiences into the curriculum and the educative experiences that take place in the classroom.
Specialized Instruction & Differentiation
To make this lesson more accessible to my students, I differentiated the content by pre-selecting quotes from the text that aligned with the theme of "building community on the team." I wanted to maintain the same learning goals for every group while providing scaffolded support to meet the individual needs of my students. For my students who struggled to stay focused when completing writing tasks, I sought to eliminate potential areas of confusion that would detract from the lesson objective. I also realized that some students might become overwhelmed if they had to start from scratch in choosing a theme, identifying three relevant examples, and give explanations for the text evidence. So, I created a version with pre-selected quotes and let my students "choose their challenge." These scaffolds made the lesson more accessible to my students. As a result, they were able to focus on creating meaningful connections between characters, text evidence, and theme in Ghost. I hope to continue channeling students’ energy towards developing strong literacy skills and engaging critical thinking beyond the classroom.
Here I used color-coded index cards to teach a reading comprehension strategy called “Somebody, Wants, But, So Then.” The purpose of this lesson was for my students to learn how to objectively summarize literary text and apply the 5-step strategy to scenes from the book, Ghost. I provided this specialized instruction to a small group of students receiving Tier 2 intervention. Based on the data from their reading records, I noticed that my students had difficulty summarizing the main ideas from literary and informational texts. I decided to teach them the 5-step reading strategy, which provides a structured way of selecting key details to include in a written summary. The color-coded index cards helped my students to differentiate between each step and visualize the order of events, as well as organize their ideas into a succinct set of summaries.
Flexibility by Design for Learner Variability
My favorite moments from this year included the organic relationship-building interactions with my students and academic “ah-ha” moments during a lesson. One highlight moment occurred during a Chalk Talk activity on the five main themes in Pygmalion. On one of the posters, I asked students to make inferences about the Flower Girl character. At this point, we had only read Act 1 of the play, so I was curious to see what my students’ initial impressions of the characters were. As I circulated around the classroom, this comment stood out to me: “The Flower Girl is very polite, but when she needs something she just begs because she needs money to live. I can infer that it will be hard to teach her because she is very expressive. She doesn’t care about who she is around. She’s going to speak her mind.” I was delighted to see this student’s in-depth analysis of the Flower Girl right from the start. Seeing as this was the first Chalk Talk I had done, I was thrilled by the quality of responses and proceeded to prepare a Chalk Talk for subsequent Acts. By having time to contemplate, analyze, and reflect in a quiet environment, my students gained new insight into the characters and themes of the play. The Chalk Talk format offered a new way for them to engage in a written academic discourse that built upon each other’s knowledge and deepened their understanding of the text.
Simonsen, B., Fairbanks, S., Briesch, A., Myers, D., & Sugai, G. (2008). Evidence-based practices in classroom management: Considerations for research to practice. Education and Treatment of Children, 31( 3), 351–380.