EDE 4943: Critical Task

During my first week at the HOST program, I thought it would be beneficial interview each of the students to get to know them better. I knew that understanding who they are, what they are like and where they come from would be helpful when planning culturally responsive lessons for the next week. What I did not know was that it would give me in insight into why the struggle with the things that they do and why they behave certain ways. Villegas and Lucas state how important getting to know key details about our student’s lives is important to their understanding and future learning (Villegas & Lucas, 2002, p.30). Before the interviews, I witnessed certain students lashing out at the group leader and being set of by the smallest things. Villegas and Lucas state that “Teachers who lack sociocultural consciousness will unconsciously and inevitably rely on their own personal experience to make sense of students’ lives—an unreflective habit that often results in misinterpretations of those students’ experiences and leads to miscommunication” (Villegas & Lucas, 2002, p. 31). Communicating with these children helped me understand that things are not always as they seem on the outside. One of the student’s parents were going through a divorce, another’s fathers was no longer in the picture, another student was new to the program and was having to adjust to not being home with this family after school, among so many other things. The group leader of the program loved on these students but saw most of them as damaged and unfixable. After only a few days, I realized that advocating for the students and being their voice is one of the most important things because they do not know how to voice it for themselves at the age of five. This piece of evidence aligns with FEAP 2d because it shows that I was taking the student’ cultural linguistic and family background into mind when I was planning future lessons and interacting with them daily. Once you talk with the children and understand who they are, being culturally responsive and helping them strive to learn what they can will becoming easier and easier as time goes by.

Throughout all the lessons that I taught at HOST, I allowed the students to work with each other to make connections and teach each other things that they might not know. From day one in the program, I was taught that students will learn more from each other than they ever will learn from us. Spending these two weeks in the HOST program confirmed this statement. During the read aloud lesson when I asked students questions (0:19, 2:22, 3:45, 4:11, 5:08, 6:01) to see what they knew throughout the story, it was interesting to see how they fed off each other. The thing that surprised me most was the great discussions about the different key details of the story. Only a few of the students could pick out the key details but they helped their friends understand what was important and why. Even though these students are young, they understand how important listening to their friends is and I could see how they were starting to make connections to things that were not even being taught in this lesson. Villegas & Lucas go on to say that “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” (Villegas & Lucas, 2002, p. 29). Teaching children is a difficult task because they will never collectively be on the same level. Allowing these students to work together is one way to prove that as a teacher you understand how students construct knowledge. When these students get up into the older grades, this is a great way to bring misconceptions to light and correct them in an understanding manner. The next step after this lesson was to plan another lesson that were engaging and rigorous but still invited them to learn in a positive way. In the article Inviting All Students to Learn, Dack and Tomlinson state that “such curriculum involves studying history, literature, music, and language in a way that connects new ideas and events with students’ varied cultures and experiences” (Dack & Tomlinson, 2007, p.13). Most of my students really enjoyed music and so during down time I allowed them to listen to different songs from other cultures while playing freeze tag. The students were so excited to hear songs in their native language. The other students got to look into the lives of their friend family and where they come from. This showed them that I care about who they are and where they came from. This piece of evidence aligns with FEAP 2d because it shows how I took the information that I saw throughout my lesson and helped manipulate it in a way to better help my students learn collectively and understand each other.

• Villegas, A. M., & Lucas, T. (2002). Educating culturally responsive teachers: A coherent approach. Albany: State University of New York Press.

• Dack, H., & Tomlinson, C. (2007). Inviting Students to Learn. Leading the Common Core State Standards: From Common Sense to Common Practice, 10-15. doi:10.4135/9781506335339.n5

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