Effective teachers provide an educational environment that provides success and achievement of all students. This week's unit focused on various models that assist teachers to reflect on being a Culturally Responsive Teacher and assessing students and the text that are part of their content reading. The models that I felt were most effective will be discussed. I will also discuss how these models and strategies will impact my planning for diverse learners.

              Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT)

    Authentic was the word that comes to mind for this model and strategy . CRT is looking at the diversity of students in the classroom and making learning real and relevant, engaging, equitable, and developmentally appropriate.  Teachers need to build foundation for learning developing relationships and trust with students. Next, the need to provide diverse resources that are relatable to student's values, instructional level, and knowledge of student's life. In Vacca, Vacca, and Mraz discusses how being CRT goes further than the contributions approach; celebrate months and holidays, and moves to decision making/social action approach; provides students with engaging activities and projects that relate to culture and social issues.

    Strategies of CRT include teachers collaborating with families, communities, and other teachers to gain insight and knowledge of the students in their classroom. Based on the video Building Trust with Families and the Office Chat video this is especially important with English Language Learner students.  In the article Culturally Responsive Teaching and Vacca, Vaaca, and Mraz, teachers facilitate small groups for peers to engage reading, writing, and communicating in their "home" language which creates positive attitudes, and students feel they contribute and add value to the classroom.  Another important piece of this strategy include having variety of posters, words, and visuals in different languages for students.        

    A fifth grade African-American student this week during a discussion about "Black History Month" stated. "I appreciate that we talk and learn about 'black historical figures', but we need to celebrate all people and different cultures, not based on the color of our skin other people are important too". This goes along with the video Danger of a Single Story; not just having students identified by race, social-economic background, ethnicity; but students as an individual with diverse educational needs and a balance of multicultural  reading materials. 

                                           SIOP Model

    The SIOP model takes learning from being abstract to visual.  In the Vacca, Vacca, Mraz, and SIOP video the teacher facilitates learning through prepared structured lessons based on hands-on activities, visuals, and build on background knowledge of students. 

Students with limited reading, writing, speaking benefit from the strategies that make up this model. The teacher provides various ways to present materials for students to access content being taught. Students have opportunities to work in groups or pairs for discussions, notes, and projects. In the video the teacher stated that if you hear and say vocabulary 7 times it can be remembered. 

                         Visual Thinking Strategy

    In the article, Common Core in Action 10 Visual Strategies, the Think Aloud model has students use visual thinking to engage in critical thinking processes beyond what is presented or read. Teachers can facilitate discussions for whole class, collaborative groups, pairs. 

-What do you notice/see/observe? What makes you say that?

-What does it remind me of?

-What is the author's purpose? Analyze, persuade, entertain?

-So what?

-Why does it matter?    

                                Code Switching

        Code Switching was having students look at song lyrics from musicians, like rappers and then have student view those composers participating in academic writing and communicating. Students could make correlation, and their instructional material had relevance for reading and writing.

                        Readability/Repeated Reading

    This strategy allows teacher to provide leveled reading text on content material to students that have different reading skills. Content specific vocabulary is most difficult for diverse learners. In the video Chris Gable, the teacher was able to have collaborative groups on content provided material that was based on level or based on student readability and instructional levels. The students were paired with students of similar skills, then he was able to have whole class discussions and student share what they learned.

    Repeated reading has students read material multiple times for learning.

                                    Formative Assessments

    Teachers using formative assessments is a strategy that is useful to guide teacher instruction and can be used as pre and post learning tool. Chris Gable mentioned how he used a formative assessment to guide his text for reading groups. In the article,"Fantastic, Fast, Formative Assessment Tools and in chapter 4 of our reading teachers have variety of formative assessments that can be used to guide instruction. A few that were of interest to me included Content Area Reading Inventories (CARI), Edpuzzel, and Fluency Tutor. E-portfolios was a way for students to be active and engaged in the assessment process. Students were accountable for artifacts, and updating information, and the teacher had data.

      As a teacher I am reflective of my instruction and how am I making the literacy content I teach available to all students. As I read and watched videos in this weeks material there were any models and strategies that were effective and will impact how I plan to improve my planning and scaffolding instruction as a teacher. I have realized that I do not have a variety of multicultural reading material in my class library. 

I have heard of the SIOP model, but thought was more of a tool for evaluating the teacher, not for providing a strategy for meeting diverse students needs.  I will use more formative assessments to guide instruction and use to determine the needs of individual students, and how gage their learning of the material.