Safe,+Respectful,+Culturally+Sensitive

|| Provide routines, organization, rules, and a safe, caring environment in which all students participate and are respected. ||
 * **Dimension of Effective Teaching:** Establish Safe, Respectful, and Culturally Sensitive Learning Communities
 * **Description:**
 * **Successes:**

Students show ownership of routines and procedures, sometimes leading them on their own and sometime correcting me if I miss a step. Students also respond positively to check marks to reinforce positive behavior. Frequent questions and clarification demonstrate their comfort and eagerness to participate. |||| **Challenges:**

As a white woman, my race is not representative of most of my students. I acknowledge this and so can reflect race and culture through books, images, films, guests, and students sharing their own heritage. || **Area for Growth:** In a classroom setting, I will use co-teacher leader Berta Berriz as a resource. I would like to establish clearer consequences for disrespectful behavior towards classmates, teachers, and any images and ideas presented in the learning process. ||
 * **Artifacts:**

This post reflects on my cultural proficiency: My greatest strengths with regards to cultural proficiency are my awareness of the impact my culture has on others, my commitment to learning about cultures, and my organizing and political skills that I have used to leverage change. As part of my ongoing education, I recently completed a course called Wrestling with Privilege, which I have used to inform my actions and to shift, share, and leverage privilege. As a professional community organizer, I mobilized people and groups for environmental justice, and I continue to partner with City Life / Vida Urbana to canvass, informing people of their rights when they live in buildings that are foreclosed upon. This post reflects on maintaining a respectful and culturally sensitive classroom: Last week I announced to my sixth grade classes that the Spanish-speaking (Latin@) students would be pulled from music and Spanish this week to work with a Latino author for Hispanic Writers Week, for which instruction and activities would be in Spanish. Some students replied, “That’s not fair,” apparently more in response to the opportunity to miss music and Spanish than because they were working with a(n unknown to them) Latino author. I replied that it also wasn’t fair for Spanish-speaking students to be in a beginner Spanish class, just as others wouldn’t want to be in a beginning English class, but that we didn’t have enough teachers to provide different levels. There was still some whining and groaning, and I would have liked to more extensively discuss the questions of separation by race and language, but had to pass out the homework and transition to the next class. It also made me think about ways that the Latin@ students can share their experience this week with their peers, since most of their peers won’t be attending the culminating presentation at UMass Boston on Saturday. Students’ response represent Cultural Precompetence because they express frustration at how their culture limits their ability to interact with people whose culture is different from theirs, since they are unable to participate in a workshop conducted in Spanish. My presentation and response represented Cultural Competence because I described my valuing of diversity and used my teacher role to leverage change and flip the tables of who is being privileged. I will demonstrate Cultural Proficiency if I effectively use this as an opportunity to esteem the cultures of others and to give students another opportunity to learn about each other’s cultures. |||| **Resources:** Web-based resources from the sessions that supported growth:

Article on Cultural Proficiency: Engaging Urban Students: **http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/urban/how.html** || I would still like to establish clearer consequences for disrespectful behavior towards classmates, teachers, and any images and ideas presented in the learning process. Students understand that it conflicts with our classroom expectations for calling out, but don’t always demonstrate understanding of why the content is also inappropriate to our classroom environment. ||
 * http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev114.htm**
 * **Reflection:** These reflections demonstrate that I have been considering my own cultural proficiency, that of my students, and steps that I can take to increase everyone’s cultural proficiency towards building a safe, respectful, culturally sensitive learning environment. These posts also received multiple responses, indicating that they stimulated thinking among my peers. ||
 * **Future Learning Goals:**