Race and/or Ethnicity

I believe as an educator, it is very important to educate yourself about the community that you plan to teach in. By community, I mean the school community and the neighborhood community because it informs you about who you will be working with and educating. If I do not make myself aware of this then it makes it very difficult to address the societal roles and issues that will impact me and my community (school and neighborhood). In many ways my awareness of the background of my students greatly impacts how I plan out my lesson plans because it is important for me to find a way to draw my students into the issues that they are faced with as young people who have layers upon layers of identities. I have found that race and/or ethnicity has been an important aspect of identity. It shapes the student experience in all aspects of his/her life and to ignore it or not address it does not help the student at all. I have also found that it is very difficult to keep biases and xenophobia out of the conversation. So my question is how do we facilitate conversations that address student concerns without turning the classroom into a scary or hostile place?

Problem Based Learning

After reading the article, I thought the reading was really great at illustrating how successful PBL can be in the classroom for some situations. However, as a content teacher in a high school that has block scheduling, I can see it having a lot of possibilities but I have found myself trying to figure out where to fit it into the classroom. I feel as though PBL takes a lot of time because students are learning through the process of solving and it helps them become creative people solvers. Therefore, I feel that teachers really need to teach students how to do PBL by giving them a strong foundation to work with because the end result can be mixed. Something that I do have a question for the writer is did the standardize tests improve due to the teachers teaching the students to transfer the knowledge of PBL skills to the test or did this naturally occur as a result of the PBL lessons?

As I read this both articles, it made me think that both groups of students have one thing in common—they feel alienated. The conflict is society’s notion of what it means to be identified as American. If students do not fit in those boxes then they are left out or end up growing up with some very messed up identities. Therefore, as future educators we must and should create environments within our classrooms that facilitate dialogues and lessons that illustrate many peoples and their identities. By providing students will complete information about LGBTQI and bilingual speakers. The information only should include be provided to students so that they have knowledge that is not distorted or incorrect. As educators, we should advocate for our students and teach them how to advocate for themselves. I admit that it can be a scary thing but it’s a skill that students should learn. Not only are they learning about the complexity of identify but empathy, too.