What does the research say about the impact of negative teacher attitudes about students ethnicity and language variations on student learning?

The teacher attitude toward students difference with culture and language are deeply connected to students performance. When a student feels disconnect do to the othering effect placed on them by the teacher they do not participate. Participation is part of learning that some are okay with missing it's not their personality so they can still achieve by listening to the conversations in class but when someone is learning a new language or dialect their input and active engage in the classroom are needed. Teacher with negative attitudes put these student in the back of the class. It's hard to be engage when you are in the back.
These student are not only struggling to find their identity in the classroom but at home too. They need their teacher to be a driving force in their learning and fitting in. Students being grouped into this other category begin to give up and become a self -fulfilling prophesy in which they believe they are outcast and can't succeed.

What are some assessment pitfalls?


Assessment are very one sided and do not take the child's background into consideration. Also a teachers pre-judgements about students hinder how they feel a student will do. Teachers even the best have a way they feel about students that make it hard for them to see passed that. two strategies I learned was hiding the name and grading papers or using a very specific rubric and grading what they have not what you think they meant.

What three approaches can be used to transform students’ dialectal diversity into an asset (funds of knowledge) rather than a liability (cultural deficit).

Take a course in lingustic diversity or cultural awareness the reading compares learning to deal with diversities like taking math and science course you take these course to learn to deal with the problems that will arise and learn to teach one thing many ways so your students understand them. Bialectal instruction in another approach that leads to less mistakes caused by non stadard dialect student can see the difference and correct mistakes on their own without the inference of their dialect confusing the situation. This approach leads to the last approach I liked which was to take a second language course it changes your attitude when you can put yourself into the situation of your student. I think back to high school taking foreign languages and I took another one in college. Trying to learn the words and then how put them in a sentence it was such a struggle. Then I try to imagine if the whole class was speaking the language and I was trying learn science, my hardest subject, instead of just the language and my head is ready to explode. These are children dealing the same situation. It changes my attitude just to think about it.

How prepared do you feel to teach in a culturally diverse classroom?



I feel completely unprepared to teach in a culturally diverse classroom although I have strategies and and reading, i learn beast by doing and we just don't have very diverse classes. I think that is one thing I learned through the Where I am project. We are all different but we have many similarities. I want to be more prepared but I think it a learning by doing type experience such as with the teacher under assessment who found her self even though she believed she was ready, stereotype and black student.