Teacher effectiveness?

Inquiry #1 was concerned with logistical aspect of supporting teachers to make an environment where the teachers are less stretched with their time and energy among the students in the classroom.

Inquiry #2 is concerned with teacher practices in the classroom.

Could effective teaching practices and strategies compensate for the difficulties of giving every student enough attention and time for them to fully develop their potentials and grow as they spend time in the classroom?

Culturally Responsive Teaching/Differentiated Instructions?

There were two different approaches to teaching that I have looked at so far. Inquiry#2 will focus on the Culturally Responsive/Differentiated Instructions.

Lorri J. Santamaria of California State University, argues that although Differentiated Instruction is an important strategy to look into when it comes to teaching students and trying tackle the different needs of the students, the growing diversity in cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the students puts enormous challenge to such practice in the classroom.

Although both Differentiated Instructions (DI) and Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) are designed to support the group of students who have historically been unsuccessful in mainstream general education classroom for various reasons, the since, DI comes out from special education research and practices, when in practice, it significantly misdiagnosed, misidentified,  Culturally Diverse Learners and resulted in overrepresentation of these type of students in programs serving high-incidence disabilities.

The author believes that CRT is more important way of approaching education and also educating preservice teachers before they go into their actual practice. The reason is because CRT is a practice that requires not only the strive for academic achievement, but it also requires cultural competence and sociopolitical competence in teachers’ instructional practices. Therefore, the argument is that it covers more ground and truly encompasses multicultural education so that every student can achieve to their fullest in school.

Although this may sound like DI is not useful, DI is still a good instructional tool that can be used in the classroom, and it covers a lot of area in student needs and their level of abilities. However, it is a limited resource when we have a diverse group of students in our classroom, and we must be able to accommodate such environment as well.

The question that I asked after reading this article was if effectiveness will eliminate time consumption that I have for each students? I think it does and that is one part of my conclusion. However, I also think that the instructional practices in the article really shows that becoming a teacher is something that takes a long time; at least to become a better teacher than you were before.

The next inquiry blog post will be about the article Developments in classroom-based talk by Robyn M. Gillies.

Chris Park