- Year 2019
- NSF Noyce Award # 1758344
- First Name Jill
- Last Name Choate
- Institution Fort Lewis College
- Role/Position Assistant Professor in Teacher Education
- Workshop Category Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Other: Teacher Education
- Target Audience Noyce Teaching Fellows, Project PIs / Co-PIs / Other Faculty/Staff, School and District Administrators, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Preparing Teachers for High-Need School Districts
- Session Length 30 minutes
Goals
1. Guidelines for developing culturally relevant pedagogy professional development sessions for Noyce Scholars
2. How to structure workshop time to incorporate learning and implementation strategies for future classrooms
Evidence
Research shows that understanding the culture of the students you teach is essential to breaking down relational barriers (Oakes, Lipton, Anderson, & Stillman, 2018). Although, this was our first year implementing our Noyce grant we were looking forward to how our scholars would perform in the classroom. Knowing that many of our scholars would be going back to their home communities and reservations we wanted to equip them with skills to understand their students. We felt the best way to do this was to provide instruction specifically around the cultural groups the scholars were likely to encounter. We performed a simple pre-test regarding understanding of learning styles and strategies at the beginning of the sessions. This coming year will be our first year to have students in classrooms and with the induction support we will be providing through the Noyce grant we plan to gather post-data regarding the use of strategies in the classrooms we provided through the trainings and how that influenced or shaped teaching practices. Hawley, Irvine, and Landa from Teaching Tolerance state, “to truly engage students, we must reach out to them in ways that are culturally and linguistically responsive and appropriate.” This was the evidence we used to create the professional development sessions around LatinX and Native Americans.
Proposal
When preparing to become a teacher, one must understand the community for which they will be serving. In an effort to help prepare scholars for their future communities, cultural competency trainings were provided for two predominant cultures found in the Four Corners Region: Latinx and Native Americans. Local experts on these two cultures each provided a two-hour professional development session for Noyce faculty and scholars with hands on, active discussions, and interactive activities to become familiar with learning styles, cultural norms, and classroom strategies for effective community building within the classroom. This workshop will present information on guidelines used to create trainings, along with how to structure sessions to ensure understanding, application and implementation of strategies learned into Noyce scholars future classrooms.
