Nurturing Inclusive Learning: Strategies for Understanding Students and Enhancing Academic Success

Knowing Students

Knowing your students as a teacher is critical because it will help in creating personalized instruction or motivational learning environments (Guido, 2017). As a highly effective teacher, I always create purposeful opportunities to learn about my students and then find strategies to ensure that the students realize that they are known. When students realize that a teacher understands their strengths, weaknesses, and interests, they believe such a teacher will certainly help them to succeed academically. Consequently, adapting the teaching style to student needs makes them feel that they are valued.

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There are a number of strategies that teachers use to learn about their students. Open communication is crucial to get a student’s information. For instance, they can distribute questionnaires where students record the details about their interests (Guido, 2017). Additionally, a teacher needs to conduct surveys to get information regarding the student’s learning styles. Furthermore, the teacher should hold open discussions and allow students to narrate their positive experiences from classes they have ever attended before. After gathering sufficient information, it is then crucial for the teacher to inform the class that you will be focusing on adjusting your teaching approach to students’ benefit.

Another strategy to use in knowing students is deploying the interview approach to understand the students’ values and habits. This strategy has also helped to know the student’s weaknesses and strengths by individually asking them related questions. The questions asked to an individual student are about their hobbies, their preferred lessons, and activities, as well as the type of exercise that assist them in remembering what they learned and improving their skills. After gathering the information, the teacher knows the student well, and thus relates the contents to the interests, and consequently offers lessons that are aligning with the students’ shared strengths.

Learning Environment

The learning environment of the students has perfectly represented what they are. Having known who the students are through the effective strategies outlined, the learning environment is designed in a way that students feel they are supported intellectually and academically. With the students’ diversity, the learning environment is used to extend the sense of belonging in the classroom irrespective of their identity, learning preferences, and education. The environment is sustained when the teachers and students keep working together for thoughtfulness, respect, and academic excellence. With such an environment, there is guaranteed academic success for every student. Mostly, our learning environment has integrated collaborative learning modes more than the students’ personal experiences to create a sense of community for the success of all.

The learning environment that integrates the student body usually involves using a friendly, caring, and supportive tone. It also allows the students to reconnoiter the relationships that are in the course material, personal, and social experiences. As educators, focus areas for promoting inclusivity of the student body include the syllabus, selections in the assigned reading, discussion prospects, and personal styles. Other ways have been integrating relevant word problems, like contextualizing math problems by including students’ names, which has made them reflect on the learning environment and make the subject more relatable. Additionally, teachers introduce new concepts by using the student’s vocabulary. For example, in classes where most of the students are great fans of sports, the soccer or sporting jargons familiar to the students are used to describe metaphors in a language class.

Involving Families

Because of involving families in the student’s learning process, there has been a profound change in the classrooms. As an educator, reaching out to the families and building relationships has been a very effective culturally responsive strategy as it has revealed how various family situations influence a child’s education. In fact, it has facilitated the entire class’s motivation, behavior, and performance. Parents have a significant role because they are the main educators in the majority of societies and many of the cultural contexts of education. When starting a new unit as well as trying new education tools, a letter is sent home to parents so that they are invited or informed on how to participate in student’s learning.

In some family situations, family members or parents may be experts and thus become useful proponents of the student’s engagement. Other family settings are not experts but offer innumerable guidance to the students as they keep track of their children’s progress. In family involvement, I make an effort to build a relationship with parents by giving them my contact information; thus, whenever they have questions, they are comfortable reaching out easily. I also share classroom goals and expectations openly with parents and initiate parent-teacher meetings to discuss the issues pertaining to students’ success.

Racial and Cultural Identity

As an educator, I have helped students develop and achieve a positive racial and cultural identity. How students feel about their racial and cultural identity has a significant impact on their academic performance. One strategy that is deployed in doing so is the use of media that is positively depicting a range of cultures (Habib, 2019). Employing novel curricula via a holistic approach encourages students to explore their racial and cultural identities in an innocuous space. As a result, they feel more engaged in their education.

During extracurricular school activities and in their localities, some students self-segregate and fail to challenge themselves in learning about other cultures. One main way teachers use in the classroom is by encouraging the students to confront issues of race, culture, and self-segregation. To effectively engage students, teachers have been molding curricula that enlighten students about the positive aspects of their own culture and that of other people. In many aspects, teachers integrate open discussions with students. They learn student’s cultural identities by asking student-centered questions that are relevant to what is being taught.

After the students get informed about their cultures, they successfully gain a historical as well as a social context, which helps them in deliberating and facing racial and cultural-related issues, both at school and in home settings. A multicultural curriculum is another way that has been used to provide a racial and cultural identity to students with a more diverse culture. Within such curricula, some media, like books and movies, that positively depict diverse cultures that are relevant to the syllabus, are used.

Current Events and Culture

There are current events and emerging cultures that shape a student’s life in totality. As an educator, I do include conversations about current events and culture because of several reasons. Firstly, current events help students understand the importance of people’s cultures, events, and issues presented in the news. Secondly, it stimulates students to explore and study more about these events and also take heed of what they hear when they are out of school.

The current events and cultures can also present ideal opportunities needed to acquire a sense of community through cooperative group instructions, classroom discussions, and debates, together with resolute follow-up writings. Some of the strategies or activities are done to ensure that the students are well acquainted with the current events and cultures, including letting students propose some of what they have seen in the news regarding the cultures, like elections. Then there are well-guided contributions from the students on the implications of the identified current events.

The process of current event conversations is effective through the establishment of cooperative base groups. Such groups are from the collaborative learning pedagogy- thus enabling the students to recurrently study and process content together within guided groups. In that case, students are asked to answer some questions as a group, like the effects of the current event on a person directly or indirectly. Peer teaching is also used where students present their views to the entire class on the implications of current events.

Student’s Native Language

As an educator, I always embrace the student’s native language in learning to ensure the learner feels appreciated in the learning environment. The majority of children are raised within environments in diverse communities. They are always interacting with speakers of diverse languages regularly. In American schools, there are many students worldwide, which reflects a cultural shift. It is challenging to teach such culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms if there is no distinct set of culturally responsive teaching (Blackley, 2019). However, learners with these diverse native languages enrich the school environment significantly (Davis, 2010).

One way of embracing the student’s native language is to create a safe, inclusive, and culturally responsive learning environment by knowing the students at an individual level. Then, the educator supports the native language in the classroom by talking about it, asking about it, and also looking for opportunities to incorporate it in projects and lessons. Additionally, teachers collaborate with students’ families on top of having curriculum night at school with an interpreter.

References

Blackley, A. (2019). It’s not uncommon for schools to have dozens of home languages—and our classrooms need to reflect that. We Are Teachers. https://www.weareteachers.com/many-different-home-languages/

Davis, J. R. (2010). Making a difference: How teachers can positively affect racial identity and acceptance in America. The Social Studies, 98(5), 209-216. https://doi.org/10.3200/TSSS.98.5.209-216

Guido, M. (2017). 15 Culturally-responsive teaching strategies and examples. Prodigy https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/blog/culturally-responsive-teaching/

Habib, Y. (2019). Building a positive racial identity could help your kid perform better in school. BeLatina. https://belatina.com/positive-racial-identity-kid-perform-better-in-school/