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The influence of the family unit is crucial in fostering the cognitive development of a child. The stability of the home environment, contingent upon the extent of parental involvement, can significantly impact whether or not the child experiences a nurturing upbringing.

An involved parent at home will bring a confident student into the classroom. It helps them to complete assignments on time, learn important concepts, and build strong relationships.

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The Power of Parent Involvement in Early Childhood Education (5 Minutes)

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Implicit biases are the hidden thoughts or feelings we have about others that affect how we treat them without even realizing it. Cultural competence is about being good at understanding and getting along with people from different backgrounds.

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When creating a framework cultural competence we must include:

Valuing diversity: Recognizing and respecting that people come from many cultures and backgrounds leading to unique perspectives. This helps create a inclusive environment for everyone.

Ongoing self-assessments: looking deep into yourself finding your implicit biases, as well as how to avoid them. This helps you grow and improve in understanding others.

Managing Differences: Learning how to handle conflicts or misunderstandings that arise from cultural differences in a respectful and constructive way. This helps maintain harmony and cooperation.

Willingness to Develop Cultural Knowledge: Being eager to learn about other cultures, their customs, and ways of life. This broadens your understanding and helps you connect better with people from different backgrounds.

Ability to Adapt: Adjusting your behavior and approach to meet the cultural needs of others. This makes interactions smoother and more effective, fostering a supportive community.

By using self-reflection and accountability of others around me I will identify and acknowledge my implicit bias's so that I can create the most inclusive classroom environment possible.

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Implicit bias can significantly impact a teacher's perception of children and families. These effects include expectations in academic performance, disciplinary actions, teacher-student relationships, family engagement, and classroom environment.

Implicit bias scenario:

The teacher is known for having a very strict and disciplined classroom. During a group activity she hears some laughing, looks over, and sees it is Charlie (an African American student). She automatically assumes that he is being disruptive and not paying attention. Teacher then interrupts the activity, tells him to stop causing disturbances, and moves Charlie's desk away from his group to 'keep an eye on him'.

Charlie now feels embarrassed and singled out. He becomes less likely to engage in class activities for fear of receiving negative attention again. As a result, his academic performance starts to decline.

This is a direct result of Teacher's implicit bias that thinks kids like Charlie are troublemakers. As it turns out Charlie was engaging with his peers about the assigned project and how they should go about it, but Teacher never knew that because she jumped to conclusions instead of asking him what they were talking about.

Teacher, by not addressing her bias, she reinforces a cycle of misunderstanding and misjudgment.

This scenario underscores the importance of teachers being aware of their implicit biases and striving to ensure that all students are treated fairly and with respect.

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Religion can positively impact childhood development by promoting moral values, enhancing academic performance, and strengthening family bonds. These influences create a supportive environment that fosters the holistic growth of young individuals.

In the classroom, the benefits of religious upbringing become evident as it encourages a sense of belonging and confidence among students. This supportive atmosphere allows educators to focus more effectively on teaching, as students who feel secure and valued are more likely to engage actively in their learning and exhibit positive behaviors.

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The impact of church attendance on child development and family life – Religion & Liberty Online

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Religious attendance is critical not only in the development and raising of children, but for society as a whole.

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The Importance of Parental Involvement in a Child's Education

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The Importance of Parental Involvement in a Child's Education

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The Importance Of Parental Involvement In A Child's Education

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"The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education. Religion helps in shaping that character."

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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How Does Culture Influence a Child’s Cognitive Development?

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Valuing Diversity: Developing a Deeper Understanding of All Young Children’s Behavior

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For teachers, it is essential to see and understand your own culture in order to see and understand how the cultures of children and their families influence children’s behavior.

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What is cultural competence and why is it important?

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Louise Derman-Sparks, Julie Olsen Edwards

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Understanding Anti-Bias Education: Bringing the Four Core Goals to Every Facet of Your Curriculum

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This article is an excerpt of the second edition of Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, by Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards.

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Building relationships and working successfully with different others can seem like a major challenge.

But you can enjoy the rewards, while keeping frustration to a minimum.

The key to making them work is cultural competence.

What is cultural competence?

Cultural competence is defined as the ability to work effectively with people from different cultural backgrounds. Cultural competence is comprised of four components or aspects:

a diplomatic mindset,

agile cultural learning,

reasoning about other cultures, and

a disciplined approach to intercultural interactions.

We go through each of these competency areas in more depth, below. Essentially, cultural competence is a set of skills and knowledge that can help you learn, reason, solve problems, and interact comfortably when you're working with people from different cultures. Cultural competence can be improved through training, education, and experience.

In our increasingly connected world, it's not surprising that we are encountering people from all manner of backgrounds in our workplaces. Whether you are leading a diverse team to develop a new product, treating patients from different walks of life, promoting stability in a conflict zone, or teaching in a multicultural classroom, cultural competence is critical to your success in the professional realm.

Why improve your cultural competence?

Cultural competence can help you do your job more effectively. What does that mean in practice?

Cross-cultural teamwork has many benefits. But, working in a culturally diverse environment sometimes comes with differences of opinion and tension.

Cultural competence can allow you to detect problems early and prevent knee-jerk reactions is situations that initially seem puzzling or even provoking. This allows you to connect and build mutual trust with the people you work with. These relationships can provide fresh insights and innovative solutions to problems. They can even give you the inside scoop on others in your environment who don't support your agenda.

Relating better to people you work with, so you can get things done. That's a realistic objective with obvious benefits.

What are the essential cultural competencies for work?

To address this question, Louise Rasmussen and Winston Sieck of Global Cognition studied professionals with extensive experience working across cultural boundaries. Their paper, "Culture-general competence: Evidence from a cognitive field study of professionals who work in many cultures," was published in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations.

One of the unique features of their research was that participants were required to have a wide range of cultural experiences to be included in the studies. It was not enough to be deeply immersed in one foreign culture. This enabled the research team to tease out general cross-cultural skills that apply when working with someone from any group.

In addition, in contrast to previous work, the team did not ask these seasoned professionals for their opinions about cultural competence. Instead, the researchers dug into their lived experiences using cognitive task analysis to uncover the skills they used to meet their most challenging interactions.

The researchers identified four broad cultural competency domains that the experts used to create successful cross-cultural relationships.

Diplomatic Mindset

Diplomacy is the art of dealing with people in a thoughtful and effective way. Though it's often talked about in connection with international relationships, diplomacy and tact can be applied to every interaction we have with people from other cultures or social backgrounds.

A diplomatic mindset starts with a focus on what you are trying to accomplish. And recognizing that you need to work with diverse others to meet your goals. It means being aware of your own worldview and realizing that your own background shapes how you see things.

Doing so helps you understand how you are viewed by the person you are interacting with. It also helps you manage your own attitudes toward the other person's culture. Making it easier to find ways to get the job done despite your differences.

Cultural Learning

Professionals who successfully navigate cross-cultural relationships actively learn cultural norms, language and customs in an ongoing fashion. There's far too much to know about peoples and cultures to think that you can read a book or take a class and be done with it.

Rasmussen and Sieck found that cross-cultural experts deliberately seek out the experiences and relationships that will advance their cultural understanding rather than remaining fixed in their own narrow experience.

They were also sensitive to the limits and biases of their guides. Hence, they'd consult and check a variety of sources such as web sites, books (even fiction), local informants, and colleagues to get a full understanding of the range of views within a culture.

Cultural learning does not only take place in preparation for an interaction, it continues afterward as well. The professionals would often seek feedback from natives of their host country after an experience to find out what they got wrong and what they could do better in the future.

Cultural Reasoning

Cultural reasoning helps you make sense of cultural behaviors that initially seem odd. Like a scientist with an unexpected result, treat puzzling behaviors as opportunities to deepen your understanding of the culture. Dig in and figure out why they do what they do.

If you're walking into a situation completely fresh, with no context to draw from, all is not lost. Taking a moment to reflect on the 'why' likely leads you to discover a few possible alternatives.

Maybe she was trying to get a read on your personal values to gauge how we'll you'll work together. Or, maybe he was trying to get a rise out of you, to get a sense of how well you manage conflict.

It may not be possible to figure out a person's real motivation is in the moment. But, with practice, you'll find that you can regularly take the point of view of diverse people you're working with. You can more readily consider their beliefs and desires in the moment and use that perspective to work together more effectively.

Once you discover people's beliefs and motives, you're in a better position to spot the differences that cause misunderstandings and conflict. And, you have your hands on the levers to influence their perceptions and decisions if you need to.

Intercultural Interaction

Showing you've taken the time to learn a custom or bit of language goes a long way to build rapport with someone from a different culture. Yet, it's natural to feel awkward and uncertain, or even silly, and so avoid giving it a try.

Fortunately, there is a natural tendency for people to positively respond to someone's attempts to address language and cultural norms, regardless of their performance level.

For example, using a customary greeting in a person's native tongue will be seen positively even if it hits the limit of your language skills.

The connection begins in the attempt. Mastery happens over time.

One trick the seasoned professionals use is to plan their critical intercultural communications in advance. This goes beyond rehearsing that greeting to getting your nuanced talking points down before a difficult negotiation.

No matter how much you've planned, sometimes interactions go poorly. People from other cultures sometimes want fundamentally different things than you. And, as is the case within any group of people, sometimes they really are just rude.

Cross-cultural experts draw on deep reserves of discipline to face these situations. They manage their reactions and the impression they make, which often earns them greater respect in the process.

How to cultivate cultural competence within your team or organization

You might be able to influence the cultural competence of others within your team or organization. Here are four ways you can get started:

Make cultural competence part of your team or organization's narrative

To do that, include cultural competence in your policies, mission or vision statements, project plans, and other resources or documents that define your expectations for your people.

Be sure to get buy-in from key stakeholders and influencers within your team or organization. They are the ones who will take your vision from paper and to practice.

Recognize and reward instances of cultural competence. Even if it's just with positive attention.

Deliberately foster dialogue with and between teammates or subordinates around cultural issues

To get the conversation started, you can share this article. You might organize discussions of cultural issues or experiences around the following activities:

Get people to report on cultural surprises that occur within the context of your work.

Discuss them as a group.

Try to take the cultural other's perspective.

Come up with some alternative hypotheses about the beliefs and motivations behind the behaviors.

Locate cultural mentors inside or outside your team or organization and ask them questions.

Compare their answers.

Discussions like this can help you set or define a positive vision. Seeing examples of outcomes of handling intercultural interactions wisely will motivate your people to improve their cultural competence.

Provide cultural competence instruction and other professional development

Incorporating a cross-cultural training program can be a reasonable option, if it's done well. Do you have someone who develops or delivers cultural competence or diversity instruction within your team or organization? Or, are you evaluating existing options on the market?

In either case, be sure the folks who develop the content you use:

Understand what cultural competence is.

Promote the specific cultural skills and knowledge that are important for your people to learn.

Give examples of how cultural competence will change and improve the ways your people do their jobs.

When you talk to instruction developers or vendors, you can use the competencies in this article as a starting point for describing the positive behaviors you expect within your team or organization.

Set realistic objectives for the change you want to see.

It's important to keep in mind that developing cultural competence is not a one-shot enterprise. It takes time and practice. No single book, article, workshop, course, or even immersion is going to get the job done.

Use the information in this article to define a specific and realistic vision for the changes you want to see within your team or organization. And, make a plan for how you will sustain and advance your people's cultural competence.

How to avoid pandering and related pitfalls

When you engage with people from other cultures, it can be tempting to think that you can't be yourself. You might even feel that you need to pretend to be someone who's willing to go along with pretty much anything.

The thing is, people in other cultures are people too. They have likes and dislikes just like you. And, they can sense when you're not being real.

Similarly, studying up on other expressions, customs, and interests is great. But it's important to think carefully about how you use that information.

Picking up others' gestures or attire can sometimes seem like mocking or intruding on another's identity.

There's a fine line between paying respect and pandering. You have to read reactions and adapt to circumstances. Going overboard showing respect can sometimes cause you to lose it.

Instead, be yourself. If you're genuine, people pick up on that and appreciate it.

Regardless of your industry or the type of workplace in which you are employed, cultural competence plays an important role in your daily environment. As a leader or a part of team, recognizing and dealing cultural differences will create a more productive workplace as well as a happier setting for everyone who is there. In today's modern world, cultural competence is a necessity for everyone.

Image Credit: rawpixel

References

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Cultural Competence: What, Why, and How - Global Cognition

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Cultural competence means you can work effectively with people from diverse backgrounds. It comprises mindset, learning, reasoning, and interaction skills.

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The Importance of Cultural Competency in Education and Beyond

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The Importance of Cultural Competency in Education and Beyond. At Titan College, we recognize the importance of cultural understanding and

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"Cultural competence in education is about creating an environment where all students feel valued and included. It's about recognizing and honoring the diverse cultural backgrounds that each student brings to the classroom."

-James A. Banks

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Whether or not a teacher "believes in" her students and expects them to succeed has been shown to affect how well that student does in school, particularly among disadvantaged students. But educators should be aware that those expectations can be influenced by their own implicit racial biases.

In a recent study that looked at interviews involving 16,000 U.S. teachers, Black and non-Black teachers were asked to predict their 10th-graders' future educational attainment. Would she graduate from high school? How about college? When asked about any specific Black student, White teachers were about 30 percent less likely than Black teachers to predict he or she would someday earn a college degree. For White students, the teachers' predictions, or expectations, were about the same.

"We cannot determine whether the black teachers are too optimistic, the non-black teachers are too pessimistic, or some combination of the two," wrote one of the study's authors, American University's Seth Gershenson, in an an August blog post. But, he noted, it is worrisome nonetheless, "as systematic biases in teachers' expectations for student success might contribute to persistent socio-demographic gaps in educational achievement and attainment."

The study also found that the racial mismatch of expectations was stronger for boys, and that the most optimistic group about Black male students was Black female teachers (even more so than Black male teachers.)

"These results are not meant to, nor should they, demonize or implicate teachers," wrote Gershenson. "Biases in expectations are generally unintentional and are an artifact of how humans categorize complex information." Hopefully, the authors suggest, the study's findings will lead to helpful discussions.

Although the U.S. public school system now has more non-White students than White students, White teachers still account for 84 percent of the teaching force.
What is Implicit Bias and Can it Be Fixed?
Implicit biases are defined by the Kirwin Institute as attitudes or stereotypes that are activated unconsciously and involuntarily. They are not the same as biases that a person might try to hide because they're unpopular or socially incorrect. Social scientists believe that implicit biases are learned as young as age 3, and may be fueled by stereotypes perpetrated in the media, or beliefs passed along by parents, peers, and other community members.

"Our belief here is that we all have implicit biases," said Maureen Costello, director of Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center working toward equity in schools. And it's not just teachers, she points out. Recent studies, prompted by police shootings in Ferguson and elsewhere, have looked at implicit biases among law enforcement officers and found that both White and Black officers often have implicit biases about Black community members.

The consequences for Black communities policed by biased officers has been tragic, but it can be equally consequential in schools, points out Becki Cohn-Vargas, the co-author of Identity Safe Classrooms: Places to Belong and Learn. "This is not about blaming or pointing fingers," she said, but it clear that the decisions made by teachers also do affect children's life trajectories. Unequal discipline, for example, may fuel the school-to-prison pipeline that has disproportionately affected students of color.

But what's important to know about implicit biases is that, once people are made aware of them, those biases can be successfully addressed. "We can mitigate them. We can interrupt them. You can train your mind to catch yourself," said Costello. "It's like breaking a habit, but the first thing you have to do is become aware of the habit."

Awareness is the first, foundational step. (To take an Implicit Assessment Test (IAT) online, visit Teaching Tolerance's Test Yourself webpage.) The second step, suggests Costello, is developing a sense of reflectiveness. Ask yourself, "Is the way I'm approaching this student affecting outcomes?" And consider the data available in your classroom: Who do you call on, and how often? (Do you need to switch to a randomized technique, like pulling popsicle sticks?) How do you seat students, or group them? Are you treating everybody the same when it comes to homework, or are you giving a break to the kid you think has a bad home life or little chance of getting to college?

Researchers also suggest it's helpful to "refute" and "counter" the negative stereotypes that fuel biases, said Cohn-Vargas. That means recognizing these stereotypes really aren't true, and opposing them with ideas that are: for example, it's not true that all Black boys are loud and disruptive; it is true that students who talk a lot often are enthusiastic.

Cohn-Vargas suggests it's also important for educators to recognize their students as people who are individuals.

Much of this kind of work is done by culturally competent NEA members, trained by NEA trainers, through NEA's National Diversity Training Program. Additional resources to help NEA members work with students who may not look like them are available online, including NEA's Diversity Toolkit and Teaching Tolerance's "Culture in the Classroom" project.

"I'm actually encouraged by some of the things happening in positive psychology," said Costello. "If you end every day by journaling or writing down three things that were great in your class, and give yourself a little time for mindfulness and meditation, you can help retrain your mind to see the positive rather than the negative."
Photo: Associated Press

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When Implicit Bias Shapes Teacher Expectations | NEA

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"It's like breaking a habit, but the first thing you have to do is become aware of the habit," says expert.

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Building Cultural Competency: How Educators Can Support Diverse Students #shorts