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 Nurtures a student's learning in all aspects of their wellbeing. 

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 Nurtures a student's learning in all aspects of their wellbeing. 

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Becca The face behind Science Lessons That Rock

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There is a lot of hate in our world today, and many of feelings and situations can manifest themselves in our classrooms. It can seem hard to combat at times. This past year at my high school was...

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Involves families to support children in all aspects

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Involves families to support children in all aspects

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Books to celebrate diversity

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Counselor Chelsey | Simple School Counseling Ideas

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Have you ever had a class or group of students who just can't seem to embrace the differences we all have? This can manifest in name calling, exclusion, bullying and more. If you've ever experienced this, you know that it can really put a damper on the culture in your school or classroom. Students are constantly in fear of what others are thinking or saying, and are afraid to celebrate the things that make them unique. Students with this type of attitude and behavior can make it challenging to have a class or school where everyone feels welcomed or celebrated.

Thankfully, teaching about diversity and inclusion can be a powerful step to promoting a positive culture in your classroom or school. Books are a great launching point for conversations that will encourage your elementary students to embrace the differences they have and celebrate each other's strengths.

Whether the kids at your school are struggling to care for and respect each other, or you just want to encourage your students to continue their welcoming behavior, these 5 inclusion and diversity books are perfect for you! Use them in morning meetings, small group or classroom school counseling lessons, or even in a school-wide assembly!

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5 Diversity And Inclusion Books For School Counseling And SEL - Counselor Chelsey | Simple School Counseling Ideas

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Have you ever had a class or group of students who just can't seem to embrace the differences we all have? This can manifest in name calling, exclusion, bullying and more. If you've ever experienced this, you know that it can really put a damper on the culture in your school or classroom.

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Creates and supports positive perceptions of each other!

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Creates and supports positive perceptions of each other!

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With teaching lessons, prepping for standardized tests, and making sure students hit certain benchmarks, equally important things like building a strong classroom community can take a back seat. Still, a strong classroom community is integral to students' success. So how can teachers build one with so little time in the day?

Below, we listed our favorite ways to build classroom community. The best part? They don't take forever to do. In fact, we're sure they'll be a highlight of the school day.

1. Use note cards to share fun facts.

This activity works well with any age group, and it's especially good for middle school and high school, where it can be challenging to build classroom community. Have students write down facts on note cards and then share throughout the year.

2. Make kindness chains.

SOURCE: All About 3rd Grade

The visual of this one is great. As you work on it throughout the week, month, or year, it grows and grows to show your students just how much progress they're making. You can theme it around kindness, like Anna did in this idea, or come up with something else that works for your classroom.

3. Talk about filling buckets.

SOURCE: Teach, Plan, Love

Use an anchor chart to talk to your students about how to fill someone's bucket. Have everyone contribute their ideas!

4. Work together toward a reward.

SOURCE: Chris Cook

Students will have to learn to work together in order to get that final prize.

5. Play the gratitude game.

SOURCE: Teach Beside Me

This game is adorable, and we give full credit to Karyn of the blog Teach Beside Me for it. She uses it with her own kids, but you can definitely adapt it to the classroom by using pipe cleaners, paper straws, or even different colors of pencils or toothpicks.

6. Get in a circle and share compliments.

SOURCE: The Interactive Teacher

For help on how to do this in your classroom, check out these tips from Paige Bessick.

7. Pair students up to make a Venn diagram.

SOURCE: Teaching With Jillian Starr

We're all the same and all different. This is a lesson that should be embraced, and this is a perfect activity to bring this message home. You can pair up different students throughout the year so they really learn about each other in new ways.

8. Give a quick shout out.

SOURCE: Head Over Heels for Teaching

The classroom door is the perfect canvas. Just grab some Post-it notes to create this awesome community builder. The combo is a perfect way to build student camaraderie throughout the year.

9. Give your students a voice.

SOURCE: Teaching With Jillian Starr

Let your students know that it's okay to have opinions and to speak out, even if they express themselves via note. You can learn more about these on Jillian Starr's website. You could also create different notes and themes that work well in your classroom. For instance, how about a fill-in-the-blank sheet about what students want their principal or classmates to know about them?

10. Set goals one week at a time.

SOURCE: The Animated Teacher

It can be great to set a long-term goal with a big reward, but sometimes shorter, even weekly, options are even better. It helps students focus on a single task and keeps them motivated each week.

11. Keep a scoreboard.

SOURCE: The Animated Teacher

This is one more idea from The Animated Teacher, and we love how visual it is. She keeps a simple scoreboard in her classroom to remind her students of goals and how they're doing.

12. Hold regular class meetings.

SOURCE: Once Upon a Learning Adventure

What is a class meeting exactly? It's more than just morning calendar time or sharing about the star or person of the week. It's a way to regularly check in with your class as a group. Here are some tips on how to hold one, courtesy of Once Upon a Learning Adventure .

What other ideas do you have for building classroom community? Come and share in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook.

Plus, icebreakers that even middle school students will enjoy.

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12 Ways to Build Strong Classroom Community

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With teaching lessons, prepping for standardized tests, and making sure students hit certain benchmarks, equally important things like building a strong classroom community can take a back seat. Still, a strong classroom community is integral to students' success. So how can teachers build one with so little time in the day?

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Cultural Diversity Bulletin Board - Posters - Equality - Think Tank Teacher
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Cultural Diversity Bulletin Board - Posters - Equality - Think Tank Teacher

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Ensures lessons are culturally responsive

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Ensures lessons are culturally responsive

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Last month, I reviewed Zaretta Hammond's fantastic book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Now I'm proud to have Zaretta here as a guest writer to share some specific strategies with us.

Culturally responsive teaching. Everybody is talking about it. The big question is: How do you actually make lessons culturally responsive? That comes up regularly when I am working with groups of teachers to improve outcomes for diverse students who are struggling. I remember working with a group of sixth grade teachers on improving learning for their at-risk students. These teachers were frustrated that their students, 95 percent of them students of color and English language learners, were not applying themselves to learning.

I suggested that we explore making lessons more culturally relevant in order to accelerate student learning. I remember the reaction of Janice, the science teacher. "I am not going to be rappin' about the periodic table," she said defiantly as she crossed her arms and sat back in her chair.

I couldn't blame her. Google "culturally responsive teaching" and you can find a dozen videos of well-meaning teachers leading some call-and-response chant about exponents or rapping about the Boston Tea Party while students sit back and giggle. That's because we usually talk about culturally responsive teaching only as an engagement strategy designed to motivate at-risk students to take learning seriously. Or we try to find a race-based connection to the content to make it "relevant" to minority students.

One of the biggest misconceptions about culturally responsive teaching is thinking you have to tie the lesson's content to African American or Latino students' racial background. The common belief is if you mention Africa, Mexico, or famous black and brown high achievers, it will spark students' attention. Then they will be motivated to participate.

In reality, culturally responsive teaching is less about using racial pride as a motivator and more about mimicking students' cultural learning styles and tools. These are the strategies their moms, dads, grandmas, and other community folks use to teach them life skills and basic concepts long before they come to school and during out-of-school time.

Culturally responsive teaching leverages the brain's memory systems and information processing structures. Why? Many diverse students come from oral cultural traditions. This means their primary ways of knowledge transfer and meaning-making are oral and active. It's a common cultural tradition that cuts across racial groups: African American, Latino, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander communities all have strong oral cultures. Each of these cultural groups uses the brain's memory systems for turning inert information into useable knowledge. They use memory strategies to make learning sticky, like connecting what needs to be remembered to a rhythm or music (that's why we still know the ABC song) or by reciting it in fun ways like a poem, riddle, or limerick.

I asked Janice what area of learning she wanted to help her kids improve. She said science vocabulary; they weren't learning the weekly words and it was getting in the way of their understanding of key concepts. She was frustrated and at the end of her rope. I asked how she was teaching it. She used the typical approach: On Monday, she listed the words on the board. Students copied them down and were required to look each word up and use it in a sentence. On Wednesday, there was a vocabulary test.

I suggested that we design word study to be more culturally responsive by making it more like the students' own cultural learning process. She was open for trying something different.

I offered her these three tips for transforming any lesson into something that looked and felt more culturally responsive to diverse students, something that would allow them to engage more and process the content effectively.

Games are the power strategy for culturally-grounded learning because they get the brain's attention and require active processing. Attention is the first step in learning. We cannot learn, remember, or understand what we don't first pay attention to. Call and response is just a way to get the brain's attention. Most games employ a lot of the cultural tools you'd find in oral traditions - repetition, solving a puzzle, making connections between things that don't seem to be related (Ever play Taboo or Apples to Apples?).

Organizing learning so that students rely on each other will build on diverse students' communal orientation. This communal orientation can be summed up in the African proverb, "I am because we are." Even making learning slightly competitive in a good-natured way increases students' level of attention and engagement. It's why the T.V. show Survivor has been around for so many years; it's a social-based game.

The brain is wired to remember stories and to use the story structure to make sense of the world. That's why every culture has creation stories. In oral traditions, stories play a bigger role in teaching lessons about manners, morality, or simply what plants to eat or not eat in the wilderness because it's the way content is remembered. Diverse students (and all students, really) learn content more effectively if they can create a coherent narrative about the topic or process presented. That's the brain's way of weaving it all together. (Bonus: It also offers a great way to check for understanding and correct misconceptions.)

So Janice took her weekly list of science vocabulary and created a variety of sorting and matching games for students. She built a set of simple card games based on Go Fish or Old Maid. In addition she created some team games. Each week students had different active ways to learn the vocabulary. For 10-15 minutes a couple of times during the week, students got to play these learning games rather than look up words in a dictionary. She gave them instructions for making the games at home if they wanted to.

Instead of the traditional weekly vocab test, she asked them to "storify" their understanding of key concept words like metamorphosis, using vocabulary from past weeks.

When I checked in with the group a few weeks later, she was the first one to share. She said student engagement was like night and day. Now all students were participating. She said she knew they were learning the vocabulary at a deeper level because they were actually using the new science terms during discussions and in their writing with no prompting from her.

The big A-ha's for the group that day were that (1) Culturally responsive teaching doesn't have to be some performance the teacher does to entertain students and (2) It doesn't have to mention race or reference culture at all. Instead, what makes a practice culturally responsive is that it mimics students' own cultural learning tools. They all realized that these practices are helpful for all students, not targeted at minority students.

The real trick is to use these strategies regularly as part of your instructional routine rather than doing them randomly every now and then. Consistency is the key. ♦

Learn more about how to improve diverse students' information processing skills and actually grow their brains in Zaretta Hammond's book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students .

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3 Tips to Make Any Lesson More Culturally Responsive

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Last month, I reviewed Zaretta Hammond's fantastic book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Now I'm proud to have Zaretta here as a guest writer to share some specific strategies with us. Culturally responsive teaching. Everybody is talking about it. The big question is: How do you actually make lessons culturally responsive?

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A deep look in to culturally relevant teaching vs culturally responsive teaching 

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A deep look in to culturally relevant teaching vs culturally responsive teaching 

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Culturally Relevant Teaching vs. Culturally Responsive Teaching