CRITICAL COMMENTARY: INCORPORATING DIVERSE CULTURES AND COMMUNITIES OF LEARNERS

In this task and others in this program, you will use Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle (Gibbs, 1988) as a framework to respond to observations and experiences. Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle encourages you to think systematically about the phases of an experience or activity, first describing the experience, then addressing how it made you feel, next evaluating and analyzing it, then drawing a conclusion, and finally considering how this experience will apply to your future practice. In this task, you will engage in activities that will go toward preclinical hours of your Early Preclinical Experiences requirements.

For this task you will select three videos that allow you to observe learning environments where efforts are being made to meet cultural, social, and emotional learning needs of students. In each video, you will observe teachers in their classrooms and will then evaluate their efforts to incorporate the diverse cultures and communities of individual learners into the learning environment.

Your submission must be your original work. No more than a combined total of 30% of the submission and no more than a 10% match to any one individual source can be directly quoted or closely paraphrased from sources, even if cited correctly. The originality report that is provided when you submit your task can be used as a guide.

You must use the rubric to direct the creation of your submission because it provides detailed criteria that will be used to evaluate your work. Each requirement below may be evaluated by more than one rubric aspect. The rubric aspect titles may contain hyperlinks to relevant portions of the course.

Tasks may not be submitted as cloud links, such as links to Google Docs, Google Slides, OneDrive, etc., unless specified in the task requirements. All other submissions must be file types that are uploaded and submitted as attachments (e.g., .docx, .pdf, .ppt).

A.   Identify three videos from the attached “Task 1 Video List” found in the Supporting Documents section.

Note: When selecting three videos to observe, it may be helpful to read the description available on the web page for each video. You will want to choose videos that will give you enough relevant material to respond to parts B1–B5 .

B.   Reflect on your video observations by doing the following:

1.   Discuss specific examples of how the teachers in the videos effectively incorporated the needs of individual learners within their learning environments, including at least one example of each of the following from any of the three videos:

•   cultural needs

•   social needs

•   emotional needs

2.   Discuss ways that the teachers could have more effectively incorporated individual learners’ cultural, social, or emotional needs in the learning environments.

3.   Discuss two culturally sustaining pedagogy strategies you learned from observing the videos that you could incorporate into your future practice as a teacher.

a.   Explain how you can apply the two strategies from B3 in your future classroom.

4.   Explain how you could involve your students’ caregivers in the execution of the strategies from part B3, including specific examples.

5.   Explain how you could involve the community in the execution of the strategies from part B3, including specific examples.

C.   Acknowledge sources, using in-text citations and references, for content that is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized.

D.   Demonstrate professional communication in the content and presentation of your submission.