American History through American Lives

Teaching Strategies

Culturally Responsive Teaching

In today’s public school classrooms, you will have students from many diverse cultural backgrounds. “Culturally responsive teaching aims to link content with students’ contemporary and ancestral cultures.”⁴⁵ This unit is designed to embrace their family’s unique and diverse cultural backgrounds. The students will have activities, readings, visitors, and presentations on immigrants from different countries and cultures.

There are other options that educators can use to make their classroom and activities more culturally responsive. This may look like using word problems with different cultural names or references. Also using multimedia to present different cultures in your lessons. In this unit, we will have families involved with telling their immigration story. Along with students sharing what their family does to celebrate their culture or family traditions if they cannot trace their families immigration story.

Inquiry Based Learning

Inquiry based learning is technique that helps guide students to ask questions about a topic, then be able to answer these questions through various forms of research and activities. For one of my interactive, hands on activities, we will be using structured inquiry to explore important immigrants and the roll that they have had in America. This way they can have some scaffolding to this skill since it’s an activity they have never completed before. “Teachers are responsible for guiding students through their questions—past curiosity and into critical thinking and understanding.”⁴⁶ Students are more likely to retain information from the activity or curriculum if they use one of the four types of inquiry-based learning. The four types of inquiry-based learning are: confirmation, structured, guided, and open. For confirmation inquiry “students are given a question along with a way to answer it.”⁴⁷ In structured based inquiry “students are given open question and investigation method.”⁴⁸ In guided inquiry “students work from an open question to design investigation methods.”⁴⁹ Then for open inquiry “students develop original questions that they answer through their own methods.”⁵⁰

Student Presentations

Another strategy for this unit is having students present their work. This allows students to take pride in their work and to build courage and confidence. By allowing students to present their activity, research or writing, you are allowing students to educate their peers in a positive manner. “Presentations are a great way to have students practice all language systems areas (vocabulary, grammar, discourse and phonology) and skills (speaking, reading, writing and listening).”⁵¹ Students will present multiple times in this unit. These presentations will be using their narrative and informational writing pieces. They will also be used after the detective boxes activity. They will share what information they have learned to their peers.

Peer Teaching

Peer teaching is when students help or teach their peers about an activity or topic. “Students learn a great deal by explaining their ideas to others and by participating in activities in which they can learn from their peers. They develop skills in organizing and planning learning activities, working collaboratively with others, giving and receiving feedback and evaluating their own learning.”⁵² In this unit, students will work together to learn about important immigrants in America and how immigration has affected this country. They will teach their peers what they have learned about certain immigrants by presenting information to their peers after they have done their detective boxes.

Guest Speakers

Guest speakers are another great strategy that is often not included into our lesson plans. We are often trying to follow our curriculum maps and often do not deviate from them. This makes it hard to have classroom visitors. However, having visitors come present, read, or discuss with your students is extremely beneficial to the students. “Use the speaker to enhance the material you are covering. A guest speaker conveys current, realistic information and a perspective on a subject that is not available from textbooks.”⁵³ This is a great primary source on a given topic. In this unit, there will be guest speakers. These classroom visitors will be sharing their immigration story. They will either be the parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, or other family member that wants to share their immigration story.

Interdisciplinary Teaching

Interdisciplinary Teaching strategies help “to encourage student to develop creative and critical skills—and to draw information from a number of different academic disciplines.”⁵⁴ This technique allows for students to learn about immigration in different areas of the curriculum, while making connections to the topic. For this unit it will look like immigration stories in ELA, narrative and informational writing in writing, and activities in social studies to learn about different cultures and immigration stories.