Week 6 Final Project
Week 6 Final Project
Your Culturally Responsive Classroom PowerPoint and Final Essay
You have been asked by your administrator to develop a PowerPoint presentation and supporting paper for the staff. The purpose of the PowerPoint is to give concrete examples, suggestions, and ideas to create a more inviting family-school climate at your site, and to entice the staff to read your full paper on the topic. Your Principal understands your desire to make change at your school site and has shown you additional research stating that family involvement supports student success. In order for your staff to buy-in to this new paradigm they must have the background knowledge and specific examples to understand the necessity of change.
Therefore your presentation and paper must:
· Address family needs and understanding
· Analyze the importance of understanding that the family/parents are the expert regarding their child
· Describe possible family stressors and include at least six resources to share with families
· Summarize current definitions and understandings of culturally responsive teaching
· Analyze research-based information regarding how culture influences an educational setting and how to support families and students from non-mainstream cultures
· List examples showing the importance of becoming connected with students' families and describe from your own experience or from a credible source one activity to support this relationship
· Describe a method for using family-school problem solving with culturally diverse families
· Analyze the role of culture and disability in your work with families
· Synthesize an approach, from the previous points in the presentation/paper, to link your school and family with your community
Requirements
The presentation should include 10-15 PowerPoint slides (enough to entice your coworkers to read your supporting paper) and a 7-10 page paper to accompany your visual presentation. Your PowerPoint should include a title slide and a references slide in addition to the 10-15 slides highlighting the major topics described above. The purpose of the PowerPoint is to persuade your co-workers of the importance of creating an inviting school climate. The accompanying paper should be well organized and professional and should be written in correct APA format as per the Ashford Writing Center Guidelines. It will be a minimum of 7-10 pages excluding title and reference pages. At least five scholarly references are required, with at least two of those being credible websites/resources to share with parents. Check with the Ashford Writing Center for guidelines regarding what is considered a credible website for a graduate level presentation.
Carefully review the Grading Rubric (Links to an external site.) for the criteria that will be used to evaluate your assignment.
Readings
1. Read from your text, Building culturally responsive family-school relationships :
· Chapter 11: Engaging in Collaborative Problem Solving with Families
· Chapter 12: Family-Centered Parent Involvement and Shared Decisions Making in Special Education Classrooms
· Chapter 14: Seeing the Big Picture: Creating a School Climate that Strengthens Family-School Connections
Recommended Resources
1. IRIS Center. (2018). The pre-referral process (Links to an external site.) . Retrieved from https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/preref/
· Explanation of the pre-referral process, includes information on how to involve parents in the process.
2. IRIS Center. (2018). Outline: The pre-referral process (Links to an external site.) . Retrieved from https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdf_module_outlines/preref.pdf
· Description of the purpose of the pre-referral process and explanation of the six stages of the pre-referral process.
Instructor Guidance
Week 6
In the last week of our class together, we are putting together the pieces that we have studied so far into a comprehensive, collaborative environment. This week’s learning outcomes include that you will summarize the steps in conducting a problem-solving meeting and explaining the steps teachers may want to take in order to understand the cultural views of a family that has a student with a learning disability. Do you feel prepared, as a teacher, to build collaborative approaches to family and school relationships? Do you feel prepared to deal with the range of diversity in your classrooms and to work with students who have special needs? Maybe you do; maybe you don’t. It is not easy to do these things, but that does not mean we should not try. Hopefully, after completing this week’s work, you will be better prepared to go to your school and work with the range of students in the classrooms. In the first discussion for the week you should summarize the steps that are involved in conducting a problem-solving meeting. Go on to explain why these steps work well when faced with culturally diverse families. Chapters 8 and 11 will be very helpful for this discussion. In the second discussion for this week, you are asked to explain three suggestions that a teacher might want to use in an IEP meeting, particularly when working with cultural diversity in the family. Ideally you will focus on the teacher’s need to understand the family’s cultural view regarding the disability and then make connections between the policy of your school and the family’s views. For the final project, you have been asked to develop a presentation and supporting paper for the staff at your school. You must provide to the staff the information they need in order to understand the collaborative paradigm and the need for change at your school. As you look at the outline for this paper, you will see that you will want to address family needs and how to understand them, summarize the definition and understanding of culturally responsive teaching, and present an approach to link your school and families with the community. You will create two files for this project. The first is a presentation of approximately 10 to 15 slides, and the second is a 7 to 10 page paper that accompanies the presentation. Remember, you are attempting to persuade your coworkers of the need for change and that you have an outline for how to make it happen. Please be sure to review all requirements and the grading rubric as you build your presentation and write your paper.
References
Amatea, E. S. (2013). Building culturally responsive family-school relationships (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.