Week 5 Discussion 2 Contextual Instruction

Week 5 Discussion 2 Contextual Instruction

Contextualized Instruction consists of three levels; teaching (strategy), curriculum (culturally relevant materials) and policy (specifically in collaboration with parents and communities). Create an activity/lesson that will address all three levels. The activity/lesson should draw on what the students may already know from home, community or school, will be meaningful, will show knowledge of local norms (please choose one culture/language/community to highlight), will show evidence of integration of the community and creates an opportunity for parents or families to be involved. Respond to at least two of your classmates’ postings.

ISCUSSION 2

Chapter 9: Using Families’ Ways of Knowing to Enhance Teaching and Student Learning

Chapter 10: Fostering Student and Family Engagement in Learning Through Student-Led Parent Conferences

In this discussion, you will share an activity that includes three components:

1.    Teaching or Strategy

2.    Curriculum or Culturally Relevant Material

3.    Policy or Collaboration with Parents/Family

At this website, you can find many excellent, culturally relevant activities for all age groups that do just that.

http://www.tolerance.org/category/classroom-resources/family (Links to an external site.)

Please take a look and choose an activity, or create your own activity to share with our classmates.

Visit nccscurriculum.org

Instructor Guidance

Week 5

In week 5, we continue our work on building relationships among school, family, and community. This week, specifically, we will be reviewing activities and communication that help provide a culturally responsive environment. You will analyze some letters written by teachers that hope to create a collaborative partnership, create an activity for instruction, and explain the value of having students lead a conference. Is your family different from others? I bet you can identify at least one activity, tradition, or way of doing something from your family that is different from your next-door neighbor. Family traditions may very well be culturally based, and yet, they may just be the way that a family does something. Understanding the cultural contexts for traditions can be very helpful to designing learning activities for students. In the first discussion for this week, you are analyzing the welcome letter that teachers send home at the beginning of the school year. In the discussion prompt you will notice that you are to read two welcome letters from the text (Amatea, 2013). For each, describe the teacher’s beliefs about culture, milieu, social systems, and ecology. Item E asks you what is different about the second letter. Notice also that you are asked to identify changes you would make to both letters.  In the second discussion for the week, you are creating an activity that will address all three levels of contextual instruction. The three levels are identified as teaching, curriculum, and policy. Please be sure to read the instructions carefully for what your discussion post should include. There is no written assignment for this week. You may wish to take that extra time that you have this week to review the feedback from your previous assignments. You will be collecting and combining many of the ideas that you have been addressing in the previous weeks for the final project.

References

Amatea, E. S. (2013). Building culturally responsive family-school relationships (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

Readings

1. Read from your text, Building culturally responsive family-school relationships :

· Chapter 8: Getting Acquainted with Student’s Families

· Chapter 9: Using Families’ Ways of Knowing to Enhance Teaching and Student Learning 

· Chapter 10: Fostering Student and Family Engagement in Learning Through Student-Led Parent Conferences