Teacher Professional Development For Multicultural Education

By Vince Welsh

Communication skills are critical for success in any classroom. In multicultural education, communication skills are even more important because students and teachers often face language and cultural barriers at the same time. Teacher professional development can help to train teachers to adjust to a multicultural classroom and foster a collaborative environment that is beneficial to their students and other educators.

When learning to teach in multicultural education, there are several important ideas that teachers must become familiar with. First, the teacher should educate him- or her-self on a variety of cultural influences in our society, and in particular the cultural influences specific to the location where he or she is teaching. Having things in common is one of the best ways to create strong relationships, and teachers can make their students feel more at ease by laying the groundwork for a successful team (team = classroom). Multicultural teacher professional development should include resources and suggestions for cultural influences that teachers should familiarize themselves with.

An ambitious end goal for a multicultural education program would be to restructure our schools to promote equality and acceptance for all students and educators. We may be on the way towards that objective, but there is still much work to be done. Multicultural education can be improved via changes in all areas of a school’s framework – the curriculum, the way teachers teach, how students are grouped together, how students are tested, and community participation. The diversity of backgrounds of students (low or high income, native or non-native English speakers, feminist or male-dominated cultures, Western or Eastern background, and even mono- versus multi-cultural exposure, and more) should be accounted for; all students’ situations must be taken into consideration. Incorporating these changes is a large undertaking and an ongoing endeavor.

Once teachers have a good idea of the existing cultural differences, they must learn to apply the findings that are relevant to their situation and they must learn to employ strategies to facilitate communication within their classroom across the different cultural backgrounds present. Even in a classroom that is not so diverse, it is still important for students to learn multicultural education skills because they will undoubtedly be in situations later on in life that will require those skills.

So here are some action steps for teachers when beginning to learn teacher professional development for multicultural education:

–Look at your current teaching strategy: what methods are you using? What textbooks and workbooks are in the classroom? What is the curriculum? Do all of these things incorporate components of multicultural education?

–Involve your students in your learning process as well. Ask them for their input about what they know already and what they want to know.

–Ask questions of both your students and yourself – find out how they know what they know already and where the knowledge gaps are.

–Look at the topics you are teaching/learning from different cultural perspectives. Then relate these topics to your students’ life experiences and our current society.

–Explore the cultures present in your classroom and learn about what differences may exist.

Teacher professional development is a great way to embrace and learn about multicultural education. These topics are important for all teachers to learn!

About the Author: Vince Welsh is CEO of Teacher Education Institute. TEI offers rigorous, graduate-level professional development courses for K-12 classroom teachers. For more about TEI,

teacher professional development

,

multicultural education

visit http://www.teachereducation.com

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