Dealing with Diversity During Holidays

The urban classroom is typically filled with students from many cultures and traditions. While this diversity can offer lots of interesting points of discussion, this same diversity can be an minefield  for teachers during seasonal holiday celebrations. 

Which holiday gets the primary focus? Student populations can represent many nationalities, languages, regions and traditions. So when it's time to celebrate holidays in classrooms, teachers have to determine the best way to be inclusive and welcoming to everyone.

Know Your Students

It's really important to get to know your students as early as possible during the year. Many cultural differences aren't always obvious.  You need to know whether your students celebrate Halloween or are religiously opposed to it. You need to know if any of students have cultural opposition to participating in politics - if so, you may need to tailor your plans to have a mock election in your classroom. In order to get to know your students, talk to them. Use "beginning of the year" surveys that students can share anything relevant with you. If your students are very young, check with parents to get the information you need.

Create an Inclusive Classroom

The classroom is a great place to learn about traditions and cultures, in a place where children can teach each other about their backgrounds. Many teaches give students a chance to explain non-traditional holidays with their classmates. Parents can also be invited to classrooms to orient students about different holidays.  If there are staff members at your school who can speak to your students, you have a built-in "speakers' bureau" that can help explain things to students in child-friendly language. 

How do you address diversity issues during holiday time?

Queen Bee

First Steps for Creating Classroom Groups

Are you nervous about managing students in small groups?

We all know that students work best when they can support each other. We also know that small group arrangements teach students critical problem-solving skills that help today's students become tomorrow's leaders. But we don't always know how to best group students for successful learning. 

Prepare Students before Grouping 
Here are a few things that you need to teach students before putting them into working groups:

• a visual signal for establishing quiet
• how to move into groups
• how to refocus on the teacher when needed
• a vocabulary of kind and motivating words 
• how to be nonjudgmental 
• how to support each other 

Once students learn how to operate as groups, and learn how to work with each other, they will be ready to work in groups.

Introduce Students to Small Groups
It's important that you assign students into groups, rather than have the students group themselves. This will ensure that cliques don't develop that could isolate students.

• When you begin the small groups, start off small. Ideally, you might want to begin by having students work in pairs. This gives shy students practice with opening themselves up to others.  
• After a brief period, rearrange students into groups of three. Make sure that they are practicing the skills that you shared earlier (supporting comments, etc.)
• When students are ready for "the big time," you can place them in groups of 4-5. This is the ideal number for small groups. Research shows that groups larger than 5 are less successful in the classroom.   

Vary Your Student Groupings

Your groups should be dynamic, and change periodically. When you change groupings, you are giving students an opportunity to work alongside different students in the class. 

It's also crucial to have more than one group formation operating when you have small groups:

• one grouping should give students an opportunity to work with other students with similar strengths (this gives students a chance to move in a similar circle of ability), 
• and one grouping that combines students with different strengths (this gives students a chance to stretch and grow).

You can schedule the different groups to operate on different days of the week. 

How do you use student groupings in your classroom?

Queen Bee