Teachers are professionals who must make many decisions throughout their day! Some decisions are immediate, spur of the moment choices like disciplining students or revising a lesson that is not working. Others decisions are more calculated, like developing a semester-long project designed to incorporate community resources into a problem-solving scenario. All the small decisions teachers make throughout their day likely support the two most important, larger overarching decisions that are made at the beginning of a learning experience and are based in part on many macrocultural and microcultural factors:
- What is truly important for students to learn?
- What is the best way to arrange experiences within the learning environment to maximize the probability that all students will learn what is intended for them to learn?
Chapter 1 of the course text provides a number of different definitions for the term “culture.” Wardle (2013) makes a distinction between cultural factors at the national level (macroculture) and cultural factors unique to a specific sub-population of people in local communities (microculture). This discussion provides you with additional practice identifying cultural influences on specific decisions teachers make to develop the most effective learning experiences possible, which further prepares you for the Week Six Final Project. You will use one of the schools or programs identified in last week’s assignment (website or web-based presentation) that you and your peers developed as the subject of the first discussion. Recall that these schools showcase examples of innovative educational experiences designed to promote 21st-century skills while promoting culturally relevant pedagogy.
Initial Response: This discussion requires you to select one of the schools/programs you researched and included in your Week Four Assignment. Once selected, you need to conduct a brief analysis of the decisions that needed to be made in the design and implementation of the school or program you selected. To help guide this analysis, ensure that the following questions are addressed:
- What decisions, in general, did the program developer(s) and/or other professional(s) need to make in order to plan the school or program?
- What macroscopic cultural influence likely supported the development and implementation of the program?
- What microscopic cultural influence likely supported the development and implementation of the program?
