Another characteristic of a classroom climate that is open to student-centered learning and allows for opportunities for students to build on their own learning preferences is student choice. Student choice should be thoughtfully planned and implemented in order to build student autonomy and students’ capabilities at making choices that will be most beneficial and engaging to their learning. It is also important that student learning choices be aligned to content and language standards.

Remember that as important as it is for you to learn about your students, it is also important for you to share about yourself. The work of community building is a continual process that is supported through shared understandings of the expectations and rules of the classroom. Establishing classroom norms collectively can be a great starting point for building community.

Creating a classroom climate that is conducive to student-centered learning requires learning about your students and their learning preferences. It’s important to get to know your students beyond who they are academically and to avoid viewing students through a one-dimensional lens that positions you to see students only as what they might be lacking or the hardships that they have experienced. Learn about students’ passions, dreams, and what makes them unique.

Placing students at the center of the learning, or student-centered instruction, is an instructional approach in which the students in the classroom shape the content, instructional activities, materials, assessment, and/or pace of the learning within a structured learning environment. Student-centered learning involves regular opportunities for pair and group work. It also includes student-friendly learning goals as well as self- and peer assessments that are framed around instructional standards and learning goals.

A scaffold is not meant to be a permanent support. Rather, the ultimate goal of scaffolded instruction is to facilitate a student in completing the same type of task independently in the future once they have acquired the necessary language and/or skill. As our colleague Tonya Ward Singer instructs, you need to both “use and lose” scaffolds (2018).

Success folders are compilations of student work. Each week or every two weeks, you can return student work and ask your students to select a piece of work that they are most proud of or that they worked hard to complete. When you are setting up this procedure, be sure to model the process for students and talk about what work they might want to include as an example. You can have students write a short explanation of why they included a particular piece of work on an index card that you attach to the piece of work. These success folders can be a great resource for parent or guardian conferences and student goal-setting meetings. You can also have students decorate their folders with inspirational quotes or images that represent success for them.

As teachers, we can model what it means to have an academic mindset by describing our own challenges and how we work to overcome them. We can acknowledge that challenge and failure are both a normal and temporary part of the learning process. It is critical for us as educators to express our vulnerabilities so that students know it’s OK to feel the same way. We can also set up procedures where students can model their problem-solving strategies and academic mindsets for other students. It is important to consider how you can provide an opportunity for students to model their own academic mindset throughout the year.

Just as we want educators to view MLs from an assets-based perspective in which they see and value what each student brings to their learning, we also want MLs to see in themselves someone who can be a successful learner. Farrington (2013) describes four characteristics of an academic mindset: I belong here.I can succeed at this.My ability and competence grow with my effort.This work has value for me.

Oftentimes, we have found that people who lack an understanding of MLs and have a deficit perspective of them have not spent any amount of time in their communities. We have noticed through our own experience that a significant increase in the number of ML families present in a community may provoke feelings of panic and resentment from some community members. Some community members—especially those who have not spent time in a culture other than their own—may fear that ML families will take away resources and jobs from the community, will decrease home values, and will lessen their school’s academics.

We all love to hear a good story, and MLs sharing their own stories is one way we can build bridges and help foster connections with ML students. Teachers of younger MLs can first model the task of students drawing a personal narrative storyboard or series of images, then have students write a response to the sentence prompt of their choice, such as “What’s your least favorite part of school? Why?” or “Share a favorite memory you have with a family member.” Teachers can ask older newcomer students to write a personal narrative and then share it with colleagues and school administrators

Engaging in an assets-based approach with MLs requires a shift in our thinking from what we believe is lacking in our students to the many strengths and assets that they and their families already possess. To do this, we must take time to learn about our MLs’ and their families’ invaluable personal, cultural, social, and world experiences and draw from these strengths-based understandings to create instructional opportunities that are meaningful, purposeful, and appealing to our students. Not only will our MLs benefit, but native English-speaking students will learn from their ML peers and see them in a new light.

Once we know more information about our students’ personal histories as well as academic backgrounds, MLs’ home language use and literacy practices should be used as rich resources in designing effective instruction. Educators can incorporate instructional practices into their lessons that provide students the opportunity to build on their knowledge and skills in their home language or languages (August et al., 2009).

Sonia Nieto (2017), in her paper titled On Becoming Sociocultural Mediators, emphasizes the importance of educators taking steps to learn about their students and their communities in respectful ways that build trust and relationships. She explains that sociocultural mediators “not only introduce students to other perspectives and experiences, but also that they encourage students to carry who they are along with them” (p. 10). Hammond (2015) urges educators to expose themselves to cultural experiences similar to those of their students in order to “experience alternative ways of doing and being” (p. 62). Consider the following steps that you might take (adapted from Nieto, 2017, and Hammond, 2015): Explore the history of students’ home countries and cultures.Visit students’ families in their homes or communities.Conduct family interviews.Develop family and community surveys.Write letters to students sharing about yourself and ask students to write you back. The questions in 2d might be a good starting place for the type of information you could share with students.Watch movies or television series that can help you step into another culture and that portray that culture in a positive and accurate light. Reflect on patterns of both verbal and nonverbal communication.

While being color-blind in relation to your teaching may seem like an effective way to treat all students fairly and equally, ignoring cultural, racial, and linguistic differences actually undermines the potential of being able to connect with each student based on her or his unique background. Being color-blind inherently denies students an opportunity to share facets of their identity. When individuals profess to be color-blind, they may also overlook the role that implicit bias can play in their interactions with students and families who come from cultures other than their own. Implicit bias is a result of our brain’s work of categorizing and stereotyping as a way to process large amounts of information (Hammond, 2015; Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, 2013). Bias can lead you to make assumptions about others and ignore the inherent inequities that exist in education, such as inequitable access to college preparation and honors courses, greater numbers of disciplinary referrals, lower scores on state achievement tests, and lower graduation rates, among many others.

The role of the teacher may vary between collectivist and individualist cultures. Collectivist cultures are those in which group goals and needs are generally placed above individual needs. In contrast, individualist cultures tend to value individual goals, individual rights, and independence. Students from collectivist cultures (e.g., Mexico, Korea, Somalia) may have been taught that they should show respect for teachers at all times by carefully listening to their teacher and not asking questions or disagreeing (Rothstein-Fisch & Trumbull, 2008). Group harmony is considered most important. In contrast, students from individualist cultures (e.g., Australia, Germany, US) recognize that they will be valued for speaking out for their unique ideas and opinions. They also tend to expect a more student-centered approach to teaching and learning.

Self-awareness is the first step in building cultural competence. As anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1959) explains, “Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own” (p. 30). In order to begin the work of building cultural competence, it is essential that you understand the various beliefs and experiences that shape your cultural identity and recognize the impact your identity has on how you teach and interact with others. Self-awareness requires you to acknowledge personal bias and take opportunities to reflect on this bias and the implications that it has on your interactions with others.

Student-centered learning is not a new concept in the field of education, and there are a variety of approaches that fit under the umbrella of student-centered learning, such as collaborative learning, inquiry-based learning, and project-based learning. Student-centered learning can be defined as an instructional approach in which the students in the classroom shape the content, instructional activities, materials, assessment, and/or pace of the learning. Student-centered learning also focuses on the idea that students are provided with opportunities to learn from one another rather than solely from the teacher.

No matter how you define culture, it is important to remember that everyone is a member of various cultural groups and that even within cultural groups there can be great variability in terms of beliefs, expectations, and behaviors. For this reason, it is important that we don’t put students on the spot and ask them to speak for an entire cultural group. Instead, we can ask them to share their experiences as a member of one or more cultural groups in a way that puts them at ease (e.g., with a partner, in a small group, in writing)—but only if they feel comfortable doing so.

In the book White Fragility, DiAngelo (2018) tells us that, like gender, race is also a social construct with there being no true biological race. External, superficial characteristics that are commonly used to define race (e.g., hair texture, skin color) are actually not reliable indicators of genetic variation between people (Cooper et al., 2003). However, many tend to believe racial differences are biologic. Instead, DiAngelo (2018) imparts us to understand that society was organized along racial lines. She shares that the idea of racial inferiority in the United States was created as the US was being formed to justify unequal treatment of enslaved African people, Native Americans, and Mexicans, among other people.

The takeaway is that MLs aren’t coming to school with the same shared knowledge. Intake forms used when students enroll in a school or district may not catch these differences either. For example, it may not be apparent that a student enrolling from Mexico speaks an indigenous language instead of Spanish as his or her home language.