Enlivenminds’ Ten Pathways to a More Inclusive Classroom

1) Promoting Education of All Students Equally
In order for the best learning environment to take place, the teacher will value all students equally. This means playing no favorites, balancing the participation among all students, respecting gender, race, religion and any other identifying facts. This approach is not complete with just the teacher adopting equality; more importantly, the teacher must be hyper-vigilant about how students are interacting with or responding to each other, and the teacher’s modelling, correcting, and guiding will be of significant importance in promoting equality.

2) Creating Learning Centers in the Classroom
We will see more of these classroom structures with multiple centers in the K-8 divisions of school; I feel there is a place for these in high school as well, albeit with a teenage appropriate purpose. Giving young children options within an environment of multiple learning centers will give them comfort, assurance, and compatibility so that their learning strengths or emotional needs at the moment can be best channeled into a center suitable to their disposition or learning style. A place to read to oneself; a place to collaborate with other students quietly; a place for working on the computer; a place to learn while
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3) Valuing Differences
There is an art to valuing differences in the classroom. The teacher who does this well will seek to know each of her/his students and will develop and grow that knowledge as the year progresses. As knowledge grows, so will the references the teacher makes to each student’s unique qualities, interests and perhaps tidbits of family information and background. These touch points in the classroom are vital to fostering diversity awareness and acceptance among the students. Of course, diversity awareness must extend to the subject matter as well, such as cultural
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4) Culturally Responsive Teaching
This approach to teaching is less about making associations between the lessons and the ethnic or racial backgrounds represented among the students in your classroom. It isn’t about choosing only anecdotes or stories whose characters or locations are similar to those among the minority students in the class. Rather, culturally responsive teaching has more to do with instruction that reflects the cultural learning styles among the students. Some students may have more experience with learning from oral strategies; others will have sing-song ways to promote memorization; others may want to role play to understand lessons; some prefer a more social approach to learning,
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5) Academic Support Across the Board:
The common perception or expectation that the classroom teacher needs to teach “down the center” of her/his students, because the highly capable kids will take care of themselves and all those with learning issues will be addressed by the school’s professional support staff, is completely out of step of where teaching needs to be. Yes, there is such a thing as learning specialists, and these people are very valuable in the school’s organization, yet teachers must reach out to all capabilities in the classroom.
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6) Creating a Welcoming Environment:
For children, effective learning and sufficient motivation to learn don’t just happen in a vacuum. The classroom environment, specifically the tone that the teacher sets and maintains every day, is crucial for students to enter into the zone of engagement. When I mention a “welcoming environment,” I am referring to the tone of mutual respect that the teacher must cultivate between students and teacher, and also this same tone must take root student to student. There are many touches that teachers miss
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7) Being an Ally for the LGBTQ+ Community:
This topic will come across to many, understandably, as a topic pertinent only to college campuses, but the K12 school community must also be a locale whereby all students, of whatever identity, feel they have their teachers’ and administrators’ support. Standing up for differences, and setting the classroom stage and tone to allow support for identity differences, is crucial in today’s school environment. If teachers or school leaders stray or duck from overt support, or falter in their expectation that all students should feel welcome, then the school’s spirit of community can quickly unravel.
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8) Teaching Tolerance
Some may regard the word tolerance as a meek word, a ground floor attitude in the upward gradation of attitudes necessary to achieve full acceptance and the celebration of differences—of minorities, gender identities, immigrants, disabilities, socio-economic diversity, or religious identity. But tolerance is extremely important in schools, as typically children seldom receive at home a thorough acclimation to understanding diversity, nor are they learning from home the practice and values relevant to tolerance or appreciation of different backgrounds, ethnicities, and such.
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9) Safe Places and Mindfulness
The most overlooked element in getting to whole child education is the social/emotional. With so much emphasis on quantitative assurances that we are advancing students along the trajectory of standards, skills, and curricula, the attention necessary for qualitative social/emotional learning gets shortchanged. Because anxiety is rising among schoolchildren to an alarming degree, it is paramount that teachers take the time to implement daily strategies to calm children down, get them academically ready following transitions, and moderate their hyperactivity in order to provide for the most conducive atmosphere possible for learning. Safe places may sound like an early childhood
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10) Celebrate Togetherness and Community
Developing a classroom culture of togetherness takes a lot of time—not time away from the syllabus, but time invested in the methods, the tone, and the awareness that teachers must bring each day in order to build cohesion in the classroom. This is never a matter of simply barking out rules on day one. A classroom culture of mutual support takes a lot of teachable moments, lots of diversity awareness, lots of time knowing each child, plus time for consistency to take hold and respect to be cultivated among the students. One of the glues that can cement progress toward building classroom community is that of celebration.
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