Instructional Strategies / Methods

Title: Piper’s Lesson

Area: Instructional Strategies/Methods

Skills demonstrated (summary from focus groups activities): Knowledge of skills to solve problems involving: communication styles, incorporating experiences of students into instruction, learning styles, evaluating instructional methods, the role of significant peers and role models, employing instructional strategies within a diverse audience.

Piper’s Lesson

Piper is a first year teacher. She plans to teach a three-week unit on immigration. She wants to teach with a multicultural focus. Using one of the lesson plans she wrote while still in college, Piper has just placed her 2^nd hour class of 37 students into groups of five or six. She has randomly designated each group a racial or ethnic label, such as African-American, Native-American, Pacific Islander, etc. After the groups have received their designation, Piper has instructed them "to read the assigned chapter on immigration and look for reasons that your group came to America. I am going to ask for a volunteer from each group to portray someone from that cultural group and explain to the rest of the class why your people came to America."

A few of the students, who are primarily middle-class whites, with a few middle-class Hispanic and African Americans, are overheard saying "I want a different group...I don’t know who they are" and "Trade with me." They begin reading the chapter aloud, imitating various accents, until Piper demands that group members read silently. When time is up, Piper begins asking the group "who would like to go first to share with the class what they learned about their ethnic group?" There is much apathy and confusion. One student in the group designated "Native American" raises his hand and asks "can we use smoke signals to communicate?" The whole class laughs. Piper attempts to clarify her goals for the lesson by trying to explain "what I’m trying to do is get you to think about what it was like for your people to come to a new country. Do you know what I mean?" The class is silent. One student raises her hand and tells Piper that she doesn’t know what to do since she has never met someone from "Laos."

1. List the problem(s) you see in the above scenario in as much detail as possible.


2. If you were this teacher, how would you use the students’ peers and their role models in your instruction.


3. If you were to write a lesson plan with a "multicultural focus," what instructional strategies/methods might you use? In other words, what would you do differently from Piper? Please give specific examples to illustrate what you mean.


4. If you were this teacher, how would you incorporate your student’s previous personal experiences into the instructional plan?

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Please feel free to email Dr. Anthony Ambrosio, if you have any concern about the grant. Thank you.

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Last revision: Oct. 2006