Instructional Content and Implications

Eliminating Classroom Bias

Name

Course

Faciilitator

Date

Science Lesson Plan: Learning the Seasons (primary school)

Objective: To teach the students about the seasons of the year: Summer, Spring, Winter, & Fall.

Materials Needed: Arts and craft supplies, Construction paper calendar, four children’s books and photos of each season.

Procedure:

Show pictures of every season to the students. I will start with spring and go up to winter, and with the visual aid of pictures, I will explain each season’s weather.

I will then read out four short books for children, each of them with a story about a season. This should give the kids something that is familiar that they can associate each season with.

The students will be put at different tables, and handed art supplies. A big piece of construction paper will be split into four. In each quarter, the students should do art that reflects every season. They can make flowers for spring, a sun for summer, a snowman for winter and for fall, they could make leaves.

The students need ample time to finish this project. I will go around helping them construct the pieces of art and labeling each season. I will frequently ask questions regarding other things each season includes, for example, when it is summer, it is time to go to the beach, and during winter, people wear coats, and keep warm.

The arts will be hanged on the walls when they are done with the coloring.

To determine how successful the class was, I will have a wrap-up with the students, and then a question and answer session about each season. I will then ask them the kinds of things they can associate with every season, as I point out the arts they made.

Homework: For their take away assignment, I will have them draw one thing they like about every season, and give them 2 days to complete the task.

Implications of Social Class to Schooling

Parents’ social class impacts greatly how well children perform in school, according to a research reported by The Guardian. This contrasts to other parenting techniques like reading bedtime stories. Social class affects schooling to a large extent in the United States.

One of the impacts of social class to schools is that it creates a cycle of inequity among students of different schools. Individuals in the upper class are more likely to attend higher quality schools and of greater prestige, compared to those attended by the low class. Consequently, members of the higher class tend to receive good educated, therefore having higher incomes. They will be able to offer more educational advantages, such as good private schooling, to their kids as well, and the cycle continues. To deal with this kind of disparity, there is need to improve the quality of education in our public schools. The lesson plan above is one that is thorough and focuses on the students’ understanding of the lesson. The kind of quality education that will see students from the upper class come to public schools is what is needed.

Research reports that children from low class homes develop academic skills slowly, compared to their counterparts from higher social class (Berns, 2015). The school systems in low class communities are often not well resourced, therefore negatively affecting the students’ academic progress. This leads to inadequate education among those families, and increase the number of dropout, therefore affecting children’s academic performance and perpetuating the low class status of the community. The lesson plan intends to give all the students an equal platform to excel. It gives the students assignment after the lesson to make sure that he low-class students also go through the lessons at home with their parents.

Avoiding Gender Bias in the Classroom

Teachers can be tempted to sometimes discriminate one gender when assigning tasks and undertaking other class activities. This, according to Larson & Keiper (2013) mostly enhances one gender’s academic performance and limits the other’s academic performance. One form of such gender bias is stereotyping. In the classroom, one way of eliminating any of the 7 forms of discrimination is by avoiding sexual stereotypes. In giving out the tasks, as teacher I could assign them in throughout the classroom in complete disregard of the gender.

The other instructional strategy that would make sure that any form of gender bias is eliminated would be promoting integration in the classroom (Pellegrini 2011). Students of both genders can work together in class projects and other classroom activities, so as to provide a cross-sex collaboration. This will also give the teacher a sense of how the students feel about the climate of the classroom in terms of the cultural background. A teacher should promote as much as possible gender integration in the classroom, and this way he/she would have eliminated gender bias that could have occurred.

Another great way to eliminate bias is by holding the same academic and behavioral expectations for students of both sexes. This practice can produce a positive impact on the change of behavioral patterns. Usually, students recognize any patterns of treatment, and immediately realize the acceptable behavior for males and what is expected of females in terms of attitudes behavior, appearance, roles, social relations, and occupations. It is paramount that the teacher minimize discrepancies in acceptance of the types of behavior and academic achievement based on the student’s gender.

With a diverse class in terms of social class, the teacher needs to have a well laid down plan on how he/she plans to execute the lesson plan. The first implementation step would to know the type of students in the class. They are diverse, but how diverse? Are some of them physically challenged? Do they come from different social classes? Are they racially diverse? All these questions are important in tailoring the lesson to suit the needs of the students.

Accommodating everyone is part of the implementation of the lesson in a way as to consider the diversity of the class. There are always the adjustments that the teacher and school personnel can make to maximize the learning as well as the social well-being of individual students. These can involve activities like arranging desks so that a student using a walker can navigate the classroom with ease. The activities used in the class could be those that are of standard quality and affordable, so that the student’s from low-social class will be able to buy them, in case they would want to. Whatever the diversity is, there is always something the teacher could to integrate the whole class, irrespective of their different characteristics.

References

Berns, R. (2015). Child, family, school, community: Socialization and support (10th ed.).

Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.

Larson, B., & Keiper, T. (2013). Instructional Strategies for Middle and High School. Hoboken:

Taylor and Francis.

Pellegrini, A. (2011). The Oxford handbook of the development of play. New York: Oxford

University Press.

Shepherd, J. (2010, December 7). Social class has more effect on children than good parenting,

study finds. Retrieved November 20, 2015, from www.theguardian.com/education/2010 /dec/07/social-class-parenting-study