As some of you may have seen, the Education Week video team had a piece on PBS NewsHour last week on the increasingly pressing topic of better preparing teachers to work in diverse classrooms. The segment looked at an ambitious program run by Illinois State University that places education students—mostly white, mostly middle-class—in high-minority Chicago neighborhoods for one month during the summer. The participants not only do a teaching stint in local schools. They also live with host families and work on community-service projects.
The idea is to give these prospective educators a more nuanced understanding of their future students’ lives and needs by immersing them in their communities. And there’s some evidence that the approach makes a difference: More than 80 percent of the teachers who’ve come through the program remain in the classroom after five years—far above the average for high-needs urban schools.
You can watch the full segment here. And—bonus—for those you who are interested in digging a little deeper into the topic of cultural competency in teaching, our video team has put together a couple of helpful web-only compilations from the footage they gathered while reporting the story.
Watch the videos and read the full article here: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2016/09/what_is_culturally_competent_teaching_videos.html?qs=cultural+competence
