The culturally competent teacher should be able to use a variety of assessment techniques...

The culturally competent teacher should be able to use a variety of assessment techniques appropriate to diverse learners and accommodate sociocultural differences that affect learning.



Every student learns in their own way. There are many different types of learners. The three main types are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners.

Visual learners learn best by watching and seeing how things work. They need to visualize things. The best way to help these learners is to use demonstrations and visually pleasing materials to help paint mental pictures for the students. In my classroom, the teacher was teaching the students about vectors, and had to show how different amounts of force being pushed in different directions produces a vector. To demonstrate this, he used a desk and pushed the desk at a force of 10 Newtons. Whatever direction the desk went in, was the vector that it produced. By showing them, some people understood. Others were still confused.

Auditory learners learn best by listening and verbailizing, rather than reading written information. These learning are pretty easy to teach, as long as what you are teaching them sounds good and is nicely organized conversationally.

Kinisthetic learners are the last type, the ones who learn the best by doing hands-on activities. These are the children who don't learn not to touch the stove because its hot until they touch it themselves and learn that its hot! And then they'll never touch it again =] They like to learn through trial and error. The best way to help them is by doing many hands-on demonstrations that allow them to help, and do real life examples that can be discussed and solved.

There are many ways to help your different learners and assess them on what they know. I believe that assigning homework and collecting it can greatly help improve a students grade. Also, by giving them frequent quizzes that they know about in advance can help them keep up on their work so they will not get behind. Then when time for a test comes along, they will not need to cram because they have kept up on it all along. Because every student learns differently, and tests differently, it is so crucial that you have all those extra grades in there to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to do well. This can help a student do well in the course based on how hard they try, not how well they test. The only problem with this are when students are absent alot. At my school, 2 to 4 kids are absent everyday from my pre-calc class. I have mentioned before that there are only 10 students in the class. The students had a quiz to take today, and yesterday one of the girls came up to me and said, "Miss can you help me? Ive been absent." Of course I helped her. The only problem was that she didnt know even the basic things that were taught a month ago at the beginning of this chapter. So with what little time I had, I did my best to teach her the basic stuff she needed to know in order to finish the review by herself for homework. She is absent alot from class. I have been going twice a week, and I see her maybe once every other week. It is very hard to stick with the curriculum and have "No Child Left Behind", when there is only so much you can do, and only so much you can control in that students life.

No matter what type of learner a student is, however, they all come from different backgrounds. We do not know what goes on outside of the school's walls. Some students may work hard at a part-time job to help support their family, some may have kids already, and some may do all their homework and study all the time. A lot of teachers expect all their students to spend all their time on homework and studying, and nothing is more important than that. HAH! I find that funny, and completely impossible. Like I said, we don't know what those students go through outside of school. Kliewer discussed the differences in different learners and learning and how to handle it with students of disabilities. These students may not have disabilities, but in order to help them without crossing the line, we need to be flexible and help them as much as we can. If we don't help them and try to accomodate ourselves to their needs, they may never get the life they strive for.