Best Practices Blog

     I chose to read the Preparing Tomorrow's Leaders blog on the Best Practices website. This blog talks about a teacher who teaches in an EL school and uses Expeditionary Learning in her classroom as instruction. The teacher writes that as she began teaching, she tried to steer toward being the "fun" teacher, and while students enjoyed her class, she was worried that they may not have learned the skills they needed.
     She changed her teaching style to more hands-on learning and saw a significant change in her students' grades. Expeditionary Learning is very similar to what I know as Problem-Based Learning. Her students took part in authentic, meaningful assignments that required them to use skills other than the knowledge gained from the CSO's and skill drills. Through these assignments, students are made to make decisions based on their own judgment and beliefs, determine fact from fiction, derive information from many sources of media, construct projects, and reflect on their learning and findings.
     I think this blog supports culturally responsive teaching because the teacher demonstrates how the students are still learning and succeeding, but are doing so in a more relatable and authentic way. The students are able to use their own devices to come to an understanding and skill-build by using real-world experiences and issues that are relevant to their lives.

Preparing Tomorrow's Leaders