In this interview, Carrie Rothstein-Fisch, coauthor of the new ASCD book Managing Diverse Classrooms: How to Build on Students' Cultural Strengths (2008), discusses the ways that cultural values and beliefs affect both teachers' decisions around classroom organization and management and their students' responses to these strategies.
Written by Rothstein-Fisch and Elise Trumbull, the book traces the work of seven elementary school teachers in the Los Angeles, Calif., area who participated in the Building Cultures Project over a seven-year period. This collaborative action research project emerged in response to research that demonstrates the presence of cultural values conflicts in schools. The participating teachers, who each work with large numbers of immigrant Latino students, observed their students, conducted research, and developed new strategies for more culturally appropriate classroom organization and management.
Q: Many people may ask, "Why address diversity issues in the classroom?" Why do you think it is important to do so?
A: Children don't come to school as blank slates. They've been raised by families who instill important beliefs and values in them. When they come to school, if we ignore those values, then we fail to capitalize on the strengths that students already have and, ultimately, undermine their relationships with their families.
The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that understanding students' cultural values can help teachers reorganize classrooms, teaching, and learning, and it doesn't have to be done in huge, sweeping ways. It can be done in subtle ways that just make the classroom more harmonious, and everyone can have a better experience that way.
Q: Why is it important for teachers to recognize their own cultural beliefs, biases, and assumptions and examine them?
A: Here's the tricky thing about culture: it's very much like the air we breathe. It's invisible and, yet, it's essential. Culture affects our beliefs and, therefore, our behaviors. So, understanding one's own culture, particularly in a nonthreatening way, is an important first step towards recognizing that no one culture is right or wrong. Once we stop making hasty judgments about others, we can reveal new possibilities for learning and development that we otherwise couldn't see.
Q: Can you explain what you mean when you use the term "classroom management" in the book?
A: We take a very broad view of classroom management. We call the approach "classroom orchestration" because there is a palpable rhythm and harmony in classrooms where the teacher is working with the culture of the students rather than against it. Classroom management was never our goal in our project; it just was one of those things that popped up almost immediately. The teachers recognized that so much of the classroom practice was influenced by cultural values that they could start really experimenting with it in ways that got their creative juices flowing and helped them to set up learning activities and test preparation differently.
We view classroom orchestration as everything from ways of encouraging students and motivating them, to interactions with families, to ways of organizing subject-area learning and assessment. We look at the strengths of the families and also the physical organization of the classroom.
Q: How does effective classroom management—or even ineffective classroom management—have an impact on how students are learning in the classroom?
A: I've been in classrooms where it seems like 50 percent of the teacher's time is spent just managing the children—disciplining them, rearranging them, trying to give them rewards for right answers—and that's a lot of time away from instruction. Once the group-centered community is established, students are really good about helping each other. They notice when someone doesn't understand what the assignment is, and they immediately move to help.
Q: What else should readers know aboutManaging Diverse Classrooms?
A: This is the first book that I've ever seen that really uses culture as a starting point for looking at classroom organization and classroom orchestration. The other thing that I think makes the book important is that it is drawn from teachers' own best practices. That's incredibly significant. The book is filled with pages of the teachers' experiments, the outcomes, and their reflections.
