Language Diversity and Learning

In the reading about language diversity, Lisa Delpit provides the reader with a vignette of what an elementary school teacher experienced when she used a different code or variety of the English language in her new classroom with a student who had prior experience with her instruction. The beauty of young children is that they have no filter. They speak what they are thinking and surely enough, the student called her out for switching it up. This is something I constantly reflect on because I catch myself slipping from very formal, academic language to everyday friendly banter with my students on a daily basis. None of them have ever commented on it and I justify it as a means of keeping them engaged and alert. However, I am worried that I may be sacrificing exposure to an alternative, more academic form, when I do this. One of the suggestions made in the paper was to record myself teaching so that I can focus in on the vocabulary that I am using, more specifically when I am questioning the students.

            This brings me to my other source of anxiety. My questioning style. It is something I am constantly working on because in my high paced classroom, there isn’t much time to dig deeper or provide students with the appropriate waiting time to respond to my questions. One way I’ve tried to circumvent this area of weakness is by starting my classes off with a warm-up question that is higher up in Bloom’s taxonomy than perhaps the type I ask as I’m zooming along. The warm-ups are done in writing and answers are shared out in a huddle after the first five minutes of class. They frequently have to do with something that ties the previous days lesson with the current lesson and therefore require students to go out on a limb to try and answer them. This means that I constantly remind them that there is no right or wrong answer. I am looking for critical thinking. In my search for examples of good questioning versus not so great ones, I came across a Ted Talk video where Joe Burgum, a dyslexic learner, shares his experience in the classroom and his realization that “a good question often leads to new collaboration and a great question is often the predecessor to a brilliant idea”. Thats what I would like to achieve in my classroom because in science, the right questions lead to the best inquiry based learning.