Diversity

As I have been doing my observations I have not ran in to very many diversity issues in the classroom.  The two classes that I observe do not have many children in the class that are different from others  These to classes are both in fairly well off school areas as well as being mostly Caucasian.

I do want to talk about diversity in behavior as part of this.  I was in a class the other day that was a very well run class as well as being very structured.  For the most part this class had no behavioral issues but did have a couple of students that she monitored a little closer.  The first student I felt was just ambivalent to school in general.  I could see that she would monitor to keep him on track and then he was so great to get things done and done well.  The second child was monitored because he was more active in class and not able to sit and get his work done as well. I did feel that as I observed it was an attention thing.  He wanted her to know where he was and what he was doing at all times.  I have not seen how teachers deal with issues in the class very much and hope that as I go along in the program I can get more training in this area as it is a concern for me.  I want to learn how behavior issues could and should be handled as I know there are students with issues that cause it to be really hard for them but I also can see that some behavior is just for show and attention and I would love to learn how to deal with this to not make it a bigger issue.

I love the idea of exceptional and gifted children in a classroom together.  I believe that sometimes pairing them up could be a help to both. I also feel that sometimes you need to have activities that you can have gifted students work on together at their own pace so as to have time with the exceptional students as one on one with the teacher.