Ashleigh DeLizza

    When it comes to my cultural experiences in literacy classrooms, I never had a personal negative experience. However, I remember watching some of my friends face negative affects while reading To Kill a Mockingbird  by Harper Lee. I remember them being uncomfortable with the racial slurs being read aloud. I also wish that there were more culturally advanced literature and lessons within my classes. Other than this, I cannot recall many issues I saw within my past literacy classrooms.      Being a culturally  responsive educator does not mean to just implement cultural books every now and then. Rather, it is a teacher who implements cultural diversity into daily lessons. It is someone who embraces and promotes cultural diversity. There is a lot of things that we, as educators, can improve to make our classrooms more culturally responsive. A few ways to do this is by allowing the students to relate to the ...

     When I was in high school, I remember we did an assignment where we watched the 1996 version of Romeo and Juliet. We watched the movie over a few day period. We wrote down our thoughts and notes as we watched. Afterwards, we read the original Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. We compared the similarities and differences between both story lines. This activity was fun and engaging for the class. We enjoyed reading and watching the story and seeing how time and perspective can have serious influences on a topic. This lesson for high school was good with Romeo and Juliet. However, I believe that if you switched the contents of the lesson, it could be used for younger grade levels.     If I were to pick three tips for people writing lesson plans, they would be: use engaging materials, create a consistent schedule, and prepare your materials in advance. By using engaging materials, students will be mo...