Group Differences

Overall, I really enjoyed our group differences forum. I think all of the groups did a great job presenting their topics, and I really learned a lot about the different types of students that will be in my future classroom. The two topics that I think I learned the most about were gender and English Language Learners. Before our discussion, I did not know that most teachers generally favored the boys in their class over the girls. In the classrooms that I have observed, I have never noticed any of the teachers treating the boys better than the girls or giving them more attention, so I was surprised that gender was such a big issue in our schools. Now that I am aware that there is a gender bias in schools, I can make sure to not give special treatment to the boys in my class during my internship. The second group I learned a lot about during our discussion was ELLs. As I said in class, I have never really considered the possibility of having an ELL in my future classroom. I think this is one of the groups that tends to be overlooked a lot in our education courses, and I am really glad we talked a little about how we can help a student in our future classrooms that speaks a foreign language. Although I feel like I learned a lot about ELLs, I wish we could have spent more time talking about strategies we can use in our classroom to help children who speak a foreign language. I feel like we only spoke about ELL students for a few minutes, and I would have liked to have a longer conversation about this particular group. 

 Because I do not usually talk a lot in our class discussions, my goal for our group differences forum was to make at least one comment each day. In short, I accomplished my goal. On the first day, I contributed to our discussion by asking my classmates questions about children who live in poverty. I also commented on a couple of the other groups' topics. On the second day, I spoke a lot when the ELL group was presenting because I was genuinely curious if other people in the educational field felt as unprepared as I did to help ELL students. Although I do not usually speak up in class, I felt comfortable talking during our discussion because I saw how respectful all of my other classmates were being. When I was thinking about how the group difference forum could be improved, my first initial thought was that I would have liked to do it a little earlier in the semester so we could have continued talking about the different groups when we covered different topics like classroom management and the theories of development. Now that I think about it though, I am glad we waited until the end because I would not have felt as comfortable speaking up during our discussion if we had done it earlier in the semester. The only suggestion I have for improving the forum is to schedule two whole class periods for the discussion, so we do not have to cut our conversations short. Other than this one suggestion, I really did enjoy the group differences forum. I learned a lot from each of the groups, and I was glad we ended our time together on such a powerful topic.