How do you model and encourage effective peer-to-peer relationships? Describe and explain how you will teach a strategy to your students that encourages relationships that are accepting and responsive to student diversity. Target the choices you make to the age/content that you teach. If you teach adolescents, you might focus on the power of language to include or exclude. If you teach young children, you might focus on strategies for learning to include others in games at recess. Choose one idea and develop it well, ensuring that you are detailing both why you have chosen it and how you would enact it.
Write this piece of your advocacy action plan as a recommendation to your administration or school grade level team to support family/community collaboration to meet student learning needs. If you work in an educational setting outside of a school, please adjust the audience of your piece accordingly (you might write this for a manager or supervisor instead of principal).
Reflecting on the resources and community supports that you identified during the course readings and activities, identify three effective ways to involve or include families in your students’ learning experiences. Address how these will provide opportunities for family engagement that may not be typically present in your school/educational setting. Be sure that these are approaches that foster collaboration with families and can or would be supported by your school/educational site.
Throughout this course, you have developed a set of skills that deepens your understanding about your students and their lives and the impact that your teaching has on their experiences. What are you going to do with this knowledge? Educators are advocates for their students by default—you can choose to be proactive with this knowledge and work in areas/issues that are particularly meaningful for you. What role do you choose to take? How do you intend to advocate for your students? Identify at least two ways that you believe you can be a voice for your students and discuss how you envision yourself taking on this role.
