Prompt #6 Lisa Delpit

"The culturally competent teacher communicates in ways that demonstrate sensitivity to sociocultural and linguistic differences, using a variety of verbal and non-verbal communication techniques that encourage positive social interaction and support learning in their classroom."

In my classroom, I saw a lot of verbal and non-verbal communication techniques that encourage and supported more learning in the classroom. As I have said many times before, I am in a first grade classroom, and we all know how 6 year old or so children can be. They love to talk to their friends and are usually full of excitement and energy. Towards the end of the year, the teacher in my classroom has started to talk to the children about becoming second graders. She has told the kids about the new responsibilities that come with being a big grown-up second grader, such as being quiet when the teacher s talking, and always listening to directions. When a child in the classroom does something that is immature for a second grader to do, the teacher immediately stops what is going on and says to the child, "Is that something a second grader does?" The child realizes what he/she did was wrong and that they should not do that. 

Lisa Delpit wrote an article entitled, "The Silenced Dialogue", and in it, she discusses the differences between direct and indirect commands. As soon as I heard the teacher ask that question, I thought of Delpit's article. The teacher was using an indirect command to sort of tell the child that he/she was doing something she was not supposed to be doing. Sometimes, indirect commands do not work because the child does not always catch on to the true command. But when I saw it work in this case, I was satisfied. 

I thought that that was a great connection to Lisa Delpit, and hope you do too!

Another thing that teacher in my classroom does is, when the children as a class are being too loud and are not using their" inside voices", she will simply go over to the light switch and shut of the lights. This is an example of a non-verbal communication technique that the children have caught onto. When they notice the lights go out, they recognize that they are being too loud and immediately quite down. 

Those are only a few examples that I have seen in my time tutoring in that classroom and I am sure I will begin to see a lot more!