Overview: All students bring their own experiences and diverse linguistic practices to the classroom, and these diverse ways of knowing and speaking about the world should be viewed as assets to enhance the learning and discourse in the classroom.
Example Strategies:
| Strategy | Description and Resources |
|---|---|
| Clear Norms for Participation |
The norms of social studies discourse are different from those of everyday speech and need to be made explicit to allow for more equitable participation. Discourse skills need to be taught and developed over time. These skills include listening for understanding, asking clarifying questions, probing for evidence, supporting claims with evidence, disagreeing respectfully, explaining ideas, and many others. To build these skills over time, teachers must name and introduce them, model and share examples of the norms in action, provide supports for students in using the skills such as sentence stems and structured protocols, and then provide feedback and reflection opportunities. |
| Valuing Diverse Perspectives | Create the norm that diverse perspectives are valuable to the learning process and should be invited and discussed. Provide sentence stems or structures to help students surface different ideas during discourse. Model how to thoughtfully consider all ideas on the table through revoicing, clarifying, and adding on. Encourage respectful disagreement and arguing from evidence. Ask groups to highlight interesting disagreements that came up to discuss as a class. Share the value of multiple diverse perspectives in science.
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| Linguistic Inclusion |
Language diversity includes speaking different languages, but also the wide variety of linguistic resources individuals use. See the tips in the article below to get to know your own linguistic background, learn about those of your students, become aware of linguistic assumptions and how they can affect the classroom, and recognize linguistic diversity as a resource.
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| Language Support for Emerging Multilingual Students | Provide supports for students to learn social studies content and practices while also building their English language skills.
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