lgbtq students Search Results

Making School a Safe Place for LGBTQ Students

…percent of these students have experienced verbal harassment and 66 percent have been discriminated against based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. As a result of feeling more isolated and unsafe, many of these students miss school, avoid bathrooms, and stay away from locker rooms. Students who experience more victimization are also more likely to have lower GPAs and to report feeling depressed. And it’s not just other students who create this hostile climate for their LGBTQ peers. Over half of the more than 10,000 students surveyed reported hearing biased remarks from school staff, and school staff often fail…

Time to Take a Look at Your Dress Code

…Southern European ancestry. I’m also not a fan of dress codes but we are, ostensibly, educating students for future careers, especially white collar, professional careers (my opinion on the “all students must go to college” meme so popular in schools today is not printable), and the dress code should be targeted to dressing the students for the careers we supposedly want them to enter. On a related topic, one school I worked in forbade students from wearing, among other things, flip-flops. but teachers weren’t so constrained. A fairly basic dress code concern should be that dress codes for students should…

Episode 235 Transcript

…to not cause your students harm during the school day. So we can quickly, all of us together who work in schools, we can rise to a fluency and ability level where we’re not saying the wrong things or we’re not making mistakes that are hurting our students and hurting our gender-expansive students. I will say though this “not causing them harm” is a starting point, right? If you ask most teachers, like, was it a success today because you didn’t harm students? Like, no. Like, I can do more, I can do better. Like, we really want to get…

Let’s Talk About the Leader in Me

…no respect for adults working in the building. This year the students are kind and courteous and I could not be happier where I am now. I should also note that I teach special education to students with emotional impairments and Autism and have found that LIM is a waste of time for my students because it is far too abstract for them. My students need clear and consistent positive and negative consequences and for $40,000, LIM offers neither. anonymous Thank you all for your insight regarding this program. As a parent, and school board member, I became interested in…

Episode 115: Time to Take a Look at Your Dress Code

…a rule against large afros. And so talk a little bit about why these types, it sort of seems very obvious to me, but talk a little bit about what the problem is with those types of rules. DILLARD: Well the new stories that I’ve seen that go viral tend to be centered around a black student’s hairstyle, it may be culturally relevant to them. So you’re singling out a group of students based on their cultural, their heritage, or their ancestral roots, which is problematic to say the least. We’re basically asking these students to erase who they are…

Making School Better for Gender-Expansive Kids

…that people ask you to use to describe who they are,” Edwards says. “And this applies to gender-expansive, transgender, and nonbinary students too. So what I recommend for schools is that their policies just say, Here at our school we use the name and pronouns our students ask us to use, no questions. By lowering the temperature on names and pronouns, we get (this issue) out of the way so our students can focus on learning. We don’t want to be spending all of our time trying to navigate concerns like this.” Using a student’s chosen name and pronouns can…

Why White Students Need Multicultural and Social Justice Education

…to teach our White students about what their cultural background is and their ethnic backgrounds so they can understand and think about their language and religions going back to their ancestry. Lessons on their culture may help them start to understand how privilege and White supremacy began. So begin with going back and taking some time to help your students understand that. You can also work with students by exploring community history and cultural influence. One of the things you can teach your students, your White students, is in history. Many White immigrants have been accused of marginalizing other White…

5 Fantastic Ideas for Collaboration Projects

…12th-grade humanities students create a voter’s guide for an upcoming local election. Students researched local politicians who were up for election, who they were running against, and their platforms. “As journalists,” the project summary says, “students are responsible for gathering, evaluating, and verifying information along the way.” You can view a sample of student work here. The Tech: “We used Spinndle as our co-learning space where students posted work at various checkpoints to the class feed,” Frank says. “They engaged in peer critique, iteration, and worked through problems through the platform. They also used Spinndle for project management, kind of…

How to Keep Teaching Well When DEI is Under Attack

…students talking, especially small groups, where there will be less pressure. Incorporate more think time after asking a question to allow students to process the language they need to respond. Activate background knowledge before giving students a text so that students who are less familiar with the language can feel confident as they read. Avoid qualitative labeling of languages: Don’t treat or label a student’s home language as incorrect or “slang” or refer to Standardized English as “correct English.” These behaviors don’t recognize the inherent value of students’ home languages and treat them as lesser than. Practice 3: Media Literacy…