Schools today are very different. The "typical" classroom of the 50's and 60's no longer exists. Many teachers expect to go into their first teaching job and have twenty-five students of a particular background or culture, but today's students vary in many different ways and minority education is prevalent in today's society. Teachers need to realize that their classroom is going to have a variety of students from other cultures. The following web sites can aid a classroom teacher with the different minority groups that may be represented in their classroom.

1.  Many students in the classroom today experience language barriers. At the web site for the Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs, a variety of information on bilingual education is available. It describes which students in the classroom are considered bilingual and how prevalent it is in the classroom today. The site also offers a variety of educational links to sites that will aide teachers with their bilingual students.

2.  The Teacher Talk web site concentrates on cultural diversity in the classroom. It discusses when the teacher is considered the minority and how to cope with a culturally diverse classroom. This web site even covers how to work with immigrant children coming into a classroom. There is also a wonderful lesson plan on how to teach about the biases towards immigrants and why these perceptions are wrong.

3.  Helping Language Minority Students After They Exit from Bilingual/ESL Programs: A Handbook for Teachers is a resource for mainstream classroom teachers (K-12) who want to provide language minority students with additional support to help with their transition from the ESL classroom into the classes where English is the medium of instruction. This handbook can be used to increase mainstream classroom teachers' awareness of some of the factors that may contribute to difficulties encountered by language minority students.

4.  Having an ESL classroom is a very new subject in education today. Everything ESL is a web site for ESL, bilingual and classroom teachers working with K-12 language minority students. Resources include information, staff inservicing, lesson plans, activities, and bulletin boards. This site is valuable to every type of teacher who has minority students in their classroom.

5.  Meeting the Needs of Gifted and Talented Minority Language Students is a wonderful web site. The site discusses how minority students are overlooked as being talented and gifted. It explains that just because a child is not proficient in the English language, it does not mean they do not perform on a high academic level. The site also provides links to sites that discuss gifted programs that are appropriate for minority students.

Created by Meghann Cleary on November 14, 1999, for PSY 306.