Lecture reflection

Yesterday in ''Practices'' course, we with the instructor ''Rasha Halat'' discussed a new lesson about Diversity in classroom. Dr. Rasha divided us to groups and every group explained one type of diversity. Beside the importance of this lesson, in this way we improved our skills in presenting and explaining our points of view toward an issue. I found this lesson a need to be understood by teachers. We all as teachers will face different types of students in a classroom, and we should learn how to make students overcome these differences. Socioeconomic status, backgrounds, Interests, age group, learning styles, personal traits, Abilities ( Linguistic, physical and cognitive), religion, political parties, Physical appearance, nationality, cultural background and gender, are all types of diversity in classroom, we discussed what each one of them really means, how they're manifested in the classroom , how they affect learners and how we should deal with them. My group's part was about physical appearance, where students in one class may have different visible aspects or outer appearance, for example; height ( tall and short ones), weight (fat and skinny ones), the presence of acne ( specially teenagers), clothes... Theses differences may affect learners negatively if students with such cases consider themselves different or other students make fun of them, they may hate school and their academic learning decreases. And here comes the teacher's role, where she/he has the power to make students overcome these differences by showing them that differences are ''normal'' and diversity exists and this can be done for example by showing students movies ( show difference in characters), tell stories, posters, activities to encourage students to think about their beliefs and look at the world in a different way. 

I like this topic it's very wide and important specially that these differences are found out side school in student's real life, so dealing with these differences in a healthy way will make students tolerate any type of difference outside the classroom and this is needed these days!