Your School Can Taste This Good! Developing a Mindset that Celebrates School Diversity.

My daughter loves to get those really spicy ramen bowls. Watching her prepare her savory treat yesterday, I thought about how useless all of those spice packets would be if they weren't actually opened and sprinkled into the ramen. The packaging promises “Hot & Spicy” and “Scorchin' Sesame Shrimp Flavor!” It comes with three packets. If she had the packets in the ramen, but never opened them, it would taste super bland! It's obvious, right?

However, we do this in schools all the time! We have students in our classrooms who speak multiple languages; we have students who learn very differently than most of their peers; we have students who are totally into sports, or books, or music, or basketweaving; we have students who have amazing personal stories. And yet . . . too often teachers and schools leave the spices in their packages and end up with bland lessons that taste exactly the same as last year, or the same as any other lesson in any other generic classroom across the country.

Why do we do this? My hunch is that we don't always see these differences as spices to enjoy. We see them as obstacles to overcome or worse, ignore. To get the most out of our schools and our classrooms, we need to change our mindset from a deficit mentality to a celebratory mentality. (YAY SPICES!) Teachers should ask multilingual students what the vocabulary list words are in their native languages -they will find some fascinating cognates! They can have students learn how to write quotes or newspaper articles by interviewing the oldest person in their family. They should ask students who learn differently how they learned something they know a lot about. Maybe they'll give ideas that will support learning for all students. In short, we have the spices right there in front of us. Use them to make your classes & schools interesting and memorable. Here's a tautology for you: if it's memorable, they will remember it. Isn't that the whole point of education?

Diversity really just means variety, right? And in that case, every classroom is diverse, every school is diverse. No one student is exactly the same as another; no student learns in exactly the same way or has the same background as the student next to them. You can look at it as a problem to be solved. (Which isn't going to work, by the way. The only way to "solve" diversity is to make everyone the same. See the catch?) Or, you can look at it as a strength to be celebrated, a multitude of spices to joyfully sprinkle on the ramen of education. This shift in mindset is where we start. Where we go from here is limitless (and delicious)!