Nathan Tanner

My Philosophy on Addressing Learner Diversity

The range of diversity among students in the classrooms is rapidly changing, and is vastly
different from my own schooling experience. Students differ from one another not just in terms
of sex, gender, and ability, but in terms of sexuality, religion, race, ethnicity, language
proficiency, home life, socioeconomic status, and more. With such a broad range of diversity in
contemporary classrooms, I recognize that the students I am teaching now and will teach in the
near future need teachers who can provide carefully planned instructional support. This includes
creating scaffolds within lesson design, modeling learning tasks, providing direct and explicit
instruction of content, and offering language assistance through curriculum design. Furthermore,
such a diverse range of students require teachers who are assertive and can adequately manage
their diverse needs, opinions, and beliefs.
I believe that in order to address the range and varying levels of diversity present in
contemporary schools, teacher must create community, provide instructional scaffolds, and
create high levels of engagement.
1. Creating Community
I intend to address learner diversity by taking the time to get to know my students and establish
caring relationships with them. I believe that through home-school communication (which
includes more than an occasional email home), individual student progress interviews, specific
praise, teacher proximity, and direct observation, I can prepare lessons that address my students
learning needs, that will help them access the content I am teaching, that will connect them to
their respective communities, and help them feel that they are learning in a safe, comfortable
environment.

Nathan Tanner
2. Providing Instructional Scaffolds
While I acknowledge that instructional scaffolding includes building learning tasks into lessons
that ultimately build upon one another for some greater learning purpose, I also believe that
helping students make relevant connections between their world and the course content is a form
of scaffolding and it must be addressed. I hope to help students practically apply what they learn
in my class to their individual lives. This way, the content becomes uniquely tangible to each
student because of their individual culture and/or lived experiences. As I work to scaffold
instruction by utilizing graphic organizers, visual aids, Think-Pair-Shares, and more, I intend to
model the learning activities in my classroom to help students visualize the methods and
strategies that are essential to helping them learn and digest the content.
3. Create High Levels of Engagement
While I still have much to learn about engaging diverse learners, I believe that one thing I can
use to meet the needs of diverse learners is passion for the content and the students I am
teaching. I believe that students respond well to teachers who are excited to work with them, and
who are passionate about the material they are responsible for sharing. I believe that my own
experiences learning Spanish, my excitement about the world we live in, and my passion for
helping others make connections between the past and the present will help me work hard, reflect
on my mistakes, and develop good strategies for working with a range of diverse learners.