Culturally Responsive Morning Meeting (Part 2)

Morning meeting is such a crucial part of the school day. This is where you create a warm, welcoming classroom community. Morning meeting is the perfect time to not only bond as a classroom family but to teach acceptance and talk about diversity. Cultural responsive teaching is having those difficult conversations with your students about diversity. Culturally responsive does not mean ignoring people's differences but acknowledging them and celebrating them.

What are the goals of Culturally Responsive Teaching?

• Creating a safe, accepting and successful learning environment for all • Increasing awareness of global issues • Strengthening cultural consciousness • Strengthening intercultural awareness • Teaching students that there are multiple historical perspectives • Encouraging critical thinking • Preventing prejudice and discrimination

Therefore, I created a powerpoint that allows you to go deeper with your morning meeting and make your students’ more aware of the world around them. They say that "a picture is worth 1,000 words" therefore use powerful pictures to have powerful morning meeting discussions. I created the Culturally Responsive Morning Meeting to inspire meaningful conversations.

One section of the powerpoint has the students comparing and contrasting photos. This is an important skill for all students to practice critical thinking skills. However, this is an important part of the speaking section on the ACCESS assessment (for ELLs). I includes sentence starters so that all students can practice speaking in complete sentences when they are responding.

I also included pictures of kids around the world and landmarks around the world. The students will simply talk about what they see in the picture. You can extend their vocabulary by using the sentence starters “I observe” or “I noticed”.