25 Biggest Mistakes Teachers Make and How to Avoid Them

Mistake 10: Racial and Cultural Discrimination
ethnic background, religious orientation,
or physical or mental challenge.
Effective teachers know that they
must possess adequate knowledge of
diverse cultures. They must embrace
and celebrate their students’ differences
and reject any notions of deficit
concerning a particular culture
(Gersten, 1996). All children want and
deserve to have their teachers like
them. Whenever they have a new
teacher, their emotional antennae go
up, searching the teacher’s face and
body gestures for any sign of love and
acceptance or of dislike and rejection.
Student antennae are sensitive to the
SCENARIO 10.5
Separate and Unequal Treatment
subtlest slights. Teachers need to be
aware of their feelings about certain
groups of children, particularly
minority youth or children who are
different. They cannot hide them from
the children. A candid inventory of
prejudiced feelings and childhood
teachings about other groups would
help teachers take a good look at their
feelings and attitudes and make
changes where necessary. Prejudice
exacts a heavy toll on those who
would entertain it and on those
who have the misfortune of encountering
it. Prejudice has no place in a
classroom.
In the first grade, the teacher put my desk in the back of a room and separated me from
the rest of the class. Her reason for doing this was because I did not speak English.
How to teach language minority
students has been a source
of controversy and debate for a long
time. Researchers have offered a variety
of techniques and approaches for
teaching limited-English-proficient
(LEP) children, but none advocate singling
out LEP students and isolating
them by banishing them to the peri phery
of the classroom where they
become out of sight and out of mind.
The teacher’s actions may be rooted in
racism, but her fear of not being able
to rise to the challenge presented by
LEP children also seems evident.
Teachers who successfully teach
LEP children would never employ
such a discriminatory practice. They
realize that isolating children because
they are a teaching challenge violates
all the rules of effective pedagogy.
The charge of teachers is to teach
all children, regardless of the challenge
they bring to teaching them.
Delgado-Gaitan (1990) contends that
language may be a major source of
student academic failure.
Torrey (1983) proposes that poor
academic performance of children
speaking nonstandard English may be
attributed more to the school’s reaction
to the nonstandard English than
to the grammar itself. The same may
be true of limited-English-proficient
children. The teacher’s reaction may
be more of a factor. The teacher in this
scenario had an unacceptable reaction
to the student’s language. Effective
teachers react appro priately to students
with language limitations. There are
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