50
No matter your high school classroom setting, cultural differences will be a part of students’ daily experience. They may feel out of place in their school, or they may not be sure how to welcome others into their space. High schoolers may even rely on stereotypes and biases that keep them from making connections with their peers.
Whether you’re a new teacher or a veteran, you can help teens move past these conversational and relational roadblocks and include cultural awareness in your lesson plans from the start. Learn how to plan lessons for cultural differences in high school with a few tried-and-true teaching tips, words of wisdom from teachers who have been there, and high-quality resources that work well with any multicultural goal in your curriculum.
1. Make cultural conversations a regular activity
It’s tempting to leave important cultural conversations out of your instruction. After all, you may accidentally offend someone, cause conflict, or single a student out while trying to make your classroom more accepting and multicultural. But avoiding these moments just makes the conversations harder to have in the long run.
Avoid awkwardness around cultural conversations by planning these discussions regularly in your lesson plans. Have students reflect on how characters’ cultures may affect their decisions, or explore historical conversations on how cultures have influenced world politics. Moderate these discussions to ensure everyone’s perspectives are heard. These conversations build community in the classroom and go a long way in making students feel safe and accepted.
Focus on identity and feeling like you belong
No one wants to feel singled out among their peers, but sometimes the pressure to fit in can feel just as uncomfortable. Show students how understanding and honoring their identity can be the key to feeling like they really belong, both in their peer groups and in your classroom.
Identity Unit | Diversity Inclusion Belonging vs Fitting in | Lessons & Projects
By LifeFluent – Health Education
Grades: 7th-12th
Subjects: Character Education, School Counseling
Use this all-inclusive identity unit to help students embrace their true identities and feel comfortable in their peer groups. With four full lessons, handouts, a 75-slide presentation, and hexagonal thinking activities, the resource has everything you need to address important identity topics as they relate to inclusion and respect.
2. Add cultural goals to your lesson plans
Learning how to lesson plan for new teachers includes setting learning goals for the lesson and the unit as a whole. How can you fit a focus on cultural differences into your lesson plan without distracting from these academic objectives?
Fold cultural goals into your lesson plans to ensure that you’re addressing diversity throughout your instruction. Possible goals may include addressing student identity, using writing prompts to reflect on student experiences, and using a diverse collection of media and reading materials to address as many learning styles and backgrounds as possible.
Explore cultural diversity from an SEL perspective
Cultural identity and diversity are often addressed separately from social-emotional learning, but when students have a strong sense of their identities, they can feel more at ease with their emotions and experiences. Include SEL activities for high school that address cultural identity and heritage in your lesson plans, and help students find pride and belonging in the most important parts of themselves.
Cultural Diversity Lesson Plans – Diversity, Race, Bias, Identity Health Unit
By Health Education Today – Health and PE Resources
Grades: 9th-12th
Subjects: Civics, Health, Social Emotional Learning
Standards: CCSS RST.9-10.2, 3, 4, 6; WHST.9-10.1, 4
This ready-to-go set of activities on cultural diversity and race is easy to incorporate into your SEL lesson today. The CCSS-aligned resource comes with three versions of an informative slideshow, exams and answer keys, student examples, and guided teacher directions to keep your instruction focused.
3. Use diverse voices in your curriculum
One of the easiest ways to plan lessons for cultural differences in high school is to bring new voices into your curriculum, whether that’s in student reading material, new perspectives in social studies, or the historical discoveries and current scientific research from different parts of the world.
Teacher Tip
Give students lots of exposure to a wide range of cultures. Repeated exposure builds understanding and respect. The goal is to normalize differences through consistent, meaningful experiences.
-Laura from Oodles of Music
Bring in writing from Hispanic authors during Hispanic Heritage Month in the fall, or show lectures from prominent Black figures as an activity for Black History Month in February. Choose reading passages written by people from unrepresented parts of the world, or have students research the lives of Indigenous groups from Oceania, North America, or Asia. Whichever method you choose, ensure that students have exposure to that person’s exact words and experiences, rather than a historian’s perspective.
Diverse Voices in STEM: Research Project with 175+ Mathematicians and Scientists
By Creative Access
Grades: 6th-12th
Subjects: Math, Science
Incorporate diverse voices from the 20th century into your math or science classroom with a list of over 175 individuals, a project choice board, and a research outline.
4. Find ways for families to share their cultures
You’ll find a wealth of multicultural experiences represented right in your classroom! Students from different ethnic, cultural, or religious backgrounds can be the experts in their own lives — and their families’ experiences are important to share and understand.
Invite family members to speak to your class, or host multicultural festivals for families to bring in food or artifacts. These interactions can help you build relationships with students and clear up any future misunderstandings as you make a genuine effort to understand their perspective and honor their families.
Teacher Tip
Contact the families of your students who represent various ethnic, racial, and/or religious groups and ask if a parent or other caregiver would be willing to talk to your class about their backgrounds. If they agree, videotape or record the adults when they are speaking to your class so you can create a bank of resources for future use.
-Susan from The ESL Nexus
5. Embrace student experiences and perspectives
No matter what culture students are from, they’ve likely experienced cultural differences in one way or another by the time they’ve reached your high school classroom. Promote inclusion in the classroom and validate students’ experiences by allowing them to share times when they’ve been misunderstood due to cultural differences, or when they’ve misunderstood others.
Incorporate these questions and experiences into warm-up journal prompts for high school students to reflect on important moments in their lives. You can also invite students to share about moments when they’ve felt their cultures isolated them from others, or when they noticed that cultural differences were affecting their friends or loved ones.
6. Move past bias and stereotypes
Finding a way to address cultural stereotypes while not reinforcing them can be a struggle, even for the most seasoned teachers. Have students acknowledge the biases and stereotypes that have negatively affected them, or if they’re a mature enough group, beliefs they’ve had about other cultures that have negatively affected their view of other people.
Teacher Tip
Share advertising flops. Companies with enormous budgets and whole teams of highly educated people still royally mess things up due to cultural differences they were unaware of, and students LOVE seeing that. It makes it easier for us to be gracious when someone else’s cultural blinders are causing problems.
–Rike Neville
Explore the roots of these biases with historical studies or a series of stories and books written during a specific time. Discuss whether “positive” stereotypes are as harmful as negative ones, and see if students can identify further-reaching impacts and implications of judging groups of people with harmful perspectives.
Introduction to Stereotypes Microaggressions Privilege & Bias Inclusion Activity
By Informed Decisions
Grades: 6th-12th
Subjects: Family and Consumer Science, Social Emotional Learning
This engaging lesson is designed to foster meaningful conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom by challenging students to analyze real-world cases and cultural understanding cards and categorize them into one of five key concepts: microaggressions, stereotyping, overt discrimination, fragility, and bias.
7. Model lifelong learning and reflection
Understanding cultural differences is a task that everyone in your class needs to take on — including you as the teacher. Modeling the process of exploring and accepting those differences can be an eye-opening moment for both you and the students, and it can make students from different cultures feel more secure in your understanding of their situations.
To show that self-reflection is one of the most important life skills activities for high school students, tell stories about your own cultural experiences, including times when you were misjudged or unfairly treated. You can also write along with your students on reflective journal prompts or respond during discussion on cultural differences. Most importantly, show students that you are open-minded to their needs and experiences, including changing part of your curriculum if they tell you that it makes them uncomfortable or singled out.
Find opportunities for inclusion in all instruction
Learning how to plan lessons for cultural differences in high school doesn’t need to be a complicated part of your teaching process. When multicultural acceptance is one of your core values as a teacher, you’ll find that it makes its way into your lesson planning, instruction, and relationships with students—and that your teaching and classroom community will improve as a result. Find more high school resources to address cultural differences and diversity, and show students how valuable their membership in your school and classroom is.