Question:

Teachers are professionals who must make many decisions throughout their day! Some decisions are immediate, spur of the moment choices like disciplining students or revising a lesson that is not working. Others decisions are more calculated, like developing a semester-long project designed to incorporate community resources into a problem-solving scenario. All the small decisions teachers make throughout their day likely support the two most important, larger overarching decisions that are made at the beginning of a learning experience and are based in part on many macrocultural and microcultural factors:

What is truly important for students to learn?

What is the best way to arrange experiences within the learning environment to maximize the probability that all students will learn what is intended for them to learn.?

Chapter 1 of the course text provides a number of different definitions for the term "culture." Wardle (2013) makes a distinction between cultural factors at the national level (macroculture) and cultural factors unique to a specific sub-population of people in local communities (microculture). This discussion provides you with additional practice identifying cultural influences on specific decisions teachers make to develop the most effective learning experiences possible, which further prepares you for the Week Six Final Project. You will use the websites that you and your peers developed as the subject of the first discussion. Recall that these websites showcase examples of innovative educational experiences designed to promote 21st-century skills while promoting culturally relevant pedagogy.

Initial Response: This two-part discussion requires you to first post a link to the website you developed last week and then feature one of the programs you researched and included in your website by providing a brief analysis and responding to three questions. It is essential that the required deadlines (end of Day 3) for posting your initial response be met so as to give everyone adequate time to review and select websites to respond to.

Analyze the decisions that needed to be made in the design and implementation of the school or program you selected and speculate about the macrocultural and microcultural influences that led to the decisions made. Your initial response must also answer the following questions for the school/program examined:

What decisions, in general, did the program developer(s) and/or other professional(s) need to make in order to plan the school or program?

What macroscopic cultural influence likely supported the development and implementation of the program?

What microscopic cultural influence likely supported the development and implementation of the program?