Educators Perceived Preparedness Regarding the Needs of Culturally Diverse Students

Abstract

With the growing military population in Northern New York, and therefore culturally diverse population, we need to evaluate the perceived preparedness of classroom teachers regarding the needs of culturally diverse students. The purpose of this study is to evaluate how prepared educators feel to teach culturally diverse students. The researcher chose to conduct questionnaires to K-12 classroom teachers in the Smith Central School District. Through analyzing the questionnaire responses, the researcher found that the majority of the participants in the study reported that they did not feel their undergraduate and/or graduate work prepared them to teach diverse students. This is disheartening, because only when we begin to turn out teachers who feel prepared to work with culturally diverse students and who are willing to embrace multicultural education, we will begin to make a difference in school climate and student test scores.