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 school or program identified in last week’s final assigmment/presentation. Recall that the school showcases examples of innovative educational experiences designed to promote 21st-century skills while promoting culturally relevant pedagogy.

Initial Response: This discussion requires you to reflect upon two schools or programs presented by your colleagues in Week Four’s Final Assignment. You can view these projects in the Doc Sharing portion of the course, found in the list of Modules from the left-side navigation links. Once selected, you need to conduct a brief analysis of the decisions that needed to be made in the design and implementation of the school or program you selected. To help guide this analysis, ensure that the following are addressed:

• Evaluate and describe the decisions program developer(s) and/or other professional(s) need to make in order to plan the school or program.
• Explain what macroscopic cultural influence likely supported the development and implementation of the program.
• Explain what microscopic cultural influence likely supported the development and implementation of the program.

Be sure to provide a link to the school or program you are analyzing so that other students can have easy access as they review your work. You may reflect on these questions in essay format, with a PPT, screencast, or using any of the other programs/tools that we have used throughout the course (or something new you have discovered). However, remember that APA needs to be used in order to provide a reflection that is linked to course content.