The teacher is organizing a family coffee hour to promote cultural understanding between families of diverse backgrounds in their preschool class. The teacher created a 5-item agenda for the coffee hour that includes: 1) introducing the purpose of promoting cultural understanding, 2) sharing their family's birthday traditions and allowing others to share important celebrations, 3) asking open-ended questions to learn about other families' traditions, 4) describing the significance of an artifact from their own cultural celebrations, and 5) asking how the families can continue learning about each other's cultures. The teacher will self-evaluate the agenda by explaining how each item addresses the scenario's goal of cultural understanding and how the agenda improves teaching and learning.

1. Preschool Cultural Understanding
To write an agenda for a family coffee hour designed to build and promote cultural
understandings and to evaluate your agenda. Scenario:You are a first-year teacher in a large
urban preschool. At your first open house, you meet families who represent a variety
of cultural groups. You also meet interracial and biracial families, as well as families led by
teenage moms. You seek to gain cultural insights about each family and to promote cultural
understandings across families. So, you decide to invite all students’ families to join
you again for an informal discussion over coffee. To begin the process of building cultural
understanding, you decide to start the coffee hour with what you hope will be a light, fun
topic: “Family Traditions for Celebrating Birthdays.” You also bring a special artifact that
your family uses for other family celebrations (e.g., a dreidel for celebrating Chanukah).
Finally, you also want to invite the families to share their thoughts on ways to continue to
learn about one another’s cultures.Focus Assignment1. Write a five-item agenda for the
coffee hour. For item 1, describe how you will talk about the purpose of your coffee hour.
For item 2, write a paragraph that describes your family tradition for celebrating birthdays.
Include in item 2 an acknowledgment that not all families celebrate birthdays, so if this is
the case, these families should share a celebration that is important to them. For item 3,
include the open-ended questions you will ask to engage the families in sharing their
stories of family celebrations. For item 4, write a paragraph that describes the significance
of your special artifact. For item 5, include the open-ended questions you will ask to engage
the families in sharing ideas about how to continue to learn about one another’s
cultures.2. Be sure to read the SELF-EVALUATION section below to guide your thinking.
Write your self-evaluation after you have completed your agenda.Self-evaluation1. For each
item on your agenda: a. Explain how this item addresses the issues in the scenario. ).2.
Describe and justify how your agenda would improve teaching and learning in the scenario.