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Professional Standards on Diversity

• Assessment
• Beliefs/Historical Perspectives
• Communication
• English as Second Language
• Home and School
• Instruction
• Learning Differences
• Learning Environments

• Administer nonbiased formal and informal assessments.
• Use assessment information in making eligibility, program, and placement decisions for individuals with exceptional learning needs, including those from culturally and/or linguistically diverse backgrounds.

• Issues in definition and identification of individuals with exceptional learning needs, including those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Historical points of view and contribution of culturally diverse groups.
• Impact of the dominant culture on shaping schools and the individuals who study and work in them.
• Variations in beliefs, traditions, and values across and within cultures and their effects on relationships among individuals with exceptional learning needs, family, and schooling. Strategies used by diverse populations to cope with a legacy of former and continuing racism. Personal cultural biases and differences that affect one's teaching.

• Culturally responsive factors that promote effective communication and collaboration with individuals with exceptional learning needs, families, school personnel, and community members.
• Communicate effectively with families of individuals with exceptional learning needs from diverse backgrounds.
• Ways of behaving and communicating among cultures that can lead to misinterpretation and misunderstanding.
• Demonstrate sensitivity for the culture, language, religion, gender, disability, socio-economic status, and sexual orientation of individuals.

• Use communication strategies and resources to facilitate understanding of subject matter for students whose primary language is not the dominant language.

• Cultural perspectives influencing the relationships among families, schools, and communities as related to instruction.
• Characteristics and effects of the cultural and environmental milieu of the individual with exceptional learning needs and the family. Potential impact of differences in values, languages, and customs that can exist between the home and school.

• Strategies to prepare individuals to live harmoniously and productively in a culturally diverse world.
• Develop and select instructional content, resources, and strategies that respond to cultural, linguistic, and gender differences.
• Impact of learners' academic and social abilities, attitudes, interests, and values on instruction and career development.
• Prepare individuals to exhibit self-enhancing behavior in response to societal attitudes and actions.

• Differing ways of learning of individuals with exceptional learning needs including those from culturally diverse backgrounds and strategies for addressing these differences.
• Teacher attitudes and behaviors that influence behavior of individuals with exceptional learning needs.
• Effects of cultural and linguistic differences on growth and development. Characteristics of one's own culture and use of language and the ways in which these can differ from other cultures and uses of languages.

• Create a safe, equitable, positive, and supportive learning environment in which diversities are valued.
• Organize, develop, and sustain learning environments that support positive intra- cultural and intercultural experiences.
• Ways to create learning environments that allow individuals to retain and appreciate there own and each other's respective language and cultural heritage. Ways specific cultures are negatively stereotyped.
• Mediate controversial intercultural issues among students within the learning environment in ways that enhance any culture, group, or person.