Implicit Bias: Equal Opportunity In Education

The past two weeks of lectures, we have covered the topic of equal opportunity in education. We have discussed many different aspects of this topic ranging from services provided for disabled children to bias. We also watched a few videos that showed us how implicit bias effects our daily lives. We learned some very important tool to success as teachers this week in learning how to provide the best education for all types of students. Beginning this topic, we talked about the options provided for disabled students which to name a few are, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, FAPE, IEP’s, and Title I. The first three I listed are laws in place to ensure every child is given all the tools they need to succeed in school. The Individuals …show more content…
Implicit bias is the subconscious attitudes toward other people, things, or groups that are expressed as judgements and behaviors. Some major bias’s that teachers have are that children know how to ask for help, accents are associated with bad writing, and students are not always experts in something they are a part of. Implicit bias is a fact of our everyday life because we judge people for every aspect of their being, not that it is right, but we do it anyway. Therefore, as teachers, we need to be aware of the bias’s we hold in order to teach our students without them. We also need to know the ways we have to deal with our students’ biases against their peers. In accordance with the lessons we studied this week, we watched two videos that showed how implicit bias effects our daily lives. One video that really stood out to me was the Northwestern student who was pulled over and tackled due to him being black. The lady who called believed she witnessed a robbery of a nice car by a black man, therefore he was pulled over and tackled before they figured out that he owned the car. The lady and police officers had the implicit bias that black people cannot own nice things. I believe this is taboo and a large problem in our society. As a future teacher, being aware of bias’s will be very helpful to my classroom and