The most important skill a teacher needs to teach diverse populations is multicultural consciousness.  Multicultural consciousness is an awareness and appreciation of diversity.  Becoming aware of other cultures means educating oneself about other people’s lives throughout history and the world.  Appreciating diversity means accepting the reality that there are people who think and do things differently that you and not judging them or looking down on them because of those differences.  If a teacher cannot be multiculturally conscious, she has no hope of reaching them. 

As a teacher, one of the first lessons I teach my students is multicultural consciousness.  I began by showing the students slides of optical illusions and discussing what it means to see things from a different perspective.  Once they have this idea in mind, I transition into asking the students to think about perspective and what affects how people see the world.  I then ask the students to think about the classic Cinderella story.  They also are familiar with the television movie version starring Whitney Houston and Brandy, and so we discuss the similarities and differences.  I then put the students in groups of four or five and assign each one a different version of the Cinderella story from Native American, German, Indian, Egyptian and other points of view.  Each student also has an image different “glass slippers.”  The assignment is to identify the cultural equivalent to archetypal elements in the original story like the glass slipper, evil stepsisters, friendly animals, Fairy Godmother, etc.   We then discuss the similarities and differences in each story, which leads to a discussion on the similarities and differences in people in general.  It serves the dual purpose of teaching multicultural consciousness as well as some of the key concepts to the course.