Here is a site which has developed a Rubric that helps teachers determine which books are culturally relevant for their classrooms:
http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/choosing-childrens-books-cultural-relevance-rubric
Engaging and interacting with people who are different from us actually makes us better people if we embrace differences and learn from them about diverse world views and perspectives. Here is an article from Scientific American that explains this:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/
Recently, a video of a first grade Math teacher in a NYC charter school went viral because of the way the teacher responded to a student's work. I was invited by the NY Times as one of eight scholars in the field of early education and child development to comment on the appropriateness of the teacher's response. Read more at the following link:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/13/nyregion/experts-on-success-academy-teacher-video.html
Here is a list of strategies and phrases by Renee Jain that may be used to calm down and work with a young child who is experiencing anxiety. This is very helpful for classroom teachers as well as parents with young children:
Right from when they are born, babies begin to observe the expressions and behaviors around them and start to match their neural maps to these observations. As early childhood educators have consistently maintained, much of what young children learn in school or at home is from watching the adults in their lives. So we need to constantly ask ourselves this question - are we modeling for our children the behaviors we do want them to practice? Are we their "social compass"?
Read the following article by Susan Pinker for more on this: