In this week’s activities, we have worked to create a lesson plan from the lesson objectives we drafted previously. The process of completing the lesson plan template provided by Teach NOW, and subsequently creating a flowchart to show how modifications will be built into the lesson along the way for children with varying needs, has been at once challenging, exciting and even uplifting as it’s called upon me as the teacher not only to plan for the mainstream flow of the lesson, but also to ensure that all of my students can enter into and succeed in the lesson from wherever they are developmentally.
In this flowchart (created in coggle) I’ve broken out the lesson, piece by piece, and have included interventions and resources which will be applied to meet students of varying readiness levels and learning style:
One of the things that I talk about doing in this flowchart is circulating around the room and monitoring student ability to successfully greet the student actors with either formal or informal greetings or commands. While in the moment itself I will be seeking to provide support to individual students who might be struggling, I will also need to use this exercise to assess at a more meta level whether or not the majority of my class is grasping the content or if I need to go back and re-teach portions of it whole-scale. I will be looking for patterns of what students might be struggling with (for instance, are students struggling to choose the right pronoun? Are they struggling to actually conjugate the verb into command form?). Whatever patterns I observe will need to drive my follow-up response – either individually, in small groups or whole group – later in the week/moving forward. If it’s a question of pronoun choice, for instance, then perhaps I need to spend more time here accentuating the differences in formality options. I might need to spend more time reviewing formal and informal greeting choices. Or perhaps I need to spend more time explicitly outlining the process of changing an infinitive verb into a command form. I could choose to follow up with opportunities for students to practice verb conjugation that would appeal not only to visual learning style, but also audio and kinesthetic – perhaps my approach to this point has been too centered on one style…
I also need to determine in this assessment if I have a group of students for whom the content might be seemingly too easy – they might need a higher level of challenge. In this case, I could consider giving them more to do, which the rest of the class may or may not fully arrive at. For instance, one component of this overall unit includes reading a text of a story in Spanish and translating it enough to be able to understand not only the content, but also the tone, particularly as the tone is impacted by the use of formal or informal language. This may be a level that remains beyond a group of some students in the classroom, and may in fact lay beyond most of them, but for the most advanced students, they could begin exploring this text as I re-teach concepts to the rest of the class individually or in smaller groups.
In addition to my own assessment of what is happening with individual students (whether they be at lower or higher levels of readiness) I think I’d also want to talk with students one on one in order to better understand what they believe is challenging, and what they believe would help them. I don’t want to rule out or underestimate my student’s own expressions of their needs. It could be that I believe I’m picking up on patterns of success/need for support and this might signal to me a certain range of responses, but it’s possible that they would articulate something very different or something more about their own needs that I could only ascertain by asking – so I should ask!
Referenced within the flowchart linked in this blog, I listed a number of resources which would be utilized to support students of varying levels of readiness and need. Examples of those resources are:
- Detailed checklist of appropriate behavioral choices for students to make during a group discussion: I would provide this to students who may already have behavior modification plans so that they have a really explicit set of expectations that they can live into in order to be successful contributors to the group discussion, which is not only good for them academically but also in earning social capital with peers.
- Graphic organizer / flowchart which outlines the process of verb conjugation for a command: I would provide this as a resource for struggling learners (perhaps those with intellectual challenges) to keep at their desks or to carry around the room with them for reference while conjugating verbs.
- List of supplemental vocab and phrases: I would provide a list of additional vocab and phrases for students who are already operating at a very high level could reference and utilize during the up-and-around activity such that they have an added level of challenge and do not become bored as their classmates work to establish themselves within the basic expectations of the lesson.
One reference which has supported my thinking in approaching my planning for this lesson with modifications has been an article by Cathy Weselby called “What is Differentiated Instruction? Examples of How to Differentiate Instruction in the Classroom.” In it, Weselby outlines four ways to differentiate for students: by content, by process, by product and by learning environment. In this lesson, I have applied modifications especially in two of these camps: content (by supplying the supplemental vocab for learners with higher readiness levels) and learning environment (by actively providing students with instruction as to how to be successful in their discussion groups). My hope is that by combining all of the approaches listed above and in the linked flowchart, I will be better able to make all of my students feel welcomed in the classroom, appropriately challenged by the content and the exercises, and to know that I will continue to adapt to their styles and abilities to create a continuously dynamic classroom.
References:
- How to Be Happy, Dammit. (n.d.). Retrieved February 08, 2018, from http://notsalmon.com/ (clipart)
- What is Differentiated Instruction? Examples of Strategies. (2017, November 20). Retrieved February 08, 2018, from https://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/classroom-resources/examples-of-differentiated-instruction/
trees do bend 