As teachers we plan our lessons and think to ourselves, "my students are going to love this lesson and will be able to understand what I am teaching", but sometimes that isn 't the case. You may plan a lesson in hopes that your students understand but it doesn 't go as planned. Every student learns differently and thinks differently and because of this we, as teachers must learn to differentiate our lessons. This may require us to change the way we deliver our lesson, change the activities for our lessons or even change the wording of our material so students understand. In this paper, I will be differentiating a lesson plan based on student readiness, student interest and student learning profile for content, process, and product. Elementary School Math Lesson Plan on Place Value CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.NBT.B.2 Understand that the two digits of a two-digit number represent amounts of tens and ones. Understand the following as special cases: • …show more content…
When teachers differentiate their lesson, the students are more engaged to learn. Students have some choice in their learning activities, which motivates students to want to learn and also puts more learning responsibility on the students. Some students may prefer to work alone or in groups and some students like to be hands-on. By differentiating the lesson, all students’ needs are being met. “Differentiated Instruction gives students a range of ways to access curriculum, instruction and assessment. DI engages students to interact and participate in the classroom in a richer way. It is based on the assumption that all students differ in their learning styles, strengths, needs and abilities and that classroom activities should be adapted to meet these differences
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Show MoreWatts-Taffe, S., Laster, B., Broach, L., Marinak, B., McDonald Connor, C., & Walker-Dalhours, D. (2012). Differentiated instruction: Making informed teacher decisions. Reading teacher, 66(4), 303-314. doi:10.1002/TRTR.01123
Differentiated instruction adapts learning to the students’ unique differences. It is a must for teachers to learn as much about each student as possible. Understanding students helps guide teachers’ decisions to match appropriate materials and strategies to each learner’s needs. The strategies and activities are student-centered, based on readiness, planned with flexible grouping designs, and changed as needed to meet the needs of all learners. These personalized experiences give students access to all of the information and skills they can assimilate in their learning journeys (Chapman & King, 2005). This approach meets the academic and related needs of a wide array of diverse learners in schools (Edwards, Carr, & Siegel 2006).
For this lesson I still need to learn how to analyze instructional goals and differentiated instructional strategies. When I transfer to a university to further my education; in my educational classes I will learn about this. In addition to student teaching, I will be learning how to handle future situations with the appropriate grade level. Lastly, I will ask for advice from art teachers and teachers in general to find out more information on differentiated instructional strategies.
Contemplating on the idea of differentiated classroom, it can be seen that it involves the collaborative attempt of both the teacher and students to create a classroom environment that embraces diversity and differences. With these differences, it helps create the realization towards finding new ways to improve the level of appreciation and learning of content. With these, it helps the educator determine the patterns or methods of instruction that can best apply and supplement the needs of students in the classroom. From this perspective, I do believe that this serves as an important foundation for shaping a differentiated classroom.
Teaching math can be a grueling task for many, but not for a certain high school math teacher. Megan Patterson, a beloved high school teacher, was born in 1990 right here in Illinois and is currently working at a very small high school that only consist of around 250 students. This high school is a private school and is also a Christian school, which is why it is named Westminster Christian high school. This is her story of how she became a great high school math teacher.
Currently I am co teaching a fifth grade class of eleven students. The class is a general education class with four students who have disabilities. My main focus for the class is teaching the human body system and implementing writing into the class. Differentiation of instruction is something we need to show that we are implanting in our classroom. There are four levels of differentiation of instruction; content, process, product, and affect. What we teach, how we teach it; how students demonstrate what they have learned, and how students feel about what they are learning is what DI is about. Educators need to start by choosing the best content that will help all of their students. The content not only has to relate to the subject matter, but need to connect to their culture. The process is also a crucial component of DI and Santamaria feels that the best thing to do for the students is having them work in groups, but Utley took an individual approach to DI. Santamaria feels that cooperative learning stimulates learning. The last component to DI is the product. This could be as simple as allowing the students to present their final product
There is a lot of information and numerous documents that speak on the great significance of using differentiated instruction in the classroom. The concept of differentiated instruction has not been recently developed, but has become crucial and somewhat a difficult concept in our educational system (Watts-Taffe, Laster, Broach, Marinak, McDonald Connor, Walker-Dalhouse, 2012).
Learning my student’s abilities, interest, aspirations, and values of learning and development can be the most beneficial to understanding how to personalize my lessons. Supporting my students learning development is a must. I will set a community environment, by building trust and rapport amongst the class (Powel, 2000). To learn and determine my student’s strengths and needs I will develop a learning profile on each of them. This learning profile will include tabs such as: biological traits, cultural, social status, academic performance, and learning preferences. To help analyze the necessary information I will use different assessments, parent surveys, student self-reporting, prior standards learned, student records, assignments, and activities to determine knowledge, understanding, skills, and interest. Once the profiles have been made I will then use students preexisting and potential interest, experiences, and their way of thinking to personalize and relate lessons to each leaners, learning level and style (Powel,
In today’s educational environment, all students expect to receive the same level of instruction from schools and all students must meet the same set of standards. Expectations for students with learning disabilities are the same as students without any learning difficulties. It is now unacceptable for schools or teachers to expect less from one segment of students because they have physical disabilities, learning disabilities, discipline problems, or come from poor backgrounds. Standardize testing has resulted in making every student count as much as their peers and the most positive impact has been seen with the lowest ability students. Schools have developed new approaches to reach these previously underserved students while maintaining passing scores for the whole student body. To ensure academic success, teachers employ a multi-strategy approach to develop students of differing abilities and backgrounds. Every student is different in what skills and experiences they bring to the classroom; their personality, background, and interests are as varied as the ways in which teachers can choose to instruct them. Differentiated instruction has been an effective method in which teachers can engage students of various backgrounds and achieve whole-class success. When using differentiated instruction, teachers develop lesson strategies for each student or groups of students that provide different avenues of learning but all avenues arrive at the same learning goal.
A struggle for many teachers could be the idea of implementing differentiation in their classrooms. Making twenty-four lesson plans for the twenty-four children in a class is not practical or appropriate. Children should all be learning the same basic ideas in differentiated lessons but how much as well as how a child learns is what will vary (Tomlinson, 2001). Tomlinson describes three major ways in which the content that children are learning can be differentiated: readiness, inte...
It targets all the students’ needs without leaving anyone out. Differentiated instruction allows educators to plan activities and lessons that provided a higher order of thinking to their students. This course has provided me with a wealth a knowledge that I can pass on to my co-worker by showing them first hand through learning activities how to differentiate content, process, and product. In the article Moving to Assessment-Guided Differentiated Instruction to Support Young Children 's Alphabet Knowledge by Shanye Piasta, provided a great reason why early childhood educators should differentiate instruction. Piasta,( 2014)
Children are like sponges, they absorb everything they see, hear and do. As teachers, our job is to mold them in becoming good citizens in today’s society. We all have that one teacher who motivated, inspired and made learning a fun experience. Those moments have stuck with us throughout life, we have given those teachers a high level of trust by showing us how much they care. Teaching wasn 't my childhood dream, however, life experiences led me to take that path. I currently work as a Sitter for an autistic child. I have been working with him for over two years now. Never have I worked with a child who has a disability. I have seen major improvement since being together, it brings me so much joy to see how much of an improvement he has been
The lessons contained in this unit of instruction were based upon Madeline Hunter’s Seven Steps of Lesson Plan Formatting. This lesson plan format is a proven effective means for delivering instruction. When designing lessons, the teacher needs to consider these seven elements in a certain order since each element is derived from and has a relationship to previous elements. It should be noted that a lesson plan does not equal one class period. Throughout the course of the lesson, it may take multiple sessions before the student is ready to independently practice the skills learned. Anticipated lesson duration is included with each lesson plan provided in this instructional unit. Madeline Hunter’s Seven Steps of Instruction includes stating the objectives, anticipatory set, teacher input, modeling, checking for understanding, guided practice, and independent practice (Hunter, 2004). For the purpose of this instructional unit, input and modeling have been condensed into a streamlined event; as well has, checking for understanding and guided practice. This form of lesson planning is preferred within the Elkin City Schools district and lends itself to the creation of engaging lessons.
One of the most urgent challenges teachers face today is creating a classroom environment where all students are simultaneously engaged in meaningful activities. Too many times students may either become lost as the teacher continues on with the lesson or the material may not be advanced enough, thus becoming boring for students. The implementation of curriculum differentiation is a sustainable solution to this prevalent dilemma.
This standard requires a teacher to really understand his/her students especially through the ways they grow and develop. It is important for them to understand that every student is different and therefore, will learn in their own ways. The teacher then learns to meet the needs of all students specifically by creating learning experiences for all to comprehend. Differentiated instruction would be helpful in a classroom in order for the teacher to meet the needs of students who have differences when it comes to interests, readiness and learning needs.