The teacher understands how students differ in their approaches to learning and creates instructional opportunities that are adapted to diverse learners.
Today's classrooms are characterized by increasing diversity of learning style, developmental needs, cultural, and economic and social backgrounds. As teachers it is our obligation to adapt instruction to meet the varying needs of our students wherever possible. As teacher educators it is our responsibility to provide our students with experiences in diverse settings.
Effort is made to insure that school sites for early field experience and internship are representative of the demographics of the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area. Partnership and professional development schools provide opportunities for candidates to work with diverse student populations. All
III-1 Accommodations for Bilingual Student, Accommodations for Students with Special Needs – Reflection and Lesson Adaptation
(a) reflection on using my
Spanish-speaking abilities to accommodate a student at Celebration School with
English as a Second Language and observation comments by Dr. Teresa Field,
pointing out the bilingual accommodation; (b) chart describing modifications of
a lesson plan for students with special needs at Patterson High School, the
lesson plan, color-coded work sheets and role descriptions. (a) The first piece of evidence that I include is a
reflection on my ability to use my Spanish-speaking skills in the classroom to
aid Efren, a Puerto Rican student who spoke little English. Though his command
of English was improving, he sometimes needed extra assistance to be able to
understand the exact questions that were asked or the instructions given to the
class. When students began their independent work, I talked with him
individually to make sure he understood the instruction and paired him with
bilingual students for group activities. I spoke English slowly to him and
clarified phrases in Spanish when necessary. (b) The second piece of evidence
is a chart showing how a lesson was adapted to meet the individual IEP goals of
several students in a U.S. History class. This chart illustrates that
accommodations made for students with special needs are often times useful to
the entire class. As another aspect of the accommodation, some of the students
with IEPs were given extra assistance during the class from the inclusion
teacher and me.
-Debbie Delavan
This artifact presents lessons geared to different types of learners. The first lesson is geared to kinetic learners. Students have the opportunity to get out of their seats and must work in groups to measure the circumference and radius of several objects. The second lesson involves manipulatives of a popular variety. The lesson is a MSPAP-type activity that requires students to predict, gather and manipulate data, draw conclusions, and theorize.
-Mary Johnson
At
the end of the school year, the fourth grade team developed a writing prompt on
a topic from our Science unit to provide the fifth grade team with a summative
assessment of our fourth grade students' writing skills (A). After the students
had spent a day or two working on the assignment, I observed that my two
students with writing challenges were struggling with the quantity of writing
(B,C). I decided that the quantity was less important then the quality, and
suggested that these two students select one of the three categories to focus
on first, and move on to the other two categories only after they had taken the
first category entirely through the writing process. This redirection allowed
one student to much more accurately demonstrate his writing skills with a
single high-quality paragraph about one of the three categories. For the other
student, this "chunking" approach propelled him through the entire
process with one paragraph, and further inspired him to challenge himself to
complete a rough draft of a second paragraph (D, E). -Renell Welch
There
are several steps involved in solving systems of linear inequalities. I found
that even when students understood each of the steps individually some students
had trouble organizing their work. This lack of organization resulted in
students omitting steps in the process which then led to an incomplete solution
to the problem. I recognized that knowing the steps was not enough for many
students, so I prepared two handouts to distribute to the class. The first
handout simply listed the steps while the second provided a chart/table that
the students could use to organize their work when completing a problem. The
headings to each column of the chart served to remind the students of the step
that they needed to complete and the columns assisted them in keeping organized
and staying focused on the problem until it was completed. Patricia
Truitt