Sunday, May 27, 2007
Differentiated Attempts
Throughout our years in the education program one of the main topics of focus has been on differentiated instruction. Differentiated instruction I believe is particularly important in reaching the ELL students in the classroom. I encountered an example of this first hand the other day and realized the value of differentiated instruction. In my class I have a young student from Puerto Rico. He has not been involved in the ESL program at the school, but I know that sometimes he struggles with some of the concepts due to language barriers. As I said in one of my other blogs I taught my first lesson last week. I taught a science lesson on the Abyssal Zone in the ocean. I went through a PowerPoint presentation and had the students simultaneously fill out a worksheet. I felt the lesson went pretty well and most of the students were pretty engaged except for this one student. Finally it was time for me to assign the homework for the lesson. I had the students create a fish from the abyssal zone that has not yet been discovered. They had to draw it, diagram it, and create a caption to describe its adaptive features. This student, who had not participated at all and quite frankly I was particularly worried about, ended up drawing a truly magnificent picture. His diagram and captions had a few spelling errors, but I worked with him one on one to fix them and the finished product he turned in was really amazing. I am actually strongly considering including it in my educational portfolio. I was really proud of the effort that this student put forth for the assignment. He is truly a great artist and I was very impressed. It seems as though he does not get much of chance to "shine" in the classroom, but he really nailed this assignment. I will keep this in mind when I become a teacher. It is important to vary your instruction and assessment techniques in order to focus on the different abilities of the different students. Has anyone else considered adding student work to their portfolio?
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2 comments:
I agree that differentiated instruction is vital in the classroom for all students, especially for ELL students. What works for one student might be totally ineffective with another, therefore it is important to use different methods of teaching the same information in order to reach as many students as possible. For example, after having students read the end of Romeo and Juliet at home, we were having a class discussion about it, and a girl was talking about the death of Juliet. Another girl then said"what, she died?"even though she had clearly read the end based on her participation a few minutes before. This is where differentiated instruction is so important. After having them read the story, we watched the movie in class, which I know helped a lot of students get a better understanding of what was going on in the play. In other stories, we use other methods, me reading the story in class, student choosing roles and reading in class, and playing an audio tape of the text. All of these different ways of reading the story help my efforts to get every student to understand the stories we cover in class.
Yes, different students learn different ways we as teachers wnat to learn them all but what about lesson planning, HW, Class activities, grading papers, projest and if you are taking college classes where is the time to learn those different ways for the students???
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