111: Differentiation of Special Needs Student

Prompt: One of the key elements of TPA task 2-4 (and a key element of effective teaching) relates to how you differentiate, accomodate and/or modify your teaching to make sure that you systematically meet the special needs students and still make sure that they achieve the expected outcomes of the course. How do you make sure that special needs students meet your UbD outcomes and are successful on their assessments despite their disabilities? What do you need to improve?


I think one of the things that I have realized more and more recently is that I need to find my own 'style' especially in dealing with students outside of the mainstream. When we recently went on a classroom visit to a school at Stanford, the classroom was so open, unregimented and calm. While it did stand in total opposition to the type of teacher that our school site wants us to be, there was also an amazing (and nearly infectious) creative energy going around- the differentiation was incredible too! It really inspired me to step back and re-evaluate the time I am spending with my struggling students. It was such a positive for the children in this classroom-- doing special projects, having additional steps built in to ensure completion of a task (such as having their work 'pre-edited' by a parent, then typed back for them to evaluate themselves), etc. It was definitely apparent that there was a path to success for these students, and there are some critical links missing with my own. While I am not sure how well it would be recieved at our school, I think that a lot of what I read up on in Chapter 2 (movement, wait time, environment, lighting, 'safe space', softer relationships with the students, etc) could potentially really help my strugglers to feel safe with their challenges rather than hiding, averting their eyes, avoiding putting up their hand, etc. I also loved the idea of students learning how to self-monitor their own 'attention level' and having to guide them on how to pay attention- something I majorly lacked in my first semester of teaching. Whereas learning how to be a student came so naturally for other students, I questioned why these few kids couldn't just stay in their chair, keep their eyes on me, etc. Now I see that there were so many other factors in play most likely, that I had not even considered-- emotional/developmental maturity, etc.

There are a few ways that I think I've gotten decent at differentiating this year, or at least have made improvements in the last few months. I am fortunate to have E. in my class-- a student with mild emotional/developmental needs as well as fairly minor academic challenges. Despite his challenges, he is super cooperative, eager to please and really willing to let me try out new tactics on him before moving them onto other students. Communicating with his team of support staff there to help him has really helped me understand some 'small ways' to help my learning disabled students out, and it has made a HUGE difference. For instance, I was able to get an inflatable 'balance' cushion for students to sit on when they are struggling with moving in their chairs, two small rugs to place outside of the classroom carpet for students who need more individual space, and a weighted vest suggested by an Occupational Therapist to help the student regain focus or balance, especially when transitioning from a more physical activity to a more sedate one.

At the same time, there are some pieces I'm definitely missing. While I'm getting better about chants and movements, I still do not do nearly enough (especially not for D, a student with an IEP for speech who is still really struggling with spoken English). I need to work on incorporating this more-- I did just get a set of chants to try out in terms of grammar/vocab building and I'm excited to try these out. There is so much from the two articles that really I'd like to see if I can experiment with this year, to see if it helps me be more effective and find my teaching strategy with those specific lowest students. I often comment that I feel like I've found my teaching style with my 'other 34' but still can't figure out how to reach my lowest six. At this point, anything is worth a try-- be it better lighting, more movement, more sound, rhythms, bell sounds/transition sounds, effacy/personal responsibility individual reporting, etc.

I think that this course should give me a jumping off point to work with those six students-- and I think I'll really be able to devise a plan that more effectively hits their needs. As of now, I have all sorts of extra time blocked into the day for them, which I feel is somewhat taking away from my instruction of other students, but needs to be done because there is such a wide gap in my classroom right now between the 'low kids' and 'everyone else'. Until this gap closes a bit, I feel pretty powerless to help others when some are struggling so very much. However, in reading and thinking about this unit, I think there may be a huge part of me that is approaching my instruction of these students wrong, and perhaps that is really contributing to their lack of success. I plan on revising my plan for these students that I have with the academic dean to reflect some of the things I will come away from this course with.

110: Equity Resources

After browsing through a few other resources, I chose to really look at the Rethinking Schools site. I was more than impressed with what I saw, but most impressed with the quarterly magazine. I read a few of the articles-- the one that stuck with me most was about the integration of technology in the classroom. I've over and over again said that I should try to get some grant money (or Donors Choose) to get a projector in my room-- having the kids huddled around my computer in the classroom is not ideal at all. I know from home visits that very few of them had computers in the home-- and if they did, they were not up to speed with modern technology. Reading the article-- about how much access to technology can affect end result in education brought me back to that. However, the article also put things into perspective-- what we stand to lose by over-emphasizing technology in education. Would it push consumer culture? Or disadvantage those students who did not learn best that way? The article, in the end, left me thinking that while I think better technology in my room still could really positively impact UbD (and give some students outside context), it is not the saving grace that I had previously imagined it to be.

I also really liked the listing of links/other resources that Rethinking Schools Online had. I was already familiar with using the ERIC database from a few college papers, but this list encompassed just about anything I could possibly need in terms of academic journals designed to improve cross-cultural equity. I could see myself coming back to this list in my planning next fall and to get new ideas of ways to ensure that my classroom becomes more and more equitable.

112: QQCCalla Handbook Chapter 3

Quote: "In our view, academic language can be best identified by describing the language functions and the level of the thinking skills needed to engage in specific content activities. Thus discrete language elements such as vocabulary, grammatical structures, spelling and pronunciation are integrated into the language functions used in the content activity, not taught as separate functions of content subjects." (41) This piece stood out for me for a few reasons. First off, because I see so much success with this in my classroom amongst some of my higher readers-- they are so much more willing to try out new vocabulary that they have picked up from a book. I have been reading Alice in Wonderland to them lately, for instance, and it has been awesome to see them using some of the more obscure words that we have pulled out as our vocab from the book, as well as some of the words that we did not specifically define but that I think they pulled from context. On the other hand, I think my lower readers are often disserved by the lack of grammatical sophistication in what they are reading. This is something I had touched on when our reading consultant came for professional development lately-- that they do not get the "fun", quality literature from which vocab can really explode. This is something that I am trying to make more of a priority in my classroom.

Question:
In a classroom with a wide range of ELLs, what is worthwhile to target in terms of vocabulary? I am pretty decent about pulling this out when I'm creating UbD units, but really poor about integrating academic vocab otherwise. Resources of what academic vocab a first grader should have by the end of the year? Most useful?

Comment: I think I got a lot out of reading this chapter. I really had not put that much thought into academic language versus social language, and in recent CFUs since beginning this unit, I've found that vocabulary is way more of an issue than I had previously realized.