A2. The teacher uses principles of learning and development and understanding of learners and learner diversity during planning of instruction and assessment.
During the spring of 2021, I got to connect with and understand students on another level since I took on the responsibility of creating lesson plans for and teaching to periods 1, 4, and 5 (with a mixture of having classes in person and virtually). The challenge that I encountered with every week’s lesson planning, however, was the fact that periods 1 and 4 were Academic English 12 classes and period 5 regular English 12. As a teacher, this meant that my lesson plans for period 5 were more scaffolded compared to my lesson plans for periods 1 and 4.
To put things into perspective, in periods 1 and 4 combined, there was only one student with an IEP. However, in period 5, there were ten students with IEPs. One can imagine how challenging that can be to handle in the right way, but having a co-student teacher, a mentor teacher, and an additional co-teacher for period 5 helped immensely. Just because there was a differentiation among the classes that created more accommodations for some students does not mean all students cannot do the work – because they can; some students may need more help than others, and that is the reality of teaching students who are human.
Below are some of the lesson plans I created with my mentor teacher for periods 1, 4, and 5.
In this screenshot, a small difference in how things were ran in class can be shown through the highlighted parts indicating student-led discussions (for periods 1 and 4) and the teacher-led discussions (for period 5). For periods 1 and 4 (the Academic English 12 classes), students had the option to choose among three books (Long Way Down, All American Boys, and The Boy in the Black Suit all by Jason Reynolds) for their book clubs. Contrastingly, period 5 (the regular English 12 class) was told they were going to read Long Way Down in order to eliminate the stress some students could have experienced in choosing a book – and to keep lesson planning simple for the teachers.
In these screenshots, the shorter post was the agenda uploaded to Google Classroom for periods 1 and 4, and the longer post was the agenda uploaded to Google Classroom for period 5. Again, adjustments including more scaffolding for some students and less scaffolding for others are apparent in both pictures. The first difference that is shown is:
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Periods 1 and 4 started off class with independent reading while period 5 listened to a portion of Long Way Down read by Jason Reynolds himself on YouTube.
In all of my classes, I tried having more than one way to digest information, but with period 5, I made an extra effort to do so for those who prefer visual learning over verbal learning – hence, the audio AND visual supplements of page two of Long Way Down. A couple more differences in the agendas were:
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All periods were directed to participate in a discussion on Google Classroom, but periods 1 and 4 had to respond to one other student to get full points while period 5 did not have to.
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Period 5 was asked to think about the name “Will” in their books while periods 1 and 4 focused more on independent reading in class.
Regardless of all of these differences and accommodations, it was still a lot of fun creating the lesson plans no matter the class period – and I learned a lot regarding how to adjust and adapt a lesson plan and to become more flexible in and with my teaching. My goal was to help students understand the assignment(s) at hand without any additional stress, and for the most part I succeeded.