Integrating Exceptional Students Platform

1. What are the key underpinnings of differentiated instruction that you embrace in your own teaching practices?

         There are many key underpinnings of differentiated instruction that I embrace in my own teaching practices. I embrace student choice, cooperative grouping, classroom accommodations, and pre-tests. As a pre-service I embrace student choice by giving my students choice with classwork. I embrace this strategy for differentiated instruction because it gives students ownership of their learning and helps them practice to be active learners. Also, student choice can be given to students in a structured way by their teacher to make their choices by learning levels, styles, or interests based. When I have my own classroom I would like to have an anchor chart of a choice board for students to choose how they want to apply their learning to certain activities. An example of what would be on my choice board includes, create a graphic organizer, create a skit, draw a flier, draw a scene and defend why you chose that, and think of an alternative solution for what you are reading.

         Cooperative grouping is really important for implementing differentiated instruction in your classroom. Students can e grouped by interest, learning style, or readiness. I learned as a pre-service teacher that cooperative grouping is an ongoing, reflective process. In my second grade class they sit at tables, therefore they have table partners and a lot of their group work takes place at their tables. When coming up with a seating chart of this specific second grade class I thought of students readiness, learning styles, and interests. I decided to use flexible grouping to mix my groups so they can all learn from each other. In my future classroom I was use cooperative grouping in many lesson plans. It is a great way give your students differentiated instruction in groups because it meets students needs.

         Another key underpinning I plan to embrace, in my future teaching practices, is to make sure I have correct classroom accommodations for my exceptional students. I am a firm believer for inclusion in my classroom. My classroom environment must be clean, welcoming, and supportive. It must be clean for students with allergies and students who have assistive technology devices that need clean air. My classroom environment must be welcoming for my diverse students. I want to be there home away from home and to do this I say good morning to each of my students as they walk in and start our days with a morning meeting to build community. My classroom will be supportive of diverse learners because I will teach my students that being fair doesn't always mean being equal. I will teach them about specific disabilities in our school community and inform my students it is okay to be unique and that everyone is a human being.

         Finally, I would like to embrace a key underpinning of pre-tests in my future classroom. My collaborating teacher has only given out pre-tests a few times this year so it is a practice I have little experience in. I think it is import for differentiated instruction because it assesses student's readiness for the content about to be taught. It gives me the data I need to guide where my instruction should be for the unit/lesson. I would like to make data charts of pre-tests results to my student’s assessments over the unit/lesson. This will show improvement and my class all of their hard work!

2. What struggles to do you continue to have with the notion of differentiated instruction?

         I continue to struggle with understanding students learning styles to group and teach differentiated instruction. This is a struggle for me because I believe my students have multiple learning styles not just one. It is hard for me to meet the needs of all learning styles during all of my lessons but I learned from the UDL module examples of how to. I am still in the developing process of using students learning styles to teach differentiated instruction.

         Another thing, I feel as if my collaborating teacher does all of her differentiated instruction naturally without detailed lesson plans, pre-set groups, and no choice boards but the students are given choice. This is hard for me to understand because I am still learning how to implement differentiated instruction. I am learning from my professors, CT, and my experience.

3. What questions do you still have or have arisen because of our work this semester?

·      Can you accommodate a student who shows evident signs of a disability but has not been diagnosed with a specific disability?

·      What should you do if a student shows evident signs of a disability but their caretakers at home refuse to acknowledge/test that student?

·      What is another strategy besides, "Ask 3 Before Me" for learned helplessness?

·      What is the best way to inform your class about a specific student who needs assistive technology in the classroom?

·      What is the best way to teach your class about a specific disability that one of their classmates may have?

·      Should parents be informed about specific students with disabilities in your classroom?

·      What has been found to be the best strategy of inclusion of students with Aspersers in the K-5 classroom?

·      As a newly hired teacher are there information sessions to inform new teachers about ESE resources at that particular school of employment?

·      As a teacher, are there trainings throughout the year about having students with specific disabilities?

4. While answering these questions share some benefits and challenges from your own personal experience you have had using the philosophy and methods covered in this course. Be specific.

         A challenge I have had in my classroom is noticing a student has Aspersers in my classroom and trying to get accommodations for him but his parents will not cooperate. My collaborating teacher and I have collected data of him throughout the school year and his parents still do not believe there is any signs of Aspersers. The data included situations where my student had a tough experience. This student's data includes what happens before, during, and after his situation in the classroom. It is challenging to me that his parents do not show any interest of helping him out. I took an initiative to help this student with the anger and gave him an apple stress ball to keep on his desk. This has helped him tremendously when he needs time to calm down. I believe in my classroom fair isn't always equal. Students know in my second grade classroom that it was fair this specific student had an apple to squeeze while they did not. My question to you is Did I do the right thing by helping out my student with this accommodation? Is there a chance I may get in trouble with my student's parents or with administration for giving him an accommodation without their permission?

         Another challenge I have had with differentiated instruction were lessons given by the district. In my second grade classroom I taught social studies. My collaborating teacher would give me lessons from the district to teach to the class. It was hard for me to come up with my own differentiated instruction while the social studies lesson plan was designed to be said word by word by the teacher. My wondering is how can teacher differentiate lesson plans if the district is demanding scripted lesson plans to be followed? By following district lesson plans, or by not following it, does it effect our teacher evaluations?

         Lastly, a challenge I have experienced in my pre-service teacher experience was not enough help from the ESE resource teacher. I am upset with the small I am at because we have only had one ESE resource teacher since our school is small, but one is not enough. My ESE student is supposed to get support for ELA and math. My specific ESE student only gets pulled out of our classroom during social studies/science to be taught ELA. He never gets accommodations in math, except for what my CT has been doing. It is frustrating to me the school does not have enough employees to meet students needs. How do I go about talking to a administration about this issue?

         A benefit I had in the classroom, with differentiated instruction, was conducting student interest surveys in the beginning of the spring semester. For my individual reading conferences I suggested books at a higher level to students to what they put down they were interested in on their survey. I learned from my emergent literacy class last fall that students are more likely to read challenging books if they are interested in the topic. Also, one of my students is very successful, so he gets bored with reading. I suggested to him to do a research project about weather, since tornadoes, hurricanes, and thunderstorms were what he answered on his student interest survey. He was very into the research project and went above and beyond what his instructions were. As I learned in teaching exceptional students class, it is important to group students based on interests because it helps with differentiated instruction to meet students needs by giving them motivation to learn with what interests them.