3e: Demonstrating Flexibility and Responsiveness

“Flexibility and responsiveness” refer to a teacher’s skill in making adjustments in a lesson to respond to changing conditions. When a lesson is well planned, there may be no need for changes during the course of the lesson itself. Shifting the approach in midstream is not always necessary; in fact, with experience comes skill in accurately predicting how a lesson will go and being prepared for different possible scenarios. But even the most skilled, and best prepared, teachers will occasionally find either that a lesson is not proceeding as they would like or that a teachable moment has presented itself. They are ready for such situations. Furthermore, teachers who are committed to the learning of all students persist in their attempts to engage them in learning, even when confronted with initial setbacks.

(Danielson, C. 2013)

Artifact 3e-2

I am currently teaching a writing unit to my fourth grade students in my senior practicum class. While we were going over the topic of organization in our writing, I created an anchor chart for the students in order to organize their ideas when writing their text. In creating this anchor chart and while preparing for my lesson, I recognized that some students would need a different anchor charts based on their writing and based on their writing capabilities. Because of this, I created various anchor charts to build their success. The first anchor chart were for students writing an biography or an all about book, while the second anchor chart is set up for students writing a how to novel. Those lower performing students were only expected to fill out some of the chart, depending on the student, while other students were invited to write more if they wanted to. This differentiation to each students demonstrates my knowledge of my students and prediction of what and how they will perform and what problems they will run into.