2. Educators know how children grow.
The educator understands how children with broad ranges of ability learn and provides instruction that supports their intellectual, social, and personal development
Wisconsin Educator Standards for Teachers
InTASC MODEL STANDARDS
Standard #1: Learner Development
The teacher understands how learners grow and develop, recognizing that patterns of learning and development vary individually within and across the cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and physical areas, and designs and implements developmentally appropriate and challenging learning experiences.
Standard #2 addresses my ability to recognize the difference in how students learn and develop various skill sets. My coursework in curriculum and methods have given me the knowledge and strategies to help the wide variety of students, and these are strategies which I applied during my semester student teaching. My ESL classes address development stages in learning English as a second language, but many of these strategies can be used for other students, such as students in special education or extended reading. I have found during my experience student teaching that scaffolds used for ELL's can also help other groups of students, such as those in special education. I have learned the value of knowing frameworks like Understanding by Design, Universal Design, differentiation, and scaffolds. Below you will find specific lessons, lesson segments, and lesson materials which demonstrate those frameworks to accommodate various abilities of student learning.
Artifact 1: ESL Lesson Scaffolds (Attached Below)
This artifact is an assignment from my Language Acquisition in Content Areas course, which was part of my ESL course sequence at Edgewood College. The assignment was to design language and literacy supports and scaffolds for a lesson or unit. The scaffolds includes are for a American Civil War unit for a middle school class (7th or 8th grade), which demonstrate my knowledge and attention to language acquisition and how students learn and build language and literacy skills.
Artifact 2: Intro to Imperialism Instruction Materials (Attached Below)
This artifact is from my student teaching experience where I taught a mini introduction unit to imperialism (artifact 3). This document includes the key instructional materials for the unit, which includes graphic organizers for vocabulary and for a primary source analysis stations activity. The vocabulary organizer demonstrates my ability to connect to student background knowledge or culture by providing students a chance to include examples, analogies, and visuals to help them understand and remember the vocabulary. The graphic organizer for the primary source stations activity breaks down the primary source analysis into concrete sections, which helps ELLs, students in special education, and students who struggle with reading and writing.
Artifact 3: Intro to Imperialism Unit (Attached Below)
These are the lessons plans for the Intro to Imperialism Unit from my student teaching experience. The instructional materials for these lessons are also attached (artifact 2). These lesson plans incorporate various strategies for engagement, including station activities and interactive online discussions, which allows students to work with peers and use their background knowledge and skills to help them demonstrate their knowledge and skills for this unit.
Artifact 4: Russian Revolution Slides (Attached Below)
These are slides from my student teaching experience which covers information and activities from the first few lessons in the unit. This is the first unit where I took lead on planning and implementing strategies for all classes. In the first lesson, I ask students to connect to their background knowledge regarding "revolution". I also incorporate a KWL to assess background knowledge. I include a slide with a blank KWL where I wrote information students shared after they talk with partners.