Teaching All Students Scenario

Teaching All Students Scenario

Mary is teaching 7th grade Language Arts. She is getting ready to teach the elements of poetry (imagery, theme, characterization, etc.). As part of a professional development day offered at her school, Mary had looked at last year’s standardized test results for her class; she noticed that her students are weak on Language Arts, especially her ESL and inclusion students. Mary is not planning the activities to teach the poetry unit and she already knows that they will be difficult concepts to grasp, especially by special population students. This year, Mary’s school board bought three computers for each classroom and made it clear that they want the teachers to use the computers for teaching and learning on a daily basis. To complicate things, Mary’s principal, Ms. Klondike, announced that she will go and observe Mary the day after tomorrow – precisely the day when Mary will be in the middle of teaching the elements of poetry to her class. Mary needs to come up with a solution on how to help ESL and inclusion students understand the difficult concepts but, what is THAT solution?

Scenario Requirements

1. Read about differentiated instruction for ESL and inclusion students. Search the web.

2. Investigate what Web 2.0 tools or software programs can help to teach and learn the elements of poetry concepts. An example of such a tool is only 2 clicks. Visit http://www.only2clicks.com/pages/SantiDigitalPoetry/591351 for ideas.

3. Review lesson plan samples and activities on how to teach to all students using Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Go to http://udlselfcheck.cast.org/resources.php and scroll down to Curriculum content resources: English Language Arts.

4. Interview a teacher on what s/he does to teach poetry to ESL and special education students.

Our Solution

In looking at the Web 2.0 tools, we found a site that lets students or teachers create little animated movies complete with text to speech voices for the characters then export the video files: http://school.nawmal.com/

We proposed having students create animated movies based on the poems complete with appropriate settings and characters reciting lines from the poems. They could then present their films in class.

We think it would work well with ESL students. They could work in teams with non-ESL students and the text to speech function of the characters would help them with their language skills. Below is a demo video my lab partner Rafiqa created showing the software in use: