1. Teaching Diverse Students

During my time at Trinity Christian College, I was able to do observations and teach in classrooms. All of these experiences required me to have to adjust and differentiate depending on the students needs. In my pre-student teaching, I was able to teach multiple lesson plans in many different subject matters. Below is an example of one of the lesson plans along with a Google Slide Pear Deck I taught for math (left). I also have a morning (8am - 11:30am) lesson plan consisting of community time and ELA topics. along with various brain break activities I used for behavior management/talking breaks. 

I applied the Knowledge Indicator of 1G) which states "...understands how to identify individual needs and how to locate and access technology, services, and resources to address those needs..." This can be shown in both of the below presentations. I used Pear Deck to give students who learn visually, verbally, and through kinesthetics the chance to interact and engage in the lesson plan/plans throughout the day. I also used technology resources for brain breaks such as Wordle, and YouTube. This helped keep students with behavior challenges stay with the lesson and still have the chance of positive engagement opportunities that are not always based on academics. 

I was able to have two main experiences in Special Education. During my junior year at Trinity, I took SPED317 which focused on Low Incidence disabilities and strategies in teaching exceptional students effectively. I was able to teach a few lesson plans to ELIM via Zoom. One of the lesson plans, which I taught with a classmate, was based on how to make purchases from a vending machine step-by-step. Due to differing ability and focus levels, I provided a lot of appearing and disappearing animations to engage and differentiate. 

For this ELIM lesson, I apply the Performance Indicator of 1J) which states "...differentiates strategies, materials, pace, levels of complexity, and language to introduce concepts and principles so that they are meaningful to students at varying levels of development and to students with diverse learning needs..." I chose this indicator because I had to differentiate how I presented this and how I asked questions based on individual needs and how students engage best. I also had to ensure that the materials were engaging and introducing the concept in a way that is realistic for the students.

During Student Teaching, I was able to teach 10 full days in the AERO Program with students in transition from high school to the world. For an observed lesson, I taught morning meeting and a math class about the next dollar up. This included me showing students how I purchase (I do), us purchasing something from a digital vending machine (we do), and then the students doing a choose your own adventure buying scenario (you do). We ended out this lesson with playing a dice dollar money game in which students rolled a dice and connected it to a money amount from the "bank." They then added it to their "wallets" and had to determine how much money they had in all. This ended when one of the students reached a desire amount of money. I differentiated with have three groups on their own levels with a para leading the group with minimal prompts.