Standard 3 - Planning for Differentiated Instruction – The competent teacher plans and designs instruction based on content area knowledge, diverse student characteristics, student performance data, curriculum goals, and the community context. The teacher plans for ongoing student growth and achievement.
This artifact was created in the Fall of 2022 during my first student teaching placement. The purpose of this lesson plan was to show differentiated instruction in a small group setting. This was completed during our group reading lesson and consisted of 4 students. In the lesson, students were practicing basic prepositions as well as practicing turn taking given their chosen form of communication (AAC device, verbal, Core Board, visuals).
Indicator 3E states that a teacher "understands the appropriate role of technology, including assistive technology, to address student needs, as well as how to incorporate contemporary tools and resources to maximize student learning". During this lesson, I utilized AAC devices with either the Touch Chat or LAAMP app. Since we frequently play board games in the classroom, I was able to make a personalized game board page with the Speech Language Therapist that offered common phrases when playing games together. This helped promote engagement and communication throughout the lesson. One the page, we were also able to add a shortcut to the prepositions page as that was also being used frequently during the lesson. Add these two pages helped promote independence for the students. Students were also provided with visuals, such as "wait", "my turn", "your turn", and the classroom CoreBoard.
This assignment allowed me to create an engaging way to teach the students about a relatively new concept and one that most of the students have as IEP goals. We are mainly working on functional prepostion words. Since this is an IEP goal and with the help of paraprofessionals in the room, data was also able to be collected while differentiated based off of individualized goals of the same lesson.
This artifact was created during Fall 2021 during my Communication and Collaboration In Special Education: Strategies and Methods course. For this specific activity, we were given a disability to research and present to our classmates. The main focus of this lesson was to find best practices for teaching students with this disability as well as communication supports that may be offered.
Performance Indicator 3P states that a competent teacher "works with others to adapt and modify instruction to meet individual student needs". This assignment not only taught me more about a disability I am not particularly familiar with and research it, but also required for us all to collaborate together on best practices for various other disabilities. Hands outs were created with strategies to help promote communication and growth for the given disability and we then all worked together to create core boards for each population. Overall, it was an extremely informative assignment that required me to informatively research with the intent of learning more ways to support students with disabilities.
This assignment will help me as a future educator because it allowed me to practice breaking down a disability and to focus on research-based best practices when working with a student with such disability. While every child is different, such research is a great baseline to start from when modifying instruction or offering support for each student.