Meeting Diverse Needs

The third element of the Candidate Assessment of Performance is 2.A.3: Meeting Diverse Needs. The CAP says to meet diverse needs an educator “uses appropriate practices, including tiered instruction and scaffolds, to accommodate differences in learning styles, needs, interests, and levels of readiness, including those of students with disabilities and English language learners” (Massachusetts DOE, 2016).

The first thing I think of when I hear “meeting diverse needs”, is the differences in my classes. Every single one of my classes has students with documented diverse needs, but a numerous number of undocumented students as well. I have students who are on IEPs and 504 Ed. plans and you know from the get go exactly what the students need from you to excel in your class, but you also have students who are undocumented that you start to learn their different needs throughout the year, that you must teach to as well.

In this aspect, I feel as though meeting diverse needs corresponds directly with adjustment to practice. In order to meet the needs of your students each day, you have to constantly adjust your teaching. Each one of your students learns differently so in order to meet each one of their needs you must adjust how you teach each day. If you teach one day in front of the room lecturing the whole class, the next class should have some group work, partner activities or individual work. To take your practice even a step forward, you would have different teaching styles within each class. This would not only help all of the students in your class with different needs, but it would also help keep your students attentive during class. When I think of this approach to the classroom it reminds me of television. When you watch a TV show the show cuts to a new point of view or scene every 10 seconds. This is because your brain will start to wander and you get bored and they want to keep your attention.

If you are not meeting the needs of your students you are not reaching your responsibility of being an educator. It may seem like a lot of work to structure yourself around the students but that's the whole job. One of the main reasons I have gone the path of education is to make a difference in the lives of others and I can't make a difference through education if I do not reach my students on an educational standpoint. Meeting diverse needs is the only way to get the “ah-ha” moment from your students, which is something to strive for.

Besides just adjusting your practice on the fly to meet your students' needs, you must also plan for this. I do this every day in my class. One of the most prevalent examples of meeting diverse needs is the tool kit cards we do in my classroom. A lot of our learning comes from the students in my lessons. Most of the learning is exploratory. I very rarely have an entire or even a large portion of the class where I am up in the front of the classroom lecturing, students get bored and no one will follow what is happening. Because of this, however, we take very few standard “notes” in my classroom. Instead we do tool kit cards. Toolkit cards are large note cards that become the students “math dictionary”. The tool kit cards would be the peak of a scaffolded lesson. The students will do activities in class each day in order to have them explore what the lesson is all about and then we bring it all together for the toolkit cards at the end. I also meet different needs when actually doing the toolkit cards. When we are copying the toolkit cards as a class, I project the card on the board as I write it with them. I make the writing in the cards in different colors so it's easier for the students to follow the math happening in front of them, as well I speak every single word I write down twice. I had done this in the beginning for one student specifically because I noticed within the first week of school that he could not look at the board and copy down what was in front of him. His brain did not retain the information long enough. But now after I started repeating what I was writing (and sometimes for the really important parts I make the students repeat it too), the kids are understanding it more because they have to focus less on what they're writing and more on what it means.

Another example of me meeting diverse needs within my classroom is when I do my “math dance moves”. This gets the kids up and active as well as gives them another way to visualize what is happening during the lesson. I have used the math dance moves for the different function families (cubic, quadratic, trig, exponential, linear and absolute value). I also have moves to represent domain and range as well as the difference between direct and indirect variation.

One of the struggles I had with one of my classes specifically was a student that had very low math skills. He was put in my AG1 class which is the lowest level “regular class”, where he should have definitely been in an essentials class. He is still at about a 7th grade level in terms of his math skills so having him in my class has challenged me in terms of trying to find the best scaffolding approach. As well in this particular class, out of my 12 students, 10 of them are on Ed. plans so I have to tailor it in a different way to their needs.

I also have an honors pre-calculus class that is supposed to be a very fast paced class and the class that I took over, my mentor teacher told me in her 17 years of teaching this class they are the lowest class she has ever had. That presents another large challenge for me in teaching them. In order to keep them on pace with the other pre-calculus classes I have to teach in a very different way. I have come up with many desmos activities for this class as well as I focus on different aspects in their homework. The homework assigned to the students in this class is less exploratory and more straight forward, because they need to work on their basic math skills to be able to excel in this class.

In my formative assessment, I had received a rating of proficient for this element but by the end if the practicum I had graduated to exemplary, so I believe I have achieved this element within my practice.