Meeting Diverse Needs

The ability to meet diverse needs is one of, if not the most, important skills for a teacher to have. Going into my student teaching experience, I seriously underestimated the importance and difficulty of mastering this skill in the classroom. When you teach a class, you are not teaching a group, you are teaching around 20 individuals that happen to be receiving the lesson at the same time. It is impossible to ensure student success without seeing each student individually and considering how best to aid them in learning the content. More than half of my students were on IEP or 504 plans, and many were also English Language Learners. As such, these students had a need for greater support in the classroom, which was my responsibility to fulfill. If these students' needs are not being met, they cannot learn. However, the truly great thing about utilizing strategies to help diverse learners is that these are beneficial to all students, not just those that they are intended to help.

My goal for my student teaching was to work on meeting diverse needs, especially those of my lower-level EL students. My mentor teacher and I quickly found that they were at an extreme disadvantage in the online format. While communicating with other students is usually a key aspect of learning English and succeeding in classes, during online learning, their ability to interact with other students was severely limited. I made it my goal to provide them with the support they needed and use the online format to their advantage as best I could.

During my first term of student teaching, I earned my SEI endorsement through a Sheltered English Immersion course. This course taught me a number of strategies to help English Language Learners which I made an effort to use in all of my classes, not just those with EL students. These strategies meant placing a strong emphasis on understanding scientific vocabulary, which is important for all students. Visual representations of the vocabulary and breaking down the meanings of the different parts of the words were key to helping all students understand the content. Additionally, my mentor teacher and I were able to set up translated captions for the Google Meets to help our EL students understand the lesson better. We made significant use of Google Translate which, while not the most accurate, allowed us to communicate with the EL students in a situation where we otherwise could not.

It was difficult and painful to be so limited in my ability to help these students under the circumstances. There were many times where I felt that I needed to reach through the screen and point to what I was talking about in order to communicate effectively, but this was impossible. I constantly felt that I was not doing enough but, at the same time, knew that I was making a sincere and strong effort to come up with new ways to support students in the online environment. While remote learning was difficult for everyone, it especially hurt those students who already needed the most support. However, even with all of the difficulties that my lower-level EL students faced, most of them gradually became more comfortable in the classroom. As time progressed, they completed more of their work and became vocal in the chat, asking questions and having friendly conversations more often than many of their peers. Their resiliency and perseverance to learn science in an entirely new language online, during the middle of the pandemic, was truly inspiring. [12] [18] [23]