Standard 3: Planning For Differentiated Instruction

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.

In meeting the Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 3: Planning for Differentiated Instruction, the artifact that I created was a lesson plan I made for teaching a Fitness class in a Physical Education classroom. Throughout this lesson plan, I go over the learning objectives, goals, and previous student knowledge to create an instructive and unique learning experience. I created this lesson plan in the Fall of 2021 during my student teaching placement.

Throughout this artifact, it was important that I focused on sticking close to the Illinois Professional Teaching Standard, "Planning for Differentiated Instruction". One way that I achieved this was through section 3B, which states, "the competent teacher will understand how to develop short- and long-range plans, including transition plans, consistent with curriculum goals and learning theory;" This was shown throughout my lesson plan as I took into account formative assessments that will be given, transitions from one activity to another, and making the lesson plan easy enough to become a short or long term plan.

I feel that a weakness that I have is my formative and summative assessments. As a student teacher, I was trying my best to accommodate for all the possible outcomes but there is still room for improvement. A strength that I have in this area is being able to adjust the lesson to be able to support differentiated learners. However, I can still improve on incorporating a stronger academic language throughout my lessons.

In meeting the Illinois Professional Teaching Standard 3: Planning for Differentiated Instruction, the second artifact that I created was another lesson plan I made for teaching my Adaptive Physical Education students Gross Motor Skills. Throughout this lesson plan, I went over several different learning objectives and walked the students through step-by-step instructions on basic gross motor skills. However, I did need to adapt some of the movements for my students in order for them to perform the activities.

Throughout this artifact, it was important that I focused on sticking close to the Illinois Professional Teaching Standard, "Planning for Differentiated Instruction". One way that I achieved this was through section 3B, which states, "the competent teacher will understand how to develop short- and long-range plans, including transition plans, consistent with curriculum goals, student diversity, and learning theory;" This was shown throughout my lesson plan as I took into account the students I was teaching and how to adapt my lesson plans for this group of diverse learners. This then allowed me to expand my teachings and continue this unit for several weeks after.

Through developing this lesson plan I learned that I need to work on is creating the formative and summative assessments throughout the lesson for my adaptive students as well. This is important as I further my career this will become important so I can adapt my teachings to the varying needs of my students as I continue to teach.