Procedures that I use in my tutoring (which is the chief use of my time as an educator)

I also used many of these procedures while a teacher at SunEd High school and at other charter schools that use APEX program (individualized instruction, learn at your own pace).

1. Find out the interests of my students

This is an ongoing process when working with middle and upper school students.

2. Save work in digital form (by scanning the work or by asking students to type their work in a computer file)

This is getting more common… but the challenge is to collect and curate the essays.

3. Display the work in a portfolio

The Free Website Project freewebsiteproject.blogspot.com and TINYURL.com/FWPstart is the basis of this work. TINYURL.com/sunDP5 is a how-to free ebook for students to download and discuss with their parents. TINYURL.com/FWPbestPracticesTeachers is a collection of examples of portfolios made by teachers and students with screenshots of key documents.

4. Instruct students using “I do,” “We do” and “You do”

These stages of Universal Design for Learning provide the scaffold that many students need, gradually accepting responsibility for the task.

5. Treat students with learning differences the same differently. In fact, treat all students the same differently.

I read this phrase “test each students the same differently” in a book by Dennis Littky. Here is an excerpt:

There is no one indicator of success that fits every kid. There can be no one set of standards for every student in the country. There will never be one test that measures what every kid knows. Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich said it perfectly when he pointed out the paradox of stressing standardized tests when everyone agrees that standardized jobs are on the way out. “There’s one certainty about what today’s high school students will be doing a decade from now,” Reich wrote. “They won’t all be doing the same things, and they won’t be drawing on the same body of knowledge.” As Reich also explained, “We’re creating a one-size fits all system that needlessly brands many young people as failures when they might thrive if offered a different education whose progress was measured differently.” (page 172)

Differentiated Instruction means offering equivalent experiences.

“They won’t all be doing the same things, and they won’t be drawing on the same body of knowledge.” (Littky)

Universal Design for Learning makes it clear that the curriculum needs to be adapted to the individual student.

6. Continual assessment.

“Many teachers have told me they can more accurately assess their students through their day-to-day interactions than through standardized tests” (page 172, Littky).

Here’s the extended quote from Big Picture Learning:

In private conversations, many teachers have told me they can more accurately assess their students through their day-to-day interactions than through standardized tests. But because most of us are not against quantitative data in principle, we stick to the measurement methods we are given and that are demanded of us. What we should be doing is spending our energy (not to mention all the money that’s gone into developing these tests) to find real ways to measure what makes good schools and successful students. (page 173)

7. I model continual learning and lifelong learning.

I teach some subjects that I don’t know much about. I show the student how to build understand, how to fill in gaps, and how to complete homework.

When a teacher … is a learner himself or herself, that is when the best teaching happens— whether it is in his or her “area of expertise” or not. I once had a teacher who taught a class on the Bible, not as a religious work but as a piece of literature, and she had never really studied it before. She told me later that, during that class, she was the best teacher she had ever been, because she was on the same level with her students—she was experiencing it all for the first time right along with them. This meant she wasn’t saying things like, “Look at the metaphors in here and compare them,” but was actually asking questions that she herself didn’t know the answers to, like, “What do we think about this passage compared to this one?” It was very exciting for her and very invigorating for her students. (page 15, Littky)

8. Make writing easier. And more challenging.

Some students don’t like the physical act of using a pencil and their typing is often slow. These students benefit from voice to text transcribing. The procedure makes the capturing of the words into a file easier. Then the real work of writing can happen. This is more challenging because the student needs to read the essay several times (paragraph by paragraph). The typical test-taking skill in writing is to create an outline and then write the paragraphs and a conclusion. Then the student is asked to re-read the completed essay for the first time and make changes, looking for spelling errors and reading for meaning and for making smooth transitions from paragraph to paragraph. In reality, many students during a timed test are lucky to build a virtual outline in their heads. When they his the conclusion, it is sometimes with two minutes left, so they can read the essay but they don’t have time to make changes. That’s the test-taking experience of writing for many students.

This means that time management is important (during a test), but they also tend to use the same test-taking technique when writing a homework assignment (when there is more time available). There is more flexibility with time for writing an essay at home, so we make the writing more challenging by getting the student to break up the writing and re-writing and re-reading into different times and even different places. For example, capture the main ideas in the classroom (perhaps with speech to text), read at home, make changes while in the car, then re-write and re-read in a future session.