Blog #7

A Scenario Where Work Is Important, Focused, and Engaging (6.1) pg.69

To me this, simply put, is backwards design. How do you know how you are going to get somewhere if you don’t know where you are going? I will be doing a form of this for every single lesson in every subject that I teach. For both my intern school and the district we have been taught a very specific way that we need to feel out our lesson plan books, it’s called Lesson in a Box (Sample to the left). First we put WT: (What will be taught, the concept/objective). Next we put HT: (how it will be taught- direct instruction, guided learning, inquiry, etc.) under this we write simple instructions on what to do, such as for the guided learning model we write what we will do for the intro, activity and response. Finally we put HD: (how demonstrated). Basically it is a watered down lesson plan. We will then turn these in every Monday to our intern coach so she can see what we are doing that week. At first it looked like a lot of work but I can see how it will help me keep my lessons important and focused, picking out the most relevant parts of a unit. As we talked about in class and as the book states in every unit there are things that are “enduring and important…versus what might be nice to know.” We also need to have a plan B incase plan A doesn’t work. As I have watched my own children these last two weeks of school, I have learned , we may have time to go back at the end of the year and touch on some of those “ nice to know” things. My son asked if he could stay home from school today because their field trip was canceled on account of the rain, so they are going to have yet another reading marathon. Why not use these unplanned days to teach something of interests to the students that you weren’t’ able to get to during a unit or something that may not be in the core but is of interest to the students. So much time is wasted these last two weeks of school. Weather should not be an excuse. If the students can’t go on the field trip, how can we bring the field trip to our students?

A Scenario Where Work Is Demanding and Scaffolded (6.2, 6.3, 6.4) pg74

As I was reading this section I was thinking about how the two tiered groups in Mr. Johnson’s class would look like, sound like, and feel like. I came to the conclusion that even in the two tiers you are going to have students of different levels, abilities, and interests. As an example of another subject let’s look at Words Their Way. You may have several students in the Within Word Patterns but even then you will have some students working on blends, some on long vowels and other on other vowels and even in those three groups there may be different levels of ability and readiness. What I like about this is peers helping each other, a sense of community. With the two tiers in Mr. J’s class the lower tier will still have some students that can help others, they can truly work as a collaborative team and the lower students in both groups can feel like they are contributing to the overall product. If this was an individual project even with more scaffolding some students may feel overwhelmed. I love the idea of rubrics. I don’t ever remember seeing one when I was a young student. The closest thing I remember to a rubric was 5^th grade social studies. We were to memorize the Gettysburg Address. The teacher told us exactly where we needed to memorize to, in order to get an A, B, or C. Our grade was our choice. The question is how to motivate the students that only care about the B, C or lower. I liked the rubric on page 145 that doesn’t give the points possible but does go in descending order. Some students may only read the first box and do what it says. With the boxes in descending order you have already set them up to succeed. I struggle somewhat with the self-evaluation. In my experience some students are too hard on themselves, while others are too easy. But I will know my students and if I see a discrepancy then I can take this opportunity to meet with each student and go over their evaluation and talk about the wonderful things they are doing and where they can improve. Then we can set goals for them.

I feel like I am just scraping the top of the iceberg on understanding differentiation but I can’t wait to apply what I do know and understand and continue to learn and grow in this subject.