Planning Instruction and Designing Learning Experiences for All Students
Planning and design play a major role in my strengths as an educator. From assessment to emplementation, the planned learning experience is critical for the success of the students' growth. I enjoy maximizing the learning opportunities for all students by removing varriers and providing access through instructional strategies. Using graphics, videos, drama, games, and storytelling, I enjoy bringing the learning experience to life for all students.
December 13, 2017
How to get from A to B? Intentionally designing sequenced lessons to get from one spot to another is a key element of my professional growth this semester at Antioch University. In class, one of the greatest challenges for a majority of the students was creating structured written content. The students were able to easily create unstructured content. The students were also able to be creative and develop drawings and ideas. After assessment, I determined that the structure was the challenge. To keep the students engaged, I created a sequenced lesson plan founded on Fairy Tales. We also integrated a reading comprehension strategy so that the students could practice reading and comprehending the content.
Day 1 - Introducing the Fairy Tale Worksheet. Then, reading a common Fairy Tale and having the class fill in the worksheet using content they were familiar with.
Day 2 - Utilizing the worksheet, I had the students focus on one main element of their story, characters. We read another Fairy Tale and the students discussed the characters.
Day 3 - With the characters defined, the students were then allowed to start working on events and problems/solutions. We watched a short video, The Red Balloon, and discussed the events and problems in the video. With a strong understanding of these elements, the students were unleashed to develop their own content.
Day 4 - Finally, while reading Encyclopedia Brown stories, we continued our discussion on characters and also talked about solutions. We then dreamed as a group and discussed what type of magic would have been useful for the main character, Encyclopedia Brown, to use to solve the mysteries. The students loved the experience and learned without feeling the work.
December 12, 2017
When videoing my lessons for evaluation, one of the students found the camera and decided to put on a show. They were so excited to see themselves on camera that I decided to create a learning segment that involved them being on video. Although there was a lot of excitement involved with the video, it was easy to integrate common core standards. The students were to develop three types of lessons to share with an international classroom (Lithuania). In this process, the students had to demonstrate a lesson in math, language arts, and anything else that they learned in class that they wanted to teach. Although the quality of video wasn't the best for educational purposes, the effort and thought that each student put into the worksheet was impressive. The students were willing to watch the video over and over. Because we were interacting with an actual classroom in Lithuania, we were able to get feedback from the instruction from other older students and their teacher. I hope to continue this shared learning experience through the next semester with another class. The students designed their lessons, practices, and also thought of ways to make the content creative. Throughout this process, they also gained digital literacy and had multiple ways to demonstrate their learning.
December 12, 2017
Creating content that is over and above the standard curiculmn adds interest and excitement to the learning experience. Not only can it be more engaging, it can sequence from their current materials.
One of the students in my fall class was losing interest in school because of a lack of interest in the curriculumn. His parents were also complaining that he wasn't being challenged enough.
After getting to know him better I discovered that he absolutely loved baseball. Specifically, he loved the Dodgers. With this information, and an understanding of where he was in the class, I created a statistics worksheet that would challenge him with graphing, averages, and overall statistics. Not only was he excited about the process, he felt cared for and special. Most days, when I got to class, he would want to show me the latest trends in the worksheets. It was a joy to share this learning experience with this young student. There were 12 player charts created for his statistical enjoyment.