Differentiation and Teaching Students
with Disabilities
I believe that every classroom community is composed of diverse learners with different curricular and developmental needs. As such, I feel that it is incredibly important to differentiate not only lesson content but also the method of instruction and the medium in which students demonstrate their understanding. In the classroom, I utilize strategy instruction, scripted programs, multisensory activities, and a variety of instructional learning formats to help my students access the general education curriculum and meet their IEP goals.
In my student teaching, I learned to use programs such as the Leveled Literacy Intervention and Fundations to build literacy skills – and I designed individualized math curricula for students using the Standards of Learning and grade-level pacing guides. I have observed, through my teaching experiences, that by differentiating lessons in a variety of manners, I am better able to meet the needs of my students and help them build their understanding of class concepts. Furthermore, by exploring methods of differentiation, I am better able to collaborate with general educators by discussing successful ways to modify lesson content, assessments, and instructional formats to engage students in higher-order thinking.
In addition, I support students with special needs in the classroom by employing elements of Explicit Instruction into my teaching practices. All of my lessons include a review of previous skills and knowledge and I structure every lesson to provide multiple opportunities for providing feedback and eliciting student responses. As a result, my students are provided instruction at a brisk pace that keeps them actively involved in the lesson. I have found that by utilizing explicit instruction in the classroom my students are better supported in accessing class content and they are given the cognitive tools they need to internalize new knowledge and skills.
As I learn more about differentiation in the field, I am looking forward to finding even more innovative ways to teach students with disabilities and to provide them high-quality instruction.
Lesson Plan
This lesson plan is an individualized math lesson plan for a 4th grade student struggling with multi-step math problems. In this lesson, I utilize strategy instruction to teacher her the steps of multi-digit multiplication. Across this lesson, I use knowledge of her accommodations and academic needs to build a lesson that will highly scaffold her learning using explicit procedures and previous learning strategies she has already learned.
Artifacts
Reading Strategy Instruction
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As each reader is different, they all require a variety of strategies to support their reading goals. In addition to utilizing the Leveled Literacy Intervention program (LLI), I also use these reading strategy posters to set reading goals for each of my students. Depending on their reading needs, they are directed to use self-monitoring strategies for decoding or comprehension.
By explicitly teaching these reading strategies to my students they are able to enrich the instruction in their scripted program by using a reading strategy that has been chosen to help them build balanced literacy skills. Then, as they grow more comfortable with their use of these strategies they are encouraged to generalize these learning strategies to their reading instruction in the general education setting and at home.
The Addition Machine Simulation
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My math curriculum is heavily influenced by the Concrete, Representation, and Abstract progression of instruction (CRA). I use CRA to help my students build their schema surrounding unfamiliar concepts such as addition or subtraction. This addition machine was a simulation that I used with several 1st graders who were struggling to transition from the concrete to the representational phase of addition instruction.
When presented with this simulation to support their use of picture addition, the students were able to visualize the two addends blending together to create a sum. By providing this opportunity to blend concrete and representational models of addition, my students were able to build their understanding of the math operation while having an engaging way to check their work.
Fundations Phonics Instruction
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I use the Fundations program as a multisensory way to teach phonics. These letter cards have a visual cue so that students can connect to the letter and build an anchor for letter-sound connections. Furthermore, I use the sound and hand-motion pairings in the Fundations program to further anchor letter-sound connections in movement.
By providing several different ways to anchor letter-sounds, my students have now internalized letter-sound connections and have begun decode and encoding CVC words using their Fundations strategies.
