Designing a Differentiated Lesson Plan

     The career requirements to be an educator goes much further than just having summers off and teaching the basic concepts to be successful. The level of how much passion goes into being a teacher can only be understood by other educators. It is not an “easy out” career path like many believes. It takes real passion, creativity, and understanding of our students that guide us to building curriculum that can reach every type of learning style and need. 

    Teacher’s research different processes, content, resources and learning environments that will help modify their instructional practices (Structural Learning, n.d.). When it comes to evaluating and choosing instructional strategies to differentiate for students, primarily relate to being flexible when meeting all levels of readiness. The way I planned for my student’s readiness, interest, and learning style required additional observations and data to be collected. This requirement is the number one tool that helped gage where each student was with their level of understanding and how they learn based off of the learning style inventory guide. The data collected helped with creating interventions used within the whole and small group activities.

     By incorporating different learning styles to ensure my remedial students were supported but also expose my students to different learning strategies. This strategy provides students with frequent experiences of making sense of content through a variety of different ways and opportunities (McCarthy, 2021). The assessments were differentiated by including different activities that related with both visual and hands-on activities before completing the formal assessment. By having students complete the first assessment, which related to looking at a word bank and utilizing the diphthongs ou (//ow/ sound), to practice verbalizing the sounds and mapping the word to find its proper placement. The additional differentiation to support ELL, special needs, gifted, and early finisher students reflected on visual aids, modeling word mapping, speaking clearly, and extending language art concepts that provided challenges. 

    The technology was included by utilizing programs that worked on phonics, reading, or Common Core standards. The three technology resources I implemented in my lesson were Lalilo, Prodigy, and Get Epic Books. These three language arts resources provided students with different options to choose from that incorporates gamified activities or reads stories. Lalilo is a program that focuses primarily on phonemic awareness skill. Prodigy focuses on grammar concepts like common and proper nouns. Get Epic Books is a reading program that allow students to choose a book of their choice that can be either read to them or independently read. By differentiating different technology tools that use various delivery formats of videos, reading, lectures, or audio provide students with the opportunity to choose their content based on their interest (McCarthy, 2015). Each one of these technology resources and curriculum materials played a big role in finding appropriate and engaging activities for each small group rotation. When it comes to differentiating lessons for students, smaller group sizes allow every student work at their appropriate levels. 

    Creating differentiations takes time and each students learning style and needs have to be included when lesson planning. It may take more time within the language arts time block to do small groups, but students will gain a better understanding through the different levels of exposure the activities bring to their learning process.

 

 

References

McCarthy, J. (2015). 3 Ways to Plan for Diverse Learners: What Teachers Do. Edutopia. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/differentiated-instruction-ways-to-plan-john-mccarthy

 

McCarthy, J. (2021). A Practical Guide to Planning for Intentional Differentiation. Edutopia. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/article/practical-guide-planning-intentional-differentiation

 

Structural Learning. (n.d.). Differentiation Strategies: A Teacher’s Guide. Retrieved from https://www.structural-learning.com/post/differentiation-strategies-a-teachers-guide