Designing Lessons for Diverse Learners

After our seminar I took a close look at the article, Designing Lessons for Diverse Learners by Natalie Olinghouse. As a whole I find it to be a great guide for the way I accommodate my students. Certain things that I am seeing in here, we do and I never even realized it was considered an accommodation. Just today I gave a word study test. I read the paragraph VERY VERY slowly and repeated each word a lot of times. Then I would reread the whole sentence and stress the words they needed to fill in. I then read the whole thing again through at the end so they could follow along and check their work. I asked my CT after if I was going too slow, and she said it was perfect because some of the kids need to hear it a couple of times. Some kids may not, but I was accommodating those who need it through a whole group setting. I hope that some of the kids who would think I am going way too slow caught mistakes and read over their papers. This would fall into the steps she sets for making accommodations. Since this is something that can benefit all students I think it is a great step to take.

Another connection I had to this article is under step 6 where she talks about altering existing materials. When I did my math unit, I did not take a lot of information out of the actual curriculum. I scaffolded my lessons based on it, but I added in almost all of my own worksheets and projects. I felt the need to do this, because I felt that the student sheets that they provided would have not worked with the class I had. I wanted to take things even more step by step and make sure that they understood powers of ten, basic facts, and place value before expecting them to do all of the clustering. The students did begin to grasp the bigger picture with the aid of these additions into the curriculum.

For my own planning purposes, I feel the chart she provides is wonderful. I have a lot of questions about specific students and for many of them I can find possible solutions right in the article. Next time I lesson plan, I am going to take a look and hopefully implement something new into my teaching.