I have a couple examples that I could share. One example happened while I was teaching 4th grade. I had one student in my room who had an IEP. He was on the autism spectrum and had trouble staying focused. He was also being evaluated for ADHA/ADD. During a writing lesson, students were writing personification poems. I could tell he was having a hard time getting started with his rough draft. After talking with the special education teach a few times before, I knew that this student always found it easier to get a task started if he felt it was attainable. I thought if I gave him more specific directions and did not leave the poem instructions so open ended he would have an easier time with it. I got a piece of paper and I wrote out the different sections of the poem that he needed and I told the class about. I then modified the number of sentences he needed to write for each section and wrote that under each section. This way the student knew that for the beginning he needed 1-2 sentences, the middle should be 3 sentences and the end should be 1 sentence. He then knew exactly what he needed to write, how to start, and how to organize his thoughts.
Recently in middle school, we have had to make some adjustments in work load for one student who is EBD and has a heart defect that is requires surgery this week. In class last week we allowed him to work on a smaller set of problems as to not overwhelm him, but still allowing him to get the most important content.
These are both useful examples for seeing how you've made instructional adjustments at the individual level. I'm curious to know if the more specific instructions you gave your 4th grader helped jumpstart his poetry writing. That particular example highlights the role of support staff, in this case the SpEd teacher, in helping maximize student learning.
ReplyDeleteThe second example is noteworthy because of the health situation your 7th grader is facing. It's pretty sobering to consider how traumatic (and dynamic) our students' lives are, isn't it? In a way, teaching is like the medical field in that all our students bring different levels of academic and personal "health" to the classroom and we have to figure out the best diagnosis and treatment to move them all forward. I don't really like that clinical terminology (diagnose/treat), but as I think through the analogy, I'm forced to use that language :-) The big flaw in my analogy is that doctors see one patient at a time and teachers see all their "patients" at once. Why aren't we paid more?