108 Self-Assessment

Concepts of differentiated instruction, driven by varied assessments that are carefully aligned to desired student outcomes, are the essence of advanced teaching and complex instruction. After reading these overview chapters and revisiting the Continuum of Teacher Development you used to craft your Learning Plan, discuss your current level of understanding, knowledge and skills. What evidence from previous Reach seminars, work with your coach, and or feedback from peers/supervisors at your school do you use to draw these conclusions?

This blog assignment intimidates me because differentiation is such a massive and crucial piece of teaching well and like most things in teaching, the more I learn about it, the more I learn I have to do or implement. At the beginning of the year, there was hardly any differentiation going on in my classroom at all, and now it's only slightly better, although my knowledge of differentiated instruction has expanded. Looking at the continuum, I can safely say that my skills fall somewhere between "beginning" and "emerging."

Since the beginning of the year, I have definitely gotten better at recognizing the individual needs of my students. From going to visit their homes and meeting with their families, to assessing them formally, to discovering their strengths and weaknesses in class, I feel like I have a good idea of what skills and strategies each of my students need, including the academic, behavioral, and social. However, this information could be more organized, which leads to my biggest weakness. It is still difficult for me to apply the knowledge I have about my students' needs towards planning differentiation on a daily basis.

My guided reading lessons are one consistent use of differentiation, but I still feel like I could be putting more time into planning this small group time as to maximize the effectiveness of Guided Reading. I take notes on students' abilities to sound out certain words, detect meaning of unfamiliar words, and use reading strategies during Guided Reading. I need a more organized system to keep track of and implement this data into my GR planning.

Another improvement I have made since the beginning of the year is the use of differentiated materials for some activities in class and during Reader's Workshop. Last month, I was set on establishing a system for multiple levels of fluency passages in class, and now I am glad that I took the leap to make that happen. Now, all of my students have their own passage and I have seen major improvements in WPM and accuracy with some of the students. This is another opportunity for them to practice PIE (pacing, intonation, expression) and I can let them know what they need to work on each Friday when I choose a couple students to time and conference with. I also introduced the listening station for students that need extra help matching sounds to words as well as allowing for students to have another opportunity to hear books read out loud in English. I'm not sure how much the listening station is actually helping my students, but for some of my lowest readers who cannot always complete the workshop jobs along with their classmates, this is time that is not wasted that is spent reading instead.

Reading about UBD and differentiation once again helped me to realize that I need to improve my differentiation for my UBD unit. Especially in this unit about astronomy, I've found that some students have background knowledge that far exceeds my own, while others need even the most basic concepts explained to them (such as the fact that the earth is a sphere or the fact that the earth is indeed larger than a globe). It frustrates me that I could be simultaneously boring my more advanced students and losing my lower students when teaching science because I have not implemented any differentiation techniques into these lessons. Informally, though, I try to get all of my students to think deeply about why these topics are important and why the facts say what they do so that they can all get the deeper understanding piece, regardless of former experiences.

Differentiation and using and communicating student data are two of my major goals for the rest of the year based on my mid-year review and looking over the entire continnuum. I look forward to this course because I want to find out how it's possible to efficiently integrate differentiation in every lesson.