Instructional Planning for Diverse Learners Synthesis Post

At the beginning of the semester, I did an assignment that involved learning about the students in my practicum classroom. In completing these profiles on my students, I began to understand how unique each student was. They all liked different books, had different hobbies, and enjoyed different school subjects. They also all learned in different ways and excelled in different tasks. In the portion of the assignment in which I did an investigation of the community, I discovered how diverse the backgrounds of the students in one classroom could be. I also realized how different the culture and backgrounds of students in a school can be from the teachers who are teaching them.

Effective educators differentiate instruction based on this information they collect about their students. Tomlinson and Moon (2013) outline some principles that guide effective differentiated instruction. Two of these key principles are quality curriculum and instruction that responds to student variance. Differentiation should also create an environment that supports and encourages learning from all students. In discussing the curriculum in schools, Eisner (2001) points out the existence of an implicit and explicit curriculum. There are the explicit lessons being taught, that one might find in a lesson plan, but there is also an implicit curriculum that students are learning in the process. This implicit curriculum is everything the students are learning about what is valued or important. Whether things are included or excluded in the curriculum or what qualities teachers seem to value all have an impact on students. Delpit (2006) discusses how there are cultures of power and those who are not already a part of this culture may struggle to assimilate as they navigate the rules and codes of this culture. As a teacher, this is important to keep in mind when planning classroom management systems and in creating a classroom environment that is respectful of the diversity of the students in it.

Effective and culturally-responsive teachers consider issues of diversity not only in classroom management, but also in the curriculum. Students from all backgrounds should be able to see themselves reflected in the curriculum. Banks (2010) describes the various levels at which teachers can introduce multiculturalism. The most basic and superficial approach is the contributions approach, which injects figures like Martin Luther King Jr. or Pocahontas into mainstream instruction with no other change to the basic curriculum or deeper portrayals of other cultures or communities. The transformation approach, on the other hand, is more involved and alters the basic assumptions of the mainstream curriculum. Under this approach, students are provided with multiple representations of content from several ethnic viewpoints and encouraged to conceptualize each culture as its own interactive entity rather than simply a contribution to mainstream common society. The next step from this is a social action approach in which students are additionally provided with a sense of political efficacy by participating in activities to do with social criticism and social change.

Creating a curriculum that is multicultural in nature is important to representing student diversity in the classroom, but it is also important to creating better citizens of the world and critical thinkers out of our students, no matter the cultural background. Sleeter (2005) proposes designing curriculum around big ideas. In balancing academic standards with rich and interesting ideas, this is a helpful way to conceptualize the curriculum. This semester I had some practice with this, creating a unit lesson plan in the method of Wiggins and McTighe (2005). Using backward design, I was able to create a unit with performance assessments and more authentic instruction focused on teaching for understanding. In this way, big ideas such as perspective-taking and multiculturalism can be incorporated with the skills and academic content found in the standards to create lessons that address both student diversity and scholastic goals.

For my internship experience next semester, my goal is to get to know as much as I can from the beginning about the students as individuals and as members of their community. I hope to incorporate this information about my students into creating lesson plans that are both engaging and of personal interest to the students. A reading interest survey, for example, done on the first day can be a great way to establish an early understanding of your students as readers. In creating a behavior management plan that is successful for the class I am in, I will also want to know as much about the individual students as possible and which approaches might work best for them as individuals, but also as a group. I will want to determine which types of positive reinforcement will be the most impactful as well as which consequences will be the most meaningful. Within individual lessons, successful differentiation also depends on assessing student understanding regularly and considering other forms of student data. I intend to combine both my own anecdotal notes and observations with more formal collections of student data to ensure that lessons are differentiated wherever possible. Having high expectations for all students begins with effective teaching practices in both planning and instruction.

References

Banks, J.A. & Banks, C.A.M. (2010). Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (7^th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Delpit, L. (2006). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, NY: The New Press.

Eisner, E.W. (2001). The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs (3^rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Sleeter, C.E. (2005). Un-standardizing curriculum: Multicultural teaching in the standards-based classroom. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Tomlinson, C.A. & Moon, T.R. (2013). Assessment and student success in a differentiated classroom. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

End of the Second Semester: Classroom Management Reflections

This week was the final week of our course in classroom management. I learned about many different theories and philosophies regarding how to manage behavior in the classroom as well as particular strategies that can be used in establishing a sense of community.    

In an earlier post I had developed a classroom layout design for a class of 25 students, as seen below.

Later, for another assignment, I created this alternate classroom layout design for the same hypothetical 25 students I had written about in my previous post.

Here is the accompanying description for the above layout, which I believe reflects a greater emphasis on community and the value of small group work than my previous layout. “The twenty-five students in the class are seated at five tables in groups of five. There are five students in the class who are high achievers and social leaders with an ability to influence others. One of them will be placed at each of the tables in the hopes that their influence will positively affect the behavior of their classmates. Seating arrangements in which high-achieving and low-achieving students are sitting together throughout the room facilitates student involvement and participation (Levin & Nolan, 2010). The seating of students in groups is in keeping with the classroom emphasis on community and group work. Students such as those with learning disabilities will benefit from small group work as well as the ELL students in the class who will be placed at different tables in the classroom.”    

In another part of the paper containing this classroom layout design, I also wrote about a few routines and strategies I would employ in my classroom that seemed to be extremely beneficial to community building and behavior management. Some of those strategies and routines included Morning Meeting (Kriete, 2002), redirection (Rothstein-Fisch & Trumbull, 2008), and the Peace Table (Bullard, 2008).    

More than anything, I think the biggest thing I learned from this course is that no matter what management style you personally have, there is a large amount of prior planning involved. Even teachers whose classrooms are more student-directed must begin with particular routines and strategies in mind to guide students to this point. Structure and routine aren’t just for the reward/coercive, assertive discipline teachers of the world. Building a community takes some serious time and planning.

 

References

Bullard, S. (2008). Peace takes practice. In Teaching Tolerance (Ed.), Starting small: Teaching tolerance in preschool and the early grades (pp. 63-75). Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center.

Kriete, R. (2002). The Morning Meeting Book (2^nd ed.). Turners Falls, MA: Northeast Foundation for Children.

Levin, J., & Nolan, J. F. (2010). Principles of classroom management: A professional decision-making model (6^th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Rothstein-Fisch, C., & Trumball, E. (2008). Managing diverse classrooms: How to build on students’ cultural strengths. Alexandria, Virginia: ASCD.

Parent-Teacher Relationships

A very important aspect of a student’s school experience is the relationship between families and the school. As teachers, it is our job to reach out to the parents and guardians of our students to create as much cohesion between home and the classroom as possible. This DOES NOT mean overwhelming parents with information about standards and assessments and using lots of teaching jargon, assuming they will now perfectly understand what is expected of their child at school. This DOES mean listening to parents, and asking them what their expectations for their child are, and attempting to learn more about your students and their families.

Carrie Rothstein-Fisch and Elise Trumbull’s Managing Diverse Classrooms: How to Build on Students’ Cultural Strengths also discusses how students’ attitudes and values about the individual’s role in the community come from the social context of their home environments. To understand how our students are inclined to feel about a range of school aspects such as helping, sharing, group work, individual assignments, eating breakfast and lunch, engaging in physical activities, eye contact, or answering questions, teachers must learn about each student’s cultural context and home environment. Only then can the teacher effectively move forward in creating a classroom environment that best supports each student’s learning style.

In terms of how I will try to incorporate these concerns into my own teaching practices, I have been thinking of the ways this bridging between school and home, between teachers and parents, can best be achieved. I will make sure to establish a relationship with parents early on in the year, either calling or emailing (depending on which form of communication is easiest and most accessible to a parent) letting parents know how their child is doing and letting them in on positive moments. This way, parents won’t associate messages from the teacher as a negative thing and if anything does happen at school that the parent needs to be made aware of, this communication won’t be the first time they are hearing from the teacher. I also hope to use open houses and parent-teacher conferences as an opportunity to establish an informal relationship with parents that is open and allows families to feel free to ask questions and voice their opinions. Too often these teacher interactions with families involve teachers talking at the families rather than to the families. Important information from the teacher about the students should be shared with parents, but overall I hope in these meetings to let parents do most of the talking so that I can learn more about families and the students in my class and establish that my role is to be there to answer any questions families may have about their child’s school experience.

Culturally Responsive Classroom Orchestration

In Managing Diverse Classrooms: How to Build on Students’ Cultural Strengths, Carrie Rothstein-Fisch and Elise Trumbull explore some important components of culturally responsive classroom organization. One important idea presented is that classroom orchestration is most effective when producing a minimum of conflict between home and school values. This means that teachers use an understanding of students’ culture-based values in choosing strategies and activities to use in the classroom. Good organization on this basis creates a more harmonious environment in which the need for discipline is much less. A classroom that is culturally responsive in everything from its physical layout to the way students are expected to interact with one another is a classroom that has a greater sense of community in which students are more likely to desire for group harmony. In a classroom like this, there are fewer incidents of behavioral problems than in a classroom orchestrated with a more individualistic control-oriented approach. In considering the role of punishment in terms of addressing negative student behaviors, there are several issues. One is the issue of punishment as a reward. For some students, the consequences the teacher has identified as a punishment for bad behavior may actually be functioning as a reward. For example, if a teacher believes sending a student out of the classroom is a punishment, a student who dislikes a particular class or assignment may begin misbehaving during that time in the hopes of getting out of the class. Sometimes when there are problems with student behavior, it is best to consider approaches that avoid issues of punishment altogether. One such strategy is redirection. Redirection involves shifting a student’s focus from one less desirable topic to a more desirable one. One example from the book was a teacher saying to a student, “Juan, tell him how you want to be treated,” as a way of facilitating the reentry of the student into the group. This reframes his issue in a positive way that builds community by encouraging students to address issues with each other as opposed to fostering thoughts that could lead to feeling alienated from the group.

Classroom Layout Design: Arrangement of Students’ Desks

This week in classroom management, we worked in groups to form a classroom layout design. While there are many components to a classroom’s layout, the main focus of our group’s attention fell on the arrangement of the students’ desks. In Elementary Classroom Management: Lessons from Research and Practice (Sixth Edition), Carol Simon Weinstein and Molly E. Romano discuss seating in terms of the effect this arrangement has on the interaction among students. This is an important aspect of social contact, which they identify as one of the six basic functions of physical settings. Different types of arrangements facilitate different types of social contact to be taken into consideration when deciding what types of student interactions you as a teacher are hoping to promote in your classroom. Desks in clusters, for example, allow students to work in small groups and can facilitate interactions among students from varying cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Desks in rows, on the other hand, promote student concentration on assignments as an individual and can increase students’ average time-on-task. Ultimately, in creating a classroom layout design for a class of 25 students, our group arrived at the seating arrangement depicted below.

 

 This seating arrangement seemed ideal in its fusion of aspects of rows and also groupings. The U-shape allows students to feel a sense of community in seating while also allowing the teacher ample room to move around the students. Groups are achieved through rows facing each other, to allow for student interaction. The aspects of both rows and clusters in this seating arrangement allow for flexibility in terms of being able to place students where they will be most likely to succeed. A student who needs to be able to focus could be placed in the less distracting single row of seats whereas students who may benefit from interacting more frequently with others could be seated in the rows facing each other.    

Following the creation of this design, we did an activity in which playing cards were distributed at random so that each of us had a set of 25 cards representing 25 different students in our hypothetical class. We were given a key explaining what each card meant in terms of describing our hypothetical student. This key is shown below.

Using our classroom layout design, we were then asked to place these “students” as we would seat them in our classroom based on what we know about them from the key, with the caveat that all the diamonds were ELL students. In my initial effort, I placed the students as seen below.    

My classroom seating “philosophy” was to mix up the students by reading level and behaviors. I tried to place the social leaders near those with the biggest behavior problems, in the hopes that peer influence would contribute to diminishing negative behaviors. I also attempted to avoid anyone with behavior problems sitting next to anyone else with behavior problems, a task that was easier said than done with a class in which half of the students were identified as nonconformists. I also avoided placing students with ADD/ADHD next to anyone with behavioral issues to avoid any further possible distractions. I additionally placed well-behaving students by possible distractions or areas of high traffic in the classroom such as pencil sharpeners.      

I also decided to spread out the ELL students, an approach I became unsure of when discussing this with another classmate whose approach was to group them together. My philosophy was that the ELL students would benefit from interaction with English-speaking students whereas my classmate felt that grouping ELL students of the same primary language together would allow them to work together and help each other in ways their other classmates could not. Ultimately, both of these opportunities are important classroom experiences for ELL students. This dichotomy represents the importance of grouping students in multiple different ways for different activities based on specific student needs and not being hindered by an adherence to your initial seating arrangements.

  

Beginning of the Second Semester: Classroom Management Reflections

In our classroom management class this week we did a free write activity, writing for five minutes everything we thought about what classroom management is or what we think it should be. At the end I had about a page of unedited, unfiltered free thought on what I thought about classroom management. We were then asked to use a can of Play-Doh to form a representation of what we had written about classroom management. What initially struck me about this activity was the difficulty of synthesizing what I had written on my paper into a visual representation. This led me to reflect on what the overwhelming message was of what I had written. The main themes were inclusiveness with consideration for student diversity and a sense of community in which the teacher is explicit about expectations. I ended up representing this with my Play-Doh as a group of students and their teacher joining hands in a circle with a heart in the center.

After doing a gallery walk looking at the representations created by the others in the class, I saw many themes similar to the one I had been attempting to express in mine. Others chose to represent themes of organization and direction or presented students in small groups working with one another. My representation was less focused on strategies and approaches and more on overall classroom atmosphere. As we walked around we each wrote a word or two on a piece of paper of what came to mind when viewing other people’s Play-Doh representations. When I came back to mine, I found that people had written words such as love, community, and inclusiveness. 

It would seem that my attitudes about classroom management and atmosphere were clear from my representation. I think the clear visual of students and teacher joined in a circle was effective for creating a connection with abstract ideas such as community and inclusiveness. It is encouraging that others were able to understand clearly my desire to create an inclusive classroom community, but there are many other aspects I was unable to translate into my Play-Doh representation. Things such as being an adaptive teacher who is responsive to the specific needs of a diverse range of students or being able to recognize when particular strategies are not effective in the classroom are also important to effective classroom management. Many other people’s representations depicted aspects of order and organization and, while I did not emphasize this in my free write, it is perhaps another facet of effective classroom management that I should incorporate into my approach.