Classroom Practices
Family Engagement
Classroom Management
Assessment
Social-Emotional Learning
Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners
Classroom Management
Assessment
Social-Emotional Learning
Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners
Family EngagementIn my classroom, I welcome and value parent/guardian involvement. I truly believe that communication with my students family members plays such a significant role in meeting the needs of all of my students in regards to their development and their learning. Having a strong relationship with parents is key to running a successful classroom. I see parents as my partners that work with me to make sure my students succeed academically. When the teacher-parent dynamic is seen this way, I find that the students benefit significantly.
In addition to actively communicating with family members, during my practicum placement, I also got the chance to send a newsletter home to families to recap announcements and changes in the classroom. The newsletter pictured on the right was created and sent home to parents to announce my arrival and discuss my purpose for being in the classroom. |
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Setting high expectations for students in terms of their behavior and their work is significant to running a classroom smoothly. I always make sure that students understand exactly what is expected of them by explaining it clearly and putting the expectations in the form of SRSD (Self Regulated Strategy Development) to ensure that students have responsibility for their actions and work.
An example of this being incorporated in my classroom is pictured to the left. COPS is a mnemonic strategy that helps students stay on track when they write. |
I always make sure that my students receive frequent movement breaks. An important thing to keep in mind when managing a classroom and student behavior is the contributing factors for that behavior. When I notice that the energy and enthusiasm in my classroom is low, I put on a GoNoodle and let them dance and gain their energy back before moving forward with instruction.
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Using bitmoji is a fun and creative way to keep children on task and to make expectations clear. I like to incorporate them into my morning messages and lesson powerpoints to let students know how I am feeling about the day and what I expect from them during an activity/lesson.
Bitmoji is a great tool to use for remote classrooms as well. It can be a great addition to powerpoints and online learning platforms to make it seem more like an in-person atmosphere. The bitmoji pictured on the upper left is one that I incorporate regularly to articulate to students that they should be putting their best effort into their work everyday! Located on the lower left is an example of my morning message during one of my takeover days during my student-teaching. |
Assessments can be done in a variety of ways; however, the ones that I find give me the most information to support my instruction in terms of making it better to meet the needs of all of the learners in my class are routine curriculum assessments and informal observation assessments. Pictured on the right, is an assessment that is routinely given to students at the end of every phonics unit. These are very helpful for me to identify where the children need more practice and where their strengths lie. I always use the results of these unit assessments to inform my future instruction. |
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Incorporating children's literature can be a very useful tool to teach students about social-emotional learning. They can be used to teach students the importance of possessing a specific character trait as well as how to appreciate themselves and others.
I played the following read aloud to my students during our SEL read aloud time when I noticed that some students where experiencing big feelings and low confidence. |
Another way to incorporate SEL into the classroom is through morning meeting. I always have morning meeting with my students at the beginning of every morning and I make sure I include a greeting, a share, and a movement activity. These components encourage students to learn more about one another, helps them gain comfortability in the classroom, allows them to talk about themselves, and promotes community building.
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What Do Teachers Need to Consider? & What Does This Look Like in Practice?: In order to meet the needs of all learners, specifically those who are culturally and linguistically diverse, it is important to put in the proper planning to ensure that all students are given equal opportunity to succeed academically. This is rooted in planning because it requires very careful and diligent thinking in terms of what adjustments and accommodations need to be made to your instruction and lesson execution in order to best support all learners. I find that the most important things to incorporate and think about when planning lessons to support diverse learners are providing a various amount of visuals that represent lesson content, providing multiple anchor charts, creating language goals, opportunities for students to provide visual representations of their work, choosing mentor texts that are culturally diverse, creating a culturally diverse curricula, and making the appropriate adjustments to worksheets, handouts, and readings to best support students (Ex: providing translated versions into the students native language in addition to providing them with the English version to hep them make connections between the two languages and have a better understanding of material). Teachers must be prepared to support all of their students with every lesson that they teach to ensure every student has the same opportunity to be engaged in the material.
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Experience: During my time in the field, I have had multiple opportunities to practice creating lesson plans that diligently take all learners into consideration. When I taught a mini-lesson on free-verse poetry, I planned the lesson with all of the students in mind, especially the English Language learner. This student spoke Japanese, and I incorporated many different ELL strategies into my planning to provide the most support I possibly could to ensure that they had an equal opportunity to learn the content as much as every other student in the class. I translated every handout and worksheet into Japanese and I was sure to create multiple anchor charts with visuals that represented what the learning and performance goals of the lesson were. Additionally, I spoke with the student individually and made sure that they understood the expectations and made clear that she could draw pictures of what she wanted her writing to be about. After planning and doing my best to create an environment where all students have equal access to lesson material, I noticed that it supported and benefited the students work in significant ways. They were able to draw some of their ideas on the paper and began writing in there native language as well.
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