Adaptations for Individual Needs
As a secondary teacher, I believe in the importance of challenging all of my students appropriately within the classroom. I also believe in scaffolding students to understand the material during every lesson. I pay particular attention to individual needs and plan for adaptations in advance. For classroom workshops, I make sure that I select appropriate topics of study with different levels of difficulty before the lesson occurs. This way, each workshop group of students will be given an area of study that will challenge them at their individual reading level.
Evidence of Standard - Symbolism Workshop
Available for download is a lesson plan utilized for 11th grade general English students. While studying Flannery O'Connor's short story, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own", I decided to include a workshop lesson that focused on O'Connor's symbolism.
The lesson includes a list of symbols for each student group to focus on during the workshop. The symbols are of varying degrees of difficulty. As the teacher, I helped each group choose an appropriate symbol that would be accessible but also challenging. Photos of student group work are below. Click on a picture to expand it. |
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Modified Tests and Quizzes
At bothTrap Hill Middle School and Grove City Middle School, I had the opportunity to work with special education teachers to help adapt my instruction for students with special needs. With the guidance of these special educators, I was able to construct my own modified assessments for a number of students with applicable IEPs. Below, you can see previews of the original assignment and adapted assignment for a test made at Trap Hill Middle School and a quiz made at Grove City Middle School.
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Modifications for Gifted Students
During a persuasive writing lesson, my students were given the task to write a persuasive letter to the editor of the Grove City Middle School newspaper, The Eagle Express. Students were told to choose a local topic that they were familiar with to write their letter about, such as school lunches, community service, time between classes, etc... For students with GIEPs, I made modifications to their assignment and let them choose a national topic to write about, such as gun control, in order to provide a more challenging topic. These students were also given the opportunity to add statistics and quotes into their essay via computer research. You can download the entire lesson plan to the right.
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