Planning for Instruction

INTASC Standard 7 calls for a teacher to plan instruction that supports every student in meeting rigorous learning goals by drawing upon knowledge of content areas, curriculum, cross-disciplinary skills, and pedagogy, as well as knowledge of learners and the community context. The first step in every classroom is to get to know the individual learners of the class. Who are they? What are their needs? What are their backgrounds? Being able to successfully integrate student needs into learning plans is essential to successful teaching. Through my time at Samford University, I have had a plethora of opportunities with a wonderful variety of learners and had unique planning challenges to overcome a a result. The biggest planning strategy for individual lesson plans is differentiation, which is the moment a teacher pauses while planning to insure that they are meeting the needs of every individual student in the classroom, especially those with unique cultural backgrounds, IEPS, and 504s.

Artifact 1 is a unit plan created for 11^th and 12^th grade students in a 4^th period Intro to Economics Class. All ten lessons are differentiated to fit student needs. For example, when planning the mathematics portion of the unit, I was cognizant of the fact that I had a student with an IEP for an SLD in Math and needed extra conceptual support with new math concepts and access to a calculator for all exams. Knowing this, I designed all math lessons to support his conceptual needs and permitted everyone in the class to use calculators during all assessments. Additionally, I had three students with 504s that required prepared note sheets for all lessons. For this reason, I prepared a fill-in-the-blank note sheet for all students to use throughout the entire unit as a study guide and attention tool. Artifact 2 is another unit plan that was created for a 9^th grade history classroom in a unit covering the Grecco-Persian War. This is an opening lesson and is carefully differentiated for the students in the class. For example, the gifted students were offered extra chances for participation and the student with hearing impairment was given a microphone/hearing device pair that I will wear while teaching. Artifact 3 contains a series of review Kahoots I used in my economics classroom to insure that all students had regular opportunity for self-assessment. The Kahoots were more frequently provided in this particular class as a differentiation strategy for a student with an IEP for a diagnosis of Autism who needs regular, structured periods of self-assessment to gage his progress. Additionally, Kahoots allowed me to get more creative with the cultural connections between student culture and the new academic knowledge, gage overall class misconceptions and/or areas of weakness, and guide concept repetition to encourage long-term memory storage.