Week 10 Reflection

            Man, was it difficult to pick five elements of differentiated instruction but when thinking about what I hold to be most important, it was quick in picking the elements. It was a reality check though when I compared it to my planned UbD lesson because many of what I held to be important was not listed in my unit. I found that it is difficult to explain via writing to show the planned differentiated instruction because I don’t know exactly what will need to be differentiated until I get to that situation with my students. Also as a third year teacher, I don’t think I have much tricks up my sleeve as other teachers. I am planning to document the ways I differentiate when I teach my unit but I think this will be a difficult task for me because I am not used to it.

            This week I commented on various classmates’ blogs but first I would like to acknowledge the comments they made on my own blog post. Heather gave me quite a few rhetorical questions about being flexible in differentiating for our students and how the “traditional” schooling system does not make this completely possible. In my district, the “math department” makes a point to acknowledge what is most important for our rural Alaskan students. I will keep fighting for this and making this the norm as next year we will have quite a few new people in our district. Gerald asked for some help on how to get students past a misconception and I gave him an idea. Chelsea, Jim, and Rachelle all seem to agree that flexibility is very important for differentiating instruction. I will need to keep my focus on flexibility when teaching my UbD lesson.

            On Chelsea’s blog, I added a bit of more depth on what background knowledge teachers need to have by adding in teachers need to know how students will react to content and not just know the content. Gerald’s blog helped me give some very practical and tangible ways of different tools for students to use. He got me thinking about my students’ performance assessment and in what ways they can show their knowledge. Jim’s blog reminded me on how we need to document assessments whether they are informal or formal and I reminded him of this. I plan to show this documentation to students so they have an idea of where they are at with their own learning. Kendra’s example of her UbD lesson gave me some ideas of what the organization of it could look like. I struggled a lot on the organization but now I have an idea of what to go towards.