Trials and Tribulations of an Inclusion teacher
Sometimes those lessons that happen on a whim turn out to be the best lessons you teach all year. This was the case for me right before winter break. I had a 30 minute time period between lunch and our winter party and I had to find something to do with my 25 students who were VERY ready for break. My husband had sent me a youtube link to videos made by this awesome science teacher named Bruce Yeany. My husband had come across this video of him making cartesian divers. I watched it and thought, my students would enjoy doing this.
Being a teacher who lives on soft drinks instead of coffee, I had a bunch of plastic bottles waiting to be recycled. I decided to have my students watch the youtube video (https:///youtu.be/TMju6WzDnHI) and then I would give them the materials (plastic bottle with water, paper clip, and straw) and allowed them to explore. It was the FIRST time ALL year that ALL my students were engaged at the SAME TIME! It was awesome. In the 30 minutes given, three of my students were able to successfully make a cartesian diver, but all students were working. The three students who were successful were very different students. One student is an outspoken gifted child, one has had some behavioral issues and has a learning disability, and the third student is a very smart child who lacks confidence. They were all so excited that they they were able to complete the task. I always find it interesting that sometimes the most well planned lessons are the least successful and the ones that are done on the fly are some of the most enaging. What do I learn from this? -Go with your gut -Monitor and adjust (My college professors would be so proud!) -Let the students be your guide
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In a perfect world, all children will master all standards when the unit is first taught. I have had to accept the fact that that thought is a fantasy. Does this mean that I am going to stop working to help my students achieve mastery? NO! It simply means that we all have strengths and weaknesses even within one subject area. Think back to when you were in school, if you were like me you had one subject that you really liked, but there may have been a strand that you didn't care for as much because you weren't as good at it as you were other strands. I have always loved math, but geometry was always a subject that I did not enjoy as much. I GREATLY disliked writing proofs. On the other hand, I loved algebra!
Our students are much the same. After teaching metric measurement to my students, I was very discouraged. No matter what I did, many of my students were not showing mastery on metric conversions. Then I spoke with my co-teacher, she reminded me that kids are going to have strengths and weaknesses and to not let that get me down. So I entered the next unit with excitement and it paid off! Many of my students who didn't master the last unit as I hoped, excelled with fractions. I did change the way that I taught this unit. I chose to front load all the skills that students would need in the unit and then we had more time to practice each skill rather than following the typical formula of introduce, practice, introduce practice where there is not much time to practice ALL the skills. This process paid off. Many students who were often earning below mastery grades in math earlier this year, began to earn mastery grades regularly throughout the unit. Students' confidence has elevated so now when I begin to reteach measurement, students will have confidence that they can in fact "do math" and will have a new excitement for learning. I am just coming off two exhausting days at an amazing tech conference in Greenville, South Carolina. The Greenville County School District puts on a FREE conference each summer called the Upstate Technology Conference. #2016UTC It is a mix of people who represent professional organizations or classroom teachers from around the southeast. A fellow inclusion teacher attended many of the classes along side me and we both walked away so excited about some of the new tech that we were shown that we can use in our classroom immediately.
Here are the FREE programs/websites/apps that I am most excited about: EdPuzzle Edpuzzle is a tool that allows you to crop videos found online, add voice overs, and put questions throughout the video to check for student understanding. It monitors the student progress and collects the data for you! It will even tell you what percentage of the video the student watched and allows you to prevent students from fast forwarding the video. It only takes a few minutes to alter the video so you could make multiple videos based on your students' needs and assign them to the students individually or as a class. Mystery Skype Mystery Skye allows your students to travel around the world and learn about places and cultures that they may otherwise never experience. The students on each side of the call ask one another 20 questions to determine where in the world the other group is. Students can do this through history questions, math questions, current events, geography, etc. It does take some prep ahead of time because the teacher needs to plan the time and date ahead of time with the other teacher, but Skype makes this easy for you. Super Quiz Add-On for Google Super Quiz allows you to assign students differentiated remediation based on how they answer questions posed in a Google Form. You simply need to get the add-on and plug in the links to videos, games, etc. and students are emailed what they need to complete. ThingLink ThingLink allows students to use a picture and link a variety of mediums to that picture. One example I saw was a picture of the solar system. Where each planet should be was the link to a video a student made about that planet. There are so many possibilities for this! It is another way to present information instead of always using PowerPoint, Slides, or Presi. Haiku Deck Haiku Deck is a presentation tool that already has thousands of pictures already loaded into the program. Instead of your students "googling" for pictures of most of class time, students can simply choose from the program's archives without having to worry about copyright. I look forward to trying these out with my students come fall! I learned a lot my first year teaching inclusion, but here are some of the biggest take aways. Some I already knew and were just affirmed, others were new revelations.
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January 2017
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