Differentiated Lesson Plans

     To prepare for writing any lesson plan, I always look at what students are bringing into their classrooms with prior knowledge and/or what they might struggle with and need more support in during a lesson. I want to make students feel confident in their ability to solve problems and try their best at any given time. I also know that a lot of my students do not come into the grade knowing all prior skills needed to be successful with grade level content. In my lesson plan, I am using the lesson provided in my Illustrative Mathematics curriculum where students are solving multi-step metric conversion problems. One instructional strategy that is great to use in differentiating instruction for students is the think-pair-share strategy (Guido, 2021). This can be called many names but provides students an opportunity to think about something, share their thinking with a partner to agree/disagree, and then come back and share whole group. In an effort to engage all types of learners in the classroom, I have provided guided notes for students to use from previous lessons that provide students with step by step instructions in how to convert from one metric unit to another. Students also have guided notes that collect our vocabulary from the unit that is used throughout and built upon with each lesson. Students are always able to look back in their notes to see how to solve their problem or to use their conversion chart. We are not expecting students to memorize how and what to convert by so reminding them that we have resources to use to support our learning and work in each lesson is very important! Students are also able to keep a digital notebook if wanted/needed to support organization, keeping up with notes, etc. We want students to feel prepared, confident, and safe in our classrooms no matter what their individual academic level is. 

    Within this lesson, differentiating assessment is key to meet all of the diverse needs of the learners. Students need a variety of opportunities to show mastery based on the teaching (Watson, 2020). Providing students the opportunity for written and verbal communication in sharing their thoughts can help them to find a way to access the content and show what they do understand as well as what they do not. Providing students with sentence stems is another great way to meet the needs of students with diverse needs, English language learners, etc. These can help students to stay on task with their conversation as well as providing them a way to share their thoughts without having to put the brain power into thinking about how exactly to say what they are thinking. This is something that educators can take for granted sometimes. We assume that people know how to share their thinking. That is not a fair assumption though. We can take the cognitive load off of a student when we provide a frame in which they can use to start the train of sharing their thoughts on how to solve a problem or why they agree/disagree with another student in the room about their work. 

    I embed technology all throughout the lesson for early finishers and also towards the end of the lesson for students who are ready to extend their learning. One of the sites I use most as a math teacher is Boddle Learning. I enjoy this, as do my students, because it takes state standards and provides questions relating back to the standards selected for any given teacher created assignment. Providing students with opportunity for practice through games can help reinforce skills as well as cater to different learning styles (Cox, 2020). In my lesson plan, I have curated a lesson on Boddle for my students to use at different points throughout the lesson. Students who are continuing practice are working to complete multi-step conversions as well as review previous work from this unit on single metric conversions and powers of 10. Students who are not show mastery on their exit ticket can extend their learning to single unit conversions with volume through another Boddle assignment. Creating these assignments is a great way to provide engaged practice for students to continue learning and growing while also being able to meet the needs of other students in the room through more teacher led work. 

References

Cox, J. (2020, March 18). Differentiated instruction through classroom games. Teachhub.com. https://www.teachhub.com/classroom-activities/2020/03/differentiated-instruction-through-classroom-games/

Guido, M. (2021, September 21). 20 differentiated instruction strategies and examples. Prodigy. https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/blog/differentiated-instruction-strategies-examples-download/

Watson, S. (2020, January 21). Differentiated instruction and assessment. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/differentiated-instruction-and-assessment-3111341