2A.3: Meeting Diverse Needs
When I first took over my integrated math class, the diversity of my students’ needs overwhelmed me. Compared to my numeracy class, which was much more homogeneous in terms of ability, my integrated math class presented a huge challenge for me. Not only was there such a wide range of abilities, but there were also several students who had learning disabilities and two students who were level-1 English Language Learners. I knew that I would need to be a lot more strategic about meeting the needs of these students.
To ensure that this diverse group of learners could access the material, I designed activities with multiple entry points that often allowed students to use their prior knowledge to make connections to a new math concept. Students expressed this sort of thinking in low-stakes writing and speaking, which allowed them to build confidence and feel more capable of performing higher-stakes tasks such as coming to the board to show their work to the entire class or giving a formal presentation of an assignment.
In my numeracy class, I often found myself needing to have more extensions ready for the students who finished assignments much faster than the rest of their classmates. At the beginning of the year I was caught unprepared many times, but after a few months I tried to always have an extension ready for each activity I taught. I also started giving students the option to either complete an extension activity or help their classmates who were still working, and many of them started choosing to help their classmates. While I suspected this choice came from not wanting to do more work, I was still glad that they were learning to better explain their thinking to their classmates and act as teachers.
2B.1: Safe Learning Environment
The learning environments in my two classrooms varied greatly. I stepped into the role of teacher sooner in the year with my numeracy class than I did with my integrated math class, which I think explains a decent amount of this difference. In both classes, I tried to infuse good energy into the classroom through encouragement and positive reinforcement. If students were talking over each other, I often stopped the entire class to remind everyone that they needed to show their classmates respect by listening quietly. To do this, I would say to my students, “Sherlyn is talking right now. What should you all be doing?” and then wait for them to respond something along the lines of stop talking, listen, and be respectful. While students did not always follow their own advice, this strategy at least got them to come up with their own guidelines for appropriate behavior, instead of just relying on me to do so.
To promote more positive classroom dialogue, I frequently asked students to share their thinking and to comment on or question each other’s ideas, which put them at the center of the classroom. One way I tried to make students feel comfortable doing this was by normalizing mistakes as a necessary and beneficial part of learning. Whenever a student told me that they weren’t sure if they had the right answer, I encouraged them to share it anyway because it would help all of us learn either way and made sure to positively reinforce that sort of risk-taking.
On March 13 in my integrated math class, Francis, a student whose behavior and academic engagement was very inconsistent, decided to come to the board to show her thinking even though she admitted that she was probably wrong. I said to the class, “I love that Francis said she wasn’t sure, but she’s going up there anyway,” to which, Nate, one of my shyer students, responses, “That’s some courage.” His recognition of and appreciation for her bravery were the kinds of attitudes I wanted to instill in my students. To further instill this attitude in my students, I often used common misunderstandings I saw in class or on worksheets as starters the next day or even as entire activities. I also made a point of stressing to my students how glad I was that people made those mistakes because now we could think more deeply about a concept.
These practices proved more successful with my numeracy class than my integrated math class. In my numeracy class, students constantly took academic risks by sharing ideas and strategies with their classmates daily and engaging each other in heated yet respectful debates.
In my integrated math class, behavior issues were a huge impediment to developing a safe learning environment. In addition, my students’ low confidence in their math abilities often stops them from sharing their thinking for fear of being wrong. At times I found myself getting so caught up in dealing with different behaviors that I forgot to be as positive and encouraging as I would have liked to be, which then didn’t help raise my students’ confidence. In March, our classroom community had definitely improved from when I first took over in November. One particular success was with Arianis, a level-1 ELL student who didn’t speak at all for the first month and a half of school. While she was still pretty quiet in other classes, she blossomed in my class, volunteering to give answers and help her classmates. Watching her evolution as a student was amazing, and although the class as a whole had a long way to go, her growth brought me hope.
2D.2: High Expectations
My mentor teacher Kate Shepard told her students that “can’t” is a swear word in her classroom. I tried to emulate that sort of thinking by always encouraging my students to work hard and try their best. When students told me that an assignment was stupid or too hard, I asked them what specifically was stupid or hard about it and then kept questioning them until we got to the root of the problem. Usually it turned out that they were confused about some underlying math concept, so I worked with them on that and then built them up to tackling the assignment themselves. Showing them that with some extra time and effort they could be successful communicated to them that they didn’t need to lower their expectations for themselves. I tried to scaffold assignments for my students so that they could go through this sort of build-up process on their own or with their pairs, but I also checked in with students throughout the period to give them a boost when necessary.
While I was always available for help during class, I put the onus on my students to appropriately challenge and redirect themselves. I pushed my students to persevere and to appreciate the struggle that comes with all learning, especially problem solving. By providing tiered assignments and extensions, students could tailor their academic experience to suit their needs, which gave them even less of an excuse to give up on an assignment.
I expected this same attitude of perseverance from my students when it came to correcting their own quizzes. When students took quizzes in both of my classes, I usually had them do quiz journals afterwards in which they fixed any problems they got wrong and explained those mistakes. Through these quiz journals, students saw learning as a continuous process that extended beyond whatever final assessment they were given and understood that mistakes were an important part of learning. Their quiz journal grade did not replace their first quiz grade, but rather was factored in as an additional quiz grade. That structure additionally encouraged students to work hard to master material, for they would see their effort reflected in their grade.
As I held my students to high academic standards, I also held them to high behavioral standards. I demanded mutual respect between my students and me and refused to be flexible on that. Although I often struggled (mostly in my integrated math class) to attain that level of mutual respect, that very fact that there was a continuous struggle proved how serious I was about those expectations. Instead of just lowering my expectations, I continued to hold myself and my students to those standards even when it would have been easier to not. I would like to think that I modeled a certain level of perseverance that my students will one day be able to appreciate.