Week Five: Instructional Best Practices & Diverse Populations in the Middle School

 This week, we read about how to support the diverse groups of students that we will be teaching at the middle school level, as well as how to differentiate our lessons. The Edutopia article in particular was very helpful to me, because it broke down how teachers can differentiate at each level of instruction. 

Throughout my time in this program, I have written my fair share of lesson plans, and so I have gotten used to incorporating different strategies into each plan for different modalities so that students will have "deeper" and more meaningful learning. However, this text was very straightforward and it made a process that once seemed intimidating sound pretty simple. This is encouraging because I tend to be a perfectionist and want to include the "right" things in my lessons. But now, I see that I have all of the tools in front of me to differentiate my instruction and ensure that students are involved in their learning. 

The most interesting suggestion I took from this article involved ways to differentiate the "product" part of a lesson. That is, to allow students a choice in how they show what they know, rather than the same assignment for everyone, such as a paper or test. I loved the idea to allow students to propose an idea for a summative assessment if they don't want to pick one of the choices given. As a history teacher, I want to use this in my future classes. It is a great way for students to engage in something they are interested in, and perhaps they will become more enthusiastic about history - or at least about the topic - because they are able to pick and design their own unique assignments. On the other side, it might show students who don't get their assignment approved that they will be confident picking one of the given options instead. 

New ideas for assessments are so helpful because I feel that in the past, history has gotten a bad reputation as a boring subject that is difficult to get students excited about. I hope that with strategies like the ones described, as well as differentiation, this can be shown as a misconception once and for all. My future students will probably never be as interested in history as I am, and that's okay. I don't expect them to. However, I CAN engage them in lessons and provide opportunities for meaningful learning experiences in my classroom. Strategies like those we read about this week show me that all educators are more than capable of doing this.