L400/500 FA19

After reading the three articles for the week, I was immediately drawn into the article regarding issues with disabilities. I feel as though issues around ability and inclusion have arose many times within my teaching career. As I was reading the article, I thought back to a TedTalk I had watched last year. I have posted it below. It is short, but very powerful, and was done by a kid!  Having discussions about ability levels and special needs with young children is very difficult. Where I teach, the expectation for all students is to walk in the hallways and stay at a level 0, silent. I teach first grade. One day this year, a CIP student was running and screaming down the hallway as my students were going to the restroom. My students all began to gasp and tell me that a boy was running and screaming. In the moment, I wasn't sure how or if I should address that that was normal for that student, and it is alright if he wasn't following school wide expectations. As we wal...

“One of the ways teachers may be told to meet the needs of their culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms is to differentiate instruction” (Baecher, Artigliere, Patterson & Spatzer, 2012). As I read readings for this week, I started thinking about the importance of differentiated for equity.  I have a strong opinion of differentiated instruction making education more equal and efficient. Not only for language learners, but also for marginalized students and student from minority groups. Differentiated instruction is not making a distinction between different groups of student. However, it is a positive strategy to inquire equity for students with special needs. As there are a lot of concerns about curriculum and teacher’s quality in the chapter 7, I believe that to inquire differentiated instruction for English learners, we need to differentiate curriculum and give our teacher a stage to learn differentiated instruction skills. To inquire the...