Lesson Planning
I create daily lesson plans for the entire week on Monday mornings. I start my lesson planning by selecting a standard and backwards planning by viewing the chapter assessment. Each lesson is designed to be rich in scientific content, culturally relevant, cross disciplinary, rigorous, and accessible for every student.
Learner Variance Lesson Plan
Every lesson I plan is designed to be accessible for all of my diverse learners. The following lessons were designed with special attention to differentiated instruction. The lessons were created to meet the needs of all of my students. These lessons are culturally relevant, engage multiple learning modalities, scaffolded activities, small group instruction, and match pairing students. Differentiation is not an option for teachers, it is the standard. Any reason to not differentiate is an excuse. Students enter the classroom with a wide variety of skills, strengths, and knowledge. After analyzing course resources and my own experiences as an educator I can confidently say it is imperative to meet students where they are and to provide them multiple opportunities to succeed. From my experience implementing both of those strategies in my classroom, I have seen increased engagement and more students reaching mastery of the objective. Prior to this module, I spent very little time differentiating lessons but moving forward I will be critically thinking through this section of my lesson plans. The more I differentiate in the beginning the less time I will spend later on trying to reteach the content. I will be designing lessons that all students can access and provide students multiple scaffolded opportunities to reach mastery. Tomlinson (p. 34, 2004) states, “Belief 5: Each student should have equity of access to excellent learning opportunities” summarizes the importance of differentiation, to be an effective and transformative teacher we must differentiate for all students.
Please note the name Katie is used as a pseudonym to protect the identity of the student this was created for. This is a differentiated lesson I created with my special education case manager. This lesson focuses on the needs of one particular student. I detailed the modifications and accommodations that I made to ensure she can access the lesson and reach her rigorous learning goals.
This lesson was differentiated by providing opportunities for different learners to engage in the content in a kinesthetic way. Additionally the lab write up was differentiated by using sentence stems to help guide student thinking. Students had the opportunity for increased rigor to write their lab report without using the sentences stems provided.
This is a reflection I wrote on learner variance in March. This reflection is about the implementation of two lessons where my goal was to create lessons that were accessible for all my diverse learners. The reflection includes student data and student responses and discusses my experience thus far with differenitation.
Leveraging Content Lesson Plan
I leverage my deep understanding of scientific content in a variety of ways in my classroom. The most effective way to leverage my content knowledge is through laboratory activities. In science students have the ability to apply what they learning and laboratory activities are an excellent way for students to demonstrate content knowledge and scientific practices. Students learn better by doing rather than taking a passive role in their education. Additionally, laboratory experiments bring science alive in a way that I nor their textbook cannot. In the lesson below students are conducting an investigation to determine the factors that affect photosynthesis and calculate the rate at which photosynthesis occurs. Instead of students reading or watching a video about factors that affect photosynthesis they are going to conduct an investigation. Students were able to modify their experiments and make observations about factors that affect photosynthesis. I try to implement one hands on activity or demonstration a week and one laboratory activity a month. During laboratory activities I match pair students based on ability to promote peer to peer tutoring to ensure that all students are able to meet my rigorous learning goals. As often as possible I try to include step by step laboratory directions with pictures for visual learners, this has been particularly helpful for my English Language Learners and helped to ensure that all students can access the activity.
I intentionally chose to have my students engage in a laboratory experiment because it was the most effective way for them to learn about factors that affect the rate of photosynthesis. In this lesson plan you will see the step by step directions with pictures for visual learners as well as pre and post laboratory questions.
This is a picture of the laboratory supplies students received during the photosynthesis experiment. Students received water with sodium bi-carbonate, spinach leaves, a straw, and a syringe.
Please click this link to see a video of my students engaging in the photosynthesis lab.
https://www.torshtalent.com/video/5a2HTsemroNxE9Do8
This my annotation to the video. This is a video of my 10th-grade biology students. They put their spinach leaves in sodium bi-carbonate and are placing them in front of a light. The student noted the time he placed the solution and leaves in front of the light so he can calculate the rate at which photosynthesis is occurring.
Cross-Curricular Lesson Plan
Cross-curricular activities are important for students because it allows them to use and practice skills that they use in other classes. In my class last year I had 10th grade biology students create an informative climate change brochure.This project required a lot of planning and prep work for all of the teachers involved. Having my long-term plan created made it easier for me to find time during the school year where we could all successfully implement this activity. The activity took several days and involved to other departments at my school. Students created a multiple page digital brochure, students worked on the science content in my classroom, completed the writing portion in their english class, and worked on formatting and presentation in their technology class. In an effort to push my students to collaborate and make connections outside of our classroom I leveraged my Teach For America partnership with a colleague at another school. My colleague had her ninth grade biology students complete the climate change brochure activity. We created a drop box for our students to submit their brochures, we then shared our students' brochures with each other. Our students were given a rubric and instructed to use the comments function on google docs to provide feedback as they peer reviewed other students work. After all the brochures were peer reviewed we were able to have a video conference between classes to reflect on the activity and discuss common themes in feedback that we saw. Students then used the feedback they received to create a final draft of their brochure. This was a powerful assignment for my students because they had to utilize their science, writing, and technology skills and demonstrates the power of cross-curricular activities.
This is a lesson plan spanning multiple days for my students' climate change brochure. This lesson plan does not contain the work they did in their english and technology class.
This is a completed climate change brochure that was submitted by a 10th grade biology student. The example shows scientific content, writing skills, and utilizes technology.
This is a completed climate change brochure that was submitted by team of tenth grade students. Because they elected to work collaboratively they were given the added responsibility to content what they were learning to their culture.
Culturally Relevant Lesson Plan
Students learn best when the content they are learning is relevant to them and their life experiences. When content is relevant it is easy for students to make deep personal connections to what they are learning. As a teacher one of my major focuses is ensuring that my lessons are relevant to my students. While I worked at Imhotep I was required to have a piece of cultural infusion in every lesson that align with one of our afro-centric values. In order to be more culturally relevant I leveraged my student relationships. As the school year progressed and began to know understand my students and the community my school was in better it began to get easier to make my lessons relevant. The video below is a window into my class. My students are positioning themselves as experts on race and talking from their own personal experiences.The video was taken in October just a few months into my first year teaching. The powerpoint demonstrates another way I infused culture into my class by introducing my students to person of color scientists. For larger assignments students were always required to complete a culture piece. In the second powerpoint students created a presentation about the circulatory system, as part of their presentation students examined Sickle Cell Anemia a disease that is prevalent in Africa. Being culturally relevant is a good teaching practice that helps with classroom management and student engagement. The more students were able to relate to the content they were learning in my class the more invested they became. This ultimately enabled more students to be able to access the lessons and increased engagement which helped students meet rigorous learning standards.
Please click this link to see a video of my 10th-grade biology students engaging in a discussion.
https://www.torshtalent.com/video/eiJmTgCyi529CstwJ
This is my annotation to the video. My class had recently moved into a new unit on genetics. Genetics are responsible for determining one’s skin color and other phenotypical traits often associated with race. I lead my class in an activity around race and ethnic identity, I then jumped into a lecture about genetics and traits you inherit from your parents. While my class did not pull on direct theories of racial development from class, the activity got students thinking about race. During this video, I ask students what race is, how old they were when they realized their race, how they realized their race, and how their idea race has changed as they got older. We then watched a video from a recent Dr. Phil in which a woman is experiencing a mismatch where she believes herself to be one race (white) and society perceives her to be another (black) the woman also discusses in a derogatory way why she is not black. Students then engaged in a discussion around the ideas of race brought up in the video.
This is an example of one of the simpler ways that I infused culture into my classroom by introducing my students to person of color scientist to increase their representation and show students science is for everyone.
This is my lesson plan for our class discussion on the connection between race and genetics. I taught this lesson at the beginning of the year and I saw a lot of room for improvement. After reflecting on the lesson, I went back to my lesson plan and looked for ways to make the lesson more effective. My reflection can be seen in red.
This is a student created powerpoint presentation about the circulatory system. Students were required to explain the prevalence of Sickle Cell Anemia in Africa and identify symptoms and potential solutions.
Rigorous Lesson Sequence
As a culminating task, I had my 10th-grade biology students identify a research question, create a survey, gather survey data, and write a formal research paper explaining their results. For most of my students, this was their first time writing a formal research paper. At first, my students were overwhelmed by the task at hand. I scaffolded the activity, which was an ongoing project we worked on throughout quarter 4, by providing them examples of each section of the project and an optional template they could use to complete their section. I used rubrics and checklists to give students a clear idea of my expectations for this assignment. Additionally, I leveraged parents to help me support my students. If a student did not submit a section or serious revisions were required I called their parents to inform them and offer additional tutoring to students. The activity I created for my students was used by other biology teachers in my school and has now been incorporated into the curriculum because it is an effective way to scaffold learning to support students to complete the rigorous task of conducting an experiment and writing a formal research paper.
This is my calendar for the social science research project. The calendar shows how I scaffolded writing a rigorous research paper for my students.
My students struggled with writing and to support them in writing a multiple page research paper the activities must be scaffolded to their level. This assignments makes writing a introudction pargraph easier because students are told what to include in every sentence. In addition, students are given an exmeplar to reference as they crate thier own parapgraph.
This is a template students were given to help them write an effective literature review. Students had access to my sample literature review to use a reference. After submitting each section students were placed in small groups to peer review each other sections. Peer review exposes students to multiple writing styles, examples, and perspectives. Peer review was another avenue of support for my students to help them achieve this rigorous task.
This artifact is the rubrics I created for the research paper. The rubric tells students what exactly is expected of them and how they will be graded. Writing a research paper is a difficult task, but it can be made easier by informing students exactly what is expected of them. The rubric contains a spot for both students to sign verifying that their section was peer reviewed.
This is my exemplar research paper I created for my students. Students had access to this paper throughout the unit and used it as a reference as they created their own research paper.
This is my slideshow that I used for direct instruction. The slideshow contains activities and content related to social science and experimentation. The slideshows includes directions for how students created thier surveys.
Only a few of my students had experience writing a literature review before. To help them in the difficult task of writing a literature review I chunked the assignment. Students used this organizer to gather information from their research sources. In addition, I had students create their text APA citations now to make the process of writing a literature easier.
The result section was particularly challenging for my students because it involved science, writing, and math. To support my students we analyzed our data together, giving me the opportunity to strengthen their math skills and teach them how to examine data.
I created the final check list to ensure students are submitting a final paper that meets all of the requirements. The check list worked like a simple to do list, students completed one item at time.
This research paper was created by a 10th-grade biology student. This was his first time writing a research paper and he selected a topic that was interesting and relevant to him, sports medicine. Often times students first experience writing a formal research paper is in college, completing this assignment was a major accomplishment for my students. His work demonstrates how students can meet rigorous goals if they are giving the proper support and scaffolding.