Meeting the Needs of All Students

With thinking of what needs your students have you should think about your planning process. Are you planning the right amount of activities for the amount of time you have in class? Does your planning involve to much information or work for the time you have? Can your students stayed focused or will they become bored or confused with the assignments you have given them?

Each question needs to be carefully considered and the right actions need to be taken. When planning for your students make sure that you do not give them to much or to little work, both can be harmful to the students learning. Make sure the information is useful and relevant to the current class assignments.

Instructional Cycle

The three stages of the instructional cycle:

Stage 1: Intended Instructional Outcomes

You start off by identifying the content standards and benchmarks that every lesson will address. Then each standard is translated into measures learning outcomes. You should have a clear idea of what each student needs to know, understand, and be able to do to meet the standards based curriculum.

Stage 2: Planning

Second you should plan effective teaching strategies and instructional activities. Planning should include both standardized tests and teacher-made test. To carry out the planned instructions you must plan for the learning outcomes, instructions, and assessments.

Stage 3: Assessment

Finally you will implement your planned assessments to show if students have met the intended learning outcomes. Assessments should be planned when thinking of the intended outcomes, and not just created at the end of you unit.

Components of Good Assessment

Any good assessment should:

1.      Provide relevant evidence

2.      Measure the skills, knowledge, or abilities the teacher holds important

3.      Match purpose with the skills assessed

All of these help you in your goals and the outcome you want for yourself and your students. They will help you measure the success of each assessment.

Adapting Instruction

Adapting instructions are used to make changes to instruction to allow children an equal access to the curriculum and to give them the opportunity to process and demonstrate what has been taught. Adapting instructions are important for students because it addresses their individual needs.

One why to adapt your instructions would be to address the accommodations. This will support a child’s disability to help him/her fully access the subject and to show their knowledge in the assignment or test given. Another way to help is to make modifications to the services given to students. This will fundamentally alter the standard of the assignment or test given.

Information-Processing Model

The information processing model of learning is divided into three stages: receiving information, connecting the information to prior knowledge, and using the information. Receiving information involves the short term memory. It means when students are paying attention the information they are learning will go into their short term memory and will stay there for them to work on, but will only remain there for a limited time. However this information can be transferred into the long term memory.

A strategy for moving information from short term to long term memory is connecting the information to prior knowledge. Teacher can help students transfer information into long term memory by: organizing information into easily recognizable categories, repeating the information, or grouping the information.

It is believed that once information is placed into the long term memory that is will always be there. Just because the information is there though doesn’t mean that it will be easily retrieved. To easily use information from the long term memory it is important to organize the information so that your students are able to easily get to that information and remember it. It is a good idea to teach students things that interest them, this way they can easily retrieve that information when later asked about it.

Learning Characteristics

Before any teacher develops instructions for their students they should identify the students learning characteristic for receiving information. It is very important for teachers to understand that if students aren’t paying attention the information being given will quickly be forgotten. Students use their short-term memory for information that they are paying attention to. Short-term memory is known as the working memory, because information here can be attended to and worked on consciously.

It is important for teachers to understand how students are receiving information, because it is how they can learn to send out the information to students. If a teacher can learn how to get students to learn for their short term memory then he/she can better understand how to help students transfer that information to their long term memory.

Content Standards

Content standards define the depth of knowledge, skills, and processes that are to be taught within any given subject. Content standards create an outline of knowledge, skills, and understanding that all children need to master in all subject areas. The content areas of content standards include: mathematics, science, reading, history, and language arts.

Content standards include instructional goals that are set for a two to three year period. Benchmarks explain the expected understanding and skills needed for content standards by each grade level and are meant to be tracked in time intervals. Benchmarks are used to determine whether progress is made to the content standard. There are testing used to assess each area.