Standard 2: Works with Students as Individuals
I have been able to learn how to accommodate my students’ individual needs for successful learning. My students have lives outside of the school. My job is to figure out how to merge these two spaces—life outside and inside school—to promote authentic engagement in my classroom. During my internship, I took action to learn what my students’ specific needs and interests were to establish an effective learning space. I was able to create tactics that investigated and adapted to students’ interests and needs.
For effective teaching to occur, I must learn what interested my students. Based off this, I am able to incorporate these interests into my lessons, so I can promote student engagement. In aims to discover students’ interest, I developed a survey for each student to take. I was able to review these surveys and find out what my students were about. I then found similarities of interests between students. I then was able to keep this information in mind when developing lessons.
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I also strived to discover why some of my students chose not to participate in class and elicit problematic behavior. I conducted a case study on one particular student to better determine how to prevent such occurrences to take place. In the process of conducting my research, I created an analysis on the student. I learned such concepts as failure avoidance and destined for failure mentality. I discovered that this student believed that he was bound for failure in school. He also did not attempt to try in class because he could then blame his bad grades of his lack of effort rather than his ability. After comprehending why the student was not engaged with the lessons, I then was able to implement strategies to promote the student’s learning.
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Also, I have learned that some students require different ways of learning, which means I must differentiate my instruction to accommodate these students’ needs. More specifically, I had a student who required more than just verbal instruction. If the student was not working on an assignment, he did not fully understand the instructions. Therefore, with each assignment that I created, I would include a written copy of the instructions. When our class was writing an extended definition essay, I made sure to include to description for each component of the paper in detail. My goal was to make as transparent as possible what the paper was asking of the student. I also made copies for each student so that the particular student did not appear to be singled out.
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