Introduction

I collaborated with a first grade teacher in a 12:1 Self-Contained classroom in a community school. All of the students in her class receive Speech and Language services and have various disabilities that affect their language comprehension and expression. My colleague is always reaching out for advice and asking how to work with particular strategies that students use. This will be her second year teaching and she is very loving , motivated and always striving to take on daily challenges. She felt very frustrated because she is struggling with having her class move on with content if they cannot understand basic questions. During our conversations she was intrigued to be helped as well as finding new ways to facilitate instruction. She was very accepting to suggestions of strategies and future collaboration especially learning about more resources

Challenges

• Some of the issues during our conversation that the teacher stressed was that it was very difficult to engage the students and differentiate for all learning styles.
• She also mentioned the high expectations being placed by administration and the curriculum without targeting basic skills first. 
• When discussing UDL Ms. Vasquez was very familiar with the topic but stated she was stumped in how to break everything further down. 

Original Lesson Plan:

Here is the lesson Ms. Vasquez asked me sit in for in order to improve it. I decided it was best to create a rubric for her to highlight what UDL  principles she used throughout her lesson and what she can improve. I was very pleased to see the supports she used during her lesson and her enthusiasm and love with her class. The focus of her lesson was for students to sequence events and retell a sequence. I saw that Ms. Vasquez used the following UDL Principles:

Original ELA Lesson Plan

UDL Framework  Rubric Addressed in Original Lesson

Revised Activity

Ms. Vasquez went over the rubric I gave her for the artifact and the UDL Principles. I wanted Ms. Vasquez to really keep in mind her objective and how to break down content to meet that objective. I helped her out by creating a Slide deck on comprehending questions activity in order to review and facilitate comprehension of concepts with the same visual they use. We felt it would be best to present this to the class as a refresher since Ms. Vasquez said this is their greatest area of struggle. The lesson focus was for students to understand “Wh” questions for a non-fiction book and then summarize what they learned. We also wanted them to have the opportunity to go the board and have a movement break from their previous lesson. 

Kahoot Activity

Comprehending WH Questions

AnimalResearchReportPrintables-1

Revised Lesson Plan

UDL Framework  Rubric Addressed in Revised Lesson Plan

I saw such a difference in her confidence in teaching her group and most importantly the students. The students enjoy engaging with the tablet and were super excited. They also enjoyed all the activities and were very engaged in the work. I really loved to see that they felt comfortable with the visuals we use in the therapy room and transferring them over to the classroom. Every student participated in the activities and it was really nice to see them all have options to demonstrate their knowledge without them getting frustrated or abandon tasks because they cannot spell. It was also great to see how a student that has limited speech used the visuals to put a sentence together.

Reflections

I along with Ms. Vasquez had to focus on addressing all the needs of the students and finding ways to facilitate learning opportunities. This experience has also been helpful throughout all my experiences with my students and I’m really making sure I allow my students the opportunity to express their learning through different modalities. Furthermore it’s always an amazing feeling to see how one’s recommendations are easily welcomed and seeing materials shared by me used in the classroom consistently.

I really wish that the school system was built a little differently than what it is and could allot collaborative planning like this so everyone could benefit. All professionals in a school building have their own set of skills and strengths and it wonderful to learn from them. It can also help foster a better sense of community in a school all for the sole purpose of improving our student’s achievement, engagement and building skills.