Richard D. Solomon's Blog on Mentoring Jewish Students and Teachers

Our hope is that this blog will become a forum in which people can exchange ideas on how to recruit, develop and retain exceptional Jewish educators through mentoring and e-mentoring students, teaching candidates, and teachers in our day and supplemental schools. The present focus of this blog is to empower Jewish teachers, administrators, teacher trainers, consultants, and staff developers to integrate web technology (i.e. web tools and apps) into their teaching and teacher training.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Title of Lesson: Differentiated and Individualized Instruction: Part One

When mentoring our pre-service and in-service teachers we need to describe and model both research-based and clinically tested best practices. This is one of many lessons we will be sharing on teaching Judaic content, lesson planning, models of teaching, differentiated and individualized instruction and learning activities designed to transform the classroom into a Jewish community of cooperative learners. The title of this lesson is “Differentiated and Individualized Instruction”.Since there are 13 elements in each lesson plan we will divide this lesson plan into five parts. Here is the first part of this lesson.

Enduring Jewish Knowledge Rationale for the Lesson

In the Torah and the Talmud there are many references regarding the responsibility of parents to teach the Torah to their children including:

For example in Talmud Sanhedrin 91b it says: "Denying a child religious knowledge robs the child of an inheritance."

Accordingly, it is our responsibility as parents and teachers to transmit our Jewish inheritance to our children. The question that this chapter and the following lesson attempt to address is: how can we accomplish that sacred and profound obligation?

Essential Question/s: Can a teacher reach all of his or her students? What can a teacher do to reach all or his or her students? In particular, what can a teacher do to address the academic needs of students with learning and other challenges?

Assessment/s: (Initial, ongoing, and final activities designed to measure what the student has learned)

Students individually, in pairs, via classroom discussion and as a homework assignment discuss the answer to these questions: Can a teacher reach all of his or her students? What can a teacher do to reach all or his or her students?

Objective/Learning Outcome: (What the student is supposed to learn from this lesson)

In his or her own words, the students will

· Discuss various instructional methods teachers have at their disposal to reach all of their students.

Name of the Active Learning Procedures: Team Projects

In the next post we will share the second part of a five part lesson on differentiated and individualized instruction.