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.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Title of Lesson: What Additional Provisions Can a Teacher Make to Reach All of His or Her Students? Part Two

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 “What additional provisions can a teacher make to reach all of his or her students?” Since there are 13 elements in each lesson plan ( we will divide this lesson plan into three parts. Here is the first part of this lesson. The second part of the lesson follows.

Introductory Activity: (Initial exercise to focus on the objective/learning outcome)

The teacher distributes the handout on students needs (below) and invites students to record their thoughts on the two questions posed.

Handout on Students with Special Needs

Directions: Think about the two questions written below, and record your reflections in the space provided.

1. What does it mean to be a student with special needs?

2. What kinds of students with special needs can you expect to find in your classroom or what kinds of challenges do students with special needs present to the teacher?

Developmental Activity: (Set of steps or procedures to reach the objective/learning outcome)

1. When the teacher judges that all students have completed their handouts he or she places students in learning pairs.

2. Each member of the learning pair discusses his or her thoughts on the above two questions.

3. The teacher then facilitates a classroom discussion related to these questions and places the list at the top of the post on a white board, chalk board, transparency, etc. During the discussion when a class member identifies a challenge that a student with special needs might present in the classroom, the teacher or a student records that challenge on the list.

Alternative: Teacher can use nominal brainstorming for generating a list of challenges that students with special needs present to the teacher and others in the classroom community.

In the next post we will share the third part of a three part lesson on interventions a teacher can implement to reach all of his or her students.