Commitment to Diversity

For this commitment, I chose a lesson that I taught to a 7th grade inclusion English class
at Dunbar Middle School. This lesson was from Achieve3000 on an article titled Did Weather
Change History? It was an article on Ferdinand Magellan and how El Nio may have changed
his path on his journey to sail the world. I differentiated instruction in this lesson, reflected on
this lesson, and made data-based decisions based on disaggregated diverse groups.
I showed the students an El Nio video because I thought it was really important for them
to see. El Nio is a concept that may be hard for students in West Virginia to understand because
we do not necessarily experience them, nor has North America seen one since 1998. The students
I taught were not even born during this time. I think that this video really showed how much
damage that an El Nio can cause, and helped the students understand what Ferdinand may have
gone through during this trip. I also read to the students through a microphone so that ALL
students could hear me. There were a couple of students who had hearing aids and needed the
microphone to be able to hear. I gave the students a word bank so that the MI students could have
access to it, but also it turned out to be universal design because it helped everyone else out as
well. I also showed the students the map of the trip that Magellan took. I thought that this was
important because I myself am not good at directions or maps, and this gave the students a good
idea of where this was taking place.
After the lesson, I graded the assessments. I found out that the students had a hard time
on the pre-test. Before the students began taking the pre-assessment, the students complained
that they could not take a test on something they did not know about. They also said that my test
was all in Spanish because of the one word El Nio. The students were showing learned helpless
ness, and I could tell that the scores were not going to be that great just from this. One thing that
stood out to me while I graded the inclusion students papers and the regular students papers was
that the inclusion students did much better.
After grading the papers, and analyzing the data, I found that the class I struggled to teach
in because of the students disengagement, were actually better than the scores of the class I
taught that was easy to engage the students. Because of this, if I did this lesson again, I want to
assess the students in some other way other than a paper/pencil assessment. I know that the
students in my well behaved class knew what they were talking about, because the whole lesson
was very engaging to them. I want them to be able to display their knowledge in other creative
ways. That class really liked hands on projects. So to assess their knowledge of the story, I would
allow them to make dioramas or other art forms of the content of the story. I still think it is
important for the students to know the vocabulary, so I would give a standard vocabulary
assessment.
After looking at the data from this lesson, I have realized that assessment should not
always be paper/pencil. I think that the students from second period would have performed better
on some hands-on activity that explained their knowledge of the vocabulary in the Achieve3000
article rather than the paper/pencil assessment did.