Mitchell Tandy

Modifications
In this examination of the specific learners of my classroom, I will first discuss
the distribution of overall abilities levels, specific needs and learning styles, and
modifications performed or planned to better address the needs of students.
The learners in my Algebra 2 classroom are divided fairly distinctly into three
different ability levels. The first level is comprised of students who are not only
strongly proficient in existing material, but pick up new material very quickly
relative to the rest of the class. Whenever an assignment is sent out, they
consistently are the first ones to complete it OR proactively seek help when they
run into issues. These students sit exclusively in the front two rows of the
classroom and make up about 25-30% of the class. The remaining two levels are
more difficult to identify at first glance, as they are mixed together in the back two
rows of the classroom. The second level is comprised of students who have
different weaknesses, such as gaps in knowledge from previous courses or poor
retention of recent lessons, but despite those weaknesses, they still are motivated
enough to try new concepts/activities and ask questions. These 30-35% will
sometimes be proactive when they need help, but more often, I need to stop by and
ask them how they are doing before they will admit to being confused and ask
questions. Once I check in, however, these students will quickly and gladly explain
where they are confused and respond positively to any assistance I provide. The
third level is comprised of students who are incredibly hard to motivate and
consistently perform below expectations, due to past academic weaknesses,
attendance issues, poor sleep patterns, and other concerns.
Below the surface level of performance on formative/summative
assessments, there is a variety of unique needs and learning styles in this
classroom. Regarding the introvert/extrovert spectrum, more than half of students
prefer a work environment where they can collaborate with their peers, but there
are a few students (including one of the best students in the class) who prefer to
work alone. From my experiences and readings on the distribution of
introverts/extroverts across society as a whole, this is a fairly common distribution.
On a deeper level, however, the extraverted students respond differently to their
cooperation with surrounding students. Two students in the second row who
individually struggle with different concepts work together to great benefit, and
another group of three students in the back row all struggle on similar items and
work on those concerns together to great benefit as well. However, one group of
three students in the second row have a history of simply copying off of the most
advanced student, while one student behind them is very close to meeting
expectations, but the under-performing students around him are causing him to not
work as diligently as I have seen at other times. Regarding different learning styles,
there are some students who do excel with drill-and-practice methods, usually
sitting in the first row. However, there are other students who need to be more
engaged and mobile to succeed, and these students perform best when they are
out of their seats working on the white boards around the classroom.

To address the differences in students preferred working environments, I

have structured my lessons to allow for students to work individually or together.
However, different parts of lessons do require students to specifically work with a
partner/group or work alone, because it is important for both extraverted students
to have independent-work skills and introverted students to have cooperative-work
skills. In addition, one strategy for this type of situation that I would do in my own
classroom is shuffle the seating arrangement so that certain students who are not
benefiting from their current placement can have a chance to excel elsewhere in the
room. For the different learning styles, I have tried to involve more movement and
physical engagement in lessons to address students who may not respond well to
methods that involve a lot of sitting, such as having students measure each others
height for one lesson and having different review problems posted on different walls
of the room for another.
One specific example of a modification/adaptation that I provided for a
student was for an advanced student during the wingspan/height activity. This
student oftentimes finishes activities much faster than the rest of the class, and I
noticed that her calculator skills were well above most of the rest of the class. As a
result, when she finished and informed me that she finished, I told her that her
calculator could also create a best-fit line with an exponential model (rather than
just the linear one from the activity). This piqued her curiosity enough to ask where
to find it, so I told her to try and find it. This way, instead of pulling out her phone
immediately after finishing before the rest of the class, she spent a couple more
minutes working (and developing more calculator skills). From what I have seen,
little extra challenges can really help manage students who finish quickly and are
left with nothing to do, as long as the extra challenges are interesting enough to
make students personally curious.
Another specific example on the other side of the spectrum was for a student
who had missed a week of class. The unit at the time was covering solving systems
of equations using graphing, substitution, and elimination, and the student in
question had missed the lessons on graphing and substitution. As a result, when
the student arrived in class on the day of the lesson on the elimination method, she
was understandably very frustrated, since the elimination method is the least
intuitive for most students. In order to best accommodate for her, we changed the
first two problems of the assignment to solve with graphing and substitution rather
than elimination, so that I could show her what she missed in class while she was
gone. While this wouldnt fully bring her up to speed without thorough practice, it
was enough to get her started on the homework assignments from that week.