Emma Steward

April 11, 2014

The needs in my classroom are reflected in the name of the class. On Tuesdays
and Thursdays I work with an MYP/IB English 9 class. The learners I see are exceptional
in that they require more of a challenge in their English class. When I taught my informal
lesson I had fun asking students to perform a scene of Shakespeare in groups without
much instruction for the activity. I found out that this class works well by building off of
previous knowledge (students had seen the activity before) and creative allowance (each
group took a different approach to Shakespeare in their performances). This experience
made me think that if I were to deliver future lesson plans, I would specifically create
activities and prompts with less structure than with a more average track class. It seems
this class can figure out the basics of some activities quickly, and redundancy would
waste time and cause a loss of attention. I would also be likely to cater to their needs by
having them think a bit more abstractly. Since these students are apt to figure out
activities and writing prompts easily, they have the ability to take their thinking to the
next level. With these advanced students, I would not hesitate to have them dig deeper
into a text to find meaning beyond standard ninth grade capabilities. I believe that with
brief modeling students could pick up on how to think through and ask higher-level
questions. Thinking more specifically on the note of whole-class modifications, if
students were reading Fahrenheit 451 across all of my English classes I might ask my
English 9 students to conduct character foils as to better understand characters and how
their relationships with others affect their thoughts, actions, and being. But what I might
ask my MYP/IB English 9 students to do would be to assess the underlying claims that
the author is making about our societys future and have discussions and writing prompts
about a future according to Ray Bradburys interpretation. The IB students I work with
definitely possess the knowledge and thinking skills necessary to answer such intense
questions. Certain modifications within the classroom might further cater to each
students ability to soak in knowledge. As an example, there are a handful of students
who seem to learn best by discussing out loud and listening to others and some who learn
best by reflecting individually (i.e. when writing). For adaptations within the classroom I
might conduct group work or station activities instead of a whole class discussion where
some voices might get lost causing learners to fall under the radar. This way, students
would have the opportunity to learn in the manner most affective to them or explore
multiple ways to learn.