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Competency 4

This document reflects on the importance of differentiating instruction for English language learners (ELLs). The author feels confident in their ability to create lesson plans that include modifications for ELLs based on their experience creating plans in their teaching program. Effective differentiation requires teachers to understand their students' needs and adjust their approach accordingly. It also requires creativity, flexibility, and patience. The author provides two examples of evidence of their ability to differentiate. The first is a needs analysis they conducted with an ELL student to understand the student's strengths, weaknesses, and perspectives. The second is a set of interview questions they developed around categories like problems, priorities, and attitudes to identify student needs.

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80 views2 pages

Competency 4

This document reflects on the importance of differentiating instruction for English language learners (ELLs). The author feels confident in their ability to create lesson plans that include modifications for ELLs based on their experience creating plans in their teaching program. Effective differentiation requires teachers to understand their students' needs and adjust their approach accordingly. It also requires creativity, flexibility, and patience. The author provides two examples of evidence of their ability to differentiate. The first is a needs analysis they conducted with an ELL student to understand the student's strengths, weaknesses, and perspectives. The second is a set of interview questions they developed around categories like problems, priorities, and attitudes to identify student needs.

Uploaded by

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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Competency 4.

C Reflection
It is no surprise that ELL students should be taught differently or provided alternative
assessments so it is crucial that teachers may be able to differentiate their instruction and
versatile when it comes to conducting assessments. When lesson plans are created, all students
should be included. Emphasis on the “all” students. Although ELL students may make up a
minority of the class, they are still important members within the classroom and deserve equal
opportunities to learn and be successful. This ability that teachers should have to differentiate
instruction should stem from making use of applying previous concepts learned and intentionally
thinking about how each individual can develop their literacy skills. This is a competency that I
feel confident in as I have had to create a lot of lesson plans while I've been in the program and
in each the lesson plans we must include any and all modifications we would for both ELLs and
SPED students. What I have learned is that this is much more than justice hanging the way you
teach a topic or subject. It is more of an adjustment to how you think and requires you to
understand your students and predict how they might respond to a specific part of the lesson.
Then once this is discovered or established, you must change your approach to meet the student
at their level so that they may be at the same comprehension level as the other students in class.
This requires patience, flexibility, and most importantly creativity. Through the use of theories
and research of linguistics, teachers must create an alternative route to reach specific students. I
believe that much of the success of this competency comes from practice and actual experience.
When you interact and work with multiple ELL students you begin to recognize things that work
and don’t work. Then with this knowledge you can come up with an educational plan of pursuit
of instructing this student. In my opinion, the most important step in this process is getting to
know the ELL students in your class. This means attempting to get a deeper understanding of
who the child is and how their personality traits and previous knowledge affect their learning
habits. With this being said, my evidence for this competency is mostly centered in my ability to
get to know my ELL students then use what I know to cater to their necessary differentiations.
My form of evidence of this comes from my “Needs Analysis Tool” I created in Tch &
Lrn 419 where we were instructed to interview an ELL student. We had to introduce the student
and define their strong and weaker subjects. Then attach the list of questions that we asked them.
Then bring everything together based on our text and what we learned. I interviewed a ELL
student that I had the privilege of getting to know while I was working at a summer camp back at
home. He was one of my campers and we built a very strong relationship and kept in touch even
after summer had ended. He is from South Korea and only comes to San Diego for the summers.
But while he is here, he also takes Language Arts classes to improve his English literacy in hopes
of becoming completely fluent in the language. One of the benefits of this interview was that it
was a student that I was already comfortable with and he trusted me so we were able to dive right
into the interview. My intention with this interview was to establish his personal abilities by
having him self-reflect on what he believed his strengths and weaknesses are. I believe that it is
crucial that students have a say in their education and ultimately they know themselves better
than anyone else so with this being said they should be included in the process of creating a plan
to differentiate instruction.
The second form of evidence that I have for this competency is “Needs Analysis
Questions” from Tch & Lrn 413. This is a task that we were assigned to come up with questions
that we would ask ELL students based on 5 categories (problems, priorities, ability, attitude, and
personal). This task had us critically think about how we could develop questions that cater to
each category in a way that students could comprehend. This was a very valuable task because it
gave me the opportunity to practice my skill in developing and executing questions that I may
actually ask students in class. The difficulty with this task was creating conscious questions that
had students think and reflect but not have them be too difficult or hard to understand. I
discovered that this is a hard line to walk on because you want students to be challenged but not
challenge so hard that they don't understand and ultimately miss the purpose of the question in
the first place. The acknowledgment of the 5 categories was super helpful and beneficial because
these are the categories that most questions that teachers ask students fall into. The key to this
skill was developing questions that lead to second language acquisition, in the sense that you
want to lead students in the right direction but not completely give away the answer or expose
too much information. This skill will come in handy when I will have to differentiate instruction
because I may give students 2 different questions that have the same answer, but they are just
worded in a way that caters to each student's skill set. The whole purpose of these questions is to
improve students' literacy development and challenge them to think on their own and come up
with responses to prompts.

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