Diverse Learners

Who are your Diverse Learners?

Every learner is a diverse learner.  All students learn in different ways and process information differently.  All learners come to school with different cultural backgrounds and experiences which shape how they learn.  Trying to meet all these needs is the arduous job of the classroom teacher.  One way to foster this learning for all students is to create what Barell (1998) states as an “invitational environment”.  Trust and the ability to take risks and communicate openly are keys to this type of learning environment.  Making accommodations for students with special needs and learning abilities will also foster the diversity of all learners.

In my first grade classroom I have 2 Hispanic children, 1 Asian child who was adopted from Russia, 1 child who appears to be on the autistic spectrum but the parents will not get him tested so he receives no outside services, 4 gifted students, 1 child who receives speech and occupational therapy, 1 child who has tracking issues and receives private assistance for this need, and 2 students on ADHD medication.  It can be very challenging to meet all of these diverse needs with every lesson to meet every learning standard. 

 What do you do or can you do to meet the needs of diverse learners. Are you creating Multicultural lessons, Multiple Intelligence Projects, and/or specific assistive technologies for students with special needs?

To accommodate my autistic student who struggles with transition and communicating with others during unstructured time in my classroom I created cards with icons for his desk to show the order of our day.  He can take them off when we have accomplished a lesson and this helps him categorize his day and tackle each lesson with more focus.  I also spend a few extra minutes explaining his assignments privately to make sure he understands the objective.  We also work on skills to handle how to ask someone if you can play at recess and making eye contact.  To accommodate my ADHD students I will break down their lessons into smaller chunks of time and provide them with frequent brain breaks.  They also are allowed to do their work standing, on the floor or however they want as long as they are on task.  For my gifted students I meet with them before heading to our Daily 5 rotations and I usually give them a higher objective I want them to meet.  Sometimes this is during writing and it might be to rewrite the ending to a story in a different way.  Sometimes they might need to use a more complicated graphic organizer to retell a story.  One item I would love to have in my classroom would be iTouches for helping my ELL students with phonics and letter sounds.  There are many apps that are perfect for this and having a handheld device to listen and repeat and record would be ideal for them.  I am hoping through grant writing to get 4 iTouches to use next year for this purpose.  With the price of $229.00 each I feel it is a practical and viable tool to use with many different learners and hope my grant gets approved.  I have also written a grant with the gifted facilitator for 2 iPad2’s  which will cost $1000.00 with the hopes of utilizing them during small group sessions for production of stories and recording of story retellings to work on reading strategies.  I currently have 3 iPads and my students use them daily to work on all reading skills.  They are organized in folders and I plan to scaffold the activities in these folders to better meet the needs of all my learners next year.  

I feel that I need to work on more multi-cultural lessons for next year.  Two years ago I had a Muslim student and I had her mother come in and do a lesson about their holidays.  It was great fun and she cooked some ethnic foods and we played some of their traditional holiday games.  This year I did not do that but should have asked even though her daughter moved on to 2^nd grade.   I usually try to cover different cultures around December with a holiday around the world unit.  I focus on Hanukah, Las Posadas, Christmas, and the different ways to celebrate Christmas around the world.  I would love to work on connecting with other classrooms around the world and I am going to research further on the International E-mail Classroom Connection and the Sister School Project suggested in our text.   Since our world is getting smaller through the use of technology it is more important than ever to teach about different cultures because our students will be working with many different kinds of people from all over the world.  

Barell, J. (1998).  Problem-based learning:  An inquiry approach.  Arlington Heights, IL:        Skylight.      

Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2010). Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.