As a first-year teacher, I’ve struggled to develop lessons which meet the needs of every student. In my 9th grade language arts courses, some students read at an elementary level, while others have progressed beyond the regular curriculum.
I have modified my approach more often as the year has progressed, and over the course of the school year, I have learned a couple things about enrichment and remediation:
1) Students learn more effectively when they’re engaged.
2) I need to adjust my instructional approach if students aren’t engaged.
I have a co-teacher in certain hours, and she helps greatly with coming up with ideas for remediation. She will think of an alternative approach to teaching a lesson or suggest ways to lighten the load for some students to make a difficult concept less overwhelming.
I have also attempted various enrichment strategies. I have added challenge questions to increase the critical thinking skills of my more advanced students. I have also provided selected students with the opportunity to conduct independent research when they completed a lesson early.
I want to follow a blogger’s advice: “By meeting students where they are in relation to their ability to process and use new information, we insure they stay motivated to learn what we are teaching to them.” It just takes time to understand enough about my students and the curriculum to anticipate their level with a particular lesson.
I’ll also need to learn how to communicate my curriculum well enough to the students that they can see relationships between the content they are learning and the rest of the curriculum. The first thing students ask when they enter the classroom is, “What are we doing today?” By reinforcing the foundation of my curriculum with remediation and challenging the students to think critically about the concepts we are covering, I will become more effective as an educator.
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