Week 4

1/3/2020-5/3/2020

During the previous few weeks, I had been getting to know the high achievers in the classroom in order to commence with one of my Professional Development Plan (PDP) goals which is to challenge the high achievers, particularly during activities. It has always been a weakness of mine to plan for activities that appropriately challenge students, whether they are low achievers, or high achievers. This semester, after setting a goal for myself, I began working on bettering this aspect of my teaching. First of all, I used a template that I created, inspired by Nottingham from the book ‘Challenging Learning : Theory, Effective Practice and Lesson Ideas to Create Optimal Learning in the Classroom’, in which I noted down the activities high achievers were partaking in and what level on the Teaching Target Model (TTM) they were in. It is encouraged to provide students with work that is in between their Current Ability (CA) and Potential Ability (PA); because this is where the learning zone is. Activities above the learning zone would be too difficult for the child (Nottingham, 2015). One indicator that the child is being challenged, is the questions they ask as they work, and whether they take time to critically think as they are involving with the activity. If they solve it with too much ease, then there isn’t any challenge to the activity. As I differentiated the activities for the high achievers, although not all of them share the same level, I could see that they were pausing to do some reflection as they worked, and they were asking questions, which to me shows that they are being stretched to some point.

One activity I created for high achievers this week was giving them resources to sort and combine a descriptive phrase. The foam cups did not have any labels, and they had to read the words on the craft sticks in order to find the size, color, and name of the object in the picture. I think it was a challenge for them, but they were able to accurately assemble the phrase.

References:

Nottingham, J. (2015). Challenging learning : theory, effective practice and lesson ideas to create optimal learning in the classroom.

*Descriptive phrase activity for high achievers