INTASC 3 - Adapting Instruction for Individual Needs
The teacher understands how students differ in their approaches to learning and creates instructional opportunities that are adapted to diverse learners.
The ability for an educator to provide multiple learning approaches and styles is crucial. There are visual learners, aural learners, and tactile learners. A good educator should be able to determine what types of learners their students are and plan lessons that create equal opportunities for success for different types of learners to best understand the material. Music is a largely aural field obviously, but there is plenty of room to use other learning styles and a strong need for it. Music teachers of any age level should seek to employ diverse learning styles with every class, every day.
The key to addressing different learning styles is variety in planning and the types of activities we use. The learning modes (and ways of incorporating them) are visualization (visual aids or mental pictures, cues, gestures), audiation (active listening, silent exercises, listening to and critiquing others/selves), and locomotion (movement activities, conducting, reacting to musical stimuli). My field experiences have shown me students learning style needs first hand. Often, activities don't "click" right away with every student and I have learned through repeated experience to quickly adapt and use my resources to provide visual aids on the white board or with my gestures or mental imagery metaphors, to provide audiation through active listening, or to provide locomotive learners with varied body movements to improve their individual vocal technique.
Planning for multiple learning styles should not just be considered for students with IEPs. A teacher needs to truly observe each of their students at the start of the year to understand their needs and thus instruct the class best as a whole and as individuals. A student's learning style preference can be affected by gender, age, social acceptance, the classroom environment, and teacher expectations. I think a vibrant, charismatic personality can transcend a lot of learner differences and keep student interest and motivation high. I encourage students to stay engaged through lots of questioning, physical engagement, and a consistent, quick pace.
The key to addressing different learning styles is variety in planning and the types of activities we use. The learning modes (and ways of incorporating them) are visualization (visual aids or mental pictures, cues, gestures), audiation (active listening, silent exercises, listening to and critiquing others/selves), and locomotion (movement activities, conducting, reacting to musical stimuli). My field experiences have shown me students learning style needs first hand. Often, activities don't "click" right away with every student and I have learned through repeated experience to quickly adapt and use my resources to provide visual aids on the white board or with my gestures or mental imagery metaphors, to provide audiation through active listening, or to provide locomotive learners with varied body movements to improve their individual vocal technique.
Planning for multiple learning styles should not just be considered for students with IEPs. A teacher needs to truly observe each of their students at the start of the year to understand their needs and thus instruct the class best as a whole and as individuals. A student's learning style preference can be affected by gender, age, social acceptance, the classroom environment, and teacher expectations. I think a vibrant, charismatic personality can transcend a lot of learner differences and keep student interest and motivation high. I encourage students to stay engaged through lots of questioning, physical engagement, and a consistent, quick pace.
Artifact 1 (Lesson Plan with Accommodations)
In this lesson plan, I included a column of accommodations alongside my procedures that I would make for a student with special needs in an 8th grade general music class. Some accommodations allow the student to display their knowledge or skills in multiple ways but be held to the same expectations as the whole group, others allow for reduced difficulty in content and thus different expectations. I also included activities that activate all three learning domains separately throughout the lesson.
Artifact 2 (Accommodations for Students with Exceptionalities, Observation and Findings)
For this assignment, I attended an arts workshop for students with special needs hosted by Ball State called the Prism Project. I observed a 9 year old girl for the afternoon and filled out a protocol sheet based on her communication abilities and disabilities. I then researched and created ways to work with students similar to her in a music classroom. I provide lots of concrete examples in this paper of how to plan to adapt instruction for students with a variety of special needs and then implement it successfully.