Educationally Driven Issue

Being able to address the diverse academic needs of our learners is an issue that
has influenced my teaching on a daily bases for many years. There are many challenges
that I encounter in order to do this and am always looking for ways to improve.
It is not just the needs of the lower ability children, but also the higher achieving
students that require attention. There are many opportunities for the lower ability
students to receive services to help them achieve, but I dont find as many opportunities
for the higher achieving students to be challenged in their academics without being held
back in their education, unless I provide it. I do this by individualizing instruction and
giving students the opportunity to present their learning through a variety of means, be it
visual representation, written expression, or the arts.
Other opportunities involve having extra help in the classroom. This can be
having SERTs or ELL teachers pushing into the classroom to assist their caseload or
having them pull out their students to help them manage their curriculum. Collaborating
with these individuals is important so the students being pulled out are studying the same
subject that they are missing in the classroom. This can be a struggle because of the time
it requires to meet to plan the collaboration. At my school we have math corp educators
to help with 5
th
through 8
th
grade, but reading corp educators are only servicing
kindergarten through 4
th
grade. We have no extra support for 5
th
and 6
th
grade in reading.
With the increase in class size it becomes more of a challenge providing individualized
instruction for our lowest ability students.
We want to provide all the help we can for our diverse learners and parent support
is essential in the acquisition of this. Some parents are very supportive of their children
in getting the support that is provided for their children, but some are reluctant on many
different levels. Some parents dont want to have their children pulled out of class to
receive these services because of loss of other academic time and having to make up this
learning at some obscure and sometimes unavailable time. Other parents dont want to
have their child receive the support for other reasons, which may be stigma or pigeon
holing their child in a situation from which they may never get out. I feel that these
parents are doing their children a great disservice by not allowing their child to receive
the support in their academics for which they truly need.