BLOG ELEVEN

"How can curriculum mapping assist you?  Do you have one?  Does your school/district curriculum map?  Where would/will you start in creating a useful curriculum map for your classroom?"

For my Algebra class there is a curriculum map.  It has been incredibly useful for me throughout the semester. The map outlines all the units and how many days to spend on each one.  It also includes the common core aligned objectives and gives corresponding homework assignments from the textbook.  Furthermore, our district also created unit exams and review guides that all Algebra 1 teachers give. The curriculum map really helps out in my unit and daily lesson planning. 

There is currently no curriculum map for my Algebra Extensions class.  In order to create a useful curriculum map for this class I will look at the final exam that has been provided for us.  This past semester I had no planned curriculum and no official final exam so I ended up teaching what I thought students needed work on.  However, for next semester, now that I have a final I will plan a curriculum based on what they need to master for the final.  This will include units on adding and subtracting, fractions, estimation, and rates.  I am going to try to outline the semester based off this exam and hopefully this will provide much more structure for my class.

BLOG TEN

"Do you differentiate instruction? Why? Why not? What is the importance of differentiating instruction? What impact does it have on student learning?"

I differentiate instruction every day in my Algebra Extensions classes. As I've mentioned previously I do stations in these classes, and I have students grouped based on their abilities.  Therefore, with each group that comes to my station I switch up the instruction based on what they particularly need.  For example, we are working on adding fractions with unlike denominators right now.  For my lower groups we spend quite a bit of time on understanding how to find lowest common denominators.  For my high groups, they already understand how to do this so we have moved on to word problems involving fractions with unlike denominators.  

Differentiating instruction is very important because you want to challenge kids, but at the level they are performing at.  For example, if I extensively went over finding LCDs with my high groups, they would be incredibly bored and it wouldn't be benefiting them because they wouldn't be learning anything new.  However, if I just jumped into word problems with my lower groups, they would get easily confused.  With them I need to go back to the more basic instruction before moving on to word problems.