1)TIERED SENTENCE FRAMES support all language proficiencies
and also promote the development of higher level thinking as students are able
to utilize the frames at their comfort level and also stretch to more rigorous
levels of proficiency. 
 
 2)Mr. Cruz employs a structure for learning by providing
students with differentiated support systems to get them to write. He
understands the use of release of responsibility and how important it is to
provide a wide range of strategies and methods to support proficiency growth. 
 
 3) Through the use of tiered sentence frames and content
specific vocabulary words, students were able to use scaffolds to explain their
thinking and learning on our classroom Class Dojo feed to all parents.  
 
 4)Using GLAD and AVID strategies, understanding how to
differentiate for Multilingual learners, growth mindset education, the
importance of embedding funds of knowledge and giving students a variety of
types of questions, Teachers understand that there is no one size fits all
approach and must meet every student where he/she is with high expectations.
 

For this competency I use a range of different teaching strategies to elicit student voice. I use COSTAS level of thinking to ensure I’m using student voice at a higher rigor. When using level 3 learning activities students are creating, imagining, and analyzing. I use these for student to express what they know in a format of their choice. I believe that student voice is a essential in the classroom and one way this can be done is in the activities they participate in class.

 

1.  The first visual example is of a fictional narrative checklist. This checklist allows students to reflect on their writing in relation to the checklist of items that were identified in an excellent narrative. Students go through every item and depending on whether they included that element they circle yes or no. This allows students to self-reflect on their writing and identify elements that they need to include to make their writing better. A way you can differentiate this rubric for struggling learners is by only including a few elements rather than all of them and to add pictures. 

2.  The second visual example is of an EDL (Spanish reading assessment) goal setting sheet. Students color in their beginning of the year EDL level and set a goal that will allow them to continue improving. Each time the student is assessed they will continue charting their growth and record their goals. For those students that struggle in creating a goal, we will create a list of goals as a class with the sentence frame My goal is________. 

 

1.  The first visual is an example of two dictados, one being a differentiated one. Dictados are a great way to improve fluency, capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Usually, I incorporate many words that follow a word pattern such as hard and soft g that we studied in our spelling lesson. In addition, I add a concept that was covered in the grammar lesson. The picture in the top is an example of how I would scaffold for a struggling learner. Students would follow along as I read the dictado, and only fill in the blank spaces. As the week progresses, I could add more blank spaces if students are ready. 

2.  The collection of images that I included at the end are a collection of graphic organizers. The use of graphic organizers promotes the development of higher-level thinking skills because students must demonstrate their understanding of the reading comprehension skill by filling it out. A way to differentiate the graphic organizers is to have part of it filled out. For example, the main idea and a supporting detail could be identified, and the student would just have to fill out the other two supporting details. To practice the use of academic language, differentiated sentence frames could be added to the bottom of graphic organizers. 

o   Questioning: Ask open ended questions, why, keep probing for more, come back give students time to think

o   Blooms taxonomy: Move away from recall

o   Inferences: Using graphic organizer to facilitate responses

o   RACE to respond to written questions

o   Voice is choice

o   Teaching different strategies to solve a math problem, conceptual vs procedural

o   Sharing the pen, allow students to show how they solved a math problem

o   Thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs to the side

o   Free choice: Independent work: Raz Kids, Multiplication.com, IXL skills, Epic Books!, High Frequency words

o   Consequences: Democratic classroom, voting to make changes, letting teacher know if something is not fair

During Instruction we use a lot of visuals. Students participate in whole class discussions as a formative assessment method. This helps me assess what students may know about a specific content.  Visuals also help students develop language such as vocabulary and making sense of the topic at hand. 

Another area students have a voice is during writing. They are provided the tools and resources to create their own written product. In the example provided, the topic is narrative writing. After I model and we a class discussion on a topic student can write their own piece. There are tiered sentence frames students can use to create their writing piece. I conference with them and provide scaffolding as needed to help create their written piece. Some students are proficient and can self-assess their writing piece using a checklist. 

We use “I can” statements in all of our lessons (picture 1 is a math example). When there is new vocabulary, we go over what the word means using hand gestures and TPR. We also use chants (picture 2) when we have concepts that are historically challenging. We repeated this particular chant half a dozen times as a class while we practiced together. Kids then used it during independent work and in small groups with me with great success.

There are a lot of opportunities for student choice in my classroom; which books to read, where they work, which problems they do in class, which animals they want to research, etc. When students have a say in at least part of the activity, they are more likely to engage with the content, use the strategies and lessons, and commit the information to memory.