- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 1758392
- First Name Kevin
- Last Name Knack
- Institution Kalamazoo Public Schools
- Role/Position Master Teaching Fellow
- Proposal Type Workshop
- Workshop Category Track 3: Master Teaching Fellowships
- Workshop Disciplines Audience STEM Education (general)
- Target Audience Noyce Master Teachers, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Goals
Attendees will examine the Kalamazoo Public School’s Newcomer Program structure and implementation for multilingual students. Attendees will break down a middle school 5e science lesson and compare the unmodified steps to a differentiated version. Attendees will have the opportunity to question a master teacher fellow about practical differentiation for both SPED and ELL in an actual classroom as opposed to a theoretical scenario.
Evidence
KPS implemented its newcomer program in 2021. It used SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) as its theoretical framework, in addition to observations from other ML integration programs from around the state of Michigan. Teachers were provided with PD on differentiating instruction for these students.Data gathered by the District Problem Solving PLC (led by Noyce Master Teacher fellows) via survey indicated middle school science teachers did not feel comfortable with their abilities to provide differentiated instruction. A new PLC was created in which science teachers met with teachers providing sheltered instruction. The science teachers provided expert content knowledge to assist the ML sheltered instruction teachers while the MLSI teacher provided expert ML support knowledge to create differentiated lessons following the SIOP model best practices. This workshop shares the framework under which MLs operate under the KPS newcomer program and does a deep dive into one of the science lessons taught in our 6th grade curriculum and the differentiations teachers actually use in the classroom.
Proposal
According to the Department of Education, multilingual learners (ML) are one of the fastest growing student groups in the US. Teachers are expected to provide an appropriate education for these students and are told to differentiate their lessons to accommodate ML learning. What does instruction differentiated for MLs actually look like in the classroom? How can a teacher address the unique needs of kids with dozens of unique primary languages, cultures, and ability levels? This workshop is designed for preservice and early service teachers to see what actively differentiated instruction looks like as well as how it was arrived at. Participants will learn about one school district’s transition structure for students coming with no or very minimal English language background into mainstream classrooms. They will examine an actual lesson taught by actual teachers that employs actual differentiation and compare it to an undifferentiated version. Finally, preservice and early service teachers can ask questions about what ML learning looks like in the trenches of a Title 1 public school. Note: This session will use a 6th grade, 5E science lesson variant as its focal point. The modifications can be useful for younger or older students, however, and most accommodations will fit nicely into other subject areas in a general sense. Additionally, the modifications presented can be very useful as a reference for differentiating for special education students.
