Culturally Sensitive Lesson Plan Reflection

By: Kitrina Ross

When planning our lesson, we as teachers discussed what we felt was

necessary for us to include in our lesson to support the needs of each of our scholars.

One thing we agreed upon as instructors was to use our former IEP plan from the

previous course to help in developing our plans. From the IEPs, it would be helpful to

use the supports / strategies sections to help guide the instruction. For example, in all of

the IEP plans we have seen, it was required that the scholars use guided notes, have

information be broken down into chunks, and use audio books/texts. All of this

information is useful because it helps to scaffold materials to help make the content

accessible to all learners.

Looking at impacting ELLs with technology, there is a variety of methods and

tools that can be used to facilitate greater learning in the classroom. There are websites

that are game-focused for students to work on different skills like vocabulary or fluency.

There are also websites and applications that could also be beneficial in fostering

discussions in the classroom. Our group thought about doing some sort of discussion-

related activity before we would have our students read a text. Doing a mini-discussion

could help students that may not have much prior knowledge in the context of the texts

topic to build that background knowledge. This would help them have greater access to

the text. Websites like Plickers, Kahoot, or Mentimeet are good tools for taking in
responses in a survey or discussion oriented manner. This discussion could be of a

culturally-sensitive nature so that students are able to bring in different opinions based

on their various perspectives and life experiences.

Kahoot & Tech for ELLs

As teachers, when planning our lessons, it is important for us to be

cognizant of how we can provide instruction in a way that all students can receive the

skill we are trying to build within them. We decided to use Kahoot (a gaming website

where teachers can create a social/online real-time quiz) to assess students ability

because students can use tech to display their answer and we are able to select

pictures to accompany the written questions. The use of technology aides ELLs in their

learning because it takes the focus from strictly English based learning to tools and

methods that convert understandings from their first language to a more universal

language. Technology provides students with mobility, this focus on mobility has

eliminated the rule of course materials being confined to a textbook. Basically, it would

show the students that they can express what they know without having to write their

responses. Plickers is another method of data collection where students can show their

answer choice by holding up a piece of paper with a coded answer that the teacher's

phone can decode. For students who are still in the silent phase as ELLs it is more

likely for them to share their answer via Plickers than having to orally respond.
 Cultural Teaching

The reading passages that were selected for the lesson were culturally inclusive.

We chose passages that have characters of different races and cultural backgrounds.

We also made sure that when we selected the passages that they were about topics

that would be relevant to the students in order for them to be able to make more

complex connections. There was no point in the lesson when scholars who speak

another language were told that they could not complete their stop and jots in their

native language. In those instances, we just want students to share their thoughts in a

way that makes sense to them and prepares them to have richer discussions with their

peers.

SPED Students: Modifications/Accommodations

When looking at our IEPs from former SPED classes, we concluded that in

addition to taking time to provide students with learning strategies that help them

maintain word tackling skills/ESL reading strategies, that we could incorporate those

strategies in the modifications for the lesson. In our research, I came across an English

educator blog that provides 7 lesson modifications that SPED and ESL students could

both benefit from.

One of those modifications was to accept alternate responses (not having only

written/verbal answers to be accepted) so having students draw a picture or act out their

answer could give them the chance to communicate their knowledge in a way that

navigates around the language/writing barrier. When implementing these recommended

accommodations and modifications, we need to be mindful to periodically evaluate their

effectiveness. During this evaluation, its important to ask and consider student

feedback in what they believe they need more of or less of to excel in the lessons.

We provided our special education students who struggle with taking effective

notes rapidly with a modified version of the graphic organizer that was given to each

scholar to write in during the teacher modeling portion of the lesson. The graphic

organizer was modified by the English teacher as it was already partially filled out to cut

down on how writing intensive this portion of the lesson was while still giving students

the responsibility of filling in the blanks with the appropriate information. We also

allowed them to draw a picture of how they would best represent those key terms for the

lesson so that we as teachers could see they understood the terms well enough to

create an image based on their comprehension.