Today’s Contributor: I am Beatriz Fernos. The 2021-2022 school year is my fourth year at the Alternative Learning Center. As the instructional coach, I collaborate with both the middle school and high school teams. I am passionate about differentiating professional development so teachers are both supported and challenged. Since we are such a small program, my responsibilities go from teaching to being an administrator and everything in between. It is an honor to serve our students!
Can you imagine getting new students every day all throughout the school year? How would you best serve new students that are joining your current students when they all are at different grade/skill levels and in the same classroom? Due to the continuous enrollment at ALC, differentiation is particularly challenging for our teachers. District wide use of BLEND due to COVID has been a powerful tool to best meet the needs of students while they are at ALC. Fortunately, students are dually enrolled in their home campus BLEND courses and their ALC BLEND courses automatically when they join us. This allows ALC teachers a unique opportunity to offer student-led differentiated instruction.
Our campus goal for the 21-22 school year was to have students leading their own learning, despite the constraints from our ongoing enrollment. We came up with the following solution which all core teachers started and ended their classes with.
Student have the following warm-up to complete every day:
- Select an emoji that represents how you are feeling today. Explain why.
- What will you be working on today? Why?
__ ALC Lesson
__ Home School BLEND
__ Other
Explain your choice:
- What topic are you studying?
- Is there anything your teacher or another ALC staff member can help with?
At the end of each class, students complete the following exit ticket:
- Rate your effort for today on a scale of 1 – 10. Explain.
- What assignments did you complete?
- What did you learn today?
- What do you still wonder?
Connect. Design. Learn 