Final Project

I am in an rural school setting, a 9th grad classroom where technology is 1-1 for students. For my final project I've created a unit where students learn irregular "yo" verbs in Spanish, they practice these verbs and as part of their final project, they create a story book with sentences using the "yo verbs". I've also added an element of differentiation to this unit because students will have different ways they want to present and create their story books. They can use an online story creator, they can draw the images and create their story book by hand and then video themselves turning through the book or they can create a powerpoint or a prezi presentation to model their story book.

The authenticity of this unit comes from the fact that students will be reading their stories to a class of Spanish immersion first graders. This is a great project to involve creative ideas as well as Spanish writing skills.

To assess the stories, I've created a rubric that outlines the expectations for every sentence a student creates. The sentence needs to have a subject, the subject needs to be "yo", the verb needs to be from our irregulars, ect. This rubric is set up where it's either a yes they have the element or no they do not. For grading, I believe this takes out the opinion piece and allows the grades to be assigned based on how the story met the standards.

Learning Readiness

Gifted Learners:

Something that surprised me from the video resources is how gifted students typically can have anxiety with group projects and grades because of their drive for perfection. I believe that one of the methods we are taught is partner and group work because it does have many benefits for students (interpersonal communication, safety net for speaking, more engaging) and for teachers (less grading, collaboration, everyone is speaking and listening). However, some students do not enjoy working in groups for various reasons. Anxiety from perfection being a reason that I have not really thought about. For gifted students, working with others may cause anxious feelings because of their need for perfection and their social communication skills. I personally have seen this play out in my placement with a student who really finds his classmates immature and does not enjoy their comments in class or working with them. He tends to do his work alone and does not want to work with a partner or group. I've noticed that if he is with a group, he's usually withdrawn from the activity and will do a separate page all for himself. 

In my present classroom, I believe that I better understand the anxieties that this student faces. For him, all of our group work, class discussions and general off topic discussions must be incredibly frustrating. Our class struggles with behavior management and for this student, he must experience incredible anxiety from the lack of structure and organization. Usually, when things are array in the class, he usually reads his book. My CT does not approve of him reading his book but going forward with this new information, I think I will ask her if she or I can ask him how he feels in class and how we can help him be more comfortable. Additionally, in future classrooms it is important that I know my students and I know them well. Technology can be a way to allow students to choose who they work with and what projects they work on. For gifted students, technology allows the teacher to give them content that will stretch them and help them grow while everyone in the class is learning. 

In general, it is essential that we as educators understand that gifted students are often mislabeled. We need to know who our students are. It's also important that all of our students are comfortable in our classrooms. Gifted students may prefer to work alone rather than in groups, that's okay.