1.1 Physical social and intellectual development and characteristics of students
1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities.
My demonstration of Standard 1 Know students and how they learn, was completed during my GTPA assessment. I was assigned a year 2 classroom with 24 students within an affluent private school in a location a 45min drive west of Brisbane. I taught a range of English and Science lesson. I utilized the first 4 days prior to teaching the required workload to collected data and build a profile on each student to gain background knowledge about academic abilities, along with insights into general interests like and dislikes, cultural and social back grounds and any learning or physical disabilities. The collection of data was acquired from previous work and assessments, observations, school records and conversations from my mentor teacher and interactions with the students during group activities during daily rotations and sporadic times during lessons and transitions.
The relevance of creating students’ profile was to design and plan lesson content that was engaging, relevant and achievable to all students of all abilities in particular my three focus students of varying abilities 1 low, 1 medium and 1 high achieving student. The collection of data continued throughout my five-week practicum as I observed students during lessons and outside the classroom, I was able to adjust my lessons to accommodate the students’ needs when required. A major part of my GTPA assessment was to create a portfolio of learning and development for my three focus students tracking their learning and development over the course of the assigned lesson sequence. Using their data profiles, I was able to design lessons to address the needs of the focus students and the rest of the class. I aligned my planning and implementation around the Age- appropriate pedagogies to ensure students were” actively engaged with purposeful learning experiences to enhance learning outcomes an promote the development of positive learning dispositions towards learning. “(Queensland Government, 2023). As highlighted in Artifact Standard 1 the majority of students learning styles aligned with a Kinesthetics learning style where they learn best by applying their sense of touch a movement (Cornell (PhD) & Drew (PhD), 2023) and or a Visual style where learning is optimal with the use of graphics, images, charts and flash cards (University of Wollongong, 2023). The five-lesson sequence Topic was Procedure Writing, Students designed a made Puppet and created procedure explaining how the puppet was made. The learning process adopted many Kinesthetics and Visual learning techniques that proved engaging and productive for all lessons students demonstrated agency in their learning resulting in positive learning outcomes. It was pleasing to witness high student engagement and enthusiasm as students demonstrated their creative abilities.
Artifact Standard 1 is a snippet of the Data profile collected for the GTPA assessment. The year 2 class identified a predominantly Kinesthetic and Visual learners. The data also includes students’ interests , English and Maths levels, work levels and learning needs. All information was valuable in the planning an implementation of lessons taught.
