2.4 Identify Ways in Which Session Plans can be Adapted to Meet the Individual Needs of Learners

2.4

I have adapted the teaching and learning strategies and resources used on my course to meet the diverse needs of the different learner groups.  The course content has also been dependent on the facilities available in the community venues such as computers.

I found this process has got easier as I have done more teaching and I have developed a bank of resources which I can use to change my session plans accordingly.  For example, in one session the learning objective is to 'identify a best practise feature from the video and indicate how to apply it to your own shared reading time.'  To help the learners achieve this objective I used a best practise online video clip, demonstrating reading out-loud, and a linked worksheet which I created. At Moss Park Infant School, this worked well, althuogh I did identify an opportunity to extend the activity with an extension activity to challenge any more-able learners.  However, at Broadheath Children's Centre, all the learners were working at a higher level and had already discussed these best practise features in their feedback from previous activities.

Therefore I reflected on their comments from the RARPA learning logs and was able to change my session plan to demonstrate phonics. It was the same learning objective, but I needed to differentiate the resources used to challenge this group of learners.  By showing a different best practise video I could demonstrate how children learn phonics and give the learners more information about this subject area which they had asked for. This wasn't built into my original SOW, but I was able to adapt my session plan to meet the needs of this group which I was pleased with as they clearly benefited from this session.

In another session at Seymour Park School, the Extended Schools Manager asked for the children of the learners to be included in a session, so I adapted my session plan for the final week to offer the learners an opportunity to practise the skills they had learnt with their children in shared reading time.  This served as a usefil recap and helped to consolidate the learning for this group.