I have the unfortunate task of teaching two classes two completely separate subjects at the same time. The size of our school and the ESL population we serve means that my Grade 9 and 10 English courses are each split into an Academic (higher understanding) stream and an Applied (lower understanding) stream. In an elementary classroom, split classes are difficult (I can imagine anyway). In high school class it can be very challenging.
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| Marina Mall - Kuwait |
The only sane way that I can cope with this situation is to construct units that contain very similar core components. For instance, we are studying non-fiction in Grade 9 right now and much of the day-to-day lessons are very similar. I focus on a question of inquiry during my units, and everything we do relates back to that question. The daily lessons are built around getting the students to work for their understanding, but the activities (and the other ways they get to this understanding) are separated for stream.
Managing two classes in one room can be a bit of a nightmare, but I often try and stagger their activities or assignments so that I can introduce a concept or activity to one stream while the other is finishing something else up. This doesn't always work the way I want it to, and occasionally I have some students staring wide-eyed at me waiting for instructions. This is where
Crafting comes into play. Students that finish their stream's activity quickly can independently work on their own learning through my
Crafting program.
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| Marina Mall - Kuwait |
The staggering works reasonably well, and I always try to start my lessons (unless there is carry-over from the previous day) with whole class instruction and inquiry. This lets kids in either stream work at answering questions or giving opinions on the topics being covered, and the whole class can work with and learn from each other. The differentiation comes when they start on stream appropriate activities or tasks. Due to a huge difference in abilities, I try to differentiate the task within a stream as well.
In practice, it has worked well with a few bumps along the way. One of the biggest challenges is simply keeping all of the tasks straight in my head. It is very easy to get some of the jumbled! My marking sheets are a bit of a mess, but it is a mess that makes sense to me...so I guess that's what counts.
And...finally...the pictures above were taken at Marina Mall, here in Kuwait. It is one of the few
nice outdoor areas here.
This last week was our school's International Week (with a bit of Kuwait National and Liberation Day celebrations). For the secondary group, our students spent one day presenting information about countries they had studied and the next few days rotating classrooms. Each teacher was asked to prepare a lesson that tied to International Week, and that would be suitable for students from 7-10. Instead of focusing on a specific country I decided to do a lesson that promoted the idea of a global community, and our students' roles in said community.
I began the lesson with some trivia, to get the students thinking globally. After that, we moved onto a reading and analysis of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken". It is a pretty powerful and simple poem, so my students loved it. We tied the poem directly into a video featuring the Kid President by Soul Pancake. You can see the video for yourself here. The purpose of the video is to promote self-study in teens and to get them thinking about the good they can do in the world. It is a great video to show to any age group. 
Their final task was to write a paragraph or draw a picture showing how they can make the world more awesome. I took their work and decorated my classroom door with it, and I think it turned out great. There was some pretty insightful and meaningful contributions from my students.
