This teaching method was implemented in the resource setting during math instruction. There are eleven students that come for math support, some of the students are identified with math goals and some are just in need of extra support or extra time to learn the material. The students come for a forty-five minute period each day and I would instruct a majority of the students and another teacher would take some of the students to a different room.
This particular teaching method works well because the students receive the extra support that they need. They are able to receive instruction, in the small group setting, where they receive more attention and one-on-one help. These students also benefit from the additional instruction on the step-by-step processes taught in math. Many of the students that come for the small group instruction struggle with memorizing and retaining the steps of the math processes so the extra support and developing cognitive strategies to remember the steps is crucial to their educational success.
Initially, this was a difficult group in the area of classroom management. Not all of the students were familiar with the rules and expectations of the new classroom. A majority of the students were familiar with the rules but I made the mistake of assuming that all the students knew or would generalize other classroom rules to this classroom. Quickly, I learned from this mistake and taught and explained the expectations to all the students and implemented a classroom behavior challenge. The students quickly learned from this challenge and changed their behavior and are continuing to work on not blurting out during instruction. It was also difficult, at first, because there were students coming from three classes and they were all on different lessons. This made it difficult to teach to the whole class at once and for the students to receive the specific support that they need. As a result, that has now been changed and all the students are on the same lesson and the class is going much smoother and the students are benefiting significantly from the change.
When using this teaching method it is important to consider the size of the class and the skills that the students already have. Even though we do not have specific lesson plans for the day because it depends on what the teachers teach that day, we still have to stay familiar with the curriculum and the skills that the students will be learning.
This is a great teaching method to use when there is a large class where specific students have specific skill deficits. The small group setting allows for additional support with these skills.
There are eleven students that came to the resource room for additional math support; out of those eleven students there are three students with math goals on their IEPs. This fact means that we were servicing and helping numerous extra students in need of math support. There were no set lesson plans for each day that the students came to resource room. Typically the period starts with working through their classroom assignment. If that gets completed then we work on basic facts or practicing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems.
During this math support time there were multiple adaptations that were implemented for all of the students. One was extended time. Originally the math study hall went only until the end of the math period, but was then extended for an extra fifteen minutes due the need of additional assistance. The students also received additional instruction or way of looking at the different types of problems, which helped many of the students have a greater understanding of the math concepts. Just the fact that the students come to the resource room is an example of the level of support that the students are receiving. For some of the students, the like just coming to a different room for part of the day, it is a refreshing change and they are ready to work when they get there.