| Mrs.
DiSimone looked at her seventh-grade social studies students. She
had been teaching in her middle school for eleven years, but had never
had such a diverse group of students before. Of the twenty-one twelve-year-olds,
twelve were "ordinary" students, three were coded as learning disabled
(2 ADHD and 1 dyslexic). The remaining six students were ENL students
from Taiwan, Mexico, and Turkey. Not being familiar with the languages her ENL students spoke, Mrs. DiSimone felt hopeless in dealing with them. She knew they were intelligent and so eager to learn, but the native-speaking children were just so far beyond them in terms of their ability to understand English. How could she structure her class so that she was neither holding back the fifteen native speakers nor losing the six ENL students? The next curricular unit was on the American Revolution. Could Mrs. DiSimone find a way to "level the playing field" by creating a task that all the students could work on together, and that would target each student's strengths rather than focus on their weaknesses? |