The emergent bilingual student I have chosen as my focal student has become one of my favorite students in my class. As I have gotten to know him more, I have figured out ways to modify my teaching that directly benefits him, but also benefits the rest of my class seeing as 21 out of the 24 students either are currently English Language Learners or are reclassified. This focal student also happens to have an IEP, in which I have to modify the lessons for him in different ways other than just for language. The way I modify lessons to reach this student is by including realia to get his attention and make sure he is interested. He may not understand every word used in conversation, but he is able to see my examples and know what I am trying to say. I use this for all students as well, but I choose my examples carefully for this student to make sure he knows what my examples are already, and can make connections to his own life with them. This, along with making sure that any text I give my students is short, but full of important information, but in simple terms, has made this student more interested in the course as well as understanding what is going on in this chemistry class.

I make sure to talk with this student one on one every single class period in order to gauge where he is at with the content, as well as go over many examples and give visual representations whenever possible. He seems to have been reacting to this well over the few weeks I have been his teacher, and I will continue to gauge his success and understanding for the duration of my student teaching experience so that I can bring these modifications to my own classroom in the fall.

For one of my focal students who has moderate academic knowledge and low processing ability, I use scaffolding and sentence structuring. The way I do this is by after we have gone over a concept in a lesson, I ask a question by setting up the sentence in a way that allows the student to have more context to answer the question. By doing this, it has helped this student understand what we are going over more, and allows them to answer me with the correct answer.

I have seen this help the student tremendously when it comes to understanding exactly what I am asking and how they should answer. This student is an English Language Learner as well, so scaffolding and sentence structure and has supported him and helped him not feel so lost or helpless. I have seen quite a change in him over the past month and he now feels more confident to answer questions because of the way the questions are set up.

The challenging part of scaffolding is coming up with the correct way to word the questions in order to get the desired answer. I need to really think about the questions and what it is I am actually asking of the students. Luckily by actually writing out the questions, I am able to make sure they make sense and will produce the desired answers with as little confusion as possible. I will continue to use this strategy throughout my teaching career as I see how well it works right now.

Disciplinary literacy in the agriculture content can look like lab reports, some research papers, models of animal anatomy, 3D models of DNA, etc. To be successful in the classroom, the students will need to know how to effectively communicate with each other, as well as with me and other teachers. This is important because without the ability to effectively communicate, the students will not be able to tell me if they do not understand the material and how I can help them. The second skill students need to be successful is the ability to learn and understand key vocabulary words so that they can read the material and be able to apply it to the content they are actually learning. The last skill students need is to be able to synthesize data. The ability to take data and look through it and make sense of it is a really important skill that students need to learn. This makes the student able to do research effectively and look through lots of information and find the key take aways and the important parts. With these three skills the students will be able to be better at using and understanding disciplinary literacy in agriculture. 

What are some other forms of disciplinary literacy in agriculture? How do we prepare students with the correct skills to effectively use and understand disciplinary literacy?