When developing a program of instruction there are five factors which must be considered: instructional levels, development levels, disabilities, reading levels, and curricular goals. Each factor will be different for every student so this creates a challenge for the classroom teacher. She must be able to create programs with lessons that maximally benefit all her students.
Instructional levels refer to whether the student has the prerequisite skills needed to participate. If the lesson requires the student to subtract fractions, he must already have prior knowledge about fractions as well as subtraction. The teacher could not reasonably expect the student to subtract fractions if he had never had instruction or shown competency in either domain. Once the student has achieved an understanding of fractions and subtraction separately then he is at the instructional level to continue onto subtracting fractions. By creating a lesson around this goal, the student will obtain a new skill as well as one that he can build on in future lessons.
The next consideration is the student's development level. The student must be at a cognitive level to understand the lesson and perform its associated activities. Obviously a kindergarten teacher would not present a lesson in complex chemistry to her class because her students would not be developmentally ready at this age. The use of chemicals would be dangerous to young students because they do not possess the advanced motor skills needed to ensure safety. They also do not possess the cognitive skills needed to process the formulas and equations. If a kindergarten teacher wanted to use chemistry in a lesson, she could find simplified examples that would still enthrall the students. For example, finding out what iron looks like in iron-fortified cereal (Helmenstine, 2008). This is a simple experiment that can be done safely in a classroom with small children. The steps in the experiment can be performed with supervision by the students because it uses items that they may already be familiar with and can understand.
The next factor is disabilities. This is probably the most diverse of the five factors. Students can have a physical disability which makes it difficult for them to actively participate or they may have a disability less subtle, like auditory processing problems. While it is easy to remember a physical disability such as being confined to a wheelchair, sometimes it is easy to overlook the subtler disabilities. This is where the teacher's creativity comes in. Having a rousing game of spelling ball would not work for either of these students. Normally this game is played with children running around, tossing a ball, and calling out the letters to a given word. It can be a very loud game and involves quite a bit of movement. The idea of the game can be modified to fit the two disabled students so that the learning part of the game is still intact. The main purposes of the game are to help students spell words as well as developing listening and attention skills. In order to modify this game, the teacher could have the students sit in a circle and toss the ball to each other instead of running around screaming out the letters every time the is ball thrown. This will allow the student in the wheelchair to play and will allow the student with the auditory processing problem to be able to discern the words and letters called out. It still remains an active game for all and the overall purposes are served.
Reading levels are another factor that is considered when developing programs and lessons. In subjects other than reading, students should be comfortable reading instruction on their own. Presenting worksheets, textbooks, graphs, or instructions at a reading level higher than her students are comfortable with means she will spend time explaining what they are reading more than helping them understand the objectives. Not every student will be on the same reading level, so she must devise materials that reside near the lowest reading level of her class. It can be expected that students will need help with reading in any lesson, but when teaching a lesson outside of reading, the goal is to focus on that material and not on trying to up student reading levels. When teaching a lesson to third graders on solving word problems, it would be most beneficial if the word problems were written so that the class can read them on their own so that they may focus on how to solve the problem and not what words within the problem mean. For example, a third grade teacher should not use the following word problem:
A phlebotomist has 4 glass beakers that are empty. The phlebotomist has a larger beaker that is holding 20 ounces of plasma that was separated. How much should be dispensed into each beaker so that each beaker holds an equivalent quantity?
