LESSON PLAN: Discovering Bacteria in a Differentiated Middle School Classroom

The following lesson is to study the kingdom of bacteria. This lesson comes in the middle of a unit that will continue with viruses and protists. There is not a culminating assessment, as that will come at the end of the larger unit. Information will sometimes be gathered from classroom resources (textbook, clips from articles/magazines/other texts, readers, etc) or the LRC/Computer Lab when available.

I had several differentiating goals in the back of my mind as I developed daily activities for this unit. One of which is to pre-assess student knowledge without necessarily having to give a pre-test. I feel pre-assessment is extremely valuable, but constantly just giving a pre-quiz is extremely boring. In the case that it becomes evident a student is already a bacteria expert, I would work with them to cluster these labs, assignments and activities to meet their individual needs. Another goal was to use an integrated performance assessment assignment. As previously stated, there is not a final assessment project with this lesson, but I was very invested in the ideas presented in this method. It was something that I really wanted to try working with. Thus, I took one section of the content and used this "assessment" method as an assignment. I am very eager to see how this will work for my students. Lastly, I wanted to provide a wide variety of performance based activities that address all learning styles and intelligences instead of typical "answer the following questions" homework. Therefore, daily note-taking and homework assignments have been scaffolded to provide a set of choices that include multiple learning styles and intelligence strengths.

Additional to these variations in my lesson, I wanted to keep all lab activities as a "non-negotiable" for all students. The hands on component of our science class is not something I wanted them to be able to choose not to do. However, the main lab activity is differentiated in choice of what to experiment.