Who am I?

I was born Anthony Joseph Taianao. I was born in Oka, Tamuning, Guam on June 16, 1994. My parents are Anthony Cruz Taianao and Jill Louise White. I come from a family of four and I am the oldest child. I have one sibling, a sister, and she is 16 years old and is a sophomore at Southern High School. I am a proud graduate of Southern High School Class of 2012. I played football, basketball, and competed in track and field while in high school. I was a four year member of my student council and spent my senior year as a member of the National Honor Society at Southern.

I am now 21 years old, and attending the University of Guam. I am pursuing my degree to become a Secondary Physical Education and Health teacher.

With a little help, everyone is fully abled

      I have always been aware of disabilities in the classroom and how they affect students, teachers, and teaching strategies. I saw a few things in this video that I did not know and did not think could be done for people with disabilities and I was pleasantly surprised. After watching this video, I can say that it was appropriately named “Enabling Dreams.” We have so many brilliant minds working towards improving the educational experience and just overall living experience that disabilities almost do not come across as a hindrance because we can now work through them effectively.

     One of the examples of full-inclusion that I observed in the video was when the teachers of the younger children were using the assistive technology. The use of such technology will always be the first opportunity for students to be successful participants. I personally feel like some features of a lesson plan that would set students with disabilities up for success would be to allot more time for certain parts of the lesson. By allowing more time for the students to understand and work with what they have, more learning and teaching will be going on. It is also very important to have time for questions during each part of the lesson. Students should also be addressed directly so that they understand that they are being spoken to and they better understand what they are being asked to do. The biggest thing that I feel is required in a lesson to help students succeed with disabilities in a lesson is encouragement and understanding. We need to encourage our students to grab life by its horns and we need to help them understand that they can do whatever it is they are tasked with, they can complete. You can see an example of this when Vishal Saraiya runs for president of the Disabilities, Opportunities, Internet Networking, and Technology (DO-IT) program’s student body. This young man has the encouragement from his teachers and parents from seeing what he can do with the help of assistive technology, and he understands that he has boundless capabilities.

     If I were to design my lesson plans while keeping in mind students and their disabilities, I would start by planning ahead. I would see if any of my students had disabilities, what their disabilities are, what is included in their Individualized Education Program (IEP), and how it could potentially restrict the student or provide constraints during the activities and lessons that would be included in my class. There is a universal design of instruction that would help to create a skeleton for your lesson plan and it also includes how to embrace students with disabilities. According to the MESA Curriculum Addendum and their article that is titled, How to Fully Include Students with Disabilities, “Universal design refers to the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation.” So with that, one of the first steps I could take to starting a lesson plan while keeping in mind my students with disabilities, I can start off by designing my curriculum or my class activities by using this “Universal Design.”

     After designing the lesson plan to accommodate all of my students, I could then teach the children about each other. I would use the idea of having the students work together. My mom is a teacher at Southern High School and she has been teaching Adaptive Physical Education with the idea of having peer involvement since she started teaching there in 1997. It is because of her that I feel like this would be a great idea. I think that students who have disabilities can sometimes feel alienated or they may feel like an outcast by their peers because of what they have to go through. I feel like there are a lot of positives when you incorporate all of your students together. By working with their peers, students with disabilities may not only improve in academically but perhaps also socially. According to Wang (2013), "students with special needs or disabilities can strive with the help of team building and or group participation." Full inclusion is the best way to go unless the safety of students may be compromised.

     “How Assistive Technology Enables Dreams” is a great short video and I feel like it is a testament to the amazing things that every student can do. The human spirit can be fire that is impossible to put out if it is kindled the right way. Being a teacher is all about learning over a lifetime while also sharing what you have experienced and what you know with every single one of your students in any way that you can. All children deserve a great educational experience, there are no permanent roadblocks when teaching, only temporary ones. My personal experience with assistive technology helping out students with disabilities is that I can see how much it helps. There was so much more that the students were able to do with the assistance and the overall learning experience was much improved and that’s what we want as teachers. We want to improve the learning quality for our students and give them the ability and hunger to be a lifelong learner.

University of Washington. (2015). How To Fully Include Students with Disabilities. Retrieved from http://www.washington.edu/doit/programs/accessstem/accommodations/mesa-curriculum-supplement-how-fully-include-students-0

Wang, K. (2013). 7 Ways to Include a Student with Special Needs in Physical Education. Retrieved from http://www.friendshipcircle.org/blog/2013/11/12/7-ways-to-include-a-student-with-special-needs-in-physical-education/

Lessons of a Lesson Plan

     This lesson plan was good practice for finding ways to relate one single topic into different types of subjects. It was a challenge to actually start the entire process but once my ideas were in order, it was a walk in the park. Some of the things that I actually liked about this lesson plan were how I grouped the students, it was at random and this was to help the students work outside of their comfort zone. Beaudoin (2005) found that, a little anxiety can help us perform at our peak, psychologists have found — in other words, when we challenge ourselves, we tend to rise to the occasion. This is good because we should be teaching our students, at an early age, how to deal with situations in which they will not be with people they are comfortable with.  This also teaches them how to adapt to the styles of others and how to correlate everyone’s ideas and mesh them all together.

       If I could change anything, I would change the idea of using cereal and keep all of the same parameters of the lesson and do the project on the meals that the kids get from the cafeteria throughout the week. As a class, we would ask for the menu for the week and we will decide what three days, and their meals, will we be looking at and examining. We could do everything the same as the cereal plan but we would have more information to look at. This would be a more in depth project and would require a considerable amount of time but this could be placed as somewhat of a research project for a final grade or something similar.

       This lesson would be a part of a larger grouping of lessons that could fall under my “Nutrition” section that I would be teaching. After learning about nutrition labels, how to read them, and some use and analysis of our favorite cereals, I would teach the students more in depth about their nutrition and what exactly is going into their bodies. We would discuss and look at the different ingredients and results of short-term to long-term exposure to each specific ingredient and how they would work as agonists and antagonists in the body. Research by Holli and Beto (2014) supports that many studies have shown that eating habits are established early in the life cycle and tend to carry through to adulthood. As a result, the food that children eat now will undoubtedly influence their state of health in later life. I feel that everything would be perfectly correlated and this lesson would perfectly follow up my previous lesson plan.

      By the time evaluation comes around, I would better understand the constraints of teaching the lesson in my school and how I can better prepare my lesson. I will also have learned more about the uniqueness of students and how to address the needs of every child while still covering the lesson, challenging young minds, and igniting constant hunger for knowledge and understanding. The objectives state clear standards provided for students and at the end of the lesson, they will have mastered everything required for that section. That correlates with the evaluation because the objectives are looking for understanding of the material placed in front of them. It also looks at the students’ observation skills and critical thinking skills. One aspect that I can think of that I feel was not included in the ASSURE lesson plan format is the initial interest because at first glance, cereal is not the most attractive food in the world. I feel as though students would have an easier time learning and being hooked on learning if they were interested in the topic from the start, but that is hardly ever the case. Although cereal is not seen immediately as an exciting food, it is up to me as the teacher to find the appeal factor as well as make it fun for the students to learn and easy to pick up. I felt as though I had a good amount of resources and assistance but there is always room for improvement. I feel like there could have been more assignments to do with the same information, or perhaps give the students a hypothetical question that would encourage critical thinking. The assistance would have come from the extra assignments because it would have enforced the lesson more and it would have also made the assignment more challenging. I would have been able to get more out of students and they probably would have had more information sticking in their heads.

       Overall, it was a lot of fun putting this lesson plan together and I know this would have been a lot of fun to teach in class. A lesson is only as fun as the teacher makes it!

Beaudoin, N. (2005). Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone Lessons for School Leaders. New York, NY: Routledge.

Holli, B. B., & Beto, J. A. (2014). Nutrition Counseling and Education Skills for Dietetics Professionals. Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.