	There are also student characteristics considered when designing instruction and assessing learning. It is a second grade classroom, so all of the students are between 7 and 8 years of age. This is still a very young age, but they are much more mature and independent than students I have observed in first grade and especially kindergarten. In this particular class, it is noticeable that students have higher expectations for themselves and for others than students in earlier grades. They work well independently, and when working in groups, they hold others to task. It can be reasonably expected that they will take some responsibility for their own learning and will get their work done, or ask questions if they are struggling, with less oversight than earlier grades. Their behaviors in the several weeks I spent in this classroom confirmed that. Another aspect considered is the different learning styles I have seen in the classroom. Most students in the classroom are visual learners or lean towards being visual learners. I have seen in math lessons, for example, which begin with a lecture with significant explanation and detail, but there is mass confusion as a result. Once a Smartboard is integrated with significant examples being shown, images being shown, processes being shown, light bulbs go off and the majority of students will get it. Visuals are a necessity in this classroom when designing lessons. 
Student skills and prior learning have to be taken into account when developing learning goals, instruction, and assessment. Through observations and through discussion with the host teacher, it has been learned that this class is often strong in social science and typically motivated, whenever lessons are well designed to promote student interest. Learning goals are often ambitious in terms of being topics that students may have never been formally introduced to before, though they are often narrow in scope when it comes to each individual lesson. The students in this class perform more strongly whenever they can focus on one individual aspect in a lesson as part of a greater unit that builds lesson by lesson. However, students in this class have a good foundation of reading skills and well-developed reading comprehension strategies, which allows for a strong basis of instruction. Social studies units in second grade in this school are often units built around the Magic Tree House series, which are a series of historical fiction stories that have non-fiction companions. The former are used in reading and language arts lessons, while the latter are used as the basis of social studies units. With their strong reading skills, lesson instruction can be built around these books with relative ease. These students do best with direct instruction for new material, so lessons are built around individual chapters and guided reading. For assessments, students are very familiar and with traditional written assessments, and they work with many quizzes and tests on a weekly basis. Though they may not have been familiar with a subject prior to a lesson, they have learned listening comprehension and reading comprehension skills that have made them skilled at picking out main ideas that might be focused on in tests. Their typical assessment results usually have a strong level of success.
