Differentiated Instruction – Research shows that differentiated teaching is an effective method to meet the needs of all students. But if you’re teaching a classroom of 30 different students, all with different strengths and needs, it can be hard to know where to start.
Adapted from the book Quick-Guides to Inclusion, edited by Michael Giangreco & Mary Beth Doyle, today’s post lays out 7 principles of differentiated instruction and provides classroom examples for each. It gives teachers who are new to differentiation a starting point for their teaching (and is a good source of ideas for teachers who are already differentiating).
Differentiated Instruction
All students want to contribute, be respected and liked. Your classroom will provide fertile ground to help students learn to appreciate differences, value commonalities, and come to a deeper understanding of such complex issues as equity, cooperation, equality, and justice.
How To Differentiate Instruction In Academically Diverse Classrooms: Tomlinson, Carol: 9781416623304: Books
Creating a “work-with” environment means that teachers and students share decisions about instructional activities, routines, ways students can work together, and how students can demonstrate learning. Teachers who create “work-with” learning environments encourage students to build responsibility to monitor their work habits, self-assess their quality of work, and help make decisions about how the classroom works.
In equitable and just inclusive classrooms, the general curriculum must be accessible to all students. When teachers plan how to ensure accessibility to curriculum content, they should consider a variety of options for differentiation, in the depth and breadth of content and in how each student best acquires the content.
In a science unit on insects, a third-grade teacher encourages some students to investigate how different insects adapt to environmental factors. Her plans for other students involve identifying familiar insects and researching their characteristics. A few students will spend several days in the library doing research. In preparation for the unit, she gathers a tub of various resources that include grade-level reading material, resources rich in photographs and light on words, audio tapes, a list of websites, and several 3D models of insects. In collaboration with a special education colleague, she has also included a teacher-made “unit dictionary” that captures essential vocabulary words and concepts.
Teachers should continuously expand their teaching repertoire to better meet the diverse needs of students. Start with just a few of your favorite strategies and push yourself to incorporate greater differentiation into those strategies. Don’t forget to use your students as resources; they can share the responsibility of proposing different routes to a common destination.
Ideas For Differentiated Reading Instruction In The Elementary Classroom
A language arts teacher strives for all students to achieve mastery in understanding the element in the environment. By using their knowledge of the students, the teacher creates more instructional possibilities:
Assessment and differentiation are integrally linked. Formative assessment, carried out at the beginning of the lesson, informs you about the range of “starting points” for each student. Summative assessment, carried out at the end of the lesson, provides feedback on how well students have mastered learning outcomes. In the spirit of differentiation, summative assessment should also allow for individual differences and strengths. Be creative, think inclusively and ask students how they can best demonstrate what they have learned.
In differentiated classrooms, students are active participants in the learning process. Student responsibilities include demonstrating such skills as making effective choices, organizing instructional materials, following directions, completing assignments, and collaborating. When teachers provide students with many guided opportunities to build competence and confidence, students develop the skills they need to be productive and responsible learners.
Reaching and teaching all of your students can feel like an overwhelming task. Developing some simple routines to organize and manage your differentiated classroom will make everything go much more smoothly – and pave the way for more effective learning.
Broadening The View Of Differentiated Instruction
What principles would you add to this list? What differentiation strategies work best with your students? Let us know in the comments below (and if you try any of the ideas in this post, let us know how it goes!)
The best-selling, teacher-trusted Quick–Guides to Inclusion provides busy K-12 educators with quick, real-world inclusion advice that really works—in any classroom and on any budget. Contains easy-to-implement tips, examples, and ideas for addressing important inclusion topics!
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Pdf) Differentiated Instruction: Making Informed Teacher Decisions
Differentiated instruction means using different tools, continuum and fair process to reach all individuals successfully. Differentiated education, according to Carol Ann Tomlinson,
Is the process of “ensuring that what a stud learns, how he or she learns it, and how the stud demonstrates what he or she has learned is appropriate for that stud’s readiness level, interests, and preferred learning style.”
According to Boels et al. (2018), differentiation can be at two different levels: the administrative level and the classroom level. The administration level takes into account the stud’s socio-economic status and gender. At the classroom level, differentiation is about account, processing, product and effects. At the continuing level, teachers adapt what they teach to meet the needs of students. This can mean it becomes more challenging or simplified for studts based on their levels. The learning process can also be differentiated. Teachers can choose to teach one at a time, assign problems to small groups, partners or the whole group depending on the student’s needs. By differentiating the product, teachers decide how studts will retain what they have learned. This can take the form of videos, graphic organizers, photo performances, writing and oral performances. All this takes place in a safe classroom where studts feel respected and valued – effects.
Wh language is the factor of differentiation, Echevarria et al. (2017), proponents of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) strongly support and guide teachers to differentiate instruction for English as a Second Language Learners (ELLs) who have a range of learning ability levels—beginning, intermediate, and advanced. Here, differentiated teaching will mean adapting a completely new teaching strategy that a teacher in a typical classroom with native English speakers would not need.
Find What Differentiated Instruction Is & Why It’s Effective
Differentiated classrooms have also been described as those that respond to student variation in readiness levels, interests, and learning profiles. It is a classroom that includes and empowers all students to succeed. To do this, a teacher sets different task performance expectations for studts, specifically based on their individual needs.
Teachers can differentiate in four ways: 1) through continue, 2) process, 3) product and 4) learning environment based on the individual student.
Differentiation stems from beliefs about differences among students, how they learn, learning preferences, and individual interests (Algozzine & Anderson, 2007). Therefore, differentiation is an organized yet flexible way to proactively adjust teaching and learning methods to meet each child’s learning needs and preferences to achieve maximum growth as a learner.
An important part of differentiated instruction and assessment is determining what studs already know so as not to cover material studs have mastered or use methods that would be ineffective for studs. The aim of pre-assessment is to determine a student’s knowledge, understanding and skills prior to the unit of study. These are assessments for learning and include diagnostic or pre-assessments that the teacher uses to guide instruction and fit each student.
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They are informal and provide qualitative feedback to teachers and students to address strengths and needs during the unit. Pre-assessments should be done several weeks before the unit of study and should not be graded.
Chapman and King (2005) note that “where teachers strategically administer pre-assessments before planning their lessons, they can address students’ strengths and needs during instruction.”
Pre-assessment can be done in two ways: 1) by identifying learning preferences and interests (i.e. Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence test or visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner), and 2) by identifying knowledge of studt understandings (i.e. checklists, quizzes , class discussion, portfolios, test/final cards, expectation guides, journals, self-reflections). Both of these types of pre-assessments are used to design stud tasks, especially what a stud might require
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