Teachers are overworked and underpaid. They barely have time to catch their breath. Teacher tired is a real thing. Most teachers teach to the middle out of necessity.
Teaching to the middle has been the go- to solution for teachers since the earliest school days. After all, most students do fall into the average range.
But what about the students outside of the average range? When we teach to the middle, higher and lower achieving students get left behind. Gifted students need more challenging activities while lower performing students require additional support.
To accommodate individual needs better, just take that approach a bit further. Try thinking of how you can make different versions of the same lesson. Nothing crazy, no dramatic changes, just slightly altered versions of the same lesson. How can you push your gifted students to delve deeper into the topic?
What kinds of supports can you add to aid students in need of extra help? Break your class into three groups and try working on the lesson with these different versions.
One way to do this is to have all three groups work on it at the same time. Another option is to rotate your groups and have them work on the lesson one at a time while the other two groups do independent work, silent reading, or center activities. I like implementing differentiated instruction via centers. In my prior post , I discussed the idea of intrinsic differentiation and the role of active learning and active teaching. Now, I want to discuss designed differentiation a bit.
Designed differentiation is the deliberate act of modifying instruction or an assignment in order to customize the effect to match the particular developmental level and skills of a student or group of students. The ideal is to provide equivalent learning activities that cater to the students' strengths but bring all of the students to the same learning objective.
On one end of the spectrum is the one-size-fits-all learning activity, while on the other end is the completely individualized learning plan for each student.
Although I believe it is time for the latter, realism demands that teachers deal with something that hovers around the middle of the continuum. The best teachers throughout time have always found ways to reach individual students. Teachers today are no different. We have all sorts of designed differentiation strategies that help teachers offer variety and choice to students of different skills and needs.
We can. There is also a strong movement of simply allowing students to work at their own pace through computer-aided instruction, or SRA -type curriculum. There is one more type of designed differentiation method I believe is underutilized -- the rough draft. The teacher may still need to fine tune instruction for some learners, but because the teacher knows the varied learner needs within the classroom and selects learning options accordingly, the chances are greater that these experiences will be an appropriate fit for most learners.
Effective differentiation is typically designed to be robust enough to engage and challenge the full range of learners in the classroom. Many teachers incorrectly assume that differentiating instruction means giving some students more work to do, and others less. For example, a teacher might assign two book reports to advanced readers and only one to struggling readers.
Or a struggling math student might have to complete only computation problems while advanced math students complete the computation problems plus a few word problems.
Although such approaches to differentiation may seem reasonable, they are typically ineffective. One book report may be too demanding for a struggling learner. A student who has already demonstrated mastery of one math skill is ready to begin work with a subsequent skill. Simply adjusting the quantity of an assignment will generally be less effective than altering the nature of the assignment.
Teachers who understand that teaching and learning approaches must be a good match for students look for every opportunity to know their students better. They see conversations with individuals, classroom discussions, student work, observation, and formal assessment as ways to keep gaining insight into what works for each learner. Our latest Educator Confidence Report shows many teachers don't feel that respect for the profession has increased in the last year, after feeling an initial surge of appreciation at the start of the pandemic.
Sign In. Cart 0. My Account. Rachel L. Tweet Tweet Share. The Importance of Differentiation in the Classroom Differentiated instruction is a method that leverages deliberate practice targeted to the skills students need to work on—and that may be different for individuals or groups of students.
Process: The way students interact with the content. Product : The way students demonstrate knowledge and skills. Synchronous Options Synchronous Options Asynchronous Options New content instruction Content review or preview Questions and answers Book readings Show and share Quiz or game New content instructionContent review or previewQuestions and answers Book readingsShow and shareQuiz or game Videos with worksheets Interactive slides Discussion boards Videos by students Photos or pictures with text Adaptive quizzes Art projects Science experiments.
Making a Big Impact: The Benefits of Differentiated Instruction Although it can be tricky to manage, research shows that responsive, differentiated instruction that meets students where they are and adapts to their needs is well worth the effort. Research by Carol Connor found that teachers also report that differentiated instruction leads to: Greater student motivation and engagement More personalized learning Greater student success Her research found that prolonged implementation reduces achievement gaps across several disciplines.
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