What is Differentiation?

Differentiated instruction is responsive instruction. It occurs as teachers become increasingly proficient in understanding their students as individuals, increasingly comfortable with the meaning and structure of disciplines they teach, and increasingly expert at teaching flexibly in order to match instruction to student need with the goal of maximizing the potential of each learner in a given area.

Differentiated classrooms are important to create because not all of the students in our classrooms are going to learn in the same way or at the same time. All students learn in different ways and at different paces/ times. When we as teachers keep this in mind, we are setting up a classroom which enables all students to learn and succeed.

Today, I read chapter 1 in Fulfilling the promise of the differentiated classroom by Carol Ann Tomlinson and I really liked a couple of things it mentioned at the end of the chapter. It said, "The concept of differentiating instruction for varied learners has its roots in the belief that we teach best when we accept the need to tame the fox. That is, we teach responsively when we understand the need to teach the human beings before us as well as to teach the content with which we are charged. In a time when teachers feel almost unbearable pressure to standardize what we do, it is important to begin with the conviction that we are no longer teaching if what we teach is more important than we we teach or how we teach." 

Another small statement I liked from this chapter was, "The premise of differentiation is that we cannot teach nearly so well when we overlook or under-attend to these student needs. Indeed, they are the gateway to learning."

My hope is that I can be the kind of teacher who looks into all of her students needs in order to help each of them learn to the best of their abilities.