Differentiated Instruction: A Primer

I recently read an Article by Sarah D. Sparks about Differentiated Instruction and I really like what it had to say. The first paragraph of the article says, "How can a teacher keep a reading class of 25 on the same page when four students have dyslexia, three students are learning English as a second language, two others read three grade levels ahead, and the rest have widely disparate interests and degrees of enthusiasm about reading?"

We need to differentiate for these students!

"Differentiated Instruction is the process of identifying students' individual strengths, needs, and interests and adapting lessons to match them." 

"Differentiation has much more in common with many other instructional models: It has been compared to response-to-intervention models, as teachers vary their approach to the same material with different students in the classroom; data-driven instruction, as individual students are frequently assessed or otherwise monitored, with instruction tweaked in response; and scaffolding, as assignments are intended to be structured to help students of different ability and interest levels meet the same goals."

Farther down in the article, it says "Carol Ann Tomlinson, a co-director of the institutes on Academic Diversity at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, and the author of The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners, 2nd Edition (ASCD, 2014) and Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom (ASCD, 2013) argues that differentiation is, at its base, not an approach but a basic tenant of good instruction, in which a teacher develops relationships with his or her students and presents materials and assignments in ways that respond to the student's interests and needs."

There are many different strategies to differentiate instruction in the classroom and if does not involve creating a whole bunch of separate lesson plans for individual students.

According to Tomlinson: "Differentiation requires more than creating options for assignments or presenting content both graphically and with hands on projects. Rather, to differentiate a unit on Rome, a teacher might consider both specific terms and overarching themes and concepts she wants students to learn, and offer a series of individual and group assignments of various levels of complexity to build those concepts and allow students to demonstrate their understanding in multiple ways, such as journal entries, oral presentations, creating costumes, and so on. In different parts of a unit students may be working with students who share their interests or have different ones, and with students who are at the same or different ability levels."

Although there are so many different strategies that can be used to differentiate instruction in the classroom and all differentiated classrooms may not look exactly the same, one of the most important things a teacher can do is begin by learning about their students and trying to tailor their teaching as much as they find feasible.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/01/28/differentiated-instruction-a-primer.html