Differentiation

Differentiation for Students

I think one of the most important things I learned from researching this topic is to be flexible.  To differentiate for all your students' demands for you to be flexible.  This skill is learned and must be practiced to become talented in this area.  The benefits of your flexibility as a teacher far outweigh the effort needed to learn how to embrace this idea.

Differentiating for students can be challenging but it can be accomplished.  When we embrace something called the "Goldilocks Principle", we can achieve success.

We must search, as teachers, for that "just right" mix of activities, assignments, and lessons that best help all our students succeed.  There are many different ways to achieve this goal.

For our low-performing students, we must provide added support that is hands-on and extremely engaging.  Allow students to use flipgrid to share their thoughts instead of having them always write their ideas down on paper.  Provide support visually with anchor charts and socially through think alouds with the other students.  By just adding a few new strategies to your daily teaching you can increase your differentiation level little by little and see almost immediate results.

For grade-level performing students, you must challenge them at their level.  My biggest piece of advice here is to just not forget about them.  They are performing at the level they need to be for their grade.  That's great!  What can you do to teach them more?  How can you change things up to challenge them to learn just above their comfort zone?  These students are often forgotten or overlooked because they are meeting average expectations.  Let's not forget them and push them to learn more.

For high-performing students, you can easily challenge these students with open-ended questions and projects.  Don't just hit them with busy work!  Find out what they are individually interested in most and provide time and resources for each one of them to explore these areas of learning.  Let them help others if they want to but do not rely on them to become tutors for all the other students.  Allow them to work on "passion projects" that speak to them.  Group like-minded students together and assign them a research project that can be shared with the whole class at a specified time.  The students producing the project will benefit and the whole class will benefit.  A win-win!!!

VOKI app link

Voki is a tool that students can use to create presentations on different subjects.  Avatars, voiceovers, images, videos, and many other options are available to students when creating their presentations.  Students will only be limited by their imaginations when using this tool.  I learned about this tool during my research on this subject and I look forward to using it in my classroom to allow each student or strategically-grouped students to create and compose on their levels and then share with the whole class.  Students love to share their work with each other.

There are so many other ways to differentiate for students that I have not mentioned here and it does not take much research to find new ideas and resources to begin.

USE STATIONS

TARGET DIFFERENT SENSES

JOURNALING

LITERATURE CIRCLES

GROUP SIMILAR LEARNING STYLES TOGETHER

PROVIDE OPEN-ENDED PROJECTS

RELATE MATH TO THE REAL WORLD

Most of all, BE FLEXIBLE!!!

Set high expectations for yourself and your students!

Thanks for reading,

Shannon