Differentiated Instruction

What is differentiated Instruction?

The definition for differentiated instruction according to the book Differentiated Instruction in the Regular Classroom is the teaching-learning process where the pace, level or kind of instruction that the teacher provide is a response for the needs, interests or the styles of every single student.

However, the differentiated instruction sometimes is misunderstood as the activity where the teacher ask to their students to do less work than other students. but the differentiated instruction is much more than that.

The differentiated instruction to be, as it is supposed to be, must be:

• Rigorous: The teacher wont set the bar so low that the students don't need to make their best efforts nor so high that students fail and feel defeated.
  
• Relevant: The knowledge will be centered only in the essential learning.
•  Flexible and varied:The teacher will employ many different instructional strategies.
• Complex:The teacher should challenge the students' thinking and actively engage them in the content that conveys depth and breadth.
  
  

Differentiated Instruction:
"One size Doesn't Fit All"

What is the purpose of the Differentiated Instruction?

The purpose of the Differentiated Instruction is make the teaching-learning process more manageable, efficient and easy to implement for teachers; increasing the likelihood that students will be successful learners.

 

Differentiation is a two-step process:

1. Analyze the degree of challenge and variety in your current instructional plans.
2.  Modify, adapt or design new approaches to instruction in response to student's needs, interests, and learning preferences.

What is the Teacher's Role?

The Role of a teacher who differentiates instruction is become in a Facilitator and a Collaborator. Being a Facilitator means that the teacher has to provide to the students all the learning opportunities that can be possible and the student can choose what they are going to do and how they will do it with a variety of ways to present their learning products. 
As a Facilitator the teacher can organize the students for learning and it depends of the assignment may be work in groups or pairs even individually if the task need it; the students may vary the time that they need to accomplish the task and it is going to depends of the group of students or of they interests and skills.

The teachers that determine the most appropriate way to organize the students for learning will have the key in order to apply differentiated instruction.

As a facilitator the teacher can manage the time of the lessons and tasks  in different ways for the different students as an example the teacher can use time to the students who needs more explanation, review or practice and for the students who have mastered the knowledge they can continue with more advance learning.
Being a Collaborator means that you can work with another colleagues of your school, department or even with the student's families. The teacher can work with  specialists of different themes. Specially for me be a collaborator means work with the students in a new scene, a new relationship more close a bit informal to connect with the students and get the pass of a traditional teacher to somebody who the students respect, love and trust. 

Who are your students? 
In order to help to the students to be successful learners first we need to know them to understand the diversity of the students the the teacher have in the classroom, the teacher need to know from their students theirs pace, learning preferences, motivations and their interests, but the question is How the teacher can know their students?
In the book  Differentiated Instruction in the Regular Classroom; Chapter 2 page. 21 we have different ways to know our students.

1. Using their academic histories, to know the students the teacher can gather information by reviewing the student's academic histories, the teacher can get information about their student's learning process, but what happens when someone was not capable to achieve the knowledge, the teacher must consider many factors as a mismatch between the student and the material or the style of teaching with the student's learning style. This is a good way to get an approach to the students but is not enough because the teacher don't know the person, only have data that has been gathered from other persons to different goals than the teacher's.
2. The Teacher can discover who are their students by discovering their interests and how they see themselves as learners. The teacher can apply many different resources as surveys, interest checklists, also in the book Differentiated Instruction in the Regular Classroom we can find a Interest Inventory on pages 29-31that the teacher can apply to their students. With this informstion the teacher can plan diverse activities according to the specific interest as example using the Interest inventory thew teacher will have an idea of the students that like to work individually or in groups in pairs.etc.
3.  The Gardner's nine Intelligences is in personal think the best way to know the learning way of the students and based on this, we can give to our classes the dynamic to engage the students in the learning process. According to Gardner's theory we have 9 differents intelligences:

• Bodily-kinesthetic
• Musical 
• Interpersonal 
• Intrapersonal 
• Verbal-Linguistic 
• Logical -Mathematical 
• Naturalist
• Existential    
• Visual-Spatial  

•            The teacher can gather this information applying to their students a Interest Surveys where   they will show their behaviors and interests to give to the teahcer an idea of the group as learners and  what kind of intelligences they have, with this information the teacher can plan activities to use their  strong intelligences and to make stronger the intelligences that for now are weakness.

 The Importance of knowing your students:
As the book Differentiated Instruction in the Regular Classroom says on page 26:
Differentiated Instruction begins with knowing your students and their learning needs.
Once the teacher began knowing their students its time to continue the next step, the curriculum and how it can be planned for the students using their individual interests and learning ways.

  
What do you teach?:
What do yo teach? Is an important question because the education around the world has been changing, today we have Standards that the goverment or another entity had set.
However these standards can be accomplished using your own and original style of teaching it only depends of your creativity.
In order to help you to get the standards the author give us a speciall technique, the essential questions and unit questions.

1.        Essential questions: are like the umbrella that cover all the knowledge of the subject and the significant learning, here a video for more information.

      2.         Unit Questions: The unit questions are more simple and this is because we can find the answer in a book or on internet; the unit questions provide specific knowledge about the theme as an example we can ask:

• What are the parts of a story?
• What is the life cycle?
• What is the common name of this formule H2O?