Differentiating
Instruction
Big Ideas
What about Common Core and Standards-based Instruction--How does Differentiated Instruction Fit In?
"Recent demands for more standards-based teaching can feel like a huge impediment to encouraging differentiated instruction, especially for teachers and principals who recognize student variance and want to address it appropriately. A relatively new phenomenon (at least in its current form), standards-based instruction dominates the educational terrain in a time of great academic diversity in contemporary classrooms. In fact, standardsbased instruction and the high-stakes testing that drives it can often feel like a locomotive rolling over everything in its path, including individualized learning. "
Read more from this article written by a leading expert on differentiated instruction, Carol Ann Tomlinson, Reconcilable Differences? Standards-Based Teaching and Differentiation.
Start with Specific Learning Objectives (KUDO's)
When creating learning objectives, use these categories:
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(K) Knowledge
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(U) Understandings
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(DO) Skills NOTE: The DO is NOT the activities, it is the skills learning objectives.
By starting your planning with targeted learning objectives, you will be able to align activities and assessments with these objectives. This streamlines instruction and helps you determine the key content that you are focusing on for the lesson or unit. It also helps you determine exactly what content might be differentiated for some students' needs. While ALL students need to reach the learning objectives, some may go beyond, and some students may need some scaffolding to help them reach the objectives.
This is part of the "Understanding by Design" Framework developed by Wiggins and McTighe. Read more by clicking on the button above.
Flexible Grouping
Flexible grouping is NOT tracking or ability grouping. Students are grouped intentionallly for a specific learning activity based on their learning needs.
Students might be grouped by readiness when it makes sense to put students with a specific need together to maximize learning. i.e. If some students need a mini-lesson on commas, they might work with teacher while other students participate in an independent or small-group writing learning activity which matches their needs.
At other times students might be grouped by interests. The whole class might be focusing on survival, but students are reading different books about survival. They can have conversations about the big idea as a class or in small groups by book.
Students might also be intentionally grouped with mixed learning styles when the learning activity requires different strengths. Students can take on roles that match their learning preferences while everyone contributes to the product.
Challenge All Students
In a differentiated classroom, there are times when students will be doing different activities than other students. It is imperative that all activities are equally respectful.
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Make all the choices engaging and challenging.
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It is OK to let students choose which activity is just-right for them
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Simply giving some students more problems to do and others less problems is not differentiating.