According
to the Glossary of Education Reform, the definition posted for
Differentiated Instruction, or Differentiated Learning, “refers to
a wide variety of teaching techniques and lesson adaptations that
educators use to instruct a diverse group of students, with diverse
learning needs, in the same course, classroom, or learning
environment.” The need for differentiated
learning can be anything from sitting a student who needs frequent
body breaks near the door to changing an assignment completely while
keeping the content the same in order for a student to get the most
out of learning.
The
Government of Alberta published a book called Making a Difference:
Meeting Diverse Learning Needs With Differentiated Instruction. A
chapter in this book focuses on meaningful activities that can be
used for students that need differentiated learning. These meaningful
activities include things “identifying similarities and
differences, summarizing and note taking, using and creating visual
representations, generating and testing hypotheses, and using cues,
questions and advance organizers to make sense of learning.” All of
these pull from the students' existing strengths and maximizes their
results to pull the same amount of learning from a lesson as those
students who are able to learn in the standard and traditional way.
The
benefits of differentiated learning is outlined in Chapter 8. It
focuses mainly on those students who have learning disabilities,
language barriers, and those who are gifted. A group that could be
added to this are those students who have difficulties in an external
environment.
Students
with learning disabilities will need differentiated learning because
they are not necessarily able to absorb the information being taught
in the way that traditional teaching expects them to. Differentiated
learning allows them to pull on their strengths to portray what they
want to portray. For example, students with disabilities that prevent
them from writing essays can draw a picture, or make a PowerPoint
presentation. The same information can be told in many different
ways.
Students
with language barriers are not going to be able to absorb the lesson
because they are not able to understand the lesson. Differentiated
learning can be through showing pictures to allow them the chance to
understand the lesson while they are learning the language.
Students
who are gifted may not feel challenged in the classroom.
Differentiated learning helps them because it allows them to pick a
medium for assignments that challenges them. This keeps them
interested and invested in what the class is doing because they are
able to do something that interests them.
Students
who have external difficulties may find differentiated learning
helpful because of their difficulties. If someone comes from a
disadvantaged family, differentiated learning allows that student to
pick ways of learning that they do not have access to outside of the
classroom. It also allows them to become more engaged in the lesson
that is going on.
Sources:
No comments:
Post a Comment