Tuesday, 23 June 2015

Benefits of Differentiated Learning

      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.



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Learning Environments

Learning Environments