Responding to the Needs of All Learners Katina Alexander Foundation of Education ED 500 Dr. Gloria Crawford

What it is...  Teachers provide various tasks within each unit, tailored for students of different levels of success.  Permit students to choose, with the teacher's assistance, ways to learn and how to show what they have learned.  Permit students to opt out of material they already know and progress at their own pace through new material.  Organize class assignments so they require high levels of critical thinking but permit a range of responses.  Have high expectations for all students.  Create learning centers with activities geared to different learning styles, readiness and levels of interest.  Provide students with the opportunity to explore topics in which they have strong interest and find personal meaning.

First, get to know your students.  Identify the level at which individual students are working in your subject area.  Manage a learning style record to determine how your students best learn.  Determine student interests.

Next, identify areas of your curriculum that could be adapted to differentiated instruction.  Study the instructional goals and objectives for your subject established by your state's department of education. Identify the major concepts, principles, and skills students should learn.  Choose one or two broad concepts or skills that lend themselves to being taught at different degrees of complexity.  Brainstorm ideas for activities, tasks, and assessments that address a specific concept or skill.

Last, examine your role as teacher in the differentiated classroom.  Brainstorm ways to vary your instructional delivery methods.  Develop a general plan for facilitating time, space, and materials in your classroom.  Identify alternative methods of assessing student performance and understanding.

 Content is what the student needs to learn or how the student will get access to the information.  Process are activities in which the student engages in order to make sense of or master the content.  Products are culminating projects that ask the student to rehearse, apply, and extend what he or she has learned in a unit.  Learning environment is the way the classroom works and feels.

Examples of differentiating content at the elementary level include the following:  Customize reading materials at different reading levels.  Put text materials on tape.  Customize spelling or vocabulary lists at readiness levels of students.  Present ideas through both auditory and visual means.  Use reading partners.  Meet with small groups to re-teach an idea or skill for struggling learners, or to extend the thinking or skills of advanced learners.

Examples of differentiating process or activities at the elementary level include the following:  Use tiered activities through which all learners work with the same important understandings and skills, but proceed with different levels of support, challenge, or complexity.  Provide interesting centers that encourage students to explore subsets of the class topic of particular interest to them.  Develop personal schedules to be completed either during specified agenda time or as students complete other work early.  Offer manipulates or other hands-on supports for students who need them.  Vary the length of time a student may take to complete a task in order to provide additional support for a struggling learner or to encourage an advanced learner to pursue a topic in greater depth.

Examples of differentiating products at the elementary level include the following:  Give students choices of how to express required learning by creating a puppet shows, writing letters, or developing murals with labels.  Use rubrics that match and extend students' diverse skills levels.  Allow students to work alone or in small groups on their products.  Motivate students to create their own product assignments as long as the assignments contain required elements.

Examples of differentiating learning environment at the elementary level include:  Make sure there are places in the room to work quietly and without distraction, as well as places that call for student teamwork.  Offer materials that reflect a variety of cultures and home settings.  Establish clear procedures for independent work that matches individual needs.  Develop procedures that permit students to get help when teachers are busy with other students and cannot help them immediately.  Help students appreciate that some learners need to move around to learn, while others do better sitting silently.

 Jennipher Willoughby stated, “Rather than simply ‘teaching to the middle’ by providing a single avenue for learning for all students in a class, teachers using differentiated instruction match tasks, activities, and assessments with their students' interests, abilities, and learning preferences.”

 Rebora, A. ( 2008, September). Making a Difference. Education Week, 2(1), Retrieved from  Tomlinson, C. A. (August, 2000). Differentiation of Instruction in the Elementary Grades. ERIC Digest. ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education. Retrieved from  Williams, K. (2004). 8 Lessons Learned on Differentiating Instruction. Scholastic, Retrieved from differentiating-instruction  Allan, S., Goddard, Y. ( 2010, October). Differentiated Instruction and RTI: a Natural Fit. Interventions That Work, 68(2). Retrieved from  Willoughby, J. (2005). Differentiating Instruction: Meeting Students Where They Are. Teaching Today, Retrieved from