As an elementary education teacher, your classroom will consist of students with a wide range of abilities in each of the content areas you are responsible to teach. You will need to differentiate in a number of aspects, including environment, instruction, and assessment. Analyzing your students’ academic and social needs and making adjustments to ensure student success is what differentiation is all about.
Discuss the following with the class:
Read the video transcript below, explain how you could differentiate the process by which a student takes in the content and/or information you are teaching.
In what ways could you differentiate the product that students create to demonstrate their knowledge, skill, or ability related to the content.
How would you describe universal design for learning (UDL)? What makes UDL different from differentiation?
Review the College’s Conceptual Framework.
How does this topic link to the College’s Conceptual Framework and the framework’s philosophical relationship to effective teacher preparation?
THE VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
As an elementary teacher you’re going to have lots of students who have different degrees of abilities. You will have some students who aren’t going to be able to do everything that you are intending for the whole class to do and so you’ll need to differentiate your instruction.
What that means is looking at the components of the content that you’re sharing.
The process or the way that the students take in the information the product that the students are going to have or the deliverable at the end of the lesson and then the affect of the environment of the students.
So what that would look like if I walked into a classroom is that I might see content being delivered in small groups for some students and maybe individually for another student. It might be that some students are reading a text and other students are having it read to them. It might be that some students are being provided information about the content on a computer using a game anything like that.
As far as the the product that the students are creating or displaying at the end.
That might look different depending on every student or different depending on just a few of the students. So for example, you might have some students who are going to create a play to show that they’ve gained the knowledge other students might write a report still other students might create a virtual field trip.
A lot of times it’s really helpful when you’re differentiating instruction to talk with the students and get to know the students and find out where their interests are if the students are interested in.
Fine Arts, for example then maybe plan your lesson differentiation around those interests because then the students are going to be that much more likely to be able to perform into and to gain knowledge.
There is a difference between differentiating instruction and Universal Design for Learning. Although you will hear both of those terms Universal Design for Learning or udl is actually a proactive approach to designing learning that is accessible for all students.
So you’re just thinking in general like what are all the things that my students might need to be able to access this knowledge. Well differentiation is more of a reactive. It’s looking at what you know about your students and determining how you can adjust your programming or your lesson planning to meet the needs or the strengths of those particular students.
