ESubjects | Differentiated Instruction

Differentiated Instruction

Although the trend in education is to look for isolated needs of individual students, there are many general things teachers can easily do that can make any classroom a better learning environment for all students. At ESubjects, we focus on three areas, communication, organization, and socialization. The socialization occurs in small group work and peer teaching activities. The 5 practices below address communication and organization.

Five things all teachers should do:

1. Have high expectations for students. (Communication) This is easier said than done when you have a high school student in front of you who appears not to be able to read or write. The fact is, though, that if this student is in your class (general ed) his or her disability is not related to cognitive delay. The ability to think and process information at an adult level is there—it's just hidden under a lack of basic skills (decoding is not the same thing as reading, for instance). And frequently, students really are unaccustomed to having much expected of them, so they have to learn what it means to be in an academic high school class. They really want to learn that! If you keep that in mind as you're working with them, look for where their intelligence plays itself out most clearly, you can start to use their strengths to fill in their weaknesses.

One thing that is true of almost all students is that they act according to the expectations of the teacher. When you talk about helping kids in special ed, one of the most important things to think about is to start challenging them, start expecting them to excel. Of the kids in special ed, only the smallest percentage are severely cognitively impaired—and those students are not in general ed classes. Many of these kids are exceptionally bright. It’s just that their minds work differently from the minds of the average student. This is almost cliché, but Einstein was dyslexic. He did not read until he was 9. He didn’t even speak until he was 5. Today, he would have been labeled “Special Ed”, possibly given drugs, and placed into a special ed classroom. He may well still have done what he did. He is an exception to us all. But the rest of these kids are not exceptions to us; they are varieties of us. We all think and process differently. Our job as teachers is to discover each student’s strength, then use that to help him or her develop skills and other strengths.

2. Scaffold. (Organization and communication) Curriculum has to be developed in a way that is cumulative and makes sense. I liken this to taking a guitar lesson one week and having your teacher teach you a series of chords to play rock songs. You go home and practice for a week and come back to the next lesson ready to play rock. Instead, your teacher tells you that now you're going to learn some classical chords. But wait! You've learned the rock chords and want to learn to play some songs. "No," your teacher tells you, "that's not what we're doing this week." And, as one teacher in OUSD that we work with added, in high school they don't even give you the guitar until the third year!

Scaffolding in education is exactly like building a scaffold to surround a building. It must begin with a solid base with each layer added at the appropriate time and linked and integrated with the other parts. Ideally, the curriculum from freshman to senior year is integrated and coordinated. Each lesson should build on the last and all should build together to create a set of skills and strategies that makes sense to students. This happens when teachers use what we call transparent teaching. Which leads to number 3:

3. Use transparent teaching. (Communication and organization) Not only are you building a scaffold for the students, you're also making that scaffold clear and visible to the students so they know what they're doing when, and why they're doing it. This is easiest when teachers write down for themselves (even if they don't write out all of their lesson plans) at least one Why? for each activity. I've seen many classes in which teachers assign an activity and assume the students understand the instructions and objectives for the activity. When the students struggle to get started and start to talk among themselves instead, the teacher becomes irritated. From an observer's perspective, it's normally because the teacher knows a lot more than he or she is telling! I don't mean that the teacher is trying to hide something, just that the reason for the activity isn't clear to the students so they can't truly understand what they're supposed to be doing. We teach students to be clear when expressing themselves, but sometimes we fall short. A standard process for presenting activities is:

1. What’s the purpose? (Why are we doing this?)

2. What is the objective or desired outcome? (Model! Whenever possible, show students what the outcome should look like before they begin.)

3. How will we go about this? (Process and procedure; the step-by-step)

4. How long will it take? (Time)

5. What should you expect at different stages? (Expectation and anticipation)

6. How will we know if we’re on the wrong track? (Error alert)

(Modified from Information Anxiety 2, Richard Saul Wurman, p.208-209)

This is a format teachers can use and can teach to students. If they're doing presentations, they should follow the same structure.

4. Teach to different learning styles. (Communication) This is something teachers struggle with every day. This approach encourages teachers to help students to find their own strengths in how they learn. But teachers should also use a variety of methods of presentation. One way of doing this is through the integration of technology, using the cognitive aspects of specific tech applications (the “how they make you look at the world”) to underscore the cognitive goals and objectives already meshed with the content. At the simplest level, some students understand easily the concept of thesis or tone in an English class. Others struggle and never quite seem to get it. These are probably not verbal learners. But show them an magazine advertisement or let them express themselves in a Photoshop image and they suddenly understand and can demonstrate clear understanding. Once students understand a concept, they can apply the concept in other situations—it's a question of finding ways to help them understand in the first place.

5. Give students the big picture and the smaller pictures from the outset. (Organization and communication) When assigning projects or introducing new units, give students a checklist of some sort for the whole project, ideally with an example of the type of work you expect from them. At the same time, let them know that there are X number of steps they'll have to complete to finish the project. It's a nice idea to give them weekly checklists too, so they see not only the huge amount of work they'll do this unit (which will make them proud!), but also that they can do it because this week they only have to do x, y, and z.

This serves two purposes. The first is that one of the things most students in special ed have in common is an anxiety about school. It frequently feels overwhelming. Showing them what you expect of them up front is a form of transparent teaching that helps reduce this anxiety. And breaking it down into bite-sized pieces makes it seem easy. The second thing this does is start to teach them organization. As a teacher, modeling what you want from students in special ed is a perfect way to get them to learn things. Modeling organization in how you present even the assignments (not to mention the content), demonstrates for them the difference between something that is entirely possible (being a successful high school student) and something that has kept them from achieving their potential this far.