D is for Differentiation

By. Meredith Biesinger

Happy New Year!

It’s 2022, and you’re starting a new semester with your students!

With a new year and a new semester combined, it’s normal to feel a push to reinvent some lesson plans or try something new. We all do this, whether it’s in our classrooms or with our personal goals like eating healthier or home projects. This is typical new year’s behavior!

Before you go and reinvent the wheel, might I suggest a sharper focus on differentiated instruction?

What’s excellent about differentiation is it’s a way of teaching; it’s not a program or package of worksheets.

Differentiated instruction is a teaching approach that tailors instruction to students’ different learning needs, and it lets students show what they know in different ways.

It sounds daunting, but it’s really not!

There are four focus areas where teachers can differentiate instruction:

1. Content: Figuring out what a student needs to learn and which resources will help.

2. Process: Activities that help students understand what they are learning.

3. Projects: Ways for students to “show what they know.”

4. Learning Environment: How the classroom “feels” and how the class works together.

Look at your curriculum and the resources you already have available to you. Perhaps it’s an e-learning program, a print-based text, a virtual field trip, or some arts and crafts supplies in your cabinet. Maybe it’s a game?! Perhaps it’s all of the above, and you’ve now created a unit of learning centers.

Remember, small workgroups reciprocal learning and continual assessment. Sometimes I think we overthink or overcomplicate the art of teaching, and understandably so when you consider the many changes that have taken place in education over the years and the growing demands placed upon teachers.