Implementing Differentiation in the classroom.

Whenever a teacher looks at his or her class, he/she will observe a wide variety of personalities, ways of processing information, attitudes, and behaviors, that make of that class a group full of diversity. The sooner the teacher realizes that, the easiest will be for the students to achieve effective learning. But how is the teacher supposed to deliver the content in a way that all students feel comfortable enough to interact with it and learn from it?.

The answer to this question leads us to the concept of Differentiated Instruction; that refers to a way of teaching consisting on providing to the students a variety of options to work with the content and take the information. This way of instructions focuses on the differences and similarities among the students in terms of learning processes, in order to plan instruction to achieve an effective understanding of the content. This is way it is important for the teacher to make the students active participants of the class by listening to their preferences and taking on count their interests at the time of developing assignments, tasks, and lesson plans.

There are plenty of learning styles and techniques to adjust the activities to them, but these are some of the different strategies to implement differentiated instruction in the class can be:

Flexible-pace learning: Consists on giving the students the opportunity of completing their task at a comfortable speed that allows them to process and reflect about the information, achieving this way a more effective learning.

Group work: By giving the students group activities, the different individuals can make good use of their diversity by each performing the task that they feel more comfortable with, and bringing it to the benefit of group. There are students are are very skilled with arts and crafts, others have a very good writing and reading capacities, and other students result very proficient in oral activities and presentations. All of these profiles together can create very interesting products in group activities, by all learning and interacting with the content in different formats.

Variable outcomes: It can result very beneficial for the learning of the students taking part on assignments and activities in which there is not a “right” or “wrong” answer, but freedom to express creativity and personalized work that can generate real learning in the students when developing processes such as self-identification or creation. These tasks also need to be very well directed by making clear the rules and guidelines, in order to make the students’ work match with the teacher’s expectations.

Learning environments: As mentioned at the beginning of the post, it is very important for a teacher to know the students’ preferences and interests, and this directly affects the learning environment in terms of classroom set up, duration of activities, etc. Making sure that there is freedom of election in certain matters such as being able to stand up and move around, use manipulative objects, listen to music in the headphones, or seating arrangements is important to consider. Again, this is necessary to be clarified and defined by the teacher based on a series of rules and expectations to keep the control of the class in every moment.