Chapter 8 Summary

Chapter 8 : Differentiating Instruction for Diverse Learners

Resources:

1) http://aim.cast.org/learn/historyarchive/backgroundpapers/differentiated_instruction_udl

a. Gives good ideas on how to differentiate instruction in the classroom as well as simulations to view.

2) http://www.brighthub.com/education/special/articles/37176.aspx

a. Gives good ideas for how to differentiate instruction with students who have visual disabilities.

3) http://iteslj.org/Techniques/DelliCarpini-RoundRobin.html

a. Gives good techniques to differentiate instruction with ELL students

· To accommodate diverse learners in the classroom, teachers differentiate content( what they teach), process ( how they teach), product (how students demonstrate content mastery), affect ( how students connect their thinking and feelings), and learning environment ( how the classroom in designed and what instructional groupings they use).

· Teachers use varied curricula and instructional arrangements, strategies, resources, materials, and technology to address the students’ strengths and challenges.

· Teaching strategies you use should be tailored to your students and your local and statewide learning standards, and you’re learning environment.

· Intial step in differentiating instruction is to individualize your curriculum by identifying the concepts, principles, and skills you want to teach. Individualize curricular goals by adding or reducing material and skills to be learned, varying the levels of difficulty of the content addressed, and having students demonstrate their mastery in different ways. Personalize it also by making it more multicultural.

· Curricular goals should be linked to big ideas, essential questions, and critical learning outcomes. Personalize them by making sure they are meaningful, appropriate, challenging, interdisciplinary, and culturally relevant for all students.

· For students with IEP’s or 504 accommodations, goals should be consistent with these documents and individualized so that they are provided with the skills they need to access the general education curriculum.

· Goals should relate to your assessment of the students existing levels of mastery. This assessment info and your examination of your curriculum, can help you individualize your curricular goals for your students by detrming the following:

o What levels of content mastery and skills do my students have?

o What content and skills do I expect all of my students to learn?

o What content and skills do I expect most of my students to learn?

o What content and skills do I expect some of my students to learn?

· Prior to planning instructional activities, use backward design, a process for planning units of instruction and individualizing lessons by which you first determine the assessments you will use to evaluate your students learning. Once you determine these assessments, use them to guide you in designing and sequencing the instructional activities your students will engage in to achieve your learning outcomes.

· In planning and implementing your assessments, use both formative and summative assessment to evaluate your student’s learning and your teaching. Formative assessment is the use of assessment strategies during instruction to monitor student learning and to use this info to make decisions about the effectiveness of your teaching and ways to improve it. Summative assessment is the assessment strategies you use after instruction to assess student mastery of specific content, topics, concepts and skills taught, and to communicate this info to others.

· Tiered assignments- occur during and at the end of instruction to allow you to differentiate your assessments to meet the strengths and challenges of individual students. This allows you to identify concepts that need to be learned, delineate multiple ways in which students can show mastery that differ in complexity and learning style, and allow students to select how they want to demonstrate their learning.

· Use curricular accomodations such as:

o Giving students choices about what they learn and how they learn it

o Collaborating with students to create learning contracts and specify learning goals, activities, and products

o Altering the instructional content, tasks, and pace

o Enhancing the multicultural aspects of the content

o Designing alternative projects to allow students to demonstrate mastery

o Focusing on fewer or different objectives

o Modifying students requirements and assessments

· Multilevel teaching- students are given lessons in the same curricula areas as their peers but at varying levels of difficulty.

· Curriculum overlapping- teaching a diverse group of students individualized skills form different curricula areas.

· Rather than being disability specific, teaching accommodations for students should be individually determined based on student’s individual characteristics, including their cultural, linguistic and experiential backgrounds. They should also be specific with research and district wide policies, appropriate for the content to be learned, and acceptable to students, educators, and families. They should be selected and implemented to help students access their learning strengths, overcome challenges, and demonstrate mastery of content. It is essential that the effectiveness of teaching accommodations be evaluated.

· Access differentiating techniques are things such as Braille, sign language, bilingual dictionaries, instructional and assistive technology.

· Low impact differentiation techniques include content enhancements, word processing and spell checkers, learning strategies instruction, and peer-mediated instruction.

· High- impact differentiation techniques AKA modifications is the use of multilevel teaching and curriculum overlapping.

· Varying the instructional materials to accommodate your students and their varied academic abilities, interests, experiential, and cultural backgrounds, and learning preferences is another way to differentiate instruction.

o Use these following instructional materials accomodations:

§ Vary the amount of material students are exposed to and asked to complete

§ Vary the format of the materials

§ Supplement the materials

§ Use materials that present similar content at lower readability levels

§ Use alternative materials.

Provide students with other professional supports from other professionals, paraeducators, and peers.

§ Address students learning styles and preferences when differentiating instruction. Use learning style assessments and note the situations and conditions that appear to influence individual students, and then adjust learning assessments and activities to accommodate student learning styles and preferences.

§ Learning and teaching styles are classified as field independent or field dependent. Field independent students appear to work best on individual tasks such as independent projects and relate formally to teachers; field dependent students prefer to work in groups and establish personal relationships with others, including teachers. Field independent Teachers foster learning through competition and independent assignments; Field dependent teachers use personal and conversational teaching techniques.

§ Address students sensory abilities- students with sensory disabilities have unique challenges that need to be addressed when differentiating instruction.

o Differentiating instruction for students with visual disabilities: Collaborate with vision and mobility specialists to develop plans for differentiating instruction; help them follow along in class by giving them important directions either verbally or recorded. Phrase questions and comments so they include student’s names; use peers to read directions and materials; describe events in the classroom, take notes. Give them opportunities to learn by doing, provide them with physical prompts and pairing verbal and tactile cues. Look at pg 294 to learn more.

o Differentiating instruction for deaf and Hard of hearing students: a) stand still and face person when speaking, b) spaeak clearly, at a moderate pace, and use short sentences, c) speak in a normal voice, d) maintain proper speaking distance, e) keep the mouth area clear, f) use facial and body gestures, g) speak in an area where the light is on your face and lips, h) provide transitions to indicate a change in the subject. Look at pg 294 ad 295 for more info.

o Educational interpreters are professionals who help transfer information b/t individuals who do not communicate in the same way. They can assist you in differentiating instruction for deaf and hard of hearing students.

§ Acceptabilty- the extent to which you and your collegues view a specific assessment, curricular and teaching practice as easy to use , effective, appropriate for the setting, fair and reasonable.

§ Differentiating instruction for students who have difficulty reading and gaining information from print materials: look at pg 296-308 for more info.

o Previewing- before assigning a reading selection, use prereading activities to preview new vocab and word pronunciation, text structures, motivate students, and activate their prior knowledge. Scan selesction and discuss meaning of bold faced words or italicized terms. New woeds can be placed in a word file of index cards by chapter. ELLs may find it helpful for you to write new words in their native language and link new vocab to visuals and cognates in their native language.

o Use the KWL strategy to help kids identify K( what they know about the reading selection or topic), W ( What they want to learn from reading the selection or topic), L ( students discuss what they have learned from reading about the topic).

o You can improve their comprehension of the topic to be read by asking them to do a writing activity related to the assignment before they read the selection.

o Questioning- have students individually or in groups respond to or generate questions about the text before, during, and after reading which can help them focus attention on the purpose of the assisgnment.

§ Types of questions to use:

· Literal questions- which ask about the facts presented in the selection ( who, what, when, where, why, and how)

· Literacy- based questions- which are related to the written and oral components of the selection

· Inferential questions- which causes students to make interpretations about and reflect on the material

· Ponderable questions- which present dilemmas or situations that have no right or wrong answers

· Elaborative questions- which asks students to incorporate their prior knowledge into info presented in the selection.

o Reciprocal teaching- involves a dialogue between you and your students. Ask students to read a selection silently, summarize it, discuss and clarify problem areas and unclear vocab, use questions to check understanding, give students the opportunity to predict future content. After you model these strategies, students take on the role of the teacher while you provide the prompting. Look at pg 298.

o Collaborative Strategic Reading- teachers use modeling and talking aloud to teach students why, when, and how to use the following strategic reading comprehension strategies:

§ Previewing- students read the selection, recall what they know about it, and predict what it is about.

§ Click and Clunk- students identify difficult parts of the selection and use fix up sentences to make the sentences understandable.

§ Get the Gist- students read and restate the important aspects of the selection.

§ Wrap-up- students summarize the important aspects of the selection and generate easy, harder and hardest questions that might be on a test. Easy questions are those whose one or two word answers are in the text. Hardest questions are those that require students to use prior knowledge and information from the selection.

§ Once these strategies are learned 3-5 students to work together to read and apply the strategies. To assist each group ask them to maintain a log of their activities, progress, and use of the strategies or assign roles.

o Collaborative Reading Groups- students work in groups and share responsibility for reading the text and making sure that all group members comprehend it.

o Story/Text Mapping- you help students identify the major elements of a story by using visual representation.

o Communicative Reading Strategies- You help students by conversing with them about the text, offering prompts and cues to help them focus on and understand the topic, simplifying sentences, defining and explaining new vocab, summarizing passages, highlighting and explaining pronoun references, and linking ideas and words, and text across passages and chapters.

o Other strategies to help with reading comprehension is to teach students how to find the main idea, predict, surveying p.300, self-questioning, paraphrasing, outlining, summarizing p. 303.

o Other strategies: Paragraph restatements and paragraph shrinking, visual imagery, and verbal rehearsal pg. 304

o Enhance the readbilty of reading materials by highlighting essential information, use instructional technology

o Differentiate instruction for students from diverse cultural and language backgrounds by using a multicultural curriculum; Use multi -cultural teaching materials; Use culturally relevant and Resonsive teaching styles p. 311. ; use Reciprocal Interaction Teaching Approaches that fosters learning through verbal and written dialogue between students and teachers. Use effective ESL and Djual Language Approaches and techniques such as :

· Total Physical Response- improves students vocab through modeling, repeated practice, and movement.

· Sheltered English- or content based instruction uses cues, gestures, technology, manipulative, drama, and visual stimuli and aids to teach new concepts and vocab.

· Natural Language techniques

o Expansion- allows you to present a language model by expanding on students incomplete sentences or thoughts or ask your students to expand on another students statement.

o Expatiation- occurs when you or one of your students adds info to the comments of others.

o Parrallel talk- involves describing an event that students are seeing or doing

o Self- talk- consists of talking about ones actions, experiences, or feelings.

§ Help ELL students lean new vocab and concepts.

Use Instuctional technologies and assistive devices