Differentiated Instruction

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Although Differentiated Instructional Practices are important for the success of all students, many teachers find it increasingly difficult to provide differentiated instruction within their classroom on a consistent basis. Below you will find resources that can help teachers provide students with differentiated learning, instruction, and assessments. Differentiated learning is a way of recognizing and teaching according to different student talents and learning styles. This form of teaching is designed to meet the needs of diverse learners and emphasizes student responsibility, peer tutoring, flexible grouping, and student choice! Allowing students to integrate their own interests and experiences into their learning is one way to allow students to succeed as themselves!

Teacher Tube:

Block, J. explains how letting students success as themselves can be beneficial to their academic and social-emotional growth! Block further explains that demanding students to conform to one standard silences them and sets the stage for endless struggles over compliance. Teacher tube is one way to create meaningful learning experiences for students; allowing both students and teachers to view school as a place of engagement, deeper meaning, and discovery! Allowing students to choose any video around a subject matter on teacher tube is one way to prioritize student voices! Additionally, giving students more voice and choice in their learning is one way to foster student-centered learning! Teacher Tube has a ton of visual resources that can be incorporated into visible teaching! Visitors to the website can search for any particular topic using the search bar at the top of the page.

Using Technology to Differentiate Instruction:

There are a variety of technology tools that allows a teacher to personalize learning through tailored instruction, assessment, and resources for individuals based on their learning needs and motivations. Online learning platforms like Google Classroom & Edmodo are convenient tools because they allow the educator to personalize the learning experience for each student. Explore this free website to explore the following features that would help a teacher to personalize learning in an easy and manageable way:

Small groups- allows subgroups of students who can collaborate together and allows you to quickly send resources, assessments, and feedback.

Differentiated resources- This Edmodo feature allows students and educators to collect and store specific articles, pictures, or other media files to a designated folder.

Snapshot- this feature tracks the progress of individual students on specific standards; allowing the teacher to immediately see who is proficient and in which standards.

Rubrics, Checklists, and Scaffolds:
Explore the following attachments and explore a few ways that teachers can provide differentiated instruction when teaching students how to write an essay. Students have the choice of using different sentence starters when developing each part of their essay. Teachers can use rubrics, modeling, and exemplars to help students become familiar with specific performance expectations. It helps for students to be able to see what proficiency looks like! Research shows that clear performance rubrics improve student achievement by helping focus student learning!