Differentiated Instruction: Reaching All Learners

This week we had the opportunity to explore how to make math meaningful and engaging for the diverse learners that will be in our classrooms! 

Differentiated Instruction: What is It? 

© Cathy Tomlinson. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2hqu0nq.

It is good to start off with a reminder of what Differentiated Instruction is. As the Capacity Building Series document "Differentiating Mathematics Instruction" discusses, differentiation involves "differentiating instruction by content, learning process and/or product to address the needs of students with varied experiences, learning readiness, learning styles, contextual interests, and learning interaction preferences" (p. 2). As an educator, I want to be proactive in understanding the individual and collective needs of my students and flexible in adjusting my teaching strategies and methods to those needs so that every child is able to thrive in my classroom! 

An 'aha moment' for me during class was when we talked about how we could adjust the game "I have... Who has..." to support diverse learners. I love this game because it is a fun, engaging, and collaborative way for students to practice vocabulary and to reinforce or review key concepts! Even though I used this game in my placement last year, I had never thought about how a simple change like anonymously colour-coding the cards based on their level of difficulty and strategically giving them to students according to their readiness would be a great differentiation strategy to better support my students. I will definitely keep this strategy in mind when incorporating this game into my future lesson plans! 

Differentiated Instruction: How Can I Achieve It?

Developing Parallel Tasks

As we explored in our reading and during our in-class activities, parallel tasks are a great way to meet a variety of needs in the classroom. By developing two problems that both focus on the same key concept yet differ in terms of their level of difficulty, teachers can address students with differing levels of readiness. I was amazed and excited to see how parallel tasks could create such a rich and inclusive learning opportunity as the common questions that are used to address the whole group encourage students to learn from one another, to make connections, and to develop a deeper understanding of the big ideas. This week's task for our unit plan where we created our concept map was great practice for learning to identify key concepts as sometimes I find that I can get so bogged down in the specific expectations that I lose sight of the big ideas. During my last placement, I tended to gravitate towards using open problems as a differentiation strategy. I'm excited to add parallel tasks to my differentiated instruction toolbox and will definitely make more of an effort to also include these types of problems in my future math lessons. 

© Pat McEachren. 2016.

Encouraging Student Inquiry 

This week's webinar focused on student inquiry. I thought this fit well with the topic of differentiation as student inquiry allows students to explore a topic in a way that fits their readiness and interests and to demonstrate their understanding in a way that suits their learning style. As we discussed in our webinar, educators can and should also differentiate for students' individual needs by using scaffolding questions to guide and support students throughout the inquiry process. As the image below mentions as well, I also love that student inquiry empowers students to take ownership of their learning and fosters their natural sense of curiosity.

© Sylvia Duckworth. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2fj4m3i.

Celebrating Mistakes

As the Math Mindset modules this week emphasized, another key aspect of reaching all learners is to foster a growth mindset where students learn to embrace mistakes and see them as a valuable and necessary part of their learning journey. If we want our students to challenge themselves when choosing a parallel task, to share seemingly wild questions or ideas during the inquiry process, and to persevere in the face of challenges, we need to create a positive and safe learning environment where students feel comfortable making mistakes and understand that mistakes and struggles lead to brain growth! 

© Oskar Cymerman. Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2hmUGJy.