Using Differentiated Teaching Strategies
Lesson Planning Tips for Working with Different Student Levels
Teachers use differentiated teaching to cater to diverse learning needs. All students are different in terms of their achievement, ability, learning and cognitive styles as well as attitudes, pace of learning, personality and motivation.
Using Differentiated Instruction with Different Students
The lower performing and average students are motivated to try and increase their knowledge because of the input of the stronger students.
Using differentiated instruction, teachers cater to a wide variety of varied interests, cultural backgrounds and world knowledge which results in more dynamic classroom interaction.
The teacher’s attitude is central in setting the scene for the acceptance of differences.
How Differentiation Instruction Works
Same Activity – Different Tasks
One way to implement differentiated instruction is to plan different tasks for the same activity. This may be teaching a grammar point or a pre-reading activity or any activity for that matter. After the initial input of the teacher, there are two main options for assigning tasks.
- Quantity – the same task can be assigned to the whole class, but students do not have to do the same amount of questions or exercises. The students are given a choice. For example, they can be asked to answer only some of the questions while others try and answer all the questions.
- Level of difficulty – The teacher can adapt the task to two or three different levels which allows the student to choose the level he/she feels most comfortable with in terms of completing. The bottom line is that the teacher adapts already existing activities in the textbook, without having to make up additional activities.
Using Differentiated Instruction to Teach Reading and Science Lessons
Teachers can use the principles of differentiated instruction to teach reading and science. In such cases, teachers are using differentiated instructional strategies in a cross-curricular way.
Same activity - different tasks
- Lower performing reading group: students read a passage and list names of people, places and numbers and then, classify them into groups. Teachers can use reading comprehension skills in other subjects of the curriculum such as reading a passage on bugs and insect for a science activity.
- Middle reading group – students answer questions that relate to general ideas
- Advanced reading group – students read the passage and answer detailed questions. They can also guess unknown words and look up their meanings in a dictionary.
Teachers can use differentiated instruction involve planning lessons that can meet the needs of all the students. Teachers can use a variety of differentiated teaching strategies to cater to a diverse learning needs.
