DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTIONS

Differentiated Instructions

Differentiated Instructions

Introduction

Education in the United States, from its beginning until the early 20th century, generally taught children in a one-room schoolhouse or multi grade classrooms. Once education had moved beyond the one-room schoolhouse era, in the early 1900s, pedagogy slowly began to change. Prior to that change, typical instruction was characterized by a one-size-fits-all format, whereby children of the same age were grouped together and all students were exposed to the same content; everyone did the same assignments and homework, and everyone demonstrated understanding of the content by taking the same test. This was the typical classroom, and this was how teachers were taught to teach.

Differentiated instruction is teaching with student learning differences in mind. As an educator, you will need to know where your students are at a given time rather than simply adopting a standardized approach to teaching. We cannot assume that all learners of a given age or grade are the same or at the same level of learning. Differentiated instruction is educating beyond a 'one size fits all' teaching model (Tomlinson, 2001).

Over the course of the century, educators came to recognize that many children were not invested in learning and were either bored or lost as the teacher taught to the mean of the class. Difference in students' abilities, communication skills, interests, emotional and social maturity, culture, and learning styles were evident in the classroom. By the early 1990s students with identified special needs were also integrated into the classroom, with the expectation they would be exposed to and learn the general education content, not just work on individualized skills. Educators realized that changes in teaching styles were needed to teach to this diverse group of students (Gregory, 2002).

Differentiating instruction has been described as 'shaking up' what goes on in the classroom so students have multiple opportunities for taking in information, making sense of ideas and expressing what they learn. By varying learning activities and assessment materials teachers challenge students at different readiness levels, appeal to students' varying interests, and accommodate students' preferred ways of learning and expressing themselves.

Thesis Statement

Differentiated instructions have a significant effect on the education. Tailoring differentiated instruction to specific students' cognitive capabilities.

Literature Review

Differentiated learning is not new. Good teachers have been using such techniques for a long time; it is only within perhaps the last decade or so that the term has come into common use. Good teachers generally differentiate their teaching for different learning styles: for example, talking about a topic for the more auditory learners while also writing information on the board for the visual learners, encouraging students to build models for the kinesthetic learners, having students work independently and in groups, etc. Teachers have also, for many years, tailored their assignments appropriately for different abilities (GILLIG, 2009).

So will differentiation change education? For far too long, teachers taught by lecturing. So, differentiation has made teaching more effective for some students, certainly for students who are not auditory learners. It also has allowed students to move at a ...