120 hr. TEFL Course Module 8-Lesson Planning (Pt.11 Differentiation)

Module 8: Lesson planning

8.3.2 How to differentiate

Here is where you find a point of contention in the educational community. Differentiation is a buzzword that politicians and administrators love to throw around without actually helping teachers understand what it is. Teachers often fear differentiation because they are afraid of the amount of work that idea brings with it. Differentiation does not have to be scary however. Here are some simple steps you can take to differentiate your instruction and appeal to students of different abilities and learning types.

Get to know your students: There is no way to vary instruction to better accommodate your students if you do not first find out some information about them. There are a few different ways that you can research your students’ learning styles. The first way is to ask the students. This strategy works better with older students, but it often yields the most honest results. The second way is by giving your students benchmark assessments early on in the year. This strategy can give you a lot of information, but it can also be skewed by such things as apathy, distractions, and poor testing abilities. The third way you can find out information about your students is through observing them during classroom activities. You may have guessed that the best course of action is not one of these strategies alone but rather a combination of all of them. As a teacher, you need to use everything at your disposal to better understand what works best for your students.

Be prepared with a toolkit of teaching strategies: Now that you have a good understanding of each of your students and how they learn best, you need to be able to access your vast repertoire of teaching strategies to facilitate your students’ needs. These teaching strategies should also be very diverse, covering a wide array of teaching styles, including:

Direct instruction: People like to discount this old-school, traditional method of teaching, but it works in the classroom as long as it is not the only strategy that you are using.

Cooperative learning: Cooperative learning is a very trendy teaching style because it allows students to take responsibility for their learning, and it is conducive to a student-centered learning environment.

Inquiry-based learning: According to many experts, this is one of the most rigorous forms of teaching because it requires students to create their own questions or hypotheses, research, experiment, or explore these questions or hypotheses, and then draw conclusions based on their findings. The skills involved in this process are very complex, and if you are able to help your students get used to successfully going through this process, you will see significant results.

Information-processing strategies: These types of lessons ask students to practice and deepen their core skills to become better writers, readers, and thinkers. Students are getting the practice they need in the skills that are most important.