Instruction and Differentiation
Whereas curriculum refers to what teachers teach or what students should learn, instruction refers to how teachers teach or how students will experience learning. Research shows: ”a bad curriculum well taught is invariably a better experience for students than a good curriculum badly taught: pedagogy trumps curriculum. (Dylan Williams, 2011).
Once of the most important pedagogical questions a teacher can ask is, how a particular learner is experiencing what’s being taught.
Readiness
- Is not a synonym for ability or capacity to learn?
- It refers to a student’s proximity to specified learning goals
- We often err by classifying students according to what we perceive to be their ability and teaching them accordingly
- Planning instruction based on what we think is a student’s capacity to learn, leads us to ask, “what can this student do?”
- Planning instruction based on readiness guides us to ask, “what does this student need in order to succeed?”
- The term readiness aligns with a growth mindset
- Many instructional strategies enable teachers to attend to a range of readiness needs. These approaches include, but certainly are not limited to, the following: tiering, small-group interaction, use of reading materials at varied levels of readability, learning contracts, learning centres, compacting, flexible time spans for work, personalised goals, and use of technology to assist students with reading, writing and other learning needs.
Interest
- A great motivator for learning.
- Can refer to a topic or skill that taps into a student’s talents or experiences or dreams – a area of current passion
- Can refer simply to ideas, skills or work that is appealing to a student.
- Can also be used to think about new possibilities a student could encounter that could be a source of future passions
- Students invest more in or become more engaged with that which interests them.
- Among instructional approaches that help students connect required content with their interests are independent studies, interest centres, RAFTs
Learning Profile
- Learning-profile differentiation seeks to provide learners with approaches to learning that make the process both more efficient and more effective for them
- Learning profiles, learning preferences, or preferred approaches to learning are shaped by gender, culture, the environment, biology, and a particular learning context.
- It is not the case that individuals have just 1 or 2 approaches to learning that are a match for them.
- It is not the case that a person learns best the same way in 2 different content areas or in 2 different topics within the same content area.
- Current research/wisdom generally do not support using surveys or questionnaires or other assessments to “determine” a student’s learning style or intelligence preference, it does not support this labelling.
- The goal of learning profile differentiation should be to create more ways for students to take in, engage with, explore, and demonstrate knowledge about content, and then to help students develop awareness of which approaches to learning work best for them under which circumstances, and to guide them to know when to change approaches for better learning outcomes, (Tomlinson and Imbeau, 2013).
- Some of the strategies useful in providing students with approaches to learning that will work for them in a particular context include the following: RAFTs, learning contracts or menus, different work-group options (such as work alone, with a partner, or with small group), and varied expression options and tolls for class assignments, homework, and assessments.