m5 u3 a2

Differentiating for and Anticipating Student Needs


Differentiated Instruction

“The Biggest mistake of past centuries in teaching had been to treat all children as if they were variants of the same individual, and thus to feel justified in teaching them the same subjects in the same ways.” (Haward Gardner, 1994)

As we all know that each student has an individual style of learning. Not all students in a classroom learn a subject in the same way or share the same level of ability, which means a “one –size – fits – all” instruction won’t extend the understanding of a student with great knowledge and skill in the same area.  . As a teacher, I need to unconditionally accept students as they are, and expect them to become all they are. So it is important to apply the differentiated instructions. Differentiated instruction is a method of designing and delivering instruction to best reach each student. One point need to be highlighted that there is no single strategy for creating a differentiated instruction.

Ways to Differentiate Instruction
1. Assessment and instruction are inseparable.
Ø  In a differentiated classroom, assessment is ongoing and diagnostic. Its goal is to provide teachers day-to-day data on students’ readiness for particular ideas and skills, their interests, and their learning profiles.
Ø  Assessment is today’s means of understanding how to modify tomorrow’s instruction.
Ø  By applying formative assessment in Chinese class, I may able to get an picture of who understands key ideas and who can perform targeted skills, at what levels of proficiency, and with what degree of interest. Then I can shape my next day’s lesson with the goal of helping individual students move ahead from their current position of competency.
Ø  Assessment always has more to do with helping students grow than with cataloging their mistakes.
2. The teacher modifies content, process, and products.
Ø  By thoughtfully using assessment data, I can modify content, process, or product.
·   Content is what I want students to learn and the materials or mechanisms through which that is accomplished.
·   Process describes activities designed to ensure that students use key skills to make sense out of essential ideas and information.
·   Products are vehicles through which students demonstrate and extend what they have learned.
Ø  Interest and learning profile also influences teacher’s modification.
·   Interest refers to a student’s affinity, curiosity, or passion for a particular topic or skill.
·   Learning profile has to do how we learn. It may be shaped by intelligence preferences, gender, culture, or learning style.

The General Differentiated Instruction Strategies in Chinese Class
Ø  Encourage students use background knowledge: Students can use what they already know about the culture, what they know about their own culture, and what they know about the food in general to connect with new Chinese food cultural information.  Different students have different background knowledge, so this method meets students’ diverse needs.
Ø  Personalize: This teaching strategy is related to using imagery. The students relate new information to their own lives, experiences, beliefs, and feelings. Making comparisons between their home culture and the Chinese culture can help students personalize the new culture, particularly by making connections between the similarities between the “foreign” and the “familiar” at this personal level, rather than just at an intellectual level. Being able to use this teaching strategy is at the heart of being able to understand the perspectives of another culture. 
Ø  Encourage students make inferences: Students can make inferences from what they understand and know, to make guesses about what they don’t understand about a culture. They can make “educated” guesses based on their background knowledge of their own culture and the Chinese culture, and then monitor and evaluate to figure out if their guess was right.
Ø  Apply Tiered Activities to help students to achieve the learning goals. Through tiered activities, all my students are able to focus on essential understandings and skills but at different levels of complexity, abstractness, and open-endedness.

 The Basic Information of Special Needs Students
Ø  Student L with less- developed readiness. She is 13 YO; studies in beginner Chinese class. She has low readiness; she can’t write Chinese characters; she only can gasp 40% content of each lesson.
Ø  Students E with advanced readiness. She is 12 YO; studies in beginner Chinese class. She often requires greater challenge than the curriculum on offer.
Ø  Student D with ASD.
Modification for Students with a Disability
1. The student with ASD exhibit core deficits of varying degrees and combinations in the following areas:
Ø  Difficulty with identifying important global concepts and elements of tasks.
Ø  Difficulty processing auditory information – understanding, retaining, and retrieving.
Ø  Difficulty generalizing skills.
Ø  Difficulty with sequencing information or steps in a task.
Ø  Difficulty transitioning between different activities.
Ø  Difficulty with time concept and time management.
Ø  Atypical and /or uneven academic, social, or emotional development.
2. The plan for the student with ASD. (For student D)
Ø  I will give student D time to respond. I have noticed that student D took long time to process auditory information, and then produce response. So I will extend the time for D to respond.
Ø  I won’t use long strings of verbal directions. For example, if I want student D tell me how to say tomato in Chinese, I will point the picture of tomato, and say 说.
Ø  I totally respect sensory sensitivities. Because student D is easily overwhelmed by regular school experiences such as loud classroom discussion, so I will request other students keep their voices down. I will also prepare a quiet space with cozy beanbag, which is for student D to stay when he starts sensory sensitivities.
Ø  Develop student D’s social skills through shared interests. I apply interest group strategy may engage him. For example, D loves tomatoes, so when the whole class together creates a tomato fries eggs recipe, D will join in the group discussion. If he can identify the tomato of the slides, and speak it out in Chinese, which means he achieves the learning goal. This strategy also develops his social skills.
Modification for Readiness
1. Readiness is a student’s entry point relative to a particular understanding or skill.
2. The plan for the students with less- developed readiness. (For Student L)
Ø  I will help her identify and make up gaps in her learning so she can move ahead. For example, in show and present your recipe lesson, after the mini lesson, if she still can’t understand the main factors of a recipe, I will let her watch the video below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0daBfj4EVs
This video shows how to make braised eggplants, and she can find the main factors of a recipe.
Ø  I will provide her more opportunities for direct instruction or practice.
For example I will use varied questioning strategy to ask her how to create a recipe of eggs fried tomatoes.
Ø  Activities or products which are more structured or more concrete, with fewer steps, closer to her own experiences, and calling on simpler reading skills.
For example, when L comments on other peers’ food, she doesn’t have to write down Chinese characters; she can use Pinyin instead.
3. The plan for the student with advanced readiness. (For Student E)
Ø  I approve E to skip practice with previously mastered skills and understandings. For example, she doesn’t need to repeat the factors of recipe learning process.
Ø  Activities and products that are quite complex, open – ended, abstract, and multifaceted, drawing on advanced reading materials. For example, she needs to create her recipe in Chinese characters.
Ø  I need to plan a brisk pace of work to allow for greater depth of exploration of Chinese food culture.
Flowchart

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Reference
1. John McCarthy. 2014. "3 Ways to Plan for Diverse Learners: What Teachers Do". Retrieved from
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/differentiated-instruction-ways-to-plan-john-mccarthy
2. Cathy Weselby. 2014. "What is Differentiated Instruction? Examples of How to Differentiate Instruction in the Classroom". Retrieved from
https://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/teaching-strategies/examples-of-differentiated-instruction/
3. John McCarthy. 2014. "Learner Interest Matters: Strategies for Empowering Student Choice". Retrieved from
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/differentiated-instruction-learner-interest-matters-john-mccarthy
4. C. A. Tomlinson, 2005, The Differentiated Classroom, Pearson Education, Inc.
5. W. Powell, O. Kusuma-Powell, Making the Difference: Differentiation in International Schools, William Powell & Ochan Kusuma-Powell, 2012.



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