"Do you differentiate instruction? Why? Why not? What is the importance of differentiating instruction? What impact does it have on student learning?"
I differentiate instruction every day in my Algebra Extensions classes. As I've mentioned previously I do stations in these classes, and I have students grouped based on their abilities. Therefore, with each group that comes to my station I switch up the instruction based on what they particularly need. For example, we are working on adding fractions with unlike denominators right now. For my lower groups we spend quite a bit of time on understanding how to find lowest common denominators. For my high groups, they already understand how to do this so we have moved on to word problems involving fractions with unlike denominators.
Differentiating instruction is very important because you want to challenge kids, but at the level they are performing at. For example, if I extensively went over finding LCDs with my high groups, they would be incredibly bored and it wouldn't be benefiting them because they wouldn't be learning anything new. However, if I just jumped into word problems with my lower groups, they would get easily confused. With them I need to go back to the more basic instruction before moving on to word problems.
No comments:
Post a Comment