What Is Differentiated Instruction?

In my average day I deal with a mix of adults and children, helping them to understand the best way for them to process information, helping them undo mental blocks and gain the confidence and self-esteem they need to move forward and bloom into assured, positive adults. A lot of the problems I see cropping up in adults are due to negative experiences at school, which have created mental blocks and insecurity in certain areas. For them, schools may have acknowledged that all children learn in a different way, but they did not actively try to provide the information in a variety of ways to support that. Today, schools are getting much better at recognising this fundamental truth, and are instead embracing the idea of differentiated instruction in classrooms – the idea that one size doesn’t fit all.

At its most basic level, differentiated instruction consists of the efforts of teachers and educators responding to variation among learners in the classroom. Whenever a teacher reaches out to an individual or small group to vary their teaching, they are trying to create the best learning experience possible for them. This is differentiated instruction. Teachers can differentiate at least 4 classroom elements based on each individual student’s readiness, interest level or learning profile. These elements include the content used to teach, the process of teaching, examining the products of the learning and their outcomes, and the way the learning environment feels.

 Content

You might be thinking, ‘surely you can’t change what you teach for each child – some might miss out on important things!’. Well rest assured, we don’t mean that the topics of study should be changed based on a child’s learning style, but rather the content used to help them learn that topic should be different. For example, a teacher could use a selection of reading materials at varying readability levels to cater for those who find reading a challenge, or provide such materials on tape for tonal learners. Spelling or vocabulary tests could be set at the readiness of students, rather than at pre-set times of the term. Ideas can be presented through both visual and auditory means, and teachers can hold meetings with smaller groups to re-teach an idea or skill for those struggling, or to extend the skills of more advanced students. By showing this level of attention to what the student needs in order to learn, teachers can help students access the information at their own pace and level without excluding anybody.

Process

The process element of differentiated instruction covers the activities students engage in to make sense of and master the content they need to learn. To do this, teachers could provide students with a series of interest centres around each topic, encouraging each child to explore and engage with subsets of the topic that interest them. Tiered activities could be developed, through which all learners work with the same important understandings and skills, but proceed through the subject matter with differing levels of support, challenge or complexity based on their abilities. Teachers can develop personal agendas – detailed task lists that contain general work for the whole class and work that addresses the individual needs of each learner. For example, when teaching literacy, each student must submit a book report, but groups can also act out the story, write rhymes to read to the class or draw a storyboard of the plot. This can be achieved by varying the length of time taken to complete tasks in order to help struggling learners or encourage greater exploration of the subject.

Products

The products of differentiated learning are the culminating projects that ask the student to rehearse, apply and extend what they have learnt about that subject. So instead of a standardised test, students can be given options or how to express the required learning. Would they prefer to write a letter, perform a puppet show or draw a mural with labels? Teachers can allow students to work alone or in small groups on their projects and encourage them to work on their own interpretation of the assignments, as long as it contains all of the required elements to demonstrate proper understanding of the material. Not every student performs well in tests, and the differentiated learning approach embraces that by giving students the chance to demonstrate their understanding in a more applicable way.

Learning Environment

The learning environment is perhaps one of the easiest for a teacher to control. They can make sure there are places within the room to work quietly without distraction, as well as places that invite collaboration. Providing materials within the room that reflect a variety of home settings and a developing routines that allow students to get help when teachers are busy and other students cannot help them immediately. This includes encouraging students to understand that some people need to move around to learn, while others do better sitting quietly, and how to be respectful of each others learning differences.

All children are brilliant in their own way, and it is our job as adults, teachers and parents to help them discover and understand that brilliance. All teachers should be encouraged to perform some basic levels of differentiated learning in order to provide the best experience for each child, and this in turn would help them achieve their ruthless targets. Learning should always be a diverse and enjoyable experience, and only by embracing the diversity in people can we embrace the joy of learning and teaching fully. For more information on differentiated instruction or if your child (or you!) needs help understanding and learning, get in touch today for your consultation.

How Building Flat Pack Furniture Reveals Your Learning Style

We all know three different types of people when it comes to building the dreaded flat pack furniture. We know activists, who will assemble the flat pack before reading any of the instructions (with varying degrees of success). We know the reflectors who like to lay every single piece out on the floor and ponder the design of each part and how it works before they pick up a screwdriver, and the diligent theorist who reads the instructions twice first, and makes sure you read them too. Finally, we all know that one pragmatist who will build the flat pack quickly, but be far more excited about what the furniture can do once it’s built. Each approach might result in success or failure, but regardless those people will stick to their style time and time again (my father once assembled a chest of drawers back to front, twice). Most people will just chalk this up to how good they are with their hands and their practical skills – after all some people just aren’t great at DIY. But it’s actually more to do with what’s going on with your brain.

 

Visual Learners Won’t Read, But See

Most instructions for flat pack furniture come with pictures. Each piece is drawn out and each stage of construction is detailed with arrows instructing which way things should be put together. This is so that you can easily tell if you are doing it right by just comparing the image to what you’re holding. It’s unsurprising then that visual learners will have few problems assembling flat pack furniture in record time (I checked, there isn’t one at the moment, so consider it a challenge) from just the pictures. They can easily visualise the objects and see how they will go together, so many visual learners might not even need to read the instructions to understand how everything fits together. They understand it simply from looking at all of the pieces. However, this is not true of all visual learners. For some, they need to be able to take the images and turn them into a 3D structure in order to understand how to put it together, and this sometimes isn’t possible just from the images given. If a visual learner struggled to turn the images into a 3D structure, they might leave the assembly to a kinaesthetic learners. 

Audio Digital Learners Will Take Their Time

Audio digital learners are all about the logic of the construction. Unlike the other learning styles it isn’t directly related to our senses, but instead to how we think about things. An audio digital learner faced with a flat pack will often read then instructions and think about them for some time, developing an understanding of why the steps are in that order and if it is the most logical way to do it. Once they have thought it through they will then build it based on the instructions and their sense of logic, potentially opting to alter the instructions if they don’t make sense to them. For example, ‘this glued dowel will break and not hold this piece in place, but if I screw the pieces together it will be a stronger structure.’ They might take their time building it, but ultimately they produce good results.

Kinaesthetic Learners Will Build It Quickest

Because kinaesthetic learners are all about doing things with their hands, flat pack furniture is like breathing for them. Kinaesthetic learners will often not read the instructions, but instead they will look at an image of the finished piece and turn it into a sort of 3D rendering. From this 3D base they then put the pieces together to create it, almost like reverse engineering. Sometimes the order they do things in might not be the same as the instructions, but they will quickly be able to build the flat pack to look and operate the way it was supposed to.  Because they can visualise every aspect of the finished object, kinaesthetic learners will rapidly understand what they need to do with the pieces and build the furniture very quickly.  

Tonal Learners Will Need Someone Else

To clarify, I don’t mean that tonal learners need someone to just do the whole thing for them, you understand. But tonal learners are incredibly aurally focussed, preferring to hear things out loud to make sense of them. Tonal learners work best with flat packs when someone else is reading out the instructions to them or telling them what to do next, rather than using the instructions themselves. When building flat pack furniture as a team, the person with the most leaning towards tonal learning will often opt to collect the pieces or build the unit, while the other co-ordinates and reads out the instructions.

We often only think of our individual learning style as being relevant while we are at school and actively learning all day every day. But the way our brains are wired to learn things and understand the world affects everything new we do throughout our adult lives as well. It impacts how we view challenges, how we learn new skills and how we implement those skills once learned. Our thought processes and reasoning will be different depending on our learning styles, and even the way we assemble furniture all comes down to that simple understanding of how we learn. If you would like to find out more about learning styles and how you can use them to teach and learn more effectively, follow my blog or get in touch through my website.