Differentiation

In School & Students...

Different-iation

Different- not alike in characteristic or quality.

iation- indicating an action, process, state, condition or result.

When people first hear of a term differentiation, it tends to break up in their head between "different" and "-iation". The first impression of these two words lead to students having different needs being approached with entirely different lesson plans. This is not true, the actual meaning is different students will always have different needs but will not need individualized lesson plans. Maybe some students require more visual examples, explanations, or even more real-life connections to grasp material and provoke self-thought. There are many ways in which the concept of Differentiation is interpreted in Rick Wormeli and Mark Pennington's, "Myths About Differentiated Instruction."

Students are not mass-manufactured robots who are programmed or learn the exact same way. Students are people who grow up through different experiences and life lessons. Students will need to be taught at different paces with more or less one on one instruction, depending on student need.

Differentiation also plays a role at home. In their home environments some students may have a more beneficial experience for learning than others. One student may be able to go home and research on the computer somethings that they do not quite understand or struggle with. One student may not have access to the same resources due to a wave of poverty in their family. This and other situations such as negative influences or role models can impact a students work ethics placing them in a lower learning category at school. Psychologist believe adolescents with a negative or no male role model tend to fall behind in school and/or are more likely to commit crimes in the future. 

There are many types of differentiation workshops to help tailor lessons around a classroom full of needs. First educators must find the needs of the class. This can be done by the typical journal, student reflections, or even brief self introductions that teachers ask for on the first day of class. Being a student in k-12 I didn't even realize that my teachers were gathering information about us to build a in head profile of the students. In retrospect I now see how helpful that can be to get to get some background on students as well as introduce them to each other. Videos from The Teaching Channel such as the one below can reveal workshops aimed to find the needs of individual students.


Technology and differentiation could go hand and hand depending on how they both are used. An arrangement of website resources could be made accessible to every student via their teacher: pictures and videos for visual learners, blogs and articles for linguistic learners, websites with video tutorials for math problems can be posted for analytic or mathematics learners such as Khanacademy.  Technology can be a very helpful resource for students especially to go home and research on their own, outside of class. Students could even create their own type of personal learning network to help study or even resourcing skills with all of these resources.