Meeting individual needs with young learners

The text quoted at the title of this entry and written by Peter Westwood and Wendy Arnold is the result of an online discussion forum in which different experts of the educational area discussed the meaning of differentiated instruction and its influence in the school.

We understand for differentiated instruction all the activities and process that we as teachers do to give answer to all the cognitive realities we can find I our class, to make it clear, it’s attending to every students learning necessities in order to adapt to every learning style so everyone gets a special attention and get the opportunity of working with material that will exploit his/her intellectual potential.

So in this discussions experts on the field argued about different ways of attending to everyone’s necessities by grading the difficulty of the tasks, creating online tasks that goes from less difficulty to more difficulty, doing small-group activities to allow everyone to participate and give their opinion on what is being treated, doing hands on activities that can accommodate to everyone’s necessities, offering different material depending on the learning style of the student, create a atmosphere of confidence and complicity between the teacher and the student, work by projects and so on.

My idea on all this process is that I think it is vital that teacher can reach to everyone’s necessities and to do that the teacher must be aware of the every child’s learning style. So if we have a child with a visual learning style, we should offer him resources such as images videos and graphical representations that can help him/her to create deep knowledge connection between the new concepts and the old ones he/she carried with himself/herself. Moreover, we should also consider that nowadays the number of children per teacher is quite high, so we should notice that sometimes we don’t have the human, economical or temporary resources to reach to everyone’s necessities, that is why if we are really limited, we should at least offer differentiated activities to the whole class, varying from one activity to another to its learning style. Nonetheless if we have the good conditions and attitude to attend to every child’s needs, we should offer to every student different activities that contain the same concepts but that attend to his/her learning style (idea based on Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Model).

See you next time!