I had wanted to share this with kindergarten/first grade teachers but website was down last week. Great videos at the bottom showing snippets from the classrooms of ten teachers that have consistently "beat the odds" with their student outcomes.
Not only does this free web based typing program let you do the normal tutorials and games but they also let you create student accounts where the teacher can customize the lessons and see the students results
This simple shift—from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning—has profound implications for schools.
How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning?
The answer to the third question separates learning communities from traditional schools.
systematic, timely, and directive intervention program
When a school begins to function as a professional learning community, however, teachers become aware of the incongruity between their commitment to ensure learning for all students and their lack of a coordinated strategy to respond when some students do not learn
teacher conversations must quickly move beyond "What are we expected to teach?" to "How will we know when each student has learned?"
Differentiated instruction is a teaching philosophy based on the premise that teachers should adapt instruction to student differences. Rather than marching students through the curriculum in lockstep, teachers should modify their instruction to meet students' varying readiness levels, learning preferences, and interests.
The instructional concepts should be broad-based, not focused on minute details or unlimited facts. Teachers must focus on the concepts, principles and skills that students should learn. The content of instruction should address the same concepts with all students, but the degree of complexity should be adjusted to suit diverse learners.
I often find that teachers struggle to identify different concent for learners because they are overly focused on the facts of the assessment rather than the concepts in the standard. If we can always articulate to learners what they are going to learn in broad terms we may be better able to see that the concept can be covered at varying levels of complexity. I found with middle school students the easiest content differentiation was providing different reading materials to different students about the same theme.
Differentiated instruction is a process to teaching and learning for students of differing abilities in the same class.
1. Establishing where learners are in their learning 2. Establishing where they are going 3. Establishing how to get there.
By considering separately the roles of the teacher and the students themselves, Wiliam and Thompson proposed that formative assess- ment could be built up from five "key strategies."