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?"
Here is an example of a collaboratively built wiki. This was assigned to college students who had one week to build it. What topics do you teach that students could build collaborative wikis around?
Katie and I used to work together. She is a great teacher and doing good work in Honduras where she also happens to teach technology. She would be a potential abroad classroom to do an exchange with via some web2.0 tool...
Siri
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.
they
do not understand what to do or why they should do it. Teachers should
spend more time explaining why we teach what we do, and why the topic
or approach or activity is important and
I have found that in many cases it is the praise or acknowledgement of good behavior or good work- the reward is physical evidence of that- the kids do not care about the value of the reward. In fact often the crummier the reward the more they enjoy it.
If you can
make something fun, exciting, happy, loving, or perhaps even a bit
frightening, students will learn more readily and the learning will
last much longer
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.