DOC1 Chapter 2 Knowing Your Students

Differentiated Materials

that address individual differences by providing curriculum options. Learning centers, for example, include differentiated materials with several kinds and levels of goals and activities. Centers, packets, and cards can be made for a particular student's needs and then stored until another student has need of them. When prepared properly, these materials accommodate different rates of learning and different cognitive styles.

Contextual Factors

includes information the teacher uses about the teaching-learning context and students' individual differences to set learning goals and plan instruction and assessment. The written report on contextual factors includes a discussion of the relevant factors and how they affect the teaching and learning process. The discussion also identifies any supports and challenges that affect instruction and student learning. Considering the contextual factors is the critical first step in the planning process.

Affective Area

focuses on feelings and attitudes. Emotional growth is not easy to facilitate, but sometimes the feelings students have about their skills or a particular subject are at least as important as the information they learn (Slavin, 2012). Self-esteem, time management, confidence, and self-direction are typical affective education goals.

Exceptional Students

include those who need special help and resources to reach their full potential. Exceptionalities include both disabilities and giftedness.

Cognitive Activity

includes information processing, problem solving, using mental strategies for tasks, and continuous learning. Children in a classroom will differ in their cognitive abilities to perform these tasks. Thus, there may be a range of low-academic-ability to high-academic-ability students in a classroom.

Learning Style

is an individual's preferences for the conditions of the learning process that can affect his or her learning including where, when, and how learning takes place, and with what materials. These styles may play an integral role in determining how the student perceives the learning environment and responds to it. Therefore, knowledge about learning styles can allow teachers to provide options in the classroom that can enhance students' learning.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

to meet the needs of all students by adapting the curriculum and delivery of instruction. UDL is an instructional approach that helps meet the challenge of diversity by suggesting flexible instructional materials, techniques, and strategies which empower educators to meet students' varied needs. Version 2.0 of the UDL Guidelines was released in 2011. To create the flexible design and delivery of instruction in UDL, teachers must provide multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement.

Self-Regulate

to modulate one's emotional reactions to increase effectiveness at coping and engaging with the environment—is a critical aspect of human development. Students benefit from self-regulation. It can be promoted by providing alternatives to support learners with very different aptitudes and prior experiences in learning how to regulate themselves. Provide options for self-regulation that (a) promote expectations and beliefs that optimize motivation, (b) facilitate personal coping skills and strategies, and (c) develop self-assessment and reflection.

Expression

to provide learners with alternatives for demonstrating what they know. Students differ in the ways they can navigate a learning environment and express what they know. For example, students with attention-deficit disorder or those who have language barriers may approach learning tasks and demonstrate mastery very differently. Some may be able to express themselves in writing but not in oral speech, and vice versa.

Engagement

to tap learners' interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation. Students differ markedly in the ways in which they can be engaged or motivated to learn. Some students are highly engaged by spontaneity and novelty, while other students are not affected by these aspects.

Students at Risk

are children and adolescents who are not able to acquire and/or use the skills necessary to develop their potential and become productive members of society. Conditions at home, support from the community, and personal and cultural background all affect students' attitudes, behaviors, and propensity to profit from school experiences. Students potentially at risk include children who face adverse conditions beyond their control, those who do not speak English as a first language, talented but unchallenged students, those with special problems, and many others. At-risk students often have academic difficulties and thus may be low achievers.

Products

are the vehicles through which students demonstrate what they have learned. Products can also be differentiated, and they may include actual physical products (e.g., portfolios, reports, diagrams, or paper-and-pencil tests) that students prepare, as well as student performances designed to demonstrate a particular skill. Performance-based assessment, including student products and performances, is discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 11. A good product causes students to rethink what they have learned, apply what they can do, extend their understanding and skill, and become involved in both critical and creative thinking. Examples of ways to differentiate products include the following: ■ Allow students to help design products around essential learning goals. ■ Provide product assignments of varying degrees of difficulty to match student readiness. ■ Use a wide variety of assessments. ■ Work with students to develop rubrics that allow for demonstration of both whole-class and individual goals. ■ Provide or encourage the use of varied types of resources in preparing products.

Gifted or Talented Learners

are those with above-average abilities, and they need special instructional consideration. Unfortunately, some teachers do not challenge high-ability students, and these students just "mark time" in school. Unchallenged, they may develop poor attention and study habits, form negative attitudes toward school and learning, and waste academic learning time.

Individualized Study

can be implemented through learning contracts or independent studies as a means to address individual needs. Such plans are most effective when developed by the student with your assistance. Individualized study facilitates mastery of both content and processes. Not only can the student master a subject, but he or she can also master goal setting, time management, use of resources, self-direction, and self-assessment of achievement. Independent study is ideal for accommodating student learning styles. Individual ability is nurtured, and students often learn more than the project requires. Independent study encourages creativity and develops problem-solving skills. It can be used in any school setting and all curricular areas. Most important, this method of learning approximates the way that the student should continue to learn when no longer a student in school. This method requires varied, plentiful resources, and it may not provide enough social interaction. The student may spend too long on the study, and parents may complain that nothing is being accomplished. When considering individualized study, you should do the following: ■ Include the student in all phases of planning, studying, and evaluating. ■ Encourage the student to ask higher-order questions (analysis, synthesis, evaluation) as study goals. ■ Encourage the student to develop a product as an outcome of the study. ■ Provide the student with an opportunity to share the product with an interested audience. ■ Emphasize learner responsibility and accountability.

Alternative or Differentiated Assignments

can be provided by altering the length, difficulty, or time span of the assignment. Alternative assignments generally require alternative evaluation procedures. Enrichment activities qualify as alternative assignments when directed toward an individual student's needs. There are three types of enrichment activities. First, relevant enrichment provides experiences that address the student's strengths, interests, or deficit areas. Second, cultural enrichment might be pleasurable and productive for the student even if not particularly relevant to his or her needs. An example would be an interdisciplinary study or a global-awareness topic. Third, irrelevant enrichment might provide extra activity in a content area without really addressing student needs.

Struggling Learner

cannot learn at an average rate from the instructional resources, texts, workbooks, and materials that are designated for the majority of students in the classroom. This student often has a limited attention span and deficiencies in basic skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics. He or she needs frequent feedback, corrective instruction, special instructional pacing, instructional variety, and perhaps modified materials.

Conceptual Tempo

deals with students being impulsive or reflective when selecting from two or more alternatives. For example, impulsive students look at alternatives only briefly and select one quickly. They may make many errors because they do not take time to consider all the alternatives. However, not all cognitively impulsive students are fast and inaccurate. On the other hand, reflective students deliberate among the alternatives and respond more slowly.

Field Dependence/Field Independence

deals with the extent to which individuals can overcome the effects of distracting background elements (the field) when trying to differentiate among relevant aspects of a particular situation. You can expect field-dependent students to be more people oriented, to work best in groups, and to prefer subjects such as history and literature. Field-independent students would prefer science, problem-solving tasks, and instructional approaches requiring little social interaction (Slavin, 2012). Field-dependent students respond more to verbal praise and extrinsic motivation, while field-independent students tend to pursue their own goals and respond best to intrinsic motivation.

Process

includes the instructional activities or approaches used to help students learn the curriculum. Process is how students come to make sense of and understand the key facts, concepts, generalizations, and skills of a subject. An effective activity involves students using an essential skill to understand an essential idea, and the activity is clearly focused on the learning goal. Some ways that a teacher might differentiate process or activities include the following: ■ Provide options at differing levels of difficulty or options based on differing student interests. ■ Give students choices about how they express what they learn in a project (e.g., create a newspaper article report or display key issues in some type of graphic organizer). ■ Differ the amounts of teacher and student support for a task.

Content

includes the knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to a subject and the materials and mechanisms through which learning is accomplished. In practice, many districts have curriculum guides outlining objectives and content that are expected for all students at a particular grade level or subject area. So there may not be much variation in the content to be taught, but differentiation in the materials could be used in instruction. Some ways that a teacher might differentiate access to the content include the following: ■ Use texts or novels at more than one reading level. ■ Present instruction through both whole-to-part and part-to-whole approaches. ■ Use texts, computer programs, videos, and other media to convey key concepts to varied learners. ■ Focus on teaching the concepts and principles, rather than on all the minute facts about the subject. ■ Have advanced students work on special, in-depth projects, while the other students work on the general lessons. ■ Use varied texts and resource materials. ■ When reteaching is necessary, alter the content and delivery based on student readiness, interests, or learning profile. ■ Provide various types of support for learning, such as using study buddies, note-taking organizers, and highlighted printed materials.

Psychomotor Skills

involve gross motor skills and fine motor skills, such as dribbling a basketball and drawing a fine line. These skills are integral parts of most learning activities. Indeed, psychomotor and affective objectives often overlap.

Intelligence

involves the capacity to apprehend facts and their relations and to reason about them; it is an indicator of cognitive ability.

Modification

is a change in the standard learning expectations so that they are realistic and individually appropriate. The curriculum or instruction is altered as needed. Modifications are used for students for whom all possible accommodations have been considered and who still need additional measures to help them progress. For example, students with skill deficits in reading or math may need modifications in assignments or the level of the content and reading materials, or they may need an alternative assessment or test.

Socioeconomic Status (SES)

is a measure of a family's relative position in a community, determined by a combination of parents' income, occupation, and level of education. There are many relationships between SES and school performance. SES is linked to intelligence, achievement test scores, grades, truancy, and dropout and suspension rates.

Teacher Work Sample

is a report describing how the student has planned, taught, and assessed a multiday instructional unit, and it includes several specific sections. The Renaissance Teacher Work Sample Consortium (2011) is a group of organizations that developed guidelines for the teacher work sample and endorsed and supported its use in member universities. The work of this consortium was well received, and their guidelines for teacher work samples have been used by other universities.

Readiness

is a student's entry point into a particular content or skill. To differentiate in response to student readiness, teachers can construct tasks or provide learning choices at different levels of difficulty. Some general strategies to adjust for readiness include these: ■ Adjust the degree of difficulty of a task to provide an appropriate level of challenge. ■ Make the task more or less familiar based on the proficiency of the learner's experiences or skills for the task. ■ Add or remove teacher or peer coaching, use of manipulatives, or presence or absence of models for a task. This varies the degree of structure and support being provided. ■ Vary direct instruction by small-group need.

Sensory Modality

is a system of interacting with the environment through one or more of the basic senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. The most important sensory modalities for teachers are the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modes. Information to be learned is first received through one of the senses. The information either is forgotten after a few seconds or, after initial processing, is placed in short-term or long-term memory. Learning may be enhanced when the information is received through a preferred sensory modality. Use a variety of instructional approaches that enable the students to receive the content through one or more of the basic senses.

Accommodation

is an adjustment in the curriculum, instruction, learning tasks, assessments, or materials to make learning more accessible to students. For example, a student might have an adapted test with fewer test items. The student may also have the same test but take it orally in a one-on-one situation with the teacher, or he or she might be given extra time to take a test. Different materials might be used to teach the same content, or additional practice or various instructional approaches may be used. In any case, accommodation is not a watering down or change in the content or a change in expected learner outcomes.

Brain Hemisphericity

is another aspect of student preferences for learning environments. The two halves of the brain appear to serve different functions, even though they are connected by a complex network that orchestrates their teamwork (Sousa, 2011). Each side is dominant in certain respects. Left-brain-dominant people tend to be more analytical in their orientation, being generally logical, concrete, and sequential. Right-brain-dominant people tend to be more visually and spatially oriented and more holistic in their thinking.

Differentiation

is classroom practice with a balanced emphasis on individual students and course content.

Culturally Responsive Teaching

is instruction that acknowledges cultural diversity . It attempts to accomplish this goal in three ways: (1) accepting and valuing cultural differences, (2) accommodating different cultural interaction patterns, and (3) building on students' cultural backgrounds. Culturally responsive teachers use the best of what is known about good teaching, including strategies such as the following: ■ Connecting students' prior knowledge and cultural experiences with new concepts by constructing and designing relevant cultural metaphors and images ■ Understanding students' cultural knowledge and experiences and selecting appropriate instructional materials ■ Helping students find meaning and purpose in what is to be learned ■ Using interactive teaching strategies ■ Allowing students to participate in planning ■ Using familiar speech and events ■ Helping learners construct meaning by organizing, elaborating, and representing knowledge in their own way ■ Using primary sources of data and manipulative materials

Cultural Diversity

is reflected in the wide variety of values, beliefs, attitudes, and rules that define regional, ethnic, religious, and other culture groups. Minority populations wish their cultures to be recognized as unique and preserved for their children. The message from all cultural groups to schools is clear: Make sure that each student from every cultural group succeeds in school.

Least Restrictive Environment

means that students with special needs are placed in special settings only if necessary and only for as long as necessary; the regular classroom is the preferred least restrictive placement.

Advanced Learners

need to be stretched in their learning as they prepare products. To do so, here are some suggestions: ■ Structure product assignments for advanced learners so that they move forward in a number of ways. ■ Consider having advanced learners study the key issues or questions across time periods, disciplines, or cultures. ■ As much as possible, include advanced-level research and information. ■ Let each advanced learner help you to develop criteria for expert-level content and production.

Interest

refers to a student's affinity, curiosity, or passion for a particular topic or skill. To differentiate in response to student interest, a teacher aligns key skills and material for understanding from a curriculum segment with topics or pursuits that intrigue students. Some ways to differentiate in response to student interest include the following: ■ Provide broad access to a wide variety of materials and technology. ■ Give students a choice of tasks and products, including student-designed options. ■ Provide a variety of avenues for student exploration of a topic or expression of learning. ■ Encourage investigation or application of key concepts and principles in student interest areas.

Cognitive Style

refers to the way people process information and use strategies in responding to tasks. Conceptual tempo and field dependence/field independence are two categories of cognitive style that educators may consider when planning instruction.

Learning Profile

refers to the ways in which we learn best as individuals. It may be shaped by intelligence preferences, gender, culture, or learning style. Integrating issues related to learning styles and multiple intelligences provides additional guidance for ways to differentiate instruction. Some ways that teachers can differentiate in response to student learning profiles include the following: ■ Create a learning environment with flexible spaces and learning options. ■ Present information through auditory, visual, and kinesthetic modes. ■ Encourage students to explore information and ideas through auditory, visual, and kinesthetic modes. ■ Allow students to work alone or with peers. ■ Ensure a choice of competitive, cooperative, and independent experiences.