Differentiating InstructionDr. Laura McLaughlin Taddei

Learning Outcomes

• Learning Goal: Students plan teaching and learning experiences to create a learning environment which promotes questioning, exploration and problem solving, and which allows for individual differences in students.

• Learning Goal: Students plan for activities that embrace multicultural and diverse experiences.

• Learning Goal: Through a service-learning experience, the students demonstrate the ability to interact with pre-school children and effectively implement mathematics lessons, which demonstrates the ability to individualize mathematics towards the developmental needs of the students.

Differentiation and Problem-Based Teaching

• Why do you think problem-based approach to teaching is the best way to teach mathematics to a range of children in your classroom?

Nuts and Bolts of Differentiating Instruction

• Instructional approach that focuses on all children. • Three basic ideas:• Planning lessons around meaningful content• Recognizing each child’s readiness, interest and approach to

learning• Connecting content and learners by modifying content,

process, product and the learning environment

Recognizing Children as Learners

• How can you gather information on children’s readiness?

Connecting Content and Learners

• What is learned should be generally the same for each child

• How children engage with and make sense of the content differs

• What a child produces may differ; how they share their ideas may differ

• How can you modify the learning environment – seating arrangement, grouping strategies, access to material, etc.

Parallel Tasks

• Two or three tasks that focus on the same big idea but offer different levels of difficulty – all children should be able to participate in a meaningful discussion with the whole group

• Examples

Open Questions

• Open when it can be solved in a variety of ways• Open when it can have a variety of answers• High level of cognitive demand – why?• Examples

Strategies to create open questions

• Give answer and ask for the problem• Replace a number in a given problem with a blank or

question mark• Offer two situations and ask for similarities and

differences• Create a question in which children have to make choices

Activity – Practice using strategies and create open questions

• In your group, practice using strategies and create open questions – pages 47-48

Learning Centers

• Provide tasks that can be repeated multiple times during one visit

• Allows children to remain engaged until they are ready to transition

• Any other benefits for using learning centers

Tiered Lesson

• Practice creating a tiered lesson – use pages 49 to 52 to assist you and template for tiered lesson plan.

Flexible Grouping

• Need individual accountability• When one member of a small group asks a question, ask

the other members of the group for their feedback. • Teammates should be first resource and teacher help is

sought when the whole group needs help• How might this create a shift in your role as teacher?

Questions

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Complete a short exit activity – Minute paper.

Thank you!!!

Resources

Van de Walle, J., Lovin, L., Karp, K., Bay-Williams, J. (2014). Teaching student-centered

mathematics. Second edition. Pearson Education.

Smith, S. (2013). Early childhood mathematics. Pearson Education