Differentiated instructional practices in Reading and Math: Reaching all students

Session Submission Type: Group Panel

Description of Session

For decades constructivists have argued that students “construe” knowledge and that their different life experiences affect their access to schooling, opportunity to learn and ultimately their learning outcomes. Central to this epistemology is that a range of experiences and conditions—i.e. where they live, the education of their parents, access to learning materials and opportunities to learn both inside and outside the classroom, their gender, their health—impact both how and what they learn.

Despite the awareness to be responsive to individual learning needs teachers will proudly state they treat all students in their classrooms the same. However, students are diverse and have different learning issues and needs. Therefore, treating all students in the same way means some students will have a better learning experience than their peers and undoubtedly a greater opportunity to learn and do well in school. It ignores the fact all students come to school with different learning platforms and expectations upon which to build new learning. It also ignores a teacher’s own unconscious bias towards her students based on her own schooling and life experiences. Nor does it acknowledge the impact of the overall schooling process and patriarchal structure of educational systems that introduce differences in learning opportunity and outcomes in a host of ways including: (1) vast differences in infrastructure and resource allocations between schools in urban and rural settings or geographical locations, (2) differences in the way teachers are recruited, trained and compensated, (3) significant differences in the teacher:student ratio and the way classroom learning resources are distributed; and (4) differences in the ways teachers reflect on their own teaching and instructional practices and how they manage their classrooms based on their beliefs about what good teaching “looks like” and how “good” students should learn and behave in the classroom.

These biases are commonly framed around templates of what good teaching ”looks like” and stem from assumptions regarding the behaviors and abilities or preferences of girls and boys and cultural norms about appropriate gender-based roles, disability, language and race. These are generally misconceptions, stereotypes and generalizations that lead to a tremendous range of biases in the classroom and unfortunately behaviors in the ways in which teachers interact with their students, the way their performance is evaluated and expectations their supervisors, peers and even parents hold about how classrooms should look like, how teachers should teach and how children should learn.

Unfortunately, these biases or lenses are not mutually exclusive of other social categories such as race, ethnicity, class, religion, and language. They also tend to be cumulative and sadly, generally ignored. Consequently, multiple factors lead to the marginalization and vulnerability of individual students in any classroom and leads to an equivalent education dilemma in which “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” In other words, students who start off with the toughest learning situations frequently end up getting the poorest instruction and least opportunity to learn.

Even though these differences can dramatically vary by region and country, statistics show that the poorer the country the greater the gap between the learning opportunities of students based on gender, social economic demographics, urban/rural settings and disability.

This panel explores key three influences that impact the opportunity to learn for all students—especially in the high status content areas of literacy and mathematics: the learning environment and other contextual factors; gender; and finally, learning differences of weaker/stronger students and those with disabilities. It discusses ways in which Creative Associates International has designed and implemented educational programs in different regions of the world that attempt to address these biases and differences. These include the introduction of reflective teaching practices and teacher professional development strategies that foster collaboration and mentoring and differentiated instructional techniques and resources. Central to Creative’s approach to differentiate instruction is that it responds to the readiness, interests and learning characteristics of each and every student. This means there’s ongoing use of assessment to gather information about student learning to help them achieve mastery of learning objectives.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Diane Prouty, Creative Associates International

Individual Presentations

• Addressing environmental and contextual factors that impact student learning experiences: Backward mapping revisited - Diane Prouty, Creative Associates International

• Differentiated teaching and learning strategies in response to how boys and girls learn - Deepa Srikantaiah, Creative Associates

• Differentiated learning strategies to reach all students including those with special learning needs? - Nicoklas Hoekstra, Creative Associates International

Discussant

• Robert Prouty, Consultant