What are the adjustments that teachers can make on an everyday basis to increase equity, access, rigor, and engagement for all students? What are the dispositions, skills, and actions needed to differentiate instruction, online and off?
Overview
Effective differentiated instruction is critical to student success, yet it can be difficult to develop and implement. Given the diversity of today’s classrooms and the variability of in-person, hybrid, and online learning, how can teachers provide instruction that offers equity, access, rigor, and engagement for all of their students?
Differentiated Instruction Made Practical provides targeted professional development that enables teachers to differentiate instruction as part of their daily classroom routines. The program is based on a four-step decision-making framework and structured classroom routines rooted in research on student cognition and motivation.
Over the course of seven modules, you’ll learn the agile thinking you need to analyze problems of student learning and effectively differentiate instruction within a range of time and curriculum constraints.
Course Details
Students come to the classroom with diverse experiences, understandings, interests, strengths, and needs. Differentiated Instruction Made Practical will teach you the why and how of building differentiated instruction into your daily teaching habits and routines.
Course content includes both theory and practice, with an emphasis on sustainability for instructors and engaging, flexible, deep, and durable learning for all students. Through videos, readings, personal reflection, and online forums, you'll experience differentiated instruction for yourself as well as learn methods for implementing it in your own classroom.
Online Course Schedule
Please review the course schedule to ensure that you and your team will be able to participate fully in the course, the average time commitment is about three to four hours per week.
Learning Goals
- Learn the theory and methods of differentiated instruction and how it can serve all learners including English language learners, students with disabilities, and students needing further challenge.
- Practice adjusting instruction through a practical four-step method designed to help you better meet the needs of diverse learners.
- Learn and practice agile decision-making about when and what kind of help to provide, when and how to use group work, and how to offer student choice.
- Begin to measure the impact of differentiated instruction on student learning and ensure alignment with established standards in your system.
Who Should Participate
- Classroom teachers
- Instructional leaders
- School leaders
- Administrators
Team Application
Teams of 3-6 are encouraged to apply. Teams may be comprised of people from within or across schools or organizations. Teams should be prepared to try out course ideas with students/learners in classrooms or other learning environments. Teams should also be able to meet synchronously, in person, at least once per module to engage in group-based activities.
Individual Application
Individuals are also invited to participate; they will be placed in a virtual team with other people who have enrolled as individuals. Individuals will be expected to meet synchronously (via phone call or video conference) with the teams once per session. We will strive to group individuals with others who are in the same or similar time zones; if this is not possible, exceptions to the team meeting requirement can be made.