Differentiation is a buzz word in education and has been for some time. Tomlinson and Allan refer to differentiated instruction as "a teacher's reacting responsively to a learner's needs." So differentiation can be any type of change in classroom instructional strategies to meet specific needs that are encountered in the classroom. This could be mid-lesson, or following a formative assessment. It could even follow a summative assessment. The most important thing to remember about differentiation is that we must meet the students where they are. Perhaps they come to us knowing all of the information that we expect them to learn in the prerequisite(s) for our course. This might be cause for us to provide accelerated work, or an unplanned depth to our content. Another possibility is that the students need further instruction because there are skills that were not mastered before arriving in our classroom. These are decisions that we sometimes need to make on the fly- in the middle of a class. After teaching the same content for some time, though, we can anticipate the different levels and types of learners.
In a World Language course, teaching to all different types of learners comes naturally because it is part of our job- according to both state and national standards- to touch on all four of the language learning abilities: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Sometimes the level at which we present is not where it needs to be, however. Knowing that, we might need to meet the students where they are and have a variety of content at different levels so the information is accessible to all students. Having worked for GAVS for some time now, I know that in my Spanish class, in every unit, the same types of assessments are offered. One is a listening assessment. The assignment that GAVS gives students is a recording of a native speaker (the majority of the time) along with comprehension questions to see that the students can not only understand the language but answer questions about the material given. One way of differentiating for this type of assessment is to allow students with lower skills to just write what they hear rather than listening to someone and then answering questions about it. Basically, we are just taking it back a notch. I created a dictation assignment for the unit that discusses city vocabulary and grammatically calls for students giving and understanding directions. Eventually, we will want all students to be able to listen and respond to comprehension questions, but sometimes we need to take baby steps to gain confidence and work on mastery. Take a look at the dictation assignment that I made as an alternate assignment for the listening. Just to be clear, a student still needs to be able to recognize the words that the speaker says in Spanish, however, conversations can be broken down in steps. First, the students needs to listen and recognize the phonetic patterns of speech to formulate words. Then the students need to recognize the meanings of the words spoken. At that time, the students can begin to respond to questions about the spoken text. I have broken this assignment down so that the student is only focused on step 1. Once they learn that skill, we can move on. I titled this differentiated lesson ¿Qué escuchas? which means "what do you hear?" to prompt students to simply dictate what they hear. Click here for the link to the lesson I created. This particular site is not one that GAVS mentioned, but it is another I chose to use. The site is called Educaplay. Educaplay has a free platform as well as a subscription platform. It is used to create multimedia teaching activities. You can create things like a video with embedded questions to check for understanding, or something as simple as a crossword for vocabulary practice. It is an excellent site! Click here to make your own Educaplay.
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