Chapter 11: Differentiating for Success

Vocabulary:

Addressing Struggling Readers Problems: 

• Predict reading difficulties early:
  • Difficulty developing concepts around written language, phonemic awareness, letter names, and phoneme- grapheme correspondences
  • Slow to respond to classmates when asked to identify words
  • Behavior deviates from school norms
• Children with family history of reading struggles are more likely to struggle with reading

Addressing Struggling Writers’ Problems:

Differentiation: Students differ in important ways. Differentiation allows students options to for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learned

Differentiating the content: Providing more instruction for some students and less for others, while all students are learning essential content. Teachers match students at different levels, with different activities. The “what”.

Differentiating the Process: The type of instruction, materials used, and activities used to make sure all students are successful. The “how”.

Differentiating the Product: The result of learning. What students understand and how they can apply what they’ve learned. Students can create projects like posters, multimodal reports, board games, puppet shows, and new versions of stories. This is where teachers differentiate the complexity of projects.

High-Quality Classroom Instruction: Teachers use a balanced approach that combines explicit instruction in decoding, fluency, vocab, comprehension, and writing along with regular opportunities for students to apply what they are learning in literacy activities

• Personalizing Instruction: Teachers adjust instructional programs to match student needs using flexible grouping, tiered activities, and respectful tasks. 
• Using Appropriate Instruction Materials: Using a single-text with the whole class should only be done 25% of the time to provide more time for students to read at their own reading levels. 
• Expanding Teachers’ Expertise: Teachers continue to grow professionally throughout their careers. 
• Collaborating With Literacy Coaches: Literacy coaches are experienced teachers with special expertise in working with struggling readers and writers. They support teachers by working alongside them in their classrooms, demonstrating instructional procedures and evaluation techniques, and they collaborate with teachers to design instruction to address students needs

Grouping For Instruction:

• 3 grouping patterns used:
  • Whole class: Basal reading programs and lit focus units
  • Small groups: Lit circles and guided reading
  • Individual: reading and writing workshop  
• Deciding which group type depends on teachers purpose , complexity of activity, and students’ learning needs. 
• Groups are ever changing

Tiered Activities: Allow all students to be successful by participating in the activity that best suits their ability. All activities are related. Activities can be varied in 3 ways: Complexity, level of reading material, by form of expression

Literacy Centers: 

Interventions: Used to address low achieving students reading and writing difficulties and accelerate literacy learning

• Interventions for preschool, kinder, and first graders: Preventative programs to create more effective early-childhood programs
• Family-focused  programs to develop young children’s awareness of literacy, parents’ literacy, and parenting skills
• Early interventions to resolve reading and writing problems and accelerate literacy development for low-achieving K-3 students

RTI: Response to Intervention, a school wide initiative to identify struggling students quickly

Interventions for Older Students: 

• High-quality instruction: Instruction is tailored to students’ needs. Decoding is a strength for most struggling readers, instructional time is better spent on vocab and comprehension
• Instructional- Level Reading Materials: Teachers teach reading using books at students instructional reading levels
• More Time for Reading: teachers spend more time for students to read at independent reading level each day

Classroom Connection: Prior to reading this chapter, I didn’t have a very good grasp on what differentiation could look like in a classroom. Chapter 11 really went in depth about what differentiation is and what it looks like in the classroom.