Description
Inclusive education and modern pedagogies presuppose teachers’ capacity to adapt their teaching to the individual needs of each student. Yet this can be written easily on paper, but hard – if not impossible – to realize in practice!
How to solve the puzzle of differentiated instruction? How to teach one subject effectively while taking into consideration the manifold needs of all learners?
The course will make participants discover how to differentiate their teaching to take into consideration the individual needs and inclinations of every student.
Differentiated learning (or instruction) is specifically based on understanding and promoting five main areas:
- Understanding students’ interests and inclinations;
- Using differentiated content;
- Understanding individual learning processes;
- Activities to promote collaboration in the classroom;
- Differentiated assessment strategies.
Participants will explore one of these areas every day of the course. Thus, they will learn to create a positive learning environment, provide students with differentiated content, to design lesson plans that take into account all aspects essential to the development of individual students and respect individual specificities and generate assessment procedures that consider the differential learning of the student.
Significantly, when teaching is planned with differentiated learning, students exert a positive influence on each other and take advantage of each individual’s strengths and interests to improve their learning.
By the end of the course, participants will know how to make their teaching more differentiated, and how to involve actively students in collective learning.
What is included
Learning outcomes
The course will help the participants to:
- Understand differentiated learning methods;
- Connect the interest of students with different school subjects;
- Design differentiated lesson plans;
- Develop innovative assessment strategies;
- Design an inclusive classroom;
- Reflect on core competencies for continuing education;
- Foster inclusive behaviors at school.
Tentative schedule
Day 1 – What is differentiated instruction?
- Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities;
- Icebreaker activities;
- Presentations of the participants’ schools;
- Differentiated Instruction: one definition and many applications;
- How different learning approaches can work together effectively: differentiated instruction and the 21st Century Skills.
Day 2 – Differentiated instruction: interests and inclinations
- How to take advantage of the student’s interests?
- Connecting personal interests with different school subjects;
- How to develop differentiated learning materials: an introduction.
Day 3 – Differentiated content
- The challenge: developing differentiated content(s) in a short time;
- Activity: create differentiated instruction content for your students;
- Lesson plan: including differentiated materials and activities in the same lesson.
Day 4 – Differentiated instruction: understanding different learning processes
- How learning processes work and how to make the most of differences in the learning process successfully;
- Activity: discover the learning process of your students.
Day 5 – Differentiated assessment and evaluation
- How to develop meaningful and successful differentiated evaluation strategies;
- Include different assessment strategies in your lesson plan;
- Creation and presentation of the participants’ lesson plans.
Day 6 – Course closure and cultural activities
- Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussion;
- Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance;
- External cultural activities
