Chapter 7: MMM

This chapter was all about differentiated instruction and how to implement it into your classroom. This is probably the most difficult aspect of teaching because you will have students with learning and/or physical disabilities, students who are general education students, and those who are considered to be gifted and talented. What makes it that much more difficult is that these students will all be in the same classroom trying to learn. Obviously, a teacher is not going to give the same amount of work to a student that has severe mental disability than a student considered gifted and talented. The objective is not to give the same amount of work, but to make sure that you get these students to the same level so that they all can understand the major concepts of the unit. Wormeli gives a list of characteristics that a teacher using differentiation should possess. These include being a risk taker, being empathetic, organized, flexible, resourceful, and having a good sense of humor. Those are all characteristics of good teachers regardless, so that means that you are more than halfway there if you want to be able to differentiate your classroom.
I have said this many times before, but I believe that differentiation is the hardest thing to do as a teacher. I think what makes it so difficult is that there really is no answer to how to do it. There are so many different types of students, and they all learn in different ways so there is no one method or plan that you could follow in order to differentiate. I do think there are things that you must avoid in order to be successful and that is to make sure that you do not give the gifted and talented students more work for the sake of doing more. As the teacher you also need to make sure that you do not give less work to the students with learning disabilities as well. I think that it should be about the type of learning and not about the amount of learning. I almost feel like differentiated instruction is a very abstract term because you would have to know each one of your students to be able to tailor lessons, but while in a college education class you do not have that ability so you end up learning about something that you do not fully understand which is what makes differentiation so difficult to understand sometimes.