Differentiating Instruction: Meeting your Students’ Needs

Course description

Differentiation is a term you’ve probably heard before.
We know good teaching means meeting our students where they are and giving each one what they need to succeed. But how do you do it?

In this course, we will look at the fundamental principles of differentiating instruction for your students and examine how technology can help you accomplish it easily and efficiently!

We will take a look at assessment, instruction, and feedback, and through video, exploration, and creation activities you will build your toolbox and create products to use in your classroom. You will learn techniques and strategies for differentiation as well as online tools to use. I will guide you through the steps of creating your differentiated unit and, at the end of this course, you will have a unit based on your curriculum you can use right away.

Course structure

Topic 1: What is Differentiation?

What do they already know? What should they learn? Have they learned it? These are the fundamental questions of successful instruction. Everything else is up for discussion! We’ll look at these questions and review some case studies to understand what differentiation is and isn’t before we start talking tech.

Topic 2: Pre-Assessment

When differentiating, we begin with the end: assessment. What do your students already know? Gathering data gives you valuable insight into your students. Let’s look at tools to make assessment, data collection, and analysis fast and easy.

Topic 3: Instruction

How can you give students more choice around instruction? In this topic we look at ways you can offer information in a variety of ways, give students more control over the process, and take back wasted class time and redistribute it where you really need it, working directly with your students to fill their gaps and extend their learning.

Topic 4: Feedback

As students progress, they need to know how they are doing. This lets them (and you!) track their progress towards the learning goals and make a plan. We will examine how to hack feedback so it is useful to students and strategies for encouraging students to take feedback and put it into practice. Let’s look at some tools to give personalized and automatic feedback so students get what they need and you can put your time and energy where it matters.

Topic 5: Summative Assessment

FINALLY! It’s time for your students to show what they know. Summative assessments should be exciting and gratifying for your students, but that isn’t always the case. How can you give them more opportunities to share their voice while demonstrating their knowledge all while ensuring you can evaluate their progress? Let’s look at some simple strategies for differentiating summative assessments that won’t make your head spin, but will let you drill down to the core of what knowledge and skills students should demonstrate.