P2-Practice differentiated instruction
Differentiation is an important skill for a teacher to employ. Finding ways to reach all of our children through differentiation can be difficult. However, there are a lot of resources available that I found helpful in planning for differentiation. One such book is called Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom: Strategies and Technique Every Teacher can use to meet the Academic Needs of the Gifted and Talentedby Susan Winebrenner M.S.
One idea from her book that I really liked was called “most difficult first”. This is a way to help plan for students who are gifted and talented. What you do is choose five problems that are representative of a unit and the student has to get 4/5 correct. If the student is able to get 4/5 crest the student can move onto the next unit. When I first saw this I thought, why not have the student get 5/5 correct? The answer has to do with the student’s feeling the pressure to be perfect, and then he/she may not try at all. I used this method with a student I have in my 6th grade math class and it has worked great (although I used more than five problems to get my representation of his knowledge. It has helped give me direction as to what topics I should be planning for him. It has also made him more confident and happy in class since he is working at his level. He is so excited that he is having the opportunity to really show what he knows and learn at his level.
rebeccaaf 