Differentiating for and anticipating student needs

Differentiation and Student Needs

Teaching at an international school abroad, my primary concern for differentiation is the same as most everyone else- some students are native English speakers, others are ESL. This means that in one class in MYP, I can say entire paragraphs and almost one third of my class might not understand. This means that if I don't differentiate, some students will be completely lost, and become disruptive or disengaged as a result. However, to get into a DP in my school in Malaysia, students have to have succeeded at MYP, which means they were top performers in those grades. This winnows out almost all of the ESL students, although I'll still have 2 or 3 who struggle to follow along due to the difficulty of the content. Instead, my differentiation primarily takes the form of student preferences for learning- some students are skilled at research, others at presenting, etc. As my students are often from different countries, I'll also try to differentiate through content- using content and recent events from their native countries, and this allows them to create projects and work that reflects their interests and culture. Intellectually, the students are all above a base level, but there certainly is a clear bell curve. This means that for tasks that I don't grade, that won't go into their final marks, I'll differentiate in feedback- being much more nitpicky with the high level students, and more forgiving for the lower levels. Finally, I don't know if it's just me, my confirmation bias, style of teaching or whatever, but I have a bit of a bone to pick with the idea that learning styles such as kinesthetic or visual can be differentiated. While I acknowledge that sure, a blind student would probably do better listening to an audiobook than reading braile, in general, differentiating by learning styles tends to give very little return in way of improved performance considering the work put into making it. I sometimes see slight benefits, but honestly I wonder if it's just a dog whistle for educators to act like they know how to differentiate and to be able to easily give examples.

All students- differentiate in process and product. Allow students to choose their groups, and choose their roles for projects. I'll keep track of the group makeups and roles, so that I can assess what students prefer, and continuously change them as we go into the unit. If I find particular areas that students hate or aren't good at, I'll either allow them to focus on other roles, or push them into improving their performance by discussing with them indvidually what their problems were and strategies to improve. I'll also allow for multiple ways for students to process what they are learning- some days we will do think pair share, other days socratic debates,. Students will almost always have a choice in the products they do- it can be oral presentation, power point, poster, diorama, play, journal, comic/graphic novel, or other text type, etc. Content questions to check for understanding are also differentiated according to student ability using Vygotsky's ZPD as a basis, making sure the questions are slightly above the student's level. 

ESL- differentiate in content. For the first class of Lolita, students are assigned research projects, after which they will present their findings. I'll group the ESL students, and instead give them a list of terms, both from the text itself, as well as from the context. They will research those terms, create sentences using them, and think about how they might be used when discussing Lolita. 

Cultures- Differentiate in content and product.

Content- Students will research contemporary cases of improper relationships in their country- whether it is teacher/student religious authority figure and disciple, etc. Whatever they can find that was big news in their country. They can also research more using their native language, and produce their product in English.

Product- students will present on the research they did about their own culture and the moral debate that resulted. They will discuss their culture's values, taboos, etc, that affected the debate and peoples' perspectives.

Flowchart can be found here.