Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Curriculum Pages for Differentiation

As I was completing my Learning Summary for EME 5050, I had an A-ha moment. Instead of using one curriculum page for the whole class, we could use modified pages for appropriate differentiation in the classroom. We can create one curriculum page for the majority of the class. Then make a modified page to support and scaffold our struggling learners. This page can modify requirements and provide additional practice of the concepts. This page could also offer review and practice of basic concepts, if necessary. This page could have the option for portions to be read aloud to struggling students.

Finally, make another page for gifted learners. This page could be an extension of what you're doing in class or something completely different if your gifted students have already mastered the objectives you're teaching. We can accelerate or enrich our gifted students through curriculum pages. This would be an incredibly motivating way to differentiate for our gifted learners. Heck, some of your gifted kids could create curriculum pages for other kids!

The initial set up of these pages would be time-consuming. However, appropriate differentiation has always been time-consuming. This wouldn't take any more time than creating differentiated centers for your diverse learners. You could start slowly and create these diverse pages for one unit you tech each nine-week period. Then slowly add pages for additional units of study. Also, teachers can work together and divide the workload to get these done. And once they are done, you can utilize them repeatedly with minor tweaking.

I think that curriculum pages could be a powerful tool in the fight to meet the needs of the diverse learners in our classrooms!

Friday, December 2, 2016