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Meeting Many Needs: Differentiated Instruction
in Language Arts Classrooms
Ruthanne Tobin and Alison McInnes (Canada)
Morgan is a very bright, talkative third grader who reads voraciously. She finds some of her class work interesting but often sits idly waiting for others to grasp concepts she already knows.
Mathew is a gifted 8-year-old with a learning disability. He receives three hours of pull-out support each week. His written responses to his in-class readings total two to three sentences at best. He is most engaged when he creates elaborate drawings of comic book heroes.
Kelly is a talkative 7-year-old who loves to learn but finds it very difficult to stay organized. She frequently loses her school belongings, including her home reading books, and often arrives at school a half-hour after her language arts block has started. She has few reading opportunities in her home community and is a reluctant reader and writer.
Sindu joined her Grade 2 class shortly after arriving from Pakistan three months ago. She is participating in the school’s ESL program three afternoons a week, but the rest of the time she sits quietly and prefers to work alone. Her English language assessment results place her at a beginner level in English, but information from her former school in Pakistan assessed her above grade level.
These students are typical of the academic, linguistic and cultural diversity that many Canadian teachers see in regular classrooms on a daily basis. Instructional differentiation in the regular classroom, particularly in language arts, could make a critical difference in the lives of these students and others like them.
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Teachers in many countries are increasingly responsible for providing well-differentiated instruction within their classrooms for learners with diverse abilities. In response to this need, Aberdeen school district (pseudonym) targeted 13 mixed-grade classrooms (11 with grades 2/3 and 2 with grades 3/4) for research on a professional development project on differentiating literacy instruction. In this article, we report on three aspects of this study: (1) the profile of one teacher’s successful experiences with learning to differentiate instruction, (2) the assessment of the development of teachers’ differentiated practices and self-efficacy; and (3) the difficulties the teachers encountered in acquiring the skills of differentiation.
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Meeting Many Needs