Engagement/Differentiation

Student engagement is crucial because it can save you from having many of your common student discipline problems.

Differentiated instruction is both a philosophy and a process; it is not just a toolbox of strategies. As an educator, you need to believe that every child can learn and improve their understanding of concepts over time. In other words, you need to have a “growth mindset”. As such, you need to offer multiple ways for your students to approach concepts, dig deep into those concepts, and show their understanding of those concepts.

Learn differentiation techniques that take advantage of the two keys of student choice and student interest.

Our student engagement/differentiation professional development now includes helping regular education teachers work with accommodations and modifications for students with IEP’s. It includes understanding a checklist of classroom accommodations, including testing accommodations, and the differences between a strategy, intervention, accommodation, and modification. It helps teachers to plan right now to better meet the needs of all of their students. It also explains the RTI model.

In differentiating, it is often best to start with where you want your students to end up in the learning process, and then back into how you will determine if they’ve learned that, and finally, by developing the activities which will allow the students to learn the content. This process is often called backward design and begins with the end in mind.

Multiple strategies for differentiating are taught with all of the above in mind. In this way, your teacher’s toolbox is built with some pre-designed organization and forethought as to which strategy would work best in each situation.