Designing a Differentiated Lesson Plan

 Hello everyone! Today we are talking about designing a differentiated lesson plan. Bellow are three main areas of your lesson plan where differentiation can play a big part in helping your students succeed. 

1: Instructional Strategies

When designing your lesson plan, it is important to design instruction that will help meet the needs of all your students. Main provides four things to think about when choosing how to differentiate with your instructional strategies (Main, 2022):

    1. Content: The first thing to look at is the content you are teaching. Main recommends considering Blooms Taxonomy by creating activities that touch multiple levels of thinking skills. 

    2. Process: Next, look at how your students are going to learn. As we talked about in earlier posts, everyone learns different. Because of this, it is important to incorporate many different learning styles in your lessons.

    3. Product: This is how your students are going to show mastery of what they have learned. This can be differentiated through providing choices for students to pick from so that they can pick the project/activity that best matches their strengths.

    4. Learning Environment: Students work best in different environments as well. As always, the classroom need to be welcoming and safe. However, some students prefer to work in groups/with others while other prefer to work along. Some work better at tables, some sitting on the floor, some up front, some in the back. Having a variety of seating options and layouts available for students to utilize may help the student focus and learn more effectively. 

When I plan my lessons, I take all four aspects into consideration. For example:

    1. Content: Many of my students are missing necessary pre-requisite skills needed to access the curriculum. Because of this, we always spend at least one lesson reviewing and working on those skills. If it is a Science or Social Studies lesson, we spend a day going over basic vocabulary and work on finding it on their communication devices. For Math, we review numbers, counting, and more. In Reading, I try to find materials that are closer to their level that covers the same information or to use to practice skills.

    2. Process: Many of my students have disabilities that affect their communication and motor skills. Because of this I adapt all of my lessons to be hands on with visuals. Having the interactive activities throughout the entire lessons helps to keep my students engaged and involved.

    3. Product: This follows up the previous area with student disabilities. Because of the language delays, writing a paper, taking a typical test, or telling me verbally about what they learner are not usually the best way to measure what my students are learning. This is where the interactive lesson come in. Students are able to match, drag and drop, and select answers to show their knowledge. More of this is discuss below under technology.

    4. Learning Environment: Grouping, seating, accommodations, and time of day for the lesson is all considered for my students. Some students do not do well in the same group, others help encourage other students. Some of my students need to get up and move more often while others have a hard time navigating their environment without assistance. Some students are only at school during certain times of the day, get pulled out for therapies, push into other classrooms, or are more awake or more sleepy during certain parts of the day. All of this is taken into consideration when scheduling and planning lessons.

2: Assessments

Assessments play a large role in my classroom. Not so much as the "graded tests" that most people think about when they hear the word assessment, but more so in the way that data is always being taken, either informally or formally, on how my students are doing so that I know where they are and what they need. In order to differentiate assessments, there are five things that can help you (NESA, n.d):

    1. current level of understanding

    2. prior learning experiences

    3. learning preferences

    4. motivation and engagement with learning

    5. interests and talents

When designing and/or choosing my assessments, I do my best to take all five into consideration. For example:

    1. I know that my students are at different academic and adaptive levels. Because of this, I start with where they are and use language they are familiar with.

    2. For prior learning experiences, I use informal assessment to figure out what pre-requisite skills my students are missing and focus on those first. I also look at what kind of assessment formats they have been more or less successful with.

    3. Learning preferences are used by making sure my assessments are adapted and as hands on as possible.

    4 and 5. As with my activities, I try to include themes and topics that my students are interested in that can be used with the skill my students are working on to help with engagement and make it more motivating. I also get to know my students strengths and talents and try to designs assessments that best fit their talents and strengths.

 

3: Technology

Technology is a powerful tool that can be used to help differentiate lessons, activities, and assessments for students (Kilbane & Milman, 2023). We use quite a bit of technology in the classroom through communication devices, interactive presentations, and a class favorite, Boom Cards. Due to many of my students having a disability that affect verbal language, many of my students have communication devices. These go with the student and can be used as their voice to express wants, needs, knowledge, and more. Different students are at different levels of comfort and proficiency with their devices so I use other tools to help them express themselves as well. 

As mentioned, a class favorite is Boom Cards. Boom Cards are interactive cards that teachers can design themselves or buy already made for any subject, topic or skill imaginable. We use the multiple choice and drag and drop features the most. This allows my students with motor skill, vision, and communication deficits to interact with the lesson, gets students up and moving, and makes the learning feel more like a game. Boom Cards have been a great help with it comes to teaching lessons, collecting data, and practicing the same skills but with different themed cards. This helps my students who are often working on the same skills for weeks, months, and sometimes years engaged and keeps activities fresh and less repetitive.

Resources:

Kilbane, C. & Milman, N. (2023). Differentiated learning and technology: a powerful combination. ASCD. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/differentiated-learning-and-technology-a-powerful-combination 

Main, P. (2022). Differentiation strategies: a teacher's guide. Structural Learning. https://www.structural-learning.com/post/differentiation-strategies-a-teachers-guide

NESA. (n.d.). Differentiated assessment. NESA. https://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/portal/nesa/k-10/understanding-the-curriculum/assessment/differentiated-assessment