Gloria Wade Gabb

Week 1: Assignment #1

Video Review -Teaching Diverse Learners

According to Strickland’s video, knowing about students’ diverse background is vastly important. Students are unique individuals. They come with many different ideas.  They are diverse learners. Only in knowing about their background, including who they are, their interests and what they bring to the classroom, can teachers effectively instruct them.  Background knowledge is essentially a springboard to curriculum planning.    It helps teachers to better communicate with their students in meaningful ways that they can understand and appreciate. Students will feel respected and included.  It helps teachers to bridge the gap between classroom instruction and the real world, thus making instruction more meaningful.  In teaching comprehension for instance, background knowledge is important. Students learn better when connection can be made to their own personal lives. Their background play an important role in how they comprehend text.

According to this video, when we as teachers prematurely assign characteristics to students, we do a disservice to them. We prejudge them and not allow them time to manifest who they really are. We become blindsided and this hinders the teaching and learning process.  We ought to foster respect for the various cultures and diversities of our students by making the effort to reach out to them. Express an interest in their ethnic background. An example pointed out in this video is learning a few words from their language.  And, when they respond to questions in ways we do not comprehend, we ought to question them even more.  Find out why they respond the way they do.  Their responses oftentimes than not are tied to their cultural background.  Having many forms of multicultural literature in our classroom also achieve this aim. Let children see the connection between what they do in school and their real lives.

According to Strickland the kind of instruction practices that addresses the range of students’ needs are multilevel instruction and scaffolding. Multi-level instruction is where one lesson is taught to an entire group of students while meeting the individual needs of each student. The same writing prompt may be used for all students, for example. Scaffolding means to render support to students in order to enhance learning and mastery of tasks. In scaffolding, the learning material may be broken into chunks and a tool or structure is provided with each chunk.

Scaffolding strategies can be used in multilevel instruction in many ways. One way is to model for the students what you expect them to do.  And as you model you use think-alouds.  You tap into their previous knowledge, as evidenced repeatedly in the video.  Let them share their own experiences, hunches and ideas on the content.  Give them time to talk and process the new information or ideas. Let them rehearse in their small groups. Have high expectations for them.  Challenge their learning by giving high level tasks. Use visual aids.  Pictures, graphic organizers or charts are good scaffolding tools.  Pause and ask well thought out open-ended questions. Take time to get the students to learn. 

Differentiated instruction (combining multilevel instruction and scaffolding) in my view is necessary to accommodate our diverse learners; however, it is challenging to execute.  Firstly, it requires extensive planning on our part as teachers. Planning is time consuming.  It also requires a lot of resources which unfortunately, we do not have in our schools.   Improvisation is needed to get as close to differentiated instruction as possible as this may be the only way to reach all students whether high, medium or low.

My aim as a teacher then is to incorporate more scaffolding in my practice in ways that are articulated above.  In doing so, I will be catering for my diverse learners.