Beyond Integration

image of cogs turning inside a circle representing a man's brain.   "Things are simple. Situations are clear. Hurdles are easy. It's our mind which makes it complex and complicated." - Anonymous . From advertisements to social media algorithms, the study of thinking plays an important role in our 21st century society. Research around thinking and how students process their thoughts or how they hold attention, store and retrieve memories, then select appropriate responses and actions (University of Cambridge, 2023). When considering how we can differentiate or vary the information processing part of learning, four thought perspectives emerge. The Differential Perspective . Even though children may possess intelligence and the ability to think, they don't always think the same way or in the same "logic". This "difference" in how they think and their logic of thinking forms the basis for this view. Based on the responses to a number of tasks and t...

 *This is a blog in the series on differentiation in the classroom. See below for the other blogs in the series.      Differentiating Content     Differentiating content centers around what we teach and how students interact with what we teach to learn. Based on a common research term called   triangulation of data , teachers can offer quality content to help students master the standards. It means not just looking at test scores, but also looking at academic strengths, readiness data, and student interests to offer different students in the same class the same opportunity to master the same standard through different content or different forms of content.  What Can This Look Like? There are a number of ways content can be differed. A teacher may offer reading stories from multiple backgrounds that emphasize the same learning standard material. A teacher may offer the content at varying levels of rigor, a second teacher may offer visual stimuli ...

 *This is a blog in the series on differentiation in the classroom. See below for the other blogs in the series.      In a recent post, Student Engagement Is a Thing, Isn't It? , engaging students was examined and a number of research-driven methodologies were described. One growing path of research in the early 2000s focused on the idea of reaching students equitably through differentiation within instruction.  What is Differentiated Instruction (DI)?      Differentiated instruction is a framework, not an instructional strategy, where different aspects of the curriculum are adjusted to help the student learn the content and show achievement. Differentiation speaks to the idea of equity for the learner. This framework is often connected to the tenets of universal design for learning (UDL). The UDL framework holds that content should be presented in multiple ways, processed in multiple ways, and presented in multiple ways. Differentiated instructio...