PD Day- Recap for Differentiated Instruction

We all know that differentiated instruction is essential to our teaching. Yet there are times that it can become overwhelming. There have been times where it seems the way we are headed is for each student to have the equivalent of their own IEP. Who has time for that?

I discovered my own misconceptions on differentiated instruction.

- It doesn't have to be extremely time consuming.

- It doesn't involve making lesson plans for each type of intelligence.

- It doesn't always mean different activities for each student or group.

We all know Howard's Multiple Intelligences and Bloom's Taxonomy. Prior to this PD day, I thought differentiated instruction meant incorporating both Howard and Bloom into as many lessons as you could. It can seem like a near impossible feat as you could plan the same lessons eight or more different ways.

There is actually a simpler approach to working differentiation into instruction thanks to research by Sternburg. You can check out Sternburg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence here, here and here relating to children.

In summary, he puts the different intelligences into three types: analytical, practical, and creative. All people have some of each, but there is one and maybe two that are more predominated than the third one. Students learn best when their dominant intelligence is addressed. 

Analytical: is considered school smart. They like things step by step or finding the parts and showing how they work. 

Practical:  can be thought of as street smarts. They use information contextually and focus on use. They apply things to the world around them. 

Creative: reacting to a situation by finding new solution. They like to think what if or improve upon something. Being able to think about it differently. It is the art of thinking. 

The best part is you don't need a huge survey from each student to figure out what intelligence they are. In a few quick questions you can survey your students and get a basic understanding what types of intelligences are represented. It can be questions like:
 Do you like to invent things or things differently than others?
Do you like to have street smarts?
Do you like to do things step by step?

When you think about it, creative is the intelligence we should strive to have our students do for those are the people who will be successful when they are grown up and out in the world. They will be able to think on their own. 

Something fun we also did was learn about our personality traits through Winnie the Pooh characters. It started with a table we filled out and rate what we do in each situation or how we would react. Then each of the four categories were tied to either Pooh, Tigger, Rabbit or Eeyore. We all had WAY to much fun with this!

Poohs focus on harmony, relationships and emotions.

Rabbits focus on being organized, completing their work.

Tiggers focus on literally bouncing around people, being adventurous, trying out new ideas.

Eeyores are more status quo they go along with everything.

We spent the rest of the day describing each as a Pooh or Rabbit. It was funny that when we needed to get some handouts out of all the people from our group who got up to get it were Rabbits. I found a similar survey here. There is a lot of other good stuff to, but the survey is the second to last page on the pdf if you want to try it. 

I have more coming about how differentiation now looks in my room, but figured that was enough for today. 

Happy Monday!!