Postsecondary students particularly benefit from differentiated instruction because of how diverse they are. A demographic cliff is coming in higher education. Moreover, in the future, students are expected to attend community or technical colleges as the wage premium for four-year college degrees declines.
In this environment, schools are turning their recruitment initiatives toward non-traditional students, including minority students, older learners, and first-in-the-family college students.
These learners may not have strong academic or self-regulatory skills—or may simply be too busy or career-focused—to thrive in a traditional lecture-oriented classroom. Therefore, schools that rely on passive learning approaches will find themselves unable to retain newly recruited students.
However, [ In contrast to the educational practices that exist in higher education, pedagogy in elementary and secondary schools is evolving to meet the needs of diverse learners.
This has been accomplished, in part, through the use of differentiated instruction. Providing students with ample practice activities and reinforcement of course information is the best way educators can promote mastery of a subject. Moreover, differentiated instruction combines individual, group, and full class education techniques. One of the largest benefits of differentiated instruction for students is that it incorporates many different teaching styles. In courses applying differentiated instruction, whole-class discussions are often followed by group or individual learning activities that help cement subject comprehension.
Finally, differentiated instruction places more focus on qualitatively adjusting student assignments. This is particularly helpful for college and university students because the quality of required assignments is more important in determining student understanding and retention than the number of required assignments. Adjusting the nature of an assignment instead of simply altering the quantity of work for that assignment is a much more effective and active way of promoting learning.
The benefits of differentiation in the classroom are also significant for postsecondary teachers. Turner, Oscar J. Solis, and Doris H. Kincade state that most surveyed instructors believed differentiated instructors brought "significant" rewards.
However, differentiated instruction also comes with many challenges. For instance, college classes may enroll hundreds of students, college professors might not focus on their teaching, and many university instructors have not been trained to implement differentiated instruction.
Nevertheless, as higher education evolves and by necessity adapts to a more technological and diverse world, instructors will discover that differentiated instruction is not only optimal, but also necessary for student learning and information retention. Universities will begin to modify their physical learning spaces, more effectively manage their classroom sizes, and better equip their instructors to create various innovative and active learning approaches.
A peek into the local elementary, middle, or high school classroom may give you a glimpse of what the college classroom of the future will look like—in terms of both diversity and structure. The future of the college classroom is diverse.
Universities cannot continue to rely on the passive, one-size-fits-all instructional strategies of the past. Colleges will need to bring the techniques and benefits of differentiated instruction to guide the students of the future. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. December 17, There are numerous advantages to implementing differentiated instruction - which colleges and universities are beginning to readily embrace What Is Differentiated Instruction?
People forget more easily than they remember. Researchers call this trend the "forgetting curve. Students progress at different paces. Some students learn fast, while others learn more slowly. The advantages of differentiated instruction strategies include addressing learner deficiencies in both speed and depth. Active learning promotes faster growth than passive learning.
Many studies have shown that active learning promotes greater knowledge retention than passive learning. Differentiated instruction allows students to actively practice what they've learned from course lecture components. Prompting the application of recently covered material helps students understand their studies more proficiently.
Team-based learning isn't trivial. Healthy, team-based learning environments are just one of the many benefits of differentiated instruction.
Collaborative learning, peer mentoring, and conflict resolution skills all boost a student's overall ability to learn. Your primary role as an instructor is to design educational experiences. Effective educators don't just inform and assess students. We are programmed to treat each child the same as we would treat any other child. No child deserves special privilege, nor does any child deserve less attention -- regardless of race, gender or academic ability.
It grates on our nerves when that know-it-all student who always sits in the front row always demands time to show off. It frustrates us to no end when the student in the back of the class makes rude noises and refuses to stay on task. Which students miss out most? It is the student in the middle who doesn't cause problems, who obeys, conforms, and never demands attention. We rarely give her the time of day in our race to take care of the extremes.
I had one of those students in my classroom. He was in my intermediate Spanish class and always sat in the middle. He never said a lot, and he did his work quietly. He wasn't the best in the classroom, and he wasn't the worst. I remember that he did struggle with rolling his rs. One day, he didn't come to class, and we got word that he had committed suicide. Not that I could have done anything to prevent this, but you always have the nagging doubt that perhaps you could have made a difference.
In that moment, I vowed to never assume the quiet ones were OK. Yet even with that, we are pressured to give the students with more needs more attention than those students who have less needs. The largest conflict about differentiated instruction boils up inside of us when we try to assign a grade to that differentiated instruction.
This can include teaching students in small groups or in one-on-one sessions. This approach works well with the response to intervention RTI process used in some schools. The goal of RTI is to address learning struggles early. Students get extra support before they fall behind their peers. Differentiated instruction can play out differently from one classroom to the next — and from one school to the next.
But there are a few key features:. Small work groups: The students in each group rotate in and out. This gives them a chance to participate in many different groups. A group can include a pair of students or a larger group.
Educators, learn more about how to use flexible grouping with small groups. A teacher uses differentiated instruction to give every student multiple paths to learning. Instead, the teacher personalizes teaching to help kids meet those goals. Learn more about setting annual IEP goals. Differentiated instruction is not the same as individualized instruction.
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